#silverbark jade

[agentx8d]

Silverbark and The Knightrogue

[hms-no-fun]

This is probably gonna be a longer and potentially more spicy ask than usual so apologies for that. I've been reading through the new chapters as they've been released (great stuff by the way) and I've noted the frequent switching back and forth of jade/silverbark going by her original name (jade) or her moniker/title (silverbark/harbinger silverbark ) depending on who she is currently talking to, the nature of her relations with the person and the context of the conversation. One example being her last conversation with karkat at the end of the latest chapter. This along with the nature of deunistic radiation you mentioned previously and the theme of divergence/character divergence throughout this series so far, makes me wonder if eventually we may reach a point where she drops her original name and goes solely by her moniker/title (at least for a while anyway).

i've got two responses to this. the first is

but the second is a bit more credulous. only a bit though. yes, godfeels has given multiple characters the opportunity to change their names, and this is partially a result of my desire to get away from the iconography of homestuck so that we can focus more on unpacking the themes of homestuck while telling a more “original” story. but i’d caution against the assumption that changing one’s name is the natural endpoint of self-actualization in godfeels.

is silverbark plural? is jade a mask she puts on around other people? is what we see in A1 the code-switching of an autist or a manipulator? these are excellent questions to be asking! but on the matter of names as such, let’s remember that silverbark is thousands of years old. a name change and gender realization is one thing for 22-year-old june egbert because she’s young and inexperienced. we see “june” as the hatched egg, the evolved form, the destination. but what if we fast-forwarded another hundred years, and she’s had all that time to live and be comfortable in her own body. would she remain rooted in transfemininity? would she still feel like “june”? does one break their gender or identity once, and no more?

among the many themes in its bucket, godfeels 3 is about change. changing people, changing times, changing expectations, changing lives and homes and friendgroups... and i’ve lived long enough to see the barest jagged tip of the truth that no two people “grow up” in quite the same way. “growing up” isn’t a static thing either, it isn’t affixed to age and it’s not a one-way street nor is it a bridge you can only cross once. i tried to show this in microcosm with dare in ch8, how they keep having life-affirming epiphany after life-affirming epiphany, only to backslide and start over from a place of only minimal progress. people can get better, and then they can backslide, and then they can get better again, and on and on, and nothing is ever done until it’s dead.

all of which is to say that i’m not interested in repeatedly showing the same types of change when i’ve got such a wildly weird cast of traumatized blorbos to poke and prod at. if june’s name is her planting a flag in her own identity, then perhaps to silverbark names and titles are a means of maintaining the area around that flag? what is “mary” to kanaya, what is “risk,” what is “dare” except a shield put up around something that needs protecting? or that’s worth protecting? for different reasons, to different ends. it’s all relative.

lastly, i would also caution against looking at a character changing their name and going, “ah, denexustic radiation!” not because it’s necessarily wrong (at least according to what VV said in the ch8 epilogue), but because it’s the boring lab-coated science officer answer to a profound philosophical question. which, you know, isn’t really an answer at all. there may be times when denexus is the culprit, or at least partially, but in most cases it’s the difference between wearing a glow in the dark radon watch for a few months when you were a kid, vs airsurfing in the radiation cloud of the chernobyl nuclear disaster.

anyway, i’ll leave us on a passage from the homestuck epilogues that is very important to me:

[catgirlweed]

havent been drawing much homestuck recently

[dailysnoozygoofs]

day 14

[telltaletypist]

it pains me to say it, but i think i hate silverbark jade (in a way i think i'm kinda supposed to tbc). there's something about her unshakable all-knowing "for your own good" ethos that i find viscerally upsetting

[jaden3011]

Hi Sarah! Hope you’re telling well, weird question if I may?

The recent chapter of godfeels gave me thoughts, and I wanted to ask it here, you mentioned back in godfeels 2 part 3 that you gave the blessing to anyone to make fanfics about Jade’s adventures as silverbark, and now I’m curious: do we have your blessing to make….essentially godfeels OCs? folks that liter the alien worlds you’ve introduced off-screen or unnamed. EWL members not referenced in canon for one reason or another. Hell, if it’s not too indulgently cringe to suggest the idea, former colleagues of the newer cast like Dana or Silverbark that fell outta contact due to one way (simply fell outta touch) or another (drifted apart after the incident™️).

Apologizes if any of this is cringe, the recent chapter just gave me lot of thoughts about the idea of one and i wanted to ask.

[antediluvianapocalypse]

wolf count is for silverbark jade

[hms-no-fun]

a pause for all seasons is over

godfeels 3 part 2 begins

https://archiveofourown.org/works/44185195/chapters/111109759

[hms-no-fun]

GODFEELS UPD8 DOUBLE-HEADER WEEKEND

godfeels 3 part 2 continues! Jane delivers a speech. Roxy gets a job offer. Jake's alone-time is interrupted.

read verse 2 here

and verse 3 here

[hms-no-fun]

If Snowbound Blood exists in relation to vast error what cool visual novel would you want to do for godfeels? (Like someone in the Legion or on Earth C.)

you know, there was a while there when i really wanted to do a godfeels VN, especially after working on pesterquest and seeing how they came to together from the inside. these two PQ sprite edits always sang to me, you know?

that said, i'm not sure i ever figured out exactly what such a thing would look like before moving on from the idea. i was mostly thinking along the lines of a straight adaptation/expansion of what i'd already written, iirc?

as for what i'd do now... you know, i honestly am not sure. we've been planning EWL tie-in stuff for a long time, specifically a short story collection. but maybe a VN would be a good avenue for that as well? of course that then begs the question of assets, and yields to a logistics nightmare i'd just as soon not contemplate at the moment lmao

if i had to come up with a godfeels VN that specifically mirrors snowbound blood's relationship to vast error... honestly Adventures of Silverbark Jade might be a good candidate? get some pre-ewl Silverbark stories together to show how she grew from the Jade that left earth c to the one we know today...

OH, actually post-Bite earth c would be a great setting for a VN too. planet got violently chomped in two then put back together, and the half of the population that knows why it happened are physically incapable of explaining it to the other half. obviously that setup is WAY too juicy for me to not have plans for it in godfeels proper, but there's a lot of room there for expansion. honestly i've always really wanted to see the parodic hyper-america of epilogues earth c get put under a big microscope, to really pluck at all its contradictions.

damn it, now you've got me thinking about this

[hms-no-fun]

to me it seems that in the later chapters of godfeels it seems like you're moving away from the more character-focused drama of the previous parts towards something bigger and plot focused, with the meta stuff adding to that feeling. are you planning on making that more overt, leaving behind the heavy focus on june specifically that the early chapters had? (this isn't anything about quality, both are good, i'm just wondering)

i can't say too much about this lest i spoil some of the surprise, but...

when folks talk about godfeels they mostly talk about gf2 and june's coming out, which is fair! but gf1 is as much about jade and the guilt june feels about her as it is about june herself.

gf2 happens over the course of about a week and is localized almost entirely to a series of living rooms, and i imagine it was about as intense to read as it was to write. it was also very much june's story, which is appropriate for what is essentially a transgender coming out book.

as much as i loved writing gf2, and as proud as i am of what it did... i can't do that again. of course i COULD keep up the slice-of-life thing, come up with new challenges for june to face on earth c, keep it grounded and normal. but as a writer, that bores me. i don't like doing the same thing twice, and fundamentally i think my version of june is at her most interesting when the universe has her under pressure.

going into gf3, i knew that jade needed to play a much larger role. while narratively her transformation into silverbark is an exercise in wresting agency from the narrative, it remains true that her existence is tied to june in a profound way. so i knew that this larger cosmic story needed to feature both of them in equal measure, the unstoppable force and the immoveable object.

i've alluded in numerous places to the idea that a space opera is happening in the background of 3.1, with many hints (and, let's be real, outright obvious signposts) as to its breadth and scope. trust me when i say that i don't use the term "space opera" lightly, or with a hint of sarcasm.

what i will state outright is that godfeels has always been and will always be june eg8ert's story. but it is also the story of her sister, and her friends, and all the people they've met over their many years both together and apart. the shape that story takes will change, and then change again, and there may wind up being many different players who take center stage over the course of its as-yet indeterminate runtime... but at the end of the day, it will still be recognizably godfeels.

[hms-no-fun]

As a writer with an inclination to write their own Homestuck fanfiction, how did you figure out the world and larger events happening in the world of godfeels? (such as Epigone, or the EWL) Like how did it travel from Homestuck fanfiction into a complicated Homestuck based universe?

the single sentence explainer for how we got here is simple: i’m a dialectical materialist at heart. mild apologies right out the gate here, this answer is a real winding journey that (as per usual for these things when they become essays) might not even answer your question at all! also, i use June’s deadname a fair bit in this post just to avoid confusion as to when in her life i’m referring to, so if that’s the sort of thing that troubles you, be warned. anyway, let’s go ahead and dive in after the break:

the tonal/generic character of any fiction begins at its conception. imagine you invite a wide array of writers to reimagine or continue homestuck in any way they liked; what would a writer who loves homestuck produce, vs a writer who hates homestuck, vs a writer who thinks they can fix it, vs a writer who’s only interested in one character, vs a writer who’s only interested in themes, vs a writer who’s only interested in the lore? probably safe to say they’d all produce wildly different fics. so before we even get to the specific content of the work in question, we can already guess how the shape of a narrative might naturally flow out from the material conditions of its artist’s perspective.

this is (as you’ll certainly agree if you’ve read the chapter 8 epilogue) rather a theme in godfeels.

so, to the material conditions of my perspective: i wrote gf1 because i felt something deeply, compellingly tragic about a young definitely cisgender man with extreme depression and self-isolation issues possessing arguably the most existentially nightmarish superpower imaginable. everything godfeels is starts at this philosophical quagmire, which for me was always focalized around John and Jade, the two characters i related to the most. where John has this tremendous power and is terrified of using it, Jade has tremendous power but is actively prevented from using it in the ways she wants to. there’s an assertion by John in gf1 that the “cost” of his deal with Typheus was in fact Jade’s near-total isolation during the three year trip, which he tried to make up for but never could, and imo that’s where aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the shit 3.1 would become really has its roots. it suggests how a person with infinite power can be rendered powerless by circumstance and yet still bear the burden of their choices, and how systems compel lateral violence for the sake of their own perpetuation. that is to say, sburb (by way of Typheus) forced John to rob Jade of her agency in order to ensure the birth of a new universe, yet still he blames himself for what felt to him like a choice he made. is he wrong? i don’t know. it’s impossible to know, honestly, which is what makes it such a compelling philosophical question. you can’t put this thought to bed, because even as we all know that There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism, we also have to believe that there’s more that we could be doing, and if there’s more we could be doing then why aren’t we doing it? you chase yourself in circles trying to puzzle these things out, and the more you think about them the more they eat away at you.

it’s a pretty rote observation at this point that what makes superheroes interesting is their limitations, but i think we tend to simplify the worldbuilding possibilities of that observation down to “everyone with superpowers has to have a kryptonite.” that is to say, we’re taught that fictional strength is only as interesting as its equal & opposite weakness, as if physical power can only be compelling in fiction if it has a direct, linearly nullifying antithesis. this sucks because it just encourages everyone to write superheroes whose biggest problem is that some guy has a special gun, encourages stories exclusively focused on superheroes tracking down guys with special guns and putting them in forever jail so that the superheroes can do literally anything they want with no oversight, which is fine because naturally people in that position of power have to earn that power and would simply choose to not be evil. THIS IS EVERY MARVEL MOVIE AND I’M SICK OF IT. what interests me about homestuck as a universe is that these characters, by the end, largely have no outside limitations, no kryptonite, no guys with special guns. Dave doesn’t stop using time travel because it’s, like, bathing him in deadly radiation or whatever, he stops using time travel because it’s fucking scary and weird having to watch yourself die all the time! in homestuck, the limitations on our heroes are primarily internal, relating more to psychological and philosophical hangups than anything. the question in homestuck is rarely “if i became an all-powerful god, who would stop me?” but rather far more often “if i became an all-powerful god, would i still enjoy being alive?” selfhood is SUCH a fixation of homestuck, i think you could argue that every major plotbeat in the story is a result of someone desperately flailing for purchase beneath the crushing weight of their existential insignificance. what i found interesting about John after the homestuck credits was the thought of him having regrets about choices he made in the past, knowing he could go back and try to fix them, and (mostly) choosing not to. knowing at every turn that he could choose to live his life like a groundhog day scenario, effectively perfecting the personal lives of everyone in his orbit, and almost certainly face zero consequences for it.

the consequence that stops him is internal- the consequence of knowing that he would have given up all of his humanity for the sake of a reality he has decided to puppeteer, based on no authority other than a power he did nothing to earn and has no right to possess.

gf1 was not written with continuation in mind. gf2 was started without the intention of continuation- what i wanted initially was for each of the three parts to focus on these personal philosophical issues. how do you process your own anger and disappointment at being let down by people you trust when you can literally murder them and then unmurder them without consequence. just knowing that’s possible and not doing it would already fuck up your brain- imagine what’d happen if you actually did it! this, of course, kinda became the central question of gf2 once Dirk showed up and decided to make a mess of things. it was only in the latter stages of 2.2 that i started thinking about this cast in parallel with the epilogues, which eventually pays off in Jane’s reveal of Dirk’s unfinished ship and the Rosebot in his basement. I didn’t intend this at the time, but i should have known the instant i canonized godfeels as an offshoot of the epilogues timeline that the existential weight of that would drive me insane enough to eventually write three novels worth of prose in as many months.

but there’s one specific hypothetical thread with gf2 that always haunted me. see, my plan at the start was for June’s coming out to go poorly, which would lead her to decide that she was The Bad June and that the only way to give herself a happy life would be to retcon to her childhood and convince her preteen self that he was actually a she. but alongside this, i wanted June to take Jade with her- because again, June feels tremendous guilt over her sister’s narratively imposed loneliness and sees it as this thing she always wishes she could fix. so she would bring Jade back with her and say basically, you can go keep yourself company for a while, or find someone to be your friend. then we’d spend a lot of time rummaging over the melodrama of that, and end with June ultimately deciding not to forcefem her past self, while Jade does choose to retcon something in her own life, which would have a similar effect as the eventual Silverbark reveal in that she’d dramatically kick someone’s door down and announce herself as New And Improved Jade just in time to save the day in some sense.

obviously, elements of this made it into gf2. i’ve talked before about how the “should i retcon my gender” question ultimately turned out a lot less compelling than i expected it to be. it’s an interesting thought but when you dig down to it, especially with the mechanics of retcon as i understand them, you realize it’s kind of a pointless choice narratively because our June wouldn’t be able to experience the end result of that retcon anyway. the only reason she was able to return to the main narrative post-retcon in homestuck proper was because she replaced an apparently identical version of herself who was killed by Typheus to make room for her. what’s June gonna do, kill the version of herself who got to be a girl her whole life and take her place? i know my writing skews towards edgy sometimes but i’m not mark millar for christs sake, i do actually have standards

so, okay, let’s bring this damn thing to some kind of a point shall we?

i lay out all this shit at such length because, well, your question is a question i ask myself quite often! how the hell did we get here, anyway??? how do you get from “i have depression and i think i might be trans” to “all sentient life in the omniverse will be annihilated in a war between ideaspace and bodyspace started by Jade’s secret lost daughter”??????

but i think if you were to read gf1 and the ch8 epilogue back to back, you’d see that we really haven’t come very far at all. it STILL surprises me just how easily it all wound up slotting together- i didn’t even consult gf1 while writing the epilogue until the third draft! i think it worked out this way because the core motivation for writing this series has always been philosophical. VV’s metaphysical roadblocks to interacting with canon are just the literalized material implications of June’s existential dread at standing outside the omniverse and witnessing its paradoxical infinity. the earth being split in two and the collective cast subsequently scattered to the winds may in the moment feel like a wild leap from the relatively down-to-earth stakes of gf2-- well, no, see, i actually already disagree with this framing. i’ve joked for a long time that the progression from gf1 to gf3 is what happens when a slice of life story becomes a space opera, but that was before i really, truly understood what gf3 wanted to eventually become. now that 3.1 is conclusively finished, though, i see that the narrative trappings are merely the aesthetic window dressing of a story that really has not changed all that much from its starting point except in scope. if there has been any major thematic alteration, it’s simply in taking questions that were previously limited mostly to June’s perspective and applying them to the entire cast. so in that way, yes, the shape of the narrative has changed-- but has it? really?? because gf2 was supposed to be a story about self-actualization, but that got hijacked by a guy who wanted June to remain static and unchanged so he could use her as a weapon. gf3 was also supposed to be a story about self-actualization, and it also got hijacked by a guy who wanted June to remain static and unchanged so that it could use her as a weapon.

and gf1 was the story of someone who felt guilty for trying to compel someone else’s self-actualization instead of working on her own.

part of how we got here as well has to do with my own political evolution. i always wanted to see how June might try to build a better world, but every time she did, she got immediately sidetracked by some Plot Bullshit. it led to a lot of cool stuff, but it also frustrated me to no end! by the time we hit the moon war in 3.1, i was genuinely pulling out my own hair over the hole i’d dug myself into. i’d wanted the moon war to be kind of a parody of the boring “end of an avengers movie” style mob invasion, but instead i just sorta... wound up doing one? chapter 8, actually, was already a long-in-production logistical nightmare for me waaaaay before i’d had a single thought about ideaspace. maybe ch8 blew up the way it did in part because it allowed me to correct course and find something in the morass that genuinely compelled me. i was so stubbornly dedicated to the idea of keeping a lid on as much of Jade’s side of the story as possible, to relegate 3.1 exclusively to June’s psychodrama as the metatextual war of attrition that the audience must endure in order to get to what i thought of as The Good Stuff. but all that that really accomplished in the text, i think, was to ferry June around from existential quandary to existential quandary until the plot deigned to finally happen to her. don’t get me wrong here, i’m extremely proud of 3.1 and i don’t think it could have wound up being what it was if it hadn’t come about the way it did- once again, i’ll remind you i’m a materialist.

but that’s just it, you see? the story’s problem was my problem was our problem. June has these moments of wanting to listen to what The People have to say, of wanting to improve society somewhat, and i always INTENDED that to become one of the central pillars of this story. how can you interrogate power without spending time with those subject to that power? and on the flip side, in the gf3 prologue we see how Jade helped striking workers and fought space cops etc etc, and yet there’s a distinct unease in the accumulation of those stories, at least for me. why is this the route Jade takes? how did she get from that, and from her overall cutesy bubbly demeanor, to the cold hardened high-ranking member of what sure seems to be a cosmic private military corporation that we’ve come to know? there’s something Troubling there, just as there’s something Troubling in June’s consistent status as a plot object. they’ve almost swapped places in a way, don’t you think?

in examining these Troubles, i realized that the unifying factor was me trying to find ways for an individual to make the world a better place. having just lived through the good and the bad of CHAZ first hand (that’s the capitol hill autonomous zone btw, a political occupation that occurred here in seattle through june 2020), i knew very well that all the most impactful actions happen at the behest of organized comrades acting in solidarity with one another. this is a huge motivation behind godfeels becoming a full-cast production, because i don’t see the political dimension of this story as separate from any of its other dimensions. that is to say, just because this is a homestuck fanfic doesn’t mean i get to set my convictions aside and half-ass some uplifting gobbledygook that has no relationship with the world we live in today. i’m a materialist, damn it! the philosophy, the politics, the romance, the action, the dialogue, the formal experimentation, the character diversity, the ever-increasing scope, all of it flows out naturally from the selfsame kernel of thought which compelled its creation in the first place.

which, uh. well. here’s something andrew hussie said on formspring that i’ve found myself thinking about a lot:

“i think writing in voice is pretty simple. its mostly about consistency. choosing a set of parameters and committing to them absolutely. it can even be a shitty set of parameters and a crappy character. but if you keep hammering away at that voice, people will say, damn thats some pretty good characterization there! i mean... they might be WRONG. but theyll SAY it.

the advantage in being so obstinate with the profile you choose is then any deviation you make will be very noticeable. this is to your advantage, if you can control these deviations with purpose and precision. such deviations can serve as the pillars for character development. they cant happen without the consistency first. and ironically, without the consistency, they DO happen. for the wrong reasons. because you fucked up.

syntax is not a typical part of voice in most works but its one ive latched onto aggressively in HS and perhaps solidifies the illusion of strong voice. in fact ive become so conscious of syntax-voice, i noticed for some reason when answering these questions ive gravitated towards an ad hoc syntax, no caps, no apostrophes, otherwise punctuated. i am fearful of deviating from it. because it will mess with your heads if i do. and mine.

See, look. Instant syntax upgrade. It's hard to believe this is even the same person talking!

Inconsistency can be one of great calling cards of utter trash. Glorious inconsistency, artful inconsistency even, I think is something to behold. It's like a window into a defective mind. These are principles I employ in SBaHJ. They interest me for some reason. Will this sentence end with a period? No, looks like it won't. But this one will. Why was that particular word misspelled? Why not just misspell every word? That would make no statement. It would invite no speculation into a uniquely defective thought process.”

where godfeels is a homestuck fanfic, it’s in my wholesale adoption of andrew’s syntax and repetition/deviation. where godfeels is a “homestuck-based universe” as you put it, i think it’s in how i’ve taken these largely mechanical concepts and applied them to philosophy and metaphysics. which, christ, what a thing to say! clearly this answer has gone on too long because i’ve been whittling away at it for like a month now and feel no closer to unearthing the true answer.

i think it’s just a matter of knowing what your seed is. why are you writing this story? what’s compelling about it? what questions does it make you ask, what emotions does it make you feel? if you can, as an artist, have some sense of what drives you to create the very thing you’re creating, then you always have a compass handy when you need to decide what route to take. if you have that compass, you can blow up a slice of life story into a space opera and make it feel natural in your sleep. you have to be honest with yourself and egolessly introspect on your own proclivities. ask yourself what you believe as a person, and ask yourself if your story lives up to those beliefs. for me, at least, a story truly becomes itself when i can hold its soul in my mind and let it guide me. a story becomes itself when it knows that you know what it is, and you trust each other to do the work as it needs to be done. maybe that sounds daunting and alienating especially if you’re just interested in writing fluff fic or whatever, but i think the same thing applies. ideas exist in space, after all, and that includes silly ones! if you know that soul and respect it, i certainly find that it frees me up to bring all kinds of wild shit into the fold because it all exists along the same ideological axis for me, because i as a person am just like this about absolutely everything.

i don’t know why this turned into writing advice at the end. i hate giving writing advice. don’t listen to me, i’m literally a goat

[hms-no-fun]

how old is silverbark?

well, she says “a couple hundred years at least.“ her time in the pix is meant to be vague and open so that readers can imagine their own stories for her (which is, in my view, the ultimate freedom she gained by fighting lord english- the freedom to live an unobserved life that we can only imagine). 

[hms-no-fun]

at what point did you consider the upsilon kids being a thing to put in the story? and also, what inspired their creation? were they characters originally intended for something else salvaged for this or were they all godfeels originals?

originally, gf3 as a whole and 3.2 in particular were meant to parallel and comment on homestuck^2, which is why we've arrived at these dual narratives of split parties out in space. after Yiffy's reveal in canon and the subsequently entirely predictable fandom explosion, another fan adventure popped up- Kittyquest. i haven't read much of it, but i could tell immediately that it wanted to present a version of "Jade's daughter" that was an immense departure from Yiffy in just about every way. considering my feelings on divergent interpretations of June, this only bolstered my sense that "Jade's daughter" carried a sort of chaotic metanarrative weight, like some kind of evolutionary wildcard building off of Jade's own origins as the "combo breaker" of the betas.

the gf3 prologue sets up a lot of the basics- Jade is keeping secrets from her friends, and she has an enemy named Dana who wants to find her daughter. i didn't know much about the upsilons yet besides the fact that i wanted to have a distinct group of kids who mirrored the omegas in hs2, and i knew that their story would largely play out in flashback. i was never entirely sure how important their story would be in the longterm, because my original plan was to keep a lot of this stuff sidelined until it became relevant. there were a lot of narrative arenas post 3.1 i had in mind that were initially meant to be fairly brief, in fact. it wasn't until my collaborators and i started discussing the possibilities of all these arenas (like the EWL, Samsaria, the Comet, & post-destruction Earth C among others) that we really started to understand the scope of what we could do with this story, IF we resolved to do it right.

i've said in much older asks that until we open up the fanserv and released chapter 8 part 1, i was pretty convinced that i'd finish 3.1 and then release my outline for 3.2 onwards and bid the whole thing an ignominious farewell. it was the readership's overwhelming embrace of 3.1's original elements including my OCs as well as my collaborators' unbridled enthusiasm for the project (for instance Julia, the Dana whisperer, is in the midst of writing a godfeels ttrpg based on the EWL. i did not ask her to do this, she just wanted to. i don't even enjoy ttrpgs!) that convinced me we could take this thing to the finish line.

so, okay, the upsilons. i didn't really have much of a plan for them until writing chapter 4, which as i've said in the past was a big turning point for the story. i needed a couple EWL characters to fill out the background and i needed to hint at some of the EWL's nastier tactics re: memory erasure, which is how we wound up with Burning Romeo and Lenore Lehart. Lenore was just gonna be A Person In The EWL, and maybe she'd be tech support for other characters later on. but as it became clear to me just how unsatisfying it felt to have Jade and Davepeta keep secrets and be effusive, i knew something had to be done. in a way you could read this like VV (whose presence as the narrator i knew about since "The Silverbark Epilogues" chapter of the gf3 prologue) monitoring the narrative through me and reacting in real time to Jade et al's refusal to let anything slip with the nuclear option of a forced implanted memory. hence: the scene of the upsilons crashing onto the mysterious planet Samsaria.

i knew that there would be a new planet central to the plot going forward, mirroring the function of Deltritus in hs2, and i knew that Dana and Edie were stuck there together for a long time... but what about the other two? there needed to be four of them, after all, and i knew that they all needed to be equal to each other in terms of depth and personality.

i'll admit that when i published chapter 4, i didn't know much about Alphi and Lenore. i invented them both pretty much on the spot, perfected Lenore's quirk in one go (you'll notice that when she uses ellipses she always uses four dots...), and then looked at Alphi and was like. yeah, you know what? big muscly salamander-looking lizard lady with six arms who has kind of a stereotypically brutish demeanor. it took a bit of fine-tuning but it's amazing how fast their dynamic crystallized for me... and it's from them that a lot of the flavor of the EWL really emerged, as i sought to understand how and why there would be a group of four wildly different people assigned together like this. their mismatchedness inspired me to take a vague idea i had and run with it, namely the meta conception of the EWL as an orphanage for victims of their own personal MSPFAs.

i've never really salvaged an idea from another project for godfeels, i think at least partially because i have another project called sunset war that is almost exclusively a series of salvaged ideas strung together to make a coherent universe (no idea when/if this will see the light of day fwiw, no time soon certainly)... but also because the base template of homestuck is already so rich, not to mention the additional complexities that godfeels brings to that template, i've never really felt like i needed to bring in outside ideas. if anything i'm so overwhelmed with possibilities just emergent from the narrative as it exists i genuinely don't know how we could possibly use it all. which is to say, we definitely won't use it all, which is a really nice place to be from a storyteller's perspective.

instead, the personalities of the upsilons sort of emerged as a response to their place in the narrative. Dana, obviously, was conceived as being Dirk-esque in some way. once i decided that Lenore was an upsilon, i had to figure out why she was still in the EWL but Dana wasn't. i knew Dana was banished in some sense, but it wasn't until then that i knew Lenore was at least partially responsible for that, and for the events that broke up the upsilons three years ago. from there i had to figure out why this happened, and once i arrived at a why the rest of it all sorta fell into place.

my approach with new characters is probably the worst that it could possibly be? because most of the time i don't even know these new characters exist until they write themselves into a scene. for instance i had no plan for Osepheus and his crew when they were introduced, but once they took the stage i found them all so weirdly charming that i elected against killing them and instead trying to find a place for them in the story. so i sat with them and thought, okay, where do they fit in this tapestry, what purpose do they serve, and how i can i tailor their personalities in such a way that they produce a tangibly necessary narrative friction with that purpose.

it was the same with Alphi. once i had Lenore, Dana, and Edie, i knew there needed to be some kind of combo-breaker that wasn't Jade-descended. so i decided to challenge myself by introducing her as a big loud boisterous creature who speaks in broken english (which is historically my least favorite type of character in a scifi setting) whose traits would eventually be... well. i can't say very much here at all, can i? that'd be spoilers.

this is how i go about worldbuilding, i guess. i know that my strength as a writer is dialogue and at least to an extent characterization, so i have to assume that most of the narrative action will play out through dialogue. with that in mind, all the interesting ideas in the world don't matter a lick if the characters aren't fun or compelling to read. i understand that this big space opera bullshit is only interesting insofar as it contrasts with the cast of characters we already care about, which is why i think it actually wouldn't have been possible to graft an already existing story onto what came before-- because the setting, the plot, all the various arcs and beats we've got planned, they're designed to make the best use possible of the cast we have. it's all designed with the knowledge of how one experiences stories. if my stuff is digestible at all (which it certainly seems to be given the number of comments i've gotten saying basically "i've never even read a book and you got me to read 400,000 words of homestuck fic in a week"), it's because i try to make the moment-to-moment reading experience compelling. if the characters aren't fun to read, if their dynamic isn't frictive or otherwise evocative, then you just get bored and zone out. say what you will about the schlock of dan brown's providence, the man knows how to write a readable book about abstract bullshit!

anyway. all of this is to say that 3.1 was in many ways the proving ground for and chrysalis of 3.2. i always knew that if i could get through the end of chapter 8 and still have the will to keep going, everything after would be a victory lap. maybe that seems pompous or ill-advised, idk, but i'm REALLY excited to get to the rest of this story. i can't wait for you to properly meet Dana, Edie, Alphi, and Lenore (the big DEAL as i like to call them in my own head :P) as they were thirteen years ago. they started from an ill-defined place, but they've since come through to be some of my favorite characters in this story. i hope you'll feel the same way, but the fact that you even thought to ask whether the upsilons existed before godfeels in the first place suggests that i've got nothing to worry about.

[hms-no-fun]

what was the inspirations behind epigone's general concept?

i can already say the answer to this one is gonna be big spoilers for chapter 8 act 4 so here's a linebreak for you

i've had a vague notion that there would be an entity like epigone showing up for a while now, but it wasn't until i really started getting into the headspace stuff that i decided to bring it onto the scene now as opposed to later. which is the same kind of thing that's happened across the board, where 3.1 was originally intended to not have much silverbark-related stuff at all, and it's just kinda been seeping its way in.

anyway, i have a very specific set of cultural and political signifiers informing my conception of epigone. not sure how much i want to go into them yet since very little has been revealed of what epigone is so far? but i will say that it is deeply tied to the themes of memories and secrets that have hung over 3.1 from the start. there are other very potent symbolic and allegorical functions of epigone as well, but again i'll leave that stuff to the imagination for now.

my HOPE with some of this epigone stuff and like, just how awful it is, is to get people genuinely asking why silverbark would take the approach she takes. because this story is so rooted in june's perspective, we're primed to side with her unconditionally. but i when folks express frustration and annoyance at jade's refusal to clarify what's really going on, i assure you that is the intended reaction, and i daresay jade is just as frustrated as the rest of us.

but i digress.

the SPECIFIC inspirations for epigone i think are kind of obvious? it's got a bit of caliborn, a bit of audrey jr from little shop of horrors, a bit of BOB from twin peaks, all of them maybe pushed through the lens of a terminally online eboy who thinks traps are gay. i wanted its parts to be aesthically very ugly and unpleasant to read, and give off sort of an uncanny valley narrator vibe. green, monotonous, and vile in kind of a childish way? but also VERY aware of and intentional in what it's doing when it's the one in control.

epigone was tough to write because i kept wanting to make it more traditionally villainous, but i found it was so much more creepy as this sort of burnt up consciousness that only remembers fragments of language and concepts. it's sort of a natural outgrowth of ideaspace as a concept and meant to be the sort of horrific counter-example to the comparatively very positive presence of dare and risk.

a question i had while developing the metaphysics of ideaspace was, if your thoughts and ideas exist in a universal shared space with every other thought or idea to ever exist, what's stopping an external idea from getting into your mind? one of the cornerstone revelations i had about this was the idea that there might be metaphorical entities in ideaspace which mirror real life conditions. so with dare, risk, and X, you see this sort of metaphorical push and pull representing june's own internal conflicts about everything that is happening to her. they're still their own PEOPLE, but their arcs are also inextricably tied to june's in this kind of fascinating way.

by the same token, what if a person with dementia is having the stores of their ideatic complexes raided and cannibalized by a pernicious entity because some boundary of their complex is thinner than it ought to be? this is not to say that the entity causes dementia, or that dementia causes the entity, but rather that dementia and the entity exist in perfect acausal simultaneity. this is the thing about ideaspace: it is both utterly independent of meatspace, but also inextricably its symbolic mirror... although you could just as easily say that meatspace is a reflection of ideaspace! in truth, all of these are true, and none of them, depending on what the moment calls for.

i find the existential questions raised by this shit quite satisfying to think about.

i'm sure it looks kinda slapdash, but i actually spent a lot of time fine-tuning epigone's dialog. it's a fun challenge, finding ways to fuck up epigone's grammar and speech without relying on the "i kind of forgot how to speak" trope of just deleting adverbs and improper nouns and such. i want it to be understandable, but also feel like maybe it's speaking in a different language? there's a really subtle balancing act to strike here because it sees itself as so effortlessly above everyone and everything else. it doesn't really care about any of these people or their dumb drama, it just thinks these kind of mind games are funny. it is a creature of decoherence, so these sharpening points of divergence are like candy to its sweet tooth.

the last thing i'll comment on is rose. you didn't ask about rose, but i want to comment on rose. i've had her death and subsequent possession planned for a while now. i actually wrote the first draft of her "i'm back from the dead" reveal months and months ago, and that was the first real bit of epigone writing i ever did. at that point i was still thinking of this monstrous entity as being much more traditionally sinister, but i quickly discovered there was a lot of emotional mileage to get out of something in rose's body forcing her to speak in this really uncharacteristically sloppy way.

this should not come as a surprise, but i have plans for horror-rose. tumor-rose. epigone-rose. epirose? rosigone? e-pig lalonde? we'll have to workshop this one.

anyway i was REALLY worried about the epigone section of saturday 2 because it is SO much, but it looks like folks are on board for the most part? i've honestly been so shocked at how immediately people are adopting the increasingly large cast of original characters in this fic. this is maybe kinda dumb to say but i'm consistently very impressed by and proud of my readership for their maturity and willingness to roll with the punches.

[hms-no-fun]

how come june isn't doing more cool stuff in that fight against those aliens? she seems kind of lousy there, and she keeps getting her ass kicked. she seemed like more cool when she fought dirk and killed everyone and retconned it.

this question gave me a good laugh. quite ballsy! normally i don't address this sort of criticism because imo the explanation is evident in the text, but because you asked it off anon i'm gonna actually give you an answer!

it's true that in the currently ongoing skirmish on the moon in godfeels 3, june isn't exactly doing a lot of heavy lifting fight-wise. and it's also true that in gf2 she was a lot more violent. you could, if you really wanted to, call that a plot hole or an inconsistent characterization. and if that's your opinion, well, i'm not a cop and ultimately your opinion won't stop me writing the damn thing, so who care!

but let's look at the context. in gf2, june has just come out of the closet to a shockingly skeptical group of people that she thought she could trust. in her anger and disappointment, she gets dangerously drunk and then on top of that licks calliope's juju. the extent of june's power as displayed in this section of gf2.2 and elaborated in a later chapter of gf3.1 is meant to be shockingly extreme, seemingly unlocked by inebriation and anger. the thing with the retconned murder spree is that she didn't really mean to do it -which, let's be clear, isn't remotely defensible in court as far as guilt and crime-doing are concerned, but IS relevant to this specific line of inquiry. her actions in 2.2 are by and large the reactions of a panicked animal with nuclear warheads for arms, and it's not until terezi shows up that she even gets a moment to really truly rest and collect herself and stabilize.

it is true that in 2.3, june arguably does some "cool" stuff. but let's remember that in this case, june is basically just an actor reciting the lines written by terezi. the "good plan" of 2.3's title is 100% terezi's work, even if they share equal credit on the billing. i would argue that the strongest display of personal agency and acting smart that june has in 2.3 isn't anywhere in the fight with dirk, but is in fact in her choice to let jade go with davepeta to fight lord english. that's the only aspect of the plan that didn't go according to, and it's ultimately the thing that saves everyone's asses when all their other contingencies fail. in fact, i originally planned for june to do what she was supposed to do with jade, but in writing the scene she naturally took over from me and decided on something else entirely. i'm admittedly a nerd about this kind of thing, but imo that's pretty cool.

so already we see that june is mostly a passive character even when she's doing drunken murders. she's reacting to circumstances and flailing, or otherwise operating under the guidance of someone who is much more accustomed to this sort of thing.

now let's look at june on the moon struggling to use a gun and getting her ass kicked handily. let's ignore the fact that facing an invading army from another universe while on the moon would be a disorienting experience for anyone, even someone like june who has survived the trials and tribulations of sburb (albeit almost seven years ago). what else might be causing her to struggle in the moon war?

consider that her very sense of reality is warped by memories of vriska's life which she remembers as her own, while versions of vriska and john argue incessantly in her head. consider that she's still having ptsd flashbacks to the events of 2.3, which only happened a few months ago. consider that she literally just got accosted by a mysterious woman in a murder robot who told her not to trust silverbark, and then got shot with a therapy bazooka that split her various selves into visible on-screen partitions so that she could watch her own insecure internal dialog as if it were a movie, and then had more memories that were not her own implanted into her brain without her consent by an alien force she couldn't see or hear. now she's on the moon, doesn't know who to trust, doesn't know if she can believe davepeta when they say that they've tried the nonviolent solution with these guys before, and just in general is frustrated that she can't seem to get a straight answer out of anyone.

also she tried to kill terezi in her sleep, like, a day ago. remember how that happened?

let's just say the word of the day here is "destabilization."

contextually speaking, i think it's more than justified that june isn't exactly behaving like a warweary superkiller space marine badass... because that's not what she is. you could argue that she's done stuff kind of like this before in sburb so therefore she shouldn't be so hesitant, but i'm gonna restress a previous parenthetical directly here and point out that the events of homestuck happened when june was 13-16. she's now approaching 23! that might not look like a very big gap, but i think one of the less spoken-about challenges you face as you careen headlong into your twenties is that things that used to come easily to you stop being so easy.

honestly i think i could just say "june's having a bad day" and leave it at that, but i wanted to take the opportunity to show that yes, i do actually think about the mechanics of all this stuff and how character motivations change over time, and yes i find this question rather silly and want to dunk on it a little. but i appreciate the free soapbox to shout about my own fanfic from!