Retcon quarantine thread [SPOILERS]

The Condesce probably could have just killed the denizens and taken their grist to Skaia herself. It just seems like there has to be pre-retcon cherubs. The cherubs talked with the pre-retcon kids and the post-retcon kids, and sometimes those conversations were different. We know Caliborn had a conversation with Jake both pre-retcon and post-retcon where he gave him the code to his sucker juju. Pre-retcon, Caliborn mentioned Erisolsprite in this conversation. Post-retcon, there was no Erisolsprite. Therefore, two different conversations happened pre-retcon and post-retcon, and it wouldn't make sense for the same Caliborn to have had both of them.

I'm not saying the retcons weren't planned by Paradox Space, but that doesn't mean the session couldn't have been won twice. Retcons aren't the same thing as scratches, even if they're similar. You don't have to be in a failed session in order to do them.

Yeahhh...retjohn!Vriska's relationship with Terezi is quite emphatically Not Okay. Really, most things about retjohn!Vriska are very, very obviously Not Okay. I was practically certain that she was going to be a huge lesson on not cheating away your problems, not clinging to your past, staying away from toxic relationships, and that the ends do not always justify the means. But now we've gotten to the end, her plan went off without a hitch, she got to be the Big Damn Hero like she childishly wanted to be, and I have no idea what to think. Hussie very, very deliberately piled up heaps upon heaps of karma just waiting to crash down on her, and then just never released it. Did he run out of time or energy? Was he trying to send some kind of message? Because if the author honestly thought retjohn!Vriska was deserving of a heroic finish, then a sociopath quite clearly killed Hussie and took over the comic sometime during the omegapause. (Wondering if this is all an elaborate setup to reveal that Lord English is in control seems like wishful thinking at this point)

Anyway, back on topic, I can see why Terezi, guilty and emotionally wrecked by Gamzee, would think that saving Vriska was the solution to her problems. It's a logical enough error to make; things started going wrong for me after I did X, so removing X will fix everything. What I don't get is why the comic doesn't acknowledge this obvious mistake as a mistake, or make Terezi face her actual problems.


I can maybe understand why people wouldn't feel comfortable shipping Terezi and Karkat (that "sharing chart" was just creepily possessive), but I don't understand why, from a character perspective, she would cut off all relations with Karkat post-retcon. They don't have to date, but I don't think they share a single conversation post-retcon, except a brief exchange during Vriska's tactical meeting. Weren't they friends for years before any of this even happens? What even happens post-retcon that would logically separate them, besides a single, cryptic message?

Not much else I can say on anything else except that I agree completely. Vrisrezi is just an utterly lopsided and unhealthy relationship.

Can't really comment on the fandom, I don't keep up with shipping too much. I love non-hetero relationships and think we need more of them, but I dislike toxic relationships even more.

I'd just like to posit this, which hopefully won't create a shitstorm: I think if Vriska were male rather than female, we'd be seeing a LOT fewer people shipping Vrisrezi, and a lot more people calling out the ones who do.

Yes. This has always bugged me, because it always sort of struck me as....like, women could never do as much damage as men? Like, the reason what Eridan does is so gross is it comes from and is used in a society where men have physical and societal advantages over women that they exploit to control them. But Eridan's relationship with Feferi is kind of an inversion of that. She's shown to be incredibly strong, possibly stronger than him (we never see him dragging a whale in a net with his bare hands) and she's higher up on the stratum than him. She has all the advantages, so his treatment of her, while gross, doesn't help him like it would have if they were human. While Vriska and Tavros...given their differences in blood color....sometimes I can't help but think of it as a story of a mistress beating the shit out of her slave and then trying to get it on with him. Which is squicky as hell. Vriska has all the advantages and she uses them to horrifying effect. She poses much more danger to Tavros than Eridan does to Feferi (at least initially and societally) but his actions are treated as worse and are punished accordingly.

And this strikes me as kind of sexist. Like, no matter how much damage a woman does you can't take it or her as seriously as a man who does just as much damage.

Also, can I just say I LOVE that we're talking about how unhealthy Vrisrezi is? It seemed that when it would be brought up previously there were more people who didn't see the problem than people who were bothered by it. It was kind of frustrating that so few people appeared to see how bad it was for both of them.

well izaya orihara is my favourite fictional character so i have accepted that the character that i like are always fucked up a long time ago. dave and karkat used to be on there though before i out-aged them
in all seriousness though i only like that type of character if they're complex. i understand that you hate vriska, but please accept that i have my own opinion and that she used to be my favourite character along with karkat before act 6 broke her arc, and still is if i ignore act 6.

and please note that fiction doesn't equal reality. i know that i would hate vriska a lot if she was a real life person. but because she's a fictional character things are different.

I think you just gotta quote the first one, ctrl-X the lot, go back the thread, quote the second one, and paste in the first.

Anyway Retcon stuff: I think another thing that bothers me about the Retcon is the fact that it's not. It's presented in the story as some sort of total Timeline overwriter that's far reaching and complete enough to be a retcon from the reader's perspective in many situations, but it's obviously not a full retcon as the F.R. is unaffected. Now I know that we, the audience, were the ones who called it a retcon, and that there's good reason for the F.R. to go unaffected, but I do feel that, if there was a way to make it work, an actual, proper retcon would be ideal for Homestuck. Not in the actual literal sense of overwriting pages and thus screwing with archival readers, but with all the meta and 4th wall breaking Homestuck does, a device that transcends the story's internal mechanics and affects it on an external level is right up Homestuck's alley.

But instead what we got out of this incredibly meta story is a device, touted as some sort of extreme reality/narrative breaker, that ended up just being a slight spin on the already existing and mundane Time Travel and Scratch phenomena.

you seem oddly defensive for some reason at like 4 words
chill a bit. i meant it in a joking manner.
i'll hate a character irregardless if they're complex. being serious here, i don't care how much vriska was forced to kill trolls becauuse of her lusus and her griefy bit before her death to john enraged me even more. it was practically "oh my god i was such a a-hole forgive me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" to me, even though that wasn't it in a technical sense.
i like complex characters, but not when they're hitler incarnate.
i liked her bit of character development when she died and was pretty mad when she got separated from meenah. one of the reasons i hate the retcon was because it brought back that awful vriska when i never expected her to come back again.

The way post-retcon Vriska was written is one of the few things that give me hope for a bait-and-switch. There's almost no way the ending in which she succeeds can be the "real ending" of Homestuck.

EDIT: I actually wouldn't mind if Terezi ended up with a better version of Vriska though. Like if Griska didn't actually double-die, and was brought back to life with the ring, or if they find a way to restore Vriska's memories so that she's not a bad guy anymore. That might actually be a fitting "punishment", to have her personality "diluted" by that of a "loser" (from her perspective). And if she just broke down and starting crying and apologizing afterwards, it might actually be a powerful scene.

(S) Vriska: R3M3MB3R? 

This is definitely the hardest pause by far. Hopefully it'll be worth it, though. When you think about it, the "ending" only took up 17 days of story time, which makes it exactly as long as the Trickster arc, and not very long at all when you look at the span of Homestuck as a whole. So I might not actually be too disappointed with it, after all is said and done.

Anyway, if a Flash like that does happen, it has to use this song:



"Without you, there'd be no sun in my sky, there'd be no love in my life, there'd be no world left for me..."

I'm not even sure why he did it. I can kind of see what he might be going for, but it doesn't even properly communicate the flaws of retconning away your problems, A6A6I5 pre-Omegapause did a better job of that. And usually he would just skip over stuff like this with regular panels, like the Black King fight and Heroes of Light: Strife. All we needed was Remem8er!Terezi narrating the panels and telling us that Vriska's plan succeeded, but there was a spiritual cost, etcetera. We really didn't need 27 minutes of Flash for this. Which makes me scared that this was actually the real ending, but... Hussie didn't even draw any of it? LOL.

Maybe this was like a swan song for fan content? And he wanted to appease the people who actually wanted ONE fight scene, Fraymotifs, the Vast Croak, a happy ending, blah blah blah. I don't know man.

Hahaha what do you meeean it was totally normal.

*ends Collide in the most bizarrely ominous way imaginable*
*takes an hour to append his newspost with the information that was most pertinent to us, when there's no way he forgot*
*refers to the ending as "THIS ending" instead of "THE ending", multiple times*

Haha oh wait.

Well, the retcon leads directly to Act 7, and is sort of the reason it is what it is. If the lead up to the final Act had been better and the retcon had been used more effectively, no one would have the problems with Act 7 they do, or at the very least they'd have less problems. So the two are kind of intertwined.

Well, the argument is that this isn't the end of the comic, but it wouldn't be without meaning. If it was meant to make everybody sure that it was the real ending so that they would be gut punched when it wasn't, then it'd serve a very important purpose. And if that soul merger thing ever happens, all this stuff would still be important even if it all goes to hell and everyone dies, because it will be a lesson our characters can learn from even if they were not originally the version of themselves that this stuff happened to. 

Besides which, would you rather this ending wasn't a fake out (and thereby had one kind of substance and meaning behind it as opposed to another) or would you rather things like the masterpiece be 'all that work for something that wasn't meant to have any substance or meaning?' instead? Because if this ending is legit, it delegitimizes a lot of loose threads that Hussie never tied up. It makes a lot of things pointless. 

... I was 30% sure it was a troll before reading this. Now I'm 70%.