Being bad-ass is the point

at some point later on Doc Scratch mentions that the fight between Jack and Bro started the scratch and that John has to finish it to reset the game properly. We know now that Jack is a constant across all sessions and his purpose is most likely to help players defeat the Black Queen by exiling her rather than fighting her along with the King.

Since Jack is suck a big part of the uncorrupted sessions it stands to reason that the energy released from the Beat Mesa would resonate with him if for no other reason than he's so important to the way SBURB is supposed to play out. It also serves to foreshadow, though most likely unintentionally, Jack's eventual ascension to First Guardian status.

I'm wondering if it somehow informed him that the session was going to be scratched?

I still don't get how Jack knew to go hide in a lotus during Cascade.

>>59858
The flashy shit in the sky tipped him off.

>>59858
Jack knew to hide into the lotus because ke knew it would take him to Earth, where he could avoid the scratch and use the exile stations to travel to the Troll session to complete his objective (destroying the universe)

>Nothing in Homestuck is shown just for the hell of it.

Ha ha ha ha oh wow.jpg

99% of the comic is composed entirely of red herrings. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but when has the White King ever had any significance? Or the shitty swords in Eridan's closet? Or Felt member #426's time travelling to Alternia's dead future (which now can't possibly have happened because their universe was destroyed)? I'm just saying, there's tons of extraneous shit in there if you know where to look.

>>59871
characters and details without immediately apparent significance on the plot =/= red herrings

also by "shitty swords in eridan's closet" do you mean the fake wands in his fridge that signified (!) his interest in wizards and magic, and then was left in a pile (per the running gag of the trolls stashing their items throughout the meteor and making piles of things) that karkat could sleep on to trigger a game over in alterniabound

also also die didn't travel to alternia's dead future, he jumped to a parallel timeline where slick never founded the city, the significance (!) of the scene being that slick literally meant it when he said he "made this town"

Homestuck has NO red herrings. Even the Perfectly Generic Objects will have a point in the long run.

>>59871
>Or Felt member #426's time travelling to Alternia's dead future (which now can't possibly have happened because their universe was destroyed)?

Not to be petty or whatever, but that never happened.

>>59874
The universe was destroyed after the part with Die. Die simply jumped from one timeline to a different point on the other timeline (the one where Slick never "made this town" and therefore the site of "this town" was instead just a barren wasteland like before (which we saw when Slick jumped back in time with Sawbuck and his past self (the Scurrilous Straggler) saw them fight). The part when Slick visited Doc Scratch and he shot Snowman was at a later time, after he had replaced his arm that was ripped off at the end of the intermission.

>>59877

Yes, exactly.

Actually, that brings up a question.
Die moves between alternate timelines of the same universe, but we don't see much of that in HS. Is he navigating doomed beta timelines?

Similarly, the fact that SS was sent to an alternate timeline by destroying the vault, and later was able to walk to Doc Scratch, which suggests that the timeline he ended up in was the alpha... does that mean that the timeline most of the intermission took place in was in fact another doomed beta timeline?

>>59879

Yes. That's precisely what it means

>>59879
>does that mean that the timeline most of the intermission took place in was in fact another doomed beta timeline?

Basically yeah. The way it works is

-trolls exile Midnight Crew to Alternia
-from that point multiple timelines are made from the MC's actions
-in one timeline they become the Midnight Crew, in the other all but SS die (you can see CD's death when Sollux blows up his computer)
-the SS from a beta timeline 'jumped' into the body of the SS in the alpha timeline via Crowbar's crowbar
-SS in alpha timeline now has all memories of SS from beta timeline, basically replaced by beta-SS

And then he got trapped in a vault.

>>59882
that or Spades just pulled all of the pins out of the voodoo doll when he was inside the station, jumping him back to the other timeline

>>59873
Jade's tower was filled with red herrings, Hussie said as much.

I just want to sort something out.
You can live in a 'doomed' timeline but you can't 'win'.
If you try to jump into anothers timeline you'll be killed like in Final Destination by the angry Universe at some point because it doesn't like untidy time shenanigans.
Though you can get around this by doing something like prototyping yourself into a sprite because I guess that counts close enough to the original time traveller 'dying' to appease the universe.
That all correct?

>>59891
Actually the whole doomed timeline business has nothing to do with winning or losing, since we've seen plenty of failure in the alpha one. But the rest is right pretty much.

>>59891
You can also argue that it's the other way around. Any universe where you're going to fail (or, to put it in an even more meta way, to deviate from the story Hussie wants to tell) can not be the alpha universe. But yeah, travelers into the alpha from such a universe tend to die fairly quickly.

As for the sprite thing, that is not confirmed. May very well be that Davesprite's living on borrowed time right now.
In the end, it's sort of hard to say. Everyone dies eventually.

>>59896
I wouldn't say it has anything to do with what story Hussie wants to tell. (Well, not in a way that's any different from every story ever.) It does have a very real effect on things in the story.

I think Davesprite gets allowed to go on since the sprites might not be allowed to live beyond the game or something like that. His days are numbered either way.

Have we gotten an answer yet for why Gamzee's ancestor, the Grand Highblood, doesn't have an eight letter name?

>>60022
A lot of people think his true name is Zillyhoo, but that's just (oddly fitting) fanon. It explains where Gamzee got his hammer, at least.

Too lazy to dig through the archives to find it, but in one of the very first first convo's we see between Jade and Karkat, he explains to Jade that she will need to contact them once her dream bot sploded. Obviously she was gonna talk to Equius to get it fixed. This convo happened somewhere in Act 3, I believe, and we all know the bot blew up in the End of Act 4 flash.

That shit never got around to being done or explained why she wanted it done as far as I know.

>>60031
>>Obviously she was gonna talk to Equius to get it fixed
How is that 'obvious'ly the case? Don't talk rot.

>>60032
It was in Act 4.

>CG: YOU KNOW YOUR ROBOT?
>GG: you mean the robot you think is stupid?
>GG: the one youve mocked me for having on a number of occasions???
>CG: YEAH, WELL I STILL DO THINK YOUR ROBOT IS STUPID.
>CG: BUT THAT'S BESIDES THE POINT.
>CG: LATER ON IT WILL BLOW UP FOR SOME REASON. IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY.
>GG: this is the worst prank youve ever pulled!!!!!!
>CG: QUIET.
>CG: ANYWAY, WHEN IT HAPPENS YOU WON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.
>CG: THE THING TO DO IS TO CONTACT US.
>CG: AND WE'LL TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.
>GG: why should i do that?
>CG: BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT YOU TOLD US TO TELL YOU.

So yeah, what >>60032 said. It was just her cue to talk to Karkat.

>>60027
That's awesome.

In terms of the whole process of scratching the game, this is all we know, right?:

>Jade, Karkat and Kanaya(?) develop a plan to meet at the Green Sun via resetting the kids sessions by using Echidna's quills on Beat Mesa
>[SCENE MISSING]
>Jade meets Echidna
>[SCENE MISSING]
>Jade acquires the quills of Echidna
>[SCENE MISSING]
>John acquires the quills of Echidna and scratches Beat Mesa with a new hammer
>[SCENE MISSING]
>Session reset

So that huge pile of money Vriska gave to John was never mentioned outside of Alterniabound?

>>60047
Its not like money or Grist was an issue for the kids by the end of thier session, it didn't need its own scene of her wiring the money to him.

>>60044
Well, a better approximation would be something like this:


>Karkat, Jade, and Kanaya hammer out a plan to initiate the scratch with the help of future Jade (Though future Jade insists that past Jade not be made aware of her influence, because of time fuckery)
Plan is as such:
>Step one: Someone brings the tumor to the Green Sun to destroy it.
>Step two: initiate the Scratch
>Step three: The remaining kids (somehow) meet up and escape through the fourth wall before the scratch finishes.
>Step four: The explosion of the green sun will be visible from all sessions. Everyone meets up there to figure out what to do next.

It actually goes something like this:
>Jade gets the Quills of Echidna, but only upon agreeing to bring Echidna, the rest of the Denizens, and the lands to the new session. She has no idea how she's going to do this, but agrees anyway.
>Jade gives John the code for the Quills along with the code for some stylish squiddleputer earmuffs or whatever they're called. He also takes this opportunity to make the Vrillyhoo by combining the Zillyhoo with the code Vriska gave him in her last communication to him.
>Rose and Dave can't agree on who's going to be the one to sacrifice themselves to destroy the Green Sun. In the end, both of them end up making the trip.
>John initiates the scratch, with instructions from Karkat.

After that, Jade is killed by CD and resurrected as god tier, Rose and Dave create the Green Sun, Jade and John escape through the 4th wall with the Denizens and Lands, and basically the rest of EoA5.

How did Gramps get into the game again?

>>60136
Was never shown. Maybe we'll see it later.

Also, why is Jane asleep after being rescued from the explosion?

>>60032
>>60040
Are you both shoving sticks on your ass on purpose, seriously? Making a a deal because I used the wrong words to "phrase" that she was gonna talk to Karkat again?

>>60152
No, are you being so obtuse on purpose? You were wrong and your question was meaningless.

>>60140
The really weird thing about that is that Jade had a dream about her and John meeting him. Which would at this point require them to revisit their old universe or their incipisphere. Or him taking a huge detour through the post-Scratch universe/incipisphere.
Or he could travel through the Furthest RIng I guess. All bets are off there.
Or they'll meet Jake when he's really old.

>>60181
or she could just be talking about Jake

>>60182
That doesn't make sense. She doesn't know that Jake is biologically identical to her grandfather and in fact thinks he's her biological grandson. To give her the impression that she and John are going to meet her grandfather, the person in her dream has to look like her grandfather.

Okay so, the R-Kids are different from the Guardians, right?

Roxy is not Mom, Dirk is not Bro, etc

They're the same people just in different timelines, right? They're not literally one in the same?

>>61536
as far as we know right now, no, dirk is not literally a younger bro etc.

>>61536
Yeah, they're not.
Keep in mind that we saw bro, mom, grandpa and nanna arrive on those meteors. If they were literally the same persons, they'd have to cross into the post-Scratch session at some point, then later cross back again into the pre-Scratch session, which would be needlessly complicated even for Homestuck.
Also, the kids we know would have to go back in time in the post-Scratch universe at a far later point in order to become all those rich famous people and then die.

>>61539

Except Doc Scratch specifically said:

"Though they could not recognize it for the bad omen it was, this session was not the one in which they had been spawned. Such is the symptom of a subtle glitch affecting certain sessions, an error designed to trigger an unfathomable cascade of misfortune throughout paradox space. This glitch is the calling card of the one I serve."

I submit that the swap of the guardians with the players is a constant whenever a session is Scratched and that ultimately leads to Lord English's arrival. The "glitch" is caused by paradox space overwriting a session on top of another though both sessions already paradoxically exist to begin with.

It is entirely plausible that the guardians John cloned were in fact sent into this new universe and the ones that Jane will inevitably create are the original guardians. Meaning Skaia's gates switched the guardians as infants.

We also have no idea how Grandpa got into The Medium and ended up finding Jade's dead Dream self and setting in motion all the events which led to Jade finding Bec.

>>61567
But Doc Scratch isn't in the humans' scratched session, so neither is Lord English.
Which means the guardians weren't swapped between sessions.

>>61567
Actually it looks like both sets of meteor babies originated from the pre-scratch session, somehow duplicated along the way.

>>61567
Yeah I neglected to mention that whole can of worms in my post because it doesn't actually matter here. The fact remains that, say, Jake and Grandpa grew up in different universes. We saw that. So it's extremely unlikely that they're literally the same person, which is what the question was in the first place.

As for the exact mechanics of the guardian swap, I, personally, subscribe to the switch theory as well, because the duplication theory creates a lot of asymmetry between the kids' pair of sessions and the trolls'. But the thing here is that we simply don't know enough yet to be able to determine anything with complete certainty.

>>61571
The switch theory doesn't really work when you consider all the irreversible damage that affected the items sent with the babies. They'd have to alchemise new bunnys, new book and bring back Mutie.

>>61574
Yeah, and considering that Roxy has a perfectly preserved Mutie at hand and Jane even has access to the original Con Air bunny with a convenient source of oil around it, that doesn't sound too unlikely to me.
Hussie even said on his formspring that he's actively trying to obfuscate further plot developments, so this could really go either way. Either the damage to the bunnies is obfuscation, or the fact that they're there is.

>>61578
No no, the I mean the bunny that's supposed to be sent back with Jade. It can't be the detective bunny Jane has without the outfit, since that one lost its leg and stuff. It's a goner.

>>61582
I know which bunny you're talking about. Should be possible to fix that with some alchemy, though. Maybe ||ing or &&ing it with the intact bunny is enough already. The book is the bigger problem, but both the text and the person with the right handwriting will be available in their session, so that should be possible as well.

>>61588
Seems like an awful lot of effort to close some time loops from people who probably aren't aware said time loops occured. Of course, the story certainly provides enough plot devices to make that work, but you kinda have to work around things instead of it happening seemingly by accident, like it usually does.

>>61589
Yeah it's mainly the book thing, as I said. While Jane trying to fix that old bunny does make sense, I can't think of a way Nannasprite would duplicate the thing without knowing what she's doing.
But it's the alternative to the kids' and trolls' sessions to be operating under different rules for no reason, and I like that less than I like this.