June 2016

Original track by Clark Powell, with additional work by Toby Fox

Act 7 gets a bad wrap.

Does it leave a lot of loose plot threads? Oh, without a doubt. Homestuck currently has more hanging threads than that pair of cutoff jeans you should have thrown away a year ago. I think most of them will never be revisited. Apologies, but man, I don’t really care about Zillywave and Sawhoo, and I don’t care what they’re up to.

For being the ‘last’ part of Homestuck, I get the disappointment in Act 7. Some of that salt will probably be hosed off in the epilogue. That said, I really liked seeing the rise and fall of Lord English in Act 7. I thought it was a really cool, poetic way to sign off.

On to the song. If you’re wondering about the differences between the old version and the new, this track has a new Doctor / Sburban Jungle section that starts around the 6:20 mark.

If you’re going to buy some music, though, and you’ve got three more bucks to spend, then pick up Symphony Impossible to Play, which includes the majority of this song, and also three more. The version of Sarabande on that album is spectacular.

Pseudumbra Fauxtasm (by Marcy Nabors & Jamie Paige Stanley)

Penumbra Phantasm isn’t on Homestuck Volume 10. But if you really, really want an idea of what it sounds like, there’s pieces of it scattered all over the place.

A few years back Toby played part of it, live, on a piano. This track, Pseudumbra Fauxtasm (alternate title: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Penumbra Phantasm), is a pretty faithful reworking of it. My favorite part’s the break right at 1:25. It’s a bit of the song that isn’t well represented in other mixes, and I love the energy of it.