[QUOTE=john_pelphre;24931728][img_thumb]http://www.mspachan.net/art/src/128493437425.gif[/img_thumb][/QUOTE]
Might I ask who drew that?
[QUOTE=Fish_poke;24931934]Might I ask who drew that?[/QUOTE]
I don't know; twas a marvelous find on the very peculiar website MSPACHAN.
[editline]10:44PM[/editline]
Sorry.
[QUOTE=john_pelphre;24932158]I don't know; twas a marvelous find on the very peculiar website MSPACHAN.
[editline]10:44PM[/editline]
Sorry.[/QUOTE]
I COME TO SAVE THE DAY!
[url]http://www.mspaforums.com/showthread.php?31993-MSPA-Fan-Art-20-Never-Stop-Drawing&p=4096648&viewfull=1#post4096648[/url]
Andrew made a big post about Sburb universes and exposition and stuff on his [URL="http://www.formspring.me/andrewhussie/q/1158290610"]Formspring.[/URL] He basically planned this from the beginning.
So, is Karkat bisexual now? :smug:
I need to read through Homestuck again. It's been a while.
[QUOTE=Klown;24933444]So, is Karkat bisexual now? :smug:[/QUOTE]
No, he just loathes John.
Also, in the flash, at some moments John has a spade shirt.
Maybe Karkat isn't his nemesis, maybe he noticed the spade..?
I LIKE HOW MY AVATAR IS READING MY POST
[QUOTE=uitham;24934697]Also, in the flash, at some moments John has a spade shirt.
Maybe Karkat isn't his nemesis, maybe he noticed the spade..?[/QUOTE]
I think it was more the spade shirt made him realize that Jonh is his kimesis or whatever it's called.
Formsprings brought much more information than the updates themselves.
Information I mostly foretold, and partially feared to come true.
[editline]12:12PM[/editline]
[QUOTE=uitham;24934697]Also, in the flash, at some moments John has a spade shirt.
Maybe Karkat isn't his nemesis, maybe he noticed the spade..?
I LIKE HOW MY AVATAR IS READING MY POST[/QUOTE]
[quote=Abdrews Formspring]
[b]Alright, just to clarify, really. Is John's spade shirt an actual garment or is it representative (or, I suppose, both)? I feel bad asking because when KARKATRAINBOWBLOOD was a common IDE I thought it was stupidly obviously not accurate... and now karma.[/b]
It's a real shirt. In his letter to Jade, he said he got her the blue ghost shirt for her birthday, at the same time as when he got his own green ghost shirt. So he was wearing a different shirt before that. We just didn't know what it was.
Turns out it was a spade shirt. There is not a huge amount of significance to this other than 1) he likes magic and card tricks, and all the Harry Anderson stuff in his room reminds of this, 2) it is the symbol favored by Jack Noir, the bad guy he's destined to face in this game, and 3) it is taken by Karkat as an omen that this kid he just discovered was meant to be his kismesis. Hate at first sight.
But then he switched to his ghost shirt on Jade's birthday, which was also when he resolved to change his handle from ghostyTrickster to ectoBiologist, just after Terezi trolled him for the first time and threatened to kill him.[/quote]
[editline]12:14PM[/editline]
Those are damn interesting
[quote=Abdrews Formspring][b]So now you've revealed that the trolls' Sburb session CREATED OUR GODDAMN UNIVERSE. How long have you been waiting to spring that on us?[/b]
Since before Homestuck started.
HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive. In the HS reality, Sburb/Sgrub is the means by which universes procreate. Planets and civilizations are the seeds from which one or many new universes will blossom if the players succeed, at the expense of the life on that planet.
This was always what Homestuck was about. This revelation was carefully guarded, although there are plenty of clues. It has taken 4.5 acts to understand the "what" (as well as some of the "how" along the way.) The rest of the story will be about exploring the rest of the "how", as well as determining whether the players succeed.
I've answered numerous times that the conception of HS had its roots in loosely combining the themes and feel of Earthbound, The Sims, and Spore. That was a formula concocted many months before I began the story, well before Problem Sleuth was finished. The story still strikes me as staying very close to that original vision. Only now does the Spore component seems like it makes more sense. "Sburb" was always a word that was supposed to be reminiscent of "Spore", tweaked to reference the house building element as well. Spore is about universe building, and more specifically, life form and civilization building, but from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Sburb is the reverse. The goal is to create a universe all at once after overcoming an extensive series of challenges, and as is implied, the universe fleshes itself out with galaxies and systems and planets and lifeforms, ready and waiting for entry by the victorious players. The ultimate reward is for the players to enter the universe they created and do as they see fit. They are essentially the gods of that universe, and that is what the trolls are to our universe.
The trolls were always meant to serve this purpose. Before I conceptualized them in any way at all, their primary description was "the group of players who created our universe by successfully completing Sburb, and who would interact with the kids in some way and help them understand the purpose of the game". Logically, the other group of players would have to be aliens, since they are not only from a different planet, but from an entirely different universe. This began the thought process that lead to making them trolls, and then specifically, internet trolls who would harass the kids, but ultimately support them as the group of veteran players who understood what was going on better than any of the kids. This was mainly solidified because I thought the concept of our universe being created by a bunch of cantankerous internet trolls was a funny idea.
But at the time I didn't expect to get as deep into their story as I eventually did. I figured I'd touch upon it in some limited way, and only introduce a handful of characters, and just keep trucking along with the kids. But as their story became more entangled with the kids' story, it felt more necessary to just go all the way and get into their adventure, not just to better contextualize and characterize them all, but as a sort of accelerated primer on the entire game objective itself. The story is certainly about four kids and their adventure together, but also at its heart, it is about this esoteric creation myth, and the troll arc became a good way to establish the true objective while getting a foothold of the scope and magnitude of it all. We got a different look at how another session could go, with a much different player count and personality ensemble, and all the ways that could contribute to variations in this highly flexible game, and ultimately what the point of all this is. All this diversity and flexibility in the game's unfolding presumably has a bearing on what type of universe will be created. These ideas will be explored in detail over the remainder of the story. There's a lot more to come.
The deeper I've gone into involving the trolls in the story, the more it seems to me they were never an element I could really just shrug off in favor of focusing on "the real story". The process of going through their story has had an effect in showing the nature of the game that could never have been achieved without going down that road. Without it, I'd have to resort to a more mundane expository means of revealing the game's purpose. The Felt intermission, which certainly seemed tangential (and surely was) still served an important purpose by helping us invest in the villainous nature of Jack Noir. Without that, his future actions would have much less meaning. Similarly, the troll arc has served to more thoroughly "characterize" the entire purpose of the game, and give it much more meaning going forward. Furthermore, the troll story is inextricably entwined with the kids. Actions of the kids had influence over the way the troll adventure unfolded, and therefore the way their own universe was created (Rose's gamefaqs, the scratch they create, just to name what we know of). The kids' adventure is obviously heavily influenced by the trolls through direct communication, and therefore the trolls have a hand in causing the kids to do whatever it was they did to impact the troll's adventure, and so on. Willingly or not, they're all working toward the same outcome, toward creating our universe, and the universe the kids are trying to create, and whatever trouble puts all that in jeopardy. Remember that both the kids' and the trolls' chum handles are needed to make the full set of ACGT combinations. They are not two unrelated groups of players as they first appeared, nor are their universes unrelated. Sollux's shades, the ~ATH code, etc help illustrate this, that they are bifurcated, interwoven realities.
Even Act 5 is a microcosm of this idea. It is a bifurcated act. Act 5.1 is the troll half. Act 5.2 is the kid half. 5.2 even begins with two sets of curtains, red and blue. Blue symbolizes the troll universe, red symbolizes our universe. First we crossed through blue, then red.
One last thing I'll mention about all this. The whole creation myth angle of Homestuck was almost entirely inspired by the ludicrous creation myth in Problem Sleuth, the way GPI used his imaginary time traveling duplicates to create all the matter in the universe. I think that was one of my personal favorite ideas to come out of that story, in terms of scope and absurdity. So when I was considering ideas for the next story, I thought it would be fun to develop that topic further, but with a little less absurdity and more depth, sophistication and complexity. And for the creation myth to exist as the centerpiece of the game purpose and story.[/quote]
[editline]12:18PM[/editline]
Excellent, this gonna save A LOT of speculations.
[quote=Abdrews Formspring][b]Is this why God doesn't answer my prayers for a sweet new car? Because he's some asshole troll locked in another universe? Thanks for nothing, God(s)!
[/b]
The trolls probably wouldn't answer your prayers even if they presided over us unfettered.
But they aren't literally gods. They would certainly feel like it, having made the universe and then going wherever they wanted, existing as very powerful warriors from all their battle experience and high grade gear.
There are other entities and forces in this multiverse reality that could be seen as more god-like. The many instances of Skaia, for one. Whatever it is, exactly. The more sinister outer gods. Omnipotent beings like English, Scratch, Snowman, Bec. The mysterious frog god briefly mentioned, "Bilious Slick". All this stuff alludes to a pretty lively scene beyond the grasp of mortals. Players of the game appear to be just more pawns in the process of perpetuating reality. They're heroes, sure. And their stories likely wind up being the most interesting in this reality. But they're still just a bunch of mortal kids.
But we do see evidence that their story elevates them to godhood in the mythology of the people who eventually populate the universe they create. The constellations in our zodiac are just arbitrary looking star clusters, but people in our history saw them as symbols of the 12 creators, and built a whole mystical framework around their story. The specifics of the story may have been lost over time, or may never have been known. It could just be that the way our universe was created is imprinted in their subconscious, and it surfaces symbolically in their stories.
This was actually my line of thinking in writing Rose's wizardfic. If you sift through that dense excerpt, you find it's about 12 evil kids who played a role in influencing every dark event in history. My intent was that this was her subconsciously echoing the creation story of her own universe.
You could also extend their influence to the personality profiles of the characters. There are a lot of similarities between the profiles of many of the trolls and the kids. Some trolls seem to share traits with more than one kid. This is to be expected to some extent, since some of the profile elements are pretty broad. But in some cases the crossover is harder to ignore, and this could be attributed to the Alternian heroes laying the psychological tracks for the heroes that arise in the universe they create. But that said, I didn't want to get too carried away with this idea, and just make the "Dave version" of the trolls, and so on. So I drew similarities at times, and exaggerated differences at others, hoping to strike a balance.[/quote]
[editline]12:22PM[/editline]
Oh well, my feelings are highly mixed about this.
[quote][b]Now that Hivebent is apparently over, is there anything you wish you could change about it?
[/b]
Nope!
That's all the questions I'll answer for now.
On the subject of this question, let's look at some...
HIVEBENT STATS
98 days
635 pages
737 images
1 three minute flash animation
70,000 words
7.5 images per day
714 words per day
Hivebent definitely went at a faster clip than usual for MSPA, in both image and word output. The word count spike seems especially pronounced.
But this was a deliberate effort, and not really just for the sake of a more compressed, sweeping story.
A while ago, months before Hivebent, I had the thought that I wanted to allow words to tow more of the load in what has been mostly a visual format (MSPA as a whole I mean). The trend had already been present in HS, with increasing importance given to pesterlogs to drive the story, and I've found the consequences to be interesting, and not really expected from the onset of HS.
So Hivebent represents more of a verbal push, I guess in part as a media exploration. It's not too inaccurate to describe it as a very vividly illustrated e-novel. I understand of course this is not what 100% of all readers have a strong appetite for, and that's fine with me. Reading through HS and then hitting Hivebent is a little like suddenly encountering thicker atmosphere in flight. The rate of progress slows, it demands a little more attention, and then when you get through it, the pace picks back up. (Probably!) Overall, I'm satisfied with how it turned out, and it reads pretty much how I thought it would. It just lasted a couple months longer than I projected, because I will absolutely never be able to pin down an accurate time estimate on a story arc. I have resolved to stop trying, ever.
[highlight]
Text-heavy visual storytelling is something I've thought about recently beyond the scope of this arc, and I think there are some interesting possibilities to explore. Perhaps I will, but I doubt what I'd have in mind would be compatible with the MSPA format. Perhaps after HS. We'll see.[/highlight][/quote]
Hivebent was so far my most favorite part of MSPA. I really hope something similar will follow after Homestuck.
The Hell?
I go into chat to report a phisher, and Millian bans me from chat.
The hell did I do?
Oh, sorry then. I thought you are the phisher. You didn't form the post in the luckiest way. I unbanned you.
Everyone who likes Homestuck should read Andrew Hussie's formsprings, it's very informative.
problem sleuth I liked better for the sole reason it maintained an amazing athmosphere
I gotta read more of Homestuck
[QUOTE=Egevened;24937520]problem sleuth I liked better for the sole reason it maintained an amazing athmosphere
I gotta read more of Homestuck[/QUOTE]
Homestuck grows even deeper atmosphere than Problem Sleuth, but it picks up mainly after act2, and so far, I liked mainly in act5 the best.
[QUOTE=Egevened;24937520]problem sleuth I liked better for the sole reason it maintained an amazing athmosphere
I gotta read more of Homestuck[/QUOTE]
Homestuck is alot different from problem sleuth in that problem sleuth was much more random, in Homestuck everything has a point.
Wait, if the trolls sgrub session created the kids universe does that mean the kids sburb session could potentially create a new universe?
Or am I just dumb.
[QUOTE=halflambada;24938718]Wait, if the trolls sgrub session created the kids universe does that mean the kids sburb session could potentially create a new universe?
Or am I just dumb.[/QUOTE]
Yes they would. It's the point of Sburb/Sgrub.
[quote=the damn formspring]
HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive. In the HS reality, Sburb/Sgrub is the means by which universes procreate. Planets and civilizations are the seeds from which one or many new universes will blossom if the players succeed, at the expense of the life on that planet.[/quote]
Yes, they can, if they win.
Y'know, Homestuck is so much deeper than I first though when I was reading Act 1.
[sp]Rate me clocks[/sp]
[QUOTE=Klown;24939797]Y'know, Homestuck is so much deeper than I first though when I was reading Act 1.
[sp]Rate me clocks[/sp][/QUOTE]
I think that it's much deeper than anybody thought.
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;24939949]I think that it's much deeper than anybody thought.[/QUOTE]
When I start reading, I first though "lol this is pretty fun". I never thought that the plot would become so complex.
Who would think it would go from a birthday to creating galaxies right?
[QUOTE=Moreto;24941632]Who would think it would go from a birthday to creating galaxies right?[/QUOTE]
Creating universes. :science:
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;24941989]Creating universes. :science:[/QUOTE]
Okay so I was a bit off, it's still awesome either way.
