The Epilogue is in active development, and Hussie is working with Viz Media on it. We can expect more info on what it is sometime this year, though of course, there’s always the possibility things will be delayed somewhat. Still, it’s coming.
This information has gone ignored partly because there isn’t really a good, centralized community source from which to get clear info on Homestuck/Hiveswap. Tumblr is great for creative fandom purposes but not really excellent at transmitting key facts to the fandom.
And partly because the fandom is still operating under the salt-fueled mass delusion that Homestuck as a vibrant IP is somehow “over”, despite the fact that Hussie’s statement makes it pretty clear that all that seems to have “ended” with [S] Credits is the comic, and we’re not even sure about that much.
Both of these are problems I’m trying to correct. I have no idea what the Epilogue is, but it isn’t Hiveswap. Which just means theres more things to look forward to on the horizon.
The Serpent Portal that sends Joey to Dammek draws from two sources: the fantasy novel The Neverending Story, and science fiction series Stargate. What we learn about it from both sources could tell us a lot about the future of Hiveswap’s story, as well as that of its source webcomic, Homestuck.
Note: Joey has at least one other wish granted by the portal, as she notes she could use a “vacation from humanity” in some text. She’s expressed other wishes that could well be fulfilled, too, but I’d rather save those for later 😉
god this took me weeks to finish but im glad that its finally done! i really really pushed for the release date of this comic to be on the 22nd of February and with only a few minutes to spare (in GMT) i have accomplished that at least!
rather than doing a comic set in the hiveswap universe with the hiveswap characters i wanted my piece to be basically an open love letter to the hiveswap team! showing them the impact they’ve helped make on mine and tons of other peoples lives! this game really brought me closer to friends who i thought i had lost and brought me out of a pretty bad rut i had been in so i wanted to let the hiveswap team know how much i appreciate the work they do! thank you for reading! @whatpumpkin
Hope you like the next video 😉 I’m making a couple that sort of condense that article’s ideas into more compressed and evocative language.
That said, that essay was written way back during like, the Act 7 hype wave or so. It’s worth mentioning that the idea that LE made the Alpha Timeline is, in fact, not just a theory. It’s been decisively proven through Caliborn’s thematic link to his Denizen, Yaldabaoth.
I think reading Homestuck as a story designed by Lord English, an explicitly flawed work/world created by a flawed Demiurge figure, is basically Step 1 in having any sort of cohesive understanding of what it’s Going For on a thematic level.
I just wanted to say that I think there’s been evolution in that conversation since that essay, and if you enjoyed it you might find that stuff interesting, too.
So now that the whole notional and material idea has been established, that leaves the question, is there another axis to the whole thing? In other words, what separates, say, Mind from Light, or Void from Heart?
I pondered this question for quite a while before coming up with an answer I found satisfactory, and I’m still far from sure I’ve got it right. But I believe the answer might lie in a slightly different perspective on the dichotomy of Active and Passive.
I think I’m starting to find this pretty damn compelling, at least with Time and Space in particular. It makes my head hurt to think about, though. Classpects are so…so….so complicated if this is true. God.
When Vriska Serket was young, far younger than her still very young age when we first encounter her, she faced a choice of monumental proportions, at an age so young many would not ascribe her any agency, any responsibility for her actions. Perhaps we might even call it a Choice, for it is similar in nature to the ultimatums presented by the Denizens.
The Choice was this: A: Start killing people, innocent or not, on an enormous, serial killer kind of scale. Dye your hands in blood for all futures to come. B: Die before you’ve ever had a chance to live.
The Vriska we encounter chose A. Obviously she did. If she hadn’t, we would never have met her because she would be dead. This is the reponsibility of Vriska Serket, that to even exist in the story, she had to be a person who chose A.
And that makes her evil. I mean that in a sense that to choose and to continue to choose your own life over that of countless innocent strangers is a horrible (albeit somewhat understandable) decision, but I also mean it in the sense that Vriska herself perceives and understands herself as a bad person.
She makes excuses for herself, certainly. She justifies her actions using troll morality, tries to pretend she doesn’t care, clings to arbitrary standards of “fairness”. None of it works, of course. Aranea makes that much clear, in that key conversation of hers with Terezi. It never works.
And with her repeated failures to find absolution, with guilt gnawing at her every step of the way, here is Vriska’s grand mistake, that she desires to be Good, more than she desires to be Well.
In this world I would be surprised to hear of anyone who does not know the consequences of prioritizing accomplishment over health.
A take on Vriska that actually mostly aligns with my own! Pretty rare. I can’t resist the urge to mention that I see Vriska’s self-imposed selflessness as being the major identifying trait she borrows from Mindfang.
Thieves being an Active class with innately selfish tendencies and Sylphs being a Passive class with the opposite, I think the Mindfang persona itself is the major corrupting influence on Vriska’s psyche.
I’ve talked to Arrghus about this before I think, I just wanted to mention it here because not only do I think this reading is fairly accurate, I also think it’s grounded in the very mechanics of Classpects. And honestly I just think that’s hella neat, I’m never over it.
One idea that recurs fairly prominently in Homestuck’s Gnostic roots is the duality of the material and the notional, the World of Matter and the World of Ideas. And with the advent of the Extended Zodiac, one idea that took root in my mind was the possibility that this duality extended to the Aspects themselves.
I don’t have solid evidence for this yet, but I do have a lot of anecdotes, below the cut. Regardless of whether it’s truly canon, though, I do think it’s a potentially useful and interesting way of thinking about the Aspects and Homestuck itself.
This is pretty interesting to me. I tend to consider Aspects as simultaneously notional and material, but the idea that they might have a bias one way or another has a lot of potential for fleshing out how we understand them in relation to each other, I think.
One of many ideas I’m not entirely committed to, but consider as I look through the text and consider the ways it might be evolving now.
An animated birthday present for @joyfulldreams ! I got a little carried away with the animation.
For context, we talked at one point about Dirk making little pixel art doodles of Jake. I figured he might have some time to practice pixel art on Earth C. He’s still as quick with the sword as ever, though…
this feels like the beginning of a game i desperately want to play
Flying through Storytelling 