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I don't think I've come across a webcomic that's managed to impress me more with its medium than Homestuck. Just, everything about it. None of it feels gimmicky or forced. At the center of it? SOUNDPAGES (a.k.a: flashes)!! There's nothing quite like a soundpage. As I'm in the middle of reading post-canon stuff, I am seriously missing soundpages.
I think it's got to do with how it's presented. The two-stage charcuterie of innovation typically goes as thus: a new concept is established, then it is fucked with. You can see this first with people's distinct writing styles (established: beta kids, fucked with: beta trolls), and also with the tampering of the CSS layout (established: Doc Scratch, fucked with: Tricker Mode & Caliborn).
But soundpages have the best implementations of it. And all the big ones have had some kind of establishment and/or fuckery of some pretty cool concepts.
What if we made an epic AMV-style movie of WV and the flying cylinder thingy?
What if we made a little point-and-click game where you get to control John for a while?
What if we made these funny movies into a signifier of super cool plot stuff?
What if we made the screen EXPAND?
What if we took the game idea from earlier and just replaced the whole webcomic with that for a while?
What if we made parts of the movie escape the borders?
What if we disabled the volume button to illustrate how much of a dick Caliborn is?
- a million more things, etc, etc, etc, etc...
Innovation is badass. Now, as one of the final massive flashes of the comic, what does [S] Collide do? Surely it's something really cool, right?
Um... Not much. For starters, it's a goddamn YouTube embed. As a frequent MSPFA lurker I have it on good word that YouTube embeds are the fucking wonder bread of soundpages. (I am also a decorated paladin of the League of Formats Supporting Interactive Web Animations.) Not only does it vandalise these precious SWF files with tasty compression artifacts, I know immediately that this flash will not feature any cool page-bending stuff à la the previous major soundpages.
I can only put it in so many words before I start to run out of them. I loved listening to the soundtrack, at least. On the content of the soundpage, it was pretty good. Everything pretty much went according to plan. That part was fine.
I think my dissappointment came with the fact that it was hamming itself up (both before the flash and during the first few minutes) to be a massive epic soundpage, kind of like [S] Cascade. And while it kind of did that, it set the expectation-o-meter reeaaally damn high. Way too high.
By itself, it's still a good soundpage. One of the best. But it told us it was aiming higher than Cascade, and it did not deliver. And in case you think I've got some rose-tinted glasses for the old days and hate everything Act 6 and beyond, I liked quite a lot of the late story. Even Davepetasprite^2. I guess a mind can only blow so many times before there's no more fuse left.
Most of the creative energy seemed to go towards [S] ACT 7, and I'm gonna be honest, that one was really cool. A full-on animation? Hell yeah.