[Discord]

LHC:
fuck it, relistening to The Baby Is You now
>all babies come into the world with a special force called… love
wait Toby Fox wrote this is this undertale canon?

Krixwell:
Of course

LHC:
this is actually the only part of homestuck that’s canon

Krixwell:
I hope you appreciated the ending of this post https://krixwell-liveblogs.tumblr.com/post/176811675159/amy-i-spoke-she-startled-as-if-id-slapped
[here]

LHC:
let’s be real, if amy wanted she could totally make herself pregnant and have the baby be you for any given value of you
the rose rap is really something

Krixwell:
ngl i unironically like that to some extent
Also so Amy’s Dave (the pregnant one), Taylor’s Rose (the spurned lover)… Bonesaw’s Karkat (the midwife) because that’s funtimes for all, Siberian is Bro (wants to eat the baby)… but who’s the baby?
Also Glory Girl could take either Taylor or Siberian’s spaces. Taylor’s only Rose because of my post, and I like my rationale for Siberian, so maybe Victoria’s Rose.

LHC:
that one bit with the person who sounds exactly like Lazy Susan from Gravity Falls

Krixwell:
Maybe the baby is Gallant.

LHC:
victoria, the baby is you

Krixwell:
Oh, alright, so we’re keeping Taylor as Rose, then, and making the actual adopted sibling of Amy neither the biological nor the adopted sibling of Dave
Sure, why not

LHC:
i do not homestuck

Krixwell:
(The adopted sibling of Dave, here played by Siberian, is also his biological dad, so hey, it’s not like I’m paying that close attention to the family tree in the first place )

(at this point I started writing the recap below)

[Discord]

Krixwell:
Fuckin’ hell, writing a plot summary of The Baby Is You is an… interesting experience

LHC:

Krixwell:
Fuck, Victoria as Rose would make so much sense with the whole incest angle
But this thing isn’t exactly about making sense, now, is it

LHC:
come to think of it, Greg should be a character in Worm!The Baby Is You

Krixwell:
He can be Sweet Bro
Not to be confused with Bro
Sweet Bro is the one who says “who would even write these conksuck songs anyway, imigrants?”
I did not typo that last word.

LHC:
[taylor, falling down a locker a lot]
i told you about lockers bro

Krixwell:
Pffffft
[…]
I guess Sparky can be K.C. Green

LHC and I got to talking about The Baby Is You and it turned into… well, this.

So to recap:

Victoria, Amy’s lab-daddy and best friend, has to help Amy out after Amy makes herself pregnant with a child that is also Victoria. They sing a song as Amy reveals this to Victoria. Then Bonesaw shows up to be the midwife, citing previous experience with delivering babies (worst C-section ever), and sings a pointless song in order to antagonize Victoria because she is in hate-love with her.

Victoria and Bonesaw get Amy to a hospital, where Taylor shows up in a car. She came as fast as she could [here]. Taylor is Amy’s sister and lover. She can’t sing because she, too, is pregnant, but engages in a romantic rap with Amy, where Amy points out that her having a child with Taylor would be bad because incest and pedophilia, and then proposes to Taylor so they can have babies. Then they make out nakedly. Also it turns out Taylor isn’t pregnant, she’s just overweight.

Then Siberian shows up to eat Amy’s baby, like she always does, but Amy won’t have that. Fortunately Siberian practically defeats herself in a rap battle – even while employing the true power of words that rhyme with themselves. Then she turns out to be a robot, but that part was cut. It didn’t fit the archetypes.

Greg shows up to comment on the quality of the songs, while Sparky initiates a sing-along.

Amy finally gets to have her baby, a beautiful baby daughter Victoria. And they all lived happily ever after.

…

I’m so sorry.

(#tw: stupidity
#i didn’t cast jade because it’s easy to miss that she’s even in tbiy
#all she says is ‘push! push!’
#and it’d just add needless complication to the recap)

---

UNfortuantely Quow’s liveblog of Pact and and CodeZeta’s liveblog, the only other liveblog of pact that I’m aware of, both stopped without much warning.

That’s a shame. Though I did take a superficial look at Quow’s blog before adding them to the Other Blogs page, and judging by a post made less than a week ago, they do want to get back into it.

…and looking at the blog now, it seems they did! They did a session two days ago!

---

“She would probably needs someone’s contribution” (Bonesaw creating pregnancy). Nope you can make female sperm. At which point she could just be cloning herself IN or OUT of herself but ypi get the idea

I don’t doubt she could make sperm. My point was that for it to not be a clone, she needs someone else’s DNA to mix with her own.

She might be able to change her own DNA enough without pieces of someone else’s, I suppose, but that’s stretching it.

Amy could totally do that, though.

---

After pressing the villainous father point, Tattletale brought up something worse she didn’t go into detail about, which Panacea desperately intervened to stop her from talking about.

I figured that was about Amy’s attraction to Victoria. Especially because Lisa’s taunting turned out right – the revealing of that secret (along with Amy’s accidental use of her power) did break up the family.

I suppose it is possible there’s another secret, involving something that can more undeniably be referred to as betraying her family than Amy using her power on Victoria and running away.

---

Taylor and Amy Team-Ups are somewhat common in fanfics, especially with Amy/Taylor shipping and Amy the fan-woobie (sad and lonely with a friendly personality just under the surface instead of rude and abrasive with an extremely black-and-white view of the world). Nevertheless the synergy between a biokinetic and a bug-controller is ridiculous: Bugs which inject tranquilizer(often enough for even lung), poisons and other stuff, flying web spinners, modified spider silk, range extenders, etc…

Image if Amy really cut loose in helping Skitter: Zerg Army

Yeah, they’d be a damn fantastic team.

---

That take on Panacea’s theme is good, but what if her song was like a rock love ballad called Victoria, crying to Vicky for help, super depressed downer lyrics, lines like “This can’t be the end of the story, girl/I got no guts and no glory, girl”

Hmm. Sounds more like a theme for the ship than the character, but could work. I do really like that last line!

Did you make this up now, or is this an actual fansong?

---

If Amy decided to join the Undersiders, and thus become a villain, what do you think her cape name would be?

Hm, right, I suppose she would probably distance herself from “Panacea”.

How about… Plague? Or maybe the name of a different health-related goddess, perhaps one with a less positive angle on it?

Also, it just occurred to me that Amy would need to fit into the Undersiders’ theme of common fears. I do suppose you could make a case for disease or big biological changes as something people are afraid of, though.

---

Concerning the Ask about Siberian vs Alexandria vs Leviathan: Alexandria wrestling Leviathan was not the only easily missed moment of awesome, aside from Taylor literally ripping Leviathan a new one. There is Clockblocker coming near enough to an Endbringer to freeze it, especially with normal human squishiness while capes are dying left right and center … and of course Vista, who effortlessly drops an entire skyscraper on Levi. She is ridiculously powerful when not holding back

Yeah, those were all pretty damn awesome! Brockton Bay has some really cool people around.

---

I think regarding being friends with bad persons, way more interesting than Tattletale is Regent, who is a rapist and murderer but tries to be a better person with varying success due being emotionally dead inside. Taylor herself thought about that in 14.1 … for like 5 seconds. What is your opinion?

While I don’t mean to excuse his past actions, I think it counts for a lot if he actually wants to and tries to be better. Intent matters, and if he intends to be better and does what he can to follow through on that, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t erase his past actions, and it’s very unfortunate how blasé he is about them, but it does make him much more sympathetic than he would otherwise be.

Also, the point about this topic having already come up earlier in the Arc is a good one. Now that that’s been pointed out, I think we might have an Arc theme going here, and I suspect it’s going to come up again when we learn about the Travelers and the 325.

---

Worm is officially subtitled “Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons” which while close isn’t exactly the same as “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”

Sharks: (I don’t actually know if it’s official.)

Ah, yeah, that also sounds quite applicable to… actually, not just Taylor’s story. A lot of characters’ stories.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons also comes up sometimes.

---

I’d argue that, fundamentally, Tattletale isn’t a bad person, she is someone being held at gunpoint, who’s only real weapon when cornered is digging into people’s psyche for their own problems. Would Amy have done the same thing if Tattletale hadn’t brought that up? Maybe, maybe she would. It wouldn’t change the fact that their family is still fucked up and needs some therapy, and that, as well as Amy’s listlessness with her powers, probably contributed significantly. Tats is still mean, though.

I certainly don’t think Lisa is anywhere near as responsible for these things as Amy thinks. I mean, sure, Lisa’s been known to mess with people’s heads, but ultimately all she did was remind Lisa of the potential for her secrets to come out and mess things up. Then Amy went through a lot of stress because of Leviathan and her dad and Gallant and Bonesaw and Mannequin and Siberian and… you get the point. I think Lisa is for the most part a scapegoat for Amy’s stress, even if Amy doesn’t realize it.

Yeah, it was a dick move on Lisa’s part, but not much more than you’d expect during a confrontation between hero and villain. Hell, Amy herself said some really mean things during that confrontation, too.

---

How do you think Taylor will react to what Amy did to Victoria, New Wave or the other Undersiders(We somewhat saw Lisa’s reaction)? And what do you think would be a fair punishment? There are Heartbreaker and Canary as contrast, we saw the Trial and the Birdcage, but also know her mitigating circumstances. What would be reasonable and what do you think will likely happen?

I think it depends a lot on how they find out, but I think when she has the full story including Amy’s POV, Taylor may be conflicted but I don’t think she’d be too hard on Amy for it.

New Wave might already know. Judging by her behavior when she came across Amy in public, I don’t think Victoria cares if people find out they’ve had a falling-out, and from there it’s not a long way to questions about why. Also, their parents would want to know why Victoria didn’t bring Amy home, though Victoria could’ve just lied and said she couldn’t find her, or that Amy refused to come back because she didn’t want to put the rest of them at risk of Bonesaw. In short, though, I think there’s a good chance Victoria told her parents what Amy did. Their reactions would be shaped by that perspective, although I suspect Flashbang is giving Amy some benefit of the doubt.

Among the Undersiders, besides Taylor, the only one whose reaction I’m really interested in is Alec, because as you say, this is comparable to Heartbreaker. However, Alec isn’t exactly much for big reactions, even (or maybe especially) to these things. If he started a liveblog of reaction video channel, I’d probably drop it fairly quickly.

As for punishment, I don’t think Amy deserves any. Even less so than Paige. At least with Paige, there was an argument to be made for carelessness, but with Amy, there are so many more mitigating circumstances. She was heavily compromised, and her personal space was violated in a way she had warned Victoria against repeatedly. It was an accident that she was actively trying to prevent. She’s no more responsible than the people who take care of a natural sightseeing spot are for tourists that fall off cliffs because they ignore warning signs and cross safety fences. Less so, even.

(Fun fact: There are such spots in Norway that don’t have fences because some tourists are more likely to go too close to the edge of a cliff when there’s a fence in their way.)

---

Anyways, if it’s not too much trouble /too personal, can we see this philosophical discord? Would love to discuss these kinds of morality questions.

Okay, so I asked the owner of the server – technically known as flopside, but everyone calls it altgen – if it was okay, and I got the go-ahead.

Here are some things to note, though:

• Altgen is a spinoff from @loreweaver-universe​‘s Discord server, though it has established itself as more of its own thing at this point. As a result, it is closely tied to the Discord liveblogging supercommunity and has multiple livebloggers frequenting it, meaning spoilers for certain things need to be handled with care (most notably Worm, Ward, Steven Universe, Madoka Magica, Wander Over Yonder, Rick and Morty, Camp Camp, My Hero Academia, Adventure Time and Little Witch Academia). There is a channel called #altspoil, which can be used to contain content that is spoilery to one or more of the local livebloggers, myself included.
• It’s not exclusively a philosophy server. That’s just one of the channels. Altgen, more broadly, is for chill and civil discussion of certain topics that are not allowed on the regular liveblogger servers, such as serious news, politics, religion and NSFW content. And yes, that last thing does mean there are porn channels, though they are manually age-gated. There’s even #spoilporn, where your filthiest, most spoilery Alexandria porn is safe from my innocent gaze.
• I’ve limited the invite below to 25 uses, just to be safe in case this post winds up in the wrong places. I doubt those are all going to be used up by you guys anytime soon, but if that happens, feel free to let me know and I might make a new one.
• Please do not join just to talk about Worm with me directly. There are reasons I don’t have a Discord server of my own (I prefer to have all my Worm talk screened and visible on the blog, among other things), and I don’t want that to get taken out on other servers I’m in.
• I’ve said a lot here, but seriously… We’re chill, I promise.

With all that said, here’s the link! Welcome!