Pages of homestuck every day

Author commentary: Right here, this is it. This is when the story blasts off with virtually nonstop troll interaction. It pretty much never looks back. In hindsight, the complete takeover of the story by the troll stuff was inevitable. Because of the way they're being introduced slowly—a mysterious conversation here, a wild and colorfully eccentric new character there—they all seem pretty intriguing at this point. It's easy to take trolls for granted as almost the center of the story when you already know about them and have been exposed to them before even reading HS. But man, when this was all just emerging for the first time, through fast and loose storytelling methods, this was Hot Fucking Stuff, let me tell you. People were psyched. By saying "authored by the constellations," I really wonder if Rose, clever person that she is, already picked up on the fact that the twelve losers in her trollslum are zodiac-themed? I know a bunch of readers picked up on it from just a few of the troll handles. Seeing all twelve handles at once makes the theme pretty obvious, but only seeing a few at a time takes a bit of deductive reasoning. It's not instantly evident that "gallowsCalibrator" could be referencing the mechanics of a scale, or that gallows are associated with harsh justice. Or even "adiosToreador." You had to think, like, hmm... Oh, I see, bullfighting. Something about a bull... Oh, I get it now—scales, bulls, Libra, Taurus, twelve characters, it's the damn zodiac. This is how puzzles work. GET IT????? This one section contains a huge payload of lore being revealed. Points that could have been roughly deduced earlier are now being explicitly confirmed, along with the introduction of some entirely new ideas. There's important stuff here, which maybe bears reading a couple times to make sure you've got it all. Thank god it's being conveyed through leet speak in all caps. Terezi was the only one who went about this in a fairly sensible way. I guess once Vriska got around to her trolling stunts, she was pretty logical and effective about it too. It's just too bad her actual goals were destructive, vainglorious, and kind of stupid. That's her brand, though: cooking up smart, cunning ways of achieving incredibly ill-advised goals.