Homesuck: Vriska Rising

[Bard The 5th LW]

Originally Posted by rpgdemon

We wouldn't be able to see the consequence of John's actions if we skipped over the bad stuff and just showed the good. It'd be like, "Okay, sure, whatever? Things are okay for like 500 pages? What kind of story is this?" It'd be crazy boring, and wouldn't have any sort of meaning attached to it, since we wouldn't actually know what the heroes triumphed over. It would be a hollow victory, and a boring narrative.

Here's the thing: I'm not going to convince you it doesn't suck, since you've already decided that it does, and you seem read the comic to look for reinforcement of that belief. I will say that some of the things you're proposing would be objectively worse from a storytelling point of view, regardless of what the trappings of the story actually are. You don't write a story about how great everything is going, you put your protagonists into a tree and throw rocks at them. It's important that things are bad for them over the course of the story, or else there's no reason to continue reading, or for them to continue their journey. If everything is great on page 2, why even have a page 500?

You're making the fundamental mistake of assuming that the author doesn't control the story every step of the way.

Like, let's be real here. Andrew Hussie has literally just undone about FOUR YEARS of actual story. Literally, the characters and events we've been following since the start of Act 6 (way back in 2011) now do not matter AT ALL.

Why do you think he did this? What purpose does it serve to the story or the character development of anyone? Odds are, he did it for one of two reasons:

1.) He literally had no clue how to write himself out of the plot he had written up until that point.
2.) He's just WAY too up his own ass about how meta/subversive his story is towards normal storytelling devices.

There are a MILLION ways he could've written the story to have Vriska survive, inject interesting narrative/conflict, and NOT have insulted his readers for giving a shit about his comic for four years.

e: Like, Snake is most certainly NOT complaining about things going wrong for the main characters, Snake is complaining about the story dragging itself out and wasting time. If you think Snake's complaints are that "Something bad happened to the protagonists!" then I don't think you're reading the same comic.

[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

There are many problems I have with Homestuck right now, but the biggest one I have personally is that we've long past eclipsed the point where the protagonists are supposed to have some sort of plan and some sort of agency in defeating The Big Menace that's kept them down for most the plot, and yet Homestuck's premise right now seems to be "How depressing has this been? LET'S MAKE THINGS EVEN MORE HOPELESS SOMEHOW," repeat forever and eternity. Even the solutions that take us years to get to somehow only make things worse!! INCREDIBLE

Andrew: You don't win extra credits as an author by presenting your heroes with the worst possible situation ad nauseum, as if like, heroes are judged solely by the odds stacked against them

Ahem.

[Bard The 5th LW]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

There are many problems I have with Homestuck right now, but the biggest one I have personally is that we've long past eclipsed the point where the protagonists are supposed to have some sort of plan and some sort of agency in defeating The Big Menace that's kept them down for most the plot, and yet Homestuck's premise right now seems to be "How depressing has this been? LET'S MAKE THINGS EVEN MORE HOPELESS SOMEHOW," repeat forever and eternity. Even the solutions that take us years to get to somehow only make things worse!! INCREDIBLE

Andrew: You don't win extra credits as an author by presenting your heroes with the worst possible situation ad nauseum, as if like, heroes are judged solely by the odds stacked against them

I apologize to Snake if I'm misrepresenting his argument, but it seems clear to me that the problem he has is that Hussie could've very easily ended Homestuck like 3 years ago if he didn't just KEEP throwing more and more shit onto the conflict pile and ultimately render all that shit pointless anyways.

And like, its a problem I have with Homestuck! I loved the comic once upon a time, and I still enjoy it from time to time, because Hussie is pretty fantastic at some things (like writing character-to-character interactions for example). But there's a point where every story ought to just end for its own good and I think Homestuck passed that point around the midway point of Act 6, if not at the BEGINNING of Act 6. At this point, I primarily follow it because I'm curious as to how/when it'll end.

[Aldurin]

I think it would have gone better if he had held off on the video game kickstarter until he was actually done with homestuck. Currently he's clearly stretched himself too thin between multiple things and can only resort to horse wordplay as a coping mechanism.

[Solid Snake]

It's kind of funny to have two people misrepresent aspects of your argument in two different ways. (I guess Bard was closer than RPG, somewhat?)

The point I'm trying to make isn't that bad things keep happening to the characters; I like a good tragic narrative as much as anyone else. I usually like my tragedies to be a result of protagonist agency, however. The Red Wedding works in Game of Thrones because it's not just an objectively shitty event but it's also an objectively shitty event that appears initially to come at you out of left field, but then you meditate on the circumstances and the politics of the world and you're like "Shit, [Dead Characters] totally fucked up and had it coming."

By contrast, everything the trolls and the kids seem to do ends up only creating the very circumstances they're trapped in and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it, even now, near presumably the very end of the story, except create the very circumstances they're desperate to avoid. We're nearing the end and no one -- least of all John, the guy who just caused this retcon, seems to have the slightest clue what he's doing or why he's doing it. It's not as if even Terezi, seer though she is, was like "Oh, by having John retcon everything I'm actually just engineering the circumstances in which Lord English will come into existence and threaten everything!"

I guess my hope for Homestuck was like, at one point or another the kids and trolls would sufficiently master the 'rules of the game,' for lack of a better way to put it, to give themselves a chance of earning their victory as a result of a coordinated strategy? Or, alternatively, that the kids and trolls would utterly fail, but at least that failure would stem from something I could wag my finger at and say "It's because they did X or Y or Z."

Where this finally ties in with Bard's point is that, no, the narrative absolutely shouldn't drag on for years and years on end if the kids and trolls aren't making any progress. "The kids and trolls, in an effort to avoid the consequences of a doomed timeline where everyone dies, have John use his newfound powers to retcon everything, only to realize they've created the exact circumstances that led to Lord English's rise to power" is not only the exact same twist we've seen before (but with Jack Noir the first time, when it was at least better written), but it's something you can easily, easily, as Andrew Hussie, establish in maybe 20% the total content.

I want to spend time with the kids and trolls as they're learning how to actually take charge and resolve these seemingly impossible issues with seemingly insurmountable odds. We don't need to spend years watching them get kicked in the teeth, only to finally get to the 'good part' where they're going to finally enact a plan, succeed or fail, and then just have that confrontation span all of a single flash or a mere pittance of updates. That's the *important* part of the story.

EDIT: Then there's the entirely separate yet equally valid grievance that we just spent years following versions of the characters who themselves aren't 'real' anymore, insofar as their newfound retconned selves are actually completely different characters with completely different relationships, aspirations, and mentalities, none of which we've actually even seen so far.

EDIT 2: Like, you know the really easy way Hussie could've written this to give the protagonists a shred of agency and actually make this whole subplot interesting? Have Terezi, John and Roxy know that retconning is going to lead to a timeline with the 'birth' of Lord English, but have them talk it over and realize they miss their dead friends so much in this timeline that they're willing to do that anyway. Sacrificing entire universes to selfishly revive those they love and preserve the friendships that are important to them, costs to others be damned -- is there any more prototypical a choice for teenagers to make? It gives those characters sufficient agency that I'm like, okay, everything we just witnessed these past couple years actually is important because it's about those three characters -- explaining a difficult decision they made, rendering them less than perfect but all too human.

That's good shit.

You know what's NOT good shit? "Oops! We just so happened to stumble ass-backwards into that very nightmarish situation we were trying to avoid, without having the SLIGHTEST GODDAMN CLUE what we were up to!"

That kind of Deus Ex Machina stuff works maybe like once or twice, but eventually it just starts to feel like a really lazy plot device that strips the characters of any actual role in the story aside from being dopes.

[Loyal]

The thing that bugs me about the recent plot direction (besides, y'know, the plot direction) is that the one person who'd remember anything of what happened in the last four years realtime - that being John - has spent those four years being as utterly unimportant as possible while still being relevant to the plot. Other characters don't remember anything because of the cosmic retcon, and John doesn't remember anything because he was never fucking there for any of it.

Of course, the other issue is that, as mentioned, we are now skipping over the "new" timeline with montages and shit, so as much of a waste of time the last four years have been, we also aren't going to see any of what happened since the retcon - plot advances, characterizations, dialogue, ANYTHING - until it catches up roughly with where we left off in the old timeline. Not even with the most pivotal change, Vriska. Yeah, she's an awful person and a blight on decency, but she was actually pretty entertaining when she's just shooting the shit, and we don't get even that.

There legitimately does not seem to be much of a reason to read Homestuck proper anymore, until it reaches its eventual conclusion with the heat death of the universe, since if you're interested in fan-wank what-ifs, the fans do it better, and if you're interested in the characters interacting with each other, the fans are the only ones doing it at all.

[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

EDIT 2: Like, you know the really easy way Hussie could've written this to give the protagonists a shred of agency and actually make this whole subplot interesting? Have Terezi, John and Roxy know that retconning is going to lead to a timeline with the 'birth' of Lord English, but have them talk it over and realize they miss their dead friends so much in this timeline that they're willing to do that anyway. Sacrificing entire universes to selfishly revive those they love and preserve the friendships that are important to them, costs to others be damned -- is there any more prototypical a choice for teenagers to make? It gives those characters sufficient agency that I'm like, okay, everything we just witnessed these past couple years actually is important because it's about those three characters -- explaining a difficult decision they made, rendering them less than perfect but all too human.

Okay, that would have been a lot more interesting. And also still play into what Hussie is (I think) trying to play up which is the whole concept of free choice/fate in a universe where you CAN technically do anything, but you'll doom your entire universe to a slow death if you do the wrong anything.

I mean, that's why I'm kind of okay with how it's been going down, though. The Great Question or whatever it's called, that we've been dancing around, IS pretty much, "Is it free choice if the choice is death for the universe, or do this other thing" and I think this latest sort of "WELP, Retcon power made the bad guy" is still sort of playing into that. And, to me, that's the whole motif of the story, which is why I'm okay with what's going on. To me, it's never been about character agency, it's always been about "What even IS character agency, when there are infinite timelines, and anytime they make the wrong choice, they're in a dead one?"

[Bard The 5th LW]

Like, I was kinda under the impression John's retcon power was meant to NOT make the bad guy? Like, if Hussie wanted to use the 'Time travel makes the villain through a doomed timeline' thing again then there's no real reason he couldn't have left out the retcon thing and just used Dave or Aradia instead?

[Malek]

To be fair, it's not this retcon that causes it, it's when they decide to go teleport into Caliborn's house and punch him in the face that causes it.

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by Malek

To be fair, it's not this retcon that causes it, it's when they decide to go teleport into Caliborn's house and punch him in the face that causes it.

But the retcon presumably leads to those events, so the retcon does cause it.