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greensun · 1 year ago

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THE BIG QSMPSTUCK LOREDUMP AKA: I finally get to do all the lorebabble I wanted to do.

EDIT (11/1/2023): THIS VERSION IS NOW OUT OF DATE AND DOES NOT INCLUDE THE PEOPLE IN THE ICE CUBES. I AM CURRENTLY REWORKING PARTS OF THIS BUT MOST SHOULD STAY THE SAME FOR THE NEW POSTS SANS BAGHERA, KAMETO, AND DANTDM'S CLASSPECTS! LOOK FORWARD TO UPDATED POSTS IN THE FUTURE.

SOME NOTES: 1. I have a very specific version of qsmpstuck going on with my art I make that I made with a group of friends (thanks Slimercord!) 2. There are other people who made other classpects and takes on QSMP characters that are more character based, mine is not that case, it looks at how QSMP as a whole would work as a full sburb session, and balancing how many people would be on each aspect or class to carry that motif of Homestuck's balancing/equal duality theme. This means I am looking at and using Classpects as a narrative & plot device, not necessarily a personality test like how someone would classpect a real person (This is how the Extended Zodiac works, and why I choose to ignore it for character classpecting. It works great for classpecting real life people though, so by all means you can use the EZ for you and your friends!). 3. AND WITH THAT! It means two people per aspect and and class, with the exception of space and time having three people, and knights and heirs having three people. 4. FAIR WARNING: IF YOU HAVE NEVER READ HOMESTUCK, THERE IS LOTS OF DEATH IN IT, WITH LOTS OF RESURRECTIONS. I WILL BE DISCUSSING DEATH IN A VERY JOKING MANNER HERE! 5. For posterity in case things change in the future: This post was made August 2nd 2023, after the French were added, and right before the Election arc finished. I'm sure if I came back to this after QSMP is over my classpecting would be different. (Updated August 20, 2023)

I'll add this again at the bottom but if you want more of my notes and thought processes or just more qsmpstuck in general here's the link to my tag for all qsmpstuck on this blog, and here's the link to all qsmpstuck on my regular mcyt blog. (my regular blog includes other people's qsmpstuck takes & reblogs however! But every classpect analysis I reblogged in there w/ an anonymous ask sent to the OP was me on anon lol)

HERE WE GO! The big ol google doc sheet I had to make for this. Every note on that godtier order list is how we decided the character would godtier, and we still aren't even technically done! I have so much information built up for this AU I am not sure I could include all of it in this post.

CLASSPECTS

Anyway, in terms of classpects, the way we went about deciding was 1. Finding symbolic meanings we felt fit the characters best 2. If the classpect was funny and had a fun double entendre to the character 3. If we really struggled, we went and picked up Dahni Witch of Light's classpect analyses and found which class fit a character best within an aspect we had a vague idea of. I find Dahni's analyses to be the best at classpecting non-homestuck characters with, because they give enough leeway in interpretation and are somewhat broad, while still applying as a fictional character's story arc, rather than solely a personality test. We also basically ignored most classpect's assigned "role" concept thingy, they were too nebulous in meaning to help much, with the only ones we kept being Sylphs are the passive creation class with Maids as the active creation class, and then Bards are passive destruction, Princes are active destruction.

AND NOW BACK TO THE CUBES YOU CARE ABOUT: As stated before, we did lay it out so we (mostly) only had two per aspect and class, to get that true fan session balancing spirit. Space/time and knight/heir are the only ones with three members. Here's how the outfits look!

My favorites here & their reasonings are: - Etoiles: Sylph of Blood - We all agreed him getting a classpect that is at least somewhat silly would be fitting, but all immediately came to the conclusion that he would hands down be a blood player. From his love of fighting, and the way he goes about befriending everyone he meets to help them, he's just so blood player. To balance out our initial silly classpecting idea, we made him a Sylph! It fits, like, really well! He creates friendship, he helps people, like. What more could you want from a classpect for him. - Mariana: Maid of Doom - I sent these two asks to this other person about this and liked their reasonings lol. - Spreen: Prince of Breath - Look I'm a Spreengirl I think he would play a great active destruction class and he takes away other's freedom (in minecraft). He kills people. He's just so Prince to me. It's really funny. - BBH: Knight of Life - Do you know how funny it is to take a guy who's whole thing is that he's like entirely black and red themed and put him in the burlap sack outfit. Also Knight & Space player frog breeding combo. He's working with Foolish on those frogs. - Foolish: Page of Space - This guy is the ultimate builder of all time ever. He was hands down the easiest to look at and go Oh he is THE space player here. - Fit: Prince of Space - Y'know 2b2t and hacked clients and griefing people? Prince of Space. Plus since he's a space player, soooo - Philza: Knight of Rage - Another great Space & Knight combo. This guy is such a hater on QSMP (positive) he doubts easily distrusts whenever necessary. Such a rage player. - Missa: Bard of Time - Missa is really failgirl I know quite a few people haven't like... watched much of his MC stuff. However you should check out when he had to be placed in a box to fish by himself so he wouldn't die a third time in Minecraft Extremo. He's a perfect Bard, and then he does music. Great set up for a Time player. Wouldn't want it any other way. - Antoine: Seer of Void - truly. Truly. A guy I looked at for two minutes and immediately knew what classpect he needed. That scene where he just like lightly questioned Cellbit after he escaped the federation and it made Cellbit so nervous he started just saying things that made him look way more nervous than necessary? Core Antoine moment for me. The fact he has a basement filled with so much writing on every candidate? The fact he hides his true face so much? We don't even know what's going on there? Void Player. Seer. So fitting it's beautiful to me. - Felps: Maid of Breath - Look, breath is THE aspect of freedom and doing what you want at your own pace. I think I would be committing a cardinal sin if I DIDN'T make Felps a breath player. - Tazercraft: Witch of Doom & Page of Time - They get to do a fucked up glitch timeloop. With these two classpects they can literally do whatever they want forever. Witch of Doom is a classpect that you give to a character if you know they can rip everything to shreds, have fun doing it, but wouldn't (usually) use it to actively hurt people out of true malice (for no reason) (a witch can DEFINITELY respond negatively if push comes to shove). Page of Time is so funny as a classpect also. Just like... Look up what the Page godtier outfit looks like. You'll see what I mean... And why Pac is a page. - Rubius: Waste of Breath - This classpect sounds really mean, sorry. I promise I like Rubius. He's supposed to be a stand in for what the Hussie author insert was in Homestuck, opposing Doc Scratch and fighting him. Hussie was a Waste of Space, I wanted to keep the pun with waste here. Breath worked the best. The federation has a Lord of Blood ability to counter him. Neither of these two count for the main classpect total.

One day I might post a copy of the google sheet and link it for more in-depth reasonings for every character, but like... almost everyone had reasonings like this where we spent waaay too long analyzing everyone LMAO. This is getting long as is, so I'll cut off classpecting here.

DREAMING MOONS

I am about to say something that will make people either really mad or really happy. There is no canon true definition of what assigns you a dreaming moon in Homestuck's text. The only thing we can glean from canon about which moon you get is that Prospit humans make their bed in the morning, and Derse humans don't. Needless to say, this doesn't help when you want to individually give each person a dreaming moon, but it IS great news for me: it makes assigning dreaming moons based on dividing the cast in half really, really easy. That is how it worked for the troll session, it was cut in half with teams, and then assigned based on red team vs blue team. So that is what I did here. All of the English speakers were given Prospit, and all of the Hispanic side were given Derse. This has lore relevance. We'll get back to it in a moment.

Also for note, the Federation is Prospit, with Dersite carapacians being a more nebulous identity against the Federation. Hispanic side was given Derse because they just seem more like Derse guys. Plus the whole Time on Derse/Space on Prospit theme going on in original HS canon is something I kinda wanted to go along with.

Quackity was given dual dreamer, with one of his dreamselves being ElQuackity, hence why he isn't listed. To balance this, we had to make another dual dreamer, and figured handing it to Kameto, who basically is permanently lost in the void, would be a good balance.

The French and Brazilian sessions were assigned using the "well this character would make sense here" method.

Server/Client Orders & Session Chains

If anyone needs a brief refresher, a client is the person you get into a sburb session, and a server is the person gets you into the session. Everyone is a client and a server to someone different. (tl;dr John was Rose's client, Rose was John's Server.) THAT BEING SAID! It means the loop for sessions close once you're all connected to both a client and a server. There are three separate sessions here, and one of them is a mobius double reacharound.

For clarity, the arrows mean: Client <- Server

The Original session, the mobius double reacharound, is the Spanish-English session. The order is

Quackity <- Mariana <- Spreen <- Roier <- Missa <- Vegetta <- Maxo <- Luzu (<- BBH)

BBH <- Foolish <- Slimecicle <- Jaiden <- DanTDM <- Fit <- Philza <- Wilbur (<- Quackity)

Because of the nature of a Mobius Double Reacharound, it means BBH and Quackity enter the session first, by technicality. The first person in a session is also the person who does the ectobiology. Unlike the troll session which only had Karkat as the ectobiologist, if Q!Quackity were the sole ectobiologist, no clones would be made and everyone would be stuck in a paradox, so I think it's funnier if BBH and Q had to work together on Ectobiology. I find their dynamic hilarious. Anyway, Luzu and Wilbur had to be the last in their respective chains, because no one else would be able to enter.

The next chain is the Brazilian closed Session, which is

Forever <- Mike <- Pac <- Felps <- Cellbit (<- Forever)

As previously mentioned, Pac e Mike (uou uou) have very good classpects to make up for the fact they have no space player. I'll come back to this.

The final chain is the French closed session. It goes

Baghera <- Antoine <- Etoiles <- AyPierre <- Kameto (<- Baghera)

They have balanced moons! They have a space player! They have a seer even! Both light and void! However, in missing a time player, they are forever doomed to fail the session.

LANDS OF PLANETS AND PARTNERS

Now I can finally explain actual lore. My apologies for making you read about 1000 words before this.

The Hispanic-English session is glitched. There is not a planet for each person. They have to share planets with a person from the opposite dreaming moon, generating lands that are a combination of two different aspects entirely. The planetary pairings for this prime session are the same pairings used for the initial egg pairings.

I really love designing lands for Sburb AUs it's my favorite thing in the world. The first one is the Land of Acid and Alcohol, Slimecicle (Heir of Heart) and Mariana's (Maid of Doom) land. Its oceans are acid and gasoline, and then covered in bottles that are a Russian roulette of alcoholic beverages, and then Molotov cocktails! The second is the Land of Steam and Dreams, Roier (Witch of Blood) and Jaiden's (Seer of Hope) land. It's filled with buildings built in an industrial revolution style architecture, playing on how people could believe in social mobility and "making it" in that time period, while also being reliant on heavy metallic machinery! I have a lot of fun conceptualizing lands.

The session's glitches don't stop at the planetary pairings on their own however, and it continues when Luzu attempts to enter the session. The session glitches from him being BBH's client, where it refuses to match pairings if they're connected directly, as the game would be unable to generate the gates above each player's house, it would simply loop back to connecting with the same Land. Luzu ends up being paired onto Quackity's land because of this, because the Game still detects him as having a dreamself on the opposite moon, even if he technically has both.

This causes BBH and Wilbur's land to glitch, and they end up paired together (as a bit of a nod back to how BBH and Wilbur were initially intended to be paired, before admins just made a new egg for Wilbur). We'll get back to this in a bit.

Some other lands from the AH session I enjoy are - The Land of Lush Forests and Iridescent Lakes, also known as LOLFAIL, BBH and Wilbur's land, which is a double Life player land, so the oceans are filled with gemstones and the land is covered in the most dense forest imaginable. It has the most difficult underlings spawn on it compared to any other land in the Anglo-Hispanic session. - The Land of Frogs and Typhoons, Spreen and Fit's land, which every space player is guaranteed frogs as part of their land, combined with Spreen being a breath player, it is a constant hurricane with frogs in it. They do not work on trying to calm the storm. They just start killing the frogs. There are so many frogs. The frogs are constantly flying at anyone who enters the land. Fit's slogan is FTF. Thank you to crow qsmp-yaoi for saying this idea because it truly brings me to tears every time I think about them being hit by those frogs flying at Mach 10. - The Land of Synapses and Static, Maxo and DanTDM's land. It's a darkened land, caused by Maxo's void, and then covered in a blanket of constant fog so thick a lighthouse can barely cut through it. The land also has mimicking noises to make familiar sounds to any player that steps on it, caused by Dan's Mind. It is an overbearingly lonely land. One where you understand what it truly feels like to be alone. One where you can lose someone as soon as you take your eyes off of them. Maxo last saw Dan on this land. No one else has seen him since.

I'm going to stop myself here, but I might come back and draw some more Land illustrations for these, haha.

Denizeggs

With the planetary partners, you might have seen this coming. Each planet in the combined session is missing a Denizen. Instead, what each player finds at the heart of the land is a little egg they need to help raise. They all find eggs at different points, however. Some people find their egg before they godtier, some find them afterward.

All of the eggs correspond to the land of their respective parents, however Luzu joins into the session too late to ever meet Tilin, second to last of the chain, she's already dead by that point.

And then the final major glitch in starting this session, when Wilbur joins as the final member of the chain, and enters, the only land open is BBH's land. Due to the nature of Sburb already knowing how things would end, it was always going to be this way, and there was no other option on who's planet he would join. The game glitches again, and detecting a second Prospit player, spawns in a new Denizen: Tallulah.

The eggs generally follow how they were in QSMP proper. Some of them die early. Some of them don't. Juanaflippa is as tragic as she is in canon. Two dads who are just bad at raising a child and it would have never worked out. Slime still kills Tilin by accident. Spreen doesn't care about Ramon, ditched him etc you know how it goes. The eggs are partially a planet quest too, so it's best if the eggs do live here.

Also in the glitches with this, there's a lack of consorts on any of the combined planets. There are a few, but not really as common as canon proper would have.

BRAZIL! 🇧🇷

The Brazil Session is a closed session between the five Brazilians. One of the requirements to complete Sburb is that you need a Space player (required to have forge in order to complete the final genesis frog & launch it into creating a new universe) and a Time player (required to keep the session in the proper timeline). The Brazilians have a time player (Pac), so they're halfway there!

There's some hiccups along the way. Mostly just Cellbit accidentally killing Felps and having to sprite him so Mike could make him a robot body to live in, but same old same old etc. Pac and Mike also kill each other by accident, but some other stuff happens there.

They still don't have the main aspect to actually continue the session, realize this, and also have a guy with one of the most conceptually powerful classpects to exist in terms of being able to glitch a game and save everyone. They manage to contact the primary session, reaching out to two grieving parents who are desperate to do anything to revive their daughter, one of whom is also a very powerful Doom player.

Brazilian Lands (brief edition)! - Land of Vultures and Culture, Forever's land, is a Hope land based around having Forever work to help save consorts who are hiding beneath intense structures and live in very isolate communities from each other. There's also massive megafauna in the skies that are always trying to kill them. - Land of Electronics and Experiments, Mike's land, is a pretty typical doom land, based around Chume labs, and has a constant lightning storm overhead - Land of Dancefloors and Dollhouses, Pac's land, is a combination of a land quest he has to get through, and a typical time land. All time lands have a clockwork or a music theme, I think him having a hot pink land that's massive amounts of dollhouse rooms attached to each other he has to make it through is just a fun concept. - Land of Cloud and Sky, Felps's world, is just a land with everything high in the sky. His whole quest is about him harnessing his ability to go with the flow to connect his consorts together. This is hard when he's sprited himself after dying upon entering due to Cellbit fucking up and accidentally killing him, and living in a robot body built by Mike. Aradia style. - Land of Searchlight and Bone, Cellbit's world, is a giant panopticon style prison. With so many bones, both decorating the prison, and filling the prison cells. His final moment is when he gets to the office of the panopticon, and it is his quest bed. He has a whole ordeal over it.

RICARLYSON! So these guys have regular consorts and Denizens, Richarlyson spawns in the heart of Skaia, and gives the quest for the other five guys to raise him.

Pac (Page of Time) has the ability to manipulate time as he wants once he realizes his abilities. Mike (Witch of Doom) can rip a hole in the universe so big it saves all of the players and sets them smack in the middle of another session, especially a previously contacted session with the connection being a Maid of Doom. With a time player land as well, they get a scratch construct on the Land of Dancefloors and Dollhouses, setting up their ability to scratch their session and set loose a whole new universe where theirs once stood.

French

The French session has probably the most normal planets of everything going on here, what really starts their journey going awry is that they have no time player.

Antoine, being a Seer of Void, can see something is going wrong. He makes contact with people outside of their session in an attempt to restore things to balance. He goes off into the veil and contacts the horrorterrors, and sets up a connection between two Doom players who seem they both desperately need it.

While he's doing that, the rest of the French proceed to have the most normal Sburb session out of anyone. Etoiles is having a great time on his planet. Aypierre gets a genesis tadpole. Kameto has two backup lives.

French Planets (Brief Edition) - Land of Apples and Airplanes, Baghera's land! It's probably the nicest land of anyone's. There are many jokes about how she doesn't get why everyone keeps complaining about their lands being horrible until she reaches theirs. - Land of Sham and Soil, Antoine's land, it's a dark land with tall dirt towers that make it impossible to see where you step. You'd need to be someone who could find where you're going in the pitch dark to even survive here. - Land of Bonds and Breakouts, Etoiles's land, is a land of a giant maze dungeon labyrinth. It's a nightmare for everyone but him. He loves it. - Land of Bogs and Frogs, AyPierre's land, is a land with frogs in a very thick swamp. I'll be honest i Just need to cook on this one some more. - Land of Hidden Leaves and War, Kameto's land, is a Naruto joke.

POMME! Is like Richas she's in the middle of Skaia. An easter egg if you will.

The French session is brought into the primary session when Antoine manages to contact with everyone else fully, rather than quietly watch from the outside. Etoiles and Baghera lose their original selves, and are their dreamselves when the universes collide in, and were unable to godtier, due to not knowing about the quest slabs.

GODTIERING! & the rest of the chronological story

THIS is the order of the godtiers from the beginning of the Spanish-English session. Anyone in the other sessions who godtier before their universe collide event has a red numeral to keep them distinct. I feel pretty strongly almost everyone would godtier here, they're all characters based on gamers. Sburb au works exceptionally well when you know everyone's gaming style.

Also, yeah I have notes listed on each godtier order for how each person dies. Like it's that detailed atp.

Spreen has the highest kill count out of everyone on purpose. I think he'd be down to cut his friends down knowing they'd be revived immortal afterward. As well as, the federation is Prospit in this scenario, they want everyone to godtier. I think him playing to what they want out of him feels his style. Anyway, he sprites his own dreamself due to ElQuackity messing with timeloops. To make his living player self trust him, Spreensprite convinces him to godtier Roier first. It is himself he's talking to, after all. Roier becomes the first godtier in any universe, and not out of his own volition. After seeing it really did work with Roier, Spreen godtiers himself. He gets li'l bear ears ala Jade getting doggy ears with her dreamself sprited, he threw in a Rubius cubito to his kernelsprite first. I like the bear ears I'm biased .3. q!Spreen being really fun in a Sburb concept is why I got hooked on this au after all.

After the first lore is repeated, BBH godtiers himself by decapitating himself with a sendificator to fuck with Foolish. He's kinda bitter about getting beige clothes. He befriends the midnight crew at least. This is before he has Dapper. He finds out about godtiering from Roier by accident and then is like. Oh I have the BEST idea.

Vegetta is killed by Spreen by request, wanting to be stronger to protect Leo, and then Spreen godtiers Missa in order to use his time powers on Derse to throw his dreamself at the kernelsprite, locking the time loop. Anyway, Missa is essentially locked in a tower on Derse's moon after this, now permanently in his Dreamself's body, who hadn't awoken prior. Fit realizes people are walking around in weird clothes, hears about it vaguely from BBH, sends a text to Spreen who'd been ghosting him, and goes like. Hey man. Wanna kill me? And gets his first reply in months.

Phil is attacked by an overpowered monster and almost dies, and Missa manages to get the message to Fit that this is happening through time shenanigans, and Fit manages to get him to his questbed before he fully dies and loses his dreamself. Phil is not happy about this and could not be angrier. He doesn't blame Fit though it's like a self anger thing.

THE BRAZILIAN CASCADE HAPPENS! PEOPLE DIE. By which I mean Slimecicle and Mariana work together to try to help the Brazilians into the session in a bid at saving Juanaflippa, hoping one of them have the ability to revive her. Slimecicle is murdered in the crypts of Prospit by Quackity in a duel, where he cuts off Quackity's arm in exchange for Quackity cutting down his life. Truly one of those luck moments where Charlie dies on his questslab. Mariana is murdered at the same time by Spreen, who is now fully working under orders from the Federation.

Pre-cascade, Pac and Mike both godtier, because they stumble into a stable timeloop, by Mike accidentally glitching Pac's questslab into throwing it at him and killing him. He godtiers with this. Now, as a fully godtiered page of time, they make it to Mike's questbed, and godtier!Mike nudges Pac's slab at Past!Mike to pick up and throw when fucking around with powers.

Felps godtiers in the cascade along with Mariana and Slimecicle, they leave behind Derse and its moon, and they both get destroyed. Where his body sleeping on the quest slab godtiers. Aradia style. Except... as a Maid of Breath, his robot sprite body doesn't explode. He just sort of... exists in both. When one falls asleep the other wakes up. The rest of the Brazilian session just assumes the Cascade fucked with his robot body's energy sources. He kind of just figures each side is a weird dream he keeps having.

Cellbit is staunchly anti-godtier, while Forever wants someone he trusts to godtier him. Cellbit refuses to godtier Forever, and causes a major fight between them. Then Spreen murders Cellbit into his godtier under orders from the Federation, which is preceded by a long Scooby-doo-esque chase, where BBH sees them both, and decides to follow. BBH is a fully godtiered Knight of Life here, he has resurrection powers for other players, and Spreen is functionally immortal as well. BBH 100% catches up to him after he kills Cellbit, and proceeds to put Spreen in a torment nexus of dying and undeath. Thus ends the Killing Spree(n).

AND THEN THE FRENCH CASCADE HAPPENS! The final session connects, and Baghera sacrifices herself to make it happen. After they make it in, they learn about Quest slabs, and there's a whole thing with Etoiles dramatically getting her to her questslab before she fully dies. Etoiles then proceeds to go kill himself on the questslab immediately after. Felps is also hanging out with the French, they found him hanging out in the void and take him with them. They lose Kameto in the void however, nobody's really sure where he went.

Pre-French Cascade, Antoine is the only French player to godtier, and no one will explain how it happened. It seems like no one really knows, but Etoiles keeps saying more fantastical descriptions every time someone asks. He's never taken his seer hood off of his face.

Back in the order of the godtiers, Forever befriends Baghera, and eventually her and Etoiles and Cellbit help him godtier. It's a whole event. Richas is having a blast.

Bobby dies, and Jaiden decides to godtier in order to get into the Federation's good graces, as well as out of guilt of feeling that if she were stronger and godtiered she could have saved him. Roier godtiers her.

AyPierre is godtiered in a tragic accident with one of his many machines. Etoiles helps pull him to his quest bed. He's a Thief of Space he has fun with it.

Foolish is the second to last person to godtier, and he is godtiered by Pomme by accident. He wanted his godtier to be as cool as possible, and somehow managed to not godtier by this point. It's just very him. He's down with the page pants.

Quackity is the final member to godtier. BBH kills ElQ at one end of the universe with the aid of Maximus. Slimecicle kills the regular QQ in one final duel.

At the end of the universe, the only people left alive and able to contact the rest of the sessions to never godtier are Wilbur and Maxo.

DanTDM disappears on the Land of Synapses and Static, never to be seen again, along with Turnip following soon after.

Luzu finds a glitch and is absorbed by it not long after he enters.

Nobody is really sure if Kameto godtiered or not.

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

We're currently working on figuring out sprites for everyone, so hey! I might come back and add an update on that, but this post is so long my computer is lagging. I have a gaming laptop. It shouldn't be doing that. Here's some stuff on the sprites we do have + some misc notes.

Cellbit's flashlightkind is like how Kanaya's lipstick works. It's a chainsaw.

Spreen has Spreensprite, BBH has Skeppysprite, Missa has a sprite that is a mysterious skull sprited twice called Skullskullsprite, and Roier has his dog with a spiderman called Dogmansprite, and Jaiden has Arisprite, who's Miku & Ari combined :D (thanks icarus!)

It is 5 am as I finish typing this and queue it. I think I started typing this at 5 pm yesterday. Feel free to comment any thoughts you have or play around in this au! Also feel free to @ me if you do, either on my main mcyt blog (@etoilesbienne), or here!

qsmpstuck tag on my art blog / qsmpstuck tag on my regular mcyt talk blog

#qsmp #qsmpstuck #qsmp au #qsmp homestuck au #mcytstuck

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sharkselfies · 3 years ago

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The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 1

Since some folks requested it on Twitter, I’ve started transcribing The Minds Behind The Terror podcast episodes! Below the cut you’ll find episode 1, where showrunners Dave Kajganich and Soo Hugh talk to Dan Simmons, the author of the novel The Terror, about episodes 1-3 of the show. They discuss Simmons’s initial inspiration for writing the book, the decisions they made to adapt it into a television series, and the depictions of some of the characters such as the Tuunbaq, Hickey, and “Lady Silence.”

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 1

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

Dave Kajganich: Hello! Welcome to Minds Behind The Terror podcast. I’m Dave Kajganich, I am a creator and one of the showrunners of the AMC show The Terror, and I’m here in the studio with executive producer and co-showrunner Soo Hugh.

Soo Hugh: Hello!

DK: And we welcome today the author of the sublime novel The Terror, on which our show is based, author Dan Simmons, calling in from Colorado. Welcome, Dan! Hi!

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave, thank you.

DK: So let’s start with the very beginning. This was a mystery from actual naval history that you decided to transform into a novel that was crossed with Gothic horror. Can you tell us a little bit about where you got the idea from this, how you went about preparing to write it, anything that can give us insight into how you blended all of these remarkable genres into this incredible book.

DS: I’ve known since I was a kid that I wanted to tell a story about either the North or South Pole. And the reason is in 1957, 58, when I was very young, actually I was just a fetus, they had the international geophysical year, and that really caught my imagination. Now the international geophysical year saw cooperation between American and Soviet scientists, it was the height of the Cold War, that’s the first time they submit(?) a permanent base at the South Pole, and I fell in love with Arctic stories. I had one book left on a book contract with a publisher I really liked, and we hadn’t decided what that book was, and I wanted to write a scary story about the Arctic, in this case the Northern Arctic, and that happened because I was doing a lot of research on Antarctica and just couldn’t figure out what the macabre, Gothic, scary part would be. I wanted to put it in, but I didn’t think they’d go for, you know, an eight foot tall vampire penguin.

[laughter]

DK: You might be surprised!

DS: There was a footnote on a book I was reading about the Franklin Expedition, which I had never heard of, and I decided that’s what I was gonna write about, and it had a tremendous amount of the unknown that I could fill in, that’s what novelists love. And so I told my editors excitedly that this was what I was gonna do, I would call it The Terror after the HMS Terror that went with the Erebus, got stuck in the ice, all the crew disappeared in history… And they said no.

[laughter]

DS: ...it was the first time the publishers did that. I said, “Why not? I think it’s gonna be a pretty good novel.” And they said, “Look, nobody’s interested in a bunch of people that’ve been dead for 150 years.”

SH: That sounds like some of our meetings.

[laughter]

DS: So I did what maybe you do, in such a meeting, I just thanked them, and I liked them all, and I had a good dinner(?) and I said goodbye, and bought back my last book on the contract and went out and wrote it on spec.

SH: Well why don’t we take a step back, Dave, and why don’t you tell us about how you found Dan’s book and that experience?

DK: Sure! Dan, you might remember some of these steps from your side of it, which is that originally this was auctioned by Universal as a feature, and I sort of tried to get the rights and was a bit too late, and tracked them down to the producers at Universal who were running the project and got myself hired as the screenwriter for a feature adaptation. By the time I was ready to start actually committing an outline to the paper, Universal had let the rights go because there was a competing project. It was interesting to sort of rack up reasons why people wanted to make it but didn’t feel that they could pull the trigger, and we were so grateful when AMC finally called us back and said, “Look, we’ve figured out a model where we can do this as a limited series,” it really felt like ten episodes was a great length for this, because we could blend genres in a way that, you know, we could unpack sort of slowly, more slowly than a lot of shows would’ve done, and drive the plot as much as we could, like the novel, with character choices and decisions as opposed to just horror kind of entering the frame and taking over for one set piece after another. So it was a long journey, getting this to AMC, but at the end of the day I think we found the right home for it.

DS: I can no longer imagine a two hour version, feature film version of this story, and I can’t imagine a second season of this story, I think it was just right.

SH: It does feel like we did a ten hour cinematic novel.

[audio from the show]

Crozier: Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There’ll be no melodramas here--just live men, or dead men.

SH: Dan, Dave and I talk about how addictive the research gets for this when you start going down the rabbit hole, how did you approach the research?

DS: I think most novelists run into that, but since I write a lot of quasi-historical novels, at least set in history, I get totally addicted to going down the rabbit hole. Readers say, “Well, Simmons’ book is too long, and the descriptions of things are too exhausting,” but I watch your characters go on deck and there are all the things and views and everything that I tried so hard to describe and then people tell me, y’know, “talky, verbose,” and in print I have to do it that way, but you just pan the camera a little bit.

DK: You have words, we have images! For every thousand of yours, we get one!

DS: Yeah.

SH: But I remember this passage in your book where it talks about all the different ices, and you vest it with so much psychological import. We talk about that passage a lot in the writers room, it was one of our highlights, of this is how you do great descriptive writing.

DK: And you made so many parallels between things like the environments of the ships and characters, you built a kind of code book for the show without realizing you were doing it, which is making visual metaphors out of a lot of these things that would normally just be exposition or historical detail.

SH: Well especially between Crozier and the ship, I mean when you hear about Crozier’s relationship with Terror, and you have so many amazing passages about, you know, the groan of the ship and how it, y’know, and you cut to a scene with Crozier and how you feel that the bones of Crozier is embedded in the ship, and we really took a lot from that.

DS: Well I noticed that on one of the episodes where Lord Franklin [sic] is trying to get back in touch with Crozier, you know, trying to be friends with him again, I think it’s a brilliant episode you guys wrote.

[show audio]

Franklin: You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.

Crozier: I’m a captain. I’m--I’m peevish off my own ship. I leave it and I hear disaster knocking at its door, before I’m ten steps away.

DS: And that was beautifully written, that. You got so much of Crozier right there.

DK: It was a pleasure to write these characters on the backs of your writing of these characters, because you really--I mean, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you know, from having written, you know, a whole long string of historical books, is to make these people’s psychologies feel as modern as they must have felt in their day, while still being able to articulate some of the blind spots of being from the eras they were from.

I’m curious from sort of a history nerd point of view, if people watch the series and like the series, and read the book and like the book, and want to know more about this expedition, what’s the first book about the Franklin Expedition you would point people to? What was most helpful or most interesting in your research?

DS: I apologize, I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s a collection of stories about both the South and North Pole, and so it’s a short section on the Franklin Expedition, but it didn’t make mistakes, and most of the other books that I read, uh, keyed, and videos for that matter, like PBS did a story about the Franklin Expedition, but they keyed off a 1987 attempt by several doctors to figure out what happened to the crew, and they exhumed three crewmen’s bodies from the first island where they stayed the first winter, and those crewmen had only been on the ship a couple of months, but they decided because of a high lead content that the lead had poisoned them and then made them stupid, and made them paranoid and everything, but they didn’t compare that test of lead with any background people in London at the time, and later they did, so I didn’t believe the lead thing.

DK: Well that’s the fascinating thing about a mystery with this many parts and pieces, kind of in flux, is, you know, you can create all kinds of competing narratives about it, and what’s fascinating about writing a fictional version is you can’t have that kind of ambiguity, you have to make a decision. I think people will enjoy very much ways that the show and the book have a similar point of view, and also ways that they diverge in their points of view, because there are so many ways to tell this story--

SH: Well you know how much we invest responsibility in the audience as well, right?

DK: Sure.

SH: In terms of your book and our show as well, we’re not against interpretation, that there’s a responsibility on the audience’s part to put together--we’re not gonna hand feed them. There’ll be some people who put more of an onus on Franklin, and others who would say, “You know, if I was in that position, I probably would’ve made the same decision,” “Oh no, this definitely killed the men,” “No, this killed them!” and that dialogue is exciting, you know, when you read fans talk about your show and your books and really smart, insightful ways.

[show audio]

Franklin: Would it help if I said that I made a mistake?

Crozier: You misunderstand me, Sir John, I--I only meant to describe why I brood, not that I judge.

DS: I don’t worry about who or what my reading audience is. People ask me about that and I don’t imagine a certain reader. But I’ve always tried to write for somebody who’s more intelligent than I am. My perfect reader would be just smart as hell, speak eight languages, you know, have fantastic world experiences, and I want to write something that will please that person, and I think your show does the same thing.

DK: Well we were--that was our motto! We wanted to be sort of the dumbest members of our collaboration and there’s a sort of horrifying moment when you realize that’s come true.

[laughter]

[show background music]

DK: Tell us a little bit about why you made the decisions to tell the story in the order you told it, and whether you sort of felt like there was anything from the way you had told it that we were--or a missed opportunity. We’d love to know sort of what your experience of that was.

DS: I don’t think there were any missed opportunities in terms of not adapting my way of telling it, and I can’t remember all the reasons for why I broke it down that way, some of them were just very localized to, you know, when I was writing that particular bit. But I do know that it gains a lot by being told chronologically the way you’re doing it, so for me that seems now the logical way to tell it again.

DK: Have you ever read the novel in chronological order? When we hired writers for the writers room, we gave them a list of what the chapters were like in chronological order, and I think we asked half the room to read it in your order and half the room to read it in chronological order so we could have a discussion, a meaningful discussion about whether there were things about telling it without being in chronological order that we wanted to embrace or not. It was a fantastic experience and I wonder if you’ve ever read your chapters in chronological order? ‘Cause it’s also a fantastic book!

[laughter]

DS: I haven’t read it that way, they were that way in my mind before I started getting fancy and breaking them up and moving them around in time and space, but I would love to have seen that experiment.

DK: The reason we can get away with it in the show is because there is a loved book out there that people trust, and you know, it is a classic in this genre, so I mean this is a perfect example of, you know, the amount of gratitude we owe the book, because we got away with a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get away with because you came before us.

SH: And speaking of those rabid fans, Dan, it’s been really interesting reading audience reactions to the show from people who’ve loved the books and who just naturally will compare the two, and we’ve been heartened by just how supportive our fans have become--are of the show. There is this controversy, some people like our choice to give Lady Silence a voice and some people feel it was sacrilege to your book, where do you fall on that? DS: At first I was surprised. In fact when you were hunting for an actress for Lady Silence and I read about that, it said somebody who’s fluent in this Inuit language and this Inuit language, and I said, “What the hell?”

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut to her dying father]

DS: Having seen her with the tongue and heard her, and knowing the different reason they call her Lady Silence, it all works for me and I was also surprised when Captain Crozier could speak fairly fluent, you know, dialect, ‘cause I had him just not understanding a thing.

[show audio]

[Crozier speaking Inuktitut to Silna in the same scene as above]

DS: I love it when readers get rabid about not changing something from a book, and I have to talk to them sometimes, not ‘cause I have a lot of things adapted, this is the first one, but I love movies. They say “Aren’t you worried it will hurt your book?” and first I explain Richard Comden(?)’s idea that you can’t hurt a book anyway, except by not reading it, I mean the books are fine, no matter how bad some adaptation becomes. Books abide, and so I wasn’t concerned. With the changes that I see, I get sorta tickled, whereas some readers get upset, and they just have that set. So I think that the vast majority of viewers haven’t--well, I know the vast majority haven’t read the book, haven’t heard of the book, probably, they’re gonna keep watching because of the depth of the characters, and that’s based on the first two episodes, and I agree with them completely.

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut]

Crozier: She said that if we don’t leave now, we’re going to “huk-kah-hoi.”

Blanky: Disappear.

SH: We get asked a lot of questions about the supernatural element of the show and the way a monster does or does not figure in the narrative, and seeing our episodes, did it feel surprising or did it feel faithful to the way you imagined it as well to your book?

DS: It was surprising to me at how well it was done, because it’s hard, I know, to show restraint in a series like this, and certainly in a movie, but it’s hard to show restraint at showing and explaining the monster.

[show audio]

[ominous music, Tuunbaq roaring, men screaming]

DS: The way you did it in the first few episodes to me were just lovely, just, you know, a hint of a glance at something and then you see the results of this creature, so that’s what I tried to do in the novel, one of the reasons I moved around through space and time, part of what I wanted to do was not cheapen the story and not cheapen the reality of these poor men dying by just throwing in a monster, and so I tried to do it in a way that would not disrespect the true tale, and I believe you’re doing it the same way I tried.

DK: The way you incorporated the supernatural into the book, I mean, I was a fan of it when I first read it. It was jaw dropping the way that it fits so well on a level of plot, on a level of character, and on a level of theme. So when we got the green light to adapt it I was so confident that we were going to be able to do something with it that would be able to be nuanced because the bones of it are so organically terrific.

SH: It helped us know what we didn’t want to do. That formed so much of our conversation, of “this is what we do not want, this is what we do not want,” and slowly you whittled down to getting down to the essence of what this thing had to be.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling]

DK: Another character from the book that really stands out for fans that they are wondering what in the world we’re doing with is Manson. [laughter] And I was curious what you made of the fact that he is pretty invisible in the first three episodes of the show, and that some of his plot beats have been given to a character called Gibson, who I don’t remember is--I don’t think he’s featured very much in the novel. And I wondered if that caught you off guard or if you sort of intuitively had a sense of what we were doing in making that change?

DS: Any discussion of Manson to me leads to Hickey converting him to his future, his tribe, the tribe he wants to have, group of worshippers, that I think Hickey wants to have, but he does it by sex below decks. Hickey’s not gay at all, he’s a manipulator, to me, and he was manipulating Manson who was big and dumb, in my book, he’s manipulating him by this sexual encounter. But I was curious whether you were worried about showing that?

DK: Well, we weren’t worried about showing characters having same-sex affairs or relationships. We wanted to make room in Hickey’s character for actual affection, or if not affection then companionship, or some kind of connection.

[show audio]

Hickey: Lieutenant Irving! I was hoping we’d meet.

Crewman: Mind the grease there, sir.

Hickey: I wanted to... thank you… for your help. For your discretion, I mean.

Irving: Call it anything but help, Mr. Hickey. Please. I exercised clemency for a man abused by a devious seducer.

DK: We wanted to make sure that Hickey had access to command in some way that a steward, an officer’s steward, would be able to provide him, that an able seaman wouldn’t be able to provide him, and that was really valuable to us in terms of charting out all of these character stories, was how does he know what he knows about how command is dissatisfied or where the fractures are if he can’t see them from where he’s sleeps in his cot in the forecastle.

SH: I mean we know that there were relations between the same sex on ships, it just was part of this world. Not to belie that there was serious consequences for it, but you know, we have 129 characters, and we wanted them to feel fully fledged and rich, and, you know, passions do naturally develop and have no characters engaged in sexual relations would have felt just as odd and perhaps even more controversial, and when Irving discovers Gibson and Hickey, his shock is from such a subjective point of view of his moral center. It’s not the camera’s perspective, right? Our camera’s very neutral in that scene. It’s Irving, that character at that point in the show, that is infusing a sense of horror, that’s his horror moment.

DS: I’d like to add that it’s not the gay connection that would cause criticism, but I was flayed alive because the most openly quote “gay” unquote character, that is, Hickey, you know, maybe hunting for affection but definitely hunting for power, he’s the only one they said in reviews, and he’s a killer and a bad person, so I’m homophobic, but I was flayed alive for that. The word homophobic appeared in about 80 reviews. Nobody mentioned the purser, who uh--

DK: Right, Bridgens and Peglar.

DS: Yeah. I thought he was a fascinating character. I loved getting glimpses of him in the series because he’s super smart, he’s super wise, he’s probably wiser than any of the commanders, ahd he’s obviously in love with--who is it that he’s in love with in the show?

DK: Peglar.

DS: Yes, that makes sense. And, uh, so Peglar says, you know, “Is this another Herodotus?” and, “No, I’m giving you Swift now,” he’s educating the man he cares for.

[show audio]

Hickey: I understand you cleared up our “association” for Lieutenant Irving? Gibson: You spoke to him.

Hickey: Mhm.

Gibson: Directly?

(beat)

Christ, Cornelius, I’d reassured him.

Hickey: Cornelius Hickey is a “devious seducer.” That was your--that was your reassurance? You’ve got some face, you know that?

DK: We wouldn’t have dramatized Hickey’s story if we weren’t also going to pull in Peglar and Bridgens’ story, because we knew that people, you know, are predisposed to sort of make that kind of quick assumption, and we just wanted to make sure that the show didn’t have that blind spot and reflected the book, which also doesn’t have that blind spot.

SH: We had those same questions with Lady Silence, and I’m sure you did as well. When we meet her, she’s a frightened young woman who’s about to lose her father, and that’s a universal character moment that anyone can relate to, and the otherness is sort of--is secondary, but then once--in the end scene of 1.02, when she’s sitting there grieving her father and then you have that language barrier with everyone else, we worked with Nive on this because we wanted to make sure the language itself was as accurate as possible, so when you say disappear making sure that the disappear in our language means the same thing as disappear in her language. I think whenever you have characters that feel othered in most media and you’re bringing them into your show, Dave and I also just wanted to make sure we weren’t swaying on the pendulum on the other side and being almost too careful about touching them, and with Nive I think when you have an actor of that talent, she was strong, she was representing a voice that she felt very confident in, and that was very reassuring for us.

DS: And it works well, and when her father’s dying, she throws herself on his chest and says “I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I’m not ready,” and I love that in the show because if she’s gonna become a Shaman he’s dying you know it’s not reached that point of education yet where she feels secure and later on you know beyond what we’re discussing today she becomes to me in the show I see her as more and more majestic.

SH: I do love the word majestic ‘cause I think it describes pretty much all of our characters. I agree, I do think there is something very sublime about who they have become at the end because when you go through that much trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful human spirit to endure.

DS: I think that’s one of the central themes of the story that you’ve brought out so clearly. In most post-apocalypse, you know, terrible situation movies and shows, everybody turns nasty as hell, they start shooting each other, it’s just like WWIII when they should be helping each other survive, and I found even though there was controversy, even though there was opposition in this story, people opposing against each other, still that they rose to the occasion. And that is so rare I think in much media these days or even books where the characters are themselves and they do the best they can, and when things get bad they rise to the occasion.

DK: The first conversation you and I had about the book, you know, I was basically pitching you sort of what I thought thematically the book was about, and I talked a lot about, that in a disaster like this, a kind of moral emergency, that we would get a chance to unpack what is sort of best and worst in these characters’ souls.

DS: I confuse readers often when I was on book tour for this book, and it was a long time ago, I’ve written a few million words since then, but I confused people by saying that if you want a theme for the survival story of The Terror, it’s love. It’s love between the men. And just unstinting love. And this came out in a piece of dialogue, in the first two episodes.

[audio from the show]

Franklin: I’ll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. If something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man.

Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John.

Franklin: For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong.

DS: That to me was right the theme I was working with, and with Crozier who shows it a different way, with Fitzjames who’s struggling to show leadership, and between the men despite their hierarchy and the British hierarchy, the rank and lieutenants and so forth, eventually they come down to loving the men they try to save. And I found that lovely.

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

DK: Thank you so much for listening to The Minds Behind The Terror, join us in our next edition when we talk about episodes 4-6 with the additional guest Adam Nagaitis phoning in from London. We will see you soon!

[preview snippet from the next episode plays]

DS: I’ll confess something else to Adam, the first time I watched it, I thought your character was a good guy because he jumped down in that grave to put the lid back on.

[laughter]

#the terror #the terror amc #the minds behind the terror #david kajganich #soo hugh #dan simmons #personal #eps 2-4 should be up within the next couple days here!#hope this will be helpful!#also i am absolutely not a professional lmk if you see any mistakes or think a dif format would be better #and i'll add a google doc link in the reblogs too the tags will just break if it try to add it now

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