Openbound Discussion Thread

It's just such an incredible accomplishment to introduce that many characters and world-concepts in 3 flashes and it was so memorable that people still go nuts over the characters to this day. I can understand taking issue with some of its content, I find Damara's character to be such a waste because she's so INTERESTING if it Weren't For The Racism. But I don't understand people who aren't interested in the sheer insanity of such dense and detailed storytelling, I love that breathless feeling of finding out so many things at once, I think all the characters, far from being 'lame parodies', almost feel unattached from what they're parodying, Porrim and Latula and Kankri in particular feel like they get so well fleshed-out with the brief amount of time we get to spend with them, and even characters like Horuss have so many layers to them.

I feel like maybe I'm not the typical reader though. I tend to enjoy extremely wordy, dense narratives as long as they justify themselves by being interesting and well-thought-out and, as an antipode to Alternia that allows for comparison and contrast, Beforus and its trolls are extremely well-thought-out and interesting to me. The only issue I have is that they could have "done more with it", but that's true of basically any concept this frantic comic introduces.

I've always really liked the gamey sections of homestuck, and openbound was far and away the biggest of these. I think even if you ignore every single one of those ten new characters, there's just a lot of really interesting stuff with the pre-established characters, and it's especially nice additional context for meenah and aranea's characters!

and as has been said, yeah, despite everything the ten new characters did leave a big impact on a lot of people. I feel like getting really interested in the lore of some random fucking guy who doesn't matter is one of the joys of homestuck, because like half the cast doesn't fucking matter (but of course they all matter blah blah blah you understand). and aranea gives you all that lore! it's great. thanks aranea, you fucking nerd

genuinely though, reading the aranea sections was a big highlight of openbound for me. because, you know, context! it's cool seeing these absolute loser dumbasses and then being told why they're so loser and dumbass

i do think there's wasted potential, but like... in a certain way of framing things, that's all of homestuck. homestuck is Ideas and none of them are explored at their most 100% possible fleshed out. and i think that's good, because that'd be not as interesting, and. fans can do the heavy lifting on the stuff they like, and historically we do? like classpecting, idk.

openbound good. sucks a lil bit, really fun

I... may have replayed the 3 "Openbound" walkarounds multiple times. There's honestly something magical about the dream bubbles, and getting to wander through them meeting new trolls? Yes please. Meenah was a thoroughly entertaining guide. By that point I was used to the sheer amount of reading this comic requires, so putting together the history of the Beforan session was enjoyable.

I was not the terminally online type when it was written, so maybe I'm just not seeing the stereotypes behind the characters so much. I watch a YouTube channel called "izzzyzzz" which deals with lot of the web culture stuff I've missed out on. At one point, they covered a crowdfunding scandal involving particularly obnoxious Tumblr celebrity of the kind who gives progressives a bad name - and I went, "Bloody hell, that's Kankri! Only worse."

(And yes, they could have done better with Damara. Her Alternian Ancestor version is an awesome concept: a time-travelling harbinger of chaos and oppression. I didn't retranslate most of OG Damara's Google-translate Japanese, and apparently I was wise not to!)

Say what you will about the tone-deaf Tumblr parodies but the implementation of hashtags in the dialogue was 100% nailed. It's so fun to see random potentially-not-even-there asides, especially when they deliver bonus punchlines. There's a reason I stole it for Befriendus.

I'm not saying it was the INSPIRATION or anything but the closest thing I've seen to it since is in Deltarune where sometimes you'll get a character adding on an aside in smaller text. It's Joke Efficiency. It's elegant.

the secret with Openbound is the same as the secret with Act 6 in general - so much so that, now that I'm typing it out, that could very well have been the point? like, asking that the reader suddenly start caring* about a whole bunch of new characters all at once and challenging them to figure out just what relevance this has to the overarching story being told... great, now I have a whole new thing to think about. thanks, Openbound Discussion Thread

anyway, the secret is that these AREN'T

*a whole bunch of new characters.

LOL. idk what i even pressed on my keyboard to send that early. give me a second to finish my thought haha

Re:jakemorph

I find it very funny that your original post also included an apostrophe in it so when I first read your second reply I was really confused because I read it like "...asking that the reader suddenly start caring* *a whole bunch of new characters. about a whole bunch of new characters all at once..." until I realized you were correcting your sentence fragment at the end.

Anyways, I'm very indifferent on Openbound. I do agree that a lot of the stereotypes have not aged well but this is the one case where the Dancestors' irrelevance to the overarching plot kind of works in its favor I suppose. If I had one personal gripe it's that I wish there was more interaction between each of these characters across the different games. I get that it was probably to limit the scope and workload, but I would have loved to be able to have Dancestors interact with more than just the small handful that appear in the same act. Part 2's Dancestors get it especially rough, since aside from Meenah who obviously gets to interact with everyone, everyone else only really gets to interact with one other Troll who is in the same room as them. Even beyond that though, I would have loved, say, dialogue between Kankri and Meulin, or Cronus and Porrim. Just more scenes with these guys to make the few moments of relevancy they have worthwhile.

oh god you're so right. this is a fucking nightmare. please boil me in oil now, for my transgressions against punctuation, amen and thank you God. let's see if i can finish my thought without fucking things up even worse somehow:

the most common problems people have with the dancestors (primarily "they suck!" or "they're so cool but why not more!") stem from the exact same problems people have historically had with the alpha kids, which is that they don't fully Get that these are just alternate timeline kid versions of characters we already knew from way earlier in the comic. okay, they GET that, but they don't get that an alternate timeline kid version of you is still You. it's not a fundamentally different person. obviously there's a degree of philosophising to be done about what makes a "person" and what constitutes a "different" one, but within Homestuck the point is made pretty clear that alternate timelines should be thought of as extensions of, not deviations from, the alpha. Dirk's personality is an elaboration on what we already knew about Dave's Bro. Jake is a more intimate look into the psyche of Jade's previously enigmatic grandfather. good GOD, is Roxy's arc a continuation of everything we'd come to learn about Rose's Mom...

the Beforans come into this phenomenon at a disadvantage, because we obviously knew a lot less about the Signless and the Disciple after Act 5 than we did after four Acts of John's Nanna. but this leads into what is a secondary but still loadbearing precept to understanding the Point of Openbound, which is that these characters exist to offer insight into the main characters of the story!! to understand why Latula exists at all, you naturally have to take a step back and figure out first why Redglare was ever introduced, and the answer to that, clearly, is to provide a cultural context for Terezi to exist within. to appreciate how the institution of legislaceration shapes Terezi as a person we must have some context for what the institution of legislaceration actually entails, and as such Latula (in all her shapes) must be understood as an extension of Terezi. Aranea is the most overt possible example of this, since Vriska is the troll who is most overtly shaped by her ancestor: in as much as Homestuck is a story about the way adults shape children's lives, exploring what Aranea was like as a teen is just as necessary to understanding Vriska's childhood as Dirk is to Dave's. once you can recognise that it's no coincidence Aranea is the most influential dancestor, you should be able to start figuring out why none of the other dancestors are "coincidences" either.

drives me up the wall when I'm trying to talk about Homestuck's feminist themes re: the trolls (if you know me you know I am trying to talk about this literally every day of the week and year) and referring back to Porrim's statements about the purple-down patriarchy and the other guy hits me with a "well that's just how it worked on Beforus so it doesn't actually apply to Alternia". it's like, what do you think was the author's purpose in including Porrim as a character, or giving her that particular line of dialogue! what do you think was the intention behind including Beforus in the comic at all ?! it all exists for the purpose of elaborating on what has come before! that's how everything works - not just in Homestuck, but in storytelling in general. these are not literal events to be interpreted as the history of a real planet that exists somewhere out in the cosmos, they're a conversation between author and audience, and you got damn beeswax in your ears..........

(CONTINUING ON FROM THE ASTERISK IN MY FIRST POST THIS TIME):

*for a given value of "caring". I don't think Homestuck actually wants you to care about the dancestors all that much, and the fact that people THINK Homestuck wanted us to care about them is another part of the problem. but this requires the reader to understand that we also weren't supposed to "care" all that much about more than 50% of the Alternian trolls, which is a difficult sell to all the Nepeta Boosters and Eridan Stans of the world. I'm sorry.

okay, addendum to an addendum here, I know, I'm a menace. but REAL ones also know that the most important purpose Openbound serves is as an exploration of the human characters' psyches, and nothing actually to do with the trolls at ALL. but that's a whole other thread and I'm not the one to make it

love the posts in here so far! agreed that the hashtags add a pretty great comedic rhythm, and i definitely think the dancestors are an interesting example of the many many ways characters in homestuck reflect each other. i'm realizing now how terezi meeting latula falls into with her general arc of disillusionment with everything she did in act 5... and yeah the aranea/vriska dynamic is incredibly fascinating.

i also think it's interesting how much the 'potential' of the dancestors/beforus has been mentioned. one subtle but striking thing about homestuck to me is how, despite being incredibly long and at times incredibly granular, so much of the comic is out-of-frame - not just specific events but whole entire aspects of the setting like the denizens, horrorterrors, and yeah, beforus! it's a whole society we only ever get glimpses of through the viewpoints of the 12 dancestors, most of whom we also only really get glimpses of. i think it's interesting how mysterious homestuck manages to be, and openbound leaves a lot of interesting details and hanging threads around. there's something so weird and melancholic about it, all these people mostly just going through the motions of stuff that happened uncountably long ago in a world that doesn't even exist anymore, with their lives and world not lost just to them but to us! not to mention how they only still exist because of the horrorterrors, who are themselves a largely unexplained and vaguely horrifying (and terrifying) part of the setting. always lots to think about with this comic

i also think the fact that a lot of the openbound-introduced dancestors are essentially parodies of the post-scratch trolls is pretty interesting when you look at it through the lens of character parallels. you can imagine that if someone like eridan had more self-awareness he might look at cronus and think 'jesus, is that really how i act?' (but of course he doesn't because he sucks) in poking fun at the fandom perceptions of those characters they almost become, like, an incredibly blunt version of that character. horuss cranks all the dumb horse stuff to 11, but he's also essentially a completely hollow person, something that equius kind of shares in how he hollows himself out to worship alternia's hierarchy, sacrificing any character growth he had or could have had in order to fulfill his role as a jokey, static bit player in dying to gamzee.

Love Openbound dearly -- I think the matter of having characters limited to 1 page appearances brought a density out of Hussie's writing that we don't always see when xe has the liberty to stretch characterization over broader stretches of story. Also eternally grateful to Aradia referring to "time" as "a figure of speech" and then doing the double-pistols-and-a-wink... wonderful little joke about "English" that helped me a lot

Probably should've put this image along with the first one? Oh well. Themes are spooky.

one of the things that the dancestors serve to accomplish, IMO, is to reinforce immortality/stagnation horror. these teenagers- young adults, really- have been around for so long it's not even clear that they know how long they've been around. certainly for a very, very long time. but time has not granted them clarity or maturity. latula is still pretending at being a Cool Girl~, cronus is still abusing mituna, aranea is still rambling at anyone she can pay to stand still long enough to listen. whatever changes they've undergone, it's into the worst versions of themselves. and they are stuck, forever, making each other worse. it is a necessary contrast to vriska's speech about dead bait kept on ice for lord english! and is it any wonder that meenah behaves the way she does- that she hits on karkat, a 13-14 year old, that she starts dating (vriska), another 13 year old- when meenah herself is stuck at the end of adolescent development? (not that that's an excuse, but it's fucking interesting!!!)

in a lot of ways the dancestors are a prototype of the epilogues' horror. this group of people who are deeply insular by virtue of the narrative they embody, engaging with the only other people they have, and time is only making things worse and worse for them, transforming them into their worst selves. (points at candy, but you can also apply this to some aspects of meat). of course, it's not quite the same, but it definitely hits enough beats that it feels similar to me.

While I agree that Openbound serves to develop the cast by introducing these foils to them, I do get the impression that everything between the introduction of The Dancestors and Game Over was originally supposed to pan out differently. Why it changed and what was supposed to happen, I don't know.

Re: DirtEqualsJuice What gave you that impression?