My poor computer’s a mess, this took forever because it keeps freezing up when I do anything on a webpage. Hopefully it’ll be a little happier now that I’ve worked through a few pages.
Oh well. There was a long one with plot today!
If You Hated It, Then You Should Have Put a Ring on It (Snowman (Slick))
Every line of this is hilarious.
She stays a few steps ahead of him, walking back through the house, glancing around to see if she can find evidence of where she may have gone. Perhaps a friend’s place.
So even having the paperwork ready for them isn’t enough to make up for marrying them? Was there any way she could have fake-married them or do they retain bureaucracy powers even when smashed?
…and now they’re going to fuck on her bed. And probably get blood all over the sheets too. Poor mystery carapace.
White and Orange (Droog (Slick))
This really doesn’t seem like it’s anything like how the characters would act or talk. Is the dialogue from what you’re crossing this with?
Also, drabble is a word for a writing exercise where it’s edited to be exactly a hundred words.
Stop doing this, everyone.
The Harlequin Rose (Lalonde, AR, PS (Egbert))
Hm. I like how you wrote Lalonde/Egbert, it’s not a ship I have feelings on either way on its own but you sold it well enough I’m rooting for the two. And I’m glad to Lalonde managed to get off some shots of her own.
Miss Lalonde is an upstanding citizen of the city, she runs several charitable organizations and works closely with the mayor
Eh, there’s nothing wrong about this, but it’s not particularly interesting. One of the fun things about Homestuck is how very larger-than-life everyone is. Miss Lalonde may be, by their standards, an upstanding citizen, but that can still include constant drunkenness and mad science, not just the usual society-lady charity running.
he stated simply.
It’s rare enough that “stated” works in a sentence. You’ll never find a time when you need to add “simply” on the end.
“I ain’t fans of the Midnight Crew, Chief, but I don’t see a motive for ‘em here. They got their hands all over this city, but Miss Lalonde weren’t in nothin’ that’d get this kinda reaction outta them.”
It’s always weird to see characters seriously discussing the Crew’s motives on this sort of practical level, as if they couldn’t possibly just do something impulsively. It’s certainly possible for something to not fit their usual behavior, but I’d think it’d be more something like that they tend not to do driveby shootings, or use different weapons, or don’t mess around in that area, or the description of the car doesn’t match… Something other than the idea Slick needs good reason in order to be violent. Or else some suggestion the Crew works more democratically and Slick’s being reined in by Droog or something.
It’s always nice when authors remember to sell what they’re writing, instead of treating it as a given. That’s my problem with a lot of the secondary ships that pop up in stories, they’re just being namedropped.
Doc Scratch: Face the End (Doc Scratch)
Lovely, eerie writing, and a very interesting look into Scratch’s head as well as a horrifying view of English.
this particular drabble
A drabble’s a writing exercise of exactly a hundred words. This is six words off a thousand.
Around the watercooler (Snowman, Aradiacester)
One of the many, many things to dislike about the whole Handmaid business is we’re left with Snowman either unaware, not giving a fuck, or in a similar situation. Any attempt to have them interact positively defaults to the third, so any feel-good bit you get for Aradiacester having a moment of friendship is drowned out by the fact Snowman’s now been dragged down into similar endless misery.
I can’t even really look forward to English dying at this point. I just want everyone to pretend the entire section of canon doesn’t exist.
Ever After (Dave, Rose, John, Jade (BQ, Jack, Bec, Lalonde, Strider))
until they day when they could rejoin society
That should be “the day” and it should probably be just “join society” since they’ve never been part of it.
The queen had foolishly started a war with the bright kingdom from across the waters, unaware or uncaring that she was fated to lose
But it’s Prospit that’s fated to lose.
Hm. This is prettily written, but rather lackluster, since it ends up just retelling everything that happened but reworded to be more fairy-tale sounding.
I don’t get why people do this. Rose and Dave even still ride off on the entire moon, despite the fact they’re supposedly protecting their kingdom in this version. What’s the point of changing bits if those bits don’t affect anything?
Blackest Palemates (Slick (Droog, PI, PS))
Very nicely written. I liked how the story takes its time unfolding what actually happened to set all this off, as well as something actually coming out of the fact they’re in conflict with Team Sleuth by nature instead of one or the other group just making endless allowances. And you write Droog well, not too emotional and not weepy, but not a flat sociopath either.
It’s surprising how much more enjoyable the crossover ships get when both sides possess a spine.
Monopoly Games (Aradia (Death, Droog))
This really seems nothing at all like Aradia.
She offered a slight curtsy and for a moment felt awkward standing there in her school uniform and not something nicer (one ought to be formal, she thought, when meeting an infinite entity like Death)
This seems like generic-quirky-Alicelike-schoolgirl. Aradia’s the one who spent her time digging holes in the ground and playing FLARP when she was alive.
“Which piece do you like?” asked Death.
“I usually just take whatever is leftover. Everyone else gets so riled up about their pieces.”
She also can do things on her own in general instead of her life revolving around Droog, and what he taught her, and how she wants to be alive to see him and not just because she wants to be alive because being alive is good. Canon Aradia managed to come back as a ghost on her own without being raised by Droog, I see no reason this one would rely on what Droog taught her in order to beat Death.
Also she sounds like she’s closer to five years old than five sweeps with her constant talk of “Daddy”.
Fucking Daddy Droog meme.
Die of the Dead Ch1 (Crowbar (Die))
Oh well, that’s what he got for being the most responsible and arguably the smartest of thirteen idiots and a huge bitch.
It’s fine if they don’t get along, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to treat Slick as a objective observer when he calls her that.
“Uh, Crowbar, what, ah, what happens when we die?”
This whole conversation stops making sense when you remember that Die sees their corpses all the time. His power is based around putting a pin in the doll and ending up next to a corpse. If something more specific is happening, then he’d be more specific about it. I get that you’re trying to draw it out, but you’ve already said it’s zombies from the summary so the readers know, and considering how dismissive Crowbar is I don’t think he’d pay much more attention to Die asking weird hypothetical questions about if the undead would have time powers than to Die asking weird hypothetical questions about if the dead would have time powers.
I also don’t get why he keeps sticking pins in instead of walking around the mansion current mansion to get what he wants, or why he seems to keep going back to whatever zombie timeline he started in (is he trying a different timeline each time and it’s just everything comes up zombie? If so, you could have Crowbar noticing he’s using a different pin. Just saying he keeps popping in and popping out makes it sound like he’s moving between two timelines.)
“Contagion spread. Temporal doors left open. Monsters coming in. Timeline fucked, everybody out.”
That doesn’t make all that much sense with how Die’s powers work. And why doesn’t he just jump to another timeline from there instead of finding someone to tell about it?
Die of the Dead Ch2 (Die (The Felt))
The power was out, which Die had always thought was impossible in the mansion, and the low lighting made everything in the room feel that much creepier. It was eerily quiet, though if he strained he could hear the occasional thump or thunk from somewhere deep in the manor. Something moaned quietly
You do a nice job of setting the stage here.
Not clear why Matchsticks is so annoyed to find out Die started in a different timeline, since it doesn’t seem like Die normally sticks to one, so he’d presumably be equally invested in fighting their opponents (or, not, as the case may be) regardless.
Lacking any better option Die grabbed the pin from his hat and just started stabbing at Sawbucks head as best as he could (while still punching and kicking as much as he could).
I don’t get why he doesn’t try using a pin on his doll. If nothing else it might bring him to somewhere with more allies to help him with Sawbuck.
That look fell away immediately when a pins-and-needles feeling spread up his arm from the Doll. That only happened when something altered the timeline’s composition, which meant he had about a minute to correct the doll before he jumped automatically
I don’t think it can work like that. If it did, Slick would have been pulled back out of the bad-end timeline he jumped to by opening the vault. Unless you mean for it to be something that only effects Die, and even then, it doesn’t make too much sense. That’d mean each Die has no set timeline and gets shunted around every time anything happens.
“Man did you even see that? He was fucking insane! How nuts do ya gotta be to go after people facefirst, right?”
I like how you’ve set things up so the zombie apocalypse is going backwards. Since he’s trying to get the pins out, he keeps jumping to them dealing with an earlier stage, and now finally we’ve reached the beginning of the usual horror movie, where no one’s figured out what’s going on yet.
Although I’m curious how Quarters died that they can’t figure out he’s dead and just think he’s crazy. Particularly when the effigies should burn up upon death. Unless Die’s broken pins have somehow fucked up the effigies as well and that’s part of what’s causing the problem…
Die paused. Quarters had gone after Stitch? Well, Stitch had obviously survived, but if he’d been injured like Eggs, that might not last long. And if Stitch was out of commission, that might… Complicate things for this version of the gang.
It seems like things are still pretty containable at this point if he tells the rest of them that hey, zombies, maybe try fire or something. It’d be good to have a better idea of Die’s position in the gang with the whole timeline jumping – does he not care about helping out at all, or only whatever his home timeline is, or only a timeline that’s still got the full set of Felt, or would he normally but he’s writing these ones off as doomed?
Except his intuition was really really stupid because it left his hand hovering over a headless pin.
That was completely ridiculous, right? This timeline seemed perfectly untouched and there was no reason for there to be any kind of horrific monster version of themselves so why wasn’t his hand moving shit shit.
But isn’t the more likely option that the broken pins still register normally to him, they just can’t successfully move him to the proper, normal-death timeline and he ends up getting shunted halfway, or sideways, or something? So they’d still be the ones he should use, they’re just not working properly.
Unless he’s already viewing the pins as different and thinks that since the broken and regular pins are different, the fact his hand is reaching for it means zombie? Since it seems for some reason he has extra copies of unbroken versions of the pins, how is going for a broken pin is different than when he has two unbroken pins and reaches for one? If the idea is the pins are different now, it’d be clearer if you had him try to shift over to one of the duplicate pins and found none of them registered as right.
Hm, I wonder what happens if they kill a zombie in a zombe timeline. If that registers as a full death, then he might get shunted out of that timeline into one where the zombie’s still around. Or if he combines a broken and unbroken pin, maybe he’d end up in the dead zombie timeline.
And Die wasn’t sure he wanted to be completely clear about it, either, because Crowbar might be kind of mad about messing with the timelines to that extent.
That doesn’t make sense, Die’s doll doesn’t seem to do anything to the timelines, it does things to him, and anyway I can’t imagine why Crowbar would care in the first place, he doesn’t jump timelines so timeline fuckery can never be his problem.
Now, pissed off Die broke a time artifact, that I could see. Depends on if the pins are something Die’s in charge of, and he can fix, or if they’re something someone else has to deal with. Or if they actually use Die’s doll for some gang purpose in addition to Die using it to hop around.
Die couldn’t take it anymore and glanced away as he tried to figure out how to put ‘I may or may not have dropped a Sawbuck cannibal monster in a timeline he didn’t belong in which might also be contagious whoops
? Is that what happened with the disappearing Sawbuck? But Sawbuck doesn’t move across timelines when he’s injured, he moves in time. And takes the person who injured him along. If Die’s meant to be moving Sawbuck, he’d need to jump timelines himself and drag Sawbuck along.
So that’s why Die wants to know if corpses have their powers? But they don’t, Slick manages to kill two Sawbucks in one blow, so the killing blow must not move you at all. Possible for zombies to work differently, since it’s not like corpses keep their ability to move normally either, but just in terms of corpses it seems they should know this one.
Hm, well, the zombie apocalypse business is interesting, as is exploring how things might go if something went wrong with Die’s powers. Some of this seems shaky canonwise, though, or maybe I’m just not following along right.
I’m not sure how much the details of how things work will go – the first chapter bit about Die unleashing the floodgates is nagging ominously – but so far so good. And despite my trepidation with the first paragraph line about huge bitch bluh bluh, Snowman seems perfectly reasonable when she appears in the second chapter.
Snowman (Slick)
Droog (Slick)
Lalonde, AR, PS (Egbert)
Doc Scratch
Snowman, Aradiacester
Dave, Rose, John, Jade (BQ, Jack, Bec, Lalonde, Strider)
Slick (Droog, PI, PS)
Aradia (Death, Droog)
Crowbar, Die (The Felt)
Four of nine.
Hm, three more and then I begin the Ealasaid wall. I should probably get to the start of that early this week instead so they have time to decide if they want out before I do the rest.