It would have spanned the events from a little after here:



http://www.mspaintadventures.com/scratch.php?s=6&p=005677



To right around here:



http://www.mspaintadventures.com/scratch.php?s=6&p=005740



What took place over those pages is almost a direct transcription of what would have happened in the flash. The events were conveyed visually and verbally to suit the Scratch narration, instead of shown through high-intensity animated visuals alone. The Scratch segment was not introduced as a substitute for the animation. An "abridged" stretch like this was going to come anyway as a device for setting a few things up before starting on the EOA animation. Axing the Rose v. Jack / Vriska v. Jack animation (aka Heroes of Light: Strife) just meant moving Scratch the segment up sooner, to use as a vehicle for delivering the full flash concept without having to scrap it as a story direction, which would have been a pretty significant architectural upheaval.



Now that it's out there, we can examine the pros and cons of delivering it that way as opposed to flash. (But note, no matter what, there was no chance of that flash getting made whatsoever. This is really not about "what could have been")



Pros of flash:



- Would have been WAY MORE RADICAL (frankly I don't care much about this. the rad quotient of preceding flash material is already pretty high, and there's plenty more combustible shit to come)



- The idea as a whole would have been delivered in minutes, rather than weeks, giving people the full sense of the story development all at once, and limiting the drag on the serial readers' experience, and corresponding vocalization of those frustrations (would have been BY FAR the biggest advantage of flash)



Cons:



- Concept as a whole may have been a bit challenging to parse with visuals alone. The two parallel battles are easy enough to understand, but I can easily imagine confusion over the alternate timeline concept as conveyed only visually. People have been confused by less. Much, much less.



- Difficulty factor. Even with art contributors. There's a limit to not only what I can do personally, but what a largely unstructured volunteer effort can accomplish as well.



- Hiatus-induced suicide pact among readership.



Pros of narration:



- Get to experiment with a little parallel storytelling, via the top banner. (pretty big plus, IMO!)



- Having it narrated removes ambiguity about a fairly cerebral chain of events, while allowing the chance to indirectly develop Scratch's involvement in the story a bit.



- I get to take my time with it and pretend to function like a normal human being for a little while.



Cons:



- Slow rolling the segment page by page has serial readers agonizing every step of the way over every conceivable issue, on points of execution, unwelcome "story developments", and so on. Once again, Homestuck is RUINED FOREVER! Until it isn't, of course.



- If you're not into Scratch as a character or don't like his tone or the whole omniscient smartass thing, then you probably aren't digging the arc much. Not much to say about this. It's just a "you like it or you don't" kind of thing.



- Altering the flow of the story always carries the risk of agitating some readers. Not only because mixing shit up = automatic complaints (which is definitely true), but because by accelerating the pace to make broader narrative strokes, you are inviting the usual objections fixated on showing vs. telling. But I think there are some legitimate gears of storytelling which involve showing by way of telling outright, as long as the reader has the patience to see it through to its conclusion (problematic serially, as usual). It's a gear in which bigger story chunks that normally are given strong magnification (like a death) are told more compactly and in succession. These bigger chunks, when stacked up, "show", or more appropriately "reveal" an even bigger idea which is at the true heart of that narrative stretch. It's not the event which the reader momentarily feels "should" expand to fill the stage, like a death. The death that with hindsight functions as a building block of a more complete idea which more effectively serves the story as a whole, completing unfinished arcs, building on the themes and such.



You can look at story pacing like rolling a Katamari ball, with respect to the granularity of what has focus. At the beginning of HS, I'm rolling it around and picking up nickels and buttons. That's when John messing around with cakes and such has focus as actual plot points. The ball keeps rolling until points like that are too marginal to zoom in on, and he's exploring a mysterious oily land killing monsters and stuff while we gloss over a lot of detail that in an earlier mode would have received intense scrutiny. We are picking up things like traffic cones and bicycles with our katamari ball, while still sculpting a shape that as a whole resembles a story. Hivebent was rolled with even bigger denominations, maybe cars and trucks, gobbling up even bigger chunks like buildings by the end of the arc, as Aradia was offhandedly mentioning how they killed the king and created a universe. With hindsight we see why, understanding the overall purpose that arc had for the story, and how that particular pacing supported that purpose. Unlike Katamari though, the ball does get smaller sometimes, to go back to accommodating certain levels of detail like conversations and game mechanics, but it never dials all the way back. Doc has rolled with some of the biggest chunks yet, like buildings or mountains, casually dropping the deaths of characters as atomic features of his narration. He clearly rolls the ball smaller at times too, when he wants. But this construction too has purpose, which needs some patience to watch it take shape and then hindsight to fully appreciate.



And like I've suggested before, these can be pretty disastrous conditions for the serial intake of a story. But honestly, there is no other way to do it. To strive to satisfy serial readers all the time is to do nothing but make something terrible in the long run. It means you can't do much to set up anything sophisticated with deferred payoff, as you perpetually submit what will immediately gratify. I can't tell people that reading serially is the "wrong" way to read it, because this is not true. But there's no escaping the fact that having pages leaked out so slowly radically warps your perception of what is happening, sometimes for the better (community discussion, noticing details etc), but often aggravates (arc fatigue, rushing to judgment...) Try to imagine watching your favorite movie, for the first time ever, but only a minute at a time, every day. Sound frustrating? How often do you think you might get irritated with the director for his pacing decisions? Or his "plot twists", which are really just the products of scenes cut short before fully paying off? How often do you think you might want to insist he move it along? What about reading your favorite book, but only receiving about a paragraph or two every day? And what if the author/director was tuned into the responses to this daily output? Is there anything he could do to outrun the impatience of the reader for plot points he's carefully set up to be evaluated in the minute-space of archival read-through, which the reader labors over in the month-space of serial digestion? Can he do anything to deflect or mitigate their rush to judgment of incomplete arcs? Should he? Probably not.



The pages spanning the two links above provide a pretty good example of how serial intake messes with perception, and of why authors tend to like to finish books before showing them to you. Now that it's all there, let's look at the reasonable serial reactions to some key moments, and compare to the reality in hindsight.



- Terezi flips coin, Vriska flies away.



Serial reaction: augh, anticlimax!!! All that build up, the stair climbing and show downing and coin flipping... where's the battle? Where's........ SOMETHING?



Reality: This was only the beginning of a deferred resolution to the ongoing Terezi/Vriska rivalry. The resolution was actually the full sweep of this series of events in totality, resulting in Terezi looking into the doomed timeline to find the rationale and the courage to kill Vriska, which she finally did. All that buildup was not for that one-page deflation, but this full sequence. Reservation of judgment was required, something that is much easier to practice when there are more pages to click on.



.....



I could go on but I just realized I'm tired of typing. But really, the list goes on and on like this throughout the whole story. Things which come off as odd or vaguely unsatisfying or even JUST SO TERRIBLE in the short term, but make sense and work better overall in the big picture.



You could complete this exercise yourself if you felt like it. Look at an event, remember how you felt on reading it live, and now how you view it in retrospect. Or, for extra credit, imagine you could wipe your memory of the past several months of content, and pretend I just posted it all today. What would your reaction be? How does it read? Do the issues which seemed to loom so large in the moment, like the omnipresent "get on with it" factor, even cross your mind for a second during such an archival dump? And for extra extra credit, imagine wiping your memory of all of Homestuck, and I just dropped it all in your lap right now while you were idling musing what sort of thing I might work on after Problem Sleuth. What do you think? Of it in totality, and of recent events? What is there that wears thin, on its own terms of pacing, rather than that dictated by two years of attrition on one's ability to remain completely engaged and cognizant of all relevant threads?



There is a lot to think about when you make a story. Not just in how to make it, but in how it is absorbed. One story is really two completely different stories. The one that is read all at once, and the one that is read over your shoulder while you make it.