it's a bit on the nose, honestly.

primarily, a lot of characters get cast as final fantasy 14 jobs when strifing. this started with the light party joke in [s] get this over with, but i think it's just fun! jake is a machinist, his rebuild action is taken directly from the machinist kit, terezi is a dragoon, her dragonsong dive move is literally just the dragoon limit break. and rose is a final fantasy black mage.

manafont is a move black mages get in final fantasy games. it restores MP in ffxiv, the one i've played the most of, and gives the user free casts in the other games it appears in, but MP isn't a system that's at play in that combat, so it just acts as a health restore. but i wanted to make it more... homestuck-y? see: dante basco's inferno in today's hsbc update. see also, meteora, fitting final fantasy spell name escalation and matching the name of the linkin park album. and in brainstorming pun ideas, what i wound up latching onto was duchamp's fountain, the piece whose conversation largely revolves around defining what art "is" and the social boundaries set around it, something rose evidently cares about given the conversation she had with dirk before proposing.

so it's less deep of a cut when it comes to duchamp's work, but otherwise you're right on the money, if i was more familiar with his work it's the kind of thing i'd go for

yup! we'll see more of this next week but it solves a handful of problems:

• one is that acts that run long tend to be kind of shapeless
• chapters do an alright job of mitigating this this, but eventually, chapters also kind of stop working, since being numbered one through X quickly results in confusion, and as we can see, chapters also kind of run long
• it provides an image to link directly to on the adventure map without direct spoilers
• but still a tantalizing amount of spoilers! you want that hook, janes goin at it is a good hook

my current thought process is that volume covers happen every 200 pages, like. if a chapter ends and its been more than 200 pages from the last one, bam, volume cover imminent.

there is! there's two, actually, one is that i genuinely feel like the resolution in terezi: remem8er is really, really good. like, when terezi: remem8er moves to show eridan in specific, it becomes clear what the purpose of that animation actually is, it solidifies the repeated beat of "the kids are alright" into something meaningful, as we see even the kids who weren't alright at the time are capable of being so, given the room to be better. that flash is like, 9 years old, i've seen it easily hundreds of times, and it hits every single time. i really, really respect homestuck's choice to depict death as freedom from narrative, and so it becomes a layered thing, to revive someone and bring them back into narrative's fold.

this is something that tavros being revived gets at - tavros's resurrection coincides with the actual plot kicking off - the first hints of what vriska's planning in the dreambubbles, the sprite dissolution, and jane's dream with meenah, and then he has a nonstop shit time that he only starts to buck like, earlier this month. its something that feferi being revived gets at, in that she was brought back to have a specific role in the narrative, but she doesn't want that at all, openly rejecting it using knowledge she could only have through her time outside the folds of the story's eye. and it's something that nepeta being revived gets at, being this character who came back with no intent to participate in the plot, but wanted to be alive again. and we don't get much reasoning from nepeta explicitly, but there is an implication when the first thing she does after returning is to start roleplaying with terezi: she wants to come back specifically because stories are fun. and eridan not coming back gets at this too, that a character simply not being in the story can be cathartic in itself.

the second is that eridan not coming back to life doesn't necessarily mean eridan won't be impactful narratively. it's hard to believe since the story on the other side of the black hole is only just starting, but act 2 opens up on things going on in the dreambubbles. it's not that eridan won't be in it, it's more that their role in the story is different. smaller than if they came back to life, sure, but i dont necessarily think a character being done right and a character getting more screentime are the same thing, and in fact, i kind of believe the more of the second there is, the less likely the first becomes

this has been a pretty common request! and i'd love to get that working, right now the thing stopping me is time spent on implementation and testing. right now, the idea is to have it be a centralized main feed - bdth updates, eternal september updates, and news posts, with each update and news post getting its own entry, but bdth doesn't have a singular "updates" feed - it's all individual pages, and putting each new page into an rss feed one by one would quickly make it unusable when i'm putting up double-digits pages at a time.

there's some more implementation stuff that doesn't especially matter in a formspring question, but the tl;dr is your classic conundrum: the way to get something usable out quickly would result in a bad feed that nobody would want to use, the way to get it done the best requires some backend work that would take time to do.