Dec 20th-24th! I’m now almost done with last year. Of course, dates are deceiving  I’m about to hit all the gift fic, and while carapaces may be less common than trolls, there was a lot of gift fic.

Wind Up

an omnipotent dog destroyer sovereign slayer

This doesn’t read right, the “destroyer” in the middle throws it off. an omnipotent dog sovereign slayer reads more smoothly.

to the you from before, the you that was once Spades Slick in another universe, in another session. Somewhere inside, you still hate clocks

This seems to be an unnecessarily forced connection. It’d be easier to say that clock-hating is an inherent trait shown in the Spades Slick version, rather than that it’s a learned trait that he’s somehow inherited despite never going through the same things.

Aside from that, the writing of this works well – I like the poetic jumble of description from Jack, his viciousness and brutality so extreme it wraps around into something surreally beautiful.

More Free Time than Good Sense II: Electric Boogaloo (Lord English (Dave))

This is weirdly hilarious and cleverly written.

Art: Symmetry (BQ, WQ

I don’t know if it’s just me, but the image seems to be broken here.

For What It’s Worth (Droog (Slick, Aradia, Boxcars, Deuce))

he was picking up Slick from bars because his on-again-off-again girlfriend had slipped off his arm and crawled into the car of anyone buying her a drink.

I’m not sure why Slick would be the sort of person to tolerate a girlfriend constantly cheating on him.

Actually I’m not sure why any of them are acting like any of this. This seems less like an AU and more OCs of your own in a real world setting.

“Don’t ask anybody for a ride, OK?” Droog stood, careful not to back into a pile of anything, and quietly navigated around his apartment in search of his coat and keys. “I’m comin’ to get you.”

“Good luck with that,” cackled Slick, as Droog slipped on his coat and locked his door. “I’ll be damned if I know where the fuck I am.”

Droog shuddered. He wouldn’t be able to last three months.

“Jesus, Slick, just walk up the damn stairs already!”

It seems like there’s a missing scene break here.

I can’t tell if the girlfriend bit is meant to be some sort of Snowman bashing or if she plain doesn’t exist in this AU.

Build this City (DD (SS, HB, CD))

“Blah, blah, afraid the sun’ll ruin your complexion, I get it,” Jack stopped at a large computer console.

When dialogue isn’t followed by a speech tag like “said”, it’s treated as a separate sentence and ends in a period. This should be “Blah, blah, afraid the sun’ll ruin your complexion, I get it.” Jack stopped at a large computer console.

Fuckin’ Trolls

Also, trolls shouldn’t be capitalized. You don’t capitalize human, do you?

“Jack!” He yelled

When dialogue is followed by a speech tag, you treat it like it’s all part of the same sentence even when you have another form of punctuation, like !, in the middle, and don’t capitalize. This should be “Jack!” he yelled

This seems a bit anticlimactic – it does make a degree of sense that’s how he could have done it, but it removes the sense of real accomplishment to have him build the city just because he’s the first one to stumble on a bunch of robots to build it for him. If he’d had to work harder to get them working, or deliberately look for them in the first place, or something like that, it’d be better. Similarly, their renaming seems pretty rushed and like it’s more there just to explain how it happened than as an interesting scene of its own.

It occurs to me that’s probably what this story really was, a description of their theory on how it happened rather than an engaging tale about what happened.

Boardingstuck (John, Karkat (Rose, Terezi, Vriska, Equius, Nepeta, PM, WV, AR))

Karkat glared at the newest arrival. “I hate him!”
Terezi looked at him with sightless eyes. “You hate him? You just met him. How can you hate him already?”
Karkat shrugged. “I dunno. I just hate him!”

First, “looked at with sightless eyes” is a cliche and not even one of the clever kinds. Don’t write Terezi with the same reactions as someone who can see and then just add on “sightlessly” at the end.

Second, Karkat doesn’t hate John for no reason, he hated him because he’d been watching John derp about life for god knows how long. If you want to have that mirrored in your AU, have John actually do something stupid that provokes Karkat to hatelust when he witnesses it.

…and now he doesn’t know what trolls are. If he’s going to a school that involves aliens, surely he’d have heard it mentioned once before?

The girl, wearing a set of red sunglasses, explained, “We’re trolls, and from a different planet than you humans. So it kinda makes sense that we look different.

The troll’s response has largely been “no, you guys are the ones who look weird”. Which makes sense, because humans would look just as weird to them as they do to humans, and also the trolls are not a friendly diplomatic race that thinks it’s most important to consider things from other people’s points of view.

“Oh, uh,” stammered Terezi, “hi Vriska. And Equius.”

Terezi doesn’t stammer, and she’s the one who came out on top in the whole Team Charge screwup.

“Oh, relax. I’m here to learn, okay? No backstabbing, I promise!” The girl, who John assumed was Vriska, offered her hand for a handshake. John, seeing that neither Terezi nor Karkat were accepting Vriska’s offer, grabbed Vriska’s hand and smiled.
“Hi Vriska! My name is John, and I believe you.”
Rose facepalmed, and grabbed John. “What are you doing?!” she whispered. “You don’t know what she’s done!”

Normal people don’t assume when people are mad about something unstated it’s because the other person is likely a horrible criminal.

Rose sighed. “Look, I’m not going to tell you who you can and can’t be friends with. Just watch your back, okay? I don’t trust her.”

Also Rose is a terrible judge of character who gets led around by Doc Scratch of all people. There’s really no need to have John getting preemptive warnings about Vriska – surely her crippling and murder of others (or this AU’s equivalent) will be explained before long by the magic of just asking what’s up, and then Rose will have an actual reason to be complaining about the friendship.

Nepeta whipped around to look at John. “What’s he doing with Friska?!” she hissed. “Doesn’t he know?” Equius shook his head, and Nepeta stood up and looked John in the eye. “Stay far away from Vwhiskers!” she spat. “She’s dangerous!”

This isn’t how Nepeta acts. Nepeta might well be nervous around Vriska due to that, but she wouldn’t be trying to enforce Vriska’s social isolation. Really, none of them save Terezi and robotized Aradia really make the crippling and blinding the end-all of their opinion on her. Karkat and Equius both dislike her for additional and/or unrelated reasons, for example.

“Well,” Vriska muttered, looking away, “yeah. But that was a while ago, and I feel really bad about it. I’ve been trying to change and be nicer, but nobody believes me.”

This isn’t particularly Vriska, either. She only admits she feels bad after murdering Tavros, and struggles a lot with even saying that might in a private conversation when she’s already been talking to John for a while. She never seems to really want to be “nicer” and she tries to make up for her mistakes by doing impressive stuff that helps, rather than atoning and changing.

So just in general, this seems more like you’ve taken your own characters and are trying to walk them through a Homestuck-inspired setup than Homestuck characters in a new setup.

It doesn’t get more interesting from there.

twin high maintenance machines PM

Art.

Kill the Hero(Dave (Jade, Bec Noir))

This just isn’t very good in a way it’s hard to articulate.

Disorientation (Droog (Die, Slick, Boxcars))

You write Droog wonderfully. He’s so thorough when he decides to be terrible.

Credit (Quarters (Droog))

He knows he could have driven, but if there was one thing Quarters learned in the war,

That’s kind of a weird thing to just drop in there. The carapaces are defined by a war, so making an unrelated character have an unrelated war as well feels redundant at best.

Beyond that, this really doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with Droog – why would he be playing with his hat on the ground for tips? I could maybe buy him playing for the sake of it somewhere public, but nothing more. And there’s nothing much here of the rivalry besides a quick mention, or anything else that defines them. It reads as rather generic.

The war thing is so unexplained I’m assuming it’s some poorly considered fanon thing making the rounds.