I love the symbol for Cauldron because it works in different orientations. Depending on which way it’s facing, it could be a C, an omega, or, well, a cauldron.
Hah, yeah! Or, as I ended up interpreting it – a Latin
Ʊpsilon 😉
Tag: asks
There’s a TV Tropes reference that I make whenever I see a kismesissitude blooming in my media view: “Aw, look, they really do loathe each other.” (I had that thought at the climax of “The LEGO Batman Movie”, which I think stands as a shining example of all four quadrants.)
I am convinced there must’ve been Homestucks involved in the making of that movie. The way it portrays the relationship between Joker and Batman makes it a fantastic hate story from start to finish. 🙂
Also, here comes a thought: What if the Endbringers are the result of Cauldron attempting to test on animals and it going horribly wrong?
It’s a bit out there as far as theories go, and I’m not sure how likely I think it is, but it’s crazy enough that it just might work.
Do you think anyone we know could’ve bought their powers from Cauldron?
Hm… it’s possible. It sounds like most Cauldron powers cause severe physical bodily changes, unless they managed to overcome that and that’s indeed what they mean by Deviations. Anyway, it’s the strongest clue I have to work with.
We only know a few people with that sort of thing going on, and the main ones that come to mind are confirmed to be either dropped off with amnesia in relation to Nemesis, or escapees like… hang on. Shamrock was a test subject, and she didn’t seem to be a “monster”. I guess, unless her bodily changes were things that wouldn’t be particularly visible, that’s evidence suggesting Cauldron is capable of non-monstrous powers. That may still have been what determined which 4/5 Subjects ended up released, too.
The contract made it sound like Deviations happen for psychological reasons, allowing them to test whether it’s likely to happen. So I guess due to their openness about this with their clients, Deviations would be less common in people who have bought the product than with test subjects.
Anyway, to get back to the speculation on who might’ve bought their powers: Maybe Siberian?
Ooh… or perhaps the Travelers. Maybe that’s what’s happening to Noelle, for that matter. Maybe a Deviation doesn’t necessarily happen immediately?
Then again, I already commented on Cauldron apparently being sort of upfront about Deviations, so if that were the case, wouldn’t Noelle and the Travelers know what the cause might be? Hm.
Oh my gosh! All the EGS references! I love El Goonish Shive and so, so wish it was more well known. Despite being into homestuck for a while, El Goonish Shive is far and away my favorite webcomic ever. I wish there was a liveblog of that somewhere…
Yeah, you wouldn’t guess it based on the beginning, but El Goonish Shive is really damn good. Here’s a good post about why, though there are of course spoilers.
(As you may have noticed, I’m currently rereading it for the explicit purpose of filling up my reactions folder. Excellent reaction images are all over the place.)
The redhead in Faultline’s Crew is Shamrock, mentioned in Gregor’s interlude.
Yep! As I mentioned, I had forgotten about her, but once her name was mentioned, it all came back to me. 🙂
You seem to have been confused a couple of times by Labyrinth’s teammates being exempted from her power, despite having stated at the beginning of the chapter when you were describing her power that she can exempt people from it?
Basically what happened was that Faultline not being exempt confused me because I would’ve expected her to be, and since I was already somewhat unsure about the specifics of Labyrinth’s power, it caused me to question whether that was actually a thing in the first place (then again, that much was pretty clear in Hive). Fortunately, Gregor helped set things right.
Relatedly, one of the other asks I just got provides a good explanation for why Faultline wasn’t exempt (besides what I eventually settled on, that being able to slice through Labyrinth’s constructs was more useful to her in combat than them not being real to her):
Most of Faultlines Crew slid down from the ceiling on columns labyrinth made. Their descent would have been a lot faster if the poles hadn’t existed for thrm
This is a very good point. And as for why Labyrinth didn’t just remotely exempt the Crew from her power after that:
In 5.7, Labyrinth doesn’t make her power unable to affect Skitter until she touches her, so presumably Labyrinth needs to be touching someone to make them immune.
Which I was probably in response to me suggesting Labyrinth might’ve been toggling it on and off for Oni to make him repeatedly fall. I guess he was just tripping because of the movement of the columns up and down.
And, uh, tripping in a different way because Labyrinth.
The Merchants can be as unlikeable as Taylor wants, she can be as gruesome as some people who fought in that ring, but whatever happens or has happened, she still stood idly by, watching a dying man crawl as he bleeds to death. No one walks right out of an experience like this the same way they were before.
Yeah, that’s true.
I know I was pretty harsh on the guy, but for all my talk, I don’t think I’d be able to do the same thing Taylor did if I were in her shoes.
There’s a lot I wouldn’t be able to do in Taylor’s shoes.
Dude, you promised that you’ll have a new chapter today. How many days are you going to postpone the new chapter?
I don’t know when “today” was when you sent it, but… I didn’t promise anything. My #next posts are intended as information about when I intend to liveblog (or, back when I was in school, when I’d be able to), with no guarantees.
Either way, this is kind of rude. I completely get the desire for further reactions – I follow a lot of liveblogs myself – but please keep in mind that I’m doing this exclusively for your enjoyment and mine, spending a lot of effort per session. I actually do this relatively frequently these days.
I think I have the right to reschedule every so often, but if it really bothers people, I could always go back to not scheduling in the first place.
“I’m sorry to say I’ve never heard of A Noble Circle before” Oh, It’s a pretty good game by the guy who made A Dark Room and The Ensign, both of which are phenomenal if you haven’t heard of them. It’s about a circle’s journey through Flatland, and a big part is about jumping above obstacles because Flatland is 2 dimensional. I assumed you were referencing it when you said “That would explain how they can appear gradually out of nowhere like a sphere descending into Flatland” in a previous post.
Oh! It sounds like the game is referencing the same thing I was, namely the 1884 satirical novella “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott Abbott (I guess
one abbot wasn’t holy enough), under the pseudonym A. Square. It can be read here.
The former half of the book goes into detail about the social and biological structure of the (horizontally) two-dimensional world of Flatland, in a way that satirizes Victorian-era English culture, and the latter half details A. Sphere teaching the protagonist about the one-dimensional Lineland, zero-dimensional Pointland and, most importantly, the three-dimensional Spaceland.
Notably, two-dimensional beings see a horizontal line. That’s the extent of their visual input in Flatland, though they also have a sort of fog that gives them depth perception (much like we see a two-dimensional image and use perspective to determine distances along the third dimension). So when A. Sphere descends into Flatland, A. Square sees him as a line increasing in length, and through depth perception and touch, he determines A. Sphere to be a size-changing circle, a priest, the noblest of shapes.
(Similarly, there’s a scene where A. Square enters Lineland and is perceived as a series of points along the line.)
So when I brought up this scene from Flatland in relation to the tesseractids / dandelions, it was in the sense that these four-dimensional (or more) beings “descend” along the fourth dimension into the Wormverse’s three-dimensional section of four-dimensional space, and the portions that intersect that three-dimension space are perceived there as three-dimensional beings that seem to shift and change in ways that don’t seem to make sense for such a being. (…I hope that sentence made sense.)
Flatland is an interesting read, though without the context that it was satire of Victorian culture, which I only learned this morning, the in-depth information about the two-dimensional world’s social structure might get a bit tedious.
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