Bonus: The Influencers

new kids are nice

小聋虾

EDIT: I forgot to finish my thought that I think there's a decent chance that those other consistencies are an intentional plot element, my bad lmao

Erin Claire

Oh that! Yeah I think that other inconsistencies (like Karkat remembering stuff from the Game Over timeline, possibly the time discrepancy between the Epilogues and HS^2's placement of the car ride with Harry and John/June) but yeah the thing with Gamzee being dropped makes more sense as a straight-up continuity error that got a little catch-up here.

Erin Claire

i love how HomeStuck always keeps me on my toes on simple features such as, understanding what the fuck the characters are saying

L0n3 Duo

this was really cool! i love these new kids, thank you <3

Chrysanthemum

i like these designs and the story but Oh God the Quirks Hurt My Soul

Walking Zero

I'm excited to see where this one goes! I'm not really sold on these characters yet (although I think the designs are pretty cute, and it's fun that I totally guessed wrong about who had which pronouns, and I'm happy every time there's a nonbinary human character), but the idea of hearing more about the rebellion from the point of view of people who aren't the original kids is very tantalizing.

Corv Leary

it isn't letting me access the bonus upd8. plz help :(

Honestly it feels very Homestuck to me. A random tangent to side characters you've never heard of before.

Malcolm

I immediately hate Avril and Imode on typing quirk alone. Damn Earth C Millenials!

Darugo Sueño

Imode Kurita is named after Shigetaka Kurita, who developed our modern emoji set for the i-mode operating system. Avril Thorpe comes from the octothorpe (the hashtag shape), and bafflingly, Avril Lavigne. I don't get WHY Avril Lavigne, but his outfit is one of her looks down to the red and black striped tie, so apparently that's the reference. I thought Silas P. Beauregarde III was a reference to Silas Chandler and P. Beauregarde. Silas Chandler was a slave who fought for the confederates civil war and was considered a confederate hero until his descendants were all "He was literally a slave, dude, not a soldier", and P. Beauregarde was a confederate general who switched to being a civil rights activist later in life. (And then Silas is dressed like a 1930s reporter, which is the III because 1930s are well after the 1860s), and I was starting to figure out the potential Implications of Silas - who was openly supportive of Gamzee initially - being named after people on the bad side of a civil war who were later thought of as actually cool until a friend on the "commentary" patreon tier told me the truth and then I realized I'd wasted twenty minutes of googling and hung out on LoSaD for a while before deciding that at least I'd learned about two interesting historical figures.

Daniel Kelly

[minor spoilers for hs^2] when vriska vriska and tav take gamzees body to the school and set off the sprinklers, they leave him on the floor and then run into the janitors closet; later when we see them in the closet again gamzee is with them. in this update they show that vrissy went out and dragged him back in. me and my friends had starting to assume that this, and a couple of other small inconsistencies, were part of the story in someway. instead it just showed that they kinda just forgot and wrote in an explanation later.

chase

Also @chase what continuity error are you talking about? I just re-read through the update and I didn't catch anything

Erin Claire

yeah I agree this wasn't very good. not horrible or anything, but it does a bad job at selling us on the characters or the premise of this side-story, and the meta stuff serves to hurt the story rather than help it (as it has in most of The Epilogues and HS^2 so far). It also just kind of indefinably doesn't feel very Homestuck in a way that everything else in HS^2 has, including new side characters like Swifer. I hope future entries in this plot line are of higher quality.

Erin Claire

I think this was the first hs^2 update ive been disappointed by. I'm not at all interested in any of the characters or scenarios introduced and I think the dialog isn't up to par with what we've been getting. I would probably just ignore it if we didn't also get confirmation that something that happens early in hs^2 wasn't intentionally written but was just a glaring continuity error. There's always the chance that a future chapter will paint a new light on everything we've seen so far, but at face value this is just real letdown.

chase

Okay I'm seeing those now! Sorry I missed them before

Erin Claire

They retweeted some ways to support yesterday.

This was everything I needed today

Paisley Dodge

Hey, I just wanted to ask that maybe the WP team consider tweeting in support of the protests going on in minneapolis right now? It just feels kinda shitty to ignore it with such a big following on twitter, especially because that account has gotten political before with its support of the Bernie campaign. I know posting isn't the be-all end-all, I just think it could be really nice to see some solidarity with fans of color, especially given HS own often questionable history dealing with race in the text.

Erin Claire

Three peeps who had text, of all people. A close friend of harry anderson, given visage and purpose. I am sooo curious what this means...... Also i think its obvious they go for it cause the media starts turning against Jane Crocker.

lordoffantasy