#Glad they all lived but where the fuck is the hanging up the armor epilogue (for them all and not 10+ years on)
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The thing about *that* line from Crosshair
I am frustratingly torn between accepting the crumbs of him finally actually verbally 15 episodes later *acknowledging* Tech's death??
Vs thinking he really ought have said Clone Force 99 died with the Republic.
The Empire broke them and they never got to be whole again. They struggled for 3 seasons. Tech died in the desperate gasp to put them back together.
#My finale feelings are: Frustrated#tbb#the bad batch#the bad batch spoilers#tbb spoilers#“we aren't that squad anymore” bitch you weren't even there#Filing this season into back half pacing disaster I think#Weird build to a weird Tantiss sequence for those three why were they even there#The whole “more clone prisoners than we thought!” to just needing one evac shuttle was wild#Glad they all lived but where the fuck is the hanging up the armor epilogue (for them all and not 10+ years on)#Where are all the beloved Pabu friends who oh btw didn't exist until we needed to care about them being in the line of fire#Is it weird that Phee & Omega never even were in a room together again beyond the transmission? That felt weird#And that's not getting into the Choices made around cx-2
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Epilogues: Candy, ch 29-38 (Epilogue 7)
Hoo boy, she’s back. *rubs hands together, cackles*
...actually having read the chapter that’s not a lot to get excited about. content note that this epilogue features a physical assault turning into a sexual assault, and then its aftermath and further violence, in chapters 32 and 37.
also like heavy depression and ennui in general
Chapter 29
...is so short it fits entirely on my screen.
Whatever alt-Calliope has been waiting for, hanging about on the asteroid, is here. Not ‘the Prince’ (i.e. Caliborn), but... someone.
Not Vriska either, we can presume, given the use of ‘he’ pronouns.
Chapter 30
Jake, laying it on rather thick, goes to Jane with bad news. Her father is apparently dead, having (supposedly) taken a bullet rocket for ‘the human president’ to save him from one of Karkat’s assassins. There is no body to dispose of, because his body was destroyed.
This has ‘obvious ruse to cover a defection’ all over it to me, but Jane wouldn’t see that I guess.
Jane takes this the prompt to escalate her war against the trolls to full-blown genocide - total war of extermination, shouting like a cartoon villain. Gamzee, the only troll present... jokingly calls this xenophobic - and turns it into a flirt.
Jane decides now’s the time to stop this whole hateflirting thing, and has her guards take ‘this troll’ off her bridge. To be executed with all the other trolls, presumably. Though he’s not dead on-screen yet.
It’s a very strange mix of cartoon-villain ridiculousness, ordinary ridiculousness, and like... the word genocide.
Chapter 31
Back to John and Vriska, with pretty much no time having passed. John gets her up to speed. Her reaction is predictable...
(VRISKA): ...
(VRISKA): ...
(VRISKA): That’s...
(VRISKA): Th8t’s the........
(VRISKA): Stupidest *F8CKING* thing I’ve ever heard!
Also she’s the (Vriska) in this scenario, because Vriska Lalonde was ‘here first’ lol
Anyway, Vriska confirms very definitely that Lord English is not dead, she was indeed on the battlefield, and she’d prefer to get back there. John brings her up to speed - by this point he’s blaming himself for the decision that broke ‘cause and effect’; everyone got what they thought they wanted and it turned out to be a horrific catastrophe.
As if things couldn’t get any worse, Gamzee - who is not, it seems, dead - shows up. He attempts to set this incandescently angry Vriska on the course of “redemption”...
Chapter 32
This chapter features Vriska beating the absolute shit out of Gamzee for... a whole lot of paragraphs. I guess everything Gamzee was all just setup for this.
This features a lot of named moves, like European-style Uppercut and Reverse Hangman. Probably a wrestling thing.
Which, well, I thought this was just going to be a fandom-catharsis, what if Vriska (avatar of People Who Like Vriska) fucked up Gamzee (avatar of Those People Who Like Vriska Dislike) really fucking hard, but I reckoned without V ‘lick the troll’s armpit’ and her sense for the perverse. tl;dr: Vriska beats the shit out of Gamzee, Gamzee gets horny for it, starts licking her foot; Vriska goes and starts a hate-makeout with him.
The existence of kismesisitude really fucks with any concept of telling someone to go and get fucked, huh. Literally no fucking clue what to make of this at this point.
Chapter 33
Rose comes to talk to John. At this point, it’s very clear that things are far from the rails of ‘canon’, whatever that means anymore.
It’s nice to have Rose back, to say some longwinded philosophical bullshit. She talks about happiness, by way of her wizard fanfiction: in short the implication is that knowing one is in ‘heaven’ destroys (the ability to enjoy) it.
ROSE: But that isn’t me anymore.
ROSE: I am blind against the veil of this world.
ROSE: It’s all ambrosia to me.
ROSE: I don’t care if it’s not true. I care even less if it’s not canon.
ROSE: I have a beautiful wife who I love more than I thought possible, and a daughter who I am immeasurably proud of.
ROSE: It can all be senseless, ephemeral noise that dissolves in the void. A whisper swept up by the wind before it’s uttered.
ROSE: I’m still grateful to have felt this way.
Glad someone isn’t miserable.
The chapter ends with a hug as the bombs go off, and John deciding ‘finality’ was always his to decide, now they are no longer part of ‘the story’.
Chapter 34
Back to Vriska Lalonde and Harry Anderson. Vriska’s involved in the war, although not taking it all that seriously at all. Apparently this Vriska is having a kismesis with Tavros, although rather tame compared to the Alternian version.
They have a fairly inconsequential conversation and then Vriska catches sounds of Gamzee, and goes to investigate... and comes face to face with (Vriska) hatefucking Gamzee, I guess.
Homestuck... was a mistake?
Chapter 35
Vriska POV chapter.
She’s having a meltdown over having just made out with Gamzee. This includes dwelling briefly on her own Awful Childhood:
She remembers the shame and excoriation of her childhood—the fear, the pressure, being coerced to do awful things to undeserving kids. All that embarrassing effort she spent trying to emulate her ancestor. She threw every bit of herself into the role, but in recent years reflecting on the charade has only made her cringe.
If this is going to be going through the same beats as Gamzee’s joke “redemption arc”, that would be something.
Anyway, Vriska furiously demands Gamzee not tell anyone - Gamzee, meanwhile, is starting to feel, more and more, that ‘he was taken advantage of’, that what just happened was sexual assault - that he’s outright feeling unsafe as a result.
I am really fucking lost as to what this is all “saying”, at this point. Is the point that, by making Gamzee out to be so reprehensible, we inclined not to sympathise when he’s sexually assaulted? To like, look out for those we hold to be disposable, to recognise that even shitbags can be harmed?
Perhaps there isn’t a conscious point.
Regardless, Vriska is so desperate to brush over what she’s done that she chokes him to death. He’s not a ‘real’ God tier, so she can just do that. Unfortunately for her, Vriska Lalonde is there to bear witness.
Chapter 36
Back to John, who is contemplating existentialism. Only for... Jake to arrive, having finally fled his horrific abusive relationship with Jane.
Love that letter J.
Anyway John is so apathetic now that he can barely bring himself to care about Jake more than ‘a sim stuck in a pool’, but he does manage to get shaken out of it by realising there’s a kid stuck in the equation.
Jake’s question... was I a bad person? Jake says he’s so used to letting other people control him, he never took responsibility when it mattered.
John makes a token effort to encourage Jake to look to the future - and Jake suddenly brightens up in a way that’s clearly suggesting something is still very much up. He invites John to dance.
It’s all a bit much huh.
But it’s enough to convince John that even if this Roxy isn’t ‘real’, he still ought to make up with her.
Chapter 37
Vriska [Vriska Lalonde] and (Vriska) [Vriska Serket] catch up, which means the text colours and the character prompts are quite difficult to distinguish.
Vriska Serket laments that John is an idiot, but holds power that the rest of the cast could never hope to have (his retcon powers etc.). Vriska Lalonde is dismissive.
Vriska Serket reminisces about the awful shit she’s done in her life - to Tavros, to Terezi, to the other Vriska who was, for a while, happy in the dream bubbles. She tries to convince Vriska Lalonde that this is bad, and not to be like her. She’s not very convincing.
But utlimately... they come round to talk about Terezi. Not by name, though.
(VRISKA): May8e that’s why I h8’d my ghost self so much?
VRISKA: Why?
(VRISKA): 8ecause I just had a sense.
(VRISKA): On some level I knew she was right. She was happy and honest with herself. And that’s what made her...
(VRISKA): A version of myself who was actually worthy of someone I cared a8out.
(VRISKA): Don’t get me wrong, we had a nice time for a few years living on that meteor.
(VRISKA): It was a good, sta8le pale relationship. 8ut that’s all it was.
(VRISKA): We couldn’t really connect in a deeper way 8ecause I was still... the way I am, I guess?
(VRISKA): Layers and layers of armor and defenses.
(VRISKA): And I had some mysterious feeling that weak ghost version of myself was always meant to form the kind of connection with her that I never could, 8ecause she didn’t have any of that stuff getting in the way.
At that point it comes out that Vriska Lalonde nicked John’s phone, giving Vriska Serket the chance to finally... well first read back their entire conversation, and then at last to text her.
Chapter 38
God this particular Epilogue is going on a bit huh! There’s only two chapters left for the final one.
There is also very little room for any sort of ‘resolution’. Of relationships, maybe... we might get to see Terezi and Vriska reunited at last. But the war and so on... are not going to be wrapped up in three chapters, though they’re not the point. The metaphysical weirdness is unlikely to receive much of an explanation.
It’s going to be a bittersweet ending, at best...
Anyway we open with Roxy, looking forward to meet up with John again. It’s nice to finally get a little Roxy POV.
John tries to explain his whole theory that the ‘candy’ choice has basically robbed everyone else of choice. Roxy meanwhile is rather back to her old self - perhaps she never left it. She won’t have any of it. She wasn’t acting like a doormat to John because of some metaphysical non-canonicity bullshit - that was just where she was.
JOHN: i just kept wanting to find ways to make everything make sense, you know?
JOHN: but maybe it just fucking doesn’t.
ROXY: i know we became grownups in a world built specifically n cosmically for us
ROXY: so i get wanting to find a pattern in everything
ROXY: but not everything has 2 b that deep
so then they move on and we finally learn a bit about where Roxy’s been at that’s not filtered through John’s perspective. It turns out that Roxy is our putative nb character I guess:
ROXY: i had all these conflictin thoughts abt how to be me in the first place
ROXY: like what it meant to date a beautiful skull alien
ROXY: sexualitywise and genderwise and person in generalwise
ROXY: for a while there i didnt know if i wanted ppl to think of me as a woman at all
But ultimately... she just drifted apart from Callie, and it wasn’t something she felt comfortable talking about with John.
I’m not going to just quote this entire chapter, but there’s some compelling, truthful stuff about Roxy’s self-conception around gender, how it changed when she got pregnant... obviously my experience of transness is in some ways quite a different one, but still.
Roxy speaks of like, the future to come, that she’s expecting to change in many more ways yet, that it doesn’t matter if it’s the ‘most true’ path, but it’s the one she’s on... it sounds corny summarised like that, but it feels a lot more real than Jake’s whole thing.
end of epilogue 7
so adulthood huh... adulthood is a fuck. being human in general is a fuck. fucked up that we gotta be a bag of seawater with a subjectivity and all that.
we’re moving to the end here. the struggles... the war and so on... it’s not really about that, they’re just set dressing. the point is just, what it is to live in a world as fucked up and pointless as this one, I guess. classic existentialism jazz. (editor’s note: bryn has not read an existentialist philosopher in her life, and the extent of her knowledge of the subject begins and ends with the videogame NieR: Automata.)
the struggles within that cycle...
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