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.

So there's a couple layers to what's going on with Vriska right now. We have a couple scenes with her in Act 1, but one is before she dies, and one is in the future, which we haven't seen her reach yet. This one today is the start of her getting there.

(CW: Discussion of suicidal ideation and attempts.)

The top layer, the obvious one, is that of entitlement. She won! She defeated Lord English, and narrative structure has told her that after a story ends with the hero defeating the bad guy, the happy ending is obtained. Status quo restored, pack all the toys back into the box and let them rest. Obviously, this didn't happen for her. A lot of the reason A1 is like that is to sell it as restful and low-stakes, compared to the high-octane, hotblooded affairs Vriska typically deals in. In being denied this, Vriska is compelled to ask where she went wrong, even though by narrative standards, she didn't do anything wrong there. The hero is supposed to defeat the villain and get the happy ending.

Vriska would never admit to this unless she was under duress though. She's a real, two-fisted, 8lue-8looded Alternian, and one of the tenets of Alternia is a cult of action for action's sake, and the happy ending, the peaceful world you fight for, is what you get for having done enough action. Maybe I'm thinking of something else.

So why doesn't she get one? She fought for it. She deserves it. Simple as.

The second, murkier layer is that of regret.

Throughout EOA1, Terezi and Kanaya, the two people who knew Vriska the most authentically, both individually come to the conclusion that Vriska knew she was going to die in Act 7. Terezi says as much in her DMs to her before Jane finds her outside the black hole that her messages to Vriska - the ones we see at the start - are her hoping that her monologue before Collide was the last thing she'd ever say to her. Kanaya mentions it while confronting Rose during Rose's own meltdown, while working through her feelings about trying to fix people. These two are the most trustworthy sources on Vriska that the readers have.

Post-retcon Vriska, the one we're following now, leapt into the dreambubbles to visit (Vriska), where we see her last major meltdown in Homestuck proper. One of the bigger complaints about the retcons is that they walked back character development, and this much is literally true, though where I tend to break is that I don't think it's a bad thing. In this conflict between her and (herself), Vriska sees what she always wanted, but can't bring herself to ask for - a life largely devoid of meaning, one where the pressure to be a hero is off, one where she can be complicatedly, always complicatedly, happy. This wrecks her. She wants so badly to live like that, but can't, because she still believes she needs to be the hero.

Right before Terezi: Remem8er, Terezi recognizes that Vriska, nice as she was to have around for the moment, is prone to this exact kind of self-destructive heroic tendency. Her last messages to Vriska read like a eulogy for her. Vriska running off to fight English is circumstantially identical to her going off to fight Jack, except this time, Terezi chooses to let her go, to let her make this bad decision and move on with her life. She rebounds onto June in post-canon, in BDTH, she finds more comfort with Jane, who is going the fuck through it too, as she feels indebted to Vriska for healing her, etc, etc, you read the comic.

There's a couple other comics that do other things at that moment, I believe Act Omega has the house juju just fizzle out, and Act 8 has something else happen that I don't remember but leads to Vriska antagonizing the rest of the cast on loop. It's been a while since I read either of them. But I think it's most potent that even if she just dies in this confrontation, either literal heroic death in BDTH, or metaphorical character death in post-canon.

In post-canon, Vriska spirals out too. She immediately makes the worst decision she's ever made, to go fuck a 40-year-old Gamzee, and is in full solipsistic delusion mode. (Hey, June parallel!)

In BDTH, she puts together that her attempt succeeded. Her saying "I did it." could then reflect either her triumphing over English, which she was directly involved in, yes, but also that she had done exactly what Terezi and Kanaya thought she had. Now she has to carry the regrets that come with choosing to be the hero, to go out in a blaze of glory, over her own happiness. (Hey, June parallel!)

And it turns out, she hates it so goddamn much and is going to tear shit up to try and find a way out of it.

(I SPOIL THE ENDING OF PSYCHOLONIALS HERE, SO WATCH OUT)

a lot of my understanding of psycholonials is as a reflection and post-mortem on homestuck fandom. there's some stuff in there that i think is more generalized - the relationship between zhen and riotus is really fascinating in its own right, and the way zhen's artistic voice overlaps with her very real mental illnesses to the point of being kind of indistinguishable is something i really haven't seen depicted in a way that actually resonated with me until then.

but i think a lot of the meat of psycholonials, the relationship between zhen and the jubilites is reflective of hussie's experience at the top of homestuck fandom. it's cynical, grimy, and sort of ignorant of what the ground floor of fandom is actually like, but that's to be expected from the same person who wrote the cherubs into homestuck.

the end of psycholonials to me then is that the jubilite movement, one that had followed zhen until their disappearance, fracturing and devolving into petty squabbles for any scrap of power they can get their hands on. everyone is backstabbing and plotting and vying for the role of supreme honkifex, it's equal parts leftist infighting, fandom drama, and religious schism. everyone is trying to assert their visions of what the jubilite movement should be.

and if you understand that as an expression of what homestuck fandom is, that's just outright what i am doing here too! i'm presenting a vision of what i like about homestuck, what i want out of homestuck, and hoping people will follow me into it, even if it ends like every other aspiring holder of the honkifex's belt-with-two-guns. should i fall in this grand clown war, may my back get blown out by a doohickey like bozo abe.

i wouldn't call myself a CS nerd outright, but it's definitely a thing i'm loosely interested in, though mostly as a fairweather observer. a lot of my interaction with programming is as a way to further my capacity to tell a story, and my medium of choice is video games more than it is comics, and stuff like godot's gdscript makes it very easy to write code. sometimes i think about stuff like learning rust or something, just to deepen my cred and get better about writing good code, but it's an "if i had the free time" thing more than a drive to be my main thing.

it helps to understand regardless, since homestuck is built around a lot of compsci principles (i am wearing a shirt that says "ask me about my object-oriented character writing manifesto")