Homestuck/Headscratchers/Resolved

• This has been bothering the dickens out of me for forever and a half now. How in the name of karkat does the reproduction-via-filling-buckets-thing work? I mean I know the basic mechanics, but how they get the...'genetic material' to put in the bucket? I've had a couple theories, and they're all equally disgusting.
  • Either similar to human reproductive fluids or as is suggested by some others, a gland that is stimulated by feelings of <3 or <3< that then stimulates them to produce some genetic material that they can then secrete in some fashion, whether from some orifice or puking into the bucket.
    • The first one makes more sense however in light of the fact that Trolls at one point did sexually reproduce.
      • Um, where was that ever said?
      • Word of God. It presumed by many to have been the case in the Pre-Scratch Troll Universe.
  • My own hypothesis is that all trolls - all trolls, with the females' kept further up - have two retractable penises: one locks to another troll's like Na'vi tendrils to produce love slop, and the other is bayonetted like some worms' to cut, and secretes a chemical that combines with the blood to produce hate slop. Makes as much sense as anything.
  • Andrew is pointedly avoiding any detailed explanation for now, simply because he's a Trolling Creator. In light of various comments he's made though, Troll genders are vestigal, and the same processes that generate genetic material in humans likely occur in trolls, or similar ones at least.
  • It Isn't unreasonable to think <3< mating involves cutting each other...

• Okay, I don't get the whole deal about Terezi trying to kill John. In Vriska's case, it was a brilliant gambit to get him to the God Tiers, alright, I know. But I don't understand why early on, Terezi tries to get him slaughtered by the custodian, only stopped by futureDave's intervention. This leads to the creation of Davesprite and is some sort of stable time loop, obviously, but why did she even attempt it? Was there a reason apart from being a huge dick? Did I miss something? Did she know about it from Dave? Or maybe from Karkat?
  • This point is probably quite old, but I'll answer it anyway. Terezi KNOWS he won't die, because she can see his future. Trying to manipulate him into getting killed was a futile act of rebellion against predestination, a way of expressing her frustration. She really didn't expect anything to come of it.
  • Alternately, as the Seer of Mind, she recognised it was needed that the timeline split as to make sure Cal wasn't prototyped. By having John die, Dave would assume that's why the timeline broke down and fix that, and while he's there fix up the whole Calsprite fiasco. It has been established this sort of planning is within her range...
    • Given her pretty much nonchalance afterwards, this seems to be a likely possibility. However she was unaware of Cal's nature until discussing it in dreams with everyone, and it remains to be seen if she can extrapolate on things she doesn't directly know about.
      • It could have been less "Cal can't be prototyped here, because we need him for OUR First Guardian" and more "if the Knight of Time doesn't get an articulate, helpful sprite, things are going to go badly for everyone," though. Calsprite was a bad idea for all sorts of reasons that had nothing to do with Doc Scratch, especially considering that Dave's kernalsprite already had one distinctly unhelpful prototyping in place.
        • Except alt!Dave was going perfectly well with Calsprite. Sure, it was a pain, but he was managing fine. The reason he had to reset was because John (and presumably Jade) were dead, caused by Terezi. If she hadn't done so, everything would have been fine, with the exception of Doc Scratch not being made. (And even then, there's Appearifier shenanigans to deal with that.)
          • Yes, but Davesprite is vitally helpful in that he helped delay Jack for as long as possible (until he acquired Bec's power) and console Jadesprite into actually doing something useful. However, this troper has a theory: there seems to be some communication between the living and the dead going on at this point. Doomed Timeline John died not just to prevent Cal from being prototyped, but also so that he could give the rest of the party some vital information about the Denizens; that they are not merely final bosses to be destroyed, but have some other purpose.
    • In a nutshell, this is how things had to happen. Terezi may have known this or not; she could've just been impulsive, using her Mind powers, or just logic based on viewing Dave's future, it's never stated one way or the other.

• If Derse's people are the bad guys who want the universe not to be created, why do half of the players dream selves inhabit it? How can they live their peacefully and safely when they are fighting against it's people? Also, it has been explicitly shown (in the prison scene) that the black Imps work for Derse. I infer from this that the white Imps work for Prospit. If that is true, why do they attack the players? Derse's Purpose has been stated as "Destruction", and Prospit fights against them, so why would they have their creatures attack the players, who are trying to fight Derse's army? For that matter, since Derse and Prospit are (or I guess it's "were" now) at war, how was the mail lady, a citizen of Prospit, even allowed on Derse in the first place?
  • There are no black and white imps. Those are Shale imps and Chalk imps. Their color is only determined by the type of resource they are associated with and the planet they inhabit, not the kingdom they are alligned with.
  • Hussie explained on his Formspring that the Derse dreamers are safe because the war against Prospit has very strict rules, one of which is that you don't attack Derse dreamers on Derse's moon. To extend the chess metaphor, doing so would be like having a pawn jump across the board and capture the king on the first move.
    • The colour of the imps don't have to do with which kingdom they work for, simply what "materials" they're themed after. (John's world has Tar as a theme, so his are black and tarry, Rose's is Chalk, so they're white like chalk).
    • So do all imps, regardless of color, work for Derse? Because as I said, we know the black tarry ones do at least.
    • Possibly, but it's impossible to confirm unless we see more. However, Dave has Amber imps (Yellow, possibly Prospit under your interpertation), and Jade has Uranium imps (Dark Green, which doesn't match with either kingdom), so unless there's two unknown kingdoms, it's unlikely the imps correspond with the kingdom's.
    • e: I'm an idiot with a poor computer. In the Act 4 walkaround, it's explicitly stated that the Denizens (who make and control the underlings) were "commissioned" by Derse.
      • Derse creates the Underlings and Denizens as foils to Skaia bringing in the players. All Underlings serve Derse.
      • And to be really fair, my understanding is that Derse just wants to conquer Prospit and prevent the destruction of Skaia through the creation of the new universe. That's why the denizens ask to be taken along to the new universe, they don't have anything particularly against it, they just want to survive. The reason why Jack is so horrible is he wants to destroy everything, which is at odds with what the other Dersites want.

• Humans don't prototype at all, Citizens of Derse and Prospit don't prototype unless they put on the ring, and the Imps and other creatures prototype automatically as the sprites enter the medium. What is the mechanic behind this? What is the ratio of power gained by a generic automatic prototyping creature receiving a transformation to one gained by someone wearing the ring? Would other creatures in the medium that aren't from Derse/Prospit (Like the Salamanders) transform if they put on the ring? What determines which creatures automatically change with the introduction of a new sprite to the medium and which ones stay the same? How powerful will the remaining Imps be now that they've got the Bec prototype?
  • Well, we know the answer to the last question. The imps have the ability to constantly teleport, it seems, but only the basic stuff, nothing fancy like we've seen Becquerel do.
    • • They seem to be able to avoid damage forever -- or until Bec does something about it -- so... I guess powerful enough?
      • Also, you have the option of fighting one as John in one of the flash games. It did take mild damage from the hammer, and could be killed, but it was a painfully slow process and it dished out heavy damage to heir-transparent John. So they're pretty nasty, but they at least can be damaged by kids with hammers.
        • Though John's ability to freeze it in time rendered the fight trivial.
    • In response to the main question, most likely only Dersites and Prospitians are affected by the ring and prototypings. Underlings are basically a different form of Dersite and have been seen on Derse. Players can't be affected though because that would be a Game Breaker.

• Why was Jack so powerful when he put on the ring? He was able to kill the king with ease, even though the king had the same powers. And how exactly does the prototyping power work? It seems to depend mostly on the shape of the object that was prototyped and not its traits (The powers from the stuffed princess squid didn't give "Stuffed tentacles", they just gave tentacles) yet prototyping with Bec gave jack his innate god powers instead of just dog powers.
  • Surprise. The Black King wouldn't be expecting his own Archagent, armed with his Queen's powers and prototypings, to show up on the Battlefield and attack him. Also, the first thing Jack did was to rob BK of his own prototyping, simultaneously nulling his height advantage.
    • As far as the prototyping thing: Remember that the rings/scepters/underlings aren't prototyped from the Harlequin or Jaspers or anything else directly; they are prototyped from the Kernel, when it hatches. I suspect that the kernelsprite deals more with perception than actuality, and thus if Rose thinks of the doll as "eldritch princess" rather than "toy that has a dress and looks like it has tentacles", the kernelsprite registers its eldritchness and its princesshood. Likewise with the Harlequin Doll, rather than "mannequin with an odd hat". And so on.

• • The Battlefield. Before prototyping, it was one dimensional (Each king had only one choice where to move on their turns). With one prototyping, it became 2-dimensional, an actual chessboard. With a second prototyping, it became a 3 dimensional cube. With the 3rd it became a sphere where battles are real time instead of turn based, thus 4th dimensional. We don't know what jades entrance has done to the battlefield yet, but one can assume it sets in motion Skaia’s purpose of transformation into a universe (which is 5th dimensional). So my question is, how did the troll sessions game board evolve? Did it become vastly more complicated, or did each entrance into the medium increase its complexity a fraction of how much each human kids entrance into the medium did? I suppose there are such things as fractions of dimensions...
    • Your guess is as good as anyone's, provided their name isn't Andrew Hussie. This is the sort of thing Hussie likes to not drop hints about and make everybody defecate their trousers when he does reveal it.
    • Incidentally, it's not dimensionality; there's no indication that the cube was turn-based. It's all about complexity. By the by, on what grounds is a universe five-dimensional? Not that it's relevant, because Skaia isn't the Genesis Frog.
      • >Agreed about the complexity. To answer the question, if one moved in another dimension, outside of our 3/4-if-you-count-time dimensions, you might presumably find yourself in a separate universe. a bunch of infinitely long 1D lines form an infinite 2D plane, a bunch of infinite 2D planes form an infinite (universe-sized) cube, a bunch of cubes form.... multiple universes?
        • >>The internet is a series of cubes
      • >Also, Skaia does need to reach its "final" prototyped form in order to create the universe.
      • Skaia's final form is a planet with a ring, which brings height into the mix and would make flying combat more important, adding another dimension

• • Prospit and Derse existed when Skaia was still the 1 dimensional game of king pieces moving in circles. Who was controlling those pieces? Were they controlling themselves? Were Derse and Prospit fighting before Skaia started evolving? Or have I got this wrong and Prospit/Derse didn't appear until Skaia prototyped the third time (i.e. When the pieces had become complicated enough to be considered sentient beings)? That would mean that jades dream self exists in the future after at least 3 prototypings.
    • The audience is never really told explicitly whether the dimension shenanigans is something actually happening or a symbolysm of how everything gets more and more complicated with all the prototypings going on.
    • This ^[dead link] is how it looks after Jade's entry, by the way.
      • Skaia and The Elder Gods are in a sense, the ones playing the game. They advise the royals on each side and are the main factions controlling the game. Derse and Prospit however exist, albeit in a time shenaniganry way. Look at it this way, WV? has lived on Skaia for years despite that form of Skaia having only existed for a few hours. Weird Time Shit abounds in Homestuck.

• Why play the game at all? Who cares which color people win? And from what the trolls say, there are infinite skaias, each created when someone plays the game,so who cares if this one falls? And what is the purpose of skaia? It says it holds special power or something, but as I said before, it also says there are infinite of them, which infinitely dilutes any special power it holds. It seems it's only purpose is to be a game, yet in trying to accomplish that, it destroys planets every time someone plays. For that matter, why protect the planet that destroyed yours? By opening up all those portals to defend itself from the meteors, it ended up destroying earth. Why have none of the kids made reference to the fact that skaia destroyed their planet? they seem to be taking the destruction of their planet pretty well. Why did none of them bat an eye at in the beginning when they st~arted playing S Burb and discovered that the game warped reality in the way that you could pick up physical objects with the click of a mouse? And finally, what is the point of winning? The trolls won, but now they're just stranded on a meteor for the rest of their lives. They didn't win anything!
  • Well, for one thing, keep in mind that the trolls have explicitly said that the four kids screwing up as badly as they did (ie, helping Jack Noir become the main villain and gain Bec's powers) ISN'T nearly as important as what's GOING to happen AFTER they lose. A chain of events has been set in motion that goes far beyond their game, and affects everyone else's as well. The reason the trolls ARE on the asteroid in the first place is BECAUSE the kids screwed up - ie, it's not the default "victory" condition, but the place they retreated to after everything got screwed up. So while there are countless versions of Skaia, EVERY version is in jeopardy because of the mistakes the kids (mostly Jade) made. So their game already matters far more than the average game does, and the default victory state DOESN'T consist of being trapped in an asteroid base forever.
  • Second, we technically DON'T care which color people win, because we've already been told the white side ALWAYS loses. Even in games where the players win, white loses. As far as we know, there is no combination of actions that can result in white winning. So the goal of the quest the kids are being forced into isn't "help white win" as much as it is "defeat black".
  • Thirdly, in the same vein, the kids aren't necessarily fighting to protect Skaia, either. What they're fighting for is to STOP the forces of darkness from controlling it (and potentially using the power it has been described as possessing for nefarious purposes). The distinction may be a bit subtle, but it can basically boil down to hating Skaia and everything it represents, but still not being willing to let the forces of evil get their paws on it.(Although protecting the source of "unlimited creative potential" for creativity's sake still seems pretty important.)
  • Fourth, we have absolutely no idea of how Skaia (as an individual existence or as the sum total of multiple versions) relates to the metaphysical nature of reality. While whether or not Skaia is saved or not (ie, whether the specific players win or lose) doesn't seem to matter on an individual basis (since as the trolls imply, countless numbers of players lose and leave their private universes as blank ruins), it's entirely possible than the sum total DOES matter (ie, if more games are won than lost, the universe as a whole evolves to a higher plane, or if more games are lost than won, then the universe is condemned to an even darker fate). Worse, since the current failure of the kids is affecting OTHER people's games, it essentially means that the entire structure and design of reality is fraying. For all we know, them screwing up winds up destroying the entire multiverse.
  • Fifth, it's been implied that if any given set of players win, then life will eventually be restored on their home planet and civilization will ultimately rebuild. So at least part of the motivation is "leave Earth a charred, lifeless husk or win the game and let life bloom anew". There's even enough evidence in the game to imply that this might not be the first game that's been played on Earth. In addition, winning the game results in the birth of a new universe with life (the troll's session resulted in the creation of the Earth universe), and which in the intended ending the players are allowed to enter at a time by which sentient life has evolved (as the trolls were about to do right before the scratch).
  • Sixth, while we can say Skaia destroys a planet every time the game is played, there's a flip-side to that argument. Firstly, none of the kids (or their "family") would have existed in the first place without Skaia (the entire stable time loop thing). Secondly, there've been hints that the purpose of Skaia is to test... something. It's possible that what Skaia is testing for has something to do with the nature of the planets it affects (meaning it serves some sort of necessary purpose keeping the universe "pure", like some kind of cosmic recycler), but it's also possible that it's preparing the players for some cosmic fate outside of the game. (perhaps in the new universe?)
  • As to why the kids are taking the destruction of Earth fairly well, it's worth noting that most of them seem like fairly solitary individuals (ie, don't have a lot of friends outside of each other), and none of them really seem to have much family (ie, outside of their own guardians). So if everyone they've ever really cared about is currently still alive and with them (and in Rose's case, she's actually gotten Jasper's BACK), the fact that everyone else is pretty much doomed may not bother them as much as it otherwise might. Not to mention the fact that a) they're getting so much information and new experience dumped on them that we could considered them too overwhelmed to ever really sit down and considered the deeper ramifications of things, and b) these are 13 year old kids, who aren't necessarily all that introspective. Add in the fact that John clearly doesn't seem to really think about the consequences of any action (his own or other people's), and Dave and Rose are both the type who would never willingly show emotion even if they WERE upset, so it's not like a recipe for profound emotional outbursts or displays regardless of how justified it might be.
  • Finally, the alternative to playing seems to be eventually getting murdered by shadowy forces of darkness, so even apart from the metaphysical questions, "not being dead" sounds like a pretty good prize to me - certainly one worth fighting for. No matter how "futile" fighting might be, it's still preferable to not doing anything and being trapped in non-reality until something slits your throat in your sleep. So even if the kids were the most cynical and jaded individuals ever to walk the Earth, with absolutely no hope of any sort of victory or achievement, they'd still potentially have motivation to keep fighting.
    • And ALL of the above rides on the trolls telling the truth 100% of the time when they explain things, which not only implies that they're not lying, but also that THEY know what's going on. They could easily be confused, misinformed, or lying themselves, meaning our understanding of what's really going on isn't entirely accurate right now.
    • I'm so glad you actually checked this page, and even more estatic that you had the answers. All of this was very informative. I love Homestuck as a source of imagination and inspiration dearly (Otherwise I wouldn't have cared enough to be perturbed for not knowing these things). I was really dreading someone just writing "IT'S JUST A COMIC HUR DURP YER SUCH A NUURRRD!" and never actually getting an answer. But I digress, what also bothered me was that many obvious questions weren't even referenced. If you remember "Jimmy Neutron" you know how they would constantly go into space without any oxygen. This didn't bother me as much because it was just a kids show, but it was very satisfying when they at least referenced it in one episode, even though they didn't actually explain it. Which brings me to the one question you didn't answer: Why were the kids completely ambivilant about the fact that "S Burb" warps reality? For the most part, were expected this is an Earth very like our own, yet the kids act as though being able to control the physical world with the click of the mouse is absolutly un-extaordinary... Ordinary... Obviously not the reaction anyone on our earth would ever give to a computer game that could do such things. All I ask for is consistancy or reference. For the most part, I consider this a normal earth (with the exception of skaia and the capatcha-cards) But the absence of awe towards Sburb makes me think that on this earth, all computer games can warp reality to a degree, but that seems like important setting information that would be stated explicitly. It would also be okay if one of the characters at least said something like "You know, nothing would suprise me now, but why didn't we bat an eye in the beggining when we discovered sburb clients could pick up physical objects with their mouse? Well who cares, were probably just too awesome to care, lets move on.", because than at least I'd know this wasn't a completely forgotten story point.
      • Well, given that they can "Captchalogue" physical objects in some sort of data/card-driven system, then send them out flying at ludicrous speeds, a game like Sburb would seem at first like a mere advance in technology, wouldn't it?
        • I can accept it as the truth if you say so. Be ready to answer more questions if I have them. And I will have them... Unless, you know, nothing bugs me about again, than I won't have questions. anyway, good luck.
      • One last point-- it's been heavily implied that the destruction of Earth was inevitable, whether the kids played the game or not. But it's also implied that the kids PLAYING the game was inevitable due to the stable time loop-- the kids were BROUGHT to Earth as infants by meteors sent by the Reckoning-- and all the meteors that destroy Earth when S Burb is released also arrive as a result of the Reckoning. But here's the simple point: Even before Jade boots up her client copy, which she still hasn't done, there is a meteor on course for her island. Wouldn't you play the game, knowing that?
  • Weighing in here in the future; yes You Can't Fight Fate. The Kids had no choice but to play the game or they would have died. The game is literally the entire reason for their existance. Also, every player gets superpowers and it creates a new universe for them to tool around being gods in, it's worth it.

• How is Dave back on his own planet after entering the fifth gate? According to the progression of gates he should have gone to the Land of Wind and Shade.
  • Maybe it's something about these "return node" things?
    • Think about this: where is the next place he would progress to after his own world? Jade's world. Jade is dead in the future and never entered the incinosphere, hence there is nowhere for him to progress, hence he just keeps returning to his own world each time he tries to progress, hence his resignation to the fact that they have lost at Sburb and cannot possibly win with them dead.
      • Wasn't it explained that if the player of the world you were entering hadn't built up to your gate you'd simply fall to your death?
  • Since there are four participants and it's on a cycle, we're working with modulo 4 arithmetic. 5 modulo 4 is 1, so logically Dave's fifth gate would send him to the same place his first gate did.
  • Actually, a diagram was drawn at one point, with where the different gates leads to. Simply put, every second gate, including the 5th gate, will return you to your own planet.
    • This diagram, perhaps? Though I honestly can't make heads or tails of it, the above explanation seems to be correct.
  • The answer Hussie gave was that because Jade's land never appeared, Dave never could advance in the chain, because the chain doesn't let you go backwards.

• Why, exactly, was Bro fighting Dave? I mean, it was awesome and all, but Bro seems to be a pretty chill dude.
  • The two fought because they both knew it would be awesome. That is all.
    • It seemed obvious to me that Bro has essentially acted as a rival/foil to Dave their entire lives solely to harden Dave for the trials he was eventually going to face (ALL of the Guardians seem to know more about the nature of the game than the kids do). Basically, while Dave may never be good enough to beat Bro, trying to become good enough to beat Bro has made Dave capable of fighting almost everyone ELSE. Of all the kids, Dave is BY FAR the most equipped to both deal with physical threats and stay cool under pressure.
      • Um. Cough Cough ROSE Cough Cough. >_> But yes, point stands other than that 'highly' debatable statement.
      • Why do the Guardians seem to know so much? They were made as alternates in case a scratch happened. Like on Alternia. In fact, judging by the Guardian's sequence breaking-ness, the game has already been scratched, and that hasn't worked.
        • As of recent events, (their reactions to seeing their guardians dead), this statement has become slightly less debatable in the "staying cool under pressure" department. Whether that's good or bad remains to be seen, though it seems to be leaning toward the latter.
  • In story it parallels the other guardian strifes. And brothers always fight between themselves, but they shrug it off and are bros. That's just how it is.

• If Snowman is an alternate Black Queen, why didn't Jack Noir destroy the universe when he killed the Queen? This seems important.
  • The setting went from a pool game to a chess game. You can kill the queen in chess without ending the game. No idea about the king, though.
    • The fact that Jack becomes the ACE shows that the game has shifted from chess to cards. The Ace logically trumps the King and Queen. God help us if the JOKER appears.
      • Wouldn't that be John?
        • The Joker is Nanna
        • its her.
        • Because she sure is dressed for the part.
        • Honk!
    • Nope.
      • Oh crap, does this mean that GAMZEE's going to have to kill Jack? or do you think that the game will change again before that happens?
  • The universe dying along with Snowman is a property unique to her, not a trait of the Black Queen across all Sburb sessions. The recap explains that after BQ was exiled in the trolls' session, she joined The Felt and "assumed special powers that make her highly inadvisable to kill".
    • It's because in a sense she is the Universe, or at least has been imbued with god like power over space.
  • Guys, each member of The Felt is a different ball in pool. Snowman is the eight ball. If you sink the eight ball before the right time, the game ends. If you kill Snowman before the right time, the universe ends. Although, with Doc Scratch telling Slick to kill her, I think the intention is for him to kill her and end the universe to bring Lord English into it.
    • So perhaps something different happens if she is killed after all the other members of The Felt go down. But is that good or bad?
      • If you sink the 8-ball, the game ends, period. If you do it before sinking all of your balls (the first ball you sink, solid or striped, is the kind of ball you want to sink), you lose. If you do it after sinking all of your balls, you win.

• During [S]Descend, why is there a Seppucrow as opposed to Davesprite, and why does Dave not have all his pimped gear? Was that just a flashback?
  • Yeah, that was a flashback to the moment Dave entered. Which was alluded to in the comic but not yet shown until this moment.
    • Mostly because people have been saying ever since Dave entered the Medium and we didn't get to see exactly how it happened "Man, are we ever going to see it?", and AH has been saying ever since "We'll see it eventually". Descend basically started out as a flashback to that point, then skipped forward showing us other things that have happened off-camera that we never saw, until reaching the present and pretty much showing just how screwed the universe is now that Jack has become an "Ace".

• Why do the kids (and trolls) only refer to each other by their real names after they've been introduced? There's the obvious meta-reason (they haven't been named by the readers yet), but as for in-story it makes no sense.
  • You have answered your own question. Referring to them by name is impossible when they don't actually have names yet.
  • Besides, it's also for ease of typing. It's a lot faster to type CG instead of Karkat.
    • It also might be that as they grow closer, they feel like they can use each others names more instead of their screenames. After all, it was just a fun little game, but then it turned into life and death.
  • For the most part, at least early on, we see the kids become introduced to the trolls' names. The way that addressing people by name works actually makes more sense with interactions between the kids and the trolls than within the kids or within the trolls.

• I don't see how Jade turned Jack into a Game Breaking Bug. From what I could see everything she did was within the game's rules.
  • She (inadvertently) supplied Jack with a weapon (the Bunny) that was strong enough to allow him to kill the Black Queen, take her ring, and just generally screw thing up. It was within the "rules" (what little rules Sburb has), but it seems fairly obvious that Jack wasn't supposed to be able to do that.
    • But both time travel and psychic powers don't seem to bother the game, it even seems to encourage those, so the Bunny came about normally. And there is nothing to show that any of the characters going crazy and killing the Queen is out of the ordinary, there are no other games besides the Trolls to confirm that. And to get really technical, Jack is still winning it for the evil team, just in an incredibly violent roundabout way.
    • It IS out of the ordinary. Jack Noir is a game mechanic that provides the players with a way to get at the Black Queen and take her out of the way early on, but since HE gets the ring in the kids session, his ambition, which normally is a good thing for the players, is turned against them. Basically, Jack is "programmed" to be ambitious, and giving him too much power has derailed the game from its intended path. It's pretty obvious too, now that he's gone and killed the two "final bosses" the kids would've had to fight.
      • Just a digression, I had fallen under the impression that teaming up with Noir to kill the Black Queen wasn't supposed to happen either, it just wasn't quite as catastrophic as the stuff the kids have done. Has Hussie confirmed otherwise?
    • In short, the game is supposed to conclude when the players either kill or exile the two final bosses or die. But now that the two final bosses are already dead, and the planet that becomes the next universe is severely damaged, how can they win?
    • Also, keep in mind that we're calling this a bug. Nobody in-universe, Troll human or otherwise, has referred to it as a bug, just a fuckup. This game sure seems sadistic enough to include things the players can do to make it impossible. The fact that you can push a box into a corner in Sokoban and make the game unwinnable makes it harder, but it's certainly not a "bug". In fact, I think that's exactly the right analogy to use, except that it's a lot harder for anyone looking to tell what's really "in a corner" in Sburb because the rules are so much more complicated.
    • But if you push a box into a corner in Sokoban, you can just restart the level.
      • You can do the same in Sburb. all it takes is a scratch
      • And in Sburb, you can rewind time. But if it didn't plan for you to do so, you're still doomed.
      • Was it the narrator who called Jack rising to power an "unexpected element" or something like that?
        • Dude, Sburb is all about emergent behaviors.
  • Jack getting the bunny didn't create a bug; even Jack getting Bec's powers didn't create a bug. The bug was intentionally brought about by the kids and trolls in order to shift Jack into the trolls session, using means that have yet to be explained.
    • The "bug" which everyone in-game calls The Scratch is essentially Bec Noir, using his newfound powers, creating an explosion big enough to open a portal from the kids' session into the trolls' session. He emerges into the trolls' universe right after the trolls create the kids' universe, forcing the trolls to escape and letting the kids' Noir destroy the trolls' session. So no, it isn't anything anyone would want to bring about intentionally.
  • Probably the best way to think about is to look at the times that Dave plays Bro's Xbox, and the skater gets his torso lodged in a pole or a wall or something, and Dave has to reset. Neat foreshadowing.
  • Jade gave John the bunny as part of a paradox. However, the problem with this is that Sburb not only regularly deals with paradoxes, it USES them to advance the game. So why are the paradoxes in this session damaging it instead of helping? It's now been explained that the whole sequence of events that screwed up the kid's game are the growths of a temporal cancer given to the kid's universe (and by extension their session) by the trolls. Basically it's all Karkat's fault.
    • Less basically, when Karkat never found the last frog to sequence Bilious Slick's DNA properly, it caused a cascade of events that would eventually prevent the players from winning. The cancer itself was not The Tumor, not any one other event or thing, but the the various mishaps in the session were the symptoms. Bec being prototyped, Jack getting the bunny, the Prospit Mailwoman taking on her quest and the whole line of events was the cancer itself. The end result was Bec Noir(the cancer) finally killing Bilious Slick(the host). The Scratch was supposed to be a sort of chemotherapy, to continue the metaphor, that would give the players a second chance.
  • It's actually really simple. The Bunny was created in B2, in order to ensure that B2 would exist- if Jack hadn't used the Bunny to break the B1 session, there would be no Scratch and no B2 universe to create it in. While the existence of the Bunny itself doesn't determine whether the session fails or not, using an item that hasn't been created is a paradox, and cheating the paradox is cheating Paradox Space- and in effect, the game. For all we know, Jack using the Bunny was, in fact, intended all along to ensure the kids would win by way of the B2 session; the fact that it initially is detrimental to the game is just punishment for attempting to cheat the game.

• Wait, when did the Vast Glub go off??
  • You're assuming they're showing everything in order. We're still waiting for that to be shown
  • Considering Feferi was the one stopping it from happening, it could be assumed that it would be after she entered her first gate. Though it begs the question why they didn't just have her leave last.
  • There is basically no way for the chronology to work out such that Feferi was not present during the Glub. She had to prototype her Lusus before entering, remember? It can't have happened after she entered. So either she herself is immune to it somehow (given that it's from her lusus perhaps?), or being in the "eye of the storm" somehow saved her.
  • Feferi has a higher position on the hemospectrum, so she is less affected by it. She also got in before him. Less exposure time plus less effects equals not much hurt. More of both equals...
    • Well given that the Vast Glub is explicitly described as something that kills every troll in the galaxy, SOME sleight-of-hand would be necessary for Feferi to survive it.
    • It wasn't necessarily the Vast Glub. Seeing as only Sollux was affected it could be the kind that only affects the psychically inclined.
    • It was the Vast Glub. That's even what Andrew referred to it as. (And the whole point of the Vast Glub being brought into the story was as a plot device to wipe out all the adult trolls outside of the homeworld. It wouldn't be brought up just to never be used.)
    • And it's now been explained: whether or not one dies from the Glub apparently has to do with the length of exposure. Sollux basically sacrificed himself to make sure Feferi got in before the Glub killed her. (Presumably the psychic effect still lingers even after her lusus dies.)
    • Did Andrew refer to it as the Vast Glub in formspring or something? I don't remember that ever happening. Also, if you take a look at the double reacharound chain, it is indeed Sollux who is supposed to be brought in by Karkat, making him the last one outside of the game.
    • It was also explicitly stated by Eridan that high-bloods can survive exposure to the Glub that would kill lowbloods. That's the reason he considered it a viable way to wipe out the land-dwellers. Sollux's blood color is quite low, and Feferi's is as high as it gets. So even though Feferi may have been present during the Glub, it naturally would have taken a lot more for her to die than Sollux.
  • We see Sollux die here, by the way.
    • It merely says "the glub". If you remember the explanation, if Feferi's lusus speaks above a whisper, then low bloods are affected. If it's a shout (aka the Vast Glub) then all Trolls in existence are killed. Since it was not declared a Vast Glub and simply a Glub, it makes sense since Sollux IS on the lower end of the hemospectrum.
    • As mentioned above, the purpose of the Vast Glub going off was to kill every troll in the galaxy (simple meteors wouldn't work since most of the trolls are offworld). It WAS the Vast Glub and Hussie has said that Feferi (and possibly the Troll Empress) share blood color with Gl'bgolyb.

• Taking in account the spectrum of troll relationships, does ACT 5 ACT 2 count as Ho Yay? Or Foe Yay, maybe?
  • What?
  • In any other comic, Ho Yay, and given the relationship and expression here, seemingly Foe Yay. However, it's actually neither. I think.
    • Karkat's <3< for John is just Foe Yay from his perspective but also Ho Yay for John because they're both guys, which Karkat doesn't care about.

• Equius's dreamself has broken glasses. The broken horn is understandable, almost, but why the glasses?
  • Perhaps he's never once been able to put a pair of glasses on without cracking them as he picked them up, and as a result even in his dreams he just can't imagine what it's like to see through a pair of shades with solid lenses.

• When Grandpa claims Dream Jade's body and stuffs it, the narration refers to "A family tradition, honored." What family? The only other instance of this "tradition" that we've seen is Jade stuffing Grandpa, which from his point of view hasn't happened yet. (And, I suppose, we see taxidermy Halley, but again, that would have had to be Grandpa who did it, considering that they left home together when Grandpa was thirteen.) Is this something from the Crocker-Sassacre family? Or has Grandpa just decided that it's a family tradition when really it's just something he does?
  • I imagine that, if one went to his former home and looked hard enough, one would find a stuffed Colonel with a party hat majestically stitched to his head.
  • If you imagine that someone else (Betty Crocker?) stuffed Halley, it does fall into a certain sense. His guardian was stuffed, and he sort of rolled from there.
  • I think it's just a morbid little joke on Hussie's part. Because really, how is this important?
    • It turns out, it's quite important! Jade needs another Jade to prototype her kernelsprite!
  • its something about a paradox: this implies that he knows that he will be stuffed after he dies, creating a "paradoxical famility tradition" he dies, jade stuffs him, and in return he stuffs jade, before that (not shown) she finds her own dreamself stuffed, and then then granpa dies, jade stuffs him and so on.

• If this is Jack we see here, then who the hell is this?
  • ...Still Jack? I don't see where the confusion is.
    • Neither is Jack. Both are Spades Slick.
    • You might need to do some rereading. Both are Jack and both are Slick.
  • There are two "Jacks". One is an agent from the troll's game session, and another from the kid's. Both of the pictures showed the troll's Jack: the first picture is Jack after being exiled from the trolls session, stuck on Alternia and renamed himself Spades Slick. So, it's the same person just in different points of time.

• Since it was mentioned several times and not one, I'll create a bullet just for this question. Now, I might have lost a detail, or many(I admit my reading of Homestuck sometimes is borderline superficial), but since all lusus have died and then infused with the kernelsprites, I assume Feferi's lusus did so as well. So how did it perform the Vast Glub, if Feferi kept it well fed and thus not glubbing while she was still around? How could Sollux have died from the Glub to let Feferi in if the lusus should be dead before Feferi went in?
  • Seems pretty clearly implied that the effects of the Glub are not instantaneous, and in fact linger for a while. And the Glub was its dying scream, I don't see what's confusing about that.
    • It was its dying scream. That's what I lost.
    • After all a scream echoes a bit.

• Wait, another thing about the Glub: why did Sollux enter last, instead of Feferi? If she did so, nobody would have to die and be replaced by their dreamselves as if nothing ever happened, since she'd be the only one around to be hit by the Vast Glub(to which she was immune). Sollux seems to be quite the clever troll, why didn't he foresee that situation?
  • Feferi isn't really that great at planning ahead (Gl'bgolyb prototyping), and Sollux's prophecies are often wrong or misinterpreted (such as when he said all the trolls would die). Perhaps neither of them knew that Gl'bgolyb would release the Glub (Sollux probably didn't even know it existed), Feferi had to enter early because she was already Eridan's server, and/or Feferi couldn't afford to wait because her house was about to be destroyed by a meteor.
  • Feferi wasn't immune to the Vast Glub, it was specifically described as "a psychic shockwave that would exterminate every troll in the galaxy." She's not immune.
    • Yes. She is. And no, I'm not digging through several months of forum history to find where Andrew specifically said she (and the troll queen) were immune to the Glub, because it should be self-evidently obvious from the fact that she survived it.
      • Incorrect. The Vast Glub simply kills the lower bloods first and moves on to the higher bloods later, hence Sollux died before Feferi was even affected.
      • I think you misunderstood. Glb'golyb's voice starts killing lower bloods if it is ever raised above a whisper. The louder its voice, the higher up the hemospectrum the fatalities creep. The Vast Glub is a fully-realized scream, and has the full killing capacity necessary to kill the higher bloods. (Sensitivity to its voice is actually related to psychic acuity, but psychic acuity in Trolls follows a semi-predictable pattern of distribution with lower bloods more likely to be psychically sensitive, and therefore more susceptible.) It is never said that the Glub itself is picky about who it affects and when-- just the vocalizations prior to the Glub. The implication is that Feferi's psychic resistance is strong enough that the Glub would not kill her, and Andrew even speculated that the Troll Empress, who shares the same blood color, may still be alive as the race's sole survivor.
      • The Condesce is still alive as the race's sole survivor, proving that she, at least, was immune to its effects. This suggests Feferi was too.
  • The main point is that Sollux was being a dumb hero and Feferi had future knowledge that she'd enter 5th in her chain and Sollux was keeping to that.

• If (as per Karkat) trolls don't have heterosexuality and homosexuality, why does Vriska say "There is at least one girl spying on you right now, you know" when she sees John's pail? Would it matter whether it's a girl or a boy? Vriska doesn't seem like the sort to intuit that it'd matter to John. (This also raises the question of how Kanaya is a lesbian, but eh, she's supposed to be weird.)
  • I think we can just chalk this one up to the author being a human and the fact that humans have hangups about silly things like that. Human gender politics sure are weird!
    • I think trolls still have heterosexuality and homosexuality, they just don't have words to describe them since gender doesn't matter in troll reproduction.

EB: it is like, when a boy likes another boy.
EB: or i guess hates, in this case.
CG: HUMANS HAVE A WORD FOR THAT?

• • Only girls get bashful about the buckets. Guys feel more inclined to brag about their buckets, if you know what I'm sayin'!
    • Not so, everyone seems to find buckets distasteful in public view or casual conversation. Even the most imaginative and prolific foul-mouths among the trolls do not include buckets or pails in their obscenities, and are shocked when one of the humans innocuously mentions them.
  • Yeah, why was it unexpected (apart from the symbol-spoiler) for Kanaya to be a lesbian? And what about this conversation which suggests heternormality twice? http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004348
  • It is entirely possible that, due to the quadrant thing, trolls can have 144 possible sexualities (many times more if we start counting different arrangements of auspisticeships) and having descriptive words for each is going to get very confusing and weird.
  • The "i am not a homosexual" conversation was Karkat's first with John, and knowing Karkat, he may have ranted at anyone who would listen (or, you know, didn't just leave the room) about the stupid aliens with their stupid confusing romantic constructions and how it was ruining his chance at kismesiship. Even if trolls don't have the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, it's possible that Vriska knew that John, individually, was interested in girls but not boys.
  • If trolls normally don't have gender-based sexual preferences, Kanaya would be considered pretty weird to have one.
    • Perhaps gender-based attractions carry no more weight with them than attraction to certain horn shapes, personalities, glasses, etc. She probably felt most kinship with Vriska at one time, but now that Rose has the most kinship with her, no one else is quite as eligible for consideration. And maybe Vriska was attracted to Tavros' horns but contemptuous of his lack of other qualities she's attracted to, qualities that she sees in John, and now Kanaya, enough to overlook their horns, or lack of.
    • She's the troll equivalent of a goth. If bisexuality is the norm, it (...kind of...) stands to reason that goths would be straight or gay.
      • Kanaya is the troll equivalent of a vampire. Contrary to popular opinion that's not the same thing. Also, assuming that all goths are bisexual or pansexual is really not a thing you should be doing.
      • Now she's a vampire; on Alternia, she was a goth. And it's a stereotype, of course, but not really the kind of thing Hussie would be above.
  • Just because trolls don't usually distinguish between gender for reproduction doesn't mean that they don't distinguish between them socially. Otherwise, why would Karkat tell Tavros to stop playing "games for girls," while everyone else tells him to stop watching "movies for girls?" It's clear that trolls still have the concept of "masculine" and "feminine," even if it's irrelevant to reproduction.

• In the midnight crew intermission, why couldn't Die have put Itchy's pin back in before taking out Spades's?
  • Probably because he wanted Itchy to stay dead.
    • Also, he probably wasn't thinking clearly after getting a sharp tap to the noggin.

• This. Um... WHAT THE FUCK?
  • I guess this explains a bit:

<span style=" color:

1. a10051;">CC: Our moons are gone too. If we wis)( to sleep now, our dreams must take place in t)(e bubbles glubbed by t)(e gods w)(o live in t)(e Furt)(est Ring.

• • • Dream bubbles are post-dreamself death dreams. God Tiered players have lucid psychic dreams.

• On this page, Terezi says that given Sollux's obsession with red and blue, it's weird that he types in "YUCKY MUST4RD". Shouldn't she know that he types in his blood color, like all Trolls except Karkat?
  • Similar to what was said below this one, it's just Terezi being Terezi.
  • Alternately, she could be saying that it's weird that he likes red and blue, not that he types in yellow - although this would be a little hypocritical of Terezi, considering her own love of a color radically different from her blood color.
    • She's just ribbing him about it because she wishes he'd type in yummy red more often. She is such a colourwhore.

• Something that bothers me is that I have never, ever seen anyone express any connection between Sollux's bipolarness and Vriska's only being able to control him half the time. Am I somehow the only one who noticed? Did everybody notice and just not comment? Am I crazy and making connections that don't exist?
  • It's a pretty obvious joke. People likely just didn't find it worth commenting on.

• Tavros's jousting dummy has a bucket for a head. A bucket with a picture of a grub on it. Does he just get away with this by virtue of no one else being around to be offended by it?
  • I think that's a helmet, since it lacks a handle and all.
  • Note how the displayed grub would be upside down if it was to be used like a bucket. Most likely as stated above, it's a helmet.
  • It's a can. The fora have been through this again and again. There's a cylindrical lid you can see just behind the dummies shoulder. There's no handle like troll buckets have. The diameter is the same throughout, rather than increasing with the hight.
  • It does have a grub on it, but trolls do eat grubs. In any event, it could be a bucket or a can and it's really not that important because since he's crippled and in the future legless he doesn't have any reproductive organs anyways.

• What exactly was Vriska hoping to accomplish when she interfered with the prototyping? I don't buy her stated rationale; that would be a shallow and unsatisfying motivation for a major figure, which is impossible in a story whose characters are so relatable.
  • But it is perfectly in line with her character before she hit her Character Development. Think of it this way - did Tony Stark do anything that wasn't shallow and ultimately pointless before he became Iron Man? It's only now, that she's talking to John, that she's becoming more relatable. (Also, someone had to do it. Stable time loops and all that.)
    • It is exactly why she did it. She's doing it for respect though, so the other trolls will like her, not for the sheer shits and giggles.

• Boy, that Equius guy sure is STRONG. He beats the shit out of robots to vent his frustration, decapitates giant monsters by punching them, and breaks stuff by touching it. Now what could kill a guy like that? A simple arrow, and a bowstring. Er, why didn't the arrow just bounce off him? And wouldn't that bowstring have snapped just by Equius flexing his neck? What gives, is he STRONG but not durable?
  • Already covered.
    • He wasn't just passive. He WANTED it.

• Why did Kanaya clock Vriska if she loved her?
  • Punishment for killing Tavros? To snap her to her senses? To keep her pimp hand strong?
  • I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that Kanaya no longer had those feelings for Vriska. That impression was strengthened by their conversation in [S] Past Karkat: Wake Up, where she had a pretty frosty disposition towards her.
  • Given the effects of her punch, it's possible that she just wanted Vriska out of the way while she dealt with Eridan. We'll probably have to wait and see.
  • It was a subtle Problem Sleuth reference, and a damned funny one at that. "Punch woman in snout to establish superiority," in case you wanted something more specific.
  • Bright Slap.
    • Does that count as an Incredibly Lame Pun, given Kanaya's glowing state?
      • She was in a speechless rage of revenge, and saw enough of what was about to happen to make sure no one could come between her and Eridan. But knowing what happened between then and Vriska's trolling of Terezi might make that clearer.
    • Kanaya does not like Vriska like that anymore, and the punch was probably simply because she didn't know she had murdered anyone yet.

• Why does Equius's face turn blue when he's strangled? Humans turn blue when our red blood stops flowing to our heads, but Equius's blood is blue.
  • I'll answer my own question: Bizarre Alien Biology.
  • I had initially assumed it was because his blood was blue, and he was... flushed for some reason? Clearly I know fuck all about biology.
    • Because his blue blood STOPPED flowing out of his head? Or...something.
    • He can't breathe, therefore he runs out of oxygen and in on carbon dioxide, which is still blue whether you're human or alien.
    • Nobody ever said a troll's think pan was in their head, or their oxygenating ventricles (or whatever they call the respiratory system) was in their torso. Maybe the blood wasn't flowing out of his head, so it built up and made him look blue.
  • According to Word of God, troll blood colors are based on a pigment in their blood, which implies that oxygenation of blood is not a determining factor of blood color like it is in terrestrial animals that rely on hemoglobin (red/brown) or cyanoglobin (blue/clear) for oxygen transport.

• Something I've never understood: Why, on this page, does Rose speak with Tavros's quirk on the last line?
  • She was mocking him, perhaps?
    • Mockery indeed.

• What's the deal with the Internet in the Homestuck multiverse? (1) The kids are still able to communicate even after the physical infrastructure which makes our real-world Internet possible got smashed along with the rest of the planet. (2) The kids then enter the Medium and are STILL able to communicate via Pesterchum, despite no clear evidence of such technology on their respective planets. (3) Pesterchum also works across universes, allowing the kids and the trolls to communicate. I guess what really bugs me about this is not Homestuck itself, but why isn't my wifi this good and how can I get it?
  • Well, there are apparently servers in the Furthest Ring... The kids are tapping into some extradimensional internet connection out there, too? Maybe?
  • The first point is brought up and Hand Waved in walk-around at the start of Act 2. Sburb just deals with it to make it slightly easier for the players.
    • It makes sense that up until Jade's entry, not all of the servers and infrastructure of the internet were down yet, just a lot of them.
      • And Jade herself lives on an island in the middle of nowhere with a large assortment of sci-fi items. Having her own Internet source would be relatively mundane.

• If Trolls are so inherently backstabbing and uncooperative that,without Karkat to chivvy them along and shout at them until they gave in, they would have been all over the place in S Grub, how on Alternia did their species manage to develop the technological superiority and military cohesion required to conquer other planets?
  • Because none of those things you said would really prevent them from doing so? Technology is technology, and their military is probably more ruled by fear than being "cohesive" in the human sense.
  • The complexity of relationships keep the murder in check to some degree. But imagine out of 12 trolls who lived long enough to see 6 sweeps, how many must have died? You can assume every troll present has either taken their share of lives or have been accomplice to it, and by this stage have settled into quadrant attractions. Even kismeses would prefer to enjoy their black romances a little bit longer.
    • As to how they conquered? Survival of the most ruthless + lots and lots of babies = vicious cutthroat empire. They already had most of the tech before going to the stars, just none of the drive.
    • Also, both Scratch and especially Dirk's descriptions of the Condesce suggest that a single, sufficiently powerful troll can do quite a lot.

• Just a thought; why does the Black Queen keep Jack Noir on Derse as a glorified pencil pusher, when he could be out on the Battlefield killing things? Skaia knows he's better suited to it. Jack's been shown several times to be a skilled swordsman (in the Intermission, where he is able to dispose of multiple Felt members with little effort (granted most of them were unarmed, but still) and again in Act 5, where he fights alongside Karkat), even before he obtains the prototyping ring. Plus, it's not like he actually did anything befitting his skills: a bit of surveilance work, dealing with a parking ticket; nothing that another, less power hungry and less psychotic goon could have done in his place. In fact, it could well be inferred that one of the reasons Jack killed the Queen is because his job was so dull, and he had a lot of pent-up stress that he couldn't vent.
  • Why would the Black Queen do something that Jack would like? She hates him, remember?
  • All the more reason for her to want to get Jack out of her hair, surely. If he's on the battlefield, he can't cause trouble; remember that Jack apparently asked everyone who went through his office to assasinate the Black Queen (and even gave them a sword to help them). In short, Jack's a danger to the throne, a danger that could easily be removed by packing him on a ship to the battlefield.
    • He gives them the Regisword to kill the White King and Queen. We know this because he told the Parcel Mistress he would give her the Bunny in exchange for both White Crowns. PM just so happened to acquire them in a decidedly non-violent way,allowing her to fulfill her bargain with Jack (and finally finish her delivery) without betraying Prospit.
    • Besides, the relationship between the Black Queen and Jack is explicitly stated to be equivalent to kismesisship, which has connotations of antagonism and rivalry. You might want to get someone you platonicly hate out of your hair, but you'd rather keep your kismesis around to harass, especially if you're in a position of authority which you can abuse. The Black Queen keeps Jack doing meaningless paperwork and playing dressup because she actively enjoys watching him suffer.
  • Except Jack doesn't seem to hold any real alleigance towards Derse. What's one of the first things he does with the prototype ring? Kill the black king. Not to mention he casually refers to the other minions as 'coffin stuffers'. He would be just as much of a danger to Derse's forces as he would be to Prospit's.
  • Also, Jack's abilities are not exactly suited for the battlefield, his primary weapon is a little knife more suited to assassination than combat on the battlefield.
  • I don't know, Jack seemed awfully competent with it in the Land of Pulse and Haze.
    • Except that Underlings by default are unarmed (though still quite dangerous), on the battlefield the pawns have swords. Fighting someone with a sword while you only have a knife is a very good way to start sporting some grotesque stab wounds.
  • The chess piece people exist to tell a story- they have the same "set-up" in the beginning of every session. Jack is The Starscream because that is supposed to be his role in the story, nothing more.
  • Jack isn't a chess piece. Jack is a playing card. You can't use a playing card in a game of chess. You might not have noticed, but there are lots of non-chess-piece characters around that don't participate in the battle.
  • Jack is vicious partially because he's fed up with the Queen's stuff. He also does seem to cut down a lot on unnecessary paperwork by scaring away anyone who's not got everything completely ready.
  • As above, it's stated that the Black Queen and Jack have a relationship seen equivalent to a kismesisship, which defined as a passionate relationship. Competent or no, one would usually be reluctant to send a perfectly good hate-sex slave out to war.

• Why, when Jack is trapped by Aradia, is he still aware of what's going on? He was frozen in TIME, not space. From his perspective, no time at all should have passed between when he was frozen and when she released him.
  • He seemed pretty capable of experiencing the passage of time. I mean, he was getting impatient. Besides, he's a pseudo-omnipotent being, and space-time are technically inextricable. You might be able to just pass it off as Rule of Funny, though. That, and we don't know exactly how Aradia's time powers work.

• How on earth is dead!Tavros summoning and carrying fire? I understand the "sick fires" pun that comes from it, but how is he capable doing that? At first I assumed it was a ghost thing, but dead!Feferi isn't doing anything like that in her appearance. Then I thought it had something to do with the mythological roles, but Tavros is the Page of Breath, so that wouldn't make any sense. Did I miss something here?
  • First off, Rule of Funny. Second of all, he's a ghost in a dream bubble which is only a locally recognizable area in a region where space, time, and physics don't seem to mean anything to mortal minds. He was a projection of a ghost in a projection of a room, he could hypothetically do whatever he pleases, including shoot sICK FIRES out of his hands.
    • Yeah it seemingly is just dream logic.

• It seems implied that the each character's (or at least each Troll's) typing quirk represents a vocal quirk they have, such as Karkat always TALKING VERY LOUD AND ANGRY-LIKE and Kanaya Pronouncing Each Word Very Carefully, and Vriska exteeeeeeeending her voooooooowels when excited. Okay, those make sense. How, however, does one talk like Feferi? What sound does "------E" makes?
  • Actually, Feferi stops typing like that when Jade points out that it's difficult to read, and even Gamzee typed differently when someone asked him to, although they both mentioned that it felt odd typing normally, which implies that they don't actually speak like that. However, Feferi's Es are probably just dragged out, Eridan's ww and vv thing might be an accent, Vriska probably drags out her words for emphasis and Tavros' "uhhh"s are a nervous Verbal Tic. The other quirks are most likely just the equivalent of customized emotes for trolls. In fact, some of the quirks wouldn't even work vocally anyway, such as Vriska's 8s, Sollux's 2s and Terezi's 1s, 3s, and 4s, since pronoucing them would ruin the word ("RUONEN THTHREE WORD HTHREEHTHREEHTHREE").
    • But Sollux's "2s" were implied being a li2p. He li2ped tho2e word2 with "s" until he got his teeth knocked out, at which point he started speaking "s"s normally.
    • Having a lisp is different from pronouncing "s" as "two". If it were directly related to his number speech, that would mean that Vriska, Terezi, Equius and Aradia would all have to have been introduced with "lisps", which they weren't.
    • But the fact is that the 2 DID represent a lisp. He stopped doing it once the spoiler I spoiled above happened, at which point he started talking like a normal person. If he really was talking/typing just for the sake of it, there would be no reason to change. He even comments how easy it is to say the words now.
    • The ----------------E might just be a way of vocalizing a form of Squee or a tendency to make E's higher pitched and longer. Gamzee's quirk apparently represents that he changes the volume of his words a lot.
    • The "----E" represents a trident. Hussie confirmed this. And to summarize and be as simple as possible, the trolls typing quirks do not necessarily relate to their speech. INSANE gamzee's ALTERNATING caps, KARKATS YELLING, and 2ollux'2 lii2py 2'2 are, off the top of my head, the only ones that actually represent speech patterns.
      • Nepeta also said something about how she liked how Equius said "blue" or "b100", which implies more than just that have unusual/unique ways of pronouncing things.
  • In short summary; typing quirks do to some extent represent speech patterns and accents for the Trolls ^[1] .
    • On Terezi, her intro page explicitly states "you KiNdA WeIrD So she replaces the letters A, I, and E, with 4, 1, and 3.
      • There is however, no indication of what that sounds like when she talks, though the most likely explanation is probably an accent rather than her literally saying "Spuhthreefourk wiionethhh thhthree" etc.

• So I've noticed that each troll tends to have some kind of reference to the zodiacal sign that they represent. Why then, is Vriska so spider-themed, when her sign is Scorpio? I know they're both arachnids, but sheesh. . .
  • ...why did you answer your own question?
  • ... He/she didn't, what on earth are you talking about?
  • Read the following bullets and take your own conclusions. Or, SPOILER ALERT: it is because they're both arachnids(and thus have 8 legs).
  • Why is Nepeta cat-themed if her sign is Leo? I know they're both felines, but sheesh...
  • Why is Kanaya lesbian-themed if she's a Virgo? I know they both sex-related but sheesh...
  • That argument makes no sense, just because a spider and a scorpion are both 8-legged that doesn't make them the same, that's like saying humans are kangaroos because we can both stand upright. Nepeta's cat-themed because lions are "big cats", and Kanaya's orientation has nothing to do with her astrological sign.
  • Lions are "big cats" and scorpions are "arachnids". The exact same relation between a lion and a cat applies to scorpion/spiders. Also, Virgo most likely has to do with her orientation. I mean, she's a lesbian, meaning she won't uh... get uh... penetrated? If not by rape? Even though trolls don't do things that way? So she'll technically always remain a "virgin". Perhaps a human and a kangaroo wouldn't make sense, but humans and kangaroos don't even share the same family. A human and a monkey, though, wouldn't be so different.
  • Kanaya though has the "virgin mother grub" as a Lusus. Nepeta, iirc rps as a Lion.
  • Scorpio is associated with archanids in some mythologies. We can probably chalk it up to though that Scorpions are simply not as rich in symbolism as spiders are.
  • The sign of Virgo is associated with femininity. Kanaya enjoys fashion, sunlight, bright colors and has interests that are similar to those of modern girls (vampire romance novels), being the most feminine troll character. It's safe to assume that her femininity is shown not only in her character, but in her preferences i.e. she prefers girls over boys. This works well in the troll society where the gender you like is a simple matter of preferences, like the person's character and interests.

• Excuse me if someone has said this and I just skimmed too quickly to see, but here http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003764 Is that or is that not The troll's session Diamonds Droog on the scaffolding? Why is he there and how would he even get there?
  • That's the Draconian Dignitary (aka Droog from the kids' universe or DD?: in commands). He got there probably by climbing down after killing the Dave that Alpha Dave threw out the window and stealing the books with the MEOW code.

• Okay, seriously, what is this about Karkat fixating on Jade kissing Jadesprite? Is he projecting his own kismesissitude with his alternate selves? But there's no blood... does he just think it's hot? Since he'd never seemed attracted to her previously, that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for a troll...
  • Karkat has displayed a slight crush on Jade, enough that he flamed his past self over it. Regardless this is probably just his shipping sense going haywire, considering he has a slight thing for shipping people with themselves (such as shipping himself <3< himself)
  • He could also be remembering the beat-down Aradia gave Equius before smooching him and wondering if the same thing would happen/projecting that onto the situation. Due to Hussie's tendency to re-use panels, the scene with Jade slapping and shaking Jadesprite use the same poses and animation as Robot Aradia beating up Equius.

• What of the billions of Non-player characters who died on the player's home planet? Do they just get erased out of existence? Are they just fodder in the Skaianet Database or code?
  • They aren't part of Sburb at all. They're dead entirely. Presumably by the time of the Exiles, the bodies have decayed otherwise it would be kinda nasty.

• Couldn't Skaianet have at least the common courtesy to create a blog that kind of explains how the S-series works? Or are they that much of jerks?
  • That might have catastrophic consequences...
  • Some people are in on it, like Bro and Grandpa. The important thing was getting people to play and survive, and they knew most players would die. But they'd have died regardless so. Better to toss a million liferafts out there and hope people work than 100,000 liferafts with detailed instructions.

• I've been wondering why Doc Scratch is the cueball and Lord English is the english. It seems Doc Scratch is more of the subtly-manipulating type, not unlike english on the ball, whereas the appearance of Lord English is when the shit really hits the fan, not unlike a cueball physically knocking the other balls into the pockets. Not to mention English is the Felt's boss, and presumably gets to directly order them around (again, like a cueball)...
  • Firstly new points go at the bottom, not the top. English is the Cue Stick in the pool metaphor; English is just his name. He directs the rest of the Felt and shapes events through Doc.
  • Also it's worth noting that unless this troper is mistaken, Lord English is just a title/AKA. His true name has yet to be spoken, or possibly is unknowable by humans. Because Cthulhu.
    • English is a nickname yep.

• Okay, I'd like to know something that's been bugging the crap outta me. Is Gamzee actually saying "Honk", or does he have a horn in his shoe(s)/pocket/etc.? I swear to god, if anyone answers "MIRACLES".....
  • According to what Hussie has revealed about Gamzee's ancestor through various form springs it may actually be neither. The honks are inside the heads of his victims. Or actually he is in their heads.
  • I don't know, really. Hussie hasn't explained it. I always assumed that the Honk! hOnK honk HON Ks came from the horns when they were available, and that Gamzee just vocalized them when they weren't. He certainly seems crazy enough to just randomly shout "HONK!" when he can't find a horn nearby to make the noise. Also, it's motherfuckin' magic.
    • Squeaky clown shoes.

• Since Karkat seems to have accidentally given the human universe cancer, would that not apply to all sessions, including, for example, Fedora Freak's session? I doubt it will be addressed, since Andrew seems to be leaving all the alternate human sessions to the fandom.
  • Likely, as the cancer is part of the human universe- thus meaning all sessions get The Tumor.
    • Also likely, is that Fedora Freak is future- or past-scratched Dad. Dad is always seen wearing one.
    • Fedora Freak is not Dad, they're separate characters. Dad's account is pipefan413.

• If the trolls aren't big into fashion (save for Kanaya), why are all of the ancestors wearing different outfits?
  • They're probably fancy high-ranking armor, for intimidation or to tell them apart from less important members of their caste and job-class.

• Maybe I'm missing something (Timey-Wimey Ball-affected troll biology sure is weird!) but if the Handmaid only arrived after the troll world was wiped out, her genes can't have been added to the incestuous slurry. So how can she be Aradia's ancestor?
  • She was never in the slurry. They were all created by Karkat in the ectobiology lab.
  • The Handmaid is Aradia's ancestor because from the ecto-lab, she and Aradia have very similar DNA, thus making them essentially twins. It's just that one went into the planet's history, while the other played the game. The one that affected history is the ancestor, while the one playing the game is the 'regular'.
    • That's right, of course ... the trolls were created the same way as the human players, and the "ancestors" are equivilent to Mom, Nanna, Grandpa and Bro. Knew I was missing something.
  • Of course, even if she had to contribute to the gene pool in the same way as anyone else, she's been a legendary, mythical figure throughout troll history thanks to time travel in Lord English's service, so it's not that much of an issue. She came both before and after all the other trolls.
  • Ectobiology stations have already been shown to have timey wimey shenanigans easily occur. Besides the Handmaid is actually Aradia's daughter.

• I really just want to get his out of my head. Is Bec Noir/Jack Noir in the trolls' session after the Kids do the Scratch?
  • Yes. We don't know how yet but it has something to do with his First Guardian powers.
  • Check Cascade; it's pretty clear how it happens.

• Why did none of the trolls captchalogue sopor slime so that they could alchemize a (virtually) unlimited supply when they needed it to sleep?
  • Because it all happens in about a day's time (Two for the trolls; one day for their adventure and one for the reset), and if they fell asleep aside for cat naps, they would most likely miss the countdown and get the game over. So taking the sopor slime would cause nothing but a game over.
  • Actually the trolls took 612 hours, about 3 weeks and some change, so actually logically there's no real reason they didn't. Probably nobody thought it was an issue, or their backups were destroyed when their hives were blown up.
    • They seem to have actually made some of it.

• Had the Green-Suit Dave got his tiger, would Alpha Dave's dream self get tiger? Would that have been able to prevent Alpha Dave's dreamself from going on his suicide mission? Or would that just branch off into a doomed timeline?
  • He couldn't because it would be a doomed timeline. Said Dave had to die because of timey wimey shit.

• In the most recent flash update(Cascade), we get Dave, Rose, and Jade Ascending to God Tier. Now I'm not against the last one since it was at least a little logical, but the first two just made me go "What". At first, it was because of the sheer awesome from the flash, but a few minutes later I did it again when I realized that they don't have any other selves to Ascend with. Ascending was established as needing more than just 1 self, but the two of them just blatantly said "screw you" to that rule and Ascended anyways. Any ideas on what gave them the ability to do this?
  • General consensus seems to be that it's a product of the Dersite Quest Beds. Also, I don't think it was ever irrefutably proven that you need a dreamself to God Tier. DS did say that there were alternate methods.
  • It's like what happened with Aradia. Aradiabot died, and Bec Noir killed Dream!Aradia by destroying Derse with the Green Miles, who was on her quest bed. Rose and Dave were their Dream selves at the time and died when The Tumor Exploded. Since it's techically not the main body that Acends, but the Dreamself (since apparently your mind gets moved to that body,) it's valid.
  • Yeah, there's a problem with that too. Dave has a possibility to ascend to God Tier because there was another Dave to transfer his spirit, but you generally need one nearly-dead and one dreamself to activate the change. Rose was rather effectively down that one body because of her fight with Bec Noir. I'm sure we can all agree you don't survive that kind of attack. Jade could have been near-dead. Rose certainly was not.
  • Hussie explains it Here. Apparently it is a result of the Dersite quest beds.

• Why exactly did the WQ advise the PM to have the rest of the exiles rig their bases to explode, as later done in [S] Cascade? I know this has something to do with bringing Jack Noir to justice, but what -- especially given what the exiles would've known at the time?
  • They did it to stop Jack from getting to the trolls' session. No idea how they knew about that, but probably WQ's inside knowledge.
  • Word of God is that WQ planned to have them flee to the Troll's session and destroy it behind them yes. WQ had Skaian visions, which we already know can show images across sessions so it was probably that.

• Yeah, about [S]: Cascade... What the hell happened to Nannasprite and god tier(?) fedoraFreak during the shrinkage of Skaia? They just kind of dissapeared after a while.
  • Nannasprite is presumably still on Skaia, being juggled around by Jade. fedoraFreak was never in the kids' incipisphere; he's in his own session.
    • fedora Freak presumably will have his own trials and tribulations in his separate session! And just for completeness sake, Jaspersprite is presumably on Rose's Land just mini.
    • But how would that happen? you need at least two people for a session and both a time and a space player, and they're probably dead by now. Plus, since Jade took all the important planets from Earth's universe, Fedorafreak's Skaia is kind of left there to blow up in the universe's explosion. There was also that thing where the trolls thought they had seperate sessions, but were really one, So I kind of assumed that All of earth's sessions took place on one skaia, like the trolls'.
      • Strictly speaking this isn't true, every session seems to have an inherent flaw to it, granted the two main sessions' flaws are pretty extreame. If we take the Mobius Trip album to be canon then we have at least one session that has a time player but no space player, so while both may be expected in a functional session neither is a guarantee.
      • Also all we know about FF's session is that he experienced his reckoning around the same time as the kid's session did, this in no way means they are the same session. FF may be from post scratched Earth.
      • It's also worth mentioning that there's absolutely no evidence that an Incipisphere session cannot survive the death of its spawning universe or that it takes place anywhere inside that universe. The destruction of the Beta session due to the Scratch and the destruction of Earth due to Jack Noir's use of Red Miles are separate events.
      • Furthermore, according to Word of God Sburb is intended to spawn multiple sessions, each with their own potential of creating a new universe.
    • Fedora Freak is assumed by the forums to have stumbled into an open chain and closed it, without knowing that himself. At any rate, he is from the same earth as the kids, because there's no indication he's from the scratched Earth.
  • FF is just an innocent bystander in someone else's failed attempt at playing a parallel session. He's not a true player, having never prototyped a kernel himself, and it's probably not even his quest bed he died in.

• Why did The Tumor need to be moved? I mean, I understand why the kids thought they had to move it, but why did it matter to Doc Scratch? Why'd he help them move it when he could have just let it go off in the kids' session, and make the Green Sun right there?
  • We don't know yet, but presumably the laws of physics differ significantly in the Furthest Ring, so the explosion transmuted into a star instead of simply being a huge fucking explosion. Also the Elder Gods are in the furthest ring, which may have something to do with it. Point ultimately really is that we don't know yet.
    • Since Lord English's existence is linked to that of the Green Sun, the only way for him to exist at all times while simultaneously only existing after the Green Sun is created, is for the Green Sun to be created somewhere where time does not flow linearly, i.e. the Furthest Ring.
    • Related to the above, Andrew Hussie confirmed that when they traveled out to the Furthest Ring they were traveling back in time. That was necessary so the sun was there before the Guardians started making use of it.
  • Also, we now know that it serves as the center around which other universes orbit. The Green Sun needed to be specifically when & where it was.

• Did Jade just kill Jadesprite?
  • Actually, it's more like Jadesprite killed Jade. In normal god tier ascensions like John's (and techinically Jade's), the real self dies and the dream self takes over. Real Jade died from shaving cream explosions, and dream-self prototyped Jadesprite took over.
    • It's probably closer to Split Personality Merge than anything else, given that Jadesprite immediately knew Jade's plans despite having not been told them.

• I'll grant that the Breeze is established to naturally take items to where they need to be. So leaving how he got it in the first place to that explanation... how did Dream Dave get the Royal Deringer to grow with the bunny's green eye removed? I assume they didn't also have a free Alchemiter hiding on Derse's moon.
  • This Deringer isn't the same one the bunny had! It's the reforged Caledfwlch Davesprite got it from Hephaestus, and then Jadesprite teleported it to Derse, where Dave broke it in half. As of now, he has it.

• Dog Tier Jade. She is the ultimate Game Breaker; the powers of a First Guardian, A prototyped Kernel Sprite AND God Tier atop all of that? She is literally invincible. Nothing can touch her offensively due to the abilities we've seen a First Guardian possess. Nothing is outside her grasp of abilities on the physical realm just outside the temporal effects of Time. I love it..I really do..but this makes John's God Tier ascension obsolete in nearly every regard. At least Dave could come away with effectiveness, and control over luck for Rose is nothing to sneeze at, but Jade still outstrips them in nearly every regard. What could possibly cause her trouble at this point despite a quick flick of her fingers? Does this make John-and his role as leader-completely unimportant and driven as useless at this stage in the game?
  • There's still Lord English. And do note that while Jade may be all powerful, she only got that power recently, while Lord English has been around far longer than she's been alive. And besides, Jane still trusts John as the leader.
  • True, but look at Problem Sleuth. The leader clearly was effective compared to the others, who may have become more powerful than him in retrospect, but none of them were EVER able to act upon their abilities because of restrictions put in place upon them. Jade has no such barriers; As a player and a sprite, she holds only to herself and the powers granted by the game and understanding its rules. Even if LE could-somehow-manipulate her like he somehow had control over Scratch-she is not his creation. She has a will all her own, and one that cannot be actually rivaled due to her incredible power. As for John...I just don't want to see favoritism taken with the humans as it seems to have been done with the Trolls and the unwanted deaths when there was nothing for them to accomplish, apparently. John is one of the most interesting and likable-heroes that I have seen in at least two years, and it would be a damn shame to see his decisions and actions outstripped by the God Among Men that is his paradox sister.
  • Also realize that since the First Guardians derive power from the Green Sun and that they'll likely need to figure out a way to destroy it (for real) in order to defeat Lord English, Jade's will be dragged back to just God Tier once that happens, if it doesn't affect her worse-- we don't know if First Guardians simply get their power from the Green Sun or their entire life force.
    • Actually, no. I do recall it being stated somewhere that first guardians don't die when they loose their powers with the Green Sun.

• Why does Tavros quit wearing pants when he gets robot legs? "Because he has no parts to hide," you might say. But wouldn't you be even more embarrassed to walk around showing everyone that you seem to have no genitals and you're probably going to be killed by an Imperial Drone some day?
  • Maybe when Kanaya cut off his legs, she also ruined his pants and they didn't have any spares.
  • What makes you think the Bone Bulge refers to genitals. For all we know, those could be anywhere else. Also, there don't seem to be any imperial drones left after the planet blew up.
    • Where did anyone say anything about bone bulges? But yes, in response to the original question, Kanaya cut off Tavros's legs in the Veil, when everything was dead already on Alternia, they had completed their session, and Bec Noir was after their guts.

• So, what possible point does John have in his favor as the leader of the original human team? While they may all respect him as leader, his powers are nowhere NEAR theirs. Control over the wind doesn't really help beat a power control over Luck, Time and SPACE. Also, while he may have a small weapon advantage by wielding the Warhammer of Zillyhoo, it doesn't really make up for the fact that he got killed so quickly by Jack and the others have ways of either predicting their opponents attacks, having multiple selves fight or controlling the physical space about them. Manipulation of an element is powerful, but his original God Tier has become obsolete.
  • John's relentless optimism might have something to do with it... At this point, he may be the only thing keeping everyone working together. Also, he's their FRIEND, not their leader! There's a big difference!
  • That, and doesn't John's heir of breath powers make him essentially invisible to Bec Noir's nose?
  • John is the leader because the rest of the kids say so and Sburb has set him up for it. The Kids don't exactly have a reason to betray a good friend of theirs because he's weaker.
  • People asking this question aren't thinking practically enough, in my opinion. The kids will presumably still have to fight with enemies of some sort, and in that respect I think John has the others beat. Dave doesn't have much more than than his sword, since the main use of his abilities are for creating time loops or maybe stopping an enemy here or there. Luck manipulation is cool, but Rose doesn't even use dice as a weapon. Sure, you wouldn't want to fight either of them; they've got cool powers, but Dave's still the best in a straight-up fight. Giant tornado drills? The huge crowd of super enemies (some of which had to have been Green Sun powered) which he obliterated with that giant windstorm-thing? If they need to kill anything, John's still the man.
  • Why do Power Levels have anything to do with leadership in your mind? John is the group's leader because they like him and trust him. It doesn't have anything to do with who could win in a cage match. It's all about his heroic, leadership qualities: kindness, generosity, optimism, pluck, and courage. These kids are friends, and aren't ruled by Asskicking Equals Authority.
    • I agree with you on the Leadership aspect, but the point still remains that he nearly becomes superfluous and obsolete compared to the incredible capabilities of the other three. In terms of overall effectiveness in combat and being a helpful player, he somewhat falls short at this point when Dog Tier and the other two Gods are concerned.
    • He's the Heir of Breath, there might conceivably be some other aspects to his abilities. Parts of the game session take place in a vacuum, but they can still breathe. It might be heroes of certain element types make the universe survivable for the players.

• If all that ever was and ever will be was completely obliterated from two distinct universes, wouldn't that mean that the Kids should cease to exist, seeing as that their births were ripped from existence as well?
  • But the kids were not born on earth. Remember, John created everyone (including himself) in an ectobiological lab. The babies John made then teleported to asteroids participating in the Reckoning, where they crash landed on earth at different times. As to why the kids still exist as of the destruction of their universe: Bec Noir used RED MILES on Bilious Slick (the human universe). Either it took a shit ton of time to actually start affecting the Earth, namely in the year 2442, when the kids were long gone, or Bec Noir used it when the universe was in the year 2442 and it reached the Earth within a matter of seconds, but, again, the kids were already in the medium and safe from its effects.
  • But Alternia's universe was destroyed too! Weren't they made there?
    • No. The human kids were made in the human's Incipisphere, which is the area that the kids / guardians teleported to when they broke/damaged their entry items (i.e. biting the apple / smashing the bottle, etc.) Alternia was where the Trolls lived. The Trolls have their own Incipisphere, which was where Karkat made the wigglers in an ectobiological lab, and also contains Bilious Slick, or the physical embodiment of the Human universe. The troll's universe has Snowman in it, which is the physical embodiment of the Troll's universe. Bec Noir used RED MILES against Bilious slick, destroying the Human universe, but leaving the Human incipisphere unharmed. Spades Slick shot the Green Sun powered(?) revolver at Snowman, killing her, and thus destroying the Troll universe, but leaving the Troll Incipisphere unharmed. To clarify: The Human universe and Human incipisphere are seperate. The Troll universe and Troll incipisphere are seperate. Blowing up the universes leaves the incipisphere unharmed. The Kids / Wigglers were made in the incipispheres.
  • It's an aversion of No Ontological Inertia; just because the Kids were created in a place and then left it doesn't mean they should stop existing when said place stops existing.
  • Wait, what? This isn't Doctor Who - the two universes blew up, that doesn't mean they also ceased to exist backwards in time as well. In fact, wasn't the whole point of Lord English's time travel powers that he wasn't inconvenienced by coming into existence at the end of a universe? I seem to remember a long, flowery speech about him traveling back in time and feasting on its corpse. If you were talking about the Scratch, this question might make more sense, and I'd go with the Ontological Inertia answer.

• How can there be any assassination attempts on Jane's life if there are no people around to be the assassin?
  • Just because people who aren't the protagonists aren't shown in Homestuck doesn't mean they don't exist!
  • Yeah, Jane doesn't live in the middle of nowhere like Jake/Jade... It's not too much of a stretch to say that someone in that neighborhood wants her dead, since she's the heiress to the Crocker empire.
    • Wait, if Jane is the Heiress to what appears to be the most valuable and important corperation in the alpha timeline , why is she living in an unprotected and easily accesible neignborhood?
      • Because Betty Crocker is an evil and greedy alien from another dimension who is already well-established as wanting to weed out the weaker of any heirs that might arise.
      • Nobody's living around there. If you were the heiress to a powerful company and people wanted you dead for power, I'm pretty sure you'd move to a small town with a small population (or none at all) so you could hide easier.

• If the Green Sun has the total mass of the two destroyed universes, where are Rose, Dave and Aradia as of "[S]: Cascade"? They are outside the Green Sun, which means they are in a place larger than it...
  • They are currently deep within The Furthest Ring. Space and time don't work correctly out there.
  • And Paradox Space as a whole is far larger than any two individual universes.

• If what Sollux said was right and the kid's universe and timeline already existed from creation to Scratch, then shouldn't the kids have already escaped their session (Jade and John by shooting through the 2 fourth walls and Rose and Dave by rising out of the green sun) from the moment the trolls finished their game and created the kid's universe, even before Jack went to the troll's session (seeing as how the kid's universe had to have already existed and have been Scratched already for Jack to flee)? How did they have time to hide in the veil and go through all they went through, with the flipping out of Gamzee and all? Did it have to do with timey wimey shit and the kids having escaped to that certain point in time through predestination stuff? How did Aradia appear outside of the Green Sun if the Green Sun contained both the trolls and the kid's universe, and how did she pinpoint the time to travel to if her universe had already been destroyed?
  • To answer your last question, Aradia used Jack's First Guardian power to teleport to the Green Sun.
  • To answer the other questions, you have to consider that according to Word of God, "Time and space do not work comprehensibly in the furthest ring." ^[2] It's called "Paradox Space" for a reason.

• Oh, here's something that bugs me-DS and the Auto-Responder are complete dicks. Sure, they may have emotions, but look at what they are doing to Jake, especially at the critical moment that he NEEDS to get the Bunny sent. Might I remind everyone that this is so incredibly important that Liv get to John that it directly effects their creation, not to mention the survival of the team. And yes...we know it eventually gets sent thanks to the events of the original universe, but the writing is on the wall: Young Bro Strider is willing to sacrifice the lives of himself and those who came before him. For what? Just to troll Jake and get him nothing. Wow, what a great guy. Oh, and the kicker? NOW he's disabled the adversary's system to actually be even stronger. Yeah...now he's not only working aside from the team, he's working against it.
  • I think you're vastly overestimating how much Bro knows/actually believes.

• What was the point in Jade making the Genesis Frog if the session was just going to be Scratched anyway. The frog wouldn't have survived it unless she intended to take it with them into the new universe.
  • Exactly. From Seer: Descend: "Though we adore Him we shall never enjoy His beauteous Croak. We spill our blood on acres of black and white so they may cross the yellow yard. At last in Skaia's reflection through broken glass He may find the pond in which He's meant to squat."
  • OP: So... that was part of their plan all along? Taking it with them to the new universe? Because then it answers my other question as to why the Genesis Frog dying was such a big deal.
    • Who says the frog is dead? It just fell into a volcano inside of a orb. For all we know, it can survive that. Worst case scenario, Jane uses the same device that captured the genes of the "ultimate frog" from her past on Earth to snag the genes of the Genesis Frog before it died and makes a new one.

• If only four (or five) players were going to survive the meteor impact, why even bother to hand the games over to non-player characters? Why didn’t Sburb just go out to the people required to play and have the rest of them die with the other mindless sheep on Earth? Same goes with Alternia: why didn’t the game just go out to the 12 and only the 12?
  • One, Rose's entries on Game FAQ's on top of fedorafreak's conversations imply (on top of Word of God saying so) that there can be multiple sessions running at once in one universe. Two, 'non-player characters' getting the game usually leads to the players getting the games, as seen in the cases of Dave and Jade- just because the game didn't literally materialize in their laps doesn't mean paradox space didn't have plans for the players. Three, Sollux programmed Sgrub on Alternia using both of the ancient frog temples and only gave it to the other 11 trolls, so it actually DID just go out to them.
    • The better question would be how the programmers made Sburb without blowing the planet up in the Alpha test. Cue WMG about the scratched universe being said alpha test.

• If Doc Scratch doesn't care about the game and its players beyond his purpose of assisting Lord English's entry into a universe, why does he claim his boss is "a very evil man"? Seems like a strange moral judgement for the good doctor...
  • Scratch may consider English to be objectively evil. Nothing against him, he just... is. And Scratch has no problem with that.
    • As far as we know Doc scratch has never outright lied, he always skillfully avoided giving a outright answer to questions that would have undermined his goal, telling people the nature of Lord english would not have undermined his porpose of allowing him entry, so he just flat out stated it.
  • Also, Scratch himself seems to be a Card-Carrying Villain.

• Alright, this has been griping at my head for a while. I think it said at one point that Lord English, while being the malevolent monster we all know now, also eats the dead universes. I'm guessing that this actually makes space for the newer universes to live in and it's actually, quite frankly, some kind of population control (but let's save that for Wild Mass Guessing). Following that, if the kids were to kill him, and after new universes are made, wouldn't at one point the dead universes all pile up, as well as the still alive ones? Wouldn't, at one point, this all lead to the dead universes and the new ones crushing against each other and ultimately destroying themselves in a big, multiversal Crunch? If so, then, well, I think this will be a Pyrrhic Victory for the kids in the long run.
  • In the very, very long run, perhaps. Even if you ignore that Paradox Space doesn't run on linear time, our universe had at least 413 million years of existence in the duration between when the trolls created it and the kids played. If they run that kind of time out, then that's a pretty good run for any species. Even in the real world, the universe won't be habitable indefinitely. The stars will go out someday.
  • Who says there's any kind of dimensions holding the Universes? For the theory above to be true, there'd have to be a cap, or a boundary, or something that stops more Genesis Frogs from coming into being or more coming into being and crushing others, which has been shown not to be the case, given that there are dozens of dead offshoot timelines from any given successful session. Moreover, who said that killing Lord English would stop him?
    • Also he's evil on a personal level, so even if he's fulfilling a vital function, he's still kind of a dick about it. Don't forget too that he basically ended up killing all the exiles on Alternia, which was a fairly hefty population.
    • If we take the population control theory as true then perhaps he's evil by design. A good man would go insane in that role.
    • Lord English is Galactus.

• Was it ever shown how PM got exiled? WV crashed through a portal, AR got stuck on a meteor during the reckoning, WQ exiled herself on purpose, WK hid in the lotus-thingy, but I can't recall how PM was exiled.
  • No. It's either an example of What Happened to the Mouse? (much like how Andrew never showed Rose as a child in a clubs shirt in Act 5 unlike the rest of the Kids) or Chekhov's Boomerang, and PM? is still on Skaia and will be exiled as part of Act 6.

• Please explain to me this: If Lord English can only appear when universe dies(ok) and Handmaiden is supposed to want to die so badly she would work for Lord English(ok), then when Handmaiden escapes she runs into Lord English. However, problem is, that at the same time we see that Doc Scratch and Snowman are alive. Futhermore, we see later how Doc Scratch turns into Lord English, who had earlier told handmaiden who says "I am already here"... Wait, what? How can be both be there already and not arrived yet? Do we have any other answer than Weird Time Shit?
  • He's a time travelling demon. It's pretty much what he does. As soon as he arrives, he travels back in time to make sure he arrives.

• So, a passive class is not as useful as an active class in combat, then? Or is an Active Class not capable of providing support like Passive Classes are apparently not so good at doing?
  • Think of it in RPG terms like UU said; while a passive class might not be as directly useful in combat, they certainly can provide excellent support and may have a few attacks, while an active class may not be very useful for support, but certainly can have support abilities. Compare Dave and Rose for example. Dave primarily uses his Time powers in combat, but has used them in a support capability a few times, while Rose's Light abilities are fantastic for support, and could be equally useful in combat.
    • Oh, I understand that bit. I also understand that conventionally, so-called 'passive' classes are hated by fans-who I would consider Fan Dumb but most would not-because they are passive or their personality could be considered passive. Using buffs or support abilities in some people's minds is considered weak or not as useful as an active class. My immediate solution to that problem was to consider if an Passive class could be more active and a active class be more passive to prevent that stereotype. Even then, I love most passive classes and characters because they can hold up a party as much as an active class can keep one moving. I just didn't want Rose or any other passive class character disliked because they were passive classes like your generic White Magician Girl, who in my opinion can be very important and useful.
    • Rose is outright Mission Control, Terezi is near omniscient, Roxy's actions have import for the entire Alpha Session, and Gamzee's own actions blurred the line between active and passive. Andrew seems to be well managing the fact that passive classes might fall into Scrappydom.
      • Alright, I'll give you omniscience, but we don't know exactly how useful Roxy will be outside clearly having the ability to teleport. Also, since when has Mission Control ever been wholly useful to someone in a game, especially when they had an idea of what they are doing?
      • Even if Mission Control isn't directly important in combat (ie, the example of an oracle character in an RPG, or something along those lines), they're still important to the plot, and vital to the game. The nearest example I can give are the sensor characters in Persona 4; one of them never even so much as throws a punch, but the entire team would be helpless without her support.

• Why is entering the medium referred to as getting into the game (is this a Homestuck or fandom thing?)? If you play it, you're in it.
  • Hmm...it is inaccurate, I suppose, since you ARE in the game once you establish a server-client connection...my best guess why the medium is seen as getting into the game is because if you don't enter the medium, you die and therefore are no longer in the game. (At least you die in the Beta-kids universe by meteors and in the troll universe by The Vast Glub...it's still unseen what forces will or will not threaten the alpha kids to enter their mediums.)
  • Because Earth / Alternia isn't where the game takes place, it takes place in the Incipisphere. Entering the Incipisphere is entering the game, but not technically the beginning of the game. The game technically has no true beginning, as players would not exist if they were not playing. However, in practice, entering the Incipisphere is equivalent to truly beginning the game. View everything prior to it as an introductory sequence perhaps.

• Why is Jake's identification in terms of preferred gender even being guessed at this point? Everything in his room and in his building that is known as his and what he is into refers to him as a heterosexual. I don't see how there can be any nuance at this point.
  • They can't see his room! Also bisexuals certainly exist don't they? Jake also specifically mentions he hides his shrine to blue women because even he knows it's embarrassing.
    • And indeed he is a bisexual.
      • Or at the very least, bicurious.

• "Every planet destined for intelligent life has such an entity meant to protect it, and facilitate the planet's ultimate purpose." If this is the case, and the trolls are a bunch of genocidal galactic conquerors, then does that mean that every planet they conquered (which presumably had intelligent life to for the word "conquer" to mean anything) had a First Guardian? And if so, then what did they do while the trolls were rolling their murder-happy empire over the planet they were meant to protect?
  • Protect and facilitate the planet's ultimate purpose. What if the purpose was to have them pushed into such a position that they had no choice but to play Sburb or go extinct? We weren't shown them, so we have no idea how they worked in practice. At any rate, First Guardians serve English first and foremost, and the planet secondarily. Notice how Doc Scratch's "protection" and Bec or God Cat's really only boils down to keeping the players alive before the session starts and setting up events for the session to begin. Protect in that sense would probably more accurately be preserve, or safeguard until the session can begin.
    • For brevity, the subsequent multipage discussion of whether or not all First Guardians serve Lord English has been moved to the appropriate WMG page. There has been no Word of God either way, and Hussie has dodged the question in the past. Any other theories on the original topic?
    • The debate about LE aside, the reply seems to have hit the topic pretty well.

• Well, there sinks the ships of the Jane/Jake shippers almost immediately...even though we KNOW for a fact that she happens to care about Jake on a level more than friendship. What the hell happened there, did I miss something? Because if I didn't, she just lied straight to Jake's face.
  • Based on her face in the next update, and punctuation across the next few pages, she lied straight to Jake's face.
    • This was completely obvious. And Jake being who he is, he'll continue to think this is the case until she outright tells him that she lied.
      • Sorry, that doesn't seem to me like the face you lie with. That seems like the face who is the most confused ever, when he was being honest. He even told her he was being super duper honest. Either she's not good at paying attention or really doesn't get how important the conversations over the messenger are.
      • Also, I'm not exactly sure I understand why she's deliberately stabbing herself in the foot here. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to backpedal, but I don't see the reason why she just can't type the words that she wants to say. See, you'd think you'd be able to stop yourself with a keyboard. And of course, the "getting furious at others for no fault but your own" sthick used in narrative. Thought we would be past that, especially when women are always angerier and rougher to the extent that it scares men....or glasses robots. Lots of Crazy Awesome people, especially Dirk and his glasses, and they're afraid of Jane. Sure, that makes sense.
      • The most likely reason in the narrative set up so far, is the tiaratop that cause brainwashing, with one of the subliminal messages being "CEASE REPRODUCTION"
      • She's a sixteen-year-old girl who just found out the dude she was crushing on is into one of her best friends and possibly gay. Is it really so irrational to believe she just said the hell with it, telling him about my feelings now is just going to make things worse?
      • Andrew directly jossed any other idea than that it was her being a teenager. Teenagers do stupid things like this sometimes!
      • I have never known a teenager to be stupid enough to recognize when someone is being completely honest with them, and do the exact opposite of their feelings and type the opposite. This strikes me as a major overexaggeration.
      • You're a far more fortunate person than I am, then, since this kind of stuff happens to a lot of people.
      • Just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen you know!

• Okay, Roxy. They are likely here to prevent you from being able to do much in the game itself. It wouldn't be too far of a stretch to start killing them now only for survival's sake, since they do serve the enemies of the game, just saying...silly drunk girl. Because I'd imagine most people would start shooting if they had knowledge of the game, wouldn't they?
  • I think the point of her not killing them is to show that she doesn't know as much about the game as she thinks she does.
  • Given Dersites are sentient, unlike Imps, what you just suggested was basically akin to mass murder in cold blood. She has a gun and most of them are unarmed; it wouldn't even be a contest. We've seen in the past that the awareness of the average exile about the game (i.e., encouraging the players) isn't about stopping Sburb, and there's absolutely no evidence to suggest these Exiles aren't simply starving and hunting cats, like Roxy suggests. Also Roxy has never claimed to know anything about Sburb and rather takes pride in being clueless about it. Dirk is the one who is proud to know things. She probably genuinely has no idea that Dersites are even supposed to be her enemies, and probably just thinks of them as aliens that happen to live around her house.
    • Knowing that Roxy has been sleepwalking on Derse, there's a fair chance she's aware on a subconscious level that Dersites are mostly harmless, which is exactly why she refuses to attack them. No Dersite, outside of the Black Royalty and their Archagents, has proved to be any sort of antagonistic towards the players; the worst we've seen is AR? being obstructive to PM (only he was just doing his job) and offscreen, the Dersites being rallied to exile the Midnight Crew (which was done by Vriska and Terezi acting under Snowman's orders, even if they didn't have the consent of the entire team and was seemingly a good thing to have done anyways).
    • I would agree with most of this, if we weren't sure that on Skaia, and in the game's very information as Nannasprite has suggested, that Dersites are the enemy. Yes, they turned against Jack Noir at the death of the Black King in B1, but under a completely different banner because their own way of life and whatever political standing as a nation that was left was threatened by one of their own. Also, each of the Exile Dersites from B1 have wildly different perspectives on life due to where they are, exactly. WV was a peaceful farmer upon Skaia, and AR was maintaining order specifically on the Land of Wind and Shade. It would not be hard to believe-and considering the current monarchy on B2 Derse is known for it-that the Dersites are known to perceive the players as major threats to their own lives, something that is not done on Prospit.
    • That doesn't make sense either; the Dersites who followed Dirk seemed to not really care that he had the head of an Archagent. Also Nannasprite's comments were a long time ago, and more recent canon seems to suggest that that blanket statement isn't entirely true. At any rate, killing them would still be cold blooded murder, especially since they are starving according to Roxy, and don't really seem to pose much threat to her. Also, WV exists in every session and his feelings are the same more or less. While the Empress is an unknown factor on Dersites, it actually seems to be working in the other direction, if the Dignitary's comments about a rebellion apply to more than just Dirk, which they very well might.
    • Right, so the fact that they brought crowbars and large blunt instruments is for what, deterrent? Come on; if they were hunting the cats, they wouldn't need those, and I'm still concerned on intent here.
    • Between about 13, probably more, they have three shown weapons; two of which look to be basically sticks and one of which is a crowbar, which has a lot more use opening things than beating people. Seems like deterrent is in full force. Besides, a large number of cats can absolutely be pretty nasty, and killing a cat with your bare hands is harder than just bashing in it's skull. Read again too that Roxy has a gun and they have sticks. Roxy also feels that while these guys are dangerous, they're apparently not a danger to her unless she provokes them. It's implied they've come in in the past too, and if they were trying to kill her, they seemingly have had ample opportunity to do so!
  • Or, you know, maybe Roxy is just a good person who doesn't think that someone being a threat to you makes their life meaningless and void. Most martial arts schools teach to avoid conflict first, and many US states require that the use of lethal force in self-defense be reasonable -- often called the "duty to retreat" rule -- including New York, where Rose's house was located. It's not unreasonable to think that Roxy didn't kill them because it was against her values (especially since that's pretty much directly implied by what she said).
  • Okay, fair enough. Now lets also place this into perspective on two levels. One, I point out that-again-Derseites did not have the Black Queen to lead them as far as implication dictates, but the Empress. She doesn't wield subtlety like the BQ; she bring down manipulation and hostility like a hammer. If the Derseites didn't already have a poor opinion of the Heroes, she would have taken it over the edge to serve their plans. It makes incredible tactical and logical sense, especially after what Dirk just displayed in the middle of their city. Add a great deal of Timey-Wimey Ball, and we're talking about a group of individuals who are desperate and hungry, yes, but also willing to bring weapons against a threat when they could have done so diplomatically. They had to know that, but decided instead to wield objects as possible deterrent leading to hostility towards the Heroine of Void. Secondly, you claimed that her moral values prevented her from killing them despite their hostility. Yes, that is what a good person does. However, a good person also is able to defend themselves against a threat when one is presented to them. It doesn't make you evil to protect yourself. I could go into how ones inhibitions would also be rather distorted when drunk, but I don't feel I need to bring that up more than a simple passing remark.
    • If all it boils down to is "She should eliminate them because they are a potential threat" then it's easily resolved by the fact that she doesn't know they're a threat / feel threatened by them yet. Characters in story aren't privy to all the knowledge we have!
    • And now we know she'd never attack them for that alone because she was raised by Carapacians and they weren't remotely a threat to her.

• If Betty Crocker's company is based off the Condencse, are the other people-named baking companies (Duncan Hines, Sarah Lee, etc.) evil in any way or are they all based off of her?
  • They're not shown to exist on Alpha Earth and on Beta Earth, they're probably not evil.

• Whatever happened to the White King's scepter after Jack triggered the reckoning? It kind of vanished after he flew off from the battlefield. Does that mean that a First Guardian prototyping gadget is just lying around for any carapican to pick up?
  • Pretty sure Word of God is that Jack ignored it because he didn't care for becoming a giant. Given that the White Scepter tends to end up in the hands of Derse in every session, it seems Scepters don't hold their power in the same fashion Rings do, and can only empower Kings; otherwise Derse would have a distinct advantage every session by having three prototyped enemies for the players to face. Given what occurred with the Black Scepter after the Trolls won, triggering the Reckoning may have destroyed it.
  • You can only have one king in chess.

• Karkat makes a good point here from the future; is his anger even valid when speaking to himself and starting and continuing the cycle? Before the game began for the Trolls, he was pissy but not all together furious. Sometimes, it was justified like with Eridan and Vriska, but at the same time a lot of has been self-inflicted and has hurt the others, especially Terezi. Current Karkat doesn't have the right to be pissed from where I stand; his emotions are on trial because he's harmed other people through his feelings, and they need to be acknowledged.
  • Your question is easily answered in that nobody can tell. You Can't Fight Fate is in full effect and Future Karkat rightfully notes the anger comes from nowhere in essence. However as for the sentiment behind it; there's so much of the interaction between Karkat and the others that is unseen or hasn't been seen that we cannot accurately make an assessment one way or the other. We can however take into account Terezi's comments in the past that Karkat is far too hard on himself. Remember too that Karkat's assessment is in his eyes only; we don't even know if Terezi is "hurt" from her own perspective, and comments from people like Kanaya show that Karkat's grumpiness is simply part of his nature and people don't seem to hold that against him. But ultimately again, too much has been unseen for us to conclusively judge Karkat's words as they apply to the others, and Karkat is heavily biased against himself.

• So, in the Alpha Session, Dirk and Roxy's Guardians were not only assassinated by the Condesce, but have been dead for over 400 years. Regardless, Dirk and Roxy are aware that their ancient Guardians are related to them through "a process of genetic reamalgamation"- likely a belief that they were bred via filial pail rather than having arrived on meteors from the Beta Session. So if Dirk only knows that Alpha!Dave shares 50% of his DNA with him and lived in the DISTANT past, then why does Dirk call Alpha!Dave his Bro?
  • From here, "TT: She is inundated with media coverage of those whom we've claimed as our parental figures. TT: That they are not presently alive nor ever played that role for us as she understands it is just an extension of a much more elaborate and far reaching explanation, which is much harder for anyone to digest in its entirety." Emphasis added. Hold tight and it seems Andrew will get around to explaining it.

• Under what John said, does he actually care about getting close to people? I mean, lets be honest that I do feel he cares about Nakama that he clearly did seem close to Rose, and I really can't believe that everything that happened in that one day-with all the weight it had-didn't effect him or cause him to become close to his friends and allies. That would be insane considering the emotional connections built to the stakes associated. He reminds me a lot of Carrot and his "Personal isn't the same as Important." shtick. From where the narrative seems to go, he should care.
  • There's a difference between not caring about people and not wanting to kiss anyone till the game's over. John simply decided to be Asexual until the game's over; a decision that was probably easy for him to make given the only women in his life on the ship are related to him, or childish animals and carapaces. In the same conversation, he laments not being able to hang out with the trolls or see Dave or Rose, so he clearly misses them! And he is worried they'll be closer to Karkat et all than other humans. He clearly still cares about his friends.

• I get the whole "John not getting too wrapped up in feelings about trolls" thing, since he won't be seeing any of them for two more years, but why on earth did Karkat get put on Rose and Dave-tier immediately beforeJohn said he wouldn't care about Vriska anymore? His rationale for not caring about Vriska (only knew her for a day) can equally be applied to Karkat, so...am I missing something here? This is especially irritating, as he doesn't know Vriska's dead, and probably should be worried about Rose and Dave growing closer to both Karkat and Vriska, rather than just Karkat on his own.
  • He didn't really seem all that kind to Karkat. He joked about pushing him down a flight of stairs but that's about it. Not a big surprise for a guy who was a huge jerk to him for ages and Jade too. John doesn't seem like the kind of person who'd "tier" his friendships anyways. Note he makes no mention of what he'd do to Vriska if he met her or wishes he could be friends with Karkat, so the idea that he's somehow putting Karkat above the other trolls is silly. Also aside from Terezi, Vriska, and Karkat, John barely knows the trolls, and wouldn't know Kanaya or Gamzee, so he's probably just using Karkat as an example of all the trolls.

• If both the Kids and their respective Guardians were created in B1, and then switched around by the process of the Scratch, such that no humans were created via ectobiology in the B2 session, what's up with it being explicitly stated that Karkat created both his friends and their Ancestors in the A2 session?
  • Simple enough. In one of the games in a paired set of Scratched sessions, one session must make the babies. In the Troll's case, this was the Post-Scratch session, as the players of the Pre-Scratch session were probably in a void session (as the description of their session fits it better than a null session), which could never produced ectobiological infants. Rose's explanation of the Scratch never answers whether this can happen, but given You Can't Fight Fate, it seems likely. Outside of that, it probably is partially to draw parallels between the four sessions. A2 and B1 are more closely related to one another, and A1 and B2 are shaping up to be similar as well, assuming the ghosts are pre-Scratch trolls.
    • No, see, but that doesn't make sense, because the methodolgy in successfully completing a Scratch is that the request sent to Skaia by damaging the Beat Mesa causes Skaia to switch the portals containing the Guardians and the Players. If there are no portals to switch, the Scratch can't happen because there's nothing to change. Conversely, unless something happened in A2 that we don't know about (then again, I wouldn't put it past Hussie), I don't think you can "unScratch" - i.e. cause Skaia to start sending things back to A1.
    • Ah but fate is also immutable in the HS-verse. No matter what they did, the Pre-Scratch session would've ended in a Scratch. All other options would simply have been doomed timelines. The two Scratched universes do not exist one after the other either, but in parallel, so there's really no barrier to Skaia sending items "backwards". Skaia also isn't bound temporally, and easily could have had future knowledge of the Post-Scratch Session, in essence "pre-agreeing" to the Scratch. As was mentioned above, Rose never directly says this is possible, but given the explanation she gave, it seems pretty likely this is what happened, especially considering the 24 grubs were explicitly mentioned as having come from the sky. Note she never says that a pre-scratch session must be the one to make ectobabies either, merely explained to Dave what happened in their case. Aranea and co. may give a more detailed explanation however. The only other plausible explanation is that the UU Session might somehow make them, or the Condesce cloned them exactly, but the UU session is still very poorly understood, and the Condesce would have little reason to clone people she despised, like the Sufferer.
  • And now Aranea's directly confirmed that the Trolls were made in the Post-Scratch Troll session.
  • Doc Scratch mentions here that the trolls were spawned in A2 instead of A1 because of a glitch, and that the glitch is used by Lord English as a calling card. The human universe did not have this glitch, so the kids were spawned normally in B1, and then duplicated for B2.

• Why does Arenea have a cancer necklace? She doent have anything to do with cancer.
  • Presumably to show allegiance to pre-Scratch Karkat, who the symbol would have logically been associated with in her timeline.
    • Or pre-Scratch!Sufferer could be a child preacher. But in all likelihood, it indicates she follows Karkat's teachings, much like how on Post-Scratch Alternia, it indicates someone follows the Sufferer's teachings.

• We still don't know how the beta guardians were involved with Sburb.
  • Why was Grandpa alive and in the medium?
    • We still don't know; that's something that has yet to be fully explained. Time shenanigans are certainly at work here though
  • How did Bro know Dave was coming?
    • Coming where? Coming into his room is easy enough to answer; you can typically hear people coming down the hall!
    • If you mean his meteor, Bro is also believed to be clued into the Skaianet conspiracy. Hence why he ordered a copy of Sburb yet never intended to play it; it was for Dave all along.
  • What was Mom Lalonde doing with Sburb equipment?
    • Mom Lalonde is suggested, though never outright stated, to have been the one running Skaianet. The mysterious lab near Rose's home is suggested to have been where the code from the Frog Temple was assembled into Sburb.

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1. ↑ Quick rundown: Aradia's h0ll0w v0ice is gh0stly, Tavros sTUTTERS AND UH, UHS, Sollux ha2 a lii2p, KARKAT IS LOUD, Nepeta loves to rolepurrlay, Terezi's MUST4RD so who knows, Vriska is a laaaaaaaarge h8m, Equius has an accent befitting a b100 b100d, Gamzee talks 1S N3V34 R34LLY T4LK3D 4BOUT or SHOUTS then whispers, Eridan has this wweird accent, and Feferi is really ------Energetic!!!
2. ↑ Remember that we know the kids' universe existed for at least the 413 million years between when Bec was sent as a puppy with the Frog Temple to Jade's island and the present, despite it having been less than a day between its creation in the troll session and the trolls' discovery of the humans via Trollian from their POV. Additionally, Rose and Dave were sent "eons" into the past to detonate the Tumor. Aradia was there long, long after the Green Sun was created long, long before the existence of the two universes cannibalized to fuel it. The same way Jack & PM faced off against each other with both the Green Sun and a dying universe used to create it both in the same background -- the same universe which when Jack last saw it from inside was dying from an attack he had performed "hours" later outside of it.