Monthly Archives: January 2021

Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 119: Denizen Persuasion and Footwear Theft

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Introduction

< Part 118 | Part 119 | Part 120 >

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4, Part 2 of 8

Pages 7007-7058

“H3R SHO3S W3R3 R3D, SP4RKLY, 4ND D3L1C1OUS. 1 4M ONLY FL3SH 4ND BLOOD”
—Terezi Pyrope, 2014

The secondary storyline of Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4 focuses on Jade and Calliope (later also Jane) sharing stories in dream bubbles, feeding readers hints before the grand reveal that concludes the act, by which I obviously mean the sub-sub-intermission.

Oh yeah, the trollsona stuff is a thing too. I’ll talk about all that when the characters themselves discuss trollsonas, whenever that is, I forget when. For now I’ll discuss Jade and Calliope’s conversation about their childhoods.

… actually, I have very little to say about this scene so far. It’s just Jade and Calliope saying stuff we already knew about their upbringings.

JADE: when i was a kid i grew up with plants all around me
JADE: but i was very lucky… i guess i took all the nice things about my life on this island for granted
JADE: i even had my own garden where i grew flowers and vegetables and fruits and such
JADE: that is all i ever ate, the things i grew myself
CALLIOPE: ooh!
JADE: but i will admit to having developed a taste for meat since becoming a dog <_<;
CALLIOPE: meat is very good.
CALLIOPE: for all the complaints i might have aboUt my childhood, near exclUsive sUbsistance Upon raw flesh is not one.
CALLIOPE: bUt then, i am sUre that comes with the territory of being a monster. heh.


I do want to say that I’ve always been a sucker for scenes in any media (such as the one above) where characters talk about food. Food is just such a joy to talk about—if you have a conversation with someone about food, chances are you’ll learn a lot of interesting things about that person you wouldn’t have learned otherwise. At least that’s true for me, not sure about you. Food is only rarely talked about in Homestuck, which means the occasional times characters do talk about food tend to be very charming.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 118: The End (or So It Seems)

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Introduction

< Part 117 | Part 118 | Part 119 >

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4, Part 1 of 8

Pages 6944-7006

God, this part is so sad.
Also shippy. But mostly sad.

Before I begin going through A6A6I4, let me get something out of the way that I perhaps should have said much sooner, like over a year ago. I hope it doesn’t come off as transphobic.

I do not plan on discussing June Egbert in my Homestuck blog post series. The reason why is simply because I see no reason to, especially considering that the canonicity of June presently goes no further than a single Twitter post by Andrew Hussie. While I have no problem with headcanoning characters to be transgender—so long as you aren’t an asshole about it, or an asshole to those who do—John Egbert being a transgender woman is simply not an idea I can personally make sense of. I do have lots of complicated thoughts and feelings about the topic of gender identity, both my own and in general, but I’d rather stray from using a fictional character as a vessel to explore those thoughts. Note that I may change my mind about this if June ends up appearing in official Homestuck media in some capacity, in which case I’ll try to keep an open mind.

With that out of the way, let’s begin Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4! We’re in the home stretch, folks. The fifth last subdivision of Homestuck, and the second last one that’s of substantial length.

(Oh yeah, I noticed after publishing this post that I published post number 118 on 1/18, January 18. Pretty lucky coincidence.)

Nice job there, Aranea.

This image is not a promising one to start A6A6I4 on. It shows us the catastrophic fate of the pre-retcon alpha session, with evidence aplenty of who all caused this mayhem: first Jade foolishly swapping her planet with Derse, then Aranea and the Condesce smashing all the players’ planets into each other in their final face-off… well, all but two of them. It looks like all the destroyed planets’ Seven Gates were severed in the process of all this, which is pretty messed up.

The two surviving planets are symbolic of the two players who survived this timeline: the token heterosexual couple, John and Roxy, who I would be a complete and utter liar if I said I don’t think they’re insanely cute together.

John’s perception of the glitches reminds me of his perception of Caliborn’s commands in Homosuck. Perhaps it’s indicative of his unique relationship with the narrative that no other character has.

… yeah, yeah, I know it’s probably just Hussie doing cool things with the glitch effects that he hadn’t done prior, but fuck it, I can interpret Homestuck the way I want to.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 117: TRAGIC ENDS AND NEW BEGINNINGS.

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Introduction

< Part 116 | Part 117 | Part 118 >

Act 6 Act 6 Act 4

Pages 6921-6943

Always fun to follow an extremely long post with an extremely short post.

Picking up from where we left off in Act 6 Act 6 Act 3, Caliborn goes to sleep and dreams in his crude pre-Homosuck art style. He ruminates on his humiliating defeat and presents us a pseudo-emotional monologue, starting as follows:

A TEEN DIDN’T LIKE THE DIRECTION OF MY STORY, SO HE CAME AND BEAT ME UP.

Ah, this line. A line often quoted in response to people aggressively complaining about Homestuck media, typically used in arguments that go in circles with such magnificent, original points as “if you don’t like it, then don’t read it”. The fan satire here is off the charts already.

> THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO ME.

AND BEAR IN MIND THAT ONE TIME, MY LEG WAS BITTEN OFF. AND I TRAGICALLY LOST A SISTER TO MURDER.

Here, Caliborn is parodying people who plead for attention and support by fabricating bad things that happened to them. But since this is Caliborn we’re talking about, he doesn’t come up with total lies; rather, he omits details to imply lies. Lying through omission is a long-running theme of such characters as Doc Scratch, Lil’ Hal, and of course Caliborn himself. In this case, he’s implying that someone other than him bit his leg off and murdered his sister. Well, his version of Jack Noir did murder Calliope’s dream self, but his wording is still very misleading.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 116: What the Fuck Happened Here?

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Introduction

< Part 115 | Part 116 | Part 117 >

[S] GAME OVER and the rest of Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 3

Pages 6901-6920

^ This image is how I feel about Karkat wearing short sleeves.

Time to finally analyze [S] GAME OVER, a flash that came out on October 25, 2014, the third anniversary of [S] Cascade. As the title may suggest, the flash consists of most of Homestuck’s living main cast either dying or getting critically wounded, so that they may soon be replaced with post-retcon versions of themselves. This retcon character replacement is a very controversial move and for many people weighs down Act 6 in its entirety. I’ve always been bothered by it myself, but a major goal of mine in these posts is to see if it’s really that bad in retrospect.

A cool detail in the Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s version of this flash is that the browser interface switches color schemes along with the website’s background.

Game Over alternates between taking place in Act 6 Act 6 Act 3 (John fighting Caliborn) and Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 3 (everyone else in the alpha session fighting each other). The flash begins on an incredibly silly note, with a callback to John’s mental breakdown when he discovered his father wasn’t a clown, and his further mental breakdown when he discovered Betty Crocker made Fruit Gushers. The callback is very fitting, because John has mental breakdowns over the absolute stupidest things.

The manga drawings surrounding John clearly indicate that they’re his principal source of anger at Caliborn, which is both amusing and fitting. Honestly, it makes more sense to be angry about those drawings than whatever impact he had on the kids’ story as Lord English, because as Dave said in A6A6I1, he’s responsible in some ass backwards way for them all existing.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 115: ILLUSIONARY YAOI FINE ART.

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Introduction

< Part 114 | Part 115 | Part 116 >

Pages 6853-6900

Act 6 Act 6 Act 3 (before GAME OVER)

Caliborn’s manga drawings are not for the faint of heart.
Neither is my commentary on them, probably.

Welcome to the fourth and final section of my Homestuck blog post series, Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections! This is the point where I start going over the portion of Homestuck that I read as it came out. As I said at the end of the last post, expect a lot more reflection on how I reacted when those updates first came out, as well as some criticism towards the direction Homestuck started going in.

I should also note that I’ve finalized the subdivisions of my Homestuck posts from here on out (though I haven’t decided on firm cutoff points for each post yet). Here goes:

  • A6A6A3 before [S] GAME OVER: 1 post
  • [S] GAME OVER and the rest of A6A6I3: 1 post
  • A6A6A4: 1 post
  • A6A6I4: 8 posts
  • A6A6A5: 1 post
  • A6A6I5: 12 posts
  • [S] Collide and following pages: 1 post
  • Act 7 and credits: 1 post

Under this plan, my Homestuck series will end consisting of a nice, round 140 posts. 115 posts down, 25 to go! I can get through this final stretch, I know I can.

WELCOME BACK.
(AGAIN.)

To start things off, you may wonder how I initially reacted to this update, which was the first Homestuck update I experienced live (and the start of Act 6 Act 6 Act 3). I didn’t think much of it; I just found it all humorous and absurd, long before I realized how inspiring Caliborn’s evolution as an artist is. Now, seeing Caliborn’s curtains open on the How to Draw Manga book that had befuddled him so much before, it’s already clear he’s going to show off his new artistic skills that the book taught him.

Thanking readers for their “unimpatience”, Caliborn proudly reveals that he has indeed succeeded at learning manga. Lil’ Seb presents him a cool trophy that I can only assume was alchemized. Or maybe it’s a game construct from his severely distorted journey through the standard Sburb player progression? I’m asking some REAL questions right here.

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