#bomfiz

Don’t try to “get past” that feeling of “Oh god this is stupid”; just kind of accept that it will be stupid, because it’s a first draft. That’s what first drafts are for! Try to keep your pen/keyboard moving as much as possible, and feel free to go off into weird tangents about octopus ninjas enacting your secret fetishes or whatever to keep yourself loose and really lean in to the cringe instead of trying to make it good. Making it good comes later. If you think a sentence is bad, don’t try to fix it, just write a different sentence, even if it means your character says “I love you” fifteen different ways in a row. You only have to use one of the sentences in the second draft. I have entire pages of ideas for Saffron that are just absolute fucking trash. And that’s fine. It’s part of the writing process. 

1. A majority of Casualgators have never read a comic in their lives and only care because Augustus the Atheist Aardvark told them about it on Youtube. 

I mean, Diversity and Comics tried shipping all his books in cardboard boxes, these people aren’t familiar with comics Kickstarters and possibly not with e-commerce as a concept. 

2.Speaking of Kickstarters, the reason Angry Youtube People shill comicsgate really hard is as an advertising scheme for their own comics, and pointing people towards webcomics runs the risk of them liking webcomics and that defeats the whole point of the scam. And it is a scam, since the comics either suck

are never even get made they just take your money and go straight into the next crowdfund

This comic doesn’t have a release date yet

So it’s in their best interest to keep their audience from thinking about webcomics, patreon, and the “online for free then print it” business model that’s standard among the dreaded SJ-dubs. 

It’s the biggest comparable webcomic patreon that came to mind as an example of Homestuck’s money-making potential (Pet Foolery is bigger but is a Facebook gag-a-day so it’s less of a fit)

Anonymous said:

I love reading Homestuck vicariously through you

Oh man, let me tell you about Homestuck

So, about a third of the way through Homestuck, we flashback to the trolls and see things through their perspective. It’s the first time the trolls get focused on, the first time we meet a bunch of them, and not coincidentally the point where Homestuck started getting super popular. In this two month mini-arc, we meet all twelve of the trolls, and learn a lot about them. 

While the kids were semi-professional about working together to play the game, we see nearly every troll was in some sort of death feud with at least one other troll, and they only won because Karkat kept yelling at them. These death feuds often related to their love lives. In Homestuck (and Problem Sleuth before it), it’s a running gag/comedy formula that characters want to do a simple thing but it’s ludicrously complicated for no good reason, and the romance between trolls was no exception. After a few weeks of characters vaguely hinting at stuff, we got an explanation of how troll romance worked, and it’s just as needlessly complicated as John’s sylladex. First, all twelve trolls are considered bisexual, with Kanaya also being exclusively sexually attracted to women. That’s because trolls need to have four romantic relationships involving five separate partners (two sexual, three non), all at the same time. These are represented by card suits

♥ - The matesprit, which is love as humans generally understand it. Batman and Catwoman are matesprits.

♦ - The moirail, which is two people basically acting as each other’s therapist

Nepeta and Equius basically exist to demonstrate what “moirail” means. It’s very much a romantic relationship and they’re constantly doing cute couple things, but it’s also an explicitly non-sexual one based on an agreement that Nepeta will perform emotional labor/therapy for Equius and he in return will protect her from both physical threats and her own instance stupidity. Batman and Robin are moirails, and Kanaya ♦ Karkat gets teased a lot in Homestuck

♠ - The kismesis, where you hate someone so much you basically have no choice but to fuck them.Yes, every troll is looking not just for a girlfriend, but a nemesis. 

In lighter stories, Batman and the Joker are kismesis

♣ - Finally, the auspistice, which is a three-way relationship where the hatefucking sexual tension is running so high that a third party has to step in and keep them out of each other for the good of society. The person that you’re getting cockblocked from hatefucking and the person you’re actually hatefucking are two separate people. In “darker” stories, most notably The Killing Joke, Batman ♣ Commissioner Gordon ♣ Joker. In Homestuck, Kanaya tends to play cockblocker to the point where she’s slut-shamed for all the sex she’s not having. Even though Kanaya is a lesbian, she was in an auspistice between Vriska and Tavros, and there’s a joke where Eridan likes a girl and tries to start a fight with her boyfriend to turn it into a clubs relationship with him in it.

This whole setup is, of course, utterly ludicrous, and the whole thing added a wacky edge to the standard teenage romance subplots, making them feel fresh and new and different. It also meant the number of possible ships quickly reached ludicrous levels, and Karkat ♥ Terezi, Karkat  ♦ Kanaya, Karkat ♠ John, and Karkat  ♣ Jade  ♣ Karkat (via time travel) were all ships being teased at the same time that were not mutually exclusive. It was stupid and wacky and ludicrous and made teenage romantic angst feel new and fresh and it was a nontrivial part of why Homestuck got so big. 

Then in Act 6, we started getting into the teenage romantic angst of an exclusively human cast, and it’s just like every other Young Adult book you’ve ever read with only the occasional romantic decapitation to spice it up, and it didn’t take off like the trollmance did

This is the most popular scene of the Alpha Kids romance stuff. Not coincidentally, it’s also the weirdest.

The epilogues basically drop the quadrants. Karkat and Kanaya have their normal human-like matesprit relationships and apparently have no interest whatsoever in filling out the rest of the boxes any more. Jane and Gamzee have what I think is meant to be a kismesis but it’s just a normal human relationship with rape play and Jake awkwardly in the room, and none of the stuff that makes kismesis funny (Gamzee ♠ Vriska happens, but Gamzee is middle aged while Vriska is 16, making it less of a wacky romantic hijink and more of statutory rape played for comedy, hopefully because the writers flat-out didn’t think about what they were doing). It’s just normal bland-ass human romance stories, with quick breaks for pretend or actual sexual violence.

I actually had to look this up because I’d forgotten

The incubators knew of Madoka’s existence, and even though they’d been foiled this time, they had all eternity to keep trying, so if Homura went with Madoka she’d eventually lose her again. 

I’m going to keep this to shorter comics you can read in an afternoon. No one’s going to archive-binge Questionable Content or Bittersweet Candy Bowl at this point. 

Narbonic is the best webcomic no one’s heard of, and one I tend to evangelize. The first arc or two is is literally unreadable in parts

But it improves fast, isn’t particularly long, and everything from “Professor Madblood and the Lovelace Affair” to the end is among the all-time great webcomics for how neatly it brings all the LOLRANDOM mid-2000s webcomic stuff into a satisfying and suitably epic conclusion

It’s probably worth toughing out the early strips because it all comes together neatly by the end, but you can also skip to Professor Madblood and the Doppelganger Gambit, as it’s the first really good storyline IMO. Avoid the commentary, though. It’s interesting (and definitely worth checking out on a re-read), but it’s spoilery

I recently finished an archive binge of Kiwi Blitz. There are surprisingly few superhero webcomics out there, but KB is a really good one, and feels a lot like a 90s cartoon. (You should also check out Sleepless Domain by the same author)

Speaking of 90s cartoons, Latchkey Kingdom is a pretty cute episodic adventure-comedy. It’s just kind of consistently a fun read.