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Behind the Scenes Sketches and Commentary: 10/25
🕑 Added 2019-10-30 16:45:08 +0000 UTCHello fans! The support for our comic so far has blown everyone on the team away. We wanted to show off a big bundle of sketches and assets and went all-out on the commentary to thank our BENEFACTOR-tier patrons!
Patreon bonus updates start in November, and we can't wait to share our side stories with you.
Pages 1-2
This initial zoom inward was the first visual concept we established for the opening of the comic. Homestuck 1 is full of very impactful zooms, both in and out--notable examples include the moment in Act 5 which reveals that our universe was created by the trolls, and the opening of Act 6 which brings us back down to Earth. Despite not having any visuals at all, you may have noticed that the epilogues opened with a zoom too, in this case approaching the black hole that provides the main plot mechanic. This is a well-worn technique in all kinds of sequential art. It helps establish scale, and lets the reader "locate" the action within physical space in an intuitive way. It's also a narrowing (or broadening) of scope, focusing our attention on one particular moment in the story about to unfold, or conversely breaking our focus and allowing us to place what we've already seen in a wider story context. The beginning of Homestuck^2 calls for the former rather than the latter, since we're starting from the scattered story elements thrown up in the air by the epilogues. It's a journey to the specific from the nebulous. Literally in this case, since the first shot shows the Theseus flying through an actual nebula. This is no coincidence. Anyway, that's enough of that. We've got a whole update to get through, and we've begun in typical fashion by spending an ungodly amount of time talking about something relatively straightforward. Here's hoping that the rest is succinct and breezy by comparison.
3
Here we see Dirk's new outfit for the first time. It's described in the epilogues as being similar to his original god tier pajamas, but somehow more "anime". I think we can all agree this new 'fit meets that description and then some. God damn this man is embarrassing to look at. This isn't his regular, day-to-day clothing, since he changed into it just to strike this dramatic pose. But it's still pretty funny to imagine Dirk going about his business on the Theseus in this getup, the pathetic slap of his sandals echoing down the hallways.
4
Here the new narrative conceit is revealed for what it really is: an old narrative conceit, shamelessly ripped off from the epilogues. Not to mention the entire history of prosaic literature. I think it's safe to say that one descriptor for Dirk presents itself right away, and that's "insufferable". This prose is hard to read by design, both because it's all in Dirk's usual shade of orange, and also thanks to his frankly appalling use of language. What kind of pretentious dweeb habitually uses words like "lumbago", "rambunctious" and "phalanx", or worse, all three in the same sentence? Dirk, that's who. We get the impression that he's been preparing a long time for this moment--he even seems to have the script pre-written. It's easy to assume that this is the only significance of the card he's holding, but the extent to which that's true is not yet clear. What else is on this page... oh yeah, Rose is here too. Man, she is really going for it with the android schtick isn't she. We can infer from Dirk's irritation that this has been a fairly regular feature of their conversations over the past three years. The story of Dirk's life is that of the silicon valley tech bro who is constantly driven to "innovate", without ever stopping to consider whether what he's doing is a good idea, or even ethical. But unlike most billionaire techies who apparently aren't beholden to justice (poetic or otherwise), this actually comes back to bite Dirk in the ass every so often. He's forever being told just how full of shit he really is, and most often it's by his creations themselves. And what's worse, since he clearly believes on some level that artificial life is inherently superior, he's just got to man up and take it. In this sense, Rose is carrying on a long-standing Homestuck tradition of trolling Dirk for being a biological normie.
5
Here we make a return to Homestuck's traditional sprite style. We felt it was somewhat important to have a nod to this in some way or another since it plays such a big part in establishing Homestuck's own unique flavor. Also of interest is Rose's line about heroism and Dirk's reticence, since there are multiple ways one could take this. Is she dunking on him, implying that nothing he's doing at the moment is significant enough to qualify for permadeath under the god tier rules? Maybe. If you're familiar with these rules then you'll know that there's always the other, unmentioned possibility, which might be a more genuine concern to Dirk than he can let on to Rose at this stage.
6
When the update was first posted, this page is where we stopped. For about half an hour, there was a submission box at the bottom of the page for people to give commands. That might seem like far too short a time to get a good selection, but all in all we got (deep breath) over nine thousand in just 30 minutes. There were only two things about the response which were completely predictable: first, that there would be an ungodly number of entries, and second that the vast majority of those entries would be some variation of telling Dirk to go fuck himself. Off the top of my head, I think there were about 25 unique instances of the phrase "eat shit and die", just to give some idea of what we were looking at. The internet is a wild, chaotic place sometimes, but it's nice to know that some things are dead certain.
7
At this point we can't go any further without taking a moment to admire the artwork. Like holy shit are you seeing this? Homestuck 1 was the training ground for a lot of incredibly talented and hard-working artists, many of whom have gone on to have successful careers of their own. Getting to welcome one such artist (Xamag) back in style like this was satisfying beyond description.
8-11
A classic staredown sequence culminating in an equally classic Strider command-box slash. We had every part of this already made prior to posting, except for the actual command itself, which was a genuine submission from a reader. The other main possibility we considered was "Dirk: Use narrative powers to remove a rib so you can suck your own dick." This is just to give you an idea of how close we came to going in a radically different direction, by which I mean, radically the same direction but with a different line providing the gag.
12
So much is going on with this page that I'm not really sure what to talk about. I suppose the most obvious thing is the absolute mess that is Dirk's study. It's a stupid, stupid room on an equally stupid ship. Speaking of the ship, astute readers will know that it's named after the Ship of Theseus, a famous philosophical problem which on its face asks the question "how much of an object can be replaced before it stops being that object and becomes something else?" This is obviously an idea with a lot of relevance to our endeavor here in writing Homestuck^2, but also one that Dirk is clearly interested in himself. In his two speeches thus far he has brought up the notion of canon multiple times, giving the impression that he's somewhat concerned for canonical integrity, whatever that really means. His quick dismissal of reader input also points to this concern. And now, seeing Dirk's room for the first time, another facet of this concern presents itself: Dirk has amassed a large number of familiar objects from Homestuck canon, themselves all somehow representative of ideas within the Homestuck universe. It's almost like he's shoring up a store of canon stuff in order to counterbalance the effect of the comic's gradual "fanonization", which has been going on since the end of Act 7 and which he seems to see as a somewhat corrosive, rather than creative force. I shouldn't say anything more about this yet, since it's still very early days. But it's worth bearing in mind.
13
Here we get some more juicy tidbits about everyone's favorite surprise ship from the epilogues, Dirk/Obama. Dirkbama? The fandom has yet to come up with a good name for it, a fact which I'm trying not to feel sore about. If you're one of the sensible individuals who are a little sceptical about the ethics of shipping real people, you can take some amount of comfort from knowing that in this case the supposed relationship is between two fictional characters. By which I mean that the version of Barack Obama that you have in your head is as much a "real" person as Dirk himself is, which is to say that he isn't. In this sense, Jade was right to believe that Obama was an OC of Dave's. Maybe the point here is that you should always be sceptical of your political heroes.
14-15
These two pages bring up a lot of questions and answer essentially none of them. Why is the headband charred like that? What could have possibly gone so wrong that Dirk calls the worldwide cosplay convention a "complete bloodbath"? How is Callie just so gosh darned cute?? Homestuck is, as ever, full of mysteries. Dirk and Dave's horns are probably the most striking things here, but notice how Rose's trollsona bears a striking resemblance to the way Kanaya first imagines her back in Homestuck 1 (compare with page 2347). This must have been quite an indulgent moment for the two newlyweds. But Kanaya is conspicuously absent from the panel... perhaps she was embarrassed at just how indulgent this costume was from her perspective.
16
I can't be the only person who finds Dirk's newfound love of succulents to be kind of adorable. It's basically the only thing about his life right now that isn't completely reprehensible, either morally or aesthetically. Of course he then goes and ruins it by making it all about his internal angst again. In this panel we can see one of the green space heaters that are dotted around the room for some reason. Why are they there? Well, this ship originally belonged to Jake. Space is very cold, as you probably know. But as someone with, shall we say, a less than functioning knowledge of the logistics of space travel, Jake probably doesn't quite understand just how cold it is up there. It's entirely possible he believed that using "space" heaters would solve the problem just by virtue of the name. It's equally possible that his belief in this solution is the only thing keeping the people on the Theseus alive in the first place.
17
Another device that makes its return from Homestuck 1 is the animated speech bubble indicating to whom someone is talking. There's an important expressive quality to the animation which is so intuitive that we don't really have to think about it: the more jittery the bubble is, the more heated the subsequent conversation tends to be. Most of the fun on this page (and many of the following ones) is in getting to listen to Terezi dunk on Dirk a bunch, so I won't spoil it by talking about it too much. Although one thing does jump out as being worthy of mention here. When she says "...ON3 OF MY TWO PR1OR 3XP3R13NC3S 1NVOLV3D SCOUR1NG TH3 FR4CTUR3D, D1S1NT3GR4T1NG CORPS3 OF P4R4DOX SP4C3 FOR... WH4T F3LT L1K3 4N 3T3RN1TY," what's interesting is that little pause in the middle. We get the impression that she was going to mention something (or someone) else, but thought better of it. What do you think?
18-19
We know that they've been watching a lot of anime on this ship, or at least Terezi has, but it looks like Dirk's a bit of a Star Trek fan too.
20
There's a bit of an east-meets-west thing going on in this study. One wonders if this was stuff Dirk put here himself, or whether the ship came like this already. It's possible that Jake envisioned touring the universe with Dirk at some point, and provided what he thought would be an appropriate living space for his best bro. Incidentally, there are quite a few stupid visual gags in this room that we didn't have enough time to get to. One of them is the door leading out, which is designed to look a bit like a sliding screen door. These move horizontally in real life, but this door in fact opens vertically. The point is, whoever designed this ship didn't really think the implications through very hard.
21
This page has a reference to the well-known and -loved fanfic Detective Pony. The extent to which this reference "canonizes" that fic is up to the discretion of the reader.
22
I make no apology for this gag.
23
Dirk breaks the traditional "[x] like a [y] and [z]" joke format by refusing to refuse to comply with the command. This isn't the first time he's done something like this: earlier on he correctly attributed a quote to Maya Angelou, whereas precedent dictates he should have misattributed it to someone else. In some sense, by doing these things Dirk is deliberately distancing himself from the traditions of the Homestuck that came before. There's a certain ritualistic quality that such running gags took on in Homestuck 1, in that they quickly become less about the humor of the original joke, and more about reinforcing the internally consistent semantic structure of the work itself. In other words, they form part of the language through which Homestuck continues to convince you that underneath it all this is still Homestuck that you're reading. Breaking away from these memes-as-rituals and potentially establishing new ones in their place will have some interesting implications for a work which claims to be an "official" continuation of the Homestuck story.
24-26
Leaving aside the way Dirk embarrasses himself here for a moment, in these pages we see the second half of the subtle implication that Dirk's prattle card on page 5 was also pointing towards. It's not just that he wrote out his prose--he somehow seems to be in possession of a physical copy of the Homestuck^2 story itself, as evidenced by the panels he has lying around on his desk, which he'll bring attention to in a moment. The full scope of this isn't clear though. Does he have everything available to him in advance? The only panels we see him interacting with as of now are past and present ones. Is Dirk himself drawing them? Or do they "fill in" as the real comic panels get posted on the website? This brings us back to that long-winded speech he gave at the beginning, where he declared that "the author is dead: long live the author." The extent to which Dirk is fully in control as an "author", or even just a narrator, is something we're not really in a position to understand quite yet. But it's a question that naturally presents itself as we watch him fucking around like this. Indeed, some people would say that this kind of metatextual bullshit demonstrates an author very much not in control of their story at all.
27
This page got set upon nigh instantaneously by the online meme machines, churning out countless edits with Dirk holding up all manner of things for us to see and laugh at. The meme-ability of Homestuck's visuals played a significant role in its popularity over the years, so this was an encouraging sign for the first update of Homestuck^2. Besides its comedic potential, this panel is interesting for another reason. Dirk is talking to Terezi, but of course this explanation is also partly for our benefit. That, plus the fact that he's looking directly at the "camera", naturally places us at Terezi's point of view. On the next page, we cut away from the comic panels, ostensibly because Dirk wants to demonstrate the virtues of traditional prose. But it serves another purpose. By cutting our visual feed, he's also preventing our sight from wandering away from the screen on the command terminal, to the other things which we might expect to see from Terezi's perspective. Indeed, he eventually has to force Terezi to stop talking entirely, just to keep our attention focused on him.
28
Homestuck is an educational work of literature for many people and for many different reasons. You might think I'm talking about Dirk's lecture on the merits of text versus images, but you'd be wrong: as it turns out, not everyone was aware that ABBA originated from Sweden.
29
Lots more visual nonsense here. Something which I didn't see anyone point out is the arrangement of tatami mats on the floor. The second panel on this page reveals this to be one large rug made to look like tatami, rather than the genuine article. Some of the dialog between Dirk and Rose on this page was copy/pasted from a chat with an irl friend about something completely different. A lot of the struggle with writing Homestuck dialogue comes from emulating the natural humor that often crops up in day-to-day discussion among good friends. So one way of getting around that struggle is to simply plagiarize yourself. Just make sure you get permission from your own agent first.
30-31
Dirk's soliloquy here is one of the only things that survived from the original pitch of this first update. It was reworked to be a bit funnier in this context, though. Everyone knows that Homestuck contrasts the tragic with the stupid like few other works of fiction, and I like to think that this is a fine example of that. To paraphrase one internet commentator: naughty narrators are put into the BOY WIGGLER to atone for their crimes.
32
Here we are, the last page of the first update of Homestuck^2. And the last bit of author commentary too! If you're reading this, then chances are you're one of our patrons--and if not, then perhaps reading this will encourage you to become one such patron at patreon.com/homestuck. Or not? I have no idea how good an advertisement this commentary really is. In either case, thank you so much for your ongoing support. See you next time.
Comments
Sam MadamMelonMeow
Finally getting the chance to sit down and read these. Already delighted. Im glad hs:bc continues to give commentary
tempest2k
for some reason the page numbers "29", "30-31", and "32" are not bolded? likely a mistake but thought id make a comment of it in case its noticed all this time later
John Mekjian
I really think they should count the total amount of pledges rather than just the number of patrons when determining when to speed up the update schedule.
Artemis Of The Void
I'm so excited :3333
Littlemissplush
Thanks for the great commentary, excited to see where the comic goes next :)
Justis M.
:)
Tinokel
The panel with Dirk holding that panel of himself was so fun. It also kinda reminded me of those old cartoons where a security camera is monitoring a hallway and they hang up a picture of the hallway right in front of the camera, as to make it appear everything is ok.
gadgetfeather
Thanks, Dirk. Thirk.
Declaration of ENEMY
Ghaar
faust
dirk really got me with that fucking OK hand huh. anyway, amazing work you guys. got some chuckles out of how much of an idiot jake is according to this commentary, which is always appreciated! can’t wait until next month to see more of this crazy ass dudes antics 👍
Anaïs Peignier
Over 9000 in half an hour is sure a lot xD thank you for your commentaryyyyyy
CassandraOOC
Well that was a fascinating read. And the art really is fucking fantastic. <3
Madame Hardy
Because this was accidentally unlocked to lower levels this morning, I swallowed hard and upgraded to Benefactor, in order to see next month's offering. You might consider offering a bigger taste to the lower tiers, just once, so that they can see what the value of the higher tier is.
FemKUltra
I'm excited to see where this concept of fanonization will come into play later in the comic, the idea of characters trying to escape the gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole that represents 'fanon' and become relevant (whatever that even means anymore) is an interesting concept to me. I wonder if jake english, being a page of hope, will have anything to do with it? Guess I'll find out.
Gab
I was a little worried what the quality of author commentary would be without the luxury of spoiling the whole story, Homestuck book series-style. But this was actually really cool! All of this is honestly so amazing, and I can't wait to embark on this crazy new journey. <333
Bryce A. Lynch
Theseus? Are the kids going to be moving into Rorschach's neighborhood? Perhaps a chance meeting with Siri Keeton or Sarasti? Is Peter Watts going to get a namecheck? Inquiring nerds want to know.
Henri
this is wonderful and hilarious commentary/beta art. excited to see more!
Kienan Li
you fools, the proper ship name is obviously BROBAMA!!
Tyler Belmont
Fascinating read, I can't wait for more.
Tfunkadelic
I’m having a hard time parsing if all the dunking on Dirk is 100% genuine sincere loathing for the character and a desire to write him as loathsome, or good natured dunking on a character that is flawed, but loved.
Rachel Frankland
OH GOODNESS I'M THE BOY WIGGLER JOKESTER I WAS NOT EXPECTING Y'ALL TO SEE OR ACKNOWLEDGE THAT
Kieran Vincent Dwyer
A mildly interesting discussion. I really do hope Dirk is able to get this story back on the rails, but all this metatextual talk of "canon" is really bringing the narrative to the crows so to speak
Madame Hardy
I enjoyed this commentary a lot. Thank you. Also, the roughs are so glorious and forceful. It would be lovely to see some of that style in-comic, if it fits the logic.
Ena-Malika Børve
Holy crap. If there was anything I wanted to hear, it was that Dirk dressed up for us, and that the sandals make sad slaps as he walks.... AKA this is everything I needed, pls&thnk
expositoryRaven
this commentary was Very Good, a lot of interesting stuff I haven’t heard of before :0c
CarnelianRogue/FabKrab
i want dirk pissing on homestuck 1 as a car decal
Fer
*EXCITED KEYBORD SMASHING *
