#dana straten

[catgirlweed]

read godfeels. became diseased.

#just trying to post everything i forgot lmao #homestuck #godfeels #june egbert #june eg8ert #dana straten #lenore lehart #homestuck art #m'art! #artists on tumblr

[hms-no-fun]

i remember a while back you saying in one of these asks that you didnt find classpects that interesting as a writing tool (or something similar, i don’t remember the exact wording) but you seem to be referring to them significantly more since then, both textally in godfeels and when you’ve discussed the work like in these asks - has anything changed in your perspective on them?

astute observation!

so, i don't find classpects particularly interesting as a writing tool. i'm not a big fan of mapping out a character beforehand, engaging in that sort of reverse personality quiz process of defining their wants, their needs, their astrological sign, etc. no hate to anyone who does, but for me it's far more interesting to just let the character decide that stuff for themselves. it's the same process of discovery i apply to the rest of godfeels, which is admittedly a sort of insane way to work and probably shouldn't be taken as an example.

so that's a very specific definition of "writing tool" that maybe isn't what other people are thinking of. i can get didactic about these things because i don't like writing advice or things that seem like writing advice if you squint.

you're right though that classpects are more at the front of my mind than they used to be. part of it is just that classpects are about to be a lot more actively relevant to the narrative (albeit not in the way you would expect), so i've obviously been thinking about them more. which, you know, those thoughts do naturally generate fiction activity which shapes how i intend to write future chapters-- in that sense, are classpects not a useful "writing tool" for me? i dunno.

it's not even that i find them more meaningful structurally. i think giving someone a title and then building their character around it is a great way to come up with wooden characters. in the case of the upsilon kids (who you will be meeting very soon), their classpects emerged through writing a bunch of little test scenes. i'd put them in a room together and give them something to react to. i really want to avoid conventional group dynamics with this crew, so i always pushed them to behave in messy ways. and over time it became apparent that what makes them work is their seeming incompatibility, which i shouldn't say much more about until you've actually got some material to draw your own conclusions from. but the point is, it wasn't until i got a good handle on each kid's vibe that i assigned them their classpects, and i assigned them in a way that was deliberately "underwhelming" or seemingly a bad fit. i did this because i don't like the narratological determinism that can arise when you give a character a title they like too much.

i don't like giving writing advice but i highly encourage young writers out there to not be afraid of writing unusable scenes. it helps to be able to think of the writing in the early planning stages as, in some sense, disposable. because the prose isn't the point-- it's getting to the characters as you understand them. there's so many scenes i've written that will not make it into godfeels proper without significant alteration if at all! and look, i know how it is when you feel like you can barely write, so every word you manage to get on the page is precious and needs to be preserved towards the Final Product. sometimes that's correct! precious things always emerge in this process. but it's nowhere near as many as you think, and the hard lesson is understanding the difference between precious and enjoyable. just because you enjoy the thing doesn't make it right for the story. even pretty trash belongs in the bin eventually.

but again, it isn't wasted work. the words aren't the goal, they're just a happy accident. the real work happens in your head.

uh shit anyway so for instance Dana Straten's classpect is Knight of Mind. i must admit she's an outlier among the upsilons in that i picked her classpect in the gf3 prologue with an understanding of her character that was vastly different from who she would end up becoming. back then all i knew about the upsilons was they'd be Dana, Jade's as-yet unnamed daughter, and two others. for a long time, once Julia came in and really breathed life into Dana, i was convinced that Knight of Mind was just wrong. it was a bad choice for her, it didn't make sense, she should have been something else that had cooler power implications and i should just retcon it to something better before anybody notices. this worry resulted in a lot of conversations with my collaborators, ultimately concluding that it was more fun to just play with the hand i'd unwittingly dealt us. so we took the Dana we felt and asked her what Knight of Mind meant to her, figuratively speaking. wrote some scenes, had more conversations. Julia and i have spent a LOT of time discussing Dana's whole situation.

the thing about this is that i don't think our idea of her changed all that much between when she came into her own in like march/april 2021 and when she properly entered the story in summer 2022 (god it feels like that gap should be a lot longer, but i double checked and it's right). much of what we already implicitly understood about Dana remained true. but through our discussions and test scenes, we were able to define those truths in some really useful ways. it was through this process that we textually solidified Dana as someone who doesn't have cool powers, at least not flashy ones anyway. Dana's weapon is her mind-- the ability to use her razor sharp clarity of perception to act on many different forms of knowledge at once. she's not a mind control person, she's not a seeing all eventualities person, she's just a really smart punch person. Knight of Mind, it turns out, was perfect for her, because she doesn't need it. and that realization was very much why i tried to create a similar dynamic with the rest of the upsilons.

so again we ask, does that not make classpects a useful "writing tool" for me? again i answer, i dunno. i don't really care. it's just the process to me. all of it is just the process.

maybe that points to why i was so free with referring to Rose in short as Seer of Mind in that ask. having reached the endpoint of Rose's role in this story, i finally understand what Seer of Light means for her (in godfeels, at any rate). it's that she saw the truth of how the narrative was changing and accepted that it wasn't for her. as in, she saw the light at the end of the tunnel and chose to walk towards it. it's become a shorthand for Rose, you see? i say "Seer of Light" the way i say the name of a friend who was really more of an acquaintance realistically speaking, like we only hung out a couple times a few years ago, but we hit it off so well every time that i was always like "man, i wish we could hang out all the time, we'd be great friends" but just, for one reason or another, it never quite lined up for that to happen. the name of a beloved missed connection, perhaps...

i guess, basically, to put a bow on this: i try not to think about classpects until the character in question is real enough in my mind that they define it rather than the other way around. once again i have no idea if this makes any kind of sense procedurally or if i'm just making my life harder by being stubborn. but then again, the only writing advice any writer can ever give you is how to write the things they already wrote, so

#sarahposts #godfeels #homestuck #rose lalonde #classpects #classpect analysis #seer of light #knight of mind #dana straten #writing advice #i hate writing advice #yet i give it anyway #sarah zedig the hypocrite supreme #of course there's nothing i'd rather be #except maybe financially stable enough to be able to work on godfeels full time #that'd be pretty cool i think

[musesofhororr]

" I'm scared to close my eyes, I'm scared to open them. "

Many spooky/horror muses.

All muses & the mun are of age.

21 +

Starter Call !

Affiliated With ; @maskedspector @will-iam-graham @vulpineobedience @illustrious-beauty @frederickchill

Rules & Muses below ;

-------------------------

Rules ;

please do NOT rush me with replies as most of y'all know i have MANY accounts xD

2. all muses are 21+

3. because this is a horror/spooky rp blog there will be gore, sexual themes and other things that will be 18 + themes.

4. Yes i do write smut but I WILL NOT WRITE WITH ANYONE UNDER AGE!

5. Whenever you send in a meme please say who it's for, for i will have many muses on here. if you don't i will assume that you are leaving it up to me.

6. i am open to shipping with anyone, for i am a shipping ho. xD but please DO NOT force a ship on me.

7. we are all here because we love to write so please DO NOT cause any drama. i am well passed that age in my life && i'm not about it. xD

8. i am OC friendly! So please message me whenever! <3

9. have fun! any questions please message me !

=======

The muses;

AHS ; Lana Winters FC ; Sarah Paulson, Mary Eunice FC ; Lily Rabe, Cordelia Goode FC ; Sarah Paulson, Misty Day FC ; Lily Rabe

Bates Motel ; Norma Bates FC ; Vera Farmiga

Bram Stoker's Dracula ; Mina Harker FC ; Winona Ryder

Charmed ; Prue Halliwell FC ; Shannen Doherty

Dracula { 2013 } ; Dracula FC ; Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Lucy Westenra FC ; Katie McGrath, Lady Jayne Wetherby FC ; Victoria Smurfit

Doctor Who ; River Song FC ; Alex Kingston, 11th Doctor FC ; Matt Smith, 16th Doctor FC ; Cate Blanchett

The Fall of House Usher ; Verna FC ; Carla Gugino

The Fall ; Stella Gibson FC ; Gillian Anderson

The Silence of the Lambs; Hannibal Lecter FC ; Mads Mikkelsen, Bedelia Du Maurier { VERY HEAD CANON } FC ; Gillian Anderson, Clarice Starling FC ; Jodie Foster.

The Haunting of Hill House ; Olivia Crain FC ; Carla Gugino, Theo Crain FC ; Kate Siegel, Nell Crain FC ; Victoria Pedretti

The Haunting of Bly Manor ; Dani Clayton FC ; Victoria Pedretti

Merlin ; Morgana Pendragon FC ; Katie Mcgrath

Penny Dreadful ; Vanessa Ives FC ; Eva Green

Resident Evil ; Lady Dimitrescu FC ; Lana Parrilla

Silent Hill ; Lisa Garland FC ; NOT SURE YET

True Blood ; Sookie Stackhouse FC ; Anna Paquin, Pam FC ; Kristin Bauer Van Straten, Sophie-Anne FC ; Evan Rachel Wood

Van Helsing ; Anna Valerious FC ; Kate Beckinsale

The X-Files ; Dana Scully FC; Gillian Anderson, Fox Mulder FC ; David Duchovny

Xena Warrior Princess ; Xena FC ; Lucy Lawless, Gabrielle FC ; Renee O'Connor, Callisto FC ; Hudson Leick

#i'm scared to close my eyes i'm scared to open them { self promo } #horror rp #ahs rp #bates motel rp #charmed rp #dracula rp #hannibal rp #haunting of hill house rp #penny dreadful rp #true blood rp #the x-files rp #doctor who rp #resident evil rp #silent hill rp #van helsing rp #xena warrior princess rp

[sheepy-0]

dana straten

#dana straten

[sopetahours]

takes a lot of effort not to tag a lot of reblogs hashtag godfeels hashtag edie halley hashtag dana straten. I am this close to becoming a “blorbo from my fanfics” gal

#godfeels #fanfic #blorbo from my fanfics

[ludo-benninger-blr-blog]

VOOR ALTIJD ÉÉN... (Dana Winner) Het is stil in huis. Het is stil in de straten. Het is stil waar je ook gaat. Ik hoor het geruis. Ik hoor bijna niemand meer praten. Iedereen lijkt te slapen en toch... het is niet 's avonds laat. Have Fun! Ludo_Benninger https://www.instagram.com/p/B-Jv6qApo_T/?igshid=fym84en7uf6h

[onceuponaseriesrewatch]

OUASR Press Release 4x16 Poor Unfortunate Soul

4x16 Poor Unfortunate Soul

Synopsis: Hook leverages his complicated history with Ursula to find out what she knows about Gold’s endgame.  Gold and the Queens of Darkness torture August for information about the Author as Emma, Mary Margaret and David race to find them.  Regina grows concerned for Robin Hood’s safety while she struggles to maintain her cover with the villains.  In a Fairy Tale Land flashback, when a restless young Ursula enlists Hook’s help to run away from home, she soon learns it isn’t wise to trust a pirate.

Written by: Andrew Chambliss, Dana Horgan

Directed by: Steve Pearlman

Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White / Mary Margaret Blanchard); Jennifer Morrison (Emma Swan); Lana Parilla (Evil Queen / Regina Mills); Josh Dallas (Prince Charming / David Nolan); Emilie de Ravin (Belle French); Colin O’Donoghue (Captain Killian ‘Hook’ Jones); Jared Gilmore (Henry Mills); Michael Socha (Will Scarlet); Robert Carlyle (Rumplestiltskin / Mr. Gold)

Guest Starring: Eion Bailey (August W. Booth); Kristin Bauer van Straten (Maleficent); Tiffany Boone (Young Ursula); Merrin Dungey (Ursula); Chris Gauthier (William Smee); Ernie Hudson (King Poseidon); Sean Maguire (Robin Hood); Victoria Smurfit (Cruella De Vil); JoAnna Garcia Swisher (Ariel); Marlo Franson (pirate); Linley Subryan (sailor)

Poor Unfortunate Soul airs July 28 at 8:00 pm EST

#ouasr #once upon a series rewatch #ouasr press release #4x16 poor unfortunate soul

[catgirlweed]

i love the homestuck art style. would like to draw in it one day :)

#i swear dana looked better in the sketch idk what happened #homestuck #jade harley #godfeels #dana straten #edie halley #homestuck fanart #panel edit #homestuck edit #godfeels fanart #m'art! #artists on tumblr #the jade design is from my fanfiction btw :) #junestuck

[hms-no-fun]

what's your opinion on fictives of characters in godfeels who haven't really broadly been definied yet? obviously i doubt you'd be judgmental based on other opinions you've expressed but id really like to hear your perspective on this

it's been interesting, that's for sure! i was fully prepared for folks to either be disinterested in or actively dislike my OCs, so for them to not only be broadly liked but also introjected to multiple systems frankly came as a really vindicating surprise! one of the reasons i parceled out info about the upsilons so slowly over 3.1 was to give them a psychological presence in the reader’s mind from a distance so that, when they became an actual narrative presence, they’d have a context within which to understand and theorize about them. apparently it worked! so that’s cool.

i’ll start by saying that my approach to fictives across the board is pretty much the same as my approach to any other fan in the discord. i may have written the source material, and i may know things about these characters that no one else will for a long time, but the characters i’m writing aren’t the fictives in my readership. does that make sense? my knowledge of Edie, for instance, doesn’t have much at all to do with any given Edie fictive because said fictive already exists; and if that Edie fictive exists, i have to assume it’s because something in the text resonated enough to allow for her introjection; thus that fictive, IN MY NON-AUTHORITATIVE OPINION, is a snapshot of that particular system’s (or someone therein’s) conception of Edie at the moment of her introjection. and that’s really fucking cool actually???? like, just from a purely practical standpoint, you have NO idea how useful it is for me as a writer to have such direct barometers of the audience’s perception of a character at any given moment in their story! the fact that there are so many upsilon fictives running around makes me really happy & excited to finally get to 3.2, not least because generally y’all aren’t too far off characterization-wise. which, you know, is one of those things that tells me i’ve done my job well and that i’m on the right track with my schemes and machinations... and that’s the least important thing i get out of the arrangement!

sure, it can be surreal reading back over a server channel where one Lenore, two Edies, two Danas, and half a dozen Junes are all theorizing about Silverbark’s behavior amongst themselves, but would it really be a materially different circumstance if they weren’t fictives? i don’t blink when a bunch of furries start awooing in a server i’m in. i don’t even blink when furries start awooing in real life! i mean, god, what’s the alternative? redditors?? fuck that shit, i’ll take the plural homestuck queers any day of the week.

there have been times when i’ve seen a fictive just be completely outright wrong about a characterization or detail, and i’ve really had to resist the urge to correct them. like what am i gonna do, say “you’re wrong about who you are”??? it wouldn’t just be a spoiler to correct them in most cases, it’d also be... idk, insulting? at least it seems like it would be insulting. i’m certainly insulted when cis people tell me i’m not performing femininity correctly! and there is a part of me who finds that worrisome. the truth come out eventually, you know? and there’s some stuff we might not be getting to for another year or more. what happens when a fictive solidifies their sense of self around a misconception that doesn’t get disproven for months and months?? what do i do if a fictive insists that my interpretation of their source character is wrong when they’ve lived as that character for a while?????

these are the kinds of breathless paranoid questions that always come up among artists with or in a fandom. and there’s a reason for that, you know? when i first started the godfeels fanserver, i was EXTREMELY wary. plural folks, kinnies, obsessive fans, they’ve got a bad reputation for causing drama! or well, they do among artists who consider themselves Normal wink wink nudge nudge. but what i found the more time i spent in the fanserv was that, like every category of identity, there’s nothing inherent to plurality or fictivity that guarantees immaturity or emotional volatility. there’s a part of me that wants to point at how many plural folks in fandom circles are teens or in their early 20s, and that generally online drama is a result of adults and children being expected to share all of the same online spaces... but that youthfulness holds true for the godfeels community and i’ve found y’all to be a remarkably mature readership!

it’s not helpful to point at circumstances outside of one’s control as the reason somebody is “bad” or whatever. if the problem is cultural conservatism, or artistic malnutrition, or an individual trauma response, or a simple misunderstanding, or just outright vindictiveness, you address THOSE things. and it’s my responsibility as an artist who chose to create a central community hub for my readership to do my best in addressing any situations that might arise with empathy and compassion. frequent users of any community hub like a discord server develop habits based on the rules of the space and how they are/aren’t enforced. if for instance you go to the HSD [do not do this under any circumstances even as a joke], you’ll find that positive discussions about most fandom projects get swallowed up by ridicule almost immediately- and not just ridicule of the project in question, but often of the person who posted it too! this creates a self-perpetuating environment of hostility where the best way to get in the good graces of community leadership is to be an edgelord. for my money, that’s why the homestuck fandom is Like That.

i’ve tried to encourage the exact opposite of this, as inspired by the success of the late Perfectly Generic Podcast server (where the godfeels fanserv’s vibes-based rules are largely taken from, may she rest in peace), and i think that’s worked out well overall? because now when an issue arises within the community, more often than not the consistent users naturally de-escalate the situation! granted, the godfeels fandom as such isn’t particularly big, and the necessary wordcount buy-in to even GET to my OCs is high enough that it naturally selects out a lot of folks who might have caused problems, so this level of community stewardship is a whole hell of a lot easier to accomplish than it might be otherwise.

wow, this answer went way off the fucking rails. what the hell was i... oh yeah! you asked me my thoughts on fictives of characters we don’t know very well yet. here, let me answer that for you.

i think fictives are beautiful, and i wish them the world. my dearest hope for any fictive, regardless of what is Known about their source character, is that they grow beyond their lateral connection to the source material. not abandon it, necessarily! but what i find so existentially fascinating about fictives isn’t really all that removed from one of the major driving forces of godfeels: one’s capacity to become Yourself. who is Edie, or Dana, or Lenore, or Alphi? who were they at 13? at 21? at 29? compare the youngest self with the oldest self and you might not even be able to tell that they’re supposed to be the same character. one reason godfeels has become such an ensemble production is precisely because much of said ensemble has undergone some amount of change, and given homestuck’s obsession with The Ultimate Self i just find that too compelling to not explore at length.

so like, if a Dana fictive is out of character from my perspective, that’s great! in case it wasn’t clear from the text of chapter 8, i am Not A Fan of unchanging & all-consuming character archetypes. in point of fact, i believe that divergence is a virtue. i believe that identity is a buffet at a playground for everyone. i believe that any person who chooses to live truer to themself than they were raised to do is braver than every cop and every troop on planet earth. i believe that human culture is an ecology of change. i believe that deciding you are a Finished Person who has learned every important lesson and acquired every necessary skill is tantamount to taking up early residence in your own grave. so really, my dream is to live in a world where EVERY fictive is as spectacularly in or out of character as they like! the hope with the Risk/Dare & Angel Dirk chapters was to give all readers, but especially fictives, a context and toolset for handling divergence conceptually, philosophically, narratively, emotionally, personally. because i don’t think it’s just the characters of this story who compel introjection, but the nature of the text itself- so, by extension, all i want is for any given fictive to feel permitted to become whoever it is they might be now that they’ve left the source text. i would vastly prefer a legion of singularly feral Edies over a well-reasoned community consensus on what Is or Is Not in character, you know?

which isn’t to say that the facts don’t matter or that i dislike reasoned community discussion btw! i love close analysis and eager back-and-forths trading text snippets and piecing together the godfeels mysteries pepe silvia style. but i believe there is room for both. there must be.

so, uh, in short i guess: you’re doing great and i’m very proud of you. keep up the good work.

#godfeels #homestuck #fictives #introject #did system #plurality #plural community #plural stuff #dana straten #edie halley #alphi apexis #lenore lehart #june eg8ert #oops i spent way too long writing this #if the ch8 epilogue doesn't come out this year blame this asker #just kidding don't do that #sarahposts

[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.

#godfeels #homestuck #the upsilon kids #the omega kids #homestuck2 #dana straten #edie halley #lenore lehart #alphi apexis #sarahposts

[hms-no-fun]

The new interlude was pretty intense, and I wasn’t sure if I followed along with the sequence of events perfectly, especially in the second half. I’m mainly wondering what exactly happened, and also how things could have changed so drastically between them? I’m not sure how much time had passed in between then and their last meeting, but it seems like the way they do things has turned to be more of an exclusively violent thing rather than violence with emotional processing alongside it.

i’m not going to spell out what exactly happened, especially in the latter half. i suggest slowly rereading this fic with an eye towards physicality and symbolism, keeping in mind Dana’s classpect and how we’ve seen her use it in the past. consider, as well, the introductory note’s use of the phrase “aggressively canonical” and what that might imply. this isn’t a huge ask imo considering “stomach” is a measly 3,994 words long, compared to the nearly 40,000 words contained in just one of chapter 8’s many fingers. there are more answers present within the text than you might expect, but you’ve got to put the pieces together yourself. failing that, there’s always the godfeels fan server...

but now to the meat of your question, which i very much do want to talk about at excruciating length (after the break).

this interlude is a lot of things. one of them is an experiment.

other writers besides me have contributed to godfeels before (Taz with Dirk dialogue in ch8 acts 2 and 3, Julia with the Dana v Silverbark fight in act 4), but interlude 3 is the first entry in the series that was primarily written by someone else. not only that, but it’s also the first real glimpse we get into the narrative universe that is likely to become a major focus of our attention in the near future. as much as i talk big about throwing my ego in the trash for collaborations, i have to admit that this was a bit scary for me! and not just in the sense that godfeels is my baby or whatever. you don’t need to look very long to find examples of indie projects like this utterly destroyed when their overly-precious creators decide to throw their collaborators under the bus for the sake of their sacred vision (money).

i don’t want to be that guy. i’ve been personally fucked over by different versions of that guy multiple times in just the last few years, and it terrifies me that i was blindsided every time. i’m terrified that i’ll take every precaution and still wind up becoming that guy somehow. i hate creative dictators. i hate that our primary cultural definition of collaboration still paradoxically hinges on one or two people being the head of the dragon. i don’t want to be the head of anything, i just want to make cool shit with my friends.

HOWEVER. the fact remains that i’ve written nearly 400,000 words of this fucking thing largely on my lonesome. there’s a lot that only i am privy to, and not just in plot terms. so the big test for us was, how do i as ~the director~ ensure that the text is true to canon, in character, and just generally up to my arbitrary standards of aesthetic consistency, without compromising the primary author’s work? this was a big learning experience and involved several long conversations about... well, basically everything i just said.

thing is, everyone in the work server has their own little section of godfeels they tend to gravitate towards, and Julia's been laser focused on Dana and Lenore pretty much since the day i invited her on board. i can't remember the exact chain of events that got us here, but iirc Julia started writing this interlude on her own, i liked it enough to suggest we should work together to make it canon, and she agreed. she finished the first draft maybe a month and a half ago, and from there we talked very openly about how we wanted to collaborate, what we were willing to budge on, what we weren’t, that sort of thing. where we eventually landed was that she reserved the right to reject any of my suggestions on the prose while giving me a lot of latitude to influence dialogue. i added/modified a few lines in the first half, but for the most part it’s all Julia. my big contribution was the final sequence, which Julia improved in several key ways.

i won’t linger on this process talk for much longer, but i think the most fun part of writing this for me was seeing which of my suggestions Julia rejected. i would comment on a single line of narration with a paragraph of thoughts, and she’d reject them... but also find ways to incorporate bits and pieces of my thoughts elsewhere in the text? this was what ultimately eased my mind about this process, because it didn’t matter so much to me whether or not she fixed any given line as long as we both knew that the ambiguity was a choice she was making.

ANYWAY, it made sense for this specific interlude (which features two 29 year old characters we’ve only just met) to have a completely different authorial voice from prior interludes. it even comes down to the title: “penny in a bed of flowers” and “eyes like violet fire” have this poetic energy to them that’s utterly absent in interlude 3’s “stomach.” the dreamy naivety of the young twenty-something giving way to the base bodily functions of actual genuine adults who’ve lived, er, shall we say colorful lives.

(one similarity between all the interludes is that they are fundamentally fanfiction. it just so happens that interlude 3 is fanfic for a canon that doesn’t exist yet :)

the first two interludes were soft, warm, primarily positive sexual experiences. i wanted them to typify some of the beauty of transfeminine sexuality, as a refuge from the pressing danger and trauma of 2.3. interlude 3, by contrast, looks at two transfems who’ve been in an on-again off-again relationship for over a decade. on top of that, this is their first private reunion after Lenore sold Dana and the other upsilons up the river three years ago. there’s a lot going on between them, most of which goes unspoken. we’re eavesdroppers here, there’s no way they’re gonna take the time to contextualize what they’re doing when it’s just the two of them.

which gets us to what i’ve been building up to all along. i want to single out this specific bit from your question, anon:

“it seems like the way they do things has turned to be more of an exclusively violent thing rather than violence with emotional processing alongside it.”

i’ll start by observing that we’ve never seen Dana and Lenore alone together until this fic, and i don’t think i’ve ever met a couple that behaves the same in public as they do in private.

it’s true that their relationship involves a lot of physical violence, but is it exclusively violent? does it really seem like there’s no emotional processing going on in this scene? from where i’m sitting, this scene is nothing BUT emotional processing. the difference is that there’s no resolution. and why would there be? it’s not like Lenore called Dana a bitch on twitter dot com (although she definitely has done that). whatever the nature of her betrayal, it led to Edie and Alphi disappearing, and Dana being banished to starve and go mad all alone on a meteor for THREE YEARS. there’s no cathartic conversation that’s gonna paper over that, especially not on the first night they’re together again. you could draw a parallel here to Dare’s many epiphanies not actually curing their depression if you liked. one might even call it “a theme.”

before i say more, Julia has some things to add:

I am a fan of metanarrative fuckery–for example, I love how Terezi's narration in the latest chapters refuses to turn inwardly, and that refusal collapses as her stress mounts. That being said, I unfortunately just have the one narrative method: I like unreliable PoVs that deny the audience information the character in question wouldn't be thinking about. Dana won't stop doing things to think about the decade-long depths of the relationship Lenore betrayed. This is her life, these are her actions. You, as reader, can but take them as they come.

If I wanted to give myself more credit than's due, I would claim that this also reflects the nature of Dana (and co.) as an internal narrative. She's older, she's more resentful, she's just come out of a situation she spent 3 years coldly simmering about, and it went worse than she expected in some ways (she didn't get to ether Silverbark), but shockingly better in others (she got the Comet and Lenore back). Crucially, Dana is trained for violence, so she's not given to these Egbertian windbag breakdowns that give away the entirety of her thoughts as a response to sudden violence–she just stances up, and acts. She's been doing it for a long time, she's good at it and she likes it enough to be a weakness.

jumping off from that, the thing to understand is that Dana is a fighter. not just someone who likes to fight but a trained, highly skilled grappler who Silverbark at one point thought of as “her finest mentee.” just from the text of this interlude alone, it’s safe to assume that Dana and Lenore have fought each other many times in the past. there’s even this snippet of a memory in the last section where Dana seems to willingly, covertly lose to Lenore for sex reasons:

(idk why i censored the words “fucks” and “orgasm” in this screenshot)

Lenore is less technically skilled than Dana, but she makes up for it by being extremely strong and durable (those troll muscles, baby). if i were to make a Lenore kin onion, Jessica Jones would be pretty close to the center. so they have this back and forth where Dana can just fucking unload on Lenore without causing any real lasting damage. and it shouldn’t go unstated that fighting and sex are basically the same activity!

Lenore says of their relationship that “we like it this way.” they both trained together in the EWL, and despite their differences and the bumpy lives they’ve led they still always wind up back together somehow. i would not call this a healthy dynamic per se, but these are fucked up women who grew up in what seems to have been a deeply ideological paramilitary organization. “healthy” is a luxury for women like these. and whatever you might think of it from the outside, they clearly enjoy it- or, at least, there was a time when they enjoyed it.

this encounter feels to me like muscle memory. the children have been put to bed, medical emergencies are taken care of, now is the time to drink and catch up. what they want, the two of them, is to have what they had, i think. they both know they have to address the shadow hanging over them at some point, but not tonight. tonight is for them. and like, yeah, of course they’d think that was possible. Dana’s been an unwilling bachelor for ages now, and Lenore? i can’t imagine she’s had much free time with her job running support for a high-ranking ewl member. maybe a few one-night stands here and there? but nothing satisfying in the long-term. throughout chapter 8, before their reunion, we’ve seen both Lenore and Dana independently wishing the other were there, despite everything between them. they’re lonely and they want to fuck each other, because they are each other’s best fuck. the entire ritual is so rehearsed, so known, so comfortable start to finish.

but of course, that shadow is just too loomy not to infect that ritual. you think they’d say shit like “i’m fine” and “i’m not mad” if they really meant it? they’re spells to ward off the inevitable and possibly relationship-shattering tension between them. these two already seemed to have something of a kismesissitude going, though i hesitate to simplify their thing (or any pair’s “thing” in godfeels, for that matter) in such basic terms, because they genuinely love each other. we can debate what kind of love it is, but if nothing else it’s pretty clear that that love has endured a LOT. they value that endurance, i think.

Dana and Lenore have been through too much together to escape their mutual orbit. Lenore thought she could, and Dana wished she could, but here they are again, back at it same as always. is it healthy? is it too violent? is it bad? i honestly don’t know. what i like about them is that they can be mad at each other, hate each other even, but still know deep down that no one else gets it the way they do. they’re rivals to lovers to enemies and back again because they’re too stubborn to really, truly let go. they’d never want to. that’s what makes it hurt all the more, one of many reasons they can’t just paper over this betrayal with a cathartic bout of a hatesex, that Dana knows she can’t let Lenore out of her life again. she knew it the instant she saw her step out of the Comet. so it’s this contradiction that can’t be resolved, not when both parties are so proud, and it manifests in this passionate anger, this desire to love and devour, to punish and protect, until they tucker themselves out and wind up just feeling empty inside, because again, the core contradiction hasn’t been resolved. it's beautiful and terrible all at once and buddy if that ain't godfeels from toe to tip

#godfeels #dana straten #lenore lehart #interlude 3 #danore #sarahposts

[onceuponaseriesrewatch]

OUASR Press Release: 4x20 Lily

4x20 Lily

Synopsis: Emma’s potential for darkness is looming over everyone, but when Emma realizes Maleficent’s daughter Lily is in fact her closest friend from her foster care days, she resolves to find Lily and reunite her with her mother.  Regina joins forces with Emma and together they set out to track down Lily and to warm Robin about Zelena.  However, neither of them is prepared for the harsh realities they’ll encounter in the outside world.  Meanwhile in Storybrooke, Gold faces a crisis involving Belle.  In a foster care flashback, things are looking up for young Emma with her new family until Lily’s appearance threatens to destabilize everything.

Written by: Andrew Chambliss, Dana Horgan

Directed by: Ralph Hemecker

Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White / Mary Margaret Blanchard); Jennifer Morrison (Emma Swan); Lana Parilla (Evil Queen / Regina Mills); Josh Dallas (Prince Charming / David Nolan); Emilie de Ravin (Belle French); Colin O’Donoghue (Captain Killian ‘Hook’ Jones); Jared Gilmore (Henry Mills); Michael Socha (Will Scarlet); Robert Carlyle (Rumplestiltskin / Mr. Gold)

Guest Starring: Kristin Bauer van Straten (Maleficent); Agnes Bruckner (Lily Page); Patrick Fischler (Isaac Heller); Christie Laing (Marian); Rebecca Mader (Zelena); Sean Maguire (Robin Hood); Timothy Webber (the apprentice); Nicole Munoz (young Lily); Abby Ross (young Emma); Cameron Bancroft (Bill); Kendall Cross (Katie); Philip Granger (landlord); Sidney Shapiro (Max); Parker Magnuson (Zach); Zoey Siewert (brunette girl); Jonathan Adams (disembodied voice)

Lily airs August 11 at 8:00 pm EST

#ouasr #once upon a series rewatch #ouasr press release #4x20 lily