Discussion Characters / Homestuck

Neeevermind, he definitely seems to be Hussie's self-insert.

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=007390

Although he's an individual entity in a sense, ghost dirk is still shares the exact same characteristics and mannerisms (for all we know) as the real Dirk. Ghost dirk is merely the projection of Dirk's personality through Jake's subconscious, and unconsciously amplified by the full knowledge that Jake's Page of Hope powers endow him with.

Don't know what broke the indexing. It looks like it should work

I'm going to resurrect this thread and take the liberty of supporting your second motion. I've checked sbahj's own character page, and it's pretty much a word for word copypasta. I'll remove it in an effort to reduce clutter.

Edit: Scratch that, the two are exactly the same, because the one on sbahj links directly to the one indexed under homestuck. Openly requesting ideas as to a move of the entire article to sbahj.

Her section was too big. When it was on the page with the greenbloods, her section took up 2/3 of the page. It's huuuuuuuuge.

Probably not; it's direct spoilers and we might want to avoid that.

A few months later here, Ancestors are really reaching the point where their collective article should be broken up into seperate tropes. Given that we still have half of them left to be revealed, that section is gonna swell up a lot.

Perhaps if/when they get more divergent development. At the moment, there's not much to them aside from their apparent resemblance to the Hivebent trolls.

Nope.

Bluntly stated.

Because the fact that they had no importance in the kids' session is no guarantee that they won't be more important in the Trolls' session. Plus, they're such a big part of the whole Sburb mythos that it seems wrong not to have them.

If they are important in the trolls' session, then yes, it would make sense to have them, but isn't that jumping the gun a bit? Right now, they're not important at all and there is therefore no reason to include them.

Also, even if they are part of the Sburb mythos, they have no unique tropes. They aren't really characters; they aren't much different from the random pawns in terms of characterization. Combat Tentacles? Chess Motifs? That's true for all the sides in general.

Anyway, if they turn out to be more unique or have more importance later, then I don't see why not to include them, but I think we should hold off until we know for sure whether or not they will be important in the first place.

I don't think we should cut the kings. There are other entries (Maplehoof, Casey, Matchsticks, Quarters) who have one or two tropes to their name but are there anyway for completeness' sake. If we were to trim the character page we should just cut all the tiny entries out instead of just the kings; I don't care about the first two but chopping the Felt would really bug me for reasons I cannot adequately explain.

Also, the white king will in all likelihood show up later—he was not killed, he abdicated. He is still wandering around Skaia.

Matchsticks and Quarters are unique characters who have unique tropes. The kings are not.

Also, why do we have entries on Maplehoof and Casey of all people? We should cut those, it's like including random NPC #413 in the character entries. They're extremely minor characters with very few tropes, so it's not worth the space.

Maplehoof was playable for a day or two in Act 4, and Casey I guess is there because a precedent was established with the entry for Mutie. Maybe we should consolidate them into a single Animal Sidekicks entry?

So I did that too.

Now, I'm wondering, should I merge Skipper Plumbthroat and the Squiddles into one entry? It's kind of like Hella Jeff having his own entry.

Also, maybe we should merge The Felt into one entry in the Midnight Crew folder. If we do that, we should probably keep Snowman and Lord English seperate.

What do you guys think?

I'd keep the Felt and Midnight Crew in separate folders. It would look messy otherwise.

Merging Skipper and Squiddles is ok with me.

Wait wait wait.

Casey should not be lumped in with Mutie and Maplehoof, because Mutie and Maplehoof have left the medium and will likely play no further role in the story. Casey is still waiting back at Rose's house, presumably. Mutie and Maplehoof are two of the characters' "heirlooms", so their roles in the story are pretty wildly divergent from Casey's.

So I guess we'll make an entry for the consorts of the various lands seperate from the animal sidekicks once we've got enough trope for that, which I think will be around when we meet the aligators in LoHaC.

For the moment, however, I have to ask: Where else would we put her? Right now, she's a two-trope character whose purpose in the story is to stand around and look cute. She's an animal sidekick.

On a different subject, I'm probably going to put Serenity in the animal sidekicks entry. Would it be reasonable to put the sentryworms in while I'm at it? Also, I'm not sure "sidekick" was the right choice of words. Would "Animal Companion" be better?

Excuse the double post, but the troll interlude is now almost over and we haven't seen anything of the kings. I think it's safe to merge their entries for now, and unmerge them if WK gets up to any interesting shenanigans on his own.

You know what, do whatever.

So ok, WK's getting up to some interesting shenanigans on his own now. I feel like I should move his entry from Agents and Monarchs to the Exiles page, since he'll probably have significantly more relevance to that group. On the other hand, that might be jumping the gun a bit, given that he's not out of the time capsule just yet.

So what does everyone think about that?

"would anyone argue that Voldemort and Xykon aren't Complete Monsters?"

As I recall, there was a relatively heated discussion on the Complete Monster discussion page on exactly that point.

Huh. Learn something new every day.

I don't want to distract from the point here, though — where should Vriska's stuff go?

I don't think it should be on the page, certainly she has done all those things, she's the Token Evil Teammate, yes, but whether she is beyond redemption depends on how the comic goes and what the reader thinks. As that is part of the criteria of the trope, I'd much rather it stay as the less heavy-handed version it was prior to whoever edited it recently.

To me, another metric of this is where Vriska is in the story, she's a supporting character along with the rest of the trolls. But whatever, I'd prefer there to be less debate and for the debate to stay off the trope page.

I added a cross-reference from Token Evil Teammate to the Complete Monster entry. If anyone feels strongly enough about it, I guess my favorite solution would be to move the current Complete Monster entry down to Token Evil Teammate, with the proviso that some feel this makes her a Complete Monster.

Though I feel that the Cameron Poe thing puts her across the Moral Event Horizon. That's just wrong.

From the Complete Monster trope page:

"The Complete Monster is the most depraved of all characters; a villain utterly lacking in redeeming features. Trying to put a value on the evilness of a Complete Monster is like calculating the credit score of Bill Gates: it's a moot point. Likewise, trying to find a drop of goodness in them is like trying to find a specific grain of sand on every beach in the world, it's impossible."

...I really don't think she fits that description, especially since Hussie has now been turning her into more of a Woobie. (And she seems to be a good enough moirail to Tavros)

Edit: What do you mean by "Cameron Poe thing", Slandor? I am rather culturally illiterate, and now curious.

In light of the revelation that she has been orchestrating Jack's rise to omnipotence from the start in order to satisfy her own ego, giving her some of the blame for the countless deaths he's caused, maybe we should reconsider including a Complete Monster entry. It's pretty clear at this point that she doesn't feel guilty at all and will never seek redemption.

It's a subjective trope; it belongs on the YMMV page. Where it is.

Orchestrating Jack's rise to power for her own ego files her under a Chaotic Neutral Glory Hound who is likely to get a (possibly fatal) Break the Haughty moment, not a Complete Monster. That page says that a character must fit ALL six criteria to qualify, Vriska only hits about three. "Complete Monster" is a very extreme label and requires that the character has zero redeeming features.

I would argue that she definitely fits all six criteria quite well. 1) She has clearly committed heinous actions by the standards of the story without ever trying to genuinely make up for them, and she only presents her actions in a positive light when she's trying to manipulate others into doing what she wants. 2) No one would argue that her actions aren't Nightmare Fuel. 3) Though she is played for laughs, it is only to a degree fitting the tone of the work, and other characters tend to take her actions seriously. 4) She has no adequate justification or Freudian excuse to balance out her misdeeds. 5) She never displays anything resembling regret for her actions. She does apologize a couple times, but her apologies are disingenuous and are only meant to get others to do what she wants. 6) She has no desire to seek redemption, and at this point it seems as though she never will. Even if she dies killing Jack, actually saving people would almost certainly have nothing to do with her motivations; she'd still just be trying to prove that she's better than everyone for her own ego. You could argue that the work could still have a happy ending with her surviving, but that doesn't necessarily disqualify her, as the main point of the sixth criterion is a lack of redemptive potential.

How are her actions Nightmare Fuel? Her FLARP sessions maybe, but those were largely Offstage Villainy. And yes, she does have a Freudian Excuse (she is socially retarded by troll standards, had a horrible upbringing, and was forced to cause massacres to feed her lusus). Though I can understand if you think this doesn't excuse her actions, it is a rather major one and can potentially keep her out of Complete Monster territory, at the very least. She also did seem to feel genuine regret for killing Aradia, though admittedly that's the only case she seems to apologize for.

Furthermore, though, I'm pretty sure that a character has to be an explicit villain to be a Complete Monster. Vriska is a Chaotic Neutral Byronic Hero, but as her character page entry states, she is still playing for the good team.

Edit: About the "Well she orchestrated Jack's rise to power, that makes her responsible for all the deaths he's caused!" thing... In the original timeline, from her point of view, Bec Noir already existed. Nothing she did would change that; even without her intervention, he would have risen to power somehow. Like Tavros, she was just trying to technically take credit for it, even though it would have happened anyway. Would you blame Tavros for killing Jade's grandpa even though he said that Bec teleported the bullet in the original timeline anyway?

First guess was Homestuck Trolls, but turns out 3 pages were made for them.

Which I enjoy the new page split, does someone want to Homestuckify the new page links? I'd doo it myself, but I don't have the time to go through all of them right at the moment.

Let's not — it's nice to be able to figure out where the pages go.

I gave it a bit of flavor text while keeping the directions simply and easy to understand. Hope this keeps everything neat and tidy.

Start over is on the main page, and goes back to the TV tropes main page.

I know; I was the one who added it.

According to the Trope Repair Shop thread, if the trolls were on a single page it would be almost large enough to break the server by itself.

We really are a loquacious bunch.

The demon and Lord English have never been explicitly stated to be the same person. It's just pretty damn likely.

I don't get the 'that was just Andrew joking' bit, though.

Seems pretty explicit to me. Karkat woke up on Prospit for the one and only time, right before it was destroyed, and he saw Perfect Form Jack, who he acknowledged in Alterniabound to be the same demon as appeared in the Scratch, which was stated to be Lord English. It's also the best explanation for how he manages to be more powerful than even Doc Scratch. He trumps First Guardians because he's packing the full power of one as just one of his four prototypings.

Further, that makes the full responsibility for the ruination of the Trolls' game fall on all four kids. Rose for writing down MEOW, John for giving the code to Dave, Dave for letting the Dignitary grab it (thus causing Haley to be paradox cloned into Becquerel), and Jade for making possible Jack's rise to power which led to her prototyping dilemma that led to Bec using himself.

It's officially inconclusive.

Okay, I'm willing to admit that I may have been a bit premature in my judgment. I should point out, however, that if Lord English isn't Jack, then we have no reason to believe he is the big bad. The entry in his section should be edited to reflect this.

At first, I was a little surprised that things got edited such that Jack/Bec Noir = LE was still unconfirmed, so I've been overlooking the archives. Here's what I've found out:

• Nobody has explicitly referred to Bec Noir as Lord English at any time during the comic.
• Lord English himself has been mentioned only twice outside the intermission, and only once by name; it had almost nothing to do with the Trolls' SGRUB session.
• Lord English uses ~ATH to enter into a dead universe upon the Great Undoing, which is clearly identified as that universe's death, not the destruction of a SBURB/SGRUB session as may have been assumed.
• It's also clearly stated that while the scratch — recently identified as Bec Noir's arrival into Sgrub — leads to the Great Undoing, it does not directly cause it. Doc Scratch even tells Aradia that Bec Noir is not his business.

So after all that... I've actually been swayed the other way, in that we don't yet have definitive proof that the BN = LE theory is true. In fact, some of Andrew's posts on Formspring suggest that the Demon = LE assumption was always meant to be a Red Herring, without denying the possibility for The Un-Twist later on.

which was stated to be Lord English.

No. It wasn't.

Honestly, I was under the impression that the only "evidence" there ever was was that Karkat referred to her as "an autistic girl in a cave".

I can say from experience that Nepeta has no autistic qualities whatsoever. She's just weird is all.

Actually this requires some explaining. Picture all of our social norms, then invert them. You now have a good impression of what troll social norms are. To us, acting calm and nice is the "default" state that people usually assume when they are talking to people. When people start yelling and getting angry, that evokes a reaction of fear from us and shows that the person has passed a breaking point. For the trolls, it's the opposite. Trolls assume that you will be angry with the person just on principle rather than the topic of the conversation, so yelling/anger is a "default" state that trolls are used to — it shows that the other person is mad but not so mad that they're going to stab you. Therefore, to the trolls, the only reason you'd act nice to someone is if you've passed the breaking point and are planning to backstab them later. People like Nepeta and Tavros, on the other hand, are just nice on principle, but come off as autistic because they're the trolls' version of people who are constantly shouting like they're angry over every little thing (Gamzee too).

In sum, though Nepeta isn't autistic by our standards, she is by the trolls'. Not sure if that counts enough to add Ambiguously Autistic to her, though.

(This is also why everyone treats Vriska like a sociopath — she never acts nice to people even when she's past the breaking point, so she's like the murderer who's smiling and happy as she comes at you with the knife.)

One, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what autism is and how people with autism behave. They don't have the innate ability to perceive how other people will react to things and what their intentions are, and tend to process everything from their perspective instead of anyone else's. They also just aren't very interested in interacting with others and prefer to live in their own little worlds, and taking them out of those worlds and placing them in social situations they don't understand is understandably upsetting to them (which is where that "autistic people are angry people" thing comes from I guess). The complete inversion of autism would be someone very extroverted, personable and outgoing, probably a skilled manipulator who can read your face like a book, and with little concept of what personal space means. And that... that describes Terezi, not Nepeta.

Two, Vriska is capable of being nice. Play as her in Alterniabound and talk to Feferi.

No, I didn't mean that Vriska is autistic by troll standards... and yes I don't know that much about autism, I'll admit. The point I was trying to make was simply that to them, Nepeta, Tavros, and Vriska seem really weird because they only use one emotional signal, even when they're feeling the other one. (That's also why Karkat says that Vrika's hate is so "empty" — one might say that to a psychopath who never shows outward signs of anger and aggression — "your niceness is so empty, you're broken in the head")

Maybe it's Andrew who doesn't understand what autism means? o_O

Edit: Even if we could write her off as autistic, she wouldn't be ambiguously so, since Karkat states it outright...does this make this whole discussion moot?

I always took it as more that Karkat doesn't understand what autism means. Just because he called her that doesn't make him right, y'know.

"TG: oh you know

TG: noirs outta control

TG: rose is crazy jades crazier and youre

TG: well youre you"

I don't understand how you can possibly get "they both went insane" out of this. It demands no explanation because it is completely stupid in every conceivable way.

That seems to be a pretty unambiguous stement that Rose and Jade went crazy.

That seems to be a pretty unambiguous stement that Rose and Jade went crazy.

That seems to be a pretty unambiguous stement that Rose and Jade went crazy.

I think some context might be helpful here. Is Octachoron deleting random memetic references? Subjective interpretations of the line? Anything that states either Rose or Jade are crazy? The first two would be valid edits, but the third would not.

I seriously don't understand why you get they're insane out of that. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be arguing against here.

Pretty late on this, but people porbably thought Rose and Jade were going crazy because Dave said rose and Jade were going crazy. They are pretty literal.

And really, people have been assuming Rose has gone off the deep end since she alchemized the Thorns of Oglogoth, so maybe there's some confirmation bias there.

No, he didn't. The questioner suggested it, and Hussie's response was "sure looks like it."

That's a reply of 'you can consider it canon', not 'I don't feel like answering'.

Appears to be the case.

No, the guy saying she was faking it is rather silly.

She's faking being willing to blow herself up for a point, but she was running her mouth and felt very strongly on the subject.

If there's another way to interpret it, it is speculative.

Well, maybe one way to make it clearer (and less controversial) is to refer to her "venting," which is how the next page describes it. That's what I'll do.

I wonder if we should have split them using a specific criterion, such as gender or team.

Not the teams. They were relevant for, what, an eighth of 5.1? Gender could work, though it'd be weird considering it's not really relevant in troll society.

And having them in zodiac/blood order just makes the most sense.

I don't see it as obfuscating, more acting silly because he likes too. He's intelligent, but also The Fool and likes to shut his brain off.

I thought they had been? Did that bit get deleted or something? Hold on, lemme check.

e: Okay, apparently it did. I went ahead and restored it.

Okay, hiya. Yeah, sorry, I'm one of the guys who has been deleting it.

Mainly because though it is a fine potential reason, the way it was phrased seemed to make it the definite reason.

Also, the way "manipulation" works seems to be very different from the way the "voices" work, so, I don't necessarily feel as though it is that strong of a connection. Second, this conversation seems to suggest that Sollux is not aware of Aradia's death: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003985 and as for that Terezi found out through Sollux and Sollux helped Terezi contact Doc Scratch under the pretense of revenge specifically, I sort of want to see that part put plainly, anyone have a link?

Oh and uh, yeah, basically, seems a bit speculative.

iiiiii agree with the person who's deleting that part. It's just a guess, and there's a lot more likely reason than Aradia's death anyway—just a few minutes before he met CD he was the death cries of literally every living troll left in the universe while he was also dying of psychic ebola. He seemed to be hopeful the voices would all shut up once he got into the game, and then it turned out that was only technically true (the old ones are gone, but there are new ones to deal with). Going nuclear is a pretty understandable reaction there.

Also Vriska controls peoples' bodies, not their minds, and there's no voice accompanying it. I can't find the log but there's evidence of that in the Vriska/Karkat log where she mind controls him into going back online, and when she forced Tavros off the cliff.

So Sollux's Berserk Button in all likelihood has nothing to do with what happened to Aradia. There's not much evidence for it. It's a WMG. (Almost everyting relating to Sollux/Aradia is. There hasn't even been any confirmation that they were actually in a relationship, it's all been Ship Tease.)

I am willing to concede the argument for the sake of simplicity, I suppose, but let me explain my reasoning somewhat more thoroughly.

The first conversation Terezi had with Doc Scratch revealed that Terezi was aware Aradia had died. Scratch also observed that she would later come under the impression that Aradia hadn't died. It did not go into specifics about how Terezi found out that Aradia had been killed, but she said: "GC: YOU S41D W3 B3L13V3 OUR FR13ND 1S D34D GC: 1S SH3 NOT?"— I don't really know who else she could be referring to with "we" than to herself and Sollux. I don't know how else she could have found out that Aradia was dead than through Sollux, either.

Presumably, when Terezi came under the (false) impression that Aradia was still alive, Sollux did as well.

Relevant conversation: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004156

But at any rate, I'm fine with leaving it deleted for now.

That is probably all true, but it doesn't have anything to do with the trope this discussion topic is about?

The thing is that Vriska's technique is physical. She doesn't suggest. She takes people over and makes them do what she wants them to even while they are fully aware and protesting. That method of mind control is completely different from hearing voices, so Aradia's death and blowing up CD's computer are not connected.

I have my doubts about how "physical" her control is, given that she was able to force Tavros to use his psychic abilities.

The way she was talking to Tavros while manipulating him the first time raises eyebrows as well, though I realize that could have just been her toying with him psychologically. It did strike me as some sort of compulsion, though. Her words stank very strongly of psychic suggestion.

And it's related because Sollux was fully aware of having been forced to kill Aradia, and was probably pretty troubled about it! So it would be understandable for him to have a very short fuse when it comes to other people screwing around in his brain, be it voices or psychic compulsions.

Plus my post was specifically intended as a rebuttal to the assertion that Sollux wasn't aware that he had killed Aradia, which someone upthread had made. So it was relevant to that.

I agree with Majutsukai on two of these points:

Vriska's abilities sometimes seem to be mental; in addition to the points Maju's cited, the command for Vriska to make Tavros kiss her was something like "Make Pupa have happy thoughts." Which isn't definitive, but it makes it seem like she has some imperfect mental control. [EDIT: I just noticed http://www.formspring.me/andrewhussie/q/1093975262, where Andrew says "Vriska commandeered Tavros's mind to get him to use his psychic powers."]

Also, the "we" in Terezi's comment definitely refers to her and Sollux; it goes back to this comment by Doc Scratch: "I gather he has recovered from his implementation as a weapon in the sabotage of your mutual friend, whom you both believe to be dead." So Sollux knows what happened, and might think afterwards that Aradia is still alive. (I wouldn't necessarily conclude that Terezi could only have found out about Aradia's death through Sollux — she presumably had some way of getting in touch with Aradia through FLARP.)

Buuut, I also agree with 168.7 that this is speculative and shouldn't be presented as a definite reason. If someone were to want to put it back in, it should probably be along the line of "This might be because of having been mind-controlled to kill his best friend, or because of the trauma of psychically hearing all the other trolls dying from the Vast Glub." Emphasis on the "might." And, eh, it's probably just as well left out. (Especially because Luzerne makes a good point — I wouldn't say we know that Vriska's technique doesn't manifest itself as a voice, but we don't know it does either.)

I agree 100% with everything stated here (well, uh, in that last post, not like, everything everything, that'd be contradicting). That was all civil, it is great!

Not to mention no one really thinks most of the stuff she does is justified. That trope gets a lot of misuse.

Speaking of which, what's the deal with T Vtropes and Vriska hate?

I guess crippling Tavros gave a strong first impression.

And even with the Horror Hunger, it's still creepy.

We have no evidence that she's a Damaged Soul at all, so I'd say "no" to type 2.

Future Karkat did say she was "shithive maggots," but I guess we should wait until we see her more objectively to decide.

I was thinking of her attack on Vriska as corresponding to Damaged Soul, though I guess if the D.S. is "very likely to be pissed off at whoever brought them back from the dead" that would mean she'd go after Equius. Which she did, at first, but for good reasons.

Well, I'll either probably change it to something along the lines of "Starts out as a Type I, but gets better," maybe with this quote from Terezi:

GC: SH3 WONT C4R3

GC: WH4T3V3R 1T W4S YOU D1D TO H3R 1 TH1NK YOU BROK3 H3R BR41N

Unless someone thinks it should be "Starts out as a Type I; may have become Type II"? I guess her sparing Tavros is further evidence that she's not a type II? Since her rage is basically directed at Vriska, who totally deserves it.

Actually I think it's a subversion of Type I, because she isn't actually back at first, and when Equius brings her back she gets better.

Me thinks I'm going to end up putting a bit of the stuff that he/she deleted back...

I'm still going through all the edits, but two things that jump to mind that were wrongfully deleted were Designated Protagonist Syndrome for John and Ghost Amnesia for Aradia.

(EDIT: And Ted Baxter for Karkat. He certainly acts like one if nothing else.)

The page was a huge mess, half the tropes didn't apply, and for some reason a lot of tropers edit in information from what I can only assume is their own personal fanon. I went through and fixed the incorrect examples because that sort of thing drives me insane.

I undoubtedly made a handful of mistakes, since the articles are huge, so yeah if you can find any put them back. But for the most part I spent a while checking things.

Honestly I'm more comfortable at least knowing the reason for each individual deletion just as a matter of preference— though I understand how that wouldn't be feasible for such a huge set of concurrent changes.

One thing that's a pretty large-scale mistake is changing every mention of playable characters to viewpoint characters. For a character to be playable is not the same thing for the story to switch to their point of view; the story switches to Doc Scratch's point of view but it's made explicit that he's not playable (won't accept commands from the prompt).

Oh whoa I didn't even notice that.

Yeah that's pretty bad. "Playable characters" is the actual term for those characters in MSPA.

I changed it because the story switching to their point of view is more important.

Lets face it, being playable in MSPA means less than nothing.

Not... really?

It's a term that relates to the format of the story, especially in the parts of the story before the suggestion boxes were locked (which comprises most of MSPA's history and at least two thirds of Homestuck).

Every playable character is a viewpoint character, but not every viewpoint character is a playable character, so I don't see how being a viewpoint character can be important while being a playable character means "less than nothing." [EDITADD: In fact it was a major psycheout that WV was the fourth playable character, when all signs pointed to GG; and this was different from the comic switching to his viewpoint in the "Years in the future, but not many" panel.]

...and even if it is, you weren't deleting mistaken tropes there, you were carrying out your own personal agenda, in a way that'll take a lot of effort to fix. That seems like the sort of thing you shouldn't do without running it by the discussion page.

I think there's a place for that stuff in WMG, but I really think it's a bit of a stretch to be put anywhere else.

I mean, I just think that once you notice it, it's pretty obvious. Fridge Brilliance, I guess. There's just no way it's all a coincidence. I'm not saying the revelation signifies anything more than AH getting clever with us again, as he does EVERY time he comes up with some new pattern for us to decipher references to. 413, 612, ACGT, and now the four quadrants of troll romance. At this point, Hussie is making connections solely for the sake of making connections.

No way it's a coincidence?

That was my nice way of saying that I think it is just a coincidence. It just doesn't stick out to me as an intentional thing.

Like I said, the WMG page would be perfect for this.

I'm with Majutsukai here, especially because Droog doesn't seem like a moirail to me at all. We've just seen him encouraging extreme bloody revenge. And in some sense we know it is a coincidence, because the MC's personality were set probably before AH thought of the four kinds of troll romance. I wouldn't be surprised if he finds a way to tie it together, but as of now it's a WMG.

Yeah, it seems to me like "leitmotif" is being used to mean "theme song", which isn't really a correct usage.

I think I was wrong when I added that comment to the page— I think that if you see the symbols as actual symbols while you're editing the page, then you shouldn't commit the edit because that's what causes it. They should appear as HTML entities, i.e. &# followed by some numbers followed by ; . I think you just have to find the proper entity code in order to make new symbols on the page.

Oh, if you were wanting to know how to fix it yourself, I just use the page history in a separate tab when I fix it. I took care of it this time, though.

Thanks! It won't happen again.

You're not going crazy, it used to be listed on Main under all lowercase letters and maybe some other tropes too (and still is, kind of). Don't think it was ever on the character sheet though?

Hm, that might be what I was remembering— and if that's the case, then no wonder it got deleted.

It's the result of a script inserting spaces after *s and #s. Hopefully it'll be restricted to when they're at the start of a line soon.

Edit: And fixed.

That's backwards. If you have a problem with it you should expand the kids' entries.

Just... just so you know, this isn't an intermission. It's still part of the actual story.

I don't see the problem. They're as long as they are because that's just how they naturally proceeded.

I think expanding the kids would be a good idea, though.

This isn't an intermission. It's an arc. It's, in theory, a seventh of the eventual final length of the story (since it's supposed to have 7 arcs). And several of them appeared in the main story as early as act 3.

Moreover, it's no coincidence that the trolls are having long entries. Because the actual plot to their arc isn't that important (almost by definition the parts which don't mirror what we already saw one group go through are less-than-relevant), the focus of the arc, other than teaching us more about how the game works, is to establish twelve characters (and yes, that's a lot of people) who are as complex as he can make them, and show us that complexity. Every troll is intentionally a mixture of what would normally be two or three character archetypes. So they'll rack up a lot of tropes.

Plus, the interpersonal relationships between the trolls are as varied as can be (and thanks to squaring, there's a lot more such links). Varied to the point of including murder, betrayal and three instances of someone being crippled and/or blinded by a former friend. The human kids all were good friends, even if Jade kept secrets from John, and the guardians all seem to be comrades; the only relationships which really break the mold are the kid-guardian relationships, of which there's only four.

To be The Medic you have to... do medicine. He makes prostheses for people, but I think that's. Trying to shoehorn him into a trope where he doesn't really belong.

The trope explicitly lets them use whatever medical technology is available. Prostheses count.

He doesn't really appear to be a member of the Felt, at least not based on what we know yet.

How? The Felt are pool-themed underlings of Lord English. Doc Scratch is a pool-themed underling of Lord English. Sure he wasn't on SS's hitlist, but neither was Snowman.

"Pool-themed" is not the same as "member of the Felt", underling of English or not. He does not appear to associate with the Felt in any readily apparent way, and is pretty clearly an entirely different class of being. I doubt the members of the Felt even know that this guy exists.

Long story short, I'm not convinced yet that putting him under the Felt section will be meaningful— or really anything more than a technicality.

Also, if you want to get technical like that, Slick did have a picture of Snowman, but he removed it from the vendetta itinerary because he knew it wasn't a good idea to try and kill her. But that's not really relevant because Slick didn't have any way of knowing Scratch existed either, so he wouldn't have appeared on the itinerary even if he were a member.

EDIT: Oh, christ, Enlong. You know what? Do whatever. Fuck.

How do you see a lack of face?

Well, it's sort of metaphorical. He lacks any sort of avatar or handle, which ffunction as "faces" in online chat.

Yeah, it's tenuous, I know. That's why I asked about it.

Well predicted.

If I may introduce a counter-point, we learn the handles before learning the actual names. Someone who hasn't read up to Act 5 yet will have no idea who that Karkat guy is.

Someone who hasn't read to Act 3 would have no clue who Jade is. Should we keep calling her GG?

Let's not turn this into a slippery slope issue. We're not going to call John "Zoosmell Pooplord" just because nobody who read past the first two panels would know him by any other name.

It's not slippery slope, it's a matter of precedent. When we learned Jade's name, we didn't keep gardenGnostic in brackets next to her name. We called her Jade because that was her name! People said it felt weird and would confuse people, but they got used to it.

Also, consider Gamzee: there was a delay of two panels between his first appearance and his naming. Nobody calls him terminallyCapricious, ever. It would actually confuse more people if we called him that!

I propose we remove the screen names from the header things and put notes on them in the body of their respective entries, like what we already have with the kids. Anyone who doesn't know them by name would be like, "Oh yeah, that guy" on seeing them, plus it's consistent with the rest of the article. Is that fair?

I think it's fair! The trolltags are extremely annoying and a bit confusing at times.

And I agree that it's not a slippery slope, because people made the same damn argument about Jade when she was named, and Dave before her! It's not even hypothetical because people have said these things.

The trolls are much more central now, and they're receiving a lot of development, so now that we finally know their actual names, it's a bit silly to keep referring to them the way we did when they were only mysterious voices on the internet.

Well, we have a separate entry for kernelsprites, so...

Seems kind of pointless to me.

While we're on the subject, I think if the trolls' sprites are minor enough, we should put them all under the Lususprites entry. Does that sound good to everyone?

EDIT: Oh hey, looks like we're already doing that!

I have to disagree. The trolls kernelsprites should be kept seperate.

We are probably never going to see every one of the troll kernelsprites. It's silly to take up so much space for extremely unimportant characters who we won't see any more than a passing glimpse of.

Aradia and her sprite are the same entity, so there's no need for an Aradiasprite entry.

How often does this even come up in the story anymore? I can't see this as being important enough to include, personally.

What are the tropes?

Apart from the tree stump, there isn't much.

Here's what I had typed up:

The Player

• Audience Surrogate
• The Artifact: The Player first appeared in an interactive page early on in the all-Flash "Beta" version of Homestuck. When the same event played out in the comic proper, the interactivity was removed, but the reference to "you" remained.
• Cloud Cuckoolander
• Framing Device: A strange example not spelled out in the comic itself: The Player is playing a video game called Homestuck, which is the comic we're reading. So when we suggest commands for the characters, we're really suggesting commands for the Player to input.
• Painting the Fourth Wall: Apparently resposible for all commands, even the ones that the community didn't suggest, such as attempting to give the characters silly names or playing with Jade's sylladex.

Also, Medinoc, that's not what I was talking about. That was someone who was reading MSPA the webcomic, not playing MSPA the game. But yeah, this was really just too confusing and not all that important anyway. Plus I think maybe half of the tropes I came up up with don't really fit. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it makes more sense to include this than the Squiddles.

A few of those could probably be included in the Main article as just general tropes.

Sure!

Okay, I did a lot of that, but I think some of the pictures (WQ, HB, and Lususprite in particular) are too tall for their entries. It throws stuff off and makes the page look bad.

I think I should remove some and crop others.

So I did that too. Is everyone okay with the images as they are now?

So I see somebody put up an image of GA. For the sake of consistency, I'll be replacing that when we get a shot of her in her room.

In light of recent events, um. How are we going to do this for aT. His sprite being kind of a big spoiler and all.

Should I... should I Photoshop it?

I don't think "spoiling" a detail like that is any worse than "spoiling", say, his name. It's not like it was a huge dramatic reveal or anything.

It's not really a spoiler, since it being revealed changes absolutely nothing.

gallowsCalibrator has been confirmed to be evil, the rest of them may be less obviously malicious, but that doesn't get them off the hook morally speaking. Right now, Evil Counterpart still seems like the best description since they play a somewhat antagonistic role to the protagonists.

For now, I agree Evil Counterpart is the best description we have, but I wouldn't even say gC was confirmed as evil. I think she just considered a prank - IIRC she expected Dave to go back and change things anyway.

Really, it's the counterpart part that chafes with me. Attributes are shared, yes, but they're too mixed up to establish any 1:1 correspondence in about half the cases so far.

They're pretty much not.

Okay, I think the thing to do here is to remove the Evil Counterpart entries from the trolls' individual entries and put a little bit in the folder intro about it. I think that thing could use a bit of updating and clean-up anyway.

Though, CG, GC, GA, and maybe TA seem like clear enough analogs to the kids to keep the label. Thoughts?

tA isn't. He talks kind of like Dave, has the same prophet role as Jade, likes computer programming like John. I'm willing to bet he has an interest in sci-fi/fantasy too, which means he's got ties to Rose too. We don't know much about gA at all and we don't know enough about gC's interests to confirm her as a straight Jade analogue (though I never really thought she was much of one to start with).

Square Peg Round Trope, don't try to shoehorn the trolls into places where they don't belong.

Putting a comparison in the folder intro (or in the trolls' individual intros) works though. There are obvious callbacks to the kids, so I figure we should put that info somewhere. Just not under the Evil Counterpart trope.

I don't think TA is a "prophet". Latest update seems to have confirmed him as a Derse dreamer, and I don't think he's ever said a damn thing about the future. (Not in the way Jade did, anyway.)

The only "clear analogue" here is CG to John, and that's sort of stretching it. Most of the similarities there are just there for the purpose of making the start of Hivebent mirror the start of Homestuck.

GC, GA, and TA are not analogues. Not not not not not not not analogues and I wish people would stop saying that, especially with TA and GC because they're pretty much nothing like Dave and Jade. Like, at all.

Terezi and Jade are both giggly young girls with glasses who are named after gemstones and have a love of stuffed animals. We don't know much about GA, but her verbal stylings are basically Rose's with the sarcasm, one of her defining character traits, removed. One of the first things we learn about TA is that he's an outrageously cool dude who has a verbal rapport with GA.

You can't pigeonhole them into the category of "So-and-so's Evil Twin", but there is no goddamn way they aren't supposed to be similar.

Terezi also doesn't have a parental figure, like Jade. They both live alone in a secluded area. Their hobbies have to do with dressing up in weird costumes (or furries are associated with dressing up in weird costumes anyway, even if Jade doesn't do it). Before she was named, though, there wasn't really any rapport between them. Most mirroring between kids and trolls is superficial, their personalities are completely different.

tA and Karkat's logs are like Dave and John's if the good-natured teasing was replaced with blistering hatred. And if both of them were more serious and socially inept. And if John was a douche. Jury is still up on tA himself, he talks kinda like Dave but that's where the similarities seem to end.

I don't know why anyone is still thinking the trolls could possibly be evil. At this point in time it looks pretty clear to me that they aren't even antagonists.

I've just been reading up on Andrew's Formspring, and he apparently didn't design the Trolls to be 'counterparts' of the kids. Make of this what you will.

The quote, beqause I don't know how to link specific Formspring questions:

Some of the trolls share certain personality traits with some of the kids. But there's no formula for it. And it's certainly not as simple as "She's the troll-Jade!" and such. That's not how I view it, or how I planned it.

So should we remove Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain from GA and AT's entries?

I don't know, but it didn't actually happen. It's a history page error.

My bad, I accidentally refreshed like three times while working on a big edit.

Agreed, plus I believe that the ones who posted those are grossly exaggerating the event. All she's doing in burning her poetry books, we have no reason to believe she's gone completely off her rocker. (unless it was decided book destroying automatically meant madness when I wasn't looking.)

Well, I think it was probably more referring to all the things about the Gods of the Furthest Ring telling her that the code must be destroyed— but even given that, I agree that we need to wait and see what happens before we can make any definitive judgments.

He's not the Dragon Ascendant because he offed her himself (making him The Starscream instead). The Dragon Ascendant trope happens when the heroes kill the villain, but then his second-in-command takes his place.

Jack Noir and the Black Queen are separate from the intermission characters. At least for now, anyway. We shouldn't merge them before the link's confirmed.

Also, I think it makes more sense if we get rid of the Exiles section and put WV and AR in the Dark Kingdom and PM in the Light. Jack Noir and the Black Queen don't have exile versions yet. Where would we put them?

Transplanting the Exiles' entries to the Kingdom folders makes the most sense logistically, but I think that their roles as exiles takes precedence over their roles as agents of the kingdoms. I think it might be better to merge the Kingdom folders together and call the result Agents and Monarchs. That way, everyone stays in the folder where they have their most important role, and the White Queen doesn't have a folder all to herself, which is why I brought this up.

(Also, we have seen Noir as an exile. Scurrlious Straggler, remember? I don't think we should make an entry for him, though. He only appeared in two panels, after all.)

Two panels that took place in an alternate timeline, so yeah, we really don't need to add him to the Exiles section.