Song used: Homestuck by Mark Hadley
Song commentary: Plazmataz came up with a melody to use as an anthem for Homestuck, which they then used in Homestuck Anthem. While that was a very driving melody, I opted to come up with something that might be more suitable for credits (opening or end) or a title screen. I really like how this came out; it sounds a bit moody, but still optimistic, which is what I was aiming for.
Author commentary: Here it is, yet another book hopelessly clogged with your favorite webtoon series, Homestuck. It's Book 5, which covers Act 5 Act 2. So in other words, a rare moment where the book number coincides with the act number. Don't worry though, that won't last long since this volume covers only half of Act 5 Act 2. So I guess it's...Act 5 Act 2 Part 1? I think I'm already getting a headache. Hey, is it too late to cancel these books? What's that? You're telling me it's too late for everything? We're all going down on this ship together? I see people in the crowd nodding their heads. Is what I'm doing by making jokes down here tantamount to what those guys were doing in playing classical music on the deck of the Titanic? Wait, I'm being handed a note from offstage. It says...yes. Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. It also says I should keep it up, if I know what's good for me, Joke Boy. Joke Boy?? Come on, guys. This book is 480 pages long, so I've got my work cut out for me. Maybe jokes are overrated. Maybe I'll start with a poem instead. Here goes: Curtains are red. Curtains are blue. Here's some more curtains. Instead of one, there are two.
/Bows, ducking under brick thrown at head./
Can we start over? The note on the first page probably sounded a bit unhinged. Time to pull my shit together, splash a glass of cold water on my face, and add some fucking VALUE to this book. I promise I will do my very best to be coherent, articulate, and funny on every single page from now on. Oh, what's that? NOW you start laughing? Here's an idea. I'll start making some remarks about Homestuck, and you can all chill out. Deal? A5A2 opens with a stately, low-key animation reintroducing us to all the plot threads and characters we put on hold for what must have seemed like an eternity but in truth was only a few months of real-time updating. It's a piece conveying narrative integration, a montage of transmission, redirecting the energy just generated by the engine of Hivebent into torque, which then begins turning the wheels of the greater plot. When this animation ends, we finally take our foot off the brake and peel outta here. Since we just took such a long detour, we need little reminders of where we left off, which was [S] Descend. One such reminder is delivered by showing direct evidence that baby John has, in fact, literally murdered his grandmother with the huge joke book he rode down from space after getting shot through a portal during the Reckoning. Perhaps I should add that ending the life of another human being via a vast collection of corny jokes is a proposition I can identify with on a very personal level.
The old threads we're being reminded of wind into the new threads we just caught up with, by way of reviewing the life and times of John Egbert through the eyes of our new and favorite buddy, Karkat. The old and the new coming together like this lets us know what we're in for over the remainder of Act 5, which by now we can infer is a Whopper Act by previous standards, because we've just been modestly informed that the rest of this act is labeled with an entirely new subdivision called Act 2. Layering acts within acts is a thing that we didn't even know Homestuck could do. But really, we should have known, because Homestuck is always trying to let us know it can do anything it wants, but we just keep not listening. When I do things like drop the label "Act 5 Act 2" on readers, maybe it seems like I'm just clowning on you as usual. Maybe it's all a big goof. If you think that, fair. But there's real purpose here. By signaling that this is the beginning of an entirely new act unto itself, yet one still contained within another act, I'm letting you know the remainder of the arc is likely to be substantial. The process of merging two major narrative rivers into one huge river is itself going to be a very substantial narrative undertaking, and the story isn't going to bother pretending otherwise. Fooling around with the story's partitioning system in this whimsical way is actually a direct, totally up-front mechanism for dropping that pretense. It is literally using bullshit in order to stop bullshitting you.
Every little morsel of John's life, no matter how mundane or foolish, is absorbed by an absolutely captivated Karkat. Every tiny increment of this strange and exciting alien boy's journey through childhood is feeding into Karkat's brewing hatred just a little bit more. We coast through a few endearing moments we hadn't seen before, such as when John met Jade for the first time. As one might expect, it was a simple "hi im jade! hi i'm john!" type of transaction that got their friendship rolling. We also get a peek at John's ludicrous Harry Anderson wallpaper. A few weeks before I typed this note, Harry Anderson tragically passed away. R.I.P. to this magician guy who barely anyone knows of, or cares about. We hardly knew ye, or cared about ye.
The gag here—okay wait, this isn't even a gag, it's serious as hell... Whatever this is, here's what's up with it. Basically, when Karkat discovers John for the first time, when he connects the dots and decides that this is the boy who is directly responsible for all his failures and problems, it's "hate at first sight." Even though this may not be a gag, it does serve as a pretty good punchline of sorts to all the buildup we just went through: getting to know Karkat through a long detour/review of his journey, learning about troll romance and how that system works, etc. Then we finally return to the A-plot, and we see the spades in Karkat's eyes, and...ah, yes. We get it now. This is why Karkat is infatuated with John and spews impotent rage through a clumsy reverse-linear deluge of hate-flirting. In a way, this is something readers can relate to, since we've had a similar experience in following John's journey and growing to love him. But for Karkat, that love transmutes into hate, due to his displaced anger and his culture. It must be very confusing for love and hate to be almost interchangeable emotions. When you add being a stupid teen to the equation, it's no wonder all the trolls are such hot disasters. And now we know all this, and so have valuable context for fully appreciating the A5A2 arc. It only took getting steamrolled by hundreds of pages of Hivebent to enjoy these dividends.