I thought the gangly white-fleshed thing (third row, second from right) was smoking the world’s longest boof but instead it’s just a scythe blade. I don’t know why he’s smoking it but Throne is a weird place even in the best of times and it’s gotten significantly weirder very recently
Also, Zaid dead on the floor with the swords stuck in the ground is so dirk homestuck coded lmao. Allison is going to do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle
When Prim’s angel told her her road had no end, she laughed. What a horrible fate for Allison to have instead have a demon in her ear telling her that eventually it would end.
this is the first time we’ve seen her cry since she ate the worm and saw cio, idr the last time she actually sobbed ): losing Zaid like the last of her earth life & humanity. godhood is suffering
They already tried that and with big dumb proclamations too. “Look! They’ve come to fight, for you! Look! These ships are here, for you! (troops and ships get obliterated without doing anything interesting in the slightest) Ah! Nevertheless,”
That’s really all they’ve got, though. The anti-Jagganoth coalition is fighting for survival in the face of sure and complete annihilation. It’s a little depressing that their situation is so hopeless, but that’s the reality of the situation. Rock and a hard place. At least for now.
What IS she doing! Is anyone else feeling confused about the principle character motivations at this point? It’s probably my own sloppy reading, but I do not understand what Allison, Michael, or Zoss actually want and how their aims differ. On page 194 Allison says she doesn’t even know if Jag is her enemy. Then what was the point of this massive war with thousands dead? Hoping someone can enlighten me. It’s been hard to keep track of this over all these years!
Allison’s principle goal at the moment is preventing the end of mortal life, for which she needs to do three things.
1) Get Jagganoth to not kill everybody
2) Prevent Zoss from using time travel to destroy this timeline and attempt a different outcome
3) Stop Metatron from wiping out mortalkind in preparation for the return of the King of the Universe and his kingdom of angels
Since Jagganoth’s stated motivation is stopping Zoss and Michael if she can do the second two things before killing him he’ll probably be willing to help her. Alternately, if she just straight up kills him, Zoss will probably accept this timeline and Metatron can be strongarmed into crowning her the King, in which case she can just order the angels to stop.
He wants to kill Metatron the most, he said as much when he said he wanted to suck the marrow out of the bones of “God’s Scribe” or some similar unpleasantness.
Allison wants to kill Jag and make the world move on from the timeloop. She was talking about metatron maybe not being an enemy, not jag. Zoss seems to want Allison to succeed. Michael serves metatron, or assumes he does.
Allison wants to destroy all of these folks because they have sworn to the alliance of Jagganoth and Incubus, foolishly believing they will be saved when Jagganoth is freed. Allison knows he intends to end the multiverse in fire, and wants to stop that. Zoss wants to restore Throne and the multiverse to a state of peace and prosperity free of the demiurges and of his deep mistakes. Michael mistakenly believes still that Zaid is the heir, and that the rot of the current age will be ended when Zaid is given the key and turned into a puppet God for an imagined peace of angelic superiority and cleanliness, iirc. When Allison was talking about not knowing if he’s the enemy, she was actually referring to Metatron and doing so for Gog-Agog. Gog has suffered through billions of the multiversal resets Metatron has been forcing Zoss to do, for reasons one can speculate upon (but that I don’t feel confident knowing), so Allison is telling Gog to fuck up the angels and Metatron for her. Allison is just being prudent when acknowledging the ambiguous role Metatron is playing yet.
metatron has a grand time loop for unclear reasons (although being the ultimate representation of stasis, preservation, and fear of change probably has something to do with it). metatron has conscripted zoss and jagganoth into his looping scheme: zoss picks a successor to his reign, the successor defeats the other demiurges, and dies to jagganoth. jagganoth kills the successor and tries to destroy the entire multiverse to remake it without suffering. before jag can finish his work, metatron rewinds time and zoss picks another successor.
zoss is aware he’s stuck in a loop, but seems somewhat powerless to fight it. at first he rewound time to pick a worthy successor, someone who could possibly break the cycle. after a thousand successors he realized that metatron was playing him for a fool. despite this, he’d rather not have the multiverse end in total omnicide, and so he dutifully picks another successor (or perhaps he’s forced or compelled to do so).
jagganoth is aware he’s stuck in a loop, but he seems to think the only answer is violence and fighting his way through or out of it; if he gets what he wants he’s still gonna blow up the whole multiverse.
Michael is tentatively allied with metatron and is carrying out his will, for now. his goal is to restore “the old order” to throne: pick a successor, let the angels resume their duty as police officers, etc. Very traditionalist. I don’t believe he’s aware of the time loops.
Allison’s motivation is considerably simpler: this world sucks, but people still live here, and so it’s worth saving. both she and jag want the loop to end, but via different means, and Allison doesn’t trust Jagganoth for many reasons: we have no idea if he’ll actually remake the multiverse or just leave it destroyed, if he’ll succeed or if his efforts will just get rewound.. plus the whole multiversal omnicide thing.
I guess it’s not too surprising that Jagganoth would come to the conclusion that violence is the only answer, given how Jantris conditioned him to believe that — “a sword is the only useful thing”, or something along those lines. (And so, claiming he would “make you useful” means making him the same as a sword, so he’d naturally view himself as a weapon)
(Both that and wanting the world to be cleansed of evil, feel like it parallels the angels generally, too. At least Juggernaut Star?)
Doesn’t justify the whole universal war, exactly, but the way he thinks makes enough sense for me that, albeit sympathising with him somewhat, I reckon he could be reasoned with.
—
As for Michael, I think he probably is aware of the time loops.
At the very least, he wouldn’t be the only angel working fot Metatron to br aware of it. Juggernaut Star knows about it — during her fight with White Chain during the tournament in Rayuba, she talks about a sense of futility from time repeating in a cycle.
So if Michael is essentially Metatron’s right hand angel, it’d make sense for him to know about this as well.
But she claims “it will happen again forever, until the conquering king is satisfied”, and that “he spins the wheel and laughs at god”.
If Jagganoth is right and the time cycles are Metatron’s doing, Juggernaut Star presumably isn’t aware of that fact — if she feels trapped, hopeless, and nihilistic due to the time loop, as she seemed to during the tournament, why fight for the person responsible?
Likewise, it’s possible that Michael knows about the time loops, but not that Metatron is orchestrating them. Although, in his interactions with White Chain, he simply gives the impression of being much more willing to deceive (including hiding the fact that he was working with the thorns) than Juggernaut Star (who seems pretty straightforward and direct), so it’s harder to tell what he’s aware of and hiding from the other angels, and what he genuinely doesn’t know about.
I believe she has said that she does not yet know if Metatron 1 is her enemy. Jagganoth is an obvious foe for her, as his goals involve killing everyone and destroying everything that the Rising King cares about.
I’ll just add that a fair bit of Allison’s personal motivation is basically “what a bunch of fucking assholes, the lot of you”.
She’s been treated like a toy, lost folks who were close to her, seen how casually the powers that be tend to treat the lives of quite literally everyone. And she’s kinda reached the point where she’s ready to kick everyone in the teeth until she either ends this shit or her foot breaks off again.
You know, its funny, but when you think about it this is Metatron’s motivation too. For aeons it was just him and his fellow angels, watching over the graves of their makers. Then this mortal Zoss shows up and massacres everybody he’s ever known. He is the only first gen angel remaining, and none of the other prime angels have awakened since that day.
Zoss forced the words out of his mouth, and he used them against him, trapping him in this whole cycle.
According to Jagganoth this is not true, Metatron gave up the names of God willingly and Zoss is his puppet. Presumably at some point we’ll find out what actually happened.
Considerig how powerful even one angel is, and that Gog Agog just admitted she has fought 1 Metatron many times and was alwasy defeated, the story that Zoss somehow defeated ALL the angels and then FORCED 1 Metatron to give up those names seems extremely unlikely. I’m inclined to believe Jagganoth in this regard.
I had/have the same quesion. None of these answers are clear, specially because we are all READERS, not authors of this mess. Only Abaddon could explain a little, or narrate better, but he’s (I think) a little lost in his own world. What are Alisson motivations? I don know. What’s she feeling? I don’t know, she’s showing nothing. And if there’s a secret motive or idea behind all these things happening at once, the story is missing its own point… many, many deus ex machina… TOO MUCH
If that were the case we might as well have had Gog wipe out these guys on her way to fight Metatron. I think it’s time Allison did something on her own. Also it seems unlikely that Nukoku’s purpose is just more violence, it seems contrary to everything we’ve seen of her so far and goes against her development from Yabalchoath to Cio to Nukoku.
She takes advantage of the fact that the prophet, who is never wrong, said she will die in thirty years or so. Practically, it makes her immortal in the moment.
How shalt thou burn, o Flame Immortal? Art thou the flame which burns giving warmth to those who gather about it, who breatheth in dark places upon those hearthfires soon to die? Or art thou the flame which burns only to devour its confocals, consuming even as thou art consumed?
O Flame, how shalt thou kindle? How shalt thou burn? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Absolutely. I’m holding my horses for now because Abaddon needs to finish in peace, but when this comic is finished I intend to yell from the rooftops about how it is a genre-creating, paradigm-shifting, metaphysics-exploding work of once-in-a-generation genius.
While some Demiurges favoured having only a single Emissary that they gave a larger share of their power to, many have preferred a larger force of agents throughout the ages.
While I believe that the servant and avenger of the late Grand Dragon remains the most powerful of this group, only a fool would underestimate any single one of the rest. A mighty force indeed.
We are SO close to the payoff, it’s been a helluva ride. If you’re still reading this Sammy Skeleton I am eternally grateful for you putting me on here.
Cracks in the facade. Dunno if she can punch her way out of this one.
Oh no, no. You’ve got this all wrong.
“Cracks in the facade? Dunno if! She can punch her way out of this one.
A Champion in another realm once said: “If you hit a wall, hit it hard!”
Another said “If there’s a wall in our way, we smash it down”
TOUCH THE UNTOUCHABLE, BREAK THE UNBREAKABLE
ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWAH
DO THE IMPOSSIBLE, SEE THE INVISIBLE!
Sniff the unsniffable! Eat the inedible! Evit the inevitable!
ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWAH
POWER TO THE PEEPS! POWER TO THE DREAM!
STILL ISSING PIECE SCATTERING, SO INCOMPLETE!
WE BE THE MOST INCREDIBLE SOLDIER FROM UNDERGROUND
SEE HOW EASILY THEY ALL FALL DOWN
Hey, Kool-Aid! Oh, yeah.
This is exactly what she needs to warm up and focus.
Then once she is warmed up, she can take on a real challenge. Plus they are all lined up neatly in rows for greater efficiency.
maybe, just maybe, she should consider a goddamn sword
If you can’t punch your way out, you’re not punching hard enough.
Or often enough. Maybe she needs to do…(takes a quick headcount) TWO punches.
HOSTILE MATRIX
TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT
I thought the gangly white-fleshed thing (third row, second from right) was smoking the world’s longest boof but instead it’s just a scythe blade. I don’t know why he’s smoking it but Throne is a weird place even in the best of times and it’s gotten significantly weirder very recently
okay, glad i’m not the only one who saw that wrong at first
The world’s most aura “This is an intervention”
Also, Zaid dead on the floor with the swords stuck in the ground is so dirk homestuck coded lmao. Allison is going to do an acrobatic fucking pirouette off the handle
Well this has gone completely fucking pear-shaped, there’s no other way out of it, you’re going to have to impale me (with an arrow).
oh my god
Oh my god, you’re right. Zaid even did the hover board thing Dirk did, except with a sword. (And, as such, was WAY COOLER).
KSBD was born a homestuck fancomic and it will die a homestuck fancomic!
I can’t fight the Homestuck, can I…
it’s the two of swords reversed
lowk I want to believe in both because you’re 100% right! Yttr Am!
wow! what a coincidence! six billion demons!
I wonder what will she do with them!
The path of suffering offers no reprieve
being alice-un is suffering…
being all-yis-un is suffering…
being is suffering…
Be Suffering
[Buffering…]
[…Uff…]
[ U ]
I?
.
B
If alice-un had a restaurant, what would be on the menu? 🤔
Whipped worms and a cocktail of suffering.
“Mine is the path of mutilation”
When Prim’s angel told her her road had no end, she laughed. What a horrible fate for Allison to have instead have a demon in her ear telling her that eventually it would end.
One of the people floating way in the back:
“Is this her? I can’t quite tell”
That’s why you bring opera glasses to this sort of affair.
You bring your nocs to the crossroads, if you want to survive.
this is the first time we’ve seen her cry since she ate the worm and saw cio, idr the last time she actually sobbed ): losing Zaid like the last of her earth life & humanity. godhood is suffering
Zaid’s death is why she has apparently started talking like Winnie the Pooh. “Oh, bother”
OMG OMG OMG SHESS GONNA DO THE THING THE COMIC IS NAMED AFTER!
You’re running out of “it is what it is”
Do you wish to continue?
There is no way back. The way forward is uncertain. Keep trying?
Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight.
They already tried that and with big dumb proclamations too. “Look! They’ve come to fight, for you! Look! These ships are here, for you! (troops and ships get obliterated without doing anything interesting in the slightest) Ah! Nevertheless,”
That’s really all they’ve got, though. The anti-Jagganoth coalition is fighting for survival in the face of sure and complete annihilation. It’s a little depressing that their situation is so hopeless, but that’s the reality of the situation. Rock and a hard place. At least for now.
I wish to continue.
It is not what it will be.
We are the cause for casualty.
The Leviathan in fullness.
She survives because the “it is what it is” within her burns brighter than the “it’s so over” around her.
What IS she doing! Is anyone else feeling confused about the principle character motivations at this point? It’s probably my own sloppy reading, but I do not understand what Allison, Michael, or Zoss actually want and how their aims differ. On page 194 Allison says she doesn’t even know if Jag is her enemy. Then what was the point of this massive war with thousands dead? Hoping someone can enlighten me. It’s been hard to keep track of this over all these years!
Allison’s principle goal at the moment is preventing the end of mortal life, for which she needs to do three things.
1) Get Jagganoth to not kill everybody
2) Prevent Zoss from using time travel to destroy this timeline and attempt a different outcome
3) Stop Metatron from wiping out mortalkind in preparation for the return of the King of the Universe and his kingdom of angels
Since Jagganoth’s stated motivation is stopping Zoss and Michael if she can do the second two things before killing him he’ll probably be willing to help her. Alternately, if she just straight up kills him, Zoss will probably accept this timeline and Metatron can be strongarmed into crowning her the King, in which case she can just order the angels to stop.
He wants to kill Metatron the most, he said as much when he said he wanted to suck the marrow out of the bones of “God’s Scribe” or some similar unpleasantness.
Allison wants to kill Jag and make the world move on from the timeloop. She was talking about metatron maybe not being an enemy, not jag. Zoss seems to want Allison to succeed. Michael serves metatron, or assumes he does.
Allison wants to destroy all of these folks because they have sworn to the alliance of Jagganoth and Incubus, foolishly believing they will be saved when Jagganoth is freed. Allison knows he intends to end the multiverse in fire, and wants to stop that. Zoss wants to restore Throne and the multiverse to a state of peace and prosperity free of the demiurges and of his deep mistakes. Michael mistakenly believes still that Zaid is the heir, and that the rot of the current age will be ended when Zaid is given the key and turned into a puppet God for an imagined peace of angelic superiority and cleanliness, iirc. When Allison was talking about not knowing if he’s the enemy, she was actually referring to Metatron and doing so for Gog-Agog. Gog has suffered through billions of the multiversal resets Metatron has been forcing Zoss to do, for reasons one can speculate upon (but that I don’t feel confident knowing), so Allison is telling Gog to fuck up the angels and Metatron for her. Allison is just being prudent when acknowledging the ambiguous role Metatron is playing yet.
metatron has a grand time loop for unclear reasons (although being the ultimate representation of stasis, preservation, and fear of change probably has something to do with it). metatron has conscripted zoss and jagganoth into his looping scheme: zoss picks a successor to his reign, the successor defeats the other demiurges, and dies to jagganoth. jagganoth kills the successor and tries to destroy the entire multiverse to remake it without suffering. before jag can finish his work, metatron rewinds time and zoss picks another successor.
zoss is aware he’s stuck in a loop, but seems somewhat powerless to fight it. at first he rewound time to pick a worthy successor, someone who could possibly break the cycle. after a thousand successors he realized that metatron was playing him for a fool. despite this, he’d rather not have the multiverse end in total omnicide, and so he dutifully picks another successor (or perhaps he’s forced or compelled to do so).
jagganoth is aware he’s stuck in a loop, but he seems to think the only answer is violence and fighting his way through or out of it; if he gets what he wants he’s still gonna blow up the whole multiverse.
Michael is tentatively allied with metatron and is carrying out his will, for now. his goal is to restore “the old order” to throne: pick a successor, let the angels resume their duty as police officers, etc. Very traditionalist. I don’t believe he’s aware of the time loops.
Allison’s motivation is considerably simpler: this world sucks, but people still live here, and so it’s worth saving. both she and jag want the loop to end, but via different means, and Allison doesn’t trust Jagganoth for many reasons: we have no idea if he’ll actually remake the multiverse or just leave it destroyed, if he’ll succeed or if his efforts will just get rewound.. plus the whole multiversal omnicide thing.
I guess it’s not too surprising that Jagganoth would come to the conclusion that violence is the only answer, given how Jantris conditioned him to believe that — “a sword is the only useful thing”, or something along those lines. (And so, claiming he would “make you useful” means making him the same as a sword, so he’d naturally view himself as a weapon)
(Both that and wanting the world to be cleansed of evil, feel like it parallels the angels generally, too. At least Juggernaut Star?)
Doesn’t justify the whole universal war, exactly, but the way he thinks makes enough sense for me that, albeit sympathising with him somewhat, I reckon he could be reasoned with.
—
As for Michael, I think he probably is aware of the time loops.
At the very least, he wouldn’t be the only angel working fot Metatron to br aware of it. Juggernaut Star knows about it — during her fight with White Chain during the tournament in Rayuba, she talks about a sense of futility from time repeating in a cycle.
So if Michael is essentially Metatron’s right hand angel, it’d make sense for him to know about this as well.
But she claims “it will happen again forever, until the conquering king is satisfied”, and that “he spins the wheel and laughs at god”.
If Jagganoth is right and the time cycles are Metatron’s doing, Juggernaut Star presumably isn’t aware of that fact — if she feels trapped, hopeless, and nihilistic due to the time loop, as she seemed to during the tournament, why fight for the person responsible?
Likewise, it’s possible that Michael knows about the time loops, but not that Metatron is orchestrating them. Although, in his interactions with White Chain, he simply gives the impression of being much more willing to deceive (including hiding the fact that he was working with the thorns) than Juggernaut Star (who seems pretty straightforward and direct), so it’s harder to tell what he’s aware of and hiding from the other angels, and what he genuinely doesn’t know about.
I believe she has said that she does not yet know if Metatron 1 is her enemy. Jagganoth is an obvious foe for her, as his goals involve killing everyone and destroying everything that the Rising King cares about.
Mat-hew is closer to the truth – Jagganoth has been surprisingly reasonable – he’s just stuck thinking killing everything is the only way out.
I’ll just add that a fair bit of Allison’s personal motivation is basically “what a bunch of fucking assholes, the lot of you”.
She’s been treated like a toy, lost folks who were close to her, seen how casually the powers that be tend to treat the lives of quite literally everyone. And she’s kinda reached the point where she’s ready to kick everyone in the teeth until she either ends this shit or her foot breaks off again.
You know, its funny, but when you think about it this is Metatron’s motivation too. For aeons it was just him and his fellow angels, watching over the graves of their makers. Then this mortal Zoss shows up and massacres everybody he’s ever known. He is the only first gen angel remaining, and none of the other prime angels have awakened since that day.
Zoss forced the words out of his mouth, and he used them against him, trapping him in this whole cycle.
Metatron hates.
According to Jagganoth this is not true, Metatron gave up the names of God willingly and Zoss is his puppet. Presumably at some point we’ll find out what actually happened.
Considerig how powerful even one angel is, and that Gog Agog just admitted she has fought 1 Metatron many times and was alwasy defeated, the story that Zoss somehow defeated ALL the angels and then FORCED 1 Metatron to give up those names seems extremely unlikely. I’m inclined to believe Jagganoth in this regard.
I had/have the same quesion. None of these answers are clear, specially because we are all READERS, not authors of this mess. Only Abaddon could explain a little, or narrate better, but he’s (I think) a little lost in his own world. What are Alisson motivations? I don know. What’s she feeling? I don’t know, she’s showing nothing. And if there’s a secret motive or idea behind all these things happening at once, the story is missing its own point… many, many deus ex machina… TOO MUCH
No time to ask yourself why. You can only kill and never stop killing.
The ‘Standing on Air’ technique is new, or we’ve seen it before?
The great standing on air/floating technique seemed to be favored by Solomon David and Jadis too. They like to be tall. Makes them feel important.
She will wield the terrible blade of want, and the pillars of heaven will quake with her coming. And her name will be… Kill Six Billion Demons.
You can tell those are polite, cultured folks by how they form straight and ordered ranks.
My paper soldiers form a wall
Five paces thick and twice as tall
He’s sure split his key a lot of ways. Perhaps that will prove to be a mistake.
isnt she literally praying to herself at this point ?
Calling a shot: here comes Nukoku with a steel chair to battle these idiots for Alison.
There’s a thought. I forgot about her, honestly. She’s been silently observing I guess, or just hiding.
I’m afraid Nukoku has lost all her fizz.
If that were the case we might as well have had Gog wipe out these guys on her way to fight Metatron. I think it’s time Allison did something on her own. Also it seems unlikely that Nukoku’s purpose is just more violence, it seems contrary to everything we’ve seen of her so far and goes against her development from Yabalchoath to Cio to Nukoku.
She takes advantage of the fact that the prophet, who is never wrong, said she will die in thirty years or so. Practically, it makes her immortal in the moment.
She wont die here, but she sure as hell will suffer, perhaps that is worse
Is she going to job, or finally start using the awesome flame of creation as an especially sharp rock?
Any idiot can do that! And Alison is one of them!
How shalt thou burn, o Flame Immortal? Art thou the flame which burns giving warmth to those who gather about it, who breatheth in dark places upon those hearthfires soon to die? Or art thou the flame which burns only to devour its confocals, consuming even as thou art consumed?
O Flame, how shalt thou kindle? How shalt thou burn? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Bingis Dingis Dingle Doo
a hundred pages to go??
simply astonishing, it’s like we’re like watching the sistine chapel get painted one panel at a time
Absolutely. I’m holding my horses for now because Abaddon needs to finish in peace, but when this comic is finished I intend to yell from the rooftops about how it is a genre-creating, paradigm-shifting, metaphysics-exploding work of once-in-a-generation genius.
While some Demiurges favoured having only a single Emissary that they gave a larger share of their power to, many have preferred a larger force of agents throughout the ages.
While I believe that the servant and avenger of the late Grand Dragon remains the most powerful of this group, only a fool would underestimate any single one of the rest. A mighty force indeed.
We are SO close to the payoff, it’s been a helluva ride. If you’re still reading this Sammy Skeleton I am eternally grateful for you putting me on here.
At points like this it is better to not stop to think, it will only get in the way of things.
Pity the dragon.
for he shall never finish the count