#failsons

to start with, taz and i have been friends for some years now! back in early 2019 i was on the hbomberguy donkey kong 64 stream where i (briefly) tried to defend homestuck, which i guess gained me some form of notoriety/infamy. i can't remember if it was taz or kate who reached out to me first but i know taz liked my stuff (and i liked his!). then kate had me on pgen, i joined the pgen server, we all started gaming together and talking about homestuck in group chats. this period, pretty much through the entirety of 2019, is when i went from feeling like i had zero grasp on homestuck to becoming cohost of an at-the-time popular homestuck theory podcast! it's funny going back to my first appearance on pgen because you can tell i was so in over my head. i couldn't remember the names of the hiveswap trolls and still didn't even really know all the homestuck trolls by name. AND I OPTED OUT OF TALKING ABOUT VRISREZI LMAO. oh how turned the tables did the tables did turn

[[[oh god i just realized the pgen website expired and i'm not sure if the eps are still up anywhere... i should talk to kate about that lmao]]]

anyway, i actually talked to taz a bunch when i was first writing godfeels 1!

shortly after this we all did a stream for the launch of the epilogues with folks from the pgen server as well as hiveswap writer/director aysha u farah. i played gamzee lmao i still have the clown horn app on my phone from that

i guess i don't really know to what extent any of this is common knowledge anymore now that i think about it! this feels sort of superfluous to me but i guess this was FOUR YEARS AGO lmao

early godfeels straight up would not have existed without all these people. i cannot stress enough that literary obsession is a social contagion. i was not born a homestuck, i was made. and i think maybe some of the extremities of gf2 especially feel a little weird or dated these days, because on top of everything else godfeels was responding to it was also responding to the particularly toxic 2019-era vriscourse. so a big part of june's confrontational nature came from me being fucking sick of the baby's-first-conservatism that took root in the wider fandom when us cancelable queers had the audacity to like problematic womens and not apologize for it. i won't say anymore about that because like, whatever, it's all dead and buried now even if the ghost lingers. that ghost will have its day eventually! but not anytime soon.

ANYWAY, so, going back to the beginning even though i wrote godfeels alone, it came about in a context of lengthy conversations with other homestuck theorists. so when gf3 started to blow up in scale and become less about my trauma specifically, it made a lot of sense to broaden my horizons and get some new blood into the mix. the posts i linked at the start will fill in a bunch of gaps for you there, i think. it’s worth noting that a bunch of us already had a history of at least attempting to collaborate. we had a thing building for a while like a visual novel with one choice that was basically, what if we wrote every possible version of “transgender john” and just had them all together as branching paths. this was before some of the broader fandom really dug their heels in on the reactionary transphobia, after which point i at least lost some of my taste for that project. maybe we could come back to it someday, we wrote some cool stuff for that...

as far as my collaborative philosophy goes, idk. i first started writing fiction on the zeldapower forums in the early 2000s and developed a thick skin for critique pretty fast as a result. i wrote and rewrote constantly, shared what i could with friends and talked about plot/story/character ideas with them. when i realized in year two that writing school had nothing to offer me, i transferred to film. but i did so explicitly not wanting to be a director or writer or anyone above the line, really, because i didn't know what i wanted to make or even if i wanted to make something of my own. what i wanted was to help other people realize their own visions and see how they did it. so that's how i ended up working grip/electric in the oklahoma film industry, because it turns out all it really takes to get your foot in the door is to lose the ego and make yourself useful. it helps that i am cursed with constant psychological awareness of absolutely everything in my vicinity at all times, so i gained a reputation for being practically psychic the way i could know exactly what my bosses wanted lighting-wise before they even said anything.

i miss that job tbh. i loved the people, i felt more physically and psychologically fulfilled than at any job i've ever had. oklahoma has a relatively small film scene so it wasn't long before i was on a first name basis with most everyone working on my side of the state. when a crew is all on the same page, man, there's nothing like it. not every set can or should be like this, but some of my favorite experiences were on sets where it felt like everyone was the director. the director had their own vision but they knew how to adapt it to the location, to the ideas of technicians and craftspeople who had their own insights. a good director knows how to let their collaborators take ownership of the work, even when they reject their suggestions! i loved film work and i think about getting back to it sometimes. problem is it's extraordinarily physically demanding work and it leaves no time for anything else. 12 hour days five days a week minimum. i quit because i wanted to focus on video essays, one thing led to another, now we're here and homestuck changed my life lmao

so that's where i come from as writer. i have very strong opinions about my work and what it means and what it needs to do, but i try very hard not to have an ego about it.

the way we work together is pretty simple. when i finish the first draft of a chapter i’ll post it to the work server, and then folks will leave comments. but also, every member of the team has their own little corner of godfeels that they’ve adopted. taz is the dirkjake whisperer, julia is the queen of dana and the upsilons, etc. so when i write these characters i’ll ask for their insight, and invite them to modify or add to the scene as they see fit. sometimes this means prose, sometimes this means dialogue. our understanding is that nothing goes in the final published work without my approval, but that also that nothing is entirely off the table until we’ve had a conversation about it.

i get a lot of my storytelling philosophy from the tv show LOST, where every question was introduced with an explanation in mind but with the caveat that those explanations only remained true until the writers came up with something better. this gets back to something i said yesterday about needing a story to be dynamic and not planning things out too much in advance. for more detailed explanations, here’s a post i wrote about my hooks & hats philosophy, and then here’s another post about my process in general. but basically, i have this massive web of interconnected plotpoints going out very far into the future right? so when someone makes a suggestion i know exactly how possible it is to fit within that framework. i know how much information about any given hook has been introduced, so i know whether one explanation has been seeded too thoroughly to be changed.

but the flipside of that is that now my collaborators are inventing OCs! taz created a fantastic character named xifus that i can’t wait to write more of in 3.2A. we talk about this setting all the time, we talk about what makes sense for it, what would be cool, what mistakes would absolutely RUIN IT, how we can avoid the mistakes of our predecessors, all that fun stuff.

collaboration is all about honesty. godfeels has become what it is because we’re all fans both of homestuck, of anime, of broader culture... and of godfeels. my dirty secret is that i love writing godfeels because i’m its biggest fan. it frequently does not FEEL like i am composing this story, but rather that it is just happening to me. always i am wrangling cats in this petting zoo. i don’t want to be making this thing for the rest of my life but also this story is SO COOL and we are all chomping at the fucking bit to get to the upsilons and so much other shit besides. is that egomaniacal? idk. i think the idea that you’re supposed to be neutral leaning negative on your own work is kinda bullshit. but also, i don’t see the creation of art as bound to suffering or even being a process that requires much expertise. writing isn’t magic, even if it can feel that way sometimes.

i talk a lot about my work and how i write because i want to help demystify the process and try to show that it’s a learnable craft same as anything else. imo the preponderance of mediocre-to-great artists is not proof of Exceptional People but rather that it’s actually dirt simple to become a mediocre-to-great artist. all you need is time and money and access to the right tools! which is why so many mediocre artists are the rich failsons of killfactory millionaires. which is why every artist should be pro student debt relief, pro public transit, pro affordable housing, pro welfare, pro socialized medicine, pro deprivatizing mass media, and pro wide-ranging government arts funding. our nightmare neoliberal media landscape is the result of decades of making the creation of art & culture economically inaccessible to the working class, hence everything being set in rich suburbs with giant houses, hence the inescapability of pro-capitalist pro-nationalist messaging, hence the refusal of all national media to talk to trans people about trans issues, because only the middle and upper classes get to touch the levers of public perception and they have a direct economic incentive to convince the working class that they are middle class.

the notion that this stuff is at all mysterious or naturally the purview of those who can afford expensive degrees is just the narrative they sell to working people to cover up the fact that once you ascend past a certain income bracket, absolutely everything is just nepotism. it’s all just rich guys giving their rich friends and their rich friends’ stupid fucking libertarian manchildren high paying jobs forever. that’s why they never go away, that’s why they always fail up, that’s why trans women and queer people can get bullied off the face of the internet for half-joking that a fictional woman who did a murder was blameless in her crimes while grifters who moonlight at raytheon can weather blow after blow and stir the pot and solicit donations they don’t need and never disappear no matter how hated they are, because they HAVE money and they HAVE security so none of this shit is a real threat to anything besides their shallow fucking egos. which, you know, to be fair, threatening a rich person’s ego is basically the same thing as killing a man in cold blood, so who can say what is wrong or right?

there’s obviously a lot of complicating factors to the anticapitalist yarn i’ve spun here, but that’s how i see it. the rich want to own culture, they commodify it through copyright and box it up and insist that we are trespassers if we try to reflect those “““properties”““ through ourselves. that is, in part, a big reason why i haven’t given up on godfeels or tried to “file the serial numbers off.” i love this story and i am treating it with as much care as i would something original, because i believe this is art that stands up even with its imperfections and it’s insulting to me that “fanwork” is considered naturally lesser than “original” work when literally everything around us that is owned by disney et al was stolen from what was once an open culture. i reject the enclosure of the commons of our imagination, and andrew hussie themself quite famously said that postcanon homestuck belongs to the most conscientious and invested members of the fandom.

and frankly, even as i wish i COULD make a living off of godfeels alone, i like that my art isn’t particularly monetizable. i like that it is considered low art. i like that many people see it as shameful or a waste of time. i do not want to create a commodity. i do not want to run a business. i do not want to be famous. i want to make art that is freely available that maybe, just maybe, can help a handful of queer people deal with the shit going on in their life and have a good time in the process.

in short: we have no choice but to revolutionize the world.