I feel you there. Like I think Vriska's revival *is* the best way terezi could think of to fix things. Because her being there could have still worked to organize the raid on HIC, and better set them up for the final battle, but it could have been done without deus ex-ing everything.
Honestly I'm surprised more people don't just let their characters be doomed (in the sense that it isn't the alpha timeline anymore) and just write about a different timeline anyway. Who knows, maybe prototyping grandpa instead of bec *could* have avoided Bec-noir all together, thus resulting in paradox space doing *something else* to smash the troll's god-door.
I guess I'm a hypocrite cuz I'm cheating a bit in veering off so close to the end, so I can avoid most of the temporal snarls because they already happened in the linear timeline of the session XD
Honestly playing with powers, especially the less...tangible? effects are half the reason even I even wrote this story. Like Dave's ability to track loops, which gives him a limited sort of future sense in a way, and I'm further exploring sensory heart powers. I don't know if I'll ever give a POV chapter to a non-strider at this point, but if I did you could bet that I'm gonna poke and prod at how their classpects bleed over into their life before and during the game.
I miss the debris cloud :< Derse is nice because plot and the other dreamers but the debris cloud was just so fun to describe and imagine and I swear we're going to get back there someday XD
Oh yeah, like, I think the clocks very much rely on the intention of the one killing them? Which doesn't seem very fair *at all*, because going down that route, a smol dersite agent could stab john in the back while he slept, and for all we know it could be ruled as Just merely because they are the enemy of the kingdom and have killed so many dersite agents while climbing the echeladders. And the bit with Jade and Jane? They were *not* acting of their own wills at all. Unless that's the point, it's not something you, as a player, can control, in order to make sacrificial plays more costly?
Haha, I don't dislike them as a couple! I do agree that they were dealt a shit hand what with the whole meddling AI-younger brother of Dirk's, and the like love polygon going on between everyone. It probably doesn't help that at that point there were like, no other options? BEing trapped into a choice by circumstance can easily make someone resent it, and I really do feel like that ended up happening to Jake.
Like, I agree with you that Terezi saw it as the best possible solution to fix things. But at the same time, I wonder if there wasn't simply a great measure of regret at play here. Like, Terezi spent a long time regretting killing Vriska. She completely let go her layer play for a while in the metheor, because it reminded her of her killing Vriska. She dated Gamzee and didn't let him go not necessarily because she hate-loved him (though she did), but because part of her thought she deserved to be punished. At least, that's my point of view.. I think, what really pissed me off about it wasn't necessarily that Vriska returned, but that we had so little time to get to know these new versions of the characters, and more importantly, what happened differently in this version of the meteor trip. Also, the deus ex machina way everything ended, of course. Hell, even a lot of what we know happened with the Alpha kids presumably didn't happen in this version. Did Jake ever meet Aranea, and then Brain Ghost Dirk, and then went on to punch Meenah? Probably not. Jane never met Fefetasprite, and never bough those potions from Gamzee. Honestly, I was surprised that Dave didn't act at all bothered by all the time travel Vriska apparently did. In the GO timeline, he had been seriously bothered at the idea of a non time player time traveling, so I'm wondering about that, and how Vriska even gained Aradia's music boxes in the first place (But then, I wonder the same about Gamzee, so...). Honestly, I think a lot of the issues I have with the end of the comic would have been resolved if Hussie had just done a little more chatlogs. I'm not one of those people that hated it with all my heart, I liked it well enough, I just think it could have been better. There were also some characters that we simply don't know what happened with them at the end (sollux and aradia fans, crying out in the distance). You made me wish to write that now, haha. I guess it's simply because homestuck is a very tangled story, and it takes some effort to do that, and not make a doomed as in "everyone will die" timeline. But then, I wish more people would write doomed everyone will die fics too. About the Dave thing; yeah, I imagined the thing you did with time is a good way to remind the reader that, even if we are back in time, that this is a young Dave, he is still a Dave influenced by his powers and lost memories. I doubt young Dave had this much awareness of time in canon xD. The clock thing is a very faulty thing, haha. I like what you proposed, though; that it could very well be the intention of the killer. Which is crazy as a system, but very interesting. The Jane and Jade thing I always saw as, it doesn't matter if it's under someones control, you still imposed your will over others (even if it wasn't really *their* will...).
I always just operated under the assumption that the alpha-kids timeline still happened more or less the same up until the point where the meteor arrived? Like even if Vriska was running around setting up crap in the background, somehow, she couldn't make the meteor go any faster through the shifting pathways of the furthest ring. And Jade still had to stop it from colliding which got her mind-controlled and sent Dirk out into the middle of nowhere. So I like to believe the bit with brain ghost dirk in the dream bubbles still happened (obviously since I wrote it into the fic XD) and the condesce setting them up to die to ascend them (since she needed roxy to make the matriorb) and then the whole crap with Roxy getting abducted to make the matriorb... So for the most part I've just been going as if it was the same aside from thinigs we *know* changed, like the lack of gamzee being free resulting in the unprototyped kernel sprites. At least know that I know Vriska was the one to prototype ARquius. He was the one throwing the wrench into that assumption before XD
You make a good point about Dave's reaction though. If he had to live with her on the meteor it's highly possible he already had his freak out on the three year journey, which they really didn't cover in much detail.
Weren't Sollux and Aradia with the ghost army? The dead didn't seem effected by the retcon at all so it's possible they ddidn't even notice anything going on XD
I enjoyed the ending for what it was, and *adored* the way he went about writing the retcon with the passwords and the parrallel pages...but yeah...I just wish there had been more time before everything wrapped up or maybe more people involved in the plan to flesh things out and make it feel less whiplashy and vriska city.
I mean, every timeline is an everyone will die timeline. But like doomed dave's timeline lasted several months before he made the decision to go back. Who's to say a different one couldn't go on for years? Even reaching a conclusion that, while doesn't quite hit the main ending, still tells a compelling story? That's the wonder of fic XD Even in an inevitable apocalyptic scenario there are stories to tell, and hell some of them might even end up with the characters deciding "screw you alpha timeline we're gonna survive" and just breaking shit. There was one soulmate-y fic I was reading that did just that. It was explicitly revealed as an offshoot "doomed" timeline but the characters just didn't care because they wanted to survive anyway.
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Katreal on Chapter 1 Wed 26 Dec 2018 08:06PM UTC
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