I am steadily plodding along in this fic because I just found it a couple days ago and this is a lot of words. A whole lot of words. Arranged in a pleasing manner that compels me to continue plodding. I was going to leave my thoughts at the halfway point but that seems to still be a good bit off (so many words), so take a comment here instead.
First off, the pace at which you drop new plot information is beautiful. I think a lot of AU/reincarnation fics make the mistake of making the Game itself and what happened in it the central mystery of their story. Which makes sense on one level because the characters don't know, and it's the main question mark to them, but it forgets to take into account that your readers already know. You've done a great job here of assuming a baseline familiarity with Homestuck (obviously) and standard fic tropes, then using them in your favor. At this point I legit don't know what's up with the Midnight Crew wanting to kidnap the beta kids, even with all the extra information; what's Hussie doing here?; why are Jack Noir and Spades Slick different people? I just don't know. I like it.
That said, I think the strongest part of this story is definitely your character interaction. The plot is engaging, but I wouldn't be planning to stick around for so many more chapters if I weren't hopelessly attached to the way you're writing these characters. Ah, ordinary reactions to extraordinary events. Emotional aftershocks to really bad things! Babies helping each other work through emotional teenager spew. (John just tell your moirail you're a superhero already it would fix/prevent so many things.)
There're a couple things I've been wondering about, too. Sorry if these are explained in later chapters, or if someone else already pointed them out and I'm just late to the party.
"Mute Dave Strider" is the tag that made me find the fic, weirdly enough. I saw a tumblr post about it and then I wondered if there was any fic and here I am. It's been bothering me, though: How does Dave convincingly act like he can talk? If he was born without a voice he should've never had the chance to learn to make mouth-forming-words movements. It's been hinted the Crew has to do with things, but if Dave lost his voice at age three and didn't regain it until a couple years before the fic starts, that's a lot of time to forget and not much practice in the first place. Hm, maybe it's nitpicky, I dunno.
Apologies for the tangent my brain is about to go off on:
When John gets back from New York, realistically he probably should've looked like a train hit him. Resilient and a fast healer or not, the poor guy should be bruised from head to toe and noticeably wiped out. He wasn't, which I guess is okay for plot convenience reasons, but then my brain hit a tangent that it won't unsee and now I'm mentioning it here for some godforsaken reason.
Observe: Karkat Vantas, winner of Most Obsessively Protective of His Moirail award, seeing John looking beat up and doing his bullshit "oh yeah everything's fine" routine. And Karkat, who does nothing but fight bad people and watch daytime TV, cannot think of any explanation other than "John is getting the shit kicked out of him," and he doesn't seem bullied or anything at school, and oh god his dad is the most likely scenario shitfuck FUCK. Because honestly, the relationship between John and his dad could read like that to an outsider. John a) does everything his dad says immediately, no questions asked to the point it's a little unhealthy b) has no friends (because he was scared they'd notice??) c) went through a depressive episode he never talks about, and d) maintains a kind of scared distance between himself and his imposing as fuck dad.
Long story short, AU where Karkat assumes the worst case scenario, making everyone panicky and uncomfortable. Whoops.
I'm almost at the character limit, but long comment short: gosh I love this fic. It's making my brain pick at things and trying to figure them out, but mostly I'm just feeling things about superheroes and how they all just need to drop the plot and hug each other a lot already. >.>
This is a very long comment 8O Sorry for taking a while to get around to replying, I tend to have month-long turnover where answering comments is concerned...my bad...
But hahahaha oh man, you may have already caught to the point where you understand a little more about Dadbert by now so I'm just gonna go read those other comments before I say anything.
Dave's voice thing is still a mystery in story though, so I'm afraid I can't say anything to clear that up for you...spoilers and all. :)
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13LuckyWishes on Chapter 6 Sun 12 Oct 2014 10:33PM UTC
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oriflamme on Chapter 6 Fri 14 Nov 2014 11:20PM UTC
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