12-16-2023 Update Writer's Commentary (Patreon)

JAMES, Director: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Homestuck Beyond Canon Writers Commentary. I just got home from a white elephant slash potluck so I hope I don’t have covid. I am probably ok, everyone tested negative that morning. I ate so much good food. Dude my bro Dave made flan. Not the Dave from Homestuck. Different guy. I wonder what Homestuck characters would bring to a potluck. Rose and Kanaya probably go all out. John seems like a desserts guy. Karkat is a strictly plates and cups guy.

FLORAL, Proprietor of Hideous Meat: Rose always brings a lactose heavy dish, to play on people’s temptations and sow self destruction in the group. Jade brings salad and nobody fucking eats it. Also hi.

MILES, Procrastinatriarch: To be honest I don’t know if I’d feel safe eating anything most of these people cooked.  They cannot be trusted to take care of themselves, let alone other people.  Also also hi.

JAMES: This ones about Aradia so I volunteered for it right away. Have I mentioned Aradia is my favorite character. I feel like I’m never saying this. Oh I guess Alt Calliope and Dave are also there.

JAMES: It's not actually about Aradia. With these pages we have Alt Callie’s Spirit Ghost Arguing with the Narration. I Always loved the sort of contentious relationship between narrators in Homestuck, and I wrote this first part just sort of thinking it was Calliope “telling” the narrator what to do, or entering prompts. I asked in the work chat, “who could she be arguing with? :0” and almost universally everyone went uhhh, isn’t it you? I guess it is!

MILES: Speak for yourself, I’m sooooooo objective and I never let any aspect of myself bleed into anything I write.  I am a homunculus.  A tabula rasa.  We as writers are just conduits.

JAMES: Do the teens still know Yamcha pose?

MILES: God I hope so.  Dragon Ball feels so quintessential and timeless that even if you haven’t actually watched it the cultural osmosis alone is enough to get you through life pretty equipped for what’s important, which is to say noticing Dragon Ball references.  Failing that maybe they’ll start calling it “Jade pose”.

JAMES: I started writing this thread back in the first HS2 run. We got to see Jade threaten Callie out of her body and then nothing came of it right away. I was like “are we ever gonna talk about that?” we did not. So now I am. It’s called tightening up loose ends, look it up. (you do not have to look it up) She is forced out with such willpower and anger that it knocks her out of ALL JADES. I had no reason for writing that, I just thought it was kinda sick.

JAMES: This whole sequence here makes me laugh because Callies Muse of Space powers are so silly to me. She is everywhere at once. So the idea of her just seeing herself across space and going “Oh! Why hello there! Lookin good.”

FLORAL: This line is either genius or a kill switch. I still cannot tell.

MILES: Finalizing the wording on this line made me feel like I was crossing some kind of mental event horizon.  I think you have to be a little bit fucking nuts to really understand any Space player, and you have to be a Lot fucking nuts to actually be one.  But this kind of pretzel-brained bigheadedness is nothing to Alt-Callie.

JAMES: Ok so the fathom thing is another in-joke. I don’t remember exactly what happened but I said something in the work chat about not being able to fathom something. It just spiraled from there. “Fathomable” is a Sephiroth word. If it's not obvious at this point a lot of us are stupid in a fun and endearing way. Well maybe it's just me. It's hard to commit other people into the “being a little stupid” lifestyle.  Anyway I love these Callies. I think Chumi’s artstyle works really well for these deadship segments. It feels a little rounder and softer, like a storybook. Calliope deserves to be drawn cutely once in a while.

FLORAL: I love this convergence imagery, Chumi did such a great job with it!

MILES: Each of these pages is like, absurdly charming.

JAMES: Writing these two is so fun, but sometimes it kind of just feels like im RPing with myself so I had the rest of the crew come in and clean up some of the dialogue and now it feels a lot better. I always think its so funny that Aradia is wearing the Cult Robes, because she’s not actually like, Alt Callie’s acolyte. She just thinks the robes are cool.

FLORAL: Aradia liking Dead!Jade’s exposed corpse sprawl is such an inspired piece of character writing. She just likes dead things! Good for her!

JAMES: Davebot is easily the most nihilistic Dave. He knows everything he’s going to do, but still has to do it. He knows every conversation she’s going to have, but in order for him to learn that information he has to have the conversation. In some sense, Davebot is more trapped by the timeline than he ever was but everything that happens to him is because he chooses to do it. As an aspect, Time is about decisive action. Davebot definitely makes all these decisions, but he already knows he makes them. Like he already knows what happens when he does something.

This conversation got edited but originally had more descriptive sentences about class. I am being censored.

FLORAL:

But forreal, I really love this direction with Davebot. He’s bored but if we are being real, a part of him is very comfortable with being bored. With the horrors of Candy behind him, isn’t it nice to know what happens? Unsurprised or worried about what direction this story is going in. He’s got the sparknotes version of Beyond Canon in his head at all times, this guy HAS to be different from any Dave we have ever met.

JAMES: damn.. Obliterated………….

MILES: Writing this update was actually super instrumental to helping me really get into Davebot’s headspace and think about what we wanna do with him moving forward, where he’s at now, where he will be, etc..  Like, writing a conversation where one participant knows everything that’s going to be said Alone is kind of an interesting challenge, but as the two of them were sort of getting as close to a feelings jam as a Dave can reliably be cajoled into it was also really interesting thinking about like… what did becoming Davebot really do for him?  What can WE do for him, long term, beyond what it is he already knows is gonna happen?  Or can we at all?  Can HE at all?  Somebody fucking help him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

JAMES: Who does she visit. We may never know.

FLORAL: This was a very good line. I can’t wait to talk more about butlers.

JAMES: Butler should be a sburb class

FLORAL: I’m not sure if anyone has seen The Butterfly Effect (2004) starring Ashton Kutcher but while doing edits on this update and thinking of ways to broach the subject of fucking with the timeline I immediately thought of it. You change one small thing and bam, Ashton Kutcher gets euthanized.

I watched this movie as a kid (my parents let me watch anything that didn’t have full frontal nudity) and if you haven’t seen it. It is incredibly bad. It’s Ashton Kutcher so you expect the stakes to be low but it’s like a Rob Zombie House of Horrors of childhood traumas. SPOILERS: They blow up a woman and her baby with dynamite. And you just know Ashton Kutcher is gonna end up worse off for preventing it. Here is a screencap.

JAMES: man this movies somethin else

FLORAL:  I love bad movies so much. It’s one of the reasons I like Egbert, because I was also a kid that engaged with stuff like this with maximum sincerity. Now that I’m older, all I see is the cultural implications of media. It’s horrible.

JAMES: There were a few more lines in these sections about AraSol, but I don’t know where they went. I am always saying we need to move things along and not have feelings jams in the middle of the action so I tried to cut down on it here by coming in at the tail end of their conversation. Unlike a lot of other scenes though, they don’t have a lot of Action to be Doing so I wanted to give them a more domestic vibe. Just two of the most powerful beings in the universe stuck on a ship without their narrative babysitter. All they do is lay around and talk.

FLORAL: It was definitely the right choice. Time players always have so much to do they’ve both deserved some downtime.

FLORAL: This is such a silly way to exert your narrative power of suggestion over other characters, I love it.

MILES: Yeah, I loved being able to just begin to sort of get into the occasional moments of pettiness that Alt-Calliope, or indeed any potential narrator, can exhibit when she feels like it.  I imagine that it could be pretty taxing for someone this Grave and Stern to be stuck with two of the clowniest freaks in the universe as her sidekicks.

JAMES: The original draft of this had ol’ Al here narrating but constantly getting interrupted by them waking up and going huh whuh welcome back but this feels better. I keep trying to write AC like she’s just one of Tha Boyz™ which she isn’t. I just want her to have friends and lighten up a little.

And that’s it for this one!

YIPPEE