Act 6 act 6 intermission 14/30/2023 ![]() Well, except maybe Roxy, who does have a character arc where she goes from being a comedic souse to a confident leader. Is Act 6 the proverbial rope climb? Did Andrew Hussie deliberately switch focus to Jane, Jake, Dirk, and Roxy simply because he needed to erect a monolithic obstacle with the express purpose of taxing the readers’ patience? I ask because, as characters, these four are kinda boring. In Ulysses, this would be Chapter 18, Penelope, which is a stream of consciousness run on sentence. Yet you push yourself forward because the end is in sight. Your energy has been sapped from the lactic acid build-up from doing the ledge crawl. But then there’s the rope climb at the end. You get pretty far, past the log run and the Leaping Spider, and you’re almost done. This implies some sort of obstacle course, like the ones on Ninja Warrior. One of the points made by a pundit at PBS was that Ulysses is an endurance test, and buckling down to actually finish reading the novel is considered some sort of accomplishment. In a previous review, I mentioned that comparisons have been made between Homestuck and the James Joyce novel, Ulysses. Like, their entire story revolves around who’s hooking up with whom. ![]() Sorry for boiling things down to a fanfiction writer’s outline, but … these are their defining characteristics. There’s Jane, a straight girl who pines for Jake, a bisexual boy who pines for Dirk, a boy who does not reciprocate the love of Roxy, because he is gay. Only they’re not aged patriarchs and matriarchs rather they are all at the cusp of puberty. Well forget all that because here’s a whole new cast of characters who aren’t as likable! These four are known collectively as the “post-Scratch kids.” We’ve met them before they’re the kid versions of the parents, grandparents, and guardians of our first four heroes (John, Rose, Jade, and Dave). Hey, remember all those great characters from Acts 1-5? Remember John, the bespectacled protagonist who’s cheery and brave despite the weirdness of the game that surrounds him? Remember Karkat, the grouchy troll who periodically drops his facade when his friends depend on him? Remember Dave, whose devotion to appreciating everything ironically often turns on him with hilarious results? Remember Vriska, the maniacal psychopath whose single-mindedness can often be quite charming? Hey, Losties: remember Lost, Season 6? The experimental one that discarded the format, explored all new characters with a sideway universe where the cast had different adventures because they were living in a parallel world? At some point, the mythology can get too top heavy, and the characters the readers learned to love over the course of the story get lost in the shuffle. There are drawbacks to being this experimental, though. When we get to Act 6, then, the question isn’t, “So, what’s Hussie going to do to answer all these puzzles and mysteries?” It becomes more, “What sort of ridiculous bull is Hussie going to make up just to needlessly confuse and deliberately obfuscate the story even further?” At least with the costume stores supplying gray facepaint to all the troll cosplayers out there. Clearly, Hussie has disappeared straight up his own butt, right? Well, that maybe so… but the gamble paid off, and Homestuck became more popular than it ever had been before. Oh yeah, and they’ve got their own alternative world and a complicated system of romance. Hussie introduces a bunch of abrasive new characters with orange horns that were so myriad that they seemed impossible to track. But then, all of the sudden, it became this complex world-building mythology, with multiple planets and a core system of light and darkness anchored by two planets with two moons.Īnd then Act 5 rolls around. Time to roll with something that makes even less sense.” When MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck started, it bore a lot of similarities with its predecessor, Problem Sleuth, as a parody of an adventure game, complete with confusing inventory systems and glitchy controls. Just when it seems like the story’s gaining traction, he’s all, “Nuts to that sh*t. ![]() They guy seems to go out of his way to be as alienating as possible. (For the rest of this multi-part review, check out my thoughts on Acts 1-4 and Act 5.)
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