Uh-oh… I didn’t receive a ½. I think tumblr ate it.
And yeah, I’d agree. It was set up that the retcon was supposed to make the characters “better”, and we get some basic signals – Rose not being drunk, (although I would have preferred to see her work to overcome that), Dave having his rant about heroism and masculinity (although I fear the whole Caledwhatsit symbolism I was talking about means he really ISN’T over all that). On the other hand, I feel like poor Terezi isn’t much better off bc she’s in an emotionally unhealthy relationship but doesn’t seem to realize that at all, retcon Vriska has had no check on her bad behavior, Karkat seems stagnant, Kanaya remains last in line when the character dev attention gets handed out, Jade got to suffer for everyone, the alpha kids are still a mess… (They didn’t have the magic Vriska cure-all.)
Ok, I went off on a tangent there, but basically, I got the impression he was saying “We needed the retcon for them to succeed” but I agree that I’m not really sold on how that was? Sure, Vriska harangued them into these teams, but her tactics were terrible anyway, and they’ll probably pay a price for that if there’s any justice in this world. I’m not convinced that they fought any better than they would’ve otherwise. Even cool teamwork bonuses felt sorta hollow – like, personally, Terezi and Dave using neat fraymotifs would’ve meant more to me if they’d had their messy history and were now getting over it and learning to work as a team again. As is, in the retcon verse, I think they mostly kept to themselves, so them being two points in a battle trio triangle meant a lot less. That’s like, the most obvious example that’s coming to my mind rn, but in general… We know from GO that the kids can still fight even in that timeline. I don’t think the retcon changed their ability as much as it just meant they went in more prepared, but Aranea was the variable last time, not everything else. Stopping her probably would’ve been enough. More clear-eyed Seers are great in theory, but I didn’t see them putting it into practice much – they let Vriska make some really bad calls.
And I feel like I shouldn’t even get started on D/avepeta, because everyone knows my feelings on the combosprites as a whole (at least Jasprose was barely around and had no time to sexually harass anyone) but their contribution was fairly minimal besides the heavy-handed Undertale ref, so I’m still not feeling the justification on binning two characters.
*sighs* It’s just… so weird. It’s been a year, and it remains so weird to me. And if it’s weird to US, imagine being an archive reader and finding out that the kids you’ve been reading about for 99% of the comic are gone. It’ll be even weirder for them.
We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.
i’m just reblogging this for summarizing my feelings so neatly.
(2/2) these characters will never feel fleshed out or really substantial to me, but you’d think at least Hussie would’ve managed to at least justify their existence over the GO kids, but nothing about this fight made me think that in the slightest.
Published
ugh 