Welcome to Act 2, this one will be hefty. Today I’m reading.
06/06/09- "Years in the future, but not many...” (/homestuck/248) to 06/16/09 - "I SEE. ==>?” (/homestuck/261)"
Select this thingy to read my commentary
Well Act 1 ended with the end times. Between the meteor that was heading for John and several dozens more Rose saw in her observatory. The world ended. It seems we’re now seeing a future in which a Wayward Vagabond is wandering the desserts of what was once earth. They encounter something with the SBURB spirograph on it.
Oh god, the economy!
But that's all for the future. Act 2 opens with Rose’s entry to GameFaq’s page on SBURB. It's a letter of condolence to those who installed the game and have brought forth the end times. She mentions she will add her findings as she goes.
We get another animated sequence. John bit the Apple. We see scenes from around John's house as we had with the end of act one but something is changing. The sky outside is black. And from all the shadows we see eyes. Something, other than John's father, is in the house.
John's house is fine though, it's now located on some sort of mesa high above the clouds in a land with a black sky.
The Kernelsprite seems to split off into 3. One piece falling down below the clouds and another shooting up into space. They leave some sort of guidance rings behind. The remaining piece becomes a more completed sprite. It's looking closer to the original harlequin doll but with a ghostly tail instead of legs.
It’s here we get an interactive piece. This is only in the newer version of the comic so I hope you are using that. Pretty much a minigame built in Flash. I can say this is exceptionally professional quality for a flash animation of the time. We are able to explore John's house and interact with things as the audience has done so far. We command John to do things and he does so obediently. The “audience” is strange though. They only seem to talk in all caps and call John “BOY” regardless of his corrections. We can check out every poster and details, but we already did most of that. I’ll highlight a few interesting parts though.
- John points out the plumbing in his bathroom is gone due to Rose's “piss-poor” job of cleaning things. He can always “go over the cliff” if he needs to.
- The Bunny is not in the box, it is gone. I hope it is ok, the bunny must be protected!
- TT is trying to get ahold of John on pesterchum, he points out it's odd he still has internet connectivity in the void. His provider must be fantastic. I also wonder how he’s even getting power.
- John mentions the Kernelsprite is a Sprite now. It’s still only tier 1 and still must be prototyped. Only the server host can prototype it
- John admits it was pretty funny when his dad got him with the pie during their Strife
- The Cruxitor is no longer active and the countdown is blank
- The area downstairs now has many large black smudges and not just the original comic this time.
- John's father is now gone, and he appears to have left in a hurry. I hope he didn't leave the oven on.
John's ordered to talk to Rose by the new audience.
Rose mentions she can still see John in the game. Apparently there’s been other meteors but his was the largest of them. His entire neighbourhood was destroyed. I guess he wasn't that close with his neighbours as no one seems remotely upset by the fact they are likely dead.
I’ve never met my neighbours, in the big city we move around a lot from condo to condo. But if I learned all my neighbours were killed, because I decided to play a video game, I’d not be ok. I think humanity in general would not be ok if such things could happen. But I guess we can shrug all that off.
Rose suggests John's first course of action should be to retrieve the PDA he lost during the chaos. John, never being on topic, decided now is a good time to call Rose out for not wishing him a happy birthday yet. She mentions she had something in mind but it was late and wished him a happy birthday.
John's new audience demands he take the towel and the totem. Together they discover they can delete the Generic Cubes John had made earlier to get some grist.
Game over, this is where Homestuck ends with everyone dead…
Well obviously not. I already mentioned there’s over 8000 pages of this and we’re only on 247.
Till tomorrow, Keep riding the pumpkin tide.
Totally forgot an Easter egg here if you “activate trickster mode” I was avoiding the wiki to avoid spoilers (even though I've already read all this once). But this article will best explain how to use Trickster mode.
In this case it is just a weird thing that turns John into some kind of weird lollypop child and Nana into the floating head of Andrew Hussie. Obviously this isn’t significant to the story. But weirdly it is related to something much further down the line.