@reimaruwa

Okay, so maybe "suspension of disbelief" was the wrong word. Obviously Homestuck is fantastical, but even if you disagree, you can at least see what I mean, right? You have Game Over, the bloodiest, most destructive animation in the story, where everyone is dead. And I as a reader am left wondering how they could possibly get out of this one. And the answer is that John has a secret special magic power that allows him to completely rewrite everything so that they never died at all, at the cost of also overwriting most of what we saw from them in act 6. I feel like it's fair to think that's pretty deflating! You can do almost anything with a power like that, and I always find myself asking "why this?" when a story does it, and the explanation is rarely ever satisfying.

As for the characters...well, people are the products of their experiences. We were there to see the experiences of the Game Over timeline, and we weren't there for the experiences of the new one. I'm happy to jump into a new version of those characters if we really have to, but that comes with the price of wanting to get an idea of who they are and why. Three years makes a lot of difference to a person! Living a totally-different three years would make me want to learn how a person got to that position, but the story seems largely uninterested in displaying much of that, and more like it wants us to just pick up most of the new lads where the old ones left off.

That's why I don't like the 'ultimate selves' conversation, within the context of Postcanon it's okay, but in HS proper it comes off almost as a handwave, to say something like "ehhhh we could maybe remember some of the stuff you care about, if it means that much to ya". It feels shallow, as far as the mentions in A6A6I5 are concerned.

Is that "traditionalist"? I don't know, if it is I'd like to know what it's being replaced with that is meant to invest the audience in the new timeline's characters, because it clearly didn't work very well on me. John and Roxy were by far the characters I had my eye on most in postcanon, and that's because I saw their whole journeys through Homestuck original. Even dead jetpack John still has his whole action period laid out clearly. It can't be that bad if it's kept around for 2/8 of the humans.