#tales from the tlc trenches

[clonerightsagenda]

It is wild to realize that newer followers of this blog totally missed the TLC saga. I did not shut up about that for years. People I'd never met were vagueblogging about me. For all I know they still are.

[geejaysmith]

brb, travelling back in time several years to throttle my younger self while screaming why did you build and organize these Photoshop files this way, this is the worst possible way you could have done this

[mixchronicles-futureboyfriend]

Dear Future Boyfriend – Are You Hungry?

I’ll be honest, I’m often usually always most certainly, without fail, hungry. Even when I’m not hungry, I’m only a few minutes from being hungry again, so food is always on my mind.  As long as I can remember, I’ve always been like this.  And lucky for you Future Boyfriend, God took mercy on my gluttony and didn’t turn me into an episode of My 600-lb Life.  See you could be destined to be with Gilbert Grape’s mom. But no, not you Future Boyfriend, you’ve been blessed with the other end of the spectrum. Because I love food so much it’s only natural that I would love to share it with those that I care about. But let me be clear, I’m not talking about my leftovers. Scram honey that to-go box is not for you.  And I’m less likely to offer up more than one “tasting” bite while out to dinner. No, I’m taking about home cooked meals. The kind of meals that are made with TLC and a little elbow grease. And in a world of repeated struggle plates, I would imagine a woman that could actually cook would be some sort of hot commodity these days. And although men claim to appreciate a woman who cooks I’m starting to think the opposite. With all the bad luck cooking for NON-Future Boyfriends has brought me, I’m wondering if I should hang up my apron and begin ordering take out.

The first man I ever cooked for was my high school sweetheart – my first love.  Although it was quite some time ago, I can recall the menu, like it was yesterday: chicken, creamed corn, green beans and mashed potatoes. It was a scheduled evening for two with the man I was in love with. And to make it special I added a surprised dinner for him. This was a big deal. I was 15-years-old and had never cooked for anyone besides myself and my younger brother.  And although he’d cleaned his plates over the years with little to no hesitation he lived off of hot dogs and ramen noodles so to say his palette was unrefined would be an understatement. Anyhow, I whipped up this nice meal, got all dressed up and set the table for a romantic dinner for my first love. A dinner he never arrived to… Oh stop it Future Boyfriend, this isn’t some sad tale about how my first love got hit by a car, crushing me forever and now I can never love again.  No, he didn’t show because he was 16-years-old and cheating on me. And although I had no proof… yet, what teenage boy would pass up an adult free evening alone with the bonus of a free meal??? Him. After all, I was still a virgin with no signs of giving it up any time soon, soooo who can blame him.  Well I did. So, after blowing up his pager with 187 codes I packed away the food and vowed NEVER to cook for another man again… oh and to also catch him in the act and bury him alive in my backyard.  After my first love, I went on to date other guys. And because a girl has to eat, I’d made a few meals here and there but, food was never special and it definitely wasn’t expected.  But then I grew up.  Some years passed, I was in love again and wanted to use my culinary skills to display my affection. Again, I remember the menu: baked salmon, sautéed spinach and mashed potatoes (again with the mashed potatoes… hummm I’m sensing a pattern here).  As the food finished, I popped it in the oven to keep it warm as I rushed to my bedroom to do my hair and makeup. I threw on brand new lingerie, I’d just ordered for this surprise and pair of high heels. I then hurried back to the kitchen to prepare for his arrival.  Now, unlike my high school boyfriend, I knew he was coming.  At this point in my life I was putting out (hints the lingerie), and a few minutes later he was knocking on the door.  See I watch too many movies. You know the ones where the girl goes to the house in a trench coat with nothing under it or greets her husband at the door in a bra and panties and he gets so excited they have the most amazing sex of their lives.  Yeah… that only in the movies. When I opened the door my then boyfriend gave me the most confused look before bursting out into laughter. Now Future Boyfriend, if you’ve never been laughed at while TRYING to be sexy, I must say it’s the most demoralizing thing ever. He claimed his laugher was a nervous habit. One I hadn’t seen in all of our time dating, but as you can imagine sex was taken off completely off menu. Oh and he ate cold salmon. Strike two on cooking for a man. My last failed attempt happened last week. I’ve recently reconnected with a guy who ghosted me 3 years ago. And no, I never really found out what happened back then, but from his bazaar behavior now I believe he was kidnapped by aliens. Anyhow, we’d decided to do a movie night at my house. I’ll spare you the menu (no it didn’t include mashed potatoes) because he never acknowledged it. Actually, he made the decision to eat before he came to my house so this could not be mistaken for anything besides two people watching a movie. Nothing more...  Just a movie.  Well this is confusing…  I own the movie and have seen 700 times. And since neither of us are being quizzed or writing a dissertation on the film so why would I NOT treat this as a date and want to host this man accordingly in my home??? Hummm note to self, I need to learn the definition of a date.  Needless to say, as I ate my solo meal on the couch across from him I decided cooking may be bad luck for me Future Boyfriend. It hasn’t worked for any of the past guys and I don’t want to risk it ruining us. Which is sad because I’m a freaking good cook.  But don’t worry, I would never starve you… or us either. I love food much too much for that. So, I’ve downloaded the Postmates app for when we’re ready to eat.  Now I just need your credit card info for billing. And we’ll always have food semi hot and ready to go.

Xo,

Mix

[clonerightsagenda]

Well it looks like mspfa kicked me off our adventure somehow because I no longer have edit access, so as long as Gill keeps ignoring my discord DMs I guess the final pages will continue to be broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ As people have noted in the comments it is at least sort of fitting in a meta way

[geejaysmith]

[clonerightsagenda]

The TLCverse Janerezi origin story is really funny because we had a scene that could be interpreted as Davek/at teasing and a scene that could be interpreted as Davere/zi teasing so I went ‘we gotta have equality here, what’s the next scene with two girls’ and Gill promptly animated a whole panel of Terezi swooning into Jane’s arms and at some point we started being sincere about it.

[clonerightsagenda]

In retrospect the funniest critique of TLC was that one anon who was furious at us for “erasing canon Davek/at” and only dropping hints considering when the epilogues came out it turned out they didn’t even get together until years after the main comic.

[geejaysmith]

Kat: What's Calliope gonna use as a weapon? She just came back.

Me: Roxy and Jake just. Give her a glock. There.

[clonerightsagenda]

Some of my most treasured memories of working on TLC are stealing a few hours in the late evening in Memorial Union hunched over a notebook next to the Jesus Club. I will never forget the absolute delight of meeting up to hash out a few lingering character arcs and then having Gill pull “let’s do a full Ace Attorney parody because we can” out of her hat.

[clonerightsagenda]

thought about assigning my different writing strategies D&D alignments and gave up but chaotic evil is definitely the fact that Gill and I drafted some of our dialog in TLC by roleplaying it in MSPARP

[clonerightsagenda]

Reminiscing about our TLC writing days and one of my favorite things was moving the character magnets a friend made for us to different zones of the refrigerator depending on who was dead currently

[clonerightsagenda]

since I was talking about our backwards design-flavored character planning process, here’s a peek behind the curtain for Jade’s page in the aforementioned Google doc

Jade Harley <3

Filed Under: Beta Kids, Humans, Battleship Crew

Personality traits and issues to overcome:

represses emotion until it explodes

defines her self-worth through powers and being ‘useful’

blames herself for things, projects that onto other people

questionable taste in men

1 on 1 interactions to fix:

Davesprite

Karkat and Dave have shipteasy stuff that I guess could use being resolved peacefully

also she’s clearly still pissed at Karkat and John 

Group Interactions:

beta kids - Jade and Rose need more interaction

battleship crew - she repressed stuff and held grudges

Plot Statements/Foreshadowing:

the one who will dissolve this solid flesh and transform it into a dew

Caliborn’s name will fill her with fear

Thoughts on dealing with all of this:

She needs to have honest communication conversations with the people who hurt her. She needs to work those feelings out in a peaceful way. It’s not fair for her to hold grudges when she doesn’t tell people she’s hurting.

It would be good if she lost her powers or gave them up and found self-worth elsewhere.

Maybe the Green Sun is close to breaking off bc of LE surrounding it, and she helps push it all the way, giving up her FG powers for the greater good. Kanaya might sew it up later, once she has ‘earned them’ back. 

Hopefully her Calliope convo could accomplish at least some dev: It’s not your fault when someone uses you. Repression is not the answer. Sometimes you should get angry.

She has not bled yet. We should fix that.

maybe if she breaks off the GS, Jack Noir then goes after her and he cuts her. 

on that vein, since her hair has been likened to Condy/grimbark mode, after she’s severed that link to both Jack and Bec, he could give her a symbolic haircut

then she and Rose can have female bonding time over her hair (though Rose mentions she’s not very good at it. Take that, gender roles). Gill note: Plot twist, the alpha kids are great with hair because they’ve had to do it themselves for god knows how long. Just an idea. 

Issue to plot notes:

Convo with Callie helps her acknowledge and verbalize issues

talks with friends to overcome repression (with John and KK, John points out it’s unfair she never said anything, overcorrects with Ds, more balanced by the time she gets to D

insists in D using sword, later realizes it’s bad. controlling/guilt complex combo

helps break off Green Sun (reliance on powers), escapes Jack

Rose convo with haircut

[clonerightsagenda]

Someone requested a DVD commentary (which anyone can do for any of my fics, although depending on how old it is I may not remember much) so I will do my best.

I suppose I'm always curious about the relationship between a creator and their work, anything they've learned along the way, and ... I guess how it feels to finally be done with a thing? I realize this is all wishywashy so dw about it

Re: the feeling of having finished something, I wish I could say I was filled with inner peace and satisfaction. Unfortunately, I’m not wired that way. (If anything, posting a big update or flash gives me a jittery adrenaline rush reminiscent of walking out on stage before a concert.) Part of the lack of closure is the weird Coda workflow - I haven’t had much to do TLC-wise for years beyond nagging Gill, and I didn’t work on the flash at all, so I felt a bit more distance. Also with the The End page and the DC still on the horizon, it doesn’t feel quite put to bed. (Oh boy, more nagging.) However, most of it is my mentality. When I finish something, my brain immediately goes ‘ok what’s the next project’. This is part of why I’m so productive, but also why I’m stressed all the time. It’s funny... ending with the message that the only way to free the characters is to cut off the author was a choice I made based on themes in the story, but given that I once self-published a novel to make myself put it down and stop picking at it, it’s a fitting theme for me too.

Wrt the relationship between the author and the story, fanfic is a little odd in that respect. People say your characters are inevitably based on some aspect of yourself, but what about when they’re not your characters? Still, the choices you make with those characters reveal a lot about you, and I’m no exception. The choices I rewarded or punished characters for, the endings I considered satisfying... those all reflect my taste (and Gill’s, but I’m mostly speaking for the characters I controlled) and I’m comfortable with that - TLC was very much *our* ideal ending rather than something universal. 

Now of course the author/story relationship is a bit different when you actually put yourself in the story. Gill and I show up at the start of the comic to explain the terms of the AU (where we’re splitting off, what changes we’ve made) which as TLC veterans know was... controversial. But also extremely in character for both of us, I won’t deny it. And it was kind of fun to pop up once or twice more, like when I’m judging Gill for her 10 panel zoom during the Strider conversation. (This was in response to the 4 pages of silence and clouds during the canon Dirk and Dave conversation.) Or when we kidnap Hussie’s self-insert while he’s stalking Vriska. As for what’s going on in our self inserts’ head at that point, see this Muppets clip. I am Kermit. Gill is everyone else in this scenario, except for the unfortunate Jack Black. 

What did I learn along the way? Hmm, it was definitely practice working with a large ensemble cast. It was also interesting to pick up an already ongoing story with a focus on ending it. I’ve struggled with endings in the past - a lot of people do - so trying to wrap up so many plot threads and character arcs was a challenge. Working on TLC has changed how I plot and outline my own work - and hopefully I can get back to some of that now that I have most of my fan projects off my plate. When we were planning everything we created a big Google doc, and something I did was list every character, identify their traits and issues, figure out how to address those issues, and then create scenes that would allow them to do that. Ironically this is not unlike the backwards design process used in education, which I learned many years later. 

Also boy oh boy did I learn a lot about making animations in Adobe. I built B3 TH3 4C3 4TTORN3Y frame by frame because we didn’t know we could import looping images. Then Play the Rain crashed on me every few minutes because we were using .psds instead of converting them into literally anything else. Putting together CBC was a snap in comparison. After Effects was so much easier to use than Animate. 

This was a big question, but hopefully I at least approached answering it.

[clonerightsagenda]

geejaysmith

God is dead and we've spent the last five years making a hobby out of gleefully making sacrilegious handpuppets out of his corpse.

and I’d do it again

[clonerightsagenda]

Some people have playlists of the music they listened to when working on their creative playlists. Meanwhile I did all the final lines and coloring for CBC while bingeing the Adventure Zone

[clonerightsagenda]

I have to say i'm really glad you touched up on the forgotten content from Homestuck, the Co-op quest was amazing and seeing Roses planet quest was so satisfying.

I can’t remember at what point in the planning process we went “what if they actually played the game? wouldn’t that be wild?” but planning the different challenges was a lot of fun! Plus it gave us an excuse to design really on-the-nose character building exercises and then blame SBURB for it. Glad you enjoyed it!