Homestuck

Homestuck is a comic about four friends who play a game called Sburb. This game takes them across dimensions and timelines, and the goal is to create a new universe to rule as gods.

Synopsis
The comic is structured into 6 acts, each longer than the last.

The Note Desolation Plays
The Note Desolation Plays is the first act of Homestuck. It introduces John Egbert on his 13th birthday and follows his misadventures in retrieving his copy of Sburb from the mail so that he can play it with his friend online, Rose Lalonde. Rose's house was struck by lightning and is out of power, but she still has power in her laptop temporarily. John gets the game, but he learns that it actually comes with two discs: a client and a server. He only has the client; the server is missing. So, Rose connects to John as his host. She can see John and his house, interact with objects, and place new objects—all from her computer. John and Rose wrestle with the game's obscure mechanics, and the act ends with John entering the Medium moments before a meteor can collide with his house.

Raise of the Conductor's Baton
Raise of the Conductor's Baton is the second act of Homestuck. John's server copy of Sburb is found but immediately lost. Dave Strider, a mutual friend of John and Rose, must find copies of Sburb to use so that he can help Rose enter the Medium and avoid dying from either a meteor strike or a forest fire—whichever comes first.

Meanwhile, John has to survive his first steps into Sburb. He's been pulled into another dimension and is being attacked by dark, oily imps. His late Nanna has been brought back to life as his sprite and provides useful exposition about John's quest to him. She tells John that a kingdom of Light and a kingdom of Dark are at war over the planet Skaia, and that darkness is destined to win. She also tells John that his father—the mild-mannered businessman with an intense love for clowns—has been kidnapped by monsters!

Rose, with her laptop having died, is forced out of her house and into the nearby mausoleum to plug her computer into the backup generator. Things get hairy when the encroaching forest fire forces Rose through a mysterious hidden passageway.

In the future, a carapacian exile called the Wayward Vagabond wanders the desert of post apocalyptic Earth. He find a command station that lets him send messages to the past, directly to John's mind. Little of use comes from this, however, and WV gets distracted doing other things. Eventually, WV accidentally initiates the command station to liftoff and fly to the ruins of the Frog Temple.

Insane Corkscrew Haymakers
Insane Corkscrew Haymakers is the third act of Homestuck. It introduces the fourth and last friend in John's online circle: Jade Harley, the eccentric islander with seemingly clairvoyant abilities. She lives on a remote volcanic island nearby the Frog Temple with only her dog, Becquerel. Becquerel has mysterious omnipotent powers, but Jade is still his master. Through Jade's dreams on the golden planet Prospit, she can see the clouds of Skaia that give her visions of the past, present, and future.

In the past, it is revealed that the past couple of years have plagued John and his friends with relentless internet trolls who claim to be able to contact the kids at any point on their timeline. Their intentions, if they have any beyond simple trolling, are unknown.

In the present, Rose comes out the other end of the mausoleum's passageway into the laboratory nearby her house. The lab uses all kinds of otherworldly technology, like instant teleporters, devices that can see into the past, and genetic machines that process time paradox slime into mutant clones. Most useful to Rose, however, is a small box that outputs stable internet and power for her laptop. She takes it and runs moment before the lab is destroyed by meteor strike. However, the shockwave of the impact has sent flames towards her house, and all Rose can do is wait for Dave to get his ass kicked by his Bro and retrieve his Bro's Sburb discs. Dave pulls through and installs the game just in time to save Rose before her house completely burns to the ground.

Meanwhile, John has been experimenting with Sburb's alchemy system. He discovers that beyond simply being able to duplicate any object at the cost of in-game resources, John can combine the attributes of multiple objects to craft brand new items, clothes, and weapons. He does this all to distract him from a recent unsettling discovery: his father may not have been as into clowns as he thought. The reveal unlocks something in John's subconscious and he finds out that he's been drawing awful harlequin doodles on his bedroom walls without realizing it.

Archagent Jack Noir of Derse is a high ranking carapacian. He serves directly under the Black Queen herself and is in charge of lots of boring and official paperwork. He's also in charge of overseeing the imprisonment of John's dad. Most importantly, Jack hates wearing comical headwear. The Black Queen demands he wear his funny hat as demanded by John's pre-entry prototyping of the harlequin doll. When John's dad destroys Jack's comical hat, Jack shows him some respect and sets him free.

In the future, the Wayward Vagabond, as well as another carapacian called the Peregrine Mendicant, have both incidentally triggered launch sequences taking them to the Frog Temple. There, they find a third carapacian: the Aimless Renegade. He defends the temple with a fierce yet inaccurate barrage of gunfire. WV tries to use appearifier technology to bring him a bundle of cable, but accidentally brings in a birthday package that was originally from John to Jade in their time period.

Fortunately, it was no accident; Jade let this happen, and She's regifting the present. Instructions for PM tell her to bring the package to her command station and send it back in time to Jade's younger self. The package contains a blue shirt and a package of pumpkin seeds, inspiring Jade's love of blue clothing and gardening. After sending her package to the past, Jade enters the Frog Temple for the first time. Inside, she finds the temple's time capsule, which opens up to reveal Dave's copies of Sburb.

Don't Bleed on the Suits
Don't Bleed on the Suits is the first intermission in Homestuck. It follows Spades Slick and the Midnight Crew's convoluted romp through Lord English's mansion on a mission to crack English's secret vault and, ideally, kill the rest of The Felt while they're at it. By the time the intermission starts, three Felt are already dead: Matchsticks, Quarters, and the highly intelligent Crowbar.

The first two of the felt, Itchy and Doze, are taken care of easily. The super speedy Itchy is tripped up and Slick handily beats him to death. Doze, meanwhile, is so slow that even Clubs Deuce can capture him. Deuce hides a bomb under Doze's hat for another Felt member—Trace—to find. Both are killed in the explosion. Slick soon runs into Die, who was using his voodoo doll to jump to a timeline where Itchy was dead. Slick takes the chance to slit his throat.

Diamonds Droog follows a trail of blood to a shark tooth on the ground that he recognizes as belonging to Fin, the future-seer. Droog, exploiting Fin's ability to touch things from the past, riddles him with bullets. Fin's trail of blood leads Droog and Deuce straight to the mansion's doctor, Stitch. Droog and Deuce jump him and force him to create his healing effigies for the Midnight Crew.

Meanwhile, Slick has been playing with Die's voodoo doll. He jumps to a timeline where Crowbar is still alive. Slick has a brief encounter with Snowman, the exiled alter ego of the Black Queen and the The Felt's 8-ball. When you kill Snowman, you destroy the universe. As such, she cannot ever be dead. After she leaves, Slick and Crowbar get caught up in a mess of random time jumps caused by Sawbuck. Slick eventually returns to his original timeline and kills Sawbuck there, along with the Crowbar from the other timeline who came with him. He takes Crowbar's crowbar, which has useful properties.

While this was all happening, the safecracking expert Hearts Boxcars is being heckled by Eggs and Biscuits, two Felt with the abilities to go forward and backward in time. Their reckless time traveling quickly creates an uncountable number of temporal doubles. Clover, a jolly little Felt with insurmountable luck, simply watches the shenanigans and laughs. It takes a while for backup to reach Boxcars, but eventually Droog and Deuce show up and try to thin the numbers a bit.

Slick runs in, kills Stitch, and uses Crowbar's crowbar to destroy Eggs's egg timer. Crowbar's crowbar has the ability to nullify temporal effects, and so all of the Eggs and Biscuits doubled created by reckless time travel disappear. Eggs and Biscuits are easily dispatched by Boxcars and Deuce. With the Crowbar in hand, Slick goes to pry open Lord English's vault despite Clover's insistence that it would cause terrible luck. When the vault is pried open, Slick is jumped to another timeline where everyone is dead except for him and Snowman. The mansion is entirely leveled except for the safe.

Slick enters the safe and scans the barcode on his wrist that all carapacians have. A hatch opens revealing a command station. On a monitor inside the station, Slick sees a familiar face: that of a young troll.

Flight of the Paradox Clones
Flight of the Paradox Clones is the fourth act of Homestuck. Jade installs Dave's Sburb copies to her computer and connects to him as his client. With all kids connected to each other now, and two of them already in the Medium, the game is in full swing.

John has climbed to his first gate and gets teleported down to the surface of his land, the Land of Wind and Shade. Rose is in her land now, too: the Land of Light and Rain. John explores LOWAS and talks to salamanders, learning a lot about his planet's lore and customs: the salamanders of the land send and request objects by carving pictures onto stone minitablets and putting them in mail tubes called Parcel Pyxides. Apart from just looking for the next gate, John is looking for his dad's car, since it still contains his server copy of Sburb, and he needs it—not to connect to Rose, though. The plan has changed, and Jade needs John to connect to her as her host player.

While their friends are exploring the Medium, Jade is trying to get Dave in as well. Jade falls asleep temporarily and accidentally tier-one prototypes Dave's Kernelsprite with the dead crow that Dave killed. They alchemize Dave's cruxite artifact: the cruxite egg. However, Dave's Kernelsprite swoops it up and places it in its nest high up in the building's radio tower. The two opt to continue deploying machines. Jade deploys a CD for Dave, who installs it to his computer. It installs a program called GristTorrent, which allows Dave to download handy grist from his players, particularly John, who has spent a lot of time saving it up. Dave and Jade experiment with the Jumper Block Extension, figuring out that it applies upgrades to the Alchemiter. Eventually, despite some trouble getting the egg down from the radio tower, Dave is able to enter the Medium.

Messages from the trolls are coming in much more frequently now. John is frequently getting messaged by two trolls named carcinoGeneticist and gallowsCalibrator. Carcino seems interested in little other than belittling John while, paradoxically, trying to befriend him. Gallows, on the other hand, has a more concrete (if still vague) goal: she wants to mess with the timeline. She contacts John and gives him tips about the game and sends him a captcha code for a jetpack. She tells him to use it to fly directly to his seventh gate to sneak past his sleeping denizen and collect its grist horde early. Before John can follow her orders, a version of Dave from the future comes back in time and tells John not to go. In future Dave's timeline, John is killed by his denizen, Jade is killed by a meteor, and Dave and Rose were left alone. They progressed through the game for four months gathering intel and resources. Now, future Dave is here to give all his gear to present Dave. After that, future Dave jumps into Dave's Kernelsprite, tier-two prototyping it with himself. The newly created Davesprite retains Dave's memories and personality and doesn't feel like being cryptic with his spritely guidance, making him a very useful ally. Davesprite messages Terezi and tells her to stop messing with John.

Carcino messages John and informs him about many important aspects of Sburb: Derse, Prospit, the Veil, and the Reckoning. Derse and Prospit are the dark and light planets at war. The Veil is a belt of meteors that divide the Medium from the infinite darkness of the rest of the Incipisphere. The Reckoning occurs when, at the climax of Derse and Prospit's war, the Black King summons all of the meteors of the Veil to attack Skaia. Skaia can send absorb some of the meteors, but not all of them. When the Reckoning starts, the players have to defeat the Black King and win the game before Skaia is destroyed.

Unfortunately for the humans, Carcino claims that their Reckoning will start early, due to reasons already set in motion and out of anyone's hands. Elsewhere, the Black Queen is trying to force a comical harlequin princess outfit onto Jack Noir. He becomes so infuriated that he attacks her, using the contents of Jade's birthday package for John to cut off the Queen's ring finger and kill her. He steals from her the ring that bestows all of the abilities of the players' pre-entry prototypings.

Terezi messages John to apologize for killing him in another timeline and gives him a map to his second gate. John follows the gate to Rose's land, right above her house.

In the future, the carapacians continue their one-sided firefight. However, when the Aimless Renegade sees that the Wayward Vagabond has a pumpkin with Becquerel's face drawn on it, he immediately surrenders. Afterwards, the three share WV's food and become friends. WV shows PM the command station. PM compliments WV for the chalk drawings he drew on the wall, and she sends John some messages using the terminal. She has John carve a picture of his Sburb copy on a minitablet and put it in a Parcel Pyxis.

Patterns
The screennames of players follows a pattern: the acronyms of the screennames always use the letters G, C, A, or T. When you create a grid of all combinations of letters you can make from GCAT, human names are pulled from the corners. In other words, humans only use the letters G or T. The only exception to this is John, whose chumhandle is ectoBiologist [EB] at the beginning of Homestuck. However, it is later revealed that his original chumhandle was ghostyTrickster [GT], which fits the pattern.

Between all four beta humans and all twelve beta trolls, all 16 combinations are used exactly once.

Game Mechanics
See Sylladex, Strife, and Alchemy.

Beagle Aegis
Beagle Aegis is a one-off mechanic used on HS 92 (page 92) and is a reference to the Treacle Aegis mechanic from Problem Sleuth.

Prankster's Gambit
The prankster's gambit is a gauge that HS 92 (increases when pranking another character) or HS 417 (decreases when getting pranked).

Chaos Dunk
On HS 1711 (page 1711), John shuts up and jams Rose's birthday gift to him back into its box using a Chaos Dunk.

The Sun
Despite the Earth's sun being absent for most of the comic, the distinct shape of the sun appears often throughout Homestuck. It's first appearance is as PS 1530 (the sun in Problem Sleuth), where it has a silly face similar to many of the simple stick figures in the early MSPA comics. In Homestuck, HS 82 (it appears on the title page) when John leaves his house for the first time. It's featured as HS 800 (one of Jade's shirt decals) in her Wardrobifier.



Most notably, the shape of the sun is used as the symbol for the aspect of Light.

Rose's Alchemiter
Before entering the Medium, on HS 1574 (page 1574), Dave and Jade have upgraded Dave's Alchemiter. 17 pages later, on HS 1591 (page 1591), Rose's Alchemiter is shown to not be upgraded at all. On the next page, Rose tells Kanaya that she's going to talk to Jaspersprite, which she does on HS 1626 (page 1626) (the pages between 1591 and 1626 focus solely on John and the exiles, and Rose's plot is not furthered or mentioned in this time). On HS 1627 (the page immediately after) talking with Jaspers, Rose talks to Jade. Jade tells Rose that there's writing on her wall that Rose isn't conscious of, prompting Rose to try and contact Dave. However, Dave is busy HS 1632 (away from his computer). While Dave is busy, Rose HS 1656 (falls asleep) to try and awaken her dream self. While she's asleep, John enters his 2nd Gate and is sent to Rose's house on LOLAR. Here, on pages HS 1688 (1688 and 1689), Rose's Alchemiter is shown to have been upgraded in the same way Dave's was.

When was Rose's Alchemiter upgraded? After Rose fell asleep, there was no one on LOLAR who could have helped him set up the Alchemiter except for Jaspersprite. I find it unlikely that Jaspers helped Dave with this setup. If Rose herself helped with the Alchemiter setup, it could not have happened after Rose HS 1628 (talks to Jade), because at that point, Dave is busy with his entry, and Rose falls asleep before Dave comes back to his computer.

With all this in mind, I think the most likely point where Dave and Rose could have collaborated to upgrade Rose's Alchemiter is HS 1626 (between pages 1626 and 1627). Rose talks to Jaspers, then immediately talks to Jade on the next page. However, there's no implication that these two events took place immediately after one another, leaving possible time for Rose to go back home and work on her Alchemiter with Dave. One piece of evidence that supports this theory is that later, it is shown that when Rose tried to message Dave after talking to Jade (which most likely happened within seconds due to Rose being worried about her psyche), HS 1653 (Rose was in her bedroom already). Another piece of evidence supporting this theory is that HS 1737 (the captcha cards) inside the Alchemiter's Jumper Block Extension upgrade are lime green, the same color as Rose's Tree Modus.

Miscellaneous

 * On HS 1380 (page 1380), a pumpkin briefly appears from nowhere before immediately disappearing on the next page. The source of this pumpkin is unknown. Most likely, it's just a visual gag.
 * After first coming back in time from his doomed timeline, HS 1657 (Davesprite is able to message Terezi) without her contacting him first. How it was decided what point in time Terezi would be contacted is unknown.

John and Jade's Pattern Inconsistencies
John Egbert and Jade Harley break multiple otherwise solid patterns of Homestuck's character designs.

Surname Length
All of the humans' full names follow the pattern of having a 4 letter first name and a 7 letter last name. This pattern is broken by John and Jade, whose surnames (Egbert and Harley) are both 6 letters. Their dancestors, Jane Crocker and Jake English, do not share this discrepancy and both have 7 letter names.

Clothing Color
All of the humans have an associated color that matches the color of their shirts, the color of their eyes, and the color of their Pesterchum texts. This pattern is broken by John and Jade, who seem to have swapped the colors of their clothes. John wears a shirt with a green picture on it, and Jade wears shirts with blue pictures on them.

Could this have something to do with the fact that John was the one who introduced Jade to blue clothing in the first place?