technicalchaotic

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That elderly couple who volunteers at the soup kitchen after church on Sundays and attends every town hall meeting has done more community direct action than 99% of internet leftists 🤷🏽‍♀️

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Oh hey you wrote Hope of Morning no way I finally found you! I see that you are taking asks about it so i hope that this is fine. Something that I wanted to know is what's going on with Gamzee's size in the fic? Is his growth stunted from the years he spent imprisoned or is it one of those "trolls age at different rates depending on their blood" kinda things?

Gee thanks Tumblr for never telling me when I have asks

Sorry! But yeah, Gamzee's growth is stunted for a couple of reasons. He was found late by the church, so his early life was spent malnourished and high. He gained back some of that growth as he lived with the church, but he was still growing when he was captured by the condece and four years of borderline-starving did a number on him. He'll eventually be taller than average, if he lives that long, but he'll probably never reach his ancestor's size. This definitely doesn't bother him at ALL.

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something is wrong

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if i had to choose between death and reading homestuck then i would probably just read the damn webcomic but i definitely wouldn't be very happy about it

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this is a message for everyone who is 22. if you’re 22 please stop worrying. take a deep breath eat a bagel maybe. everything that feels impossible is going to work itself out. have a great day

[technicalchaotic]

The number of artists I know who stopped creating, even if they, personally never experienced the kind of harassment that comes with callout culture. The number of writers who just stopped writing at all. The fact that I haven't posted anything publicly in years. It's fucking terrifying to think about audience response, to nitpick over every decision for moral purity, and know that it doesn't fucking matter because the goalposts are constantly moving.

And the fact that for some of the assholes who do this purity callout bullshit, this was the intended effect.

I feel like a somewhat disregarded aspect of modern internet callout culture is the impact on people with anxiety or paranoia or intrusive thoughts and how the general sentiment of "bad things will only happen to you if you're bad, so just be good all the time" just exacerbates obsessive self flagellation

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Commenters are the real MVPs

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Where is the rest of Kankri's clade?

In prequel I haven't given a lot of thought to the rest of his family because it makes everything much more complicated, but if I think about it, they would almost definitely come for Kankri in the church at some point. He just disappeared! With a clown! What the fuck Kankri!

By the modern gamkar fic they're probably all dead, which is depressing, but I like the headcanon where Karkat falls on the tyrian side of the red, and has the same longevity/agelessness as Condy. In the prequel, I think Kankri does a lot of negotiating and Manipulating and Kurloz does a lot of standing behind him leaking murdervibes until they all end up in relatively safe positions within the empire (according to Kurloz) where they can sneakily gnaw away at the worst parts of the hemospectrum(according to Kankri)

GHB-Condy bad blood

Okay I'm putting this under a cut bc I honestly don't know if any of this is spoilers for what remains of the fic, but this is just most of the history of alternia in HoM.

When I'm writing things there are pivot points where things change from canon, and GHB and Condy is one of them. In HoM (and pmuch any other fic I write that involves the church or the empire in some way) Kurloz and Meenah were a complicated sort of kismessitude/moirallegiance. They always start out that way, and it always comes down to two questions. When did Meenah ask Kurloz to put her before the church?(she nearly always does) and what was his choice when she finally asked?

In HoM she asked way, way too soon. They were both young, both freshly come to power, and Meenah didn't understand Kurloz's relationship with the church at all.

She saw the church as a resource, and Kurloz's position as Grand Highblood as an extremely successful con. She understood that he had to maintain a certain image to maintain control, but she didn't understand that he was sincerely and wholly devoted to his duties as the head of the church. He cared for her in their weird way of caring for each other, but she couldn't stand that the church would always come first.

She wanted to be his first and only priority, he brushed her off, she pushed harder, he broke ties with her.

When he broke contact, the empire was still growing. Church-controlled territory was valuable but relatively small, and extremely well-guarded by subjugglators, and the total conquest of alternia came much slower without purplebloods as the backbone of the imperial police state.

The sufferer's rebellion proceeded nearly unchanged, slightly more successful than in canon. Without the total control of the subjugglators, the condesce couldn't just destroy all mention of the rebellion wholesale. So more midbloods were swayed, more lowbloods remembered, and when the summoner's rebellion kicked off(20-30 sweeps before HoM), it was semi-successful, especially when a certain mutant-red soldier started climbing the ranks.

For the church, things looked a little different. A number of trolls decided living under church rule was better than living in an active warzone, so the smaller church territories were relatively prosperous until the empire decided they were too prosperous to ignore any further. About 10 sweeps before HoM starts, the church starts seeing active conflict, and while the church enclaves were full to bursting with powerful, dangerous trolls, they didn't have the sheer unlimited numbers to hold the line for more than a few decades. They might still be holding out though, if they hadn't lost Gamzee.

Gamzee was pretty fucked up when he was brought into the church, but Kurloz was enamored with the idea of a legacy. He'd never taken more than a passing interest in mentoring one of the church wrigglers until Gamzee. But Gamzee had been so fragile and so sick when he came to the church, and he'd been Kurloz's own descendent, Kurloz took a special interest in him, despite not being part of the Lusus clade. He grew up into a strong, highly trained laughsassin with schooling in diplomacy and administration as well as fighting. He was probably the equivalent of 18 when he was given command of the squad he was leading when he was captured. Losing Gamzee about broke Kurloz's spirit, and it was a heavy blow to morale for the rest of the church too, because he had been well-known and well-liked, and it had been a commonly accepted thing that he was being raised to succeed the current Grand Highblood. There were rescue attempts. Gamzee never found out about them. There were raids on seadweller strongholds that were expensive in terms of resources and lives. Ultimately, Kurloz was pushed into taking risks that he knew better than to take, and without Kurloz's leadership, the rest of the church crumbled in one genocidal sweep. Meenah gave purples the lime treatment, set herself up in the church territories as a benevolent dictator who saved the trolls there from brutal purpleblood slaughters, and when the other half of the war didn't go her way, gave the last purpleblood she had as a 'present' to Karkat. She doesn't really know trolls that don't act like she would, and she would have taken full advantage of a young, beautiful concubine gifted to her over peace talks. She'd been sure that Gamzee would have torn his throat out by the third day.

This got rambling and long. I hope it makes any kind of sense.

I just read Hope of Morning and it is SO good, I love your worldbuilding and characterization and clown church and everything :DDD absolutely fantastic job!!!!

Ah. I also found your post from like last year about questions to ask, and while all of those are fantastic and compelling things I would absolutely adore to hear you talk about, narrowed down I’d probably ask about either the sequel, the GHB<>signless thing, or the thing that sparked the conflict between the GHB and HIC in Hope of Morning (I think that’s the thing? I’m in mobile rn so no checking)

Anyway!!!!! Regardless of whether you’re still into homestuck and/or want to answer, your writing is good and I hope you’re doing well!!! Happy pride as well :)

Oh shit. I read this a couple days ago and I swear I responded but I guess I just thought really hard about it instead.

Okay sweet, it's 3am, I just checked into a hotel that I'm pretty sure is owned by bedbugs, and I've been feeling the clown itch again so let's talk about some shit

Hope of Morning Sequel

Let's call it 'bottled memories'

So full disclosure, I fully intend to end HoM someday but I just came off a *hellish* career mistake so it'll be a minute.

So I'm gonna try and describe the sequel without spoiling what's left of the main story. I may or may not be successful because I dont actually remember much about where the last chapter left off.

Bottled memories is focused around the resurrection and reformation of the Mirthful Church. The thing about laughsassuns is it's hard to be sure you got *all* of them. The thing about trolls is the mother grub is gonna keep churning out wrigglers in all colors so long as the jades bring her slurry. The thing about (my) clowns is that purple lusii aren't shit, so clowns make do.

It's also partially focused around one of my fanclowns. It's a crying shame the only longfic I ever got around to writing requires all my clowns to be dead because I love them. Especially Kalton, who has been around for something like 7 slutty, slutty years.

If you want more than that you'll have to ask because I crave attention constantly.

Ghb <> Signless

Okay so I'm a slut for doomed romances and dancestor echos. I'd have to go back to the post to remember which one I was thinking about specifically, but generally I want it to go like this:

Kurloz is a fucking bastard okay? But you know what, so is Kankri. They're assholes. Maybe Kankri lures him into a debate. Maybe it's a murderstuck-style emergency romance, maybe Kurloz only ever meets him once he's on the jut and knows the instant he looks into those burning eyes that he has done something unforgivable and irreparable. But my favorite is where they somehow make it work, and Kankri stays a well-kept secret among the upper castes, enacting subtle changes in alternian society while Kurloz is slightly less murder-happy with a Vantas holding his leash.

I do want to talk about the bad blood between condy and Kurloz, but I'm falling asleep on my phone, so that will be in a reblog tomorrow.

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Fuck, that one

Alright so it's actually two fic. The post-sgrub one focused on Gamkar, and a Many Years In The Past one that was going to focus on Kurkri.

Holy shit this got long. Putting the rest under a cut.

so I don't know how long you've been around in Homestuck fandom but there was a point during one of the early hiatuses, before the alpha kids and everything were introduced where a post-game theory that spawned a lot of fic was that everyone would just sorta.

Get dropped back into their original universes like nothing ever happened.

Like obviously that got jossed to hell and back, but honestly I kind of adored the concept.

So the fic there goes,

The trolls get dumped back on alternia. Everything sucks. They have a couple perigees before ascension and Karkat spends nearly all of it freaking the fuck out because, y'know.

And ascension comes around. Gamzee has a plan, you see. He's been doing some reading. Things are so much clearer now. It's so much easier to make sense of things sober.

Because palemates are sacred. He doesn't know how he missed these passages before. Must've been pretty fucked up. Anyhow, palemates are sacred and good as family, and anyone who lays claw on family, rust to tyrian, the church horde will fuck that person up.

So all Gamzee has to do is get Karkat onboard the church fleet and he'll be fine. This is a "Karkat gets adopted by the cult of the Mirthful messiah's fic."

Karkat obv thinks this is a stupid idea but he's gonna die one way or the other so~

And then they get on-fleet and Gamzee is called to see the grand highood who's descendant he is, and Kurloz is Very Sad that Gamzee doesn't have a palemate with him because Karkat is gonna be in hiding until they can get him registered as Gamzee's moirail.

And then Gamzee meets Kurloz's moirail, the best-kept secret in the church fleet. Because Kankri fucking Vantas is not only not executed, he's painted fucking Mirthful and has been spending the last several hundred sweeps very gently guiding the church and by extension the entire empire into a kinder, gentler form. Meanwhile Kurloz has spent the last several hundred sweeps very gently convincing Kankri that some trolls are annoying enough to deserve culling. Neither of them really get it, but they're doing their best. Imagine if a staunch conservative American politician fell head over heels with a hippie time-jumped from woodstock, but also killing your way out of a problem was socially acceptable as a form of conflict resolution.

Gamzee and Karkat, who knew both what alternia was like pre-sgrub, and Beforan Kankri and Kurloz, both exchange the shadiest fucking looks and decide to never mention it again. Gamzee has a few dozen crises of faith but this is a "we're ignoring all the shit I didn't like post-cascade" fic so they're not irreconcilable crises. He probably gets in a lot of theological arguments with Kurloz for the rest of his life.

Anyway the rest of that fic is about Karkat becoming Clown. I'm a little sad it won't get written at this point because it was fun.

The prequel is about Kurloz and Kankri and I swear I was planning it well before 2020. I stopped writing Homestuck or planning new fic in like 2018.

It was very much a riff on the lion and the mouse, playing into kankri-as-christ(flawed) and also one of my favorite tropes "you're my enemy but I have a duty of care and I'm not even going to do a shitty job because I have pride if nothing else and also I'm going to heal the fuck out of you out of spite."

So there's a plague sweeping alternia. Some kind of pox, like a full on bubonic thing. Alternian healthcare is almost as bad as American healthcare, even pre-ascension in the early centuries of the Condesce's reign, so it's spreading out of control and killing a disproportionate amount of lowbloods. I like the (head ?)canon that Kanaya has some amount of first aid/medic schooling, so translate that up to the Dolorosa having an amount of herbalism/hedgewitch/healing woman knowledge, translate that to Kankri being incredibly fucking stubborn about saving as many trolls as possible and getting himself a reputation as a miracle worker and prophet.

Until the Grand Highblood, newly risen to power, falls ill and none of his priests or medicullers are able to do anything to stop the progression of the disease until one of his younger Acolytes (Sirrah, not yet titled Infernal, one of my oldest and most loved fanclowns, a right bruiser butch bastard of a disaster lesbian and who I want to be when I grow up) in her desperation goes and does the thing Kurloz hasn't been able to do for sweeps, tracks down Kankri, and begs him to come and heal her brother.

Anyway that's the first chapter, the rest of it is Kurloz's recovery and Kankri trying to heal this asshole and also not get his stupid ass killed and also the fucker won't rest for five fucking minutes

There's a little coal inside that diamond, but adversity is the spice of life.

This got super fucking long. I will reblog with HoM fanclowns and sequels and GhbCondy bad blood

I just read Hope of Morning and it is SO good, I love your worldbuilding and characterization and clown church and everything :DDD absolutely fantastic job!!!!

Ah. I also found your post from like last year about questions to ask, and while all of those are fantastic and compelling things I would absolutely adore to hear you talk about, narrowed down I’d probably ask about either the sequel, the GHB<>signless thing, or the thing that sparked the conflict between the GHB and HIC in Hope of Morning (I think that’s the thing? I’m in mobile rn so no checking)

Anyway!!!!! Regardless of whether you’re still into homestuck and/or want to answer, your writing is good and I hope you’re doing well!!! Happy pride as well :)

Oh shit. I read this a couple days ago and I swear I responded but I guess I just thought really hard about it instead.

Okay sweet, it's 3am, I just checked into a hotel that I'm pretty sure is owned by bedbugs, and I've been feeling the clown itch again so let's talk about some shit

Hope of Morning Sequel

Let's call it 'bottled memories'

So full disclosure, I fully intend to end HoM someday but I just came off a *hellish* career mistake so it'll be a minute.

So I'm gonna try and describe the sequel without spoiling what's left of the main story. I may or may not be successful because I dont actually remember much about where the last chapter left off.

Bottled memories is focused around the resurrection and reformation of the Mirthful Church. The thing about laughsassuns is it's hard to be sure you got *all* of them. The thing about trolls is the mother grub is gonna keep churning out wrigglers in all colors so long as the jades bring her slurry. The thing about (my) clowns is that purple lusii aren't shit, so clowns make do.

It's also partially focused around one of my fanclowns. It's a crying shame the only longfic I ever got around to writing requires all my clowns to be dead because I love them. Especially Kalton, who has been around for something like 7 slutty, slutty years.

If you want more than that you'll have to ask because I crave attention constantly.

Ghb <> Signless

Okay so I'm a slut for doomed romances and dancestor echos. I'd have to go back to the post to remember which one I was thinking about specifically, but generally I want it to go like this:

Kurloz is a fucking bastard okay? But you know what, so is Kankri. They're assholes. Maybe Kankri lures him into a debate. Maybe it's a murderstuck-style emergency romance, maybe Kurloz only ever meets him once he's on the jut and knows the instant he looks into those burning eyes that he has done something unforgivable and irreparable. But my favorite is where they somehow make it work, and Kankri stays a well-kept secret among the upper castes, enacting subtle changes in alternian society while Kurloz is slightly less murder-happy with a Vantas holding his leash.

I do want to talk about the bad blood between condy and Kurloz, but I'm falling asleep on my phone, so that will be in a reblog tomorrow.

[technicalchaotic]

I just read Hope of Morning and it is SO good, I love your worldbuilding and characterization and clown church and everything :DDD absolutely fantastic job!!!!

Ah. I also found your post from like last year about questions to ask, and while all of those are fantastic and compelling things I would absolutely adore to hear you talk about, narrowed down I’d probably ask about either the sequel, the GHB<>signless thing, or the thing that sparked the conflict between the GHB and HIC in Hope of Morning (I think that’s the thing? I’m in mobile rn so no checking)

Anyway!!!!! Regardless of whether you’re still into homestuck and/or want to answer, your writing is good and I hope you’re doing well!!! Happy pride as well :)

Oh shit. I read this a couple days ago and I swear I responded but I guess I just thought really hard about it instead.

Okay sweet, it's 3am, I just checked into a hotel that I'm pretty sure is owned by bedbugs, and I've been feeling the clown itch again so let's talk about some shit

Hope of Morning Sequel

Let's call it 'bottled memories'

So full disclosure, I fully intend to end HoM someday but I just came off a *hellish* career mistake so it'll be a minute.

So I'm gonna try and describe the sequel without spoiling what's left of the main story. I may or may not be successful because I dont actually remember much about where the last chapter left off.

Bottled memories is focused around the resurrection and reformation of the Mirthful Church. The thing about laughsassuns is it's hard to be sure you got *all* of them. The thing about trolls is the mother grub is gonna keep churning out wrigglers in all colors so long as the jades bring her slurry. The thing about (my) clowns is that purple lusii aren't shit, so clowns make do.

It's also partially focused around one of my fanclowns. It's a crying shame the only longfic I ever got around to writing requires all my clowns to be dead because I love them. Especially Kalton, who has been around for something like 7 slutty, slutty years.

If you want more than that you'll have to ask because I crave attention constantly.

Ghb <> Signless

Okay so I'm a slut for doomed romances and dancestor echos. I'd have to go back to the post to remember which one I was thinking about specifically, but generally I want it to go like this:

Kurloz is a fucking bastard okay? But you know what, so is Kankri. They're assholes. Maybe Kankri lures him into a debate. Maybe it's a murderstuck-style emergency romance, maybe Kurloz only ever meets him once he's on the jut and knows the instant he looks into those burning eyes that he has done something unforgivable and irreparable. But my favorite is where they somehow make it work, and Kankri stays a well-kept secret among the upper castes, enacting subtle changes in alternian society while Kurloz is slightly less murder-happy with a Vantas holding his leash.

I do want to talk about the bad blood between condy and Kurloz, but I'm falling asleep on my phone, so that will be in a reblog tomorrow.

[technicalchaotic]

uh oh! you misunderstood a social cue and said something mildly awkward. you will think about this and cringe everyday for the next 20 years

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Sorry, PETA, I would 100% eat a T-Rex.

[technicalchaotic]

Murderbot and ART are the couple of all time. They are a cyborg and a sentient spaceship. They are in love and dating and it is NOT romantic but they are MORE than friends and also they HATE eachother and they will NOT elaborate on what that relationship means.

All they do is watch TV together, argue, and trust eachother with their lives. They wont even admit to being friends.

They have mind melded multiple times and had a child together.

One time ART died and its last action was to trick the hostiles into finding Murderbot bc it KNEW Murderbot would bring it back to life.

Their names are Murderbot and Asshole Research Transport.