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Its almost definitely Dirk.

Mega Man fanatic extraordinaire

I do think it's worth reading this page in particular to see for yourself how Rose thinks of this. There are several points where Rose raises doubts but Dirk's narration changes her mind.

Edited by Druplesnubb on Feb 15th 2020 at 7:31:22 PM

Mhm. Dirk justifies it as pushing her into making the decision quickly when she otherwise would've wasted his time first before coming to the same conclusion. This is not a premise that holds up to scrutiny, and it strikes me as being as much about convincing himself as it is about convincing us.

And, indeed, the basic dynamic we're seen between Dirk and Rose is that she raises an objection, but is always convinced that he's right suspiciously quickly.

"Canada Day is over, and now begins the endless dark of the Canada Night."

I saw an interesting reddit post that compared this update to the Platonic Cave. Terezi leaves the cave while Dirk and Rose stay for their battle of gods. The reddit post stated that Terezi would possibly have a major revelation or gain a perspective that would lead her to oppose Dirk and Rose in some capacity.

I never really took notice of Dirk's machinations during Homestuck 1, but to see him as an "antagonist" now...

He's playing the role of a villain but talks as though intervening in the universe they create is a necessary act. Is the notion that the kids shouldn't take part in the universe they create and just let it run its course on its own? Because they are gods. SBURB essentially lets them create a world that they could rule as they see fit—but is Hussie implying that they shouldn't?

Immortality and being the literal creators of the universe does not, I think, necessarily imply that they are qualified to rule said universe. Sure, I think they do have some measure of responsibility - with great power and what-not - but I think it's also responsible to realize when you're not the best person for the job.

Edited by KarkatTheDalek on Feb 15th 2020 at 11:24:15 AM

Oh God! Natural light!

It's like what Karkat said - they made a universe, then fucked it up in what, seven years, when they finally got back there?

It's been fun.

The kids left Earth C and came back thousands of years later, where it had been doing fine without them. And then they messed it all up.

Dirk and Rose seem to be taking the reins right at the beginning, but dead!Calliope seems intent on trying to stop them for some reason.

Why, what harm could creating an entirely new society do to paradox space? ;p

I always forget, how long is the standard period for spoilering everything from the last update.

Edited by Keybreak on Feb 15th 2020 at 11:32:40 AM

There's some dialogue I vaguely remember but can't quite recall enough to search up that touched on something like this, with the moral choice of what to do after winning. My one lead led to this, and the mention of the choice whether or not to attain immortality, but that wasn't really that relevant.

But, really, if this seems confusing, just think: It's like having a kid. You have a responsibility to raise them properly. That doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want with or to them. Not even if you have their best interest in mind, and especially not if you're using them as a means to an end. Why would that be any more acceptible when you multiply the scale by several orders of magnitude? The title of "god" doesn't change that; Paradox Space clearly does not have any axiomatic principle that god tiers can do no wrong, otherwise Just deaths wouldn't be a thing.

Winners of SBURB make a universe, but the only ones who claimed said universe was thus the winners to rule as they see fit were the trolls. They uh. They didn't get it. Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that them being barred from entering the Universe they created was a serendipitous response to them winning without solving The Ultimate Riddle, it's pretty clear they skipped over all the philosophical stuff and were worse off for it.

Gods should interfere in their creation; they should live in it, for one. But they should do so responsibly, with regular moral considerations. Unless you're a believer in enlightened dictatorship, it should be an obvious conclusion that they shouldn't install themselves as rulers. They certainly shouldn't create a whole species (or any number of real, living people) with a purpose decided for them, with a burden saddled atop them which they in no way asked to carry, even when that doesn't involve subjecting them to an otherwise avoidable apocalypse. (It also means they shouldn't make a bunch of babies and then fuck off for a thousand years without any proper care.)

And here I was forgetting why the ending bugged me, welp.

Mostly does better things now. Key word mostly. Writes things, but you'll never find them. Or you can ask.

It's extra screwed up because They're making a species where the majority of their number and their entire civilization will die by the very game they're setting up. They're playing Spore with real life forms with the knowledge that they WILL lose the game.

Edited by RhymeBeat on Feb 15th 2020 at 12:37:46 PM

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

Yep yep. They just skipped over the tricky civilization-building part and jumped right to the easy 'live like Gods' part. Which I've always thought was a pretty shitty thing for them to do, and a major reason I was unsatisfied with the ending. And a major reason why I liked the epilogues was that they made it clear just how bad the fallout from that shitty decision was; it felt vindicating.

And, indeed, the 'children' metaphor is an especially apt one, because it's literally true; the one of the only things they did before jumping forward in time was create a whole bunch of ecto-babies and then leave them all for the Mayor to worry about. They quite literally abandoned their children.

But Dirk here is overcorrecting for that mistake. There's a big difference between abdicating all responsibility for your progeny and becoming an fickle tyrant who's only caring for his creations so that one day they'll be worth destroying.

"Canada Day is over, and now begins the endless dark of the Canada Night."

Winners of the game are born into the universe created by the winners of the last game.

The trolls didn't really leave any morals in the kids' universe; only the zodiac. To which people in our universe attributed their own meanings.

Did the kids have their signs in the new universe? ...now I'm imagining how the trolls must gave misread the squiddle zodiac...;p

Didn't they say the only reason the trolls only left the zodiac for us to remember them by because they effed up and didn't actually finish the game as intended? As in, "if they had won it as intended and been allowed to take the price, they would have entered into our world as gods instead of just a vague thing like the zodiac."

Edited by akanesarumara on Feb 15th 2020 at 6:57:34 PM

Maybe...also the wiki says that Hussie deconfirmed the 48 squiddle session in the physical Book 4, so there's a headcanon I've had for years all asploded.

Yes. When she says this, she is a teenage philosopher with a degree from the University of Wikipedia. She has an alcoholic mother who while loving is not a great caretaker and as such Rose is put into a position of having to try to be mature beyond her years. Her mother's attempts at bonding over a shared interest in wizards are seen as a passive-aggressive mockery, leading to Rose burying that interest and leaning more towards Lovecraftian eldritch horror. When she enters the Medium and finds herself on LOLAR, she sees it again as mockery. And she says this in the middle of a very… eventful, shall we say, day. She's a traumatized kid projecting her personal baggage on the system. She's also a victim of manipulation by both the Horrorterrors and by Doc Scratch.

The post-canon content has had heavy themes of the characters navigating their traumas as they've matured into adults. At the beginning of the Epilogues, Rose is 23. With the timeskip from Meat to the Theseus crew's story in HS^2, she's 26. That's a lot of time for a lot of deeply held beliefs to drastically change. She is absolutely having her will twisted by Dirk's metanarrative control, and thus we don't really know how much might be her own changed outlook.

That would probably be because Dirk wasn't really very manipulative in the original comic. Splinters of him, namely the Autoresponder/Lil Hal and the various entities he became components of, were where Dirk's potential for manipulation were put on display. For instance, Hal was the one who set up the Dirkjake corpse smooch in Unite Synchronize. Dirk feels responsible for the things done by his splinters, because as far as he is concerned, there is no real seperation between his Alpha self and the splinters. They are him and he is them. So Alpha Dirk takes on the reputation as a manipulative mastermind with so many irons in the fire and internalizes it, building up self-loathing for the shit that his alternate selves do. Come the Epilogues and his consciousness has expanded to his Ultimate Self, the culmination of all Dirks in all timelines. Know how I mentioned the entities Hal became part of? That chain goes Arquius -> Lil Cal -> Doc Scratch -> Lord English. These are all partially Dirks, and thus would influence the bodyless and timeless persona that is a culmination of All Dirks. It's no wonder he went off the deep end.

ETA: holy shit, i just checked the wordcount of what i wrote here on a whim and it was exactly 413 words.

Edited by Sixthhokage1 on Feb 16th 2020 at 2:49:57 PM

That's why the concept of Ultimate Self horrifies me, pretty much.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

I understand people can change, even their deeply held beliefs. But that general change can happen isn't itself satisfactory explanation for any given specific change happening? It needs a reason. Navigating trauma doesn't really explain why Rose would go from that position to one which is pretty clearly immoral in addition to being antithetical to how she used to think.

Being brainwashed squares this for me. Otherwise it'd be like Jane all over again. That's a change that makes no sense to me, that I can only imagine as having been thought up for plot rather than actually being a sensible extension of character growth. That just happens to bug me, and this one did up until the explanation.

Mostly does better things now. Key word mostly. Writes things, but you'll never find them. Or you can ask.

All I can guess is that the pressure of running a baking empire caught up with her and she turned her frustration onto the trolls.

Only Dirk, Rose and Dave have worked up to their Ultimate Selves, but I'm suspecting that one of either version of the rest of the kids would try to reach them too.

I'm guessing Meat John (after he's resurrected somehow), Meat Roxy (after he gets to Detritus), Candy Jade (when she finds out that Candy Dave did it), Candy Jake (because...Iunno) and Candy Jane (because it would be pretty climactic?).

She was still heavily instilled for years with subliminal messages by the Condensce.

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

That too.

;p I follow a Lets-Player who's been doing Friendsim and Pesterquest saying "Her Imperious Condensation". I still don't know if it's a joke or he just doesn't know how to pronounce it.

Yep. Because there's nothing like being shown OBEY, SUBMIT, CONSUME, CEASE REPRODUCTION all your formative years to convince you to take charge as a despot.

Everything we see from Condy to Jane is grooming her to be a follower, not a leader. It's not aimed at her morality. The inference seems to me that it's set up to wear her down and then the tiaratop can work with what's left to get Condy a proper agent. It doesn't really explain her later turn. If you think that turn makes sense, that's fine, but I keep seeing this used as like, the smoking gun, and... no?

Mostly does better things now. Key word mostly. Writes things, but you'll never find them. Or you can ask.

All of those are things she did ultimately enforce on the trolls. I don't know the precise mechanics but I do think there's a connection.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

There’s also her thinking the taking over a massive company and annexing the post office are all good things

But the way people think as a youth doesn’t always reflect their adult self

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

About Rose. I am still not fully convinced she is being as genuine about this whole thing as she is letting on. Dirk is a manipulator, but so is Rose. And she is a Seer at that, I am still on the belief that she may be plotting something on the side to counter Dirk's meta bullshit.

Furthermore, just because something is antithetical it doesn't mean Rose wouldn't do it, I don't think. She have always been the most "shady" of the original kids. She is not really evil by any stretch, and cares a lot more than she pretends to, but I do think she would go against her principles if she thought it worked toward a worthwhile goal. So even if Rose is not explicitly plotting against Dirk or being brainwashed by him^note which would be my least favorite option I think there could be a good reason for her to be doing this that doesn't contradicts her previous held values.

Basically, I don't think we really know all that much about Rose's actual opinion on this situation to draw strong conclusions out of it. I don't think Raichu is wrong to notice there is an incongruence about how she acting, but I think this is a clue, not character assassination.

PS: About Jane. Yeah, the subliminal messages are about subjugation. But Jane's actual regular upbringing was not. She grew up dreaming on becoming the head of huge corporation that she knew full had shady influence on public institutions. Influence that she planned on growing. Over the course of the story she went against Betty Crocker but she never had any epiphany about the methods being wrong, just the end goal, so it is not, at all, weird she became the head of an evil corporation with influence on the government as an adult. That have always been her childhood dream.

I do agree the racism kinda came from nowhere, though. It doesn't bother me because I get what the writers were doing, and people do often grow up to be bigots, even if you couldn't tell that when they were teens, but that is a lot less elegant than the rest of her characterization in the Epilogues.

Edited by Heatth on Feb 16th 2020 at 4:32:42 PM

I've always found the Strilondes to be contradictive in their mannerisms, in contrast to the HarleyCrockerBertEnglishes, who I feel are more straightforward.

Dave is gay, but he spent all his youth steeped in irony that he didn't figure out that he was until years later. Roxy ends up either trans, or seemingly so blissed out that John doesn't believe that she really liked her life. Rose writes about wizards as a coping mechanism as though she doesn't like them, but ends up pretty magical in the end. And Dirk puts on the cool guy persona even though he hates himself. The four are all about class and cool, but a lot of them are just facades.