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caledfwlchthat · 5 years

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Characters: John Egbert, Dave Strider, Karkat Vantas Ships: John/Dave/Karkat, John/Dave, Dave/Karkat, John/Karkat Other Tags: Post-Retcon Meteor, Dream Bubbles, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Xenophobia, Closets, Coming Out, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Troll/Human Sloppy Makeouts, Polyamory Negotiations, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Fat Vriska Jokes, Unreliable Narrator, References to Depression Rating: Not Rated

Hi followers, now that Polyswap reveals are out (a few days ago now), I can fess up to writing this 20 kw JohnDaveKat thing about making out in literal supply closets, that I wrote for @cassandraooc (check out her art and AO3, she’s tops!). Shout-out also to @katreal-fic for her help as a sounding board and general pompoms while I was writing this.

R^4 fans: this was my May/June, I have not forgotten you! But if you like all the dream bubble romance and the awkward poly negotiations Rose and Kanaya have been having about Dave, you might give this one a look too.

Process discussion (as best as I can recall it) under the cut, as with other swap assignments I’ve done, for anyone who’s interested in the (long, spoilery) story of what the hell I was thinking exactly when I wrote this thing.

So my giftee’s prompts were -- by her own admission -- written in a bit of a sleep-deprived haze (I had to laugh as I read them, haven’t we all been there at some point, I know I lost some sleep over mine). We were each required to provide between three and six prompts for polyships (3-6 characters each) that we wanted to see depicted in gift fic or art. Cassandra’s OT3 was JohnDaveKat, which sported a string of elaborate sub-prompts (“medievalstuck!”, “soulmates!”, “haunted house!”, etc.) -- along with an invite to not use any of those and just write whatever I felt like. Other prompts for Dave/Sollux/Karkat, Jane/Callie/Roxy, and Rose/Kanaya/Jade were basically completely open-ended.

I’m trying to remember exactly how I seized upon the idea I ended up executing. Although some of my other works feature polyships, such as Kankatrezi (The Cafe Mocha Caper) and Daverosemary (foreshadowed in R^4), the process of how they got together is important for me in ways that I don’t care about as much for canon ships. I felt some resistance to just picking one of the ships and starting to write it as if it was already established. Also, people who know my writing know that I like to stick close to in-game or post-game AUs, or at least the broader Homestuck setting, rather than non-game AUs or other settings that remove the characters from the context that made them who we recognize them to be. So I was going to need some runway and a satisfying premise to run along it with. But by golly, if Cassandra wanted JohnDaveKat, she was gonna get JohnDaveKat.

The JohnDaveKat prompt I personally found most hilarious and awesome was

John gets turned into a Trickster, and finds Karkat and Dave. In the ensuing candy fueled mess, a lot of pent up emotions and secret crushes get revealed, including Dave realizing and admitting that John was probably his first crush on another boy though he was in denial at the time, and Karkat admitting that his own pitch crush for John never went away. (For his part, John finds out that he might, in fact, be a bit of a homosexual.)

Another JohnDaveKat prompt that turned out to figure in heavily later with the work I ended up producing was

John decides to surprise Dave and Karkat with a visit, only to find them already *quite* busy. Before he can think of what to do or do enough thinking at all to leave, he gets caught, and Dave notices evidence of interest, knows Karkat's still got some pitch feelings, and has some of his own, suggests maybe John stay a bit and they talk over some things and maybe do other stuff later too.

Going with Earth C could also bring the Epilogues material into play, and I briefly toyed with an Epilogues-related scenario that could score multiple polyships at once, before remembering that the Epilogues are hugely polarizing and maybe I want to be double sure about my giftee before giving them such a gift in a fan swap. A combination of Tumblr-stalking, re-reading the prompts and discreet inquiries showed that my idea wasn’t going to work, largely because Ultimate Dirk is a legendary piece of shit and his presence over against End-Of-Act-7 Dirk would cause real friction with Cassandra’s requests -- which leaned fluffy and offered bonus points for “DirkJake” and “Dirk and Dave being good bros who love each other”. Maybe I could have just done something similar in a separate Earth C AU without a lot of the Epilogues baggage, but by that point the specific discarded spin on the idea had so thoroughly colonized my brain that I just had to ease the whole thing carefully onto the shelf. I’d still be keen to write that other fic sometime. Just not for this particular fill.

So, I took a break for a few days before revisiting the prompt and asking what else I could do. When I think of John, Dave, and Karkat together, my mind goes immediately back to the “EVERYBODY STFU, I HATE YOU BOTH ETC” memo, in which Karkat tries to dissuade Dave and John from encouraging Terezi’s and Vriska’s flirtations, respectively. This convo is burned into my head because I’ve VA’ed it -- I draw a lot of inspiration for character dialogue from the time I’ve spent doing goofy voiceovers for them. And there is a lot of grist for the mill here: Karkat alluding to his pitch crush on John, Dave making fun of Karkat for being gay (while not realizing or admitting how he might be projecting), John being totally clueless about whether he’s attracted to Vriska. All of these are compatible with the “pent-up emotions and secret crushes” Cassandra asked for, and favors Dave <3 Karkat <3< John as a baseline.

Now, one of the reasons I love writing dream bubble fic is because I am fundamentally lazy. I can basically use any canon Homestuck pesterlog as a prompt and run with it. So that’s what I did here. In the moment that they realize that it’s a dream, the participants are forced to reckon with the way dream bubbles respond to their innermost thoughts. Deep desires manifest in weird ways; emotional distances contract, go non-Euclidean. Despite this, the association with dreams simultaneously offer a layer of abstraction or remove to Dave and Karkat -- allowing them to access and slake those deep desires without having to take responsibility for it, either with themselves or each other, during waking hours. In that sense, John opening the closet is like walking in on them a second time -- the dream bubble itself is their main outer closet, and they already know the jig is up when John diverts the pesterlog down Memory Lane. This then raises the question of whether they might have wanted John to discover them, deep down? Perhaps John’s convenient remembering is a sort of wish-fulfillment dream summoning.

From there I already sort of had the fic’s contours and decided it would be best written from John’s POV. The other nice thing about the dream bubble setting was that it let John participate even during the meteor journey, when Dave and Karkat must have been messing around trying to reverse-engineer their own sexual preferences. How gay is Dave, and how troubled is he about it at this point in his history? How does he feel about John finding out? Does Karkat somehow have some symmetrical hangups that leave him struggling as much as Dave, or is he just a giant crab? (The literal vs metaphorical closet thing was accidental at first, but once I discovered that I ran hard with it.)

There were still some problems I struggled with, such as how to get John to fall for Karkat pitch-ways when he’s said in canon that he isn’t gay, and when Karkat has said in canon that he’s not pitch for John anymore. The second problem is easily dispatched by pointing out that Karkat isn’t a reliable narrator of his own preferences, by construction. As for the first -- John might be no Casanova, but he loves his friends and is fiercely loyal to them, and he also saves his anger for either really important moments (like his GAME OVER fight with Caliborn) or utterly trivial moments (like Con Air not being as good as he thought). This seemed like a good place for the former. Once that was laid out, the trio coalesced nicely -- Dave and Karkat need John to keep them honest, and John needs Dave and Karkat to keep him anchored. John <> Dave and Dave c3< (John <3< Karkat) were dynamics that just showed up on their own.

The interpretation of the ending is left open, but the other difficulty I left unresolved is the timeline mismatch between pre-retcon and post-retcon, and the question of which John it was exactly that showed up in Dave and Karkat’s shared dream. Pre-retcon Davekat didn’t happen because Dave and Karkat were fighting over Terezi, but post-retcon John died in the explosion of LOWAS and couldn’t live happily ever after having so gloriously enabled post-retcon Davekat. And I wanted them to live happily ever after. The two most obvious interpretations I could think of were (a) the three are all on Earth C and dreaming together of each other -- or, more poignantly, (b) pre-retcon John is starting to integrate some of post-retcon dead!John’s memories. The second possibility leads in the direction of Ultimate John (what would that even be?) so I made sure to place the ending in a time frame that gives the Epilogues a miss -- although the background DirkJake also signals that this is probably an AU that diverges after the ACT 7 victory.

All in all this was really fun to write! There were lots of other great prompts in the collection, but the ones that grabbed me looked like they would spawn more 20-30 kw novellas and I need to get back to my poor neglected serial! I’m looking forward to making my way through the treats that others posted, eventually adding some of my own, and of course going through Cassandra’s other stuff. (Maybe that awesome fantroll Friendsim project will be the next thing to eat my life after this.)

#homestuck #homestuck fanfic #dave strider #karkat vantas #john egbert #johndavekat #metablogulation #pswap 2019 #fic challenge debrief

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ajkal2 · 7 years

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homestuck fic recs

So I’ve been meaning to do a homestuck fanfic recommendation post for literal years, and as hiveswap is coming out (finally) I figured now is the time. Here are my personal favorite fics from the homestuck fandom, those I would select and place in an anthology to hand down to future generations. Read all of them, they are all beautiful and wonderful and perfect.

Like One Sundered Star by @sunderedstar - 1.5M words (so far) (yes thats a million) - lots of ships, starts with a focus on pale johnkat - superhero au - This fic, is amazing. The characterization is on point for every single character, and it features p much the entire homestuck cast. The plot is so so well developed, the humour is beautiful, its just a monster of beautiful words.

(note: this fic has recently been completed (but not fully posted yet) and im just. This is the end of an era, holy fuck, and sunderedstar has done so so well to finish this BEAST and i will probs cry when i read the end and just. Congratulations to sunderedstar, youve done so well and this fic is so beautiful and how did you keep track of everything and ill stop here but just wow.)

Spellbound by @toastyhat - 64k words - beta gen - magic au (?) - toasty always does such good worldbuilding, and this is no exception. The fleshing out of the cultures, the integration of aspects from canon, all wonderful. Also, again, great characterisation.

The Serendipity Gospels by urbanAnchorite - 130k words - terezi and gamzee focus, most beta trolls make an appearance - No Sburb, exploration of alternatian society - I couldn’t have a rec list without putting this one on. This is a candidate for best fic in the fandom, even though its abandoned. Such good worldbuilding, all the little details that make it into here are so wonderful. Emotional, and you really get to see these characters stretched to breaking point, pushed and pushed and held until they reform. Its abandoned, as it was simply too great for this world.

The Great Escape by elanor_pam - 67k words - karkat-centric - pre-Sburb karkles gets kidnapped by pirates - A grand exploration of child characters under pressure, and how trauma affects trust. This one makes my heart ache, as, like any good story, it’s a rollercoaster. Now I have to go reread it, excuse me.

Sea Salt by @khemi - 25k words - dirkjake, x2 multiplier - Merstuck - I loved the perspectives in this, the voice was so interesting. Also very well presented characters and romances, amazing descriptions, and generally a good fic. (also check out all the rest of khemi’s work, its awesome)

a thousand years by venusianeye - 22k words - dirkjake - close to canonverse - Amazing. I love love love all the symbolism in this, the use of god tier powers and abilities, as well as all the references to other stories and interweaving of worlds and repetition of motifs, this is just amazing. Venusianeye works have this dreamy, etheral quality to them, and its frankly beautiful. Strange, and poetic, and beautiful.

Sing A Rainbow by @khemi (again) - 48k words - Dave-centric - soulmate au - This one is a special bunny. Yes, the writing is beautiful. Yes, the characters are great. But this one is on this list because of the world. This fic takes that soulmate au idea (when you see your soulmate, you can see in colour!) to a whole new level. Ever wondered about ace people in a soulmated world, or about how the soulmate system would affect society? Wonder no more! Khemi deals with the problems of a simplistic ‘true love!’ world amazingly. This one will make you cry.

Sinking Fear In Quiet Steps by roachpatrol - 2.9k words - focuses on dirk and dave as siblings - post-canon (back on beta earth) - I love this fic. Its short, but the character focus and the relationship development that it shows are just awe-inspiring. The small character details are amazing, and this fic really delves deep into what makes these silly boys tick, and how they’ll fit together, and the similarities and differences between the versions of them in different universes.

Dave Strider’s Stupid Fucking Jawline by @cumulativechaos - 11k words - davekat - high school au - This is, in my opinion, the best davekat fic out there, if not the best fic full stop. It is so so fudging funny, and ive reread it so many times i could probably quote sections verbatim. The characterization of every single party in this fic is beautiful, and the way it sets up punchlines and fluffy moments and- it’s just amazing. Check this one out.

Who’s Asking by sunflowerwonder - 2k words - dirk-centric - canon-verse pesterfic - sunflowerwonder does the BEST pesterlog fics, and this is one of the best of the best. The dialogue feels like it’s been ripped straight from canon, and when reading it you can just picture the expressions they are making.

Honourable mentions (wouldn’t quite make it into the anthology but still amazing and worth a read):

Family Never Ends by a heartless saDIST (This fic has been orphaned, and so I sadly cannot trace the author) - 227k words - BroDave - moviedirector!Dave AU plus a bunch of other changes - I cannot with good conscience recommend this fic. This will rip your heart out, stomp on it a few times, and then nuke it. Do not read this fic. But at the same time, I can’t make a rec list without mentioning this fic. It’s characterizations are great, the plot is breathtaking, but this fic stays with you. And the ending is downright cruel. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Hopeless and Heartless by @lateniteslacker - 234k words - dirkjake - modern fantasy/demon hunters au - Good world, very very good plot, a solid au. Twists and turns and twists and turns.

Independence Week by @toastyhat - 9.5k words - dave-centric - no-sburb yes-powers au - This one requires a bit of thought, which makes it even more enjoyable. It’s a bunch of time travel shenanigans told in chronological order. It’s also a fun time to read, with some great moments and plot twists that keep you interested.

Crash Standing by askerian - 128k words - davespritekat - post-sburb au - This fic is awesome. The pesterlogs are great, the characterisation is just awesome, and I love the way Byrd develops into his own person, not just another Dave. A wonderful read.

#homestuck #fic rec #fics #dave strider #dirk strider #karkat vantas #read all of these #all. of. them.#also if anyone has the tumblrs of the authors i havent linked to hmu

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