Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 38: Ascensions and Failures Thereof

Introduction 

Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 11 of 32

Pages 3075-3132 (MSPA: 4975-5032)

I haven’t had title images with John in them lately, so here’s one with him I guess. We aren’t going to see him for a while anyway.

John levels to the top of his echeladder and the air returns to being cloudy, and I guess this is kind of meant to indicate that the echeladder is not at the end of the line. We’re about to get introduced to the concept of god tiers.

Up next is another walkaround game featuring John. It’s similar to the Act 4 game (with very similar music) but I guess it switched to the Earthbound style. John answers Vriska in the game, and I have a few things to say about that.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 37: I Killed Your Grandpa And I Like You

Introduction 

Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 10 of 32

Pages 3048-3074 (MSPA: 4948-4974)

Picking up from where we left off, Jade has an extremely awkward conversation with Tavros.

AT: i SPENT SO LONG SLEEPING AND DREAMING AND PLAYING ON PROSPIT, 
AT: tHAT BEING AWAKE WAS MADE TO FEEL WEIRD, aND i DIDN’T LIKE IT FOR A WHILE, 
GG: yeah i have done a lot of sleeping myself 🙂 
AT: oH, yES, i KNOW, bUT, 
AT: i SAW YOU, yOU WERE AWAKE A LOT TOO, 
AT: aFTER A CERTAIN MOMENT, i SPENT JUST ABOUT EVERY WAKING HOUR BEING ASLEEP, 

just realized something. Breath and blood are thought to be an opposing pair of aspects. Karkat, the trolls’ hero of blood, did not sleep at all during the trolls’ session; Tavros, the trolls’ hero of breath, slept almost the whole time during the trolls’ session after a certain point.

GG: what did you want to talk about? 
AT: i WANTED TO ASK YOU PERMISSION, 
AT: i WOULD HAVE ASKED PERMISSION THE FIRST TIME, 
AT: bUT AT THE TIME YOU WERE NOT ABLE TO GIVE IT, oR TALK OR ANYTHING, 
GG: permission for what? 
AT: tO COMMUNE WITH YOUR LUSUS, 
GG: with bec? 
GG: uh…. 
GG: what do you mean by commune? 
GG: and 
GG: what do you mean the first time! 
GG: you did it before? 
AT: yEAH, 

Tavros is asking if it’s OK for him to commune with Bec, even though he had already did so before, and as we’ll see, it wasn’t any good.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 36: Lava Is Not Better Than Snow

Introduction 

Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 9 of 32

Pages 2997-3047 (MSPA: 4897-4947)

From where we left off, Jade gets out of bed and it does appear that maybe it is indeed a sprite magic bed.

In a callback to Bec’s debut flash. Jade sees a Bec-prototyped imp and strifes it in an interactive page.

The music in this minigame, titled Sunslammer, is one of the best songs in the whole comic. It’s the kind of music that only when you listen to it on loop do you realize how awesome it is. Seriously I’ve listened to that song (and many others from Homestuck) on extended loop. As for the flash itself, it’s a lot of fun seeing a Bec imp teleport Jade around the whole incipisphere—yet another ramification of Bec prototyping himself, in action. It also has the same “review of what’s going on everywhere” feel that walkarounds have: the windy thing on LOWAS, Bec imps thrashing John’s bedroom, Rose no longer in the study room, three instances of Dave seeing Jade, how huge the kids’ houses are, and a bit of a tour of LOFAF.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 35: Backwards Logic and Nightmare Faces

Introduction

Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 8 of 32

Pages 2942-2996 (MSPA: 4842-4896)

Continuing the exile arc, WV recognizes the Bec-shaped base, and only then does he remember that he had previously met the boy he commanded a while back. How come he only recognizes John now? PM recognized both John and Jade when she saw them on her command screen.

John sees WV? in the dream he told Rose about and then wakes up and does stuff we already saw. WV returns to commanding John as he promised way back in Act 2.

The whole scene is one of those moments where exile commands are shown on scenes we’ve already seen; such things are often meant to show us that exiles were behind certain things we’ve already seen, which reminds me of how Vriska is behind some stuff that happened in the kids’ session. I don’t think John mentioned having the exile voice return in his conversation with Rose, which makes sense because John couldn’t “hear” the voice.

John doesn’t listen to WV’s commands so he presses caps lock despite the narration telling him not to, locking him in the command station. Here’s an exile thing I’d like to discuss. When exiles give commands, apparently they’re sent to both characters and their own narrative prompts. The mechanics behind this are kind of a meta thing and aren’t really explained that clearly.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 34: Villain Caninification Station

Introduction

Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 7 of 32

Pages 2891-2941 (MSPA: 4791-4841)

“The villain is a FUCKING DOG WEARING SUNGLASSES.”
—Andrew Hussie

Back to Jack’s duel with a wicked rad dude, his creepy puppet, and his bird son/brother, we get some panels like the one above that are creepy but crazy awesome. See, if this lightning ninja freak is fighting a villain, that’s when he’s pretty cool, like an impossibly rad character from Street Fighter or something.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 33: Cthulhu Acid Trip Dreams

Introduction

Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 6 of 32

Pages 2841-2890 (MSPA: 4741-4790)

Yes, this really is a scene in Homestuck. I promise you, not all of it is an LSD tri—oh wait you should know this, because this post series is made on the assumption that people reading it have read Homestuck.

In which I decide against the “in which blah blah blah” thing because that would be stealing an idea from the blog that inspired this post series, and stealing ideas is a bad habit I’ve had in my creative projects for as long as I can remember; and also because I went fine adding title pictures to my older posts without any text immediately following.

Continuing from where we left off, we see what Jack Noir is up to. He yanks the ninja sword out of the beat mesa record thing, and I wonder where exactly Dave’s bro went. I actually don’t remember. I think he escaped and somehow went to LOWAS offscreen but I’m not sure. I guess I’ll see and find out.

Then comes a famously bizarre and nightmarish flash in which Jade wakes up from her dream. I’ll comment on it with the screenshot method I’ve seen livebloggers use.

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Neat-looking blog view I just got done

NOTE: This post is basically meaningless now that this blog has been migrated to WordPress, but I’m preserving it anyway because why not.

So I just got done giving most of my blog posts title pictures that are done in such a way that blog views which show a rundown of each post will have a picture for each post. And the blog post tiles in the flipcard view look REALLY nice:

I could stare at this shit for hours.

If you’re wondering how I did that, it’s simple: for each post, the first picture that’s uploaded from your computer (not from an image URL) will be the one used to represent the post. If there’s no such pictures there won’t be such a picture for the post, which is why most of my posts previously didn’t have representing images in those blog views.

Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 32: The Bard of Fuck I Forgot

Introduction

Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 5 of 32

Pages 2793-2840 (MSPA: 4693-4740)

I am debating with myself whether it’s clichĂ©d to start putting in “Where I…” between the title pictures of my posts and the first pictures. Because I want to have something between those pictures or it just looks awkward. Then again I have nothing between the title and following pictures in many of the posts where I retroactively added title pictures.

John connects to Jade and gets ready to do some important stuff until…

She’s back!

Nanna makes her classic pranking entrance and summons a bed to catch John and his stuff.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 31: Shipping Grids and Massive Walkarounds

Introduction

Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 4 of 32

Pages 2784-2792 (MSPA: 4684-4692)

Pictured above: why this post covers only nine pages.

Welcome to post 31 of this whole big project. Honestly this is just filler text to make the gap between the title picture and the following picture less weird.

I wonder if this picture was deliberately meant to give an M.C. Escher vibe or if it’s just weirdness arising from visual callbacks (in this case calling back to the view up from Terezi’s hive).
Also, we can infer from John’s lack of panic sitting up here that he doesn’t have any fear of heights. Come to think of it, pretty much nobody in Homestuck seems to have fear of heights.

— ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering arachnidsGrip [AG] — 

EB: hey vriska!
EB: ok, i still cannot find my nanna up here, so now i am just installing this game.
EB: what are you up to?
AG: John! What the hell. There are so many things wrong with what you just said.
AG: First of all, who told you you could just hassle me without warning like this? That’s not how this works!
EB: why not? you guys do it all the time.
AG: Yes, 8ecause we are trolling you! Those are the rules. We get to 8ug you any time we feel like, and you have to sit there and t8ke it like a chump.
EB: bluh…
AG: I am too 8usy to 8e fielding your nonsense at the drop of one of your a8surd human hats. I have a ridiculous num8er of irons in the fire. You will speak to me only when I am ready to contact you, is that clear????????
EB: that’s dumb. i’m going to talk to you whenever i want! 

Here, John is giving Vriska a status update out of his own will. I thought up some reasons last post as to why John feels the need to keep in touch with Vriska, and it’s still pretty interesting, especially because John is contacting Vriska rather than the other way around.

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A gem of a blog I found

http://prettyprettyponies.blogspot.com

Yes I know the link sounds like a blog about My Little Pony before it became an Internet phenomenon. But it isn’t really that, more like something I find really hilariously amazing that it exists. To explain this awesome Internet find I’ll need to explain why I think it’s cool.

If you didn’t know, I’m currently working on a video series where I read aloud this edit of the Pony Pals book Detective Pony. The edited book originated as something from Homestuck, where one character edited Detective Pony to make it funnier and gave it to another character for her birthday. The first few edited pages were shown, and someone decided to edit the whole book, and it’s glorious.

When I find out about cool things, I tend to get way into them, which is why my big projects exist: my large number site, my Homestuck blog post series, and my Detective Pony video series. Recently I used Google Books to read bits and pieces of the original unmodified Pony Pals books, just to see how incredibly dull they are with clichĂ©d plots and stuff. I know those books are meant for little kids so of course there will be dumb stuff, but it’s still really funny to read them.

So I decided to google things about Pony Pals, specifically seeing if every damn book mentions that Anna (one of the main characters) is dyslexic, a fact the books always seem to take a moment to bring up but is pretty much never relevant to the story as far as I know. The modified version of Detective Pony even parodies this by making Anna’s dyslexia very relevant to the plot 3/4 of the way through the story. In the aforementioned Google search, I came across the blog I linked to at the top of this post.

It’s an old blog which hasn’t been updated since 2011 where some teenage girl named Lauren first dissected all the Pony Pals books, then started dissecting other kids’ books. It actually reminds me a lot of my Homestuck blog post series: she commented (pretty negatively) on all the Pony Pals books, then the commentary gradually became less angry and more sincere to the point of having favorite and least favorite moments in the end. Later she wrote something which is apparently a fanfiction of the Pony Pals six years later when they’re in high school?

I’ve gotten pretty carried away with my Homestuck blog post series, and seeing a similar post series about Pony Pals is pretty enjoyable. I’ve thought of reading the whole Pony Pals book series just to see how ridiculous it is, and it looks like someone actually did that, with blogged commentary and everything!



As absurd as it may sound, I want to read that book series now.