Almost all of it was beautiful but there's one gaping spoilery flaw that's ruining it for me and now I'm going to be angry all night. Someone talk me down? :(
How's it going? Talk about something else. How's life? How about that non-stuck friend that talked to you? Want a fanwork? I have a lot of good reccs and I'm not opposed to writing a quick and dirty drabble if you need a particular itch scratched. Have an otp? I might be able to suggest a fanartist/author for it.
Friend had to go to bed, it's the middle of the night here. I really don't want to think about Homestuck at all right now and possibly ever again except for complaining myself out. I feel like such a downer over something that's making other people happy and like I'm overreacting beyond all measure over something silly, but it feels like it's ruined 4EVA. I was unhappy already today because of stupid celebrity bullshitting opening a wellspring of horrible comments about abuse survivors, which I was only just really coming to terms with saying I was, and my computer screwing with me. This is just kind of pushing me over.
don't worry about it, I'm kind of down over it myself because of several disappointing factors (many characters I liked getting shafted by the narrative. a tragic ending would be more satisfying than this kind of NON-ending.) And more than that, it brings home the amount of time that's passed, and how much my life has changed. (I watched Cascade with my ex who hasn't spoken to me in almost 2 years, for example.) You're not overreacting.
Even a silly non-ending would have been preferable. If it was some sort of orchestral rendition of "How Do I Live Without You" featuring cosplayers dressed like all of the trolls and kids while a couple of people dressed like the Cherubs did an interpretive dance of the ending and someone brought a horse in a Nic Cage mask on stage, that would have been as fulfilling. I liked the animation and music itself but it felt... Kind of empty? It's like really ornate fondant icing and fondant flowers on a cake: it's really pretty and I appreciate the artistry that the person who sculpted the actual icing. But it's really unsatisfying to eat, and actually stifles the flavor of the cake itself.
I ranted to a non-HS friend because I needed someone to talk me into functioning again and I compared Gamzee's drop to having Snape randomly disappear before his part in the climax of Deathly Hallows. I don't think that really covers it though. I wouldn't have minded so much but there were so many things which were built up hugely as if they were going to be important and then just... weren't. I'm also pretty pissed off at how it broke one of the cardinal rules of storytelling; the Lord English battle was way too fucking easy and the ghosts were way too happy to die, and the secret weapon worked with no hitches. Quoth How Not to Write a Novel; "When there is a plan, things cannot go according to it. Otherwise the action becomes dull and predictable, the plan becomes a spoiler, and the reader's plan to finish your book is what gets derailed." (Hey, I love fondant ;P Yes I know nobody else does.) I feel kind of weird about having been up till 4AM crying over this. It feels like such a silly thing to go into meltdown mode over. I think this has been my first major disappointment with an ending, though - I wasn't fond of the third His Dark Materials book as a child but it properly felt like an ending and I could see why things went the way they did.
Y'know, even the ending of The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls where Spoiler: spoiler and suicide the entire cast committed suicide felt more satisfying than this did! And I'm having a shitty couple of days in general; offensive comments by a celeb I used to like, I fell and skinned my knee, my shoe sole is broken through and the shop won't/can't mend it, and the wheel snapped off my trolley.
I don't know if this is going to help at all, but what's helped other people I know is to remember that Hussie has had an insane amount of shit to wade through the past couple years. The disintegration of the Kickstarter money, apartment flooding, death in the family, whatever the hell softowl was. This ending was produced under massive pressure. Maybe once he's had a year or two to get his shit back together, he'll come back and make an ending that the old, little-webcomic-guy Hussie would be proud of. EDIT: And I don't know what kind of shoe you're talking about fixing up, but you might be able to use some Shoe Goo to build a sole back up. It works for skateboarders, anyway.
Bringing this over here, since this seems like a more vent-y thread (kinda) Exactly this. Spades Slick's death keeps sticking in my craw because it was so unnecessary except for the fact that Dave, Dirk, and Terezi went along blindly with Vriska's plan when she said Spades was to be assumed a threat. When a situation like that occurs, the plan should go wrong, or it feels...off-kilter. Especially after all the musical cues of Collide hinted something was doomed to go wrong one last time. Moreover, Spades and Noir are not equivalent beings; they're separate, distinct individuals - all of these kids and their dead selves are - with their own experiences and should be respected as such, no matter what Davepeta says about cumulative, gestalt experiences, and if MP is shown with Noir in some fashion in the possible-epilogue just because Hussie decided to pair the spares, I'll be...personally displeased Homestuck is built on parallels and double reacharounds and synchronicity and paradox loops, to an extent that these elements made up part of the game and narrative structure as a whole. Weird plot shit happened and could usually later be explained by those elements. Not having Karkat show up to convince Spades to ally with them feels wrong because Hussie just let all those parallels and momentum fizzle out. He decided it was more important to reach his original vision for the ending than to actually follow through on what he's built it up to be with said elements. Maybe breaking the mold and going to focus more on the "myth about kids and houses" perspective would have worked better if he hadn't dropped all character dialog and arcs so abruptly, when it was such an integral part of the comic beforehand. I don't know. Maybe I'm being prescriptivist, but my English major brain keeps nagging me that he jumped the gun. He let Vriska punch him and go about her merry way triumphant, then shrugged and decided that she was forceful enough for Lord English to go down easily. I'm hoping the epilogue will have at least some pesterlogs to cover everything he glanced over...please...
I feel bad about hating this so much. Before when I've seen people curse out final installments I always dismissed it as silly, because before I couldn't see such a massive drop in everything that made it interesting. I thought it was funny when I saw a couple of people praise most of Harry Potter to the skies and then claim the last two books were the worst thing ever, and I feel like now I'm doing the same thing.
I don't think you should feel bad about hating this. It went in a way that, as you had read and analyzed the story, went antithetical to the earlier parts and was pretty pretentious in it's vagueness. Being disappointed, and even heavily pissed off, at a work you've invested so much care into is understandable. There's an episode of Fillmore that actually did a pretty good job at this, and didn't portray the fans involved as being silly idiots for not getting why the writer took a weird turn or being upset that something they cared about turned out pretty weird at the end. Would it help any to see it? (It's under the name 'The Unseen Reflection', on Kisscartoon if you want to check it out.)
something just occurred to me if he planned all along to end it on an ambiguous but hopeful note WHY THE FUCK WASN'T IT CASCADE?? (or at least Act 6) /salt
I have to wonder how much of the letdown was a result of training. My moirail and I were both having very strong reactions of "Oh fuck, we're fucked." immediately post-Collide, pre-Act 7 because it was HAPPY. They beat the bad guys and they were HAPPY and how often has Hussie given us happy schmoop and then wrenched it out of our hands while cackling madly at our outraged sobbing? The sudden "No, really! The happiness is legit!" was jarring because what? No, that doesn't happen in Homestuck. I was ready to have my heart torn out and stomped on by, fuck I dunno, "Alt!Callie Is The Real Lord English," or "Lord English Eats The Ghost Army And Gets More Worser" or something equally horrible and it's like, "By the way, do you like puppies? HERE'S A BASKET OF PUPPIES!" And now I'm standing here, strife specibus equipped, going "Wait, what?" with an armload of unexplained puppies.
I think stuff like Happy Fun Meteor Murder Time (Murderstuck? What do we call that part of the story now?), and Game Over, absolutely trained us to expect Bad Things.
I normally call that point of the story Murderstuck. And it's how I tend to hear it referred. I was definitely expecting the worst by the end though I so badly wanted a happy ending that I was VERY HAPPY to have one. I was definitely trained to expect the worst too. And now that my anecdota on being trained by Homestuck is given back to hiding away since I'm not one of the people disappointed with it.
I fell out of keeping up with homestuck a little while back, about when things started getting very retconned, and i was planning on waiting for it to end and then catching up all in one go. And now I don't think I want to, from what everyone's been saying about the ending. I mean... especially if Vriska gets to Save The Day. I deeply, deeply dislike Vriska.
I...appreciate Vriska as a powerhouse game changer. The girl's got drive, and I feel like in a different situation, if she hadn't been allowed to run roughshod over almost everyone until they were almost unrecognizable, she could have been a useful force to sic against one of the powerful enemies like the Condesce. But again - her plan was generally shit, she treated the others (especially Jake and Tavros) like shit, and when you write a character like that, the audience expects a comeuppance. Her plan should have fallen apart. All the musical keys in Collide hinted that the rug was about to be pulled out from under everyone in the worst way, and her plan would come crashing down around her ears. People on tumblr keep giving Hussie excuses about how these are "people" not "character arcs," how they had to escape narrative convention to be free of LE, and how we should Just Let Them be Happy, but that's just...bull. Hell, I agree that escaping the story would be an effective way of beating LE, but there wasn't enough build up or follow through, and in a situation like this, like I said before, Vriska "winning" doesn't feel right to the readers without a massive amount of justifications and cop outs. I'm writing a fic like this, where certain characters are aware of and influence the narrative on a meta level, and where the approach of LE disrupts the timeline of the text and causes glitches and plot holes to cover my earlier mistakes and I'm still aware that there has to be a balance of normal narrative structure and weird meta bullshit, or you wind up with a modern/postmodern/etc mess at the end
Bringing this back because DIALOGUE, Hussie! Dialogue was your strength in Homestuck! Snapchat is not a satisfactory medium for more than another weaksauce series of bland pictures like what act 6 devolved into, and I'm not interested! Aughhhhhhh!
I mean, it is good for confirming a few things like Terezi making it through, and the funny sight gag of the non-flyers hanging off the flyers, but...
