Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 133: Tenuous Illusions of Free Will

Introduction

< Part 132 | Part 133 | Part 134 >

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5, Part 7 of 12

Pages 7672-7732

No, this isn’t a part where characters have an existential discussion on free will.
The title of this post simply refers to this fake character select screen.

It’s time to go through the second of A6A6I5’s character select screens in this post… except this time, it’s a fake character select screen, which the reader must go through in linear order.

Wow, 10 path options!!!

Wait a minute. You click and click, but nothing happens. This path selection screen seems to be broken. Looks like “free will” got greedy and overloaded the thing with “choice”, rendering the graphic up there completely useless, except you guess as a cool rollover thingy. For the first time EVER, in the over 9000 page history of this website, you begin to feel slightly deceived. Oh, how you would have loved to taste the fruit of free will one last time before this wild ride jerks our bodies to a deadly stop. Alas it is not to be. You must proceed through all of these options linearly, one by one. You click the link below, as usual.

Although this passage initially makes the fake select screen seem like a brutal prank, we’re instead going to be treated to a fun spin on character select screens: instead of going through options in whatever order you want, you go through them linearly, and after each option, you can hover over all the prior options to check on each group of characters. So this fake select screen isn’t completely fake: it’s more of a twist on select screens that focuses more on the rollover aspect.

Given the contents of the select screen shown above, it makes sense for it to be in linear order as I just described. Roxy/Calliope and Dave/Dirk both show up twice in the list, and there’s a lot of bias towards Roxy in there. Most of the conversations feature characters presently on the victory platform: the only ones that don’t are the two Dave/Dirk sections and Meenah/Vriska. Note that I will not be going through the entire fake select screen in this post: rather just the first eight options. I will go through the ninth (Dave/Dirk) in the next post, and the tenth (Roxy/Kanaya) up to the true final select screen in the post after that. After that is three more posts going through the rest of A6A6I5, the Collide post, and the Act 7 and credits post.

Now let’s begin the fake select screen with Dave and Dirk!

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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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