Sketches and Commentary: A Daughter Astray

So here we are. Another month of Homestuck draws to a close. But of course this wasn't just any old month of Homestuck, Oh Goodness No. April is the month where all the little children around the world feel a strange sensation on the breeze, and find themselves googling pictures of horses long into the night for a reason they cannot explain. While to T.S. Eliot it may be cruel, to a Homestuck April is the weirdest month. How was yours? Mine was fucking busy.

Anyway, we've got quite a bit to get through, so let's get on with it.

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Jane is being evil again, while Jake sort of simpers (no, that's not what that word means) pathetically over her shoulder. No idea what BGD is up to. He's just chillen'.

If you're reading this then you already know that the daughter Jane is referring to is Yiffy, rather than Vrissy. But for the first-time reader the implication is obviously the other way around. Pretty standard misdirection.

What else to say here. The chyron (the little scrolling text thing on the bottom of news channels) is an IT joke. You know IT? The Steven King novel. I hear it got a movie adaptation recently. I know jack dick about IT other than that a lot of people are drawing fanart of boys kissing. This describes almost every fandom on the internet though so I might as well know nothing at all.

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This kind of page layout will be familiar to you if you've been following Catnapped, or if you remember the 2xPanel combos sometime in Act 6. (I'm not gonna look up where because do you think I have all day?). I think this is a fun way to present two conversations happening concurrently, and having a connected panel rather than two distinct ones is also pretty Neat if you ask me. Comics are fun to play about with. The two halves of this page are almost exactly the same length, and you may even spot that Vrissy and Tavros stop talking at the precise moment Harry's phone starts ringing on the other side of the room (provided you're reading with the page at its full width). I'm sure you'll want to know how I managed this, since it seems like it might be a bit tricky to plan and it's a pretty staggering coincidence otherwise. But, dear reader, you will have to be content with being staggered, because sheer fucking coincidence is what it was. I'm still happy to take the credit for it though.

Oh, also the dialogue on this page is pretty funny.

195

Harry is worried about his dad being mad. If only he had read Homestuck, he would know that this basically never happens.

196

I like writing John and Harry talking. I think it's cute.

Quite a lot of people were very sad about the Dirk Strider memorial effigy. Me too. I was crying when I wrote that. It could, however, have been significantly worse: originally it was going to be the Dirk Strider memorial pinata. I changed it because contrary to what the internet will tell you, I am not a fucking monster.

197

THERE THEY ARE... THE WIFE'S.....

198

We considered giving Kanaya a full-blown vampire style cape but we toned it back because that would have been silly. Rose's new haircut was OK'd by a hand-selected panel of lesbians and is therefore beyond criticism.

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Oh right, here's a random NPC for you all to hyper-fixate over I guess. I got an awful lot of questions about Alfonz after the update, most of them extremely tedious. I'm here to tell you that whatever you want to be true about this person we'll likely never see again, that thing is potentially true. Do whatever you like. Please stop DM'ing me about Alfonz's pronouns—they're about to get ejected out of the comic...

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Right about...

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Now.

Holy shit Jade just shoved Alfonz out of the way like it was nothing. This is terrible! I expect everyone to add this to the list of reasons why Jade Harley is verifiably evil, just under "is a woman" and "who has sex".

Oh my god look at her beans though.

202

Rorb 2.0.

203-204

Aaaaand boom, there it is. Yiffy has been teased at last. Reading this after the fact, I'm sure you have Opinions about this development. Let me assure you that whatever emotion you're feeling right now, we all felt in spades back when we first heard that we had to include this in the story. Yiffy was a non-negotiable plot point, a solid nugget of patented Hussnasty bullshit integral to the HS^2 experience.

I don't want to start this discussion prematurely though, so more about it later probably.

This was where the first update of April finished, leaving us with what can only be described as a Yiffhanger. But it's ok, look. The next page is clearly going to explain everything.

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I hate this fucking comic. 

That's almost certainly what Vriska is thinking here, in fact.

206

Arguments are fun to write, fun to read, but not generally fun to participate in unless you are a man on the internet. I am not a man, though I am, unfortunately, on the internet. I hate arguments.

207

Earlier on we had the sequel to Rorb; here Harry Anderson has become Rorb 3.0, the next generation of Rorb. Ballry Anderson. Harry Andersphere.

Oh, one thing to mention about Vriska's dialogue here. A lot of people seem to take her statement that Harry should be grateful to receive parental affection as indicative of her feelings towards John. That may well be true, but the other implication here is that Vriska is bitter about her relationship with her own parental figure. Remember Vriska's lusus? It's been approximately nine years since she was last relevant. How time flies huh.

208

Ooooooh new chumhandles. I bet people were wondering if we were ever going to see these. I know I was! It was a spur of the moment decision, in all honesty. It's very easy to think that all of the old Homestuck staples, like strife specibi and chumhandles and so on, are just things that you HAVE to include in order for it to even be Homestuck. But we don't wanna apply that kind of thinking uncritically. I mean, WHY is it strictly necessary to have chumhandles? By the end of Homestuck, everyone was just talking aloud, with their lines designated by name. Deciding to walk that back for nostalgia points alone isn't going to be worth it, frankly.

So then, why DID we return to chumhandles here? Well... it just ended up being the most convenient thing to do. Harry has left the room, but needs to continue having a conversation with Vrissy. There is a preestablished medium through which distant (or not-so-distant) communication takes place in Homestuck, i.e a chat client such as Pesterchum. So I used it. But the important thing is that it actually served a purpose here, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Oh and yes "glamor" is a valid spelling of the word.

209

There's something interesting about this panel which I have not seen anyone point out. 

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I'm sure all of you have something anime related to say about this.

211-212

Oh right, these pages. I was responsible for writing Chapter 8, as well as producing all of the old Homestuck-style panels. For these two, we could have just used the original ones from the sequence where John chooses HAMMERKIND as his abstratus, since SCISSORKIND was also included on that old list. But that would have been boring, so instead I remade them with a bunch of new abstrata. 

Making these panels was a bit more of a pain than I anticipated. The original font used was a variety of Lucida Console called "Semi-Condensed", which was bundled with Windows XP. As far as I can tell, it literally does not exist any more. So what I had to do was use Photoshop's text settings to modify the regular Lucida Console font to match the one that appears in Homestuck. If anyone wants those settings, I have saved them and can include a screenshot in a concept art bundle. I'm sure literally thousands of people will be interested to see this. But seriously, it was an important detail to get right, because otherwise thousands of people would have GENUINELY gotten extremely mad at me. Homestuck is just like that.

Some people were curious about the kind abstratus that's partially hidden by the cursor. To you, beloved Patrons, I can exclusively reveal that it was "CRLNGIRNKIND".

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Vriska heard that some boys were going to have character development, and rightfully concluded that this was a dumb idea.

214

There she goes.

215

Vriska is a common dispensary of these kinds of bombastic speeches, which makes it easy to compare and contrast her motivations and intentions at various points in the story. In this sense, Vriska is as close to pure theatre as Homestuck gets. How do you see her position as a character now, compared with, say, the "8y 8eing me" moment back in Act 6?

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There were several people who got their hopes up here. Monsters.

219

Sorry to disappoint. You think she's going down that easily?

220-221

Think again.

222

Ok, this page. Upon reading it, a lot of people were of the opinion that this page "should" have been a flash. Why is that? I think we can assume it's because the moment it represents is of sufficiently high tension, and the events that are described of a sufficient level of badassery, that it would in Homestuck proper have warranted a flash page.

But here, we have prose. To the Homestuck reader this feels like being cheated out of something which they were led to believe would happen. It's important to realize that at no point in Homestuck^2 has such an expectation ever been established. Remember what I said about following conventions just for the sake of it? Here, of course, it's a little more complicated. Flash pages were a beloved part of the original comic and added significantly to its overall appeal.

I'm not interested in entering into yet another discussion of the reasons why we are not making Flash animations for Homestuck^2. The important point for our purposes is that, in this situation, prose was a means of communicating the action in a way that was a) time-, energy- and cost-effective; b) unexpected; and hence c) more interesting and exciting (this last point is where most of the disagreement lies, I feel). To put this as politely as I can: if this direction of the comic is something that you personally don't find engaging, that's fine. But quite literally the first update of Homestuck^2 was dedicated to elaborating on the new format the comic would take. Nobody can say there wasn't any warning. Anyway, to conclude, this page is funny and I like it.

223-225

This is adorable! Nuff said.

226

Longjohn. More parent/child cuteness. John rambles about Linsday Lohan to a group of people to whom she has never existed. Doesn't get much more Homestuck than that, if you ask me.

227-228

Kanaya is being let down, gently. She has, on previous occasions, been let down less gently than this. We're about to hear about one such occasion!

229

It makes my heart happy to see these colors on the same page. Forget what was said about the combination in Homestuck proper—having Jade's green and Rose's purple next to each other is enough to brighten any day.

230

Kanaya is taking her job as a revolutionary very seriously.

232-5

Alright, the final Yiffy sequence. Here's where we hear the bulk of her background, in all its wonderment and stupidity. I actually have remarkably little to say about this, other than the fact that I feel pretty good about the whole thing. There's a particular kind of euphoria that comes from having made something that severely pisses thousands of people off, and dear reader, I've been clinging to that euphoria in these dark days.

If you're reading this later on, you'll already be confused at this, because you will have fallen in love with Yiffy so completely and utterly that the idea of anyone saying a bad word against her will seem totally infeasible. This is my prophetic vision. And with that, thanks for reading! See you next time.