#anyway read godfeels

[sliimetrash]

i have the curse of finding june egbert really compelling in a way that anyone else in the fandom who likes june does Not

[marsti]

dare egbert furry convention 2024

POV you're meeting up at the con hall

[hms-no-fun]

i have an intense love/hate with godfeels because it is beautifully written but it also makes me viscerally uncomfortable. something something disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed probably. engaging with that discomfort teaches me more about myself and is definitely worth it for something like godfeels. any advice for constructively engaging with media that Pisses You Off, by no fault of the creator? what would you say to your haters in good-faith, if you could?

well, to be fair i have said plenty to my haters in good faith previously, but that was a very direct response. if you and i were having a polite conversation amongst the two of us, my first question would be "how far did you get?" godfeels has been going for six years now (!!!), and it's gone through many phases in that time. i'm at a point now in my life where if someone tells me gf2 didn't click with them, i'll probably nod and say "yeah it's rough around the edges, there's a lot of stuff i'd do differently today." the most vocal contingent of haters i've ever gotten were the handful of people who dipped at gf2.2 when june got superdrunk and accidentally murdered a bunch of people, assuming the story was going to be about how cool and based that decision was. anyone who's actually read gf2 to completion should find that misconception laughable. it also makes a difference if you finished gf2 and stopped there, or started 3.1 and fell off, or if you got through chapter 8 and fell off, or if you're currently reading Double Album. each of those is a slightly different conversation with its own pros and cons. whether or not i'd try to talk someone into continuing their read depends entirely on those questions (and also how self-confident i'm feeling in the moment).

i guess i would say to someone who is not enjoying godfeels that they should stop reading godfeels. it's an extremely heavy story that digs into a wide variety of traumatic subject matter. it is also deeply personal in a lot of ways, which is perhaps a weird fit for a Homestuck fanfiction. so i can understand someone from the wider fandom hearing about godfeels as "the June Egbert fic" being disappointed that it's not fluff. i've documented in the past how gf2 emerged out of my dissatisfaction with the image of "Hairclips June," whose transition exists off screen and whose acceptance by her friends is an obvious expectation. i kind of feel bad for how that shook out in the long term since, between the lengthy hiatus of hs2 and the broader strangulation of the post-canon movement during the pandemic, the canonical "Hairclips June" story (or at least "June Who Doesn't Suffer 100% Consequences" story) doesn't seem to exist. i don't mean literally canonical, i mean "seeped into the fandom's collective unconscious" canonical, like Detective Pony. there are plenty of fanworks that do a good or at least interesting job with June, but they're not *about* June in quite the same way godfeels is. it's entirely possible that such a thing DOES exist and IS popular (i freely admit to being out of touch with modern fanworks), but for better or worse godfeels still seems to be the thing that comes up most often-- and not always in a positive light.

for a while now i've been working on an "Author's Introduction" which on the surface is an attempt to contextualize the phases of godfeels for new readers, but in actuality is more of a history of/commentary on the post-2019 fandom and the so-called "Homestuck Renaissance." i see this as necessary because godfeels is an extension of that moment, in particular the loudly recuperative pro-Vriska boosters and their exquisitely galaxy-brained VrisRezi meta. then gf3.1 responded to the fandom backlash, chapter 8 responded to my experience watching every foundation of my post-transition life crumble during the pandemic, and then Double Album is an exploration of building yourself and community back up in the aftermath of tragedy.

it's not that this context is necessary to understand or appreciate godfeels, just that i think it helps put things in perspective. when i started gf1, i hadn't written fiction in nearly 7 years. today, the series is sitting just shy of the 500,000 word mark. at every step of the process, the quality and ambition of my writing has increased exponentially. there's a reason i've written Double Album as a jumping-on point for new readers-- besides being better in virtually every way that matters to me, it's also largely shorn free of the baggage that can make godfeels a hard sell for folks. whether or not it actually SUCCEEDS as a jumping on point is another conversation entirely.

so i guess all of that is to say, if we were having a private conversation just the two of us, i freely admit that godfeels is a wildly disjointed story on top of being extreme and often emotionally masochistic. i am proud of this work from start to finish, but it fundamentally is the process of its authorship in a way that a thoroughly drafted and edited novel simply isn't. i used to publish chapters the instant they felt done to me, with only minimal revisions. these days i let chapters bake a lot longer and put much more thought into how they fit into the larger whole. i kinda miss the old way but the new way results in much better work.

i'd be curious to hear what exactly it is that Pisses You Off about godfeels, and why you nevertheless feel it's a worthwhile reading experience. you ask me for advice on how to constructively engage with media that pisses you off, but i don't have any because in general i don't engage with media that pisses me off. i stopped reading fanworks after 2020 because everything that survived seemed to cater only to the sector of the fandom that harassed my friends out of their jobs and platforms. i found their interpretations/extensions of canon lacking, their tendency for straightforward fluff rather grating. i COULD have made that everyone else's problem, but what would be the point? i wasn't the target audience. i didn't enjoy the work, so i stopped reading it. i'd rather move on to media i enjoy than suffer through media i don't.

BUT. there's a fine line here, because it actually takes a lot to Piss Me Off. i don't really believe in rules or standards in art as Inviolable Laws Of Nature. my measure of whether something is good has a lot less to do with its inherent quality and a lot more to do with the balance between intention and execution. it rarely matters how amateur something is, if it meaningfully accomplishes the thing it set out to do then i'll probably like it (or at least respect it). i look for expressions of authenticity, moments where the artist and the medium are in perfect sync. there are plenty of critically praised pretty-looking movies and games with big production values that i don't particularly like. sometimes that's because they're a naked moneymaking enterprise disguised as art. sometimes it's a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. and then sometimes an artist is just full of shit and doesn't really know what the hell they're talking about (i like to call these people "Californians"). mostly, i just embrace that art-making and art-viewing are inherently subjective experiences, and i find little value in numbered rating systems of any kind.

a lot of my favorite movies and albums underwhelmed me my first time through. they challenged me in a way that i at first interpreted as incompetence, but have come to see as brilliance. there's stuff i found alienating in high school and early 20s that i find deeply relatable in my 30s. as a film student i've had so many conversations with so many people who have wildly different takes on the same movie that i've completely given up on the idea that anyone is an objective arbiter of what's good and what isn't. the only real thing is if it works and if it works for you. i search for the best in everything, because at the end of the day i'm just here for the love of the game and i don't much enjoy hating things. for media to really Piss Me Off, to elicit a genuine I Hate You response, it has to be more than just, like, poorly edited or whatever. it has to embody a repulsive worldview, be a tool of jingoistic propaganda, or otherwise act as an extension of corporate greed and wealth extraction. these days i reserve my hatred for that which has connection to real Power and exerts a mass cultural Influence, or that otherwise blindly reproduces the same problems.

i think it's far easier to critically engage with work you don't like when you search for the things that work, rather than the things that don't. when it works, when it really clicks, you see what they were going for, and only with that perspective can you see why what doesn't work doesn't work. all i ever ask is for readers to take my stuff as it is, good and bad, and judge it on those terms. i find your use of "comforts the disturbed, disturbs the comfortable" funny and fitting. art that wants to be for everyone is art that cannot be for anyone. it is a perfectly round grey sphere that all who gaze upon it can agree "exists" and "succeeds at what it's trying to do." good art is imperfect, because it is the result of a perspective you may not share. i've never wanted to make art for the masses. i want to make the kinds of things that i wished existed when i was younger. there are a surprising number of people who feel that godfeels positively affected their lives, and i know that i have very little to do with that. godfeels is an object that exists in the world. i had ideas of what it was when i wrote it, but i can't control what anyone else sees no matter how much digital ink i spill trying to explain my original vision. if it truly comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, then on some level i must have succeeded in what i was trying to do even if the path to getting there was spotty and rough.

i did the best i could at every stage of writing godfeels. i would do things differently today, but i also wouldn't be here at all if i'd done it differently back then. i try to extend this grace to other artists as much as possible, that we're all just figuring it out as we go along. but i also know that everyone goes to art for different things, and finds value in different aspects of its expression. really, all i ever want is to have a conversation about the object without the looming specter of Respectability Politics and Moral Hazards. it's when people start acting like godfeels is Dangerous, and that i'm dangerous by extension, that i start having opinions about where critics are fucking up. tell me what it does or fails to do. point at the text and show me you've read and comprehended it by citing your sources and arguing through the text instead of around it. absolutely fuck off with the moral hand-wringing about Transgender Representation and Glorifying Violence and Perpetuating Toxic Stereotypes. it's a fucking Homestuck fanfiction, for god's sake.

but anyway you're not doing that, so, good job! i'm glad you find the experience of reading godfeels illuminating even if it pisses you off. i hope you found this lengthy answer enlightening, and maybe a bit annoying also. consistency is key, or so they say

[davekat-sucks]

hi! i know it's like, a week old, but i'd like to offer extra information regarding "podfeels"

podfeels was a work started by fans of godfeels who were in the officially sanctioned godfeels server, at the specific request of the creator of godfeels, sarah zedig

it's an entirely unpaid "passion project" of completely hectic and unprofessional management

they've recasted the role of terezi *thrice*, and the director and her partner uncontestedly obtained the lead roles!

along other baffling choices (john and june played by different actors??) and a lot of adaptational nonsense (reading straight from the fucking fic with little to no changes except for when they get to make a "cool action sequence"), the project is clearly meant to be an attention seeking ploy more than any attempt at an earnest adaptation and that's been true ever since it was conceived

i hate the direction godfeels has taken but i don't hate the very beginning of it, and i was deep in the social circle of the godfeels discord from 2021 to 2022, so i thought to apply as an adaptational writer to try and help fixs those gripes i have with the project

the result? i got in, joined the production discord, and was immediately kicked, because i'm currently engaged to someone who previously heavily critiqued both godfeels and the attitude its fandom has around it!

of course i agree with my fiancee's perspective, but i never actively said anything about the matter, so it boiled down to them kicking me out just for dating somebody they dislike! not even anything about me! (of course the excuse they used is an easily and previously debunked accusation of "grooming" despite her *also* being a minor at the time?? but they'll just weaponize anything against you if they don't like you)

anyway, all this to say the production process of podfeels sucks and the end result isn't even that good

I'm sorry you went through all that. It really did became a hugbox for them. Why didn't the creator of Godfeels say anything about this? Is it because of her bias to get her fanfic more attention? She can't take criticism? This just makes it all worse.

[ignoranceshaft]

i feel like something not enough people understand about june is that she didn’t simply come from hussie wanting to be Cool and Woke now, but she was popularized by actual trans women picking up transfem coding from homestuck’s narrative and sharing that interpretation w/ the fandom which is why it will always be sus to me when someone has like. a Seething hatred for all things june.

[swimfuel]

Thoughts on romantic pairings with June? (personally I like June with Vriska and Terezi because I'm a sucker for a trans polycule)

i actually don't have any thoughts on anything SOLID solid for june pairingwise!! ive read a lot of different pairings with her and ive liked a lot of them so let me just list a bunch

soljune: t4t.... out of the leftest field ever but idk i like them... I LIKE THEM I DO. take into account that this might just be august 2pickisms because i am juneist and solluxist if i am nothing else but they're still so real? i think it would be incredibly funny for the usual sollux tboy swag chaddery to have absolutely zero effect on june but she dates him anyways. but on a less superficial level idk if june has the capacity to deal with emotional volatility on the scale that sollux has w/o that longer history between them... i'm just saying whatever but i think they'd be cute short term but not last long-term bc of june's avoidance/bluntness & sollux unmedicated/without therapy or a good support system... BUT I COULD BE WRONG!!!! (im gonna be real i generally see june as a transfem lesbian so soljune actually works pretty well for her figuring out that she doesn’t Have to like men in a romantic sense just bc she’s a girl and unlearning that in the early days and also the comedic value is very high. i hope they stay friends)

junerezi: it's crazy how despite being very similar to terezi in many ways irl i kind of find it hard to understand her? she's just very opaque to me in a way that not a lot of characters usually are... the thing about june to me is that she's very vriskapilled in a lot of ways and i feel like she bases a lot of her coolgirlideal on vriska....which makes junerezi interesting for a LOT of reasons. i think im gonna defer to godfeels on this one

vrisjune: see above

vrisjunerezi: i don't know anything about polycule structure so i'm essentially shooting into the dark here but i feel like the best way for this trio to work is vrisrezi STABLY together (because imo vrisrezi need long-term stability to heal) w/ june coming and going as she pleases, free to go out and experience what she likes but always having a place to come back to. and now that i've written it out i swear i read a fic with this exact premise and i stole the general concept from them

junerosemary: see above but the vibes are different... regardless i think any trios including june have to give her the kind of space and freedom that she needs until she's experienced the bulk of what she wants to post-junediscovery and then she'd probably settle down a bit. i feel like the best way to explain it is if any pairing raises a child, june as the pair's third is always the Cool Aunt and never a Third Mom. i don't really see june as wanting the responsibility (or the baggage) that parenthood brings

juneroxy: t4t but i will always be a callieroxyist sorry for reading hs in 2018 i don't do it on purpose

junerose: cute but to me they are almost too close to date without an added element LIKE I KNOW THIS DOESN'T MAKE SENSE BC I JUST TALKED ABT JUNEROSEMARY BUT... IDK... their personalities as adults work very very well together though like they're very good even just for that reason alone but they also have a lot more going for them

junedave: actually very cute esp. as teens but my fav interp of them is t4t transfem june w/ dstri bc most of the transfem dstri content ive seen is w/ them actually? havent put too much thought into it and idk how well their personalities would mesh further into adulthood

arajune: HEAR ME OUT... THEY EXPLORE THINGS........AND KISS?!

[betweengenesisfrogs]

After the End (Again)

Despite all the words I’ve poured out on the subject, I don’t think I ever completely cracked Hussie’s endgame.

One year out from the Epilogues, and the question of what The End of Homestuck means feels even more complicated.

Granted, there’s a lot I feel like I understand (I’m so happy to see most of the fandom be on the same page about stuff like Dave’s arc or the meaning of the Gnostic references), but Hussie’s goals for the original end of the comic remain elusive, much like the man himself. Possibly deliberately. I’m eagerly looking forward to his final batch of commentary, where, in many years, we’ll finally get his own take on the subject. Probably.

I saw someone say recently that the Epilogues improved Homestuck – that as an ending, Act 6+7 is incomplete, and relies on the Epilogues to give Homestuck a definitive final statement.

On the other hand, I’ve also heard plenty of people say that the Epilogues ruined Homestuck, altering its final meaning to something unrecognizable.

Maybe there’s a way to make sense of both of these things?

The more time goes by, and the more I read of Hussie’s own thoughts on his work, the more I become convinced that Homestuck’s central thesis is the rejection of existing narratives. Or, to put it in other words: Fuck clichés.

This takes many forms, from Dave’s “there’s a vampire in the closet oh fuck get in the minivan” riff to Hussie’s emphasis on women as active drivers of plot to Dave’s own rejection of toxic masculinity.  It’s also the main plot arc of Act 6 + Act 7: we escape Lord English, controller of the total narrative.

But these inherited narratives are insidious things. It’s hard to escape their hold over our brains. We live in a society, even when we start all over and try to build a new one. We might, for instance, see someone echo the same toxic ideas about authority and power out of a feeling of necessity. So the theme of the Epilogues is Act 6+7’s theme inverted: how are we still bound by these narratives?

From Divine Comedy to Divine Tragedy, revealing and reflecting each other.

My feeling is that Hussie wanted to express both of these things as Homestuck entered its final stages. He chose to tackle one, wait a while, and then tackle the one that was far more difficult to render compellingly.

This is how I make sense of the utopian, gnostic themes of late Act 6 + 7. They present a sincere aspect of Homestuck’s message: tear off the ideological chains of your mind. Transcend to the Pleroma. Build a new world. But this Gnostic hope was always going to be followed up by a statement on the difficulty of doing just that. For the power of the Demiurge is great, and his illusions deeply rooted in your mind.

I used to get in all sorts of debates as to whether Act 6-6-5-Act 7 (Ending 1 of Homestuck, if you will) was good or bad. Maybe that’s not the right question, though? Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, or it never mattered.. I think it would be kind of impossible to tell, anyway. Because what Hussie left us with in 2016 was a thick stew of fascinating ideas to dig into and discuss and try to understand. Act 5 was a mechanical puzzle, challenging us to figure out how the world of SBURB worked; Act 6 a thematic one, challenging us to become better readers who engage with Homestuck’s metaphors and themes. Given the level on which we understand these things now, I think we resoundingly succeeded.

And when we started to ask the right questions, then—only then—were we ready for the Epilogues.

It’s true that the Epilogues have a certain feeling of primacy now. That’s inevitable, given their role of deepening the conversation and their at times shocking content. But I think it would be a mistake to read them as more important than the first ending.

Because I think Homestuck genuinely believes in the importance of that escape. The other reason for that three-year pause? Maybe it was to give us time to draw our own conclusions. Both in the sense of wrapping our minds around Hussie’s thematic puzzle, and in the sense of creating our own stories to follow the ending. Because if English’s narrative, aka Homestuck, is the thing we’re escaping from, then to follow the gnostic vision of escape is to enter the Pleroma of fan creation. The actual, canonical nature of Earth C is a multiverse of fan interpretations, reaching in every different direction, many of them offering hope, a utopian society, and/or the possibility of major growth for our characters. Those didn’t go away after the Epilogues. For my part, I read quite a few Davekat fics that still stick with me after all this time, informing how I understand the characters. Guess what? Homestuck explicitly grounds them as significant.

To put it in Rose’s terms, these timelines and stories may not be essential, but they are true and relevant.

Now, fandom is not perfect. (Understatement of the century.) Fan writers hold onto clichés and toxic narratives as much as anyone. One of the goals of the Epilogues is to offer a counterpoint to that vision as well—to show the dark side of redemption arcs, marriage proposals, and coffee shop AUs.

But at the same time, the three-year feast of storytelling made possible by the Final Pause remains an important, and explicitly heroic part of the Homestuck multiverse.

(It’s been a treat to see how the community has responded to the darker points raised by the Epilogues as well. A great example is Sarah Zedig’s Godfeels series, which returns to the idea of Earth C as a place of meaningful growth and change (for June Egbert, especially), but recognizes the difficulty of making that change when the people you know are stuck in their own ideas of what the world should be. I’m looking forward to reading more works in this vein going forward.)

All this suggests an intriguing possibility: that the dissatisfied feelings many walked away from the original ending with may have been deliberate. Not to say that there aren’t some pretty satisfying arcs in Act 6. But perhaps some were left open and ambiguous, even frustrating, on purpose: to point us in the direction of filling those gaps. Fertile, untilled ground for the fanonical imagination.

Is that good storytelling? I have no idea. What I do know is that there’s nothing else like it out there.

And honestly? I’m really glad something as weird as Homestuck exists.

And that we get to be a part of it.

<3 Ari

[aspen-aura]

Lugh Godfeels inbound

I came across a post on tumblr the other day that had a list of a bunch of books written for people who grew up in troubled/abusive situations. My parents weren’t abusive, and in fact they never once yelled at each other before my dad left, but it was, I’m realizing, an emotionally alienating environment.

Last night, I got nudged to buy one of the books on the list called “Adult Children of Emotionally Immatrue Parents: How to heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents” by Lindsay Gibson. I’d been considering buying it for a bit, but last night someone told me that it’s a key to a door on my own personal journey.

As I started reading it, I was really feeling Lugh’s presence, and I was stunned to find that He was sad. He kept telling me how proud He is of me, and kept nudging me whenever I read something that was particularly prevalent to me.

The biggest thing so far has been the continued assertion that children of emotionally immature parents often, as a defence, put other people before themselves and their own emotional needs, which they suppress as an assumed prerequisite for gaining someone else’s favour.

Damn if that ain’t me.

And...He was crying. I’m convinced of it, literally crying because I’ve done so much denying of myself in order to survive and cope with the things I’ve been through, and He was just so supportive, and loving, and then I was crying, He was crying, we were all crying...

Anyway. Most memorable quote:

“I want to see you to a place where you won’t shrink away when someone tells you they love you, like you just did. This is why I’m so set on you being true to you, rather than carrying out detailed and complex rituals to honour me. Honour yourself, and you will honour me.”

I’m still emotional about it.

[hms-no-fun]

14 again, but this time “Meat or Candy” interpreted as narrative philosophies rather than the halves of the epilogues

aghhh this is so mean!!! i've always read the meat/candy dichotomy as sides of the same coin rather than two discrete narrative philosophies, and homestuck itself as a structural exploration of various ways to balance/unbalance the split. picking between one or the other is like picking between air & water!

i certainly write godfeels with an eye towards finding a balance. serious drama needs to be offset by goofy comedy, cool anime fight scenes need to be offset by cursed bullshit or drydick exposition. chapter 8 especially is meant to be a tonal roller coaster. 'the shadows left behind' for instance is an almost 40,000 word long section about a depressed idea slowly clawing back personhood from their out of control death drive. there's murder attempts, there's suicide attempts, there's gore, there's psychological torture-- it's some of the heaviest shit i've ever written! and yet that same chapter also contains some of the funniest shit i've ever written. a story like this NEEDS that kind of variation to maintain reader interest, otherwise you get bogged down in seriousness or get so sucked up into lightheartedness that you lose all sense of substance.

like that's very much the reason ch8 ends with an epilogue full of jargon and exposition and obtuse metaphysics. i knew, at the close of ch8 act 5, that we were finally opening the door to what i consider The Good Shit. but it wouldn't be right to jump straight from that endpoint to where 3.2A begins. from an archival reading perspective, you need a palate cleanser to pull you back out from the thick of it and re-examine everything that just occurred from the outside. within the rest of ch8 there is a constant ebb and flow between meat tendencies and candy tendencies; what the epilogue reveals is that it was all candy in some sense, because it was functionally one extremely long action scene. it does this by serving as the meaty parallel, something much closer in tone and purpose to the author-insert sections of homestuck proper. it's meant to feel tedious and tantalizing at the same time, something you have to eat slowly and chew on to properly digest after the insane fast pace of [s] saturday. and even the epilogue swings back and forth between funny and serious! it's meat/candy all the way down!!

i suppose like any red-blooded american of the toonami generation, i have the most fun as a writer when i'm indulging myself in the candy of dumb anime bullshit. most of 'the shadows left behind' was back-constructed from the scene where Dare's "body" gets impaled and cut to shreds by X and they just keep walking towards it anyway. especially that moment where X tries to swallow them a second time, and Dare grabs it by the jaws and throws it off-- that whole sequence popped into my head and suddenly it clicked for me, oh shit, Dare is the secret shonen anime protagonist of godfeels! everything beforehand was a prelude to that moment when June really sees Dare for the first time, asks if they're real, and they shout defiantly, YES!!!

probably every writer does this to an extent, where they write towards some cool/interesting shit they can't get out of their head. there's a temptation to just go there, just get to the good stuff, because ultimately it's what you're there for and you KNOW the audience is gonna lap it up. but if you give in to that temptation and just string together all those keystone moments with bare-minimum bridging material, you paradoxically rob those moments of all their meaning and energy. did 'the shadows left behind' need to be 40,000 words long in one go? probably not. but i don't think the final culmination of that story would have hit nearly as hard otherwise.

you need meat to sell the candy. i wanted 3.2 A1 for instance to be much shorter than it wound up being, because god damn it i want to get to The Good Shit already!! but i realized very quickly that everything i wanted to get to would be poorly served by a cast of characters whose reasons for participating are murky at best. so i decided to invest in more of those meaty chapters between jade and various characters, which themselves needed their own fluctuating balance between meat tendencies and candy tendencies. from a structural standpoint it sort of becomes a meat/candy fractal, as each subdivision of each narrative unit has to maintain the same relative push-pull frequency that the entire fic as a whole does. does that make sense? i have no idea if that makes sense lmao.

anyway that's my take on the meat/candy split. hope it was satisfying u_u

[hms-no-fun]

This is probably gonna be a longer and potentially more spicy ask than usual so apologies for that. I've been reading through the new chapters as they've been released (great stuff by the way) and I've noted the frequent switching back and forth of jade/silverbark going by her original name (jade) or her moniker/title (silverbark/harbinger silverbark ) depending on who she is currently talking to, the nature of her relations with the person and the context of the conversation. One example being her last conversation with karkat at the end of the latest chapter. This along with the nature of deunistic radiation you mentioned previously and the theme of divergence/character divergence throughout this series so far, makes me wonder if eventually we may reach a point where she drops her original name and goes solely by her moniker/title (at least for a while anyway).

i've got two responses to this. the first is

but the second is a bit more credulous. only a bit though. yes, godfeels has given multiple characters the opportunity to change their names, and this is partially a result of my desire to get away from the iconography of homestuck so that we can focus more on unpacking the themes of homestuck while telling a more “original” story. but i’d caution against the assumption that changing one’s name is the natural endpoint of self-actualization in godfeels.

is silverbark plural? is jade a mask she puts on around other people? is what we see in A1 the code-switching of an autist or a manipulator? these are excellent questions to be asking! but on the matter of names as such, let’s remember that silverbark is thousands of years old. a name change and gender realization is one thing for 22-year-old june egbert because she’s young and inexperienced. we see “june” as the hatched egg, the evolved form, the destination. but what if we fast-forwarded another hundred years, and she’s had all that time to live and be comfortable in her own body. would she remain rooted in transfemininity? would she still feel like “june”? does one break their gender or identity once, and no more?

among the many themes in its bucket, godfeels 3 is about change. changing people, changing times, changing expectations, changing lives and homes and friendgroups... and i’ve lived long enough to see the barest jagged tip of the truth that no two people “grow up” in quite the same way. “growing up” isn’t a static thing either, it isn’t affixed to age and it’s not a one-way street nor is it a bridge you can only cross once. i tried to show this in microcosm with dare in ch8, how they keep having life-affirming epiphany after life-affirming epiphany, only to backslide and start over from a place of only minimal progress. people can get better, and then they can backslide, and then they can get better again, and on and on, and nothing is ever done until it’s dead.

all of which is to say that i’m not interested in repeatedly showing the same types of change when i’ve got such a wildly weird cast of traumatized blorbos to poke and prod at. if june’s name is her planting a flag in her own identity, then perhaps to silverbark names and titles are a means of maintaining the area around that flag? what is “mary” to kanaya, what is “risk,” what is “dare” except a shield put up around something that needs protecting? or that’s worth protecting? for different reasons, to different ends. it’s all relative.

lastly, i would also caution against looking at a character changing their name and going, “ah, denexustic radiation!” not because it’s necessarily wrong (at least according to what VV said in the ch8 epilogue), but because it’s the boring lab-coated science officer answer to a profound philosophical question. which, you know, isn’t really an answer at all. there may be times when denexus is the culprit, or at least partially, but in most cases it’s the difference between wearing a glow in the dark radon watch for a few months when you were a kid, vs airsurfing in the radiation cloud of the chernobyl nuclear disaster.

anyway, i’ll leave us on a passage from the homestuck epilogues that is very important to me:

[hms-no-fun]

i both really wish (and dont wish) cohost had a similar ask system to tumblr because im 300% more comfortable on that website than this one but ive had this particular burning question since i binge read godfeels during a covid ridden fugue

The more general version of this question is: how has optiministDuelist been involved in the writing of godfeels 3.1? (or even the future parts you're working on, if you can do so without spoilers)

The more specific version that makes this a question better suited towards you rather than shooting the question towards optimisticDuelist, and is rather a series of questions extrapolating on the first one is: why did you involve them? are they helping you write dirk or jake? are they providing input/advice? and that goes towards other people you've had help with the project too, if they're comfortable with being spoken about - i was just a fan of od's analyses and was surprised to see his name attached to godfeels! in fact im so curious about the nature/process of collaboration in godfeels it seems reductive to even try to condense it into questions that would be easier/faster to answer, in that i fear that what i put in will be what i get out, and that logically it's silly of me to bank on the fact that you might go more in depth than how these questions may imply on first glance. i fear my words make no sense and rather instill anxiety into the reader. anyway these are more like guidelines for something i was hoping you could talk about

oooooo this is a good one! i've written a fair amount about my collaborations in the past. here's a post where i talk about working with taz on chapter 8.2. here's a post where i talk about working with janet girlpillz on chapter 8.6. and here's a post where i talk about working with julia on the nsfw interlude 'stomach'! and then for bonus points, here's a piece my gf zoe wrote about working with me on the first official godfeels art in chapter 7.

but you want more, so here's more.

to start with, taz and i have been friends for some years now! back in early 2019 i was on the hbomberguy donkey kong 64 stream where i (briefly) tried to defend homestuck, which i guess gained me some form of notoriety/infamy. i can't remember if it was taz or kate who reached out to me first but i know taz liked my stuff (and i liked his!). then kate had me on pgen, i joined the pgen server, we all started gaming together and talking about homestuck in group chats. this period, pretty much through the entirety of 2019, is when i went from feeling like i had zero grasp on homestuck to becoming cohost of an at-the-time popular homestuck theory podcast! it's funny going back to my first appearance on pgen because you can tell i was so in over my head. i couldn't remember the names of the hiveswap trolls and still didn't even really know all the homestuck trolls by name. AND I OPTED OUT OF TALKING ABOUT VRISREZI LMAO. oh how turned the tables did the tables did turn

[[[oh god i just realized the pgen website expired and i'm not sure if the eps are still up anywhere... i should talk to kate about that lmao]]]

anyway, i actually talked to taz a bunch when i was first writing godfeels 1!

shortly after this we all did a stream for the launch of the epilogues with folks from the pgen server as well as hiveswap writer/director aysha u farah. i played gamzee lmao i still have the clown horn app on my phone from that

i guess i don't really know to what extent any of this is common knowledge anymore now that i think about it! this feels sort of superfluous to me but i guess this was FOUR YEARS AGO lmao

early godfeels straight up would not have existed without all these people. i cannot stress enough that literary obsession is a social contagion. i was not born a homestuck, i was made. and i think maybe some of the extremities of gf2 especially feel a little weird or dated these days, because on top of everything else godfeels was responding to it was also responding to the particularly toxic 2019-era vriscourse. so a big part of june's confrontational nature came from me being fucking sick of the baby's-first-conservatism that took root in the wider fandom when us cancelable queers had the audacity to like problematic womens and not apologize for it. i won't say anymore about that because like, whatever, it's all dead and buried now even if the ghost lingers. that ghost will have its day eventually! but not anytime soon.

ANYWAY, so, going back to the beginning even though i wrote godfeels alone, it came about in a context of lengthy conversations with other homestuck theorists. so when gf3 started to blow up in scale and become less about my trauma specifically, it made a lot of sense to broaden my horizons and get some new blood into the mix. the posts i linked at the start will fill in a bunch of gaps for you there, i think. it’s worth noting that a bunch of us already had a history of at least attempting to collaborate. we had a thing building for a while like a visual novel with one choice that was basically, what if we wrote every possible version of “transgender john” and just had them all together as branching paths. this was before some of the broader fandom really dug their heels in on the reactionary transphobia, after which point i at least lost some of my taste for that project. maybe we could come back to it someday, we wrote some cool stuff for that...

as far as my collaborative philosophy goes, idk. i first started writing fiction on the zeldapower forums in the early 2000s and developed a thick skin for critique pretty fast as a result. i wrote and rewrote constantly, shared what i could with friends and talked about plot/story/character ideas with them. when i realized in year two that writing school had nothing to offer me, i transferred to film. but i did so explicitly not wanting to be a director or writer or anyone above the line, really, because i didn't know what i wanted to make or even if i wanted to make something of my own. what i wanted was to help other people realize their own visions and see how they did it. so that's how i ended up working grip/electric in the oklahoma film industry, because it turns out all it really takes to get your foot in the door is to lose the ego and make yourself useful. it helps that i am cursed with constant psychological awareness of absolutely everything in my vicinity at all times, so i gained a reputation for being practically psychic the way i could know exactly what my bosses wanted lighting-wise before they even said anything.

i miss that job tbh. i loved the people, i felt more physically and psychologically fulfilled than at any job i've ever had. oklahoma has a relatively small film scene so it wasn't long before i was on a first name basis with most everyone working on my side of the state. when a crew is all on the same page, man, there's nothing like it. not every set can or should be like this, but some of my favorite experiences were on sets where it felt like everyone was the director. the director had their own vision but they knew how to adapt it to the location, to the ideas of technicians and craftspeople who had their own insights. a good director knows how to let their collaborators take ownership of the work, even when they reject their suggestions! i loved film work and i think about getting back to it sometimes. problem is it's extraordinarily physically demanding work and it leaves no time for anything else. 12 hour days five days a week minimum. i quit because i wanted to focus on video essays, one thing led to another, now we're here and homestuck changed my life lmao

so that's where i come from as writer. i have very strong opinions about my work and what it means and what it needs to do, but i try very hard not to have an ego about it.

the way we work together is pretty simple. when i finish the first draft of a chapter i’ll post it to the work server, and then folks will leave comments. but also, every member of the team has their own little corner of godfeels that they’ve adopted. taz is the dirkjake whisperer, julia is the queen of dana and the upsilons, etc. so when i write these characters i’ll ask for their insight, and invite them to modify or add to the scene as they see fit. sometimes this means prose, sometimes this means dialogue. our understanding is that nothing goes in the final published work without my approval, but that also that nothing is entirely off the table until we’ve had a conversation about it.

i get a lot of my storytelling philosophy from the tv show LOST, where every question was introduced with an explanation in mind but with the caveat that those explanations only remained true until the writers came up with something better. this gets back to something i said yesterday about needing a story to be dynamic and not planning things out too much in advance. for more detailed explanations, here’s a post i wrote about my hooks & hats philosophy, and then here’s another post about my process in general. but basically, i have this massive web of interconnected plotpoints going out very far into the future right? so when someone makes a suggestion i know exactly how possible it is to fit within that framework. i know how much information about any given hook has been introduced, so i know whether one explanation has been seeded too thoroughly to be changed.

but the flipside of that is that now my collaborators are inventing OCs! taz created a fantastic character named xifus that i can’t wait to write more of in 3.2A. we talk about this setting all the time, we talk about what makes sense for it, what would be cool, what mistakes would absolutely RUIN IT, how we can avoid the mistakes of our predecessors, all that fun stuff.

collaboration is all about honesty. godfeels has become what it is because we’re all fans both of homestuck, of anime, of broader culture... and of godfeels. my dirty secret is that i love writing godfeels because i’m its biggest fan. it frequently does not FEEL like i am composing this story, but rather that it is just happening to me. always i am wrangling cats in this petting zoo. i don’t want to be making this thing for the rest of my life but also this story is SO COOL and we are all chomping at the fucking bit to get to the upsilons and so much other shit besides. is that egomaniacal? idk. i think the idea that you’re supposed to be neutral leaning negative on your own work is kinda bullshit. but also, i don’t see the creation of art as bound to suffering or even being a process that requires much expertise. writing isn’t magic, even if it can feel that way sometimes.

i talk a lot about my work and how i write because i want to help demystify the process and try to show that it’s a learnable craft same as anything else. imo the preponderance of mediocre-to-great artists is not proof of Exceptional People but rather that it’s actually dirt simple to become a mediocre-to-great artist. all you need is time and money and access to the right tools! which is why so many mediocre artists are the rich failsons of killfactory millionaires. which is why every artist should be pro student debt relief, pro public transit, pro affordable housing, pro welfare, pro socialized medicine, pro deprivatizing mass media, and pro wide-ranging government arts funding. our nightmare neoliberal media landscape is the result of decades of making the creation of art & culture economically inaccessible to the working class, hence everything being set in rich suburbs with giant houses, hence the inescapability of pro-capitalist pro-nationalist messaging, hence the refusal of all national media to talk to trans people about trans issues, because only the middle and upper classes get to touch the levers of public perception and they have a direct economic incentive to convince the working class that they are middle class.

the notion that this stuff is at all mysterious or naturally the purview of those who can afford expensive degrees is just the narrative they sell to working people to cover up the fact that once you ascend past a certain income bracket, absolutely everything is just nepotism. it’s all just rich guys giving their rich friends and their rich friends’ stupid fucking libertarian manchildren high paying jobs forever. that’s why they never go away, that’s why they always fail up, that’s why trans women and queer people can get bullied off the face of the internet for half-joking that a fictional woman who did a murder was blameless in her crimes while grifters who moonlight at raytheon can weather blow after blow and stir the pot and solicit donations they don’t need and never disappear no matter how hated they are, because they HAVE money and they HAVE security so none of this shit is a real threat to anything besides their shallow fucking egos. which, you know, to be fair, threatening a rich person’s ego is basically the same thing as killing a man in cold blood, so who can say what is wrong or right?

there’s obviously a lot of complicating factors to the anticapitalist yarn i’ve spun here, but that’s how i see it. the rich want to own culture, they commodify it through copyright and box it up and insist that we are trespassers if we try to reflect those “““properties”““ through ourselves. that is, in part, a big reason why i haven’t given up on godfeels or tried to “file the serial numbers off.” i love this story and i am treating it with as much care as i would something original, because i believe this is art that stands up even with its imperfections and it’s insulting to me that “fanwork” is considered naturally lesser than “original” work when literally everything around us that is owned by disney et al was stolen from what was once an open culture. i reject the enclosure of the commons of our imagination, and andrew hussie themself quite famously said that postcanon homestuck belongs to the most conscientious and invested members of the fandom.

and frankly, even as i wish i COULD make a living off of godfeels alone, i like that my art isn’t particularly monetizable. i like that it is considered low art. i like that many people see it as shameful or a waste of time. i do not want to create a commodity. i do not want to run a business. i do not want to be famous. i want to make art that is freely available that maybe, just maybe, can help a handful of queer people deal with the shit going on in their life and have a good time in the process.

in short: we have no choice but to revolutionize the world.

UHHHH wow that got off the rails at the end there didn’t it? i love giving writing advice hahaha!

[hms-no-fun]

As a writer with an inclination to write their own Homestuck fanfiction, how did you figure out the world and larger events happening in the world of godfeels? (such as Epigone, or the EWL) Like how did it travel from Homestuck fanfiction into a complicated Homestuck based universe?

the single sentence explainer for how we got here is simple: i’m a dialectical materialist at heart. mild apologies right out the gate here, this answer is a real winding journey that (as per usual for these things when they become essays) might not even answer your question at all! also, i use June’s deadname a fair bit in this post just to avoid confusion as to when in her life i’m referring to, so if that’s the sort of thing that troubles you, be warned. anyway, let’s go ahead and dive in after the break:

the tonal/generic character of any fiction begins at its conception. imagine you invite a wide array of writers to reimagine or continue homestuck in any way they liked; what would a writer who loves homestuck produce, vs a writer who hates homestuck, vs a writer who thinks they can fix it, vs a writer who’s only interested in one character, vs a writer who’s only interested in themes, vs a writer who’s only interested in the lore? probably safe to say they’d all produce wildly different fics. so before we even get to the specific content of the work in question, we can already guess how the shape of a narrative might naturally flow out from the material conditions of its artist’s perspective.

this is (as you’ll certainly agree if you’ve read the chapter 8 epilogue) rather a theme in godfeels.

so, to the material conditions of my perspective: i wrote gf1 because i felt something deeply, compellingly tragic about a young definitely cisgender man with extreme depression and self-isolation issues possessing arguably the most existentially nightmarish superpower imaginable. everything godfeels is starts at this philosophical quagmire, which for me was always focalized around John and Jade, the two characters i related to the most. where John has this tremendous power and is terrified of using it, Jade has tremendous power but is actively prevented from using it in the ways she wants to. there’s an assertion by John in gf1 that the “cost” of his deal with Typheus was in fact Jade’s near-total isolation during the three year trip, which he tried to make up for but never could, and imo that’s where aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the shit 3.1 would become really has its roots. it suggests how a person with infinite power can be rendered powerless by circumstance and yet still bear the burden of their choices, and how systems compel lateral violence for the sake of their own perpetuation. that is to say, sburb (by way of Typheus) forced John to rob Jade of her agency in order to ensure the birth of a new universe, yet still he blames himself for what felt to him like a choice he made. is he wrong? i don’t know. it’s impossible to know, honestly, which is what makes it such a compelling philosophical question. you can’t put this thought to bed, because even as we all know that There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism, we also have to believe that there’s more that we could be doing, and if there’s more we could be doing then why aren’t we doing it? you chase yourself in circles trying to puzzle these things out, and the more you think about them the more they eat away at you.

it’s a pretty rote observation at this point that what makes superheroes interesting is their limitations, but i think we tend to simplify the worldbuilding possibilities of that observation down to “everyone with superpowers has to have a kryptonite.” that is to say, we’re taught that fictional strength is only as interesting as its equal & opposite weakness, as if physical power can only be compelling in fiction if it has a direct, linearly nullifying antithesis. this sucks because it just encourages everyone to write superheroes whose biggest problem is that some guy has a special gun, encourages stories exclusively focused on superheroes tracking down guys with special guns and putting them in forever jail so that the superheroes can do literally anything they want with no oversight, which is fine because naturally people in that position of power have to earn that power and would simply choose to not be evil. THIS IS EVERY MARVEL MOVIE AND I’M SICK OF IT. what interests me about homestuck as a universe is that these characters, by the end, largely have no outside limitations, no kryptonite, no guys with special guns. Dave doesn’t stop using time travel because it’s, like, bathing him in deadly radiation or whatever, he stops using time travel because it’s fucking scary and weird having to watch yourself die all the time! in homestuck, the limitations on our heroes are primarily internal, relating more to psychological and philosophical hangups than anything. the question in homestuck is rarely “if i became an all-powerful god, who would stop me?” but rather far more often “if i became an all-powerful god, would i still enjoy being alive?” selfhood is SUCH a fixation of homestuck, i think you could argue that every major plotbeat in the story is a result of someone desperately flailing for purchase beneath the crushing weight of their existential insignificance. what i found interesting about John after the homestuck credits was the thought of him having regrets about choices he made in the past, knowing he could go back and try to fix them, and (mostly) choosing not to. knowing at every turn that he could choose to live his life like a groundhog day scenario, effectively perfecting the personal lives of everyone in his orbit, and almost certainly face zero consequences for it.

the consequence that stops him is internal- the consequence of knowing that he would have given up all of his humanity for the sake of a reality he has decided to puppeteer, based on no authority other than a power he did nothing to earn and has no right to possess.

gf1 was not written with continuation in mind. gf2 was started without the intention of continuation- what i wanted initially was for each of the three parts to focus on these personal philosophical issues. how do you process your own anger and disappointment at being let down by people you trust when you can literally murder them and then unmurder them without consequence. just knowing that’s possible and not doing it would already fuck up your brain- imagine what’d happen if you actually did it! this, of course, kinda became the central question of gf2 once Dirk showed up and decided to make a mess of things. it was only in the latter stages of 2.2 that i started thinking about this cast in parallel with the epilogues, which eventually pays off in Jane’s reveal of Dirk’s unfinished ship and the Rosebot in his basement. I didn’t intend this at the time, but i should have known the instant i canonized godfeels as an offshoot of the epilogues timeline that the existential weight of that would drive me insane enough to eventually write three novels worth of prose in as many months.

but there’s one specific hypothetical thread with gf2 that always haunted me. see, my plan at the start was for June’s coming out to go poorly, which would lead her to decide that she was The Bad June and that the only way to give herself a happy life would be to retcon to her childhood and convince her preteen self that he was actually a she. but alongside this, i wanted June to take Jade with her- because again, June feels tremendous guilt over her sister’s narratively imposed loneliness and sees it as this thing she always wishes she could fix. so she would bring Jade back with her and say basically, you can go keep yourself company for a while, or find someone to be your friend. then we’d spend a lot of time rummaging over the melodrama of that, and end with June ultimately deciding not to forcefem her past self, while Jade does choose to retcon something in her own life, which would have a similar effect as the eventual Silverbark reveal in that she’d dramatically kick someone’s door down and announce herself as New And Improved Jade just in time to save the day in some sense.

obviously, elements of this made it into gf2. i’ve talked before about how the “should i retcon my gender” question ultimately turned out a lot less compelling than i expected it to be. it’s an interesting thought but when you dig down to it, especially with the mechanics of retcon as i understand them, you realize it’s kind of a pointless choice narratively because our June wouldn’t be able to experience the end result of that retcon anyway. the only reason she was able to return to the main narrative post-retcon in homestuck proper was because she replaced an apparently identical version of herself who was killed by Typheus to make room for her. what’s June gonna do, kill the version of herself who got to be a girl her whole life and take her place? i know my writing skews towards edgy sometimes but i’m not mark millar for christs sake, i do actually have standards

so, okay, let’s bring this damn thing to some kind of a point shall we?

i lay out all this shit at such length because, well, your question is a question i ask myself quite often! how the hell did we get here, anyway??? how do you get from “i have depression and i think i might be trans” to “all sentient life in the omniverse will be annihilated in a war between ideaspace and bodyspace started by Jade’s secret lost daughter”??????

but i think if you were to read gf1 and the ch8 epilogue back to back, you’d see that we really haven’t come very far at all. it STILL surprises me just how easily it all wound up slotting together- i didn’t even consult gf1 while writing the epilogue until the third draft! i think it worked out this way because the core motivation for writing this series has always been philosophical. VV’s metaphysical roadblocks to interacting with canon are just the literalized material implications of June’s existential dread at standing outside the omniverse and witnessing its paradoxical infinity. the earth being split in two and the collective cast subsequently scattered to the winds may in the moment feel like a wild leap from the relatively down-to-earth stakes of gf2-- well, no, see, i actually already disagree with this framing. i’ve joked for a long time that the progression from gf1 to gf3 is what happens when a slice of life story becomes a space opera, but that was before i really, truly understood what gf3 wanted to eventually become. now that 3.1 is conclusively finished, though, i see that the narrative trappings are merely the aesthetic window dressing of a story that really has not changed all that much from its starting point except in scope. if there has been any major thematic alteration, it’s simply in taking questions that were previously limited mostly to June’s perspective and applying them to the entire cast. so in that way, yes, the shape of the narrative has changed-- but has it? really?? because gf2 was supposed to be a story about self-actualization, but that got hijacked by a guy who wanted June to remain static and unchanged so he could use her as a weapon. gf3 was also supposed to be a story about self-actualization, and it also got hijacked by a guy who wanted June to remain static and unchanged so that it could use her as a weapon.

and gf1 was the story of someone who felt guilty for trying to compel someone else’s self-actualization instead of working on her own.

part of how we got here as well has to do with my own political evolution. i always wanted to see how June might try to build a better world, but every time she did, she got immediately sidetracked by some Plot Bullshit. it led to a lot of cool stuff, but it also frustrated me to no end! by the time we hit the moon war in 3.1, i was genuinely pulling out my own hair over the hole i’d dug myself into. i’d wanted the moon war to be kind of a parody of the boring “end of an avengers movie” style mob invasion, but instead i just sorta... wound up doing one? chapter 8, actually, was already a long-in-production logistical nightmare for me waaaaay before i’d had a single thought about ideaspace. maybe ch8 blew up the way it did in part because it allowed me to correct course and find something in the morass that genuinely compelled me. i was so stubbornly dedicated to the idea of keeping a lid on as much of Jade’s side of the story as possible, to relegate 3.1 exclusively to June’s psychodrama as the metatextual war of attrition that the audience must endure in order to get to what i thought of as The Good Stuff. but all that that really accomplished in the text, i think, was to ferry June around from existential quandary to existential quandary until the plot deigned to finally happen to her. don’t get me wrong here, i’m extremely proud of 3.1 and i don’t think it could have wound up being what it was if it hadn’t come about the way it did- once again, i’ll remind you i’m a materialist.

but that’s just it, you see? the story’s problem was my problem was our problem. June has these moments of wanting to listen to what The People have to say, of wanting to improve society somewhat, and i always INTENDED that to become one of the central pillars of this story. how can you interrogate power without spending time with those subject to that power? and on the flip side, in the gf3 prologue we see how Jade helped striking workers and fought space cops etc etc, and yet there’s a distinct unease in the accumulation of those stories, at least for me. why is this the route Jade takes? how did she get from that, and from her overall cutesy bubbly demeanor, to the cold hardened high-ranking member of what sure seems to be a cosmic private military corporation that we’ve come to know? there’s something Troubling there, just as there’s something Troubling in June’s consistent status as a plot object. they’ve almost swapped places in a way, don’t you think?

in examining these Troubles, i realized that the unifying factor was me trying to find ways for an individual to make the world a better place. having just lived through the good and the bad of CHAZ first hand (that’s the capitol hill autonomous zone btw, a political occupation that occurred here in seattle through june 2020), i knew very well that all the most impactful actions happen at the behest of organized comrades acting in solidarity with one another. this is a huge motivation behind godfeels becoming a full-cast production, because i don’t see the political dimension of this story as separate from any of its other dimensions. that is to say, just because this is a homestuck fanfic doesn’t mean i get to set my convictions aside and half-ass some uplifting gobbledygook that has no relationship with the world we live in today. i’m a materialist, damn it! the philosophy, the politics, the romance, the action, the dialogue, the formal experimentation, the character diversity, the ever-increasing scope, all of it flows out naturally from the selfsame kernel of thought which compelled its creation in the first place.

which, uh. well. here’s something andrew hussie said on formspring that i’ve found myself thinking about a lot:

“i think writing in voice is pretty simple. its mostly about consistency. choosing a set of parameters and committing to them absolutely. it can even be a shitty set of parameters and a crappy character. but if you keep hammering away at that voice, people will say, damn thats some pretty good characterization there! i mean... they might be WRONG. but theyll SAY it.

the advantage in being so obstinate with the profile you choose is then any deviation you make will be very noticeable. this is to your advantage, if you can control these deviations with purpose and precision. such deviations can serve as the pillars for character development. they cant happen without the consistency first. and ironically, without the consistency, they DO happen. for the wrong reasons. because you fucked up.

syntax is not a typical part of voice in most works but its one ive latched onto aggressively in HS and perhaps solidifies the illusion of strong voice. in fact ive become so conscious of syntax-voice, i noticed for some reason when answering these questions ive gravitated towards an ad hoc syntax, no caps, no apostrophes, otherwise punctuated. i am fearful of deviating from it. because it will mess with your heads if i do. and mine.

See, look. Instant syntax upgrade. It's hard to believe this is even the same person talking!

Inconsistency can be one of great calling cards of utter trash. Glorious inconsistency, artful inconsistency even, I think is something to behold. It's like a window into a defective mind. These are principles I employ in SBaHJ. They interest me for some reason. Will this sentence end with a period? No, looks like it won't. But this one will. Why was that particular word misspelled? Why not just misspell every word? That would make no statement. It would invite no speculation into a uniquely defective thought process.”

where godfeels is a homestuck fanfic, it’s in my wholesale adoption of andrew’s syntax and repetition/deviation. where godfeels is a “homestuck-based universe” as you put it, i think it’s in how i’ve taken these largely mechanical concepts and applied them to philosophy and metaphysics. which, christ, what a thing to say! clearly this answer has gone on too long because i’ve been whittling away at it for like a month now and feel no closer to unearthing the true answer.

i think it’s just a matter of knowing what your seed is. why are you writing this story? what’s compelling about it? what questions does it make you ask, what emotions does it make you feel? if you can, as an artist, have some sense of what drives you to create the very thing you’re creating, then you always have a compass handy when you need to decide what route to take. if you have that compass, you can blow up a slice of life story into a space opera and make it feel natural in your sleep. you have to be honest with yourself and egolessly introspect on your own proclivities. ask yourself what you believe as a person, and ask yourself if your story lives up to those beliefs. for me, at least, a story truly becomes itself when i can hold its soul in my mind and let it guide me. a story becomes itself when it knows that you know what it is, and you trust each other to do the work as it needs to be done. maybe that sounds daunting and alienating especially if you’re just interested in writing fluff fic or whatever, but i think the same thing applies. ideas exist in space, after all, and that includes silly ones! if you know that soul and respect it, i certainly find that it frees me up to bring all kinds of wild shit into the fold because it all exists along the same ideological axis for me, because i as a person am just like this about absolutely everything.

i don’t know why this turned into writing advice at the end. i hate giving writing advice. don’t listen to me, i’m literally a goat

[hms-no-fun]

our question boils down to, “has there been an intentional plural archetyping going on in June’s system?”, but with this addendum for context. we’ve been doing a lot of reading about “Gatekeeper” archetypes, and X seems to have a lot of those characteristics. so we’re curious how much of that had more to do with the incidental outcome of writing a character like them / if at any point it wasn’t intentioned, but then became intentioned / other. really curious about the evolution of the process 💜

the short answer is no. the long answer is also no, but i’m gonna say more anyway.

i haven’t talked much about my own relationship with plurality. there’s a variety of reasons, but one of the big ones is that i’ve been afraid to expose the various pieces of myself to the world lest folks decide that i’m doing it wrong or that i fall into some kind of toxic dynamic or, worse, that by virtue of talking about my own plurality in public, that makes me some kind of expert or “community leader” in the eyes of folks outside hs/plural circles. maybe this seems like a self-absorbed sentiment, but it already happened to me once with being a trans woman! i don’t like it when folks project their morals onto what they think they know about me, because i simply cannot live up to them. i’m too bitchy, too angry, too full of opinionated snark, and the story i want to tell with godfeels 3.2 is one that will skirt dangerously close to a lot of potentially problematic subjects. no matter how careful i am, it’s only a matter of time before i say or do something that pisses the wrong people off. again, it’s happened before. and i just don’t want any aspect of my plurality to be part of whatever that conversation/dogpile ends up being (because let’s be real, folks are NOT normal about plurality in most spaces and are really eager to use it as proof of one’s antisocial derangement).

with that out of the way, i’m gonna talk a little bit about my own plurality here, because it’s relevant.

i said in my post announcing june’s canonical plurality that my hesitation in embracing it was partially because of my hesitation embracing my own plurality. i knew people in high school who were plural (though that term didn’t really exist yet afaik), and i mostly found them obnoxious and cringe. i never said anything mean to them or mocked them out loud, and in fact one of my best friends at the time had a woman in his head for a while... wow, damn, i forgot about this actually, me and her talked a lot back then, i was there with her when she decided to stop existing and i guess reunified with my friend? and i said for years after, “i think most people are lying about DID/multiple personalities but i know at least one person it was real for.” you know, i bet i believed him and disbelieved everyone else because “everyone else” were women lmao. god i was such an asshole

anyway uh, my judgmental nature throughout my teens and twenties came out of being a closeted autistic trans woman who worked VERY hard to understand what “normal” is for the in-group i was told to be part of (ie gamer bros and jocks). this shit got really fucking deep into my head, and i spent maybe four or five years just actively trying to not be like that anymore. and i’m still finding leftover bad habits and bad takes every day lmao. this is why it took me until 27 to realize i was trans, and until 31 to realize i was plural. turns out the people you most harshly judge, especially in your twenties, quite often are the people who remind you most of yourself! in my experience, anyway.

so, okay. when i decided to take June’s plurality seriously is around the time i decided to take my own plurality seriously, and so June’s system and my system are uniquely intertwined. i deliberately avoided learning the terminology before writing the Dirk and Risk/Dare chapters because i didn’t want the defined archetypal tendencies to override any given character’s personality. if i’d known what a “persecutor” was, for instance, i can see myself having made a lot of different choices about both Angel Dirk and X.

one of my headmates is, i guess, technically an ex-persecutor by definition? but that’s never how i saw her, really, and i think if i’d started from a place of learning other people’s models of plurality i might not have been so open to the mea culpa we had which finally forced me to accept her and my other headmates as real. they’d been piping up more and more as gf3.1 went on, and it scared me. if i’d known more, known that there existed a defined archetypal dynamic for our relationship (including a multitude of different but equally bad suggestions re: what to do about it) i might have let that fear lead me to treating them even worse than i already did. but maybe not! these things are impossible to know. my experience with first questioning my gender, however, was that the prevailing models of transness simply did not fit with my experience- so i anticipated that the same would likely hold true of my plurality in that i needed to engage with it on my own terms and find out what it meant for me, rather than understanding it as a scientific or sociological phenomenon. setting aside what i thought was “real” and what i could or couldn’t “prove” in favor of just feeling it out.

so here’s the thing. my experience of plurality is fluid, blended, and often ambiguous. it’s rare for anyone but “me”, sarah, to front, and when they do i’m still never quite gone. during the hell of the last four months, when we were applying to apartments left and right, i had such a nervous breakdown that my ex-persecutor did in fact take over for a couple days. but it’s not like i don’t remember doing what she did. so naturally there’s a part of me that’s always like, is this actually real? or is this just an idea i’m using to help me survive?? ultimately i’ve decided that the answer doesn’t really matter. whatever it is, it works for me. and it turns out my headmates give good advice sometimes! who knew

what i wanted with June’s system was to imagine plurality as fueled by the infinite creative power over reality inherent to her retcon powers. it is, in a lot of ways, a vision of my “ideal” plurality, one in which every member has complete independence yet is inextricably connected, where anyone can front and anyone can recede into obscurity as they desire, and where “headspace” as such is a field of endless creative and metaphorical possibility. from there, i wanted to give all four of them the chance to define their own personalities independent of whatever role they might play in the system archetypally-speaking. and i think the result of this is a group of characters who clearly constitute pieces of a whole, but in such a way that shows the “whole” is not lesser for being quadfurcated. it is, in fact, far stronger for its diversity of selves!

to bring all of this together, the whole point of going about June’s plurality (and mine) in this way was to avoid inadvertently medicalizing her system. i’m not particularly interested in plurality as a “condition” in the clinical psychology sense. i think some writers, when they actively choose to write someone as part of a marginalized identity they aren't themselves a part of or educated about, can take their supposed responsibility to create “good representation” far too seriously and too literally. good representation doesn’t try to be good representation, it just is. a plural person is not only a plural person, same as a trans person is not only a trans person. when writers TRY to make an interesting character with DID, for instance, they almost always fall into the trap of exclusively relying on medical literature without ever really questioning whether the medical establishment knows what the fuck it’s talking about, without seemingly any awareness of just how deliberately the DSM is positioned as a first and foremost capitalist psychological framework. they’re so obsessed with getting it “right” in some objective sense that they end up completely showing their ass over it, because there is simply no facet of human identity which can be objectively isolated and quantified with 100% accuracy. i will take a dozen poorly researched portrayals that treat their protagonist’s internal reality with empathy and respect over a “representative” homunculus defined solely by how their “condition” impacts their ability to function in normal society and how that’s really sad and tragic or maybe it’s very funny and silly but what it never is is just one character trait among many. it’s never a locus for examining unjust marginalization; in most contemporary narratives on the subject of plurality, even empathetic ones, their marginalization is a matter of safety that is ultimately as good for the marginalized as it is for everyone around them. attempts at "good representation" only ever seem to result in representation that is palatable for its intended audience of cishet neurotypical white people.

so, no, i didn’t do any intentional plural archetyping with June’s system, because i wanted these characters to show me who they were on their own terms, and because godfeels as a narrative is opposed to the tyranny of imposed archetypes (whether cultural or macrocosmic). but also, it’s kinda cool that they fit some broad archetypes anyway! that, to me, is evidence that i probably made the right call in taking this approach.

[hms-no-fun]

what is your reasoning for having some characters have dual name/text colors? is this just another stylistic choice to try and even further branch out from homestuck or what

there are a lot of unstated style rules in godfeels that have just kinda emerged. there's a logic to, for instance, who gets third person narration vs first person, & how they show themselves in that narration. June's narration is always her text color because she isn't really capable of intense subterfuge. Terezi, meanwhile, is very good at hiding herself in narration up until she gets flustered or mad. i never really set out to make an expressive narratorial matrix for these characters, right, but it's there.

going back to 2.1, i actually originally wanted to make June's name be Vriska-blue and her text be Egbert-blue... but i had yet to discover the magic of find & replace, and the thought of having to manually replace "June:" with "<span class="vriska">June:</span><span class="john">" forever after seemed like WAY too much of a hassle. i think giving her a bespoke text color was by far the better choice, because it literally being a blend of Vriska and Egbert was a very very early metaphysical indication to me that there was a much more complex psychological phenomenon occurring under the surface. it took me until writing 3.1 before i realized that the name for that phenomenon is plurality (thanks to the commentary made by a number of plural readers).

in homestuck proper, having a name that's a different color from your text is generally relegated to the sprite^2s. i always read this as a simple way of visually communicating that they're fusions. i always liked the EFFECT of reading their lines because the dual text colors help them feel ascended in some abstract sense.

so, when it came time to introduce Silverbark, i wanted a way to indicate that something big had changed with her beyond the obvious stuff like her appearance. because what makes Silverbark interesting imo isn't just that she's gotten older. if she'd just gotten older while living more or less the same life she was living on earth c, i don't think her hair would have greyed, and i don't think her name color would have changed. it has to do with experience and perspective somehow. to my mind Silverbark's silver is the ultimate tell that her initial impression as the same silly girl that everyone remembered was a front she was putting on. something has changed in her deep, deep down, and in a way the whole space opera side of things emerged out of my own desire to understand what changed. perhaps one could make some inferences there given Padua's color conventions.

in the case of Risk and Dare, i take sort of an opposite approach-- and here i'm now realizing this actually pretty closely mirrors my philosophy about who gets first person narration. imo there's two primary ways one takes control of their own narration. one side, the Dirk side, is brute force. the other side, June's side, is self-realization. so you have two poles, one associated with external power and the control of others, the other associated with internal clarity and a desire to live one's own life more genuinely. i know this particular verbalization makes it sound like one is good and one is bad, but i think you can look at the events of godfeels and say pretty definitively that both camps are just as capable of doing both really good shit and really terrible shit. how you got power certainly informs how you use that power, but it's hard not to think of obama running on hope and change only to turn around and become just as bad as the last guy, dismantling every apparatus of party organization that got him in power and made sure the dnc would never ever run a campaign that effective again. it's complicated, baby. there's no easy answers in life, and there's no easy answers in godfeels.

so anyway in Davepeta's case, you've got a name color change due to a cosmic fusion, the result essentially of a basic math problem. in Silverbark's case, you've got a name color change due to some level of personal/political ascension, a crossing of some kind of rubicon that came with great benefits at what looks to have been a pretty heavy cost.

with Risk and Dare, you've got name color changes as a result of literal self-actualization. it is with Dare's insistence that their name is Dare and they do exist that they finally push through the veil between internal self and external self, forcing June to acknowledge that they are in fact Real and Whole and Independent from her in some key way while also being equally part of her, inextricable from her. it's the final expression of Dare's arc-- throughout chapter 8 they keep trying to find reasons to live, trying to find gods to believe in. they plead to June, they plead to the universe, they even plead to us as readers, and still they get no answer. it's only when they take their life into their own hands and embrace the name that X gives them that they reach the point of being In Control that allows them to fight back in the way that they do. you'll remember that when Epigone is making everyone sing happy birthday, Dare-as-J is the only one who seems to be able to put up any kind of resistance to the words being pushed out of their mouth.

in Risk's case, the motivation for the color change is similar but distinct. for her it's a matter of realizing that "Vriska" as an archetype just doesn't fit anymore. it's still self-actualization, but where Dare's was about fully knowing and embracing their right to exist as an individual, Risk's is about knowing and embracing her right to be someone who doesn't already exist. what exactly that means in the longterm remains to be seen, but you can be sure that it's gonna come up again eventually

[hms-no-fun]

out of curiosity: if 3.2 will be more like an MSPA, do you still plan to host it on AO3, or on something more MSPA-esque in format, like MSPFA?

the current plan is to move godfeels to a dedicated website, and there's a couple reasons for this.

ao3's css library is extremely limited. in the short term that was a good thing, at least as someone with basically no understanding of html or css who learns best with a pared down toolset. i mean literally writing gf1 i didn't understand that you couldn't just color everything in a doc and copy/paste it to ao3 lmao, i really started at zero. but these days i'm feeling more and more limited by the tools ao3 offers. hosting 3.2 on a separate site gives us a lot more control over that stuff, and now i feel a lot more ready to take advantage of that than i would have before.

i think, also, that hosting it on a website will help tremendously with pacing. a recurring complaint with chapter 8 is that act 3-1, the risk & dare chapter, is just way too long and difficult to navigate. and like, yeah, you know what, 40,000 words on a single webpage is a lot to get through.

but chapter 8 is the nonsensically octofurcated behemoth that it is precisely because i am dedicated to structure. while i certainly agree now that it would be a better reader experience for 3-1 to be split into three or more sub-chapters, as a writer it just feels wrong to deliver it any other way-- EXCEPT if we had an mspa-style clickthrough function. i've always wanted to utilize the ==> prompt, and my use of excessive dramatic line breaks is an attempt to experientially emulate that click for the reader. homestuck similarly has nonsensical structure out the wazoo, but from a reader's perspective that doesn't really matter because the moment to moment pacing is dictated by physical action on your end. you aren't reading 400,000 words in one go, right, you're reading chunks of 50 - 100 at a time. i just think the hyperlinked presentation will be overall more satisfying for both parties. and that'd be true even if we weren't planning to do consistent spritework!

so anyway, here's the plan. everything that's currently on ao3 will stay there in perpetuity. when 3.2 starts, there will be a fic created in the series whose body will most likely just be a link to the godfeels site. gf1 to 3.1 will, at some point, be re-hosted on our site. i've been considering the possibility of taking that as an opportunity to "remaster" godfeels [rolls eyes] but idk how willing i am to open that particular pandora's box just yet. what i definitely want to do, though, is translate the fic as it exists to an mspa-style presentation, keeping all the same structural designations but paced differently. this is something that's already existed in my head for a long time and i think it'll make for a really interesting re-read experience down the line.

DISCLAIMER: OBVIOUSLY I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO CHANGE MY MIND ABOUT LITERALLY EVERYTHING

[hms-no-fun]

I'm curious about the way you write physical violence in Godfeels. There's a LOT of it, of course; you could fill a good-sized text document with a list of all the ways June has been put through the wringer. And yet it never feels gratuitous and it's always gut-wrenching to read. That can't be an easy balance to strike.

so i guess in a lot of ways i view narration primarily as a way to break up the dialogue to change scenes or provide dramatic breaks. narration is a function of the scene, and it's the primary indicator of the tone in which the dialogue exists. its job as far as i'm concerned, besides conveying to the reader who is present and what they're doing, is to expand and contract in tension with the dialogue.

i've always been fascinated by violence in media, and i find it really compelling as a way to give the narration and the scene as a whole a sense of subjective expediency. you learn a lot about june in the way she panics in the face of violence, the way her retaliations are always haphazard and sloppy. compare that to dirk, who calmly describes his fight with roxy while a sense of guilt eats away at him. where june is rarely in control when violence strikes, dirk is only ever in control. what he struggles with is not a fear of death but a clinging, irrational sentimentality that makes him want to take pity where he knows he shouldn't.

every scene needs to have an element of this, right? there needs to be some sense of propulsion. because narration in godfeels is inextricably rooted in character, it is uniquely suited to pulling double duty as both a mechanical conveyance of information and as a more fluid means of exploring character. so for me a scene is dead if there isn't some momentum, some tension between what's being said and what's being felt that is pushing the scene forward. this is the case for a lot of scenes between silverbark and june, where june keeps wanting to ask more questions but knows that silverbark will refuse to answer.

anyway. this is a story about trauma and violence. i am driven so much by the longterm impacts of trauma, the way it affects everyday life long after the event in question. in order to sell the extremity of that trauma, it's absolutely necessary that i depict the offending violence with gravity and clarity. and the thing about violence is that you can't revel in it. i mean, you can, but only in very specific circumstances. mostly though, violence is quick and dies quicker.

dirk breaking june's arm is such a vivid, painful moment, but it happens REALLY fast. it's a visceral OOOOF that only lasts two or three lines. the key is to then have that wound recur in various ways throughout the rest of the scene until it gets dealt with. and that's what i think separates my approach to violence from like... at least all major hollywood action movies? when someone gets cut or breaks a limb, it doesn't just hurt, it leaves you rattled. and it gets worse as time goes on! eventually it gets so bad it affects the perspective character's ability to narrate at all. on a longer timescale it can lead to psychological or emotional issues. what matters is less the violence than what the violence does to its victim.

the knife that cuts you leaves. the scar stays with you forever.

i never want to be gratuitous about violence because i actually find it quite tasteless when done without good reason. this is why we didn't see june's retconned murder spree, and why davepeta getting vaporized was instantaneous and without warning. from a story mechanics perspective, these scenes aren't really very interesting. i find skipping right to the part where the survivors react works much the same way that not showing the monster does in horror movies. save the visceral violence for the moments when it's REALLY called for, and otherwise let your audience do the hard work for themselves. it'll make the story better and the readers will thank you for it lmao