#lenore lehart

[sam-keeper]

Here's some early marker tests for the pop up emotes in the new Godfeels chapter

yes, the reason they look like paper cutouts is because they actually are drawn on paper. I thought it would be funny and Sarah agreed! originally I planned to have them look like the "BLEH" and "BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH" scribbles in Homestuck but I'm just not very good at drawing that kind of cartoon frankly, and it also just didn't look as good imo in actual marker vs the hard mspaint brushes. so, I gravitated towards a more game ui influenced look, a little more polished. once I hit on the speech bubble looking icons with just facial expressions inside that felt pretty good, with one weird wrinkle: I was working with this sort of busted staedtler marker that Sarah found in our building's dumpster along with a bunch of other staedtlers and, bafflingly, some totally unused posca paint markers. anyway, I was using it to lay down the dark navy color because I liked how bleedy it was, how quickly the ink started flowing fast and hard. it did make the process more tedious because I had to turn the dumb thing upside down and wait for it to calm down before I did each new set of three sprites but overall I liked the results... until I scanned them in. I think my scanner has a weirdly limited sensitivity to blue generally, and it seems like whatever pigment staedtler uses is... I guess MORE reflective of light? than the tombows I used for the rest of the colors? especially the red tombow I used for Dave's colors. so I had to monkey around in photoshop to drop the blue values down darker, to match how it looked on the actual page.

here's the whole sprite sheet, which for whatever reason in this photo is much closer to the physical colors than the scans above are

once I color corrected them, Sarah cleaned them up and Janet composited them in with her sprites and set, resulting in the fun combo of styles in the chapter:

[catgirlweed]

read godfeels. became diseased.

[skunkbert]

****FVCK YEAHHHH****

[hms-no-fun]

Tell us about Dill and Alexander! I kinda picture them in my head as Kermit and that blue eagle Muppet but gay and gamer/greasy mechanic. Is that where you got the idea? Is sburb's frog fascination gonna play into the story of these boyos?

oh what's that? you want to be the captive audience for a lore dump about my very special guys? completely unprompted and with total investment in everything i might have to say? well well, don't mind if i do!

SO, Dill Croaker and Alexander Falcon are members of a now-defunct group called The Falconers. they are modeled after Star Fox (the team) from Star Fox (the video games). we haven't seen Alex on screen yet, but here's @girlpillz's rendering of Dill for B1 verse 1, where Lenore Lehart shows off her sick bouncy ball skills for Dana Straten to get the attention of Dill.

Alex being a blue falcon, i imagine he looks legally distinct from Falco Lombardi from Star Fox (the video games; the team) albeit less cocky and attitudinous.

there are technical reasons for The Falconers' existence. going into 3.2B, i knew i wanted a secondary supporting cast in the margins capable of handling dirtywork off-screen. for instance, they're decrypting and analyzing Lenore's stolen witch data so the main cast doesn't have to worry about it, leaving us more time to luxuriate in what we're actually here for: feelings.

Star Fox 64 is my favorite game, so when it came time to come up with that supporting cast, the possibilities of a knockoff Star Fox team immediately sold me on the idea (especially since this is the only story where i will ever reasonably be able to get away with such a blatant act of self-indulgence. you wouldn't believe it from looking, but i don't actually do a lot of indulging myself with Godfeels. i try very hard to never throw things in without serious calculation. The Falconers are pretty much the only thing i've introduced that came as an inorganic external mandate of my own selfish making, and even then i've worked very hard to integrate them naturally). as a broken up four-person crew, they mirror the Upsilons-- and so, them helping the Falconers reunite in order to find Alphi and Edie gives these guys some juice. their backstory is a shadow of the Upsilons', and a useful point of comparison as the narrative plugs along. i could've made a girl Star Fox team, but frankly Godfeels is just so women-centered, so female-focused, so tgirl-transfixed that i figured it was about time to throw the boylikers a bone.

The Falconers are balanced as a calculated twist on the Star Fox team. the most immediate difference is that here, Alexander Falcon fills the role of Fox McCloud. he's the charismatic team leader, a little surly (especially these days) but good at his job and deeply committed to the care of his team. Dill Croaker is, obviously, only about five runs through the dryer away from Slippy Toad, and fills the same role. my reason for this is that everyone is mean to Slippy and they're wrong. Slippy is a brilliant engineer and programmer, why do you expect him to be an ace fighter pilot too? that's YOUR job, hotshot! Nintendo themselves have been all over the map with Slippy in terms of characterization, pretty much never getting him quite as right as he felt in 64. so, yeah, Dill is my take on Slippy: a clueless gamer frog who plays with a lot of edgelords but is himself impervious to their venom. he never cusses because he's a good boy, and he respects women.

Dill and Alex have lived together on Crime Planet for a long time. are they fucking? no, i don't believe they are. Dill strikes me as something of an ace king, and anyway i don't think he's Alex's type. mostly they work together in the shop and hang out doing bro stuff. maybe Alex lifts weights while Dill plays shitty space MOBAs. but all this begs the question: who is Alex's type?

as of the B1 solo we've learned a little bit about the other two Falconers. first there is Erol [last name unknown], the oldest member of the crew who's likely analogous to Peppy Hare. which leaves us with Yolo Sionnach. a lot of information can be implied about him from this exchange:

yes, a lot of information indeed. but as much as i would love to enumerate the implications, i must hold my tongue. i mean, i would type it all out, but i can't, because i'm literally using my fingers to hold my tongue in place so that i can't say the spoilers out loud

anyway, i like the muppet comparison. that wasn't what i had in mind at all, but now i'm imagining the Falconers as the puppets Nintendo used to advertise Star Fox Zero and........ ohhhh scope creep you saucy temptress

the Slippy slander is rampant! and that's to say nothing of the ad where muppet versions of Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Reggie Fils-Aime slowly transform into Peppy, Fox, and Falco respectively.

i can't say that Sburb/the Universe Engine have much to do with The Falconers' story. they're not godtier, they don't know anything about the UE, they are literally just space mercenary furries. they come from the Lemurian Star System, trained at the Academy on Lemuria, and worked in the Lemurian Sky Corps until starting their own independent outfit as contractors (which i imagine is a fairly common career path in a region racked by interplanetary war and rampant espionage). age-wise, they're in their mid 30s.

thank you for this wonderful question. no one ever asks about the other guys, and i am always dying to talk about the other guys.

[hms-no-fun]

godfeels update: B1 Chorus 3

we're back! godfeels 3.2 continues with B1 Chorus 3, where we learn a few things about a young Lenore Lehart

[hms-no-fun]

8!!

I need to know if there's a SERRAH ZEDIGG

i've never made a trollsona for myself! tbh i've never been much of a sona or OC person, at least not in the way that you tend to see in fandom? if i create an OC or whatever it's part of a specific story and i don't get much out of posting About them in abstract. the closest i have to a trollsona is Lenore Lehart, who i think started as a vast error OC but immediately turned into a godfeels mainstay.

maybe someday i'll make a real trollsona. sawwah tzedig perhaps

[hms-no-fun]

what's your opinion on fictives of characters in godfeels who haven't really broadly been definied yet? obviously i doubt you'd be judgmental based on other opinions you've expressed but id really like to hear your perspective on this

it's been interesting, that's for sure! i was fully prepared for folks to either be disinterested in or actively dislike my OCs, so for them to not only be broadly liked but also introjected to multiple systems frankly came as a really vindicating surprise! one of the reasons i parceled out info about the upsilons so slowly over 3.1 was to give them a psychological presence in the reader’s mind from a distance so that, when they became an actual narrative presence, they’d have a context within which to understand and theorize about them. apparently it worked! so that’s cool.

i’ll start by saying that my approach to fictives across the board is pretty much the same as my approach to any other fan in the discord. i may have written the source material, and i may know things about these characters that no one else will for a long time, but the characters i’m writing aren’t the fictives in my readership. does that make sense? my knowledge of Edie, for instance, doesn’t have much at all to do with any given Edie fictive because said fictive already exists; and if that Edie fictive exists, i have to assume it’s because something in the text resonated enough to allow for her introjection; thus that fictive, IN MY NON-AUTHORITATIVE OPINION, is a snapshot of that particular system’s (or someone therein’s) conception of Edie at the moment of her introjection. and that’s really fucking cool actually???? like, just from a purely practical standpoint, you have NO idea how useful it is for me as a writer to have such direct barometers of the audience’s perception of a character at any given moment in their story! the fact that there are so many upsilon fictives running around makes me really happy & excited to finally get to 3.2, not least because generally y’all aren’t too far off characterization-wise. which, you know, is one of those things that tells me i’ve done my job well and that i’m on the right track with my schemes and machinations... and that’s the least important thing i get out of the arrangement!

sure, it can be surreal reading back over a server channel where one Lenore, two Edies, two Danas, and half a dozen Junes are all theorizing about Silverbark’s behavior amongst themselves, but would it really be a materially different circumstance if they weren’t fictives? i don’t blink when a bunch of furries start awooing in a server i’m in. i don’t even blink when furries start awooing in real life! i mean, god, what’s the alternative? redditors?? fuck that shit, i’ll take the plural homestuck queers any day of the week.

there have been times when i’ve seen a fictive just be completely outright wrong about a characterization or detail, and i’ve really had to resist the urge to correct them. like what am i gonna do, say “you’re wrong about who you are”??? it wouldn’t just be a spoiler to correct them in most cases, it’d also be... idk, insulting? at least it seems like it would be insulting. i’m certainly insulted when cis people tell me i’m not performing femininity correctly! and there is a part of me who finds that worrisome. the truth come out eventually, you know? and there’s some stuff we might not be getting to for another year or more. what happens when a fictive solidifies their sense of self around a misconception that doesn’t get disproven for months and months?? what do i do if a fictive insists that my interpretation of their source character is wrong when they’ve lived as that character for a while?????

these are the kinds of breathless paranoid questions that always come up among artists with or in a fandom. and there’s a reason for that, you know? when i first started the godfeels fanserver, i was EXTREMELY wary. plural folks, kinnies, obsessive fans, they’ve got a bad reputation for causing drama! or well, they do among artists who consider themselves Normal wink wink nudge nudge. but what i found the more time i spent in the fanserv was that, like every category of identity, there’s nothing inherent to plurality or fictivity that guarantees immaturity or emotional volatility. there’s a part of me that wants to point at how many plural folks in fandom circles are teens or in their early 20s, and that generally online drama is a result of adults and children being expected to share all of the same online spaces... but that youthfulness holds true for the godfeels community and i’ve found y’all to be a remarkably mature readership!

it’s not helpful to point at circumstances outside of one’s control as the reason somebody is “bad” or whatever. if the problem is cultural conservatism, or artistic malnutrition, or an individual trauma response, or a simple misunderstanding, or just outright vindictiveness, you address THOSE things. and it’s my responsibility as an artist who chose to create a central community hub for my readership to do my best in addressing any situations that might arise with empathy and compassion. frequent users of any community hub like a discord server develop habits based on the rules of the space and how they are/aren’t enforced. if for instance you go to the HSD [do not do this under any circumstances even as a joke], you’ll find that positive discussions about most fandom projects get swallowed up by ridicule almost immediately- and not just ridicule of the project in question, but often of the person who posted it too! this creates a self-perpetuating environment of hostility where the best way to get in the good graces of community leadership is to be an edgelord. for my money, that’s why the homestuck fandom is Like That.

i’ve tried to encourage the exact opposite of this, as inspired by the success of the late Perfectly Generic Podcast server (where the godfeels fanserv’s vibes-based rules are largely taken from, may she rest in peace), and i think that’s worked out well overall? because now when an issue arises within the community, more often than not the consistent users naturally de-escalate the situation! granted, the godfeels fandom as such isn’t particularly big, and the necessary wordcount buy-in to even GET to my OCs is high enough that it naturally selects out a lot of folks who might have caused problems, so this level of community stewardship is a whole hell of a lot easier to accomplish than it might be otherwise.

wow, this answer went way off the fucking rails. what the hell was i... oh yeah! you asked me my thoughts on fictives of characters we don’t know very well yet. here, let me answer that for you.

i think fictives are beautiful, and i wish them the world. my dearest hope for any fictive, regardless of what is Known about their source character, is that they grow beyond their lateral connection to the source material. not abandon it, necessarily! but what i find so existentially fascinating about fictives isn’t really all that removed from one of the major driving forces of godfeels: one’s capacity to become Yourself. who is Edie, or Dana, or Lenore, or Alphi? who were they at 13? at 21? at 29? compare the youngest self with the oldest self and you might not even be able to tell that they’re supposed to be the same character. one reason godfeels has become such an ensemble production is precisely because much of said ensemble has undergone some amount of change, and given homestuck’s obsession with The Ultimate Self i just find that too compelling to not explore at length.

so like, if a Dana fictive is out of character from my perspective, that’s great! in case it wasn’t clear from the text of chapter 8, i am Not A Fan of unchanging & all-consuming character archetypes. in point of fact, i believe that divergence is a virtue. i believe that identity is a buffet at a playground for everyone. i believe that any person who chooses to live truer to themself than they were raised to do is braver than every cop and every troop on planet earth. i believe that human culture is an ecology of change. i believe that deciding you are a Finished Person who has learned every important lesson and acquired every necessary skill is tantamount to taking up early residence in your own grave. so really, my dream is to live in a world where EVERY fictive is as spectacularly in or out of character as they like! the hope with the Risk/Dare & Angel Dirk chapters was to give all readers, but especially fictives, a context and toolset for handling divergence conceptually, philosophically, narratively, emotionally, personally. because i don’t think it’s just the characters of this story who compel introjection, but the nature of the text itself- so, by extension, all i want is for any given fictive to feel permitted to become whoever it is they might be now that they’ve left the source text. i would vastly prefer a legion of singularly feral Edies over a well-reasoned community consensus on what Is or Is Not in character, you know?

which isn’t to say that the facts don’t matter or that i dislike reasoned community discussion btw! i love close analysis and eager back-and-forths trading text snippets and piecing together the godfeels mysteries pepe silvia style. but i believe there is room for both. there must be.

so, uh, in short i guess: you’re doing great and i’m very proud of you. keep up the good work.

[hms-no-fun]

at what point did you consider the upsilon kids being a thing to put in the story? and also, what inspired their creation? were they characters originally intended for something else salvaged for this or were they all godfeels originals?

originally, gf3 as a whole and 3.2 in particular were meant to parallel and comment on homestuck^2, which is why we've arrived at these dual narratives of split parties out in space. after Yiffy's reveal in canon and the subsequently entirely predictable fandom explosion, another fan adventure popped up- Kittyquest. i haven't read much of it, but i could tell immediately that it wanted to present a version of "Jade's daughter" that was an immense departure from Yiffy in just about every way. considering my feelings on divergent interpretations of June, this only bolstered my sense that "Jade's daughter" carried a sort of chaotic metanarrative weight, like some kind of evolutionary wildcard building off of Jade's own origins as the "combo breaker" of the betas.

the gf3 prologue sets up a lot of the basics- Jade is keeping secrets from her friends, and she has an enemy named Dana who wants to find her daughter. i didn't know much about the upsilons yet besides the fact that i wanted to have a distinct group of kids who mirrored the omegas in hs2, and i knew that their story would largely play out in flashback. i was never entirely sure how important their story would be in the longterm, because my original plan was to keep a lot of this stuff sidelined until it became relevant. there were a lot of narrative arenas post 3.1 i had in mind that were initially meant to be fairly brief, in fact. it wasn't until my collaborators and i started discussing the possibilities of all these arenas (like the EWL, Samsaria, the Comet, & post-destruction Earth C among others) that we really started to understand the scope of what we could do with this story, IF we resolved to do it right.

i've said in much older asks that until we open up the fanserv and released chapter 8 part 1, i was pretty convinced that i'd finish 3.1 and then release my outline for 3.2 onwards and bid the whole thing an ignominious farewell. it was the readership's overwhelming embrace of 3.1's original elements including my OCs as well as my collaborators' unbridled enthusiasm for the project (for instance Julia, the Dana whisperer, is in the midst of writing a godfeels ttrpg based on the EWL. i did not ask her to do this, she just wanted to. i don't even enjoy ttrpgs!) that convinced me we could take this thing to the finish line.

so, okay, the upsilons. i didn't really have much of a plan for them until writing chapter 4, which as i've said in the past was a big turning point for the story. i needed a couple EWL characters to fill out the background and i needed to hint at some of the EWL's nastier tactics re: memory erasure, which is how we wound up with Burning Romeo and Lenore Lehart. Lenore was just gonna be A Person In The EWL, and maybe she'd be tech support for other characters later on. but as it became clear to me just how unsatisfying it felt to have Jade and Davepeta keep secrets and be effusive, i knew something had to be done. in a way you could read this like VV (whose presence as the narrator i knew about since "The Silverbark Epilogues" chapter of the gf3 prologue) monitoring the narrative through me and reacting in real time to Jade et al's refusal to let anything slip with the nuclear option of a forced implanted memory. hence: the scene of the upsilons crashing onto the mysterious planet Samsaria.

i knew that there would be a new planet central to the plot going forward, mirroring the function of Deltritus in hs2, and i knew that Dana and Edie were stuck there together for a long time... but what about the other two? there needed to be four of them, after all, and i knew that they all needed to be equal to each other in terms of depth and personality.

i'll admit that when i published chapter 4, i didn't know much about Alphi and Lenore. i invented them both pretty much on the spot, perfected Lenore's quirk in one go (you'll notice that when she uses ellipses she always uses four dots...), and then looked at Alphi and was like. yeah, you know what? big muscly salamander-looking lizard lady with six arms who has kind of a stereotypically brutish demeanor. it took a bit of fine-tuning but it's amazing how fast their dynamic crystallized for me... and it's from them that a lot of the flavor of the EWL really emerged, as i sought to understand how and why there would be a group of four wildly different people assigned together like this. their mismatchedness inspired me to take a vague idea i had and run with it, namely the meta conception of the EWL as an orphanage for victims of their own personal MSPFAs.

i've never really salvaged an idea from another project for godfeels, i think at least partially because i have another project called sunset war that is almost exclusively a series of salvaged ideas strung together to make a coherent universe (no idea when/if this will see the light of day fwiw, no time soon certainly)... but also because the base template of homestuck is already so rich, not to mention the additional complexities that godfeels brings to that template, i've never really felt like i needed to bring in outside ideas. if anything i'm so overwhelmed with possibilities just emergent from the narrative as it exists i genuinely don't know how we could possibly use it all. which is to say, we definitely won't use it all, which is a really nice place to be from a storyteller's perspective.

instead, the personalities of the upsilons sort of emerged as a response to their place in the narrative. Dana, obviously, was conceived as being Dirk-esque in some way. once i decided that Lenore was an upsilon, i had to figure out why she was still in the EWL but Dana wasn't. i knew Dana was banished in some sense, but it wasn't until then that i knew Lenore was at least partially responsible for that, and for the events that broke up the upsilons three years ago. from there i had to figure out why this happened, and once i arrived at a why the rest of it all sorta fell into place.

my approach with new characters is probably the worst that it could possibly be? because most of the time i don't even know these new characters exist until they write themselves into a scene. for instance i had no plan for Osepheus and his crew when they were introduced, but once they took the stage i found them all so weirdly charming that i elected against killing them and instead trying to find a place for them in the story. so i sat with them and thought, okay, where do they fit in this tapestry, what purpose do they serve, and how i can i tailor their personalities in such a way that they produce a tangibly necessary narrative friction with that purpose.

it was the same with Alphi. once i had Lenore, Dana, and Edie, i knew there needed to be some kind of combo-breaker that wasn't Jade-descended. so i decided to challenge myself by introducing her as a big loud boisterous creature who speaks in broken english (which is historically my least favorite type of character in a scifi setting) whose traits would eventually be... well. i can't say very much here at all, can i? that'd be spoilers.

this is how i go about worldbuilding, i guess. i know that my strength as a writer is dialogue and at least to an extent characterization, so i have to assume that most of the narrative action will play out through dialogue. with that in mind, all the interesting ideas in the world don't matter a lick if the characters aren't fun or compelling to read. i understand that this big space opera bullshit is only interesting insofar as it contrasts with the cast of characters we already care about, which is why i think it actually wouldn't have been possible to graft an already existing story onto what came before-- because the setting, the plot, all the various arcs and beats we've got planned, they're designed to make the best use possible of the cast we have. it's all designed with the knowledge of how one experiences stories. if my stuff is digestible at all (which it certainly seems to be given the number of comments i've gotten saying basically "i've never even read a book and you got me to read 400,000 words of homestuck fic in a week"), it's because i try to make the moment-to-moment reading experience compelling. if the characters aren't fun to read, if their dynamic isn't frictive or otherwise evocative, then you just get bored and zone out. say what you will about the schlock of dan brown's providence, the man knows how to write a readable book about abstract bullshit!

anyway. all of this is to say that 3.1 was in many ways the proving ground for and chrysalis of 3.2. i always knew that if i could get through the end of chapter 8 and still have the will to keep going, everything after would be a victory lap. maybe that seems pompous or ill-advised, idk, but i'm REALLY excited to get to the rest of this story. i can't wait for you to properly meet Dana, Edie, Alphi, and Lenore (the big DEAL as i like to call them in my own head :P) as they were thirteen years ago. they started from an ill-defined place, but they've since come through to be some of my favorite characters in this story. i hope you'll feel the same way, but the fact that you even thought to ask whether the upsilons existed before godfeels in the first place suggests that i've got nothing to worry about.

[hms-no-fun]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[hms-no-fun]

The Lesbosity. The piercings. The L quirk. Was Lenore Lehart at all inspired by Elwurd?

lenore doesn't have an L quirk, she has a "sharp angles" quirk. she replaces u with v, replaces apostrophes with ^, and emphasizes words & phrases by surrounding them with up to four asterisks.

anyway, no, lenore wasn't inspired by elwurd at all. that probably seems crazy considering how aesthetically alike they are, but if anything i'd say i was more impacted by cinare from snowbound blood! but even then, i never really had a specific media referent for lenore.

when she was introduced in 3.1 ch4, i was still kinda figuring out who the upsilons were. i knew there were four of them, and i knew the most about dana and edie (though at the time her name was song). i'd written some test scenes with them that involved the character who would eventually become alphi. but in ch4 i realized i needed to stop being quite so stingy on EWL information, so i just sorta invented this tech support character from whole cloth who would interact with june and maybe get her to ask questions about whether jade is really trustworthy.

then over time i just sorta pieced together that she should be one of the upsilons because of how well she slotted into this backstory i'd come up with for them. slowly she adopted a lot of other ideas i'd had for "a character" and became who she is. her being a huge dyke is just the natural result of my unrepentant lesbianism.

[hms-no-fun]

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

oooo this is an interesting one.

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

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

anyway.

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

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

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

ok spoilers for godfeels 3.1.8.1 under the break!

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

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

and then in ch5, lenore says this to june:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

uhh the end

[sophiagoodnight]

i watch vtena and say “i think i wovld work for akio”

what would be each upsilon's favorite anime?

dana: yu yu hakusho, keijo

edie: lucky star, yugioh arc-v

lenore: cowboy bebop, utena but she doesn't get it

alphi: devilman crybaby (original ova), monogatari