#i do not wish to see homestuck 2

[stem-sister-scuffle]

STEM SISTER SCUFFLE: ROUND 2 MASHUP 7

Alphys (Undertale) vs Jade Harley (Homestuck)

Alphys is a Roboticist, Biologist and Souls/Determination Researcher!

Jade Harley is a Nuclear Physicist!

Why you should vote for each contestant:

Alphys:

"Because she messed with DETERMINATION and made Amalgamates, blending monsters into each other to form horrible combinations of undead beings. She’s a lesbian"

"Man made horrors, overwhelming guilt, cute lizard girl, bisexual"

"SHE'S SO CUTE. She's awkward and shy but you can tell she knows a lot about what she does!! She's also a bit of a tragic character considering her biological endeavors have gone kinda. wrong. SHE'S BI AND LIKE ANIME 🫶"

"Ultra qualified women with deep scientific knowledge who are also massive anime nerds and can't hold a simple conversation represent!"

"idk she's kind of just. The Royal Scientist . built a robot and put a soul in it. tried to bring monsters back to life, this failed miserably. did research on souls and determination. has a kickass lab. also nerdy as hell and can't just. tell the truth to save her life. love her"

"I don't think we have a word for "works with SOULs and DETERMINATION, including fusing ghosts with robot bodies and creating immortal abominations of multiple people stuck together." I guess you could probably just put her down as Robotics. Mechatronics or something. Like sure she melted a bunch of guys, but she takes responsibility! Feeds em dog food! That takes responsibility. Bisexual"

"She had a friend who was a ghost, and they wanted to be famous! So she used her knowledge of robotics to build them a new body how they wanted! He became famous, as he wished! And Alphys worked on a bigger, better body that fit him well, though it used up a lot of power and needed more upgrades, hence why it wasn’t used often until the final battle with him (Him being Mettaton). But basically, Mettaton got a new body the way he liked it, changed his name, and started going by different pronouns (Mettaton is only ever referred to by they/them when people reference the ghost). Alphys allowed him to feel much happier as himself, and they’re great friends! Though, she did pretend that she created Mettaton and his SOUL herself, no ghostliness involved. But Mettaton did agree to that.

Because of her perceived achievement, (though her actual achievement was also pretty cool) Alphys was hired as the Royal Scientist for the Underground, and got to work with Asgore, the king of all monsters! She continued working with Mettaton, and Asgore asked her to try and find a way to break the barrier that was trapping them Underground without killing humans. Alphys found an interesting thing called Determination, or DT within humans using the SOULs of humans Asgore had killed and allowed her access to.

She tested it on some flowers in his garden to see what would happen, and nothing did. That she realized at the time, anyway. She had actually injected DT into a flower sprinkled with the remains of Asriel, the king’s dead son, and brought him back to life as a flower. Problem was, Asriel, or Flowey as he eventually called himself, didn’t have a SOUL anymore, since he was a flower. Thinking that nothing had happened, Alphys decided to try and see if it could really bring back monsters that had fallen down/were on the verge of death. She asked people for their family members that had fallen down. The monsters that had fallen down were basically dead, but the last of their magic hadn’t quite run out yet. However, their magic was being spent keeping their bodies from turning to dust, and they were unable to move, pretty much in a coma. So really, if it didn’t work, no harm done! Either it works and they live, it kills them, or it doesn’t do anything and they still die!

Alphys conducted her tests, and at first, it worked! All of the monsters were getting up and moving around! She contacted the families to send them back, but when she was about to, she discovered they had all started melting and had stuck together and merged into one being. She chickened out for fear of how the families would react, and proceeded to ignore a bunch of letters for quite a while. Eventually, she did own up to it, though she was immediately fired (by the EX-queen, not Asgore. Was that even legal?). The families were just happy to have their loved ones back, and while they were still somewhat upset, understandably so, they didn’t really blame her all too much.

ALSO!! She got a girlfriend!! She’s canonically expressed interest in Undyne, Captain of the Royal Guard and who would eventually be her girlfriend, Asgore, and the unknowable! She has made mistakes. Big ones. But honestly, I don’t blame her for the mistakes. The real problem was that she is incredibly anxious and let that get the better of her, leading to her not telling people important things that they deserved to know. She’s not the best at being honest."

Jade Harley:

"She's soo fun and silly and her symbol is literally an atom. she regularly irradiates steak to feed her weird dog"

"She and her nuclear powered dog creating a new universe. she's cool"

"Built a modded bass guitar that's only playable when she's in her robot form and has extra arms. Became a doggirl. She also plays the flute :)"

"i think you have enough ramblings about her already but i couldnt NOT submit her, she is so dear to me <3"

"bbg has THREE scientific specialties!! she genetically modifies plants and makes them grow beautifully high just because she can and loves science. in her alpha timeline she’s a tech mogul and creates technology that challenges the evil empress that brought earth to ruin. AND she’s a furry"

"Doggy"

"She plays a silly flute refrain. She's a furry. Literally, she's a doggirl. She's also a god and created the universe. JADE BEST GIRLIE!!!!"

#stem sister scuffle #round 2 #alphys #ut alphys #undertale #utdr #jade harley #hs jade #homestuck jade #homestuck

[dukeofriven]

To Ravel-Out The Weaved-Up Follies: The Decline and Fall of Homestuck^2

[I first started this essay a few months ago during a strange, brief resurgence of Homestuck^2 discussion that vanished almost as quickly as it began. Because my brain is A Wretchedly Uncooperative Thing this essay has stayed in draft form, being picked at, until—naturally—Homestuck^2 surprised us all by relaunching with a completely new team at its head. I’ve decided to push myself to publish this anyway, because I still think the core of my thesis is correct. So, keeping in mind that this leaves the starting gate slightly later than I would have wished (not knowing I was in a race), let us commence.]

___________________________________________________

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. -Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 “Once upon a time there was a Boojum——" the Professor began, but stopped suddenly. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he said. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." -Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

Several posts about Homestuck^2 have started to crop-up… adjacent to my dash. I'm not attaching myself to those posts because it seems rude, but their points are largely an attempt at revisionism of the fate of Homestuck^2. Understand I'm not using the term ‘revisionist’ pejoratively: it is common, even sensible for artists to look back at failed projects and try to pick up the pieces and derive some value from them. I’ve done it myself, many times. Nobody likes to say "I entirely wasted my time, my passion, and my creative energy for [X] days, months, years.” It is important to look at a failure and see what you did right, treasure the parts that were worth treasuring.

But equally I don't want to go too far in rehabilitating what was, undeniably, a failure. There's a lot of critical theory being brought-up, a lot of talk of Homestuck^2 from a standpoint of post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, trying to engage with what Homestuck^2 was as a platform for ideas. A habitus, if you’ll forgive the jargon, what Bourdieu famously called (in a Hussie-like masterwork of language) “the structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.”

I get it. I get what the Homestuck^2 team was trying to do intellectually: where their minds were at, the hostility they faced, the vitriol they were harmed by. I get it.

But that's not why Homestuck^2 failed. Homestuck^2 did not fail because it dreamed too big, or was too intellectual. It did not fail because its themes were not worth exploring, or because its lens was too meta: for most of its original run, after all, Homestuck is nothing but an interrogation of Homestuck. Its brains were not why Homestuck^2 failed. The problem was its execution. The problem was its heart.

There's a lot to be said about not giving fans what they think they want. The internet drowns in coffee shop AUs where everything interesting about a franchise's characters has been vulgarly ripped from the text, leaving a drama-less, tension-less pablum where everything is stagnant and unchanging, everyone gets along, all the romances are cute and smooth, and you can burrow in the comforting ooze of artistic and narrative death. Give fans exactly what they want and frequently nothing creatively meaningful will result. Fandoms famously resisted both The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan when they first released because they pushed characters to change, and yet they grew to be beloved as fans realized that what they thought they wanted and what it turned out they could enjoy were not as alike s they assumed. There's nothing wrong with showing fans that there can be more to a story that just doing the same thing over again, retrenching into the pablum wastelands of growth-free comfort fics.

But when asking whether Homestuck^2 did or did not gave fans what they wanted or needed, we must first raise an important establishing question: which fans? That is to say: who was its intended audience? Who was Homestuck^2 written for?

At its peak, Homestuck Classic had millions of readers and a million page-hits a day. There was a whole contingent of fandom who came only for the trolls (in some baffling cases actually skipping the first four acts of the story to jump right to into Act 5). There was another contingent who loved the video game parody, there were Problem Sleuth junkies, and in the early acts there were the suggestion box obsessives: all of these were readers who were fans of parts of the story but largely stopped reading Homestuck as the story got more concerned with the complex nature of stories and narrative itself. Homestuck^2 is clearly not for them—as indeed Homestuck Classic itself had not 'been' for them for much of its run. Homestuck^2 is also not for new readers: if you haven't read the Homestuck Epilogues through at least twice, if you don't remember all its major plot points and the plot points of Homestuck Classic, it makes no attempt to onboard you and is, probably in-arguably, outright impenetrable to those not already in the know. It’s not impossible—there were SBaHJ fans who onboarded with the first context-free SBaHJ and went ‘yeah, I can vibe with this’ and never knew or cared that it was a reference work for something else— but it doesn’t seem likely that many people ‘jumped on’ the Homestuck train with Homestuck^2. I think Homestuck^2’s writers would agree that Homestuck^2 expected you to know the lay of the land. So: nobody new was likely going to read Homestuck^2, and (given its density of Homestuck call-backs) neither was it for more casual Homestuck fans. Homestuck^2 was not even for the truly otiose Andrew Hussie diehards: Hussie was only tangentially involved in the project, they weren't writing it, and there's seemingly no references at all to Barty's Brew-Ha-Ha or Inappropriate Time for Ham, so that's a full seventeen readers it also likely turned off (sorry, comrades. One day…)

So who, then, was Homestuck^2 for? Its intended readers seemed to be those who read the Epilogues and loved them. This is a complicated issue: for those who weren’t there, the Epilogues were… controversial. I defended them at the time: I liked them, even admired them, partially because I believed with the fervor of a zealot that there was still something else to come. I called this final entry ‘Pumpkin.’ Homestuck, a story that always rejected binaries, surely was not meant to conclude with over-the-top Candy and/or grim, dour Meat. I knew in my heart that Pumpkin was coming, where John rejected both of these dark and crazy futures and found a third way in which his friends grew up and matured without losing themselves and their friendship: not a story without conflict, but surely the prime timeline as existed in general fandom imagination could not accept Dirk’s grotesque, manipulative suicide, breastfeeding Gamzee, brutal civil wars, and Dirk and Jane becoming so cruel and hateful. Surely that was set-up to pay-off a better future later: after all, like its author, Homestuck abhorred a binary.

But Pumpkin never came, and now I look at the Epilogues and I find lot in it (for lack of a better term) ‘edge lord showboating.’ It feels like reading 90s comics all over again, including the bits with cannibalism. A lot of bleak and miserable things happen in the narrative, and I find myself asking ‘do they happen because they should, or just because they could?’ (And how many times can one franchise treat Jade Harley like absolutely garbage?)

But if the Epilogues had a true and golden virtue, it was their framing as intrinsically being fan-fiction: Meat or Candy, this was not the 'true' continuation of the franchise (as much as that means anything), this was speculative futures, not much different from Doc Scratch’s story of the Vriska/Noir battle. A one-shot, in other terms, an elseworlds: not a definitive statement about What Homestuck Was From Now On, but an experiment in tone and structure. How far can you push Homestuck before it doesn’t feel like Homestuck any more? (Turns out not nearly as far as you might think.) A lot of people didn’t notice, however, or perhaps simply didn’t care: the Epilogues ripped the Homestuck fandom apart. Homestuck Classic often did things in bad-taste as part of its odd charm: Gamzee’s codpiece, Jack playing dress-up after slaughtering a nice couple on a date, Caliborn’s cartoonish misogyny. Some bits land, some don’t, but for fans—I think for many, if not most—the Epilogues crossed a line that they were not comfortable with.

In some quarters the Epilogues are reviled, and I honestly can not fault people who found them off-putting. They are: intentionally so, provocatively so, and it should be okay for people to be put off by them without insisting that the haters ‘just didn’t get it.’ Often they did: they ‘got it,’ they just didn’t like it. It ‘squiked them out’ as we used to say, and the writers had to have known it would: discomfort is the nature and partial purpose of provocative art.

(Sidebar: Epilogue writers, you wrote a plot-line in which 16-year old Homestuck Act 6 protagonist Jane Crocker grows-up to become a racist dictator who has a cuckolding sexual relationship with Gamzee Makarra that involves kin-play involving public breastfeeding.

Sorry Andres Serranos acolytes, that’s not going to go down super-well with the majority of people, not because they are uptight suburban prudes but because they liked Jane Crocker and felt this outcome was not grounded well in the character they knew: only the obtuse would act shocked and try and argue it was due to a lack of sophistication. You took a gamble, you took a risk, you faced the outcome. You fucked around with ICP Hitler breastfeeding cuckoldry and you found out.)

So: who was Homestuck^2 for? It was for people who had read Homestuck multiple times, had read the Epilogues multiple times, and wanted a sequel that involved those Epilogues.

That is… a small audience. A very small audience. I counted myself among them, but had no illusions that its reach was ever going to be very large. Homestuck^2 was never going to be the Second Coming of Homestuck as a sui generis cultural phenomenon: seemingly by design, it was deliberately written for an insular audience who liked a controversial and difficult interpretation of a famous story and wanted more of that interpretation. So the Homestuck^2 team wrote for them: they came to the table with big dreams and big ideas. They came to the table with lots of critical theory under their belts: they knew their Barthes and Baudrillard, they could reference queer theory and the legacy of post-structuralism, they were the sort of people who knew how to situate Homestuck in post-post-modernism and what that meant for the nature of its exploration of stories.

They had an audience, and they had a plan. They were going to give the fans what they wanted.

So after much hype and fanfare, after interviews and the Tumblr equivalent of a press-junket—which saw the new team saying how excited they were to tackle Homestuck’s legacy, how many great ideas they had, how much having a diverse team was going to see Homestuck ‘done right’—Homestuck^2 first published on the 25th of October, 2019, releasing 32 pages.

We start in the glittering majesty of space. The camera swoops in among the stars, barrelling towards a rushing spacecraft (every frame of Homestuck^2 looks great, the visual arts team's work is its unquestioned highlight). We aim at a viewport in the spacecraft’s hull and slowly the Muti-Narratively-Dimensional Ubervillian Dirk Strider comes into view. Fresh from his triumph in the Epilogues, continuing his wicked schemes, he looks right at the camera, and—speaking directly to the audience—he voices the first line of dialogue in Homestuck^2:

"Surprise, bitch."

…

There is…

…

… there is no coming from back that.

There is no saving it.

It is the 25th of October, 2019, and Homestuck^2 launches with its own death-rattle. It stumbles out of the gate like a beautiful racing pony catching its delicate hoof on the sharp, treacherous edge of an unwieldy analogy and tumbling into the indifferent soil of hard reality, shattering all four legs and immediately marking itself for teary euthanasia at the hand of the devastated young girl with the violet eyes who raised it from a foal and dreamed of making Nationals.

We have established that Homestuck^2’s potential audience was small. The people who were most likely to like it were already an insular, distinctive group who had bought-in to what much or all the Epilogues had to offer. Homestuck^2’s opening-day crowd did not need to be sold on the word of the Lord—they already believe it: they came to see their first glimpse of the promised land.

And in its very first conversation with that audience, in its very first words, Homestuck^2 makes the most spectacular miscalculation of tone since 2013's DmC: Devil May Cry—or for those of us of who remember the 90s: ‘Dirk Strider’s about to make you his bitch.’

There's nothing wrong with starting a story with a villain, there's nothing wrong with a villain being a contemptible heel to its audience, but Homestuck^2 spends its opening 32 entries—which, at over 7600 words are longer than the prologue to the Homestuck Epilogues—jumping between Dirk’s smarmy conversations with fellow characters and a monologue to the audience, pages infused with an arrogance and condescension that is downright enervating. The text is frequently dense, so dense it feels like chewing your way through a plank of wood. It is actively tiring to read: I bailed on my first attempt at reading Homestuck^2 when it originally dropped because I just did not have the energy to squint at my screen and read that much orange-on-off-white text.

It is, to be clear, contemptuous. Dirk did much the same in the Epilogues, but the locus has changed. In the Epilogues Dirk taunts the reader with the changes he is making to the story: he knows they object to his manipulations, and he preens as good villains do. But in Homestuck^2, Dirk speaks not of his changes but of the very existence of Homestuck^2 itself. He treats his audience as inherently hostile to the entire existence of the work they have just shown-up to read (or even support via a Patreon), a hostility that culminates when he ‘opens’ a suggestion box and receives the suggestion ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck,’—which he at-once rejects and goes on to monologue some more.

Dirk is talking to an audience who isn’t there. He is speaking to everyone who didn’t like the Epilogues and objects to Homestuck’s 'sequel' directly following them: but that audience isn’t reading Homestuck^2. They bailed in advance, and any who did try and keep an open mind likely jumped ship the moment the comic started by calling them a bitch and implying they’re idiots. The only people likely to read past the fifth page are those who already bought-in to Homestuck^2’s plan: and they are greeted with some 32 pages and 7600 words of the comic’s villain re-litigating and justifying that plan over and over and over again to people who nominally already agreed with him.

It is draining. It is annoying. It is boring to read.

There’s so much you could critique about Homestuck^2’s choices: from Rose cheating on Kanaya to impregnate Jade to Jane Crocker going full Trump and keeping kids in cages. Equally there’s arguments to be made that Homestuck^2’s very premature cancellation inhibits any ability to judge the story fairly: like any serialized narrative stopped mid-way, we have no way of knowing what narrative payoffs were supposed to be. Decisions that seemed baffling on page 8 might prove brilliant and bold by page 8000. But we never got to page 8000, because Homestuck^2 made one crucial error:

It started by telling its audience they were fools for not being smart enough to appreciate how brilliant Homestuck^2 was going to be, and then spent a majority of some 7600 words repeating itself like the worst self-pitying incel you’ve ever had the misfortune to be trapped with at a party. If only the ungrateful could realize how smart, handsome, and well-educated I—Homestuck^2—am, the love I deserve will come flowing in. I’ll show them all.

Homestuck^2 never recovered from that first, fatal error. The rest of its choices, good and bad, are almost irrelevant in the face of that opening broadside, that hostility, that tedium. Homestuck Classic earned its walls of text and at least knew how to space them: Hometuck^2 took its audience forbearance as a given and opens with a lecture on its principles and quality like an unusually snide abstract on a sociology paper. Homestuck^2 essentially began by telling its audience to leave unless they were willing to give it carte blanche, to roll over for its brilliance from the first, to accept in advance that its intelligence and virtue were first rate. So the audience did leave and it never came back and eventually the whole thing collapsed via artist infighting that was so rancorous and possibly subsumed by NDAs that to this day no one has ever halfway adequately explained what happened at the end.

But that ending was preordained from the beginning, for the balance was hopelessly incorrect.

So to anyone trying to write a revisionist history of Homestuck^2 in which its downfall was the fault of readers who simply didn’t ‘give it a chance,’ who didn’t appreciate its themes, who couldn’t grasp (or didn’t care to grasp) its intellectual bonafides (not to mention its extraordinary self-assurance that it was going to be queer Homestuck ‘done right,’ which is a whole essay about a priori reasoning in and of itself)... in other words, a history in which Homestuck^2' downfall happened because people just didn’t ‘get it,’ I’d like to sum up my counter-argument succinctly:

People didn’t like Homestuck^2 because you wrote it bad.

[Afterwards:

There is something bitingly funny about the ‘return’ of Homestuck^2 with the announcement that, from what I can gather, seemingly every person involved with the original project was fired (or, as they’d probably insist, refused to come back). Dirk’s preening, overwhelming arrogance, that ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck’ prompt, will forever haunt the original team’s unwieldy vision. “I’d bet you just looove for us not to make Homestuck anymore” the team said, with all the confidence of an entrepreneur dismissing safety regulations before climbing into his homemade submarine, and boy were lessons learned. My problem with the return, however, is that I don’t know who genuinely wants to see the story of Homestuck^2 finished: the remaining cadre of die-hard patrons who still have enough goodwill to want the promise of the story’s finale fulfilled is microscopic. I’d argue there’s more people waiting for the conclusion of Wizardy Herbert, and I’m the only person I know who has ever read it. What I mean is: as a choice to revive a struggling franchise it doesn’t make much sense, and further—if it is not clear—I don’t think this is a story worth finishing. What is to be salvaged? Jane-the-Dictator, Rose’s cheating, Obnoxious BabyVriska, Dirk Strider the monster? The problem with Homestuck^2 is that Pesterquest happened, and those who played it went ‘this—this is the kind of story we were hoping for, not your edge lord showboating.’ And we only got one Pesterquest and Homestuck^2 limped on for another year reviled, ignored, and eventually forgotten. When it died, most people didn’t have any idea, because the drama never crossed their screens: nobody was talking about it any more. As my best friend noted, give us more Paradox Space. Give us more stories with joy and some sense of fun, something not written by people who often felt like they had an ‘End of Evangelion’ style hatred of Homestuck, or at the very least took the old joke that Hussie was ‘trolling’ his audience at face value. (Writing a good story with twists, set-backs, and tragic moments is not trolling, it is just writing a good story.) Homestuck^2 never felt like it understood that: it was rude and iconoclastic for no more compelling reason than it thought that was meaningful. But then I think the legacy of Epilogues has been extremely toxic—part of the positivity towards Pesterquest was that it let the Epilogues go, featuring a triumphant moment where YoungDirk confronts his Epilogues self and goes ‘I don’t have to be a huge wanker, actually, I can stay a character people can stand and even love again.’

Do that, new team. Pesterquest is named-dropped on the new site more than once, and my dream is that its cast arrives and overthrows the corrosive toxicity of the Epilogues, banishes it to the far realm of underbaked elsewhere ‘what-ifs’ along with every DC cannibalism story and that time Peter Parker’s radioactive semen gave MJ cancer.

The Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are, at this point, not worth salvaging—but I’d happily see them formally buried.]

#homestuck #Homestuck 2 #Homestuck^2 #homestuck beyond canon #andrew hussie #dirk strider #pesterquest #homestuck team #james roach #jane crocker #rose lalonde #kanaya maryam #homestuck epilogues #Wizardy Herbert #Vriska Serket #Jade Harley #daikatana #john romero

[weirdmageddon]

OK OK SO!!

First off!!! Hello fellow davejade enjoyer i see you. Second off—what sort of things do you wish you could’ve seen with these two in canon :0. Could be expansion on canon scene, arc direction, or just a new scene entirely. for me personally I would’ve loved to see some genuine fighting collaboration going on. I felt VERY teased with all the magic combo’s in collide.

Third! I know they do a lot of music collaboration in canon, and I’ve seen some things with them making a band together post canon. What sort of sound do you think they’d have/what artist do you think they’d sound like?

Thank you :))

okay god theres so much i wish was expanded on in canon with regard to dave and jade

this post is swan dive into homestuck meta and took me over a day to write. so i would appreciate feedback or discussion on this if you'd like, reblogs appreciated!

despite this question being posed as davejade related, my answers here are actually relevant for anyone interested in homestuck meta as well.

it’s just recently come to my attention that there are a a handful of people on twitter who are vocal davejade dislikers. i didnt know it was actually disliked until i looked it up on twitter, i honestly thought it was a joke blown out of proportion but no they exist! it surprised me a lot to see people think they "lack chemistry". not only because knowing what i know about them thats a ridiculous insinuation, but also i haven't seen the vitriol on tumblr. probably because we can actually poast about it on here in an unabridged manner which thus enables better, deeper critical analysis and engagement with the media. i think also people forget that dave strider is canonically bisexual and are too yaoipilled + facing the consequences of the epilogues to even give davejade a serious look/analysis. (dave dates terezi and karkat in separate timelines, thinks jane is hot, thinks roxy is a babe but shoves it down when he discovers she’s his ectomom lmfao. davesprite—an extension of dave himself—dated jade! but i'm going to cover that in more depth in this post since theres a lot of misunderstandings about the nature of that relationship in fanon.)

(as a side note according to what some people have told me in inbox and what ive seen lol i think that ive been inadvertently been getting people into davejade. it's all in my davejade tag here in chronological order if you'd like to get a Whiff. be sure to read the tags on posts in there too!)

even though theres a lot in this post as it is, it doesn't cover everything ive talked about wrt davejade, and i think it would benefit readers to have complementary posts alongside this for the full picture with stuff it doesn't cover. there's a ton about why theyre cute and why i think they work well together in that tag.

here's some highlight analysis posts, but be sure to check the tag because there's a more in there:

post a / post b / post c / post d / post e / post f (← one of my favorite ask responses ive ever gotten)

i think a huge chunk of the issue has to do with how the narrative handles dave and jade. one of the most damning things to me is how glossed over their canon interactions were in act 5 despite them collaborating on one of the most important things in the story. i haven't talked about this yet but i'm going to do so here. because they’re put on the backburner by the focus of the narrative during act 5, people who don’t read carefully will miss the implications that are there all along in canon but easily passed over.

under the cut ive separated it into multiple parts

1. Jade’s Quest: What Frog Breeding Entails

this is an analysis examining apart exactly what jade and dave did while frog breeding. i wrote it while high which was extremely enlightening and it allowed me to comprehend it and hopefully explain it in an understandable way. i also discuss how shitty the lack of on-screen communication between jade and dave was for this part and the next.

2. Jade & Dave vs. Jack Noir

ive discussed this one before on my blog so it's not as dense (see davejade tag). but i still sewed the gifs together and discuss how unfortunate this was to be be delegated to a banner at the top of mspa and the neglect of that whole arc despite the outcomes of it being reissued by characters thousands of pages later

3. Davesprite and Grimbark Jade

i get into davesprite's head here and try to make his motivations about the breakup clear to the extent that i can infer because jesus fuck i love these characters way too much ive known them for a decade i understand their core personality structures and why they think what they do and what is most likely to happen when extrapolating? i also talk about how grimbark jade changed the way the fandom perceives their relationship, leaving davejade on a low note instead of a high note. and then hs epilogues had even worse consequences for davejade but i wont get into it because it was character assassination all around and doesnt deserve my time or yours. but if you wanna know what i think, here

4. The music question

where actually answer this ask like it's an ask and not an essay

1. Jade’s Quest: What Frog Breeding Entails

i wish we could have seen what collecting frogs entailed for the two of them. what exactly were they doing? jade’s quest is one of the most interesting.

before i start i want to take a tangent and say the frog breeding reminds me of back in 2020-2021 when i would breed hybrid flowers in animal crossing new horizons to get a very specific gene sequence for these flowers to not only use to breed for hybrids, but to get known gene sequences that i could use to “check” the genes of other flowers. the goal is to get two parent flowers whose sequences when bred would make a specific phenotype 100% of the time.

this sounds complicated but here’s what i did for the lilies:

(“rare island” refers to one of the first acnh patches that removed a nook miles island from the pool that had hybrid versions of your native flower of very specific phenotypes for each color. i wrote out the breeding chains to get parents that would always breed that exact flower found on the rare hybrid nmt island that is no longer available.)

the cleanup ALL TO GET the white 2-2-2 lily looked like this. and after i got white 2-2-2 lily it was smooth sailing

after all that i could use the orange 2-2-0 lilies and white 2-2-2 lilies made in the black lily process and get rare island orange 2-2-1 lilies 100% of the time. in mendelian genetics these numbers (2-2-1) are quite literally RR-YY-Ww.

RR-YY-ww (orange) x RR-YY-WW (white) = RR-YY-Ww (orange: heterozygous Ww gene)

and all that effort into getting white 2-2-2 lilies enables me to get it over and over again now. i don’t have to repeat that process to get rare island pink lilies. all i need to do for the pink 2-0-2 lilies is breed two default bag red lilies (2-0-1) together. 50% will be red (2-0-1) lilies, 25% will be black 2-0-0 lilies, and the last 25% will be pink (2-0-2) lilies.

anyway sorry back to the main point. FROG BREEDING. it just reminded me of it. now that i think of it the frog breeding process also reminds me a lot of artbreeder back from when AI was only a fun little toy 4-5 years ago

ok so have a look at what kanaya says about what jade must do. this is the coolest quest imo because of how it progresses and how long it actually is

here’s how it works. remember back in act 2, when the wayward vagabond needed to tie a longer cable to descend down the ship (and refused to give up the ones that made up his mayoral sash)? he used the appearifier in the ship to appearify the extra cable across the gap to his location? that’s how the appearifier normally works when when it’s locked to the present. it’s very straightforward.

when jade appearifies a frozen frog, it shows us this exact thing. she appearified the actual frog itself (the same way WV appearified the actual cable across the gap) to her exact location. it can get the frog out of the ice in the way WV could untrap serenity from the amber. if something’s destiny wouldn’t otherwise be changed, it will not be paradoxified, it will just simply itself be warped to that location, with precise carving if it is somehow trapped inside of something else.

if you could appearify it to your location right now, you wouldnt be able to take it out the appearifier’s crosshairs in person later to alter its destiny because the object won’t be there at that time. it wouldve been with you the entire time. unless you decide to take the appearified item back to that location so that you could appearify it in the past, but that’s the most pointless time loop ever and doesn’t change its destiny.

for this icicle frog jade and dave weren’t capable of changing its destiny anyway, because it was completely encased in ice, and just didn’t bother to go after it. partially because it was with jade at the appearifier the entire time anyway and she can’t exactly put it back in there in the future. the point is, besides jade appearifying it to her location, the frog had no other possible routes of destiny. in that part of lofaf where she appearified the frozen frog from, the ice is too deep to get anything out of it (other than appearifying it) and i’m not sure the forge would have melted it in time before their reckoning ended anyway.

the goal of jade and dave is to target frogs on the appearifier screen and trust that their future selves follow through in altering the frog’s destiny. if so, then the frog’s paradox slime will appear instead and its genes would be collected in addition to creating offspring between multiple paradox clone frog genes. then, dave and jade would necessarily have to go out adventuring and find the frog so that they end up following through for their past selves.

if i understand correctly, jade is creating all the frogs on her planet that grow up with manually modified genes. these frogs must be genetically altered from their parents so that the frogs she creates don’t grow up to become one of their parents (as they’d be identical). the mutant offspring frogs “generation A” she ectobiologizes will eventually mature from tadpoles to frogs, assisted by dave’s time travel. then she will eventually target “generation A” with the appearifier to get their paradox slime to fuse with some other frogs’ paradox slime and create new slightly altered frogs “generation B” (and then follow through on altering the “generation A” frogs’ destiny so their slime and genes can be paradoxified by jade and dave’s past selves). repeat until the genes are fine tuned for the genesis frog.

this is why i compared it to my breeding in animal crossing. getting the genesis frog reminds me of the blue rose paths. i worked with the garden council back in the day and i used backwardsN’s “cesspool” method, except i honestly gotta say my white 2-2-2 lily thing was much more involved and carefully maneuvered in a way that i imagine frog breeding is more like. backwardsN’s “genepool method” was basically making a red-orange-black rose primordial soup and waiting for a blue rose to emerge out of it, just increasing the chances seeing a blue rose sprout the next day after watering with each generation of offspring. you KNOW my ass was using time travel, even if i happened to get lucky and got a blue rose without even finishing the big turtle plot. without time travel, most players (95%) will get their first blue rose before these # of days. (open up advanced tag)

there must be so many daves running around to help her going back in time all within the span of a few hours while still having their own linear, older timelines that are much longer than the “time stage” they’re actually functioning in. this sounds complicated but it’s not. think of this “time stage” as analogous to the 3 days until the moon falls in majoras mask. it’s the “time window” all the time travel takes place within, but link doesn’t become a day younger when he travels to a day ago. the timeline of his “self” is older but is kept within the confines of the 3-day timeframe. similarly, in tears of the kingdom, two master swords exist simultaneously for most of history, but the one on the light dragon’s head (who was above the cloud barrier before the upheaval btw) is further ahead on its own linear timeline: it starts as the other, pre-gloomed master sword → broken by gloom → sent to the past to be repaired → renewed over time, existing at the same time on the “time stage” as its own pre-gloomed past self but ahead on its own linear timeline

now imagine this but within the “time stage” of just a few hours within the same 24-hour period. kanaya says frog breeding ordinarily takes weeks. multiple daves can exist simultaneously because they’re operating in the same few-hour-timeframe but one can linearly be days ahead of another. it’s the exact same thing as breeding flowers in animal crossing for irl days but to your game it’s whatever date you have it set to. your irl progress isn’t lost if you go back a few days in settings. i’d often find a week in june to use as a “time stage” to loop through when it would rain at least one hour on each day of that week which would save me the hassle of watering my flowers every day before time traveling to the next.

it must’ve sucked for dave to hear jade say the same things over and over again. the novelty probably wore off pretty fast lol…… dave says he saw his future self fighting and dying to jack and knew that’s what he’d eventually have to do as well. every single dave at all points of his linear timeline understood that and it probably settled something horrible into his heart.

im imagining during the original run dave was thinking to himself: “im bored but cant alter anything about this without creating a doomed timeline. if i dont see my future self hugging jade then i cant hug her even though i really fuckin want to. note to future self: hug jade. aww shit look at me go guess i remembered. hell fucking yes cant wait for that to be me in a few hours” and gives a thumbs up

future dave pov, hugging jade and watching his past self give him a thumbs up from afar thinking to himself: “ahaha i remember exactly what i was thinking there” and gives a thumbs up

but anyway. goddamn. JADE AND DAVE. what did hussie do to you.

this is a goddamn atrocity.. what the hell man. i wish we could have at LEAST seen the text file jade sent to kanaya. we got to see ConversationWithAVeryStupidGirl.Txt but not daveisafunnyguy.txt?

i mean i GUESS the humor is delivered through this

and like, yeah that is pretty funny? but i feel like the single laugh this gives me is nothing compared to the joy i wouldve gotten out of seeing what dave has to say about the cloning apparatus for ants here and talking himself into circles about frog procreation enough to make not just gigglehouse jade laugh, but kanaya too

we spent so much time learning about the mechanics of the punch designix and hardly anything about creating the seed of the actual new universe. we learn about it through kanaya and karkat messaging jade, instead of dave and jade working that out through SHENANIGANS. even though this is JADE AND DAVE'S session. it’s fine that kanaya is helping them, as she should, but we’ve seen parallel pesterlog conversations before so i dont get why we didn’t get that here! jade and dave frog breeding is one of the most important events in homestuck, and yet it was terribly glossed over. everything in the story, their futures, are predicated on their success. not just in their unwinnable session, but the one they split up for 3 years and escape to.

at first i thought, maybe their lack of shown interaction has to do with hussie working out the intricacies of pesterlog/dialogue thing? as he once stated on tumblr:

shoshaumbay asked: In the intermission of act 6, it says that they get to talk. Does this mean that their guardians couldn’t talk to them before and that is why they left them notes all around their houses?  The achievement badge only upgraded their ability to speak to each other as presented through the comic. I.e. it permitted them to speak to each other… WHILE WE WATCH! Do you think all the trolls were hanging out together, not talking at all? Or Dave and Jade were doing all that frog hunting without a single peep?? That’s ridiculous. On the other hand, abstraction weaves itself through the Homestuck reality, and it can be hard to pin down where abstraction is to be taken literally. The truth is, there is not much distinction between the layers of abstraction and the reality they are meant to stand for. John was both literally named on his 13th birthday, and not quite, because that’s silly. The guardians are both literally silent automatons, and not really, as there is indication through allusion they function as normal people too. And the kids went through a huge adventure, achieved immortal god status, and even then had to gain a few more levels just to gain the achievement of simple dialogue as a literal upgrade, as well as not literally, because that makes no sense. The reality is inseparable from the way the story is presented and the way the “game” is played. But those abstractions are also a facade for a more life-like reality beneath it as well.

then i realized, this is not only an arbitrary cop out that affects my enjoyment of the comic in retrospect because they wind up being able to talk later anyway and that makes me feel cheated in these moments, but also still actually awful within these parameters because hussie breaks his own rule here, proving he could have shown us dave and jade talking in person at any time regardless of needing the gift of gab achievement for us to watch them as readers. recall this is also the first time john and rose met in person (at least when rose wasn't asleep):

2. Jade & Dave vs. Jack Noir

this is where i take out my frustration over this being delegated to a banner at the top to the point where readers forgot it occurred.

(also i want yall to take a moment to acknowledge this ^)

i wish their time on lofaf frog breeding and fighting with jack was front and center and wasnt just in the banner at the top of the page. it makes it seem not as important when it completely was, considering that characters brought up what had happened in that scene multiple times.

it is significant because it is at that point that jack noir has killed all of the kids at least once. the only one left being jade who he refuses to kill due to bec’s loyalty

THIS IS WHAT THE REFRANCE (foreshadowing)

jack noir killed john on his quest bed which allowed him to ascend to god tier. then he killed john AGAIN but it wasn’t a heroic or just death so john was revived

jack killed grimdark rose. john smooched rose’s corpse, allowing her to take over on derse.

jack killed dave by redirecting jade’s bullets into dave’s body instead. jade smooched dave’s corpse, allowing him to take over on derse.

after jade shoots him through jack, he’s down for the count. she kisses him and he wakes up on derse; all he and rose have left of “themselves” in an existential sense are their dreamselves. they didnt know they were going to ascend to god tier delivering the tumor. they assumed they were just going to die like for real and not come back which is why dave went with rose since he didnt want her to die alone.

it was also an important point since her time spent with dave on lofaf is the first in-person contact jade has had with another living human since she was probably 4 years old with her grandpa.

for jack noir, we got [s] seer: desend and [S] ==> (3696) which were hella impactful. seeing jade and dave essentially go through the same thing but with an extended battle sequence honestly kinda warrants a flash in my mind. (the sad thing is that unite synchronization was originally written with those pages in mind (the track was originally called redshift) but of course malcolm brown couldnt have known what was going to happen unless hussie commissioned him for a specific track for a specific story beat, probably like whatever he did to coordinate cascade’s music with toby ahead of the 10/25/11 release of the flash and publication of volume 8 on bandcamp)

i think one of the worst parts is that entire conversations were referenced, but cut or never written.

this is a real forgotten homestuck fact: jade was completely freaking out after filling dave with bullets until karkat had talked her through it. very easily forgotten since even though it being referenced twice we never actually saw the conversation. (i overrode the black scratch background so it's easier to read)

wow thats so crazy i as a member of the audience dont in fact remember! would it have killed to write it my guy

and we find out thousands of pages later dave was thinking more about how it wouldve made jade feel to watch him die than knowing he was about to fucking die. if you even care btw

i wrote more about this here

3. Davesprite and Grimbark Jade

davesprite—an extension of dave himself—dates jade but breaks up because he feels inadequate at being the dave that he thinks jade deserves. NOT because they fought or anything. they were still on good terms. davesprite just felt inherently unlovable. john seemed more upset about the breakup frankly.

what davesprite did was because he thought it was in jade's best interest. there is nothing to suggest it was a fight / clash break up. they still seemed to be on good terms, davesprite asking where she went and all. jade says the breakup “is complicated” and “hes going through a lot of stuff”. given the context i think it's reasonable to assume that davesprite's thought process was: “we're coming up to the new session soon and youre going to meet up with dave again and i dont want to make shit awkward with you dating knockoff dave. you deserve to be with real dave instead so im gonna cut what we have going here in advance and distance myself from your life”

jade probably protested about saying how he's just as real as “real dave”, but davesprite made his decision already. im sure it wasnt easy for davesprite to break up either. with emotions running high (sadness, not anger) he probably just left to be alone and distance himself from jade, and seems to harbor guilt about it as we see in the log. that's probably why he wasn't at john's movie party. this is just speculation on my part but it doesnt seem in character for the breakup to be explosive because jade seemed more understanding than john. sad, but understanding.

i feel like a lot of people forget this. grimbark jade made it seem like davesprite did it to hurt her, or for this to mean that dave and jade are not actually good for each other, which is a wild mischaracterization of what happened but the one that stuck with the fandom nonetheless.

not only that, but davesprite's existence tragic and he's understandably depressed. after spending about a year in sburb (accounting for time travel) without john or jade, only to go back and give up your personhood to advance the alpha timeline and become forgotten is fucking crushing, and i think the breakup is also about davesprite coming to terms with that trauma, being okay with his existence as a sprite instead of being a bootleg stand-in for the dave that jade knew.

basically what vintagegamebro says,

it was such a tragic way for them to part for 3 years with no communication, and it was only proceeded by more tragedy because jade then had no one but davesprite to turn to, and davesprite needed anything but romance at that point

grimbark jade isn’t a good reflection of jade’s actual self. she pushed the mayor into lava for fucks sake which normal jade would never dream of doing, grimbark jade is straight up unhinged. i’m sure jade was hurt because all breakups hurt, but it was blown out of proportion (see how calm she was above a few days after the breakup?) because of Evilness. but also as @vintagegamebro mentioned it also felt somewhat … “off”? or out of left field? especially seeing what the nature of the breakup was from both sides in the above screenshots.

when dave says “theres no way i would have done that to you” i genuinely believe him. i have no reason not to believe him. look at him above asking for questions and clarification. thinking about how what davesprite did, a version of himself beyond his control and how it reflects on himself, i think it's obvious dave cares a lot about how jade feels about him

even after this confrontation in the game over timeline, dave laid down his fucking life to defend her corpse from the becs in he hope she could be revived by jane

and to think that after all this he still chose to save her, like always, probably knowing he had little to no chance, just because he cares for her, her life and who she is beyond this moment, really meant a lot for them. i really, really was mad that this would be the last time they would truly ever be together in a way that to me mattered

4. The music question

i wrote this post regarding instruments with this song in the back of my head if its anything. takes about 12 seconds to start after you press play for some reason

this too, closer to the “style”. i like imagining dave going apeshit on drums

#homestuck #dave strider #jade harley #davejade #homestuck meta #hs

[davekat-sucks]

Below is my "I strongly dislike Davekat and wish it wasn't canon and don't have ill will towards fans of it, but I do think they are being ignorant on purpose because Dave's character fucking sucks cock after Act 5" rant. Apologies but I needed to share this because it's almost 4/13 and I'm feeling festive.

You know why most of the fandom left homestuck around 2013-2014? cause of long pauses between updates and then we got stupid content that wasn't going anywhere. I left the fanbase DURING [S] game over. I fucking checked out because that was the stupidest fucking flash it could have possibly been and at that point I was waiting for a moment to just give up on the story and come back to it when it was finished.

I'd say most of the homestuck fandom seems silent about what they think about the story. Every fanbase is like that, most people watch from the sidelines and I do that too. I usually say nothing about the media I consume. Sometimes, rarely, I'll go through homestuck's reddit around this time of year and I'll see common sense. (There is hope!) But a good chunk of the people who stayed with the homestuck fandom through all of Act 6, or younger fans who are just joining it now, are able to just take whatever is given to them and not think anything through. I'm not saying anyone in the fanbase is stupid, no, I'm saying that they don't care enough about the story to admit what is good writing and what is shit writing. They don't care about writing. They don't care about the characters. They care about fannon. They care maybe, MAYBE, about activism.

A good chunk of the fanbase seem to be Davekat stans. Why are there are so many Davekat fans? It's because they can just eat the sludge. Maybe they grew up off of it so they can tolerate it. (I think Act 6 does a number on a motherfucker and makes you lower your standards so low that any content will do.)

Some people think any canon gay rep is good gay rep, but who would want to be represented by this? In Homestuck 2, Karkat is demoted to "Dave's boyfriend" and Dave was a selfish jerk through nearly all of Act 6. Dave was such a good character in Act 5, and Act 6 just had him ignore rose's alcoholism and ignore terezi's struggles. He didn't care about anything. Karkat at least somewhat tried to help Terezi or cheer her up. I can't understand for the life of me how someone like Karkat would end up with someone as selfish as Dave was. (Dave was selfish in the pre-retcon bit but still! why show us that? the epilogue was no different Dave abandoned jade instead of talked to her and let him know he wasn't interested in her because he's gay. I hardly recall what was going on at that part of the story, I just remember being dumbfounded that the story reinforced Dave only cares about himself.)

I wish Dave was written differently. I wish he had SOME, an ounce at least, of chemistry with Karkat. Instead what we got was Dave childishly drawing dicks on Karkat's face in some Hussie art and that pretty much sums up their whole relationship. A massive L for Karkat. I'm fine with Karkat being with meenah, nepeta, jade, davepetasprite for christ's sake! Just not the person that Dave ended up being. Why does fixing Dave fall on Karkat? Dave isn't the only shit character. I can't believe that John just gave up fully and completely. I find it hard to believe that Rose, at the end of the story, wouldn't advise John to train with her so he could learn how to use his new powers to go fight the empress. Why doesn't John do more with his powers? Why isn't John a better dad in the new content? I would imagine he would have tried to be like his own dad. Why did the story write Jake the entire way through like he was so worthless he wasn't worth our time and then dedicate so much of the story to him? I could go on and on about this, and I did go off so I will stop here.

This fandom and this story is going to continue circling the drain. The only thing that could possibly save it is a full overhaul and rewrite from people with skill who actually LIKE the characters. If anyone cared about the story THEY WOULD PRESS FOR THAT!!! If anything Hussie wanted to actively destroy any good will the fans had towards it. Maybe he fucking hates the story, I never looked to far into any of the backstory of how homestuck was made but I assume he fucking hated it from how he wrote Act 6. It's so sad to see because most of the characters had something really special about their stories. It's a story that is all about potential. It was crushed under the weight of it's own stupidity. Wait. I'm not done! What the fuck was that part where Dave left a note for Jade that said "I missed you" and a little red band? I didn't ship them but it certainly felt like Dave was into her or at worst leading her on. Am I supposed to believe that Dave was just fucking with her? Was he trying to be there for her? I guess he was fucking with her or trying to be into girls cause he ended up with Jade only to leave her in the epilogue. Why did he turn out to be such a prick!? Why didn't he talk to her? What point is the story trying to make? Abandon everything when you find out who you really are like your old friends don't matter anymore? Dave was maturing in act 5. Why the fuck is the story like this!!!?!?! YOU'RE TELLING ME THIS IS THE SAME MOTHER FUCKER WHO GAVE IT HIS ALL TO HELP? WHO SAVED ROSE'S LIFE AND THEN WENT TO DIE ALONG SIDE HER IN CASCADE? I FEEL LIKE THE ONLY REASON HE TRIED TO HELP BRING JADE BACK FROM THE DEAD IN GAME OVER WAS BECAUSE JADE WAS A SPACE PLAYER AND THEY NEEDED ONE TO TALK TO HER DENIZEN SO SHE'D BIRTH THE DAMN FROG THING OR WHATEVER!? DOES DAVE JUST SELECTIVELY DECIDE WHEN HE'S HAD ENOUGH BEING A COCKSUCKER? IS HIM BEING ABUSED BY BRO A GOOD ENOUGH EXCUSE TO IGNORE HOW LITTLE HE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT ANYTHING?!

WHY DO PEOPLE THINK THAT DAVE IS EVEN GOOD AFTER ACT 6?! WHAT GAME WERE THE REFS WATCHING!?!?!?!

Long story short, Karkat deserves at least somewhat better. Thank you.

Very well said! Everything about this is perfect! People excuse Dave's actions is because of the whole Bro Strider being abusive to him as he grew up. So they think it's okay for him to not move on past it or grow better as a person. Instead, he will just wallow himself in self pity and everyone must feel sorry for him. One could say it's projecting too. Ignoring the fact that Jade had to live ALONE when growing up on an island with an animal guardian. It may be normal for trolls since they have a society that relies on this, but it's not the same for Earth or humans. Not only that, but didn't Dave find out that it was BRO STRIDER who faced against Jack Noir and helped Davesprite ESCAPE? So wouldn't that put into more question about how he feels about his brother and wonder if there was more going on behind the scenes than what he saw? Like why would BRO let Davesprite, who just a Dave from a Doomed Timeline, protect him, knowing how he will be killed? Was his training helpful or did something else make him be this way? It still technically happened by Post Retcon too. So that event and fate is inevitable for Bro Strider. Closest interaction Dave had with Karkat pre-Act 6 is through the memo with John, but even then, he's just fucking around with Karkat. Taunting him to say that interspecies romance is a thing now between the Beta Kids and Trolls and Dave is ready to bang Terezi if Karkat doesn't step up to his game to admit his feelings for her. Maybe it was kind of shitty to use Terezi's feelings and their relationship to mess with someone else that he knows has feelings for her. But dude jumped the chance to use it against Karkat when he thinks humans dating alien trolls should not be a thing. We see Dave do showing kindness. From things like hiding all his dead Daves from Jade so she wouldn't get upset and him having a good time with people like Rose and John. It shows that he is capable of being a good person and probably would wish to be a better one. He wants to be BETTER than Bro. Be someone that treats others better. Maybe even towards his own kids if he decides to have one. But sadly, we live in an age where having a family is a bad thing now. Karkat really deserves better and Dave sucks as he is in these recent HS projects. I don't think James Roach or HICU will make him any better. And Davekat will be hard to make it go away with how the people who work on Homestuck and ones outside of it (like Requiem Cafe) will pander to it because they know it will get the most attention and money. Like carrot on a stick. Even the carrot is rotten, they will still take it.

#homestuck #homestuck fandom #Davekat #Dave x Karkat #DavexKarkat #DaveKarkat #KarDave #KatDave #KarkatDave #Dave Strider #Karkat Vantas #Andrew Hussie #WhatPumpkin #What Pumpkin #James Roach #Homestuck Independent Creative Union #HICU #Requiem Cafe #Homestuck cafe #Homestuck x Requiem Cafe

[indigonite]

The whiplash I got from reading that last ask

you and me both

it seems like there’s a new team of dedicated fans working on it so I do wish them the best of luck

opinions on homestuck^2 aside, there was a story planned for it, they did have a plan, so it’s always nice seeing halted projects picked up again, instead of just being abandoned and forgotten. it shows that people still care

#homestuck

[thewebcomicsreview]

Happy 10/25, the third most important religious holiday in the Homestuck Calender, and we got a new HS2 to celebrate, focusing on one of the new kids. The new kids were one of the parts of Homestuck 2 I actually liked, so let's see how the new writers handle them! With a Jailbreak reference, apparently.

Wait, hold on, deep lore: thespiansGlamor is Harry, glutinousGymnast is Tavros. RecidicivousGainsayer and gavageCunctation are names we haven't seen before. GC fits into the AGTC DNA theme of all the screen names we've seen so far (it's Terezi's acronym), and RG doesn't. They might be random NPCs, but they might also be foreshadowing. Also, neither Rose nor Kanaya appear to be on their daughter's friendlist, unless they're under the scroll bar, but maybe that's not weird.

What, uh, what did she draw the key with, HS2? That's her blood color, but she's not bleeding.

Also, who's narrating this? This has been a question in HS2 all along, but the narration here calls attention to itself more. It's much more "Homestucky" than HS2's had been.

We even have narration describing conversation, which is something HS2 has never done and HS1 restricted to carapacians.

You suggest to Vriska that you should go the other direction. Vriska says nah this is definitely where we wanna be. She says between the two of you, you've probably got enough luck to take this whole place off the map if you really wanted. You ask her what the fuck she means by that. She says you know like with your Thief of Light powers. You tell her you don't have anything like that. She says huh, weird!

Oh FFS now I have to go look up if post-Retcon Vriska met Aranea, her own dancestor who was not a Thief of Light. That's such a weird thing for Vriska to assume, that Vrissy not only has Vriska's powers but has mastered them. Also, I wonder if this narration style, besides being a Jailbreak reference, is because the new writers aren't confident writing the HS2 characters yet? Or maybe they just don't want Vriska/Vrissy dialogues because they're kind of hard to read.

I like these expressions. I also like this continuation of Candy Lore, that all the HS1 characters see Candyland as a "fake" universe and that's part of why they fucked around so much and got so fucking weird, whereas we see here that the actual Candy Natives do not see their planet as "bootleg". The fact that the HS parents don't think of their own children as entirely "real" is actually super fucked up, but I guess Yiffy's got the main right of complaint there.

I like that Vriska, who can fly, still makes Vrissy give her a boost. What a jerk!

Vriska says now THAT sounds like some shit a REAL Vriska would say! You roll your eyes and start to leave when Vriska calls out to ask if you're going without wishing her good luck. As you start to wish her luck she cuts you off and tells you to keep it, as she already has aaaaaaaall the luck she needs. You say okay dude.

I don't know if the original HS2 writers intended for the resolution of the "Vrissy kind of idolizes Vriska" subplot to end with "Vriska's so fucking Vriska that Vrissy is disillusioned within literally minutes", but it's honestly kind of funny and I like it.

JANE: From the conversation recovered from Egbert's phone, we've learned that Roxy has been... conspiring alongside the rebels for months now. Operating a lab deep within the ruins of the Troll Memorial Meteor, she and her coconspirator Calliope are preparing some kind of super weapon they've dubbed "The Plot Point". JANE: Heretofore referred to as The Point.

This feels a little like shade.

JANE: Let’s get to The Point!!

A lot like shade.

It's a little convenient to the new team that they took over right when HS2 was starting to actually go somewhere, but regardless, that was a neat page. I got a soft laugh out of it, the plot is starting to move, and there was some decent worldbuilding.

#Homestuck 2 #Homestuck 2 Liveblog #Feels nostalgic to do this! #Homestuck

[pesterquestrewritten]

Sorry if this is an inappropriate question to ask, but why do you want to rewrite pesterquest? Was there anything wrong with its original version, or are you just doing this for fun?

brain is a Lil Loopy rn so please excuse if this answer is semi incoherent - recovering from ankle surgery rn.

im gonna try to not harp on the original pesterquest as a project/talk about my percieved issues with it. from what I understand about the work environment where it was developed, it was hell -- poor communication, tiny budgets, little overall direction. plus every artist/writer involved was likely busy with other things at the same time (for example finishing the development of Hiveswap Act 2). they had so much going against them, and... it sorts shows in the final work, which isn't their fault. the original PQ team was passionate and cared and like. the absolutely last thing i want to do is disrespect them.

(generally also stating for the record that calling the original PQ "trash" or "replaced" is like. not good vibes. please don't do this if you're trying to enjoy PQR -- the last thing the original postcanon team needs is more harassment.)

anyway.

pqr is fanfiction, fundamentally.

i started making pqr because in september i was sick with covid, i wanted to learn renpy, and i wanted to study homestuck more. i wanted to figure out what made PQ tick, literally, figuratively, all of the above.

plus i really wanted to write a different story arc for mspar.

i also really love the side characters in Homestuck, and wish they all got more time to shine. the pqr prologue including a set of Spades Slick sprites just for a brief encounter i think helps establish what i want to do with the like. raw potential of the premise of a Homestuck visual novel.

damara is the other big thing -- i've wanted to make a story with her in it work for ages. (if anyone remembers the old MEGIDO hades mod, that was my first big public attempt. she was gonna be the protagonist, breaking out of scratch's mansion. turns out coding in renpy is WAY easier LMAO)

like. the plan wasn't even initially to have the prologue be a full damara route? i just let the writing take me where it wanted to take me. it's been deeply fun and cathartic.

the prologue's "bad end" has some incredibly intimate themes of like. inevitability, and worrying you've let everyone you love down, and i showed it to a college friend who i hadn't spoken to for ages and she set a screenshot from it as her background.

like. to me. that's pqr. that's why i make it.

pqr is the laundry room ending of rose's route, a deeply personal look into my own fears and anxieties as an author reflected back through this girl's circumstances. pqr is also the retcon ending of rose's route, a wildly stupid and indulgent romp through my own past fanfiction for a silly gag that people seemed to really love.

pqr is about dave and myself looking for a place to stay simultaneously -- pqr is about jade leaving prospit, and how i was adding to that part of the game in real-time as i dropped out of college, changing both of our destinies to something unexpected but hopefully better, at the same time.

pqr is also a silly extended sleepover scene. it's just fun to see them interact.

pqr is an excuse to turn over corners of homestuck and see if we can't peek behind them. what was it like for roxy, to think she lost joey and then find rose's meteor barely a year later? of course she'd think it's impossible for her to succeed as a mother. pqr is about finding empathy for yourself for your own mistakes, reflected back at you through homestuck characters.

because really, isn't that what we're all here for?

pqr is me coming back to my last long-abandoned attempt at an act 5 rewrite. pqr is an excuse to watch my girlfriend grow in confidence and style as she makes all the endcards and incidental art (except for joey route pt 2, but THAT was an excuse to work with a NEW friend!!!!!!!)

pqr is a friendship simulator that i am winning by having an incredibly supportive and collaborative group of friends in the dev thread who are cheering me on with every segment of text i post, friends who will hop in vc to check out the newest segment. friends like @dare0451 who literally yesterday rendered out some new audio to upgrade the June route to be even more fucking amazing and terrifying than it already was, AND DARE HASN'T EVEN PLAYED IT????? IT'S LITERALLY JUST. IT'S FRIENDSHIP MAN. PQR IS FRIENDSHIP

what the hell was this question again.

oh right.

yeah it's been fun basically. that's why i do it lol

#pesterquest rewritten #pqr #homestuck #fansim #hom3stuck #asksbox

[bloodyshadow1]

for the new d20/acoc season I made a list of pros and cons

Pros

Too many to mention but I’ll try

Brennan getting to play in a world he made

Matt getting to dm for Aabria and Brennan

Lou getting to play in a game dm’d by matt, I remember him wanting to be in a campaign with him one season and now he gets too

More calorum lore

Aabria and Anjali are gorgeous as always

Mango Jessica rabbit need I say more

Lou and Zac getting to play with Brennan, it’s always cool to see the players get to play with their dm in a game

Can’t wait to guess what classes everyone are

We might get to see Amathar’s sisters

Lou was one of my favorite parts of ACoC so I’m glad he’s here in the prequel as well, kind of wish he was playing a young Amathar but that’s not really fair of a criticism

Cons

gonna be honest there being 5 players in the dome is bothering me far more than it should, there should be 4 or 6, 5 feels wrong

are they going to be fighting against Candia because that would be sad

ACOC was very stressful and I’m not sure if I can deal with that again

I was hoping that another CR person would be there, just personally.  I think it would have been neat for Matt to have a CR friend to heckle him when he’s doing a d20 prequel like Brennan had Lou his d20 friend to heckle him when he did a prequel to CR

Low magic settings at low levels kind of bother me personally, but I’m still excited for it

When Matt pulled the sword out in the trailer I had homestuck flashbacks

We might have to see Amathar’s sisters die

Other:

It seems like they might be playing a bad guy campaign, or at least anti-hero/otherside given that they’re called scrumptious scoundrels as their group name

Don’t really know where this all fits because I’m pretty sure since if I recall in the Ravening war, it was Candia, Fructerra, and the dairy isles, vs the Vegitainia, the Meat lands, and Cersia

we have 1 fruit, 2 vegetables, one meat, one cheese which wouldn’t matter much if they’re a rogue faction or something, but seems odd to be fighting on the same side

If they kill Cal in the past does that save Amathar’s hot sisters?

Is Matt capable of being as bloodthirsty as ACoC demands to give Brennan a taste of his own medicine?

#a crown of candy #dimension 20 #d20 #acoc #acoc the ravening war #the ravening war #a crown of candy the ravening war

[callmearcturus]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

tagged by @lo-fi-charming

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 82, 83 if you include the one I wish I hadn't orphaned.

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? 2,721,477 words

3. What fandoms do you write for? Oh boy. Homestuck, The Magnus Archives, Mission Impossible, Borderlands, Welcome to Night Vale. Some one-offs in other fandoms. First really cut my teeth on The Dresden Files.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos? Let's seeeee.

dustsceawung (The Magnus Archives) with 4,600 kudos

a steady hand, a delicate man (The Magnus Archives) with 3,316 kudos

dripping with alchemy (Borderlands) with 2,663 kudos

The Eurydice Suite (Homestuck) with 2,164 kudos

I'll bring the motion (The Magnus Archives) with 2,163 kudos

5. Do you respond to comments? When I have something fun or interesting to say, yeah. I don't wanna just say "thanks!" on every comment so I tend to try to repay the comment with a tidbit or something?

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hmmm. See I'm a Happy Ending Guaranteed kind of writer so I don't know. Maybe we float before the sea at dusk because it's technically a bad end?

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? GOD that's hard... I think maybe all the world is earth and water or the Five Years Later ending of The Eurydice Suite.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not anymore. 8)

9. Do you write smut? what's smut never heard of her

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? I'm going to choose to interpret this as "fusions" instead of "crossovers" and in that case I have written....

Homestuck/Inception (The Eurydice Suite), Homestuck/Kinda Sorta John Wick (so we don't kill the ones we love), Homestuck/Fallout New Vegas (out here the good girls die), and WTNV/Good Omens (all plans are golden in your hands)

Out of those, I think the New Vegas one is the most out-of-left-field.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? By now, at least 10 times that I'm aware or.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? A few times, yep! Russian and Ukrainian I think.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? BOY HAVE I.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? I despise this question and if this question had a face, I would punch it. I assume this has to be a ship I have written since this is a writing questionnaire.

In my heart of hearts, it's Karkat and Kanaya. I enjoy their platonic love more than any romance pairing....

SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS QUESTION is that I... think for me personally, the pairing is a vehicle of the wider story/themes, so I can't say "Oh its DirkJake" because to me the KTOWL DirkJake is wildly different from, like, TES DirkJake.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? The barely-inspired-by-Hellboy AU that I should probably just write as an original story. But I won't because I'm a coward, lmao.

16. What are your writing strengths? Consistency and structure, I think. I'm a tradesperson, not an artist.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I feel like I lack a lot of foundational material that other artists have due to my lack of education and just generally not knowing things. Like, the kind of works I personally admire and learn the most from, I lack the toolset to create myself, which is constantly frustrating.

Structure is sometimes a shackle, and I often feel like I can't execute something truly Artistic because to me, writing is a trade, not an art.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? I do this sometimes and lemme tell you, every single fucking time I do, I rigorously check everything.

Like, I recently agonized over whether a character would use Verzeihung versus Entschuldigung in a fic, and that was a solid hour of research. Worth it tho!

I'm of the opinion that if you're just going to use google translate or something, then I would elect to write it as ["Excuse me," he said in overly-polite German as he passed], but that's me.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Uuuuuuuuh ppppppprobably Gundam Wing or something? Way back in the era when you could post smut on FF.Net.

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? Could it be anything other than KTOWL? Honestly.

I am taggingggggg @arquiving and @interropunct

#talking about writing

[wingsonghalo]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

Tagged by @cnnmonbimee! Thank you for the tag!! Read her awesome answers here!

1. How many works do you have on Ao3? 66! More than I thought were on there tbh!

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? Uhhh apparently it's 684,757! Less than I thought!

3. What fandoms do you write for? In order of most fics to least: Ace Attorney, JSHK, My Hero Academia, Mob Psycho 100, Homestuck, Hunter x Hunter, Phineas and Ferb, and Supernatural. I've also written a lot of Pokemon stuff, but somehow that has escaped Ao3 despite it being my longest fandom LOL. Working on a Pokemon SV one currently though 👀

4. What are your top five fics by kudos? Project: Matchmakers (shocker, I know), Sleep (Too) Tight (It's always been slowly but steadily popular), Force of Habit (bit of a surprise there honestly), Project: Matrimony (less surprising), and The Stuff of Dreams. So what I am seeing here is that no one leaves kudos on my JSHK or MP100 or MHA fics :') Some of these fics are one-shots, so it's kind of surprising! I wish PlayWright had gotten more attention; that fic killed me while I was writing it. I'm not giving number of kudos because I'm not comfortable with that and it makes me feel bad about myself haha,,,

5. Do you respond to comments? I try to! I've fallen behind on responding to them in the past 2 years or so because life has been so busy, though…

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Probably A Practice, For Now?? LMAO it's also my first JSHK and the one with the most kudos HMM COULD THIS FANDOM BE ADDICTED TO ANGST PERHAPS??! I don't write angst a lot!! What can I say, I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Almost all of my fics end happily, LOL. Pick any of them that actually has an ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not commonly. I've gotten anon hate before about them on tumblr on rare occasions, but usually my comments on ao3 stay pretty nice.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I do sometimes, but I'm so shy about it that I rarely ever post it /)//w//(\ Usually I just share it among friends, haha!

10. Do you write crossovers? Nope, and I never will!

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Yes. Someone tried to run Project: Matchmakers through a translator to hide the word matches and sell it as an ebook on Amazon, but they only bothered to hide it for chapter 1 so someone reported it to me and then in retaliation I started actually selling it on Amazon for the lowest price I could because the thief was trying to sell the shittier version for like 7 dollars LSFJ;AKLD. Read about the whole debacle here.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yes, quite a few! People have been great about asking me for permission! 💖

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Yes, here and there! Usually it's either fics where I have written one part and someone else has written another scene, or someone had me look over something they'd written and I added so much commentary or threw additional ideas at them so much that the story ended up changing and I somehow became a co-author, LOL.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? Oh my god don't make me answer that ;alskdjfl;k. If I wrote a fic for them ever, they're my favorite. I have so many favorites that I've never written fics for, too.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? THE UNDERCOVER FIIIIIC [sobs] and also Left on Read hnnngh

16. What are your writing strengths? Emotions!! I'm super good at those! I'm also really strong at dialogue and banter, and making my writing kinda witty/funny.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Describing settings ;w; I write my scenes like I draw my art: in Descriptionless Blank Voids lkas;dlkf. I also struggle with the flow of action scenes sometimes, though I think they usually turn out okay if I spend enough time on them. I also probably use too many adverbs and adjectives, but y'know what? Fuck it I like my descriptive words thank you very much

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? As long as you're checking that it means what you think it means, or possibly asking a native speaker if you're unsure about context or need a sensitivity reader, I think it's fine. It annoys me if I have to check a footnote every other line, but if you can mostly understand it without a translation in context, it can be kinda nice! At least it says you're trying more than phonetically spelling out an accent, which--remember, kids!--is always cringe! 👍

19. First fandom you wrote for? On Ao3, it was Homestuck. On the internet in general, it was Animal Crossing and Pokemon, LOL.

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? Don't make me cHOOSE BETWEEN MY BABIESSS 😭 I dunno man! Project: Matchmakers is my magnum opus, but the PlayWright is lowkey kind of a masterpiece, I love so many of my JSHK fics to bits and pieces, a lot of my MP100 and MHA fics are very special to me, I've been trying to write a HxH one for YEARS and have poured my heart into making it beautiful, just UGHHH every single one of my fics I have vivid memories of conceptualizing and working on and most of them are my favorite to some degree!

I tag @carochinha, @kittykatz009, @toastytoaster22, @ittybittytoostormy, and anyone else who would like to answer these questions!!

#stuff i write #jibaku shounen hanako kun #narumitsu #ace attorney #mp100 #tagged me #hxh #pokemon #friends

[saltminerising]

1, Even as an autistic person, I gotta say... if the FR team doesn't respect the fae facial expressions lore, why should I?

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2. fuck spring actually THISTLE is the best color 💯

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3. I was playing higher/lower and of the nine times the 7 card was face up, four times the face down card was 9, twice the face down card was 8, and once it was 10

I wonder what the chances of that are

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4. Idk if anyone even cares but the 1st anniversary cakes are such a weird stupid item like we were just given a bunch of those on the 1st anniversary and then never again even though it would make a lot more sense to give out those cakes every anniversary? My ass was a newbie at the time and accidentally converted them even though I actually wanted to keep them, we had no vault at the time, but also Crim still asks for them and I'm honestly just wishing they'd be unretired and distributed through Galore every year. C'mon let us all have some cake during a birthday.

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5. i saw the fandragons in clan lore ask and was reminded of something weird/funny that happened to me that i wanted to share

one time like 6 years ago i bought a pre named dragon off the ah to incorporate into my clan lore and apparently he was named after a homestuck character because someone messaged me something like "i see your sneaky homestuck fandragon, you cant hide hehehehe" and told me to add them on discord so since then i am always sure to immediately rename any pre named dragons i buy

i dont remember his exact name because i got rid of him at some point but i know it started with an e

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6. my weird pet peeve is when players turn off likes on their dragons. mate, I wanna give your dragon a star. this star isn’t even meant for you, it’s for the d r a g o n, and only the dragon. leT ME GIVE THEM A STAR DAMMIT—

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7. Aahh has anyone suggested making the which waystone notify you when you have completed pursuits to pick up?? I swear halfway through every goddamn month I remember that pursuits actually exist and then promptly forget again after picking them up. I use the waystone daily for the exact purpose it was added for: to not fucking forget about shit. I rely on it a bit too much actually so please just put pursuits in there I'm begging. I want to save up those stupid achievement coins for when they add new stuff to the shop but I'm so slow doing it because I keep forgetting aaahhhhhh

#fandragons

[whamss]

Ok I have to ask because you have such based takes on rose as a character,

1) do you read fan fic/ if you don’t what’s your general take on fics interpretation of Rose and other characters in homestuck

2) if you do, please I am begging for any rose character study / rose&kanaya pieces you like, anything will do I just would adore to hear your thoughts. Ao3 is like a drought of mischaracterization of Rose & Kanaya and it hurts my soul.

Oh man, I don't read nearly as much fic as I wish I did not gonna lie, I'm so lazy! (And I suffer from chronic daydreamer disease, where instead of reading fanfic I walk in circles in my room and put Rose Lalonde in Scenarios). I have a few that I've read over the years that I've liked a lot though, so I can try to compile a general list:

the ennui of too late and too little

Starting with this one because it was just posted (and I just read it) and I think it's fantastic! Kanaya POV but Rose-centric, with a particular focus on Rose reflecting back on her childhood with her mom as Kanaya and Rose wander through the wreckage of her childhood home. There's a lot of sweet Rosemary banter in here, and I think the characterization is fantastic. It's a good one if you're like me and want to see Rose actually go through the motions of understanding her mother, balancing her newfound sympathy with her Mom's situation and the things she actually put her through. Her feelings are complicated! And I think the author captured the nuances of how Rose might deal with that very well

And, trying to unfold for you, was brittle

Following the theme of fics about Rose and her mom is the Vampire Slayer Rose AU. This one has slightly less of a Rosemary focus (although it's still there), but explores Rose and her mom's relationship more directly in a way that I think is fantastically developed. It's a very interesting read, albeit a little hard to describe Why it's good unless you read it (read it! It's good!!!). I know you're not asking for Kanaya-centric stuff, but if you like this fic (and are okay with reading or skimming over a tiny bit of smut) I think that this author writes a lot of very solid Kanaya fic. Particularly recommending We Face Back All The Way, a Fallen London AU where Kanaya tries to save Rose's soul from a contract with Dr Scratch, and Where the River Narrows, a fic where post-game Kanaya deals with the precarious future of her race, and wanders the dreambubbles in hopes of solutions (and deals with Some Bullshit along the way. And yes, there's Rosemary. Who do you think I am!!!). From there I also think this is a pretty good author to scroll through in general, lots of bangers in there

Yarn Interpolation

This is a Rose-centric series of two fics that I think is very good. Doomed No Sburb AU where there's no game but Rose's powers develop enough for her to know what she's missing. I don't quite remember the exact specifics of this, but it's a very good beta kids fic with Rose mourning the wife she never met and platonic JadeRose marriage. It's cute and sweet, and I remember it being a fairly cathartic read

Show the Lights

Grimdark Rose comes of age and deals with some internalized homophobia along the way. Fun stuff! This was one of the first Rosemary fics I ever read so I hold it close to me, but I think it's a pretty good fic where Rose reckons with her feelings for Kanaya against the prospect of procreation and the continued survival of her species (in between the desire to feel useful to her group as her friends embark on an Egbert rescue mission). Some smatterings of a very fun pitch Vrisrose dynamic in here as well, as a bit of a bonus

love left her screaming at the screen

Speaking of Rose dealing with internalized homophobia, if you spend enough time shifting through Rosemary AO3 you've probably already read or at least heard of this one but I still think it's good enough that I should include it. Very reminiscent of what it was like to be a lesbian teenager in the 2000's, Rose deals with these preconceptions at the end of the world, through an unrequited crush on Jade and Slightly More Requited feelings for Kanaya. This fic was good for me specifically as someone who was always urked by the fact that Rose's sexuality is never really discussed in depth in Homestuck proper (compared to characters like Dave, Dirk, and Jake), and beyond that I think it's a very interesting exploration of how the bigotry and politics from Earth might stick with the kids, even when everyone who would judge them is long dead. This is another author who's fics I think are fun to sit through as well, lots of good Rose and Rosemary stuff in here (will give a particular shout out to think about staying alive, a Rose Strider AU, which is great for those of us in the Put Rose In A Situation camp who also love good gen fic with Rose and Dave)

Reviews Of Young Adult Novels, Mainly Those Prominently Featuring Vampires, And Containing At Least One Love Triangle

This one is just plain silly, but it's one of my favorites. Rose is an alcoholic who writes young adult novels, and Kanaya is her greatest online critic. Sort of an Urban Fantasy, more of an alternate No Game timeline, with a lot of canon elements sprinkled in (classpect powers are still a thing, Dave's that played the game timeline jump, things like that). This one has a very fun Rosemary dynamic, and in general I think Rose's characterization in this is wonderful. It's unfinished but I think it stands very solidly as is, so if you're looking for something goofy and fun to read this is a great fic to turn to

Vermeil Tarnishing

A shorter one shot AU where Rose is a Derse priestess captured by Prospit. This is a fun one I think, lots of fun dialogue with little glimpses into fictional politics, which ends with a bit of a bang. Not a massive Rosemary focus, but the bit of them that we do see is very fun!

> Rose: Reorient

What kind of mutual would I be if I didn't recommend @awellreadmannequin 's Rose fic? Post-game Rose, dealing with her addiction and the mounting threat of a relapse, visits Roxy and Calliope. Very good characterization, Rose's thoughts are rambly and meandering and she is very much Going Through It, but things get better, you know? Good Rose angst, great study of her character with little discussions of philosophy sprinkled in. A look at how Rose's more ironic childhood interests might grow into something more genuine, and take her down a more hopeful path, with some very sweet Rosemary moments near the end of the first chapter and little hints of vrisrosemary in thoughts and dialogue (in Rosemary's hearts). It's still a work in progress, but I think that the first chapter alone is a great read with a very hopeful conclusion, and I look forward to seeing how it pans out, and I think that other people should read it!!! (Best read on a computer or horizontally on a tablet)

#ask tag #homestuck #rose lalonde #kanaya maryam #kanaya #fic recs #hopefully theres something in here you find good! #i definitely need to read more fic. maybe /i/ should be asking for rose and kanaya centric fic recs #(this is me asking for rose and/or kanaya centric fic recs. rosemary or otherwise) #also sorry this took a minute i wanted to read afformentioned Newly Posted Fic before i posted this in case it was good #(and it was) #hoping i didnt miss anything. im sure i did lol

[dreadedender]

Drawing My Homestuck Ships Part 2

Continuing doodling and talking about ships I like, lol.

1. EriNep: My eyes widened when the story mentioned Eridan tried getting into a relationship with Nepeta and we didn't get to see any of it. Since then, my head's been full of the possibilities. I hinted at it in my Meenah's Feferi AU, but I'd like to make an AU where Eridan gets character development by not being isolated from the group as he was, instead, hitching onto the Meowrals' dynamic. Think about it! As Equius has most of his attention on Aradiabot during the early days of the session, Nepeta 'gets stuck' with Eridan and the two gain a strange bond. Nepeta has a pension for picking up and managing pathetic saps (*looks at Equius*) so although he's annoyed her in the past, seeing him post-break up intrigues her cursed shipper heart to try to help him get out of his funk. Any stupidity thrown her way, she's able to bite back perfectly well, and at the threat of her leaving and him being alone, he would always calm down and apologize. Their spats slowly subside the more time they spend together (maybe she even sticks around his horrid world and helps soothe the Angels before the massacre really begins), and come near the end of their SGURB session, Equius is able to rejoin the dynamic again and makes an uneasy peace with his 'mortal enemy'as both are disgruntled highbloods watching their privilege being reduced to nothing. But with his new connection, Eridan doesn't think about leaving anymore. He's still mad, but not nearly as desperate. He's got friends now. And his connection with Nep only grows stronger when Gamzee snaps, Eridan is tasked by Equius to protect Nepeta, and he dies doing so. (May write the scene and more shippy moments in their friendship prior to dying later)

2. JadeTav: I WISH THEY GOT TO MEET. It didn't occur to me at all that Karkat was Jade's patron troll. I really thought it was Tavros! And I had hoped that his confession would bear fruit later on in the story, after they actually got to know each other better through the journey. Tavros really took it like a champ! It made me so proud of him :[ Maybe I should make an AU for it where Tavros lives and IS the troll to help her the most. I just think their friends-to-lovers potential was too strong and wrongfully cut short. They had a wholesome, supportive, and dorky dynamic. (And yeah maybe it would've been cool too to slap back Vriska's taunts about him being pathetic for being 'friendzoned' by having them be official later. They were good for each other, they just needed time.)

3. EquiKat: This stems, like I am realizing most of these ships do, from my desire of the canon interactions to have gone differently. I would have liked to have seen a rougher Equius that posed more of a threat to Karkat's leadership instead of him being all talk and no action. Yeah the bit is funny that he likes being bossed by lowerbloods, but I felt it would have been better to see more of the struggle of him not wanting to let go of his stubborn beliefs (and it'd help give him more reason to 'give in' to Gamzee killing him other than 'haha horni', that he was actually glad something was 'making sense' to him again).

So there'd be constant arguing between the two, Karkat getting especially vicious with the increasing criticism, eve having fun finding new ways to shut the indigo-blood up quicker just by getting closer to him, until enough time passes and he has the very disturbing realization that the headaches he got from having Equius around have been replaced with catharsis and clear-headedness after their arguments. Equius provides an outlet for him to get all his frustrations out, and after their big show of insults, the two are able to calmly talk things over, and Karkat can actually think clearly. He jas very clearly fallen into a pitch relationship with the sweaty horse troll. He's embarrassed, and the others jump at making fun of the situation.

Nepeta is baffled and miffed that he got into Karkat's shipping chart before her.

#homestuck #homestuck ships #jadetav #jade x tavros #tavjade #equikat #erinep #eridan x nepeta #equius x karkat #homestuck karkat #karkat vantas #karkat #eridan ampora #homestuck eridan #eridan #nepeta #nepeta leijon #homestuck nepeta #homestuck jade #jade harley #hs jade #tavros nitram #hs tavros #homestuck tavros #homestuck au #homestuck alt timeline

[celinou]

Thanks @lenorelovesmax for tagging me 🤍

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 2, currently. Well, more like one and a half baked scene that has no context, to be more accurate.

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 194.036 words.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos? I have like the one fic, the other thing has 2 kudos. So... - A Walk in Chiaroscuro (354)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Yes, absolutely. It's pretty rare when I don't. I like to tell people that I appreciate their support and comments or to answer questions they might have about the story or the choice I made.

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I don't do angsty endings. I'm too old and too jaded by life to appreciate them anymore. I'm at a point in my life where I need to know there's hope and happiness at the end of the line.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? I'm guessing there will be some kind of repetition since I've only published Awic... Soooo, it's a Walk in Chiaroscuro! ...but if you want to know about the ones that I keep in my drawer never to see the light of AO3, the happiest ending goes to Let's Write a Love Story (it's a Homestuck fanfic)

8. Do you get hate on fics? No. I'm writing in a mostly dead fandom so far and for kind of a rare pair so, people have been starved of content. They were so nice and sweet to me in the comments.

9. Do you write smut? I wish! I don't have the chops for it but I so wish I could write good smut! Honestly it's something I really want to push myself into exploring. Unfortunately your girl is a bit too vanilla in her taste which makes for poor reading. I don't fear being bad... I fear being boring, you know?

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've ever written? I've never done that, no. But who knows what future will lead me to write.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? No. I don't have enough reach to be the target of theft.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Nope. And tbh I don't have the patience to translate it myself in my native language.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Could have... but no. There was an attempt at a joined project for Dragon Age but, unfortunately, it didn't work out in the end. I'm not abandoning the idea of writing for Dragon Age but I'll probably go in a very different direction since it would be a solo project.

14. What's your all time favorite ship? I... don't have one... Yeah, I'm not much of a shipper at the core. I mean I did write for Caulscott but I practically ship Max with everybody in LIS so... I was more interested by Nathan's potential as a love interest more than the ship itself. Outside of LIS... I can't think of any ship rn, I'm afraid.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? Tough question. If I abandoned a project I don't consider it a WIP. It's a dropped thing that goes in the reusable idea bin... and if I'm still working on it, I don't go into thinking I won't finish it. So, it's hard to say really. To not leave you with such a vague answer, I'll give you this: the fic I planned to write about the Hidden Object Games series Dark Parable, that never took off and never will (for I have better/much more attractive projects to work on). It's a dropped thing. But now you can see I have weird and obscure taste.

As for original projects: I have a Horror RPG project that probably won't ever see the light of day, called: The Clockmaker. (because I realized I'm shit at pixel art, tragic)

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? Hum... No. I don't mind people doing it but I tried it myself in my pirate epic and, let me tell you, I'm not that good a multilingual as to be witty in more than 2 languages. I found what I wrote cringe af when I read back my text in the editing phase and scrapped it all out.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Homestuck. I started writing fics very late in my life. (I wrote original stuff before that)

20. Favourite fic you've ever written? A Walk in Chiaroscuro. Because it's the only fic I went into unafraid to write what I wanted without thinking about who might read it. And to this day it's the truer work I've put out. Not the most personal by any stretch but the one I indulged in the most. And I'm so proud of it. Flaws and all.

I tag @sourrind and @momochizoey if you feel like doing it. And everybody who'd want to as well, consider yourself tagged, friend!

#tag you're it #thanks again for the tag #it was fun to do

[meraki-sunset]

Okay, this two questions are conected so i’ll answer them together. I had multiple reasosns not to save dad crocker

1.       Acording to the postcredits, he never replaced dad egbert in john’s life (even tho they show us how they hug eachother in homestuck when they meet) and John eventually got (aparently) depressed about not having his dad around, but someone who looks like him 

2.       In the prologe, the epilogue and homestuck2 Jane reestablishes Crockercorp, the evil baking corporation, with the epilog and HS2 covering her coruption into the condesce’s true heiress even wearing full red, the empire’s signature color instead and the oposite of cyan, her true color (it might not be 100% canon but it’s canon enough for me) and like they said in the comic, csau Jane could end up the same if she has Dad Crocker as her guardian enableling her to become like hs2 Jane

3.       Also, i really think losing your guardian is a rite of passage in the game, and players are suposed to lose them in order to become true gods

4.       A reason i can’t just exclude is the fact neither one of the dad’s have a face and one of the ways i tell the story is through facial exprecions. I tried to give him a face so i could work with the character but it wasn’t working for me and people didn’t like him.

5.       Nanna is also another reason for dad crocker’s death, through the story nanna became John and Jade’s new guardian, her arc culminating on her getting back her youth and now simbolicaly (and actually for real) taking the role of John and Jade’s mother. On top of that, in the future epilogue, the Harley-egbert’s basically become a big assembled family and dad crocker playing basically the pathernal rol when nanna already was fullfiling the mathernal rol would have been weird as fuck since, Dad Crocker is sort of a clone of Nanna’s son 

In short all the reasons listed below meant i had to delete him from the story 

When it comes to Dad Egbert and Mom Lalonde, John never saved them in canon with the power of retcon probably because he didn’t wanted to change any events terezi didn’t specify on her list and risk dooming the new timeline. And while on csau he DID changed things beyond terezi’s plan (stealing the troll’s bodies and slab beds) taking dad and mom’s bodies may have had unintended consecuenced down the line.

Dad Egbert would have also been a problem to integrate to the story like Dad Crocker for all the same reasons, artstyle, losing your guardian being nescesary, being weird having him a round in the new integrated harley egbert family, not to mention he would also take nanna’s guardian role that she gained during all the comic. It would undo the whole story.

I do regret not being able to save Rose’s mom, i feel like she could have had a lot of growth and i wouldn’t have had any problems integrating her to the story. She could have had really interesting interactions with everybody and be Good Friends with nanna, mirroring Jane and Roxy’s friendship.

But if i saved her with retcon i would have had to save Dad Egbert and that was a big no, so mom had to stay dead.

I’m still playing around with the idea of her coming back but don’t count on it

Another person i wish i couls have saved is Alt!Calliope, but due to the nature of CSAU, it’s explicit that the Alt!Callie we see is the canon one, from canon homestuck, and we only encounter her twice before she causes the blackhole and flies to the HS Epilogue. I can’t change her fate, because she’s just a borrowed character. (another borrowed characters from canon are Ghost!Vriska and Ghost!terezi who end up in the blackwhole with the dancestors, since canonically we don’t know what happened to them, just that they found eachother and got probably sucked by the blackhole eventually)

Aside from that, i found a way to everyone i needed/wanted to save in csau (not to mention whatever happens in the epilogue)

#csau extra

[horatioo]

henry dashboard sim

mutual 1: i want him [picture of leon kennedy]

mutual 2: do robotgirls dream? do they yearn and wish and think? would a robotgirl want to hold my hand and whisper in my ear? can i cannibalize her

mutual 3: Ok i know i just wrapped up the worst mental breakdown yet, but we NEED to talk about adventure time yuri ok? [And they're right]

mutual 4: look at this stupid gay rabbit lol [Eldritch horror]

mutual 5: SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER WHEN YOU SEE THE WHITE WHALE BREAK YOUR BACKS AND CRACK YOUR OARS MEN IF YOU WISH TO PREVAIL [70 pictures of Ishmael from Limbus Company in a row]

mutual 6: [homestuck joke here]

mutual 7: i want victor frankenstein to kiss robert walton on the lips and then have a mental breakdown about it

mutual 8: STOP FUCKING REBLOGGING MY ALBERT WESKER FANART PLEASE HENRY YOU'VE REBLOGGED IT OVER A HUNDRED TIMES IT POSTS TWELVE TIMES A DAY [i will not stop]

mutual 9: i want him [picture of macready from the thing (1982)]

mutual 10: [masterpiece of art] Thanks to victor-frankensteins-gay-ass99651 for giving me inspiration

#if ur mutuals with me feel free to point out where i put u #lol #mutual sim #dashboard sim #dashboard simulator