4/13 Update Discussion Thread - IT'S HERE

Another symptom of the Big Problem in Homestuck: The Condesce, Jade, John, and even Jack English are shown to cause much more devastation and destruction than Lord English ever does onscreen in the comic.

Retroactive responsibility is awesome, but... we still never actually SEE him do any of it. it's all off-screen or implied. He never throws around planets or teleports into a dozen places at once, and we never see him use any time travel powers like John and Dave did plenty of times. It doesn't work as well when we never get to see any of it.

I think the problem is that English is sort of set up almost as an impersonal force of nature that has no motivation and no mind to do much but ignite chain reactions that cause horrible things to happen. Him having no discernible personality works in the case where that is true. But then he's reintroduced as a character, and that's where things get problematic. A character needs motivation, needs to actually be seen doing stuff, and has to have some kind mind of his own that we can observe. This isn't the case with Lord English like it is with Caliborn. 

And don't ask me to just assume LE has Caliborn's personality. Doc Scratch is the same amalgam of parts that LE is and he's almost nothing like Caliborn, so how do I know LE isn't, like the Doctor, an entirely new personality made up of a different construction of the same parts?

Is the King's entire existence based on the war itself? Could it not be said that his purpose is actually the winning, and that the war is simply the most obvious means to that end? Which would mean that the Black King would consider some other plan if it had a greater chance of success? Plus we saw the A2 Black Queen abandon her royal duties in the name of vanity and pride, and the B1 White Queen was sensible enough to abdicate and abscond when her kingdom went to shit instead of needlessly going down with the ship. So we know the royalty can be flexible/dismissive with their own rules.

Big philosophical question: If someone claims to have done something Evil, but no-one has any idea what they actually did, and no-one seems to be negatively affected by what they did, is it actually Evil? Because that's what the Destruction of the Furthest Ring really is. Yes it looks bad because of the crack-like appearance and the fact that it's English doing it. But beyond that, what is it? We've no idea what the Destruction of the Furthest Ring actually means, and the only people who could possibly be affected are the Ghosts who shouldn't have been around anyway. So this, to me, cannot serve to demonstrate the Evilness and Danger of Lord English, because without any Context or Explanation, it's all just pretty lights without meaning or consequence.
Yet half the people here think Lord English accepted his defeat to the JuJu because Inevitability got him back.
Does he actually hate him, or did he simply recognise him as a threat, like anyone worthy of the title 'Big Bad' ought to have done?
We've no proof of this. His treatment of Alternia could've been A) A warped attempt to make them better, stronger or B) Simply the brutal means to make the semi-effective Sburb players he needed.
All things considered, Gamzee wasn't actually angry all that often. And for that matter, how do you know Lord English is? There's no way to read emotion of the guy. Just because he's breaking stuff doesn't necessarily mean he's angry.
See again the point about Lord English supposedly being defeated by such a straightforward and hare-brained scheme. If you really believe this, then you ought to join us pessimists in the English-Wins party. But again, where did we see definitive proof of English actually being smart. As far as I can tell, the extent of English's planning was to instruct various minions to sort shit out.

In general, few, if any, of these traits can actually be reliably assigned to English's Character. Instead, you've just put Caliborn in the English shaped hole and seen that it's a plausible fit in many areas, which is not the same thing and does not confirm English's actual character.

Sure, but isn't that also true of someone like Hitler, to use the most generic example of a real "evil" person? There's a reason people tend to demonize the person on top--Hitler isn't considered ineffectual just because most of what he personally did was give speeches and give instructions and help create policy for his underlings to carry out. I would think that someone making other people do evil or destructive things can still make someone a very good villain.

You mean other than being the only one shown to kill ghosts and being responsible for creating cracks that alter the structure of reality?

Yes, it is. His existence starts as a neverending stalemate with his counterpart, and his sole purpose is to lead the ever-evolving battle in Skaia. Once he wins or loses, there is no further point to being alive, and considering his sentience, he probably enjoys being alive.

Anyway, you're not wrong that they could be flexibile/dismissive with their roles, but they're also already pretty pointlessly rigid about them, considering both sides probably know which one will inevitably win. Why does the Prospitian army not simply give up when they know they'll fail no matter what? Why would either of them have need to care at all when the outcome of their fates is pre-decided?

Because even if their destiny is a railroad, they still want to have that experience. Only Jack is sociopathic enough to want nothing more than to cut everything short at every possibility.

Well, I'm oversimplifying and assuming a bit. I guess I don't actually know whether they know the predecided outcome of their battle, and they act pretty unaware of the grander schemes of Sburb a lot of the time. From the standpoint of their instantiated backstory that sort of abstractly exists, I imagine that their stalemate exists in part because both sides uneasily agree to play by the rules. If one side finds some exploit that they try to use on the other for an early advantage, that would create unpleasantries and invite them to do the same if not worse. What little diplomacy there was to be had falls apart and the war turns from a relatively tidy, constrained affair to something far less palatable. However badly the Derse royalty might want to prevent Skaia's purpose from coming true, I don't think they want to bring whatever that might entail on the only lives they'll ever know.

Plus, they're a bunch of genetically engineered chess people. So maybe most of them aren't all that smart. Queens excluded.

This appears to be part of his MO. He allowed the Handmaid aka the Demoness to gain an even bigger and more gruesome reputation than himself in Alternian mythology, even though her every action was by his design. Come to think of it, it's interesting that he would put his pawns in a situation more interesting than the one he's stuck in, doing the same thing over and over again for who knows how long. Considering how evil he is, it almost seems gentlemanly of him. Or maybe he had no way of outsourcing that task since he's the only one powerful enough.

Anyway, some suspect B2 Jack was under some kind of hypnosis or possession from English, I personally think he was only given a power boost and set loose to do what he does best when Jacks are made more powerful than they should be. But that power boost was explicitly planned by English. He was more of an unwitting pawn which he also created, much like the kids themselves apparently were to Doc Scratch.

Tbh I don't mind the idea of divvying us up into parties like that. Maybe we could even design sig flags.

...

o3o

That was what upset me the most about the ending. Over half of the comic had been spend building up to this. The biggest mystery to me was always "how the hell are they going to beat LE?" I thought they would have to work out some complex plans and combine their powers in unique ways and manipulate spacetime itself somehow. And with Hussie intentionally building him up as such an untouchable demon, even saying that "glitches and exploits in spacetime" would be necessary to defeat him, this wasn't an unreasonably hyped up expectation at all. 

I don't think really Hussie's actual intentions were for Lord English to have won, but I do think that's what all of the evidence points towards. The efforts of the protagonists always end up furthering his own goals. He helped Vriska find the juju, and he just stood there while she brought it to him. If he didn't want to be in that situation, he would not have been in that situation. My theory is that he wanted the juju so that he could escape through its door and follow the protagonists to their new universe.

I'm pretty sure the Prospitians know about their inevitable failure. I remember there being a book in a library at Skaia (Seer: Descend) about it.

Here's one for the "all endings are canon" party too.

Not saying I disagree with your overall point, but the chest wasn't what (supposedly) killed him, the Juju inside of it was.


Eh, that fourth one doesn't have anything to do with the comic, I feel like a blue sky with "thanks for playing" or something would be better.

Same with the first one in your second set. Maybe a confused Jailbreak guy would work for that one?

LE wins:



They escape the story:



Act 7 was a psyche ending:



Everything is good and straightforward:



Everything is canon:



The ending is terrible:



I have no clue what happened: