If you have read the Machine of Death anthologies, these will probably seem familiar.
If you have not, you are in luck, T-Rex will explain them for you.
If you don’t want to listen to T-Rex… I am not sure we have much future as friends. But the conceit is that there exists a machine that will print off a slip telling you how you die, and it is always correct. (Please note that “correct” is different from “straightforward and non-ambiguous” and is also different from “helpful”.)
So I decided to made death slips for a bunch of Homestuck characters.
Well. For their first deaths. Well. Their first known, non-dreamself, non-doomed timeline deaths….
(Yeah. Homestuck is terrible for this game. It’s embarrassing how many of these I remembered wrong on first go.)
#Homestuck #Machine of Death #text is in captions#thanks to nextian for the glanceover #(a story by nextian:#yes. that’s definitely what’s going to happen.#he’s going to be a public fucking example of perfection.#they’re going to weep in awe at the incredible mastery of his death.#he just needs to go lie down for a minute for unrelated reasons.)#(a story by odditycollector: #actually I think the story is she doesn’t care to look at it.#equius gets her tested #and when he tries to give it to her she hisses at him.#later he reads it alone #and doesn’t share.)
ah.
Oooh! I love that book.
(I don’t understand Vriska’s, though. If it’s her first death, she very conspicuously wasn’t killed by love. That’s kind of her whole beef with that incident. It’s a workable reading of her final death, though.)
(Who says it’s Vriska’s?)
This one’s a characterization call. Personally, I think that while Aradia did not destroy Vriska for reasons of love, the chain of decisions leading them to that point are based off Vriska’s desperate need for people to love her, and then her continuing to make every wrong choice available (either to make them love her, or because she doesn’t actually understand how love works).
Those are the ancestors’….. except maybe the one that would have been the Summoner’s, since we don’t actually know how he died. The cerulean one is definitely Mindfang’s, though, and the rest makes more sense as Handmaid’s, Sufferer’s, Redglare’s, etc.
i think the troll ones are meant to apply both to A2 kids and A2 ancestors, while the human ones apply to both the kid and guardian versions of each character. i think. not totally sure about dirk and jake – i don’t really get how “delivery of child” works for dirk or bro, and “happy, loved and without regret” only seems to apply to grandpa harley since jake’s first non-dream self death was while he was decidedly unhappy and regretful.
but yeah the troll and beta kid ones at least seem to work both ways. aradia’s death was in service of a plot, sollux died multiple times of catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage, karkat’s death was to serve as a public example of jane’s revival power… etc. odditycollector explained how “love” could work for vriska as well as mindfang. the summoner and ghb are unknown and the condesce and terezi haven’t died once yet, but these are at least ways they could conceivably die/have died. and “to get to the other side” does work for meenah, though the rest don’t work for the other alpha trolls.
Minor confession about the dark green one… it was originally “Being happy, loved, and without regret.” I like it better without the “being”, but possibly it was not the right choice, grammatically.
(Jake did not die in that state, but his death followed from it.)
Cheloneuniverse 