>Start thread for MS Paint Adventures

I haven't made it all the way through this thing yet, but I think we can agree that whatever other fuckery Hussie may have delivered Economic Policy Wonk Dave is fucking amazing.

Dave is great in this. I am pretty sure he became my favorite character in this whole nonsense, which is actually surprising to me, because unlike half of the fandom I personally never cared all that much about him. His rants used to tire me off and make my mind wander, but now I find him hilarious.

PS:

Edited by Heatth on Apr 22nd 2019 at 9:46:42 AM

Whatever goes on with Dirk he doesn't attempt to sabotage Dave and Karkats relationship like Candys Narrator does. So, take that for what you will.

Thinking about it, I think it is because Dave is very relatable to me now, in a way he wasn't before. For starter I too am, right now, struggling to understand and define what is masculinity to me and to shave away some past shittier parts of myself. More specific to the epilogue, I to am starting more and more to realize how many of my own toxicity can effect others and how to deal with that.

Dave is now dealing with the inrerent awkwardness of "woke" politics, Including of course, left wing economic politics, while not actually having much of a clue, except the are problems that he is now hyper aware of. And that results in some performativity but not, like, out of malice or deception, but it of being aware of his own priviledges while not actually being sure how to proceed.

It is a very relatable experience. And also very very funny.

If he has one redeeming quality, is that he genuinely loves Dave and wanted the best for him.

Edited by Heatth on Apr 22nd 2019 at 9:48:21 AM

I think Reddit is right and there will be a third branch/conclusion that shows why you need both 'meat' and 'candy' in a narrative.

At this point I will just be further skeptical of any "conclusion". This will just go on forever, only becoming weirder and more meta.

Considering what happens at the end of Candy, I'd say that's a given.

And then Viz suddenly realizes a trailer for "Homestuck the Anime" with the subtitle "Where the fuck is Hiveswap?".

Nah, I don’t really think so. Even like, disregarding the statement by the authors that this is the real deal end of Homestuck, the story seemed complete to me. Sure, we don’t receive resolution when it comes to Rosebot and Dirk, but we know what their plans are and it never seemed like the thing we’d get closure on. Aradia and Davebot enter the wormhole, and draw a line determining what is canon, what matters, and what is non-canon. Both postscripts have an aura of finality about them, saying that while it’s possible for things to happen after this, and they probably will, this is the end of the story being told, and anything created from this point forwards is neither necessary nor true. It’s a conclusion in itself to NOT write about what happened to Rosebot and Dirk, because if it isn’t written than it isn’t necessary. If it was written, that would create a genuine conflict, but if it remains unwritten the conflict is settled and done with, as is the story.

Edited by atiredonnie on Apr 22nd 2019 at 12:08:03 PM

Narrator!Dirk: Roxy’s the only one left I haven’t been able to crack. Her mind remains a total enigma to me, just like it always has. If I had to guess, it’s her Void powers that make her invisible, even to increasingly omniscient parties such as myself.

Reading this over and over and its so Doc Scratch it hurts.

What people are saying and what Muse Calliope was saying seems accurate. Dirk has been corrupted by his splinter selves that entangled with Caliborn and he's becoming Caliborny. Not unlike Alia Atreides and Duke Harkonnen but somehow both more and less creepy.

I will say, the concept of a Rosebot delights me.

I am halfway through Candy now and I gotta say I can now understand better the talks of OOC. Roxy in particular sound fake to me. Maybe because I read Meat first and they are a very different person there, but they are just too weird. The way they dealt with their relationship with John and Calliope just don't compute to me. (Also, I guess I am calling them "they" now. Probably because candy!Roxy sounds fake while meat!Roxy sounds plausible, so I am splitting the difference)

Another thing is Jane's rise to fascism. I can actually but it as an unfortunate evolution of her character. I do know people who turned out to be assholes as adults, so that is fine. But the overall inaction of sinister everyone else is not. I can buy the initial relutance, but I think even Roxy would stop defending Jane. And despite the awkwardness with Karkat, I would think Dave and Jade would do *something*, specially considering how engaged they were in Meat. If course, maybe they are doing something and I am just not seeing it yet.

That said, still loving it.

Edited by Heatth on Apr 22nd 2019 at 5:28:14 AM

I think it does say something about Jane as she spent her youth idolizing Crocker before learning she was an alien tyrant. Thinking she could do things better without the bad things, without realizing shes just reinforcing the bad things. They even point it out. While Roxy clearly doesn't want to believe Jane is becoming HIC 2.0

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Apr 22nd 2019 at 1:39:33 AM

Something that occurs and may be relevant is that the various kids never learned to actually give a shit and do something about something.

Sburb ground them down until they just passively accepted with some complaining whatever it was that they were told was their destiny.

And people like Vriska or Dirk basically lollipopped the group by telling them what to do. Forcing progress without ever jarring the others from the passivity of just listening to some know-it-all.

I mention this because I'm still sore about Vriska bossing everyone else around on the lilypad right before the end and would like to believe that it was intentionally bad.

And in a new world where everyone is either part of their peer group or sees them as the gods that created the world, they all just continue in their ruts because they never learned to break that passivity.

I was unsure about where janes character arc went in both but then I remembered it was a arquiu a dirk splinter who removed the head and. Whose to say he didn't put some other stuff in there.also I love (vriska) s ultimate end of being a knockoff to the better model and being stuck in candy irrelevance forever. Thems the 8r8ks

I'm pretty sure we're meant to think that Candy!Roxy seems OOC. Like, John makes a lot of comments about how weird and fake she seems. Whoever the Candy narrator is fucked with her head good.

I'm not sure how to take Candy!Roxy in general, but I think it's a misread [born of an intentional misdirect] to think that she's "fake" and leave it at that.

Like, throughout the majority of the story, we are shown her appearing to be seemingly passive, with either little agency or acting in bizarrely, disquieting arbitrary fashion - Especially with Teen!Jade's corpse party nonsense, as the key example of the latter behavior...

But then, at the end, when John finally takes the time to try to talk to and "see" her without presumptions, we get a vary salient image, that would suggest she did have interior thoughts and rational motivations for her actions — that she her [perceived] passivity wasn't the result of a lack of personality.

It's here that it is made clear that she had the same thoughts and concerns as Meat!Roxy, explicitly in regards to gender identity and performance — just that she coped with them in a different manner than he did, due to their different circumstances.

The only thing that seems to mark the shift from Candy!Roxy being flat in her "characterization" and her being three-dimensional is... how far John is up his own ass in dealing with his depression and indecision, and how much he's willing to trust and actually fucking listen to her.

Rather not unlike how Dirk doesn't understand Meat!Roxy, or genuinely take his concerns, thoughts, and actions "seriously," couldn't meet him where he was on a metaphorical level, and not just because he never tried to reach out to him on a personal level, due to the Mindfuck Double Reacharound of having his infinitely fractured Not Quite Ultimate Self unwittingly colonized by the splinters of Caliborn stuck in it and/or/also growing up to be hugely narcissitic prick who cannot comprehend not knowing The Real Truth about everything without destroying his own ego.

Like, sure, Roxy's role as a Hero of Void definitely plays a role in how various types of omniscience keep their interior nature a secret on the metatextual level, but the metatext exists as a part of the text and subtext. It's not a coincidence that, throughout the Epilogues, Roxy seems to keep being misunderstood, I'd say.

All this, combined with a couple other factors — especially (Vriska)'s explicit concerns — makes me suspect that John is, probably unwittingly, the narrator of Candy. Even despite the text of the narrative towards the conclusion (especially Candy!John's final fruitful conversation with Candy!Roxy) quite pointedly rejecting John's feeling of guilt over everything that's happened, and dispelling his concerns about it.

(though I do wanna say, there is, as ever, still more weird shit going on with Calliope. Like, all versions of them, but I mean the one who isn't a metatextual black hole goddess. It's Candy!Calliope's frankly fucking inexplicable request to John that he free fucking Gamzee that serves as the textual cause for setting Candy on a path towards madness and civil war... Whereas, after Godhead!Calliope makes her appearance in Meat, Meat!Calliope vanishes into their and Roxy's house and starts drawing, among other things, Gamzee and (Vriska)'s infinitely awful final make-out and murder session. so like, what the fuck)

I could see John as the Candy!narrator pretty easily, with the whole thing being colored by his self-loathing. Stuff like Jake being abused by Jane and the debacle that is Dave/Jade/Karkat are emphasized as terrible, and also happens to be things that John feels directly guilty about as he tried and failed to help Jake and Dave. Meanwhile, other awful stuff like Dirk's suicide that John doesn't feel any responsibility over don't get much attention, and Rose and Kanaya whose lives are genuinely better in Candy are Out of Focus.

Yeah, I seriously dislike the claim that everyone is intentionally OOC and nutty in Candy, rendering everything they do meaningless. Roxy literally states near the end that she has her own thoughts and feelings that are important to her, that she’s not a fundamentally different person and there’s no reason why you should assume the “spirit of Roxy” is someone who would never want to have a kid or get married, or someone who could never be passive in the face of everything getting fucked. I think people are taking the earliest point raised in Candy- “all of this is fake and bad and all the characters would NEVER act like this”- while disregarding the multiple statements made at the end about how while the Candy timeline might not be relevant and might be fucked up in some ways, no one in there is a brainless, inanimate doll and their happiness or sadness is real. They may not be acting like the characters we knew in the comic, but late Candy seems to explicitly challenge the idea that the characters have some moral boundaries they could never cross and some personalities they could never possess. Jane can be a fascist. Jade can be a fucking futa or whatever, because in the end the human spirit isn’t concrete and any person can be whatever the hell they want. It’s a very nurture like perspective in the argument of nature vs nurture, to the extent that it suggests that NO ONE has an inherent nature and all perspectives and personalities can be changed. Sometimes for the better (see: Rose being content with her life) sometimes for the worst (see: Jane and Dirk, just, generally.)

Candy route is a long ass intentional subversion of Homestuck’s favorite phrase, “a universal constant.” Candy posits that nothing is a universal constant. Everything can change.

Except Gamzee being a bag of dicks. That’s a universal constant. Fuck that guy.

E: Used she/her pronouns because this is Candy Roxy.

Edited by atiredonnie on Apr 23rd 2019 at 1:57:06 PM

Speaking of which, the Character Derailment entries on CharacterDerailment.Webcomics. Should the Homestuck Epilogues entries there be deleted, or should they stay?

I feel like clarifying that my post above was made before I'd finished Candy, and that I hadn't yet read the Roxy scene you guys are talking about. And I feel it's also worth noting that Heatth was in a similar boat. Don't blame us for falling for the authorial misdirection before we read that the scene where it was revealed to be misdirection.

It's possible, judging from Calliope's comments, that the entire idea of there being a specific Candy Narrator was misdirection aimed at those of us who started with Meat- that forcing the reader to think in those terms means that Dirk's shenanigans in Meat would be dangerous and destabilizing even if he'd been 100% benevolent about it.

There's definitely something super bizarre about both version non-God versions of Calliope, though. She goes weird right away in Candy, but is normal until her God-self shows up in Meat. So that's something.

hey gamzee had a sad upbringing and said he was wrong stop being down on the clowns redemption

Edited by Deadpoolrocks on Apr 22nd 2019 at 6:12:53 AM

They seem fine to me.

I would agree with Jane, and disagree with Jade. Why does her enjoying sex make her derailed? Either way it's an edit war.