#godfeels askbox

it's not that we've sidestepped the idea so much as put it on layaway. in general i'm not huge on transfem Dave-- not because i think he's cis, but because it's Dave we're talking about here. he canonically lived with Karkat for more than half a decade before they had their first kiss. this is a dude for whom suppression is an artform. there's no "sudden moment of gender revelation" for him the way there was for June, no magical gender ghost to deliver the answer full formed. in a way he's sort of the opposite.

waaaaay back in the gf3 prologue, Jade hit him with the button that turned him into a cat against his will, but when he returned to being a person he kept the ears and tail as a subconscious acknowledgement that he liked being a cat. but he had no agency in this process. it wasn't something he asked for. i think after you've been trans for a while you'll meet someone who is just SUCH an egg, and every cell in your body wants to blast them with rays until they crack. and you know what, sometimes it works! i'm not an evangelist of the egg prime directive, it very much depends on context and sometimes somebody just needs to get walloped with a big gay mallet. but Dave very much is not one of those people. at least from my read of him, he's the type of guy who takes each step into new territory slowly and timidly, and if you try to hurry him along he's just going to give up and retreat until he can start over again on his own terms.

which is, you know, very catlike behavior. he's kind of a traumatized rescue if you think about it, even going back to him and Karkat on the meteor. it's easy to forget since Dave is such a funny and avoidant character, but he's lowkey got the most fucked up backstory of all the betas and maybe of all the homestuck humans. like the way Bro raised him is so messed up. it really reminds me of videos you'd see at the dawn of youtube, of gamer bros walking up their sleeping cat and then screaming loudly out of nowhere, chasing them around and laughing. if you've ever fostered an abused animal, you know that that kind of treatment leaves a mark and it doesn't come out easy.

so Dave's now in this really interesting position of being totally out of his comfort zone in every way imaginable. fleeing from earth with people he just met on a mission he has no stake in and unable to communicate with his better half for the first time in like a decade, while ALSO having these lingering feline features he very much has not come to terms with. he's started wearing skirts because they're more comfortable for his tail, but he's SO embarrassed about it. and now the people who meet him for the first time, the only version of him they know is the one with cat ears and a skirt. so already before he's even gotten used to artificial gravity, other people are defining his image for him just by bearing witness to how he looks.

this, to me, is not a conflict you resolve by having Dave say "oh wait, i'm a girl."

which is why he's latched onto Dare as hard as he has, and why the both of them have so quickly reverted to the comfort zone of how they used to act when they were teens. there's a boyishness to their friendship right now that is... i mean, god, i might as well say it since we've been circling this drain for a few paragraphs already, it's kind of an age regression arc isn't it? that's not how we've been writing it but in practice that's basically what has happened. both are majorly traumatized and suddenly single, both have a ton of baggage to sort through and have no idea where to start or even what their goal is. sometimes when you're in that situation the only rational choice is to bunker down and act like a kid again until the storm blows over. i like them as a pair because it lets us kind of relitigate classic JohnDave as a concept in a vacuum, but with all these added complexities orbiting around them in the background. gender being, naturally, one of the big ones.

In godfeels canon, how far does this extend? Do kingdoms sometimes resemble corporations? Instead of planets, do lands exist sort of as one large plane? More succinctly, my question would be what are the fundamental similarities between UE sessions as you interpret them?

I can understand you may want to keep the powder dry on this but I'd love to see your thoughts

with love, "why is june white"-anon

the big point of reference here is vast error. in a lot of early fanworks, the rules of sburb/sgrub were taken to be universal (or omniversal as the case may be). vast error breaks the mold by presenting a version of the game that operates on an entirely different set of logics. where sburb has you move your entire house into the medium before the reckoning, VE's game has its cast move the entire planet of repiton into the medium. classpects operate somewhat differently, the game constructs are far more varied, and that's just what i can remember from not having read it in a couple years. this sparked my imagination as someone who can't help but start drawing conclusions from two entire data points. what does it mean that this is still metanarratively "the same game" as sburb despite so many consequential differences?

this was the original animating idea behind the development of the extracosmic witchkind legion. a society of outcasts and orphans from the universe engine, whose goal broadly is to help others who are trapped in sessions of their own. on paper, every single character in the ewl is a survivor of somebody's fan session/mspfa. it hasn't really come up much yet and might not be wholly feasible to commit to to the extent i imagine it, but in my head it's not even that there are lots of different species and shapes and sizes of people but that they're also all drawn in completely different ways. you get a hint of this with the upsilon sprites, where Lenore is drawn without hard outlines to match xamag's style in vast error. Dana, meanwhile, has kind of an akira toriyama look to her. Alphi is sort of a fraggle muppet. and Edie is a dog.

so this naturally extends to the universe engine itself. i imagine that there are certain pillars that remain true in most (not necessarily all) sessions. in the same way that trolls and humans are "keystone species" that naturally and independently emerge throughout the extracosmos, things like sprites and denizens and alchemy and skaia are pretty consistent. think of it in darwinian terms. there are tens of thousands of bird species that are all wildly different in form, but biologically most of them are pretty similar. zoom back farther and think of how virtually every living thing on this earth shares a common ancestor and, as such, has most of the same skeletal structures, just squashed and stretched by evolution over time. i imagine that the universe engine operates on a similar logic, with each subsequent generation of universe inheriting traits from prior versions (think of how the warhammer of vrillyhoo is a relic of an ancient session from a whole other universe & species that predates all the trolls). metatextually you could probably say that the common ancestor of the universe engine is homestuck, but that's only true from our limited perspective. the big bang occurred so long ago and the paradox is so infinitely complex that cosmic natural selection has occurred quintillions of times to the point where a single seed has grown into an entire forest bigger than everything that's ever existed put together.

given this, the job of the EWL is to have a broad understanding of the constants and variables inherent to the universe engine. there are very specific rules about what sessions they can intervene on, how many people can be sent in, and how much knowledge they can gather about the session before going in, but i'm afraid that's the stuff i want to keep the powder dry on, to borrow that wonderful turn of phrase. suffice it to say, the rankscipline system exists in part to delineate hyper-specific varieties of expertise, such that squads can be dynamically assembled and balanced to most effectively respond to the conditions within any given session.

AHA. so, unfortunately, i don't think i had a specific song in mind for this moment, but i was thinking of a specific scene. indulge me in a bit of a tangent here. i used to listen to a lot of east coast emo as a teen/early twentysomething, and a lot of those guys turned out to be raving sex pests. my favorite band for a very long time was Brand New, whose last three albums especially came out at really important moments in my life and influenced my art in much the same way that Car Seat Headrest does now (christ i'm such a stereotype). then in 2017 they released Science Fiction, and lead singer/songwriter Jesse Lacey got turbo me-too'd. there are ~problematic artists~ whose work i can still engage with, but in Brand New's case it completely ruined their music for me. after what i rationalized for years as a sort of archetypal persona inhabiting Lacey's lyrics was revealed to be just, like, him as a guy writing what he knows, that became all i could hear anymore. i adore the instrumentation and experimental arrangements of their later albums, but SO many of their songs are about longing for missed connections in an obsessive, often possessive way, sometimes to the point of religious crisis. which is hardly abnormal for a mainstream rock band, but with the context of the callout it's impossible for me not to hear those lyrics and wonder... is he talking about an underage girl he flirted with on tour once?

House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski very much informed my approach to the infinite-scroll text format and the ways you could use line spacing/text placement to tell a story. less obviously, i also like HoL as a nested pseudo-epistolary, with multiple narrators writing in very different styles and proposing contradictory visions of reality within the text. i think you can very much see that influence in the later parts of godfeels.

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is obviously a gargantuan influence. weirdly enough i didn't read it for the first time until after i'd already decided that Silverbark was ultimately going to occupy a sort of Marion Wheeler role, i was actually in the midst of writing the Risk/Dare section of Chapter 8 when i picked up the paperback. it encouraged me to develop the metaphysics of ideaspace and acted as a fantastic baseline against which i could deviate in terms of antimeme/voidthought-related stories. and then, yeah, once i realized the dial i was turning up on Silverbark was the Marion Wheeler dial, obviously i turned it up even more.

Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin hit my brain like the tsar bomba. i put most of those influences in the gamejam game i helped write in 2023 titled Come Home Wolf (which is actually based on an idea i cannibalized from godfeels because there wasn't room for it anymore) but you can definitely see it in B1 as well. Le Guin's approach to materialist worldbuilding breathed new life into my desire to write science fiction, i just think that book is so beautiful and strange and impossible. the most direct influence is in the B1 solo when the Comet crew use an ansible to talk to the Falconers.

right now i'm reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, the first of his Culture novels which i've been told clearly had a huge influence on godfeels despite me never having read them. i'm a little over halfway through and i can tell it's GOING to have an influence. i love this book so far (with the exception of a single bizarre fatphobic interlude) and it's giving me a lot of ideas for how to talk about & explore the EWL.

honestly there's a timekeeping-esque rabbit hole attached to pretty much everything related to cohabitating species from different universes. what do you do about people acclimatized to wildly different G forces? what do you about species that are exponentially larger or smaller than the statistical humanoid average? IS there a statistical humanoid average??

the obvious answer that a lot of speculative fiction comes up with is that you have multiple civilizations of vary scales occupying the same space. sorry, i'm so sorry, but i'm thinking of Zootopia here, where there's little mouse cars on separate mouse roads next to the big regular sized roads. every time i see this kind of reality proposed it just seems wildly dangerous and inefficient. i mean, there's ALWAYS a tiny person who almost gets squashed! imagine trying to build a highway in a world where a really big fox girl might step on it accidentally. just imagine! are you imagining it? god, can you even imagine...

but like, seriously, it would be catastrophic. either you have strict "big creatures here, little creatures here" boundaries between spaces, or you have a form of integration where inherently one size of creature is going to be preferenced over the others (presumably whichever occupies the largest statistical average of the population/generates the most economic activity....... which, if we assume all creatures regardless of size share equal intelligence and ability, is a logic that would actually preference the smaller creatures, since they tend to reproduce faster and at higher volume. ah, our anthropomorphic perspective is really doing us in here!)

so, let's do away with the obvious answer. if the Legion can dynamically manipulate time to synchronize a wide variety of circadian rhythms, why not do the same thing for size/mass/gravity? i've toyed with the idea that Legion members are sort of squashed and stretched to be able to comfortably occupy the same space, such that if you and Godzilla met in a EWL hallway, he'd only be a normal amount of intimidatingly taller than you. presumably the Legion is capable of increasing someone's size without increasing their mass, and perhaps even of locally varying G forces to the comfort of the individual. i'm not 100% sold on this idea yet for various reasons. like idk, maybe the big fox girl doesn't want to be regular person sized. maybe being huge is part of her gender and making her small again induces dysphoria, did you ever think of that?!

so i think, like with a lot of stuff in the Legion, there just won't be a universal explanation. some facilities might have automatic body size normalization, and others might not. maybe there's a commune that has mouse cars on mouse highways next to dog cars on dog highways next to people cars on people highways next to elephant cars on... you get it. i think the answer is that you go where you can be comfortable. the Legion is big enough that it has accommodations for basically anything you can imagine.

this is connected to the notion that while the Legion has the ability to freely manufacture pretty much anything by way of universe engine game mechanics, they still try to preference handmade or uniquely crafted goods where possible/sustainable, because it is good for a society to have something constructive to do with its hands. not that they OUTLAW alchemy, that would be unfeasible, but rather that they don't let the absence of scarcity push them away from technologies developed in scarce conditions. many EWL members are immortal, remember. it's not just about having a lot of different kinds of leisure, but different kinds of everything. building a society that encourages Gods to remain grounded and engaged with material reality. chronological syncopation, size normalization, and the rankscipline system are just three ways that the Legion tries to put everyone on equal footing, not preferencing one particular variety of member just because they happen to represent a statistical majority (by one arbitrary unit of measure) or fulfill a specific cultural role/expectation.

how the fuck do you know that?

that's a great question. i think there are a few explanations that are all equally true. the most basic one is that she's guessing. it's not exactly four dimensional problem solving to figure that June/Dare is feeling angst at this point in time, after all. but then, how does she know the Comet's name? it's important that Jasprose is the narrator here. being self-actualized enough to dictate one's own narration seems to bring with it at least the potential for limited semi-omniscience. for instance, where does one's ability to intuit their subject's internal thoughts cross over into out-and-out mindreading? June-as-narrator could only ever guess at other people's feelings, and often rather poorly. Dirk-as-narrator (in the Epilogues) was exceedingly over-confident, to the point that he seemed to literally impose his thoughts on other people, at times overwriting their agency (his capacity to do this also seems to have been tied to the self-actualization of whoever's thoughts he was narrating. where Jake and Jane were easy marks, Roxy and Terezi had much higher resistance, albeit for different reasons). but even still, there's an undercurrent to Dirk's narration like he is quite literally reading a script of his subject's thoughts and translating them for us. and yet there were things he didn't know, or was surprised by, that indicate very distinct limits to his narratorial control. classpect certainly plays a part here, but we can only really guess at how it works because the specifics are never laid out outside of a few very subjective lore dumps (i'm thinking of Alt!Callie's speech to Aradia in the Epilogues, which i'd link directly if the homestuck website wasn't caput, but suffice it to say this would hardly be the first time a Calliope has falsely positioned herself as an unbiased expert on narrative mechanics), and tbh i prefer it this way. gives us all more room to play.

i think VV-as-narrator is the more relevant example here. they have access to an endless feed of information from infinite timelines, and yet their stated goal is to preserve individual agency as much as possible. so they're able to flit our attention across the cosmos on a whim. Jasprose exists at a mystifying parallel with VV, which is not a comparison the text primes you to make because you probably couldn't find two more polar opposite & unrelated characters in this story if you tried. but it's important to remember Jasprose is on some level always putting on act, much like her namesake. Rose as Seer of Light had many visions of the future, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that one of those included the Comet. one can only imagine how being a sprite^2 will have compounded that ability. if Jasprose has access to her ultimate self, then she can probably see realities where she wound up on the Comet instead of Kanaya (perhaps she can even see an earlier version of the story that i scrapped where Rose's horrorterror-oozing corpse wound up becoming the Comet's battery). but Jaspers mucks it all up for her, pulls her away from the macrosocial dissociation that seems endemic to narrator-tier characters of a certain power level.

in talking to Calliope about the fate of the other sprites, she describes herself as being "psychologically high-definition." she is one specific Rose, and she is literally every Rose, and she is a SBURB object meant to be a sort of player tutorial, and she is a dead house cat, and she is Jasprose. i think Jasprose is more than just "all of those things at once," but rather a relatively-siloed individual who exists just past the crossroads of all those elements. she's synthesized. as such, i don't think she really has direct conscious access to all those discrete components anymore. maybe there's a mechanical reason for that, or maybe it's just a coping mechanism. either way, her answer to how she knows what June/Dare is up to on the Comet in that moment is probably a shrug of the shoulders. she just does. it was a moment of cosmic symmetry that surfaced into her awareness for a brief moment, and then submerged again just as quickly. i don't believe she can tap into that awareness deliberately, because doing so would likely compromise "Jasprose" as a distinct entity. or at least, that's probably what she fears might happen.

hahahahahahaha

if a new guy ever randomly shows up in godfeels, you can probably bet money that i threw him in on a whim for the yuks. when i was still thinking of this Bridge as a fairly short and kinda jokey thing, i was mostly searching for uncanny gags to make the audience laugh in a "what the fuck?" kind of way and was getting frustrated that the characters weren't giving me much to work with. then in walks Arnold fully formed, and i laughed for a minute straight after writing the scene that is basically unchanged in the published version. that was pretty much the only other thing i'd written besides the introductory conversation when i turned my draft over to QueerOnFire, and i demanded they keep him in the same way Andrew demanded the hs2 team keep Yiffy. one of my favorite gags in long-running media is introducing a new character by acting like they were always there. Invader Zim did it ironically, LOST did it earnestly, i'm sure there are other examples but idk i just find it hilarious. it's the kind of creative decision that gets people thinking "wow, you're really out of ideas," how could i not flirt with disaster when it struts before me so sexily? and that's pretty much the calculus. i like flying by the seat of my pants as a writer, and i like writing things that make me laugh.

but, okay, you're asking about more involved decision making. the truth is, it's all post-facto reasoning. the question was never "do we keep Arnold" because obviously we're keeping Arnold, but rather "what do we do with Arnold now that he's here?" and historically, that's where the magic happens in the godfeels kitchen.

so one of the running things about gf3 Roxy is that she has a whole life off screen that we don't know anything about. this is true of all the main cast, but it's especially true of Roxy because of her voidy thing (passive voidthought radius). VV revealing that she was transfem this whole time is one of my favorite moments in all of godfeels, so any opportunity i can find to emphasize the narrative's allergy to Roxy's personal life, i take. the fact that it extends to literally everyone in Arnold's case is sort of ridiculous, but that's the point. i like the questions this begs us to ask. i like feeling as a reader that you aren't witness to Literally Everything, like you're playing catchup and having to fill in blanks even if you've been reading from the start, which fits in with gf3.2's general theme of being "a story about being in the middle of stories." and i want us to be wondering what else we don't know about these characters now that they're free from the totalizing gaze of an unreliably motivated narrator. makes for good friction.

but in a more down to earth sense, this is just a thing at parties, especially milestone ones. somebody will bring a guy that most everyone in your friend group somehow knows and you've never heard of and you just have to be cordial and get to know them and see what all the hubbub is about. it's sort of a surreal experience that, depending on how long you've known the friends in question, can get you doubting your own experience of reality. like, am i really an important fixture in these people's lives, or just another ornament? (the answer tends to be, just because someone has more friends than you doesn't mean they like their friends any less than you like yours.) and the surreality only doubles when the new guy is somehow crazy compatible with you, because then they just fold into your life like they were always there! social groups are weird and it's very easy to write them as if they're not.

i like the destabilizing force Arnold brings to the table. as a writing tool he's very useful for a sequence like The Party. without him, i think Vriska and Terezi have way too easy a time slipping back in with the crew. he's an excellent counterpoint to them in a way that heightens the weirdness of what's become of canon: Vriska and Terezi, the arguable axis of Homestuck, are the awkward outsiders trying to figure out how to socialize, while some rando mortal human redhead we've never seen before is on a first name basis with them! even Jane knows who Arnold is for crying out loud!! little disruptions like these can do a lot of thematic heavy lifting when applied strategically (and yes, swinging a big obvious cartoon mallet IS a strategy). i like the working class perspective he brings, particularly as he's basically partying with his bosses. to say nothing of them being literally The Gods that Arnold will have grown up reading stories of! i mean seriously, what's that about? is this ethical? there's a lot of tension around the power imbalance of his presence that puts a big fat cloud over the whole shindig, but it's exactly high enough in the sky that you can kinda just ignore it and get along with the festivities anyway. which is great because that's how everyone at the party feels!!!

and then naturally, there's the obvious promise of an eventual continuation of the Earth C plotline once this section wraps up. the premise is too juicy and the pathos with Karkat, Jane, Jasprose, Vriska, and Terezi too delicious to leave entirely off the table, even if it takes us a while to circle back around to it. does Arnold become a major recurring character in whatever that continuation turns out to be? i think if a new guy ever randomly shows up in godfeels, you can probably bet money that they're gonna show up on screen at least one more time. but we're getting waaaaaaay ahead of ourselves now, the party has barely even started and Arnold only just got here!

so yeah i guess tl;dr i put him in as a bit but i kept him in with distinct intention. on the whole, i'd say that's a pretty good encapsulation of most of the decisions i make for godfeels! judge for yourself as to whether or not that's a remotely sensible way to run a show.

edit: i have been asked to relay important commentary from my collaborator.