Dethroning Moment / Homestuck

>Reminisce on astoundingly lame incidents

You peruse your mind for memories you'd rather not keep in it.

Warning: As with all other pages related to Homestuck, all spoilers will be unmarked.

Keep in mind:

• Sign your entries
• One moment per work to a troper, if multiple entries are signed to the same troper the more recent one will be cut.
• Moments only, no "just everything he said," or "This entire comic," entries.
• No contesting entries. This is subjective, the entry is their opinion.
• No natter. As above, anything contesting an entry will be cut, and anything that's just contributing more can be made its own entry.
• Explain why it's a Dethroning Moment of Suck.
• No ALLCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSs out loud.

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• Master Hand: Everyone's going to kill me for this, but I think Homestuck had started to jump the shark a while back. The real Dethroning Moment, however, was in Act 5 Act 2: Eridan kills Feferi and Kanaya after getting in a fight with Sollux, but not before blowing up the matriorb right in front of Kanaya. Meanwhile, Gamzee becomes a Monster Clown apropos of little else, and Tavros is found dead, ostensibly at his hands. It was blatantly out of character for both Gamzee and Eridan, and while Cerebus Syndrome can be done right, here, it wasn't. As if all that wasn't bad enough, it invalidated opportunities for plot twists and character development that would've made for a much better direction for the story to take. And on top of that, the way that the comic tried to make jokes about it was just mean-spirited and disrespectful towards both the characters and those who cared about them— Feferi falls dead into the horn pile, Kanaya's death is subtitled with a line from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and Tavros gets a posthumous Humiliation Conga from Vriska, Terezi and Andrew. The comic certainly had potential, but I really wish it took all that back and started being entertaining again instead of just resorting to cheap heat. I was able to put up with Andrew's shit up to that point, even if I really didn't think it was a good idea (and there was quite a bit of that), but I wasn't able to keep reading after this. The comic was making me feel uncomfortable just reading it, and that's not the mark of something you want to read. What were they thinking?
• duckflesh: Andrew puts the reader through so much that I think everyone is bound to get tired of his shit eventually; it's just a matter of when. For me, I was with him until Act 6 Act 1. He made what I consider a big mistake: introducing five new characters at once, none of whom were particularly original or interesting, whilst simultaneously foreshadowing the appearance of an additional thirteen. Homestuck already has a huge cast of characters, and he really overstretched the limit of how many I can care about. Now I find myself hoping certain characters will die just so they can get out of the plot's way.
  • Canama: In retrospect, this is when I should have bailed. But I kept on reading, and Act 5 Act 2 got my hopes up by pruning the cast significantly. But then Act 6 came along and he introduced even more new characters! I really don't get why Hussie seems to think that introducing more and more characters will make Homestuck better for some reason. I finally stopped reading right around the time he started hinting there were more Trolls, because frankly I can't bring myself to give a shit about that many one-dimensional, poorly-developed characters.
    • Morgan Wick: Of course, they turned out to mostly be intentionally one-dimensional, poorly-developed, and most importantly, ignorable, a march of ten different ways for Hussie to make fun of his own fandom.
• CJCroen1393: A little while later, John meets Vriska again and learns that she's planning a La Résistance against Lord English, and that she and Aranea are mind controlling a bunch of ghosts to act as C-List Fodder. You may think that that is the dethroner, right? Nope. The real dethroner is when John tells her that the fact that the other trolls reactions to this show him how crazy and dangerous Vriska truly is. Why is this a dethroner? Because said trolls never once objected to her plan! Aranea actively helped her, Sollux and Meenah didn't seem to care, Tavros was more concerned with how Vriska was treating him specifically and Aradia was totally thrilled with it. And yet John seems convinced that they're all talking about how crazy she and her plan is (the closest thing they get to doing this is correcting Vriska when she messes up her nautical terms). Honestly, John, it's no secret that Vriska is a jerk, but you could easily just give your reasons for thinking that instead of parroting objections that were never made in the first place.
  • Morgan Wick: Did he ever specifically say it was the trolls' disapproval that tipped him off? His reaction to Aradia's reaction was something like "oh my god you people are all insane!" In other words, he seems to see himself as the Only Sane Man who knows how crazy Vriska's plan is. Given that, I suspect it's their cooperation he's afraid of: that Vriska is crazy and dangerous because she has the cooperative manpower to carry out her plan.
• SomeNewGuy: Jade's death at the hands of Aranea Serket. Yank the Dog's Chain, Hope Spot, and Trolling Creator all rolled into one hideous passage. Not only is Aranea derailed from the Only Sane Woman of the pre-Scratch trolls into a heartless murderer, her manipulation of Scratch's Just/Sacrifice clock is a blatant Ass Pull that literally serves no purpose other than to rub it in our faces that one of the few remaining moral and competent characters, in a story where the majority of characters are sociopaths, assholes, or idiots, is no longer available in any capacity. It's blatantly clear that Hussie no longer gives a fuck about telling a story. All he cares about is cheap shock value and bleak tragedy purely for the sake of tragedy.
  • Pikachu 4 Prezident: Seconded. For a while, I had felt Homestuck was in serious decline around the time Act 6 had begun (me and everyone else), and it was primarily because of all of the pointless death sequences, sluggishly-paced plot, and new less interesting/pleasant characters (plus circumstances not directly related to the comic itself, i.e, its fandom). Jade's death at the hands of Aranea has pretty much become the comic's lowest point and Hussie's general attitude nowadays seems to be, "If I make the villains as unstoppable as possible, make the new characters completely flat and unpleasant, and kill most of my existing cast for a few cheap jokes at the expense of enjoyability, surely I'll keep my fandom around for a bit longer!" At this point, the efforts of the kids will become fruitless and spiral down into an inevitable Downer Ending. Almost a shame, considering I used to be a huge fan of the comic.
  • Morgan Wick: The fact Hussie attempted to explain Jade's death by claiming the Condesce's mind control merely unleashed her darker impulses, something that to my knowledge had had zero evidence to that point and applied to a character most fans saw as being so almost unbelievably "good" it wasn't clear she had darker impulses to begin with, probably only came off as another Ass Pull to attempt to get out of the first one. And the fact all of this is obviated by John's time shenanigans doesn't even save Aranea's derailment, as noted below.
• InTheGallbladder: The October 11, 2013 update. Gamzee, having gone rogue for no clearly explained reason beyond the usual handwaves, beats Terezi to a pulp in lovingly rendered detail, while everyone else bullshits a suitably dramatic reason to stand around instead of helping. Special mention goes to Jake, who unceremoniously comes Back from the Dead a stone's throw away and spends the rest of the update motionlessly staring at Gamzee's dick. This segment really didn't need to be there, and it wouldn't if Hussie still valued telling a story over manipulating his audience.
• Midna: I'm not a Homestuck fan. There are multiple reasons why, but the single biggest event that proved the series isn't worth my time is what happens after Nepeta heads off to fight sober!Gamzee. Months pass until we find out her eventual fate... Killed. Entirely offscreen. No death sequence. Yeah, Anyone Can Die and all that, but this is one of the most popular characters in the series just... vanishing, never to be seen or mentioned again. If Hussie is that willing to callously kill off likable characters, I will be very surprised if the comic ends in anything other than a Downer Ending.
• despairChihiro: The introduction of the alpha trolls - the "dancestors", if you will - is probably the DMoS for the comic as a whole. It introduced even more characters, of which... 3 are useful. Even then, they're arguably just padding and used to fill Plot Holes. Meulin is almost entirely pointless, Rufioh's a case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character, and Mituna is simply fucking ridiculous. And those are just some examples out of the 12. So over the entire summer of '13, we got 3 flashes of Meenah walking around the dreambubbles and having everyone she knows tell her that they can't help her fight. What a beautiful, beautiful waste of time.
  • Sciencejoe: My huge issue with this is that the majority of the new trolls have glaring character flaws; Latula is faking her personality to hide her depression at living forever, Kankri has no idea what he's talking about and his "lessons" are either useless blabber or manage to make things worse, and Cronus is a jerk who won't take no for an answer. Unfortunately, it seems like they're going to remain as useless as despairChihiro mentioned while Meenah and Aranea get most of the spotlight; Meenah even had enough decency to warn John that her lust for greed will cause her to steal his ring. At least some of the original 12 trolls (Karkat, Terezi, and Kanaya) learned from their mistakes; the others either became villainous (Gamzee, Eridan), or wound up dead before that could happen (Equius). Meanwhile, Hussie created this whole cavalcade of new characters with a lot of potential for a good story... and they're just going to sit there. It was all a ruse! They were just there for Hussie to make fun of the fandom. Granted, Homestuck's not over at the time of this writing, but considering that all the other characters are coming together in one huge cluster, there's probably no time for every alpha troll to go through a character arc. In the end, Hussie did not waste a perfectly good plot. He wasted a perfectly good everything, and all to get back at the fans who pay him undying amounts of adoration.
• Yaridovich 23: Aranea suddenly becoming a villain. No buildup. No hints at it coming. Nothing. Just bam, she's suddenly evil and insane and ready to end lives to get what she wants. And just like Vriska, she's obsessed with being just like Mindfang. I mean good God, even if she's a terrible character and a rapist, it's hard to deny Mindfang is badass and all, but what's with these two devoting their lives to being just like her? Anyway, Aranea being a villain isn't bad enough, she also is conveniently behind a lot of Gamzee's actions, any time he was always smiling at least, and that came out of nowhere too. I guess I should have seen it coming since Mindfang and Vriska have also been OP, boring, awful characters that just like to steal the spotlight from characters that are far more interesting than they are. I pray that Lord English rainbow blasts her into oblivion at some point.
  • Morgan Wick: It's obvious Hussie flipped an "evil switch" on Aranea solely so he could use her to screw up the session enough to force John to go back and fix it, because apparently what he'd already set up wasn't enough to do the job. (Oh, and of course John ends up "fixing it" by stopping Vriska from being killed, the culmination of Vriska's transformation throughout much of Act 6 starting with Hussie's own Author Avatar developing a crush on her.) Despite Hussie's self-admitted Writing by the Seat of Your Pants and heavily involved Author Avatar, not once have I felt so bluntly reminded of Homestuck's status as a story being written by an author... until A6A6I2-3.
• Phi Sat: Vriska being retconned back to life. Undoing all this nice Character Development we've seen for both her and Terezi and probably more characters we haven't yet! Keeping so much focus on an utterly vile character and then retroactively making them a Karma Houdini because you've written yourself into a corner by killing everyone is not good writing.
  • Morgan Wick: Roxy seemed to imply that, to some degree, everyone would still have memories of the way things were in the original timeline, though Jade sure didn't before Godtier!Calliope told her why LOWAS exploded. But Vriska must, because despite what Phi Sat says Vriska, the huge bitch bluh bluh who, in Act 5, was a complete asshole even by troll standards and inserted herself into every bad thing that happened in the kids' session for the sake of her own self-aggrandizement, has suddenly become a Fixer Sue who, we are expected to believe, solves all the kids' and trolls' problems with her mere presence, while also being implied to be a much nicer person and bigger team player than even her Act 6 character development would have suggested. People may have hated Vriska back then, but at least she was an interesting character and people hated her on her own merits! Combining this with the above, it becomes apparent that Act 6 Act 6 from Intermission 2 on is basically a Fix Fic by the original author, embedded in the original story, in which Hussie needlessly trashes his own story solely so he can bring in his literal Author Avatar's crush Vriska to fix it all.
• Cptn Lhurgoyf: Hussie stated that he wrote in the scene where Mindfang mind controls the Dolorosa into having sex with her as, and I quote, "sexy lesbian fanservice". First of all, mind controlling someone into having sex with you is rape, and writing a rape scene solely to get people off is absolutely despicable. But then you have to consider how the Dolorosa is the equivalent of the Virgin Mary in the trolls' Crystal Dragon Jesus equivalent of Christianity. In other words, Hussie wrote about the Virgin Mary being raped and expected people to find it sexy. Speaking as a Catholic, it goes without saying that I am disgusted by this.
• Stealthyboy: The introduction of the Trolls, heralding the change from weird puzzle shit into unfunny pseudo-epicness and wholly unnecessary cast bloating.
• The Retcon:
  • Ike And Mike: I pick the moment John gained control of the Yaldaboon power. Before this point, time travel existed in-universe but it had limitations (doomed timelines, stable time loops, etc). But once John gained the power to actually alter canon past events without needing to form a stable time loop, and take things/people from different timelines with him, the limitations no longer mattered because someone could get around them. Nothing that happened before matters because it can be changed (and some of it has been already, like Vriska surviving instead of being killed by Terezi). Nothing that happens in the future matters because it can also be changed, removing any dramatic tension or suspense from the rest of the story. Hussie messed with, to quote Karkat, "forces which if handled recklessly will nullify the basic ability of intelligent beings in all real and hypothetical planes of existence to give a shit." And I for one no longer give a shit about what happens or has happened in this story.
  • Great Pikmin Fan: Agreed. I had my doubts about Act 6 for a while, and this "time travel but better, also less consistent with the previous time travel and working in the way the plot wants it to" cemented it. The timeline that John traveled away from becoming "doomed" and its ghosts continuing to exist in the afterlife isn't even really fitting for something that's supposed to be "meta travel" and not "time travel." Having him question if that would be the case "because reasons" doesn't make it any better, it's the same kind of "if we point out our flaws we don't have to fix them" you'd see in something like The Simpsons. Not to mention that the story shifting focus to the "alpha, retconned timeline" (in the form of their Jade and Jane talking with Calliope) before the pages where John creates it makes less sense if it really is, again, going back to alter the comic itself and not the timeline. But more importantly, there wasn't any big downfall from this. I was hoping that some twist would arise from trying to do such a blatant "do over," which was the main reason why I kept reading after that. But there wasn't. Because everyone who already survived Act 5 ended up surviving to the end (plus some revivals) and all of the villains were ultimately defeated all thanks to the retcon, the whole endgame felt like a really shallow, hasty, and poorly-written conclusion that tried to win fans over with a long flashy fighting sequence followed by beautiful animation, as if those things (while they were good) alone are enough to re-invest emotional attatchment after such a clunky way of setting things right happened.
• Calamity Jane: Cascade and the subsequent flanderization of the rest of the carapace characters. While these characters were interesting, fun, likable, and entertaining, they seemed to no longer appeal to the author who unceremoniously killed them all off. The ones who did survive (WV, PM, and Spades Slick) were flanderized until they no longer had any depth. Despite having character-related plot threads that needed closure, by the time the comic ends, they are no longer the three dimensional characters they were at the beginning, and they were replaced by even more angry, unlikable, poorly written characters introduced far too late in the story.
• The Titan Prince: There's a lot of moments I could list here, from Openbound, to the lack of development given to the Alpha trolls, to John being able to retcon previous events without dooming the timeline, but people have already ranted about that on this page. But there's one moment in the comic that just really, really bothered me that I don't see anyone else talking about, and that's Gamzee's Face–Heel Turn. Gamzee is introduced as a sweet, friendly, but slow stoner who's close friends with all the trolls. Then comes Act 5, when he runs out of drugs and finally goes sober. Suddenly, he's a deranged, violent, impulsive, and aggressive psychopath who believes he's not one, but two messiahs, and hates all the other trolls so much that he goes on a rampage to kill them all. Character Derailment at its finest, folks. It gets worse, as this is never undone. A redemption arc is hinted at when Karkat shooshpaps him into ending his rampage, but the farthest that goes is just him not murdering them anymore. He never recovers, never becomes the friendly person he used to be, never rekindles his friendship with the trolls, never shows any remorse for his actions, nothing. And if you can believe it, it gets even worse! Gamzee becomes mute after that, dresses up as a clown, starts collecting troll corpses, and becomes Lord English's right hand man. It gets so bad that if you were to change sober!Gamzee's name, nobody would be able to tell they were the same character. If I had been told when it first happened that this was permanent, I would've quit reading Homestuck then and there.
• Ninja 857142: Some say "It's the journey, not the destination." But in many contexts, including this one, I'd argue the destination is a part of the journey; indeed, that makes it a journey. Like many stories, Homestuck has had its ups and downs, but managed to still be enjoyable to me. However, a critical part of a good story is a satisfying conclusion, and Homestuck has had us anticipating one for so very long. Now I'm not saying Act 7 was a complete disappointment; it was beautifully animated, and it was nice to see a brief glimpse of people with a happy ending at last. But it was just so open-ended and inconclusive. The glimpse of the new universe was so brief, and I wanted to see so much more of it. I anticipated people living, talking, enjoying their new world together. There was plenty of conversation between the kids and walls of text before the climax! Most notable is the Anti-Climax Boss of Lord English. Throughout the comic, there is so much build-up to him as an ever-looming, monstrous, unstoppable force. He's such a cruel, ruthless, destructive, despicable character that we root so hard for the heroes to succeed and bring him down. Yet we don't get to even see how/if he dies, how exactly Caliborn becomes Lord English (I know about the claymation bit, but it was kinda vague, confusing and... it's Caliborn's claymation!), or what the treasure does!^note I know about the 4 kids apparently being sealed inside the treasure, so the most likely scenario is them showing up and fighting him. The problem is we're still not shown it, and considering Hussie loves crazy unexpected twists, pretty much anything could have happened. Even if this is what happened, the fact that it's not shown is still anticlimactically detrimental to the presentation. And it's especially jarring after the penultimate animation is 18 minutes of action and fighting, wherein all the villains but Caliborn and English are defeated. Again, I do enjoy the good things Act 7 had to offer; I just wish it felt more satisfying, explanatory, and conclusive. While Hussie's apparently making an epilogue (I'm not holding my breath though), this is for now my Dethroning Moment, because often, the destination is the most important part of the journey.
  • Cookiefonster: I agree 100%. Act 7 resolves pretty much nothing which is a shame because that's not how story endings are supposed to work. Everything cuts off right before it happens, making the whole animation kind of frustrating to watch. This is my definite dethroning moment for the comic. As far as I'm concerned, Lord English could have very well won since it takes a lot of logical leaps to assume whatever happened in Act 7 actually destroyed him and his grip on paradox space.
• Troper/I_Aint_Tropin: I apologize in advance, as this has to do with shipping. Now, I love Homestuck wholeheartedly, and even with things like Vriska being retconed back into existence, I was still fairly okay with that and went along with it. I was even okay with the cryptic ending of Act 7! But, one thing that always bothered me was how Karkat/Terezi got pushed to the side in favor of… Karkat/Dave. Now, for the record, on the list of Homestuck ships, Karkat/Terezi doesn't even make into my top ten. It's not my favorite, but I felt as through their relationship was integral to the plot as well as both of their characters; plus their pesterlogs are fun to read. Now, along comes [S] Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5, and out of the blue; we're supposed to accept that Karkat/Dave is now canon. What? Look, I can accept Vriska making sure Terezi doesn't enter an unhealthy blackrom with Gamzee, I can accept her making sure Rose doesn't become a drunkard, but how does Vriska's meddling have any correlation with Terezi's relationship with Karkat? Karkat and Terezi had enough Belligerent Sexual Tension to make a Takahashi Couple look like Platonic Life-Partners. I know this is Hussie, but to push aside a ship with 4+ years of devolpment in favor of a ship where all the development happened offscreen just reeks of an Ass Pull and Strangled by the Red String. I've seen people defend this by pointing to John/Roxy, but at least it didn't feel forced and we got to see their development onscreen. The fact that Karkat and Terezi didn't even speak to each other one-on-one after the retcon happened makes it worse. It honestly felt like Hussie erased their entire relationship just so Karkat/Dave could become canon.
• Mighty Mewtron: Before my first choice of DMOS (Vriska's revival as detailed above) came another decision that left me uneasy, making (Vriska) and Meenah a romantic couple. First off, at the time she died, (Vriska) was the equivalent of thirteen, and has the body, and arguably mental state, of a thirteen year old. Meenah is the equivalent of a nineteen year old. Yes, they do mention how Meenah's blood type has a greater longevity and most other people are younger than her anyway, but the power imbalance is still very clear, with how (Vriska) becomes nearly dependent on Meenah and emulates her. That isn't the main DMOS though; it's when Hussie talked about said couple on Twitter, claiming that Homestuck was becoming so gay it would "make korra look like republican propaganda." Acting like a relationship between a thirteen year old and nineteen year old is positive gay representation spreads a pretty bad message especially considering certain stereotypes of the LGBT community, especially when putting down one of the first gay couples in a children's cartoon, which is between two adult women. And Hussie's self insert is seen secretly watching the girls make out, because that really shows respect for gay women. And after all that, Meenah later dumps (Vriska) basically out of boredom, leaving (Vriska) in tears, so even if they had been of equal age and power, it still wouldn't have been a positive gay story! Trolling Creator is one thing, but Homestuck has a huge LGBT Fanbase that deserved better than this lousy attempt at pandering. Even with later additions of healthier gay couples, I still don't fully trust Hussie as a good writer for the LGBT community.
  • chelonianmobile: It's worse than that. Remember Hussie's clearly-adult Author Avatar stalking and proposing to (Vriska), who, let's repeat it one more time, is THIRTEEN, and this is supposed to be funny? Not my biggest Dethroning Moment but it's certainly evidence that Hussie doesn't take sexual harassment or child abuse seriously.
• chelonianmobile: Not exactly a "moment", but the blatantly half-assed lip service paid to gender politics that only got worse in Hiveswap. Troll gender is presented as pretty much the same as human gender through the whole comic and game; only the girls wear skirts, only the girls have visible eyelashes and outlined lips (except for Lanque, which has its own unfortunate implications since he was named by the devs as trans male), only the girls and a couple of boys presented as effeminate dandies wear makeup, their hairstyles are gendered (Equius has long hair scraped back and not prettied up, while the girls with short hair have flips and bobs and generally shaped 'dos short-haired human women tend to favour), and the ancestor portraits and dancestor talksprites have humanoid gendered figures (Mindfang's noticeable curves versus the Grand Highblood's Dorito body and giant codpiece). Porrim is presented as the cool feminist, the jade and fuchsia castes are heavily femininity-associated, and according to Hiveswap and Pesterquest trolls can be trans. Yet... why? While the human gender binary is inadequate to describe the actual human experience, the concept arose because most humans can be put in two rough anatomical categories based on reproductive strategy. Trolls all have the same reproductive strategy, dumping spooge in a bucket for the Mother Grub, so why do they even have two different phenotypes at all? As for trans trolls, obviously if they have multiple phenotypes for whatever reason there's no reason they wouldn't be able to be trans, but it's presented as if transitioning is easy for them and no one questions the they/them pronouns some of the Troll Call use. Why, when their society is in all other respects based on extremely brutal conformity to physical norms? The death penalty is earned for having birth defects, for becoming disabled without a decent workaround (Tavros was at risk of culling while Terezi may have been fine with her super-scent power rendering sight unnecessary), or just because someone of a higher rank feels like it. Why is this one type of nonconformity okay? It all just makes it terribly obvious that neither Hussie nor the Hiveswap writing team actually thought it through at all, and it feels more like tokenism than a real attempt to represent anyone. If I have to pick a specific moment to represent this, it would be in Hiveswap Act 2, when Joey, the human girl from 1994 who appears to be either ignorant or in denial about the fact that homosexuality exists, not only doesn't question Cirava's they/them pronouns but knows them without being told.