Tag Archives: calliope

Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 140: The Circle of Stupidity Is (Not) Complete

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Introduction

< Part 139 | Part 140 (the end!)

Act 7 + Credits + Closing Thoughts

Pages 8127-8130

This is it, folks. This is the end of my Homestuck post series.

Are you ready for the grand finale of my Homestuck blog post series? After six long years going in and out of working on my Homestuck posts, I have finally reached the finish line. I cannot overstate how amazing it feels to get started on my final Homestuck post. It feels far more amazing than I could have ever imagined to actually be at the final point, not just imagining when I might reach that point.

There’s many ambitious projects that I’ve started over the years—since I was a child, in fact—but most of them fizzled very early on. A fair portion of those projects I got quite a good way through, but a much smaller portion of those did I successfully finish. On the day this post is published, I can proudly say my Homestuck blog post series has joined the elite club of personal projects that I have finished. The post series spent almost two straight years being a project that I thought I would abandon forever, but eventually I somehow had it in me to resume it after all, and from then on, it was an on-and-off climb to the finish line, which is where I am now.

After one year and five months working on this post series, one year and ten months putting this post series on pause, and two years and nine months working on and off in months-long bursts, I proudly present to you Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 140: The Circle of Stupidity Is (Not) Complete. What better way to name my last Homestuck post than with a reference to an anime that I haven’t seen? I sure can’t think of any.

(By the way: happy sixth anniversary to my first Homestuck post! A fitting day to release the last one, if I say so myself.)

Alright, now let’s begin this post with Act 7!

Act 7, as you should already know, is a nine-minute animation that concludes Homestuck, released on the comic’s seventh anniversary. You should also already know that it is a very divisive ending that is often argued to leave a lot unresolved, and that it is animated in a style heavily inspired by anime, giving closure to the long-running misconception that Homestuck is an anime. Before writing any of the text from this paragraph onwards, I rewatched Act 7 in its entirety, and one thing is immediately clear: I had somehow never appreciated before how stunning the animation is. This may have something to do with the fact that when the flash came out in 2016, I knew nothing about any anime, and was expecting Act 7 to be… please don’t laugh at me for this… a gigantic walkaround with every character interaction possible. In retrospect, I think my dissatisfaction with Homestuck’s ending came mostly from the unresolved character interactions!

Now of course, my more positive reaction to Act 7 today no doubt relates to how the epilogues resolved the threads it left open in a way that brutally deconstructs the concept of plot resolutions. The epilogues allowed me to appreciate Act 7 much more for what it is: a beautiful animation that mostly shows things we already knew would happen, but in a fashion that’s stunning enough to be a worthwhile ending flash. But even putting aside the epilogues, I think I’ve outgrown all those childish complaints that I once had about Homestuck’s ending content. I guess that’s what happens when you’re 22 years old, huh? You realize that some things really aren’t worth getting hung up about.

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

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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 Reflections Part 131: Meeting of the Contrasting Muses

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Introduction

< Part 130 | Part 131 | Part 132 >

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5, Part 5 of 12

Pages 7561-7634

I feel like I should mention that a friend of mine who doesn’t know anything about Homestuck recently joked about me doing blog posts analyzing Danganronpa, which I don’t know anything about.

(I really hope I didn’t jinx myself there.)

Finishing the transition from last post, Skaian clouds take us to Jade, Jane, and Calliope on the yellow spiral cherubic stage thing. The zoom-in is much less grandiose than the zoom-out from the victory platform was.

*sigh*

It’s not that I hate the dream bubble scenes in A6A6I4 and A6A6I5 with Jade, Jane, and/or Calliope. It’s just that when I try to comment on and analyze those scenes, I spend big chunks of them being completely stumped as to what to say about them, so I kind of just end up going through them quickly and picking out a few bits of dialogue that I do have something to say about. And this scene is no exception: Jane asks when and how she can wake up, Calliope offers to wake her up the same way she woke Rose and Roxy to cut short their reunion in Act 6 Act 5, but then something else happens to the stage and spiral.

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Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck Reflections Part 120: The Part Where I Keep Getting Distracted Thinking About Fireflies by Owl City

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Introduction

< Part 119 | Part 120 | Part 121 >

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4, Part 3 of 8

Pages 7059-7099

You would not believe your ghosts
if 120 Homestuck posts
were written by cookiefonster

(120 is pronounced “one twenty”)

Before we begin, have an obligatory plug of my 8-bit cover of Fireflies. Also an obligatory statement that this post includes the oil retcon scene.

Alright, let’s begin this post!

Jade and Calliope commence their storytelling session for real, wielding pens in their respective text colors. Jade tells the two stories about John as promised in their last scene.

JADE: im starting to remember the things she told me so vividly now
JADE: its amazing what a creative project can do to get your mind turning
CALLIOPE: ^u^


I know exactly what Jade is talking about regarding creative projects. These posts have gotten my mind turning about many matters, Homestuck and otherwise, definitely not to an excessive or distracting degree or anything.

CALLIOPE: what shall i draw first?
JADE: the land of wind and shade!
JADE: that is where the story starts
CALLIOPE: i see.
CALLIOPE: which story, exactly?
CALLIOPE: her story, or yoUrs?
JADE: hmmm
JADE: both, as a matter of fact
JADE: my story began with a tragedy on lowas, which led to meeting her in the first place
JADE: and then, she used my memory of that tragedy as a starting point for her story, which turned out to be related
CALLIOPE: ooh, fascinating!
CALLIOPE: (i love stories)
JADE: (i know)


All three voiced cherub characters in Homestuck—I consider the regular and god tier Calliope separate characters—display a strong affinity for circumstantial simultaneity. In their many stories, they frequently tie together seemingly distant events using common points; in this case, the stories about pre-retcon John and post-retcon John are tied together using their visitations to LOWAS.

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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 Dissects Homestuck Part 112: Grandfatherly Saiyanification Station

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Introduction

< Part 111 | Part 112 | Part 113 >

Pages 6606-6681

Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 2, Part 2 of 4

It’s over 6000!

I’m getting so close to the Gigapause, which is kind of scary to think about. I’ve been working more on music stuff lately than this post series, which is why my posting schedule hasn’t been too fast lately despite being done with finals.

Picking up from where we left off, Jane notices Jake’s hope field and has a villain-to-villain confrontation with Aranea, which as I said in my last post is a good indicator that this timeline is going way off the rails.

Still in his prison cell, Jane’s father watches the scene in stern fatherly confusion. This is the point where it starts becoming clear that Hussie is having a lot of fun throwing in humorous callbacks and early act throwbacks into all these action scenes, which further implies a burnout on writing Homestuck the way he had done shortly prior. I could complain about how the retcon that follows made so many story events arguably pointless, but I’ve come to accept that it’s more fun to analyze Homestuck in a matter-of-fact fashion.

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Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 96: Patron Manbros and Prankster Burnouts

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Introduction

< Part 95 | Part 96 | Part 97 >

Act 6 Act 5, Part 4 of 6

Pages 5669-5712 (MSPA: 7669-7712)

Next post is the trickster arc. I am so fucking sorry in advance.
But who knows? Maybe it isn’t that bad. I’ll see for myself.

October 1, 2019 is the day I will migrate my entire blog to a custom web domain! Currently figuring out the details of how I will do that. (NOTE: The custom web domain is where you are right now. Before that date, I ran this blog on Blogger.)

Also, there will be no Homestuck post next week because I have two big school assignments due a week from now.

Jake answers Caliborn, who wants to have an earnest gentlemanly conversation with him. 

uu: FEMALES ARE NOT BIOLOGICALLY EQUIPPED TO BEHAVE REASONABLY. AS PROVEN BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT. BY EMPIRICAL ASSERTION.
uu: THEY ARE VERY SHRILL AND INSANE AND DON’T MAKE ANY SENSE. THEIR EMOTIONS ARE OUT OF CONTROL AND THEIR FEELINGS NEVER SHUT UP.
uu: AND WORST OF ALL. GIRLS ARE VERY TRENCHANT TOWARD BOYS WHO WOULD KINDLY INFORM THEM OF THE WAY REALITY FUCKING WORKS.
uu: TALK ABOUT UNGRATEFUL. NO. THERE IS NOTHING WORTHWHILE TO BE GAINED. FROM CHATTING UP THE BITCHES.
uu: AS SUCH. IT IS MY SOLEMN BOYPLEDGE. THAT I WILL NEVER BOTHER SPEAKING WITH YOUR FOUL HUMAN STRUMPETS AGAIN.

Caliborn’s sexism never fails to crack me up. It’s just so much funnier than it has any reason to be.

Jake goes on a walk through the Land of Hills and Stone Henges as he talks to Caliborn, which gives us some nice scenery.

uu: THROUGH CAREFUL OBSERVATION OF YOUR PARTY. I HAVE DETERMINED THEY ARE BOTH USELESS. AND HOLDING YOU ALL BACK.
uu: ON THE OTHER HAND. BOTH OF YOUR MALE PLAYERS ARE PRETTY GOOD. THE OTHER GUY, AND HIS RED FLOATING MALE GHOST? THEY’RE SO STRONG. IT’S SO GREAT.
uu: I REALLY RESPECT THAT.
GT: Yeah. Dirk is a pretty tough cookie alright…
uu: YOU’RE NOT AS STRONG. BUT WHATEVER. YOU’RE ALRIGHT ANYWAY.
uu: LET’S FACE IT. COMPARED TO THE FECKLESS HOES. YOU’RE IN A CLASS OF YOUR OWN.
GT: But i thought you hated me!
GT: At least thats how i remember it when we last talked.
GT: Which was admittedly a while ago.
GT: Ive never been accused of having a photographic memory but i dont recall you typing in green either.
GT: Are you ripping me off bro??
uu: NO YOU FUCKING MORON.
uu: IF I STOOPED TO YOUR LEVEL. AND DECIDED TO JACK *ANY* PORTION OF YOUR SWAGGER.
uu: DON’T YOU THINK. YOU’D NEED TO EARN MY RESPECT FIRST??? 

Foreshadowing, am I right??? For some reason, I never realized until writing these blog posts how much the events of Caliborn’s Masterpiece had been foreshadowed.

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Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 94: Wizardfic Nostalgification Station

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Introduction

< Part 93 | Part 94 | Part 95 >

Act 6 Act 5, Part 2 of 6

Pages 5572-5634 (MSPA: 7472-7534)

“Nostalgification” is totally a real word, I swear.

Years in the future…

Minus several.

After a bunch of pages that were mostly romance drama and hints at the Condesce’s machinations, it’s time for a fun throwback. The image shown above depicts Roxy’s carapacian neighborhood on a rainy evening, just like how Rose’s house was in the early acts. This whole scene is going to be a lot of fun, I can tell.

I forgot how cute Roxy looks in her starting outfit, my god. Full disclosure: for me, a fictional girl’s cuteness is mainly determined by whether or not she wears tights.

It’s time to read Wizardy Herbert! You might already know that Wizardy Herbert is the name of one of Hussie’s pre-MSPA works. It’s an unfinished Harry Potter parody story with wild metafictional elements and overall insane nonsense. It is my understanding that Hussie in real life never cared much for wizards and decided when writing both Wizardy Herbert and Homestuck to crudely parody the fondness people have for them.

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Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 91: Drunken Smooches and Costume Parties

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Introduction

< Part 90 | Part 91 | Part 92 >

Act 6 Intermission 3, Part 6 of 6

Pages 5399-5437 (MSPA: 7499-7537)

Featuring the best psycheout in all of Homestuck.

If only John and Vriska knew how much their friends nearby miss them…

You reach the end of the game to find an intriguing convergence of outrageous personalities. You are just dying to see what these heavyweights of badittude have to say to each other, but somehow you discover within yourself the superhuman restraint to hit pause. 

When I got to the end of Openbound Part 3 in the last post, I already knew that the walkaround ended right before Meenah could talk to Vriska, John, and Tavros but I was still a bit disappointed to remember it cut off right there. But upon further consideration, I think it’s fair to cut things off here and resume this arc with something other than a walkaround because we’ve been overdosed with walkaround content this whole intermission. You probably know that Homestuck doesn’t have any more full walkaround games after Openbound. I’ll discuss this point at the end of this post, where I recap Act 6 Intermission 3.

There is a whole world of fucking around going on with the meteor crew during the second year of their voyage, and it would be a criminal act of negligence to end this intermission without at least having a peek at their tomfoolery. A weaker person would just want to see what happens with Meenah and Vriska right away. Thank goodness you are a player with a strong sense of responsibility and discipline.

Every scene on the meteor so far in Act 6 has been hilarious, so I’m totally down for checking out what those characters are up to even though we’ve already seen plenty of it in this intermission so far.

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Cookie Fonster Dissects Homestuck Part 84: Cherubic Gloats and Confused Glances

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Introduction

< Part 83 | Part 84 | Part 85 >

Act 6 Act 3, Part 10 of 11

Pages 5137-5237 (MSPA: 7037-7137)

But no coconut guns, sadly.
If there were any, you’d better believe they can fire in spurts.

Lucky coincidence: today is the first anniversary of Homestuck’s migration from MSPA to homestuck.com!

I made this GIF myself, please appreciate it.
Why didn’t I think of making my own GIFs for these posts sooner? There’s plenty of non-[S] Flash pages I could have done that with.

Once again, last post ended with Calliope and this post starts with Caliborn. This selection screen gives us teasers of what he looks like. It leaves out just enough not to outright confirm that he is Lord English.

undyingUmbrage [uu] began jeering uranianUmbra [UU] 
uu: HEY. 
uu: I WOuLD LIKE TO PLAY A GAME. 
uu: IT’S CALLED “BOND WITH AN IDIOT SISTER OVER SOME BuLLSHIT SHARED INTERESTS BEFORE SHE DIES FOREVER.” 
uu: DOES THAT SOuND FuN. 
uu: HERE’S A GOOD PART OF THE STORY I THINK. 
uu: YOu MuST KNOW THE ONE I MEAN. 
uu: LET’S TALK ABOuT IT TOGETHER. 
uu: SHARE SOME THEORIES. 
uu: DO SOME FAN GIRLING. 
uu: PRODuCE SOME. 
uu: “FAN ART.” 

We got more than enough story told through Calliope speculating already, so it’s only fair that now we get a big dump of Caliborn’s speculation. Both cherubs’ speculation is surprisingly reliable and accurate; you’ll never fully understand how much those two have in common unless you dig deep into the stuff they say. Or if you have a realization that you were in denial about being a fan of something. I mean, purely hypothetically of course. It’s not like I was ever in denial about liking something people like to trash on, haha what are you talking about!!!!!

(I was in denial about liking something people like to trash on. Let’s not dwell on it, OK?)

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