#'what if i did this' 'gill i'll fucking kill you' i sa common exchange here

[clonerightsagenda]

Another director's commentary, when you have time: john and davesprite and jadefrom the very start of tlc, including "is that yourarm?" And up to the accidental bucket death.

I realized the section you requested is like 150 pages so I’m gonna have to comment on the other bits later. But we’ll do the John, Jade, and Davesprite scene for now. It got REAL long, though, so it’s under a cut.

This scene witnessed the birth of OUR VERY FIRST MEME.So I hung out and watched Gill draw these panels, which soon became a bit of a tradition. On page 20 she was trying to recreate the battleship room from a different angle and was wrangling some sort of weird tchotchke in the corner until I said, “Hey, why don’t you just make Davesprite’s wings bigger and cover it up?” and from that point on, whenever Gill was struggling with a panel, no matter who was in it, I would scream “MAKE HIS WINGS BIGGER” from the other room.On page 22 the gif maker was being weird so we decided he’d just… vibrate faster when agitated. It’s fine. It’s all fine.

Man going through these pages is like whoah the style sure changed, hasn’t it? You don’t really notice until you look at the earlier stuff.

Now, a bit of this conversation was actually betad by skiba, who is going by who knows what username now. I haven’t chatted with him in years and he’s no longer affiliated with the project, but we still appreciate the help he lent. Thanks man! Couldn’t have made it through the dual Dave dysfunction junction without you.

Page 25 is the last arm sighting because would you want to keep hiding arms in panels? I think not.

The “I’m not a joke” thing was something I wanted to bring up, because I made a post a while ago saying that the stuff scattered around the kids’ houses sometimes seems to connect to their views of themselves, and while Dave is surrounded by puppets and feels like his hands are tied, John is surrounded by clowns, and I think he feels like he’s the “joke” of the friendgroup, since he tends to get told what to do or screw around and mess things up. You see this self-perception when he’s criticizing John Cusack on his 15th birthday. So this was a spot where he finally talks about it outright as he’s taking some initiative. He’s accomplished something, maybe by falling ass-backwards into a power, but then he used it. In canon he mostly does what he’s told with the retcon ability, but John does make some actual decisions about what to change and what actions to take here, because I thought it was important for him to counter that overly Breathy ‘getting pushed around by others’ routine he was chafing under. Page 26 y'all, and I’m setting the fucking precedent that Prospit kids get character development in this damn adventure.

Speaking of which, enter Jade. I remember making a tag comment that 'the most important character in Homestuck is here everyone’ which was a joke because Gamzee is in the fridge. But I was looking forward to this. Page 31 is fun because the massive :( is the standard initial response to Grimdark Jade. The characters and fandom both were like… horrified by her on day one but as soon as she opens her mouth she’s not really scary anymore, so John is already Done with this, and in about two pages Davesprite’s over it and is arguing with her over vocabulary. I’m sorry, Jade. You’re just not that good at being a villain.

I think I complained about this back when we were putting it up, but the lack of dialog tags means I have to lean on the dialog itself to convey how it’s said. Which, you know, is suggested in good writing in general, but sometimes it’s hard, guys. So I intended the “dont you like the new me?” to be less gloating and more have an edge of “you fuckers lived with me for 3 years and could never be damned to notice”. You may have noticed the following monologue is adapted off dark Willow’s little spiel. (I was raised on Buffy, I’m sorry. The whole ‘what do you want to do tomorrow’ comes from there too.) If she hadn’t been interrupted she would have just ranted at them for a while longer, she’s noticeably reluctant to draw blood herself.

Gill made the executive decision to make the sound effect of Jade being knocked out 'SASSACRUSHED’ but I was kinda hoping it would be 'SLAM’ so that you could have them arguing about the use of the word slammer and then smash cut into that being a sound effect. Alas. We can’t win everything.

I remember back then we checked out our new followers and I went “hey I think we just picked up a jade/davesprite person who is probably here because they actually spoke to each other and that’s the best they’re gonna get” and Gill went “well then I will have him HOLDING HER BODY as a reward to our like, third follower or whatever” and I went Gill I’ll fucking kill you so Jade goes smack down on the fucking carpet. That’s equality.

JOHN: i guess we should put her somewhere safe, or make sure that she doesn’t wake up any time soon.

A LEGEND

Ok first of all John’s war on compound words is actually meaningful here, since Jade + Roxy + Calliope + alt Calliope total up to a crowd and attract Lord English. They sure did wake up some time. But also, this is the famous spot where I hastily revised the line maybe five minutes before the page went up because it read “make sure she doesn’t wake up” and that was A Little Dark. Gill drew a draw the squad meme to commemorate it.

Aaaand then, past John shows up, sees that there’s no ring, vanishes into Caliborn’s story, fights him, shows up in the Game Over timeline, and comes back. It’s a stable loop where the reason the ring is gone simply changes, which is why there’s no other John we had to kill off in some convoluted way. Lucky him.

DAVESPRITE: were not stuffing your sister in the fridge DAVESPRITE: thats messed up

This was me staring directly at Andrew Hussie through my computer