#it is important that 1. homestuck characters fuck and 2. they do not do it in good and appealing ways. and the real misstep in post-canon:

[loathsomespider]

bdth readers will never know just how much bad sex happened during the timeskip and that's beautiful

[homestuckreplay]

To be fair, you have to have a very high wisdom to understand Colonel Sassacre. The mischief is extremely nuanced, and without a solid grasp of mangrit and maturity most of the pranks will go over the typical reader’s head.

(page 759)

If I was making a webcomic, I’d probably take a well deserved few days off between story acts, but not so in Homestuck. We’re back, and kind of, sort of, unofficially, maybe, in Act 3?

For Act3posting, I’m gonna do a couple things.

- Hard cap reaction posts at 500 words. Time to get economical.

- End reaction posts with a command suggestion. I can’t access the actual suggestion box, so can’t influence the story directly, but I still have ideas I’d like to share.

Starting now.

So, there’s a message from Nanna in the front of Colonel Sassacre’s – and not just any message. I’d call this a prophecy. This is real fantasy novel territory, with battles and royalty and chosen ones and protagonists with cool dramatic titles and wise old spiritual guides who know far more than they should. I eat this stuff up even when it’s cliché. I wonder if the story within Sburb and the story outside of Sburb could be totally different genres.

Nanna says this book’s ‘journey will end on the Final Day of [her] life’, with Final Day underlined, so we know it’s plot important. This means she wrote this some time ago, already knowing about John’s future. Signing up to be a Sburb beta tester because it’s the Game of the Year no longer feels like a happenstance. This is cosmically fated somehow, which… is a little sad, because it takes away some of John and Rose’s success from them, if they didn’t get to this point in the game through skill but through destiny. I’m gonna have to get used to that concept, and start thinking through how free will can be exercised in a story that plays with time this way.

These titles are SO cool. ‘...the Heir of Breath and Seer of Light, the Knight of Time and Witch of Space…’ these fuck so hard. I want one. These probably correspond to John, Rose, Dave, and their secret fourth player Todd from Missouri, maybe in the same order we meet the characters, although maybe there will be a surprise shakearound. After all, Rose seems way more associated with darkness than light, and ‘Witch of Space’ feels like it’d fit her way better than ‘Seer of Light’. And no way does Dave have the earnestness and devotion necessary to be a good knight – John, on the other hand, could rise to that challenge.

Nanna’s ‘P.S. HOO HOO HOO!’ could indicate that she knew all along that she would become Nannasprite, and perhaps knew that she wouldn’t be able to deliver this message directly in sprite form, as it would be game spoilers. Or it could be that she always liked to say hoo hoo hoo, carrying the spirit of the harlequin even without being prototyped with the doll. Personally, I hope both are true.

According to the Adventure Map, Act 3 is called ‘Insane Corkscrew Haymakers’. This is really different from the first two act titles, which are both very literary sounding, have musical allusions, and indicate a setup and inciting incident of a story, respectively. A haymaker is either ‘a powerful blow with the fist’ or ‘a machine for curing hay in rainy weather’, and this is not a farm story, so my guess is the punch. Act 1’s title related to John and Act 2’s to Rose, so this should be Dave’s, especially as his narrative is often treated less seriously. Perhaps these insane corkscrew haymakers happen during his rooftop battle with his bro?

> John: Find a prank to play on Nannasprite.

[relatableblorbopoll]

Round 1 of preliminaries, group 6

The first two places get a place on the bracket

Little reminder: there will be 2 more rounds of preliminaries, the losing blorbos of this poll still have 2 chances of getting in the official bracket

propaganda under the cut

Jesper Fahey (Six of Crows)

No Propaganda

Crowley (Good Omens)

"He's gender. He's been in love with one guy for literally 6000 years and then royally fucks up his entire confession. He yells at his plants. He drapes himself over every fucking surface he sits on. He walks like *that*. He just fuckin makes sounds sometimes. He's me fr."

Dave Strider (Homestuck)

"everything that can be said about Dave's relatability will probably sound redundant, clichéd, or overdone if you are at all familiar with tumblrs sort of blorbo culture. this is exactly why he should be in this tournament.

stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: he hides his genuine emotions behind a persona, deflects sincerity with jokes, but also has a deep desire for validation and connection, so that his persona has many cracks where little bits of his true self slip through. deeply insecure, compares himself to others. a defeatist streak, avoids responsibility. does not wish to be troubled by The Horrors. he just wants to hang out and do his lil creative hobbies (making music and drawing comics). talks a lot to the point of being pretty awkward, rambling, and accidentally saying stuff he shouldnt.

all these things I think tend to resonate deeply with a lot of people, especially on Tumblr - that "person who is insecure and struggles with emotional openness so copes by making jokes" sort of trope, it's just like kin bait (affectionate). he also has a complicated relationship with gender which I know many find relatable (shout out to the "Dave homestuck was my trans awakening" homies) but whether it's about figuring out gender or sexuality or trauma or the apocalypse or anything else, Dave comes at it with an initial, learned, fear and reluctance that I think a lot of people have experienced, because it's very human and very much a part of many readers experiences (we live in a society). but he's always good, and likeable and that makes for a very important sort of relatable character. very comforting. even if he's a mess and he's an idiot you can believe he can get to something better, and you can watch him develop and grow.

also, I think he's extremely relatable because he never really knows what's going on in the comic either. I mean, that's gonna be relatable to most people Vis a vis homestuck. he's confused and he just wants to vibe and make his friends laugh. WHO AMONG US cannot relate?? I do not believe you if you say no.

I wrote too much and got way too weird about it. I'm sorry it's late I'd edit down but I really don't have the brain capacity.. which is very Dave core of me actually"

Junior (Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race)

"i relate to him a lot because his whole character is being embarrassed of his dad who tries too hard to be cool, but still loves him anyways. that is literally me"

Kim Dokja (Omnicient Reader's Viewpoint)

"kim dokja. oh kim dokja. so, without going into spoilers too much, kim dokja is very much a character you are expected to relate to and it makes the novel DEVASTATING. here's just a few things about him: - he is obsessed with a particular piece of media, and finds comfort in it when real life doesn't give him any. he's constantly thinking about it and defending it and trying to recommend it to other people (even though no one else bothers reading it, because it is an objectively bad 3000-chapter webnovel). even beyond that one novel, he's been using fiction as an escape for just about his entire life, something that rings true for a lot of people, especially in the modern world. - he struggles with socializing with other people. the first chapter alone gave me so much second hand embarrassment. it's so real but god it's So bad. he has zero friends and has that sort of loneliness where you're miserable but you can't really bring yourself to feel anything but resigned to it. in general he is just very Resigned to his unfortunate life and can't fully understand or accept it when it finally does get better - he has a complicated relationship with his mother. it's the kind of relationship where the parent genuinely does love their child, but they fail to give them what they need & have to accept that they hurt their kid and that they cannot be the most important person in their life. it's certainly not a universal experience but those sorts of parent-child relationships are woefully common but scarcely acknowledged -the insecurity. god there is so much insecurity in that man. it's hard to even completely tell it's there at first, because it's so ingrained in how he thinks that you don't question it until you know more about his character and suddenly it's all too apparent. he cannot believe that he can be loved (or, if that he can be, that they certainly would not be able to love all of him, only what he chooses to show them), and is selfless but like. the literal meaning of the word, where he will throw away all of his being for the people he loves. in general there is a lot of sacrifice as a love language which like. while i'm not off around throwing myself in front of magic death beams for people or anything i sure would give up everything i could if it meant helping the people i love - ok enough of that. here's some funny things i can relate to. the guy meets his favorite fictional blorbo and instead of worshipping him instead he bullies him constantly and internally complains about how unbearable he is both in the book and in real life. it's like a "i love my blorbo. i would not last 2 seconds in a room with him." You know. he gets so caught up in his fanon characterizations and biases about characters that he completely mischaracterizes them like constantly. he literally kills a guy half because he was his least favorite character. -this is a poll about blorbo relatability. therefore i must mention that kim dokja too related to his blorbo (or at least attempted to) and what is more relatable than that. anyways. kdj made me realize far too much about myself and is by far the most i have ever related to a character (and i Hate it). and tumblr would definitely relate to him too so :thumbs-up:"

"(SPOILERS) He is literally all of us. Reader. Just some guy. And then insane tragic backstory. But he’s also just some guy. He’s special and also just a guy. He’s also god. He can be shipped w anyone. He has versatility and interests and motivations. He also never tells anyone anything ever. He is so me."

"He reads a trashy, long-ass novel as a coping mechanism and doesn't think he's capable of being loved. Bro dissociates when he's emoting too much."

"I'm a homestuck fan, a Dave Strider fan even Never heard of Omnicient Reader's before Voted for the kim fellow because judging by the propaganda it looks like he himself would be a homestuck reader therefore making him more relatable than the homsetuck character himself"

"This guy’s been my companion since I was 11, I’ve grown up with Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint and I think that’s pretty funny since he grew up with Ways of Survival (the 3149 chapter novel) and therefore I’m straight up mirroring him. I, too, scare everyone off by being too enthusiastic whenever the webnovel is brought up! His insecurities are severe but I do see myself in some parts of him (which is worrying but whatever.) He is absolutely The Guy Ever. Utterly pathetic wet cat of a man. I love him. He represents the crazy fandom tumblrina in all of us."

Donutella (Tokidoki)

"she's made of donuts basically like me at this point"

[batberryparfait]

having sat with it for a while, and reread it with the express knowledge of what it is, i think i need to write a lot about the recent upd8. full content warning for frank discussion of CSA below the cut.

i was definitely blindsided by (for lack of better words) the shock value of the upd8's content, and i think that being detached from that state of "holy shit that's fucking insane that they did that" makes it a lot easier to say they shouldn't have done that. or, at the bare minimum, they should not have done what they did in the way that they did it.

exploring Doc Scratch as a sexual predator is not a terrible idea, nor is it something Homestuck shouldn't or can't do. multiple characters (chiefly Rose and Vriska, but just about half the cast has beef with the guy) have a lot of completely unconfronted baggage with Scratch, and i think that completely waffling past those aspects of the characters would be a waste.

however.

however.

i think the way Scratch's influence on and abuse of Vriska was handled in the recent upd8 was 1) absolutely not appropriately included in the content warning and 2) absolutely not handled correctly. a lot of other people have said it, and i'll add my voice onto that pile-- this is a subject far too intense to be written as what amounts to whump with a vague, inconclusive content warning.

it's important to note that i still really like the upd8 itself. even if it could've been handled better (the echeladder is in extremely poor taste and the content warning was not ample enough for the content of the upd8), it's still absolutely cutting writing that does not mince words... but it feels like it wants you to think it does, in a way?

Homestuck very rarely every directly says things as heavy as they are. what happened between Terezi and Gamzee is never called sexual abuse, but that's what it was, and Terezi's recovery from it is out of focus but still consistent with that fact. Dave's childhood is clearly shown to be abusive, but the exact extent of it is mostly masked by both the story rarely dwelling on it (or positing aspects of it as heightened/comical) and by Dave himself being a character that does not tackle these things more than a handful of times (in pesterlogs that a lot of people skimmed anyway).

this upd8 calls Doc Scratch a pedophile. this upd8 does not mince words about the fact that Doc Scratch is a sexual abuser of children. maybe it was written in such a way that it was meant to be read as a joke (i.e. Bro throwing Dave down a flight of stairs being a SBaHJ reference, doing something absurd and terrible in an in-your-face way), but that potential comedic reading is completely lost when the rest of the upd8 is like that. it's like immediately following Dave and Bro's strife on the roof with a scene of Dave graphically injured.

i don't really have a conclusion or finale here, just a lot of rambling thoughts. i love Beyond Canon thus far, i think it's absolutely stellar and i can't wait to see what the team does next. i hope this upd8 and its rollout having issues doesn't dissuade the team from doing more heavy things like it; i think clearer, more explicit content warnings are an absolute must if we ever get anywhere near this level again (and that a content warning in the actual flash is fucking imperative for archival readers), but all in all the story being told is worth being told.

[kusukixcrystal]

MM Classpecting: Saeran Part 2

Zen Classpect

Yoosung Classpect

Jaehee Classpect

Jumin Classpect

707 Classpect

V Classpect

Saeran Classpect Part 1

This is part 2 of my Saeran classpecting post. In the first part is the Page of Heart interpretation, which I don't believe is his actual classpect. Now, I will cover what I think suits his character considering the events of the main story (Deep Story, 707 route and Secret Endings)

Classpect Interpretation 2:

Classpect - Muse of Rage (+): One who commands Rage, or commands through Rage, for others.

How this applies Saeran: Holy. Shit. Where do I even start? The world is out for Saeran: his father is trying to kill him and his mother abused him. Rika then indoctrinated him into a fucking cult. Saeran blames his own weak constitution for why his brother left him. In Mint Eye he accepts that the world is a cruel place, and dwells in self-deprecation, hatred and negativity.

In Another Story we see what would happen if Saeran breaks out of this cycle of self-deprecation, gaining strength in order to protect MC and his brother. In order to mature, in both Another Story and the Secret Endings Saeran must learn to trust Saeyoung and the RFA in order to escape Mint Eye and lead a better life. At his worst as Unknown he is pessimistic, isolates himself and suppresses any emotions that would deem him ‘weak’. Saeran in his After Story works with Jumin and Jaehee to stop his father, using his hacker skills. He has the ability to exert force on his environment when provided backing from people he cares about. We see the world tug him in every which way; V trying to show Saeran positive sides to the world with gardening and photography. Rika with Mint Eye. Another Story makes this more explicit, with the divide between Ray and Saeran. At that point he was still not Unknown yet, still malleable with Rika and V trying to shape him.

Unknown Commands over many people in Mint Eye and is in a high position. He orchestrates getting MC into the RFA and yadda yadda. 

We have to talk about why I think he is a Muse in the context of the main story. In Homestuck, Muse/Lord are considered to be Master Classes. They are classes given to only 2 characters in the entire comic: Calliope and Caliborn respectively. We see that with these classes these two play the role of influencing the other characters to act. They are given to people who influence the events of the entire story to a great degree. As one of Mystic Messenger's main antagonists, Saeran's role can not be understated. His actions literally lead to all the stories/routes happening. He is the one to lead MC to Rika's apartment. He is the one to hack the RFA chatroom and put everyone on high alert. He is the one to break into Rika's apartment and threatens to blow it up with the bomb. He is a Conductor, Commanding the RFA to act through using his Aspect... Speaking of his Aspect, let's discuss that.

This is what the Extended Hiveswap Zodiac has to say about the Rage Aspect:

“Those bound to the aspect of Rage are bringers of chaos. They possess great contempt for lies or false ideas, including the stability that false ideas can impart. To them, the true is far more important than the good; they would tear down a system just to destabilize it if, by their reckoning, it is built on faulty premises. Often the Rage-bound prefer anarchy to any of the alternate forms of civilization, which they believe to be riddled with lies and foolishness and obedient masses. They are bringers of confusion and doubt, and they can be frustratingly difficult to convince otherwise when they have attached themselves to an idea. If they sound dangerous, they are. The Rage-bound tend to be most volatile and unpredictable of the aspects. At their best they are original, revolutionary, and fearless. At their worst they are cruel, uncompromising, and vicious.���

How this applies to Saeran:

As previously stated, as a Muse of Rage Saeran Commands with Rage, utilizing his Aspect, his Rage, against the RFA to sew chaos and disorder within the narrative. Destroying the RFA's once peaceful lives.

He does this because he believes in Mint Eye's ideology, that outside institutions are feeding everyone lies and that they are a paradise in this world. He believed Rika, thinking that Saeyoung lied about saving him. These 'lies' and 'false ideas' from both his brother and society makes Saeran very angry, using it to destabilize the RFA. This brings doubt to the members of the RFA, where once everyone (excluding Yoosung) believed in V wholeheartedly, began to doubt him when they learn that there is a bomb in Rika's apartment and his constant absence.

When a Muse Commands with their Aspect, they are shaped by it too. His Aspect of Rage shapes him into Unknown, blinded by betrayal and Rage against Saeyoung, turning him into a violent bundle of anger and sorrow. He embodies the forces of his Aspect through violence and utilizing the bomb in Rika’s apartment and the gun he uses to shoot V. He also presumably tortures Yoosung with stuff as well (Yoosung Bad Ending 3). Unknown’s presence haunts the RFA in the game, the hacker threat a prominent story thread hanging over them. This influences the RFA to be careful and take precautions. The martyrdom part applies more to After Story Saeran, who sacrifices himself by directly confronting his father for his brother.

In Saeyoung's route, when he confronts Saeran in Rika's apartment and even at Mint Eye, he has difficulty getting his brother to believe that he thought he was living a good life. Saeran's belief can not be swayed easily, a prominent trait seen in the Rage-bound.

Saeran is unpredictable and volatile, seen in all Casual and Deep Stories in this game. He can strike a hacker attack at any time. In bad endings he appears almost randomly, catching the characters off guard.

In the beginning of his route, he uses his Rage to hurt and Command the MC, having control over her. It is only after the route progresses and MC gets through to him, somehow managing to persuade him away from his false ideals, that Saeran redirects his Rage in a different direction: towards Rika and his father.

Just to clarify, the reason I bring up Another Story so much in this analysis when I said I’d only focus on the main story in previous posts is because we just never had the opportunity to see much of Saeran in the og game. These traits of his character do apply to who he is as a person, its just that we only get to see it in Another Story more. Its the same thing as looking at other character routes to build a characterization of the other RFA members. His main role in the narrative still takes precedent and it all still fits well with Unknown/Saeran.

Now that we discussed his Class and Aspect separately, let's summarize. A Muse of Rage would be one who Commands Rage for Others. A Muse could be subjected to anger and violence themselves (his abuse and neglect), he later goes on to have Command over Rage and violence himself as Unknown. He inspires Rage within others (The RFA), and Commands them through Rage and have them pit against each other. In Saeyoung’s route Yoosung voices his grievances about V after the bomb was revealved. Saeyoung begins to doubt too, and is frustrated that V is hiding information from him, losing all trust and incensed after seeing Saeran. Even Jumin begins to confront V about his absence and behavior. By doing all of this, the narrative progresses forward, Saeyoung and MC finally deciding to go to Mint Eye, where all truths are revealed.

[charmikarma]

charmikarma's homestuck fanwork rec list

will be updated as i work my way through more things i like :) check under da cut

notes: parentheses indicate the focus(es) of each work, and works with explicit content are marked [E]. gen means there's no specific ship or character focus.

Canon Compliant or Canon-Adjacent Works

Karkat Goes To A Convention, Act 1 by Cole (gen)

i have two pitches for kgtac. here they are:

if you ever find yourself missing homestuck in the old days before postcanon, or even just the old days of homestuck fandom, you should read karkat goes to a convention immediately.

this is the most homestuck thing i have read since homestuck.

act 1 of kgtac is completed, and is the main draw here. act 2 is currently ongoing and is pretty much completely unrelated to act 1. i think it's alright. but act 1 is absolutely a must-read.

Detective Pony by sonnetstuck (dirk)

do i even need to explain this one? it's detective pony. it's a great character study of dirk. i'm sure you've all heard of it. if you haven't read it, go do that now. please.

Jade Route by SPICYYETI (jade)

jade route is a post-epilogues comic following meat!jade who is trapped in a body controlled by calliope. it's a take on the "ending" that the epilogues don't offer. i think it's pretty clever - it does a great job of using the medium. also, it's about jade :) may or may not have had an impact of some size on how i personally read jade.

AU Fics

Crossfire by HappiKatt (gen; dave)

ok, this series only contains one fic (for now). it's called "the calm is terrifying when the storm is all you've known." ok i literally could not put this fic down. it has the best hook i've ever seen. a proper fucking novel. and some of the best character writing i have EVER seen for the whole strilonde family. augh it's so good. and the art is really good too (YES IT'S ILLUSTRATED).

The Eurydice Suite by callmearcturus [E] (gen; davekat)

inception au. some of the coolest action and plot stuff with an ensemble cast i've ever read followed by the best davekat fic i've ever read. really cool stuff.

Catacombs by oxfordRoulette [E] (jadekat; dirkjohn)

another series. it's a d&d-like au. very tongue in cheek about this fact at times. the real draw here is the third fic in the series, Vanitas Vanitatum, which has stellar dirk and john writing. you could read it on its own, but the first two fics are also QUITE good, are about jadekat, and the second one sets up vanitas beautifully, so... you should read all three??? :3c

Miscellaneous

Homestuck Made This World by Ranged Touch (analysis)

hsmtw is a readthrough/analysis podcast whose goal is not to analyze homestuck on its own terms, but to challenge it and put it back into its historical context. it's not the easiest to listen to as a homestuck fan - the hosts are very critical at times, and i don't always agree with their opinions on things that happen in homestuck - but i think the analysis about what homestuck does, tries to do, and is responding to is very important, especially for people who weren't there for homestuck's original run. which... includes me! i read homestuck in 2014. i missed most of the most important homestuck historical moments. in any case, hsmtw changed the way i look at homestuck and other media. highly recommend, at the very least for understanding homestuck's historical context

Sugoi Quest for Kokoro by death420 (gen)

well well well well well well. well. 🤔 well. if it isn't ratchet and fuckin CLANK

DORITOS & FRITOS by bb-panzu (davejade)

good video. has davejade. i'm not an artist or anything but i think there's some kind of artistic genius happening here. it scratches my brain just right.

[thereal-true-ogilvie]

Hello everyone welcome BACK to: I talk about Benrey for a minute here!

Today we will talk about everyone's favorite: Mischaracterization in Fanfiction!

[I want to preface this with a very important note. Anything I bring up here is NOT something I'm complaining about. I LOVE mischaracterizing my little guy sometimes, especially by making him more like me, heart emoji. I just also know what's wrong so I mischaracterize him in a better and more accurate way /ref]

Now, the most common little thing is him showing basically any emotion in a human/allistic way. Laughter is pretty much the only exception, followed only by whining. He would NOT apologize and he would NOT break down sobbing. In fact I don't believe he has tear ducts he forgor to make them.

[as user needsmoreexplosions has said in the replies, this is hyperbolic! he does show plenty of emotions, just more muted than you'd expect. The first act has more bursts of emotion than the later acts as well. They brought up the "dont FUCKING talk to me" and I mentioned him yelling to Tommy happily. However, there's still not MANY examples. I'm going to rb this with every example of strong emotion he conveys and itll probably be shorter than this post. again. i love people making him emotional anyways, even if its not quite in character]

If he were to learn that Regular People Can't Respawn, he wouldn't go crying and apologizing to Gordon. He would go "oops." He would complain that no one told him. He would make fun of Gordon for not being able to respawn.

See:

"Benrey's not on this team anymore, apparently."

"Yo what- why would you say that, that's so mean."

[Whining, not crying. Always]

SPEAKING OF WHICH. The arm thing. A LOT of people tend to go with "he was trying to get the trackers out/hev suit off," when Dr. Coomer literally says, "I think they're just spiteful." He was getting back at Gordon for all the times he like. Shot him or somethin idk. People are right that he didn't expect the soldiers to cut off his arm, but he also DID expect them (and hype them up) to kill him. Not so he'd respawn without the hev suit or with his passport, just because "hey everyone else has died. And you are so mean to me. Your turn."

He doesn't act like a cat or crave attention, I'm so sorry fic writers [again, it's so fun and I love it tho, so keep doing it please] In fact, he loves to fuck off and leave the team, he does not need their attention. And, when given attention, he tends to just be mildly confused or antagonistic.

And he's not obsessed with the passports, guys! Let me get my fuckin 26-page document up rq... He says Passport/ID 26 times in Act 1 [yo what the fuck what a cool coincidence..... That's actually fucking awesome], then literally once in Act 2 and it wasn't even directed at Gordon. He doesn't say it at all in Act 3, though he does say One (1) time how much he loves his. He says it 6 times in Act 4, ALL of which are during his Boss Fight.

People make him a gamer. Yes, he is 100% but they make him the wrong KIND of gamer. He's not a Minecraft Animal Crossing Mario Kart gamer, he talks about Heavenly Sword, God of War, Halo, MAG, Grand Theft Auto and TF2. 2 First Person Shooters, 3 very violent action/adventure games, and TF2.

[actually, speaking of this image, did anyone else catch Gordon referencing the stairs bit but with ropes? Gordon has canonically read Homestuck]

The only TV he references is All Dogs Go To Heaven 2 and Fighting Redemption which are WILDLY different. And also whatever Ms. Pebbles is.

Not necessarily a common mischaracterization, but an important tidbit is that Benrey tends to be pacifistic towards Xen creatures, and not towards scientists and later security guards. Lots of people headcanon Experimentation which, while there's not really any evidence for that, there's also no evidence against it and it's a good headcanon that I like a lot.

He likes taking pictures. (shakes fic writers) give him a photo album!!!! SCANS OF GORDON'S FEET WOULD NOT BE IN THE ALBUM HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY HAVE THOSE. IT WAS NOT A FOOTSCANNER HD HE LIED.

The things he does know vs doesn't know are. Difficult. He isn't clueless about "human Things" he understands that shaking = nervous and balled fists = angry. He doesn't know what pigeons are but he does know mayonnaise and Big Mac with Freesh Fries.

The final important bit of info. Canon is kinda... flimsy? Canonically, according to Gir, Bubby is a straight guy who FUCKS. Canonically, according to Holly, Bubby is agender and married to Dr. Coomer.

So like. Go fucking crazy! Go stupid! A a a a a!

Just be aware when you're wrong LOL

[hermitcyclop]

for the ask game…

fuck you. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25.

jk. 1, 2, 7, 13. bonus points if they are homestuck related

list 3 positive things about your current fandom(s)

Ok so for one, the sheer variety and uniqueness of fancontent produced by this fandom. The MSPFAs. The reanimated flashes. The dozens of fanmusic albums. The fangames, from VNs to fighting games to puzzle games to even multiplayer online sburb simulators. Fan merch like I've never seen before. Even more "classic" fancontent, like fanarts and fanfics, are distinct. Seriously, I didn't know it was possible to do all these things on ao3 before I started reading homestuck fanfics.

2, I don't know if this reflects the hs fandom at large (probably not) of the communities I dwelve in, but the fans are pretty queer, and it shows into their character depictions and comic analysis, so that's pretty cool.

3, I love all the little events and celebrations that rhythm the year, be it important dates such as 413 or 612 or the kids' birthday, or fan-led events such as the dirkjake big bang or rosemary month. These events persisting after years is pretty cool too.

a headcanon you weren't sure about at first but have come to like!

I'm not sure how to answer that bc I'm either pretty lenient about my HCs, or a die-hard about some of them and will have a hard time coming around an HC that contradicts them. Although when I was pretty new to the fandom I didn't really see Dirk as a trans guy, and look at me now.

your favorite tropes to read/write/draw

I *love* seeing two characters, who aren't into each other or related, who are ride or die for each other. BFFs who'll go to the end of the world if this means the other is happy. Bonus if one of them is a guy and the other a girl, for personal reasons. As for hs tropes, it's probably not really one but I like godtier garb and dream pajamas redesigns.

your favorite type of fandom event (gift exchange, ship week, secret santa, prompt meme, etc)

Fuck I already kind of answered that in the first question. Pretend you didn't read it. Anyway my fav fandom event is the djbb. Second place is SAHCon.

[lifeonvenuswriting]

Three things I'm gonna say right now and never repeat again.

1- my fics about a trans guy getting pregnant aren't written for kinky reasons. Trans families are important to me. I would like to have kids of my own one day as a trans guy. Don't EVER compare my non-sexual fic about pregnancy to literal fucking incest.

2- yall have lost your commenting privileges.

3- don't try and diagnose me with stuff? You don't know me. I don't know you.

I have an exam this afternoon. I'm tired. I'm shaking and I'm stressed out. Never in my life have I seen a fandom so goddamn disrespectful of boundaries. The danganronpa and homestuck fandoms treated me and my boundaries better than yall fucking did.

Grow the fuck up. Do better.

I'm probably gonna have someone I know ghost post for starseeds or any trigun fic from here on out.

And. By the way. If yall think that me saying "incest ships gross me out and it's very personal my reason why and I don't want to interact with people who ship that" is an attack on YOUR character maybe you should self reflect on that! I don't think anyone deserves harassment at all but oh my GOD I'm allowed to dislike people for something they willingly participate in.

[spiritelectric3]

My journey through Homestuck: Act 1

The gods have chosen me to experience the horrors of Homestuck. I have chosen to do so via comic dub (specifically the Void Over Nexus dub). Here are my takes:

-Okay, I'm still in the kid's bedroom and they are already introducing such complicated mechanics. -16 minutes in and he's finally left his room. I'm so glad I didn't read this or it would have taken forever -I'll admit, so far, this does make me feel kinda nostalgic for my childhood. It has an attitude that was common for comic books and cartoons of the 2000s, but has gone away. Reminds me a lot of picking up random comic books from the library as a kid and reading them over and over. -With some deeper thought, too, this is a pretty accurate description of what it's like to have free time as a kid, how you kind of just goof off doing whatever, but somehow it all feels important. Sort of like how the Lord of the Rings dedicates a lot of pages to walking so that the reader gets a similar feeling to the characters. -Plus, from what I know from the plot, this is kind of an actually good way to set up a story like this. John's home is important, so the work spends time on it. It's annoying that it takes awhile, but that's why we have comic book dubs. -okay, tbh, this is a pretty accurate depiction of what (neurodivergent?) childhood thinking is like, at least for my own childhood -okay, so more on the neurodivergent thinking thing: I love how well the comic integrates strange system but shifts the reader's mindset towards the world of the series well. It reminds me of how I end up seeing the world differently based on my current hyperfixation -also unrelated, but I thought Stacks were first in first out and Queues were first in last out -wait, how is this inventory system different!? -thought on the language: I think the descriptions thus far are kind of hit or miss. It's a hit when we get detailed poetic descriptions of childhood mentality. It's a miss when it becomes so long and pedantic that I can't make heads nor tails of it. -Is TT… psychic!?

-I love how no one in this series can handle simply having a human body so they need inventories and the ability to move things long distance. Honestly same (oh god I'm beginning to think like the writing style) -okay, this is just what it's like to play an overly complicated video game for the first time, just in semi-literary form -I'm kind of terrified of what's gonna happen to the second person narrator later on -Why are John's eyes shaped like glasses lenses if he doesn't wear them? -I love how ominous Sberb is quickly becoming -…OH. I think I'm beginning to realize how this became a massive influence on all media in the 2010s+ -This is the moment where I am wondering if I should turn back, already realizing that it is too late -Honestly, I can already see how someone could write a paper on how this series fundamentally redefines thought, in and of itself -why does this series make me want to play Run 2 on coolmathgames.com? -this is legitimately like non-cyperpunk cyberpunk -I'll admit that for all that's been happening the meteor is kind of a weird uptick in stakes -Ah, that's what happens to the second person voice -I love how the narrator's personality shifts to match Rose's -Seeing Rose get introduced this late feels like during a first dnd session when your the last character to be introduced at the end of the session -Rose's captchalogue is pretty based -okay, I'm gonna say it. Rose is a much more entertaining character than john. She's like if Susie Derkins had a wilder imagination -Wait… WHAT THE FUCK!?

Overrall I'd say, yeah this is pretty slow. In this format it's honestly worse when they're playing the game than when John is just doing stuff in his house. Those earlier sections almost made me tear up. They didn't, but they got close. I think there is a childlike joythat encapsulates this series thus far, and has been the majority of the charm

[nerdsinc]

so uh. i drew mark and nguyen with homestuck godtier outfits. because i cant escape that fucking webcomic.

anyways explanation of their classpects under the readmore

Mark: Mage of Heart

i originally almost made mark a prince of space since that would fit him in act 1 a lot, and the outfit being mainly black with a white star symbol would have been awesome foreshadowing for him turning into star but it just didnt end up fitting.

instead i made him a mage of heart! with how many different versions of mark exist, i thought it would be fitting to give him the aspect of "self". that, paired with the mage class, basically means that while mark gains knowledge on his aspect, that of souls and the concept of "self", he looses his own aspect. and by loosing his own aspect, hes basically shattering into different versions of himself which genuinely does happen in the series.

honestly with how mark has been continuously stuck in a loop of being star and back to being mark, aswell as everything with michael (his original self) and then EVERYTHING in act 2 it just made sense to have him be a heart player that somehow destroys/looses his aspect. the concept of "self" is just so important to mark as a character and him shattering into several versions of himself is such an important point, so it just fit too well.

Nguyen: Rouge of Breath

nguyen could have easily been a mind/light player, with the ultimate knowledge thing and both of those being tied to knowledge (ESPECIALLY mind, since that fits how he acts in act 2 a lot) but i felt like that was just too easy.

instead i focused on the fact that hes one of few characters with free will, so i gave him the aspect of breath, which is speculated to be about freedom and independence, which i think fits the whole free will thing a lot.

as a rogue of breath, nguyen would be taking free will and redistributing it for the better of others, which honestly makes a lot of sense in terms of the actual series, with him basically waking up a bunch of characters from authors control; doing so unintentionally to mark early on in the series, and then intentionally shaking x out of authors control as well, and then planning to go to other servers and do the same to whoever they came across.

plus the blue fits the blue diamonds on his mc skin lol

[alloarocharactershowdown]

Redemption Round 1 Eliminations

Vi have already selected four of the eight characters who will be returning for Round 3, leaving four more characters to be selected. Based off the submissions vi received, vi have narrowed down the options to 14 characters. Y'all will have the opportunity to vote on a Google Form to pick four of these characters to return for Round 3.

Below the cut are the names of all the characters included, plus what reasons people gave for nominations (both in Redemption Round and initial nominations) as well as any propaganda made for them.

At the very end of the post is a link to the Google Forms.

Katsuya Serizawa

"The others are more just so I don’t look like I only have two options and are people I would love back in as well."

"My blorbos"

"but i also chose a few others i can see as aroallo since we can pick more than 1. sorry it's obvious i only know the anime characters..."

"They great and they fuck"

Submitted propaganda - [link]

Dean Winchester

"I mean just look at them have you seen them? They deserve it."

"He's the character I think of when I think of aroallo characters. Ik it's not canon but he's accidently great rep"

Teruhashi Kokomi

"Technically the only one I feel strongly about is Noszaki and Teruhashi because I’m a huge fan of their respective shows and they fit it to a T."

"They great and they fuck"

"She is absolutely consumed by heteronormativity but deep down is a aromantic lesbian. She only likes saiki because he doesn’t like her and is doing exactly what I did and fooled myself into thinking I liked people because I felt like I should"

Jake English

"I feel bad bc he was an early aro headcanon of mine and meant a fair bit to me as a teen but also he went up against my specialest boy of all time miles straume so I couldn't vote for him. I think he deserves a second chance he is very aro coded from what I remember just not as much as miles was. and miles is like next level."

"Let’s start with Jake English. In Homestuck, a core point of his character is the desire to be recognized as more than an object of romantic desire. See, several characters over the course of the comic are attracted to him, romantically or otherwise; in fact, all 3 of his best friends were attracted to him at one point in time. He even gets together with one of his best friends - Dirk. The thing is, though, many people around him within the story don’t really see him as anything *outside* of the people who desire him, which is a point that causes him no small amount of grief. Uhh I’m not really sure where I was going with this. But yes, an important part of his arc is wanting to be recognized as somebody outside of how people romantically desire him."

"JUSTICE FOR JAKE ENGLISH THE OG ALLOARO!!!!"

"as an alloaro dude myself, i rel8 to him so very much. him fumbling his way into a rel8ionship with a close friend because "hey might as well i mean i guess i can be into him if i try" + convincing himself he was feeling romantic attraction heavily resembles how i went about things. also hes coded grey and green."

"He is canonically aromantic and heavily implied to be bisexual! He is physically attracted to women and at one point dated a man, but ended it because he realized he doesn't feel romantically for anyone -- never has and never will!"

Grog Strongjaw

"He fucks and he does not love. He fucks so much. He does not love (romantically. He loves his friends a whole lot.)"

"1) It would be REALLY entertaining for me personally, and 2) They're the characters that I know that fit the alloaro vibe well"

"I'm projecting onto characters from my fixations please"

"Canonically very interested in sex, but no romantic love interests. The player, Travis Willingham, specifically did not want to do any romance in this campaign. Grog still has very strong interpersonal connections, especially his friendship with the gnomes Scanlan and Pike."

"He canonically is very into sex but has never felt any sort of romantic attraction towards anyone in his entire life. That's pretty alloaro to me."

"He's also a himbo. I think he deserves extra points for that /j"

"He is never portrayed as wanting or needing a relationship and is shown as perfectly happy with the companionship of his friends but also recognizes that booty is nice"

"I love him so much"

Buffy Summers

"Come on did you SEE how close the Buffy vs Jeff matchup was she literally lost by 1% Just give her a chance and she could go soooooo far she's the character of all time and deserves to sweep every tournament she's in. Also I recently rewatched the episode I was made to love you and it really solidified my aro bi buffy trutherism she was giving off VIBES in that episode. It's not even just the obvious part where in this episode she has her revelation about how she can maybe be happy outside of a relationship having time with herself it's also her protagonist of a movie about a divorcee finding herself energy it's her being so fucking done with all the dudes in this episode obsessing over their unrequited crushes and it is, most importantly, her spending the whole episode identifying with a robot"

"For Buffy, Miles, and Mello I just think them being aro is fun and I wanna see them have another chance. But more importantly I want all of them to rejoin because Im Aro and So Are They Can’t You Feel It"

"Her aro bi swag <3 It's more Vibes than anything and in fact is often actively contradicted by the show but also there's Something there! SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF BTVS but I am thinking in particular about the show's finale in which Buffy decides that she doesn't want a relationship with any of the love interest characters and like the show presents it as her wanting to take time to figure out who she is which is cool and sexy and valid of her but also. could be the aromanticisms. It's especially pertinent that there's a running theme throughout the show of her believing there's something wrong with her because her relationships never work out and in the end her having this realisation that there's nothing wrong with her it's ok to have failed romances she's still working out who she is (AND WHAT'S SHE WORKING OUT? THAT SHE'S AROMANTIC??? HUH????) And tbh I'm not even tinhatting or making this a bigger thing than it's meant to be like they put buffy's speech about getting out of the vicious cycle she's been stuck in getting trapped in relationships that don't make her happy in the finale episode which is all about her changing the system that the show's entire premise has been based around and like. creating her own story. it means a lot to me!!! Also someone else pointed out that she had two different love interests who were convinced she didn't actually love them while they were together which I mean. sure that could just be those specific guys and their issues but WEIRD THAT IT HAPPENED TWICE HUH"

Alix Kubdel

Canonically alloaro

"All these characters are definitely aro and utilize their aro-ness in such a great way that it makes me feel glad to be aro (like Sonic being aro but still being incredibly devoted to his friends, Alix willing to hide in time for them, Agent 3 being a great leader of the Squidbeak Splatoon because they’re amicable but also, can do it alone because they trust their friends are there)"

"My blorbos"

"Word of god specifically aromantic and not asexual. Also an absolute badass and voice of reason."

Submitted propaganda - [link]

Jess (Loveless)

Canonically alloaro

"she’s canon aroallo and the jess nation is strong!"

"she’s canonically aroallo (and bi too - double win)!"

Submitted propaganda - [link]

Kaname Date

"I picked these characters because I love them and I am aroallo. However I’d like to put a special word in for Kaname Date, who, if I remember correctly, never shows any romantic interest in anyone but is so relentlessly horny that his reaction speed is three times better when looking at or thinking about porn. This is due to a near death experience with a snake as a child. He’s the guy ever and I love him."

"Alloaro swag so immense it puts me to shame"

"babygirl <3"

Umetarou Nozaki

"Technically the only one I feel strongly about is Noszaki and Teruhashi because I’m a huge fan of their respective shows and they fit it to a T."

"So aro, very good boys"

"They great and they fuck"

"He doesn’t understand romance in the slightest and I will die on the hill that he is aro"

"I’ve never even seen the show…. O.O"

Makoto Sunakawa

"my main pick is kou yamori and you already know why but i also chose a few others i can see as aroallo since we can pick more than 1. sorry it's obvious i only know the anime characters..."

"So aro, very good boys"

"He's the conventially attractive friend of the less conventionally attractive (and wholesome!!) protagonist in the story, but never accepts any girl's crush 'cause most of them have talked badly about the protag behind his back. The only time a girl confessed to him that didn't make fun of him, he turned her down anyway because he didn't like her in that way, but they were on good terms anyway."

"He's an excellent wingman to the protag and his girlfriend, but none of his advice is particularly romantic. It's all about caring for one another as people, and given how his friendship with the protag isn't deep, I see him as a loveless aro. He's not canonically aro or ace, but he has been my comfort aro-coded character so it would be nice to see him there even if he doesn't win~"

Kou Yamori

"my main pick is kou yamori and you already know why but i also chose a few others i can see as aroallo since we can pick more than 1. sorry it's obvious i only know the anime characters..."

"He’s basically canonically aroallo. By that i mean they didn’t use any label but he canonically has no romantic attraction and canonically has sexual attraction."

"His aroallo identity is also a big deal in the story since the premise is that he wants to become a vampire, but to become a vampire you have to be bitten by a vampire you are in love with. So that’s the conflict. He isn’t villanized for this identity nor is the moral/goal ever to “fix” him. Also they tackle amatonormativity and the value of platonic relationships :) incredibly refreshing and meaningful to me"

Submitted propaganda - [link]

Clover Martinez

Canonically alloaro

"clover is i think the first aroallo character i've ever read about in a book, and it's super cool to have an aro protagonist. i really love how her aromanticism was handled- the book is about other things but her aromanticism is still important and talked about"

"canonically aroallo (aromantic bisexual)"

"she's cool"

Anya Jenkins

"Anya - Listen if ONE character I've nominated today gets through to the redemption round let it be her please please please I'm begging. She has SUCH aroallo energy and beyond my own personal hc I do think that a lot of her character just adds up so much more if you take that view of her. Like she canonically uses romantic relationships as a way to give herself a sense of identity and to make herself feel like a normal person (she used to be a demon before being turned human so she has a Complex about that) and she makes multiple jokes about how sex is the only thing she actually likes about being in a relationship. let her in the redemption round the writers fucked her character arc so bad and she deserves a win"

"the aroallo character of all tiiiiiiime oh my god. she was a human who got turned into a demon and then back into a human again after a thousand years. she didn't understand the difference between sex and romance. 99% of her problems could have been solved if anyone had sat her down and explained the concept of friends with benefits. she spent most of the dates we saw her go on infodumping about her past murders. she became the love interest to one of the show's leads largely because she thought he was the most tolerable guy at their high school and felt like she needed to go to prom with Someone. she agreed to marry him because she thought it would give her the sense of identity she lacked and was desperate for. she sang a musical number about how she only wanted to get married for the sex money and sense of identity. she got left at the altar. she immediately went and fucked an amoral vampire after getting left at the altar. she was vaguely trans coded. she was even autistic <3"

Redemption Round 1 Eliminations - [link]

[marsti]

reverse unpopular opinion: someone asked for hazbin hotel, what about helluva boss?

ask meme here

oh thank g-d we are back on cartoons. thats an easy one too because im a known HB season 1 defender! ive seen very little of season 2 though, im very quick to drop things when they stop being for me, so i cant really say any nice things about that specifically.

some genuinely good shit in there! blitz is my favorite character and if youve ever met me thats the least surprising thing ever. i just love a guy who systematically destroys his most important relationships as a way of punishing himself for existing. you know, for normal reasons.

also helluva boss is genuinely funny! made me laugh out loud several times. though anyone whos met me knows i have dajoker disease, aka giggly bitch syndrome, so it's not an especially hard thing to do. i guess it's just the type of humor i like!

story-wise, it's not the office comedy we were promised but im personally fine with that. i like to meet stories where theyre at and the story they ended up going with is one i like, i love a good bit of angsty interpersonal conflict! im literally a homestuck fan! give me that good father/daughter shit, give me these two old gays trying to make it work, give me people being messy and treating each other like shit and everyone being unhappy. im so fucking here for that.

i of course have to mention that on a purely technical level the animation is top notch and i think it's really cool we get this kind of high quality work just for free on youtube.

and like i didnt say this for hazbin but genuinely no matter what you think of them it's undeniable having this kind of edgy teen show thats also very very queer is just a good thing. when i was a 13 year old trying to feel like an adult my options were south park and nothing else! i AM genuinely glad the edgy queer teens have something to watch now, you know?

[takendruid]

Abandoned homestuck art for the time being since 1) I need a break from it and 2) I’ve revived my special interest for Destiny.

My friends don’t play Destiny but my dad does! But I actually don’t know what his gaurdian’s face or hair looks like. I made my friends do a survey to see what they’d choose and all of us are exos, and even my d1 characters are both exos (all three of my characters have the exact same fucking face shape…). Also my dad’s guardian isn’t my guardian’s dad, just to clarify…

Top three are my two characters, and the bottom two are my friends’ designs that they did through me. My D1 character is a new character I’ve made because I literally couldn’t continue the house of wolves campaign with the stuff I had on my first character (which literally had the same fucking face and horn as well BY THE WAY. Which is also the same face shape as Shiro-4.)

My D2 character is called Taken because like,, even though I didn’t ever play The Taken King DLC, I want him to have been like,, Taken by Oryx 👁️👁️ he used to be called Edward-15, but that’s no longer the name he uses. He lost his memory mostly (since he’s an exo) but now goes by Taken because he was the Taken Guardian. His ghost also lost his light for a period of time, which is why my D2 boy was able to be taken. Taken is a very sweet boy pre-taking, but gets an attitude post-taking because… yeah :) he was verbally abused by another Guardian (who is based on my abuser, who got me properly into Destiny). Cayde is sort of like a father figure to him (even though I started D2 in January 2019 but SHHHHH) and after Cayde dies, Taken calls his ghost “Ace”. Also Ace has much more of an attitude than the Ghost normally does because he had to put up with Feral’s (my abuser’s guardian) abuse. Like- Feral would rip into Taken for being dysfunctional in Taken hotspots and literally complains about him to Ikora during the Red War campaign while the two are RIGHT THERE, and Ace is literally like “can we fucking talk about something that’s actually important and not literally talking about my guardian like he’s not there?” He has a lot more sass than our ghost normally does. Also Taken is a bladebarrage and stasis user, which is funny because they’re literally polar opposites; dark and light, and ice and fire.

My D1 character is the guardian you play in D1. He’s called Atlas-9, and his ghost is called Cronus. Cronus would probably have dinklebot’s voice, and Atlas would probably be Russian due to waking up in the cosmodrome. I use bladedancer on him, but 1) I want to use nightstalker so bad and 2) he would probably be a spectral blades hunter. While Taken is aroace, Atlas is so fucking gay. Especially for Cayde. Literally the definition of Tom Cardy’s “Flirt (with your dad)”. Taken finds this extremely fucking weird because Cayde is literally the Vanguard, aka their boss. Dude tries MULTIPLE TIMES to flirt with Cayde, but Cayde just ignores him (but finds them amusing). @/sylenth-l hcs that Andal Brask was a void hunter, so… ngl I half made Atlas a nightstalker hunter for some Cayde angst… Also Atlas doesn’t have a proper design because I literally don’t have any good gear yet (I haven’t even finished the vanilla campaign (I’m on the last mission) but I’ve finished Dark Below and I’m in the middle of house of wolves). Also fun fact, I gave my first character a horn before finding out Cayde had a horn, so Atlas having the horn is only half because of Cayde. There is a HC that Shiro-4 has the body of a Titan or was a Titan, and I love that HC so much that I literally thought to myself “what if Atlas… was the same, and that’s why he’s so much taller and beefier than Taken”

Atlas’s ghost is called Cronus because I’m a sad little homestuck fan 😭 I literally looked up at my wall and saw my Eridan sticker and thought to myself “what’s Eridan’s name origin and can I discreetly call his ghost Eridan?” The answer ended up being no, however I looked up Cronus Greek mythology and saw Cronus was a titan. Then I looked up other Titans and saw Atlas. I looked up if Atlas 9 was a thing and turns out! Mercury-Atlas 9 was the final USA space craft mission to Mercury, and I thought that was perfect because Atlas is found in a Cosmodrome, which is literally a Russian launching site for spacecraft. USA and Russia are two very different things, but the take away was “space craft! Cosmodrome! Space mission! Perfect!!” Also the numbers in Atlas-9 and Edward-15 are connected to 1) my username but also 2!) the taken king release date >:]

As for my friends! The female Exo is called Del-4. I was looking at exo names to see if any were just normal names and was like “omg there’s an exo called del-3!” And my friend is called Del. She literally said to me “shitpost and call her Del-4”. Also her ghost is called Crab because it’s cute. As for the male exo (even though they are nonbinary) is called Attica-2 because one of their characters is called Atticus. Their ghost is called Malachite, which is the name of an OC they own but also! The name of my Druid OC, which was quite connected to their Atticus OC.

[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!

[lostsometime]

Meta by subject!

Names & Naming

names and naming, part the first

names and naming, part the second

Caleb & names p1

Caleb & names p2

Caleb & names part 3

Caduceus & names

Caleb Widogast

Caleb and trust, early on

the meta implications of caleb shifting from evocation to transmutation

Caleb & names p1

changing the past is a bad plan, caleb!

caleb & self-deprecation

caleb does a lot of projecting

Caleb & names p2

caleb is a good friend

caleb is the black widow (and also river tam. and also ophelia.)

“light them up, pretty”

Astrid & Eodwulf

Empire sibs

Caleb & names part 3

“i want to hear you say it”

crazy/stupid

vollstrucker “brothers and sisters”

“chosen one” follow-up, re: Caleb

she knows him “very well”

terrible rolls in the Happy Fun Ball

wizard morality

Caleb & Yussa & Essek

Caleb & Astrid & scars

Jewish Caleb vibes

Wizards love towers

Caleb & forgiveness

Caleb on schools of magic

Mollymauk Tealeaf

Molly & group-building

Molly & jumping to conclusions

blank slate meta at some point

tal is doing hamlet characters

Cad doesn’t know anything about Molly

stop expecting people to earn things

Mollymauk Pippin Feels

Everyone projects their own issues on Molly!  BONUS: Somebody giffed it!

Beauregard Lionett

early Beau thoughts

Beau and the problem of feeling invincible

Beau is a good friend

Empire sibs

Beau teasing Essek

Beau is good at talking to people!

Beau doesn’t trust maids

Beau hates racists so fucking much

Jester Lavorre

Jester & resurrections

Jewish Jester vibes

Jester & Artagan, meta 1

Jester & Essek, p1

Jester silliness is proportional to stress

Nott the Brave/Veth Brenatto

“i want to hear you say it”

Nott & goblins

Nott and some Hogwarts Sorting Posts 

Nott/Veth morality

“that’s nice”

Fjord

Fjord

Fjord & faith

Fjord & the narrative of the “chosen one”

Fjord & deception through nature

Caduceus Clay

Caduceus doesn’t know how to deal with people who aren’t grieving

Clay family road trips

Cad doesn’t know anything about Molly

Caduceus needs DBT

Caduceus & brain problems

tal is doing hamlet characters

Caduceus & names

Yasha Nydoorin

Yasha

Essek Thelyss

Caleb & Yussa & Essek

Essek & cupcake

Essek & loneliness

Essek & Bazzoxan

Beau teasing Essek  (BONUS: Verin speculation)

Wizards love towers

Essek is a dummy part 1

Jester & Essek, p1

Essek talking around things

Essek is a dummy part 2

Essek as a reflection of the dynasty’s values

Essek and the scourger

no deep dark secret, essek’s just insecure 

it’s not a big deal! 

stop expecting people to earn things

They should tell Essek how they got the beacon p1

“My intentions were never good; they were important.”

What’s Essek’s problem with Adeen?

Timeline of Caleb getting shanked

Less blame on Essek for the war, more blame on Essek for giving Trent Ikithon new resources

Additional Essek posting

Artagan

Artagan & Vesh

Jester & Artagan, meta 1

it can just be beautiful

Artagan plays favorites with Jester’s friends

Astrid & Eodwulf

Astrid & Eodwulf

Caleb & Astrid & scars

Miscellaneous

level 9

Avantika

Homestuck-style shipping

food & drinking meta

food & drinking and social class meta

Additional social class meta

Thuron

Some Hogwarts Sorting Posts 

Wizards love towers

Most wizards don’t like each other

More about WIZARDS!!!

Verin 

Verin 2 

Verin 3 (and social structure) 

Language & place names

Krynn military speculation (this is a post about moirails)

Kryn worldbuilding speculation

What the fuck is the Luxon? (p1)

Additional Kryn worldbuilding

Speculating about Ripley and Dwendal