Subject: I like my new mythological role.
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Posted on: 2014-04-17 04:15:00 UTC
I reevaluated myself with the canon-compliant test, and I wound up with Seer of Space. I actually think that fits me a lot better than Knight of "Keys"/Mind, since regardless of how awesome psionic powers would be, I would work much better in a passive class. Plus, the Space aspect combined with Seer would mean that my primary ability would be observation and analysis of the Medium, and processing the information that I collect for mutual benefit of the rest of the session. It would be equally useful in combat, detecting and assessing enemy encampments from far away, determining spawn patterns, and figuring out the layout of dungeons or other areas to prevent, ambush and find good places to hide. In between battles, I could locate plot-important areas and other zones of sweet loot for myself and various fellow Sburb players, which would help everyone with the all-important "completely breaking the game" aspect of any worthwhile Sburb session. Also, since I'm the Space player, you know what that means! Come on, everybody! Frog hunt on my planet!
Discussion time: let's see... let's start with the basics. Plot twists corner. Which did you like the best, and which did you dislike? For new Homestuck readers, these plot twists contain spoilers, surprisingly enough. My opinions will be a little influenced by the fact that I've been reading Homestuck for so long that most of the pre-Act Five elements don't really seem like plot twists any more, since they've been entwined in the story for so long I can't remember them not being important. So, all of these will come from Act Five or Act Six.
Favorites: I have two, which might be cheating a little, but they both cover similar ground, so I'm saying they both count. First, Becquerel's prototyping. With one quick action, not only were several theories about the stuff lying around Jade's house entirely debunked, the stakes were raised for the rest of the session. If there were any doubts that things just got escalated, the low-level enemy who sent Jade on a wild teleportation chase across all of the Medium cemented that yeah, their entire session is like this now. I almost wish we'd seen a dog-eared teleporting Giclops at some point, but we can't have everything.
I will willingly admit that I was part of the group that thought that the Becquerel-enhanced Jack Noir would eventually become Lord English, because if anyone was likely to become a multiverse-terrorizing monster of horrific might and ferocity, there's a good chance that it'd be the noted psychopath who has suddenly been gifted with the power to rend reality into tiny little chunks. But hey, him becoming the monster who blew up the trolls' session was a pretty awesome consolation prize. Wait, is that a third plot twist? I'd better move on to my other pick before I start describing entire character pathways.
Two: Aranea's sudden reveal as a villain. I have a hunch that this isn't a lot of people's favorite, but I absolutely loved it. Not only was it a culmination of several minor plot threads that gave numerous characters their own reasons to interact with her, and not only did it give an alternate-universe ancestor troll some role in the main story, but I just love Aranea's brand of villainy. Most of the other Homestuck villains were either near-mindless monsters, world-wrecking maniacs, or people who turned maniac due to something in their environment, but Aranea is just this incredibly cold and direct character, wrapped up in a case of warm friendliness. And the thing is, it's completely genuine. The helpful and somewhat desperate-seeming exposition fairy from half the act ago wasn't putting up a facade, and wasn't driven crazy by moral isolation or being taken off her sopor. I really like when a character doesn't go suddenly adopt the shape of the typical looming and overdramatic archlord when they go evil, and Aranea's outbreak of antagonism is a great improvement on the type. She's completely calm and even occasionally cheerful, even as she bursts in after millions of years of inactivity with a plan to rebuild time and stop a reality-threatening godling by literally cutting him off from his past. After all, being more traditionally antagonistic would be out of character. Also, her method of fulfilling her plan by mind-warping Jake and Gamzee(and maybe testing her mind-altering powers on Terezi, but that'd probably just be wishful thinking on my part to justify Terezi's angst) to act as facilitators both allows for her plan to start out surprisingly subtly(that bit falls apart after she mind-warps Jake, but that's mainly because nothing is subtle when it involves a sixty-foot orb of light hovering in the sky and screaming "Gadzooks!") and to distinguish her from her counterpart, Vriska, showing how far the other Mindfang's developed from her earlier callous self. Also, as I mentioned, all of those minor plot threads villain-Aranea brings together. Just the best. It's like she was driving the story specifically in her direction for half the act, and didn't want to show it because getting too directly involved would prevent things from getting where they needed to go.
Not favorite: The secret treasure, a.k.a. that house-logo-shaped weapon and/or portal that John stuck his hand into. I have always loved how Homestuck can introduce a plot element, leave it somewhere in the background for years on end, and then bring it back into the main fold. It's been an extremely entertaining and very effective way of telling an intertwined story, especially one of Homestuck's complexity. The portal-house-weapon's effects retconned the image of John's arm, not only in that montage of arm-panels, but directly into the past scenes, and given how great Homestuck had been in the past with their story elements, just retconning in another plot thread and pushing it to a major position in a story already full of dozens of them just seems like cheating.
Also, in slightly pettier terms, I'd been working off of a primary image of how Homestuck's world works for a while, and managed to squeeze a measure of consistency out of its inner workings, but the portal-house-weapon immediately circumvents one of the few core rules of the setting, the time travel mechanic. That's petty largely because Homestuck has never been averse to defining some new elements of its universe because of or for the sake of a joke.
It did make for some entertaining scenes, but now the constant threat of "that thing you just saw never actually happened" is looming over the story. It was bad enough when Doc Scratch was doing it, and at least that guy was both established beforehand as unreliable and drawing from canonical-but-unimportant doomed timelines. Now I'm just concerned that John is going to go and redefine something important at the last second or something.
...In other news, I appear to have regained my sovereignty in the field of Typing A Whole Lot Of Words. Hooray! Maybe if I pull all of my walls of text together, I can build a mighty castle on my Incipisphere planet! Now, where did I put my towing cables?