PANELS 327-330

Vriska’s having kind of a difficult day.

Imagine showing up right after getting completely obliterated by a huge chunk of reality through the torso, and everyone you just said goodbye to a couple hours ago is now a boring 40 year old constantly having marital problems. Fucking absurd. I honestly feel like most of them don’t know what to do with Vriska. They’ve got this new upgraded version of her who doesn’t have gallons of PTSD or the baggage of growing up with an abusive spider mom.

John definitely thinks that her being here is going to make a big difference, which is what he excitedly told Karkat in one of the previous updates. But as we saw…Karkat wasn’t particularly impressed by what he had to say. To Karkat, Vriska is probably just another complicating factor in an already intense situation. She’s a wild card, and she doesn’t fit in this new world.

Vriska is slightly overblowing her accomplishments here, for her audience of Vrissy. But I do think she’s fairly entitled to feel put aside. She isn’t used to having to deal with adults. And we have even more indication of just how incredibly large the gap is between the two Vriskas’ experiences. To Vrissy, misbehaving is sneaking out of the house or going on a trashy website. To Vriska it’s doing some child murder. Ya know. Little teen things.

Meanwhile, John and Harry Anderson are also having a difficult day, but they deal with that in a different way. I like the parallels of these chats, though. Vriska and Vrissy being two iterations of the same person, and John and Harry being kid & parent. They’re both sort of playing off their counterpart, working out where they stand with them in their uh. Very different ways.

Harry Anderson and John are still working out how to interact with each other after so long not really ever talking. H.A. is a forgiving lad, no matter how much shit he talks. I wish we’d been able to include the whole clothes measuring scene, but too much plot is happening i GUESS.

PANEL 331

YIFFY OFF THE LEASH WHAT WILL SHE DO

Sigh. God, Yiffy is just such an extremely good girl. Look at her go.

PANELS 332

I think these are the two most blessed panels in all of Homestuck. Definitely all of HS2.

Sometimes you have a lot of fights with your Moms and you have a difficult relationship, but at least you agree you all need to hug it out when you get free of a psychotic cookie lady.

PANEL 333

First off, I love this combination of text colors. Just a very good-looking group of text.

Boy, do I love women threatening each other. I don’t think we’ve ever seen Rose and Jane have a conversation before, at least not without a big group setting. Rose, in a way, is sort of Jane’s rhetorical nightmare, seeing as she’s a pretty heady mix of Dirk and Roxy (both figuratively and literally) and therefore has the ability to hit her where it hurts. With Dirk’s unruffled, precise wit, but with Roxy’s imagination, and a little bit of vindictive delight that is just pure Rose.

PANEL 334

I wish Jade had more chances to yell at people. She deserves them! She’s got a lot to yell about! She also kind of has a Metal Gear look going here, I’m digging the goggles.

PANEL 335

Jane’s secret police are really well-dressed.

PANELS 336

Someone mentioned in the writer’s room that it’s a pity green and purple don’t look great together, to which someone else countered that’s absurd, look at Evangelion Unit 01. Whatever the case, I think Kanaya’s and Rose’s spaceship is extremely snazzy. Or, skyship, maybe? Idk if the ships in the fleet are actually used to go up into space.

Obviously, Kanaya is not going to murder Tavvy. However, she is very much going to be Kanaya about it, and express herself accordingly. Jane wants to remind us all that she did read Homestuck, thank you very much, she knows you don’t get vamped from being bitten. Although if she read Homestuck she should know that Kanaya Maryam wouldn’t kill an innocent child. But Jane has spent so long being a hideous racist that she’s started to believe her own bullshit.

PANEL 337-339

So. Jane. A controversial topic if there ever was one.

Full disclosure, Jane didn’t really hit my radar as A Homestuck Character I Cared About until the epilogues. Vaguely distasteful teen Jane is fine, but I sleep. Villainous femme fatale Jeff Bezos ass dictator Jane? Sign me the fuck up. And this is partly because I love villains, and because I love evil women, but another part is that as cartoonish as Evil Jane is, she’s also…frighteningly real. Who among us does not have at least one friend who has fallen into the facebook alt-right hole? There are people I knew in high school who have become full whole ass white supremicists. It’s frightening to think about what people we thought we knew can become.

At the end of the day, I don’t think evil is a moustache twirling villain in a cape, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily someone who is trying to do the right thing and just has corrupted judgement. I think it’s somewhere in the middle. You know that you’re doing wrong, but you’ve justified it to yourself. “It’s for my family, it’s for my nation, I deserve it, I want it and I don’t care who gets hurt.” With this you can justify all sorts of shit. Like, say, considering letting your son die on live tv to implicate your former friends in a war crime.

PANELS 340-343

So would Jane have actually done it? Ordered a plane shot down while her son was onboard. I’m not sure. But we now do know that she wouldn’t do it in front of Jake. She hadn’t yet reached the point that she will kill her child in cold blood in front of his father.

Which is…good, I guess? Great job, Jane.

See you next time!