Hyperstuck: Homestuck, Kickstarter, and Experimental Comics

"I think you have served as inspiration to any creative person who's wondering if they should bother pursuing their ideas. You've shown what is possible if they do. There are no gatekeepers anymore. There's only your support to be earned. And when it is, I don't think there's a more powerful force to have on your side." --Andrew Hussie, on his fans supporting him to the tune of 2.5 million dollars

Ah, hello again dear visitor, I know it's been a while since I posted, but I don't think you'll be disappointed with the finished product.

As posts go, I am simply the best there is.

I suppose this is the part where I say "Let me tell you about Homestuck," but an entity of my unfathomable genius need not stoop to such banality. Every article on the comic always begins with the same tired explanation: the comic depicts the adventures of four internet friends who decide to play a game together, a game that will eventually usher in the destruction of the entire world. Along the way, they come into contact with twelve alien kids who are similarly ensnared by the game's clutches, and over time it becomes apparent that the fates of the two groups are intertwined in mysterious and sometimes labyrinthine ways. The comic begins as a humorous pastiche of text based adventure games and gradually metamorphoses into an epic quest against forces beyond evil, forces that threaten the basic ability of intelligent beings in all real and hypothetical planes of existence to give a shit.

We wouldn't want to have to rehash all of that in one big paragraph, would we?

Let's talk about me instead.

I happened to come to Homestuck just a month or so before Andrew Hussie, the webcomic's creator, started his now somewhat infamous Kickstarter, a Kickstarter that eventually netted Hussie 2.5 million dollars to fund the creation of a real adventure game. As I finished going through the archives a second time, and watched the numbers (both page and dollar) climb to unfathomable heights, I realized I was watching a silent revolution take place.

And what's more, I was probably going to be one of maybe just a dozen or so people worldwide that got the full implications.

See, Homestuck isn't just a webcomic. It's a Hypercomic: a comic that can only exist within the confines of a digital environment. In other words, it can't be taken from the web and printed out unless you fundamentally change the core experience. There have actually been a number of significant hypercomics (at least, significant to theorists)--enough to feel out the basic forms available to us. For example, hypercomics can make use of embedded, looped media within panels, creating a comic that uses minor animation without becoming a full animated feature (this page from 5ideways uses looped sound and animation, and this page from Argon Zark, the fabled First True Webcomic, uses looped animation). It could also make use of the interactive nature of the web to create a unique navigation system (that Argon Zark page, for example, or the smooth keyboard transition effects of Platinum Grit). And, of course, we can't leave out the very first type of Hypercomic codified by famed comics theorist Scott McCloud: the Infinite Canvas comic, which uses the screen as a window into an infinite terrain, where the page size and shape can be anything the creator wants (see the incredibly not work-safe Delta Thrives and McCloud's own experiment, My Obsession With Chess). So, there is quite a bit of material to study and examine.

And yet, if you told me a few years ago that a hypercomic could net millions of dollars for its creator, I would have probably sighed wistfully and agreed that perhaps someday some wizard of web promotion would succeed where so many others had failed. I would have treated you as a seasoned nihilist treats the prophet of the coming messiah: with dejected disbelief. See, the field of Hypercomics was in a grim state way back in 2009 when I came to the field. Let me put things into perspective:

Every single comic listed above had been abandoned by the time I found them. Every one. Even McCloud had stopped experimenting with his beloved Infinite Canvas at that point, and while there were a few notable exceptions, the more I sought new hypercomics, the more desolate ruins I discovered.

The story was the same everywhere: people really tried to make the whole experimental comics thing work, but their "real" jobs took too much of their time, and they couldn't figure out how to make any money with products that by their very definition could never be printed and sold. To make matters worse, a number of the most innovative geniuses (Neal Von Flue, for example--I would show you his work, but it's all fallen off the Internet completely now) banked on some shaky payment models that ultimately turned out to be disastrously impractical.

Hypercomics was a wasteland, and at one point I despairingly remarked to my partner in exploration, Ian McDevitt, that perhaps we were simply picking over the remains of a medium long dead. How could I know that the messiah I doubted wasn't just coming... it was already here?

Three years later, that savior of Hypercomics made its presence known in the form of a 2.5 million dollar bloom in the waste, a bloom that proved that Hypercomics were a viable medium.

Or at least... that they could be.

But it occurred to me as I watched the bemused commentary on the astronomical success flow in, and journalists and bloggers joined together in a kind of collective shrug that boiled down to "Wow, Homestuck fans sure are crazy, huh? Guess that's what happens when your comic is full of geek references," that a success so poorly understood could not be replicated.

So, just what makes Homestuck different from other hypercomics?

Well, let's start with the formal. Think of the three classifications of hypercomic I gave earlier. What would you say Homestuck is?

It actually doesn't really fit into any of them, does it? Or rather, it happily dips into any and all of the classifications whenever the narrative calls for it. It has a form that transcends the quadrants, you might say.¹ What's more, it even periodically decides to stop being a comic and just straight up turn into an animated music video, a game of some sort (adventure, RPG, &c.), trashy romance novel, complex metatextual web design, and so on. Homestuck is all over the place.

That's actually the first key. Or at least, it obliquely is.

Take another look at how I phrased that: it makes use of different techniques when the narrative calls for it. In Homestuck the MESSAGE drives the MEDIUM rather than the other way around.

And this is where about half of the hypercomics ever created fall flat. They create a story--or even just a bunch of abstract pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo--as a vehicle to show off their new clever tech. The result is something that intellectually is quite interesting if you're a theorist, but ultimately has no heart.² What's more, a lot of them got locked into a particular mode of storytelling. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing--comics like Platinum Grit, Delta Thrives and Patrick Farley's other major work The Spiders, Von Flue's The Jerk, and the rambling whole page compositions of Dresden Codak all made their particular model work really well for the kinds of stories they were telling--but it did mean that the supposedly infinitely variable nature of hypercomics could potentially become just as restrictive as that damnable printed page, or the "setup, beat, punchline" of the standard comic strip.

If you look at Homestuck, though, you'll find that Hussie has picked a medium for each moment, and done so deliberately to modify the tone and experience. It's sometimes a bit difficult to see when you're slogging through the archives, in part because a lot of the choices he makes seem counterintuitive or designed to frustrate, but Hussie has a good command of what techniques he's using where. (It's worth noting, in particular, where he tends to insert more complex games and what effects that more immersive experience achieves. [S] Seer: Descend and the animation that follows are a good example of this--we play through Rose's experience, making us complicit with her actions and directly involved with the hopelessness of her quest, and then at the climactic moment our control and agency is taken away and we watch what comes next helplessly. Even the music echoes this and sets the mood to one not of epic badassery but tragic inevitability. It's a masterful decision.)

This suggests that a successful Hypercomic will be driven not by the desire to invent new technology abstractly but the need to convey the story in the most effective way possible. If you want to really over simplify things, it will be driven not by the head but by the heart.

I can't believe how good this movie is.

"But wait, Freder!" I hear you say, "What about all the Hypercomics that have taken a multimedia approach, or at least have made excellent use of their particular tech, and still failed to reach Homestuck's massive, unnervingly passionate audience? Why haven't Plantinum Grit, or NAWLZ, or The Spiders, or When I Am King, or any of the other great hyperstories gotten the hyperattention Homestuck has? Are Nicholas Cage jokes really that powerful?"

Well... the answer is probably that yes, Nicholas Cage jokes really are that powerful.

No, seriously. Look, one of Homestuck's great strengths is almost certainly the fractal reference humor. And, despite what skeptics might suggest, this isn't dumb reference humor, either; it's not a matter of pointing at something familiar and laughing (see: The Big Bang Theory), it's a matter of building the pop culture knowledge into the very fabric of the comic. While researching this article, I came across something Hussie said about all the Nick Cage jokes, in particular. He questioned hypothetically whether the constant mockery of Cage and his terrible movies hadn't metamorphosed into a kind of shrine to the films, simply through the process of getting to know John Egbert, and having the films become a driving force in the comic's narrative mythos. They become a fundamental part of what makes the comic tick, not just something that is recognized and passed over.

Here's that emotional core of the comic again: the jokes become a way of entering the minds of the characters, of better empathizing with them. You can see this with the trolls in particular: what start out as vaguely defined pastiches of internet culture grow into fully developed personalities. Hussie manages this process so well that people were actually disappointed when a joke character whose entire raison d'etre was horse cocks died a joke character death. He never stopped from getting more ridiculous, and yet along the way he became something people somehow related to and found admiration and sympathy for. So, it's not just the reference humor, but how Hussie develops that reference humor into a bond between reader, writer, and text.

And while we're on the subject of this bond:

I've actually seen people sneer at the way Hussie encourages shipping, fan input, rampant speculation, and a kind of semi-adversarial creative relationship between himself and his fans, as though an artist adapting to the needs of his audience is somehow creatively bankrupt. I suppose if you are committed to the idea of the Grand, Singular Authorial Vision, what Hussie does must seem odd, but to me that reaction sounds more like sour grapes.

Because like it or not, it works.

I can think of a few other properties that either accepted or openly encouraged creative fan responses, and what they have in common is a vibrant, creative fanbase that are, not coincidentally, also loyal customers. Whether it's My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic encouraging fan art and periodically giving nods to the adult community in the show, Magic: The Gathering providing forums for people to post their art, fiction, and custom card designs, or JK Rowling simply being openly OK with fanfiction, it seems that one route to success is the acceptance and even promotion of the creative efforts of fans.

This makes quite a bit of sense if you think about it. After all, if the urge to create is strongly present within most humans (I personally think it is) then entities that enable and support creative input are going to succeed. And that simply isn't something we've seen with a lot of hypercomic artists, most of whom seem to come from the auteur school of comic production where a single mastermind generates writing, text, and unified creative vision. Again, let me stress that the work that's come before is brilliant. But, if we're talking about differences between Homestuck and other hypercomics, the overwhelming encouragement of fan input and creativity is definitely one difference we can't ignore. I'm not criticizing so much as pointing out why one thing succeeded where another failed, regardless of how good the final products actually were.

This is also, of course, why I am actively encouraging you all to ship me and my guest columnists. Oh, and draw fan art of me and Lord Humongous! It's fun!

Actually, let's talk a bit about the fan materials and part of why they're so viable. Here's another McCloud Theory 101 topic: how do you encourage immersion in an environment and identification with a character?

Yep, iconic design:

The design doesn't stop from getting more iconic.

Hussie has described the characters in Homestuck as gaming abstractions, placeholders for what the player imagines. Canonically, Homestuck characters are a-racial³, and their depictions can differ dramatically from panel to panel depending on the style employed. According to McCloud, this is actually a useful strategy for encouraging identification, because we fill in the character with our minds, taking on their role while exploring the more detailed environment.

Much of Homestuck runs on this logic, from the iconic shirts (one symbol for each character), to the vaguely-defined and intriguingly recombinable Class/Aspect system, to the use of color, to the sometimes aggrav8ting quiirk2 o+f th-E tr0ll CH4R4CT3RS. Let's take a moment to drop out of Artistic Appreciation mode and note how from a cynical marketing perspective all of this is sheer genius. Hussie has made a bunch of deliberately iconic characters that we are encouraged to see ourselves reflected in, then given each of them a particular symbol (twelve of which are just the damn zodiac plus a color), and then given them particular colors, items, and even language quirks that can be embraced and emulated and, best of all, merchandised.

Wow.

Even if this was kind of accidental, as Hussie has suggested, it's still clear in retrospect why it eventually cascaded into 2.5 million dollars in funding.

So, the way forward seems simple: find a story with emotional resonance, deliver it with a heavy use of iconic material, encourage fan input along the way, and leave yourself open to medium experimentation when the story calls for it.

And you, too, could have a 2.5 million dollar comic!

Except there's actually something else we're missing... Now what was it...

Ah, right!

The 14 hour days that Hussie worked for years to get to this point.

Perspective stings something awful, doesn't it?

Ten thousand hours is the standard suggested by Malcom Gladwell in his book Outliers; ten thousand hours until you become a true master of your field. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that part of the reason Hussie is so good at what he does, part of the reason he's had so much success, is because he lived and breathed Homestuck for a while, after working on other comics for years. Oh, and he's also been consciously experimenting during all that time to find what works:

I'm not trying to make the best thing ever here. Only something which is very fun, extremely flexible, and serving to accelerate my abilities, my understanding of what a story can be, and my grasp on how people react to things. That is actually a valuable part of the exercise, watching mass reactions in real time, on every aspect of each update. From the minutia, to the big plot turns. There is a very real component of this that resembles a huge social experiment. I'm not just putting pressure on the limits of a story's format. I appear to be doing this with the psyche of the readership as well. I have discovered many obscure buttons which can be pushed. I am taking extensive notes. (see: this question and answer)

Yeah. This is not a quote from someone who just stumbled into success. And here's the grim fact it suggests: my beautiful little summary up there probably isn't going to lead to any sort of guaranteed success. What it does offer us is a more complete understanding of what works, and a guide to some of the pitfalls in which hypercomic artists--and artists in general, perhaps--can become, well, stuck.

I am, in essence, some ancient eldritch chucklefuck, plotting out points of interest in the great, unfathomable void that is hypercomics theory. If you want to actually use this map for something, you are probably going to have to actively start breaking things.

I don't know if this is going to be an outlier, a chance manifestation in the void. It could be. This could be the first and last great success of Hypercomics for a few decades, even. Not everyone gets to God Tier, after all.⁴ But I'm hoping that someone out there is reading this and realizing that the great idea they had for a storytelling format can be enhanced by an actual story, that they can relax their authorial grip and promote experimentation, and that their technology doesn't have to be a sarcophagus--it can be one of many employable ways of telling a story.

This might just be a flash in the pan.

But I'm going to fondly regard it as the miracle of a new beginning.

Interested in Hypercomics? My aforementioned partner Ian McDevitt and I are slowly alpha testing our very own interactive metahypercomic: Understanding Hypercomics. Feel free to check it out, although be forewarned: it's pretty rough. We could definitely use the feedback though. And I swear, this time I won't spend an entire month writing the next article! You can follow me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper or on Twitter @SamFateKeeper. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

1. There's a secret fourth type of hypercomic that makes use of a unique property of the web and of George Lucas films. I keep going back and forth over whether or not Homestuck uses this technique.

Those are your hints. Good luck!

2. If you're following along, this is the ANIMIST space on your SCOTT MCCLOUD CONCEPTUAL BINGO SHEET. Most of the experimenters were hardcore formalists, and while that's very important, it ultimately misses what makes art widely resonant rather than appealing to a set group of specialists.

3. Yes, Kankri, there is something problematic about using the literal color white to represent any and all races, but on the other hand, Hussie has laid the proverbial smackdown on people criticizing cosplayers who happen to be the "wrong race," and he went out of his way to emphasize the idea that the characters are whatever the reader wants them to be. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether the clock is falling on the Just or Heroic side in this debate.

4. The tiger is just too fast.

I Need A Hero's Journey--Games and Joseph Campbell

Check out this article. For those of you that, like me, are a bit shaky when it comes to this type of tech article, allow me to translate briefly.

Essentially, what they're talking about here is the ability to create videogames that constantly generate totally unique landscapes each time you want to start a new adventure. In this type of game, you would always be exploring new locations, because the code itself would create new locations. Essentially, all "procedural generation" means is that instead of telling your code "Hey, a wall goes here" you tell the code, "Hey, here's a set of rules that tell you whether or not you want to put a wall here."

A set of rules and categories that can be used to generate multiple different experiences... hm... now where have I heard that before?



AAAAAAAIIIIIIIIiiiioh hello there, Mr Campbell.

This is Joseph Campbell, the very person whose ideas were on the tip of my tongue just now. Campbell wasn't the first person to codify or use the term "Archetype," but he's the thinker most relevant to our current discussion. What is an archetype, you ask?

Well, an archetype is really rather similar to the rules that go into procedural generation. It is essentially a set of rules that determines the underlying structure of a character or story. In Campbell's ideas, a whole selection of archetypes put together generate what he termed the Hero's Journey, or Monomyth. The core of this concept is that all the great myths and stories have the same underlying characteristics, even if individual elements are edited and changed--just as in the game landscapes described above, basic qualities like the presence of forests and deserts and mountains, and regions of cold in the North and heat in the South, are changed and rearranged in order to create unique maps.

So let's break this down a bit more into some of the component parts, and how they show up in more familiar works of fiction. These are, of course, the extremely condensed, cribbed versions of the archetypes, and are probably four or five generations removed from Campbell's actual scheme, but it should give you a general sense of how this all works.

THE CALL (It Knows Where You Live!)

This is, as the name suggests, the summoning of the hero character, and the start of the adventure. This is R2D2 showing Luke the hologram of Leia. It's Gandalf showing up at Frodo's door, looking like a complete basket case, going, "Is it secret?! Is it safe!?" (He was only ever that crazy in the movie...)

THE REFUSAL OF THE CALL

The Hero, due to the universal law that Good Is Dumb, will totally blow The Call off. This will result in events that eventually force him or her back into the quest. This is Luke trying to avoid getting involved, and coming back from Ben Kenobi's hut to find that the Storm Troopers have killed his family. In a modified form, it's Frodo realizing that unless he accepts the role of ring bearer, the meeting called by Elrond will deteriorate into strife and violence.

THE MENTOR

This isn't a stage; it's a character. The Mentor teaches and instructs the hero, and sets the hero on his or her path. Usually this mentor will die, generally as a symbolic passing on of the quest to the Hero. This is Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, and both Obi-Wan and Yoda passing on and vanishing into the Force. It's also, arguably, Dumbledore at the end of the sixth Harry Potter book.1

THE BIG BAD

This, as far as I can tell, isn't an explicit element of Campbell's myth arc, and it doesn't actually appear in many older myth epics, but it seems to be a mainstay of modern Hero's Journey stories--whether it be Sauron, Emperor Palpatine, or Voldemort.

THE LITTLE BAD

Here we're really running off the tracks, but this is a sort of miniboss character that, I suspect, falls generally under what Campbell called the Road of Trials--a set of tasks that the hero must fulfill before reaching the goal. Shelob and Saruman, Darth Vader, and any number of minor Death Eaters like Malfoy or Snape all fit this model--they are lesser obsticals for the hero to overcome.

INITIATION and DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD

And this is where things get a bit crazy. The idea is that the Hero is initiated into the world of the heroic quest, and marked as a part of this world. Again, I'm sort of rolling a bunch of ideas into one category for the sake of simplicity and time, but one of the elements of this initiation is often some sort of spiritual death, attaining of cosmic knowledge, and rebirth. Frodo passing through Shelob's Layer can be seen as this sort of descent, or Luke's fall from grace at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

THE VICTORY AND RETURN

This is an interesting one. The hero attains the goal of the quest and returns home... but this isn't often so easy. In Lord of the Rings, the heroes are forever altered by their experiences and have trouble reintegrating into normal life. The Elves, along with Gandalf, Sam, and Frodo, all journey off into paradise. Eowyn and Faramir, scarred by their experiences, eventually manage to find comfort in each other but still are dislocated from their former lives. One of the major complaints about the end of the Harry Potter series is that there is no difficulty of return for the heroes--they simply live out happy lives and have children named after their dead friends.2

This is the bare bones explanation of the Hero's Journey concept, and, as I said, it's hardly accurate to Campbell's exact theories. But, it should give you a bit of a primer for how these ideas work.

Now, this might seem like just one of my tangential explanations of one thing by introducing another thing, but there's a deeper application here. In essence, I think that the tools--the archetypes--that can be used to set up a story in other media can be used as parameters in a generated game. Rather than just abstract story elements strung together, the Hero's Journey would give players a set of goals and a point where the quest becomes complete, while not railroading them down a particular path.

Let me conjure up some help to explain this bit.

It is at this point that you notice, with growing trepadation, that there is a third beer glass sitting upon the table between us, as though awaiting another visitor. With a horrible rumble, the entire fireplace heaves back in its moorings to reveal a vast bank of sparking transistors, from which issues forth a spirit of fire and energy. It reaches out, takes the glass, swirls it, and grimmaces at the poor quality. There is a smell of brimstone and crushed dreams.

This is Ian McDevitt, a friend of mine in training to become a game developer. Perhaps he can shed some light on this subject.

The first and most obvious question, I suppose, is would it even be possible to generate the characters of a Hero's Journey tale?

 Absolutely. I've seen examples of character generators that give you nuanced backstories, character motivations, detailed physical descriptions, personality quirks... basically, everything you could possibly ask for in describing a person. If you have an archetype to build off of, like, say the Chosen One, then it's that much easier. You've got a finite list of character motivations, like not wanting to let everyone down, pride in being Chosen (by whatever mechanism it happens to have been), or fear of their world being engulfed in darkness (or whatever evil they've been Chosen to fight). Of course, this is just an example; I imagine the player would fill the role of the Chosen One, typically.

Would it be possible to create those sorts of characters without the gameplay becoming repetitive and predictable, though?

 That would depend on the limits of the archetypes. If the archetype demands that the Plucky Sidekick, for instance, be an idiot and basically useless, then in every game it generates that has a Plucky Sidekick, you're going to get a basically useless idiot.
And from what I gather, useless idiot sidekicks are rather overabundant in games these days.

 Hahaha, basically, though usually it's not the programmers' intent; it's just really difficult to teach NPCs to fight (or do whatever it is the player's doing) nearly as well as a human can. Though on the other side of the same coin, it's perfectly possible to make an NPC too good at it...

Which could be a problem if you end up with a generated Big Bad that is too tough to kill. But looking at these archetypes might be a good way of picking out where whole character types tend to be problematic, letting developers preempt some of these problems.

 Absolutely. I'm of the opinion that basically any information about how something works will help you design a computer system to replicate it. As any programmer will know, the hardest part of solving a problem is formally defining it. That's really the main difficulty in procedural generation and artificial intelligences.

Speaking of artificial intelligences... would these generated characters be able to exist as characters? For example, could they carry on an actual conversation with the player?

  If we teach a computer that, "If you see a grouping of letters together, there's some likelihood that the next letter will be __," then the computer will learn to create strings of characters that are ordered thusly. You can extend it to groups of words, and groups of sentences, to make full paragraphs of coherent speech. On top of all that, you can program in grammatical rules that humans follow (well, most of follow them!), so that it has a sort of censorship; it won't output anything until it has checked and made sure that it makes grammatical sense! Then it's just a matter of plugging actual subject matter into the right location and tweaking speech based on a given character's personality quirks. It sounds more difficult than it is!

  No, wait, that's backwards, it's actually more difficult than it sounds!


So, this is something that will need time and effort, but ultimately isn't impossible.

 Absolutely not impossible. Just... difficult.

Well, we know we can do it, with effort... but why should we? Where's the value in this sort of generated content? After all, the article I linked to describes how much less detailed the graphics become, and how much simpler the stories would have to be. What's the advantage here?

  For the most part, novelty. And I don't mean, "Oh, hey, this is a kitschy little system, let's build it as a senior project for the hell of it," I mean more along the lines of actually having something new and novel every time you boot it up. As for making things that are lower-quality, that may be the case in terms of actual graphical crispness, but I don't agree that the stories would have to be simpler. A computer can generate anything you teach it to, so it's just a matter of teaching it how our stories work, and it will make stories that are very close to the mark.

So, essentially this system would be valuable because each time you played it, it would be different.

  Essentially, yeah. But the great thing about a system like this is that because of the way computers randomize things, there's always what's called a seed. If you give players a way to check what seed was used to generate their world, and a way for players to pick which seed to use for that generation, players will begin sharing their worlds with one another. Minecraft has a system like that, and it has spawned, at the very least, www.minecraft-seeds.net .

So the most interesting quests--the most interesting stories--would be traded around, replayed, and explored over and over. Really, not different at all from how the best myths get passed down through centuries and across cultures.

The spectre, pleased with this conclusion, chugs the rest of its cheep beer and descends back into the bank of transistors from whence it came, leaving a smell of ozone and charred trollflesh in the air.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, about wraps things up for the evening. Ultimately, both these ideas--procedural generation and the Hero's Journey Archetype--are tools used to generate story experiences that people can enjoy and relate to. From simple rules can come enduring complexity, so profound that it remains with us even today, after all these centuries.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations. And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.


1SPOILER ALERT DUMBLEDORE DIES.

2"There is literally no way to move forward from this point!"