#Old Homestuck > HS2

[jade-harley-yuri]

[marxismleninismmangumism]

To be honest I miss the old early slightly edgy nerdy Homestuck from the first couple of acts....that ruled so much

[squizazz]

art dump 0u0

kankersore for a frond

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

im in the dadroog zone (+1 catnapped swifer/cliper reference)

[catspritesquared]

id like to have hope for hs2 like evryone else right now(lie) but also like within this new chapter theyve made like 3 meme references which just instantly curse it to become dated. like i know old hs2 did this too or whatever (i hated it then too.) biut like… in this upd8 they made a berries and cream joke… they made a how hungry joke… they made sollux say ‘no bitches’… release me from this hell. this comic is unsalvageable

[r0semultiverse]

Rose Lalonde Sprites & Edits

Use these for whatever you want, just give credit if you use these for anything!

[huckleberr1es]

dog this whole sequence has me a little fucked up poor baby meow meow :(

[shoegazingmonad]

If the house juju has it's retcon powers because of the Breath + Space + Light + Time aspect combo from the beta kids souls, would a juju that combines the alpha kids souls and aspects (Life + Hope + Void + Heart) have an ability that would be able to bring ideas to life from nowhere, purely from your own belief and feelings??

[marsti]

hate to tell some of you guys this but "don't harass the hs:bc team/hicu! they're not problematic and probably won't be mean online" is not the Good Take you seem to think it is

[dingodad]

personally the vriska calling him a pedophile bit wasnt out of place for me. Canonically vriska doesnt shy away from saying that scratch is a sexual predator, she does state outright to his face that he gets off on manipulating little girls in the comic.

i think "would it be in character for vriska to say that" and "does it make sense in the context of the story for her to say that" are two subtly but crucially different questions, though.

like, on the one hand: it has always been textually clear that doc scratch is not LITERALLY a pedophile. he's a completely asexual organism. by using that word to describe him, you're making the subtextual textual. and this kind of "saying the quiet part out loud" is something the HICU have done very deliberately since they took the helm of hs2; they are intimately aware, i think, of the fact that they are fans in charge of deconstructing homestuck for the entertainment of other fans, and that in service of that aim sometimes you need to be willing to have mature discussions out in the open. a lot of the time this has worked for them quite well, especially in terms of getting old readers back on board with a story which has in the past been overly subtle to the point of excruciating boredom. but sometimes it teeters close to the edge of "characters talking like they're fully aware they're getting therapy", and i think this example leans somewhat toward the latter. like, is there really anyone reading hs2 at this point who doesn't already have some understanding that scratch is a predator? who exactly did it serve to make that already blatant comparison that much more overt?

on the other hand... i get the impression that vriska is actually aware of this distinction, on some level? like emphasising the fact that scratch is a child predator is almost a sort of shield for her. the name of vriska's game in this chapter is minimisation; while it's super cool and heroic to admit that part of your tragic backstory involves a sick spider monster and a badass lady pirate, by trying to paint scratch as nothing more than a pathetic kiddy fiddler what she's really saying is that because he never actually molested her then she was never really abused, that she was never really a victim and therefore he was never actually a significant presence in her life at all. that's how she lives with it, by role playing as the predator to forget the fact that she was ever prey.

i think what i question about this is possibly that vriska would even know to use that word at all? writing dialogue that actually feels authentically like stuff trolls would say is another thing i think hs2 has had a rough time with ("that is a completely normal human sentence"?). the gay joke in the tavros chapter was funny because it had been a long time since we heard caliborn and jake do the same gag but it feels like they tried to capture that same energy with vriska calling tavros a "pussy" in this chapter and it fell flat. and it felt just as unnatural for a troll to say the word "pussy" as it did for her to say the word "pedophile". i think what makes alternia and its traumatic knock-on effects so effective is that it's often more insidious than it is explicit; trolls barely have the language to describe all the institutionalised neglect and abuse that is happening around them all the time because to them it's just how the world works! yeah sollux has that line about sex offenders and schools, but i think that basically serves to illustrate my point, because for the most part we all seem to understand that trolls don't have what we would be able to identify as "school" either: sexual abuse and education are concepts that, in the world of homestuck, exist entirely in the abstract; tropes to be evoked but not things that ever actually happen.

that being said, alternia is designed to reflect the structure of homestuck as a whole, and the reason alternia doesn't have sex offenders or schools is because homestuck in general does not explicitly concern itself with these topics. we understand that escaping homestuck and settling down on Earth C means settling down in the "real world", replacing the threat of time-travelling demons with real struggles and real problems, and as a continuation of the homestuck epilogues hs2 naturally IS going to continue to touch on sex and politics and all the other stuff that was delegated mostly to the subtextual in the original comic. i think the structure of this chapter even kind of alludes to this; tavros and erisol beckon vriska to relax for a moment and play childish games with them like she used to do when she was a kid on alternia, but by choosing to forge on ahead with her personal growth vriska is immediately confronted with the fact that becoming an adult is NOT like a webcomic, it's NOT all allegories and RPG battles; it can be sick and it can be hurtful and it can stop you right in your tracks just as you thought you were "making progress" toward "winning".

i just feel that by having vriska apply Earth C vocabulary to an Alternian experience right off the bat, we've skipped over a key part of her transition from homestuck to the real world. would this chapter have been any easier to stomach if it had been about vriska coming to grips with the fact that scratch was a predator in the first place? no, of course not LOL. i think my gripe here might literally just be with the word choice. like i believe the writers have it in them to express what they were trying to express here in a much more interesting way than simply having vriska say "lol he's a pedophile". yes, addressing something literally that has only ever been mentioned before in symbols and whispers is part of the impact of this update, but i don't think that has to come at the expense of the dialogue actually feeling like it belongs in the mouths of these characters

[hms-no-fun]

What's your opinion on the new HS^2 update? I'm really excited it's back but I'm a little worried. Like, the fandom has had a real problem with pretending all the horrible shit that caused it to end in the first place never happened. Is this just gonna sweep that under the rug even more? Is James Roach heading the project because he's less "problematic"? I love James roach and I'm sure he'll do great but what about all the transphobia? I just hope they finally fulfill the Toblerone Prophesy and make June Egbert cannon.

short version is, i'm cautiously optimistic! but this is a loaded question you've given me on a lot of fronts, so i'm gonna try to take it piece by piece.

to start with, the sudden revival of Homestuck^2 (now minus the squared) took me by surprise because to my knowledge, it was entirely dead in the water. my involvement with anything Official ended at Pesterquest, and pretty much the entire post-canon crew i was friends with in 2019-20 has moved on to greener pastures. i share a similar sentiment with @pochapal in that i would have put money on hs2 staying dead forever. i have, quite frankly, dreaded the inevitable day when official Homestuck media would resume production, because the fandom at large seems quite eager to sweep the ceaseless harassment and transphobia that ended hs2 under the rug and pretend that it just, like you said... never happened. when that california cafe used older Pesterquest-like character designs that omitted short chubby Terezi and black-coded Roxy, however well-intentioned and ultimately harmless that was, it felt like a sign of things to come. that, as you fear, the sharper & more personal queerness that we tried to bring to this series would be erased, in favor of something meant to simultaneously appease both tenderqueers and redditors, two sects of the fandom most responsible for the aforementioned harassment.

luckily, that really doesn't seem to be the case!

to your worry that James Roach was made director because he's "less problematic," i'll just say that's entirely the wrong way to look at it. it's not like WP (such that it even still exists) were cruising to get HS2 back up and running. by all accounts, James is the only reason it's happening again in the first place. i can't stress enough just how small an operation this Homestuck business actually is (or, at least, was when i was involved). this is not a Huge Corporation making cynical cash grab decisions. this is someone who cares about the material pushing to get something made where otherwise there would be nothing. check the new About page, where the principles of the so-called Homestuck Independent Creative Union are laid out in plain terms. this is something the original hs2 team fought for, so for this new version to start from there as square one is huge and a good sign of the possible longevity of the project.

next, let's talk about the question of this new team erasing the legacy of the old one. Kate Mitchell is on the record that she was reached out to about this new hs2, approved it, and declined to be involved. i don't know if the other writers were reached out to, but i have no reason to believe they weren't. this is a tremendously important gesture of good faith and goes a long way towards easing some of these worries.

but let's look at the composition of the team itself. do you remember The Perfectly Generic Podcast? originally hosted by future hs2 writer Kate, pgen became a flashpoint for community discourse, often opening doors between official homestuck and homestuck fandom. what made that show special was that, rather than relying on the imo tired genre of the liveread, pgen focused on a different topic each episode and explored it with one or two qualified guests. Kate's goal with the show was to encourage a more adult and quasi-academic discussion of homestuck, of its successes and its failures. if you weren't there, the weight i'm putting on pgen might seem overblown (not least because you can't find it anywhere anymore except on the internet archive). but it's not! when they decisively criticized the wild contents of the Skaianet debacle in episode 19, Andrew listened and worked to bring a more diverse group of creators into the fold. in the months after the Epilogues were released, Andrew issued a statement through pgen on episode 52 about how the Epilogues are meant to create bridges and offramps for the post-canon fandom. it's an essential piece for understanding the epilogues and their relationship to fanworks! that it wasn't included as the author's introduction to the Epilogues in the book version remains to my mind an astonishing oversight, but whatever. point is, pgen mattered to the folks in charge.

so let's look again at the writing staff of this new crew. James Roach first guested on pgen in episode 7, and would go on to be a regular. Haven, who did the Vriska and Roxy sprites in Pesterquest (and probably more stuff i don't remember), guested in episodes 81 and 87. Miles guested on episode 87 as well (unless it's a different Miles, i'm not familiar with their work and ugh this damnable linkrot). Floral, creator of one of my favorite hs fanworks & huge godfeels influence Liminal Space, first guested on pgen in episode 47, and would go on to be a regular (including once during my tenure as host to talk about Jade). on the technical staff side, Kohi built the hs2 website and has remained a backend mainstay both on the WP side and on Vast Error.

all of which is to say, if you were looking for a crew to cynically erase the past and appease the haters, these probably aren't the folks that'd be at the top of your list. of course, if you *really* wanted to cynically erase the past and appease the haters, you wouldn't bother reviving hs2 in the first place!

and that's the crux of the matter here. what cash is there to grab? what clout could possibly be chased? i struggle to think of a decision less obviously profitable and popular than continuing hs2 with a new crew right where it left off. i have to believe this is happening because the people involved want to make it.

so, yeah, i'm cautiously optimistic. i like this crew, i like the contents of the first upd8, and i'm glad as hell it's not a reboot! i'm grateful that by reviving hs2, the hs:bc crew have instantly yanked the epilogues & the post-canon project back into relevance in the broader community. and i always liked hs2 a lot! i was excited to see where they were going! i'm really looking forward to seeing more YIFFY!!!!!

but the thing is, this won't be the hs2 i wanted. i know that, and i'm not expecting it. my greatest hope for hs:bc, for this crew, is that they get the chance to take up the reins and drive this thing in whatever direction they feel most passionate about. if that winds up looking like the hs2 that was originally planned, great-- but more than anything, i want everyone on this team to feel just as empowered to leave a profound and personal mark on this series as the original team did, as i did working on Pesterquest. i hope the outline changes! i hope they take some really wild swings! i want to be surprised!! i want to be challenged!!!

above all, i want them to have the chance to pick a course, sail it, and see it through to the end regardless of what the public thinks. they deserve the chance that the original crew didn't get.

i have plenty of bitterness and cynicism in my heart over the events and circumstances of 2019-20, but as far as i'm concerned it has no place here today. i would never, ever wish the trauma and stress of that era on anyone. let the fandom at large react in whatever way it will, but i want things to be different this time. this is a second chance-- not just for hs2/hs:bc, but for all of us. even people who hate homestuck post-canon! this is an opportunity for everyone to choose to be better this time, and to push back when others might squander that opportunity. this team is not a group of celebrities, not an abstract fiction on the other side of the world, they are human beings who took a job. they've earned the opportunity to do that job, and they deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity that was so often absent a few years ago.

as to your last point, about june egbert and the toblerone. i've been saying for years that andrew's confirmation of june was less "the granting of a wish" than it was "a spoiler shared without input from the creative team." that there is any doubt about june's providence in hs2 can only be attributed to willful, aggressive ignorance on the part of people who refuse to engage with the written word in any way other than plodding literalism. the original team didn't unveil june ~immediately~ because they didn't think of june as a wish, they thought of her as a character in an ongoing story who needed time to develop naturally. i have never not felt entirely crazy about how thick everyone has been about this!

but will the new team make june canon? obviously i have no way of knowing for sure, but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that probably the answer is "yes, when they're good and goddamned ready." just, please, for the love of god, don't go after every upd8 like "where's june? where's june? why hasn't june yet????" this was one of the worst results of the toblerone spoiler and it put INSANE pressure on the hs2 team. so just... just let this story be what it is. let this new team make the homestuck continuation they want to make.

and in the meantime, if you're really hungry for june... there's always godfeels :)

[frenzyarts]

Jane Crocker was made to be ooc and evil in HS2... or WAS SHE?!?!?!? 🧐🧐🧐

Here is my Homestuck Theory:

From a young age Jane was involved with Crockercorp. She even used the UNREAL HEIRESS THOUGHTWAVE TIARATOP, which was basically force-feeding her propaganda, literally straight into her brain. Even her vision becomes covered with propaganda and ads.

Much later, we see Jane reminiscing on her old room. She sees the tiaratop and admits that "it was doing funny things" to her head.

Despite that, she decides to put it on again, and it controls her brainwaves louder than ever, causing her to rip it off.

And it stays off until grimbark jade poofs it onto her head again, and the Condesce takes over.

ARQUIUSPRITE explains to Dirk how the tiaratop has made her a vessel for an evil AI, and even seems to enjoy that fact about her.

However, he's the one who removes it from her. I didn't capture it in my screenshots, but right as he removes it the screen flashes with DISOBEY.

But what if... What if he was still rooting for an AI Jane? What if he didn't fully de-program the tiaratop? The next time we see Jane wearing the tiaratop is in the HS snapchats. She has it as a necklace. But her crocker technology is hacked by the Felt and she's kidnapped. She remarks that "all our technology was scrubbed clean," but clearly it wasn't. Perhaps her tiaratop necklace wasn't either!

Then *evil music* the epilogues happen. In Candy, we see her follow the path to the evil CEO she is in HS2. In the beginning of Candy, we can see her character begin to change. She says she feels like "nothing I do matters." Which I believe is in reference to the fact that the epilogues are "semi-canon" and therefore don't matter, which is what drove Dirk to become Ult Dirk in an attempt to make things matter again.

But he becomes Ult Dirk in Meat. As we know, he's deceased in Candy, because "nothing matters" there. And immediately after the "nothing matters we're in Candy" revelation, this exchange happens:

Notice how right after this revelation, she starts hitting on Jake again, and suddenly wants a bunch of babies? Jake even remarks that she's never wanted this before. In fact, the only time she wanted this was when she was UNDER THE MIND CONTROL OF THE TIARATOP...

WHICH SHE IS CLEARLY WEARING ALL THROUGHOUT HS2!!!! She put that shit back on in the snapchats and never took it off and it turned her evil!! The tiaratop is imbued with the essence of the Condesce the same way lil cal is imbued with the essence of lord english which is a HUGE part of what caused the version of Dirk that was Dave's Bro to become evil.

That's why she seems ooc... because she IS! It's the ghost of the Condesce, still controlling her! Which makes me wonder, once she takes it off, will the Jane we know and love return? Or is she too far gone?

Anyways, that's my theory and defense of Jane. I would love love love to hear other's thoughts on this :D even if you disagree with my theory, I still want to know, because I love reading analysis ^u^

[the-troll-book-of-mormon]

iykyk :}

[r0semultiverse]

The implication that Terezi is stronger/immune/indifferent to Dirk's narrative writing/reality-warping powers is interesting. 👀

I am so excited for the new writers to explore her character more.

Hopefully this also means we'll be seeing more classpect & god tier power exploration as well!

[genderisareligion]

I haven't explained why I've decided to be Homestuck's Alt Calliope on this blog but if we're mutuals on @genderisstillareligion (and if you were with its predecessor) you've probably seen me rotate between like the same five trolls and one of the Strilalondes for years now lol and I just wanna clarify to new people that I'm technically an ex fan since I haven't touched HS2 since 2021 and won't until "they finish it" and don't hang out on the Reddit anymore as of that year too and as of mostly finishing my Act 1 & 2 pilot script to potentially send to Andrew one day if anyone is ever insane enough to fund the infamous Homestuck anime after a good amount of the subreddit said don't bother writing this but not for very good reasons (listen, I was a Healthcare worker during COVID thus suffered a gradual mental breakdown that began with me rereading almost the entire comic again page by page during "lockdown" lol I'm mostly recovered now but won't ever be entirely)

I was extremely touched by the Wicked film and Cynthia's performance and the power that is Black Elpheba despite having mixed feelings about Ariana (the racebaiting is a lot and she's too rich but as she's the most well known Nickelodeon child star victim I have huge empathy for her and can separate appreciation for her voice from whoever she is) because I no longer remember my previous obsession with Wicked during childhood due to amnesia from DID; can't remember the exact year it toured in my city when Idina and Kristen first debuted but I was old enough that I should remember why I was so upset that "the third section of the book wasn't in the show" (no idea if this is true just what I remember lol past me is so pretentious and has no idea how privileged she was to even be able to see the show 😭) and if it's not obvious

This green vaguely "female" alien from Homestuck is heavily inspired by Elpheba

Calliope like every Homestuck character has multiple versions of herself due to the nature of the setting (a reality altering video game where after you lose a life your past self doesn't pixilate in the nothing it sticks around and might fuck with you) but her multiself situation is probably the weirdest because when this alien species is young there are two distinct "personalities" "minds" "souls" what have you who trade turns being awake/using the body until maturation when one will usurp the other

With the help of psychotherapy and an app called Pluralkit I've determined I have 10 to 20 alters at the moment as far as I know but I was unaware of the count for most of my life because one "personality" of the "highest order" (a more intelligent network in my brain) "hid" this from me by adapting creative writing as a hobby and making me think that my hypergraphia (a legit neurological disorder I just learned about) was "normal"

Who I've presented out in the world and who I've been in my inner life have not always been opposites per se because that would imply a bipolar rather than a multipolar spectrum that I can exist on, but they pretty much don't ever fully agree and sometimes don't exist in each other's worlds, I've often found myself "holding conflicting opinions" and "wanting to summarize everything and explore all sides" and still wanting "world peace" like the twenty year old sorority pageant girl I was once

It hit me like a ton of bricks when I reread the Epilogues in 2023 (I bought the hardcover leave me alone I'm a grandma fan and completely avoiding the tumblr fandom has vastly improved the experience lol) that as much as I always think that I'm just some amalgamation of the Strilalondes in one body, I'm actually very much Alt Calliope as I enter my 30s

Towards the end of Calliope's story she finds an indeterminably old version of herself who unlike our Calliope won the fight for dominance at maturation rather than the other "personality" Caliborn, which our Calliope always thought was what she needed to do to win the video game and save everything real potentially being killed by it. Turns out not and the dominant Alt Calliope lost to the death (there's only one win condition and no one knows what it is it's all trial and error) and has been wandering alone in the waste of her trial for thousands of years, knowing that her only hope is the chance of a better reroll in some inconceivablely far future

But being dead isn't even a little bit of a hindrance once the new Calliope finds the old Calliope and the save condition is met, because she retained all her powers and is basically the reason all the surviving main characters now have a victory planet to do sequels on, a victory planet she can't take part in but can only narrate the events of

I don't think I have to spell out the radical feminist metaphor. If you know you know lol

[leah2eroes]

Have you ever read the crow strider au fan comic for Homestuck?

this greatly depends on how old said comic is. if it was made before 2017, theres a half decent chance i have; otherwise probably not? i spent a lot of the last 7 or so years not interacting too much with newer fan content. im not even up to date with hs2 and i need to reread the epilogues too lmaooooo

but feel free to share im curious :p