Let Saika Tell You About Homestuck: Act 5 Act 1

Just look at that grumpy little fucker. Yes, dear readers, if you’ve stuck with me all the way through Act 4, you are finally going to be rewarded with actual knowledge about those weird grey troll characters. Let’s do Act 5 Act 1.

Act 5 Act 1 is, fair warning, another complete break from the story of John and company. It’s actually set in another universe entirely. But don’t worry, we’ll get back to them in Act 5 Act 2.

This is probably the most accurate depiction of Hussie that Hussie has ever drawn.

A5A1 is sort-of-colloquially-titled Hivebent, and it follows twelve trolls as they discover and play Sgrub, the troll version of Sburb. Trolls are a violent alien race that inhabits the planet Alternia, and most of this Act is dedicated to character-building and cultural exposition. Coming out of this you should be familiar with lusii (lususes?) have a working understanding of the four quadrants of troll romance (kismessitude, auspisticism, moirallegiance, and matespritship, amirite?) develop a tolerance for ridiculous typing quirks (t)(1S 12Nt )(4rD twwo r3—4D r1gHt????????), and forget everyone’s usernames in favor of their actual names (I’ve seriously forgotten all of them at this point).

That happy-looking fellow whose picture sits at the top of this post is Karkat Vantas, and the simplest way to describe him is that he’s the John Egbert of Hivebent. He’s sort of the main character, he has similar interests in terrible cinema, and even though he’s not the instigator of the Sgrub session or the best at the game, he ends up being the leader of the troll player group. I’m not going to get into the whole rest of the batch because there are twelve of them and you might as well just go read it yourself instead of listening to me summarize their characters, but suffice it to say there are interesting and annoying and funny and hateful trolls, and you can decide for yourself which ones go with each of those descriptors.

If you think this is a lot of characters to remember, honey you ain’t seen nothing yet.
(fanart by timeless-knight at deviantart)

This Act also sees the return of Spades Slick from the Intermission (now going by the name Jack Noir), so aren’t you glad you listened to me and read the Intermission so you know who that is?

Although this half of Act 5 returns to the more expositional, slow-moving tone of Act 1 because of all the new characters to introduce, I honestly didn’t really care because trolls!! I’m pretty sure ninety percent of new Homestucks (me included) started reading because they saw a kid in grey-makeuped cosplay at a con and wanted to know what was up, and so it’s exciting to finally get to learn the names, appearances, and backstories of the characters who piqued our interest in the series to begin with.

Furthermore, as you may have noticed, I am both an avid shipper and a big ol’ nerd about social/queer/gender theory so the idea of a universally pansexual blood caste-based alien race with two presented genders and four types of romance makes me geek out a little (okay, a lot). In fact, the worldbuilding of Alternia in general is really interesting and provides some interesting culture-clashes between the trolls and human kids.

Also, the relation between the Alternian universe and the human kids’ universe is revealed to some extent by the end of this Act, and it’s only a slightly large mindfuck than the whole paradox-clones, I-am-the-Bad-Wolf-I-create-myself timey-wimey nonsense that capped off Act 4.

Get your Hivebent on with Act 5 Act 1 here, and… do I really need to recommend the MSPA Wiki at this point? You do have a whole new radically different alien culture to absorb. Get reading.