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factual-fantasy · 3 months ago

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30 Asks! Thank you!! :}} 🌊

😅Ah, well this is awkward-

I haven't drawn Gravity Falls in quite a while. And with this sudden fandom resurgence following the book of Bill.. I actually went back and privated a huge chunk of my Gravity falls posts. :x

My reasoning for this is that looking back, a lot of those old posts are rather embarrassing for me 💀 now I respected them all as stepping stones to where my blog is now so I didn't actually DELETE any posts!! But now with the fandom coming back people are finding them aaaannddd.. when ever I get a notification of someone liking an old cringey Gravity Falls post of mine? I just go beet red. uhhg they're sooooo embrassingggg...

SO! For my own comfort, I privated lot of those embarrassing posts. I didn't delete them in case I change my mind and want them back in the future- but they should all be hidden.

Now that that's explained, the comic you're talking about is likely one that I privated parts of out of embarrassment. But if you happen to have a link to one of the parts or can remember the what the comic was about... mayyyybe I could go back and un-pivate it.? <XD But just that comic! It depends on how beet red I turn when I see it-- :x

I've heard of cult of the lamb, seen a lot of fanart for it- and several of my friends play it!... But I still don't know much about it <XD Isn't it like a cult simulator or something..? Idk-- the cult imagery just didn't really feel like my thing 😅

XDDD THANKY IU SO MUCH!! :)))))

@i-v-y67 (Hiding the image because its not my art! <:D )

Sorry man, <XD Maybe someday I will! But for now I got Welcome home, FNAF and Pokémon on the mind 💀

DUDE I LOOOOOVE THE AMAZING WORLD OF GUMBALL!! That show has absolutely no right to be that funny XDDD

XDD Aw, thank you! Truly the highest compliment my version of Wally could receive. 😌

Idk how Bibi's name is actually supposed to be pronounced.. but I personally pronounce it as "bee-bee" <XD

And for his little sister Cici, its the same. "see-see"

While I'm at it, Gerald's name is pronounced "erald". The G is silent XDD

Aw man.. Ingo couldn't cope.. 😔😔

No that's not me saying that Emmet loved Ingo less or was emotionally stronger than him- but Emmet sees Ingo as his strong and capable older brother. With some comfort from Elesa, he believed at his core that Ingo could handle what ever he was facing out there.. although his body was wracked with worry..

If the roles were reversed.. I mean.. man..

Ingo sees Emmet as his precious baby brother. Despite them being only minutes apart in age. He knows logically that Emmet is just as strong and capable as he is.. but just imaging his baby brother out there.. wounded and all alone.. he should have been there. he should have done more. He's all alone. What if he never sees him again? What if he dies alone out there?

The separation would quite possibly destroy Ingo..

@anikakitty11

Boop!! :DDD

@cat7890

I'm feeling pretty rough, but doing my best to rest! <:D and thank you!! :)))

@katjustvibinglmao

XDD EGGDOG!!

I don't have many clear ideas for Home yet.. I'm thinking that its pretty sentient. Home can problem solve, make assumptions and learn..

What does it think of everything... I'm not quite sure. I imagine Home to be curious though, and that's why it watches Wally sleep and why it watched Eddie at the Christmas party..

I also pictured Home to have been in an almost coma/zombie like state back when it was dilapidated.. but then I wonder if Poppy would still be spooked by it.. hmm..

It couldn't have been comfortable in that state at least. So when Wally fixed it up, maybe Home was grateful? Or maybe Home is just kind'a coming to and doesn't know how to feel about the neighborhood springing up around it.. overall I kind'a want to keep these general malicious undertones to Home... 👀

Yeah, I didn't have them crushing on each other because I don't like writing romance stuff for characters that are not my own.. <XD

But this doesn't mean that Eddie and Frank cant have a strong platonic bond in my au! :0 One thing I imagined for their friendship is how they met/how it started.

I had this picture in my head that Frank used to butt-heads with the other neighbors a lot more than he does now. Frank had a certain way of talking and expressing himself that some of the other neighbors didn't really understand.. and since Frank can be irritable at times.. well.. I guess the best way to put it is that Frank had a hard time making friends at first..

I imagined that on a particularly bad day, where nothing seemed to be going his way.. Frank was huffing and puffing and just grumbling to himself.. attending to some chores around the house and just overall feeling down. At some point, he realized the package he ordered should be here any second now.. so he stepped outside to check the mail.

When he went outside, whaddya know! The new mailman was here right on time and putting his package in the mailbox. Well FINALLY something went right for him! That's a nice change..

I imagined Frank went out in a huff to grab the mail, not intending to chat.. but 10 minutes later and he was still stood outside talking to the new mailman.

I thought that when Frank spoke to Eddie, Eddie listened intently and waited patiently for his turn to talk without interrupting. When Eddie talked to Frank, he basically asked all the perfect questions in the perfect tone to get Frank to simmer down.

Eddie told him how beautiful his garden looked, and with his tone and bright smile, you could tell he meant it! Well that's a nice thing to say..

Frank asked how he feels about the neighborhood. And Eddies responses were relatively quick and to the point. Huh.. its nice to have no filler in this conversation considering how grumpy he was today..

Eddie makes a comment about Franks nice clothes, Frank chuckles and comments that his grumpy expression probably doesn't make them look any nicer.. Eddie is a little taken aback, "I didn't think you looked grumpy.. I'm sorry to hear you're feeling down today neighbor.." Huh.. someone who doesn't just see his frown and assume he's a grump. That's a really nice change..

By the end of their conversation, Franks day had been completely flipped on its head. He had a nice chat with the new neighbor and got his mail right on time. Eddie was respectful, interested in what Frank had to say, and had plenty of genuine compliments to spare.

Since that excellent first impression on Eddie's part, their friendship would grow and grow into what it is today. Not a romantic relationship, but definitely a best friend situation for sure. :)

@viennaarttt

A phone call? :0 Is this one I talked about happening in my at some point and forgot or was this something that happened in canon? <:0 Forgive my poor memory- today is not my day! 😅😅

WAAAAGGHH WAAAA THIS IS SO SWEETTJJA WAHAGHAGGG CANONCANONCANONCANON!!! 😭😭🥺😭💞💞💞💞

@glitchhayden418

AWWWEE!! the little babeee.... 🥺🥺💞💞💞💞

(In response to this post)

Thank you! These past few days have been pretty rough but I'm hangin in there! <:D ...

ALSDO WAAAARRHRHHHAAAA!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! THATS SO SWEEETTT RAAAHGGAA!!! 😭😭🥺💞🥺💞💞💞💞

Man I really gotta work on the story/personalities for Julies siblings <XD These ideas for them are just wonderful! Him meeting Julies brother/sisters sounds like a fun drawing idea!

B-But.. with no return address... how am I supposed to send a thank you..? <:'(((

@holly-opal

It is one of my all time favorite shows.. 🥺🥺💞💞💞 I love it to bits. Stanley is my favorite character.. I watched it like twice and I would have watched it a third time but I couldn't watch it without crying so I had to quit <XDD 100/10 would recommend Gravity Falls.💞💞

(Jangles birthday post)

Ahh don't worry, his birthday was actually on the 6th. I was late too! <XD

Also thank you! I'm glad you like the details I added! :)))))

😔😔😔Man, it never ends. Thanks for letting me know though..

I kind'a pictured it being similar to Sans and Papyrus. Well, if Papyrus loved puns that is- XDDD

Their personalities are kind'a opposite. Barnaby is relaxed, laid back and always cracking jokes. Howdy is always on the move (in the warmer months). Always darting from shelf, gotta stock stock stock! Gotta go go go! Got so many things to do!

Barnaby usually hangs out in the shop and chats with Howdy. They like to talk about life, their opinions on different topics. And of course exchange jokes back and fourth XDD

I imagine their friendship is strong enough that they've opened up about some darker things. About their pasts and what not..

Sorry if this wasn't super descriptive and/or didn't answer your question 😅 brain is not braining today!

She's thought about telling someone else. The people she would trust the most would probably be Wally, Barnaby, Poppy and Sally.

Though she's afraid if she shows Wally, he'll be afraid of her. Just like all the other humans were...

She thought about telling Barnaby because he's so laid back and easy going.. perhaps he'd accept her for who she is.. but Barnaby really values honesty.. maybe he'd be upset that she lied to him about who she really is and wouldn't want to be her friend anymore..

She almost told Poppy, but backed out last second. She doesn't want to scare poor Poppy..

She's considered telling Sally.. and since Sally has a similar story to her.. maybe she'd be really understanding and accept her.. but she wasn't sure. So she never told her..

I'd like to imagine Home does, but Wally either doesn't notice them or thinks they're just normal old house things :0

For example, the first picture in this post shows Home before Wally restored it. The peeling paint was supposed to be like rotting flesh, showing a pale red wood underneath.. bright red wood exists in their world, but its not usually that shade of red...

I thought about there occasionally being a faint blowing sound somewhere in the house. Accompanied by drawn out rise and fall in temperature though all the rooms. Wally would say the windows don't seal that well or the walls have poor insulation.. Other's would say it feels like breathing..

I've considered that when Wally tries to hang a picture, the walls leak some kind of thick fluid. Obviously meant to be blood- but I miiiight not go with that one. Since that would be a big glaring problem that would grab Wally's attention-

KSJLJSJK WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO HOWDY?? XDDD

Also I'm actually pretty thin on ideas for Howdy.. although I DO have these headcannons about Howdy not liking winter/the cold! :0

I imagined that Howdy can't handle the cold at all <XD In the wintertime howdy is constantly cold, hungry and sleepy. This makes him move really slowly and show up late to everything 😔Thankfully he has his good pal Barnaby to lend a hand around the shop. But it just sucks that he's so exhausted in the wintertime and can hardly get anything done..

(In response to this post)

Thank you so much! :DD And ooooo! Yellow and black could work really well! :000

ALSO NOOO DON'T TUMBLE DRY THE CATERPILLAR- XDDDD

@neo-metalscottic (Chandelure post in question)

AAAAA THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I'M SO GLAD YOU LIKED IT!! :DDD

And as for Julies sisters/brother, I actually haven't thought about them much.. BUT THIS IDEA IS SOOOO GOOD AND SPOOKY!!! U GOTTA FIND A WAY TO ADD IT TO THE AU!! :DDD

I would like to draw that comic, but its just a huuuuuge project for me to pick up atm <XD

@problematicskeleton

Thank you so much!! :DD Although unfortunately I don't know what image you're talking about.. I don't remember seeing Eddie hurt with Wally carrying him, and I don't have any intentions for Eddie to get seriously hurt! <:0

#my response #gravity falls #welcome home #factual fam #slime rancher #ingo and emmet #submas

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ghostrealmgatekeeper · 8 months ago

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I'm...very sorry I was overworked and stressed, and I may of went into headspace...but I overreacted either way..

*no, no he has not left homes shadow house area. Yes he had refused anytime home asked if he wanted to come out*

#resurgence frank

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ghostrealmgatekeeper · 7 months ago

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resurgence, go check on your boyfriend

-he rushes to Wally concerned-

Wally? @ghostie-wally

#limbo! barnaby au #welcome home au #welcome home multiverse #resurgence frank

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franki-lew-yo · 6 months ago

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James and the Giant Peach is still (mostly) for young children

Despite a single pre-metoo joke and it's uncanny-ish artstyle that's a serious make-or-break-you factor on if you like it, James and the Giant Peach is aggressively a movie for young children. I personally like it as I never find it a patronizing sit for little kids, like Don Bluth's movies from the 90s so often were, but that really is what I think alienates people; the intended audience may be a bit too scared of the visuals (NOT like how they are with TNBC, which kids go in expecting to be scary) where the adult audience who is here for the 'creepy stop-motion' feel like the movie is lacking for not being Nightmare or Coraline, which is unfair. It absolutely scared me as a little little kid but upon finally facing it at, like ten or whenever it was on Cartoon Network's movie show, I realized there was nothing to fear. And that, in turn, was exhilarating. It's such good symmetry that the film is about facing your fears and standing up for yourself because that's exactly what my relationship with it was. It's such a comfort film for me. My og Bluey. JatGP, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Ernest and Celestine = perfect comfort after I watch something serious and/or disturbing.

Half my reason for trying to pied-piper everyone else towards it as it's own merit is I think James and the Giant Peach would hit hard for lovers of weirdcore and dreamcore ala Jack Stauber or @samsketchbook's 'Welcome to Our Dimensional Party'.

That "looks unsettling/potentially disturbing but actually cute or gentle" vibe pairs perfectly with dreamcore aesthetic. We're coming up on it's 30 year anniversary I hope to see a genuine resurgence. If I had it my way and I was Dan Olson I'd make an hour-long look at the movie, the original book and Henry Selick's filmography as a surrealist the way Dan made an hour-lookback at Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. But I'm not. Cause I'm not Dan Olson and I can't build up the nerve to either show my face or figure out how to make videos in two years.

But anyway, about the title of this post (content warning: downer nsfl stuff; mentioning of real life child ab*se cases):

James' life with his aunts hits VERY different when you're an adult and you've watched too much true crime.

It's not intentional on the part of Dahl or Henry Selick. Selick had Mariam and Joanna ham up the screen and they clearly loved every minute of it and Dahl I think was just trying to tell an 'authentic' type fairytale story where the main character has to escape their evil family. Point being- Spiker and Sponge are supposed to be 'evil for the sake of evil' villains who could only exist as hammy caricatures in an already weird story. They aren't supposed to be like the parents in Matilda or the Twits who I'd argue are a little more 'realistic' depiction of awful people...except for the fact that legal guardians like Spiker and Sponge DO actually exist.

There's a heavy implication in the film that no one else in their county even knows James lives with Spiker and Sponge (literally the only people around to recognize James' existence are the bugs when they first meet him!). His aunts seem to make James work out of frustration for having to take him in, like he's a burden and they're making him pay for being one by being their slave. They actively don't feed him except for rotting fish and then shame him for not eating it. The Lane Smith picture book implies that James' parents weren't killed by a rhino but rather it's Spiker and Sponge who put that idea in James' head and use it to control him. And all that BEFORE the beatings which you know are happening off screen.

After the horrifying cases of Ruby Franke, Sylvia Likens and the Turpins, the "every child deserves a parent but not every parent deserves children" reality of it all makes you realize that James probably would have died if he lived with his aunts. Considering how they flip out on him in New York- that boy REALLY needed to escape, giant peach or no.

This is absolutely another reason for why JatGP is a comfort movie for grownups. You have this horrific childhood rescued by loving in-human parents who will kill everyone in the room and then themselves if you touch their human boy. It's like Opal but if Claire found a happier family. Of bugs. None of that was intentional, ftr, but it's what sticks out to me.

#james and the giant peach #franki's features #dreamcore #oddcore #dereality #cw: child abuse #true crime #henry selick #um yeah #also this fandom needs to be bigger so I don't have to be bombarded with only TNBC or pr0nz posts

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dukeofriven · 1 year ago

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To Ravel-Out The Weaved-Up Follies: The Decline and Fall of Homestuck^2

[I first started this essay a few months ago during a strange, brief resurgence of Homestuck^2 discussion that vanished almost as quickly as it began. Because my brain is A Wretchedly Uncooperative Thing this essay has stayed in draft form, being picked at, until—naturally—Homestuck^2 surprised us all by relaunching with a completely new team at its head. I’ve decided to push myself to publish this anyway, because I still think the core of my thesis is correct. So, keeping in mind that this leaves the starting gate slightly later than I would have wished (not knowing I was in a race), let us commence.]

___________________________________________________

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. -Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 “Once upon a time there was a Boojum——" the Professor began, but stopped suddenly. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he said. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." -Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

Several posts about Homestuck^2 have started to crop-up… adjacent to my dash. I'm not attaching myself to those posts because it seems rude, but their points are largely an attempt at revisionism of the fate of Homestuck^2. Understand I'm not using the term ‘revisionist’ pejoratively: it is common, even sensible for artists to look back at failed projects and try to pick up the pieces and derive some value from them. I’ve done it myself, many times. Nobody likes to say "I entirely wasted my time, my passion, and my creative energy for [X] days, months, years.” It is important to look at a failure and see what you did right, treasure the parts that were worth treasuring.

But equally I don't want to go too far in rehabilitating what was, undeniably, a failure. There's a lot of critical theory being brought-up, a lot of talk of Homestuck^2 from a standpoint of post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, trying to engage with what Homestuck^2 was as a platform for ideas. A habitus, if you’ll forgive the jargon, what Bourdieu famously called (in a Hussie-like masterwork of language) “the structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.”

I get it. I get what the Homestuck^2 team was trying to do intellectually: where their minds were at, the hostility they faced, the vitriol they were harmed by. I get it.

But that's not why Homestuck^2 failed. Homestuck^2 did not fail because it dreamed too big, or was too intellectual. It did not fail because its themes were not worth exploring, or because its lens was too meta: for most of its original run, after all, Homestuck is nothing but an interrogation of Homestuck. Its brains were not why Homestuck^2 failed. The problem was its execution. The problem was its heart.

There's a lot to be said about not giving fans what they think they want. The internet drowns in coffee shop AUs where everything interesting about a franchise's characters has been vulgarly ripped from the text, leaving a drama-less, tension-less pablum where everything is stagnant and unchanging, everyone gets along, all the romances are cute and smooth, and you can burrow in the comforting ooze of artistic and narrative death. Give fans exactly what they want and frequently nothing creatively meaningful will result. Fandoms famously resisted both The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan when they first released because they pushed characters to change, and yet they grew to be beloved as fans realized that what they thought they wanted and what it turned out they could enjoy were not as alike s they assumed. There's nothing wrong with showing fans that there can be more to a story that just doing the same thing over again, retrenching into the pablum wastelands of growth-free comfort fics.

But when asking whether Homestuck^2 did or did not gave fans what they wanted or needed, we must first raise an important establishing question: which fans? That is to say: who was its intended audience? Who was Homestuck^2 written for?

At its peak, Homestuck Classic had millions of readers and a million page-hits a day. There was a whole contingent of fandom who came only for the trolls (in some baffling cases actually skipping the first four acts of the story to jump right to into Act 5). There was another contingent who loved the video game parody, there were Problem Sleuth junkies, and in the early acts there were the suggestion box obsessives: all of these were readers who were fans of parts of the story but largely stopped reading Homestuck as the story got more concerned with the complex nature of stories and narrative itself. Homestuck^2 is clearly not for them—as indeed Homestuck Classic itself had not 'been' for them for much of its run. Homestuck^2 is also not for new readers: if you haven't read the Homestuck Epilogues through at least twice, if you don't remember all its major plot points and the plot points of Homestuck Classic, it makes no attempt to onboard you and is, probably in-arguably, outright impenetrable to those not already in the know. It’s not impossible—there were SBaHJ fans who onboarded with the first context-free SBaHJ and went ‘yeah, I can vibe with this’ and never knew or cared that it was a reference work for something else— but it doesn’t seem likely that many people ‘jumped on’ the Homestuck train with Homestuck^2. I think Homestuck^2’s writers would agree that Homestuck^2 expected you to know the lay of the land. So: nobody new was likely going to read Homestuck^2, and (given its density of Homestuck call-backs) neither was it for more casual Homestuck fans. Homestuck^2 was not even for the truly otiose Andrew Hussie diehards: Hussie was only tangentially involved in the project, they weren't writing it, and there's seemingly no references at all to Barty's Brew-Ha-Ha or Inappropriate Time for Ham, so that's a full seventeen readers it also likely turned off (sorry, comrades. One day…)

So who, then, was Homestuck^2 for? Its intended readers seemed to be those who read the Epilogues and loved them. This is a complicated issue: for those who weren’t there, the Epilogues were… controversial. I defended them at the time: I liked them, even admired them, partially because I believed with the fervor of a zealot that there was still something else to come. I called this final entry ‘Pumpkin.’ Homestuck, a story that always rejected binaries, surely was not meant to conclude with over-the-top Candy and/or grim, dour Meat. I knew in my heart that Pumpkin was coming, where John rejected both of these dark and crazy futures and found a third way in which his friends grew up and matured without losing themselves and their friendship: not a story without conflict, but surely the prime timeline as existed in general fandom imagination could not accept Dirk’s grotesque, manipulative suicide, breastfeeding Gamzee, brutal civil wars, and Dirk and Jane becoming so cruel and hateful. Surely that was set-up to pay-off a better future later: after all, like its author, Homestuck abhorred a binary.

But Pumpkin never came, and now I look at the Epilogues and I find lot in it (for lack of a better term) ‘edge lord showboating.’ It feels like reading 90s comics all over again, including the bits with cannibalism. A lot of bleak and miserable things happen in the narrative, and I find myself asking ‘do they happen because they should, or just because they could?’ (And how many times can one franchise treat Jade Harley like absolutely garbage?)

But if the Epilogues had a true and golden virtue, it was their framing as intrinsically being fan-fiction: Meat or Candy, this was not the 'true' continuation of the franchise (as much as that means anything), this was speculative futures, not much different from Doc Scratch’s story of the Vriska/Noir battle. A one-shot, in other terms, an elseworlds: not a definitive statement about What Homestuck Was From Now On, but an experiment in tone and structure. How far can you push Homestuck before it doesn’t feel like Homestuck any more? (Turns out not nearly as far as you might think.) A lot of people didn’t notice, however, or perhaps simply didn’t care: the Epilogues ripped the Homestuck fandom apart. Homestuck Classic often did things in bad-taste as part of its odd charm: Gamzee’s codpiece, Jack playing dress-up after slaughtering a nice couple on a date, Caliborn’s cartoonish misogyny. Some bits land, some don’t, but for fans—I think for many, if not most—the Epilogues crossed a line that they were not comfortable with.

In some quarters the Epilogues are reviled, and I honestly can not fault people who found them off-putting. They are: intentionally so, provocatively so, and it should be okay for people to be put off by them without insisting that the haters ‘just didn’t get it.’ Often they did: they ‘got it,’ they just didn’t like it. It ‘squiked them out’ as we used to say, and the writers had to have known it would: discomfort is the nature and partial purpose of provocative art.

(Sidebar: Epilogue writers, you wrote a plot-line in which 16-year old Homestuck Act 6 protagonist Jane Crocker grows-up to become a racist dictator who has a cuckolding sexual relationship with Gamzee Makarra that involves kin-play involving public breastfeeding.

Sorry Andres Serranos acolytes, that’s not going to go down super-well with the majority of people, not because they are uptight suburban prudes but because they liked Jane Crocker and felt this outcome was not grounded well in the character they knew: only the obtuse would act shocked and try and argue it was due to a lack of sophistication. You took a gamble, you took a risk, you faced the outcome. You fucked around with ICP Hitler breastfeeding cuckoldry and you found out.)

So: who was Homestuck^2 for? It was for people who had read Homestuck multiple times, had read the Epilogues multiple times, and wanted a sequel that involved those Epilogues.

That is… a small audience. A very small audience. I counted myself among them, but had no illusions that its reach was ever going to be very large. Homestuck^2 was never going to be the Second Coming of Homestuck as a sui generis cultural phenomenon: seemingly by design, it was deliberately written for an insular audience who liked a controversial and difficult interpretation of a famous story and wanted more of that interpretation. So the Homestuck^2 team wrote for them: they came to the table with big dreams and big ideas. They came to the table with lots of critical theory under their belts: they knew their Barthes and Baudrillard, they could reference queer theory and the legacy of post-structuralism, they were the sort of people who knew how to situate Homestuck in post-post-modernism and what that meant for the nature of its exploration of stories.

They had an audience, and they had a plan. They were going to give the fans what they wanted.

So after much hype and fanfare, after interviews and the Tumblr equivalent of a press-junket—which saw the new team saying how excited they were to tackle Homestuck’s legacy, how many great ideas they had, how much having a diverse team was going to see Homestuck ‘done right’—Homestuck^2 first published on the 25th of October, 2019, releasing 32 pages.

We start in the glittering majesty of space. The camera swoops in among the stars, barrelling towards a rushing spacecraft (every frame of Homestuck^2 looks great, the visual arts team's work is its unquestioned highlight). We aim at a viewport in the spacecraft’s hull and slowly the Muti-Narratively-Dimensional Ubervillian Dirk Strider comes into view. Fresh from his triumph in the Epilogues, continuing his wicked schemes, he looks right at the camera, and—speaking directly to the audience—he voices the first line of dialogue in Homestuck^2:

"Surprise, bitch."

…

There is…

…

… there is no coming from back that.

There is no saving it.

It is the 25th of October, 2019, and Homestuck^2 launches with its own death-rattle. It stumbles out of the gate like a beautiful racing pony catching its delicate hoof on the sharp, treacherous edge of an unwieldy analogy and tumbling into the indifferent soil of hard reality, shattering all four legs and immediately marking itself for teary euthanasia at the hand of the devastated young girl with the violet eyes who raised it from a foal and dreamed of making Nationals.

We have established that Homestuck^2’s potential audience was small. The people who were most likely to like it were already an insular, distinctive group who had bought-in to what much or all the Epilogues had to offer. Homestuck^2’s opening-day crowd did not need to be sold on the word of the Lord—they already believe it: they came to see their first glimpse of the promised land.

And in its very first conversation with that audience, in its very first words, Homestuck^2 makes the most spectacular miscalculation of tone since 2013's DmC: Devil May Cry—or for those of us of who remember the 90s: ‘Dirk Strider’s about to make you his bitch.’

There's nothing wrong with starting a story with a villain, there's nothing wrong with a villain being a contemptible heel to its audience, but Homestuck^2 spends its opening 32 entries—which, at over 7600 words are longer than the prologue to the Homestuck Epilogues—jumping between Dirk’s smarmy conversations with fellow characters and a monologue to the audience, pages infused with an arrogance and condescension that is downright enervating. The text is frequently dense, so dense it feels like chewing your way through a plank of wood. It is actively tiring to read: I bailed on my first attempt at reading Homestuck^2 when it originally dropped because I just did not have the energy to squint at my screen and read that much orange-on-off-white text.

It is, to be clear, contemptuous. Dirk did much the same in the Epilogues, but the locus has changed. In the Epilogues Dirk taunts the reader with the changes he is making to the story: he knows they object to his manipulations, and he preens as good villains do. But in Homestuck^2, Dirk speaks not of his changes but of the very existence of Homestuck^2 itself. He treats his audience as inherently hostile to the entire existence of the work they have just shown-up to read (or even support via a Patreon), a hostility that culminates when he ‘opens’ a suggestion box and receives the suggestion ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck,’—which he at-once rejects and goes on to monologue some more.

Dirk is talking to an audience who isn’t there. He is speaking to everyone who didn’t like the Epilogues and objects to Homestuck’s 'sequel' directly following them: but that audience isn’t reading Homestuck^2. They bailed in advance, and any who did try and keep an open mind likely jumped ship the moment the comic started by calling them a bitch and implying they’re idiots. The only people likely to read past the fifth page are those who already bought-in to Homestuck^2’s plan: and they are greeted with some 32 pages and 7600 words of the comic’s villain re-litigating and justifying that plan over and over and over again to people who nominally already agreed with him.

It is draining. It is annoying. It is boring to read.

There’s so much you could critique about Homestuck^2’s choices: from Rose cheating on Kanaya to impregnate Jade to Jane Crocker going full Trump and keeping kids in cages. Equally there’s arguments to be made that Homestuck^2’s very premature cancellation inhibits any ability to judge the story fairly: like any serialized narrative stopped mid-way, we have no way of knowing what narrative payoffs were supposed to be. Decisions that seemed baffling on page 8 might prove brilliant and bold by page 8000. But we never got to page 8000, because Homestuck^2 made one crucial error:

It started by telling its audience they were fools for not being smart enough to appreciate how brilliant Homestuck^2 was going to be, and then spent a majority of some 7600 words repeating itself like the worst self-pitying incel you’ve ever had the misfortune to be trapped with at a party. If only the ungrateful could realize how smart, handsome, and well-educated I—Homestuck^2—am, the love I deserve will come flowing in. I’ll show them all.

Homestuck^2 never recovered from that first, fatal error. The rest of its choices, good and bad, are almost irrelevant in the face of that opening broadside, that hostility, that tedium. Homestuck Classic earned its walls of text and at least knew how to space them: Hometuck^2 took its audience forbearance as a given and opens with a lecture on its principles and quality like an unusually snide abstract on a sociology paper. Homestuck^2 essentially began by telling its audience to leave unless they were willing to give it carte blanche, to roll over for its brilliance from the first, to accept in advance that its intelligence and virtue were first rate. So the audience did leave and it never came back and eventually the whole thing collapsed via artist infighting that was so rancorous and possibly subsumed by NDAs that to this day no one has ever halfway adequately explained what happened at the end.

But that ending was preordained from the beginning, for the balance was hopelessly incorrect.

So to anyone trying to write a revisionist history of Homestuck^2 in which its downfall was the fault of readers who simply didn’t ‘give it a chance,’ who didn’t appreciate its themes, who couldn’t grasp (or didn’t care to grasp) its intellectual bonafides (not to mention its extraordinary self-assurance that it was going to be queer Homestuck ‘done right,’ which is a whole essay about a priori reasoning in and of itself)... in other words, a history in which Homestuck^2' downfall happened because people just didn’t ‘get it,’ I’d like to sum up my counter-argument succinctly:

People didn’t like Homestuck^2 because you wrote it bad.

[Afterwards:

There is something bitingly funny about the ‘return’ of Homestuck^2 with the announcement that, from what I can gather, seemingly every person involved with the original project was fired (or, as they’d probably insist, refused to come back). Dirk’s preening, overwhelming arrogance, that ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck’ prompt, will forever haunt the original team’s unwieldy vision. “I’d bet you just looove for us not to make Homestuck anymore” the team said, with all the confidence of an entrepreneur dismissing safety regulations before climbing into his homemade submarine, and boy were lessons learned. My problem with the return, however, is that I don’t know who genuinely wants to see the story of Homestuck^2 finished: the remaining cadre of die-hard patrons who still have enough goodwill to want the promise of the story’s finale fulfilled is microscopic. I’d argue there’s more people waiting for the conclusion of Wizardy Herbert, and I’m the only person I know who has ever read it. What I mean is: as a choice to revive a struggling franchise it doesn’t make much sense, and further—if it is not clear—I don’t think this is a story worth finishing. What is to be salvaged? Jane-the-Dictator, Rose’s cheating, Obnoxious BabyVriska, Dirk Strider the monster? The problem with Homestuck^2 is that Pesterquest happened, and those who played it went ‘this—this is the kind of story we were hoping for, not your edge lord showboating.’ And we only got one Pesterquest and Homestuck^2 limped on for another year reviled, ignored, and eventually forgotten. When it died, most people didn’t have any idea, because the drama never crossed their screens: nobody was talking about it any more. As my best friend noted, give us more Paradox Space. Give us more stories with joy and some sense of fun, something not written by people who often felt like they had an ‘End of Evangelion’ style hatred of Homestuck, or at the very least took the old joke that Hussie was ‘trolling’ his audience at face value. (Writing a good story with twists, set-backs, and tragic moments is not trolling, it is just writing a good story.) Homestuck^2 never felt like it understood that: it was rude and iconoclastic for no more compelling reason than it thought that was meaningful. But then I think the legacy of Epilogues has been extremely toxic—part of the positivity towards Pesterquest was that it let the Epilogues go, featuring a triumphant moment where YoungDirk confronts his Epilogues self and goes ‘I don’t have to be a huge wanker, actually, I can stay a character people can stand and even love again.’

Do that, new team. Pesterquest is named-dropped on the new site more than once, and my dream is that its cast arrives and overthrows the corrosive toxicity of the Epilogues, banishes it to the far realm of underbaked elsewhere ‘what-ifs’ along with every DC cannibalism story and that time Peter Parker’s radioactive semen gave MJ cancer.

The Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are, at this point, not worth salvaging—but I’d happily see them formally buried.]

#homestuck #Homestuck 2 #Homestuck^2 #homestuck beyond canon #andrew hussie #dirk strider #pesterquest #homestuck team #james roach #jane crocker #rose lalonde #kanaya maryam #homestuck epilogues #Wizardy Herbert #Vriska Serket #Jade Harley #daikatana #john romero

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kastlenetwork · 11 months ago

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Hi! So I'm pretty new to the kastle fandom and wanted to know if there are any like- classic fics or interviews or memorable moments in panels and cons (with the actors) that I should know about? I know about the interviews that are on the kastle wikifandom page but only because I've read them.

helloooo! welcome to the family! it's been quite quiet lately, but frank and karen are always in our hearts lolol and every now and then there's a little resurgence, so that's nice. umm first up interviews. there's a lot of little quotes here and there that were a big deal. we didn't get many interviews of the two of them together, if i remember correctly. i think two comic cons were pretty exciting.

here are some interviews from comic con 2017 yup

this is a cute clip from last year, where deborah talked about how jon's intense but really uplifted her. and that they want to work together again.

(i'm looking at kastle's wikifandom and, really, the big interview quotes all seem to be there.)

“ … just in terms of whether this is Jon’s story to tell or my story to tell, you just want to kind of be respectful of everybody’s contributions. Jon and I have certainly felt that there is room for a romantic story in there. And there were certainly scenes where we took it farther in some takes than we did in other takes. We’ll have to sort of wait and see what the editors chose, and how far they decided to push it. But we as actors allowed for that possibility.” -deb cinemablend

deborah and jon were both supporters, but deborah was always including frank into karen's romantic potentials:

“But all of the romance I’ve gotten to play, with any of the characters in the series, whether that’s Frank or Matt, they all come from a need. From a lonely person, a person who doubts whether she is deserving of love.” -deb collider

“I like that Karen can say, ‘How far down this road of violence of revenge do you go before you’re ripped apart?’ and he can look at her and go, ‘I’m already ripped apart. And you are, too.‘” -deb 92.1 bobfm

“When professor [Jeph] Loeb [Marvel TV head] told me we were gonna do a series on The Punisher,” Bernthal continued, “first thing i asked him is would I have the pleasure and the honor to work again with one of the most honest, the most kind, and the most talented actors I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.” --jon ew

oh! karen page being announced for the punisher. very cute.

youtube

"i just want to say, you guys don't love him as much as i do" was very exciting when it happened lmaoooo. the hope for kastle was high.

*****

i'll be honest up front and say, i tend to forget a lot of stuff? so, basically, i can read a fic and then read it again months later and it's like a brand new experience. which is both a blessing and a curse. so, i basically just zoomed through my bookmarks to try and find some things?? 😩😩

(i'm scanning my bookmarks and.............a lot of them are basically just smutfdjklgsdfjglkdfjglkdfjg)

ballads for a dead man ❤❤ [three parts, unfinished] Safe up in the mountains with Frank following a bloody showdown in Hell's Kitchen, Karen wonders just how much more complicated things between them can get. She's about to find out.

these heavy words, your open heart 😘😘 (this was a kastlechristmas gift to me from @carry-the-sky 😊❤) “You told me once that I was honest. That I don’t lie to you. But the hospital—you asked me to start over, and I said I didn’t want that.” Karen sucks in a breath. Frank’s eyes are still on her, wide and bright. It’s the most vulnerable she’s ever seen him look. “I lied,” he says.

The Reporter [kinda iconic ❤👀] Force Recon missions keep Marines isolated, entrenched for long periods in covert locations. They rarely received visitors, and in Frank’s long experience, the visitors were almost never civilians, let alone gorgeous blondes with mile long legs and sky blue eyes. Frank was trying not to stare. They all were. Well, everyone except Bill, who’s face had just split into a shit-eating grin.

The Flower Cam [oh god, the flower cam! i just remembered!! ❤] It had been a long time since there had actually been any flowers in the window. She must have trashed the white roses after his latest bullshit at the hospital with Madani and the kid. Good. Good for her. She should forget about him. But still… Frank couldn’t help but check every once in a while.

actually just, everything in their ao3. i have all this bookmarked.

(..................god, my bookmarks are really all smut. this says a lot about me.)

Castle’s Auto Shop ❤❤ yes. yep. Karen Page is in need of a car mechanic. Castle’s Auto Body Shop seems a reasonable choice. There’s just one problem: This little auto shop has become a well-known spot where less than honorable people to go get their car fixed…only to have justice find them at the next stop light. Having her brother’s truck fixed there means Karen will have to own up to a few secrets in her past.

Blood and Bone ❤❤❤! this is the fic that has seared itself into my brain. i've never once forgotten this. iconic. Frank Castle is a boxer at the top of his game. Laconic and anti-social, he has a reputation for being an incredibly-tough interview. Karen Page is a sports reporter trying to prove herself in a male-dominated field. She's done playing games--trying to be the "Cool Girl" who caters to the male fantasy--and now she's on a mission to take no shit. "For a while, the fact that an interview with Castle lasting longer than 5 minutes even existed was big news. Splashed all over the message boards—circulated among boxing and Castle fans alike. The very concept that someone actually got the man to sit down for more than a breath of time and give multiple-sentence answers to a question—it was huge. Massive. It was the only thing Castle fans could talk about. Until three months later, when Frank Castle disappeared. Then that was the news. It was the only news."

this is hard lmaoo how ludicrious. i have about seven collections from some of our events, as well. there's loads of good stuff in there:

kastlesmutweek 2018

kastlesmutweek 2019

kastlechristmas 2018

kastlechristmas 2019

kastlechristmas 2020

kastlechristmas 2021

kastlechristmas parent collection

#theshipdiaries #kastle #ask #txt: chey #kastleff

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browsethestacks · 1 month ago

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Original Art - Two-Gun Kid #073 Pg 02 (1965) by Dick Ayers And Frank Giacoia

From ha.com...

Outlaw Hunk Galloway has the drop on the local sheriff -- until Matt "Two-Gun Kid" Hawk charges in to even the odds. Here is a splendid sequence from Marvel's resurgent heroic period, when editor/author Stan Lee sustained the creative momentum with the Western titles even as the company's revamped line of superhero titles was gathering steam toward the development of a coherent Marvel Universe. A marginal note indicates that Lee had intended to give the badman the name of Gab Galloway, a punning reference to jazz artist Cab Calloway. Ayers usually inked his own pencil compositions, but here Giacoia applies the right finishing touches to emphasize Ayers' virile and robust imagery.

#Comics #Marvel Comics #Two-Gun Kid #Dick Ayers #Frank Giacoia #Westerns #Western Comics #Vintage #Art #Marvel #Stan Lee #1965 #1960s #60s

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thepunkmuppet · 6 months ago

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I can’t find frank iero tongue stigmata story either it timed out before I could see it or he deleted it but um. did I manifest this by causing a minute tumblr unholyverse resurgence I’m scared I feel like I angered god (wahey) and it’s some kind of weird cruel joke on me

#I’m SCARED like WHY NOW??? SIR????#DON’T LOOK AT ME EVER WHY DOES IT FEEL PERSONAL AAAHH I’M SORRY FOR READING HOT CATHOLIC RPF ABOUT YOU BBGIRL #frank iero #unholyverse #danny reads unholyverse #uhv #mcr #my chem #my chemical romance #my chemical fucking romance

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madamtrashbat · 1 year ago

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I was chatting with a friend recently about the ways antis operate and how damaging their ideology is and I wanted to organize my thoughts about it.

It's one thing to be like "I wish minors wouldn't interact with my work because it's got adult content" (which is not something you can 100% control short of paywalling) but it's another thing ENTIRELY to be like "minors should never look at anything sexual ever and people who think it's okay that they do are secret pedophiles."

Teenagers need to have the safe space to explore their sexuality and figure their shit out and sometimes that place is fandom. Sometimes teens are trying to deal with the fantasies they have about their hot history teacher so they consume teacher/student smut in order to work it out. Sometimes they're wondering what gives them their jollies and are just reading whatever they can to wank to, including incest and rape and other "unsavory" things just so they can get it all figured out.

Sometimes awful things have happened to teens and they're using the avenue of art and fiction to take the power back from their rapist and create a narrative they control where they are working through it safely.

And antis would see all of this and want it fucking destroyed.

I was brought up in fandom by a few of the sweetest older women (adult women!) who took me under their wings and showed me that what I was thinking and writing wasn't bad or wrong or shameful and it was all perfectly sane to have these sexual feelings because nothing makes sense when you're a kid and if you want to write Frerard where Gerard is the hot teacher to Frank's catholic schoolboy in order to deal with your feelings about the sexy sub you just got at your school then that's totally fine.

These trusted adults also comforted me when I was afraid, taught me what boundaries were (please do not actually pursue the sub!), told me what were normal interactions and what I should be wary of (do NOT let the sub pursue you), and they were proud of me as I made my way into the world as a reasonably well-adjusted adult.

(Hi, Gaja, can't wait for your Christmas card!)

Sexuality is weird and messy and whatever makes our pants tighter is all individual and equally weird. Telling teenagers to not seek out porn and to not even speak to adults is just a one-way ticket to growing fucked-up people who don't know how to operate without shame and then we have a resurgence in Catholicism and NOBODY needs that.

And the way that antis rally against this, like teenagers are Pure and Sweet Babies who are being corrupted by the Awful Adults Like Me (who are secretly child diddlers obviously) is just. So fucking damaging.

Imagine trying to handle the way your hormones are firing off at everything and you're just not sure what's going on and instead of a kind adult going "hey we were all freaks at 16 and it's totally normal to be like 'this strange thing is turning me on' I promise" you have some sniveling puritan asshole going "YOU ARE ACTUALLY A SEXUAL PREDATOR IF YOU LIKE THESE THINGS AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED AND PUNISHED BEFORE YOU ACTUALLY HARM PEOPLE."

Like. Y'all. I have seen antis claim that people who wrote about/drew rape in order to deal with their own assaults DESERVED IT because they chose to deal with it in this way. I have seen antis tell people they hope they get raped for the fiction they create. They wish death and harm against people who make fiction. Antis literally have a body count over this shit. And yet they want me to believe they're the good guys? Bye.

Antis will argue that it's not normal for people to think about gross and icky things. I argue that Holocaust survivors had sexual fantasies about actual fucking jackboot Nazis.

No one says you have to like everything everyone else does. We have a robust tagging system for a reason. But to behave as if what YOU like is the only thing that is acceptable and everything else is Bad and Wrong is not the business. Kink Tomato exists for a reason. We are all individuals who like different things. Get with it.

Teenagers are in a precarious time of development and if you want to shame them for whatever is going on in their heads then you are the problem, not the solution. Be the kind of adult you needed as a teenager, not some shaming, screaming Puritan trying to pin scarlet A's onto everything because it's sinful. Goody Proctor is just trying to rub one out in peace.

Get with the way fandom has always operated or go away. ACAB means fancop, too.

#discourse #long post

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