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02-10-2024 Update Writer's Commentary
🕑 Added 2024-03-01 20:00:09 +0000 UTCWe made this Writer's Commentary immediately available for everyone to view instead of waiting for the next two months! The writers were really excited to talk with y'all about the last update, so we figured why not have this one be a treat? Enjoy!
JAMES, Director : Welcome to another writer's commentary. Hell yeah rosemary update babey!! I sure hope nothing bad happens! I did very little on this one and I think it shows because it's really really good. I keep trying to credit the team but everybody keeps just saying “that magnificent bastard James Roach did it again!” Well I didn’t! It wasn’t me! Floral did it! I’m a complete fraud.
FLORAL, the guy: James has been super supportive as a Director and really takes all the writer’s input to heart. Also hi, it’s Floral and it's so crazy to see this update out for other people to see!
HAVEN, in the vents: I really love how this came out, my favorite update thus far. It makes me feel insane every time I read it. I remember saying when we were writing it, I was like, “this is the update where we’re gonna see if people are really rockin’ with us or not.”
MILES, listening and learning: YESSS. We’ve all been crazy stoked for this one to come out, and getting to finally drop it has been a treat indeed... let’s walk you all through it.
FLORAL: So since joining the team, I have become a major Yiffy fan. I loved her design when she was originally announced, but Kim and Chumi really sold me on her story after the fact. We had like a 6 hour call, getting up to speed and hammering out details into “The Yiffy Document.”
HAVEN: Yiffy rules. It's been so funny going back n’ forth wondering how she’d be received, but it always kind of just ends on, “yeah she’s dope everybody’s gonna love her.” It’s a real testament to how dope she is, that she’s so beloved despite her origin being such a huge point of contention.
JAMES: The secret Yiffy Files. Unobtainable Yiffy Lore. Ancient Yiffany Tomes. I had to add the word yiffy to my personal dictionary in google docs because I typed it so much and I was getting tired of the little squiggly line.
JAMES: wack
FLORAL: Wack, indeed.
Also spotlight on Kim for specifically conceiving of Yiffy’s posse of pubescent punks. Who doesn’t love a gang of miscreants loitering around the mall past curfew of their extremely strict school. It’s so fun, with this group of kids they actually have lives IRL.
MILES: I think we went kind of apeshit bonkers with alliteration again, but I’m not mad at it. I’m not going to apologize for making words sound good. Anyway, on to what’s important: like everyone else has already gotten into, it’s been such a treat to finally engage with Yiffy and give her internal monologues, more of a voice; to start crystallizing her Vibe. We have so, so much planned but as folks have mentioned, we’re pretty confident that people are going to fall in love the same way we have.
HAVEN: The removed the window line was killing me. This poor kid, probably the most fucked childhood out of all the Next Gen™ kids. Well, I guess maybe not as fucked as Yiffy’s.
MILES: I love when we get to write Tavvy because I know that every horrific tidbit of his personal lore that sneaks through is going to make him more powerful than you could possibly imagine, in the long run. On top of getting the chance to join the Tavvy Torture Team, though, I’ve also really enjoyed how we’re giving him some more positive traits and allowing him to shine in little ways. I think it’s actually pretty sweet how he legitimately is trying to make up for his mom’s crimes by giving Yiffy a soda (TWO sodas???) and just sort of... stepping up to try and be normal around her, when everyone else is busy melting down about it and being dramatic. There’s a line about “mutual maternal malaise” that I wanted to emphasize; I feel like the two of them are more kindred spirits than Yiffy (or any of us, really) might initially realize.
MILES: That said, I also love writing him as a little passive-aggressive.
HAVEN: What a shitter.
JAMES: Errant Beavis is an incredible homestuck-ism. Love it.
FLORAL: Really channeling the late 90’s and early 00’s with this update. Out of all the art Earth C has failed to restore or preserve from pre-game history, MTV has persisted. I love the idea it was Yiffy’s punk buddies that introduced her to shitty rips of it.
FLORAL: I think I personally connected with Yiffy when I realized she probably really likes Green Day, because I was a kid who really liked Green Day. Along with all the other anti-war anthems and nu-metal that were made mainstream during the peak of the Iraq War. I think that is an important part of Homestuck, it’s never about what’s currently most relevant but what you look back on as standing out. Anyone remember Good Charlotte? I went wild for Good Charlotte.
JAMES: Green Day is canon in Homestuck. So is Troll Green Day. They are two different bands that sing basically the same songs but nobody says anything.
FLORAL: Miles helped me out with this line, boosted it up hard with the building adjectives. Fun how Yiffy is very much like the Beta kids with the discontent with her parents, but it’s so much bigger than that. The Beta kids couldn’t stand the way their parents decorated their houses, but with the Omega kids the entire Earth C is their parent’s shitty house.
MILES: Yiffy’s whole manifesto moment was just awesome, I feel like Logan really unlocked something in all our minds about how she thinks; her 15 year old revolutionary’s spirit. It really reminded me of being that age and feeling like I understood fucking EVERYTHING... that crystalline, righteous wrath... being a teenager is intense, man, and Yiffy’s life has been stranger than most.
FLORAL: Here we go. This is the moment the adults are finally alone to unload all that beef. While Kanaya and the audience have had time to recognize Yiffy is a real thing that is actually happening, that also means time to see all the holes in JadeRose’s story. Kanaya has long earned this confrontation and she’s not going to accept anything less than the truth.
MILES: This, for realsies, is the moment we have ALL been waiting for.
JAMES: This is the funniest line in Homestuck.
FLORAL: Lets fucking goooooooooo! Kim did such an amazing job with this update, every single panel he drew got an excited little squeal out of me. The intensity of the situation was sold so hard by his work, very cool, very sexy.
MILES: Kanaya is so fucking stupid hot in this update.
JAMES: This one was for the sapphics. The most important demographic that exists.
FLORAL: Absolutely! The goal was for this update to work in tandem with what was posted in the original HS2. The last one was very focused around understanding the situation from John’s POV, who had little to no context for what any of these people’s lives look like. With Kanaya leading this conversation, entirely new information is made available.
I personally like to see writing, especially Homestuck related things, as building a puzzle. HS1 is our strong and crucial border while the Epilogues and HS2 are the extension of that border but we are still way off from seeing the majority of Beyond Canon’s full picture. This scene is also only one small part of the larger puzzle, bridging between what already existed in HS2 to what we want to do deeper into HS:BC.
FLORAL: Everyday people must be reminded that Roxy and Jade are parallels to each other and, spanning their multiple selves, are intrinsically linked in a lot of ways. Despite having one conversation in HS1 where Jade was evil.
Also, love Kanaya taking gut punches that imply a more complicated history than the assumed lack of conflict!!!! *airhorn SFX*
MILES: Yeah, seriously. I felt viscerally going in that it was really important that Kanaya get some time to just be a stone cold bitch, both in the context of this particular marital fuck-up and in general. She deserves it. You Will Fear Her. Trust that this is only the beginning of the Kanaya Severity Era... may god have mercy on the rest of us.
FLORAL: Was so excited for this panel when we were first outlining the update. I had a lot of feelings about how we should move forward from the initial Yiffy reveal, but justification for these narrative choices only matter inside of the text itself, and this is only a tip of a much larger iceberg.
That said, what has always appealed to me the most about Candy in Beyond Canon is that it’s an opportunity to explore alt. selves to the max and start finding the missing “Meat” to Candy’s unbalanced and unsatisfying narrative.
FLORAL: This section from the Epilogues always stood out to me. It’s framed as a beautiful moment where Rose has been freed from the confines of being an Alpha Rose, and allowed to love freely but…
The war which began over troll reproductive rights, which Kanaya’s entire destiny is founded on and the reason Rosemary has Vrissy in the first place (even with them it's always about the biological), is not seen by Rose in a human way. You know what I mean? People physically fighting in a war usually don’t want to be in one.
HAVEN: The world hasn't felt real to Rose since she was 16, this life is like a game to her. For her, a war is just “something to do.”
FLORAL: Exactly! The entire scene is sweet and lovely and hopeful, but ultimately serves to be a kindness towards John to make him brave enough to face Roxy. That’s why it’s shown, that’s why THIS is relevant and not the war Kanaya is fighting in right now. It’s a little sad that even during a Rosemary moment, it's never really about Rosemary, huh?
JAMES: I would, personally, never do this to a hamster. Maybe that's just me.
FLORAL: I was really happy with this joke and then very worried about this joke. Jade fully loses touch with reality and flashbacks, and part of what makes it so funny is how horrifying it is. There really needed to be a joke here, too, to sell the emotional drop the next page brings
HAVEN: We fought to keep this joke. It got removed like two separate times, but we kept being like “no put it back it’s funny as fuck.”
JAMES: Who removed it?
MILES: I was ready to riot if it got taken out. I would’ve quit. Resigned in protest. Or worse. Luckily, it never came to that.
JAMES: Who were you fighting??
FLORAL: They saved the dead hamster.
JAMES: ?????????????
FLORAL: One interesting choice of the epilogues is that Earth C is barely mentioned outside of the political sphere Karkat, Dave and Jane operate in. Which is wild, since the first Act of OG HS the environments are always major characters in their own right and consistent “antagonists.” Their homes, their planets, the physical/temporal distance always separating the kids from meeting their friends; they all challenge and frustrate the kids, always standing in the way of their next goal, forcing them into action or reaction. It’s one of the ways early Homestuck’s storytelling takes advantage of its point-and-click games inspiration.
So for this major backdrop to not be fleshed out always stood out to me. There are a lot of ways to interpret this choice, but maybe for Candy in particular it wants you to feel like a stranger by design, and helps lean into a sense of unreality and disconnect from the characters. Obviously there is A Lot to talk about Earth C though. It’s a planet whose entire history is based on knowing Gods Are Real. There are probably Caparcians still alive that remember the kids before their timeskip. They had a whole parade planned for their arrival! It is so fucking interesting, and that’s not even getting into the war specific to Candy. The team has been more and more interested in building up this world so it has an actual relationship to the characters and I’m so here for it.
FLORAL: This was a last minute request I made to Kim to really sell the overarching soda joke and he killed it. Of course it was Haven’s idea to have Tavvy drop onto Jade in the first place, which really gave the conversation a strong definitive end.
HAVEN: I love making people crawl through vents in these scripts. It’s my go-to move.
MILES: Ventage-foods.
FLORAL: If you have ever swapped stories with people in their 50’s or 60’s, you know these conversations inevitably lead to the “Family Drama” lore drop. And no matter how absurd the big fallout stories are, after a while they all start making sense because these situations are all problems that were 20 years in the making. There’s catalyst events, sure, but ask a few questions and it becomes apparent everything rides on the history of smaller fights, disappointment, sweeped away passive aggressions, miscommunication and unsaid hurt feelings.
This is why writing characters in their 40’s is great and why there is so much to do in Candy. Behind all the patented Homestuck misdirection and narrative unreliability, you’re left with an offshoot full of alternate selves at their lowest, layered in apathy and evidently not saying what they think (and when they do, are immediately decentralized from the narrative.)
It’s fun because in a way, we don’t know these are versions of the characters yet. And now we have to go through the horrible ordeal of perceiving them, like sitting down with a highschool friend you lost touch with 20 years ago and have only known about through concerning Facebook posts.
And there is something that is so exciting about being part of a team that is so committed to tackling these larger themes and concepts with so much genuinity. Every meeting we have is so much fun, and full of passion. Every new piece of writing or art is the most inspiring thing. I feel grateful to support and be supported by the HICU.
JAMES: COMMENTARY OVER
Comments
Roll+Weird
Love this behind the scenes commentary stuff - Question: Any hope of a physical Volume 7 and beyond? And if so, a physical Beyond Canon could include this kind of stuff farther down the line
David Kligman
I can see it, yeah. From that perspective, the question then becomes, what would cross that line for Rose? Does this Rose care about *anyone* enough for something to make an impact on her? I'm not convinced she does. I've wondered all this time how much of this is purely psychological, the corrosive effects of living in a world that sees the players as gods and not people, and how much is the mind-altering effect that Candy seems to have. One of my biggest questions about the story is, if the Candy players ever escape the black hole, as quite a few story threads seem to lead towards, will this *change?* Will their perspective on events and on their own terrible actions shift at all? (I know this was under the previous writing team, but I think the stuff that happened on Deltritus was notable, where Meat Rose was ideologically opposed to the idea of all-powerful godheads ruling over the world, to the point that Ult-Dirk had to just start directly mind controlling her because he couldn't convince her. It's hard for me to imagine that Rose being on board with any of this.)
Daniel Kelly
I maintain that Jane, like Rose, doesn't really see Candyland as "real", and thus doesn't consider the war to be real or to be hurting anyone. Jane and Rose aren't enemies on opposite sides of a war, they're friends playing war with their toy planet. No one, or no one "real", was actually getting hurt until Jane's dad died, and that's when shit got serious in her mind.
David Kligman
The simplest conclusion is that Jane went along with it because she thought she'd be able to use it against the rebels in the future - but that really doesn't explain why she waited this long to leverage it, surely she could have undermined the rebel leaders with it long ago before the war reached such a critical evenly-matched tipping point. I've always believed that the actual truth of Yiffy's origin is that she's a Mary Sue self insert OC written into the story by god tier Calliope (for a variety of reasons), and that all the weird things that don't seem to make sense about her are the narrative trying to catch up and retcon itself to accomodate her existence, and having to contort and damage itself to do so. Obviously that theory was formed under the previous writers, so there's no way to know if it holds true, but until we see otherwise I'm sticking to it.
David Kligman
Great and enlightening commentary for the best update yet. I don't know if you guys will read this, but this is the update where you've officially and fully earned my confidence. I was very nervous about this project, exciting as it was - I was afraid that you were going to bow to the loudest and angriest parts of the community and roll back the interesting parts of the Epilogues. I was afraid that in this new era you would stop doing what was so daring and ambitious about the post-HS1 era - being *challenging to read*, having the characters behave like human beings with serious flaws, and not the perfect ideal blorbos that a lot of fans seem to want them to be. Well that fear is out the window with this update. This is as challenging - if not *more* challenging, than anything in the epilogues, I'd go so far as to say that Jade and Rose are behaving *worse* than they ever have previously, even if Jade's perspective is at least hypothetically sympathetic. (And I am *dying* to know what Rose's 'I knew you would forgive me' line really means - that's by far the cruelest thing we've ever seen her say, one of the crueler things any of our protagonists have ever said, outside of the intentionally difficult ones like Vriska, and as someone whose favorite character is Rose I'm *fascinated* to learn if it's literally true, if it's something she's foreseen but doesn't know the meaning of yet, or, hell, if she's just bluffing!) But beyond that the update is so rich, thematically, and your commentary gives a lot more weight to it. We have two diametrically opposed perspectives on Earth-C here, from Rose and Jade. Rose sees the people who they're ostensibly fighting for as faceless NPCs, all meaningless and irrelevant. Jade kind of hates them, and hates the world that they're fighting for - but she *does* see it as real, and she sees these people as real - if they weren't real, they couldn't hurt her so badly. It fits really well with her position as the one who has been most immersed in the society that they've created, actually walking among its people, even if we now know that that experience was painful and harmful to her. It's delivered in a negative and traumatic way, but it's a humanistic point of view. And I'm really excited about your commitment in the commentary to exploring Candy further and continuing to explore the nature of Earth-C's society, because to me it indicates that you're avoiding an element of metafiction that really bothers me. Metafiction can be fun in general, and Homestuck has always had meta elements, but I was always really concerned about the story taking Ultimate Dirk's declarations of what does and doesn't matter too seriously, that he was meant to be another character who communicates true information in a way that's hard to hear and believe (which is another tradition of Homestuck's writing), a perspective that one way or another Rose seems to have absorbed. The declaration that Candy is 'irrelevant' always felt bizarre to me - does it make any sense to state that 50% of your text 'doesn't matter'? - and I found the idea that all the people that the gods are fighting to protect or decide the fate of are non-entities who aren't really people and don't matter because they Aren't The Main Characters deeply unsatisfying, it's one of my pet peeves in fiction in general. So I really hope that I'm reading this correctly, and that you guys on the writing team agree with Jade, not with Rose or Ult-Dirk. And I have no idea where this is going, or what it is Rose has sensed or foreseen that has turned her into this cruel, disconnected person, but I do dearly hope that in one of these timelines at least she can find some kind of real future. Hussie said that Rose's arc is about "embracing her imperfect sense of humanity rather than satisfying an external sense of obligation ... through a path of shallow narrative regimentation." Obviously Hussie is no longer here, this is your show now, not his. But both Roses have clearly fallen off that wagon - and I hope that at least one can get back on it, get out from under the thumb of inexorable destiny and inhuman knowledge that seems to have crushed her in both timelines, and find a way forward. Where in the world we go from here, I have no idea. But regardless of what happens I'm really excited to find out.
ryanapplegos
This is definitely one of my favorite scenes period, original homestuck included. I do want to point out that it looks like there's a typo on page 566. When talking about the new troll children she says "if memories serves" instead of "if memory serves."
Ben Waffle
i love this upd8 so much, keep up the awesome work yall :)
Matthew Gertz
There's been a lot of substance to updates since the recent relaunch, and it's been a lot of fun to read -- it feels like there's a direction now and that plot points are starting to move forward. I look forward to updates, checking every few days or so just in case I've misremembered the timing for them. I must admit, I was completely turned off by the whole Yiffy character (gads, that name) when introduced before the break, but this most recent update has moved me into a more "wait and see, keep an open mind" position. (I also have to keep reminding myself that the Candyverse, by its very nature, is intended to be even more off-kilter than HS in general, and the commentary today does a good job of also reminding people of that.) Keep up the good work!
BODACITY
Really enjoyed the update and this commentary. I'm still iffy on a few things, but the commentary shows that y'all are putting in the work to make this worthwhile.
Daniel Kelly
Such a great update, finally Jade fans get to eat again. We still haven't even started to approach one of the biggest Yiffy mysteries, which is why *Jane* went along with this harebrained scheme and only reneged when her dad got killed. I'm very excited to see what kind of wacky bullshit was involved there ("Jade found out Gamzee is Tavvy's biological father somehow and was keeping it a secret!"), and the fact that I'm unironically excited for Yiffany Longstocking lore is a testament to how good she is and how good this update is
What Pumpkin
hey thanks man -james
celestiic
this is probably my favorite writer commentary yet. this update has stuck with me in such a major way and while I've already been in love with HS:BC this whole time, this was the upd8 that hooked me BAD. I love what you are all doing, you understand this world and these characters better then anyone i feel
