#askbox

[auriidae]

Stressmonster101 in the rain? :3333 (LOVE UR PAPER HERMITS BTW THEY R SOOOOO CUTE)

sun shower :)

[kriimhild]

I'm sorry but I imagine the DL boys in this 😏😏

same here

[azure-bluet]

ur empire zam is still the best thing to happen ever i look at her and go eeeee tehehe

thank you so much!!!! :D

[alandove]

Draw a tasque loafing

kitter! meow (8-bit)

[pianokantzart]

Can you explain what you mean by Hellen being similar to Luigi?

Less her being "similar" and more being "uncannily opposite in almost every single way." The only real similarities between Luigi and Hellen is owning a ghost pet, being a willing second-fiddle to someone they admire, and (I say this tentatively since it's yet to be confirmed how rich Luigi is in canon) rolling in cash.

But Hellen, besides being obsessed with King Boo, is also obsessed with appearances and control.

She has an assortment of extremely strong ghosts living in her hotel, and though she gives them fitting accommodations the tradeoff is that she is (quite literally) at the top of the heap. Her existence is one of splendor and extravagance, keeping a tight grip and close eye on everything that goes on in her estate. But despite how cool-headed and dignified she appears, it's a veneer. The decorations of her penthouse are a shrine to what she desires, but can not have. Her temper turns hair-trigger the moment things don't go her way, and she is constantly applying a thick layer of makeup to hide her true form from the world.

Luigi is the opposite in every possible way. He is goofy, anxious, and clumsy; short, big-nosed and plainly dressed. He has difficulty saying no, and makes an effort to be as unobtrusive as possible to the point that he can be a little bit of a doormat at times. His appearances make him easy to underestimate, and he is the last person in the world to get angry if things don't go his way. He gave up on having control of his life a long time ago.

But Luigi's a man without a facade or false pretenses. He is who he is, and for as crazy as his life is he loves his home and the people who surround him. Whether or not he's canonically rich, in the end he doesn't really want power or riches at all. All he wants is to sleep in his simple little house knowing his family and friends are safe.

The two couldn't possibly be more different, but they share just enough similarities that their differences create a very interesting contrast.

[abyssalzones]

You mentioned in ur Transfem Stan stuff (really good btw. Love it) that it made you appreciate Stan as a character more, and I was wondering what held you back on her character before?

shrugs..... I think I might've been largely influenced by prior negative experiences with gf fandom. which is Never something you want. but essentially the way stan's characterization often gets flattened for the purposes of angst or comparisons to ford, where she's the one who was "right" all along in their conflict and always has pure of heart intentions... is not something I find very interesting. so I suppose I forgot about the actual nuance of the character! whoops.

then again, I've also just never been the type of person to get attached to male characters with a strong "I have to do this for my FAMILY" angle. interpreting stan as transfem and butch does largely 'fix' this for me because I find it puts a lot of her behavior into perspective in a way that's really interesting (she has to be the protective Man of the house but feels like a fraud when trying to perform traditional masculinity, family is immensely important to her but she's still the black sheep of her own family, etc) but I did also just naturally come to appreciate stan as a "family oriented" character whose behavior and motivations are extremely messy Because of that. often the family "man" in fiction is a noble, paternalistic savior figure who enacts violence against perceived outside threats as a necessity to protect the structure of The Family, and you do actually see this in stan but interestingly you also see how damaging this family-first mentality can be when it comes to her relationship with ford (and projecting their problems onto the younger twins).

basically stan suffers the role of "fandom favorite whose writing gets flattened like a pancake in popular interpretation" and being a fordliker since 2016... jades you......

[leftneb]

lol calling Lawson talented is something. Too bad his talent took a day off during his tyre tests. Comparing Oscar to a guy who couldn’t get a f2 win is something

hey man you ever drove an F1 car before? F2? F3? Formula-fucking-Renault? Chinese F4?

the post this is about lmao

also not be factchecking an anon hater of all people (the lows I let myself sink to...) but Lawson has 5 wins in F2, he came 3rd in the championship in his 2nd year. No he hasn't won the F2 championship but neither have uhm, any of the rookies coming in next year. Neither have Alex Albon, or Yuki Tsunoda both of who are I think pretty inarguably talented.

And guess what? Mick Schumacher and Nyck De Vries DID win their respective F2 championships, got their seat, and drowned! Winning F2 doesn't equal being good in F1, that's just not how it works, straight up. Not to mention that the previous two F2 champions aren't even in contention for a seat anytime soon, where do they place on your talent scale if I may ask?

[grapenehifics]

For the keyword search game, may I have "red"? :D

Me: how often is 'red' going to come up, actually

Also me, after getting 17 results: Okay so apparently Anakin blushes a lot in this fic

“This okay?” Anakin asked.

“Wonderful. Thank you,” Obi-Wan said, and Anakin’s ears went red at even that faint praise, and he hurriedly pretended he wanted to wear his hair down all of a sudden for no particular reason and yanked his scrunchie out, shook his hair down around his shoulders, and slid the scrunchie onto his wrist.

“Look, you don’t have to…” Anakin spread his fingers out wide on the table between them. “…owe me for helping you. It’s my job.” He was very proud of himself for getting all the way through this sentence with only a slight bobble in the middle when he’d gotten distracted by the way Obi-Wan’s biceps shifted under his shirt sleeves as he crossed his arms over his chest.

(Send me an ask and I'll send you a snippet of one of my WIPs!)

[hms-no-fun]

i have an intense love/hate with godfeels because it is beautifully written but it also makes me viscerally uncomfortable. something something disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed probably. engaging with that discomfort teaches me more about myself and is definitely worth it for something like godfeels. any advice for constructively engaging with media that Pisses You Off, by no fault of the creator? what would you say to your haters in good-faith, if you could?

well, to be fair i have said plenty to my haters in good faith previously, but that was a very direct response. if you and i were having a polite conversation amongst the two of us, my first question would be "how far did you get?" godfeels has been going for six years now (!!!), and it's gone through many phases in that time. i'm at a point now in my life where if someone tells me gf2 didn't click with them, i'll probably nod and say "yeah it's rough around the edges, there's a lot of stuff i'd do differently today." the most vocal contingent of haters i've ever gotten were the handful of people who dipped at gf2.2 when june got superdrunk and accidentally murdered a bunch of people, assuming the story was going to be about how cool and based that decision was. anyone who's actually read gf2 to completion should find that misconception laughable. it also makes a difference if you finished gf2 and stopped there, or started 3.1 and fell off, or if you got through chapter 8 and fell off, or if you're currently reading Double Album. each of those is a slightly different conversation with its own pros and cons. whether or not i'd try to talk someone into continuing their read depends entirely on those questions (and also how self-confident i'm feeling in the moment).

i guess i would say to someone who is not enjoying godfeels that they should stop reading godfeels. it's an extremely heavy story that digs into a wide variety of traumatic subject matter. it is also deeply personal in a lot of ways, which is perhaps a weird fit for a Homestuck fanfiction. so i can understand someone from the wider fandom hearing about godfeels as "the June Egbert fic" being disappointed that it's not fluff. i've documented in the past how gf2 emerged out of my dissatisfaction with the image of "Hairclips June," whose transition exists off screen and whose acceptance by her friends is an obvious expectation. i kind of feel bad for how that shook out in the long term since, between the lengthy hiatus of hs2 and the broader strangulation of the post-canon movement during the pandemic, the canonical "Hairclips June" story (or at least "June Who Doesn't Suffer 100% Consequences" story) doesn't seem to exist. i don't mean literally canonical, i mean "seeped into the fandom's collective unconscious" canonical, like Detective Pony. there are plenty of fanworks that do a good or at least interesting job with June, but they're not *about* June in quite the same way godfeels is. it's entirely possible that such a thing DOES exist and IS popular (i freely admit to being out of touch with modern fanworks), but for better or worse godfeels still seems to be the thing that comes up most often-- and not always in a positive light.

for a while now i've been working on an "Author's Introduction" which on the surface is an attempt to contextualize the phases of godfeels for new readers, but in actuality is more of a history of/commentary on the post-2019 fandom and the so-called "Homestuck Renaissance." i see this as necessary because godfeels is an extension of that moment, in particular the loudly recuperative pro-Vriska boosters and their exquisitely galaxy-brained VrisRezi meta. then gf3.1 responded to the fandom backlash, chapter 8 responded to my experience watching every foundation of my post-transition life crumble during the pandemic, and then Double Album is an exploration of building yourself and community back up in the aftermath of tragedy.

it's not that this context is necessary to understand or appreciate godfeels, just that i think it helps put things in perspective. when i started gf1, i hadn't written fiction in nearly 7 years. today, the series is sitting just shy of the 500,000 word mark. at every step of the process, the quality and ambition of my writing has increased exponentially. there's a reason i've written Double Album as a jumping-on point for new readers-- besides being better in virtually every way that matters to me, it's also largely shorn free of the baggage that can make godfeels a hard sell for folks. whether or not it actually SUCCEEDS as a jumping on point is another conversation entirely.

so i guess all of that is to say, if we were having a private conversation just the two of us, i freely admit that godfeels is a wildly disjointed story on top of being extreme and often emotionally masochistic. i am proud of this work from start to finish, but it fundamentally is the process of its authorship in a way that a thoroughly drafted and edited novel simply isn't. i used to publish chapters the instant they felt done to me, with only minimal revisions. these days i let chapters bake a lot longer and put much more thought into how they fit into the larger whole. i kinda miss the old way but the new way results in much better work.

i'd be curious to hear what exactly it is that Pisses You Off about godfeels, and why you nevertheless feel it's a worthwhile reading experience. you ask me for advice on how to constructively engage with media that pisses you off, but i don't have any because in general i don't engage with media that pisses me off. i stopped reading fanworks after 2020 because everything that survived seemed to cater only to the sector of the fandom that harassed my friends out of their jobs and platforms. i found their interpretations/extensions of canon lacking, their tendency for straightforward fluff rather grating. i COULD have made that everyone else's problem, but what would be the point? i wasn't the target audience. i didn't enjoy the work, so i stopped reading it. i'd rather move on to media i enjoy than suffer through media i don't.

BUT. there's a fine line here, because it actually takes a lot to Piss Me Off. i don't really believe in rules or standards in art as Inviolable Laws Of Nature. my measure of whether something is good has a lot less to do with its inherent quality and a lot more to do with the balance between intention and execution. it rarely matters how amateur something is, if it meaningfully accomplishes the thing it set out to do then i'll probably like it (or at least respect it). i look for expressions of authenticity, moments where the artist and the medium are in perfect sync. there are plenty of critically praised pretty-looking movies and games with big production values that i don't particularly like. sometimes that's because they're a naked moneymaking enterprise disguised as art. sometimes it's a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. and then sometimes an artist is just full of shit and doesn't really know what the hell they're talking about (i like to call these people "Californians"). mostly, i just embrace that art-making and art-viewing are inherently subjective experiences, and i find little value in numbered rating systems of any kind.

a lot of my favorite movies and albums underwhelmed me my first time through. they challenged me in a way that i at first interpreted as incompetence, but have come to see as brilliance. there's stuff i found alienating in high school and early 20s that i find deeply relatable in my 30s. as a film student i've had so many conversations with so many people who have wildly different takes on the same movie that i've completely given up on the idea that anyone is an objective arbiter of what's good and what isn't. the only real thing is if it works and if it works for you. i search for the best in everything, because at the end of the day i'm just here for the love of the game and i don't much enjoy hating things. for media to really Piss Me Off, to elicit a genuine I Hate You response, it has to be more than just, like, poorly edited or whatever. it has to embody a repulsive worldview, be a tool of jingoistic propaganda, or otherwise act as an extension of corporate greed and wealth extraction. these days i reserve my hatred for that which has connection to real Power and exerts a mass cultural Influence, or that otherwise blindly reproduces the same problems.

i think it's far easier to critically engage with work you don't like when you search for the things that work, rather than the things that don't. when it works, when it really clicks, you see what they were going for, and only with that perspective can you see why what doesn't work doesn't work. all i ever ask is for readers to take my stuff as it is, good and bad, and judge it on those terms. i find your use of "comforts the disturbed, disturbs the comfortable" funny and fitting. art that wants to be for everyone is art that cannot be for anyone. it is a perfectly round grey sphere that all who gaze upon it can agree "exists" and "succeeds at what it's trying to do." good art is imperfect, because it is the result of a perspective you may not share. i've never wanted to make art for the masses. i want to make the kinds of things that i wished existed when i was younger. there are a surprising number of people who feel that godfeels positively affected their lives, and i know that i have very little to do with that. godfeels is an object that exists in the world. i had ideas of what it was when i wrote it, but i can't control what anyone else sees no matter how much digital ink i spill trying to explain my original vision. if it truly comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, then on some level i must have succeeded in what i was trying to do even if the path to getting there was spotty and rough.

i did the best i could at every stage of writing godfeels. i would do things differently today, but i also wouldn't be here at all if i'd done it differently back then. i try to extend this grace to other artists as much as possible, that we're all just figuring it out as we go along. but i also know that everyone goes to art for different things, and finds value in different aspects of its expression. really, all i ever want is to have a conversation about the object without the looming specter of Respectability Politics and Moral Hazards. it's when people start acting like godfeels is Dangerous, and that i'm dangerous by extension, that i start having opinions about where critics are fucking up. tell me what it does or fails to do. point at the text and show me you've read and comprehended it by citing your sources and arguing through the text instead of around it. absolutely fuck off with the moral hand-wringing about Transgender Representation and Glorifying Violence and Perpetuating Toxic Stereotypes. it's a fucking Homestuck fanfiction, for god's sake.

but anyway you're not doing that, so, good job! i'm glad you find the experience of reading godfeels illuminating even if it pisses you off. i hope you found this lengthy answer enlightening, and maybe a bit annoying also. consistency is key, or so they say

[stil-lindigo]

hi, i don't know if you've seen the statistics for the arab.org clicks but in the last quarter of 2023, they generated $380 for unrwa - not a huge amount in context of palestinians who need much more than that to leave gaza, but nobody had to donate those dollars. those were generated. and generally, they raise ~$100 per quarter, with most of it coming from their own bridging the gap of donations to make it worth it. i got curious and looked at the stats yesterday and just thought i'd point it out because i feel like people don't see the results of the "daily click" and maybe this would prove that it is actually well worth it. wishing you well <3

thank you anon, that’s a really amazing point!! here’s a reminder to do your daily clicks.

[kriimhild]

I couldn't resist after some of the questions inspired this. NEON is just short but she be 26 &Hally b 22

AAAAAAAAAA I LOVE THIS! Yeah just because someone's short and pretty doesn't mean they're a minor. RIGHT MOON?! speaking for short goblins here khehehe I don't know if Moon would do right this, but taking his protective habit I wouldn't be surprised at all! Poor man with the slapping mark on his face XD Sun making a facepalm omg this is pearl Your ocs are so cool and cute:3

[azure-bluet]

draw him cramping

i got two asks

[bluegiragi]

Have you ever animated or attempted to? And If so, Did you like it or was it just not for you? Also, Love all of your artwork! Every single drawing you publish is an absolute masterpiece!

i animated this kiss over a couple days!! i'd love to animate more, and there are a couple of songs i've storyboarded things to, but honestly its just always a massive commitment and I usually can't spare the time for it.

[z13lovebot]

A BUNCHA ASKBOX RESPONSES HI

[tidalpooles]

I love how geometric your art looks. I feel like I can sort them like legos

Legos...hmm... ...That's this guy!

He likes bugs I also like bugs

[abyssalzones]

i saw this on my pinterest and thought "this is fiddauthor" and imagined a drawing of the 1st one as ford and the 2nd as fidds . and thought to tell you because i imagined chronic pain ford and thought of your great headcanons my liege

I did think it was funny thank you