Fic Review: Refuge in Oblivion
Also known to sickos as YAaRFaOE and YGtPoaSU. Abandon all Hope, all ye not Homestuck who click here.
This is a prequel, but reading the first work in the series is optional. In fact, it's possible that reading this first might be a better overall experience; I'm not sure.
Sometimes the notes an author chooses to write tell you a lot about the work you’re about to read and the person who made it.
Refuge in Oblivion is a Homestuck fic series intentionally written in Machete Order:1
You Are a Refugee From an Omnicidal Empire, a.k.a. YAaRFaOE,2 or simply Refugee, is the first work written for the series. It starts in-medias-res, with the reader trying to figure out what the hell happened to remix the original Homestuck premise to such a degree. It ends on a cliffhanger.
You Guard the Pyres of a Stillborn Universe, a.k.a. YGtPoaSU, or simply Pyres, was the second work, which ignored the cliffhanger and instead decided to explain the events that lead to the first fic, in prequel fashion.
The unnamed sequel to Refugee, which was aborted when the author decided to make a prequel instead. After that prequel was finished, he fucked off forever. No one knows who the author, an UK citizen by the name of “adjourned” is or where he went. Maybe, like most Homestuck fans, he’s just ashamed of the incredibly pathetic state of the franchise and its author, and decided to cut his losses.3
This left the series in an incredibly awkward place, but that only makes its fans more rabid. As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said:
Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones, as wind extinguishes candles and fans a fire.
Yes, you are certain Eliezer Yudkowsky said that. One hundred percent positive.
You have the feeling it’s going to be a long review.
You Guard the Pyres of a Stillborn Universe
I read the prequel first.
I was tricked, bamboozled by the denizens of the Homestuck Discord, who kept recommending it over the first story.4 I was also sabotaged by myself, who refuses to read Author's Notes and story synopses on first reads. I was asking for it, really.
Thankfully, as you can grasp by the beginning of this article, it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s not like when I accidentally read a prequel book of Wheel of Time as my first and got really confused by how shitty the famous fantasy series was.
Pyres’s plot: If you’ve read Homestuck, you know that there is a sequence titled [S] Game Over, which is a fitting title. Almost everyone dies, and John, one of the survivors, is forced to awaken some reality altering powers to fix it. This “retcon” involves “killing” their alternate versions, or letting them stay dead, while his newly created timeline survives. This directly leads into the terribly handled endgame of Homestuck.
Our cast isn’t the survivors, it’s the people who died and never won the game. John and his three best friends (Dave, Rose, and Jade) wake up in a weird universe where Earth hasn’t gone through its previous apocalypse (long story). SBURB ruins that were originally only part of the game are now part of this planet’s known prehistory, studied by archeologists.
Oh, and in 2002, the trolls showed up, and first contact was made. Turns out they’re not beings from another universe, they’re right next door. In summary, every reality featured in the original Homestuck got remixed into one, a relatively normal first contact story.
Dave Strider, known coolkid, is the viewpoint character. Worth mentioning that he’s not in character—no one is in either fic. Rarely, we get an interlude from one of the other kids’ perspectives that shows this writer is even worse at writing them. It’s not exactly bad dialogue or characterization, it’s just not compatible with what we saw in Homestuck except in the bare basics.
Luckily this is a plot heavy fic, though our protagonists’ objective is essentially just figuring out what the fuck is going on.
They start doing that.
While they’re not able to find their “native selves” in this new dimension, they do find John’s Dad. Apparently in all realities he’s just an orphan, so the lack of SBURB doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. However, he’s pretty mentally screwed up. He’s recreated John and Jane’s rooms in his house, where he lives alone tormented by retro-prophetic dreams. It’s pretty heartwarming when the kids show up and explain his purpose. It’s kind of ruined when the author has him speak in one chapter (and not the others!) instead of using the in-narration dialogue we’re used to with Homestuck guardians. He also names him Josh for some reason. Why does Dad need a name again? Pretty inconsistent. But overall a nice segment.
They begin using that house as a homebase while exploring Earth for more clues. At its core, this is plainly a fantasy mystery story, despite the sci-fi undertones.
I’ll get into it later, but I’m annoyed by how static this fic’s plot is. The characters are not exactly reactive, but the world’s riddles get presented to them pretty artificially, like this is a video game and they’re slowly advancing from one discrete problem to another.
One particularly egregious instance of this is the Alchemiter incident. The kids decide they need to be able to defend themselves against mind control, as that’s one of the abilities people working under the main villain (the alien queen Condesce, longer story) tend to have. So they dig up some Carapacian ruins and decide to use the alchemiters there.
The writer decided this wasn’t interesting enough, so he retcons something in:
The thing is that Carapacian alchemiters are radically different from the ones deployed by Sburb. Royal Prospitian engineers would jaywalk to get their hands on your machines, because what takes them entire mountains of precise engineering to achieve, Sburb packs into a few cubic yards of pure distilled bullshit. Player alchemiters are to Carapacian alchemy as sci-fi replicators are to the factories of real life—namely, as if James Cameron hired a team of consultants to craft a realistic post-scarcity future, sunk millions of dollars into deliberate research, and then took the outcome, chucked all the numbers out the window, and fucked physics in the ass with the laminated card of artistic license manifest.
[…]
Before you towers a behemoth of alchemical machinery from floor to distant overhanging ceiling, packed with distillifiers and refractionators and equivalence forges and optothermic gristalizers. Industrial pipework spills from its dizzying array of ports to overrun the massive cavern around you, chugging a mechanical leviathan's fill from gargantuan vats of tar, amber and mercury. Hoppers of powdered shale feed into churners and decant in caulk suspensions, recomplexing with sulfur slurries and iodine dilutants into esoteric intermediates too catastrophically unstable to stock in bulk cache.
[… the kids start alchemizing their mind control helmets]
Seconds pass, automated startup routines falling back on failsafe after failsafe. You keep expecting the whole thing to fall apart any second, but somehow, against astronomical odds, the crime against science holds together. One by one, pressures recover and cylinders unblock, lights on the giant control panel tip from red to green with each satisfied thunk, and—
Ow
.
You come back on fire.
You panic and scream, batting at your burning clothes before remembering that you can change them and fuck your new clothes are on fire too.
Yeah, that entire sidequest ends with the alchemiter exploding. It had been buried underground for eons after all, so the pipes got clogged or something.
Throughout the entire sequence I was thinking “did the writer forget that Jade has alchemiters in her inventory by virtue of being a bullshit Space god?”. No, but he made the characters forget just for that dumb sequence that takes up an entire chapter, she remembers later.
There’s a lot of scenes like these, where the writer has some arguably cool imagery but can’t figure out a way to fit it in, so he just hamfistedly writes it and comes up with a post-hoc explanation that breaks the flow of the overall plot. Why would you choose to write a plot where half the chapters are OOC problem solving?
Back to the main quest, once our protagonists have their anti-mind-control foil wrap helmets, they think hard about their next steps. They realize it’s possible the Trolls, their alien allies, are stuck on their home planet Alternia, about to be conscripted into their army and possibly killed for being weenies. So they want to go to there.
The problem is that, while Alternia is in the universe, it’s nowhere near Earth, and only the aliens have FTL space travel. To solve this conundrum, they decide to visit their Denizens, kind of their mysterious secret guardian boss fights in the original game, and ask for advice.
Dave and John go to the public ruins of Hephaestus’s Palace, joining some guy’s guided tour, while Jade and Rose descend to the underwater barely explored ruins of Echidna.
As we follow Dave, and he finds the in-stasis hammer and anvil of his denizen, we make it to the point that made me think that the fic was worth reviewing in the first place. It’s also the point that makes many people think this is special and worth recommending to everyone who’ll listen. Repeatedly, annoyingly.
Sorry if this quote gets long. Just giving you a taste.
Even if you had a step-by-step user's manual with you, simply the prospect of trying to wield this thing is daunting in and of itself. You weren't joking: you don't think you could get it off the ground with all your divine strength.
Maybe you can just...
Just sort of reach over and...
Ah, fuck.
The moment the tip of your index finger touches the hilt of the hammer, it bucks in your hand. Not literally—the thing stays perfectly in place—but it's like an shock wave blasts through you and the shape of space is twisting at your fingers. Unconsciously, or maybe consciously, you don't know, you tip forward and the rest of your fingers clutch onto the grooves lining the tool's grip.
Then the hammer's eye opens.
You jerk back, but you can't tear your hand or eyes away. The eye of Fear No Anvil gyrates and unfolds, the gears contained within the circular watch-portal retracting from the inner volume of the globe, leaving behind the red starless void of eternity. And through that circle, through your frozen, dilated pupils, all of time pours through.
It's like when you tried putting on the sooth specs you found in a LOFAF bubble, but instead of the maw of the Furthest Ring etching its eldritch scream into your retinas, it's an incomprehensible expanse of time, stretched out to eternity and beyond. Every subjective and objective second, every mote of a universe's lifespan, is rendered in Planck resolution in your mind's eye. It's too much to take in. You're drowning in a sea of quantum strings, and you don't know how to stop it. There's no controlling this tide. You tug at what you can, grasping for the mental levers hooking you up to this cosmic work, but it only makes things worse, and then what whispers of pull you've effected are washed away again, scrambling all sense or direction.
This— this is why you don't do shit like this. This is why you don't go sticking your hands into ineffable cosmic artifacts. The eye is resonating with your soul, whispering to an infant time god, but its whisper is a deafening air raid siren to you and the resonance is shaking you to pieces.
But amidst this struggle, at the rear of your mind, barely registering to your conscious ego in the vice of this unstoppable, irreconcilable enlightenment, there's something ticking. A silent logic ticking like clockwork, methodically parsing and fitting and running down its pre-programmed list. At first you think you're finally losing your mind, but whatever it is isn't going away. It's getting louder, speeding up.
Flashes of insight spill through you every time one slots into another, then vanish a blink later as they decouple. Impossible, irrelevant things. The tensile strength of dried cyanwood. How to chisel marble. The minimum number of nails needed to build a standard
f6OP1m7qchair.Then something clicks. A card jolting in place. A ping of overwhelmed, smugly satisfied success.
The universe shifts under your feet. Fear No Anvil slips minutely out of place against the rest of the dust and rubble surrounding you. Suddenly you're not gripping it anymore—you're holding it, and the difference is somehow critically important. Your hand is still pinned to the handle, your brain is still overflowing under an endless waterfall of time, but something inside you is fuller. More whole. No, you're...
Your strife portfolio has a new entry.
Fear No Anvil genesiskind ●●●●○ (emulated)And all of a sudden, you know how to use this thing.
A short adventure through timelines with Dave wielding Hephaestus’ power ensues.
This “genesiskind” twist, wherein a sufficiently ascended God Tier can wield key items of the game with their full power, fits Homestuck like a glove. In fact, it’s the kind of escalation that makes the original comic feel lame and incomplete by comparison. With all the crazy shit that happened, with how Homestuck was clearly the most important SBURB session ever by the end of Act 6,5 it only makes sense that the players can take over their Denizen’s powers and interact with the game at the lowest level possible, inherit the keys to the kingdom in a way.
If you didn’t read Homestuck, though, you won’t get it. It’s like having a dagger pulled out of our heart after seven years for us. To put it in context, in the webcomic, a side character ended up beating the game for the main cast. Mostly offscreen.
In this story, Ascended Dave proceeds to use his new powers to travel to other timelines, getting enough parallel “pieces” that he can forge into one where no one dies. Unfortunately, that means he gets stuck in the white void where he went, he can’t exactly forge a timeline while he’s in one.
I’m sure he’ll return in the sequel.
Back in the new timeline, the surviving Dave gets an infodump from his ascended self, but he’s not cool enough to wield the hammer himself, not yet.
We switch to Rose and Jade’s quest, with a new character, also named Jade. This is just a random old human scientist, Jade Astra,6 who is exploring the Echidna ruins when they get there. She doesn’t seem to really fit in the plot, but she’s the mandatory human viewpoint character that looks at the kids like gods. I wonder if she’s meant to be more important in the third work of the series, or if I’m missing the point, but she really could have been written out or made a nameless character without any loss.
Rose and Jade don’t get anything from Echidna’s corpse but a prophecy and a fraymotif (lit. unlockable combo move) that solves their major problem: interstellar travel.
But wait, hold on, let me talk about prophecies. I hate them so fucking much.
Have you ever read a story with a prophecy that didn’t either waste a ton of story time or outright spoil potentially cool scenes? Any story where the reveal happened and you were like “WOW THAT’S WHAT THEY MEANT, WHAT A GOOD STORY TWIST, AUTHOR” instead of “thank god it’s fucking over"? They have basically one good use: trigger theories from your fandom. It works for Harry Potter’s four years between books 5 and 7, less so for this fic that has no real following.
Anyway, buried under the future inklings that are nonsense right now—because this is a type-A prophecy—there is a single parsable instruction: the kids have to kill this universe’s Genesis Frog. They do so, with fire, and guard its corpse as it burns up for a while, because Genesis Frog blood has a lot of power that can’t fall into the wrong hands or whatever. This is the justification for the fic’s title.
I’m unfazed by this development. They weren’t playing SBURB nor interested in making a new universe anyway, they’re in a perfectly cromulent world right now! The writer himself admits that the Genesiskind scene was the climax of the fic, and I wholeheartedly agree, but he tries to have his cake and eat it too by pushing a lot of narrative weight and angst onto this other scene, and it falls flat. Jade basically has a big tantrum over killing this non-sentient animal, that, as “stillborn” implies, could never become a universe anyway. Forced drama, but at least she gets over it.
At the end of the fic, Dave stays on Earth to hold the fort, while the other three kids use the fraymotif to travel to Alternia in order to save the trolls from culling. Dave joins a local university to stay busy and learn more Sburb lore, maybe find out about why the universe shift happened, and we get a couple epilogue scenes from non-characters that imply the Alternian Empire has just learned something weird is going on on Earth.
This directly leads into the next/previous fic. So let’s get to it.
You Are a Refugee From An Omnicidal Empire
No, seriously, it was like a crash in slow motion as I realized what I was reading: a romance fic. After the incredibly unnecessarily in-depth worldbulding from the prequel, I didn’t expect a “college AU” to be where this was going, but we did leave Dave there so I guess I should have.
The ship is Davekat. For those normals who didn’t click the x button after seeing this was a Homestuck fic review, the kat stands for Karkat, one of the male alien troll characters. It’s technically an official ship, but only hinted at in the original content.
This relationship is a weird darkhorse in the fandom’s history. A big name fan spammed it all over 4chan’s comics board for years, a couple of her friends made a couple big fics, hints of the ship began appearing in Homestuck, and then it quickly became one of the most popular pairings in fanfiction and fanart.
I feel confident in assuming Hussie never planned it himself, considering those fans soon got officially hired. Though I’m not a shipper at all, basic reading comprehension would tell you the comic was going for a “boring” John/Rose & Dave/Jade pairing in Acts 1-4, then Hussie changed his mind as Rose became unavailable, and shifted to Rose/Kanaya, Dave/Terezi, John/Vriska, and Jade/no plot relevance and dying alone.7
In any case, Davekat wasn’t in the cards until Act 6, and for, in my opinion, good reason. The two hate each other, and not in a particularly friendly way. There’s no one-sided Naruto/Sasuke-ness going on here,8 neither Dave nor Karkat express any inclinations for being near each other until Act 6, and, by that time, the secondary fandom had taken over Hussie’s brain and warped the comic into unrecognizability.
I’m typing a lot of slashes. That’s enough background for you.9
We see this fic from Karkat’s perspective.
"So what's the problem?" you hiss as he pries your fist open and laces his fingers through yours. You hate how your heartbeat accelerates at the contact, like it hasn't gotten the fucking memo that happy fun time is canceled. For the eminent foreseeable future, it seems. "What are you trying to say?"
What I'm saying— I'm saying that humans only have one type of romance," Dave forces the words out like he's pulling teeth. "I can't keep this strictly conciliatory, that's what I'm getting at. The flush flirting wasn't just a running gag, I-"
Is that it? Is that all it is?
"I don't care about that!" you lash out. He rears back, surprise and hurt in his eyes, and you immediately amend, "We can work with that. Red vacillation as miserably vanilla as you can get, when has it ever stopped anyone? It's not like we're not Troll Romeoh and Julliet here."
Anyway, I guess Refugee does a better job tackling the romance, but I’m still not sold on it. Unfortunately, just as busywork filled the empty space of Pyres, hurt/comfort scenes and relationship drama tend to take over this one.
The plot is simple. Dave and Karkat have the same Sburb-related major.10 Turns out Karkat and Sollux (another troll) are refugees from an empire so omnicidal it borders on the titular, and both are stuck on Earth learning shit. Dave seeks out Karkat and they slowly become friends, while Dave hides his true identity. That’s the first half of the fic, nothing earth shattering, and with an anemic cast of three.
I wonder if this would have been more interesting if I didn’t “spoil” it for myself by reading the prequel first. The mystery I lost would have balanced out the cloying and generic romcom scenes. On the other hand, I think if I had read this, I would have enjoyed Pyres less because I would have had more idea of what’s going on there. I’d be distracted by expectation. So I’m 50/50 on this.
The second half is triggered by a kidnapping attempt on Sollux and Karkat. The Empire wants them as hostages, because their friend Feferi has triggered an assassination plot on the other side of the galaxy. Dave rescues them both, tells them the truth of his identity, and they escape, trying to get to Bec to teleport themselves to the other three kids. The details are not really important if that confuses you, they are just trying to find a walking macguffin to teleport away.
Typing this all out really makes me realize how little plot there is. I’m really not skipping anything important. The brunt of this fic is the romance at least during its first half, it’s not symbiotic with any worldbuilding we didn’t see on Pyres.
Karkat and Dave confess their undying love for each other and become boyfriends during their dramatic escape scenes. I say escape scenes, but there’s no feeling of danger or even a time limit. Dave is stated to be able to deal with pretty much anything the Empire throws their way, so who cares, right?
This is a general problem with both fics. They barely have any stakes. Even when we understand them, there is often no time limit, and the kids are immortal, so there is no tension or anything for our hearts to grab onto. The closest thing we get is their relative hurry to get to Alternia, but an entire two fics can’t hinge on that.
Anyway, Dave gets captured in a baffling Worf moment, Karkat and Sollux get him out, there’s some exposition about how Karkat is the prophecized descendant of the Signless, a mythical figure, there’s a big forgettable action scene, and we get to the questionable climax.
It’s not remotely as cool as the prequel’s. It’s just Sollux hacking their IM program to be able to communicate with their friends all at once. Dave impulsively opens an interplanetary memo, and Karkat virtually reunites with Terezi, Equius and Vriska. Jade, Rose and John have arrived to the planet and start inducting the clueless trolls into their secret plan. There is some funny dialogue that ends too soon, with the writer admitting he can’t handle a Homestuckian level of interactions, so he restricts himself to five or so characters speaking at once. Props to him for admitting it.
Throughout all of this, Dave and Karkat kiss a few times, but the romance kind of stands back after the plot of the second half kicks in, to the point you forget it's a thing. I guess the writer only cared strongly about the will they/won’t they element.
After another short action scene, Karkat dies, which is a weird thing to happen at the end of a story without warning. This traumatic experience triggers an eureka moment for Dave, and he realizes that they, the kids, must have been the ones to set all this in motion in the first place. It’s always a stable time loop.
Dave and Sollux will travel to a specific meteorite landing place, where he expects to find some clues that lead to the Ring of Life, a macguffin in the original comic that can revive a character once, use it on Karkat, and move on from there. Bec is also supposed to be near the crater for some unstated reason.
And finally, we’re done. And we move onto the prequel—wait we already did that.
Nothing beside remains.
The Conclusion
These fics both kind of suck, and it’s only because the Homestuck fic scene is a terrible mess of romance fics that it stands out at all in the first place.
If you may allow me a digression (hah you can’t stop me anyway), Homestuck is such a twisty piece of time travel fiction that it’s near impossible to make one of my favorite types of fanfiction, single point of divergence, also known as For Want Of a Nail.
To humor the romance obsessed, let’s say you want to make a fic where John dates Rose instead of Kanaya, and Rose doesn’t go on the meteor with Dave. Jade goes with him instead.
The plot is instantly ruined, in multiple ways, and not just because the story becomes unrecognizable. Rose not being on the meteor means she doesn’t write the Sburb guide read by Calliope, which means the Alpha session is derailed, which means Jade never gets the bunny from Jake at the beginning of the story, which means John is dead long before any of this, since the time-traveling bunny saves his life all the way back in Act 4.
I know that’s gibberish to you, crazy non-Homestuck reader that made it to the conclusion somehow. My point is that every plot device in Homestuck leads not only to the next, but also to ten others in the past. The story is twisted up in a million knots of self-consistent time loops.
If you remove single point of divergence fics, what’s left? I guess AUs, alternate universe fics like Refuge in Oblivion, where you no longer need to care about fulfilling the draconian rules of the Alpha Timeline. Alternatively, just short romance drabbles. Most people chose the latter, and their works make up a combined hundred million words of gay porn over at ArchiveOfOurOwn dot org.
Refuge was doomed from the start, simply because as an AU, the author had a way harder task set for them than someone who can actually pull from canonical events and setpieces. The original comic was made with sweat, blood and amphetamines, and this was a writer that gave up after two hundred thousand words and was anonymous enough to lack accountability to write the last 100k. A lower standard is to be expected.
I have to wonder what would have happened in the sequel. The kids and the trolls fight the Condesce, and then use some crazy genesiskind powers to build the universe they’re in in the first place? Maybe they also get locked away, but at least know they made a good universe exist? We may never know.
So, what’s my score, if I was forced to give one by myself typing these words right now? I’d have to say 3/10 for Refugee, 6/10 for Pyres, raised to 10/10 during That One Sequence, then back to 6/10.
If, and only if, you’re a Homestuck fan who read the entire comic, I recommend you read Pyres up to that point, then drop it immediately after. Everything else is diminishing returns.11
A guy with Machete in his blog’s title came up with an order for watching the Star Wars movies. To justify the prequels, he’d insert episodes II and III right after episode V and the Darth Vader = Luke’s father reveal, to make those prequels less awkward and more of an intentional “these two movies explain how the twist you just saw happened” artistic choice. Then, the final movie brings everything together, as much as jungle koalas can bring anything together. He skips episode I because it’s bad and pointless.
This is, of course, nonsense. The prequels are completely different from the original trilogy and you can’t stop the jank and whiplash no matter what you try. Unfortunately, the blog post started a trend of “““analysts””” that for example, recommend you read half of the Homestuck Epilogues’ Meat, read all of Candy when prompted by a character’s visions, then read the other half of Meat—wait no that’s me.
Hey, this fic also has an alien empire our fated heroes have to rebel against…
I’m unsure anyone but the author and the series’ deranged acolytes in the Homestuck Discord use that unholy acronym. I’m unsure anyone besides them READS it in 2023.
Don’t even get me started on this.
You’ll learn later that they were somewhat justified.
This is, of course, a retcon. In the earlier acts, Lord English is merely one of multiple iterations, and according to Doc Scratch, the kids may only ever kill one of them, while a myriad other corrupted sessions also kill their LE instances, or maybe figure out how to end him for good. Our kids are going through a massive cross-universal adventure that to their main villain is just a Tuesday. Then Hussie got lazy, or forgot, and suddenly the LE in Homestuck was the only one that ever existed or will exist. Lord English dies when he is killed, which is stupid.
I wonder if this is a play of words with Ad Astra, but like, this character is just an Earth scientist that doesn’t travel space at all, so it just sounds like a bad OC name.
Ironically, I read that the fic’s writer based Jade’s characterization on her Pesterquest route. Pesterquest is a non-canon side game written by randos, not the original author. In this case, one of the musicians wrote Jade’s route, so you can imagine how terrible Jade was in the original comic that it was the superior alternative.
Not that Naruto/Sasuke is canon either. I just understand its fans more.
Unless you click this footnote. Rose/Kanaya and Dave/Karkat share the same flaw, which is that once they get together, they stop having unique character traits and just become a one-note unit of repetitive dialogue with no agency. Dave barely, barely survives the phenomenon, ironically due to more retconned-in character drama, but Rose, Kanaya and Karkat effectively stop being anything but plot devices in Act 6. This is not a problem in this fic, however.
You’d think that the flavor text would hint at anything useful, but I think it’s basically 100% worthless. We don’t get any full class scenes or anything, so it’s fine I guess.
Ugh, just like LOST, I wonder when we’ll get a genuine Homestuck fic that gets at the core of what people loved about Acts 1-5. Cool and New Web Comic got close, but it’s also dead…