Tag Archives: homestuck reread

Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 7: Land of Swords and Smuppets

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Introduction

< Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 >

Pages 562-665 (MSPA: 2462-2565)

Act 2, Part 4 of 5

Link to rewritten version

NOTE: Posted this one early because I’m gone for the weekend.

Just another title picture I guess. All of said pictures were added when I was on post 30-some.

A bit of a stretch to call this a “kitchen”.

Last time, we focused mainly on John as he sees the mess that was made of his house, and Dave as we get a glimpse of his brother’s stuff. Now, Dave examines the rest of his living room, which has, well, a lot of things in it. Swords, turntables, Game Bro magazines, Xbox equipment, nunchucks, skateboards, baseball caps, power cords, creepy comics, shurikens, fireworks, and most prominently, those fucking puppets. His brother flash-steps around the room and moves objects at a whim, in a way that’s more than a little unsettling. And then we go to the kitchen which is filled with dangerous stuff, and no actual food anywhere—something that’s played for laughs at this point, but much later what TV Tropes calls “Cerebus syndrome” kicks in and Dave portrays his old home life as legitimately unsettling when he vents out all his frustration about his upbringing. One thing of note is that Dave seems to know the Scrabble letter point values by heart—why is that? He isn’t portrayed as a nerd who would know that kind of stuff like John is (though he does have a nerdy side). Maybe his brother would challenge him to intense Scrabble competitions every week? Maybe those Scrabble competitions were intended to train Dave to be an expert at his fetch modus, which would make sense given the other insane training his brother is known to do, like sword fighting. It’s pretty amusing to imagine Dave playing Scrabble against his brother, who I like to think is nightmarishly adept at that game. Maybe the guy slaps his tiles onto the board at his ultra ninja speed and kicks little Dave’s ass every time they play with his obscure words calibrated to get the best possible combinations of triple score squares. That might make sense given that Dirk has a florid vocabulary, like Rose. Anyway, maybe it isn’t too far-fetched to know all the Scrabble point values; I only play Scrabble once every few months or so, but I could probably list out all the letter values with at most two or three mistakes. Then again I’m into memorizing stuff.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 6: Imp Madness and Can Openers

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Introduction

< Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 >

Pages 429-561 (MSPA: 2329-2461)

Act 2, Part 3 of 5

Link to rewritten version

JOHN YOU DO NOT SAY NO TO COOKIES. I COMMAND YOU TO GET THEM.

Last post cut off at the end of Nanna’s exposition session, a natural stopping point. Now we continue to see John throwing a tantrum about cookies, since he’s had more than enough baked goods today, not to mention the wrath of Betty Crocker. WV is upset that John doesn’t want to eat cookies, and commands him to get cookies; these childish flip-outs about mundane things are one of John’s defining traits (see also: the time he flipped out because he suddenly hated Con Air). As Dave once put it: “thats classic john though he doesnt get pissed about anything except for the absolute dumbest shit”. It’s easy to miss that John even sticks up his middle finger in the corner of this page. WV then accidentally turns off Caps Lock, opening a capsule with food and a book on human etiquette.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 5: Grandmotherly Expositation Station

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Introduction

< Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 >

Pages 358-428 (MSPA: 2258-2328)

Act 2, Part 2 of 5

Link to rewritten version

NOTE: I know “expositation” isn’t a word, I just wanted to make “exposition” rhyme with “station”.

Here’s another title picture, in case you forgot. This one is meant to match the name of this post.

Lousy goddamn stupid wizards.

Last time, we got a taste of the weird shit that happened to John now that he made it into a mystery world, and we learned how Dave lost those Sburb discs. Now we see what Rose is up to. She examines her wizard-adorned house, and we see how strongly she believes that her mother has no real love for all those wizards she litters her house with. One thing I just now caught is how Rose sometimes has guests visit her house: the narration says, “There is the sound of rushing water beneath the floor. It tends to strike guests as a strange presence in a living space, but it’s become hardly audible to you through familiarity.” What’s the deal with those guests? Are those her mother’s fellow scientists or something? It’s weirder because Rose’s house is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, way out in the forests of upstate New York to be specific. “Forest” and “New York” are two words that sound a little weird together, given that New York makes most people think of the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 4: Haunting Voices and Coolkid Mishaps

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Introduction

< Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 >

Pages 248-357 (MSPA: 2148-2257)

Act 2, Part 1 of 5

Link to rewritten version

Where John’s house ended up.

Act 2 of Homestuck opens up by skipping years in the future, but not many (if 413 years can be deemed as “not many”), to a post-apocalyptic desert Earth. A certain black-colored being referred to as a “wayward vagabond” walks across the desert and comes across some kind of device with the arc symbol spirograph logo. Then, Rose starts her Sburb walkthrough with her trademark nigh inscrutable purple prose, with the standing-out quote: “Since you are reading this, chances are you have installed this game on your computer already. If this is true, like many others, you have just participated in bringing about the end of the world.” Shit just got real.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 3: Bizarro Real-Life Sims Interface

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Introduction

< Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 >

Pages 138-247 (MSPA: 2038-2147)

Act 1, Part 3 of 3

Link to rewritten version

A weird game indeed.

Where were we? John just installed Sburb, and bam, he and Rose can now play it. Immediately you’ll notice a glaring oddity of the game: it lets Rose mess around with John’s house from afar in a Sims-inspired game interface. It’s already obvious that Sburb is not an ordinary game. The first thing Rose does is accidentally move John’s magic chest to his roof. Then she starts deploying a bunch of weird devices around John’s house as she talks to him about the game. What the hell is going on here you wonder loudly.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 2: Pointless Game Disk Sneakaround

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Introduction

< Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 >

Pages 47-137 (MSPA: 1947-2037)

Act 1, Part 2 of 3

Link to rewritten version

Here’s a retroactive “title picture” to streamline this blog series a bit (see post 30 for an explanation of these). You’ll see a lot of these soon, unless the first picture I previously used in the post already makes a good title picture.

One-man birthday party?

Continuing from where we left off, John leaves his bedroom to go to the first floor of his house, to sneak around and obtain his discs of Sburb. We see a living room filled with clown pictures which suggest that his father is obsessed with clowns, a birthday present, and his grandmother’s ashes. It’s also mentioned for the first time that John hates Betty Crocker, marking the first indirect mention of one of the comic’s main villains, although the whole evil Betty Crocker thing would for a long time thereafter remain merely a joke. Besides the numerous clowns, there isn’t much remarkable in John’s living room, especially compared to what we see with the other kids.

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Cookie Fonster Critiques Homestuck Part 1: Bedroom Screwaround Session

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< Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 >

Pages 1-46 (MSPA: 1901-1946)

Act 1, Part 1 of 3

Link to rewritten version

A young man stands in his bedroom…

Homestuck opens up with a picture as mundane as can be: a nerdy-looking 13-year-old birthday boy standing in his bedroom, looking left and right and blinking his eyes, and drawn in an odd “stubby” fashion that conceals his arms, as the text below reads: “A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, 2009, is this young man’s birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name! What will the name of this young man be?” These famed words that open Homestuck insinuate that the boy doesn’t have a name until now, and that we will give him a name. As it turns out, this is a joke, since the boy has called himself “John” since a few years before the story started.

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New post series! (Cookie Fonster’s Homestuck post series introduction)

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One day, I decided to start a blog post series in which I critique the popular story webcomic Homestuck as I read all the way through it for the third time. By critique, I meant that I would mostly review and discuss the stuff in it, but not really negatively, since I’m a pretty big fan of Homestuck. However, as I progressed through my re-read, the posts grew to be in-depth commentary on the comic, to the point where I wish I posted that way the entire time. That said, over the years I’ve been faced with the truth that my Homestuck blog posts have evolved over time, both the writing style and the opinions I express, and while I had at one point started a project to rewrite the first 27 posts, I no longer plan on finishing that. My Homestuck blog post series began in September 2015, and after numerous pauses and burnouts, I finished the post series in September 2021. The post series is meant for people who have read Homestuck in its entirety, because the posts will contain spoilers for stuff that happens later.

Before we begin, I’d like to give a shout-out to this blog known only as “Let’s Re-Read Homestuck”, the blog that inspired this post series. It’s a very well-written unfinished Homestuck reread blog that you should check out if you like my posts. Also check out Fletcher Wortmann’s It’s Hard and Nobody Understands, another excellent unfinished Homestuck commentary document that helped inspire this as I went along.

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