How did you perceive the carapacian war on skaia?

[Roxy]

I dout this post will be nearly as riveting and strongly opinionated as my last of this forum but i really am curious, how did y’all think of the war? It was always described as some grandiose chess game of politics and war but as far as i could tell aside from the queens and those directly around them (basically just jack) i feel like they werent necessary? The whole concept really seemed to have been lost somewhere among the rest of the story to me

Maybe i missed some huge exposition though, how about y’all, how’d you see it?

[Flame_Warp]

It was a game mechanic, and like every other game mechanic it stopped being especially relevant once the game was broken and SBURB became the setting rather than a driving plot force.

[thorondraco]

I think its secretly a metaphor about a conflict happening with every sburb session. Basically every session is an attempted to illuminate a part of the Furthest Ring and give it form. The light of skaia allows a fragment of the void to become apparent and navigable. if it is destroyed, then the realm fads back into the Void once more, obscured in darkness.

The Prospitians represent Skaia and paradox space as we know it, the Dersites represent the Furthest Ring. They despise the frogs with a passion because if a frog appears, the voids lose more ground. If they win, the void stays strong.
It should be noted that Dersites seem to be able to twist things slightly in terms of narrative. Spades slick in particular was able to make his fake plastic eye act like a real robot eye. And the furthest ring has been said be where the influence of paradox space is at its weakest.

Its specifically said to be space and time but basically those are the same thing as the narrative in homestuck so XD

[calamityCons]

I found the carapacian war on skaia to be extremely engaging and I was supremely excited to see what would happen and how the Beta kids would resolve the conflict. I loved it a lot and I was sad to see it minimized and ignored and shunted into the background.

[TH4NK YOU B3N]

I think there's something meant to be said about the sburb players providing weaponry to both sides (via prototyping) and then wiping out the winning kingdom at the very end. Not sure what it'd be.

[Generalrabogolfo]

I think there's something meant to be said about the sburb players providing weaponry to both sides (via prototyping) and then wiping out the winning kingdom at the very end. Not sure what it'd be.

oh fuck is homestuck also a political critique now? I dont want it to critize England
: (

[bathtimebird]

It's just a game mechanic, or rather, a countdown timer. Eventually Derse is gonna win, and they'll initiate the reckoning. This is supposed to be a good thing though, as some of the meteor's the Black King/whoever has the scepter will send hurdling towards Skaia
have important bootstraps (paradox clones, frog ruins, etc) and will get sent through its defense portals and down to earth. So really, you're meant to fight the Black King while the Reckoning is happening. It's scripted. The entire chess war leads up to this.

[Flame_Warp]

I think there's something meant to be said about the sburb players providing weaponry to both sides (via prototyping) and then wiping out the winning kingdom at the very end. Not sure what it'd be.

oh fuck is homestuck also a political critique now? I dont want it to critize England
: (

Homestuck is a metaphor for the Obama administration, we've been over this

[thorondraco]

It's just a game mechanic, or rather, a countdown timer. Eventually Derse is gonna win, and they'll initiate the reckoning. This is supposed to be a good thing though, as some of the meteor's the Black King/whoever has the scepter will send hurdling towards Skaia
have important bootstraps (paradox clones, frog ruins, etc) and will get sent through its defense portals and down to earth. So really, you're meant to fight the Black King while the Reckoning is happening. It's scripted. The entire chess war leads up to this.

Its also a metaphor for paradox space i think and how its formed. Its as if Skaia is at war with the Furthest Ring. Whenever Skaia wins, the Ring weakens, as more of it is illuminated by its light.

And that is where the players come in. Skaia itself is not as powerful as the furthest ring by far. The Void is vast and primordial. It is why the prospitians are marked to lose, along with the fact that if the kingdom could win on its own then the hero would have no purpose.

But i think it implies a con too, a Kansas shuffle. Skaia deliberately turns the meteors upon their home planet to ensure the timeloop and to ensure that the Players fight the Dersites in the end. The prospitians are too passive to win and the Dersites want to destroy skaia in the name of the Furthest Ring.

Skaia is thought of as benign and at worse, pragmatic, but an aware and godlike entity. One that apparently has retcon like powers to completely reset it. It can of course ensure the reset is like ti always happens, but the prior event is erased.

It does not need to win all the time. It only needs to win bit by bit, as the frogs populate the furthest ring, lilipads of void turned into stable space. There is nothing the furthest ring can do to reverse this. No horror terror is as powerful as the Frogs themselves.

[Crpal]

Honestly, its kind of fucked up. These people with real thoughts, feelings, and emotions, who have dreams and wants, are ultimately just thrown away to die in a ultimately worthless war. The whole point of the war is to just give the players increased impetus to beat their session and create a new universe. Even if Derse wins (which is always destined to do) everyone loses because their session becomes doomed and fades away.

[Roxy]

I think there's something meant to be said about the sburb players providing weaponry to both sides (via prototyping) and then wiping out the winning kingdom at the very end. Not sure what it'd be.

oh fuck is homestuck also a political critique now? I dont want it to critize England
: (

Criticizing england isnt political critique. Its public service to the global community.

[thorondraco]

Honestly, its kind of fucked up. These people with real thoughts, feelings, and emotions, who have dreams and wants, are ultimately just thrown away to die in a ultimately worthless war. The whole point of the war is to just give the players increased impetus to beat their session and create a new universe. Even if Derse wins (which is always destined to do) everyone loses because their session becomes doomed and fades away.

... Suddenly i am imagining a enormous planetoids that peoples from failed sessions just end up. Run by a horror terror that works a bar.

[Roxy]

Honestly, its kind of fucked up. These people with real thoughts, feelings, and emotions, who have dreams and wants, are ultimately just thrown away to die in a ultimately worthless war. The whole point of the war is to just give the players increased impetus to beat their session and create a new universe. Even if Derse wins (which is always destined to do) everyone loses because their session becomes doomed and fades away.

... Suddenly i am imagining a enormous planetoids that peoples from failed sessions just end up. Run by a horror terror that works a bar.

yknow id read a comic about that if I still read comics. pretty funny idea and definitely something I agree is possible

[MorganMustDie]

I figured it was kind of a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. If you look at the whole SBURB thing as the universe's reproductive system, where you replace sperm and ova with gods and skaia, the war could be a way to separate those that would make Good Gods from Bad Gods
If the players don't have the skills to resolve the pretty simple, literally black and white conflict of the carapacian war, what business do they have running an entire universe full of living things?

Thus, if you're bad at the carapacian war aspect of Sburb, you're probably nowhere near as likely to wind up winning the game. How does the war impact the eventual universe birth? Guess we'll never know

[rookie1978]

It's just a game mechanic that overarchingly doesn't mean anything except setting up the Black King bossfight.

[nonsenseMnemonic]

I didn't really care about it in my first read, but I think it's a lot more interesting now, and wish it had gotten a bit more attention later on. WV talking to John continues to be one of my favorite sections of the comic and I'd have loved to see more carapacian-player interaction (though I guess that's not really a war thing so much). I do think it makes sense to ultimately neglect the war as an early game mechanic that really isn't important to their game in the end, but just the fact that it ends up forgotten by necessity as one progresses into the late game is pretty interesting and something that might've been neat to reflect upon.

[JakeMorph]

i don't think the war on the battlefield is 'forgotten by necessity' through progress in the game: the defeat of the black king and his army is the final level of Sburb. the fact that the war faded into obscurity as the comic went on is more of a symptom of the kids' own personal journey and lord english's hijacking of the normal chain of events.

even then i don't think the war is necessarily 'irrelevant' to the ending of Homestuck. adversity between prospit and derse has always just been essentially a proxy war between the forces of destruction and creation - represented by the horrorterrors and skaia - and that battle continues to rage on until Act 7, just with different soldiers and in different theatres. of course, it becomes more complicated when it turns out the horrorterrors and lord english, despite both being destructive entities, are at odds with even each other: but that's why Homestuck's ending is essentially a compromise between the two sides, destroying one world to make room for the creation of the next. the black and white colour theming associated with the epilogues is partially representative of this.

[calamityCons]

The carapacian war and its conflict and the journey the kids would have taken to defeat the Black King I thought was engaging enough. The wrench that Jack Noir threw into the mix was also extremely engaging and new, and clearly not how the game is supposed to go, so I thought that was enough of a twist that it would carry the rest of the story. I even kind of held on to hope that there'd be a way to make peace between Prospit and Derse, or that after the game was over the four kids would go back to Earth post-post-apocalypse and live with the Carapaces who guided them. Man. It's pretty cool.

[thorondraco]

i don't think the war on the battlefield is 'forgotten by necessity' through progress in the game: the defeat of the black king and his army is the final level of Sburb. the fact that the war faded into obscurity as the comic went on is more of a symptom of the kids' own personal journey and lord english's hijacking of the normal chain of events.

even then i don't think the war is necessarily 'irrelevant' to the ending of Homestuck. adversity between prospit and derse has always just been essentially a proxy war between the forces of destruction and creation - represented by the horrorterrors and skaia - and that battle continues to rage on until Act 7, just with different soldiers and in different theatres. of course, it becomes more complicated when it turns out the horrorterrors and lord english, despite both being destructive entities, are at odds with even each other: but that's why Homestuck's ending is essentially a compromise between the two sides, destroying one world to make room for the creation of the next. the black and white colour theming associated with the epilogues is partially representative of this.

It seems less creation and destruction and more order and chaos. Thing is it almost feels like Skaia, or the forces behind skaia, are the aggressors in this instance.

Chaos renders everything null and incomprehensible. But Order brings and restricts to the point of sterility and eventual destruction. Skaia cause the frogs to exist and, in doing so, turns more of the void into stable space, one 'lillypad' at a time. Which in a sense is destructive to the nature of the void, to bring sense to the senseless.

Weirdly enough i feel a more sinister presence from skaia and the 'powers that be' than the void and horror terrors... I am starting to think that Skaia is in fact, invasive. The true form of paradox space is the Furthest Ring. Skaia unwinds it with its light giving form to darkness. Maybe a balance can be formed but Sburb is not about balance, however it balances sex pairings and twelve aspects. its about control.

[Bahinchut]

Honestly, its kind of fucked up. These people with real thoughts, feelings, and emotions, who have dreams and wants, are ultimately just thrown away to die in a ultimately worthless war.

irl war is also like this