#hide out from the general homestuck community and stuff for a while

[airprime7]

*unpins my pinned post*

hi im hiding from the internet now

[hms-no-fun]

what is your reasoning for having some characters have dual name/text colors? is this just another stylistic choice to try and even further branch out from homestuck or what

there are a lot of unstated style rules in godfeels that have just kinda emerged. there's a logic to, for instance, who gets third person narration vs first person, & how they show themselves in that narration. June's narration is always her text color because she isn't really capable of intense subterfuge. Terezi, meanwhile, is very good at hiding herself in narration up until she gets flustered or mad. i never really set out to make an expressive narratorial matrix for these characters, right, but it's there.

going back to 2.1, i actually originally wanted to make June's name be Vriska-blue and her text be Egbert-blue... but i had yet to discover the magic of find & replace, and the thought of having to manually replace "June:" with "<span class="vriska">June:</span><span class="john">" forever after seemed like WAY too much of a hassle. i think giving her a bespoke text color was by far the better choice, because it literally being a blend of Vriska and Egbert was a very very early metaphysical indication to me that there was a much more complex psychological phenomenon occurring under the surface. it took me until writing 3.1 before i realized that the name for that phenomenon is plurality (thanks to the commentary made by a number of plural readers).

in homestuck proper, having a name that's a different color from your text is generally relegated to the sprite^2s. i always read this as a simple way of visually communicating that they're fusions. i always liked the EFFECT of reading their lines because the dual text colors help them feel ascended in some abstract sense.

so, when it came time to introduce Silverbark, i wanted a way to indicate that something big had changed with her beyond the obvious stuff like her appearance. because what makes Silverbark interesting imo isn't just that she's gotten older. if she'd just gotten older while living more or less the same life she was living on earth c, i don't think her hair would have greyed, and i don't think her name color would have changed. it has to do with experience and perspective somehow. to my mind Silverbark's silver is the ultimate tell that her initial impression as the same silly girl that everyone remembered was a front she was putting on. something has changed in her deep, deep down, and in a way the whole space opera side of things emerged out of my own desire to understand what changed. perhaps one could make some inferences there given Padua's color conventions.

in the case of Risk and Dare, i take sort of an opposite approach-- and here i'm now realizing this actually pretty closely mirrors my philosophy about who gets first person narration. imo there's two primary ways one takes control of their own narration. one side, the Dirk side, is brute force. the other side, June's side, is self-realization. so you have two poles, one associated with external power and the control of others, the other associated with internal clarity and a desire to live one's own life more genuinely. i know this particular verbalization makes it sound like one is good and one is bad, but i think you can look at the events of godfeels and say pretty definitively that both camps are just as capable of doing both really good shit and really terrible shit. how you got power certainly informs how you use that power, but it's hard not to think of obama running on hope and change only to turn around and become just as bad as the last guy, dismantling every apparatus of party organization that got him in power and made sure the dnc would never ever run a campaign that effective again. it's complicated, baby. there's no easy answers in life, and there's no easy answers in godfeels.

so anyway in Davepeta's case, you've got a name color change due to a cosmic fusion, the result essentially of a basic math problem. in Silverbark's case, you've got a name color change due to some level of personal/political ascension, a crossing of some kind of rubicon that came with great benefits at what looks to have been a pretty heavy cost.

with Risk and Dare, you've got name color changes as a result of literal self-actualization. it is with Dare's insistence that their name is Dare and they do exist that they finally push through the veil between internal self and external self, forcing June to acknowledge that they are in fact Real and Whole and Independent from her in some key way while also being equally part of her, inextricable from her. it's the final expression of Dare's arc-- throughout chapter 8 they keep trying to find reasons to live, trying to find gods to believe in. they plead to June, they plead to the universe, they even plead to us as readers, and still they get no answer. it's only when they take their life into their own hands and embrace the name that X gives them that they reach the point of being In Control that allows them to fight back in the way that they do. you'll remember that when Epigone is making everyone sing happy birthday, Dare-as-J is the only one who seems to be able to put up any kind of resistance to the words being pushed out of their mouth.

in Risk's case, the motivation for the color change is similar but distinct. for her it's a matter of realizing that "Vriska" as an archetype just doesn't fit anymore. it's still self-actualization, but where Dare's was about fully knowing and embracing their right to exist as an individual, Risk's is about knowing and embracing her right to be someone who doesn't already exist. what exactly that means in the longterm remains to be seen, but you can be sure that it's gonna come up again eventually

[keeper-not-hero]

MY THREE HUMANS AND MY THREE TROLLS ARE FINALLY DONE BEING THOUGHT ABOUT AND ARE NOW PLACED INTO THE WORLD FOR YOU TO ENJOY READING ABOUT, Massive post under read more!!!

[Obs: These ain’t kids. They’re all in their early 20’s tho.]

Gatolt Osbizb (name means nothing. = Muse of Doom.) - 

Looks: Hair that goes down to her shoulders, curly and surprisingly well groomed. Skin (and body) made up of tiny chunks stitched together. Fingers, hands, legs, slightly different shades of grey, with seams colored with the multitude of different blood types beneath. Blank eyes, shirt and pants. Simplistic dress code.

Personality: A hodgepodge of Troll flesh, bones, and a few cybernetic enhancements all stitched together into a singular being. Goldblood, purple blood, violet, and more. Both of her eyes are blank (though she can still see thanks to cyberoptics), and she is usually in at least a mild amount of pain due to the strain of her body barely being able to keep itself together. Despite all that, she tries to act cheery and tries to be the life of her friend circle, though not always with success. And besides, she rarely tries to mingle outside of it, feeling unwelcome in other circles.

Constantly requires maintenance which she usually does herself, and… fresh replacements. Her creator fucked up in making her, which means she is now slowly yet constantly rotting away, to the point every part of her body except the brain and enhancements are different than her first resurrection.  Her girlfriend, Bakhus, usually helps with gathering ‘replacements’. She feels like a burden due to her condition that sometimes leaves her bedridden for days, which makes her stay quiet and sometimes even enable her friends’ bad habits, because she doesn’t want to be a drag. Hates the fact her whole life revolves around her condition. Likes gardening and clockwork.

Bakhus Gredui (Greedy Bacchus / Dionysius. = Thief of Void)  - 

Looks: Hair that goes all the way to the floor and a few feet behind her, greasy, messy, and dragging food bits in it. Tank top with her sign (Sign of the Brazen) on it, suspenders and oversized clown pants. Juggalo make-up messy and somewhat faded, droopy yellow eyes, usually with a hunched stance. Very, very tall, and extremely strong - with some healthy weight to her body to go along with it.

Personality: A purple-blood that represses her kind and motherly urges under liters and liters of Faygo. A chef at heart and a great cook from years of experience, she constantly throws barbecues and small carnivals on her massive garden, which attracts lowblood and highblood alike. Her festivities have become small gathering spots for those who wish to mingle with the upper / lower classes despite their own status, and for spies of both the Condescension and those who oppose her. Bakhus is, of course, too busy grilling to mind that she has accidentally created the perfect neutral spot.

Despite her cooking prowess, the Faygo inhibits both her ability to feel much empathy or care about the taste of her food. Deliciously cooked and prepared meals placed near overly-sugary, soggy, Faygo-drenched pretzels. She carries a massive cookbook alongside her massive pot, which has recipes that certain blood types enjoy, and… recipes made out of said blood types. She has no qualms cooking violets and reds, and sometimes will go so far as to grab Faygo-drunk trolls in her cookout and take them inside to ‘rest’. They’re never seen again.

Also keeps a small spice garden. Gatolt usually takes care of it, with whatever isn’t used to cook as fertilizer. Occasionally, she sends the butchered corpses to Marciu. Who also happens to be Gatolt’s creator.

Marciu Shelli (Like, y’know. Mary Shelley. Frankenstein’s author. = Seer of Space)  - 

Looks: Short hair, think Eridan, but with no streak. Scrawny to a fault, and clearly underfed. Big scientist glasses with special prescription lenses, white lab robes that hide his starving figure and his left hand gloved with thick, hazmat-suit-like protection. The right one is a prosthetic, indigo tubes and wires trying to replicate the sensation of the original with… some success. Pointy nose, sharp teef.

Personality: Anxious, skittery and, quite frankly pitiful even for an indigo blood, Marciu spends most of his days either robbing graves for corpses or putting his ill-gotten gains to use in his laboratory. Deeply resentful of feelings he has about himself, he buries them deep within him and, to make sure no one can say he is valid or try to empathize with his pain, keeps pushing himself further and further down the hole until he pushes everyone away. Having lost a hand to a nasty accident involving a bone saw and a few too many of Bakhus’ spiked snacks, he also has a mechanical replacement.

A master of biomechanical engineering, he constantly creates half-troll, half-machine abominations to help him around the lab. Rotten servants just barely able to move their joints with hollow eyes and faces, mechanical hearts pumping blood and fuel throughout the system. Still, despite his best attempts at being as repugnant as possible, his friends still cling to him.

Except Gatolt. Gatolt has actively tried to kill him multiple times, being stopped only by Bakhus’ eternal kindness to the weirdo that occasionally gives her “aged” ingredients. Also, his human friends.

[Why does he have human friends? Idk, Pesterchum + machines or AU where humans and trolls live in the same world after a few Sburb/Sgrub/Swhatever versions playing out after homestuck and Lord English being gone.]

Bert Kairos (Albert Einstein and his whole relativity stuff + Kairos, a greek concept of time. = Mage of Time.)  - 

Looks: Very short and very curly hair. Dark skin, both legs missing, though one has a very unpolished, simplistic metal prosthetic to help him stand in one foot. Right arm missing too, half of a prosthetic attached to it,cut off at the elbow from an accident. Hasn’t bothered replacing it yet. Blouse with a robot symbol and shorts, chin stubble. Brown eyes.

Personality: A gentle soul who makes more time for everyone else than he ever did to himself. Spending literal days away from his parents’ home, staying in his makeshift workshop creating toys for the kids on his street and to help the people of his community. Lost both legs and an arm from accidents with heavy machinery and cars that he work repairing to make a living, usually for meager scraps out of the kindness of his own heart and the belief that it’s all part of a greater plan that he barely gets enough to survive, relying on crutches and Marciu’s prosthetics that often break because of even more accidents due to his very precarious working conditions.

He dreams of one day being able to inspire people, though. A big, endless machine of silly, simple delights. Not curing the world, not controlling the weather, a machine with the same utility as a painting. A machine that could cover the entire world in its width and length, proof that humanity can do anything if it just bands together. A wish that sometimes consumes his mind as he spends hours on end, instead of sleeping, building small moving pieces that will hopefully one day help fill this whole. This magnificent machine he will make to help mankind flourish through its artistic value, that they will sing his name in praise for generations, that mankind will be uplifted until we don’t need work, money, barriers, differences, just a homogenous mass streaking across the cosmos with machine brilliance. 

But, he has way too many people to take care of, so he never dabbles on it too much.

Andy Eissuh ( :) - Lord of Life) - 

Looks: Blonde hair tied in a manbun. Bushy stubble beard all over his face. Smuggest fucking grin you’ve ever seen. Blue eyes. Average height, an air of superiority that is as annoying as it is believable due to how he carries himself; like an untouchable douchebag. White tuxedo and business pants, y’know, like a doctor. Right? He’s even got the white cross! Yeah, sure, that sounds right. Like he cares about proper dress code for doctors.

Personality: A very, very, very bad doctor. A very bad doctor that has just enough good reputation and far too much money from their family to let their pretty much 100% patient loss rate slip without anyone being able to pry into it. Patient comes in, body bag goes out, and nothing ever leaves the hospital. The one time he actually saved someone was by accident, and it was a botched (and misdiagnosed by him) liver transplant where he accidentally removed the appendix instead of said liver, forgot to replace it, and the patient recovered in a short while with the help of the nurses from what he later learned was appendicitis.

Believing himself to be able to do no wrong, with a chirpy, colorful yet aggressively passive personality, he keeps his friend group around mostly to dispose of the bodies without many questions asked, and so he can feel better than the pathetic wretches he considers them. Completely blind to his irredeemably cruel medical malpractices, which he didn’t even study for, he simply bought his way into a degree because he “could feel it was my destiny.” Soft, sweet, and completely unhinged. Finding great joy preying upon the insecurities and naivete of his peers, which he feels is a breeding ground to use and abuse them for his own needs. Shoulda been smarter if you didn’t wanna get taken advantage of, duh!

Cain Pyrite (Cain the first sinner + Fool’s Gold. = Rogue of Light. ) -

Looks: Hair slightly above his shoulders, dark and greasy. Sickly pale skin, beeg librarian glasses. A nice fuzzy coat, plus shirt, plus jeans. Eye symbol on his coat. Looks like he hasn’t seen the sun in weeks, which, yeah, is absolutely right. Gentle smile, though it occasionally cracks into a nervous attempt at hiding… something!

Personality: Dedicated to… no, OBSESSED with preserving occult and ancient knowledge. Scrolls from ancient alchemists, bones of kings, relics thought long since lost hidden on the back of his seemingly normal book shop. Spending most of his days with no clients, he occasionally gets someone who is aware of his darker inclinations. He is always happy to trade knowledge for knowledge and artifact for artifact.

Only, not always the originals. No. Never the originals. 

Always finding a way to spin a story and make sure that he can spot out any fakes, he builds his collection of convincing lies, and hidden truths. Friends with the others since grave-digging always inherits some fun and interesting things, and his appetite for the esoteric and forgotten is only comparable for his taste in interesting and unique foods.

[catflowerqueen]

With the resurgence of interest in Hiveswap given the upcoming sequel, as well as me finally playing Friendisms, there’s something I’ve been curious about:

I wonder how much Alternian society changed with each new heiress? Based on some of Xefros’ dialogue, as well as some things that were mentioned in the dreambubbles, it looks like the Empress and heiresses had a lot of direct impact on the culture—what items were available, different trends in advertising, etc.—sometimes by actual, imperial mandate. So with people like Trizza and Meenah, who are very “in your face” with their personalities and actively promote themselves, you see a lot more interest in things like social media, consumerism, fashion trends… stuff like that.

In comparison, Feferi doesn’t really seem to get out as much. Truel, she was a little younger than Trizza is, or at least she seemed to be—it is still a little unclear how old trolls actually have to be for the Maturation trials, but apparently trolls like Xefros and Dammek were nearing it, and they seem to be around the same age as Joey—who is clearly early teens. I mean… sweeps are longer than years, so even if Dammek’s trials were coming “next sweep,” that would still be 2.5 years away or so, which IS a lot of time for growth, since that would put him around 15ish for the trials. But even then… while the Beta trolls did discuss a little bit about their future plans in their introductions and before they entered the game, there was none of that “this is actually impending and coming really soon, time is running out” feel like you got from, say, Skylla’s route?

Anyways… point is, even if we factor in Feferi’s youthfulness, her personality seems to be more… not introverted, exactly, but more oriented on behind-the-scenes planning type stuff? She isn’t really putting herself out there much, is what I’m saying, and she seems to be more focused on safety/fortifying the ranks, as it were, and making sure her mother is appeased over everything else. (And now that I think about it, she actually has a lot in common with her niece [technically, via adoption. And ancestry. Sort of] Joey, as far as animal care and the like goes. Kind of). I’m not entirely sure anyone outside of her friend group even knows she exists, actually, which leads me to wonder about troll society and culture, now that there’s a void where Trizza was.

Now, maybe this is a relatively new thing. Perhaps it’s because Trizza was so out there and public, that Feferi felt the need to hide. Maybe her mother told her to do so because of however Trizza died. Perhaps because Trizza was so influential on the population, Meenah tried to give herself more of a presence than she typically would have when it comes to Alternian youths. Karkat mentioned soda like Tab… maybe that was a relatively new development—Meenah’s response and push-back on the brand Trizza promoted. Who really knows.

Beyond that… I have to wonder what forces are at work when it comes to the maintenance and implementation of all the technology on Alternia. Some of it is probably the kids, sure, but we know that adults do sometimes deal with them directly, even if not necessarily in-person. Those adults the lusus bandits were working with? Or the fact that the Grand Highblood apparently communicated with the churches a lot (though, admittedly, that could be an outlier because of just how weird and complicated the purpleblood caste is). Things like the libraries or clubs… the structures surrounding the mall on Polypa’s route… someone has to be maintaining those structures through each successive generation of children. After all, it isn’t as though the kids take it with them when they go into space. And stuff like movies—it was at least heavily implied that those were created by adults.

But at the same time… it doesn’t look the kids and adults share their internet services or forums (beyond adults probably monitoring them to look for signs of rebellions), so you would lose giant chunks of culture and things just to people going off-world. Like—their accounts would probably still be around and accessible, but nothing new would be uploaded. So unless you had a lot of mentoring situations going on, you probably wouldn’t get a whole lot of lasting, impactful influencers or ideas for subsequent generations.

Which is probably part of the point, as far as quashing rebellions go, but…

It just makes me wonder how extreme the generation gaps would be among the new young adults on the ship, what sorts of culture clashes you would get since the majority of adults wouldn’t be able to access what the kids are doing, to keep up with any new trends or ideas. Especially ones started by the heiresses.

How much loyalty and confusion would there be when the trolls who grew up under the effects of Trizza then made it to the fleets, where Meenah rules? Wouldn’t you see more rebellions happening immediately after enough young adults were finally old enough to join the fleets?

Maybe weeding them out is part of what the trials are about. Or the fleet is big enough that it would be easy to spread them thin.

Going back to an earlier point about Meenah, though, and her possibly increased influence on Alternia while Feferi was growing up…

It is entirely possible that, had the Game not happened and Feferi had continued to remain more-or-less out of the wider social loop… or I guess even if she had, assuming Meenah kept up the presence she was curating… that the trolls of Feferi’s generation would have less of a cultural shock upon joining the fleet (at least as far as actual social aspects, trends, and popular products goes) simply because Meenah was promoting herself both on the Alternian Homeworld and the wider fleet. There would be more familiarity, at least.

And I really do think that’s what she was doing during the period that Homestuck was taking place, since Karkat and the others seem far more aware of the Empress and what she does and likes than what the Friendism/Hiveswap trolls do. Sure, they are aware an Empress exists… but they only really mention being glad she’s busy far away, whereas they actually talk about Trizza by name and act like she’s already ruling everything.

Anyways. Just some ramblings to think about.

[skaiatemple]

June 23rd is the Festival of Blood!

If you follow as a practitioner of Pop Culture Paganism, a user of Homestuck inspired Chaos Magic, or just want to use your favorite series to inspire you throughout the year, Skaia Temple is your resource center!

Whether you want to just celebrate it on the day, use it as a date for empowered energy, integrate it into your more mundane celebrations, or just appreciate your favorite characters and concepts this month, we have suggestions for whatever path you want to take with us!

Read below the cut for a condensed idea & resource list for this month of Blood!

Aspect Centered Celebrate the Aspect in all its glory if you’re all about on celebrating the Festivals for exactly what they represent: The Aspect and all the traits associated with it.

“Blood-bound are absolutely leaders, but they inhabit more of an inspirational role than a commanding one. They are prophets, rather than generals, giving others the strength and motivation to keep fighting.”

Blood is about bonds, familial, friendly, but above all United. It’s about everyone standing together for a common cause. Community. If Doom was about empathizing with other people, Blood is about standing with them, to fight for a cause that will better both of you.

Get out into your community or one you care about and stand with them, hear their stories and find common ground to fight on. None of us can survive without social bonds, make ones that mean the most to you.

This month is for sharing.

Magical Inspiration If you want to use Homestuck concepts more abstractly and need some ideas for what brands of magic would work best for the season, if you have an Aspect or character-themed spell, feel free to send it in so it can be added to this section!

Now is a time for sympathy spells and togetherness. Talk with your mundane friends and see if they would be interested in you trying to magic up some better luck for them. Look at your community and think about what its lacking that you could try to conjure up for it. Make poppets of your family or pets to stuff and coddle them with love. If you’re forced to be more discreet and private, pay it forward to some strangers. Make some sigils to hide around town for a passerbys benefit.

While I couldn’t find anything specifically Blood themed, we do have this Karkat themed Protection Bottle! if you have any Blood or Vantas themed spells or practices please tag us or send them in! What else we do have is the blog @sufferersstigmata full of testimony and Sermons from the Signless.

Integration Route For people in the broom closet who are too timid or anxious to celebrate the Festivals openly- you can always integrate the Aspects traits to fit in with the more common trends and holidays of the month. Not even Hussie is is Homestuck God, no one will mind!

July 4th for America is Independence Day! You can use the celebrations to bond with family friends and community, or use your own definition of it with a smaller group to find independence for yourself or a cause you believe in.

Fandom Driven For if you’re not all about spirituality or routine and just want to enjoy going all-out with a beloved story & characters, you can honor the ones of this month by driving full-throttle on the fandom bandwagon.

The Blood Aspect belongs to the Vantas boys. Characters who can be just as disruptive and passionate as they can be obnoxious and overbearing. They’re doubtlessly admirable both in how hardcore they go after what they believe in, and always they believe in the goodness and security of their fellows. Be it as revolutionaries big or small, or just a great friend who will give you an intervention or good lecture when you really need it, they absolutely have values you can be inspired by- as long as you don’t go offensively overboard and step out of your lane with it. Ahem.

Draw art, write fic, and post anaylsis’ about this revolutionary family. Get biblical with your depictions- or show them chilling out for once. It could be better for everyone that way.

We hope you got some ideas for activities you can do with your friends or otherwise use to inspire and better yourself this month. Everyone plays the game of life differently, and everyone's beliefs are their own. Celebrate yourself as you see fit, and Thanks for Playing with Us.

~Mod Bee

[cutwwater]

About the mun

In general:

Real name: ene Nicknames: shrug Age: 25 Sexuality: pansexual Preferred pronouns: any Are you a morning person?: i try 2 be...........but no definitely not lol When swimming, do you prefer to do it in the ocean, or in a lake?:  i like both but smaller lakes are also kinda nasty idk... everything is slimy and anything could be wiggling around down there i’ve seen enough horror movies 2 know

On Tumblr:

Anyone you would like to meet in real life?:  idk everyone lol i love makin friends Anyone you have met in real life?:  i used to meet ppl on tumblr at cons a lot but tbh its been a while since i’ve been that active on tumblr in general When did you first join? How old is your current account?:  i joined in 2011 with a personal and started rping in 2012. this acc is super new tho it’s just from a few months ago Any peeves?:  character hate and white-knighting, ppl in the community either hatefully condemning or forcefully justifying a character for their morally ambiguous actions..... Unpopular opinion:   i have seen ppl in the fandom saying u cant love eridan, gamzee and vriska, that everyone who loves one hates the other one or two.  well, allow me to prove u wrong bc i love them all

Feelings:

Do you easily get jealous?:  hmmm only when it comes to very specific things Do you easily get angry?:  it’s rly hard to set me off unless u offend me, and it’s also pretty hard to offend me so nope Are you easy to cheer up?:  not most of the time lol. when i’m sad i’m usually sad until i sort through it myself What’s the most hurtful thing someone could do to you?:  idk honestly don’t rly even care to answer that What’s the most hurtful thing someone has done to you?:  pass on that 1 too lmao Are you good at hiding your emotions?:  irl no lol but i have trouble expressing them online jhgfdsjgf i don’t always know if how i come across accurately reflects how i’m feeling u kno What’s the very best way to cheer you up?:  talking abt smth were both passionate abt!!! i find smth about connecting over a mutual passion with someone rly uplifting and energizing, even when things are rly tough

Relationships:

Are you currently in a relationship?:  yea Do you currently have a crush on someone?:  my gf >:) If yes, might that someone be reading this?:  nah i wish shed join this comm tho. she writes hs sometimes but only privately >:( Do you kiss on the first date?:  perhaps Do you prefer going out, or staying home, when it comes to dates?:  going out definitely, i like dates when they’re exciting full day excursions go hard or go home

Things:

Favorite drink:  chamomile tea hfhmsdhgfhdsjg Favorite food:  authentic chinese and japanese cuisine.....the spicier the better Most calming place?:  lying in the grass in the sun. tho as long as it’s warm, there’s some nature and some sun i can and will chill Most stressful place?:  probably my own home lol... even though i live alone i’m just healthier and happier when i get out a lot and stay social and i don’t always do that enough Most prized possession?:  i mean i got a lot of old stuff from my childhood that’s priceless to me but if we’re talkin abt prized possessions maybe my homestuck shit... like my 2012-15 calendars and other collectibles i’ve got... i’d be so sad if they were ruined or smth cuz they r special and not replaceable

[shinssoliloquy]

WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHY? HOW?

5 Questions you should ask anyone when they’re starting off a project made from the basis of ego and tenacity. I’m really not a particularly smart person, But I’m smart enough to know how dumb I really am.

I’ve always been itching to do this. Twitter was never a great way to display my thoughts and writing on grounds that by limiting characters your characters by tweet you’d either get into long threads of diatribes that likely no one will even read or you’d have to space out your thoughts and mince words in order to fit to these said limitations. Obviously it’s not a bad way per say to fully flesh out your thoughts but there’s obviously some downsides and you won’t be fully capable of fulfilling those quandaries, much so espousing on your thoughts and opinions to the fullest extent. I could write a book but I’m not knowledgeable enough feel like my thoughts are worth putting into a non-fiction book. I could join discord servers but I don’t know a wreath of people who even care. I could still talk off into the Twitter void but that’s only for short bursts at a time, any ideas or subjects I’d like to elucidate or spell out would just get lost, all my themes would shoot off into the negative space that is a twitter timeline regardless of if they’re worth revisiting or not.

But of course, would it even matter if people do care or they don’t. People live off making Youtube videos and content based on themselves because they assume people actually care about whatever benign thought or creative pursuit they’d have in their head. It’s not up to me to judge if my thoughts are worth putting out there but I guess the reason people use social media is to give a voice to the voiceless, have anyone out there a chance of their own success, But how does that affect content input though, How does impact your very own mental psyche. This is a conversation for another post and it’s far from a topic I’ll have any meaningful outlook on, just from my own experiences as an outsider looking in.

WHO?

I always fancied myself a writer more than an illustrator. The whole crux of my need to learn how to draw was from the idea that “hey no one wants to draw my webcomic ideas on something awful or whatever internet messaging board I was using at the time that’ll date this post when I look back on it when I’m 40, I’ll learn how to draw then and show everyone I can STILL MAKE IT” Then I started drawing and never really looked back. Within the few years or so since I’ve made that discovery I never really focused on my writing, much less my creative writing. I’ve had few instances where I’d try to light up my spark by blog posting was making other short lived wordpresses and blogspots where I can peruse and write for a short while until I get bored and go back to drawing everyday. Of course two particular things happened in which I’ve gotten that spark back, to an extent. 1. The corona virus quarantine happened and I was stuck with nothing to do, I dropped out of school to go to a new college out of country that hasn’t really happened yet and aside from my retail job I haven’t had a good outlet for where to put my creativity too. So I ended up just drawing more but also, reading off some books off my backlog. I’ve always been interested in philosophy and non-fiction since reading Kant and Hume at age 12 and Now rediscovered it because of quarantine. Really I’ve always been a better writer or story teller than anything else but efforts to light up that energy in me has been fruitful and I’ve relegated to being another artist in the pile of artists who’s only personality is that they “like art”. Which made me realized how much of a better self sufficient and self respecting the writer can be rather then the animator. Illustrations are fleeting, words stick with you. Of course greats work of art exist and will always exist. Beautiful paintings can grip me just as much as a good work of philosophy can, But lately beautiful paintings have been disgruntled and disavowed from public schema. If you want to provide good art for people to see, use hashtags and make fast fleeting content for people to consume easily and forget about. Such is the way of social media and how they grip you to keep using their products, It’s not a revolutionary idea but it’s a concept that ends up working. In a way I’d like to counteract this by making fast fleeting content but also putting in forth ideas and writings which I can consider good but we’ll see how that ends up panning out. My goals as an artist is for another topic entirely but really I need a way to practice my non-fiction writing skills and having a blog where I can just go on and on about pointless shit is good exercise. 2. I’ve stopped communicating to people that would point me to a direction in life I didn’t really need to go through and because of that I took a detour in my mental stability and mental development, really it wasn’t good for me. but because of that I was able to keep track of where I need to go and have removed all elements in my life that can allow me to find different paths and know where I’ll truly be. I could also just talk to people about these kinds of stuff but it’s hard to really find people who I can talk about the stuff I want to talk about with and nothing really beats writing a whole diatribe about whatever comes to your mind at the time. Why do I have a lot on my mind? You’ll hear that story in another time but it’s MOST likely an autism thing.

WHAT?

Look at section: Who again but to summarize and clarify what I mean. Content is fast fleeting and non-self actualizing, people don’t want ideas they want content, They need personalities to leech off and see themselves in instead of being creatives themselves. As someone who makes art and wants to make more art It’s hard to really judge if my art is worth it for the algorithm or if it’s worth it to bring in audience retention. Not to mention most people who use social media are kids, and the only way to grab kids attention is to play to their interests, play into their already corroded brains by playing onto their synapses, Not to imply I dislike it per say but more so that I feel that certain audience can somewhat affect your creative output. 

WHERE?

I made a Medium account last month after reading an article on Luxury Communism. It was a fine article but what I got out of it was how good it seems to use Medium to communicate and write articles like these, Until I realized that really it can only be used for more academic pieces and while sure I’d like to do that one day something more lowkey and personal was what I really needed. Hence a tumblr, originally a blogging website before being used to oxidize internet discourse and internet creativity in general, was a perfect outlet for these kinds of posts. I’m actually used to using tumblr for one and can edit and know my way around doing these sorts of posts and the archive feature is good if I ever want to look back on old posts as opposed to Twitter. I can use the ask feauture to take requests or have feedback on my posts in a more concise manner. Unlike Medium or Wordpress I can easily hide certain posts or even the entire account if I wanted too and I won’t be seen or be recommended by the algorithm because I won’t even put tags on these posts. If you know where to find me you know where to find me. Although I do think I’ll make this public at some point I atleast need to know if I’ll even use this or if I’ll even keep making the same kinds of posts as I’d want too.

WHY? 

I’ve already explained why you knucklehead, but I guess here were some of my inspirations to make a writing blog. I could list actual writers or twitter personalities or internet reviewers with blogs I can talk about, for example Yahtzee Crosshaw, Film Crit Hulk, Or even the elusive Andrew Hussie when he had a wordposts and while those people were instrumental to my development as a writer and artist I can’t say they were my full inspiration for making this.

Back in 2016, I was introduced to the Procrastinators’ Podcast by consuming Digibro content and having her podcast be linked at the end of one of her videos. I’ve since started concurrently watching her podcast and while I’ve always sucked into Digi’s cult of personality I’ve started appreciated her other friends in the podcast too, everyone except Nate. One of those members I gravitated too was MunchyWearsTinyHats. He was only one year older than me but I could still see myself in him and in effect appreciated him more than anyone in the podcast. We both seemingly grew up watching and reading the same shit, Homestuck, TF2, He introduced me to Nuclear Throne which because one of my favorite games and we both had the same appreciation for Hussie, Sam Hyde (sadly) Performance art, weird abstract art bullshit and of course My Little Pony. If I actually joined RFCK who knows what would’ve happened but that’s just my take. Of course a surface level description of Munchy aside, as someone who consumed everything he was in, I Lived my life vicariously through him and to all the members of the Procrastinators’ Podcast to an extent even though we both became completely different people as we reached our 20s. Currently he’s 20 and I’m less than a year away to being 20. But I feel as if our paths have drifted far enough that I can properly say I became a whole new different person to who I was in 2016. I still have appreciation for MLP, Homestuck and Minecraft and all the weird media shit me and him consumed. Back then I even modeled my art and persona to look like his too, It was a whole thing. Of course all of these posts and videos and personalities are very very out of date and they don’t reflect the content I consume or even the type of person I am now. I had a friend who also liked the PCP, well it was more like a love-hate relationship I feel but it was nice having someone who I could talk about the PCP with since at this time they were the only people or content creators I was consuming, what’s less said about current pcp the better. She’s always told me, I feel sorry for people who model their lives around these content creators and take advice from them since they clearly don’t know what they’re doing. And while I agree with her to an extent, I wouldn’t go as far as to discredit these artists accomplishments since they seem fulfilled with what they’ve made of themselves, not like we’re doing anything different or are any different to them. It’s about trying to live in a world with your own meaning in it and you can’t do that but disparaging the careers of grown men you don’t even know. Again topic for another day but I guess with this blog I’m always copying and ripping off some of their ideas for myself. In 2019, Munchy made a Tumblr where he’d detail and do the same thing and post blogs or writings he’s made or opinions he’s had, It hasn’t been updated in a year and a half but if it isn’t broke, don’t call the gas company asking for a refund. I even stole his alliteration with Shinsuke’s Soliloquy and Munchy’s Manuscripts, Shinsuke being my real God-given name. Of course the posts on his tumblr are really incredibly out of date and downright stupid and I’ll talk about them on their own on a seperate post since I feel like he really just didn’t know what he talked about and they’re baseline at best and wrong at worst. Regardless he still planted the seed of me as a person to make my own blog and talk about random bullshit.

HOW?

Obviously I will still tweet out stuff on my private twitter, Obviously I will still make art. Right now I’m making my own comics and writing a few short stories that maybe? I’ll put here I’m not really sure. Just depends on if they’re worthy on being posted since I’ll make a short story collection with them instead. Maybe I’ll continue the favorite character writing, maybe I’ll make my own picrew. We’ll see and no doubt these promises will become out of date in a week or two. Rather than the right of the moment malaise of tweeting around bullshit and sending it quickly I’ll use this for more concise text, something that I can sink my teeth in and tap away for what like 5 hours or so? Beats the essays i’d be doing but it doesn’t help that I am typing this in total silence, and I guess those essays will just be posted here. Do people post their school essays like they post their poems or their artwork for school? If you want to use my ask blog then it’s right there if you want a topic for me to talk about or just ask me a regular question. I’m bringing back tumblr asks to it’s real purpose. And of course, the only thing sure about me, is that nothings for sure.

[konkoa]

One thing I'm curious about with the mindset of "all platforms rise and fall" is what this means for AO3 itself in the future, since it was made specifically to prevent the need for this phenomenon.

But maybe it'll happen anyways? There are people who get so vehemently furious over AO3's donation drives, and who hate the lack of restrictions on content (so long as it is properly tagged). How many of these people don't know or understand why AO3 exists as it does, and as the years go on how will this ignorance spread? Will younger generations start thinking "this archive is not for me" and move elsewhere? Will AO3 remain when whatever alternative site people use or create meets its own inevitable fall?

Something else I wanted to address was the hub-like nature of fandom, and the pros/cons of such things. In its original form, fandom spaces were very single focused: you had your fanzines, email lists, geocities shrines, livejournal communities, etc. Then fandoms became less centralized with the rise of tumblr. Our feeds stream us content from the people we follow, who share whatever they're interested in and eventually move onto other interests while remaining on our feeds until we realize either "oh, we no longer have anything in common" or "hey, I want to get into that too". What this meant was that instead of people leaving the spaces that were for a specific fandom when they were no longer into it, leaving the remaining fans to continue as they were, the fandom experiences we curated for ourselves warped and shifted into things we no longer could recognize. The blog you followed for Homestuck became a Kpop blog, the blog you followed for Supernatural got into Doctor Who and Sherlock as well. Someone you were friends with moved out of fandom entirely. Maybe you're still following all of them, have dabbled in all the fandom rises and falls, giving your own followers Homestuck and Kpop and Superwholock and the things that are no longer fandom at all. Anyone else remember the days of fandom blogger vs hipster blogger? That rhetoric fell away entirely as the spaces were curated to our own interested became interspersed with all the stuff that would have also had it's own spaces before: from memes and to resources, aesthetics to politics, to awareness of all the good and bad of the world around you... and the realization that you now have an inability to escape to your fandom space to relax and unwind. I would say that this is what has led to the resurgence in hubs like discord.

And yet not all aspects of fandom are pulling away into our own nooks and crannies. In my experience, many fandoms have moved to twitter, which for me is like setting up a D&D game in the middle of church, or displaying your nudes on the television with the blinds wide open to a busy street at night. Celebrities use the same platform as the people who ship them with other celebrities! RPFandoms... there has to be a better way!

In some ways, it's good that fandoms have gotten so bold. No longer hiding away in fear of cease and desists. No longer hiding content warnings behind citrus fruit. No one who is in fandom bats an eye at shipping two men together (at least solely on the basis of it being gay). But have we gotten too comfortable? It seems like every year a new petition goes around for people to sign to protect our freedoms on the internet. Some things which on the basic level seem moral and just are very easily used to crush us: us as people, us as internet users, and us as fandom. Because we don't want another Livejournal style strikethrough that targets fiction writers and abuse survivors as though they were no different from predators.

This comment has gotten away from me. Before I end this I want to mention one of the problems I have with tumblr and twitter style fandom: the lack of archive. How so many fandoms are so hard to keep up with, to track down the past buried under poorly working tags, delete blogs, changed usernames, and years worth of scrolling. How it seems like "you had to have been there" to fully gain that insider knowledge, because there's a lack of ruins to prove that a particular fandom was a big deal. Sorry to anyone who arrives late to the party. It's been mentioned before how the lack of fan led archive for art is majorly unfortunate, desperately needed, but currently unattainable.

To wrap this up, I'm one of those people who is clinging to tumblr even as people are moving on to the likes of twitter. I have moved into discord for the newer fandom i'm in, but I do enjoy what tumblr was and is. Maybe I got lucky, and never saw the worst of the tumblr experience based on the blogs I followed. The state of my dashboard right now isn't really "fandom" at all if I'm being honest. But I know twitter is not the fandom space for me. I'll drop in now and again to see art, but for now and the foreseeable future, my fandom home base is AO3.

Hey y’all, remember that 2018 survey that almost 2,000 of you filled out?

Here is a video essay about the results as well as my general musings about the “death” of fandom LiveJournal, the rise of AO3, and the possible future of Tumblr. You’ll also find some TL;DR in the link above, or you can even read the entire resulting paper, published now in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction: “Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities.”

And for the serious TL;DR here’s the fancy chart again. :)

I’d love to know what you think! Feel free to reblog with how all this tracks to your own experience, or what your predictions are for the future of fan platforms.

[the-condesce-did-nothing-wrong]

The Toxic State of the Homestuck Fandom (Mainly the Femslash Fandom)

Y'know, I feel like the Grimdorks Uprising is a representation of everything toxic in the Homestuck community, and it especially shows just how toxic the Femslash fandom is.

I’m not trying to resurrect a discourse here, but I am using it as an example. There’s a lot of things that showed me just how entitled, aggressive, and straight up petty the HS femslash fandom can be.

Now, disclaimer before I get started. This is very much about the extremist femslash fans who feel the need to:

1. Shit on any ship that isn’t Femslash (mostly het) because it’s not Femslash.
 2. Express Blatant Biphobia and refuse to acknowledge or outright bash Bisexual headcanons. See: constantly claiming Roxy or Terezi are Lesbians despite clearly being Bisexual and getting angry with people who headcanon Rose as Bisexual. 
 3. The rampant Misandry. I get that you’re not going to focus on men, but repeatedly bashing male character or stating they’re all incompetent while the girls are all perfect competent badasses is fucking gross. Stop it.
 4. Bully and harass fans of ships because the ships in question are ‘bad’, either because of subjective tastes or because it violates the tumblr shipping principles, mainly the ‘Don’t ship characters outside of their sexuality (unless they’re straight)’ rule. 5. Adding to the above: Spamming the tags of said ships either with passive-aggressive art or just accusing everyone who likes the ship of Then getting mad that the shippers are upset and/or retaliating, as if you didn’t just; oh, I don’t know, accuse people of being hateful or inherently awful people just because they like a ship with different characteristics from yours. 6. Acting incredibly entitled to female characters. 7. This cancer, which is a combination of the first three.

I’m certainly not trying to say that all Femslash fans are like this. In fact, I see several Femslash fans who are actually respectful, nice, and generally just cool people. But the toxic and extremist parts of the fandom is hard to ignore. It gets to the point where I’ve pretty much experienced Pavlovian conditioning to avoid nearly every Femslash fan I come across because I’ve associated them with this toxic behavior.

But what I really want to stress here that your community isn’t doomed. I mean, the more forgiving part of me even believes this Toxicity is a side effect of this hellsite we use. Not saying that the toxic aspects of the fandom is excusable, but it just explains where they may come from and why. Calling out this behavior is the first step to making sure it’s healthy and generally non-toxic to everyone involved, even to people outside the community. When you let this type of behavior go unchecked, sooner or later you’re going to have some problems. Ex: Voltron Fandom. Or, fuck, the DDADDS fandom. That game hasn’t been out a week (As of when this post was made) and look what this hellsite did to the fandom.

To Clarify one last time before I get started: It’s the Femslash extremists I have a problem with, not the lesbians or the Femslashers in general.

Now, I believe this Uprising has it’s origins in a post (That I cannot find right now, nor would want to because I don’t want the OP to be harassed) where someone basically said ‘Grimdorks works better for Jaderose because they’re both dorks who went grimdark’. I don’t think it really blew up, mostly because the last time I remembering seeing it had… maybe less then 50 notes? So the only explanation I have is that the creator or the people who interacted with the post agreed and shared it with other Homestuck fans on forums, tumblr, or discord.

Pretty harmless in and of itself, since everyone knew the ship name belonged to Johnrose (As the reasoning behind it was John and Rose were dorks and Rose went Grimdark) and it was mostly just a joke/fun little introspection by someone.

I don’t know what happened in the days leading up to the Uprising, but I imagine it went something like this (Note: Since this is me theorizing; I could always be wrong, so PLEASE understand that when reading this):

1. Some people are talking about Jaderose or just ship names in general, and someone brings up how Grimdorks would fit Jaderose. 2. Some people agree, and some point out that Johnrose is already called Grimdorks. 3. There may or may not be some people in this discussion who hate Johnrose. Perhaps they just find it boring, maybe they just don’t see it, maybe they dislike it because they feel it erases Rose’s relationship with Kanaya or her sexuality, and maybe it could be all of the above. 4. Someone with any of the reasons listed or not listed above could have suggested taking the Grimdorks ship name for Jaderose. 5. People agree, they start discussing it, and some people or just one person decides to make a blog to spearhead the Uprising. 6. Blogs similar to the original crop up. 7. Grimdorks fan wakes up and sees a random Jaderose post on their dash thanks to Tag tracker. 8. ??? 9. Shitstorm.

So, first off: I think what this best shows is this bizarre sense of entitlement Femslash extremists have. I mean seriously, the idea that you can just ‘reclaim’ a ship name that’s about 5+ years old is pretty damn entitled. You’re kind of implying that it’s stolen, even though it was possibly made by Johnrose shippers and it was certainly made for them. If anything, Jaderose shippers were the ones trying to steal it, even though they have the arguably superior stand ship name ‘Guns n Roses’.

Next is the general hypocrisy of the discourse.

Now, we can argue about Rose’s sexuality until the cows come home, but one other reason I see being touted around for why you can’t ship Johnrose is ‘Rose is married’. The main problem I have with this is how these people say this… then turn a blind eye to any other ship that includes Rose. Hell, they might even multiship Rose. I’m not saying you’re not allowed to multiship, but when you say ‘Rose is Married’ against a ship that includes Rose, then ignore another ship that includes her, how do you not see the hypocrisy? This is especially jarring since the Grimdorks Uprising was done by Jaderose shippers, or at the very least people were using Jaderose as the ‘face’ of the Uprising, so to speak.

Next up is some of the more… uh, Biphobic stuff in the uprising. Now, I understand that Rose’s sexuality is kind of vague. I mean, sure, it’s entirely in character for Rose to have been flirting with Dave ironically. But can you really blame some people for having trouble sifting through Rose’s lavender maze of irony and Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness? Even Kanaya had trouble understanding this snarky broad.

Regardless, telling people thay can’t Headcanon Rose as Bisexual because it’s ‘Erasing Lesbians’ is um… kinda… I dunno, sketchy? I mean assuming you’re not just saying it’s because lesbians untainted by men are rare, what part of ‘Bisexual’ is scary to you? It’s not like saying Rose would enjoy kissing boys is going to degrade her canon love for Kanaya. Or, hell, even that she would do so while in a committed relationship with Kanaya. So… I guess it’s just down to preference? There’s always going to be headcanons you don’t like, but I suppose the best thing to do is just leave these people to their own devices. :V

And finally, the pettiness and aggression of the whole thing.

When you look at this whole discourse, it’s just petty. You’re trying to take a ship name and claim it for a different ship, and you’re just being a giant asshole on top of that. I know it was a stupid thing to get up in arms about, but really, with all the factors I listed above, it’s a little difficult not to get annoyed. Especially when you combine it with shit like this, it’s just icing on the cake of shitty behavior! Seriously, how else is a Johnrose fan supposed to take people spamming their tag with an irrelevant ship and accusing them of being an inherently awful people just for shipping as anything other than aggressive?

Even worse, when people start calling them out for it, these people have the gall to play victim and hide behind their labels as if it justifies this behavior! Or, even worse, try to make it one big joke. Sorry, but bullying is bullying, no matter what reasoning or intentions you have behind it.

Now that we’ve reached the end, I’m sure at one of you is wondering how to fix the fandom. The most simplest solution I have?

1. Don’t partake in behavior such as the six points listed above 2. Actively discourage such behavior 3. Understand that you do not run the fandom 4. Understand that you no say in how a person wants to enjoy Homestuck 5. Understand that shipping has no bearing on canon or a person’s beliefs and morality. 6. Understand that you have the responsibility to blacklist, block and distance yourself from ships you don’t like 7. Only step in when you believe a fan is hurting others, such as harassment or bullying.

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on the Homestuck Epilogues

Oh boy, where do I even begin talking about anything to do with a series that was such a huge part of my teenage years, and which I haven’t really thought about much at all since it ended over three years ago.

I wasn’t exactly going into it with high hopes, but honestly I really enjoyed it. I have a lot of complicated and mixed feelings about it overall, but at the end of the day it’s basically just even more Homestuck than we had before, with everything that entails.

I have a feeling that the fandom reaction to this has probably been really divisive, but I haven’t really looked at anything people have to say about it. And I’m gonna keep away from the fandom until I’ve caught up with the sequel series that apparently exists now, so I don’t get spoiled.

Anyway, detailed thoughts under the cut.

I guess the best place to start is probably by saying that I enjoyed the narrative structure of splitting this into two story arcs a lot more than I thought I would. I wasn’t even sure what to expect from how each path would go, since i went into this with basically zero idea of what to expect. Mostly I was worried that they’d feel unnecessarily similar and repetitive, but aside from the early parts of each path, they felt extremely different, in ways that I really liked.

For the record, I read the Candy path first, and then the Meat one. I’m still not entirely sure if that’s the ‘best’ way to have read it, but I liked it. Candy set up a whole bunch of mysteries that ended up getting explained in Meat, so I think that flowed nicely.

I think people are going to have very divisive opinions about which path they liked better, simply because each of them focus on taking the story in very different directions. Personally I’d say I liked Candy more than Meat just because I’m more of a ‘characters over plot’ kinda person, so the deep dive into long-term character development in that arc was a lot more interesting and satisfying to me than the more plot heavy focus of Meat, but there were also a whole bunch of moments in Meat that I really liked. And a whole lot of parts that I didn’t.

I’m glad I went into this [mostly] spoiler-free, since I had absolutely no idea that Candy was going to cover such a long period of time. I knew that both arcs started several years after the end of the main story, but I didn’t expect Candy to go up to when John and co were like 40. I have a feeling that a lot of people might not have liked that, but I did. Seeing how everything panned out for the characters and their relationships over such a relatively long period of time was really interesting. And for the most part I think the character development stuff in Candy just worked a lot better than in Meat because of how it had all that time to grow. The whole plot point of John’s depression in particular felt WAY more deep and serious in Candy when we saw it unfold over entire years of in-story time, and how it slowly eroded and warped his relationships with his friends and family. Watching John get married, have a kid, slowly drift away from his wife and kids due to his depression, and then eventually reconcile with them, was genuinely surreal to watch unfold.

In general i think the Epilogues as a whole [but Candy in particular] did a lot of surprisingly interesting and realistic things with the main characters, in ways that I wasn’t expecting. It really gave some of them the sort of relevance and development that they were kinda lacking in during the main story. To the degree that a lot of people probably interpreted some of it as out of character stuff that the author just came up with after the main story was over. But it all felt pretty natural to me. Jane basically becoming a fascist dictator probably pissed a whole lot of people off, but honestly it felt pretty true to her character and all of the different influences in her life, and she really needed SOMETHING to stand out as a character. It also made it pretty interesting to compare the Epilogues to the main story in terms of the time periods they reflect, and the sort of political commentary they express. By the end of it, Hussie seemed very self-aware of the fact that, to put it simply, Homestuck was written during the age of Obama, and the Epilogues were written during the age of Trump.

Jade’s one of the characters who felt most notably fleshed out compared to how she was in the original series, although she kinda ends up getting psuedo-fridged by the end of both arcs so I don’t have high hopes for how she’ll go as a character in the sequel, lol. Either way, it kinda felt like Hussie didn’t entirely know where to go with Jade as a character for the longest time, and I guess he came up with some ideas by the time he wrote this, one way or another. I wasn’t entirely expecting her to grow up into a promiscuous party girl, but honestly it makes sense, the more I think about it. I get the feeling not everyone liked it, though, lol.

Rose felt kinda sidelined here, especially in Meat, which was a little annoying, but I really liked her whole arc in Candy. Especially the whole scene where she talks to John about how even if he regrets the choices he made and the way that things turned out, she loves her life and how things worked out for her.

Jake still feels just as shallow as ever, and it kinda creeps me out how much it seems like Hussie has genuine contempt for him as a character. It just feels like it gets a little over-board at times, how much the story objectifies and humiliates and berates him. Between him and Tavros, it feels like Hussie really despises people who he thinks are ‘playing the victim’, but I don’t really feel like anything those two ever did in the story justifies the amount of shit they get. It’s just kinda weird and off-putting.

I’m really happy that we got so much focus and development for Dave and Karkat and their relationship. The emotional climax between them at the end of Meat was honestly one of the most emotionally rewarding parts of the whole book, as someone that’s shipped these two since I was a teenager. I do have some issues with how their stuff was written, but it’s part of my larger complaints about the Epilogue as a whole, so I won’t get into that just yet.

I’ve already talked a bit about John and his development arc in this so there’s not a whole lot more to say about him, I guess, but I still wanna say that even though I really liked how his relationship with Terezi was portrayed in theory, I think the actual ‘culmination’ of it in Meat felt kinda . . . unsatisfying. In general his whole arc in Meat felt extremely bare-bones compared to Candy, but him hooking up with Terezi just felt a bit shallow and honestly a little bit sleazy, in terms of the whole context and setting of it. It also just felt a bit rushed compare to how, in Candy, John had all those years to mull over his feelings for her. Seeing him struggle with the awkwardness of keeping up communications with her while hiding them from Roxy, and him eventually having to let go of her and accept that they’ll never meet again, felt a lot more emotional than them actually meeting and hooking up in Meat.

There’s a whole lot I can say about Dirk, but mostly it boils down to me not knowing if I just ‘love to hate him’, or if I just straight up hate him. He’s intentionally aggravating and polarizing as a character in every way, but sometimes that just means that in practice you’re writing an unlikable character that people don’t want to read about. I think his whole deal in Meat was extremely interesting from a narrative perspective, and I really liked the meta-textual focus that he gave to that arc, but it also meant being directly exposed to a whole bunch of his thoughts while he directly and indirectly manipulated with people. He kinda ended up defining how the Meat arc felt like it kept going between highs and lows. At the very least, I think he makes for a compelling villain for the sequel, way more so than Caliborn/Lord English ever was.

Even though I really loved what happened with John in this [mostly], I think that Roxy ended up being by far the most interesting and surprising character in the whole book. And probably one of the ones who people are most polarized on.

Just for the record, I’m gonna refer to him with he/him pronouns in this, since that’s where things ended with him in the Meat path, which seems like the one that’ll continue most directly into the sequel. And even in the Candy path you can tell that he struggles with his gender identity, and just takes a much longer time to come to any sort of answer about it. I haven’t actually read the sequel yet so I’m not sure what may or may not go down with him in that, and if he decides to continue to make changes to his presentation and self-identification, but this is what I’m going with for now.

In a lot of ways, I think his material in the Epilogues was some of the most compelling and emotionally earnest stuff. Until Dirk comes in and ruins it all with everything about his extremely obnoxious attitude. That ended up being one of the most aggravating parts of the whole book, lol. But it was pretty accurate to how a lot of people end up expressing their transphobia. It just made it uncomfortable to sit through. Mostly the whole whiplash between his extremely transparent and performative moments of being like ‘good for him. I absolutely do not care about gender at all, so he can do whatever the fuck he wants. This absolutely does not bother me at all, and I RESENT the idea that anyone could think that it ever would’, and him two seconds later being like ‘oh who the fuck cares if I misgender her, it’s not like she can even HEAR me, ugh’. It honestly felt a little weird and unexpected that Dirk ended up being so . . . . weird about the whole thing. It seemed like it struck some sort of nerve with him, and I’m not even sure why. Either way he ended up being a good example for future reference of this specific strand of transphobia where people flip back and forth between performative allyship and overblown and melodramatic annoyance at all of the ‘expectations’ that people are placing on them. Which tbh felt pretty similar to Jane freaking out every time someone rightfully accused her of being xenophobic.

Anyway, I really wasn’t expecting Roxy’s whole arc in this book to mostly revolve around his gradual acceptance of being non-binary/trans, but I really liked it. There’s definitely gonna be a whole lot of people who’ll think it came out of nowhere and is Dumbledore all over again and blah blah blah, but it made a lot of sense to me. Maybe Hussie didn’t have it planned in advance, but I don’t even think it really matters. And one way or another, looking back on the main story in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that he was always performing a sort of exaggerated image of what he thought of as femininity. Which we really saw a whole lot of here, especially in Candy where he never really gets the chance to properly explore those feelings of his. I have kinda mixed feelings about it, but I did like the part near the end of Candy where he’s reconciling with John and he talks about how giving birth helped him to reframe his mental perception of his female body as something unique and personal that he can embrace while divorcing it from the concept of femininity. I think that was a really interesting angle to go with. But there was still something more satisfying about seeing his progress with coming out in Meat, and how he experiments with his presentation and pronouns and whatnot. Maybe it’s a little insensitive of me, but I kinda wished there was an illustration of how he looked near the end of that path when he started presenting in masculine ways. I’m just really curious to see how that looked. I mean, they make it clear that he ended up looking a lot like Dave, but still.

Realistically I guess Roxy’s whole arc ended up resonating with me so much because of how it forces me even more to confront various personal conflicts and insecurities that I’ve been struggling with for a long time, but that’s a whole other story entirely.

Which is probably the best segue I can come up with to move into the topic of how, one way or another, I ended up with a lot of both praise and criticism for how the Epilogues handled these sorts of LGBT topics.

I guess the best way to sum it up is that a whole lot of it just felt like ‘cis/het author dude decides to Write About LGBT Topics [tm]’, if that makes sense. It was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but for a lot of it I still felt like there was something inauthentic and detached about the whole thing. And tbh it felt like there were some kinda annoying double standards. Mainly with how we got all sorts of different f/m romance scenes laid out in all their detail and glory, but a lot of the LGBT stuff was kinda . . . cagey and distant. I kinda had to roll my eyes at the whole part where Dirk as the narrator tried to guilt-trip the audience for wanting to see Dave and Karkat make out. Listen, dude, if I had to sit through whatever the FUCK that sex scene between Vriska and Gamzee was, you better believe that all the straight dudes out there should have to read about Dave and Karkat making out. Honestly it kinda speaks to an even more broad double standard in media in general, where f/m stuff is taken at face value as being the expected norm, but it’s seem as ‘entitled’ or ‘voyeuristic’ to make demands about LGBT rep. It ends up just being an exhausting and transparent way for straight people to try and guilt trip people by going ‘don’t you think that YOU’RE being the real weirdos here????? hmm makes u think’. But that’s a whole complicated subject. And I do still think that Hussie has a lot of respect and care for his LGBT characters and their relationships and identities, but sometimes it’s just a bit exhausting to sit through this sort of perspective on it.

But it’s not like I hated all of it, or anything. As I said, Roxy’s character arc was really nice [even if seeing Dirk’s running commentary over it was fucking mind-numbing], and the stuff with Dave and Karkat was extremely satisfying and relatable. I also did like what relatively few moments we got between Rose and Kanaya. Let’s just say that I’m happy Kanaya’s whole arc in Meat didn’t unironically end with her going ‘welp, guess I’m single now, should have seen this one coming’.

And on a similar note, I’m really curious about the implication that Vriska from the Candy arc was able to get in touch with Terezi from the Meat arc. I’m really curious to see how that plays out.

Anyway, there’s probably a whole lot more I could talk about if I wanted, but I don’t want this to be TOO long, so here we go.

The Epilogues weren’t perfect, but they were a whole lot more substantial and ambitious than I expected, considering that I was getting the vibe that Hussie was burned out on the franchise and was probably looking to do something new instead. So I’m really surprised that the Epilogues were their own whole thing while also being a direct set-up for a full-blown sequel. I honestly have no real idea what to expect from that, but I’m excited. And I wasn’t expecting to be genuinely excited about the prospect of a Homestuck sequel in the year of our lord 2020, but here we are. It looks like it’ll mostly focus on Dave, Karkat, Roxy, Kanaya, and Jade from the Meat arc chasing after Dirk and Rose, which will be cool since I want to see more of those versions of them. I’m really curious to see if the Candy timeline and it’s cast end up being particularly relevant to the sequel, or if they’ll mostly just be left as their own isolated thing. At the very least, it looks like the Vriska from there is getting in touch with Terezi, and that the Dave from that timeline is gonna be part of the sequel as Davebot. But we’ll see.

So yeah, that’s around about it. I guess there’s no better way to start the new decade off than by being punched in the face with 600 or so pages of raw, concentrated Homestuck.