Hello tumblr dot com! Dang, I’ve been here a while and my main blog, @caledfwlchthat, has gone through a bunch of different uses: from mostly voice acting up until the Homestuck Gigapause, to Homestuck art reblogs after the Gigapause given the lack of new canon content, to adding fic starting in 2016 and increasingly starting in 2019. It’s been a very mixed bag and I have often just forgotten to post new things here.
I’m gonna keep the main for general ‘Stucking, but I thought it might help keep things less cluttered to have a sideblog for HS fic content. So because bytes are cheap, that is what I have done. Chug on over here to @caledfych if you’d like a bunch of AO3 links and noodling about the writing process on your dash. As a reminder, I generally write non-Explicit stuff featuring a variety of ships (Rosemary’s a fave) and exploring canon-divergent situations.
The pandemic has not been kind to my creative output and so I’m just now picking the torch back up again. I am going to do my darndest to keep updating with something Stucky on Mondays Eastern US time. Right now my meteorstuck longfic serial Rose: Remember (Rashomon Roshambo), or R^4, is getting pride of place; it’s been updating in earnest since December 2018, and I’m going to try to bring it home by the holidays this year. Huge ongoing thanks to fic friends @laurasauras and @katreal-fic for doing sprints with me and getting me to keep adding to things the entire month of October. Go follow them right away and love on all their fics, they both rule.
Also! If you are keen on writing “in-game AU” Homestuck fics -- ones focusing on SBURB, canon-divergent timelines, Alternia in all its dumpsterfire dystopianity, fan sessions, and similar -- give me a shout. I’ve been as scattershot about community as I have been about promoting anything, but I would like either to find or to corral a community of folks who can encourage more such content and promote the hell out of each other. I include Earth C, the Epilogues and HS^2 as “in-game” themes for these purposes, although I have friends on both sides of that fraught divide and will respect boundaries; I’ll tag any such posts as “#homestuck epilogues” and #homestuck^2 if anyone does not want to see anything to do with those.
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Hi followers, now that Polyswap reveals are out (a few days ago now), I can fess up to writing this 20 kw JohnDaveKat thing about making out in literal supply closets, that I wrote for @cassandraooc (check out her art and AO3, she’s tops!). Shout-out also to @katreal-fic for her help as a sounding board and general pompoms while I was writing this.
R^4 fans: this was my May/June, I have not forgotten you! But if you like all the dream bubble romance and the awkward poly negotiations Rose and Kanaya have been having about Dave, you might give this one a look too.
Process discussion (as best as I can recall it) under the cut, as with other swap assignments I’ve done, for anyone who’s interested in the (long, spoilery) story of what the hell I was thinking exactly when I wrote this thing.
So my giftee’s prompts were -- by her own admission -- written in a bit of a sleep-deprived haze (I had to laugh as I read them, haven’t we all been there at some point, I know I lost some sleep over mine). We were each required to provide between three and six prompts for polyships (3-6 characters each) that we wanted to see depicted in gift fic or art. Cassandra’s OT3 was JohnDaveKat, which sported a string of elaborate sub-prompts (“medievalstuck!”, “soulmates!”, “haunted house!”, etc.) -- along with an invite to not use any of those and just write whatever I felt like. Other prompts for Dave/Sollux/Karkat, Jane/Callie/Roxy, and Rose/Kanaya/Jade were basically completely open-ended.
I’m trying to remember exactly how I seized upon the idea I ended up executing. Although some of my other works feature polyships, such as Kankatrezi (The Cafe Mocha Caper) and Daverosemary (foreshadowed in R^4), the process of how they got together is important for me in ways that I don’t care about as much for canon ships. I felt some resistance to just picking one of the ships and starting to write it as if it was already established. Also, people who know my writing know that I like to stick close to in-game or post-game AUs, or at least the broader Homestuck setting, rather than non-game AUs or other settings that remove the characters from the context that made them who we recognize them to be. So I was going to need some runway and a satisfying premise to run along it with. But by golly, if Cassandra wanted JohnDaveKat, she was gonna get JohnDaveKat.
The JohnDaveKat prompt I personally found most hilarious and awesome was
John gets turned into a Trickster, and finds Karkat and Dave. In the ensuing candy fueled mess, a lot of pent up emotions and secret crushes get revealed, including Dave realizing and admitting that John was probably his first crush on another boy though he was in denial at the time, and Karkat admitting that his own pitch crush for John never went away. (For his part, John finds out that he might, in fact, be a bit of a homosexual.)
Another JohnDaveKat prompt that turned out to figure in heavily later with the work I ended up producing was
John decides to surprise Dave and Karkat with a visit, only to find them already *quite* busy. Before he can think of what to do or do enough thinking at all to leave, he gets caught, and Dave notices evidence of interest, knows Karkat's still got some pitch feelings, and has some of his own, suggests maybe John stay a bit and they talk over some things and maybe do other stuff later too.
Going with Earth C could also bring the Epilogues material into play, and I briefly toyed with an Epilogues-related scenario that could score multiple polyships at once, before remembering that the Epilogues are hugely polarizing and maybe I want to be double sure about my giftee before giving them such a gift in a fan swap. A combination of Tumblr-stalking, re-reading the prompts and discreet inquiries showed that my idea wasn’t going to work, largely because Ultimate Dirk is a legendary piece of shit and his presence over against End-Of-Act-7 Dirk would cause real friction with Cassandra’s requests -- which leaned fluffy and offered bonus points for “DirkJake” and “Dirk and Dave being good bros who love each other”. Maybe I could have just done something similar in a separate Earth C AU without a lot of the Epilogues baggage, but by that point the specific discarded spin on the idea had so thoroughly colonized my brain that I just had to ease the whole thing carefully onto the shelf. I’d still be keen to write that other fic sometime. Just not for this particular fill.
So, I took a break for a few days before revisiting the prompt and asking what else I could do. When I think of John, Dave, and Karkat together, my mind goes immediately back to the “EVERYBODY STFU, I HATE YOU BOTH ETC” memo, in which Karkat tries to dissuade Dave and John from encouraging Terezi’s and Vriska’s flirtations, respectively. This convo is burned into my head because I’ve VA’ed it -- I draw a lot of inspiration for character dialogue from the time I’ve spent doing goofy voiceovers for them. And there is a lot of grist for the mill here: Karkat alluding to his pitch crush on John, Dave making fun of Karkat for being gay (while not realizing or admitting how he might be projecting), John being totally clueless about whether he’s attracted to Vriska. All of these are compatible with the “pent-up emotions and secret crushes” Cassandra asked for, and favors Dave <3 Karkat <3< John as a baseline.
Now, one of the reasons I love writing dream bubble fic is because I am fundamentally lazy. I can basically use any canon Homestuck pesterlog as a prompt and run with it. So that’s what I did here. In the moment that they realize that it’s a dream, the participants are forced to reckon with the way dream bubbles respond to their innermost thoughts. Deep desires manifest in weird ways; emotional distances contract, go non-Euclidean. Despite this, the association with dreams simultaneously offer a layer of abstraction or remove to Dave and Karkat -- allowing them to access and slake those deep desires without having to take responsibility for it, either with themselves or each other, during waking hours. In that sense, John opening the closet is like walking in on them a second time -- the dream bubble itself is their main outer closet, and they already know the jig is up when John diverts the pesterlog down Memory Lane. This then raises the question of whether they might have wanted John to discover them, deep down? Perhaps John’s convenient remembering is a sort of wish-fulfillment dream summoning.
From there I already sort of had the fic’s contours and decided it would be best written from John’s POV. The other nice thing about the dream bubble setting was that it let John participate even during the meteor journey, when Dave and Karkat must have been messing around trying to reverse-engineer their own sexual preferences. How gay is Dave, and how troubled is he about it at this point in his history? How does he feel about John finding out? Does Karkat somehow have some symmetrical hangups that leave him struggling as much as Dave, or is he just a giant crab? (The literal vs metaphorical closet thing was accidental at first, but once I discovered that I ran hard with it.)
There were still some problems I struggled with, such as how to get John to fall for Karkat pitch-ways when he’s said in canon that he isn’t gay, and when Karkat has said in canon that he’s not pitch for John anymore. The second problem is easily dispatched by pointing out that Karkat isn’t a reliable narrator of his own preferences, by construction. As for the first -- John might be no Casanova, but he loves his friends and is fiercely loyal to them, and he also saves his anger for either really important moments (like his GAME OVER fight with Caliborn) or utterly trivial moments (like Con Air not being as good as he thought). This seemed like a good place for the former. Once that was laid out, the trio coalesced nicely -- Dave and Karkat need John to keep them honest, and John needs Dave and Karkat to keep him anchored. John <> Dave and Dave c3< (John <3< Karkat) were dynamics that just showed up on their own.
The interpretation of the ending is left open, but the other difficulty I left unresolved is the timeline mismatch between pre-retcon and post-retcon, and the question of which John it was exactly that showed up in Dave and Karkat’s shared dream. Pre-retcon Davekat didn’t happen because Dave and Karkat were fighting over Terezi, but post-retcon John died in the explosion of LOWAS and couldn’t live happily ever after having so gloriously enabled post-retcon Davekat. And I wanted them to live happily ever after. The two most obvious interpretations I could think of were (a) the three are all on Earth C and dreaming together of each other -- or, more poignantly, (b) pre-retcon John is starting to integrate some of post-retcon dead!John’s memories. The second possibility leads in the direction of Ultimate John (what would that even be?) so I made sure to place the ending in a time frame that gives the Epilogues a miss -- although the background DirkJake also signals that this is probably an AU that diverges after the ACT 7 victory.
All in all this was really fun to write! There were lots of other great prompts in the collection, but the ones that grabbed me looked like they would spawn more 20-30 kw novellas and I need to get back to my poor neglected serial! I’m looking forward to making my way through the treats that others posted, eventually adding some of my own, and of course going through Cassandra’s other stuff. (Maybe that awesome fantroll Friendsim project will be the next thing to eat my life after this.)
I’ve finally finished both halves now. For the record, I read Candy first.
Also for the record, like many others, this epilogue stomped on all my feelings and ran them over with a steamroller before chucking their tattered remains into a burning pit filled with starving robotic badgers. I have a separate word doc that is just the phrase “FUCK YOU DIRK” cut and pasted 1,377,459 times in coruscating rainbow shades. @bladekindeyewear, whom I’ve followed for yonks, has some fantastic live blogs of both routes where he also varies the number of U’s in each separate utterance of FUCK YOU DIRK just to keep things interesting. (See also his notes in the last post about his interpretation of the Meat postscript re: insulating fandom works from future canon threats.)
(Seriously, my condolences to anyone who loves Dirk ca. end of ACT 6 because now there are so many theories about What Went Wrong as regards Ultimate Selves and maybe we just want the Striders to get over their issues together.)
And the thing is I doubt I would have been nearly so invested in the outcome if both routes had not been impeccably executed. I was drawn into the world immediately, not just textually but metatextually in classic Homestuck sense -- my attention was often sent going up and down the levels of meaning but never jarred out of the fictional dream. Dirk in Meat, and Gamzee in Candy, each compelled me to take multiple showers through the course of my reading, because EW. And to yell at the screen almost continually for about the middle third of each route. And most of the loose ends that I wanted to see tied up, were. Hats off to @cephiedvariable and the other writers for being awesome. I dunno. Maybe I just like having my feelings stomped on and my brain put in a blender on "frappe”?
I have multiple rounds of thoughts on different themes which I may or may not dump: Dirk and transhumanist tech-bro hubris; Gamzee and OOCness; this Ultimate Self business; the Epilogues as parodies or critiques of various fanfic tropes. Might take a while to collect, especially if I actually want to keep updating R^4, which I may now have to tag as Epilogue Non-Compliant unless I can figure out a new ending. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing. I now have all kinds of great ideas for Epilogue-Compliant things.
PSA in case it’s needed: As you can see, this particular blog now mostly features Rosemary, some Locked Tomb content, and small fuzzy creatures. I have not done any voice-over work in an increasingly very long time. If you’re looking for updates on (mostly Homestuck) fic posted to my AO3 account with this handle, check out @caledfych instead.
I have at this point cultivated a reputation for highly sporadic output, owing in part to day job stress and/or to various exchanges I’ve been in. I think it has been four months at this point. To keep a long story fairly short, even though I have a lot to be thankful for relative to others over the last year, I find myself struggling to find bandwidth for anything outside my immediate daily routine and reblogging the occasional cute thing. Writing fic or recording voice things has sustained me through some times that by any objective measure would be difficult for people, so I hope I can regain the momentum to return to it at some point. Perhaps if I can once again carve out an hour or two in the evenings.
I understand I have no real obligation to post anything (after all, we’re all working for free here) and that we should all look after our own mental health first, but it seems like a good time to say thanks for everyone who still clicks on my fics and engaging positively with them. It actually helps a lot, not even solely as motivation to write the next part, just in general. Thanks for enjoying them, I hope you’ve found what you needed in these weird times, and I hope to give you more where that came from, sometime soon.
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Okay so I haven’t put anything in here for a while. The past few months haven’t been great for fic, not so much because I haven’t had time but because I’ve barely had any leftover spoons. I’m still committed to finishing all my as yet unfinished fics, so fans of R^4 and Doors please know these fics are not dead! I’m not sure which is the next cab off the rank but you’ll find out in due course.
Most of my fic effort of late has been going into my Polyswap Derse fill, which I have fortunately finished, in some form at least. So I look forward to shilling that here when I get a moment, but it isn’t now.
Apart from that, I have a couple of other fic projects planned, some of which are Homestuck-related, others of which aren’t. I’ll shill the Homestuck here, at least, when it’s finished.
At some unknown point, maybe I’ll actually start producing HS^2 response fic but that moment also isn’t now.
Yeah. Kind of anticlimactic. Mostly just, not quite dead. Getting better.
Okay, apart from the fact that life is happening and my crazy extended holiday is well over, I find myself having some difficulty writing the next few chapters of R^4. I have a solid idea of where I want to get to, but I’ve been writing what feel to me like some big checks in both the Davekat and Rosemary parallel subplots and am struggling to cash them, so to speak. In Davekat’s case, to figure out a believable set of actions and reactions that could just about torch all the meteor kids’ relationships in the ways Karkat relates; and in Rosemary’s case, to talk through the weird body-image-distorting projection effects implied in the most recent chapter in ways that are vulnerable and authentic without being excessively mannered (or, tbh, creepy).
I’ve also felt oddly numbed lately for no real reason I can put my finger on as well. It isn’t as though I haven’t had time for writing, but energy seems harder to come by right now. I’ve been phoning it in a bit in the offline world -- what do I need? time with friends, more exercise, better sleep, better diet, Twitter/Facebook/news abstinence, some meaningful reconnection with loved ones or classic fiction? these things all kind of bleed together and so of course the answer is “yes”. Over the years I’d like to think dealing with vague anxious/depressive symptoms would get easier, but it never seems to. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to get harder either. So there’s that.
Anyway, I’ve been working on the next R^4 installments whenever I can scrape some effort together. I think I’ll be more aggressive about posting links to updates here, b/c honestly, why not? Thanks to all the crazy Homestucks who have read and liked and commented and supported so far, you are the best.
Haven’t been here in a long time. Largely because I care about privacy and Oath’s surveillance and censorship regime creeps me the fuck out. I’ve now got my Tumblr browsing cordoned off in a little sandbox away from the main cookie jar, but it’s probably not enough. Working on that. Not anonymity, really, just the right to compartmentalize my fan life away from stupid ad networks.
I miss Homestuck and its fans. I worry that any remnant Homestuck community on Tumblr is vulnerable and about to be washed entirely away, particularly given the story’s prominent status as a “gay singularity”. Heard about George Buzinkai’s passing and became incredibly sad. Still listening to Clark Powell’s music all the time and hoping they’re well. Amazed at how much voice material I put out over the years, and how much less it sucked by the end than it did when I first started out.
Thankful that AO3 has a .org extension, and donating to them like anything to help defend space online for lovely people to be weird in peace. Looking to rally around any remaining community there. At this juncture given the lack of good studio space it’s easier for me to write than to VA, so that’s what I’ll be concentrating on for now. Will occasionally cross-post fiction-writing thoughts and updates here. Any Homestucks still following, I love you all.
