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Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Sollux having a foot on both sides might be a hint, or it might just be Sollux being Sollux. I'm not counting on any kind of breakout beyond that, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised either.

CidGregor posted:

If that's the case, What i HOPE the interactive part will be is playing as John on LOHAC, in which you yourself have to scratch the beat mesa, all the while fighting off monsters trying to stop you. That would be such a sweet game.

I wouldn't expect something quite so heavy; but clearly there's going to be something unusual about it or there wouldn't be any reason to worry about it running on everyone's computers.

Then again, maybe it's just because it's that goddamn big. How many situations are in immediate suspense right now?

- John's about to scratch the Beat Mesa.
- Rose and Dave are having to deal with DD and then need to blow up that sun.
- Jack in the troll session is about to defrog the human universe.
- Jack in the human session is still hanging out right next to Jade how is that possibly going to end well
- WV is about to get blown up and/or finally put on that ring, maybe start fighting Jack somehow, or something.
- I guess the end of this would be a good place to finally show more of Lord English than his eyes, but who knows? The situation with Aradia's ancestor is more or less resolved, unless AH wants to throw something extremely unexpected at us on that front.

Less urgently, the surviving trolls are going to be watching for a green blip to steer for, and it seems like the sprites might have one more job to do, perhaps. Damned if I know what it is, though. I'm curious about a bunch of other stuff (for example: Spades Slick and Snowman are still out there! What's going on with fedorafreak? What did Betty Crocker actually do? Was she involved in getting Jade's grandpa from the past into the session? :derp:) but I don't think most of it is going to be addressed here.

I'll have to get up and go to university at about American east coast midnight tomorrow morning, so maybe if he's fast I'll get to take it in first thing!

Goddamn (six hundred and) twelveterhooks over here. Bigtopperhooks? Better not.

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Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Evil Mastermind posted:

When did this happen? I don't remember this; I though Jack in the troll session was just destroying everything.

The whole "Jack is the cancer, it's him" bit. Towards the end of this sequence of pages.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Haha, well, this sure was something. No wonder this took two months.

SEVERE SPOILERS, in case anyone is foolish enough to decide to read this thread without having watched the flash even though the hundreds of new posts in it are probably all going to be about it.
- I don't think any of the Derse gods are traitors. It's too early to be certain, but my reading would be that Aradia did know they were going to create rather than destroy the sun - because it already happened, or the sun wouldn't be there in the first place. No way of preventing it, and telling them would just create another doomed branch, so why bother? Now that both parties are out of their collapsing sessions, maybe they can work on solving whatever problems are coming up, which will presumably involve Lord English.

- God Jade. Purely Jadesprite's memories, or did any kind of merger take place? She seemed well aware of Jade's bargain with Echidna, but that's not much of a hint. I guess we'll need to see her talk to clarify this point.

- The battlefield and the kids' lands are coming with, so there's some room for answers to old questions, given that e.g. Nannasprite remains alive as far as we know. The dream of a fedorafreak intermission will never die!!

- I appreciate how DD just sort of died offscreen like a chump, just like he did to a Dave all those pages ago.

- So I guess the title "Cascade" is almost certainly a reference to Doc Scratch's "cascade of misfortune" from the passage SpaceDrake quoted earlier: the glitch affecting "certain sessions" affected specifically the original troll session and, perhaps, an older human session which was scratched to produce the one we saw. We haven't any evidence of other universes, but if those even actually exist then perhaps it always happens this way, with the players of two intertwined sessions attempting to save themselves and retroactively inviting Lord English in.

- Also, obviously all the bubbles will burst, releasing all the dead so they can work with the living. Except for Eridan, who goes on a squiddle-hunting rampage instead.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Hjalmar posted:

There must be some time fuckery involved then. We saw Jack jump into the meteor immediately after putting Jade on her death bed, in which he brooded in a flower until eventually being released and unleashing hell on a the future wanderers. Either he hadn't quite got around to stabbing trolls yet, or there's some mechanic to the flowers I'm not understanding.

At the end of the human session's timeline, Jack caught a meteor back to Earth's past, where he jumped into the time capsule. He came to the troll session after murdering all the Earth exiles except PM. There he did all of the required planet destroying and troll/frog murdering, while back on Earth PM dragged corpses around to bury or something; eventually WV dropped the ring, and she put it on and followed Jack, who had just killed a frog and was watching the lab meteor head for the green sun.

yellowyams posted:

So what am I forgetting here, how is everyone supposed to meet up if Jade and John went through the fourth wall while everyone else is at the green sun?

It's unclear how that'll work exactly, but there's a god of space on one end, and on the other end there's two gods of time and a non-god but still high-level space player. They'll figure something out if they have to.

Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Oct 25, 2011

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Cleretic posted:

Hey, guys.

Look what I found.

http://homestuck.bandcamp.com/album/homestuck-vol-8

Gah, of course this has to show up five minutes before I have to go. I guess this leaves something to look forward to for later, at least.

Edit:

Size: 413.7 MB, for the 320kbps MP3 version. :stare:
What's in there? Commentary like for the Jailbreak album?

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Nate RFB posted:

I am a little disappointed we didn't get to see the battle between DD and Dave/Rose.

Like I said earlier, this is the perfect revenge for the way he chumpstabbed a beta Dave a long time ago. :colbert:

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Quite enjoying this album. Still only halfway through and some promising titles yet to come!

Gabriel Pope posted:

No, Dave and Rose just created the first and only green sun (or at least the only one for these universes? unclear if it's a multiversal thing or what.)~Time shenanigans~

Also: The sun already existed when Aradia got there, which means that Dave and Rose took some time to get out of there. I guess it makes sense that they wouldn't get out of an explosion the size of two universes all that quickly, but I wonder exactly how long it took and whether Dave's powers helped subjectively shorten the trip or anything.

haruspex posted:

If I was gonna guess, I would say just Nepeta, since she had all the foreshadowing with Jaspers as well as not appearing with DEAD next to her, which Equius did.

The ???s could also simply mean "if there were god tier characters for these elements, this is what their symbols and colours would be". Alternatively, of course: the reset session's players needn't have the same titles as before...

Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Oct 25, 2011

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Evil Mastermind posted:

Aw man, now I have a memorial avatar. :(

Are Dave and Rose in the Troll universe now? Is that what happened at the tail end there?

They're at the green sun, which is an out-of-universe big green sun that powers the first guardians and, by extension, Bec Noir. The plan was to blow it up and depower Jack; then the remaining trolls at the lab would see the blip and somehow navigate to it, so then everyone could meet up there and find their way back to the newly reset human session. Aradia got there ahead of time by using Jack as a portal when he came rushing at her just after she awoke, and is meant to help guide everyone who is at the sun to where they need to go.

Dave and Rose were moving the Tumor out to the sun, which they intended to destroy with it, but whoops! the Tumor created it instead, right on top of them. Then they found Aradia already there when they emerged. (And meanwhile, Sollux is killing himself psi-propelling the laboratory meteor with the rest of the surviving trolls - and all of the corpses - towards the green blip. Which probably works because he's half there and half at the sun already.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Mom would more likely be Mind, out of those two, what with her effortless mastery of passive-aggressive mind games.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Every session we know of has been thoroughly screwed up in some way - it seems like most Earth sessions failed without even a single entry, we've been watching the existing human and troll sessions, the previous troll session didn't get as far as ectobiology, and some other session (which even after Cascade still seems more likely to be a reset human session than anything else) is about to have a bunch of gods and aliens smash into it. fedorafreak's session also seems to be heavily abnormal in that he didn't even know there was a game going on, and it's unclear whether there are any other players in it or how far he'll get. (Was that his quest bed or wasn't it? We'll never know, until he suddenly comes in from offscreen when everyone's preparing for the final battle and just oneshots Lord English.)

There might be other sessions out there that didn't spawn from some version of the human or troll universe. Maybe players who have absolutely nothing to do with either universe involved in the absurd mess that created the Green Sun, if they exist, are actually able to just play the game normally and make their new universe, but it's hard to know because if so, none of them are ever going to be relevant to the main story.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Hussie just posted the third part of his clarification of events. This makes it more obvious why Jack did what he did here: first he saw the incoming Scratch, so he hopped a meteor out of there. Then, hey, this universe is being destroyed! Time to use this convenient exit device. Another session? Better smash all their planets so they can't scratch it.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Dolash posted:

Also, why does everyone think there's going to be a reset sessions? That universe in its entirety died when Bec Noir killed Billious Slick in the troll session, didn't he? I know the Scratch was supposed to reset it, but in my mind that was like pressing the reset button on your game console while what Bec Noir did was more like jam a sword through the top of it.

Now, the new universe Jade made, that might be okay since I think it mentioned somewhere the genesis frog had to go into the volcano, but surely Scratched Earth is gone?

What does "gone" mean? I mean, Jack destroying the frog doesn't make it so none of that universe has ever been. Otherwise the kids wouldn't be around. It's hard to get a solid grip on this circumstantial simultaneity business because it runs essentially on narrative convenience, and it's hard to figure out how a universe is a frog from the outside and also half of a bomb in a completely different place, but given all of that - why can't there be a different, reset timeline leading up to the universe's destruction? Maybe in the frog's other eye.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Lady Charlemagne posted:

:aaa: this cannot possibly be right.... can it?

It is. If you copy/paste all the story text from the search pages into a document and count it, you get something like 330k words. This includes the recaps, page titles (including "==>"s), dates and such, but doesn't include any text from the flashes; so it's not an exact count, but it's probably within ten thousand or so.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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That could be the case, but it needn't be. Ectobiology is weird enough that it might well just have happened the other way around in the new session. Or the order in which they arrived on Earth could have been different, or...

There are lots of possibilities here, and there is so much still to do that I'm not too bothered by all the gods and the insane amount of power Jade has now. I'm really looking forward to seeing where it goes from here. (I like the idea that we'll be sort of following the new players for a bit with the old cast just popping up in the background once in a while.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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loquacius posted:

So it totally makes sense on many levels for PM to be the one to wear the White Queen's ring and fight Jack -- Propsitian vs Dersite; dog vs mailman; etc -- but then why was there all that foreshadowing earlier about WV doing it instead? Y'know, this dream sequence?

The dream sequence could be seen as explaining why he didn't put on the ring and fight when Jack came after him. Too scared of the power.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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His cueball head opens up like a flower and the shards fall away, revealing Big Cal.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Hussie specifically said so, in fact.

It's a good thing Jade had so much important poo poo to do immediately because it's got to be confusing to be her right now.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Yeah, that's his sober typing style, not his murderous typing style. Until Karkat did the shooshy thing, sobriety drove him to murder, but they're not the same thing.

I think the order of events in troll land goes like this:

1) Terezi stabs Vriska.
2) Everyone else shows up, in the order we saw.
3) Shooooooooooosh.
4) Karkat talks to John on Vriska's computer.
5) Karkat talks to Jade until the connection cuts out on her end due to the Scratch.
6) Maybe some other stuff happens as the trolls talk to each other or something, we haven't seen whatever might go in between. It certainly doesn't seem like anyone else gets killed.
7) Gamzee gets on the computer with Cal sitting in his lap and ends up talking to Doc Scratch, watching the creation of Becsprite etc. He isn't surrounded very closely by everyone else, but there isn't a great deal of empty space around him in the shot so it's not like they're all necessarily miles away.
8) After the Green Sun shows up in the distance, Gamzee gets up (recaptchaloguing Cal) to stare at it with everyone else in that brief shot we saw with Terezi pointing in the wrong direction.
9) Sollux pushes the lab sunward.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Humans don't have moirallegiance, so clearly they couldn't possibly understand.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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And learning that John knew about Vriska's misdeeds really threw Karkat for a loop. Quite possibly he was thinking that there's no way to predict how these people will react to anything and it'd be better to just not get into it.

(Of course the real reason was so we'd spend the next couple months wondering whether he'd killed Gamzee or not, but it's not like it's entirely out of character.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Oct 29, 2011

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Renaissance Robot posted:

Everything from Havoc to Lotus just blends into one progressive supertrack for me (which is awesome), except for Revered Return, which I can't really figure out. I love it, but like, what is it meant to be?

Going by the title, the track art and the older songs it quotes I was assuming it's basically a theme for the hypothetical return of Vriska.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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We already "knew" at the time that Rose, Dave or both would be heading to the Green Sun to blow it up (or not, as it turned out), and we'd seen the red and blue glow associated with the tumor here, though it was unclear what that meant at the time. I think people were speculating about it in terms of the two universes, but there was so little to go on that most everyone forgot about it for a while. I didn't remember it until I saw the tumor open in Cascade.

(And the cover wasn't Andrew's work, no, so it'd be surprising if it had major hints in it. According to the txt in the Volume 7 zip, it was drawn by Vinks and Shelby. No idea if they had any input from him; it seems neither of them posted about it on their tumblrs.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Oh yeah, I haven't done this.

Easy mode for me is also WV: Ascend. It was old when I saw it - this was a couple weeks into Hivebent, I was checking out where all those weird demon kid avatars were coming from - but while I'd been enjoying the story before, this is the page that irrevocably hooked me, I think. I'm picking it more because of that than for any other reason.

Hard mode, well, I don't know. It's hard to choose anything specific. I'm going to just go with the whole sequence about Aradia's ancestor: all that extra tragedy ladled onto the trolls and their history, culminating in the reveal of... Betty Crocker's true identity, of all things. And ridiculous metanarrative bullshit going on at the same time. Absurd.

edit:

FrictionlessEmu posted:

Those credits are actually for the cover art for the song Black Rose / Green Sun, which isn't the same as the cover art for the album (for some reason Bandcamp replaces the art for the first song on the album with the cover art for the entire album when you purchase and download it). It's not clear who did the cover art, but my guess would be that it actually was Andrew, since if it's someone else there probably would be credits thanking them!

Oh, weird. I didn't know the track had art of its own - why does Bandcamp do that? Should have guessed something was up since it isn't much like their other work.

Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Oct 30, 2011

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Kit Walker posted:

And Jaspers and Grandpa Harley.

Yeah there's a few outstanding questions like that. I don't think they're as big as all the ones that finally got answered in Cascade, though.

I think the deal with Jaspers is probably that he lived with young Mom in that bedroom under the laboratory for a while. That bedroom, with its parallels to the Handmaid's, is another question that hasn't been settled 100%, but I figure that Mom was raised there by... somebody connected to Betty Crocker, somehow.

As far as we've seen, Mom has certainly not been anything like what the Handmaid became, but I guess that's unsurprising if a First Guardian wasn't doing the job and Lord English wasn't present in that version of the universe.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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marsattacks posted:

Do you mean the continuous and extremely pressing mystery of how exactly Jaspers died?

Sounded like old age to me, from what he told Nepeta. What we don't know is where/when he went, who zapped him there and why they sent him back after he died. Could also be something that'll only come together when we see the reset session, of course - like Jade's penpal, if he's indeed post-scratch Grandpa.

(I like to think that reset Rose's relationship to reset Mom will be exactly what original Rose thinks Mom's relationship to her is. Here's a pet for you, a cat from an alternate timeline. No expenses spared.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Oct 30, 2011

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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King of Solomon posted:

...or any of the trolls (except possibly the Condesce).

This is actually an interesting point. Assuming the Scratch does go through in something resembling a normal manner (and Hussie has explicitly said that the hard reset did happen, although he hasn't clarified how the death of the universe affects this) and assuming that Betty Crocker is indeed the Condesce, how does the Scratch affect her? The easy answer would be that she just wouldn't be there because she came in from outside, I suppose.

The question might be made moot by her disappearance, anyway. We don't know what the deal was with that; she vanished from Nanna's life well before the kids' meteors arrived, but then this might also have been her. (If not, that would have had to be Grandpa or someone working for him, which would have interesting implications.)

But if she was gone by the time the game began, there are a few options: she might have just been allowed to die, of course, her task complete... or she might have crossed over to the reset timeline before anyone else did, on LE's orders. (Assuming that he's already there, of course, and that this kind of transfer is possible - the latter part, at least, would follow if J. is reset Grandpa.)

ArfJason posted:

I wonder if there is a generally accepted animal that devours frogs, the way lions do deers and such. Keeping thematical sense and all, would kinda narrow down Lord English?
Wonder if we'll ever see him at all, but don't really mind either outcome.

Storks. (Fitting that he'd involve himself with the process of universe-birthing, too.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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This would be a great place for a terrible "furthest webring" joke if this story were being told 10-15 years ago. Count your blessings.

Nate RFB posted:

Why does that only affect the very end of the universe rather than all points?

Because it ends the universe, so whenever it happens to happen is when the end of the universe is. I guess that only shifts the question to why it would be that particular point in time, one possible answer to which is that that's when Jack left that universe.

But I definitely agree that it's a bit confusing and the Scratch makes it more so. Will the reset universe also be destroyed by the same means at the same point on its timeline? At a different point, as narrative convenience circumstantial simultaneity demands? Is it a different part of the same frog, or the same frog put back together differently, or another frog entirely, out of Jack's reach?

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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I do think you're being a bit more definite than there is grounds to be, Zoolooman. We have very little evidence on what a universe's different timelines mean for outside observers hanging out near its frog. The trolls being unable to communicate with beta timeline kids doesn't necessarily count - the nature of the Scratch is different, and in any case we don't know exactly why that is. I think it's probably an unavoidable consequence of the nature of things, but it could also just be because Sollux had a hard enough time tuning Trollian into the alpha timeline.

Given how strongly the pre-scratch kids' alpha timeline and the post-scratch trolls' alpha timeline are intertwined, I think you might well be right, but it isn't a sure thing.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Zoolooman posted:

The story goes out of its way to explain that there are multiple timelines and that a scratch makes a new, alternate one. If there are further interactions or stipulations, we are yet to see them. When they occur, we can amend our knowledge. Until then, what I've said is what the story has given us.

The point where people are disagreeing is that inside the frog and outside the frog are separate timeline bundles. The scratch makes a new in-frog alpha timeline. What does that mean outside the frog? Search me. You're suggesting that it creates an entire new meta-timeline where the frog itself did not originate in the troll session, or that it wholly or partly resets the troll session as well, or something of the kind. It's certainly an option, but it also is not part of what the story has explicitly given us.

King of Solomon posted:

...No? She had her chance after the showdown, then didn't bother.

I don't think she even knew Vriska was going to do something as stupid as going after Jack directly.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Gabriel Pope posted:


If there's a reason to hope for a Vriska from the hypothetical beta timeline where she fought Jack to show up, it's this. I'd be interested to see how she'd handle defeating Jack and then just having to hang around with everyone dead and nobody to lord it over.

Zoolooman posted:


Okay, then I must have misread you. I got the impression you were definitely asserting that, barring further information to the contrary, Jack's actions in the trolls' medium would not affect the reset universe.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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And there's that pink moon again, mocking us. :argh:

I think this might actually not just be the entry of Lord English into the troll universe, but where he emerged in the first place. Where Doc Scratch's apartment is drifting looks a lot like what we saw when the Green Sun was being created... where better for his part to begin?

(In any case, all of this also kind of explains why Doc Scratch didn't lose his cool until Jack attacked the clock. Seems like it might have been more than an indicator all along.)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Black Numenorean posted:

Hey, guys, look at when the spaceship is flying through. There's a ruler on the ground... or should I say, a yardstick?

That was there when the walls were set up. Just to get this out of the way: you might notice that it's a yellow yardstick, too.

Incidentally, making the other side of the fourth wall huge enough for the ship to fit through has made it come out really tiny on this side. I guess if Jade doesn't for some reason lose access to her powers or anything it'll be trivial for her to fix the scale issue (assuming she can affect herself that way) but it's still amusing to picture a tiny Prospitian battleship suddenly bursting into Jack Noir's office (or wherever this goes).

All assuming John and Jade don't spend the entire rest of the story just hanging out in Hussie's study, of course.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Ohtsam posted:

She didn't make the wall large enough to fit through, she made the ship small enough

Same thing. Probably.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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I kind of want that pattern to mean something but I've seen nothing to suggest that it does.

Roger Explosion posted:

Which, if taken from John and Jade's perspective for those 3 nanoseconds, makes Andrew Hussie a pretty damned big man.

Speaking of him, where is his in-story avatar now? We never saw him go back through that fifth wall THIS IS IMPORTANT

(Also, just to be at least as petty as he is big, I rechecked the EoA writeup and confirmed that, as I thought I remembered, Jade did make the fourth wall big rather than the ship small. :colbert:)

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Whoops, forgot about that page. Glad that's settled, I would have lost sleep over this question!

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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I think a plain Big Cal would have been scarier for me, but maybe that would have been a little too on the nose.

I also don't think this story will end in a thousand-page boss battle like Problem Sleuth did, but I suppose in order to be sure we'd first have to know what this guy actually does except indirectly arrange for everything to be really lovely, and what his relevance to the new session will be.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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Option B: the people who have been suggesting anyone outside the session/universe isn't incorporated into the reset world turn out to be right, and due to weird time poo poo Dave, Rose and the trolls arrive in the new session decades after Jade and John, who have been stepping in to raise (two of?) the guardian-kids. (Or, of course, everyone arrives a long time before the game begins.)

It probably won't be this - although it's hard to say much about the exact mechanics of the Scratch since we know so little about the one documented instance of it. Doc Scratch's conversation with Rose, the one where we learned what the Scratch actually does, kind of suggests that getting out will preserve them without removing versions of them from the reset world, but we know well enough to be careful about things Doc Scratch kind of suggests.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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That's what I mean: he certainly does not come out and straight up say anything like this. What he says directly is "you will all cease to exist completely if you remain here during the Scratch" and "you may find a way to survive the reset and participate in the renewed session", where "you" means the current versions of the kids in both quotes. This suggests there's a way to cause the Scratch and get out of the way without being deleted by it (and it has turned out that there is) but it tells us little about how it works other than that. Nothing about what he says directly implies that escaping the Scratch alters the composition of the reset universe (except by going back in afterwards) and so the suggestion is that it does not, but that's very shaky ground and I wouldn't try to build certitude on it.

Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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I doubt it. There's no clear and natural division into groups of six and indeed I haven't found one that gives anything remotely interesting, although I only looked for five minutes or so so maybe somebody more obsessive than me will do better.

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Hamiltonian Bicycle
Apr 26, 2008

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I have to agree that expanding the role of the trolls like that (I believe Hussie has said that in his original rough outline they weren't going to be followed nearly as closely) did introduce some pacing issues, as exemplified by Act 5 being longer than everything else put together, but I think the story is nevertheless better for it. Wouldn't want to miss the trolls as they are, dumbass typing quirks and all.

(Hivebent was going on when I started reading so it wasn't a problem for me. I could probably relate better to the people who were missing the kids if I'd spent a real-world year following them exclusively.)

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