Homestuck book 3 commentary

From /hsg/ (or /hst/) with love – rambunctiousHooligan

HOMESTUCK BOOK 3 COMMENTARY [brackets will be used to indicate specific pages if commentary covers a large scene]
Book 3 covers from page 002659 to [S] Enter

The Fancy border around every page of Sassacre's Daunting Text was affectionately borrowed from a copy of “Wizardology” which I augmented with scribbles of naked people and dragons having sex with cars, and then gave to a friend.  I put a picture of my face on the back cover, labeled “YOU'RE WELCOME”, which she immediately tore off, because she thought it was weird.  I guess it was a little weird, in a handsome kind of way.

And now the border decorates the author notes footer of this book.  Because that's just what I thought these books needed.  More bullshit.

When you find out when she actually wrote this inscription, you will realize what a sly old prankster Jane is.  Also.  Check out all those Capitalized Underlines Terms.  Man, did I ever stop doing THAT as the story went along.  See : conceit_abandonment on Wikipedia.  (That article doesn't exist)

Through a variety of cunning characterization devices, we begin to develop a sense that this girl may be rather silly.  In my creative writing workshops, I often suggest that to convey a character has a certain quality, use that word to describe the character repeatedly in their introduction.

I wonder which troll named her Farmstink?  Do trolls even have farms?  Maybe they call them musclebeast pastures.

[002663]
OKAY, THEY ARE NOT ACTUALLY FLASHING RED.  THEY ARE JUST SORT OF BEING RED, BUT WHATEVER

Look at Jade's lovely handwriting.  I wish my handwriting was like that, or that I was even hypothetically capable of writing like that.

Jade:  Find something to support your garden planters other than a thousand flower pots.

We don't get her formal introduction until she journeys up to her room.  This silly character is already BREAKING THE RULES.  How is that possible?  Can she even DO that?  Jade, Homestuck has rules please try to respect them.

[002669]
On this Flash page you get to play Jade's flute by hitting keys on the keyboard.  All of the keys play a different terrible note.  I used samples from my friend Jan who recorded himself playing terribly.  We originally used those clips in an edit of Star Trek TNG wherein Captain Picard played his flute very poorly while the Enterprise was under attack by the Borg.  This might be the only thing that Jade and Picard have in common at all. [TNG edit in question https://youtu.be/oOnPXcjuGaE]

I guess the implication here is the flute appearify-ed there from an exile station?  But that doesn't make much sense.  We never saw any flutes on those stations.  Obscure theory.  Alt-universe Jade as an old woman sent this flute to her, because she always regretted not taking up the instrument as a young girl.  Whew.  Plot hole count:  Back down to Zero.

By now, we've observed patterns for each character.  Jade is the one who breaks many of them.  We were to expect she would have another irritating modus.  Instead she has all these fun and silly ones based on games.  Because she is FUN AND SILLY.  This helps broadcast that fact to readers.  It's amazing how much I'm teaching you about characterization so far.

Lola she's bonkers at memory.  What a fuckin Mary Sue.

Another pattern broken.  She is supposed to reject the standard suggestion in the form of __ like a ___ and ___ on your ___, just like John, Rose, and Dave did.  She is not supposed to actually do it, let alone enjoy it.  All this pattern breaking is starting to become a pattern.  (Don't worry, she'll break that one too.)

You know what?  I think I'm going to ditch the fancy border on the footer graphic for the rest of the book.  Good grief is this thing frivolous.  It doesn't feel like I'm commenting on the book so much as it feels like I'm casting a spell.

There, that's better.  FYI, the green one on her pink is reminding her to watch Shrek 2 later.

Are you noticing how her shirt icon keeps changing?  Weird!  Can't imagine that'll ever get an explanation.  An even bigger mystery is why I never produced and sold all of her shirt designs??  Think of all the money I lost!  Please go buy several more copies of this book to make up for it.

[002685]
These happy fruits appear throughout the rest of the story at some very odd times.  I didn't remember until now that they all had special names.  These names are never used again.  What a shame.

“Ascend” is a loaded word in Homestuck, and it often portends some hella major shit going down.  (or up!!!)  But ascending can also be no biggie.  Like, hey.  She just walked up the stairs and how she's in her room.

TLDR;  She likes Squiddles, furries, splitting atoms, building stuff, falling asleep, and predicting the future.  Mary Sue anybody??  Ha ha, nah.  She's just a cute cartoon character who is fun and entertaining.  Now let's all delete our bookmarks to Tv Tropes Dot Com, and pretend it never existed.

Jake loves adventure.

Are you familiar with Humanimals?  If you aren't, then shame on you.  I will not explain Humanimals to you.  Not here.  Maybe in private, like in a dark alley, or on a foggy night down by the docks.  If you are familiar with Humanimals, then here's what I have to say.  Manthro Chaps are to Humanimals as Squiddles are to Horrorterrors.  Now you know the secret.  Shhhhh

Re:  Posters: the “Green Slime Ghost” one I made not long into Homestuck's run and sold as one of the first prints.  Which was a pretty esoteric product, now that I think about it.  It portrays a fairly authentic looking Japanese knockoff product based on Slimer from Ghostbusters, featuring Engrish and also “reverse Engrish”, I.e. phrases in Japanese which make very little sense to Japanese people.  Also notice her SBaHJ furry poster, which was clearly a very thoughtful gift from Dave.

[002697]
The weird anime furry to the left: for some reason I drew over this once NSFW furry art so that it had a human nose instead of some sort of cute catgirl snout.  Why did I do that??  That's just awful!  Also, Preemptive Callback Zone:  Not only does this panel get reused thousands of pages later as a different character, but the furry prose also gets recycled later, as morse code, in a completely unrelated situation.  Homestuck is actually kind of weird guys.

Due to the real hypodermic needles supplied with Coxcomb's VACCINATION KIT, Manthro Chaps have been banned from all first AND third world nations.  Luckily, Jade lives in neither type of nation, so she and Coxcomb may attend the barnyard gala unfettered.

This page helps us understand exactly what kind of furry Jade is.  Which is the casual kind, as opposed to the TOTAL WEIRDOS, who like to dress up as animals and yiff each other and stuff, thus completely ruining the story.  No, the story will have to wait until Act 5 to be ruined by those kinds of weirdos.

Maybe Vriska started picking on Jade because she's all h8ing on magic 8-balls?  Everyone knows 8-balls are GR8!!!!!!!! Come to think of it, this page is what retroactively led to Vriska's interest in 8-balls, her weird obsession with smashing them, and ultimately her entanglement with themes of luck, both good and bad.  For all of this story's absurd and self-indulgent detours, it's pretty hard to find a totally useless page with no later relevance.

That innocuous cue ball also has relevance later, in ways that are pretty seriously totally UNNinnocuous.  The only things in that chest that don't get brought up again are the tarot deck, that pillow which could probably have been used to make a nice dress, and Problem Sooth (which you are dying to peek inside.  I just know it.)  Also the fact that her grandpa taped to the chest where John kept a photo of Harry Anderson maybe suggests John views Anderson as a grandfather figure.  Or maybe he WAS his grandpa?  Oh God, it's all adding up now.

Sometimes I think about how many thousands of pages I still have to put into books in order to finish this series, and I look at pages like this dedicated to playing a fake game of Memory, and I wonder to myself,  “What am I doing with my life?”

Now that I think about it, it probably wouldn't have been too much work to make this an actually playable game of Memory in Flash.  Might have been a waste of time though.  What would be the bigger waste?  The time it would take to do that, or the paper it took to print it in a book?  What is the more valuable resource?  Time or paper?  I'm not sure they're comparable.  Like comparing apples and oranges.  And limes and lemons.  Fruit jokes.

Wait, now on this page I am lampooning the fact that this wasn't a Flash game.  It was just a series of automated gifs that made it appear as in the “player” was a bumbling idiot.  Anyway, some other things to say about this page:  Jade regrets breaking the 4th wall here, but later she breaks a much bigger one.  Also:  fruits on the loose.  Fruits on the loose in a funny phrase.  That's all.

Wait, it's a rotary interface, but they still have buttons?  Oh, that's just a dumb reader command that thinks they're buttons.  I probably called that guy out on his mistake on the next page.

Yup, see?  I pointed out that it was a rotary dial, not a radial arrangement of push-buttons.  I go to the trouble of inventing a quirky interface for this food gizmo, and it's like pearls before swine.  I then go on to say it doesn't really matter.  I guess it doesn't.  I don't know, the whole thing is ruined now.  THE ROTARY FOOD DIAL THINGY IS RUINED FOREVER.

Did you know that when you irradiate meat, it turns bright green?  Dr. Seuss knew that, and made one of his stories revolve around the principle.  The character Sam was a zealous advocate of the poisonous food products, and though his victim resisted valiantly, he eventually caved.  The result was a tragedy.

Here we confirm that Jade lives on that island we saw at the end of Act 2.  Sometimes I feel these notes would benefit from an OBVIOUS TRIVIA ZONE, about stuff that should be obvious, but you never know.  Her house is modeled after her moon tower on Prospit.  The ruins are a model of the incipisphere, with the frog in the center representing Skaia (which is where a giant frog is supposed to go).  Prospit closely orbits, so is attached to the main temple (broken off).  The four planets surround it in the medium represented by water.  The circular edge of the crater is the Veil (consisting appropriately of meteors).  And just outside is Derse (also broken).  The volcano is called the Forge, which also plays a key role in the overall system here.  Oh.  And the ruins are seven levels tall, representing the seven gates one needs to ascend through to reach Skaia.

There is really a long and aggressively revisited tradition of people being in piles of things in Homestuck.  I guess it started with Dave being in the puppet pile last book.  Plushies, pillows, horns, robot parts, you name it.  Ok, it might actually only be those four things?  Anyway, you get the idea.

[002728]
I remember being pretty assiduous about making this holographic computer UI in Flash.  Probably unnecessarily so.  I got a little 3D modeling program and extruded a few of those green shapes there and made them spin.  Made Pesterchum Enamel look like it was made out of super shiny plastic, because of course that's what all cool future technology looks like.  Glossy plastic bullshit everywhere.  Also here is where we first get a glimpse of the extensive troll roster.  Oh if only we could shrug those names off as “not a big deal.”  But we can't.  They all turn out to be a really, really big deal.

Just another one of Dave's many, many conversations where he spends most of the time talking to nobody.

With the (playable) FRESHJAMZ playlist, we are provided with the implication that these are all songs produced by the kids collaboratively.  Their icons indicate who was involved with the songs.  Just another sign earlier in the story that these kids have some musical talent and this is the sort of thing they do with their spare time.  This is one of those things that starts getting buried as we move along.  For instance, we never quite get to see God Tier Jade picking up that old bass and rocking out.  Which is a shame.

The in-story MSPA.com as we already know is host to a long Midnight Crew adventure instead of Homestuck, as was the case in our universe.  But it DID have a Homestuck intermission.  Whereas in our universe, Homestuck got a Midnight Crew intermission, which takes place immediately after this book! /OBVIOUS TRIVIA ZONE!

The Midnight Crew have item/weapon duality, just like in Problem Sleuth which is in the fictional realm they originated from.  But it's almost a hybrid inventory system adding a dash of Homestuck, since the items that become weapons are always playing cards (you know, kinda like captchalogue cards).  The four aces in the deck represent their primary weapons: the horse hitcher, the car antenna, the table leg, and the pool cue.

The Felt are the MC's adversaries in the actual Homestuck intermission.  Fifteen members (plus their boss) each representing a billiard ball.  They are all time travelers, and mostly a bunch of incompetent goons.  The surface of a pool table is made of felt, hence the name of the gang.  Also I guess they are a little reminiscent of a bunch of green puppets, so there's that.

Hey, another copy/pasted conversation.  We read this back in book two, before we knew a dang thing about Jade.  Goofy modusses?  What could those be?  Ah yes, a bunch of board games.  Really it was so obvious in hindsight.  She can tell the future?  Whats up with that?  I guess we still don't know yet.  She has a devilbeast?  Well, we know it likes green steak, whatever it is.  A granddad too?  These are things we still need to learn.  That's what a story is.  A series of things you need to find out.  First you learn about all the things you need to find out.  And then you eventually find them out.

Dave commiserating with Jade about intense family encounters is a nice way to transition to the beginning of an intense encounter with his own family member.  That is some really on-point transitioning there.  Nice going, me.

In round one of Dave's strife with Bro, he warms up against his old puppet sparring buddy, Lil Cal.  Bro operates Cal while moving so fast, you can't see him.  It's suggested that this is a pretty common battle routine for the Strider brothers, an extreme training regimen to prepare Dave for battle.  It's almost as if Bro is training him to face last boss.  Or it would be if last boss had the slightest thing to do with this creepy puppet, which of course is preposterous.

Cal easily outmaneuvers Dave, and the result is his comedic humiliation.  But what would probably be even funnier would be if it turned out after a while, Bro stopped operating Cal, and Dave just continued to struggle with him, believing he was still being operated through flashstep puppetry.  Bro just watches from the distance as Dave grapples with a limp puppet.

At the end of the animation, Cal then dances on Dave's head for infinite minutes.  Most of those infinite minutes have been omitted here for brevity.

“TT: Enter?” Yes, Rose.  Enter.  It's the title of the animation at the end of this act.

When Jade says there are questions Rose hasn't thought to ask yet, she mainly means questions like,  “Will I get totally hammered and make out with an alien?”

That last panel is the intro frame to the flash battle on the next page.  The particular configuration of reminders she's referring to is on her pinky where two black strings sandwich a blue string.  The blue one represents John, and the black ones represent the two ogres surrounding him.  I guess she put those there so she could remind herself that in this point in the story, John is getting owned by a couple of ogres?  That's definitely something she would want to remember, especially since she can't do anything about it, and doesn't do anything about it.  But the point is, SHE REMEMBERED!

[Comments below are for 002743]
Behold, the mighty pogo hammer.  Once, John's dangerous childhood nemesis in the form of the backyard pogo ride.  Now, a similarly self-jeopardizing implement of only marginal combat value.  Just think how easily one misfiring BOING could send him launching off the roof, or maybe just send the hammer careening back in his face?

Consider how poignant it is that John spends this infinitely looping battle getting demolished by familiar items from his childhood?  First, getting clobbered by the huge heirloom joke book left to him by his grandma, and then getting lassoed by the old tire swing from his front yard, which surely brought him years of joy.  How poignant is that?  Way, way poignant.

This maneuver is actually very similar to a move that someone does in an old Street Fighter game.  I honestly don't remember if that's where I got the idea for it though.  I probably just asked myself “how's a huge dude gonna take out some trash with a tire swing?”  And correctly determined there was literally only one way it could be done.

The Crude Ogres may be giant bullying assholes, but you really have to admire their teamwork.

Nannasprite has healing powers of course.  It's unclear whether other sprites have these powers, as she's the only one who exhibits them.  But then, it makes sense that she would have these abilities, since in a different world she is the Maid of Life.  There you go, some more dots were just connected for you.  You now understand nearly 1% of Homestuck.

The battle then loops like that eternally, which John being dealt the same savage beating only to be revived by Nannasprite and sent back in for more abuse.  His suffering is only limited to your ability to watch for hours, or failing that, leaving it open in your browser and forgetting about it for days.  :(
[end of 002743]

The robotic sentry worm was maybe going to be a friend to PM in the same way as Serenity was to WV.  And it kind of was, for a while.  But then she kind of moved on.  The main problem with the arrangement is it's hard to become bffs forever with a metal worm that's confined to its station.  (not to mention a station which blows up later.)

John contributes to Rose's walkthrough.  This is strictly for COMPSCI nerds.  If you are not a COMPSCI nerd, skip this page immediately, or write me a short angry note here:_______________

I like the implication that not only did John take the time out of his quest to type this, but he apparently downloaded some sort of ASCII art generator to make the hideous captchalogue card and ghost.  That's some dedication.  It's a shame, because I'm pretty sue even Rose got sick of maintaining this guide not long after this entry.

He talks about hacking codes to theoretically extract simpler items.  Which is exactly what he does later to make the rocket pack.  So there you go.  This entry was not merely a nerdish indulgence, but provided critical foreshadowing which you skimmed over.

Oh my god.  The hub-grid looks like a chessboard.  I JUST noticed that!!!!  ha ha, just messing with you.  I made it that way on purpose.  Can't believe you actually fell for that.

Jade's parental unit, as the Pattern Breaking parental unit, has a much larger variety of strange, off putting interests.  Dad has FANCIFUL HARLEQUINS, Mom has EXSQUISITE WIZARDS, and Bro has RADICAL PUPPETS.  Grandpa has not one, but FOUR such interests, of the same descriptive two word format.  They're all just as dumb though.  One reason among several for this was to create an element of uncertainty over what kind of item Jade would prototype with .  And by uncertainty, I mean misdirection, which is what I always mean by uncertainty.

Notice the colors of the lights in each room.  Orange, pink, and cyan, corresponding with Dirk, Roxy, and Jane.  The items have a loose correlation with the other three guardians too.  Knights in that Dirk is a skilled swordsman.  Roxy's land is full of pyramids, Jane was grandpa's long estranged blue lady.  You see how the gears are always turning.  Not only does everything mean something.  It turns out everything means EVERYTHING.  Now you know.

The beauties were the oddest of the four oddball interests to say the least.  I'm just going to say this struck me as a novel and hilarious fetish.  Also, I defy you to enter a beauty parlor or hair salon without seeing one or more posters hanging up that have been bleached due to exposure to the sun.  Something about the chemistry of CMYK inks I guess makes the yellow and magenta inks degrade in sunlight faster than blue ink.  Or maybe technology has advanced and this doesn't happen anymore?  Maybe I'm just as much of a dinosaur as Grandpa.

Referring to the creature as unspeakably hideous is probably the funniest joke in the book so far.  From now on, I'm going to tell you which jokes are funny.  Is that understood?  Ok, great.

Here's Karkat, He's an asshole.  He will be this obnoxious loudmouth poking into the story to shout some nonsense every now and then for the next several books until we finally learn his name (which is Karkat) in Act 5.  But then later you will grow to love him, as he exhibits qualities which are somehow more human than most other characters, which is ironic, because he is not a human.  Oh, I should have mentioned.  In addition to telling you which jokes are funny, I'm also going to tell you which characters are good.  I am a really helpful author.

All of those blocks in the 8x8 grid there are numbered correctly, which has I recall was fairly painstaking.  There are exactly 10,000 tiny squares there ( each represents a green power cube), but each block Is 12x12. And the vertical/horizontal paths of 4 squares are subtracted from the 10K total, so the numbers weren't very even.  Oh, also take note of the GPS coordinates which point to a real place in upstate New YoAUGH WHY IS EVERYTHING SO NUMERICALLY METICULOUS, OH MY GOD, ROSE PLEASE JUST DO SOMETHING FUNNY AND DISTRACT ME FROM THIS PEDANTIC NIGHTMARE I HAVE CREATED.

Look, Rose is cooperating and doing some funny stuff.  Thank you for saving me from my meltdown, Rose.  Random musing: if I were to go about editing this story, how critical do you think it would be to leave in the part about auto-balancing the tree modus?  I don't know, it might be too important.  Better keep it.  In fact, it might be prudent to insert another 5 or 6 pages pseudo-coding the auto-balancing algorithm, just so we really know what we're dealing with here.

The carapacians who ran this facility when it was in the Veil had a real problem with people sneaking into the place and stealing the hubs, so they made this whole system where they were all locked to the floor, and could only be unlocked by the kiosk.  That way, if you wanted to steal a hub, you had to get in line behind everyone waiting to use the kiosk, unlock your hub, and steal them one at a time in an orderly manner.

“UNESTABLISHED IN:” is a common type of phrase you see in cultures whose mythology and traditions revolve around the apocalypse.  They are much more fixated on endings than beginnings.  Their fairytales never start “Once upon a time...”  They usually start with something like “Once, long before everyone died...”

You know when PM's impressive TALLNESS ATTRIBUTE is still a heap of mailboxes short of getting the job done, then the situation is seriously fucked.

The PM x Sentry Worm Best Friendship Forever got off to a kind of rocky start when she decapitated him.  But it's cool, there are three more, so she gets a do-over.

In round two of Dave's strife, he tries to escape from the relentless puppet pummeling, but Bro slashes the ABSCOND command just like he sliced all the other battle commands in round one.  The message is clear.  Dave can't escape until he has been dealt the requisite daily helping of domestic abuse, wait I mean ninja training.  What did I say there?  Nothing.  It was nothing.  Homestuck is a lighthearted and funny cartoon dealing in highly abstract  and stylized household situations, and nothing about it shall evoke the gritty realities experienced every day by real life victims of abuse.  Now let's watch this 30-something year old man pound the daylights out of his adopted 13 year old brother and biological son.

Dave is like.  You see this?  This foam puppet I guess I decapitated earlier when I flipped out in the kitchen.  See it, yeah.  This could be you.  Just watch your step bro.

Professional tip: use the blur filter to make it look like someone is going fast.  Am I the first person to ever think of that neat trick?  The answer is, almost certainly.

Bro is really just pissed at Dave for ripping up the weird Muppet Babies comic that was taped to the door.

If a dude is in a sword fight, he cannot be authoritatively identified as an ice cold motherfucker unless he blocks the other guys sword without even looking.

It is also an unwritten rule that in nonlethal sword fights, while all the coolest moves are done through swordplay, any attack that makes actual bodily contact must be done through punching and kicking.  That's because in reality, if a sword slices you, you pretty much just die.  And when someone dies, that's when the coolness ends.  Although I guess theoretically one of the swordsmen could still sort of leap and cavort around the dead body, flipping out awesomely with his sword and such.  That would be one way to prolong an awesome sword fight.

Dave was doing alright there for a while, but here's where it all starts to unravel.  Don't worry, the training is for your own good, Dave.  It comes in handy later when you...uh...I guess when you swindle some idiot crocodiles out of trillions of dollars in the stock market?

Let's face facts.  This training was pretty much useless.

Bro is just standing there with Cal, primed for the knockout blow with his tiny hightop sneaker.  Insult, meet injury.  Again, hang in there, Dave.  You will get your revenge later in the story, by grieving over your older brother's slain bloody corpse.

There are many, many references to Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff throughout Homestuck, both visual and textual.  Each one serves a very important purpose.  That purpose is usually to remind you that Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff exists.  Especially if you don't like it.

There is a lot of trivia to talk about here.  But most of the trivia is already covered by the narration.  That's the great thing about Homestuck.  Whenever something weird or confusing is going on in a panel, a lot of times it's just straightup fucking EXPLAINED underneath, using a whole bunch of words.  That's the key to good storytelling.  Just explain everything.  No, stop laughing at me.  Shut up.  But for real, here's some trivia.  In the lower panel, see that small diagram of an eight planet session?  That's probably the most obscure and long term bit of foreshadowing in the entire story.

I wonder if one of those little meteors landed squarely on the Burger King about a half hour north of Rose's house, which Rose and Dave were talking about like 3000 pages later?  For some reason this strikes me as a sad thought.

OBVIOUS TRIVIA ZONE!  The green circle hovers over Dave's city, which appears to be somewhere in Texas.  Does Dave being a Texan make him a better or funnier character?  I'll leave that conclusion to you.  The huge blue circle signifying the Extinction Level impact is targeting Jade's island.  But don't worry.  With Earth's First Guardian protecting the planet, what could go wrong?

The reader had to use the Sburb interface to navigate though the house to find John.  Which really just served as an intro to round two of RUMBLE ON DA ROOF!  Starring John, Nanna, some ogres, and now Rose at the Sburb helm.

With a little help, John does better this time.  That's because the most important themes of Homestuck are teamwork and friendship.  In fact, the most important themes of every work of fiction are teamwork and friendship.  Don't ever be fooled into thinking otherwise.

John takes a hunger trunk to the kisser.  This is what John's dad would regard as a quality character building experience.  If he were watching he would be stroking his chin in fatherly approval.

Nanna's phantom oven doubles as a GRANDSON LAUNCHER.  Actually, there are more ovens that physically contain characters in the story other than there are ovens which do not.

This attack was so KINETIC in the flash.  Specifically that BOING was just so BOINGY, and watching it here like this, so static and lifeless, it's like watching a caged bird yearning to spread its wings and wow I am being melodramatic.

Sometimes these animations were so fast paced, they could be a little hard to follow.  It's a relief to see that when slowed down and printed frame by frame in this book, they're barely any easier to follow at all.

Cue the shot of John connecting with a pogo hammer blow while random bathtub is in frame behind him.

LOOK AT AL LTATR GODDAMN GRIST.  One of the keys to showing advancement through a long mock-game in the form of an illustrated story is not to show every grueling milestone of achievement, every level gained or every treasure collected, but to at least show major incremental advancements are POSSIBLE.  Like so.  And then the imagination can fill in the blanks with many more of the types of windfalls we just saw.  So much later when John is sitting on a huge pile of grist we can just say, oh yeah, looks like John killed about a thousand ogres for all that loot.

John:  immediately waste all grist on a shiny new fleet of pogo rides and ten tons of Gushers.

It's too bad John skipped over the GADABOUT PIPSQUEAK rung entirely.  That was the level that contained puberty.

Little Known Fact, soon to be a Widely Known Fact:  Any time I spell a foreign word that has a special character in it like Piñata, I never bother with the 'ñ.  I always just go with the standard 'n'.  The way I see it is this...Who Cares?  Here's an example to help you understand why.  Let's say in English, any time you wrote “cool” you had to put a smile under the 'oo' to make it look like a cool guy with sunglasses.  If you were a Mexican who had to spell “cool”, wouldn't you just say, wow, fuck this, and just spell it without the smile?  You're god damned right you would.

The first ever drawings of Derse were admittedly pretty funky.  I used my standard collaging methods of heavy desaturating and tinting bits and pieces of cathedral architecture, which usually tends to look alright.  But then for some reason in these early drawings I kind of scribbled over it with lighter shades of purple.  I'm retroactively grading that decision as a MEH+.

Without going into much detail, we MAY be catching a glimpse of the sort of behavior which got Dad banned from cirque du soleil.  (He possibly saw a man he deemed too hairy, and couldn't control the trigger finger on his lather blaster...I'VE SAID TOO MUCH ALREADY)

Some readers used to pretend I did another story starring a guy named Dr. Brinner, and made up a bunch of bullshit about the story and gave it a tvtropes page and everything.  So I decided to address this envelope to him.  This gesture seems a little silly to me in retrospect, because by now there is so much bogus fanon lore about my creations and things I've done, it's barely worth keeping track of let alone acknowledging in the story.  Also pay attention to that postage stamp.  It'll come back later.  Oh who am I kidding, you're going to forget I ever mentioned it.

Gosh the Perigrine Mendicant sure does love her some mail.  Alternatively, this entire page can be read as me ripping on Costner's film, “The Postman”, whose nearly fetishistic portrayal of mail delivery as the backbone of civilization was to be honest just a bit silly.  The postman was based on a novel of the same title which was written, fascinatingly, by a man named David Brin.  He has a Ph.D.  Yes, that is Dr. David Brin.  I guarantee that you are floored by this utterly magical coincidence.

Another maddening glimpse of the future.  When the station terminals are first used, they're cued up to the moments shortly after the kid onscreen has entered the Medium.  PM is Jade's exile.  Though sadly, she doesn't get to play that role for very long.

We are invited to wonder many things.  What's that on the ground?  Is it ash from an erupting volcano?  Is it snow?  Why is Jade shaking her head at the camera?  Does she know PM is there?  Are her “psychic abilities” in play?  Is that also why the thing blew up??  Like I said.  Maddening.  Stay tuned for what really happened in 2000 pages.

It never even comes close to being explicated in the story, but it is strongly implied this is where Rose's mom grew up.  Though after the introduction of Roxy, and another reread, this probably becomes more obvious.  Who raised her?  Was it the owner of Skaianet, a younger grandpa Harley?  Did he outsource parenting duties to someone else in the lab?  Maybe some exiles?  If so, she had an upbringing fairly similar to that of Roxy in the future.  These mysteries have LEGS.

John:  Never mind that big purple gusher.  Look up at the top panel and say hi to Vodka Mutini.

[002810]
The series of letters up there was going to spell, “Descartes Meditationes da Prima Philosophia, in qua Del Existentia et animae Immortalitas Demostratur” and was to preface a lengthy treatise on the meditations of the renowned French philosopher.  But I decided to cut it short because ultimately it didn't have much to do with John's trepidation to enter his father's room, or his fear of clowns.

The transition was confusing to some people.  At first they thought John had jumped down into this weird room containing a mysterious alter to Jade.  But no, this is a scene switch, and that is the foyer of Jade's SPOILER! Dead/SPOILER! stuffed grandpa.  In hindsight, this altar is actually a very poignant memorial to Jade's dream self, who we later discover SPOILER! died saving John /SPOILER! And was SPOILER! Stuffed by grandpa /SPOILER! And then SPOILER stored in the lab at the top of Jade's house for practically her entire life /SPOILER!

Consider that these four dolls were basically old man Jake's idea of good company to have around the house.  The thing you have to understand with Jake is he's kind of a loner.  And also, kind of an idiot.  Oh well, at least Mr. Moose there looks pretty friendly.  Maybe Jake isn't as dumb as he seems.  All this probably makes good sense to him.  He just has a special kind of brain.

[002817]
VRIIIIIIIIIIIIIISKAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!
/spoiler

[002818]
These psycheouts have EVERY OUNCE of punch on paper as they did online, and I won't entertain a single objection to this perfect fact.  You thought we were going to watch Dave get puppet whipped some more, but no.  It's time to make Jade frolic around the stuffed corpse of her adoptive grandfather and biological father. (which frankly should just be caller her “father” because come on, old dudes are perfectly capable of siring children.  This guy is really just “Jade's Dad” end of story.)

Here just like the flute page you could press keyboard keys and make Jade do some totally silly stuff.  She likes to pretend to get into strifes with her dead grandpa, which is kinda sad.  Also this is the first page which makes it clear her grandpa was dead all along, thus completing a HUGE TWIST, which is to say, and absolutely minuscule twist in the greater scheme of Homestuck.  And by “makes it clean he was dead all along” I mean “some people still didn't actually understand he was supposed to be dead here.”  In fact I had to go back and draw a stitch on his head to make it EXTRA CLEAR, cause you know, living people are almost always mounted to plaques bearing their name like a trophy.

And then to make it EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA CLEAR she was just frolicking with a dead man: “he was so much easier to deal with when he was alive.” (4000 pages later, I overhead you say, “you know...I'm starting to think grandpa Harley might have been dead all along!”)

PM x sentryworm best friendship = BACK ON TRACK!!!  Just imagine though, if PM decided to use this flying pod to air drop mail around the wasteland.  That overzealous worm would make dropping deliveries SO FRUSTRATING.

To be fair, if the arcade machine did still take coins, it would probably need more than 12 cents to operate.

Ha ha, Jaspers was being characteristically recalcitrant.  That was SO Jaspers.

Don't look now but you are being given a short tutorial in ECTOBIOLOGY.  This is important.  This is why our heroes exist.  Because of slime, temporal mechanics, and fucking around.

“Whoever was operating this machine in the past” COUGH MOM.  I wonder if in her childhood she made as many cats as she did in the alt-future?  Jaspers was surely a result of this process, likely making him a true paradox clone.  Bonus facts.  Jasper's secret is “Yo, I'm about to disappear and spend the rest of my life with your mom as a little girl in a water world AU four centuries in the future, then later I'll jet back here as a corpse, and you can attend my funeral which you think your mom is hosting ironically but really isn't.”

If you ever see timestamps or such in Homestuck, just assume I was meticulous about the numbers and try to get on with your life.

[002838]
Imagine haunting pipe organ music with an absurd chorus of meows, and you have successfully recreated this animation in your heart.  It will live there forever.

This page has twelve panels.  The number of panels featuring new content: two.
[end of 002838]

rose needed to retrieve Jaspers for important plot reasons.  If she didn't prototype him later, he would have no one around to have cute conversations with.

We don't know here yet that Jade's “intuition” is mostly tied to her dreams on Prospit, so when it calls Bec “invisible” to her intuition I guess that's mostly code for “she never dreams about him.”  This is because, at the risk of becoming excessively technical, First Guardians are really really mysterious.

Becquerel had to bolt suddenly because someone on the other side of the world just threw a tennis ball.

John's dismay is compounded when he scans the spreadsheets and realizes his dad's boring firm got hammered in the fourth quarter.

[002848]
Imagine for a moment that this page WASN'T a flash animation set to some extremely dramatic over the top music for the sake of laughs.  Just imagine that instead I deliberately composed this sequence of panels, specifically for a book, exactly like that.  What a surreal and marvelously peculiar display of sequential art.  Actually thinking about it like this somehow makes the joke funnier.

I dont know what kind of father doesn't have a series of pipes mounted on his bedroom wall, just above a lone box of cake mix in the corner.  Maybe Hitler's father.  I dunno.
[end of 002848]

Unrevealed fact:  when John imagined his dad's life as a street busker, he figured most people who gave him money were paying him to stop.

Jack.  That man is why you are forced to wear that ridiculous outfit.  If he didn't pretend to love clowns to bond with his son, he wouldn't have bought the clown doll and rose wouldn't have prototyped it, thus imbuing your queen with clowniness, thus making her insist everyone in the kingdom wear clownish attire.  Jack are you listening?  He stopped listening half way through that explanation because it was boring.

The orange fingers are my fingers.  Why are they orange?  Let's not answer that question.  Next question, ok.  Why are they typing a guess at Jack's name, and commanding him to state name and rank?  Jack at this stage is the villain.  Villains in Homestuck tend to be meta-villains.  That is, they exist much closer to the surface of the story's meta-bubble, and often interact with the way it'd told.  For instance, Jack Noir is the original owner of the 4th wall.  (See next page.)  As a universal bureaucratic game construct, he can keep tabs on everything going on in the session, including just outside the story.

Though Jack Noir is a meta-villain, there are limits to this, possibly tied to his personality.  It could be the scope of his ambition never includes messing with the story itself.  His desire for power lies entirely within fictional parameters.  Later, there are much more flagrant meta-villains, in Doc Scratch and Lord English.  They live on the surface of the meta-bubble, and at times badly puncture it.  All iterations of Lord English in total basically represent the ultimate meta-villain.  Thought it takes a very long time for this to become apparent, and for it to be revealed exactly what this means.

Hearts Boxcars a.k.a. The Hegemonic Brute, despite being the muscle of Jack's crew, is repeatedly proven to be the whipping boy of the agents.  He just keeps getting his ass handed to him.  And the deeper we get into the story, the shorter-lived his instances are.

Glorious Monarch, huh?  Gotta be a dude, right.  Nope, that's the queen.  Come to think of it, that turns out to be a minor trend.  Later there's a character named Snowman, and we're all like, come on now that has GOT to be a dude.  But NOPE, it's the black queen, yet again.  PM turning out to be a girl I guess maybe is part of this trend too, but that was literally only a surprise because she had neither boobs, not “girl eyelashes”.

The ongoing humiliation of HB begins.  Also let us note...wait hold on (temporarily unblocks tvtropes.com from browser, goes there) ok yes, let us note the “Worf Effect” taking place here.  Earlier, we saw HB lifting a huge safe, and now Dad easily bests the brute with a headlock maneuver.  So THAT'S how strong Dad is.  Then much later Dad gets Worfed by Jack and then Jack gets Worfed by (blocks tvtropes.com again).

It must be great to be a kid in Homestuckworld.  Instead of getting Nintendos and stuff for your birthday, you just accumulate more weird and stupid ways to pick stuff up.

John: Even better, skip ahead a few thousand pages to the part of the story where sylladexes don't matter anymore.

I bet most current readers of Homestuck aren't even old-enough to remember having to blow dust out of game cartridges.  Let me tell you, youngsters.  Life was gritty back then.  You had to WORK to play your shitty games.  You could be plowing through some dungeon in Zelda, and stomp a little too hard on the floor and RESET the whole fuckin NES.  Many of my generation were tormented by that little blinking red light next to the power button which seemed to say “Ha ha.  You were born into an era JUST SLIGHTLY before technology stopped totally sucking.”

John:  build Shoegorg
[John captchalogues a buncha shoes]

the best thing about this revelation is that when I first included Gushers in HS as a gag, I actually had no idea Betty Crocker made them.  It was as mindblowing to me as it was to John.

[002879]
MIXED BERRY SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER was discontinued as a flavor.  But only because the Condesce ran out of that kind of troll blood.

Another most unfortunate juxtaposition between bukakke and slime from Ghostbusters, a correlation which once again sails right over John's head.  Literally, in this case.  Also let's take note of “RANCH DRESSING RAMPAGE” which is being partially covered.  Let's take note of it because it's the funniest one.
[End of 002879]

[002880]
Jade: Seriously, just walk over there and pick up the present.  Bec wont mind.  He's a good dog.

What you don't see in this series of freeze frames is that when Bec appears, for a split second you can see the green sun.  this is some very far in advance, blink of an eye, foreshadowing.  Back when I made this strife page, I did envision a vast supernatural green sun as the energy source for Bec, and all first guardians.  But that was well before it picked up steam as a major plot element.

Bec's magic powers were a great excuse to show off Flash's COOL MASKING EFFECTS.  Let's be honest here.  Showing his expanding and contracting shape clipping the area of the new place he's warping to makes the idea of teleportation WAY MORE FUN.  Though if we're totally keeping it real it should be noted that this effect is SOMEWHAT LESS COOL ON PAPER.

Wait there it is!  Another split second shot of the sun I mentioned.  See?  I wasn't lying.  But full disclosure, literally all of my other notes have been lies.

Do you see what Bec just did?  He let the bullet pass through his portalized body somewhere into outer space.  He let it travel through space at warp speed, all the way to our galaxy, and then back down to Earth, as particularly cosmic means of “fetching” it.  He presumably let Jade come along for the ride with the bullet.  When you think about it, Bec is really kind of sassy.

Oh, there's yet another shot of the green sun.  now I just seem silly for saying you couldn't see it a few pages ago.  And there's a big red sun a frame before it.  With a big swirl in it.  I wonder if red and green swirls ever become significant later.......Naw.

Bec also comes off as a little dickish by implication when you consider he could teleport Jade off the island any time to go hang out with her friends, or even, you know, lead a normal life somewhere.  Then again, he is rather protective and territorial.  He doesn't want anyone else homing in on his Jade time.

There's a variation on this game which is played with a flashlight instead of a rifle, and Bec fetches the photons.

Jade: Take dog out behind woodshed and give him a big hug.  The woodshed is actually an ancient stone monument though.  Yes, just that like.  That's fine.
[End of 002880]

Jade was acting too happy so Vriska put a stop to that.  You don't know what I'm talking about if you dont know who Vriska is.  Maybe it's better that way.

Rose: Peel printed liquor bottle pattern off of shelf surface..

Rose: This is all very stressful.  Develop a drinking problem later in canon.

The irony is that Rose is not just messing around with her computer, but is now actually in peril.  Now that I said that for you to understand, let's reflect on how great the word 'businessmanlike' is.

Jade's interpretive dance is literally the only thing in Homestuck that foreshadows nothing whatsoever (Unlike the mysterious arm in the lower left corner, which...yeah I'm not even going to touch that topic in this book.)

There is much to speculate about with Jade's dreambot.  Did Grandpa Harley build it to record and study Jade's dream life?  Or to prevent her from sleep walking?  Dream selves and the rules surrounding them are very significant to the rest of the story.  Not only that, but the robot bodies become a recurring thing too.  What I'm saying is these are some of the most important pages in HS, if not THE most important.

“You sincerely pity anyone who might be forced to endure such a fate.” if a rare moment of self awareness in the story, directed at readers who are, in fact, forced to endure such a fate.  I promise it will never happen again.

See the calendar?  There it is.  Direct evidence of the other three kids birth dates.  Look how hard John is working to send all his friends gifts wrapped in identical blue packages.  He is just flying through the blue wrapping paper.

This is a very simple conversation, but there's so much going on here.  First of all, Jade is being a filthy liar again.  She knows what's in that box.  Second, casual allusion to “too many trolls”.  Makes you wonder which ones are hassling her.  Bet you she's been getting HAMMERED by Gamzee.  Third, John calls them retards, which is pretty ableist of him.  Who knew a 13 year old could be such a jerk?  And finally, we learn why he switched from GT to EB.  Whew that's a lot.  With this kind of economical dialog, there's no WAY this story will turn out to be more than a half million words.

And so begins the tradition of naming pets stupid things, and then renaming them to other stupid things later at least once, before they are eventually slain.

Rose should be really excited to learn of John's mental illness, because of her interest in psychology.  Too bad she doesn't actually know what she's talking about, since shes 13 and you have to go to college for that.

Gamzee sure did a number on that poor kid's head.  Fuckin' chucklevoodoos.

WV: Go limp, fall to the ground head first.  Use the pumpkin bindle as protective headgear.

WV: Measure mayoral sash with yard stick.  WV: Put top hat and monocle in bindle.  WV: Wonder why top hat an monocle aren't real.  AH: Draw all these bonus panels and make book longer.  No wait don't.

Jade saw WV in a dream and said well OBVIOUSLY he's not going to part with that sweet sash.  Better bunch of some spare cable here to use as bait.

WV: Look at letter, but we don't get to see the letter yet, not for a while, ok good, stuff like that always happens.  What, do you think storytellers just come right out and SHOW you things?  Lol.

WV: You forgot the little flower pot.

LADY GAGA??? Oh, no.  It's a black carapace man with a machine gun.  Trivia: it's the same machine gun last boss has.  AR isn't last boss though.  He's not really last boss material.

In the grand scheme of things, I wonder which will stop working first.  These tinyurl links, or mspaintadventures.com itself?

ARE YOUR SHIPPING FIRES STOKED YET?  Let's face it, this is a bland ship.  The first boy and girl introduced in the story?  Please.  Buying in this ship is kind of jumping the gun.  Like when a shareholder sells off stock at the first sign of trouble.  John x Rose is a ship for the nervous investor.

It's not that awesome.
[regarding the bunny sassacre wizard hat]

Chimneystuck, starring Rose Lalonde.  She wins.  Everyone else go home.

Existence of Prospit revealed.  Another one of those incremental pages which broadens the scope and scale of the story.  It doesn't stop from keeping to happen.  Who really knows what gravitational pull of the planet is or if it's strong enough to keep the moon in orbit.  Hence the chain.  Alternatively, it's just a cool thing for a golden fantasy planet to have.

The bot goes where she goes.  If you're Bec, it's probably funny to be hanging out on the island and frequently seeing this little robo girl floating around as if she's got important stuff to do, talking to thin air and such.  Then again, it's probably not that funny to him, since hes a dog.

Jade: Compliment tiny crude drawing of Prospitian on lovely hat.

PM: Be recognized as PM by reader.  Reader: Ohhhhh.

He's confused, because it's deliciously green, but only partially green.  So this is the best idea he has.  Maybe he doesn't understand the concept of licking?

WV: HUBBA HUBBA

Jade is obviously just setting them up on a date.  She is shipping them, through the literal shipping of a parcel.  How Ironic.  Who am I kidding.  I burned through all my irony credits an act and a half ago.

The aimless renegade sure has bad aim.  Almost like hes an..
Unreliable...
Marksman.

What is the worm doing with the mailbox?  It probably thinks it's helping.  Why is everyone being so cute STOP IT YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK.

You fail to fly gracefully.  You fly like a silly doofus instead.

Jade's dreaming confusion and forgetfulness is kind of an odd symptom that's never been quite duplicated by another waking dreamself.  There are two possibilities.  One is I was still ironing out the dream self rules early in the story, and that symptom never panned out for others, OR, it is because her sleeping habits are imposed on her by external forces.  GUESS WHICH EXPLANATION I PREFER.

Sburb tip: You only earn the ability to do 1980's time-lapse montages after you go god tier.

You people don't even know that the && and || operators mean, do you?  Why don't you go learn computers you dorks!  Although to be fair, technically the single & and | bitwise operators are what perform the described functions.  So now who's the dork, Me.  I went with the logical operators (&&,||) instead because they are more recognizable and frequently used fro ma pure coding perspective.  So it's this weird case where I dumbed it down for the sake of people who ACTUALLY KNOW HOW TO PROGRAM.  Good grief.

The first official Homestuck 'alchemy binge.'  It is the funnest thing that can possibly happen in HS.  It is literally all down hill from here.

If you ask me, there aren't enough hammers whose handle is a fully functional, presumably delicate telescope.  Not enough hammers made out of huge ancient joke books either.

A blue phlegm aneurysm is one of the least pleasant aneurysms you can have.  If you ask a neruoscientist about it, they won't say anything, but just give you a knowing look of dismay.

Honestly I forgot til just now that a mirror could be combined with items to flip them.  I don't think that clever tactic was ever used again.  But then, in a universe where sprites can just “flip turnways”, maybe it's not actually that useful?

The Batterwitch produces these things en masse for 3rd world armies.  A more heartless profiteer from war and suffering you will never find.
[BETTY CROCKER BARBASOL BOMB]

You didn't follow any of that.  BTW I own that horse painting IRL.  Nuff said.

Bill Cosby is the perfect father.  We all know this.  Whereas Bing Crosby, though quite fatherly onscreen, was actually a total douche to his kids.  I didn't know this until way after I put him in HS.  I wonder if Dad would have a dramatic breakdown is he learned that.

I don't think we ever got any more clues to what the Problem Sleuth hammer was.  Probably just a Sepulchritude themed hammer or something.  Whatever it was, even though it seems powerful by its cost right now, other weapons surely left it in the dust.

This page was posted on the site at Christmas.  The moment took place on his birthday in the story.  With that one joke, it became official.  The comic somehow consists more than 100% of4th wall-bending dramatic irony.

The crows do enjoy a good Strider beatdown.  They gather on the roof every day waiting for the lopsided brawl to start.  Maybe that's why the crow came in Dave's window squawking at him.  It was saying, “Hey get your ass on the roof so we can watch your bro beat the shit out of you!  CAW!!!”

Cal's like, DIS GONNA BE GOOD.

Now the record on Dave's shirt is broken and stays that way forever.  Bro has a way of foreshadowing important events in an oblique and violent manner.  Like when he stabs the big record plateau later.  He couldn't make it any clearer unless he just shouted, “DAVE.  YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SCRATCH A BIG RECORD IN HALF LATER.  GET WITH THE PROGRAM.”

Well at least that creepy puppet was destroyed, and we'll never have to see him again.  Let's put this ugly chapter in Homestuck behind us.

You can tell Dave and John are tight bros because he sends him brief updates like this now and then.  Nothing fancy.  No bigger point to make.  Just got his ass kicked.  Thats all.

[002973]
Here we see an earlier conversation repeated from Jade's POV, while a fantastical Flash animation is blowing your mind.  Except not, because you're reading a book.  If you face hurts, that's because you're frowning too hard right now.

It's possibly more clear in the animation (???) but everything happening here is a mirage created by Prospit's moon passing through Skaia.  The clouds blow through the golden cityscape and project illusions, in this case showing her moon tower in place of the house on the island, and then showing what her island looked like millions of years ago when the volcano was active and the ocean wasn't there.  At that time, a meteor came through a portal and crashed, creating the crater which is now a lagoon.

The frog temple spawned from the seed left by the meteor.  Inside the temple is a time capsule.  The first hing to come out of the capsule was Bec and he just sorta hung out there for eons.  HS BONUS TRIVIA QUESTION: Do you know what the last thing out of the capsule was?

Dream Jade is too spacey to remember all she has to do is play bullet fetch to get him out of the way.

What Jade should have said was “if anyone can save the world I think it is probably you, and 12 trolls, and maybe 4 other side kids and like 12 other dead trolls and some chess people and stuff, and maybe not so much the world as all of reality or something.”

Whew, false alarm.  Jade and John almost met there, and has a fun an heartwarming reunion.  Let's buckle in for another few thousand pages of isolation and estrangement, or what I like to call Homestuck's wheelhouse.
[end of 002973]

John: Solicit grandmother's advice, cookies.

I think Jade literally does mean literally.  But whatever, she's just a silly kid.

Some of the reminders are to help her keep track of which Deviant Art accounts her furry posters are from.

Killing two birds with one harpoon gun would be one-upping Dave who earlier killed one bird with one shitty sword.

PCHOOO is a sound a gun makes, and lots of other things make, in “Homestuck”.  Learn more about Homestuck facts like this, and other Homestuck facts, in my author notes(tm).

John's house is finally starting to resemble a level in an actual videogame, enemies and everything.  It's about time.

There's no more juice in your closet, Dave.  Keep dreaming.

The hashrap battle really would have taken too much time and stretched out the story a bit, so I'm glad I didn't do them.  Other things I could have cut out to save time without losing much include: most pages.

Generally I have my finger on the pulse of reader desires.  Even when i'm not reading their feedback.  I can just feel it.  It's like a sixth sense.  That's how I knew that exactly right about now you were all craving more sylladex shenanigans.

Gross spongy proboscis fellatio is a concept that I introduced to you before anyone else did.  I guarantee this.

(crappy, sorry)

john, are you sure that was a high highfalutin psychology book you cracked, and not a copy of “The Horny Teen's Guide to Confusing Analogies”?

This would be the first extensive conversation with a troll, which considering how many come later, should be looked upon as a significant benchmark.  Kanaya, oops I mean GA, likes to throw around the term “human sarcasm” as if sarcasm is something trolls don't have, when they clearly do.  Actually that's pretty much the thrust of all jokes about their cultural differences.  Hell, they don't even have different movie stars.

When she says the campaign of provocation wasn't thought out all that well, she's really just busting on Karkat.  That's literally all that's going on there.

Yo, sup
(shit)

Please note that John here is explicitly urging Dave to become a bird.  Stick that fact in your cap for later.  Less literally he's giving Dave a new look so he can be more distinct from his brother.  Personal arcs in the Strider clan tend to have a lot to do with identity.  But Snoop Dogg/Lion there would agree, you've got to be you.  Uh oh here's Tavros.

And here is the first time we see indisputable evidence that troll conversations can be funny.  That is a real watershed moment, because it happens a lot later.  Well ok, it happens sometimes.  Well ok, it happens this time.  Also I feel like I should point out that when he mentions the phone booth, people think I'm referencing Dr. Who.  But really I (Dave) was thinking more along the lines of Bill and Ted.  People need to quit all the nerd shit and start boning up on excellent movies.

As is so often the case with jerky teen males on the internet.  Dave's cudgel of choice here appears to be the relentless homosexual innuendo.  Please not the phrase “cudgel of choice” may be considered homosexual innuendo as well.

Dave's joke about mayo STRONGLY foreshadows the friendship he has later with the mayor.

Somebody tried to bust me on the clip vs. magazine issue, but I just busted them right back because wow, who giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiives a shit.

AR: Retrieve deudly firearms.  Wait that joke hasn't been made yet.  AR: Wait for that joke to be made.

I ship AR x Terezi because of their mutual interest in justice, and AR x PM,  because of his explicitly stated attraction to her, I am a simple shipper who is easy to please, folks.

Jade's ancient rustled bass getting lodged in the elevator gives the musical euphemism “jamming” a new meaning.  Wait, was that joke not funny?  Oops, Sorry.

Jade isn't even looking through the scope there.  She's no-scoping that skinny cable from like a hundred yards.  Damn she's good.
(Mary. Fucking. SUE.)

PM: There's no hole in the left side of that helicopter thing, and that stone column is still standing.  Realize the diagram is useless, and discard it.

Law: Get been by AR

Subtle Trivia:  Did you know the “LoB” sound effect is written with lettering similar to the Tab logo?

Did you know that if you press hard enough of the SbaHJ text up there with your finger, the book will open up the sweet bro comic, it's referencing in a new browser window?

I think AR may be getting an unfair share of the blame for his poor marksmanship.  The rocket launcher might be showing its age here.  The paths some of these rockets are taking are BULLSHIT.

Jade's cartooning style is pretty fun and charming.  Maybe she'll get into web comics when she grows up.  Nah, she has too much sense for that.

SAD FACT ZONE: This butterfly survived for more panels after it was introduced than some characters in Homestuck.  In other news, old man Jake is a dick.

Bec could not give a fuck.

Aw dang where'd I go??
(blarg, so terrible)

Jade is pretty good at reading for a two year old.  Let's just assume she's two and move on.

This is the biggest fuck you imaginable coming from Dad.  There is no greater sign of disrespect than setting a man's hat on fire, slathering it in Barbasol, and stomping on it.

Little did he realize it would only earn Jack's admiration and gratitude.  (for now...)

Jade's earlier use of the bass + amplifier to grow the vegetables foreshadowed this extremely significant moment, where she uses the same technique to grow a lily pad bridge.  The goofy cartoon frog Jade I guess foreshadows frogs, which come up again later in the story, but I forget why.  It's not important.

Does the long pattern of runes on he wall of the temple represent the code for Sburb?  Or maybe the entire genome for bilious slick?  Neither, it is a magic eye diagram, and when you unfocus your eyes, you can read the word “ribbit”.

They are lampshading Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, which itself is already lampshading god taste and quality judgment.  In Homestuck there are so many lampshades, there is no room left for actual lamps.

[003049 S: Enter]
Here is the beginning of the end of act animation, [S] Enter:  Panels are sliding around the screen.  They're showing stuff. Things are happening.  It's exciting.

Look at how I was still switching her shirt logo around even in the middle of a Flash.  This is called attention to detail.

And there goes the bed.  If only the bed could have burned to dearth on its quest bedbed.

All this stuff goes by pretty quickly in the Flash, so maybe we can appreciate it being slowed down here, and really soak it in.  Look at Dave putting all this stuff in these terrible inconvenient locations.  What a jackass!

The real hero of Act 3.  a 20 foot tall, 10 ton stone statue of Zazzerpan the Learned.  Those Zazzerstats are canon btw.

Rose was eager to play this game in the first place so she could resurrect her dead cat, AND GOD DAMNIT THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT SHE'S GOING TO DO.  All these flaming tornadoes and flying wizards can go to hell.

There's this whole spiel on Sburb's “entry items” and what they mean, which I won't get into now.  But here's another brief spin on it.  John's was an apple from a tree, obviously like the one from the bible.  In that tale, the apple represented a temptation to Adam and Eve, and trouble was-a-lurkin' if they took a bite.  In retrospect the liquor bottle similarly represents a kind of temptation in the cont text of this character arc.

Usually with acts in Homestuck, there's something that happens at the end that brings the act back full circle.  Act 3 started with Nanna's inscription to John, and here we see when and how that was written, while getting a very brief glimpse of whats under the clouds and thus a peek at the much bigger story waiting for us to discover.

One wonders if she was aware Dave had given Jasper's some useful tentacles to bail her out with before she jumped.  It was quite a leap of faith.  Or just outright suicidal.  The Lalondes and Striders are basically all cuckoo bananas.  But anyways, let's reflect on the teamwork involved to make everything work.  Rose bringing Jasper's back, Dave's making him a princess, Jaspers saving Rose...God teamwork is great.  So is friendship.  If your story isn't in some way basically about friendship and teamwork, you are failing hilariously at your job.

At the bottom of this montage we see a very quick rewind of WV blasting of in his big can.  Which turns out to be the cork of a huge bottle, the unsurprising shape of the exile station which formed in Rose's crater.  Exile station designs are based on the entry item of that location.  As if you didn't know that already.

Sure cuttin' it close there Rose...
My characters never listen to me.

During this frenetic animation, crazy story revelations are strobe-lighting into your brain every few seconds, and you can barely keep up.  Here they are delivered at the speed of BOOKS, which is to say the speed of a sloth swimming through a tar pit.  The thing being revealed here: Dave's copy of the game has been stored in this lotus time capsule for millions of years.  WHAT??  Yes, the same juice-stained copies currently on the roof below his window.  How do they get here?  This is how most mysteries work in Homestuck.  You know a thing is going to happen in the future, but you don't know why or how.  So you just keep reading, while screaming.

The animation just keeps on going, and the song “Sburban Jungle” sorta bumps it up a notch.  John proceeds to climb his house while kicking imp and ogre ass.  There are a few moments in the earlier acts which seem to trick you into thinking Homestuck is all about getting cool gear, gaining levels, and kicking ass like you expect to do in such games.  This is kind of misleading though.  In totality, HS isn't really about ass-kicking at all.  It's about presenting awesome fantasy environments and situations in which ass-kicking could THEORETICALLY take place, but very rarely does except in dramatic hot points like this.  Instead those environments serve as backdrops for a huge amount of dicking around on the internet, babbling to friends about feelings, and being a bunch of stupid useless kids struggling to grow up. If you are ever under the impression HS is about anything else, you are invariably in for a world of hurt.

The best part of the animation is when John just runs up and clocks a hapless imp in the face.  Don't even try to tell me it isn't.

Whereas this imp gets inadvertently Cosby'd into the pit.  You'd think John would later find the Cosbytop lying around somewhere down there, but I don't think that's what happens.  I think he just makes another one??  Why the hell not.  The great thing about alchemy is it puts very little premium on just about any single object.  Except ones which are Plot Critical to be unique, like the game disc, or the matriorb.  It's almost like...the game knows when an item is plot critical??  It's almost like...my brain as the author of the story IS the game??

then John boings into the thing.  The end.

We zoom way out of his house and for the firs time understand that this mysterious realm is actually a whole planet.  After this we get kinda used to the ever expanding cosmological scale of the story, but let's slap our jaded faces for a second here, take a step back, and realize this is all pretty cool.  Wow, all the kids who play the game get their own special planet?  Wow neat!  Actually we can't conclude that formally until we see Rose's planet appear later.  Until then, people are likely to (and did) speculate that her house will appear somewhere on this cloudy planet.  But no.  Let's slap out faced again for jumping to that conclusion.

Bye Act 3.  The Midnight Crew Intermission is next!  If anecdotal evidence can be trusted, you will either buy ten copies of that book and give them all names and raise them as your children, or you will skip it altogether.  Skipping it would be a huge mistake though, trust me.  Almost as big a mistake as getting involved with Homestuck in the first place.