======> (2517): This page reuses Vriska art from her rendezvous with Tavros. It's also the first time we would see the chest design that would go on to be used in walkarounds.

8th exile: Type "=> SWITCH 2".): Snowman is referred to here as the 8th exile. This raises questions. Does Hussie mean 'of all known exiles'? Because there have been eight exiles shown at this point (WV, PM, AR, WQ, SS, DD, CD, HB), making Snowman the 9th. Does Hussie mean 'of the troll session'? Because that would mean there are at least three unknown troll exiles. My pet theory? To match the midnight crew, the trolls also had Prospitian Problem Sleuth, Ace Dick, and Pickle Inspector as exiles, as seen in an Openbound easter egg.

The purple text used for the SWITCH command matches Sgrub's logo color, as it matched the Sburb colors in the kid's session.

Seer.: Squiddles! Was released at this time! On the album:

"This album began percolating many months ago, and as with much of what this music fellowship works on, it snowballed in quantity and silliness and awesomeness over an extended period of time. It began with Alexander Rosetti's great single track (1st in playlist), a snippet of which found its way into the big [S] Descend mashup.

The idea we formed around that song was to make an album that would serve as the soundtrack for a fictional cartoon show for kids, full of ridiculous happy tunes with strong themes of friendship and chock full of squeaky noises and aquatic gurglings. Seems to me like they pulled it off. It's very easy to picture this as a real show now!

Most of what you hear and see is musician/artist-conceptualized. I didn't have much of a hand in it other than the original idea. The guiding principle for working on Squiddles stuff is, any idea someone has for it automatically becomes Squiddles canon. So really anything going on here, candy corn shrimp, skipper Plumbthroat's connivings, underwater unicorns, all that came together through the collaboration of these artists while I sat quietly and boggled vacantly at their shenanigans. These guys are a bunch of nuts. But they are your nuts, and now their work is yours as well."

======> (2528): Reused pose from the interrogation of Senator Lemonsnout.

To begin your mission.: Look at that utter long boy of an underling in the background! That length can't possibly be derived from prototypings, but rather from the original template...

Equius: Read first memo.: We get two 612s here, as we see a Karkat from 6 hours twelve minutes in the past and a Karkat from 612 hours in the future. It's unknown whether he's writing from before or after Jack's entry into the troll session. The troll's session is referred to as taking '600 hours' from beginning to end, which is equal to 25 days. The implication here being that the total time is 612 hours, although certain memo timestamps and Trollian timeline views make it seem like it took longer than that (probably not Hussie's intention).

Karkat: Begin another memo.: Actually, Aradia appears here (and in the previous memo) as having entered the game before Equius (marked by the grey bars), which is incorrect. Vriska uses the same sentence that Snowman used on Terezi last page. "you are a strange and funny girl/boy". The marking on the walls here indicate that the consorts of this land are turtles.

RETCON WATCH: Oil on the back of the crabtop.

======>======>======>: Visual callback to when Tavros was laying on the floor after being injured.

======> (2555): Another usage of the phrase 'make him/her pay'. In addition to the reference to Snowman's black inches and the ring's red miles (yet unnamed inside the story).

Snowman: Continue briefing.: This statue implies that Terezi's consorts were crocodiles.

Centuries ago...: The name of Kanaya's land is never actually directly revealed in-story, but strongly implied. The text is just gibberish.

Terezi: Fly up.: This page provides the header image for Act 5 Act 1. The winged rocket pack Terezi uses is probably alchemically descended from another rocket item.

Terezi: Get closer look.: The trolls have 108 known symbols, but Karkat may be referring to a separate set of 48 symbols that serve as horoscope signs to them. No plot hole... This time.

======> (2576): It ultimately turns out that Karkat only wakes up in time to get totally wrecked by Jack destroying Prospit.

The password to continue on the alternate route for this page is "MOM3NT".

[S... BAHJ] Terezi: Ascend.: Alternian: "SWEET KID AND HELLA JACK"

On the pause at this time (it took around 5-6 days to make the flash):

"That will be the last update while I do a bit of animation. It ought to take... maybe a week? Let's call it a week. I'm sure I could do it faster. In fact, I can't really promise I won't! (<- horrible thing for me to say, ensuring rampant F5ing several days from now until time of next update.)

But I will err on granting the task a wider berth. I keep making this pact with myself, sort of like a recurring New Year's resolution that has no particular affiliation with any calendar event, that I will try and take it easier on this thing now and then. I repeatedly fail to honor this resolution, and like that pledge to lose those stubborn holiday pounds which so easily falls by the wayside, I cannot seem to shed the drawing hours. And so I keep drawing and wallowing and eating ice cream.

What am I even talking about anymore."

[S] Make her pay.: This animation is the first time we can kind of see the extent of the impact the art team could have on the overall story. This flash was very much an 'art team flash', moreso than others, since they essentially generated a loose jumble of assets that Hussie arranged into an animation, with less strict direction (the little montage in the middle is where this shows). And for better or worse, I'm fairly certain this animation inspired the 'blind girl has nice ass?' fandom meme, stemming from that low camera angle shot of Terezi staring up at the sky.

In addition, there's a variety of reused poses and to-be-reused poses for characters here. Of particular note is the silhouetted shot of Vriska being telepathically lifted into the air, which will be better remembered as being associated with god-tiering.

Music: "Crystamanthequins" by Erik "Jit" Scheele in Homestuck Vol. 5
Remix of "Crystalanthemums" by Alexander Rosetti
Remix of "Mannequin" by Perry Sullivan

Erik Scheele, aka Jit, has mainly composed Homestuck music (including a solo album), but has worked on many other pieces, including a variety of piano covers.

Art contributions from Brett Muller, clorinspats, Eyes5, FauxMonstur, Jessica Allison, Lexxy, M Thomas Harding, myluckyseven, Nic Carey, Paige Turner, Richard Gung, SaffronScarf, Tavia Morra, SkepticArcher, Sockpuppy, Vivus

======> (2591): The little 'SOULBOT VIDEO LOG' banner is in the same style as the video logs for Jade's dreambot.

======> (2594): First instance of the word 'fraymotif'.

======> (2596): We now know the effect associated with this particular dice roll (Ancestral Awakening).

======> (2602): RETCON WATCH: Arm coming off-panel from around where Tavros is.

======> (2607): RETCON WATCH: Sneaky patch of oil hiding amongst the blood smears on one of the dismembered Aradiabots flying close to the camera.

======> (2608): Check out that sweet rocket unicycle that Gamzee made.

======> (2611): Both Alternian and Terran suns are marked with a 'flame swirl'.

==>: When asked how long he had waited to reveal the purpose of Sburb:

"Since before Homestuck started.

HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive. In the HS reality, Sburb/Sgrub is the means by which universes procreate. Planets and civilizations are the seeds from which one or many new universes will blossom if the players succeed, at the expense of the life on that planet.

This was always what Homestuck was about. This revelation was carefully guarded, although there are plenty of clues. It has taken 4.5 acts to understand the "what" (as well as some of the "how" along the way.) The rest of the story will be about exploring the rest of the "how", as well as determining whether the players succeed.

I've answered numerous times that the conception of HS had its roots in loosely combining the themes and feel of Earthbound, The Sims, and Spore. That was a formula concocted many months before I began the story, well before Problem Sleuth was finished. The story still strikes me as staying very close to that original vision. Only now does the Spore component seems like it makes more sense. "Sburb" was always a word that was supposed to be reminiscent of "Spore", tweaked to reference the house building element as well. Spore is about universe building, and more specifically, life form and civilization building, but from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Sburb is the reverse. The goal is to create a universe all at once after overcoming an extensive series of challenges, and as is implied, the universe fleshes itself out with galaxies and systems and planets and lifeforms, ready and waiting for entry by the victorious players. The ultimate reward is for the players to enter the universe they created and do as they see fit. They are essentially the gods of that universe, and that is what the trolls are to our universe.

The trolls were always meant to serve this purpose. Before I conceptualized them in any way at all, their primary description was "the group of players who created our universe by successfully completing Sburb, and who would interact with the kids in some way and help them understand the purpose of the game". Logically, the other group of players would have to be aliens, since they are not only from a different planet, but from an entirely different universe. This began the thought process that lead to making them trolls, and then specifically, internet trolls who would harass the kids, but ultimately support them as the group of veteran players who understood what was going on better than any of the kids. This was mainly solidified because I thought the concept of our universe being created by a bunch of cantankerous internet trolls was a funny idea.

But at the time I didn't expect to get as deep into their story as I eventually did. I figured I'd touch upon it in some limited way, and only introduce a handful of characters, and just keep trucking along with the kids. But as their story became more entangled with the kids' story, it felt more necessary to just go all the way and get into their adventure, not just to better contextualize and characterize them all, but as a sort of accelerated primer on the entire game objective itself. The story is certainly about four kids and their adventure together, but also at its heart, it is about this esoteric creation myth, and the troll arc became a good way to establish the true objective while getting a foothold of the scope and magnitude of it all. We got a different look at how another session could go, with a much different player count and personality ensemble, and all the ways that could contribute to variations in this highly flexible game, and ultimately what the point of all this is. All this diversity and flexibility in the game's unfolding presumably has a bearing on what type of universe will be created. These ideas will be explored in detail over the remainder of the story. There's a lot more to come.

The deeper I've gone into involving the trolls in the story, the more it seems to me they were never an element I could really just shrug off in favor of focusing on "the real story". The process of going through their story has had an effect in showing the nature of the game that could never have been achieved without going down that road. Without it, I'd have to resort to a more mundane expository means of revealing the game's purpose. The Felt intermission, which certainly seemed tangential (and surely was) still served an important purpose by helping us invest in the villainous nature of Jack Noir. Without that, his future actions would have much less meaning. Similarly, the troll arc has served to more thoroughly "characterize" the entire purpose of the game, and give it much more meaning going forward. Furthermore, the troll story is inextricably entwined with the kids. Actions of the kids had influence over the way the troll adventure unfolded, and therefore the way their own universe was created (Rose's gamefaqs, the scratch they create, just to name what we know of). The kids' adventure is obviously heavily influenced by the trolls through direct communication, and therefore the trolls have a hand in causing the kids to do whatever it was they did to impact the troll's adventure, and so on. Willingly or not, they're all working toward the same outcome, toward creating our universe, and the universe the kids are trying to create, and whatever trouble puts all that in jeopardy. Remember that both the kids' and the trolls' chum handles are needed to make the full set of ACGT combinations. They are not two unrelated groups of players as they first appeared, nor are their universes unrelated. Sollux's shades, the ~ATH code, etc help illustrate this, that they are bifurcated, interwoven realities.

Even Act 5 is a microcosm of this idea. It is a bifurcated act. Act 5.1 is the troll half. Act 5.2 is the kid half. 5.2 even begins with two sets of curtains, red and blue. Blue symbolizes the troll universe, red symbolizes our universe. First we crossed through blue, then red.

One last thing I'll mention about all this. The whole creation myth angle of Homestuck was almost entirely inspired by the ludicrous creation myth in Problem Sleuth, the way GPI used his imaginary time traveling duplicates to create all the matter in the universe. I think that was one of my personal favorite ideas to come out of that story, in terms of scope and absurdity. So when I was considering ideas for the next story, I thought it would be fun to develop that topic further, but with a little less absurdity and more depth, sophistication and complexity. And for the creation myth to exist as the centerpiece of the game purpose and story."