#and *homestuck* of all things was the one to release me from that hold

[chrisrin]

it’s my favorite time of the year!

🌟 art summary of 2022 🌟

open the read more to see past years! vv

[tunaababee]

gonna get really sappy and DEEPLY tmi/personal about twenty one pilots on main so im gonna put it under a cut. i am cringe but i am free and clancy tour coming up is giving me Feelings

i've been a top fan since 2016. i initially had some resistance to them bc it was when Stressed Out was at its peak and like, yall know how oversaturation goes. even if its good, its fucking annoying by proxy. all the 12/13 year olds at my high school were into it. i was turning 17. and it was a really fucking rough year.

i've been deep into homestuck since i was about 14/15, but by age 16 i had branched out into text-based rp and met a guy from italy who i kind of had a situationship with i guess?? at the time?? idk if that's what the kids call it. (whenever i describe how many relationships ive had, i count this one as a 0.5) anyways. it eventually got to a point where he was emotionally abusing me for a period of about four months. it was brief, but intense, especially since im a fucking lovesick lonely teen at this point who doesnt know any better. he lovebombs me, talks to me and acts like i am his girlfriend, gets jealous and shitty if i talk about other people, but then the moment he goes and does the same shit i get told i'm the reason he was depressed, im the reason for his problems, etc. until he calmed down and placated me and won me over again. over and over, regularly, for four months. it was a lot for my little developing brain to handle.

i know people have had it longer, have had it worse, but it really left a lasting impact. i was left with a litany of abandonment issues, and self-esteem and image that was already bad was buried dead in the fucking ground. i wanted to die every single fucking day for those four months. he even told me, as i began to question my sexuality properly, that i couldnt be bi 'because i liked him'.

but he LOVED twenty one pilots. would quote their shit regularly. wore the merch. all that stuff.

by 2016 i'd managed to see clearly enough and have enough support from friends that i felt comfortable cutting him and his circle off permanently. and it was fucking hard. i didn't have a lot of irl friends at the time and it felt like my only support network. after i finally left, i was desperate to feel some semblance of control, take something back, my own personal little 'fuck you' i could carry in my heart.

with all the hype around them, i gave top a try. slowly eased my way in. i knew i was hooked when i heard Holding On To You for the first time. it made me feel like i could take back that control and find a light at the end of the tunnel.

i consumed everything they had put out after that. i saw them live at emotional roadshow sydney 2017, i was turning 18. i made so many new friends. i felt such hope in my heart. i sobbed so fucking hard when they played HOTY. they weren't the only reason i made it through, itd be naive to contribute everything to them when i've done a lot of work and so have the people around me, but they were like a lifeline to hold on to when things were hard.

i went and saw them again in 2018 for the bandito tour. i made my own outfit and was surrounded by people who had done the same. i made more friends, had more adventures. i was dropping out of high school the year that Trench released due to having the worst mental health i'd had probably since my abuse and felt so lost but it helped me feel a little more stable and grounded. like that light was still there.

a lot has happened since. i'll be 25 when i go see them in November, once again at Qudos Bank Arena in sydney. i'm in a happy relationship with someone i love who respects me. i'm doing things that make me happy. i'm happy. i've felt and experienced and lived and loved and lost and done so so so much since i was a scared 16 year old hearing them for the first time. i've gotten piercings and tattoos, something i never thought i'd do, and put their work permanently on my body. i'm so proud every time i see my tattoo on my arm. i genuinely love and accept myself exactly as i am, which is something i NEVER thought i'd do.

having Clancy come out nine years to the day from blurryface, an album that has been so deeply important to me in a lot of ways, gets me real misty. this entire tour gets me so misty. i didn't think i'd live past 18 at BEST. but i'm here and i'm fucking happy.

genuinely cannot emphasise how much this album and this tour means to me. i plan on getting a Clancy tattoo once the album comes out and i've had some time to sit with it. it feels very full circle, i guess. hearing Next Semester has just had me thinking about this constantly and all weepy all the time haha. but a good weepy.

i cannot fucking wait to scream in a stadium full of people again in a way that heals my heart.

[unoriginalpun]

Sumeru's Grand Scribe: Seer of Light Alhaitham

Maid of Space Kaveh Analysis

Disclaimer: Just like before, this analysis may include my own personal headcanons about the character. Just a heads up! Forgive me too if its format is a little all over the place.

SPOILERS FOR HOMESTUCK TOO.

Since we already know a whole lot about him as well as having already cemented himself as an important character in Sumeru's storyline, instead of just focusing on predicting what kind of character he might be, I'll include some facets of how his surroundings affect him and his classpect.

Seer: Passive knowing class => One who sees their Aspect or one who sees with their aspect. Alternatively, one who understands their aspect or informs others of/with their aspect.

Light: Abstract => Knowledge, awareness, fortune, luck. Literal: Actual light (Brightness), Vision

The Grand Scribe of the Akademiya, a normal and ordinary employee for Sumeru's government, and most importantly; Kaveh's roommate. The irony of the both of them living together is that despite Alhaitham being the one to hold the light aspect, Kaveh's the one who has a title and fame while the former would prefer to stay out of the spotlight as much as he could help it. He even turns down the chance to be the Grand Sage, Sumeru's head official and leader of the Akademiya.

Alhaitham, even though time and time again has been told that he has potential to become someone of great renown, rejects attention and wants nothing to do with fame. He'd rather stick to his unassuming job of Scribing than live in the limelight; wanting to pursue his desire to learn about the world around him on his own terms. From this description alone it makes him an obvious light-bound, yet he makes it a point to hide from it.

So why is it that the one who sees and is encompassed Light constantly pushes it away?

Let's shuffle things up a bit. Instead of his aspect, lets start with Alhaitham's class: The Seer.

The Seer's role is to learn about their aspect and use what they've learned to help others and guide their party towards whatever goal they need to achieve.

Terezi Pyrope is a good example of a competent seer, despite not having to have gone godtier in any of her iterations. As a Seer of Mind, she informs her teammates (most notably John) of the potential outcomes of their decision as Mind is the Aspect of choice and its consequence. With John, she gives him a list of events and choices he has to reverse and change in order to guide their timeline

Then there's fellow Seer of Light Rose Lalonde, who's role couldn't have been described any more flawlessly than by Aradia:

I'll revisit this as I'll further explain Alhaitham's character and how Aradia's description of his classpect could also apply to him and how he acts throughout the archon quest and his character story.

Then there's Kankri. Well... It can be assumed that as his session's Seer of Blood he would've seen how his teammates would interact and bond with each other and in turn figure out ways to tie them together into a more cohesive unit. But it's know that that isnt the case.

Now lets return to Alhaitham and how he fits the Seer role.

Alhaitham has repeatedly showcased how he always seemed to be two steps ahead of his opponent through careful planning, putting up all the triggers in place for a chain reaction you could say. He was able to allocate every one of his teammates to a purpose that would in the end save their imprisoned god Nahida from her imprisonment in the Akademiya.

Specifically, Alhaitham knew how to divert attention away from his plan from the Akademiya . Primarily through distractions that draw the Akademiya's awareness away from the ones who were delegated to free Nahida, was Alhaitham able to bring his party to the most desired outcome of releasing their god.

So you can assume that while the action was happening, Alhaitham stayed in the background overseeing the whole operation from the outside right?

Wrong

I would be amiss if I failed to mention at least once that Alhaitham does actively participate in his own plan, being the nexus that ties all their plans together. Along with his personal motive of just wanting to keep his simple job as a scribe, it would make sense to place him in the Mage class.

I do plan on writing a section that expands on how both he and Kaveh are forced by Sumeru's society to act into different roles, for Alhaitham's case it would be having to act out the role of the Mage, so i wont get into too much detail.

But to put it simply: Alhaitham wouldn't want to be a Mage as it goes against his wants for an untroubled, comfortable life.

Also, he say outright that he'd rather take on a passive role:

Now, there's Alhaitham's personal story quest where he takes a bit of a back seat and exhibits more traits of a Seer.

Another role that a Seer could fulfill is to learn and understand their their aspect or through their aspect, and Alhaitham takes a great deal of his story quest investigating Ilyas and the Hivemind he was a part of due to Sirage.

It all accumulates into he climax where he reveals that all this time be had already figured out what Sirage was up to along with his his plot to overthrow him and position as Acting Grand Sage and had long figured out how to collapse his hivemind through helping Ilyas remember and divulging information out of him, learning more about him and Sirage. Alhaitham then was able to quietly plant seeds in the form of information that challenged the hive's perception of himself that would bloom and spread across the overmind and eventually take it down.

Although Alhaitham is still involved with this investigation, it can be noted that he does not take much action throughout most of the quest until the very end where he destroys the machine that controls the overmind. He mostly guided those around him through each stage of the investigation until they've reached the root of Ilyas' problem.

Finally, let's talk about the latter half of his title: the aspect of Light.

Light in homestuck represents not only Knowledge, but also fortune, luck, and attention; relevance.

One's who are bound to Light are knowledge-seekers that have the spotlight cast on them; wherever they go, the story follows. Sylph of Light Aranea Serket is a fountain of information that spouts up details of anything to anyone who listens. Her dancestor Thief of Light Vriska steals the show and always wants to have the story revolve around her, nothing is secret to her either as her Vision 8-fold reveals to her everything that's hidden behind a physical wall.

Then once again there's Rose, one of the first four main characters and someone who's curiousity for the unkown allows for Light to let her learn about it.

Indeed Alhaitham is a knowledge seeker, his introduction explicitly states this fact:

Yet attention and relevance are what Alhaitham strives to avoid. Does that not make him a true Light-Bound by ignoring half of what makes the aspect of light, or is there something more at play?

Well, I woundn't want this analysis to stop here and now and neither would you right?

First, I like to discuss that in order for Alhaitham to comfortably live in Sumeru he would have to roleplay as three different classpects:

The Aforementioned Mage of Light, which is forced upon by the Akademiya.

The Knight of Light and the Mage of Void. (also both classpects that I associate with King Deshret ;] )

To summarize a point that would need a whole other post dedicated to it: Just like Kaveh, Alhaitham has to switch between performing two roles if he wants to be able to live out his life in Sumeru comfortably. Acting as a Mage of Light in tandem as a Mage of Void so he can foresee and act on a problem that poses a threat to his lifestyle yet conceal his schemes in secrecy, as well as a Knight of Light where he uses knowledge to protect it.

Just like in the Archon quest, Alhaitham was able to uncover a plan that was void in the public's eyes and after bring it to light was he able to plan and act on it, using what he has understood through his findings to protect his country.

So let's come back to the question: With all this roleplaying and its proof, does that mean that Alhaitham isn't truly a Seer or bound to Light?

No, it just means that Alhaitham is really good at acting.

Though, this also could be a great metaphor for masking too. Having to act out certain roles in order to fulfill his society’s expectations of him.

But with that aside, Alhaitham's true colors shine when he is left alone along with the job that he chose for himself.

By himself without the noise of unexpected events, Alhaitham is in the background quietly obtaining information through Scribing; recording and being privy to gatherings and the data it could provide.

And maybe if he was a little less unburdened with Sumeru's problems then perhaps he could fit into that role a bit more snugly.

But how would there be a story if there wasn't any struggle.

Which brings me to my final point, The Seer's arc.

Seers are first deprived of their aspect and surrounded by its opposite. Their character arc is basically them dispelling what obfuscates their aspect in order to learn about it themselves before providing their judgement on it to others.

Rose once was shrouded in Void, first by Mom's drunken and unclear motherly acts of affections then by Doc Scratch through the horrorterrors so he can move the plot forward.

Terezi was clouded by Heart through her unhealthy black romance with Gamzee which rendered her unable to think for herself and left her feeling terrible.

And Kankri with Breath, as he was the only one of his blood color to exist on Beforus and thus began with a lack of any relation through blood.

With those patterns established, I'm going to start diving into headcanon territory and how Alhaitham's title shapes his character arc.

This will differ from Kaveh's as in his case we don't know much about either his past or what he's doing in the present specifically, but with Alhaitham we know a fair amount of both. BUT there are gaps between him in the present and in his past that could be filled in with a classpect's imagination.

Despite growing up in a city drowning in Light, Alhaitham was shrouded in a certain void while he was a child. This was partly self-imposed as the little scribe would rather stay at home with his grandmother teaching and learning by himself rather than using the Akasha system or by being a student at the Akademiya, which in turn deprived himself of Sumeru's light.

Even if he was surrounded by his grandmother's vast collection of books, he does admit that even they are subject to misinformation and can't possibly be relied on 100%. Yet this kind of void is something that doesn't harm him as it's through understanding this void can he starts to see its light.

But perhaps this void persists even after he admits himself as a student in the Akademiya, and it takes the form of the architect Kaveh. Kaveh and Alhaitham are two sides of one mirror: one driven by hard logic and the other driven by emotion. The saying opposites attract did in fact apply to them as during their Akademiya days did they become close. That void that surrounded Kaveh did not leave but Alhaitham once again did not mind.

It was only until a joint research project did the void become bothersome. Ideals and perspectives started to clash and this time Alhaitham wasn’t able to pick apart and figure it out why Kaveh’s point of view. He wasn’t able to find an explanation to why they were at each other’s throats now.

So they called off the project and went their separate ways, a fallout.

Although the source was gone, it’s fog still lingered in the back of Alhaitham’s mind. Many what-ifs ran across his head and scenarios in which he created multiple contingency plans that will never come to pass because they were always about what he should’ve done to avoid their separation. 

Now there’s a new emptiness that surrounds Alhaitham, one he could explain but not easily dispel.

It bleeds into how he interacts with others, only keeping people within an arms length and no closer, learning to adopt different behaviors in order to reach a favorable outcome that wouldn’t result into the same one that shrouded him in this unknown.

He would have an opportunity to rectify this as Kaveh becomes broke. Alhaitham offers him a place to stay the moment he hears the news.

Now with a new start, maybe this time Alhaitham could better understand his now roommate with everything he has picked up during his absence. The arguments that they have often is now new data about Kaveh’s personality for him to analyze and synthesize.

Aaaaaaand that concludes the deep dive into the Seer of Light! I’m totally not setting this up for a series of posts where the nexus is of a certain ship that involves these two (hehe).

[davestriderascend]

the homestuck reread pt 2

this is a continuation of this post, where i recap my reread of acts 1-4. in this post, ill be focusing on just act 5, bc its literally like the length of 1-4 all on its own. act 5 started in 2010 and finished in 2011- it took about a year to make! act 1 started in 2009, meaning that this one act took the same amount of time to finish as the previous 4 acts!

act five is split into two acts, or "bifurcated." the curtains are red and blue, the act is neatly split into two plots, and we are introduced to the best and most important troll- sollux (jk). anyway bc of this i will also be splitting my recap into subacts, and then talking about the act as a whole!

Act 5 Act 1 - AKA, Hivebent

a5a1 is the act where we are finally, officially, introduced to the trolls. a5a1 is fast-paced, text-heavy, and made with the intention to summarize the trolls session as quickly as possible. its hussies way of catching us up on the trolls backstory, the plot relevant info from their session, and the midnight crew + felts role in sgrub (w implications for how that impacts the kids sburb session). were introduced to doc scratch, and we learn a lot more about the paradoxical nature of sburb/sgrub. thats pretty much the whole subact! while this act was coming out, toby fox released his solo album alternia, and a bunch of ppl collabed on a squiddles album!

The Plot

im going to mix it up a little and start w the plot this time. the plot of hivebent was fastpaced and crammed a lot of things into one subact. if you recall anything from hs that happened before the trolls were on the meteor, chances are it all happened in this act! the purpose of this subact was very obviously just to set up for the following subact, and i noticed a lot of people complained about the pacing on the formspring (were still on the first one, btw). personally, i understood immediately what hussie was doing, so it didnt really bother me at all.

the trolls session was brief, largely bc unlike the kids, they were all already familiar w violence and weapons and frankly overprepared for their session. they breezed through the quests and bosses, and without even godtiering (except vriska) they all managed to beat an extremely overpowered black king that had been prototyped 12 times, one of which was w feferis monster horrorterror lusus. aradia largely played jades roll in setting up the whole session, following nudges from mysterious sources to discover the ruins, get sollux to create the game, and push all of her friends into playing it. hivebent ends with the end of their session and their new fate on the meteor.

The Characters

karkat, obviously, is one of the main characters in hivebent. hes ornery and obsessed with leadership, and he fights with everyone all the time. however, we still see a lot of moments where he genuinely connects with even the most insufferable people, regularly giving all of his friends the benefit of the doubt and offering compassion every time the need arises. in a5a2, vriska credits him for being the reason why the trolls didnt devolve into competitive murder. while he might not have been the best leader, he was genuinely really good at keeping the team together, even when the thing uniting them was just bitching about his obnoxious memos. like dave, karkat was one of my favorites on my first readthrough, and like dave, hes been a lot less compelling for me this time around, but theres still a lot to enjoy about his dynamics with others.

in a lot of ways, vriska also holds the limelight. sometimes it kind of feels like act 5 is her act to me, but maybe thats just bc she was my favorite and therefore all i cared about. vriska and john are both like, just as compelling to me as they were my first read, and my feelings on them really havent changed at all. its incredible. vriska is just such a complex character, and its like. man to this fucking day i will see tumblr posts like man i wish we had female characters who x and im like vriska already did. she already did and she killed it and fandom hated her so bad for it. shes genuinely so refreshing as a character bc i feel like we really never do get to see women who are just loud and brash and cringe and messy and she is just. ugh. she is the moment she is everything fr.

kanaya is my GIRL. shes one of the most genuinely hysterical characters in all of hs and one of my favorite trolls. even before she meets rose and starts playing up the sarcasm thing she has a very dry, deadpan sense of humor, and very little tolerance for stupid people, as much as she is patient with them. shes a little goofy, a little silly, and her crush on rose oh my god its literally so cute. i completely forgot she had a crush on rose way back before she even met her. listen, i love her, shes so great

tavros gets a fair bit of focus as well, as an early troll in hs, and ill be honest. i paid like no attention to tavros whatsoever my first read, bc i just didnt find him very interesting. however, im finding him a lot more compelling on my reread! the parallels he has with vriska are really interesting, and its unbelievable how much fandom has watered him down. he really is kind of a dick? and i dont understand why youd get rid of that! it makes him a much more nuanced and complex character than the woobie shy boy i see in so much fancontent

terezi gets less attention than you would think before a5a2, but she certainly has her own role in this act. shes never really been my favorite, because i just dont really relate to her at all? so i dont have much to say other than like. man. she sure is there. her relationship with nepeta is cute i love when people rp along w her and i think its really cool how she manages to outmanipulate doc scratch (tho that might be a5a2?), and early karez! is actually pretty cute.

aradia and sollux occupy a much smaller role, which mostly starts and ends with their responsibility for getting the ball rolling. they made sgrub, they got everyone playing it. however, despite the incredibly small role they play, i love them both so much. sollux in particular was one of my favorite trolls when i first read hs, and whoa! shocker! he still is. hes so fucking funny. his relationship w karkat is hysterical and hes just a lot of fun as a character

nepeta and equius have an even smaller role. personally tho, i fukcing love equius, i think hes so fucking funny. he feels very much like a thirteen yo boy who spent too much time in video game lobbies and started saying racist shit as a result. hes weird and uncomfortable, but mostly harmless, when he isnt being a huge fucking bigot. nepeta on the other hand is one of the most iconic girls ever in fiction, which i must acknowledge even when she isnt one of my personal faves. shes vicious and tough and still super cute and girly and like, not in a femme fatale way, but just in a middle school girl playing warrior cats way. which is SO REAL? she is THE weirdgirl, man. its her. little girls everywhere are being so represented right now.

gamzee is uh. well ill be honest. he basically doesnt matter at all. he has almost no lines and no relevance and is just kind of there, really? hes such a nothing character in this act. even that infamous tavros and gamzee conversation? thats really late in a5a2. so he literally doesnt do anything worth noting. rip.

eridan and feferi are the very last characters introduced, and so they just have very little fucking page time. every time i read hs pesterlogs im always so struck by the imaginary version of feferi that exists in the collective fandom mind. people were never normal about either of them, and ive always found myself at odds with popular opinion when it came to those two. but idk that i should really get into that, just bc it seems like my life would be easier if i didnt.

im going to hold off saying anything about the midnight crew until a5a2, but i did want to comment very quickly on doc scratch. it is insane how much he influences in a5a1. like, vriska talks about how she had no intentions of killing aradia, or maiming tavros or terezi, and how she feels like its just going way too far, but she only did it bc of scratchs pushing and manipulation! he was grooming her, for ages. he also manipulated terezi, and kanaya, and aradia! none of them even realize the extent to which he manipulated them, he was so fucking slick about it. im also going to take this moment to mention that while it might not be clear in the comic, hussies talked a lot in the formsprings about how scratch literally only talks to girls, except for that one time he said one sentence to screw w karkat. he is like. so creepy. :')

The Albums

i think alternia was the very first solo album made for hs, and its not surprising it was made by none other than mr radiation. the albums pretty good, but honestly listening to it i just wanted to be listening to alterniabound. a lot of the alternia songs are remixed for alterniabound, and i like the remixed versions a lot better tbh.

and then theres.... squiddles. this album is a trip man. so many of these songs i was listening to and was just like. what the actual fuck. highly recommend sending to your non hs friends to mess w them, 10/10 way to spend your time. the unicorn song was particularly upsetting.

Act 5 Act 2

this one is significantly longer than a5a1. a5a2 basically synthesizes hivebent with the kids story and builds towards the scratch- or, cascade, which is the biggest flash project to date. this is where terezi kills that doomed john, where jade enters the medium, where most of daves medium journey takes place, where rose goes grimdark, where all the kids godtier, where gamzee goes shithive, the one with alterniabound, the bit with doc scratch and the green background, all that shit. a lot happens! during this act, hussie also quits using the first formspring and starts a new one, in hopes of streamlining it and answering less nonsense questions, which she abandons by the end of the act, instead starting up a tumblr. there are also a lot of new albums released during this period, including the felt, vol 6: heir transparent, strife, alterniabound, medium, mobius trip and hadron kaleido, vol 7: at the price of oblivion, sburb, the wanderers, prospit and derse, the vol 1-4 compilation, and vol 8. so lets get into it.

The Plot

theres so much. so much happens. but what you need to know is that everything from right before jade enters the medium to when they scratch the session, blow up the green sun, and are about to meet up w the trolls, happens in this act. for the trolls, this pretty much means everything from the end of their session to when they meet up w the kids, including the gamzee shithive incident.

The Characters

lets get the easy shit out of the way first. most of the trolls, with the exception of the patron trolls (terezi, karkat, vriska, and kanaya), have very small roles in this act. their only real moments to shine are during alterniabound and the murderspree. i will say, alterniabound and the other meteor walkarounds do a lot of work in terms of like, fleshing out the trolls relationships to each other. all of it, really. pretty much all of the touching, cute relationship moments between trolls happen in these logs, including karkat and eridans weird bromance thing, karkats love for kanaya, like, all of feferi and solluxs relationship, sollux and terezis honestly really touching friendship, and like all of the good equius and nepeta moments (where previously their relationship had just come off as creepy and controlling). i could probably write a post just about alterniabound, so im not going to get into it here.

dave also actually doesnt have a lot going on in this act. dave spends most of the act timetraveling around, collaborating with terezi to get a bunch of very necessary but completely unseen shit going on. it isnt until much later that we really get any moments with him, but notable moments include: john valuing their friendship so much that he listens to dave instead of terezi, daves horror at roses suicide plan and determination to intervene, dave and roses way of cutting straight through each others bullshit and being real with each other in a way that they arent with anyone else, and daves extremely weird and avoidant reaction to his bros death (foreshadowing!)

rose, similarly, is offscreen for most of the beginning, doing grimdark bullshit. it isnt until right before she literally goes grimdark that we start to focus on her again. compelling moments for me: her reaction to her mothers death, and pretty much everything she says about her mom (their relationship is so complicated, but it is obvious that rose does actually really care about her and mourns her, in contrast to daves relationship with bro), the way everyone tells rose that the horrorterrors are lyign to her and tricking her but nothing... really bad seems to come of her going grimdark, and she doesnt lose control or anything? and, again, everything with her and dave leading up to cascade

vriska probably plays the biggest and most interesting role of all of the trolls in this act, serving as johns patron and leading him through to godtier. her relationship with john is really cute, actually, and its kinda fun how john simultaneously sees right through her and teases her, but also will go along with her shit and is actually very kind to her most of the time. most compelling to me is her conversations with john about guilt, weakness, and death

john and jade easily have the biggest roles in this act, though, with jade finally getting into the medium, prototyping jadesprite (and THAT whole mess), befriending the trolls, coming up with the password system, and putting a lot of the plans into place, and john being heavily featured as he goes through his game and is the first kid to make it to godtier. i kinda feel like id just be repeating what i said w act 4 tho, so lets keep going

the midnight crew! i said id come back to them. there is a lot of filling in the exiles backstory in this act, so that its pretty much full circle by the time it ends. the midnight crew in particular i found interesting bc we see enough of them (post introduction of the quadrant system) that hussie actually starts leaning into their card suits as quadrant roles! cd excels at settling disputes between parties, jack is super destructive, hb is obsessed w romance, and dd regularly pacifies jack and talks him out of impulsive plans that they both know would just make their lives harder. which is really cool!! it was a neat little touch that i really enjoyed

The Formsprings and the Tumblr

finally, finally, the first formspring came to an end. hussie claimed that there were just too many asks and people were starting to ask things that had already been answered, so they wanted to make a new one devoted to only the comic relevant stuff. and, well. it didnt work. it was better! but the formspring was still full of stupid, pointless bullshit and dumb nothing questions. there were a couple of running jokes that made their way into canon (shooshpap, fedorafreaks session) and some running jokes that just sucked (fat vriska. ugh.), plenty of the usual bigotry, and a few answers that were genuinely really interesting. still dont recommend reading it. obviously, hussie wound up torching this one too, as it wasnt really any better, and instead started up a tumblr! as of the end of a5a2, there were almost no posts and so i have nothing interesting to say about it other than it existed.

The Albums

ok so there are so many that were released like, right at the end, i am not actually caught up yet. so ill just talk about the ones i have listened to so far.

first up, we have the felt album. the idea for this one was similar to the mc album, where music helps set the stage and develop the environment and characters. the concept was an orchestral album that played with chronology, and the results are so cool. songs reverse and slow down and fast forward, and listening to it is just such a cool experience! i thought docs song especially really fit him.

vol 6: heir transparent. its a pretty middling album. its good, but i dont have anything particularly interesting to say about it. i hate the nic cage songs on here, but it has megalovania, which we all know is an irrefutable banger. i honestly kinda prefer the hs megalovania to the ut one.

strife! this was actually one of the first hs albums i ever listened to all the way through. time on my side is one of my all-time favorite hs songs, and heir conditioning STILL goes hard as hell. its a good album!! its fun.

i said earlier that listening to alternia just made me want to listen to alterniabound. this album is fantastic, and i think its also like, the first one w track commentary? which was really cool to read through! i think my favorite track is killed by 8r8k spider, but all of the themes just fit the characters so well and theyre really well done.

medium. this was another environmental album meant to sort of set a mood for the universe, and a solo album! i liked this one, but i dont have much to say about it. it was very pretty.

mobius fucking kaleido whatever. i hate this one. its a solo album and most of the tracks have lyrics and i just did not enjoy that one bit. the lyrics feel really corny, the like... art book thing?? is illegible, and it is just not for me.

vol 7: at the price of oblivion. this is the first album to have individual track art!! which, ofc, is all gorgeous. a lot of the songs on this album are so fucking good (except warhammer of zillyhoo. ugh. UGH.), and my favorite is terezi owns. it goes HARD. black rose/green sun is also really striking and perfectly haunting.

sburb is another solo, environmental album. the whole thing is a series of piano compositions, and its beautiful. really, really stunning work.

i listened to the wanderers while i was typing up this bigass post, and its really good! i think it perfectly fits the vibe of the desolate wasteland planet and the exiles silly little shenanigans, and i think of all of the like, themed environmental albums so far, this one does the best job at representing the energy for me personally (except probably squiddles, but ugh. squiddles). my favorite track is riches to ruins movements i & ii, i can tell it was remixed for heir of grief and i actually really love the og.

im still working through my relisten of prospit & derse, but like strife, this was an album i listened to over and over again long before i started this reread and i know i fucking love it. derse dreamers was always my favorite (theyre ALL good tho, NO misses), but who knows! maybe ill have a new one when im finished. i always really liked that the prospit tracks had really distinct piano, bass, and wind instruments (in parallel to john and jade playing bass, piano, and flute), and the derse tracks have really distinct synth and violin (in parallel to rose and daves instruments). its such a nice touch.

idk if vol 1-4 has any new stuff in the collection, and i havent listened to vol 8 yet, so ill just update about those whenever i write another recap.

Final Thoughts

uhhhh... im tired? lmao. ive been typing so long i cant remember if theres anything else. there was a lot more to say about this act than i thought thered be.

i guess, in summary, im really enjoying my reread so far. i think im reading with a much more critical eye than i did way back when (i started in 2014, for those of u just getting here), and im really paying more attention to certain characters i glanced over before or the actual mechanics of like, alternia and sburb and etc. ive retained more memory of the characters than i thought, but less about the plot than i thought, and my favorite characters have shuffled around a bit.

prior to my reread, i probably would have told you my favorite characters were dave, john, karkat, and then vriska and the rest of the strilondes. during my original read (almost a decade ago), my favorites were dave, vriska, sollux, dirk, and rose. now, id say my favorites are rose, kanaya, vriska, john, and sollux.

but yeah! i think thats about all i have to say, for now. stay tuned for. sighs. act 6.

update: wow, here it is! act 6, sub acts 1-3. also, heres a recap on the formspring and blogspot. youre welcome.

[teaandcharchives]

Ask Skyrim Johnkat - Battlehorn Chapter 4

Fandom: Homestuck, skyrim, the elder scrolls.

Pairing: johnkat, DaveJade, and eventually we’ll be getting into some poly stuff that I hen’t figured out how to annotate yet.

Word Count:   13866

Rating: M, might go up to E later, or I might post those parts either. For now just sexual references.

Summary:   More in the realm of “after the happily ever after.” They may have managed to save the world, but can John and Karkat handle the actual homecoming? If that seems like a step down, it’s probably because early modern local government is a lot more complicated than it first appears. Especially because there’s a lot of moving pieces in the Egbert Family once everyone comes home…

Read on AO3 here, or under cut below

Series start

Notes: Let this be a lesson in why you leave comments on old fics - There was one very kind person who read all 260k words of this AU a couple months ago and really loved it, which inspired me to go back and reread it, learn it still holds up (though I did make a couple little tweaks), and realize I wanted to go back to playing in the space. So I did.

I'm not sure how this chapter got to be almost 14k, other than that the only logical splitting point was less than 1/3 in. Besides, if you're gonna come back after *checks watch* four years, might as well do a lot.Because this is just playing in the space, I'm not sure how much more I'm actually going to write, and it's definitely going to be a lot more episodic than the other pieces. But I do have outlines for 3 more chapters ready to go. So there's that lol.

Chapter 4 

It’s easier than you thought it’d be to slot yourself back into life at the castle. You were worried that after a full year of wandering around it’d be overwhelming to keep so many tasks balanced, to commit yourself to a schedule. Yet, after a few days it almost feels like you'd never left.

You’ve got Karkat now, of course, but you barely see him, especially compared to when you traveled together. He spends all day with his nose in books, but it’s not like when you were at Winterhold. You were separated all day, sure, but then in the evenings he’d be so animated in telling you about whatever he’d read. Now he just seems drained. You suppose that’s the difference between law or etiquette and shit he actually cares about. You can talk a little bit in the baths and you hold each other once you get back to your rooms, but you don't get much time before exhaustion takes one or the other of you. On Temple days you sit beside him, sure, but it’s hardly a social experience. You just share space as the priest and congregation offer prayers to the divines, and then as soon as services are over you have to hustle back to the castle to listen to grievances with your dad. You admit it was kind of nice to have a bit of space at first. It gave you something new to talk about in your time alone, but now you kind of miss him.

Then, one day in early Frost Fall, your father calls for a house meeting in his study. By the time you arrive, everyone else is there already. Your uncle sits at the desk and your dad stands behind him. You were expecting Karkat and Jake, but are somewhat surprised to see Provenco and Marcellia, the steward and head cook. That means it’s probably not strictly a family problem, but there are still plenty of things it could be. Your mind is racing. Did someone die? Is someone going to die? Are you losing funding? Are the borders changing? Which ones? When you take your place next to Karkat, he quickly grips your hand tightly. 

Two pieces of paper on the desk catch your eye. You see broken seals on the top and bottom. They’re clearly letters, but you can’t see enough to tell from whom, just that one was sealed with white wax and the other blue. 

A smile tweaks at the corner of your father’s mouth. “Don’t look so stressed. This is good news.” 

There’s a collective breath outward. Not a full sigh from anyone, but enough of a release of tension to be palpable. 

“Could have led with that,” you hear Karkat grumble. You gently elbow him. 

“First,” Your father continues. You’re not sure if he didn’t hear Karkat or is just choosing to ignore him. “Jade is returning sometime next week. And much like John, she's bringing someone home.”

“So she and Dave did get betrothed?” Jake asks. 

“According to this letter, yes.” 

In some ways that’s even more of a relief. You and Jake look at each other and smile. You wanted to believe Karkat when he said Dave would come home with Jade, but with how little you knew about the guy you couldn’t be sure. But she’s coming! She’ll be home soon! And then if she starts training apprentices too, maybe you’ll be able to have a little more time to spend with Karkat. 

“And the timing is perfect, because Countess Olivia Valga will be joining us for the Witches Festival as well.” 

“This isn’t a prank, is it, my lord?” Asks Provenco. His voice is firm, and his broad, serious features are set in a neutral expression, but you can see hints of concern in his eyes. “The last time a Count or Countess came for a banquet was your wedding. My staff would only have a week and a half to prepare!” 

“You may read her letter, if you wish,” Dad says, lifting the piece of parchment with the blue seal. “I am sorry for the short notice, Provenco. Especially since I know your father handled the preparations last time. However, you have managed this estate for many years now, and you are as skilled a steward as he was, and I have every faith in you, as well as Marcellia,” he adds, nodding to her. “You will have the apprentices fully at your disposal until then. It’ll do some of the younger ones good. John, Jake, I expect you to coordinate with the Pontillas, make sure they have all the help they need.”

You and your cousin nod.  

“When is she coming and how long will she be here?” Marcellia asks. “I need to know for menu planning.” 

“She plans to arrive the thirteenth and leave the fourteenth. She’ll be bringing one handmaid, but is leaving her husband to manage the city.” 

“Did she say why she’s coming now?” You ask. 

“She did not, but I imagine it has to do with you. The way most people tell it, you - with or without Karkat’s help depending on the teller - effectively ended the war and dragon crisis by yourself. And furthermore,” Your dad’s gaze turns to Karkat. “She’ll want to meet her future vassal.”

Your fiance inhales sharply, and you gently rub his knuckles with your thumb in reassurance. 

“We’ll be switching to a focus on etiquette,” Uncle Joel says, “So you don’t have to worry so much about logistics until after Olivia leaves. The goal, remember, is for you to succeed.” 

“Right,” Karkat says. It’s subtle (for him), but you can tell he doesn’t believe it. 

“Any questions?” Dad asks. 

Everyone looks at each other awkwardly. 

“Well, then, let’s get to it. Karkat, John, you stay.” 

You and Karkat both tense. 

“You’re not in trouble,” your dad and uncle say at the same time. 

Jake and the Pontillas leave. Jake gives you a reassuring pat on the shoulder on the way out. 

“So…” You say. 

“We need to figure out the best way to get Karkat up to speed as quickly as possible.” Joel says. “And we’ll need to work together on that.”

Karkat looks down. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s not your fault!” you insist. “You’re doing great!” 

“I can’t complain about your progress thus far,” Uncle Joel amits, “But we weren’t expecting you to encounter other Cyrodilic nobles yet.” 

“Yeah,” you say, “I mean, sure, we technically invite Liv to every festival, and she always invites us, but that’s just a formality. More of a ‘you’re welcome if you want to show up, but we know you’re not gonna.’ kinda deal.” 

“Indeed,” Dad says. “John, I need your honest opinion. I know you interacted with several Jarls in Skyrim. How did he do with them?” 

“I mean…” you shift your weight uncomfortably, thinking of how to word it. “It seems like things are less formal in Skyrim. He didn’t treat them much differently than anyone else, but it seemed like that was fine.”

“‘Fine’ may not be good enough.”  

Karkat takes a deep breath, straightens his posture, and makes a valiant attempt to put on a proper accent. “Once I realized that John was more proficient in dealing with those of standing, I allowed him to take the lead in those conversations. I… do admit that at times my temper gets the better of me, however.” 

“Hey, good more formal word choice!” You say. 

He smirks at you. “I’m rather well read, as you recall. My vocabulary has never been lacking.” He drops the accent. “It’s just a lot of times the best word for the situation is ‘fuck.’”

You can’t help but laugh at that. You catch a smile on Dad’s face, but Uncle Joel is a bit more serious. 

“True as all that might be,” your uncle says, “I think your accent is unlikely to be solid enough by her arrival next Morndas. It may be better to embrace sounding a bit foreign and focus on learning some of the quirks of Cyrodilic etiquette. It's not uncommon for people of other provinces to take up positions in various courts, and while many never pick up the accent, the manners are indispensable." 

Karkat purses his lips for a moment before speaking again, this time with a much harsher accent, identical to his father’s. “If… If you think it would help, I can do this one much more reliably.” 

“Yes, that may be for the best. I don’t…�� Uncle Joel pauses for a moment. “This is your home, and I don’t want you to feel exoticized, but we cannot risk you making an enemy of the countess. And, though we should not lean into it too much, playing the foreign card may serve to have her accept some things that aren’t at a fully noble level.” 

“No, I get it.” Karkat runs his fingers through his hair and goes back to his normal accent. “So what do we do now?” 

“Study, same as before, just a slightly different topic.” Dad turns to you. “John, walk him through as much of what he has to know as possible. Show him the actions, and tell him what you know about the Countess and her family. Tomorrow we’ll meet to go over everything. Hopefully by then we’ll have come up with a plan.” 

“Got it,” You say. 

“We won’t let you down,” Karkat adds, looking directly at your uncle. 

He smiles. “I’ll hold you to it.” 

Karkat nods sharply. Then, with an air of determination, he turns on his heel and leaves. 

—

“Okay,” John says, putting a closed book over the piece of paper you’ve been staring at. “So to review…” 

You sigh and lean back in your chair. “Yes?” 

“How long has Liv’s family been running Chorrol?”

“Six hundred years. Ish.”

“But?” 

“But not always in a direct line. Just before the Oblivion Crisis the count died and his only living child was married to the Count of Leyawiin. After the Crisis, that daughter tried to claim the County, but her… cousin? I can just say cousin right? Or do you always have to specify with you people?” 

“In this case cousin is fine. Keep going.”

“Okay, her cousin sued, saying that there was no way for the Countess of Leyawiin to manage counties on opposite side of Cyrodiil, but because the Imperial line just ended everyone was way too busy to deal with it, so the Countess’ mom stayed in charge until she died, then the cousin just kinda walked in and took over. Uh… no one stopped him because…  the Count and Countess couldn’t leave the city of Leyawiin because they were fighting Bravil and basically independent at the time. By the time the case actually made it to court, it had been like 20 years or something and everyone was just like, ‘yeah, just let the Valgas keep it.’ The Carros are still bitter about this but have way bigger problems now. Um…” You rack your brain, trying to think of any other details but you’re coming up blank.

“Remember any of the names?” 

“...No.” you admit. 

“Arriana Valga was the married countess, Alessia and Marius Carro, and the cousin was Horatio Valga.”

“Right, fuck, I kept getting Arriana and Alessia backwards.” 

John shrugs. “I mean, the good news is that you can almost always get away with referring to someone using either title-holding or title-family. That reminds me, what do you do when the Countess gets here?” 

“Cry.” 

He laughs. “No, but really.” 

This one you’ve got. It was the first thing he drilled into you. “She’s going to be introduced by a page. When she enters, your dad and uncle say hi first, then you, and then it’s my turn.” You stand and bow. Then in your best Imperial accent you say, “‘It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Countess Valga.’ Then if she offers me a hand I have to kiss it, because humans are gross like that.” John snorts. “If she has more shit she wants to say, I respond politely, then we get out of the way and let Jake go.”

“Good! And knowing her, she’ll probably ask you to call her Liv. And after that, remember-” 

“'I'll be there all night running interference.'” You say at the same time as he does. “I know. You’ve told me constantly the entire fucking time we’ve been cooped up here doing this!” 

“Right,” He says, running his hand through his hair. “Sorry. I’m just worried.”

“Why the fuck are you worried?" You snap, "I’m the only one who’s really liable to make a skeever out of himself.”

John frowns. “I know I’ve told you this too. Even ignoring the fact that whatever you do is going to reflect on the whole family, Liv needs to know you can behave.” 

“Why does everyone here talk about me like that?” You demand. “I’m not a dog or a child!” 

“I know that! Dogs and kids have way more time to learn this shit!” He puts his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, Karkat.” He says, after a moment. “I just wish I knew why she was doing this.” 

“I just assume she wants me to fail.” 

“That’s not like her. Not like the Liv I knew, anyway.” 

“People change.” 

“I know.” 

The two of you sit in silence for a moment. Crows caw in the courtyard and bits of dust dance in the slits of late-afternoon light coming through the narrow windows. You reach through the sunbeam bisecting your little table to cup John’s hand in yours. He looks up at you, sad and confused and it hurts. 

“Thank you,” You say. “For everything you’re doing for me.” 

He blinks at you and you pull your hand away. 

“So the cousin thing,” You say, changing the subject, “I’m still pretty sure you Cyrodilic nobles invented the concept of ‘third cousins’ and being ‘removed’ to either obfuscate or put checks on the ridiculous amounts of inbreeding the counts and emperors are wont to do, especially since arranging marriages is one of the only times it comes up. That and inheritance laws. But since inheritance is one of those reasons, why didn’t it matter with the Valgas?” 

“Oh, because it was an illegal seizure anyway. Chorrol should have gone to Alessia and her children by law. But I think they were first cousins anyway, which makes the claim stronger.”

“Is he the cousin that would have gotten it if Alessia died?” 

“I think so? I’d have to double check. The rest of the extended family wasn’t that important and it’s been 200 years.” 

You laugh. “See, you say that, but Dunmer politics you can see single family heads last that long.” 

John pauses for a moment and looks thoughtful. “Huh, you know, I wonder if that’s why you guys don’t need to track extended cousins. Because it’s just like you can’t marry anyone under the same family head, or under the same head as anyone who married into your branch of the family, right? But if that covers like ten generations-”

“Nords also don’t have second cousins.” you point out, “They just have kin, which is just ‘as far back as people can remember.’” 

“Yeah, but they settle inheritance disputes by duels,” he counters.

“Keep telling yourself that and just be glad you got born into the ‘let’s get fresh blood in here’ noble family.” 

“And yet we’re pretty sure everything wrong with me comes from Dad’s side and not the Skingrad side.” 

“Psh, Skingrad’s also new money. The last Hassildor only died 150 years ago. The Lafirias were wine merchants before then. Even with your scandalously short generations, a century isn’t enough time to get well and truly inbred unless you’re really working at it.” 

“Oh, so remembering details is easy if it’s to talk shit about my mom,” John teases, sticking his tongue out at you. 

“Not your mom in particular, humans in general and specifically Imperials as a whole. Besides, I never said that being from a merchant family was bad. If you are, then you are talking shit about both of our moms, and, while mine does kind of deserve it, I thought we’d agreed after meeting her that she could have been a lot worse.”

“Divines and Daedra, I love you,” John says with a laugh. 

There’s a knock at the door. 

“Come in,” John calls out. 

The younger page, Quinn you think his name is, opens the door. “I was sent to tell you Lady Jade and Sir Dave have arrived.” 

“‘Sir?’ Who’d he get to knight him?” You mutter.

John ignores you. “Thanks for letting us know, Quinn, we’ll be right down.” 

Quinn bows and leaves. 

“You’re not gonna make me dress up in the name of practice, are you?” You ask. 

“I won’t encourage Dave and Jade to give you more shit than is necessary.” 

You put the proper affectation back on. “You are too kind, my lord.” 

“Pfft, never speak to me that way again.” 

“You got it, dickwad,” you say, standing up.

“That’s my Karkat.” He gives you a quick kiss before leaving your chambers.

You follow him down the stairs. He pauses for just a moment, clearly trying to figure out where everyone is, then takes off towards the east wing. You hustle just to keep up. Thankfully he keeps it below a run.  

Dave and Jade are in the study, talking to John’s father and uncle. John runs right up and embraces his cousin the same way he did in Whiterun. Jade looks exactly like you remember her, but there’s something different about Dave. Part of it is probably clothing. He’s ditched the heavy cloak and thick Nord-style shirt and pants. He still wears a red laced-up vest, but even that looks to be lighter in terms of both material type and color. He’s switched to a white linen shirt and gray pants, rather than the black he wore before. It’s a nice change, you think. It makes him look less washed out. …Or is that it? You remember with a start that his eyes used to glow. Then you realize he’s breathing. 

“You’re alive.” You say.

Dave smirks, just barely showing off normal-sized canines. “You’re damn right.” 

John stiffens and looks with concern at his dad. 

“Oh, don’t worry, I told them ages ago,” Jade says. 

“Okay good.” John returns to your side. 

“Yeah, and I already got read the riot act from Jade’s folks in the capital.” Dave adds. “Her dad did not appreciate my observation that while the age gap is pretty significant it’s now literally impossible for me to meet girls my age without necromancy.” 

“I think he mostly didn’t like the one-two punch of you being biologically eighteen,” Jade says with a giggle. 

He shrugs. “Sorry, I can’t help being too old and too young for anyone I’ve been interested in for the last few millennia.” 

“Anyway,” John’s father says. “I was just telling them about the Countess’ upcoming visit.”

“It will not be a problem,” Dave says, his accent flawless. “It’s been quite a while, but from what Jade tells me, the rules have not changed too much in the last few centuries.” 

“...That’s not fucking fair.” You grumble. 

John takes your hand gently. 

“I’d been meaning to ask, though,” Dave continues. “Is the dancing still mandatory?” 

“More or less, unless you’d like to play the part of an old man like me,” 

“Yeah, no, I’d rather keep the ex-vampire thing within the family.” 

“Reasonable. Now,” Lord Egbert fixes his eyes on you and John. “How is Karkat’s progress?” 

John’s face lights up. “Great! I think he’s just about got the trivia and manners all down. Right?” 

“Oh… Yeah.” You say. 

John’s father and uncle give you identical skeptical looks. 

“I know enough that she’ll know I did the research, even if I don’t have all the details.” Their expressions do not change. “I’ve only had four days!”

“Fair enough.” John’s dad says. “I’m certain she’ll take it into account. We just also want to wow her as much as possible.” 

“Right.” Good enough isn’t good enough. You get it. Fuck. 

“Do you think there will be time to practice dancing soon?” John asks. “I know everyone else is also busy preparing for the feast, but I am so rusty and haven’t been able to teach Karkat at all.” 

“Why don’t we work together?” Jade suggests. “If you still remember how to play the harpsichord we can trade off playing and teaching! Dave is about 400 years behind on dance moves.”

Dave shrugs.  

“It’s more I don’t think I know enough to teach,” John admits sheepishly. "I haven't been to a real feast since Liv's wedding." 

“Speak to Jake,” Joel says. “The other day he told me that most of our apprentices, even some of those that come from noble families, need a dance lesson. Besides, I’m sure he’d like the excuse to spend some time with the rest of the family. With the three of you working together, I’m sure you’ll get it.” 

—

The next week goes by in a blur. Whether it's dancing or studying, you’re exhausted by the end of the day. None of this comes naturally to you; not the endless parade of names and dates, not the imperial dancing with its fancy footwork and next to no movement in the arms or hips, and certainly not holding your tongue and following the strict, hierarchical code of manners. John tells you you’re doing good, but you understood his uncle loud and clear. Good enough isn’t going to be good enough. And, fuck, it feels like the literal children are doing better than you, much less Dave. He almost makes the imperial dancing look good. Almost. 

You’re just… you’re tired. You don’t know how much more you have to give. You just want to spend time with John. Preferably doing something other than memorizing a bunch of dead humans’ names or looking like some sort of mentally deficient ground bird as you attempt to dance. You try not to fall asleep too quickly every night so that you can have some time with him, but inevitably you fail, drifting off what feels like mere moments after you lay down. Then, the next thing you know it's the day of the Countess' arrival. 

You frantically leaf through books, trying to pick up on something, anything, you've missed. But as soon as you look away from the pages, the facts slip from your mind like fish from a cracked basket.

John comes back from the kitchen with your normal breakfast. As fall has set in, the fruits you enjoyed earlier  He smiles at you softly, if a bit sadly. 

"Here." He says.

You ignore the food and look back down at the book.

"You should eat." 

You give a noncommittal grunt. 

He puts one of the scones on a small plate and shoves it in front of you. You give him an annoyed look, and he responds by raising his eyebrows and tipping his head down in a clear, “you’re going to do it, though.” You sigh, roll your eyes, and begin picking at the scone. It’s just not worth fighting over. 

"So,” he says, grabbing an apple, “Today, Dad is entrusting me with doing some rounds through the domain, making sure everything is ready for Liv's arrival."

"Good for you,” you reply flatly. 

"You should come with me."

"I can't. I'm studying." 

He sighs. "Karkat."

"What?"

"Are you even absorbing anything? This is like the tenth time you've read that book." 

You freeze and look back up at him, feeling the guilt on your face. "But the banquet…" 

He grins. "Come on, I'll be sure to get us back in plenty of time to make you all pretty."

You scoff. "There's not enough time in the world for that." 

"Shut up. You haven't seen you in the good clothes. Besides, what if she asks what you think of the barony?" 

"That's… not a bad point…" you concede.

"Come on, Karkat. Let's go out, ride around the countryside. I know it's not as pretty now that the wheat has all been harvested but it's a lot cooler out now. We can talk, ride together. Just like before."

Your hand reflexively goes to where your ring hangs under your shirt. You smile in spite of yourself as you finally meet his gaze.

"Let's do it." 

You put on your vest, grab a light cloak and one of the apples, and then the two of you are off. 

As you descend the castle, you see the Witches Festival fair beginning to take shape in the town square. A couple dozen people are hard at work assembling stalls and hanging banners from the buildings. In a manner of hours, practically everyone in the barony will be down there singing and dancing, trying the sweets and rich pumpkin and sweet potato dishes, with no expectation of decorum or stratification. 

From what John said, in a normal year, everyone from the castle would be right there with the common folk. Before the Countess' letter came he'd excitedly told you about everything he wanted you to try: the sweets, the breads, the games and folk dances. After the letter he promised you next year. You just hope you can give him the chance to make good on that. 

By the time you reach the stables, Shadowmere and Mouse are already ready to go. Demeem, the stablehand, is mucking out the adjacent stall. He’s a solid man, almost as tall as John and even broader with a wide flat nose and the longest dreadlocks you’ve ever seen, which he keeps tied back with a silk ribbon. His size makes him imposing, but he might be the gentlest man you’ve ever met and the horses love him for it. 

He pauses for a moment, tucking a loc that had come loose from his ponytail behind his ear and smiles at the two of you. 

"Mornin'" he says. "Got your horses ready. This is where we'll be putting Countess Chorrol's when she gets here. And we got plenty of space for her carriage on the end. Should be able to pull it in straight. Couple of septims and a handful of the village lads were more than happy to help." 

"Perfect," John says. 

He takes both horses’ reins and leads them outside. It takes a mere moment for the two of you to get into your respective saddles, and then you’re off at a reasonable trot. Though it’s been nearly a month since you’ve ridden, keeping up with John is nearly effortless. Gods, when did that happen? It wasn’t long ago that even being near a horse scared you. 

John notices and gets a wicked gleam in his eye. “Well,” he says, “First we gotta make sure that the road’s in good shape between here and the border.” 

“That’s, what, a little over two miles?” 

He nods. “Just about. So it’ll take about fifteen minutes at a trot.” 

You narrow your eyes at him, not sure where this is going. “Right.” 

“See you when you catch up!” He kicks Shadowmere into a full gallop and tears off down the dusty road. 

You curse after him and urge Mouse forward. She’s startled and confused, but that makes it easier to urge her into a sprint. From there it’s a race. You haven’t gone further than the little lake at the end of the village since you got here, and John probably knows the way in his sleep. Fortunately, most of the time the local masons have nothing else to do but maintain this stretch of road, and the horses naturally follow the easier path, rather than attempt to cross the fields. Shadowmere is bigger, with a longer stride and the power of Sithis, and he had a head start. But Mouse is slight for a Skyrim horse, and John is a lot heavier than you are. As the fields get rougher and more overgrown, the gap between you and John starts to shrink as Shadowmere starts to tire. 

But John knows you’re coming, and the road isn’t that wide. He keeps glancing over his shoulder, nudging Shadowmere left or right so you can’t get around. 

“That’s a dirty fucking trick, Egbert!” 

He flips you off over his shoulder. 

You growl at him, trying to figure out what to do. Fuck, you wish you knew some kind of magic that didn’t involve setting shit on fire. You should have Jake teach you a calm spell. But then you see your chance: the road curves slightly just up ahead. You grin and hold tight to Mouse’s reins, directing her up over the edge and straight across the scraggly grass. 

“Eat shit, asshole!” You shout at your fiance as you pass him. 

By the time you finish cutting the curve, he has to pull back or he’d plow right into Mouse’s ass. But unlike John, you’re a decent person and keep Mouse galloping at top speed. Or as close to it as she can do uphill after two miles. You’re approaching the border marker rapidly, and a quick glance over your shoulder proves you’re leaving John in the dust. 

You crest the top of the hill and cross the border with several lengths between you and John. The horses startle a murder of crows, which fly off a hundred feet or so before settling back down into a freshly-cleared field. 

“Who’s the better rider now?” You demand as John catches up. 

“Heh, I’ll remember that the next time you ask me to top,” John teases as he slides off of Shadowmere. 

“Hardy fucking har,” you say sarcastically, hopping down. “I won and you know it.”

“Still fun, though,” John replies, grinning. He pats Shadowmere’s heaving flank. “We should probably let these guys have a little rest now, though. Thanks for being a good sport, buddy!” 

Shadowmere shakes his head, you assume because horses are physiologically incapable of rolling their eyes. You take an apple from your pouch and slice off a large chunk to give Mouse as a treat. After what John put you both through, she deserves something for her trouble. That gets Shadowmere’s attention and so you have to give him the rest. You wonder briefly if he misses being your only horse before you decide that’s stupid. Demonic or not, he’s still a horse. 

John sits on a nearby stone fence and looks down into the valley below. You walk over to him and follow his gaze. From here, you can see what you know to be Chorrol’s walls rising in the distance and the Great Forest beyond. The city is scarcely more than a little gray lump sitting atop a golden and brown quilt of fields, woods, and farms, stitched together with stone or wood fences and embellished with cottages and hamlets. The Black Road gently curves down towards the city, disappearing every now and then below the cover of gold and burgundy trees. You know there are guard patrols and carts down there. The Countess is on her way in the carriage right now. But all of those people and horses are nothing more than specks against the gray stone. You’re alone in the middle of the countryside with John, and it gives you more of a pang of nostalgia than you thought it would. You take a seat on the three-foot wall next to him. 

“Someday,” He murmurs softly. 

“Huh?” 

He clears his throat. “Dad says that when he was growing up, our lands looked like that too. I mean, not so much in the west. That was still mostly shepherds. But this side was all farms. Did Uncle Joel tell you that?” 

“Right, but then the war happened.” 

“Yeah, and the damage and Imperial relocations cost us two-thirds of our people.” He sighs and looks down at his lap. “I know Dad regrets not fighting harder, but what could he do? He’d already lost most of the family.” He pauses, then looks out at the valley with renewed determination on his face. “But we’ll get there. I know we will.” 

You take his hand. “We will,” you affirm. “You’ve got a solid start. The population’s gone back up about 50% in thirty years, right? So don’t do anything stupid and even with your evanescent human lifespan you might live to see it.” 

He nudges you with his elbow. “See? I told you, stuff is sticking. You just need to get out of your head.” 

You scowl, “I need to work on my insults. They aren’t doing a damn thing anymore.” 

“When have they ever bugged me?” He laughs. “As soon as I realized you don’t really mean them-” 

“I’ll show you meaning it!” You growl, shoving him backwards. 

He wraps his arms around you, bringing you down with him. The two of you land on your shoulders, laughing and holding each other. John leans in to kiss you, and in that moment you remember what it is to be young and in love. 

When you return to the castle you’re in much higher spirits. John cheerfully reports to his father that their holdings are in the best shape they can be at this time of year. The two of you do a little work helping get the festival ready, and the innkeeper (Mrs. Dralentius, John helpfully supplied) gave you each a couple of candies in thanks. 

By that point it’s up to get ready. You and John wash and shave, then John does your hair. He just starts with water and a comb, but then he starts to work in a tiny bit of this thick cream called Uhigris. You didn’t quite believe him when he said it’d make your hair manageable but it does. Your hair isn’t flat, not really, but it weighs the curls down and defines them better, makes them look intentional. For the first time, you briefly consider growing your hair out. There were so many lice problems in the Gray Quarter you’d never dreamed of it as a child, and then when you’d moved out you’d assumed your hair was too unruly but maybe… 

Then you have to move out of the way so John can have the mirror to plaster down his perennial cowlick. Instead, you go to the wardrobe and pull out the small cedar chest John gave you. You pull out the clothes and check them over carefully, expecting some horrible stain or tear to have appeared somehow. But no, they’re as perfect as ever, which is probably why it feels so wrong to pull them on. You’ve been sleeping on silk for almost two months now, but somehow having it as a shirt feels different. The way the outfit is cut to be looser around the shoulders and thighs and tighter around the forearms and calves makes it feel like it’s designed for someone else, in spite of the fact that it’s bespoke and that every transition hits the exact right spot on your body. You look down at yourself. This outfit is a costume, and an utterly unconvincing one. You might as well be down with the peasants dressed as a lich or something. At least boots are just boots. 

John laces his doublet shut as quickly and easily as breathing and goes to grab his sword and its formal sheath. After he places the weapon on his belt, he looks up at the mirror and smiles. 

“Gods,” he breathes, “Look at us.” 

You do and… he’s right. John is, of course, radiant. The deep blue doublet brings out his eyes and the gold of the embroidery pops. The paler blue silk of his shirt contrasts perfectly with his dark skin, making him look as warm as his personality and his embrace. Though his body will always be more enticing with less on it, the doublet helps emphasize his shape; the breadth of his chest, the strength of his core. The contrast of looseness and tightness in the shirt and pants gives you just a taste of the muscles hiding below. 

But it’s not just John. You… you look like you belong. Your red doublet and black shirt complement your natural colors the same way John’s outfit does for him, and play perfectly with the silver accents. You don’t understand how the same cut of clothing can make you look as lithe and ephemeral as it makes John robust, but it doesn’t matter. It works. 

He offers you his hand and you take it in the graceful, dainty way you’d been taught over the last few days, barely cupping it. 

“What’d I tell you? You hadn’t seen you in the good clothes.” 

You pull the fancy accent on and dressed like this, looking like this, it somehow feels right. “I do not recall that conversation, my darling. But if I did, I’d probably point out that neither of us had seen me with my hair under control.” 

He laughs and then puts on his proper accent, “Well then, what say you we bring you to your first official event as a member of House Egbert?” 

“I say that sounds splendid.” 

Hand in hand, the two of you descend down the stairs without a single misstep. 

The rest of the family waits for you in the main hall. The tables have been moved, arranged into a large U shape with the opening facing towards the entrance. A couple of musicians who you think normally play in the tavern glance up for a moment when you enter before turning back to each other and speaking softly. 

The men in John’s family wear similar styles of outfits to yours, but none of them match quite the way you and John do. Jake’s is the most similar, but rather than flare out at the hip, his green doublet ends and he wears separate pantaloons. On the other end of the spectrum, John’s father and Uncle have much looser, almost robe-like vests that stop at the mid-thigh. You don’t know enough to say whether that’s an older style, or just viewed as more appropriate for men their age. For the first time, you see John’s father wearing his badge of office, a golden circlet with a large black gem in the center, and carvings reminiscent of Daedric script around it. 

Jade’s dress has a similar silhouette to her daily dresses, except she also has the puffed sleeves, but has several different shades of green silk woven into a plant-like pattern. It’s also cut much lower than her other dresses, and you think her purplish-brown bodice might be laced tighter than usual. You make a valiant effort to stop noticing that and the low gold and emerald necklace she wears. She claps and grins when she sees the two of you. 

“Aw! You guys look so cute together!” 

You feel yourself begin to blush. 

And John, seeming to feel every bit as awkward says, “Thanks, um, you too.” 

She laughs and loops her arm around Dave’s. If anyone looks out of place here, it’s him. His clothes are closer to a Nordic style, with most of his body covered in a long quilted coat made of burgundy velvet. 

“Aren’t you hot in that?” You ask. 

He winks, “You’re damn right I am.” Jade elbows him. “For real though, I’m fine.” He reaches down the neck of his shirt and fishes out a silver pendant pulsing with a faint blue light. “Amulet of ice.” 

“I need one of those for next summer,” you say. 

“400 septims.” 

“He’ll do it for free,” Jade says, elbowing him again. 

“Listen, if I do one for him, I’ll have to do one for everyone.” 

“Make it a wedding present.” 

“Anyway, what’s the word on Liv?” John asks. 

“She arrived very shortly after you returned.” John’s father says. “I showed her to the room she’ll be staying in. I believe she is preparing as we speak. She knows supper will be ready in about an hour and a half, but I do not know exactly when she’ll choose to join us.” 

“So, what?” You ask, dropping John’s hand. “We just wait here?” 

“Yep!” John says. “I mean, Dad’s the host, but none of us can really tell her what to do. The food’s gonna be ready when it’s ready, but other than that we’re on her time table.” 

“Right.” 

“Please do try to hide your disgust with the hierarchy while our liege is present,” Joel says. 

“Huh?” 

“Has anyone ever told you that you have an incredibly emotive face, Karkat?” 

“Shit. Uh, sorry.” You try to put a blank expression on your face. 

John chuckles. “Now you look like you have gas.” 

“...Man we’re so fucked.” You murmur in Dunmeri. 

“Hey, don’t worry. It’s gonna be fine. Remember, just stay next to me, follow my lead, and now… I don’t know, think about puppies or something?” 

“I’m not a dog person,” you remind him. 

“Yeah, that’s Jade.” 

“Hey!” she calls out, but then she grins. You can practically see the wolf tail wagging. 

At that point the door opens. Truss, the older page, enters and clears his throat. “Introducing her Excellency, Olivia Valga, Countess of Chorrol.” 

John takes your hand less delicately than before as the whole family, with the exception of Joel, rushes into position in a receiving line. The bards quickly begin playing softly. Once you’re all ready to go, Truss opens the door. An Imperial woman glides in. She wears a dark blue velvet dress with silver details. White lace rims every hem, and her arms are heavy with bracelets and rings. Her long black hair is intricately woven into a single massive braid with several baubles inserted. Atop her head she wears a large silver circlet with a sapphire half the size of your fist embedded in it. Behind her walks an Argonian wearing a nice cream gown and veils over her fins. She almost looks familiar. You wonder if any of her relatives work at the Assemblage. Not that you’re likely to get a chance to ask. While the Countess is around, she’s invisible. 

“Welcome, my Countess,” John’s dad says. He takes her hand and kisses it. 

“Oh Jack, there’s no need for such formalities with me. You’ve always been like an uncle to me. I’m glad to finally sample your hospitality.” 

“We’re delighted to have you. I hope you can forgive my brother for not standing to greet you. At seventy, getting around with one leg is enough of a challenge for him.” 

“Of course, I understand we all have our limitations” She nods in his direction. 

“Naturally, you remember my son…” 

“How could I ever forget? It’s wonderful to see you again, John.” 

“The feeling is mutual, Liv.” John also takes her hand and kisses it. 

“You’ll need to tell me all about your trip to Skyrim! I understand it was quite exciting! And certainly rather rewarding.” She turns her gaze to you. “After all, what Egbertian adventure is complete without bringing home a spouse?” 

He chuckles. It’s not the carefree laugh you’ve learned to love, but a lot more restrained, measured. “What adventure indeed? This is my betrothed, Karkat Vantas. I asked for his hand this spring. As is tradition for us, he’s not a noble, but he and his family are well-connected with the Dunmer of Skyrim, and I’ve been teaching him our ways.” 

“It’s delightful to meet you, Karkat.” 

“Likewise,” Your voice comes out in your attempt at a proper accent, rather than your father’s. Shit. Fuck. Well, we’re rolling with it now. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Countess Valga. John has told me so much about you.” 

“All good things, I hope.” 

“Of course.” 

She offers you her hand and you kiss it as you were taught. “And please,” she says, “anyone so close to my favorite page can call me Liv.” 

“Liv, please, it’s been eleven years since I left,” John says. 

“I know, but you were so darling! I think it may be because you were the right age to really look up to me.”

You don’t know what to do now. Everyone’s been introducing the next person down the line but… 

“Jake,” she says, turning her attention to him. Thank Stendarr. “It’s nice to see you again. How are this year’s new apprentices?” 

“Oh, every class has its quirks. But we’ll get them in tip-top shape in no time!” 

“I have every faith in you and your family. You know, my youngest brother turns fourteen next year. I understand you must be objective in selecting apprentices, but perhaps we can speak about his prospects.” 

“I’d be happy to. Though I’d prefer to talk to the lad too, find out his ambitions and see how he handles himself.” 

“Lovely, we’ll set up a meeting. I’m sure my mother will have an opinion as well.” 

“And your sister?” She asks, looking at Jade.

“Oh, I’m still getting my feet back under me. I only arrived home last week.” 

“Now, I haven’t heard as much about your escapades, Jade.” 

“Well, my adventure didn’t involve dragons.” 

“I see it also involved finding a man, though.” 

“It did! This is Dave, he was instrumental in helping me avoid a proxy civil war in High Rock.” 

“Pleased to meet you,” Dave says with his stupid flawless fancy accent. He bows deeply.

“High Rock? Are you a Breton?” She asks. 

“No,” he says, “I’m a Nord.” 

“Indeed?” 

“It’s a long, sad story.” 

“I’d love to hear it.” 

“Well,” He shifts uncomfortably. “Perhaps suffice it to say my father was a high elf, and my mother was… less than thrilled.” 

“Ah. Yes, say no more. I should have realized, such things often happen in the wake of wars and occupations.” 

“Thank you.” 

“Well,” John’s father says, clapping his hands together, “The Apprentices will be joining us for supper, but we still have a bit of time before that. Now, let’s have some wine, enjoy each other’s company, or perhaps the gardens? They’re starting to be a bit sad, but fall has its own beauty, don’t you think?”

One of the servants, a teenager named Theocus, comes out with a tray laden with pewter wine goblets. John’s father takes the lead, talking about the vintage and this year’s grape harvest and the status of the vineyards here and blah, blah, blah. But still, you’re grateful. If he’s talking, you have less of a chance to say the wrong thing. You need to write to your father. He’ll want to know you’ve overcome your medical inability to shut the fuck up. 

Unfortunately, it gives you time to analyze and over analyze everything you do: your stance, your facial expressions, if you’re drinking enough, if you’re drinking too much. You keep looking to John, and every now and then he gives you a little reassurance: a touch of the arm or a little smile. Maybe being his arm candy isn’t as bad as you thought it would be. At least you can feel confident you look the part. 

You successfully manage to answer a couple of questions when they’re directed at you, mostly about your opinions of the barony, adjusting to Cyrodiil, that type of stuff. You have your canned responses ready, try to make them sound as good as possible. But, good to his word, John takes the lead and directs the conversation whenever it turns to the two of you. Sometimes he’ll prompt you for your input, give you the chance to respond, and then take back over. 

Fortunately (and you’re still not entirely sure how rigid the seating rules are, other than “most important people near the middle”), once you’re seated you have John, his uncle, and his father between yourself and the countess. Even with the music and multiple conversations reverberating through the high-ceilinged stone hall, you’re positive you could make yourself heard, but you have no desire to do so. Instead, you and John mostly wind up talking to Gitmel (who’s technically at the next table, but whatever) about her ongoing research with Ayleid stones. Most of the stuff she talks about with resonances goes over your head, but it’s at least mildly interesting to compare the Aylied with the Dwemer. 

It’s almost… pleasant? Maybe the wine is starting to get to you. It’ll be hard to tell until you stand. The food certainly helps. Marcellia prepares a veritable banquet for everyone on a normal day, and tonight she’s gone all out. You understand now why she called so many of hte apprentices in to help her in the kitchens. She’s made an entire young pig, a capon, several pigeons or some other small birds, and at least three kinds of mutton, on top of intricately woven breads, miscellaneous pies, and more local vegetables than you can hope to identify. She’s even put together a multi-tiered aspic. (You try a little bit and though you’re not a fan you at least appreciate it’s a fancy thing that took a lot of work.) 

But all too soon, dinner is finished. The moment the last of the dishes are brought back to the kitchen, the bards start playing just a little bit louder and a little bit more intensely. A couple of the teenage apprentices are the first to get up and start dancing, then Jade drags Dave out onto the floor. Jake, who had been sitting beside the countess, says something to her and then the two of them are off. You look at John nervously. 

“It’s okay,” he says. “Yanno, if you were actually any good I’d just be dragging you down.” 

You can’t help but laugh at that, as does John’s uncle. Fuck, though, some of the kids are good. Their steps are precise, so fast, and they complement each other perfectly. You sincerely hope these are younger noble children, ones who served as pages or maids only to learn that their real choices in life were legion officer or priest. Honestly, you’ve spent such little time with the apprentices you’re not sure. 

John stands and offers you his hand the way he did in your chambers a few short hours ago. With a deep breath you take it and rise to your feet. Glancing about the hall, you see that no one is really looking at you very closely. Maybe John’s dad and uncle, but everyone dancing is far more interested in their partners. 

It still doesn’t quite feel right, but you have to admit it makes a little more sense in the doublet. Helps you keep your spine straight, anyway. And the softer soles of the fine boots make it easier to keep your steps light and dainty. You hold your own for the first few songs, the old-fashioned processionals and traditional Cyrodilic banquet dances. You’re not great, but neither is John. You’re not the best judge, but either Jake and the countess or those two apprentices who won’t admit they’re dating are probably winning. But you haven’t been told you’re offensively bad, anyway. 

Then the countess breaks away from Jake for a moment and approaches the bards. From where you are you can’t hear what she says, but the music pauses for a moment. The bard playing the harpsichord changes the tempo from a 4/4 to a 3/4. As the flute and lyre rejoin, you realize you recognize the style, light and bouncy and elven. This is an Altmer dance, the one you could never quite get right. You take a step away from John.

“Are you thirsty?” You ask. “I’m thirsty. I’m going to get some wine.” 

“I’m good,” he says.

You give him a sharp look. 

“I’ll come with you, though. Not a bad idea to take a breather.” 

Before you’re even back to your seat, Theocus is there with a pitcher of wine. 

“Take your time,” you murmur to him. 

You’re not the only one who’s bowed out. Most of the apprentices are taking the opportunity to have more water, and many of them are chatting amongst themselves. But that gives the remaining four couples more space. There’s two pairs of apprentices, including the two that started the night, Dave and Jade, and Jake and the countess. 

You hate to admit it, but when done correctly the dance is beautiful. The expressive arm movements almost remind you of Dunmeri folk dances, but combined with the same light stepping of Cyrodilic dances. The couples are arranged in a square, and they begin to switch partners, the leads breaking away to circle one another, then the followers. But they eventually always return to the same base corner, walking in a circle with their palms gently touching. 

When the first song ends, the pair of apprentices that are totally dating go down and join in, apparently gathering up their nerve. There’s a bit of a shakeup in partners, as Dave steps away. You watch him tap his chest, where you know his amulet is hidden, and walk out of the hall. Jade approaches her brother to take his place, and the countess gracefully nods her head and comes back to the table. She takes a few sips of her wine, and then locks her eyes on you. 

She approaches smiling. “John, my dear, you look a bit sad.” 

“Oh, not at all. Just watching.” 

“Do you remember the choreography my father had everyone learn ahead of my wedding?” 

“I think so. It’s been a while, though.” 

“Want to give it a try?” 

He gives you a worried glance. 

You plaster a fake smile on your face. “Go have fun. I’ll be here.” 

“Alright.” He gives your shoulder a little squeeze and then takes her hand the way he took yours. 

The two walk away, speaking too softly for you to hear. She leads him to the center of the room and everyone else seems to give them a little more space. It seems like everyone is watching them. John notices and looks around nervously.

You can almost hear her words when she looks at him gently. “Don’t pay attention to them. Eyes on me.” 

Your stomach clenches and you down your wine. Theocus kind of gives you a look. You glance over to John and the countess. Their eyes are locked, hands lightly touching as they start their dance. Theocus looks at them, back to you, and then shrugs as if to say “fair enough” and refills your goblet. 

The apprentices have all gone to the benches along the edge of the hall, just leavine Jake and Jade and John and the Countess. The choreography is a lot more complicated, and requires all four to coordinate. Each of them stumbles at least once, but it doesn’t seem to matter. They’re smiling and laughing and it ties your stomach in knots. 

When the first song ends. 

The countess laughs and says “Let’s try that again.”

The other three agree. The music starts back up and they try again, this time more assured. Jade is doing this with her brother. It doesn’t mean anything. You know it doesn’t mean anything. And yet… Watching John and the countess look at each other like that. 

It’s around then that Dave comes back. He watches the four of them for a moment, then looks up at you. He walks up along the edge of the hall, staying out of the dancers’ way. 

He plops down in John’s chair. “You know,” he says. “During dinner Liv spent a lot of time asking about the local flavor in Skyrim.” 

“So what? You think they’re just doing that to talk about our trip?” 

“Nah, they’re not talking. I’m thinking that this is 3/4 time. So,” he bows and puts the accent back on, “May I have this dance, Mr. Vantas?” 

You give him a wicked grin. “Oh, Sir Strider, I’d be delighted.” 

He takes you by the hand for real and says, “You can lead since you’re taller.”

Having watched the dance once, you know about how far they go, and that most of the U between the tables is safe. You put your hand on Dave’s hip, he puts his on your shoulder and gives you a twitch of a smile. As you begin to dance with Dave, it’s the most comfortable you’ve felt all night. The upper arms of your shirt are a little tight for this, especially when you help Dave do a spin or two, but you actually feel like you know what you’re fucking doing. 

Before you know it, the song ends. You and Dave stand there, together for a moment, and then over his shoulder you notice everyone looking at the two of you. You turn to look at John and the Countess, and they’re both staring at you utterly gobsmacked. 

You saunter up to the two of them and clear your throat. “Dave told me you were interested in knowing more about Skyrim culture, and thought you might want a demonstration.” 

The countess collects herself quickly. “That was… certainly something. I suppose that’s a folk dance?” 

“As I understand the Jarls do it as well,” John says, “Not that there was much time to attend proper banquets during a war.” 

“Fascinating. Perhaps I should arrange a visit someday,” The countess says. “It is a rather charming dance.” She looks up at John. “So that I’m prepared for such an event, do you think you could teach me?” 

You feel your face fall. 

John shakes his head. “I… Probably wouldn’t be the best teacher. Karkat taught me actually. Him and his friends.”

“Oh, nonsense.” 

“Well, for now, I think I might have been neglecting my fiance a bit too long.” 

“John…” She says, a bit of sharpness in her voice that hadn’t been present before. 

Dave swoops in Jade and Jake in tow. “Hey,” he says, “These two were interested in learning too. Let me show you all at once, let them have their fun.” 

“That’s very kind of you, Sir Strider,” she says. “I’d appreciate your tutelage.” 

You smirk and take John back out onto the floor. 

“Karkat,” He says, voice low and serious. “What are you doing with all this?” 

“Dancing. Showing her I know what I’m doing.” 

“You know most Imperials… think this is too close for dancing.” 

“Most imperials can suck my dick. You brought home a foreign elf, you told me she wants to know about adventures in Skyrim, let’s show her.” 

He sighs. “Karkat, keep it together.” 

“I have it together,” you hiss. 

You see the countess start dancing with Dave. She’s a little uncertain, and it’s always going to be a little awkward because Dave is leading and he’s half a head shorter than her. But she’s catching on quickly. Too quickly for your taste. 

When the song ends, she approaches you. 

“Alright, then,” she says. “Mind if I cut in? I’d love to continue our conversation.”

“Come on,” you growl, your accent slipping. “Can’t you just leave him alone?” 

“Karkat!” John hisses

“Excuse me?” the countess asks. Her tone is still fairly even but you can hear the threat. And you don’t like it.  

“You were on him at the first opportunity and haven’t let up since then! John is my fiance, not yours!” 

Her nostrils flare. “You insult my honor and forget your place.”

You scoff. “Yeah, I think we all fucking know my place. I’m not made for this kind of charade and had no time to learn to bullshit may way through properly, since you gave us less than a fucking week before dropping in! Then you needle me with comments about being cute and quaint and monopolize John’s time all night! I don’t know what your game was, if you were hoping to get a rise out of me to prove I’m not good enough, or if your head is so far up your own ass that you have no idea how to talk to people who don’t bow to your every whim, and at this point, I don’t care.” 

“That’s enough!” John’s father stands. You think this is the first time you’ve heard him raise his voice. It booms through the hall, and you feel an immense weight in your chest as you realize what you’ve done. 

“Fuck.” You whisper. You look back at the countess. Congratulations,” you say. “You win.” 

Before the words even leave your mouth you hate yourself for them. You storm out of the hall before you can make things worse. 

—

You’d say you can’t believe he did that, but you absolutely can. That might be why you’re the first person to stop gawking after Karkat’s outburst. 

“Gods, Liv, I’m so, so sorry. I’m not sure what’s gotten into him! He’s not usually like that!” 

In your mind Miraak scoffs. Sure, you also know it’s a lie, but it’s the one you need to tell. 

Liv just shakes her head. “My… my goodness. I’d always heard tell Dunmer have a fire in them, but that’s just-” She turns to Jake, “Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” 

“I did,” he says. “I, er, think we all did.” 

You think the whole county did. 

“He’s…” You choose your words carefully. “He is a work in progress. Dunmer, especially those in Windhelm, are a proud people, and Karkat is, if nothing else, fiercely loyal.” 

“Loyalty? You tell me about loyalty and he just-” she gestures to the door. 

You’re not sure what to say to that, but by then your father is there. 

“My apologies for his outburst,” he says, “It shall be dealt with.” 

“Wait, what do you mean by that?” You demand. 

He gives you a hard look. 

“Dad, you can’t just- after all we’ve been through!” 

“Well, it is not up to me whether Her Excellency feels it right to forgive him.” 

You turn back to Liv. She’s clearly still reeling from shock, but you’re beginning to see anger creep back in. 

We can stop them both, Miraak says. Make them do whatever you want.

Until the spell fades, then we’re in even deeper shit. 

I’m not proposing using the Shouts. I can perform a very subtle calm spell. 

It won’t work on Dad.

What about her?

We can’t risk it. 

At this point what else is there to risk? 

…You have a point. 

Speak, child, and trust me. 

“I’ll go talk to him,” you say. You can feel a prickling sensation on your tongue, almost like mint, as Miraak works magic into your words. Gods, you hope this works. 

Keep talking. This spell is delicate and precise. It takes time to sink in. Make sure your words would be soothing on their own so that no one suspects a thing. If she knows she’s being manipulated all will be lost. 

“He was wrong to confront you on all counts, but it is true that he has not had much time to learn to behave in high society. It is… a significant drawback to choosing our partners as we do, I’ll admit. But if I remember correctly, my father’s first wife also struggled with etiquette when she first arrived, having grown up in Valenwood, and your parents grew to love her, right?” 

“That is true…” your father admits. He gets a wistful look on his face, and part of you regrets bringing her up but… 

Keep talking! And don’t give them more openings! 

“Karkat is a good person,” You say quickly. Gods, you’re so nervous your accent is slipping a little. But you have to keep pushing. “He’s been working so hard every single day to catch up because he didn’t have the noble education we did. I know he’ll get there. He cares about everything more than anyone I’ve ever met. Sometimes too much, I know, but there are benefits to being that passionate.” You lower your voice, making it almost a whisper. “Gods, Liv, you should have seen the way the people in Windhelm listen to his father, the way his friends listen to him. And I know you’re skeptical about the loyalty right now because his anger was so clearly misplaced, but I know he did that because he cares deeply about me. He doesn’t know you well enough to give you his loyalty yet, but he’ll get there. I know he will.”

Just a little longer, Miraak says. 

“He lost control, and that’s bad. But, Liv, if you wrote off everyone who lost control in front of you, everyone knows I wouldn’t be here today. Please, let me talk to him, give him a chance to apologize and prove himself to you.”

As you speak the last few words, the tingling sensation leaves your tongue, and you think you see a bit of green flash in her eyes. 

It is done.  

Liv looks at your father for a moment. His features are expressionless as usual. 

“Very well,” Liv says. “Once he has calmed down I’ll hear his case.” She glances around, noticing how literally everyone is staring at you. “Perhaps somewhere a little more private? No need to drag this scene out any further than necessary. Go speak to him.” You jump to follow her instructions. “In the meantime, Jack, I’d like your opinion on his prospects.” 

He takes her hand and starts leading her back to the head table. “Karkat is absolutely still rough around the edges, but what John says is true…” 

You close the door before you can hear anything else. 

I can’t believe that worked, you think. 

Why not? Humans are such simple creatures. Noble or peasant, it makes no difference. Elves and the bestial races present a bit more of a challenge, but only a bit. The mind is such a fickle, fragile thing… 

And she won’t know we cast a spell on her?

No. No one will. That’s the beauty of targeted emotional manipulation. But it… takes a lot out of me. I’m going to have to teach you.

We’re not doing it again. 

Of course not… 

He sinks into the back of your mind. 

We did what we had to, you think. I did what I had to. 

You climb the stairs to your chambers. Karkat hasn’t lit any candles, so you cast magelight. You call out for him but get no response. Maybe he’s not up here? Then you open the door to your bedroom. There’s an elf-sized lump under the blankets and you hear sniffing and muffled sobs. It hurts to see him this upset, but you’re relieved he didn’t just run away into the dark somewhere. 

“Hey,” You say softly. 

“Fuck John, I’m sorry. I fucked everything up.”

“It’s gonna be okay. Dad's talking to Liv,” You say, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “He'll smooth it all over. But you’re gonna have to apologize.”

“She started it!” He snarls. “She provoked me, climbing all over you like that!”

“She was a little much tonight,” you admit, gently placing your hand on the lump of blanket containing your fiance. “I’m not sure if she was trying to test you and you took the bait, or if she was just playing around. I should have prepared you for it better, but that kind of flirting is all just a game. It doesn’t mean anything to anyone. Liv loves… okay, I don’t actually know how much she loves her husband, but she’s completely loyal to him, and I love you.” 

“Then why?” 

“I don’t know. That’s just how it’s done. I know you don’t know all the rules yet. If anyone was expecting you to have all of them it’d be a massive dick move. But at the same time, you did… kinda overreact. Like a lot. You can’t just shout at a countess like that. Especially not your countess.” 

“It’s fucking bullshit,” he says, poking his head out. “So she’s just allowed to say whatever the fuck she wants and I have to take it?” 

“I mean, kinda?” 

“It’s not right!”

“I know. But it's not about being right.” You smile sadly down at him. “It's about convincing more powerful people that you're not a threat.” 

“Why would I want to do that?!” Karkat snaps. “I was supposed to get her to take me seriously, not make her think we’re her playthings!” 

You sigh. “We can't fight every battle. At least not on this level. The cost is too high.”

“So we just let her push us around?”

“Only when it doesn't matter.”

Karkat looks at you incredulously. “How the fuck doesn’t this matter?” 

“Because this is just a social call. Who cares if you look stupid or she thinks of you as a toy or a pet or whatever as long as when push comes to shove she'll fight for us? If she wanted she could revoke our title, expose us as daedra worshipers, do anything she wanted. But she doesn't, because she likes us.” 

“For fuck's sake, though, can't she give us a fucking ounce of respect?” 

You stand. “I… I'm sorry.” 

“You’re sorry?” He asks. “For what?” 

You walk over to one of the tapestries and begin playing the the fringe. “I- I knew you were stressed. You hadn't been acting like yourself. You were barely swearing, forcing this fake smile all the time.” You glance back at him and he’s got his eyebrows lightly furrowed, a small pout on his lips. He’s listening. “I knew that, so I tried to help you relax earlier. And I knew it wasn’t enough the second dinner started, but I kept telling Liv whatever she wanted to hear anyway. I pushed you too far.” 

“John, you-” Then he cuts himself off and his face hardens. “Wait, fuck, you're doing it now, arent you!?” 

“This isn’t the same.” You say. 

“It absolutely is! I see you do this all the time: you pretend to be dumb and friendly to soothe the situation when people get pissed.” 

“I don't do it to everyone, Karkat.” You go back to the bed and try to take his hand but he pulls it away. “I don't do it to people I trust. You know me.” 

“I thought I did.”

He might as well have reached right through your ribs and crushed your heart. “I've shown you everything. You've been in my soul. I've been in yours. What more can you want?!”  

“I don’t know!” He shouts. Then he wraps his arms around his knees and looks down. “I don’t know.” He repeats. He sniffles and you see candle light reflect off of the tears in the corners of his eyes “I want to be good enough for you. But good enough isn’t good enough. I’m the half-breed son of a disgraced spy and an adultress. I’d have to be perfect, better than perfect just to make up for the crime of being me.”

“That’s not true.” 

“It is, though. Your uncle told me.” 

“He did what?!” you demand.  

“Well…” he shifts uncomfortably. “Not in as many words but… it felt pretty clear. I had to shape up, I had to have her accept me, or you’d have to find someone else. This was my only chance.” 

You feel your heart plunge into your stomach. 

“No.” You say, standing. 

“No?” He looks up at you in confusion. “But you said it yourself-” 

“It was going to be. But I talked her into giving you another shot.” 

“Really? How? After I-” 

“I… Can be persuasive. And I know the rules.” 

“What, did you bat your eyelashes at her some more?” he snaps. 

“It wasn’t flirty, actually. Just… said the right things the right way, I guess.”

He looks at you curiously. You have to press on. 

“We still need to impress her tonight, but the night isn’t over.  Let’s get you cleaned up. We’re going downstairs.” 

—

The countess waits for you in the trophy room. She stands with her arms crossed squarely behind her back, staring into the fire burning on the far side of the room. John’s ancestors look down at you from their portraits above her. You’re not sure if it’s your nerves or how thin the line between worlds is tonight, but you feel them judging you. You glance over to the first portrait, Colonel Sassacre… Sheogorath. You already have his blessing, but how much does that really help? 

“Liv,” John says firmly. He has his shoulders squared and is standing at his full height. “Thank you for waiting for us.”

She glances over at the two of you. John is head and shoulders taller than her, but she’s utterly unintimidated. “I find it prudent to hear my vassals out, at least. Whether or not I take their positions is another matter.” 

“I understand.” John replies. “But I was not thinking of this as a negotiation.” 

“What is it then?” She asks sharply. 

“I’ve come to apologize,” you say, putting on your best accent. 

“Indeed,” she replies. Her tone is flat, disbelieving. “Please take a seat.” She gestures to the two large armchairs facing the fireplace. 

You look at John. He silently nods and you sit before speaking. 

“I… allowed my anger to get the better of me and acted without thinking. In doing so I insulted you, and for that I’m deeply sorry. It was a poor first impression, to say the least.” 

John gives you an approving smile. 

“That it was,” the countess says. “And among higher nobility, first impressions are everything. What if I had been the emperor?” 

“I’m not asking for your approval,” you say. “Not yet, anyhow. I just… Please give me another chance.” 

She turns and appraises you, her pale blue eyes, which looked at you and John so kindly mere hours ago, tear into you like an ice wraith’s bite. You’ve combed your hair back down, straightened your clothes perfectly. You’d hold your own in a Tribunal delegation, and you know it. At least until you opened your mouth. 

“How long have you been here?” 

“Since Last Seed,” You reply. “Most of my training has been in local history and administration. The plan was to pivot to etiquette after Sir Joel evaluated my ability to serve as John’s right hand. We… were anticipating more time before I met you.” 

“Liv,” John says, dropping the formal accent. “You’ve known me since I was seven. You know that I know how to play the game. And I believe in Karkat. Out of everyone I met, there’s no one I’d rather work with. He’s who I want.” 

“Love is blind, John,” she says. 

“But I’m not. And I’m not a kid anymore either. At some point, you’re going to need to trust me to make major decisions. You weren’t in Skyrim. You didn’t see the way he brought people together. The way he fought tooth and nail to save everyone. He had a way out multiple times and he never took it.” 

She looks directly at you. “He could be playing a long game.” 

“I’m not!” You insist. 

“John’s already said his piece on your behalf. Twice now. As did his father and uncle. But I need you to prove the value in those words. Convince me.” 

You start to snap back, but kill the words before they leave your throat. 

“No,” she says. “Say it.” 

You take a deep breath. “If… If I was just in this for the money or status, why would I have called you out in front of everyone? If I didn’t care about John, it would have been easy to sit back and watch you two together. But I just- I couldn’t.” 

“John?” She says. 

“Yes?” 

“Leave.” 

“But I-” 

“Go. It is nearly midnight, and I believe you have a ritual to perform.” 

He looks at you with concern clear on his face, but you nod at him. 

“Alright,” he says. He gives your hand a reassuring squeeze and then leaves the office, closing the door behind him. 

“You understand that behaving like you did tonight is unacceptable, yes?” 

“I do. Which is why I came to apologize.”

“Then why do it? Why jeopardize your status?”

“I… I was jealous,” You admit.  

“Of what?” 

“John… when he was younger he used to like you. He told me a long time ago. And then seeing you tonight, without understanding the nuances and particularities of courtly interactions, I misunderstood both of your intents. I felt jealous and let it get the better of me. I am working on my temper.”

“Indeed. You, Karkat Vantas, are an unsophisticated brute without the first concept of deference or decorum.” You wince. “And I can work with that. The only thing I truly require from my vassals is loyalty. I need to know above all else that I can trust you. You’ve certainly won over the Egbert family. After you left, John spoke quite passionately in your favor, and Jack and Joel both spoke quite highly of your abilities and character.” 

“They did?” You ask. “Like, Joel specifically?” 

“This is a surprise to you?” She asks. 

“Er…” You snap back into formal mode. “He has very high standards. And I know I still have much to learn.”

“I see. But that does not answer the primary question.” She turns sharply and marches towards you, bending down so your eyes lock. “Can I trust you, Mr. Vantas?” 

“Yes.” 

“Good.” She sits in the chair beside you. “So, then, while the Egberts channel a dark god, tell me your story. Omit nothing of importance, no matter how it makes you look. After that, I will tell you how you can best be of use to my county. And keep trying with the accent. The practice can only help.” 

—

End notes:

So I spent like 2 days doing research on specifically 1400s-ish banquets and feasts to write like 2 paragraphs of details. I then spent a further 2 days researching what went into managing a barony in the later medieval and early modern periods. Like a lot of history, the answer is “idk, it depends *shrug emoji.*” A lot of the sources are about England and France, which the Empire is probably closer to politically, but the climate is all over the place and the names are certainly Latin/Italian inspired. Given its proximity to Hammerfell and being at the foot of the mountains, I’m giving Battlehorn a Near East adjacent climate, but historically that area has a very different culture and style to what appears in Cyrodiil so this is a case of having done a good chunk of research and then deciding to mostly throw it out the window. 

 A lot of the political background details I’m saving for if they become relevant later (like, for example, the 50-odd townspeople I have now named and given life stories), but some of the feast stuff was kind of interesting, so I thought I’d include some historical notes here. 

While I’m using banquet and feast interchangeably, there was usually some sort of difference with the former being fancier occasions. But regardless, the tables would be arranged in a U with everyone seated around the outside so that servants could bring things and take it away more easily (I was not able to confirm, but part of me wonders if this is why everyone is on the one side of the table in the Last Supper painting). In the earlier medieval era, food would be served on bread trenchers to sop up juice. However, by the early modern period, these had mostly been replaced by flat wooden trenchers, which is closer to what we see in the Elder Scrolls games. Music would be playing the whole time, and dancing was a must. 

It turns out that there’s actually a lot we know about formal dancing during the Renaissance, since a lot of kings and dukes and such employed dance masters to teach courtiers more complex choreography, and some of these masters wrote and sold dance books (Some of the more prosperous counts and countesses in Cyrodiil probably do this, but the Egberts certainly would not). There were some processionals (think like two lines approaching each other and walking back), but they were somewhat old fashioned by that point. To the modern eye, a lot of the popular dances look really goofy. Because of how stiff the clothing was in the upper body (think like Elizabethan ruffled collars), there wasn’t much movement in the upper body, but a lot of prancing and jumping. (Eventually, these would develop into ballet). By the mid 1600s, minuets had become dominant in England and France, and I like to think that maybe this is a Altmer dance that’s become more popular in Cyrodiil since the Aldmeri Dominion’s influence has grown and a lot of Cyrodiilic nobles try to suck up to them. People Jake’s age are probably the oldest to have learned it, but by the time John was growing up, they were standard. 

Waltzes are kind of a weird case. It seems they were invented near Vienna in the 13th century, but it took 600 years for them to make their way to England. In the 1800s when they first showed up, many of the upper crust thought it was scandalous, due to how close the man and woman were. I was purposefully vague on how Nordic dancing worked in the original Skyrim Johnkat, but I’m giving this to the Nords, somewhat arbitrarily but also because it worked and, like I said, we’re playing fast and loose with historical inspirations. Just about everyone who lives in Skyrim adapted the waltz fairly quickly because (just like in real life) any excuse to be good to your cute dance partner is a good excuse. (Also, Nords and Dunmer are somewhat used to sharing dances, as both traditionally practice forms of circle dance, and while the forms are distinct, they share centuries of cultural exchange and adaptation, dating back to before the eruption of Red Mountain). At this point, the Imperials consider the Waltzes to be a northern folk dance, much like Dunmeri and Nordic circle dancing. And while it is viewed as more graceful and refined than the circle dancing, it’s also more scandalous. 

But it could be worse, it could be Redguard dancing, which is normally done like a competition between two individuals or groups, and tends to feature stomps or otherwise firmer leg movements and very expressive and often quick movements in the upper torso. Because it is, in many ways, the opposite of the primary form of court dancing, most nobles consider it to be incredibly base. It is, however, the primary form of dancing enjoyed by the Battlehorn peasants, along with Colovian folk dancing, which is similar but does not involve as strong stances and often has slightly smaller hand movements. (Having spent most of his life in Battlehorn and taking part in folk celebrations, these are the forms of dancing John is more comfortable and skilled in. That and the wide, strong stances are closer to how he’s used to moving his body for combat training). 

[tatsumi-rin]

Oh shit Guero by Beck... I never processed the fact that I was kind of obsessed with that album as a teenager. Totally should have held onto my copy for shits and giggles instead of donating it back to whence it came, but it's not irreplaceable if I want it back. Scouring the shelves for it and other albums in charity shops when a Spotify subscription wasn't viable and I wanted something tangible I could hold was pretty fun though.

I can't remember a lot of my more music tastes at the time being all that cool in 2012-2014. Some were popular, sure - just not something I would share too much of lest I open myself to more criticism from family and friends (still got some banger gorillaz merch for my 18th though). I was going through my "anything not immediately playing on music channels or the radio is infinitely more cool" phase, but also kind-of-an-emo-but-not-really phase along with my "I like the idea of 90s music but Nirvana is too mainstream" phase (💀💀💀💀), and most importantly what I like to term my Napstablook phase - aka; finding the most obscure music possible on random websites for indie releases and such in a manner not unlike the Undertale character. I like to think Toby Fox somehow had a vision of me at that time whilst I was listening to his contributions to the Homestuck soundtrack and made that character and Alphys based on me specifically (kidding).

Just a little weirdo teenager in an Adventure Time hoodie sat in the corner; talking to no one and either vent doodling or trying my best to cram A-level biology in its entirety into my foggy head whilst wrapped in often taped-up pound shop headsets. Ironically with how many I went through, there was no way I could convince my family to let me get anything more expensive when these things broke so much.

I honestly look and realize that this is uhhh probably when my music tastes solidified lmao...All of that music was weirdly important in that ways these things can be when you're 16.

[euthanasia-rollercoast3r]

there is a piece of media that i really like. i first learned about it when i was 12 years old - back then it seemed like something mysterious, something people on the internet always talked about, but i could not comprehend at all. my first attemps to read it started at the same age, and they all failed miserably, but i finally managed to read it from start to end when i was 14.

i thought it was the best thing in the entire world. i spent hours on the internet looking at fanart and videos and discussions of said thing, my character designs and stories are all at least partially subconsciously inspired by said thing, and i kept thinking about how amazing that experience was for MONTHS. when i was around 16 or 17, i read it again, and it was not as good as the first time i read it. in fact, a lot of the writing in said thing was simply lazy and completely unsatisfying.

now, it is worth noting that i am very picky towards things i watch or read or play. a single line of bad writing can make me stop reading or watching something, and i will likely not even try to get into something by that author again. however, it did not happen to said thing. i acknowlegded how bad it really was, now that i was a bit older and wiser, but it was still an enjoyable experience. i had fun, and reading it was accompanied by the warm feeling of nostalgia.

it is also worth noting that i witnessed said thing’s downfall. both in the literal sense, when it presented its finale and the fans didn’t know what to do with themselves anymore, and in the figurative sense, when a godawful HORRIBLE sequel was released and most fans (or what was left of them, anyway) either decided to pretend the sequel doesn’t exist or dropped said thing altogether. i know now that the creator of it was a disgusting human being. i know now that it was actually a horrible piece of media with a very annoying fanbase, that people rightfully hated, that people rightfully removed from their internet experience. and yet, i still hold warm feelings towards said thing. while the rest of the internet now mostly just cringes at the mere mention of it, i remember the emotions it gave me, and i realize that after so many years and so many disappointments, i am still, in my heart, a fan of said thing.

even after reading it 2 times, sometimes i get the random urge to read it in its entirety again, and while i can resist it because it’s very time consuming, i know that inevitably i will give in and do it again. there is a possibility that i will never be free again, that something will always push me to come back to said thing, that i will read it again, not once, not twice and not even thrice.

i watched a lot of movies and i played an ABSOLUTE fuckton of videogames that could have had the same effect on me. but for some reason, they didn’t. now, i have a question to ask. to everyone, to no one in particular, to myself and to god specifically. out of all the things that could have burned themselves deep into my brain, out of all the things that could have fundamentally changed me as a person, why the FUCK did it have to be homestuck?

[tomatograter]

i saw on twitter you reread the epilogues! would it be okay to ask how you feel about them now on a reread? have any of your opinions changed, for better or worse? i've really loved the art and analysis that's come out of your tumblr/twitter ever since they dropped, so i'm excited to know what you think. i couldn't get a great read on your feelings based on your tweets so that is why i am asking directly, hope that's okay!

Not much changed. That wasn't the first time I attempted to re-read the HS Epilogues, I've gone through bits and pieces of them a handful of times in the years since the original release and it's an effort I make to remind myself of events that happened because I tend to... forget. I don't mind reading books, I like those! In the hellscape that was 2020, according to my StoryGraph stats (great new site, by the way, stop using the Amazon-clawed Goodreads and transfer your account to a black led effort to diversify the current literary environment) I managed to read about 22 new books. Not too shabby for a total dumbass. The problem isn't that it was text-only, they just sort of mush together as a nondescript mass in my brain given enough time. 

The first time I finished the epilogues, I said they felt like a purposefully unfinished text, but one at odds with itself (though in much more undercooked words, as I had just spent the last 2 days busy reading it) and it's an impression that has deepened since.

I do not mean anything like "Meat contradicts Candy" with this, that'd be foolish; the dissonance is the fucking point. I know how dubiously canon alternate universes work and I *enjoy* them, otherwise I wouldn't have wasted years in the circus ring that is accompanying Big 2 Comics in the hopes they'd do anything genuinely cool with that concept. Instead, I find there is a general problem in terms of internal cohesion. The Epilogues want to be a lot of things at once, be it a continuation, an expulsion, a deliberate attempt at public scorn, a somewhat genuine play in heartfelt analysis, a reinvention of what came before, or a loaded gun pointed straight at one's own foot. And in the process, they end up undermining the impact of their own strongest moments. 

I don't like the Epilogues. Their lukewarm indecisiveness makes for a poor reading experience that needs far more asides, warnings and 'before you read it-'s than the book is worth. It is a text with a particularly distasteful, juvenile fixation in the show and repeated humiliation of sexual abuse victims, and manages to be more regressive about its female characters and what roles they're allowed to play than Homestuck, the 2009 Comic, ever was. And that was disappointing. It's as if the coming of adulthood must sort them into one of two categories: "wanted, desirable" woman or "unwanted, undesirable" woman. It also interacts with trans women in a really shitty way. It is a text married to traditional white-centric politics that makes an attempt to challenge them from that same perspective but falls flat on its face by pulling big moves like "making the alien-Hitler analogue character fight for a rebellion meant to represent racial liberation" and other unsavory choices. But I don't need to like the Epilogues to acknowledge them as both a text that exists and works within a shared universe. 

They're pretty fertile ground for dissection and analysis. I think it's interesting how they accentuate some of the worst facets of the HS "canon"/"lore" by being incredibly blatant about their connection to stuff like the Skaianet archives, how they play with Fanservice and Fan Expectation by dedicating so much time to solving or sinking ‘The Davekat Equation’, and how they elaborate on complex facets of old characters. It's a text that acknowledges the existence of fanfiction and popular fanworks on a direct quotable basis (like "Can't sleep without holding onto a motherfucker" of 4Chords fame) as well as Fan Movements that preceded it (the also Gamzee-based "Free the clown!" Rush from 2016) it's intrinsically interactive, and that's not something you can say about a lot of media. The olive branch beckons.

I don't recommend the Epilogues. To me, the Epilogues portray glimpses of two potential, but not absolute, futures soaked in limiting metadoomer pessimism, best appreciated as "what-if" tales taking on the questions of serialization, post-myth, the self-cannibalistic nature of franchises, the abstractness of Canon, the absurdity of fanon, and why fascists like milk. The Epilogues are also not going to magically disappear or un-exist from our collective recollection anytime soon, or… ever. These statements coexist. 

I think complex feelings towards media are best put to use in the making of your own art, which is unsurprising, given the fact I'm an artist and a fag, & I've personally enjoyed creating things that interact and rebuke aspects of that text. I've also been graced with the existence of wonderful art from others doing the same, may that be in the form of illustrations, written epics, analyses, comics, videos, songs, the collective transgendering of the series' main character, and all sorts of harder-to-categorize community creations. You can make the best of it. That's my favorite part of the whole ordeal, and one I don't regret one bit. 

I hope this is an appropriately satisfying answer on this subject, and if it isn't, well, here's the thing; you can write a better one.

[none-gender-left-man]

Let's talk LGBTQ+ erasure in the Marvel Fandom

Mischaracterization in fandom is a big problem, and it's something we see from every fanbase. A character gets boiled down into a few condensed traits and their nuance is washed out and forgotten. Fanonization isn't always inherently bad, and can lead to fandom solidarity and representation through headcanon, and this can sometimes eventually have influence on canon, which can be seen in the Homestuck fandom, where eventually slash pairings that received enough attention became endgame romantic pairings (Dave and Karkat, Rose and Kanaya, etc.). Of course I'm not here to discuss Homestuck today, I'm here to discuss the Marvel fandom and its toxic dudebro fans, as well as related topics that intersect with this issue. 

There's a common mischaracterization problem in the Marvel fandom, particularly in relation to queer relationships and characters. 

First example is Deadpool. Wade Wilson is described by his canon writers and creators to be omnisexual or pansexual, or of an otherwise fluctuating and open sexuality. The Deadpool video game wildly mischaracterized Wade and even made him behave in some homophobic ways, acting grossed out by men and homoerotic implications. This was jarring for me as someone who has read his comics and knows for a fact that Wade has multiple emphasized crushes on or at least attraction to other male characters, such as Spider-Man, Thor, Cable, and others. The game was very popular despite this mischaracterization and created a condensed fanonized Deadpool that is made into nothing more than an ultraviolent oversexualized joke, despite his character being the epitome of coping humor and having a very tender and compassionate side to him. It's known in the comics that Wade uses his humor to cope with his severe trauma, this doesn't mean he is just comic relief. This has gotten consistently worse since the Deadpool films. (I'm looking at you, shitty Wal-Mart DP t shirt that shows Wade holding a sign that says "oh I'm sorry did I offend you?" Which is really OOC imho)

Many of the more hypermasculine fans of Deadpool seem to have this false image of him being the epitome of "offensive humor" when in reality his trademark is Metahumor, not going out of his way to be a dick to people. These fans also often either ignore or aren't aware of Deadpool not being straight, portraying him as thirsting after buxom ladies but forgetting his openly admitted male attracted orientation which is just as obvious if you're not actively ignoring it. This is a grave mistake that takes so much from his character, especially in the case of the Deadpool/Spider-Man team up comics. 

In that span of issues Wade went through an entire moral transformation, molding himself and his moral compass to earn the respect of Spider-Man, while unable to go more than a few pages without flirting with him. The things Wade goes through in order to Do the Right Thing by Spider-Man in any other story would be considered romantic. If a man did this much for a woman in a narrative of course no one would question the romantic subtext, but because it's two men, half of the fanbase has a kneejerk reaction to this concept and swear that Deadpool flirting is a joke. (Or that it's just "Bromance")

Yes, because apparently a man being attracted to a man has to be a joke. /Sarc

Wade and Peter are even canonically shown to be "heartmates" and this still isn't enough for the erasure to end, and ultimately I think this is because the fans guilty of this either didn't read the Deadpool comics and only know the movie or game, or they chose to read the comics through a straight washed lense, assuming all "gayness" is a joke.

It's made prominently clear in Deadpool/Spider-Man that Wade is probably in love with Spidey based on his actions, and truly every single interaction with him leaves more evidence to support this idea, especially when you look at his relationship with Shiklah and how not-good it was in comparison to his much healthier dynamic with Peter. Even with the knowledge of the ridiculous Peter Parker Policy (that states Peter Parker must always be portrayed as a straight white man in canon despite him being the embodiment of the underdog), one cannot deny Wade is attracted to Peter canonically. The only thing in the way of them being a pair is that they're both men and Marvel is too cowardly to make one of their most famous and family oriented characters queer, and that fans who aren't queer actively ignore the obvious subtext and narrative value of the Wade/Peter dynamic in the comics. Marvel has doubled down on this with the MCU by making Peter Parker WAYYYYY younger than Wade than he actually is in the comics (don't ship MCU spideypool folks, that's gross. Comics only. MCU Spider-Man is far too young even at 18), making it now impossible for us to see this dynamic on screen, because they're only capable of giving queer representation when it comes with an R rating, apparently (and they really didn't do that w Deadpool either tbh they stated that he's pansexual in some trailers but never showed much queerness in the films at all, even with Ryan Reynolds wanting to focus on Wade having a boyfriend at some point, it hasn't come to fruition bc Marvel is too scared to lose their rabid straight fans).

The same erasure can be seen in Venom, in relation to Eddie Brock and his undeniably queer relationship with the genderless, masculine presenting alien living in his body. 

Eddie and Venom are portrayed and referred to as if they're married, Venom himself states that their bond is equivalent to a marriage, and Eddie calls Venom "love". Yet again, this is ignored by edgier straight fans who refuse to see the blatant truth about the characters. 

Venom drops everything to be with Eddie, his purpose in life itself. He chooses Eddie over his biological purpose and has repeatedly been shown to do ANYTHING to stay with him, never wanting to be apart from Eddie. 

After the release of Venom 2018 this relationship is receiving spotlight again, but not without pushback. Many fans seem to have the impression that this relationship is fan generated and accuse shippers of "hamfisting gay shit into everything" when in reality they're the ones hamfisting straightness where there is none, and erasing the canon in order to fit their personal interpretation, the very thing they accuse queer fans of doing. The same thing happens with Spideypool, with Stucky, with Symbrock, with Loki and Venom's nonbinary genders, with every LGBTQ+ hero or character in Marvel this can be seen as a pervasive problem. The elitist nerds who go out of their way to delegitimize other fans are often the least fluent in the source material they claim to defend.

This is both a result of toxic fandom, and of badly managed representation on the part of Marvel as a company. I'm by no means an authority on all things Marvel, but as a queer fan of Marvel properties, I feel this needs to be said.

[thewebcomicsreview]

Do you have a theory about what drama befell Homestuck 2, or if there was any drama at all to cause it to seemingly go down?

I had no clue, but Andrew Hussie posted his explanation on Patreon, which is a public post so I’ll just quote the whole thing here:

Homestuck^2 is going to be completed, but the Patreon will not be charging patrons anymore. The account will be frozen and no additional patrons will be accepted, but the ones currently registered are welcome to stay and receive notifications about the future of this project if the team is inclined to post any.

The plan now is to have HS^2 finished, but without a regular update schedule. Previously saved Patreon funds will be used to privately commission the team to finish the story. It will all be posted at once when it is finished, and there will be no updates until this happens. I expect that it will take a long time to finish the story. This is because I am specifically instructing the team to work slowly.

I originally agreed to let this project move forward entirely based on the presumption that it would be an enjoyable experience for the team involved. It's not like I had a burning need to release a continuation of the narrative, or a formal "sequel", which is never how I viewed this arc. The project mostly came about because I picked up on the enthusiasm the original creative group had for the idea, and I also sensed that energy was being reciprocated by the particular state of the fandom at the time. But since then I've observed it's been pretty far from an enjoyable experience for the team due to the way the members have been treated by large segments of the fandom, and this pattern appeared to surface almost immediately after the project launched.

This put me in a state of conflict about the project ever since, because I like the content quite a bit. Some have lamented that it doesn't feel much like the original series, but it was never supposed to. I've never once invited anyone to work on a Homestuck project with the hope they would perfectly clone my style or approach to making content. I feel that is neither possible nor desirable. So any time I invite anyone the only real standard I want them to meet is to bring their own voice and perspective to the work even if, or sometimes especially, this results in significant departures from the expectations for the characters fans typically have. Like pretty much everything else that's been released over the last few years, I think HS^2 has satisfied that purpose very well.

So there has been conflict between liking what's being done, not wanting to waste the work or disappoint those who enjoy it, and the chronic abusive treatment the staff has received while trying to work on this story. I admit I've been at a loss on how to handle this, so I've just let it ride for a year or so. To some extent it's part of any project like this, to put stuff out there and receive criticism, and I'm sure the team understood that. But I think there's a line where criticism crosses over into more abusive expressions, and I've observed this has happened way too often.

If it were just me making it, I don't think it would even occur to me to have a problem with it, because I'm so used to wild stuff coming at me from doing this for many years prior. I view attitudes toward me very differently than those I invite for collaboration. I've done this so long hostility toward me barely even registers. If I inexplicably log onto tumblr appearing to resemble some sort of extravagant clown, make a few shitposts, and I'm met with literally thousands upon thousands of comments about feet, it's pretty easy to laugh it off because that's exactly the type of stupid shit I expected to see. I've just always worked with those types of contentious interactions in a way that is inseparable from whatever strange performance is connected with the content I happen to be making at the time. But it's a very different situation when I see stuff directed at the people I work with.

The things I see that my co-creators and friends have to read are a lot more alarming. One major problem here is the people I work with are mostly women, many are transgender, many are people of color. So the stuff they get is especially vicious, because the people giving them shit usually target the sensitive features of their identities in ways they don't with me. And I'm not just talking about obvious stuff like calling them slurs or anything. It's more that I've noticed people have clever ways of using people's identities to bully them in less conspicuously bigoted ways. They always go a little harder, a little more critical, manufacturing ways of blaming them for things they had nothing to do with. Stuff you start noticing when you've seen way too much of it. Much of this stuff even crosses into physically threatening territory. Some people I work with get multiple threats every week, and it's just become a routine part of their lives while being involved with Homestuck. All the above treatment I'm referring to is not focused on a couple  people, it covers everyone contributing to the full range of Homestuck projects over the last several years.

And I don't think that's what contributors were signing up for, or at least, I never wanted anyone who takes on official work to feel like it's an essential cost of participation. But I've never really known what to do about this, because it's very difficult to control fandom behavior, and if you ever try to police anyone's conduct it usually just backfires. The worst offenders out there almost see it as a challenge to go harder. So usually I leave these things alone, since the only alternative is pulling the plug on certain projects. Which is essentially what I'm doing here, while taking steps to make sure it gets finished in the background, because I really don't want to see the work wasted.

My only criteria for the completion of HS^2 is that whoever is involved the rest of the way just has a good time with it, and ends up feeling like they have made a good story. If the team is happy with it, then so am I, and nothing else about it matters to me. Especially not sticking to a schedule or satisfying fandom demands, whatever those even are at this point.

Since this is a post appearing on the Patreon, I should say any reference to abusive fan behavior isn't including current patrons obviously. I can only assume anyone willing to donate to the project for this long would hold a very sincere attitude about supporting this project, which I greatly appreciate and I'm sure the HS^2 team does as well.

There's probably more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now. If there's anything to add later I may address it in an internal note to patrons (remember that if you want to remain a patron you will never be charged again). I'll consider ways to thank the patrons for hanging in there all this time and supporting the team. Maybe some free stuff. We all appreciate your support. —Andrew

[rosemary-is-in-pesterquest]

literally I was watching someone's playthrough of pesterquest as it was being released, and I almost finished it, but then I got spoiled for the fact that Ult Dirk shows up, and it totally knocked me off the wagon. like I've had it in my head that eventually I'll go watch Dirk's content, but it's been so long since I watched everything else... by this point it'd be kinda disjointed to even do that.

also, I was weirdly irritated by MSPAR in pesterquest? I found them so charming in hiveswap, because they were characterized as kind of a bumbling, overeager and well intentioned traveler that just wanted to help. but in pesterquest they get all know-it-all ish... it's reeeeeeally off putting. like I could forgive them being confused or disheartened, but they went a step too far and got all cynical and been-there-done-that, and gave a lot of advice that just wasn't good? as if they were some sort of expert or something. it makes pesterquest kind of irritating because you play as an irritating audience surrogate character who does shit that you don't actually want to do.

like, okay, Eridan's route, right? at the end, the advice MSPAR gave was basically "stop being an asshole" which is like... warranted and fair? but first of all, this Eridan needs different advice than homestuck's Eridan! and second, would a real asshole actually take advice like that? it's so... basic.

Eridan is a character that I'm not super attached to, but I get peeved when people get him wrong. in homestuck, the thing that Eridan needs, is to realize that if he wants something from another person, he has to try not to be a leech about it. everything is all about his perspective all the time. when he wants something, he'll ask, but if he doesn't get it, he'll whine and beg, and if people get mad at him for doing that, he gets all self deprecating and bemoans how hopeless his situation is, and how much everyone hates him. like he'll literally annoy one person into getting fed up with him, just so he can go cry to another person about his problems, and ask them for advice that he probably won't even take, because getting attention was the point, and this is technically what he wanted anyway. and the more people catch on and get frustrated, the more fuel he has for his "everybody hates me" pity party.

and the interesting thing about Eridan is that all of this probably comes from a real worry that nobody could like him, even if he tried. I mean, most of his friends are lower on the hemospectrum, and have a systemic reason to hold some sort of resentment towards him. so like, he probably likes Feferi because the two make an appropriate match class-wise... but he also probably likes her because she's his only friend that is more privileged than he is, so she can't hold his status against him.

also, pesterquest leans into that old fanon thing where Eridan is indiscriminately desperate and will date anyone. like... no! originally, Eridan specifically wanted to fill all of his quadrants! he wanted a matesprit (Feferi), a kismesis (Vriska), an auspistice (Kanaya), and a moirail (possibly Karkat). and not only that, but he wanted these specific people to fill these specific roles for him unconditionally and without conflict, in spite of their actual feelings. Feferi doesn't want to date him... she doesn't even really want to be his moirail because she's doing all the emotional labor and it's exhausting. and Kanaya had a red crush on Vriska at the time... the last thing she wants is to be auspistice-zoned! meanwhile, Vriska is becoming less and less interested in Eridan anyway because she's got her own unhealthy fascinations with certain people. so like, Kanaya wouldn't even be acting as a proper auspistice anyway... she wouldn't be helping to calm a volatile rivalry, she'd be trying to force a lackluster relationship to continue. that's like, the opposite of how it's supposed to be!

literally the only one of these that might've worked is Karkat as his moirail, because Karkat is amazing at giving advice, and dealing with difficult people's bullshit without getting sucked into too much drama. but like... that's probably the one relationship out of all of these that started from genuine charisma between two people, rather than Eridan deciding who he wanted to pursue based on a checklist of socially advantageous qualities. at least with that, it's implied that Karkat also likes talking to Eridan... like, both of them are getting something out of this. in all other cases, Eridan isn't even in it for the romance. he's in it to gain validation by living up to a societal standard.

it's only after our 12 trolls end up on the meteor after their SGRUB session that Eridan starts getting all weird about dating people other than the specific four he was already interested in. and that's specifically because there are now only 12 trolls left that exist. these people are the only ones left, so if he can't get a relationship to work with any of them, that's that. so basically, when pesterquest characterizes him this way, even though he still lives on a fully populated Alternia... why is he acting like that?

Eridan needs to learn how to actually put something into a relationship that he wants to get something out of. and to do that, he needs to believe that he has value beyond his status, and that it's possible for people to be motivated by more than class politics and spite. he treats people exploitatively because he expects them to try and exploit him just as badly... it's not just about fixing bad behavior. it's about him learning to put in work, and give another person reasons to like him, without feeling like a sucker for conceding any ground. the more defensive he gets, the worse he is.

and pesterquest messed up Jake's route too! what is it about hope players that stumps people like this?? I get that Jake is tricky, but jeez... I won't get into it as much, but Jake is always masking what he really feels, and the way his route handles him makes him seem like he's acting equally neutrally friendly to each of the other alpha kids. but then it implies that his true feelings are that he considers all three of his friends' romantic interest in him to be equally serious, and equally unwanted. that is... blatantly untrue. he knows Roxy might find him attractive but won't make a genuine move on account of Jane. she literally drunkenly told him so. and Roxy also drunkenly told Jake that Jane likes him. meanwhile, he also pretty much knows that Dirk had a crush on him when they were kids, but back then he kind of shut it down, or at least sent mixed signals, because he wasn't confident about having a crush on a boy. now Dirk himself is not confident that Jake actually likes him, and is trying to back off because he feels like his younger self was overly aggressive, but the AR is still as brazen as Dirk used to be when pursuing Jake, so it kind of undermines that attempt. still, Jake feels like he might've already come off poorly to Dirk. he does like him though... and he knows that Jane has a crush on him, and doesn't want to be the one who disappoints her, so he weasels his way out of addressing it. that is the deal with the alpha kids. not Jake just kind of bemoaning the fact that all of his friends are in love with him and he's not down for anything. so once again, we see a pesterquest route written on the basis of mistaken assumptions.

sorry for going on and on and on... I just find all of this so frustrating. half the characters are only the fan interpretations of themselves, and MSPAR sucks, and the meta is confusing, and... I wish it was good but it's not.

I love you for this ask anon, I never played friendsim but I did see a lot of people who tuned into all the friendsims express annoyance over the way Reader was portrayed in pesterquest. I can't even remember what happened in the Jake route bc I'm tired but it definitely could've been better.

Imo, best alpha kid routes go from: Roxy, Jane, Jake, and Dirk (half his route wasn't even dedicated to him lol rip)

[ardenttheories]

I think I may have said this before, but if not, let me say it here now:

One of the biggest reasons people dislike Homestuck^2, beyond how unsatisfying it is to read unless you’re really into the metanarrative complexities and connecting all the little dots, is that it doesn’t host the feeling of Homestuck anymore.

Homestuck was written with the fans in mind. Hussie had us front and centre first and foremost, especially during the first few years of Homestuck’s creation. At no point were we not involved, even when we could no longer include any of our suggestions because the fandom was simply too big for him to pick one. 

We can all agree that there’s a point where Homestuck stopped being written “for us”. There was just a point at which it didn’t quite hit the same way, but it was still Homestuck, and they were still characters we loved, and to some degree we were still involved. Even at some of the worst times, we were there. We can definitely say there are some parts we disliked, and some things that didn’t quite hit right, but overall we can still look at Homestuck as something worthwhile. Something that we still love even four years after its conclusion. Something we can still reread and produce content for.

But when Homestuck was over? When the main story had finished? When the Epilogues were released? That’s when it really stopped being “for us”. That’s when they stopped caring how we felt about the characters, what we wanted, what would hit right for us. The Epilogues were meant to hurt. They were meant to play with our connection to this story, to these characters, and they - for a lot of people - went a step too far. They were heavy. And while the metanarrative stuff was interesting, and there’s so much we can get out of it as theorists and literature students and writers, for the normal fan? The everyday content consumer? There’s nothing enjoyable to get out of reading the Epilogues. Everything is tinged with bitterness. 

This brings us back to Homestuck^2. 

Homestuck^2 was touted to have a base storyline that could change - and would change - with fandom involvement. That they’d pay attention to us and would include us in the writing process again. In other words, it was going to be like early Homestuck. We were going to be a fundamental part of something we love. This was the chance for it to feel like Homestuck used to - and, maybe, for us to get something enjoyable out of the Epilogues. 

But what’s happened instead? More and more of Homestuck^2 is coming out, and every time there is a flurry of posts detailing how much people hate it. How it hurts. How they don’t understand what the fuck is going on with these characters. How it’s just a bit too far. 

Every time I tell people who don’t read Homestuck^2 what happens, I don’t get a response of “oh shit, I gotta catch up!”. I get “oh thank fuck I decided not to read it”.

This is not the response of a fandom that feels they are part of a writing process. This is not the response of a fandom that is enjoying what’s happening as much as they did with the original piece of media. This feels like a fandom watching a train wreck; horrified, uncomfortable, but unable to look away. 

Does this feel like a story being influenced by fandom voice? When a majority of the fandom is uncomfortable with what they’re reading? When a fair portion of the fandom has outright stopped reading? No. It doesn’t. 

This is another story being written without thought for the fandom. Arguably, this is being written against the fandom. There’s just so much that is inherently unenjoyable. And when the original text was founded on fandom interaction... this just doesn’t vibe the same. 

I get that there’s the argument that this is like the Marvel comics multiverse. That there’s different authors, different series, and that at the end of the day, you as the reader hold authority over which you like, which you see as canon. But this isn’t that. 

This is an actual continuation of Homestuck. This is “what comes after”. You can’t consider this the same as bringing out a new series of Spiderman - because this is the Hussie-approved followup of the original story. This is partly the story he wrote. 

You know what would have been more like the Marvel comics argument? Paradox Space. Multiple authors writing equally canonical and noncanonical comics that are hosted within the same universe as Homestuck, but aren’t involved in the original, core story. No one PS comic is the true “continuation” of Homestuck. But Homestuck^2 is. 

You quite literally can’t cut that tie. You can’t state that this isn’t the official continuation of Homestuck when it’s written by Andrew Hussie and the official writing team under him. You can’t disconnect that Hussie Seal of Approval from Homestuck^2. You can’t cut that influence that this is how Homestuck goes on.

Trying to tell us that “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” just doesn’t fly. It doesn’t give the writers a right to speak out against an unhappy fandom. It doesn’t give them a right to do worse things and then be angered or upset when we don’t like it. “This isn’t something you have to read” doesn’t work when we’re all avidly aware that this is what Homestuck is now. That it’s completely out of our hands, and there’s nothing we can do about it because the writers aren’t upholding their end of the “we’re listening and co-writing with the fandom” bargain. That it isn’t a Marvel comics situation. 

Homestuck^2 is Homestuck. There’s no two ways about it. But it fails to hit every note of what made Homestuck the wonderful cult classic it is, because it fails to take into account the fandom in a text that is historically untangleable from the fandom. 

[trilies]

Homestuck^2 will continue on; Hussie’s letter on Patreon

Homestuck^2 is going to be completed, but the Patreon will not be charging patrons anymore. The account will be frozen and no additional patrons will be accepted, but the ones currently registered are welcome to stay and receive notifications about the future of this project if the team is inclined to post any.

The plan now is to have HS^2 finished, but without a regular update schedule. Previously saved Patreon funds will be used to privately commission the team to finish the story. It will all be posted at once when it is finished, and there will be no updates until this happens. I expect that it will take a long time to finish the story. This is because I am specifically instructing the team to work slowly.

I originally agreed to let this project move forward entirely based on the presumption that it would be an enjoyable experience for the team involved. It's not like I had a burning need to release a continuation of the narrative, or a formal "sequel", which is never how I viewed this arc. The project mostly came about because I picked up on the enthusiasm the original creative group had for the idea, and I also sensed that energy was being reciprocated by the particular state of the fandom at the time. But since then I've observed it's been pretty far from an enjoyable experience for the team due to the way the members have been treated by large segments of the fandom, and this pattern appeared to surface almost immediately after the project launched.

This put me in a state of conflict about the project ever since, because I like the content quite a bit. Some have lamented that it doesn't feel much like the original series, but it was never supposed to. I've never once invited anyone to work on a Homestuck project with the hope they would perfectly clone my style or approach to making content. I feel that is neither possible nor desirable. So any time I invite anyone the only real standard I want them to meet is to bring their own voice and perspective to the work even if, or sometimes especially, this results in significant departures from the expectations for the characters fans typically have. Like pretty much everything else that's been released over the last few years, I think HS^2 has satisfied that purpose very well.

So there has been conflict between liking what's being done, not wanting to waste the work or disappoint those who enjoy it, and the chronic abusive treatment the staff has received while trying to work on this story. I admit I've been at a loss on how to handle this, so I've just let it ride for a year or so. To some extent it's part of any project like this, to put stuff out there and receive criticism, and I'm sure the team understood that. But I think there's a line where criticism crosses over into more abusive expressions, and I've observed this has happened way too often.

If it were just me making it, I don't think it would even occur to me to have a problem with it, because I'm so used to wild stuff coming at me from doing this for many years prior. I view attitudes toward me very differently than those I invite for collaboration. I've done this so long hostility toward me barely even registers. If I inexplicably log onto tumblr appearing to resemble some sort of extravagant clown, make a few shitposts, and I'm met with literally thousands upon thousands of comments about feet, it's pretty easy to laugh it off because that's exactly the type of stupid shit I expected to see. I've just always worked with those types of contentious interactions in a way that is inseparable from whatever strange performance is connected with the content I happen to be making at the time. But it's a very different situation when I see stuff directed at the people I work with.

The things I see that my co-creators and friends have to read are a lot more alarming. One major problem here is the people I work with are mostly women, many are transgender, many are people of color. So the stuff they get is especially vicious, because the people giving them shit usually target the sensitive features of their identities in ways they don't with me. And I'm not just talking about obvious stuff like calling them slurs or anything. It's more that I've noticed people have clever ways of using people's identities to bully them in less conspicuously bigoted ways. They always go a little harder, a little more critical, manufacturing ways of blaming them for things they had nothing to do with. Stuff you start noticing when you've seen way too much of it. Much of this stuff even crosses into physically threatening territory. Some people I work with get multiple threats every week, and it's just become a routine part of their lives while being involved with Homestuck. All the above treatment I'm referring to is not focused on a couple  people, it covers everyone contributing to the full range of Homestuck projects over the last several years.

And I don't think that's what contributors were signing up for, or at least, I never wanted anyone who takes on official work to feel like it's an essential cost of participation. But I've never really known what to do about this, because it's very difficult to control fandom behavior, and if you ever try to police anyone's conduct it usually just backfires. The worst offenders out there almost see it as a challenge to go harder. So usually I leave these things alone, since the only alternative is pulling the plug on certain projects. Which is essentially what I'm doing here, while taking steps to make sure it gets finished in the background, because I really don't want to see the work wasted.

My only criteria for the completion of HS^2 is that whoever is involved the rest of the way just has a good time with it, and ends up feeling like they have made a good story. If the team is happy with it, then so am I, and nothing else about it matters to me. Especially not sticking to a schedule or satisfying fandom demands, whatever those even are at this point.

Since this is a post appearing on the Patreon, I should say any reference to abusive fan behavior isn't including current patrons obviously. I can only assume anyone willing to donate to the project for this long would hold a very sincere attitude about supporting this project, which I greatly appreciate and I'm sure the HS^2 team does as well.

There's probably more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now. If there's anything to add later I may address it in an internal note to patrons (remember that if you want to remain a patron you will never be charged again). I'll consider ways to thank the patrons for hanging in there all this time and supporting the team. Maybe some free stuff. We all appreciate your support. —Andrew

[bettsfic]

do you know anything about like, the development of the purity rhetoric that now seems to be ubiquitous in fandom and how it got there? i used to be on tumblr in like, 2014 and only recently came back to fandom and i remember everyone being generally kind of cool with things like incest ships and morally grey characters (speaking specifically re the frozen fandom and elsa/anna here lmao) whereas now it seems like the conversation about those things has drastically shifted and i am..puzzled by it

this is what i imagine that experience was like for you:

according to fanlore, purity culture started in the homestuck fandom which. based on what i know of homestuck, that tracks. however i’ve never been in homestuck so i’m not sure what that transformation was like. all i know is my personal experience with the disk horse. afaik there’s no cohesive timeline of events across fandom, and i lack the time and resources to be able to make one myself. if anyone knows of one, or wants to make one, please let me know.

i do know that purity culture is a movement started by very young teenagers, who were maybe 13-15 in 2014 and are now 18-20. they were 8-10 when ao3 was founded, and therefore seem to have a limited knowledge of fan history, censorship, and critical thinking. i’m hoping that since they’re now entering college, they’ll get some insight and broader social awareness, and this movement will finally die out in the next few years. 

on any other platform, at any other time, their toxic rhetoric would not have gained traction. but here and now, on tunglr dot com where anyone can gain a platform, where mob mentality thrives and inciting an anonymous dogpile is as easy as hitting Post, where the brokenness of this place makes it difficult to control the content you’re exposed to -- it’s the perfect storm. we live in an age of hopelessness. young people grow up with social media as an extension of their identities, tethered to devices that hold all the information in the world. i think it’s fair for them to be afraid of their futures, and i can understand the desire to control the online spaces where they have the most agency, where their voices are the loudest. 

that may explain why, but not how. as in, where did they pick up this mentality at all? @freedom-of-fanfic (whose work is a necessity in understanding the disk horse) connected anti-shipping to TERF rhetoric. i’ve linked the fanlore page because it has all of the links and some of the responses. i honestly do believe that the language surrounding purity culture has its ugly roots in TERFdom. at its core, purity culture -- the policing of female and queer sexuality -- is misogyny. 

when i started writing destiel circa 2014, fandom was as you described. wincest was a juggernaut on par with destiel. teen wolf was full of underage and noncon. a/b/o was on the rise. it seemed like fandom was a genre without restraint -- anything you wrote, if it found the right audience, would be celebrated unabashedly. people who have been following me for a long time know that i was addicted to adderall at the time and pounding out all sorts of manic nonsense. i remember living on the validation of comments (and at the time, there were lots of comments. not so much anymore, but that’s another story). i got critical comments only rarely, and they were the type that i admired -- readers without judgment thinking through the story, reacting to it earnestly. i made some of my best friends because they left long, critical comments on my work. sometimes they didn’t like it, sometimes they did, but ultimately, they were engaged, and that’s what counted.

i remember my first policing-type comment, i think at the start of all the purity nonsense. it was a destiel fic, and someone very angrily told me i should tag my bottom!cas because it was triggering. i’ve thought about that comment a lot over the years. top/bottom discourse is nothing new, but to say that bottom castiel is triggering? that was ridiculous. but then i realized -- there was a writer in fandom at the time i won’t name, who was known for being extremely sensitive (for bottom!cas especially, which they found triggering), and their very dedicated following offered fic that was safe for their fave to read. i have nothing against this person at all. they were not part of the purity discourse, they were up front about their sensitive nature, and as far as i knew (i believe i met them at a con once?) they were very kind. 

but that commenter had been clearly influenced by this person and believed that a specific fictional character receiving anal sex from another specific fictional character was actual, real triggering content, and it was my obligation as a writer to tag for it. which i did, because i felt bad, and i was baffled by that request. at the time, i wanted more than anything to be liked, and conformed wherever i could. if i got such a request now, i would ignore it because it was rudely written and honestly kind of bonkers. i’d happily add a tag for something i may have missed, or even something i’d never considered before, but there’s no reason a person can’t make that request politely. 

this situation isn’t about purity discourse proper (the commenter didn’t tell me not to write the fic, and it had nothing to do with morality), but it’s the earliest example i can think of where the process of policing had occurred: a person of influence on tumblr affected their follower’s thinking, and that follower felt entitled to command another writer to conform to that ideology.

i could be completely wrong about making these connections. maybe that commenter truly believed bottom!cas was a legitimate widespread trauma. they did not say the fic was triggering to them, but that it might be to some other people, in the same way purity police say “think of the CHILDREN” when in fact they don’t give a fuck about children at all. 

after destiel i moved to stucky, which was, at the time, a juggernaut ship where anyone could write anything. this was also the time when the term “cinnamon roll” became incredibly popular, circa 2015. it was a fun and seemingly innocuous meme, but it positioned the ideas of “purity” and “wholesomeness” in sharp relief, and cemented these ideas by beginning to give it a distinct vocabulary. “trash” was pitched as its opposite. stucky is where i first came into contact with “antis.” in destiel, there had been ship wars, sure, but it was of a different flavor than antis. destiel vs wincest wasn’t about morality in 2014. it was about everything but.

in stucky in 2015, however, the disk horse was running rampant. the MCU had a sub-section of fandom called HTP (hydra trash party) in which steve and/or bucky have dubious or nonconsensual relations with various or many members of hydra. this is the first time i remember being aware of morality becoming a cornerstone of shipping. HTP was loathed by purity police. by the time i wrote a stucky bdsm au, i’d accumulated multiple nasty anons, rude comments from entitled readers, and other nonsense that all said the same thing: your filth is not welcome here in our space of purity. go away.

but the release of the force awakens is what really turned the tide. TFA offered three major ships: stormpilot (as it was called at the time, now finnpoe), reylo, and kylux. the fandom that developed around the sequels was firmly divided. franzeska wrote an amazing meta about this phenomenon which gives some insight into the seeds of purity policing. in short, stormpilot should have been the primary pairing of the sequels, but instead many of the badwrong writers from other fandoms (and HTP specifically, which was how i entered the fandom) flocked to the blank slate of kylux. 

it took a long time for the ship to gain traction. a friend told me that kylux had started with angry star wars racists who hated that there was diversity in the sequel trilogy. and i told them no, i was there, there were twelve of us and a cornchip, and all we cared about was the dirty/darkly comedic potential of these two ridiculous villain characters in one of the biggest franchises of all time. it wasn’t that complicated. i don’t mean to dismiss the discussion of race in fandom; i think it’s important to acknowledge that racism, as franzeska describes far better than i can, plays a huge part in fandom, particularly in star wars, and it’s an important and ongoing discussion to be having, especially given what kelly marie tran has gone through, and how it affected (presumably) rose tico’s extremely limited presence in TROS.

the early fics of kylux weren’t particularly taboo. they were post-TFA hurt/comfort mostly, then slowly the bdsm and power dynamics crept in. those of us who wanted to get away from purity discourse had finally found a new home. for a while. 2016 was the golden era of kylux. we were all very happy.

i remember talking to a friend about how there were certain things i couldn’t write in certain ships. being from ye olden days of fandom, she was appalled by this idea, and told me i could write anything for any ship i wanted, wasn’t that was the whole point of transformative works? and i agreed! but i tried to explain, if you post badwrong for a fandom of purity police, you’re going to, at best, get dogpiled in your comments/inbox. at worse they will find you, call your employer, and try to ruin your life. people will tell you to kill yourself. they’ll report your tumblr and try to get your blog shut down. there are real-life, harrowing consequences to writing taboo fic, and many who write fic as a hobby don’t have the emotional energy to field these risks.

around this time, discord became popular, which offered a private space for badwrong writers to congregate. i had started grad school and didn’t have much time to write fic. metoo was happening. tromp got elected. kylux was slowly turning mainstream so a lot of us turned our attention to gradence in fantastic beasts. some went on to hannibal and other fandoms that hadn’t yet caught the attention of purity police (but it was, as it is now, just a matter of time). kylux, i feel, was specifically decimated by a single fan creator, who was like a police chief. they would get wind of someone writing underage or noncon and write a call-out post about them, and that writer/artist would get pitchforked. a few times, my comments or posts got screencapped, and posts were written urging people to stop reading my works because of how heinously immoral i was. this happened to several of my friends too. 

the great tumblr tittyban of 2017 happened, which only added fuel to the fire and further legitimized the purity movement. i shifted hesitantly to the 100 fandom, which seemed small in comparison to supernatural, marvel, and star wars. i thought it was a chill place. i was wrong; it was just as toxic as other fandoms. but i also didn’t care anymore, and i appreciated that i was mostly left alone. more importantly, i found a lot of support from other people who were as tired of the purity as i was, and @the100kinkmeme was reborn. 

the state of things is pretty abysmal. there are some really amazing writers out there writing under multiple sock accounts, keeping their fandom identities shattered so as not to call attention to themselves. as much as i understand why writers do that, and i respect that decision, i also think it’s sad. it deprives readers the chance to read that author’s other works. it limits the sense of community and our ability to make friends. it fractures the future of the genre.

what’s most important to acknowledge is that none of this is happening solely in fandom. i went to a writers’ conference where 2 of 3 panels were about the history of moral policing and censorship in art. it is worth noting that of the 40-ish visiting writers on faculty, only one (1) was a woman of color (jaimaica kincaid). naturally, older rich white people who have spent their life in the arts are all about death of the author, separation of art and artist. they’re on the total opposite side of purity police, and they won’t acknowledge at all that racism and sexism are a problem in the creative world. they don’t have any nuance on the discussion, or modern perspectives in light of metoo or popular culture. 

this went on longer than i anticipated. i neglected to mention YFIP (your fave is problematic) an old blog that started the idea of call-out culture by pulling receipts on celebrities, and how call-out culture led to cancel culture, which also aided in the purity disk horse. i think a lot can be said about how some of this stuff is genuinely good (metoo and holding men accountable for their bullshit) while also being profoundly toxic (punishing criminals via mob mentality, ruining their careers and livelihoods through social media, rather than giving them their due process in court. i understand it -- the judicial system is built by the hands of the very predators we seek to condemn, but still. the jury of the internet is never a fair trial). 

if you want to read more, my tag is tsatp (the sacred and the profane). i’m sure i’ve left out a lot, but i can only speak to my experience. i think it would be good if people would share their experience dealing with purity policing, too, so we might get a cohesive timeline in place. feel free to reblog and add your story.

[noro-noro-noro]

dream about darkest dungeon characters living in my mom’s house & also aliens

had a dream the darkest dungeon characters were staying at my mom's house for some reason &none of them would look at me or talk to me they would just sleep in the guest room & come downstairs & eat cereal. i liked having them around though I tried to be extra nice to them & was planning on making little origami things for them before they left, but it was raining really heavily & they all went outside & vanished. i know at least 2 were fighting enemies. i walked around my neighborhood with my sister to look for them & 2 of them had found a kitten but they know my mom doesn't like pets so they were at a neighbor's house in the garage with it. the rest were straight up gone. these other guys came back when the rain stopped, but my sister & I wanted to finish the walk, but the neighborhood layout changed & we got lost. someone was building a dance studio 3 feet behind a house in the middle of the night & all the houses were close crammed together.

woke up due to a spam cal & went back to bed. something about friendly aliens that dismas specifically was trying to help, & we ran into him. i was excited to see him & gave him a paper bug & he explained what was going on & that we needed to go to X location. he started driving my car but he's never driven a car since he's from the darkest dungeon universe & those don't exist there, so he ran 2 red lights & the cops started chasing us & I was like "oh my god this is gonna show up on MY record since I'm in the car right now & it belongs to me but he doesn't have a license oh my god they're gonna take my fucking car" & dismas heard & did some really bonkers moves like turning the car 180 degrees & ramping up rhe side kf the road & we did manage to Los the police temporarily. we got out of the car & started walking to the sci-fi mansion thing that we had to go to & there were policemen riding past us on comically small bikes. we tried to look innocent. I needed the blood ritual for something so dismas cut his shoulder & put the blood on the ??? & then somehow the sidewalk moved out from under us so we were standing in this one older man in a blue striped bathrobe holding his small brown daschund like a handbag. we were standing in his "Rose grass" & he was talking to a cop. the street was gone & it was suddenly a barbed wire fence in front of us blocking off some grass. the house area ended up turning into a weird metal art piece. dismas jumped the fence when the cop was distracted, but my sister & I aren't that athletic, so we just kind of stood there smiling and nodding trying to appear innocent. he finally went for is though &I ducked under the fence & dropped my "Homestuck card"?????? it was a piece of laminated cling wrap with green stripes???? under the fence. the cop tackled the fence over. suddenly I could shapeshift & ???? dismas came back & we were dodging around the weird metal spikes with my sister & I turned into a bug & they tried to flick me out of here so one person would get away, but I crawled off the fingerfor some reason ??? anyway then I turned into tiny metang & they got me but I was so intent that I started using ???magnet power??? to attract all metal things in the area so the other two were able to sneak. then it was nighttime, the moon was full, & we were in the mall where the decorative plants revealed themselves as 5 huge alien tentacles ready to release the young through the glass roof (which was politely opening) & into space. i woke up but I knew that the cops would have shot at it

[alastanor]

To start, I would like to thank @cis-het-angel-kinnie for bringing this video to my attention, even if it was to praise the video rather than to point out it's flawed arguments against Charlie for main character.

If you have not seen the video yet, I recommend giving it a watch prior to reading this or you may be confused.

Click to read more...

What Is A Protagonist?

I am not bringing up this question because I think the source used was incorrect. However, the statement that "protagonists ask questions and antagonists make arguments" is an oversimplification of both roles. And I am going to explain why.

The trope of protagonist vs antagonist is an age old theme which has been used countless times throughout storytelling's history in books, plays, films, and story-driven video games. As such, the definition of both roles has continued to flourish and evolve over time. It is no longer good vs evil.

While @diregentleman used books written by, I assume, published writers for his argument, I am going to use Creative Writing and Literary Experts from a Masterclass article.

In the article, a protagonist is described as this:

"In storytelling, a protagonist is the main character or principal character or group of characters in a story."

More than one character is capable of being an antagonist in this story. Given that demons are meant to be redeemed, fitting the theme of the story, it is fair to surmise that all (or the majority of) the demons surrounding Charlie are protagonists in some form.

The article goes on to state that the protagonist's goals reflect the overall story goals and the plot moves forward based on their decisions.

This being said, Charlie's overall goal reflects the premise of the story, that being that Hazbin Hotel is a story about redemption. This is a goal that Angel Dust does not have.

In DireGentleman's video, he claims Angel Dust joined the Happy Hotel with the intention of being redeemed, albeit skeptical whether it could actually be done. This is actually inaccurate, and we see this in both the pilot and the comic.

Angel does display skepticism straight from the gate, but when they explain their reason for approaching him (that no one else has agreed), he makes this face:

Does that really look like someone who believes redemption may be possible? But for further establishment of just how little Angel believes redemption is possible, Angel also laughs them off and calls their goal "lame."

The only reason Angel agrees to Charlie and Vaggie's proposition is because it is a rent free place to stay. He admits as much just a bit further into the comic. By the end, Angel says "Redemption, it's silly. Huh, Nuggs."

The tone we are led to believe he uses is one of contemplation and relief. Relief due likely to the fact that there is some light at the end of the tunnel to the shit situation he was in.

This is just comic evidence, of course. If we go to the pilot, when Angel is engaging in the turf war with Cherri Bomb, he explains that he is using Charlie and Vaggie for free rent. Further exemplified when he later asks if participating in the turf war meant he didn't have a free room anymore. But also in his conversation with Cherri, he also admits that he is still taking some drugs behind Charlie and Vaggie's back. Something that we see immediately toward the opening of the pilot when Angel buys a bag of Angel Dust.

Character Dynamic

I cannot emphasize this enough, the Hunicast is NOT a good exemplifier for character dynamics. Every single "character interaction" is based on fanon, not canon, and they are prompted by the fans themselves. Only Viv really knows exactly how Angel and Alastor would canonically interact. It is no better a source for character dynamic than the wiki is for accurate information. IE, some things may hold true, but the majority of it is not and it is better just to wait until it is confirmed canon.

Moving on...

There is a lot of focus on Valentino as a main antagonist, based entirely too much on the hope that Angel will be the main protagonist. And this is really just disingenuous when you consider there are two other implied Overlords, as well as several other sources of strife within the world of Hazbin Hotel.

An Antagonist is someone working against the protagonist to prevent them from achieving their goal. Alastor would not meet this criteria, as he is a self-professed observer and conflict creator. But he is not a main antagonist. Someone working against the goal of redemption could be anyone from the Overlords (which, far as we know, would include Valentino), Lucifer, or even Heaven itself.

Where antagonists come into play, quoting Masterlist once again, I think these two types of antagonists were overlooked:

A conflict-creator. An antagonist doesn’t have to be a “bad guy.” Sometimes, they’re just a character whose goals are in direct conflict with the protagonist’s, like Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Javert working to arrest Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

The protagonist themselves. The main source of conflict in a story can be from within the protagonist themselves—their shortcomings or insecurities are keeping them from reaching their goal. A prime example of this is Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. While Holden comes into conflict with many characters in the novel, the ever-present antagonizing conflict comes from his own obsessions and insecurities.

Now, why did I bring up these two types? Well! I'm glad you asked! You see, where conflict-creator comes into play would line up more with Alastor. He isn't really the bad guy, but he does create some friction where his goals meet with Charlie's. He is a professed observer, but it is strongly believed that there is something else, another goal, that he has omitted.

As for the Protagonist themselves, this lines up pretty strongly where Charlie is concerned. You could argue that it does for Angel too, but Angel's goal, as mentioned before, is not Redemption. That goal is Charlie's, and hers alone. Yet it is her naivety, inexperience, and insecurities surrounding her failures as a princess that are holding her back from achieving her goal. Going by this, not only do we have multiple protagonists, but we also have multiple antagonists.

"So far, no one else's past is wrought with tension like Angel Dust's."

Even if this wasn't a sweeping, dismissive statement made with limited information, it would still be incorrect. Why? Because each and every character in Hazbin Hotel is going to have their own story to tell. Stories that will each be as relatable and wrought with tension, the only reason we know Angel so extensively is because Viv put the most work into him. She has admitted that Alastor and Angel were characters she wrote based on past dealings and experiences she had. Let those implications sink in a bit.

Now, to further this, people don't need to empathize with a character to like them. They can sympathize as well, even if they personally cannot relate to the emotions the character is feeling.

And where Angel is concerned, he is not addicted to drugs. Angel has used drugs to escape the pain of his trauma. His response in the pilot to having his drugs stolen from him is not one of a typical addict. Which leads us to believe the drugs are simply a coping mechanism more than they are an addiction.

Real Audience for Hazbin is 12 to 16

I would really fucking hope you are joking. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that this was said by someone who isn't a parent. While yes, kids will be sneaky and watch or play things they're not supposed to, a show with drug use/abuse, rape, sex, physical/mental/emotional abuse, and suicide is as much for them as Rick and Morty.

Further, it is not just these themes that make the show for adults. It is the format of the storytelling. Yes, you can complain about what you consider issues with the pilot. But at the end of the day, it did it's job. It established the story premise, introduced important characters (Fat Nuggets does not fall in that category, calm down), gave a basic understanding of their relationships to each other, and get the audience interested in continuing the series. Considering the views for the pilot and the resulting disproportionate growth of the fandom, I would say it did that in spades.

Hazbin Hotel is not Steven Universe. I cannot say this enough times, and the reason I cannot is because I cannot tell you how many times I have come into contact with the underage side of the fandom griping about lack of lore, griping about lack of production information, and overall being exceedingly impatient. At the risk of sounding like an old miser, the underage side of the fandom has never had to wait for additions to a series. Like waiting for Homestuck updates, or the new release of a Harry Potter novel. They have had a steady schedule of content, along with shows that give exposition dumps "in the first 3 minutes."

So don't look at Hazbin Hotel through the lens of kids' show fandoms. It has so much more to offer than that.

Alastor vs Valentino

No, this is not about whether Alastor could beat up Valentino. In the video, DireGentleman pulled a huge pet peeve of mine and lumped Valentino and Alastor together, labeling them both "monsters." Which is opening a huge can of worms for me. So, I will give a brief summary of why that is wrong, and provide a link to one of my other posts for deeper diving.

So, there is a reason why Valentino is more hated than Alastor is. Lumping them together is a mistake.

Valentino is a pimp that abuses and manipulates his victims through intimidation and (implied through) some kind of addiction to the red smoke (whether that is real or symbolism is yet unknown). He takes who and what he wants, be damned the consequences or who gets hurt. He is incredibly self-serving, with no consideration for anyone else. He uses people like pawns, and when those pawns refuse to do what he wants, what does he do? He forces them to do it anyway.

By comparison, while Alastor may use his people like pawns, he also has more consideration for them and doesn't abuse them (far as we can tell). The evidence to support this is the attitude of those serving under Valentino vs those under Alastor. Niffty and Husk both seem to not have a problem with Alastor, and where Husk is concerned it seems that his attitude toward Alastor is their typical banter. But definitely nothing that displays abuse. In fact, when Husker is hesitant or even refusing to do as Alastor asks, Alastor doesn't force Husker. He offers payment in the form of something Husker genuinely likes.

Now, while some might argue this is also manipulating through addiction, one could look at it this way. However, Alastor didn't make Husker an alcoholic. That was Husker's vice to begin with, Alastor simply has no intention of fixing it. After all, Alastor has said he doesn't think anything can change a sinner.

For further explanation and delving into Alastor, click here.

Parents don't 'get' Charlie = Disney Princess

Once again, we fall upon the slippery slope of disinformed statements. While the joke was made that the princess of hell expresses herself best through song, parent issues do not equate to being something that is relatable primarily or only to kids and teens. It's kind of offensive that there is a sort or implication in this statement that adults don't have issues like insecurities surrounding their own failures, or parent issues like what Charlie has or worse. And once again, we fall into the empathize vs sympathize realm and I once again will say that the audience does not need to empathize with the protagonist to make them a good protagonist.

Charlie is a failed princess, her people don't respect her and didn't even prior to her hotel announcement. Yes, she is sheltered and naive. Likely due to how little she was able or allowed to interact with sinners. After all, her ex-boyfriend was from another hellborn family. One that, from what we can surmise, interacts rather frequently with the Magne family.

And it is because of this naivety and inexperience that her method to redeem sinners will not work.

In the video, DireGentleman states that we can pretty much assume that Charlie's redemption methods will work. But her methods, as we see in her song, is to inject demons with meds and take away/burn their vices. She is seeking immediate resolutions to problems that require therapy and a long process that should be making sinners want to change. All Charlie is currently accomplishing is earning the ire and scrutiny of her people. This is why I previously mentioned that Charlie is both protagonist and antagonist, as she is getting in her own way to accomplishing the goal of redemption. And this is where we find that Charlie meets the "starts out being wrong" requirement mentioned in the video as well as "admiring a character for trying."

Charlie is also in a perfect position to be the tour guide for us, the audience, as we observe the metamorphosis of every demon who needs to be redeemed. She is, once again, surrounded by those who need to be redeemed which means we will witness every character arc. This includes Angel, who does not need to be the central focus for us to witness his story.

Finally...

It was stated, or at least implied, that Hazbin Hotel's pilot is no longer relevant. This is a statement that pretty much leaves me puzzled. The only way it would be irrelevant is if Hazbin went in a completely different direction, and we have no reason to believe it will. Vivziepop is still creative director for Hazbin Hotel, and A24 is notorious for giving creators their creative freedom. What A24 is doing is animating, making VA regulations, and ensuring there is an air tight lid kept on the project. Especially given it's popularity in such a short amount of time.

Contrary to what DireGentleman said, Hazbin Hotel will definitely live up to it's hype. Being picked up by A24 will not compromise the show simply because it's not in the same realm of indie production that Helluva Boss is. And it's a bit unfair to Vivziepop to imply as much.

In Conclusion...

Please do a bit more digging in regards to not only the show, but everything surrounding it. Don't lump fanon and canon together and expect them to be equal sources, and please do not claim an obviously adult-audience show is more fit for children and teens.

And lastly, please do more digging to better understand media and storytelling. Reading books is great, but what you were using as the foundation for your arguments were far too simplified and vague,, given the complexity of the protagonist and antagonist roles. Overall, the video just came across as one huge helping of Angel Dust bias with a side of strong dislike for Charlie.