#godfeels 3 chapter 8

[hms-no-fun]

I hope this ask doesn't come off as rude at all-- and I apologize if it does!-- but as an aspiring writer, I'm honestly really confused by some of the early choices in Godfeels, and I'm curious if I'm just not "getting it". I saw some posts about it pop up in the tag (and they WERE very shitty and rude about it :/), but I'd love to hear your explanation/take on June's big character change immediately post-realization, and especially the... "Trickster Arc", I guess it could be called? The former I get to some extent, but I'm really curious about the choice to do all THAT so early in the story with the trickster candy.

Seriously love your work, your narration is honestly a big inspiration to me in terms of how meta it gets and how close it gets to communicating directly with both the main character AND the audience!

no rudeness detected at all! this is a great question, in fact it’s one i’ve been kinda hoping someone would ask because i’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot these last few months. but i get the sense that you’re at least a little new here, so uh, yeah, hello, when people ask me interesting questions i tend to answer at great length. so strap in for that after the break lmao. also as a note, there will be some spoilers for all of godfeels here but please don’t let that scare you away, they’re all contextless and, if anything, might honestly make the rest of the story *more* enjoyable as a result.

as far as "getting it" goes, i've talked at length about the how & why of the violence in godfeels in multiple places so i'll try to avoid rehashing that too much here. but one thing i want to emphasize right off the bat is that i never intended godfeels to be an ongoing thing. you talk about the trickster arc happening “so early in the story” but when i wrote godfeels 1 i didn’t plan on writing more. i didn’t even plan on making john trans! my idea of what the sum total of godfeels 2 would be when i started writing it wound up being completely different from the finished work. i didn’t plan to make this thing so long. i didn’t plan for june to accidentally on purpose kill her friends while drunk and then retcon it. i didn’t plan on turning the whole thing into a space opera. it all just happened to me, man. i kept writing because i kept finding more interesting things to say. and it’s important to specify that when i started gf1 i hadn’t written fiction in years. i think if you jumped ahead to godfeels 3 part 1 chapter 8, no matter how you feel about the content we’d at least be able to agree that in the years since 2019 i’ve become a much much better writer. if you want more insight into how my process has evolved, i’ve written so so so much about it, too much maybe even, in the #sarahposts tag.

anyway, now i want to talk about june's "big character change." the extent to which her trickster arc makes sense or feels in character seems to vary wildly from person to person. what always bugs me about "ooc" as a criticism is that godfeels starts six years and change after the end of homestuck. let's remember that the protagonists of homestuck were sixteen when the comic ended. now i want you to ask yourself if you as you were at 16 would think that you as you are now was "in character." or vice versa! probably not, right? it doesn’t even have to have been six years. i was STILL sixteen when i started to get embarrassed of who i was at sixteen!

that should be all i need to say, but it isn’t. and it doesn't really get to the core of the issue anyway. i am not nor have i ever been interested in writing "a sequel to homestuck,” even though it has kind of just become that anyway. godfeels has always been about the meaty existential drama you can tease out through the complicated character dynamics of these fucked up traumatized gods. godfeels has always been my way of analyzing the themes and ideas of homestuck, the existential ramifications of the mechanics of SBURB and the classpects and retcon (let’s remember that i wrote godfeels around the same time that i took over hosting duties on the perfectly generic podcast). godfeels has also always been about me and my trauma. i even used to joke that june was my self-insert character, though i've seen that line repeated unironically by enough people who haven't read godfeels that i've stopped saying it. because it's not true! june is very, very different from me... i just happen to see my life reflected in her eyes.

to immediately rehash what i said i wouldn't, june eg8ert arose out of my frustration with most versions of the june egbert headcanon particularly in the summer of 2019. let's call her "hairclips june." hairclips june is always smiling, usually with smiling friends, she's wearing hairclips and has nonzero tit and is A Woman Now. as i said in my video, while i don't begrudge anyone their comfort food, this simply was not my experience with coming out as a trans woman. and of all the characters, i’d always identified most with john. also i thought, you know, these kids are SERIOUSLY messed up, every single one of them has died multiple times, they've seen things and done things no one should ever have to. and retcon! god, what a mindfuck retcon is.

those are the primal ingredients of godfeels. what if june came out and everyone wasn't chill about it? some folks say that's out of character and, idk, i guess that's arguably true. but i had friends who were very vocal trans allies who’d been in queer relationships who still stopped talking to me after i came out. let me tell you i spent a lot of time fucked up in the head over how "out of character" that was for them, to the extent that i blamed myself for their reaction because surely they couldn't be so out of character. to which one might respond, well, why do this as a homestuck fic then? why not just do my own original thing instead?

and i guess the answer is that i didn't want to and i still don't, really. it's not just about the characters for me. i like the rules of the homestuck universe. i find it interesting how it mechanically reflects being a fictional narrative. and, you know, maybe it's easier for me to process violent intrusive thoughts through a character who is capable of acting on those thoughts and then immediately undoing them consequence-free. retcon is, in fact, sort of the perfect mechanism for exploring violent intrusive thoughts because it lets us play out the fantasy without lasting diegetic harm, such that we can just focus on the existential and moral questions of the phenomenon itself. and like, yeah, that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. but isn’t it still just as valid a topic to explore in fiction as anything else?

like em or not, people have intrusive thoughts. people have violent impulses. sometimes they even act on them. the unpleasantness of a phenomenon shouldn’t dictate whether it is acceptable to depict in fiction-- if anything, we ought to take our instinctive desire to look away as an urgent invitation to look closer instead. as i’ve been wont to say for years and years now, “problematic” implies a problem to be solved. that which is human is inherently complicated. to pretend it’s all good or bad excises humanity from the equation, or at least flattens the range of acceptable humanity. all of which is my extremely soapboxy way of saying (as i’ve said a million times by now), yes, godfeels june is problematic. that is in fact what godfeels is about.

there's an extent to which i think this can be blamed on how rooted we are IN june's perspective in gf1 and 2. i don't think people really appreciate the fact that godfeels 1 is john threatening to commit suicide and almost going through with it. that's the context in which her friends react poorly to her coming out; i mean, she's literally sleeping on rose's couch because everyone's so worried about her! i think that, by being completely within june's perspective for all of these events, we don't really get a good sense of the interpersonal dynamics at play (probably because i didn't even really understand them myself until later). instead we just see people who should know better acting like dicks.

i think whether or not june’s trickster arc is canonically palatable to you depends very much on whether or not you've had a dear friend disappoint you so much that you're no longer on speaking terms.

but if we want to reel this back from the abstract philosophical, maybe it’s enough to say that we just have different interpretations of these characters? they’re not monoliths, you know. different people see different things in different characters. some folks get a lot out of hairclips june and that’s okay. maybe i was a bitch about other people’s headcanons back in 2019 when redditors were calling me and my friends abusive pedophiles for liking vriska, but i gave up that fight when the redditors got what they wanted (to harass a group of queer creators offline and out of their jobs). if someone wants to woobify gamzee, whatever man, go right ahead. that ain’t my cup of tea and i personally don’t think that’s very in character either, but that’s why i don’t read it. it ain’t for me and that’s fine. i like homestuck BECAUSE these characters can mean so many things to so many people. is this variability not precisely the thing that makes the postcanon era so interesting?

i have my idea of who these characters are based on who they were in the comic and i work very hard to keep them in character, but i also don't want them to be trapped in amber. i want them to grow and change and become different people, because homestuck itself is obsessed with inescapable absolute archetypes (ie the ultimate self, or the captchalogue system) and i enjoy troubling that. i enjoy swimming in a sea of weird problematic dilemmas. that’s what’s fun about fiction for me, you can think about and write about all the most difficult and even fucked up things you like, and it definitionally cannot cause real material nonconsensual harm to another human being. and yet we get so tied up in the question of harm anyway! maybe that makes sense when talking about marvel movies, but this is fanfiction we’re talking about. this is HOMESTUCK fanfiction. if i were to go on twitter right now and post “homestuck is good” i’d end the day with at least five comments saying “lol no it’s not.” SOME OF THOSE PEOPLE WILL HAVE HOMESTUCK AVATARS. there are few things as cringe as liking homestuck even among people who like homestuck, so who cares? i like homestuck, i like the epilogues, i like hs2, and i think a pretty gargantuan majority of this fandom are subliterate babies. that’s why i don’t engage with them or make much of an attempt to bridge the gap. i think godfeels and its cool little fandom is all the better for how much work it requires of the reader to “get it” as it were. i wish more people would give it a chance, or at the very least not immediately throw me and a lot of my friends under the bus at every possible opportunity, but what can you do? i just write. people will react how they will react. what matters to me is that it stays true to itself as a work, and that it grows with me and my audience and my collaborators. trying to backpedal or soften the edges would just ruin the whole thing, likely alienate my current readers and inevitably invite even more bad faith readings. no thanks!

some folks stop reading godfeels after june's trickster arc, and i can respect that. if you get to that part of the story and don't like it, chances are you're not gonna like the rest of it! and in that sense, i guess you could say i “chose” to have june’s trickster arc happen so “early on” as a litmus test for the reader. as annoying as it can be feeling like i’m constantly having to address this exact issue, i vastly prefer it to a bunch of people hate-reading something that wasn’t made for them. but again, i didn’t know this was “early on” when i wrote it, because i didn’t plan it to happen. i didn’t intend for june to go on a killing spree, she just did it and i as writer decided, you know what? this is way more interesting than what i had planned. and then dirk became the antagonist because, oops, june coming out fucked up all the schemes he has that play out in the homestuck epilogues. and i guess in THAT sense, the palatability of godfeels depends on whether or not you liked and/or tolerated the homestuck epilogues and homestuck^2. these, too, are not for everyone. but godfeels is not a replacement for them, as some folks like to claim (god bless them). i’m not interested in rewriting homestuck or fixing its sequels. ok well that’s not entirely true, i think the epilogues did jake REAL dirty and that’s become a big focus of mine going forward. but even then, i don’t pretend the epilogues didn’t happen. in fact if you’ve read all of 3.1, you know just how cosmically important they end up being.

but this is, i guess, kind of the crux of the issue for me. june’s trickster arc happens very early on in the story, yes, and that’s deliberately challenging on a lot of levels. june spends a great deal of time being challenged by it herself! but folks who stop there (if they even make it that far) often act like the whole story is grimdark wish-fulfillment violence or me airing out my irrational hatred of Boys (????), and that's just not true. i don’t give a shit about that. we get to june's trickster arc at around the 25,000 word mark, out of the current grand total of over 400,000 words. her violence is functionally the prologue, and she spends the entire rest of this story suffering the consequences of those actions. so if i am frustrated with this line of questioning, a lot of it comes down to the fact that if you just read the rest of the story you’d see that i have in fact had all of the same thoughts you’ve likely had. i know people who think i did dirk dirty in gf2, and i actually kind of agree! which is why dirk comes back and has a difficult, complicated relationship with his past self. people complain about certain characters being ooc, which i can certainly understand because when i started godfeels i really did not have a great grasp on them! but also, if you kept reading godfeels you’d know that the tension of whether or not someone is cosmically “in character” is a huge running theme of this story. june’s friends react poorly to her coming out in part because it seems out of character for her! hell, phenomenologically how *could* june be in character after coming out when she barely even knows who she is yet? her whole thing in gf1 is that she doesn’t know who she is anymore! just realizing that you’re trans changes you, changes how you see the world, how you relate to other people. or it did for me, anyway. risk, dare, X, angel dirk, and silverbark are all sorts of caught up in this question. and if you’ve gotten to the end of 3.1 you’ll know about the concept of denexustic radiation:

and that’s just the tip of the metaphysical iceberg. all of which is to say that this is a feature, not a bug. so it’s always very funny to me when people drop out so early on only to complain about the very same problematics that i’ve spent three years and 400,000 words exploring.

BUT. but. yeah godfeels 1 and 2 are messy. the gf3 prologue is very messy. it’s a serial narrative that has changed shape multiple times over the years, and barring a bit of polish on gf1 around when i started writing gf3 i generally refuse to go back and rewrite things. there’s a lot i would do differently today, but if i had done it differently then the story as it is today would not exist. and i love this story! i might look back on gf2 and feel like it’s rushed and messy, but i know that it was the best i could do at the time. it’s a reflection of who i was as a writer then. i live with the ramifications of that for the same reason i don’t delete the old videos on my channel from before i came out/learned what communism was: because i don’t like to pretend that the present was always present. i’m a different person now, a different writer. i made mistakes, i learned, and i changed. i will continue this process for the rest of my natural life, as will you.

ultimately i guess my answer here is that godfeels is a flawed work written by a flawed person, and the extent to which readers relate to it seems to have a lot to do with how much their flaws overlap with mine. i get lots of people telling me my characters are in character. i get people telling me they’re more in character than some canon! and it’s not that i weigh those comments as more valuable, i just see it as an indication of who my audience is. i’m not writing for people who want more hiveswap, and i’m certainly not writing for people who dismissed hs^2 out of hand. i’m just writing for myself and my friends, and it just so happens that some people seem to get a lot out of it.

i’m gonna close out here by actually finally directly addressing your question with what i think you were ultimately hoping for: some writing advice.

the rules don’t exist. there are things that can make some art better or some art worse but they are not universal. the rules are fake and if you hold every story you touch to those rules, you’re gonna have a bad time. a story is not static and it is never truly yours. you discover it. sometimes you can expand it or alter it in ways but, at least in my experience, doing so more often than not just kills the whole thing-- or at least demands a complete reconceptualization. all of which takes time, and we live in a world where taking time to get in touch with and hone your craft is considered sort of a bad economic decision. but art is what it is and it does what it does and we can either play with it or we can put it in a cage.

what i like about making art is that i am not entirely in control. i have my plans, my schemes, my ideas, but the fun of writing is just putting a bunch of characters in a room together and seeing what they do. quite often they do things i would never expect, that are far truer to their character than i anticipated. my experience has always been that the more you outline a story before you write it, the harder it is to actually write that story. when i know everything that’s gonna happen on a moment to moment level, the whole thing falls dead on the page. but obviously you need to know SOME things! and i’ll say that from the inception of gf3 back in december 2019 to now, very very few of the broad strokes of my plans have changed. if you’ve read all of 3.1 you know there’s a very specific timeline at play in the backstory of a group of characters we’ll be spending a lot of time with in 3.2. there are no questions or mysteries or whatever else i’ve introduced to this story that i did not have at least the sense of an explanation for. but these are simply bullet points that dictate the endpoint of a path and suggest something of the moral/philosophical/emotional arc that needs to occur in order to get there. the real meat of it comes out in the act of writing itself, and that’s what i’m here for. it’s a gamble that doesn’t always pay off, and it does mean that i have almost 80,000 words of material i ended up rewriting or cutting sitting in a doc somewhere, but that’s worth it for me.

if art is to be relevant, it must have the capacity to make an audience uncomfortable. if art is to be essential, it must have the capacity to demand a strong reaction (positive or negative) from everyone who sees it. if art is to be true, it must have the capacity to reflect the disquiet contradictions of simple existence that we desperately wish to ignore in our daily lives. that doesn’t mean everyone has to or should read difficult art, or like it, or make it. but it has always existed and it will always exist, and i think it is essential for writers and critics alike to learn to stop themselves from mistaking a common storytelling method for THE storytelling method. and frankly, most of the art i love most in this world is art that i didn’t particularly like the first time we crossed paths.

and lastly, never forget the inarguable truth that the audience bears quite a lot of responsibility in this equation. you are never, as a writer, inflicting anything on your reader, because your reader can always opt out at any moment they wish. if something doesn’t work, yeah, that’s a problem you can fix. art is a conversation in that way, or at least ought to be. but at the same time, art has no obligation to be perfect, or smooth, or easy to consume. the rules are fake. they exist to be broken. the pursuit of perfection is a dead end. just make shit

okay this one has gone on QUITE long enough lmao i hope there’s something useful in there for you somewhere and uhhhh i hope you enjoy the rest of godfeels if you haven’t already read it!

[hms-no-fun]

hey can you just generally ramble about your terezi (and (terezi)) choices? I am interested in your process for her characters this chapter.

yeah! naturally i have a lot to say about a lot of things so spoilers for godfeels 3.2 A1 solo below the break!

let me just start this by saying that (Terezi) has been the BIGGEST pain in my ass of the entire core cast since beginning godfeels 3.

getting A1 out the door in general has been something of a nightmare, in part due to inconvenient irl circumstances but also because this track had a LOT of heavy lifting to do. Double Album is an ambitious project --too ambitious, arguably, considering how much time it takes to write (lots) and how little it pays (nothing)-- and this first glimpse into what's to come needed to do a lot of recapping prior events, moving pieces around on the board, clarifying character motivations, giving everyone a reason to be staying/going, and setting up several hefty dozens of plot threads in both major and minor ways, all while simultaneously being entertaining enough to read that old and new readers alike don't just get bored and peace out before we even get to the stuff that this story's actually about.

i think on balance A1 is going to wind up being sort of an odd duck among the tracks for this reason. i've been thinking of it as sort of a pilot episode, very much in the mold of the pilot of LOST whose very minimal flashbacks belied the load-bearing structural centrality that the flashback device would come to occupy in the series. but it's also a pilot episode for a series that's already three seasons in, which just further complicates the logistical job it needed to do. here again i took inspiration from LOST (get used to this comparison, btw-- everything from chapter 8 onwards has been/will be heavily inspired by LOST in theme and structure), where the season openers always had to pull double duty of cleaning up the mess from whatever bomb dropped in the season finale to completely change the status quo AND giving the core cast time to acclimate to the new status quo in a way that sets the audience up for what this season's gonna be about. it's a fun and punishing challenge that takes a lot of trial and error. there have been so many versions of A1 that all conveyed largely the same information in completely different ways to wildly different ends.

i'm glad i put that work in, because i'm really proud of how A1 ultimately turned out. i think it accomplishes the goals i set out for. and in a serial work like this you just don't get a chance to redo your first episode. if this part didn't work, if every character wasn't utilized with absolute precision, everything that followed would be at a disadvantage. i feel more confident in the future of this side of the story than i did when i first started writing it. but it was hard!

and at the center of that challenge was (Terezi), the character whose desire to go with Silverbark is easily the most obvious of the departing cast and yet simultaneously the most mysterious. i have a document for every writing project where i save cut material just in case, and the one for A1 is over 8000 words. of those, just shy of half are scenes involving (Terezi). because ever since the start of gf3, she's been a delightful, infuriating wrench in all my plans. it's easy enough to understand why she would want to go with Silverbark, but what does she feel about it? how does she feel about what she did to June, what June/Risk did to her, or about the state of Earth C today, and especially about the medicated domestic 30-something Vrisrezi who've just shown up out of the blue?

i wrote the dream strangulation scene in 3.1 chapter 1 knowing it would put a dent in her and June's relationship that would be a pain point through the rest of 3.1, but i'd always planned for them to get on better terms before the end (until Vrisrezi showed up, at which point all that progress would be painfully backpedaled). but as soon as she left the house, (Terezi) completely closed herself off and refused to come to the table again. throughout gf3 and especially chapter 8 i tried to find ways to let her talk about what was on her mind, and she just wouldn't. the Host-intruded memory of them getting into an argument watching Consort Jerry Springer and the birthday flashback where (Terezi) eats leafs both wound up defined in their conflict by (Terezi)'s own silence, her refusal to say what's really bothering her. even as she opens up some in the latter scene, she remains infuriatingly closed off to Risk and us. the question she thinks she's answering is why she's uncomfortable on Earth C, but the question June and Risk are really asking is, why am i not good enough to make this place feel like your home?

this is a dominant theme of Divergence Syndrome-- characters ensconced in noise looking for silence, or characters sick of silence hurtling mortally towards cacophony. the strict meaning of silence vs noise change depending on the person. all the circus flashbacks are moments where characters just can't quite bring themselves to say the thing they really want to say. silence and noise, secrets and truth-- you might draw some comparisons here between this theme and the concept of Voidthought as introduced in A1. i try not to push my hand when it feels like characters don't want to be accessible. it's easy to want to give everyone center stage all at once, but it gets to being too much very quickly. you've got to pick your battles, give everyone their moment when the time is right, when you and they both feel ready for it.

but with (Terezi) i genuinely was like. hey. tell me the thing you really want to say. give me something to work with here. i'm trying to understand how you got here from where we left you in gf2. were you just lying when you said you loved how unpredictable June was? were you lying to Kanaya when you said you liked how boring Earth C was compared to Alternia? what changed in those eleven months between gf2 and gf3 and why didn't i see it until it was too late?

and she just WOULDN'T. every time i've tried to get her talking it felt forced and wrong. she only talks in narration when she wants to. she refuses to humor her guilt even to herself. i wrote a complete version of the scene in Dave's room where Silverbark is much, much meaner, just to try and get a rise out of her. but it was so out of character, it was too much, too forceful. you just can't drag secrets out into the open like that. not with a Mind player as stubborn as (Terezi).

that scene was for me, really. i needed to write it because i was mad at her. i won't share it here because i think quite a lot of it will end up recycled in some form down the line. i don't exactly want to give the impression that (Terezi) is a distinct entity, because none of these characters are. it's more that i see the narration itself, and each characters' varying awareness of it, as having strict rules and boundaries. there's that moment at the end of A1 where Vriska pops into the narration just to say, actually no i don't want my feelings on display right now. i'd planned to have a whole lot of prose there! but when i wrote that interjection, it felt right. it showcases a different form of closing one's self off-- where (Terezi) is doing bullheaded self-harm in her silence, Vriska there is being mature and recognizing that sometimes you just have to let things go. good characterization in this story isn't just about dialogue. every word you read is a function of character in some form. 3.1 was narrated largely by VV. 3.2's narration/structure is what i've been calling "paramniscient epistolary" --basically a roving narratorial eye that can take the form of disconnected third person narration but give way to direct influence from characters whenever they desire. the epistolary part will make more sense come future tracks. but all of that is to say that yeah, to let that device be honest in what it is, to really fulfill VV's promise of letting these characters have genuine agency, i need to be willing to step back and let them be obtuse sometimes.

the original version of that scene between (Terezi) and Silverbark broke rules i didn't yet know, and it taught me a lot about what this story wants to be. gf2 was so much about June expositing her every thought, having revelations, working through shit, coming to terms with her Self. gf3, at least so far, is the opposite. (Terezi)'s lack of answers, her refusal to self-examine, is a protest against the kind of sincerity that June often embodies.

the horror of encountering a Terezi who's well-adjusted and happy is that for (Terezi), it feels inevitable. like a death sentence, a sword hanging over her neck. it's proof that if she ever got what she wanted, she would have to lose so many of the things that she still feels are essential to her Self. i think she tried to force herself to get better in gf2, under the assumption that simply being with someone you love who loves you is enough. but getting better requires work. i don't like the pervasive idea in fiction that couples getting together is the Solution to interpersonal problems, because it's not. it can help! but when you're accustomed to being alone, it's easy to stay alone even when you share every waking moment with someone else. i think Terezi is proof to (Terezi) that getting better takes work, and she despises the notion that she needs to do that work, that this version of her "getting better" is obviously preferable to who she is now. it's revealing that she imposes parentheses on herself so immediately upon meeting Terezi. it's worth noting that when Vriska tries to talk to (Terezi) in the A1 solo, she doesn't use those parentheses.

i think (Terezi) knows that if she even started to have a conversation about all this stuff, she'd lose. there are so many little moments where you can see her resolve shake a little. her harshness is a manifestation of instability. to open that door even a crack is to consent to demolishing the whole house. so she closes herself off altogether. she tells Terezi she'll kill her if she speaks to her again, and when Vriska begs her to seek help, (Terezi) spits in her face.

infinite credit to janet girlpillz for all the art in A1 solo but this panel especially. it took a lot of work to get the mood and tone just right. i cannot overstate how lucky i feel to have her in my camp. this moment would be nothing without her.

it was important for me that the impact of this particular patooie be almost entirely on (Terezi). Vriska's shocked, yes, but in the way of being interrupted mid-sentence more than anything. i wanted to see the moment right before Vriska can emotionally process what's just happened. nonverbal, not overly emotive, surprised, taken aback. but not mad. not sad. not angry. it's (Terezi) who's angry. Vriska laughs it off pretty fast once the fluttersled departs, because she sees the gesture for what it is. it's not really about her or for her. it's (Terezi) kicking the dog to chase it away, maybe because she thinks its for the dog's own good, or maybe because she just doesn't want the responsibility of taking care of a dog, except she IS the dog and she might not even know it.

as to (Terezi)'s turn towards "Justice," i'm not even sure she really believes it. does she actually think June is guilty of a crime? or is this just an extremely elaborate means of tethering her fate to the woman she used to love? and in fact, is that love truly in the past tense for her?

right now, (Terezi) and the rest of the crew are in a state of transition, carried forward by the high-stakes manic momentum of chapter 8 into a new life with new rules without really knowing what that actually entails. i think their commitment to any idea of their role in that future is highly precarious, especially as we proceed out of that manic phase into what will, eventually, become the new normal. right now their motivations are all hypothetical, contingent, abstract. that is not enough in the long term. it will take something real, something personal, to get them not just to stay in Silverbark's company, but to live there. Silverbark has sown the seeds of these in each of her conversations with the core cast. but to paraphrase VV, their ultimate reason for choosing to do what they will do is theirs to decide.

it wouldn't take much to shake (Terezi) out of her present self-destructive funk. it's just that there aren't very many things that could, and most of them are on Earth C. the question for me going forward is, what will it take to transform (Terezi)'s present verve for becoming "a detective" from an elaborate larp into a genuine career conviction? she can't maintain her delusion of moral superiority without that. (Terezi)'s a real piece of work but i don't think she enjoys lying, even and perhaps especially to herself. but she is a serial lifelong liar-by-omission. the currency of her deception is silence.

and that's something that (Terezi) and Silverbark have in common.

my final note (dear god does this woman ever shut up) is on the characterization of Terezi. she obviously doesn't get many lines in this chapter, and that's interesting. I have a hard time imagining that even a medicated 30-something Terezi is particularly good at holding her tongue. part of it is just sheer practicality. there are ELEVEN characters with speaking roles in this chapter, and of those Terezi is the least... i don't want to say "important," because she IS important. least relevant, maybe? none of this interpersonal drama has anything to do with her. when you think about it, Terezi is in a similar position now to the one Silverbark was in when she returned to Earth C. older, wiser, fundamentally different, while simultaneously stepping into the role her less mature younger self occupied in all these people's lives. i think she recognizes that the only thing she can do in this situation is cause trouble, so she mostly avoids contributing altogether. her home base in the scene is Vriska, until at last the space opera drama mamas fuck off to their Very Important Story and she can safely make jokes again. wow, what a bitch. let's go get omelettes.

it'll be interesting to see (when we get to it, which will be a long time from now) how Terezi fits in with Jane and Karkat, and on Earth C in general. how will the media respond to her? how will culture at large respond to her? jesus christ man, it's gonna be such a fucking mess.

anyway, those are some rambling thoughts on Terezi and (Terezi)! i hope your thirst is sated, or at least that you didn't drown.

[hms-no-fun]

Sarah, Do you hate Rose Lalonde? Not in like the heavy malicious way people associate with Andrew and his relationship with hussie but like, as a fan of godfeels for probably the wrong reasons (my autistic ass really likes the way you approach the character and also me when someone writes Dirk and doesn’t make him a irredeemable piece of shit and a active creep) something that’s stuck out to me reading your tumblr and thinking back on the story is that rose is, to me at least, one of the most unluckiest characters in godfeels, both from a writing and in character perspective,m.

she’s the first to display the kid’s transphobia and thereby the first to get reality checked by June (which, to be fair to both June as a character and your reason for that scene in your godfeels video, she deserved) and therefor the first forced to learn the lesson of “you can move on and continue being friends with people but still not forgive them for the shit they put you through” (which I will admit I might be wrong on) and I’m pretty sure the first one to die when June does the whole kill everyone (or at least everyone that’s considered gods) on earth c thing, and besides that, unless I’ve misremembered something, besides the first chapter of divergence syndrome, she doesn’t really do much until she gives her final message to kanaya and well, the shit all goes down.

I’m not a big big fan of rose Lalonde, but it just feels like there’s something like, there, like there’s something about rose that you’ve never agreed with, and thinking back on it I don’t hate it, but it feels like sometimes rose is a means to a end, which is what all characters are but I mean like, a means means to a end, “how do Segway into the beta kids transphobia of June” through Rose’s constant biased Psychoanalysis failing her in the worse way possible, “How to keep epigone in after Dirk’s absolute asskicking” possessing her corpse, “how to finally get Gerald’s halo out of the story” get her dead, “how do I pronounce death to all endgame ships” kill the lesser used part of the pair, it just, feels like there’s something there, not something outright malicious, but something just, there, like the reverse of the hussie Vriska stuff, creator’s Chew toy stuff.

I apologize for the rudeness this ask may give off, I do truely love godfeels and read up to date anything about it that gets released, this just has been negging the back of my mind for so long.

spoilers for godfeels 3 here but i guess that ship's kinda sailed if you read the question lmao

i don't hate Rose at all! i mean i think freudians are all cranks and it really bugs me how much mid-century and contemporary marxist theory is couched in freudian/jungian/lacanian bullshit, but that's not really got anything to do with Rose lmao. i can't say that i hate any of the characters in godfeels the way andrew seemed to hate, say, Jake English (though there *are* homestuck characters i dislike and wouldn't enjoy writing, which is why they're not in the fic). i'm of the mind that every character sucks in their own unique ways and that's precisely what makes fiction fun to read. that Rose doesn't have a ton of direct agency in the narrative just comes down to, in part, this being a story focused primarily on June. that i didn't really understand how to write Rose in gf1-2 certainly doesn't help. but it's also related to how i interpret her role as a Seer of Light.

her role in gf3 onwards is defined by the Epilogues, where she either needed to transfer her consciousness to a robot body that could contain her ultimate self before her physical body died, or otherwise exist in a universe untethered from canon where connection to her ultimate self is irrelevant. she's had visions of, presumably, a great deal of the events of chapter 8, and i think understood that VV's whole gambit (whether or not she knew it was VV specifically playing this game) was to split the difference between Candy and Meat by disconnecting from Homestuck canon while still maintaining existential relevance in the shadow of some other story.

a lot of the best narrative premonitions/prophecies, especially in Homestuck, use them for dramatic irony-- that is, by trying to avoid a projected future, you only end up creating it. classic macbeth shit. if there's anyone in this story who viscerally understands that vicious narratological cycle, it's Rose Lalonde. so rather than pushing back, warning her friends, trying to rally the troops, she instead accepts that her universe's survival requires sacrifice, namely Major Character Death.

in this way, her so-called suicide wind is an echo of Dirk's own suicide in Candy, albeit towards existentially opposite purposes. and in that sense it's an equally selfish act, because who knows! maybe they *could* have done something substantial to prepare for Epigone's coming if Rose had bothered to warn anyone! but such is the passive nihilism of our beloved Seer, whose death could never be anything less than a dramatic tragedy. this was, in fact, an exercise in absolute agency-- Rose chose to accept her fate rather than fight back against it, perhaps even vibed with how poetic it was to be decapitated by her own beloved wife.

all of this is very relevant to the future of godfeels-- i didn't put her at the center of a load-bearing polycule just to have her death be meaningless. :)

[hms-no-fun]

so off of the thing u posted earlier about serial stories and how it’s felt for me to read this upd8 as the first one i’ve seen live, how does the release schedule of gf affect how you write? like do u decide to focus on specific characters or storylines after an especially long hiatus, or do u intend the parts to be read as a more cohesive whole

oooo this is an interesting one.

i'll start by saying that there is no release schedule as such. chapter 8 is a bit of a unique circumstance because i view it as a singular unit of storytelling despite being split into three acts, so it was very important to me that they all come out within at most a week of each other. going forward into 3.2 i definitely WANT a more consistent release schedule (so that i can actually budget time to work on other stuff), but up until now it's basically been "a new chapter comes out when i finally have the energy to write a new chapter."

for the record, when i first published 3.1 chapter 1 in january 2020, i was certain that i'd have 3.1 finished by july 2020. oops!

anyway.

when i divide a fic up into parts, i don't do so arbitrarily. from the first chapter of gf3.1 i've known how it was gonna end. so for me, the writing process is basically just a matter of getting to that endpoint in as interesting and fulfilling a way as possible.

i definitely design godfeels, especially gf3, to be a story that rewards archive reading, and i always want it to feel like a cohesive whole. when a fic in this series is finished, i want it to feel like a complete unit of storytelling whose beginning, middle, and end are all satisfying, even if there's a bit of a cliffhanger or something. like i think gf2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 each have their own identity and make sense as individual fics even as they they tell one continuous story.

in the same way though, i also put a lot of effort into making each chapter feel like a complete unit of storytelling in itself. it's not like i just write until i stop and then say "yeah that's a chapter, sure." i also have very specific endpoints for each chapter in mind, and work the same process out accordingly.

ok spoilers for godfeels 3.1.8.1 under the break!

with the latter half of gf3 especially, there's also sort of a mental checklist of hooks that i need to set up that i'm constantly ticking from. for instance with ch8.1, it was really important that we see exactly when/where dave, roxy, callie, rose, kanaya, karkat, jane, jake, jasprose, and yes june, jade, and davepeta (rip) are before the countermeasure goes off. besides giving us a status update on the cast, this also gives me a chance to further iterate on some plot threads that i've got in the works (like rose's nightmares, or roxy and callie's plan re:jade, or karkat slowly converting jane into a communist). i also have plans for individual characters that i'll take the opportunity to seed in minor ways.

as a longterm for-instance that i think is safe to talk a LITTLE BIT about: in ch4, the robot in jade's space mansion says this:

and then in ch5, lenore says this to june:

and lastly in ch8.1, burning romeo says this to lenore

i can forgive you for not connecting these dots seeing as we're talking about really long chapters where a lot of stuff happens that were all released between months of downtime.

so basically what i'm trying to do is get the reader to ask themselves why controlling/erasing memories keeps coming up with these characters. and then of course there's gherard's halo which is implied to be rewriting june's memories, and which jade herself seems painfully familiar with.

if i ever say some shit like "the answer to [x] seems painfully obvious to me" it's almost always because of little shit like this. the hooks i'm talking about are very intentional but rarely bigger than a couple words in the middle of a speech... so they're really easy to miss, especially if you're not reading this thing all at once! and this is the way in which i think gf3 especially will be rewarding to return readers by the end, because once you have a fuller picture of what's going on then a whole lot of stuff that seemed innocuous will immediately stand out as foreshadowing.

BUT! as fun as these hooks are, they can't carry very much narrative weight in the short term. so when writing a chapter i am always trying to find a balance between like a dozen disparate elements. if i know a chapter is going to be tragic, i want there to be humor in the dialogue. if i know a character's going to lose agency, i want to give them something real to do. vriska-june's fight with xtrick, for example, is pure candy. is it strictly necessary? is there much in the way of plot weight in that fight? well there's some light worldbuilding and characterization involved, but... no, not particularly. it just felt like we needed a cool mech battle! like if i'm gonna go to all this trouble to set up this big epic moon war then fuck dude we might as well have a cool mech battle!

a hiatus between chapters has never really changed my plans in the short term? i will say that i'm glad i waited to write ch8 until i got medicated, because in the months since i posted ch7 i think i've gotten over a small chunk of the homestuck-related cynicism i gained through 2020. but overall i don't choose to focus on specific characters as a result of a hiatus.

in the case of lenore's big aside, that was actually one of the last additions before 8.1 went into revisions. i knew that i wanted lenore to abandon the legion, but i thought that scene was gonna be real short. except when i started writing it i realized, wait, hold on. this is the PERFECT opportunity to finally give the audience a sense of what kind of operation jade and davepeta are running. on top of that, it also let me set up some very important hooks that will be a major focus of 3.2.

it's funny that when i started this fic i was really determined to keep the space opera stuff out as much as possible until we got to 3.2. like there's a specific piece of information that will be revealed in 8.2 that i thought for the longest time was gonna be endgame shit. but i've been thinking a lot about story structure and how easy it is to just sort of hide everything from the audience and string them along on the promise of big reveals. so i've pretty much decided, no, i'm gonna have the confidence to show my hand a little. because the meat of this story isn't in the plot twists or the slowly emerging mysteries of the grander plot, it's in the way these characters interact and how they cope with the situations they wind up in. if i have confidence in my ability to write that stuff well, then i'm actually much more capable of writing something that feels really cohesive and like it's building up to something. it's a delicate balancing act, giving enough of a substantive trickle of new information that it's clear there definitely IS something there and not just a vague mystery box, while ALSO not revealing so much that when we actually get to the bits that i'm foreshadowing the reader feels like they're retreading old ground.

to circle this back around, the reason these last three chapters are all under the umbrella of "chapter 8" isn't just because i wanted the eighth fic in the series to end with eight chapters (although that is true). i view all three acts as being part of a very deliberate contiguous whole, in the same way that the beast that is chapter 4 exists as a contiguous whole in my head. but i think you'll see when 8.2 goes up in a week that there's a pretty natural division within the acts themselves that lends towards being presented as their own discrete units of storytelling. you could easily see them as their own chapters? but there's a particular sort of... simultaneity, let's say, that demands (imo) they be read as a singular thing.

mostly though i just really like ending chapters in big dramatic ways!!! i love making people go OH SHIT OH FUCK and keysmash relentlessly. and that's how homestuck ended its acts!

uhh the end

[hms-no-fun]

GODFEELS 3 PART 1 CHAPTER 8 ACT 1 IS UP

read the rest right here 

[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]

so about the scene near the end of 8.3.1, when j and vriska are like "we dont share a head anymore, we're real!". essentially it has me worried for some implications that could come across as really not great depending on how it plays out. i don't think it will be because you've done an excellent job so far i am just a bit nervous and wanted to let you know that it could be concerning if handled poorly and to ask about how you do intend to handle it if you are at liberty to say.

there's a couple things i want to say in response to this, and they will probably come across as harsh, so first of all i just want it stated for the record that i 100% understand your concern here. this is a sensitive, personal subject that would be very easy to fuck up, and i know a lot of folks are really invested in this story and don't want to see it turn into another thing they resent for getting it wrong in some way. i've watched this happen countless times to art that i was really invested in. i've felt that disappointment and i want nothing more than to avoid that in the case of godfeels.

(this is a long post so i'm gonna put a break here, some spoilers follow for godfeels 3 part 1 chapter 8 act 3 [1/2] lmao)

i'll agree that J and vriska saying "we're real" upon having physical bodies is maybe weirdly mixed messaging compared against J's personal realization of "i'm real." this is something i stared at on the page for a while, because i knew the implications, but i couldn't really come up with a better way to phrase it that didn't involve a much lengthier conversation that felt totally out of place given the circumstances. to my mind, it makes perfect sense that there would be two separate colloquial uses of the term "real" here. when J says "i'm real," it's a statement of personal agency and an affirmation that they do exist as an independent entity. when J and vriska on the beach say "we're real," they're speaking to the fact that they have physical bodies and are separate from one another in a way they've never been before. having them say, instead, "we have bodies" maybe would be clearer for the reader, but it just didn't feel in character to me. maybe it could have been "we're real! i mean, real real!" but i think if anything that would just make your fears even worse. i elected to keep the text as it was published because i felt the context of the rest of the chapter resolved these questions in a much more satisfying way than a simple conversation ever could.

this is, to an extent, why i originally wanted to release chapters 8.3.1 and 8.3.2 within a couple days of each other, because despite its length 8.3.1 is still functionally the middle of J and vriska's arcs. there are a lot of unresolved questions on the table right now and i recognize it's probably a lot harder to appreciate what 8.3.1 is doing when there is this big cliffhanger that we've been stuck on for nearly 60,000 words. it's just unfortunately true that real-life circumstances made it impossible for me to get the last part of this chapter finished in the timeframe i wanted to, and i knew it would be difficult for folks to be left with SO MUCH uncertainty after all the dread i've been invoking for a solid three weeks now. so i can only imagine how all of that could make this uneasy feeling about J and vriska being physically "real" that much worse. and i have sympathy for that! i really do.

but also, i can't say i super appreciate being questioned on my intentions like this. because essentially what you're asking me is "are you planning on doing good representation?" and i just don't believe that there's a way for me to answer this question that will satisfy you. the work will speak for itself when it's done. but i have said multiple times in multiple places that i am looking at this as a plural story, and i've reiterated multiple times in multiple places that i've very explicitly considered these concerns long before this chapter was released. i don't know how many different ways i can vaguely assuage your fears before it feels like what you really want is for me to just tell you what happens, as if you have a right to that information on the basis of anxiety alone.

i know this story means a lot to you, i know you just want it to be the best it can possibly be, and i know you want to make sure i don't wind up tripping over myself in the execution. but the thing is that i am not accountable to your concerns. i never have been, and i never will be. i certainly, 100% take those concerns into account, because i don't want to tell a story that inflicts harm accidentally. but i am not aiming to tell a prototypical narrative in any way. the model of transness i showed in gf2 was not meant to be THE model of transness, just my perspective on it. in the same way, the model of plurality i'm showing in gf3 is not meant to be THE model of plurality, just my perspective on it. chapter 8.3.1 was not 40,000 words because i wanted to appease my plural readers. it was 40,000 words because i was reckoning very directly with the psychological reality of my own headmates, and the damage we knowingly/unknowingly inflicted upon each other over the years before i/we recognized our plurality for what it was. which is a thing i feel like i shouldn't have to say!! i really hate toting out the "actually i've suffered so it's okay for me to make challenging queer art" excuse. the work should speak for itself. i'm willing to talk about the art forever, as should be BOUNTIFULLY obvious at this point, but this kind of thing? i don't like talking about my own plurality in public, but i feel like doing so is the only way i can convey the seriousness with which i am treating this story. and that fucking sucks!!! i really just don't appreciate the extra pressure to "get it right." i already knew the pressure was there. you aren't telling me something i don't know by asking this question.

if anything, it feels like a threat. and i know that's not how you intend it, anon. but i have been on this roundabout more than enough times to know where this line of reasoning leads. what happens if i do disappoint you? what happens if you feel utterly betrayed by this work that has helped to define some brilliant piece of you? do i then become the next enemy, the next andrew hussie, the next queer traitor whose name is hissed in hushed tones with derisive vitriol? "she came so close, and then she fucked it all up..."

this exact pressure, from this exact fandom, has literally derailed the lives of several of my closest friends for years. i have watched AND personally endured harassment campaigns both for homestuck fanworks and for discussions around the text of homestuck itself. i almost abandoned godfeels outright last year because i was convinced the joy i felt in telling this story could never be outweighed by the sheer possessive monstrosity with which vocal sections of this fandom treat anyone who tries to do something different. especially if that "something different" involves messy queerness.

to put it as frankly as i can: i do not care about good representation, and i never have. if i cared about good representation, i would have made june exactly the bubbly best-case-scenario post-transition gal that a lot of fanart depicts. if i cared about good representation, i would just have june be plural and immediately start using plural terms and go about it in a very safe and conventional way (insofar as any depiction of plurality can be called "conventional" at this point).

the only thing i, as an artist, have ever cared about is whether my art is telling the truth. if it's not, then it's worthless. if it is, then i believe that accusations of "good representation" will naturally follow, because on the whole i think most readers (especially queer ones) know when you're lying to them. this story has always been rough, traumatic, and challenging, entirely because it is an expression of my own rough, traumatic, and challenging experiences both as a trans woman and now as a plural trans woman. what i care about is making sure that this story is and remains undeniably itself.

and i just don't think that is possible in an environment where i'm also being pressured -even in a well-intentioned way!- to tick the right representational boxes in order to satisfactorily avoid criticism of x y z depiction.

and look. if the last part of this chapter comes out and utterly beefs it, we can talk. i've deliberately not educated myself on a lot of existing plural models because i wanted this to be something that was mine, but it's entirely possible that in the process of that i will end up stumbling over some harmful trope that i didn't know anything about. but fundamentally, my decision to put plurality on the center stage in this narrative was not a "oh i have a lot of plural readers so i should pander to them" situation. i decided to put plurality on the center stage in this narrative because i realized it was always on the center stage, and i was just in denial about it. i would not introduce anything to the universe of this story out of a sense of obligation or fanservice or whatever else. i did this because i believe in it, because i believe it is an honest part of this story that expands and enhances the palette of what already exists in beautiful and unexpected ways. i don't take that lightly. i don't take the responsibility i feel as someone who has, in a very real sense, stumbled ass-backwards into being the steward of what i guess i have to acknowledge at this point is, in some sense, "an important work of plural fiction" lightly.

i know, maybe better than most people, what's at stake here. reminding me of what's at stake only makes me more nervous, thus making my job (which isn't even a job since i literally can't get paid for godfeels) that much harder. so please, just have patience and let me finish this corner of the narrative, and when it's done you can judge it for what it is.

[hms-no-fun]

The new interlude was pretty intense, and I wasn’t sure if I followed along with the sequence of events perfectly, especially in the second half. I’m mainly wondering what exactly happened, and also how things could have changed so drastically between them? I’m not sure how much time had passed in between then and their last meeting, but it seems like the way they do things has turned to be more of an exclusively violent thing rather than violence with emotional processing alongside it.

i’m not going to spell out what exactly happened, especially in the latter half. i suggest slowly rereading this fic with an eye towards physicality and symbolism, keeping in mind Dana’s classpect and how we’ve seen her use it in the past. consider, as well, the introductory note’s use of the phrase “aggressively canonical” and what that might imply. this isn’t a huge ask imo considering “stomach” is a measly 3,994 words long, compared to the nearly 40,000 words contained in just one of chapter 8’s many fingers. there are more answers present within the text than you might expect, but you’ve got to put the pieces together yourself. failing that, there’s always the godfeels fan server...

but now to the meat of your question, which i very much do want to talk about at excruciating length (after the break).

this interlude is a lot of things. one of them is an experiment.

other writers besides me have contributed to godfeels before (Taz with Dirk dialogue in ch8 acts 2 and 3, Julia with the Dana v Silverbark fight in act 4), but interlude 3 is the first entry in the series that was primarily written by someone else. not only that, but it’s also the first real glimpse we get into the narrative universe that is likely to become a major focus of our attention in the near future. as much as i talk big about throwing my ego in the trash for collaborations, i have to admit that this was a bit scary for me! and not just in the sense that godfeels is my baby or whatever. you don’t need to look very long to find examples of indie projects like this utterly destroyed when their overly-precious creators decide to throw their collaborators under the bus for the sake of their sacred vision (money).

i don’t want to be that guy. i’ve been personally fucked over by different versions of that guy multiple times in just the last few years, and it terrifies me that i was blindsided every time. i’m terrified that i’ll take every precaution and still wind up becoming that guy somehow. i hate creative dictators. i hate that our primary cultural definition of collaboration still paradoxically hinges on one or two people being the head of the dragon. i don’t want to be the head of anything, i just want to make cool shit with my friends.

HOWEVER. the fact remains that i’ve written nearly 400,000 words of this fucking thing largely on my lonesome. there’s a lot that only i am privy to, and not just in plot terms. so the big test for us was, how do i as ~the director~ ensure that the text is true to canon, in character, and just generally up to my arbitrary standards of aesthetic consistency, without compromising the primary author’s work? this was a big learning experience and involved several long conversations about... well, basically everything i just said.

thing is, everyone in the work server has their own little section of godfeels they tend to gravitate towards, and Julia's been laser focused on Dana and Lenore pretty much since the day i invited her on board. i can't remember the exact chain of events that got us here, but iirc Julia started writing this interlude on her own, i liked it enough to suggest we should work together to make it canon, and she agreed. she finished the first draft maybe a month and a half ago, and from there we talked very openly about how we wanted to collaborate, what we were willing to budge on, what we weren’t, that sort of thing. where we eventually landed was that she reserved the right to reject any of my suggestions on the prose while giving me a lot of latitude to influence dialogue. i added/modified a few lines in the first half, but for the most part it’s all Julia. my big contribution was the final sequence, which Julia improved in several key ways.

i won’t linger on this process talk for much longer, but i think the most fun part of writing this for me was seeing which of my suggestions Julia rejected. i would comment on a single line of narration with a paragraph of thoughts, and she’d reject them... but also find ways to incorporate bits and pieces of my thoughts elsewhere in the text? this was what ultimately eased my mind about this process, because it didn’t matter so much to me whether or not she fixed any given line as long as we both knew that the ambiguity was a choice she was making.

ANYWAY, it made sense for this specific interlude (which features two 29 year old characters we’ve only just met) to have a completely different authorial voice from prior interludes. it even comes down to the title: “penny in a bed of flowers” and “eyes like violet fire” have this poetic energy to them that’s utterly absent in interlude 3’s “stomach.” the dreamy naivety of the young twenty-something giving way to the base bodily functions of actual genuine adults who’ve lived, er, shall we say colorful lives.

(one similarity between all the interludes is that they are fundamentally fanfiction. it just so happens that interlude 3 is fanfic for a canon that doesn’t exist yet :)

the first two interludes were soft, warm, primarily positive sexual experiences. i wanted them to typify some of the beauty of transfeminine sexuality, as a refuge from the pressing danger and trauma of 2.3. interlude 3, by contrast, looks at two transfems who’ve been in an on-again off-again relationship for over a decade. on top of that, this is their first private reunion after Lenore sold Dana and the other upsilons up the river three years ago. there’s a lot going on between them, most of which goes unspoken. we’re eavesdroppers here, there’s no way they’re gonna take the time to contextualize what they’re doing when it’s just the two of them.

which gets us to what i’ve been building up to all along. i want to single out this specific bit from your question, anon:

“it seems like the way they do things has turned to be more of an exclusively violent thing rather than violence with emotional processing alongside it.”

i’ll start by observing that we’ve never seen Dana and Lenore alone together until this fic, and i don’t think i’ve ever met a couple that behaves the same in public as they do in private.

it’s true that their relationship involves a lot of physical violence, but is it exclusively violent? does it really seem like there’s no emotional processing going on in this scene? from where i’m sitting, this scene is nothing BUT emotional processing. the difference is that there’s no resolution. and why would there be? it’s not like Lenore called Dana a bitch on twitter dot com (although she definitely has done that). whatever the nature of her betrayal, it led to Edie and Alphi disappearing, and Dana being banished to starve and go mad all alone on a meteor for THREE YEARS. there’s no cathartic conversation that’s gonna paper over that, especially not on the first night they’re together again. you could draw a parallel here to Dare’s many epiphanies not actually curing their depression if you liked. one might even call it “a theme.”

before i say more, Julia has some things to add:

I am a fan of metanarrative fuckery–for example, I love how Terezi's narration in the latest chapters refuses to turn inwardly, and that refusal collapses as her stress mounts. That being said, I unfortunately just have the one narrative method: I like unreliable PoVs that deny the audience information the character in question wouldn't be thinking about. Dana won't stop doing things to think about the decade-long depths of the relationship Lenore betrayed. This is her life, these are her actions. You, as reader, can but take them as they come.

If I wanted to give myself more credit than's due, I would claim that this also reflects the nature of Dana (and co.) as an internal narrative. She's older, she's more resentful, she's just come out of a situation she spent 3 years coldly simmering about, and it went worse than she expected in some ways (she didn't get to ether Silverbark), but shockingly better in others (she got the Comet and Lenore back). Crucially, Dana is trained for violence, so she's not given to these Egbertian windbag breakdowns that give away the entirety of her thoughts as a response to sudden violence–she just stances up, and acts. She's been doing it for a long time, she's good at it and she likes it enough to be a weakness.

jumping off from that, the thing to understand is that Dana is a fighter. not just someone who likes to fight but a trained, highly skilled grappler who Silverbark at one point thought of as “her finest mentee.” just from the text of this interlude alone, it’s safe to assume that Dana and Lenore have fought each other many times in the past. there’s even this snippet of a memory in the last section where Dana seems to willingly, covertly lose to Lenore for sex reasons:

(idk why i censored the words “fucks” and “orgasm” in this screenshot)

Lenore is less technically skilled than Dana, but she makes up for it by being extremely strong and durable (those troll muscles, baby). if i were to make a Lenore kin onion, Jessica Jones would be pretty close to the center. so they have this back and forth where Dana can just fucking unload on Lenore without causing any real lasting damage. and it shouldn’t go unstated that fighting and sex are basically the same activity!

Lenore says of their relationship that “we like it this way.” they both trained together in the EWL, and despite their differences and the bumpy lives they’ve led they still always wind up back together somehow. i would not call this a healthy dynamic per se, but these are fucked up women who grew up in what seems to have been a deeply ideological paramilitary organization. “healthy” is a luxury for women like these. and whatever you might think of it from the outside, they clearly enjoy it- or, at least, there was a time when they enjoyed it.

this encounter feels to me like muscle memory. the children have been put to bed, medical emergencies are taken care of, now is the time to drink and catch up. what they want, the two of them, is to have what they had, i think. they both know they have to address the shadow hanging over them at some point, but not tonight. tonight is for them. and like, yeah, of course they’d think that was possible. Dana’s been an unwilling bachelor for ages now, and Lenore? i can’t imagine she’s had much free time with her job running support for a high-ranking ewl member. maybe a few one-night stands here and there? but nothing satisfying in the long-term. throughout chapter 8, before their reunion, we’ve seen both Lenore and Dana independently wishing the other were there, despite everything between them. they’re lonely and they want to fuck each other, because they are each other’s best fuck. the entire ritual is so rehearsed, so known, so comfortable start to finish.

but of course, that shadow is just too loomy not to infect that ritual. you think they’d say shit like “i’m fine” and “i’m not mad” if they really meant it? they’re spells to ward off the inevitable and possibly relationship-shattering tension between them. these two already seemed to have something of a kismesissitude going, though i hesitate to simplify their thing (or any pair’s “thing” in godfeels, for that matter) in such basic terms, because they genuinely love each other. we can debate what kind of love it is, but if nothing else it’s pretty clear that that love has endured a LOT. they value that endurance, i think.

Dana and Lenore have been through too much together to escape their mutual orbit. Lenore thought she could, and Dana wished she could, but here they are again, back at it same as always. is it healthy? is it too violent? is it bad? i honestly don’t know. what i like about them is that they can be mad at each other, hate each other even, but still know deep down that no one else gets it the way they do. they’re rivals to lovers to enemies and back again because they’re too stubborn to really, truly let go. they’d never want to. that’s what makes it hurt all the more, one of many reasons they can’t just paper over this betrayal with a cathartic bout of a hatesex, that Dana knows she can’t let Lenore out of her life again. she knew it the instant she saw her step out of the Comet. so it’s this contradiction that can’t be resolved, not when both parties are so proud, and it manifests in this passionate anger, this desire to love and devour, to punish and protect, until they tucker themselves out and wind up just feeling empty inside, because again, the core contradiction hasn’t been resolved. it's beautiful and terrible all at once and buddy if that ain't godfeels from toe to tip

[hms-no-fun]

what do u think should be the semi-official soundtrack 2 listen 2 (loop?) while reading the epilogue!

well golly would you look at that, i just so happen to have a playlist for exactly that purpose!

[hms-no-fun]

not a particularly serious question but who is the coolest godfeels character in your opinion

it really says a lot about the swerve godfeels 3 has taken that my gut response here is angel dirk. he gets a bunch of great one-liners, he's got a cool busted-ass godkiller sword, and he was rebirthed into the mortal plane like athena from the forehead of zeus. he gets SO many coolguy moments in chapter 8, it's unreal.

i think the runner up has to be dare. as the not-so-secret-anymore anime protagonist of godfeels, dare is basically the only character who gets an unambiguously happy ending out of chapter 8. not to turn this into a character analysis post, but it was really important to me that we have someone whose entire arc was tied into the fight for autonomy...

fuck it, i'm gonna talk about themes for a second.

in homestuck proper, retcon was treated like this sudden revelation that completely changed the game (literally and figuratively). coming into gf1, obviously the existential psychodrama of possessing that kind of power was a big focus for me. how that power and responsibility can eat away at you until there's nothing left, and how to find hope that life is more than just power (hint: it's other people).

then in gf2, that question gets expanded and recontextualized. now june is june, she's a trans woman demanding to be heard, demanding to have her own autonomy. when her friends react poorly to this, she reacts poorly back. obviously murdering your friends isn't the healthiest response to them being shitty to you when you come out as trans, but also this is homestuck. none of these bitches are healthy and they never have been. they're gods, and they can destroy countless lives accidentally. at least june made her destruction un-happen!

the other side of that in gf2 is dirk reacting poorly to having to revise his plans for june. he was relying on her passivity, and now he has to get aggressive. this is meant, beyond the obvious display of complex social transphobia on an individual level, as a microcosm of the power dynamics at play between marginalized queer people and those in power.

this is the conflict that gets expanded to a cosmic scale on gf3. we see in june's retcon-fueled powerset an unfathomable productive capacity, and in epigone we see the next level up beyond dirk, a systemic cannibalistic urge to seize that productive capacity and use it for its own ends. we see, as well, that in this kind of power struggle, queer people simply have no recourse in fighting back. when epigone arrives, that's all she wrote. no amount of will or bluster or strength is enough to fight back. it takes a miraculous chorus of hope to pull the afflicted out of its corruptive gestalt long enough to fight back, and even then epigone seems pretty confident that this merely delays the inevitable.

dare and dirk both serve as interesting counterpoints to epigone, because while they both fall to its influence, they also are the ones most responsible for keeping it from winning outright. it's telling that they're both exploited queer people with complicated histories desperately fighting for some kind of autonomy. which they both get! although in dirk's case it's a bit of a double edged sword for, uh, hopefully obvious reasons.

this is why it was important to me that dare be this archetypally lucky anime character. i knew from the outset that they would, eventually, convince X to let go of june, and that it would be quite literally a "the power of friendship" moment. the only way to sell that, in my opinion, is to have it be the culmination of this brutally painful and difficult journey through setback after setback. this depressed and often suicidal person choosing to live, which of course extends to X as they are members of the same system, and ultimately clawing their autonomy back despite all odds.

i don't know to what extent this makes dare cool, but it does make them one of my very favorite characters in the story right now, and someone i'm really looking forward to writing more of as time goes on.

[hms-no-fun]

I'm curious about your general process for writing. How far ahead do you plan? do you have basic outlines that you then flesh out, or is it more stream of consciousness write-it-as-it-comes? how many revision passes do you typically do before you call it good enough?

this is a fun one because i've learned a LOT of lessons about this exact topic recently! this is another long one, so keep reading after the break.

generally speaking, my process involves finding a balance between planning and improvisation. i've known how gf3.1 was gonna end for over a year now, and i knew a lot of the broad beats that i wanted to hit along the way: setting up silverbark's backstory, teasing the upsilons, the reality storm, junerezi divorce fever, various character deaths. when i wrote kanaya's "milf mug" conversation back in 3.1 chapter 3 (published april 2020) i knew that she would use the positive/negative space thing to help june et al escape at the last second.

i've spoken about why chapter 8 got big and round a couple times already, but at the risk of retreading trodden ground: when i decided to embrace june's plurality as part of the narrative, i didn't quite understand the scope of what i was getting into. when i wrote chapter 8 act 1, i'm pretty sure i had no plans to bring dirk back (though i definitely did by the time the chapter was published). a whole lot of the worldbuilding of june's headspace, the metaphysics of ideaspace, even epigone to an extent; these were all improvised on the fly. if i had known just how tremendous this task would prove to be, i definitely would not have pressured myself so much to get it all done as soon as possible. but, then again, it's entirely possible that i couldn't have written chapter 8 any other way.

(to speak about the internal process here: i'm very keen on avoiding this kind of thing in the future, so before a single chapter of gf3.2 comes out we're gonna spend a solid month planning and plotting things out. this will help us split the work of writing between multiple writers, and make for an overall better narrative imo. there'll still be room for improv but i want to avoid anymore surprises like chapter 8)

on a broader scale, there's a lot that i know about the future of this story. i know the outline of all the remaining parts, and i know roughly how the series is going to end. but there's also a lot that i don't know! which for obvious reasons i can't outline here lmao.

you could maybe see my process as creating a series of nested endpoints. i know where godfeels 3 ends; i know where 3 part 1 ends; i know where chapter 8 ends; i know where this chapter ends; i know where this particular conversation ends. but rarely do i know exactly how we're going to get there from a moment to moment basis. so on the smallest scale, i know which characters are going to be in a conversation and what the "point" of the conversation will wind up being. i'll probe the scene to see what characters say and then over time coax their motivations out, which lets me further refine the dialogue to make it feel that much more driven and essential.

this ties back to my storytelling metaphor about setting up hooks to hang hats on later (kanaya's milf mug speech being an example of a hook i hung my hat on at the end of [S] saturday 2) in a really interesting way, as it's kind of the same process in reverse? maybe half the time when i set a hook, i have no idea how it will pay off (or i only come up with the payoff the moment i set the hook). so looking forward i have these endpoints i'm working towards, and looking backwards i have all these hooks i've set up that i want to hang a hat on sooner or later. it's a wild balancing act that i've refined over years, and that i'll probably continue to revise for as long as i can still write. i need a plan, a spine to work with and towards, but if it's too specific or rigid then i find it sucks all the oxygen out of the story. the thing needs to be flexible, because the fact is that your life is constantly changing and the meaning of the story you are trying to tell often changes with it. i can certainly attest to how much of chapter 8's tone is the result of recent events in my own life in a way that i never intended! it'll be tricky to find a way to maintain this flexibility while also bringing collaborators on in a more active capacity, but i think we've got a pretty solid roadmap in that regard. and my collaborators themselves have proven that they Get It in a way i never thought was possible. get you some friends who think about stories the way you do, it's SO freeing and inspiring, i'm telling you.

anyway, to the last part of your question: in the past, chapters have typically gone up around draft two or three. i'd write the whole thing and fill in the gaps, give it a complete once over (which is when all the best shit happens), and then hurry to get it out asap because i'm impatient and hungry for validation. i like to think i have a pretty good sense for when my prose is working and when it's not, but i'll often find spelling and grammar mistakes in older chapters when i go back to search for a dimly-remembered hook that make me wish i'd let these things sit a bit longer. if chapter 8 has felt like an upgrade in terms of quality, it is 100% the result of me bringing trusted collaborators on board to check my corners. these days when i get a chapter at "first draft complete" i'll post the doc in our work server and hit em with an @ everyone. at that point i've got at least three people i can depend on to come in with comments and suggestions. this is ESPECIALLY useful as my memory of big swathes of homestuck proper is, uh, patchy at best (there's a reason i've mostly fixated on the beta kids so far).

i still prefer to release chapters as soon as possible, because i find too much time in the oven leads to temptation. the delays on the chapter 8 epilogue are already doing this, because now that it's on a whenever-it's-done timeline i keep coming up with more things to add. the entire process of chapter 8 really has been

anyway uh i sure hope that answered your question

[hms-no-fun]

I am dumb when it comes to writing I'm sorry bbbuutt... how much of Godfeels 3 so far is in June's head? (I'm assuming Carnival Egotisica is just in her head but that COULD be entirely wrong)

the end of chapter 8 act 1 when the countermeasure goes off to the end of the circus egotistica in act 3 [2/2] all takes place literally inside june's head (and not in a, you know, "it's all in your head" kinda way). basically the countermeasure is what took the bite of earth c in combination with june's vicegrip on reality in that moment, which wound up dragging that chunk of planet and all its inhabitants into her mind along with everyone else in range of the countermeasure. it still physically happened in every way that matters, none of it was "just her imagination" or whatever, the events were just metaphysically isolated.

[hms-no-fun]

GODFEELS 3 PART 1 CHAPTER 8 STARTS SOON

ch8pt1: an arrow without a bow - 6/11

ch8pt2: hell and home - 6/18

ch8pt3: everything new is old again - 6/25

thank you for being so patient with me. even knowing beforehand that this was going to be a beefy chapter, its scope has still managed to surprise me. despite being split up into three parts, chapter 8 in total will still encompass more than a third of gf3.1's final wordcount.

i think i've done a pretty good job setting everyone up with a thorough sense of dread (and trust me, that dread is warranted), but with ch8pt1 coming out tomorrow i wanted to give readers something to keep in mind.

godfeels is obviously a difficult story that is embroiled in deep personal trauma. as a writer i don't think i'm particular capable of writing purely happy stories, because i think happiness is only really palpable when it is contrasted against the suffering that preceded it.

but as much as i like exploring dark territory, i don't want to be seen as a mean writer. i want to tell a story that is upsetting, funny, and hopefully at least a little profound; i do not want to tell a story that is needlessly grim or cynical. and i do not want to tell a story that is violent just for the sake of being violent.

i should hope that after [checks ao3] jesus christ 238,000 words of this story, you would have faith enough in me to not take us to a dark place if i didn't know there was a light on the other end... but a reminder every now and again can't hurt.

good luck tomorrow, folks.

:)

[hms-no-fun]

weird question that doesnt have to do with story trajectory at all, does dare have any bespoke typing quirk, or do they simply take on the quirks of the other headmates?

dare's quirk is june's pre-transition quirk. their quirks blend sometimes, but they *all* blend together at various points in different ways. this is the result of pushing and pulling within a system as we saw in chapter 8 act 3. actually, i think if you went back through godfeels you'd find a bunch of meta moments that carry a lot more weight now that you know about dare, risk, and X. even before they explicitly existed they still represent fundamental pillars of june's personality.

anyway idk quirks are weird. they're completely divorced from their original context as AIM behavior and are now just weird ways to differentiate characters through dialogue. i wonder a lot about what to do about them, because they're extremely useful and fun but they have some profound textual limitations that bother me on a metaphysical level. uh. not that that really matters lmao. we'll see what happens with quirks now that the gang is in grow-up mode

[hms-no-fun]

What has been your favorite chapter(s) to work on so far in Godfeels?

this is a tough one! chapter 8 has been such a hectic, stressful process, and the whole series has been a struggle in various ways. my first thought is [S] saturday? everything from 8.2 on was SO tough, because i was inventing a metaphysics and cosmology out of whole cloth in real time. there were so many little details i'd planned for but hadn't initially intended to come into play yet, so getting everything to fit together up to the circus egotistica was like this gargantuan math problem that i just had to stew on for hours and days and weeks.

by contrast, i've had the vast majority of the action for [S] saturday pretty well mapped out in my head since july 2020, and a whole lot of it goes back as far as january. this entire time, i've had this big messy dramatic fight looming on the horizon as The End Of Godfeels 3 Part 1. it might even be the thing that kept me from giving up on writing godfeels when things really felt bad a year ago, because it was just so CLEAR in my imagination and i honestly just wanted to see if i could pull it off! so finally getting to it after chapter 8 ballooned so fucking exponentially with the ideaspace side of things, turning what i expected to be a couple-weeks-long commitment into a three-month full-time job, was unbelievably cathartic.

writing [S] saturday wasn't always smooth, but it was so much fun. i'd wondered for a long time how i was gonna depict it, because i knew the moment required multiple layers of interiority. i thought about having the whole thing narrated and guided in and out of different perspectives (which does happen towards the end of the chapter, For Some Reason), but then i remember that back when i wrote fiction more frequently i liked using numbers as subchapter markers! so i wound up adapting a technique that i forgot i had in my toolbox, and it worked so well i'm almost certainly gonna use it more in the future.

once that structure landed, god, it was like butter. i wrote the first i think ten or fifteen subchapters in one go. the energy of it, the fact that it was exclusively stuff happening rather than this endless parade of torturous psychodrama, i honestly surprised myself with how successfully it managed to embody the spirit of the [S] while still remaining very firmly a legible work of prose. i loved coming up with gags like risk's horns, or jake dodging the sword, they were things that just emerged as i was writing it. as i went on though, the simultaneity of events got so complicated that i just had to write each layer of the scene as a whole and then splice them together after the fact. but even with these, it was such a joy to find ways to make each moment resonant, to give everyone stuff to do. like kanaya's fight with terezi? my god. completely changed how i think about kanaya lmao

otherwise though, i’m not really sure how to even quantify which chapters i enjoyed more? 3.1 has always been so deeply mired in trauma, it’s never really been pleasant to write. generally i think like, i loved writing the party scene at the end of 2.3 (that felt like such a victory lap for me, i cried a lot writing it), i loved collaborating with zoe on 3.1 ch7 and figuring out how to incorporate the art she made. that was the first real indication i had that actively collaborating with others might be the natural future course of this story, and the most fun i’ve had in the entire project has honestly just been spitballing ideas with my friends and building out the lore of this universe with folks who don’t think i’m wasting my time.

maybe i’ll be better able to consider this once the ch8 epilogue is out and we’ve properly begun A Pause For All Seasons