Tag Archives: black comedy

Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 108: Blindness Reinstigation Station

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Introduction

< Part 107 | Part 108 | Part 109 >

Pages 6397-6446

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 1, Part 4 of 5

This post’s title picture was originally going to be Terezi putting on her newly alchemized blindfold, but I feel a strange sense of obligation to use this one instead, much like I did in the posts featuring the Equius/Aradia and imagined Jade/Jadesprite kissing scenes.

Picking up from where we left off, it’s time for the middle part of the glitched selection screen, which is now the only open option. I find it amusing that the story’s glitches in this case make it more linear rather than less, as the page’s narration points out.

KANAYA: Why Would You Do That!
KANAYA: I Do Not Understand Why You Needed To Impale My Friend To Demonstrate Your Resurrection Abilities!
KANAYA: I Believed You!
KANAYA: It Was Pointless And Cruel And Does Not Advance My Willingness To Cooperate With You At All!
KANAYA: Furthermore It Did Not Prove That You Can Use Said Abilities To Harm Me!
KANAYA: I Believe That Assertion Was Based On A Fallacious Theory About My Constitution!
KANAYA: In Actuality One Could Easily Kill Me With Any Number Of Conventional Methods!
KANAYA: Im Sure You Could Chop My Head Off Or Burn Me Alive Or Crush Me To Death And I Would Die Just Fine!

Kanaya’s rant at Jane for killing Karkat as a demonstration features an amusing expansion upon her standard typing quirk: just as each word starts with exactly one capital letter, each sentence ends with exactly one exclamation point.

KARKAT: (whoa, kanaya)
KARKAT: (could you maybe not give the psycho fork girl any more ideas???)
KANAYA: I Am Not Scared Of You!
KANAYA: None Of Us Are!
KARKAT: (i kind of am)
KANAYA: Karkat Shut Up!
KANAYA: If This Treacherous Despot Serving Turncoat Seeks Compliance From Me Then She Will Have To Pry It From My Mutilated Lifeless Cadaver!
KARKAT: (oh no oh god oh no oh god)

Karkat interjects a few times with his immediately recognizable flavor of utter panic, just like how he was in Murderstuck when his friends started killing each other. His fear of Jane is more extreme than even his reaction to Gamzee when he turned evil, probably because he had thought for sure he was done with watching his friends die horribly.

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Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 87: The Mental Breakdown to End All Mental Breakdowns

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Introduction

< Part 86 | Part 87 | Part 88 >

Act 6 Intermission 3, Part 2 of 6

Pages 5264-5307 (MSPA: 7164-7207)

Alternate post title: Con Air – It’s No Masterpiece
Alternate post title 2: John Egbert Dissects Con Air
Alternate post title 3: Ghost Butt Speculation Station

Five years and one day ago, I started reading Homestuck for the first time. I can’t believe I’m still obsessed with it after all this time. Enjoy this post as a five-year celebration of sorts! I wrote the whole thing on vacation, then made a few revisions at home.

September 18 will be the fourth anniversary of my Homestuck blog post series. I think it would be fun to get to the end of Homestuck’s fourth year on that day, but that’s 900 pages away so it probably won’t be possible unless I REALLY pick up the pace.

You pause your adventure through the afterlife because you’ve been at it for way too long already. You’ll get back to this in a little while. You just know more of your dead loser friends are lurking in this area. You can feel their lameness emanating from beyond the grave. You can also feel it emanating from within the grave, which is good, because that’s where you are. The grave. 

The page that immediately follows Openbound Part 1 tells readers that we’ll be getting back to meeting the Beforan trolls in not too long. Another bit that was most useful for serial readers at the time.

What we REALLY need to do is see what John’s been up to. It almost feels like it’s been a year since we saw him. Hell, it’s probably his birthday again. When is it ever NOT John’s birthday???

Um, I’m pretty sure November 2016 was way more than just a year ago.

Jokes aside, “when is it ever not John’s birthday” is a damn good question. It’s incredibly disorienting whenever a part of Homestuck doesn’t take place on his birthday. I like to assume Harry Anderson Egbert was also born April 13, because of how much of the Candy Epilogue takes place on his birthday.

It is indeed John’s birthday; his fifteenth, in fact. To celebrate, we’re treated to an enormous zoom-in to the Prospitian battleship he and Jade have been living in. Act 6 Intermission 3 has quite a few lengthy art sequences, only befitting of an act that experiments HARD with storytelling style.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 77: What Is "Actuality?"

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Introduction

< Part 76 | Part 77 | Part 78 >

Act 6 Act 3, Part 3 of 8 or so I hope but I really don’t know

Pages 4862-4877 (MSPA: 6762-6777)

I couldn’t resist having philosophy bullshit for a post title.

Why did I have to stop in the middle of this exposition sequence? I’m sorry everyone.
Also as you probably haven’t noticed I’ve taken a bit of liberty ordering text and images.

Take a moment to appreciate this panel. Not enough people do.

TT: My bro did this too with his many fine films.
TT: Practically everything was a symbol for something. Either in mockery of the batterwitch, or conveying some hidden message to its audience. Each film was always rigorously picked apart for its head-scratching symbolic meaning.
TT: But he managed to accomplish all that without ever compromising the purity of his ironic vision, which I think was admirable.

Last post pretty much ended with me discussing the supposed symbolism in Rose’s books. Now we learn that Dave’s movies also had a crazy symbolism thing going on, but I guess we’re supposed to infer for ourselves what lies in there? Or maybe it’s more like how Homestuck references those comics and it’s probably intertwined with that.

GT: Your forebears are certainly entrepreneurial if nothing else.
GT: I can get behind the idea of making a killing if it means i also get to be as good at doing adventures as i hope to be.
GT: Did they ever bring the battle to the witchs doorstep or were the blows dealt strictly through public masquerades and theatrics?
TT: Yeah, they got pretty deep into the shit eventually.
TT: They were both very skilled combatants. I’m pretty sure she had some weird powers too.
GT: Powers you say?
TT: Communion with occult forces. Something like that.
TT: She knew things. Had visions. It’s why she was able to write those books, and more importantly, why Roxy and I were able to survive here. 

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Rose in the scratched universe had the exact same whole crazy knowledge thing going on as her other self. The explanation almost feels like handwaving stuff but given what previous stuff we’ve seen with the trolls and their ancestors’ abilities it kind of works fine, makes sense even.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 75: The Juggalo Strikes Back

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Introduction

< Part 74 | Part 75 | Part 76 >

Act 6 Act 3, Part 1 of 8 or so

Pages 4820-4840 (MSPA: 6720-6740)

Fun fact: the music in this walkaround was written for Rose’s planet, and yet it somehow works reasonably well here.

Act 6 Act 3 opens up with a walkaround game where Jane explores her planet, much like Act 4 did. As much as it established Doctor as a memorable song, the Act 4 walkaround was definitely a drag to get through. This one is very different with a more point and click style that makes it somewhat harder to miss out on anything, but requires more of you actually doing stuff and figuring it out. Or at least, it did according to my memory. Better see for myself.

This isn’t very cautious of her, actually.

Unlike in the last view of Jane’s house, her mailbox is gone once again.

When Jane enters the game, the first thing she does is jump off the balcony of her sinking house onto this platform thing. Unlike when John entered the game, she’s immediately exploring the world which is weird considering how much the alpha kids are thought of as doing nothing pretty much forever. At least this is a step in the right direction; if I remember right this whole act is one of the better parts of Act 6.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 70: A Friendship Permanently Ruined

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Introduction

< Part 69 | Part 70 | Part 71 >

Act 6 Act 2, Part 5 of 6

Pages 4569-4594 (MSPA: 6469-6494)

Jane’s conversation with Dirk’s responder about Sburb (i.e. stuff that matters) looks like this:

but her conversation with Roxy about teen drama shit looks like this:

(click to zoom in)

I think this difference says a lot about the alpha kids’ story arc, and how much time they waste on stuff that isn’t Sburb. I don’t even have much to say about the short pesterlog, other than that Jane is noticeably enthusiastic about starting up the game and more than ready to begin, and I think her entering the game could’ve easily progressed smoothly from here on out.

However—and this is a tangent that isn’t so much saying stuff about the short pesterlog—I imagine the progression of events might be too straightforward if Jane didn’t start getting bugged by other people. In the beta kids’ arc, getting John into the game was an interesting storyline because it was our first time seeing that happen, not to mention we didn’t even know he would be transported to another dimension. In the trolls’ arc that stuff is all kind of fast forwarded through, while in the alpha kids’ arc it’s interrupted by relationship drama. I think the story probably would’ve progressed interestingly enough without that happening since plot twists regarding starting the game have already happened in the form of things blowing up. Then again I can kind of see why Jane entering would keep getting delayed like that. Act 6 Act 2 isn’t really in any position to conclude yet; for one thing we still haven’t heard from Jake at all in this act, let alone see him make progress on his bunny mission.

Anyway let’s get on with the long pesterlog.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 63: Dirk’s Ironic Robot Company

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Introduction

< Part 62 | Part 63 | Part 64 >

Act 6 Act 1, Part 4 of 4

Pages 4227-4284 (MSPA: 6127-6184)

In a callback to a scene in the trolls’ arc, Jake discovers a grumbling giant version of Karkat’s lusus. Presumably the callback is there to make it extra obvious those are the trolls’ lusii—this isn’t the only time such a thing is done.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 51: A Tale of Two Vengeful Seers

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Introduction

< Part 50 | Part 51 | Part 52 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 24 of 32

Pages 3695-3716 (MSPA: 5595-5616)

Before we begin, here’s a fact that probably no one who isn’t me cares about: when moving these blog posts to WordPress in 2019, I edited this post far more heavily than I did prior posts, some edits regarding the painfully basic John/Rose ship, and others just smoothing out faltering wording (which there’s plenty of up until about post 70-some). I’m not sure why I went so much heavier editing this post than any before, but looking back, most of the edits are just clearer wording, so I’m leaving them as is while I go through these posts in order in 2021 after having finished writing (but not yet publishing) the final post.

It’s time for [S] Seer: Descend, a walkaround game that tops all others in chilling mood and rivals Alterniabound in scale while completely dominating it in plot relevance. Like some others, it opens with a flash sequence with, as the title suggests, Rose descending into the castle. I can’t help but notice the giant black squidmonster aura surrounding her, which just utterly dwarfs anything she did before going dark, and that includes glowing three different colors to my recollection.

Another part of the flash opening sequence that is pretty much impossible to screenshot: we very briefly glimpse both the green sun and a color-inverted pink sun. I’ve heard of theories that there’s a pink sun to complement the green sun, just like Alternia’s green and pink moons, though those are dismissed by many as a ridiculous crack theory that makes no sense. Only through catching the glimpse after rewatching that sequence did I notice that glimpsed pink sun. It’s really probably just a color-inverted green sun though.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 48: Bored Superdogs and Memory Revelations

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Introduction

< Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 21 of 32

Pages 3546-3613 (MSPA: 5446-5513)

Only in Homestuck could this picture make any sort of sense. Even then…

NOTE: I’m really blitzing through Act 5 now (by which I mean going about 30% faster), and boy am I proud of that.

NOTE 2: As school is ending, I have a big project over the next few weeks which I have to work a lot on. This means that I’m slowing down posts somewhat, with the next three posts weekly instead of every five days. Next post coming Sunday.

: (

We now focus on what Jack Noir is up to. He just killed Dad and Mom offscreen. As with Nepeta, it’s a bit of a relief we didn’t have to see them die onscreen; showing a guy killing two loving parents of main characters in love together would obviously be even more heartwrenching than anything we’ve seen so far. Compare this to Bro, who got an onscreen death scene. This is probably not because he is (arguably) not as likable as the other guardians, rather because his death was the culmination of a fight, while the other two were just on a date when it was suddenly interrupted. If John’s dad was in a fistfight with Jack and lost when Jack became more powerful, he would no doubt get a full death scene.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 45: Everything I Know Is Turning Magic

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Introduction

< Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 18 of 32

Pages 3415-3437 (MSPA: 5315-5337)

Man, when was the last time the title picture was at the start of the stretch of pages the post covers?

Picking up from where we left off, John went on a car ride with WV?* and is now talking to Jade in another long pesterlog.

* The question mark notation for the exiles before they became exiles always confused me in my first read. I think I interpreted the question marks a little too literally; I kind of thought it was supposed to indicate stuff on the order of, “is this guy WV or is it not?”

EB: hey jade, are you there? i have a computer now. 
EB: this boring guy keeps blinking at me though, and it’s weird. 
GG: john!!! 😀 
GG: wow, finally! 
EB: hi! 
EB: sorry i disappeared after you entered the game… 
EB: but from what i have seen in the clouds, it doesn’t look like you have had much trouble making progress! 
GG: nope! 
GG: dave was able to set up as my server player 
GG: he is building up my house right now so that we can deploy some equipment up there 
EB: oh, nice! 

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Commentary Part 44: Black Comedy Investigation Station

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Introduction

< Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 >

Act 5 Act 2, Part 17 of 32

Pages 3360-3414 (MSPA: 5260-5314)

Yet another title picture that doesn’t match the post’s name.
I would’ve done something from the investigation scene but I’m avoiding having spoilery title pictures.

NOTE: Next post will be April 10.

This is the picture accompanying Karkat’s memo.
We just got done seeing evil Gamzee, so this is some pretty strong juxtaposition.

To kick things off, Karkat starts up a memo to warn his friends about murderous purple-bloods on the loose.

CCG: THE WORST CASE SCENARIO HAS HAPPENED.
CCG: THE BARD OF RAGE IS ON THE LOOSE. 
CCG: YEAH, I KNOW WE ALL THOUGHT THAT TITLE WAS A JOKE, BUT IT TURNED OUT IT WASN’T. 

This is the official reveal of Gamzee’s god tier title; he’s no longer the Bard of Fuck I Forgot. As I said last post, Gamzee’s god tier title most likely wasn’t revealed earlier because it would be too obvious of a hint that he’d become evil.

Also, it’s interesting how the trolls apparently all thought Gamzee’s title was a joke. Did nobody find his title the least bit foreboding? Or did they think that was merely an example of the idea that titles are meant to challenge players? Come to think of it, it’s probably the trolls thinking the idea that people are sometimes in some way the opposite of their title, which has been brought up a few times. I’m not sure, but really, it would make sense for the title to be at least a little ominous.

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