#godfeels 3 part 2

[hms-no-fun]

a pause for all seasons is over

godfeels 3 part 2 begins

https://archiveofourown.org/works/44185195/chapters/111109759

[heroicdivergent]

padua godfeels...hate her (affectionately) already. why are Hope players Like This

[darks-arts]

(Twilring my hair) Sooo theres this God who Feels

[godfeelscritique]

An Introduction:

godfeelscritique is a blog created with the purpose of doing an in-depth critical analysis of the eponymous fanfiction saga godfeels, or: "i dreamt of feeling better". godfeels as a work is a continuation of the internet multimedia webcomic Homestuck.

APPENDIX A: godfeels began as a four-chapter character study of John, later and for most of the work, June Egbert, commonly deliniated from the character's "official" counterpart as June Eg8ert by the fandom. For the purposes of this writing, the character will be referred to as June Egbert for the remainder of this blog.

godfeels, later renamed godfeels 1, was published between March 30, 2019, and completed April 03, 2019, ten days before the prologue of Homestuck's official continuation, The Homestuck Epilogues, was published. godfeels 2, a work spanning three "parts" as deliniated on Archive of Our Own, started on September 03, 2019, and ended on October 12th, 2019. As of writing this introduction, godfeels 3 is still ongoing, starting in November 15, having concluded it's first "part", divergence syndrome on January 03, 2022, currently being in the middle of its run of its second part, double album A: no one does it like us, and double album B: DEATH HANDS. I assume you're familiar with the work to an extent before reading further. If not, in spite of however harsh my writing on it may be, I recommend you check it out. This blog won't make sense otherwise and I'm not here to sway opinions one way or the other.

This recap out of the way, there are a couple of questions I think are worth bringing up. I'll do my best to answer them concretely and succintly.

QUESTION A: WHY GODFEELS?

godfeels is a very fascinating phenomenon to me. By all accounts it's not really the most well-known Homestuck fanfiction, nor is it expansive in its attempt to divorce itself from its context as one, at the time of writing. However, it has a very clear niche it manages to really hit, and that niche is vocal about its love for the work to the point where it is almost defining for its scene. Not really an artistic scene necessarily, but certainly a level of an aesthetic scene. That scene would be the plural transfem with a deep attachment to the original work of Homestuck who links all three traits together into a partially coherent set of signifiers. A scene I happen to belong to.

Thus, I first read godfeels sometime in 2021. And honestly, it didn't do much for me. I've continued keeping up with it, and other works by its multiple creators, out of a sense of respect for its existence and place in the scene. But in truth, I'm fascinated by what exactly makes it not resonate for me in the first place. Therefore, analysis is in order.

APPENDIX B: I'd like to take this question to make a brief disclaimer. Nothing I write here comes from malice. I hold a deep respect for those involved in the project, those who love the project, and even to the project itself, for its cultural significance. This is simply an exercize for myself and anyone who finds what I have to say interesting. I'd ask anyone who reads to refrain from insulting any of the outlined parties.

QUESTION B: WHY NOW?

Truth be told, this is a project over two years in the making. It was sometime around the end of volume 3 part 1 (commonly shortened to 3.1), divergence syndrome. I realized the feelings of the vague curiosity and confusion the work stirred in me on how it managed to evade me completely began to coalesce into thoughts. I realized this would be a good thing to do, for myself mostly.

However, I thought at the time the most sensible way to do it would've been to wait until the work was done. Judge it as a whole, let it coalesce just as I'd let my thoughts. Two years passed, and today I just decided I'd begin straight away. Why exactly, I can't say, but I did come to the realization that these works were all at first written in conversation with other ideas, expecting themselves to be the end of their part in the discussion. I'm a firm believer in judging everything, especially art, on its own merits, and its own framework.

And thus, if any annotations were to be sparked by further updates down the line, I could do just as the work did, and tie back to it when the work called for it. So here I am now, writing this.

QUESTION C: WHO ARE YOU?

You can call me GC. I don't mean to hide my identity particularly, but I do believe in the idea that an author is a paratext to their own work. (You'll be seeing me use that word a lot.) So, I would ask that you do not seek me out, either.

I have made and will make reference to myself again, but this blog will have open communication channels available. If you'd like to talk to me, discuss an idea with me, dispute some aspect of this blog with me, I'd recommend the Inbox, though I'm partial to DMs as well.

APPENDIX C: You're free to make every assumption you want about parts of my identity as you see fit. I will however correct you if I think it's silly. I don't care for identity politics.

QUESTION D: HOW WILL THIS WORK?

I've considered many different ways of tackling this. A single mega-essay, an essay per volume, an essay per part, an essay per chapter. But ultimately, I leaned towards writing an essay per part. That's the process in which the works make the most sense, and the only way I can really conceptualize them being written, given some of the gaps between publishing.

I'll provide screenshot supplements, but I don't really want this to ever devolve into me just restating the plot, peppering it with personal opinions. I'll try to focus formally on both the form and the function of the text.

Again, I believe in judging a text under its own parameters. I don't believe in the characters being "out of character" by the metric of Homestuck, because in that case I would be reading Homestuck. But I do care about its own internal logic as a work, and it's logic beyond as to the intent of how that work was made, and why. Those are the parameters of style and substance, form and function, that I will be falling back on as my ethos.

QUESTION E: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Today, April 10, 2024, I begin with this introduction. Over the next few days, I'll begin working on the first critique, an in-depth look at godfeels 1. Afterwards, I'll continue at whatever pace the process of reading, annotating, and writing follows. I can't promise specific time tables beyond that.

If you've read this far and wish to continue, welcome. This post will be updated with links to read in chronological order.

[godfeels 1]

[homestuck-fanauthor-coalition]

good name

good name (7253 words) by EtchJetty Chapters: 2/3 Fandom: Homestuck, godfeels Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Calliope & June Egbert, June Egbert & Roxy Lalonde, Calliope/Roxy Lalonde, June Egbert & June Egbert Characters: June Egbert, John Egbert, Roxy Lalonde, Calliope (Homestuck), Risk (Godfeels), Nannasprite (Homestuck), june eg8ert, Jasprosesprite (Homestuck), Roxy's Mom | Alpha Rose Lalonde, Clint Newton (Homestuck), Claire Newton (Trans Female Clint Newton) Additional Tags: Godfeels - Freeform, Time Travel, Trans Female Character, Trans John Egbert, Gender Dysphoria, Reset Angst (Undertale), Retcon Powers (Homestuck), Multiplicity/Plurality, Complacency of the Learned Summary: Your name is no longer June Eg8ert. Suddenly, the whole of your world has fallen out from under you. A divergence from the end of godfeels 2, part 2: set in stone, Chapter 2, following a June Egbert who lost the retcon coinflip.

@classpectpokerap brings us another godfeels spin off fic!

[jaden3011]

Hi Sarah! Hope you’re telling well, weird question if I may?

The recent chapter of godfeels gave me thoughts, and I wanted to ask it here, you mentioned back in godfeels 2 part 3 that you gave the blessing to anyone to make fanfics about Jade’s adventures as silverbark, and now I’m curious: do we have your blessing to make….essentially godfeels OCs? folks that liter the alien worlds you’ve introduced off-screen or unnamed. EWL members not referenced in canon for one reason or another. Hell, if it’s not too indulgently cringe to suggest the idea, former colleagues of the newer cast like Dana or Silverbark that fell outta contact due to one way (simply fell outta touch) or another (drifted apart after the incident™️).

Apologizes if any of this is cringe, the recent chapter just gave me lot of thoughts about the idea of one and i wanted to ask.

[overtrolled]

June Egbert :3

I originally felt I sort of missed the boat with June. I was not reading postcanon, I wasn't on twitter, all of a sudden people are talking about how John from Homestuck is now June from HS^2 or whatever. Little did I know that it barely is flirted with in the part of HS^2 we have and that it is almost completely a fan phenomenon. This annoyed me at first.

However, I appreciate the June phenomenon now. I did not really pay a lot of attention to John in my first readthrough, and looking for June (and myself i guess) in her helped me look at the series with fresh eyes. Some of my new favorite Homestuck fanfic are June fics (off the top of my head, Early June, One More Night (your ex-lover is dead), and godfeels). I tend to over-identify with her in some cases, so learning to pull back and look at her character as depicted was a bit of a wakeup call. all in all a nice change of pace

[ao3feed-rosekan]

godfeels 2, part 3: a good plan

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2ldgoln

by SarahZedig

My name is June Eg8ert, and I think I'm ready for what comes next... 8ut I'm still only human.

Words: 9828, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Series: Part 5 of i dreamed of feeling better

Fandoms: Homestuck

Rating: Mature

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: June Egbert, Terezi Pyrope, Rose Lalonde, Kanaya Maryam, Dave Strider, Karkat Vantas, Dirk Strider

Relationships: June Egbert/Terezi Pyrope, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas

Additional Tags: Earth C (Homestuck), Lesbian Relationships, Everyone Is Gay, Emotional Baggage, Sexual Tension, Canon-Typical Violence

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2ldgoln

[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]

GODFEELS UPD8 DOUBLE-HEADER WEEKEND

godfeels 3 part 2 continues! Jane delivers a speech. Roxy gets a job offer. Jake's alone-time is interrupted.

read verse 2 here

and verse 3 here

[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]

how much context does one miss from godfeels by not reading the hs epilogues? im caught up with godfeels as of this ask and would like to know if im missing just thematic elements or if there’s characters and/or backstory relevant to godfeels, especially with the characters that were introduced, to my knowledge, in godfeels 3.

the epilogues' influences on godfeels are a complicated mix of thematic elements, metanarrative elements, and plot elements. godfeels 2 occurs about 10 months before the epilogues (referenced in Jane's description of the stuff she found in Dirk's basement), and a number of events in gf3 only happen because godfeels isn't the epilogues. that's (one reason) why it's called "divergence syndrome."

so there are minor textual callbacks to the epilogues in various places like that, but for the most part i would say there's not much narrative context missed by not reading the epilogues. but june's narration & dirk's narration and the ways they brush up against each other is philosophically pulled directly from the epilogues, and much of VV's exposition at the very end of gf3.1 is meant as something of an answer to the "a martyr died and said fuck" conversation between Aradia and Alt-Calliope in the epilogues.

all the new characters are OCs whose backgrounds will be expounded upon at length in 3.2. if you've got a lot of questions about what is going on, don't worry, you're kind of supposed to. but it can't hurt to reread the gf3 prologue and then skim through 3.1 just to be sure!

[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]

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]

Same anon who asked previous question. Just want to clarify or frame my ask as someone who is very excited for 3.2 especially the upsilon kids and new non-cannonical stuff. I think fan works evolving from a status as 'fan work' into something brand new or with a couple bones in a skeleton framework of Homestuck.

The main point is I'm very excited for it to be not Homestuck and hope I didn't offend by seeming to ask for more derivative stuff.

I guess my question was kinda about how much influence or relevance events and characters of Homestuck will have on the EWL and plot going forward without asking for more Homestuck.

there's not much i can say here without just straight-up telling you what's going to happen. all i'll say is: the next part of this story is called "godfeels 3 part 2: double album" not "something completely different (featuring the cast of godfeels)."

[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