#patreon commentary

More on how I feel personally responsible as I mentioned earlier... Back when the original Homestuck was ongoing, I hung on every word of Andrew Hussie's and even those tangentially connected to the Homestuck project for hints to the Class/Aspect system that I zealously considered the key to understanding the whole story, something Andrew eventually pointed out I (and those like me) had likely gone overboard with in some of the Book Commentary. I was hyperfixated on the system, took the "story that is also a puzzle" deadly seriously, and I'm sure a ton of other people shared my views and crashed right along with me into the ending of Homestuck that ultimately didn't reveal SO many of the answers we had been expecting we'd been owed before the final page. We weren't owed anything by the story; we created expectations Andrew hadn't necessarily intended to nurture. He had a different ending message in mind for the story than us, a message of freedom from all the plot threads I practically worshipped him for keeping so well track of. The fact that I was heartbroken enough to need therapy before coming back to anything Homestuck (EMDR works wonders) shows how much I unhealthily attached myself and my sense of self-worth to what I expected, one-sidedly, out of the story. I was bitter about not getting the answers I wanted, but even more bitter about how I'd thought the author had valued the same things I valued in the story when that didn't turn out to be true, and luckily for everyone else I let that crush me inwardly instead of projecting it outwardly. I'm glad therapy helped me work through that and see the continued works of Homestuck, hopefully, more for what they are than for what I "need" them to be.

I'd like to say I was unrelated to anything detailed in the document, or in Andrew's account of stalkers in the Color Composer post... except I did engage in an instance of something close enough to stalking, once. Decade-plus followers of my blog might remember it, though I'm too embarrassed to link it (and am having trouble finding it besides). I had a Private Message exchange over the MSPA Forums with someone in Andrew's circle at one point, and one of their responses provided what I viewed as some juicy classpect history. So in my hyperfixated excitement, I immediately went to paste screenshots to my tumblr blog and discuss it... without asking if I had any permission to reproduce Private Messages from this person. They messaged me back that they hadn't appreciated what I did, and I quickly apologized and redacted the screenshots from my blog... I recall apologizing pretty profusely, and I also recall them at least appreciating that I'd acted quickly and expressed remorse. But even if I had some degree of forgiveness from them, I don't doubt that I contributed to the atmosphere of being stalked that people in Andrew's circle had to contend with, taken together with all the other people seeking out their every word and hint.

And if **I** made a mistake like that with my intense, emotionally-dependent hyperfixation, I can't imagine how many others I might have inspired to do the same. I can't apologize for that enough.

So please, be reasonable when doing any theory-seeking or classpect-hunting going forward. I'm also newly skeptical of how I've been doing reactions to the Artist and Writer Commentary on Patreon-- while I've made some effort to make sure I don't detail too much of what's sealed behind the paywall to preserve the incentive for folks to pay up to the Homestuck Patreon and see the fun stuff I'm excluding, "making sure I get all the potential theory content" as has been my obsession and the reason I reacted regularly to those posts isn't like... SO goddamn important that I have to be spoiling ANY paid content and potentially depriving Homestuck of funding by reproducing parts of it, y'know? Why does my "need" for early answers override their need to make a living? I've already made the one for this month, but thinking seriously about it now, going forward I may significantly reduce the way I reproduce Patreon content in my Commentary reactions, and perhaps keep things to paraphrasing and actionable bulletpoints in a significantly reduced form. Maybe I'll ask advice from someone anywhere close to the team's circle to see if I've been doing my strictly-partial Commentary reproduction-reactions kosher enough, and if it's fine maybe I'll keep putting in the same amount of elbow grease, but I really don't want to undermine the Homestuck teams in my obsessive search for answers on my silly overanalysis liveblog.

Sorry if this post was a bit of a downer, but as soon as this all started to occur to me last night I realized I had to get some of it off my chest, even if it'd mean harassment going forward. Fundamentally, the biggest reasons I avoided posting about fandom drama were to avoid tainting what I was too emotionally invested in AND even moreso to avoid getting caught in the shotgun-blasts of those who had taken one side or another because I thought I lacked the emotional bandwidth. Maybe I still do, given I'm still unwilling to engage. I'm afraid to be identifiable as a member of a marginalized community, but I can't avoid that forever. Hell, my fears have been reinforced because a dear friend of mine was recently convicted for protesting. I'm a coward who has always lacked the energy and determination to put myself at risk to stand up for what's right, and... I'm probably going to remain that sort of coward for the rest of my life, honestly. But I'm not going to be able to keep out of sight forever if I want to get out there and be myself, and that means that the VERY least I can do is briefly signal boost those who have been living in a position I've always been personally terrified to occupy.

I noticed a homoerotic jab or two during the exile exchange between Jake and Karkat, but for some reason my mind filed it under "all in good fun" or just "typical for Jake" who, as fitting for a Hope player, has always managed to make things sound suggestive unintentionally. Looked at holistically, though, there's a broader pattern I completely missed until it was pointed out for me:

Jake and Karkat constantly at each other's throats, jamming the same keyboard at the Exile Terminal just like Karkat and Terezi used to.

Them nominally sharing interests in the same thing in their argument, such as the alien romance system, and Jake throwing in comments like "For a boy so lovely" referring to Karkat in the same breath he alludes to pussyfooting.

Yaoi fannymph Del'fi using a hex to literally bind them together.

Previously in the Jadetok sequence, Jake being personally responsible for Karkat getting seriously injured TWICE, crying and laying a hand on his thigh while Dave stares accusingly at him.

Also back in the Jadetok, engaging in scantily clad (on Jake's part) wrestling while Jade comments on them being "such good friends".

(Thanks to the friend who pointed it out isolating the screenshots for me.) So, what are we looking at here?

If I had to guess, the writers are flirting with the pretty suitable idea of Jake <3< Karkat. Dave previously didn't make a polyamorous relationship work with Jade and Karkat in another universe, but that's not something that completely rules out Karkat having leanings in his other quadrants, or Dave being potentially more open to the idea if discussed properly now that he and Karkat are so much more emotionally open with each other compared to the Candy Epilogues. To be clear, I don't believe that infidelity is going on, but this leaning of Karkat's could reasonably cause Dave some discomfort that may be somewhat entertaining to have resolved, whether or not this black shiptease between Jake and Karkat persists. It's easy to imagine Karkat busting out a chart to propose Dave the idea.

(For a Romspec proponent sometimes I can be really dense to romantic overtones that don't fit my preconceived notions, I'm really grateful someone pointed all this out to me.)

On another topic, that friend also brought up that it's been commonly thought in the fandom that the three Satyrs don't just echo parts of Dirk's personality, but possibly his personality fused with that of each of the three friends he grew up holding dear. Swiss being something of a combination of Jane and Dirk, what with his ambition and responsibility and anxious head-to-laptop smacking; The Mountain resembling Jake and Dirk's martial overlap and showmanship, sentimentality; TC the Seer of Void representing a Roxy/Dirk mix. I honestly see merit in all of it, especially TC so far who has quite an understandable Roxy vibe given their incredibly likely Aspect overlap.

They also showed me the similar argument that Rose and her three Nymphs represent John (Ly'lac, as has been said she's this session's stand-in for in the Commentary), Jade (CC?) and Dave (AA?), but I honestly don't see it, no matter which way you flip CC and AA around. Drawing comics/doodles is the only superficial similarity CC shares with Jade or Dave IMO, and AA behaves more like a Rose/Kanaya fusion than any of the other Beta Kids.

I also completely forgot sometime in the past year that CT is likely the morphotype with wings. Absolutely slipped my mind somehow.

One more thing, I'm not sure I caught it at the time, but even though TC seems to be cooperating directly with Vriska and the Candy Kids to fulfill his "he's got to have his inside info from someone" quota the data suggested, I'd missed that there was other direct evidence connecting TC to Dirk:

Why has TC had a "front-row seat" to (presumably) Dirk's (and not some stand-in's) life for years? (We know he's the EXEMPLAR, I'm not sure if he's been specifically called the Founder though it's like a 90+% certainty.) Exactly how close is TC to Dirk Strider? Is it a one-way affair where he lives close to where he's doing... whatever he does? Have they spoken? I know Strider's gotten hands-on with his race throughout history, likely far more often than Lalonde has, but exactly how much immortal time has Dirk spent in real time with Satyrkind on and off to be relevant for "laps" at a time? Could this front row seat have been some sort of metaphor, maybe TC's giant compound is a place for time spent at some sort of study facility dedicated to Dirk's accomplishments despite that residence not sharing a Dirk-like visage/theme?

I'm not sure. Could TC be playing both sides? A Seer could plausibly strike that balance. Vriska and Dirk are doubtless at bitter odds in my opinion due to Vriska bringing in the pollution of the Candy Kids, but it's not out of the question that they could have some sort of hands-off truce to keep either side from interfering directly in the Session, and TC could have contact with both of them because of it somehow. It's puzzling, and I don't think it'll be fully resolved until we actually meet TC formally, if I had to guess.

OKAY THAT ALL TOOK MUCH LONGER THAN I THOUGHT. Let's get to the Artist Commentary:

Wait hold on, when we got a glimpse of those mountains, did I miss The Mountain's home inside a mountain cave? Lemme check...

Nope not quite, just the Frog Temple expected of a Space Player's residence. No clear sign there or in the pages before it exactly where he lives amidst it all. He DOES likely have wings however, so, high up is a perfectly valid option. Oh DUH, I just realized the giant green block that says "CT's House" is blocking out CT's house from our view since it'd be a spoiler, duh. So, probably not Cave House.

The artists go over the color experimentation and design of CT's home area, show off the first glimpse of The Mountain in-person and how they thought it "would be funny if it wasn't the typical MSPA style". (If you subscribe to the Patreon you can see a cleared-up, less blurry version.)

Then back to Del'fi roleplaying as a Satyr complete with shapeshifted ears...

And, their room!

Floral: I made the first floor the room around the time where we did the Derse update, so we’ve been holding onto it. Overall, I wanted to surround Del’fi in creature comforts scavenged from the remnants outside. Chumi: Lots of things going on here. The huge skull in the back is an edited sperm whale skull! The sweater on the ground is an edited Jiraiya sweater. We got some curious satyr skeletons, who knew they had different-colored bones?

You get to see close-ups of a ton of the posters they mocked up and Satyr-ified of animes, of the drawings Del'fi has on hand, including that gorgeous gift The Mountain rendered for them:

Floral: Little factoid, I actually drew this with actual charcoal pencils. When considering CT’s art, it just felt wrong to have him use a tablet. 

Moving up, lots of potion bottles in their potion room. They note that a couple are uncorked and stuff's floating out of them.

Oh, gosh, I never realized til they pointed it out that the third / top-level room is actually "bubbled" to remain dry and not damage some of the Satyr merch!

They go into how much effort they collectively put in to give us such a broad Yaoi collection/impression all at once.

They even give a list of all the pairings and properties they included, which could conceivably give some theory foundations, however it feels wrong to copy that out from the Patreon post so I'll leave that to subscribers to their Patreon to enjoy. I will point out just one they left special notes on:

ZADR (MILES note: this one was important to me.  We all immediately agreed that this was about as necessary a time capsule taste indicator for this specifically evoked era as it was possible to be.)

Which is... *looks it up* Zim and Dib romance????!? Ohhh, okay I get it. Del'fi ABSOLUTELY talks in chat like someone from that era.

There is a HUGE collection of the individual posters and figurines here they edited into Satyrs and/or compromisingly BL positions.

Skipping forward:

Floral: Ouran was recommended pretty early in conversation about Del’fi’s taste. And while that in-universe Ouran is a non-historically accurate AU, it was fun satyr-fying everyone. Andi: I’d recommend watching Princess Tutu. It’s pretty good. Pretty apt, I daresay.

I gather from the descriptions, and I've heard since they showed up in the upd8, that both of these are pretty important for understanding Del'fi.

There's her desktop background:

Andi: Are you a true fujo if you didn’t play DMMD at least once? 

Oh, and they actually give a list of what the puns are on each of the Application names! And while I won't post the whole list (you can subscribe for that), Trench2Peak IS supposed to evoke Second Life as it happens.

They get to the gift art Del'fi made for Ly'lac:

Haven: What’s fun to note with this image is the similarity it bears to Vriska taking the omega kids away. With the flames being changed to waves, and Ly’lac in the place that Vrissy would have been in previously.

And finally the design of the Happi Coats the staff wore at NYCStuck, and a huge thank-you from them to everyone who did and didn't attend. <3

On to the Writer Commentary of the month!

They emphasize how anticipated the CT and CC conversation was: "this conversation (and Del’fi’s general circumstance) has been one of our prominent through lines within Act 2". It's definitely one of the biggest connections and crossover-points between the Satyrs and Nymphs, that's for certain, even though TC and Ly'lac have a quieter friendship going on.

The writers go into detail about the nature of this dynamic they set up and what they enjoy about it.

There’s even a bit in this intro section where the two of them sort of overtly spell out a lot of their dynamic.

I know it's still theory, but after all the hashing-out I did on the forums I'm personally really inclined to think this is a Prince (of Space) and Bard (of Blood) dynamic here, the destroyer and the fire-fueler. I'm planning sometime to make a full post with a nice cover image setting my guesses down on all the aspects and classes of our 10 players like I did in that forum thread, so people have a nice date-marked image to send around Tumblr and judge what I was wrong about later. :D

I won't be photoshopping that together just today though, so moving on with this Commentary... Ooh, Miles mentions that part of the purpose of the photo CT shared was that this is a NEW MASK he's wearing, that makes so much sense!

MILES: [...] Del’fi spends a lot of this early half of the conversation encouraging CT to beat up and enslave the satyrs around him, urging him to be more confident and assertive, were such a thing even possible.

(COUGH COUGH inviting destruction COUGH bard insinuations COUGH)

FLORAL: Raise your hand if you picked up on this being a poop joke. I was trying to be conspicuous. MILES: Constipicuous.

I did not, in fact, catch the poop joke. That is a very good poop joke.

More on the way the conversation unfolds, skipping to when CT...

FLORAL: [...] But here we are, with another “puzzle piece” regarding this web of feelings and relationships between these kids. That while Swiss is begging to be consoled by CT, Dagger is pushing to support him through his embarrassment. 

Yeah, CT served as emotional support for Swiss to vent at, but that took a psychological toll on CT that he had to vent to CC about. I suppose from what we learned last upd8 about Satyrical ⍺/β/⍵ (or A/O/B), would that be more of a Beta or Omega role CC is serving, or perhaps flipping between them both throughout this conversation? Hmm... especially with CC urging CT to dominate, and presumably be more Alpha-like even though it's not domination-exclusive...

Okay, we're approaching an important bit. They talk about how the playing around turns into the serious emotional discussion about what Dagger really is, CT giving into doubt from the accusations Swiss made...

MILES: [...] and demands an answer, which leads to one of the more touching moments in any of the conversations we’ve had between the Delta kids thus far, even if it’s also one of the hardest to swallow:" FLORAL: This whole part is the foundation of this update, this escalation. This is such a fun log, but the whole time you can see CT avoiding thinking about Swiss’ words. [...] MILES:  There’s a lot of really tough emotions swirling around in this one.  A lot of the way we write CT and Del’fi is predicated on the feelings of really, really connecting with a person online in the sort of intense, almost dangerous way that can happen when you make an online friend and feel like you’re finding a real escape from your current circumstances in your relationship with them.  For reasons we only touch lightly on now with CT, and get more into with Del’fi in the coming pages, both of these kids are pretty anxious and dissatisfied with certain aspects of their IRL lives.  That feeling of getting to be “real” with someone online in the way that you can’t be in person is probably familiar to a lot of readers who discovered the magic of having an Online Life and Online Friends compared to the social constraints of your whatever your IRL circumstances/persona are; it’s a beautiful thing to have this space to play in.  Of course, it also introduces the issue of having to confront within yourself the reality of these two existences, and as we grow and flex them both we begin to sort through those two selves and try to triangulate the truth of who it is we really are from it.  Ideally, you reconcile and integrate them, and become authentically Yourself reflected in both realms, but it’s still hard, and I think at least for some people, it involves a lot of... I almost want to say dismantling of lies?  Or at least, the dismantling of Restraints, the lies of omission that we tend to wield unconsciously as kids in this space when first given the privilege of partitioning out which parts of ourselves we want to be known by in online vs irl space.  There’s a real need to be sure that you’re becoming Yourself online, and not a character, and it’s scarily easy to become a character before you even realize it’s happening.

I can absolutely relate to that in a few ways, and know plenty of people who would relate to it even more. It's pretty interesting that there's some serious dissatisfaction in THE MOUNTAIN'S life, too... it'll be fascinating to get into that.

Also, I don't want to miss that they capitalized Restraints -- a curiously Blood-like way to phrase this sort of phenomenon. Where Breath is being whatever you can imagine yourself to be online, with its associations with whimsy and freedom, and Blood is the ways we hold ourselves back or the constraints our acts put on us, though also ways we're keeping ourselves from fully being who we want to be, the shackles of reality and even those we put on ourselves...

Even classpecting aside, this is really good discussion for understanding these characters and, for some of us, understanding ourselves and how we've experienced living online through these characters as mirrors.

Continuing to quote again:

MILES: Anyway, that was kind of a weird rant, but the point I’m getting at here is that a lot of the core of this conversation between these two friends, ESPECIALLY from Del’fi’s POV, is driven by a lot of these feelings.  Del’fi getting to be authentically himself with CT emotionally, and also to play this character as a satyr, is this really precious experience for him, but at the same time, there’s so much about the Premise of Dagger that isn’t authentic at all, or is at the very least predicated on a pretty large lie of omission.  There’s this dear and REAL aspect of who he gets to be with CT that is wrapped up in the complicated anonymized construction of his aforementioned Character, which we get into a lot in the coming pages/next update, so I won’t go into it much more here, but behind all that, from both ends, is the yearning for something Real.  CT, for reasons that will become more apparent later, also blazes desperately for the Real, and the anxiety CT and Del’fi both suffer at the possibility of trouble in paradise hangs kind of sadly over the end of this conversation.  More on this later.

I do catch that Miles is using he/him for Del'fi! That's important to note. And yeah, it was important later on in the update to note Del'fi thinks Dagger is a dumb, early name and wishes to change it but can't because Del'fi's locked in this pantomime with CT, which they'll probably go over.

MILES: Ultimately, the two settle on a truce: CT will get the full truth eventually, Del’fi has more time to just Be Dagger without having to step fully out into the light for now.  CT is satisfied with this, and Del’fi is relieved, but the tension is only really being kicked down the line.  It’s hard, being a kid online and growing up.

:C

The fact that it's hard being a kid online and growing up is a real Homestuck staple theme, and I'm really glad we've been given such a great opportunity to return to that theme and tackle it in so many new ways.

Floral also uses he/him for CC now that the cat's more or less entirely out of the bag dancing in front of everyone, and:

We also wanted to make a point that, despite CT’s extreme show of violence and comforting himself with any betrayal brought to justice with death, CC’s major concern with meeting up is the death of The Mountain.

Yeah, Del'fi's confidence that The Mountain would absolutely be the one to die at Del'fi's hand was super well done to include, both parties assuming they'd absolutely destroy the other if the End ever came and Del'fi's assumption that it'd be the only option.

We have the mock introduction Del'fi gives for Dagger Tartarus, and:

MILES: [...] The degree to which Dagger Tartarus IS Del’fi, vs a character that he’s uncomfortable with and even has a little contempt for, is played with a lot in this update, but I always liked this bit for its very clear parallels to Del’fi’s actual life. [...]

Yeah, I could kind of read that in to how Del'fi's been in a large sense a similar sort of prisoner at the bottom of the sea like this.

There’s also a clumsy chuuni masculinity to it that I feel really dearly about.  I hope this doesn’t feel condescending to say, but the degree of almost satyrical (Ha ha.) manliness in here being a sort of “gender chicken” attempt at brushing up safely against masculinity in the context of playing out a caricature of it feels... I don’t know.  Authentic to the experience of being a kid and trying to figure stuff like this out.

Extremely, extremely Egg. (Personally, I'm going to continue to use They/Them a bit longer for current Del'fi, despite their egghood being obvious, in part so I can crack open the He/Him pronouns when Del'fi actually goes for them like tearing open a morphday present. Or maybe I'll change my mind and give in to he/him soon regardless, who knows.)

FLORAL: I think it says a lot about how gender works on Deltritus considering Dagger’s circumstances are completely flipped, in the sense of going from a prisoner to a warden. The position of someone fighting to escape and prevail versus being the person to maintain the status quo.

And some confirmation that Del'fi's not the prisoner, but rather the warden-- and the prison is not only that of isolation, but that of the responsibility (BLOOD) Del'fi bears in their cage of a deepsea world.

Finally moving further into Del'fi's intro:

MILES: [...] I do love the detail in here of 2000’s era leetspeaky livejournal cuteness being a classical dialect.  If there’s one thing artists are going to do it’s succumb to the siren song of nostalgia and glaze their childhood just a little bit.  It’s our right. HAVEN: I love “teh dignified dialects of yore” Ancient nymph society of leetspeaking nobles, long since lost to time.

Yep, as soon as they placed the date with Dib/Zim shipping it made perfect sense.

I'll skip past some of the continued commentary on how much fun Del'fi has in their room... consider chipping some in to the Homestuck Patreon to get the fun alongside the facts, and extra facts I may have missed!

FLORAL: [...] I just think the use of necromancy so a child can have a dance party is so cute.

OH OF COURSE, it's unclear how literal Floral is being but if so, I completely missed that the reason the skeletons were staying curiously well together and dancing was that Del'fi was using NECROMANCY. That could have been made a bit more clear!

(They also mention how Del'fi dismisses the Beta of the fictional relationship between room-skeletons and it's likely indicative of their shipping tastes.)

CT's charcoal drawing by Floral is "Hokuto no Ken/Baki-esque"

Ah, we've gotten to Del'fi being profoundly unsatisfied with the name Dagger, and:

FLORAL:  It was funny watching people speculate that we wrote this part after the previous update dropped because of the all the heated discussion but this has been here for months and months. We tricked you. Bwahahaha.

--confirmation that they'd always intended Dagger to be a discarded name. Whatever name Del'fi settles on, it'll be something he likely finds out as he finally finds himself and realizes the true options for who he can be outside of mere fantasies.

The writers point out that the Cauldron is obviously full of dense goop because it's not mixing with the water or rising...

We have Karkat coming in to join Jake at the terminal, and then the Yaoi room. "[MILES:] Karkat is predictably blown away."

There's the Uni-Nymph rant:

MILES: Well what’s this…! More mentions of the Uni-Nymph, and also more references to the way that nymph authors occasionally publish work amongst satyrs under pseudonyms/assumed identities. Sound familiar?

Yep, even more of the Gender Divide and how online publication bridges the gap. Floral goes on to mention that Ouran was foundational for them, and "Using this media to pick apart this kids psychology is such a great device." which I super agree with, and feels right at home with Homestuck even as it goes a fair bit further than even Homestuck Original did IMO.

A bit more Karkat/Jake banter... more fun discussion... then the reveal that Del'fi is The Beyond Anon who makes Beyond Canon inside Beyond Canon.

MILES: Another interesting reveal that Del’fi has been hiding the fact that he’s the author of Ly’lac’s favorite webcomic from her.  There’s so much that Del’fi keeps at arm’s length...!

And the call for user input...!

MILES: And here we ended with another ever-so-slightly passive aggressive call for reader input through the FRAF forums. This became even more special as it was also incorporated into the festivities we recently held at NYCstuck, so in addition to all the crazy submissions we got through the forums we also got a bunch of incredible submissions in person that I actually have in a physical notebook with me right now at my very own house!

That's really cool and engaging, I love that!

MILES: One of the things I hope I’m not too out of line when I talk about it here is that unfortunately, a LOT of the suggestions we got on FRAF were pretty fundamentally misunderstanding what kind of submissions we (and, in-character, Del’fi) were asking for, or they just weren’t playing as much in the space as we were hoping they would. Like, Del’fi is here asking fans for suggestions regarding HIS webcomic, Beyond Canon, which is not the same thing as Homestuck: Beyond Canon, but the vast majority of the FRAF submissions were suggestions for the plot of HS:BC itself, regarding people and details in Del’fi’s actual life (he’s anonymous!), not really adhering to the kayfabe of Being Beyond Canon Readers, asking for yuri (look at Del’fi’s room. Come On Now.), or some combination thereof. Maybe this is on us as writers for not making it clearer!

OH MY GOSH I THOUGHT THIS SAME THING SO HARD. That's part of why I couldn't resist sending in my own submission (possibly too specific of one!). Heck, considering that, maybe I have more of a chance than I thought of getting one of those suggestions included...

MILES: On the plus side... we did get some good ones, and a whole bunch more that were admittedly more on-task from the amazing audience at NYCstuck during our panel.  But I’ll talk more about that in the commentary when those suggestions actually show up!

That's it for the Artist/Writer Commentary that I thought was worth highlighting for speculation reasons (and/or a bit of fun) without spoiling the whole Patreon experience. I do hope I'm not quoting too much of these, and I'll gladly cut it down to paraphrasing or bullet-point revelations or something if there's any broad sentiment that I'm possibly quoting/including enough to undermine, like, the incentive to pay to read and experience and internalize some of this in-person.

Artist commentary takeaways:

Oh, they wanted to do Second Life for Trench2Peak screenshots but instead worked with modders to heavily mod Sims 4 for screenshots. Hilarious. There's lots more raw screenshots in the Patreon post.

The BINDING CURSE was originally art-conceived as binding Karkat's wrists to Jake, putting their hands together rather than their whole bodies. It just turned out easier to reuse the terminal panel and their sprites. Still on-theme Blood of course IMO.

The creative quirky coding style for Del'fi's use was inspired by LOLCODE and they put a lot of thought into making the subject of the code relevant, the Ion Cannon resemble famous DDOS tools of yore, etc.

The hand-around-the-head mantle for the Great Combiner was wanted early on. (Great design choice!) Merged with the idea Haven had for "an undersea nymph city that was on/inside a massive sleeping nymph, for a child who lived literally inside their caretaker."

The night sky theming all around Del'fi's home architecture, the stars and moons et cetera, is to environmentally reinforce the theme of "(HAVEN:) Del’fi waiting for a morning that will never come. Which paired with the child's blanket/crib mobile to allude to feelings of arrested development."

The intentionally-styled "drool" line on their sleeping caretaker is actually a gap cut in their lips. Confirmed the body is (they think) "(HAVEN:) largely vestigial [...] a body-shaped dilapidated pulpit for the Lightstone".

Next to a sketch of the baby Great Combiner they refer to her as "baby GC", which I didn't realize fit the kid shorthandle pattern, further amplifying the chances this is a Meteor-sent Nymph ancestor.

Writer Commentary takeaways:

Trench2Peak intentionally further advances the theme w/ Del'fi of "(MILES:) the aforementioned need to use the internet/online space as a way to learn more about things that you might not really be able to encounter or act out in your own personal life." Mentioning the Outernet and Uppernet aren't flush with each other but rather have a "vaguely interconnected frontier-like nature of the interstitial zone that bridges the two separate satyr and nymph internets [which] leads to spaces like this becoming small oases of mutual understanding between two cultures that are otherwise almost entirely cut off from each other". They note that the drive in young people to seek these spaces out, IRL, is properly reflected here and in Del'fi and means a lot to the creators. Gosh, I love that the Beyond Canon writers care so much about these themes that are so close to the original Homestuck's, the ways we grew up and connected to each other as kids online, the motivations and struggles behind and inherent to those ways. (Y'all should really read these Writer Commentaries, they're consistently great.)

Satyr Romance and Values. They wanted to avert some Omegaverse traits like making roles biologically determined, "experience-based" rather than another layer of gender/sex/race which is already quite a busy space in this Deltritan story. A "mandate determined from birth" wasn't as interesting for them. (I'm also guessing this is part of why Betas aren't excluded from the mpreg of the relationships, etc.)

They go back to Swiss's shipping chart and mention how unlikely it is that Swiss actually ends up being an "obvious alpha", which all of us could clearly see anyway. They mention it's "(FLORAL:) a welcome difference from quadrants because it’s less focused on unconscious emotions", and it "feels very true to the new age of yaoi we are in that is very focused on playing with expectation/dynamics [...] playing with the idea of dominance and desire outside of simply dom top and sub bottom." They have a lot more to say on this and how the writers were educating each other on tropes in the (rapidly evolving) traditional omegaverse space, while also outlining how their A/O/B formula creates an inherently different sort of space with its own nuances that, unless I wanted to quote it all, you're probably better off reading from them. (Either by subscribing or reading in two months when it unlocks!)

Note about Dirk they make: "A lot of how satyr society is set up is a fairly telling portrait of a busy, ambitious desire for things to Work Out, Make Sense, and Feel Empowering. There’s a very utilitarian and goal-oriented fixation [...] personal ambition [...] productivity-minded-positivity[...] seems like the kind of thing a certain someone would really be into."

There are some backstories for the Beyond Canon Inside Beyond Canon cast that Del'fi drew about. Lots of funny stuff here, but to stick to the potentially relevant stuff... Calliope's "favorite food is twin", Alt!Calliope/AL is "Lunch that packs a punch", and Roxy is Rose's "greatest rival". Jade is not even mentioned, even though Kanaya IS even though she isn't shown yet.

Davebot MIGHT have just needed more balls and chains because he's stronger, because Haven mentions: "[T]he only real design note I had going in was they [Aradia and Davebot] needed to both be Alkyrins. [...] But each shackled metal ball added to Davebot made me laugh harder and harder. I had to stop myself from adding a 5th." This doesn't rule out that they might have had some sort of Jade is the balls-and-chains symbology going on here, or at least the SINGLE ball-and-chain for Dave initially, but it does make the extended metaphor of Davebot having "more baggage" in Jade-or-family form represented by the multiplicity of chains potentially less likely.

The biggest portion of the Writer Commentary is about the TC / Del'fi conversation, which they have SO MUCH to say about. I'm only going to touch on a few of the things they say.

The invasiveness of what TC is doing here is of course highlighted, as is his request and how he's trying to seemingly "speedrun" what he may see as a "natural friend[ship]" between himself and Del'fi. And they've intentionally left it ambiguous whether or not he even picked up on the fact that his overture didn't work all that well. (My own thoughts, TC identifying with the one of them who's secluded in THE ABYSS and darkness, not to mention reclusive hacker etc, is also very Seer of Void.)

Mirrored themes in TC and Del'fi of a "real dissatisfaction with their circumstances that’s reflected in very different ways".

Del'fi telling TC "dont ever tell me what to do" in harsh terms met with TC's "that's the fuckin spirit dude!" as: "(MILES:) genuine delight of not only seeing Del’fi stand up to meet what he sees as circumstances trapping them both, but Seeing Del’fi, period." FLORAL: "It’s almost as if to TC being seen could only be liberating." (I think this adds further points to my Seer of Void theory, or at least him being any sort of Seer, but especially one who understands and loves to understand who people are IN SECRET under their layers and masks.)

The conversation unsurprisingly also reflects the Satyr/Nymph cultural mindset difference of striving vs fatalism.

Mentions TC's invasion is, as much as he seems to appreciate 'seeing' Del'fi, "(MILES:) with very little thought for perspectives outside his own."

That despite admiring Satyr culture, the writers note that readers have noticed that Del'fi still has enough internalized skepticism about interspecies cooperation to reflexively reject the idea of ACTUALLY coming together as TC proposes, that (FLORAL:) "despite admiring parts of satyr masculinity, Del’fi’s feelings aren’t so simple as we may assume".

They go into The Great Combiner as Caretaker for Del'fi, noting their relationship is much like "(HAVEN:) Knuckles' relationship with The Master Emerald." Also talks of the Combiner as having "a childhood bereft of attachment" leaving them to grow up so disturbed, which again, explicit Blood language being used.

The apathetic generation that saw The Combiner's childhood seems to have been recovered from somewhat: "(HAVEN:) AA’s earlier comment about Nymph Culture makes it seem like after this very scary era [that almost led to the entire planet's destruction(?)] they tried to make a big turn around, and that’s the culture she’s been proudly raised in." Even though they know the prophecy still has to come true sooner or later, which colors much of their society still.

They also cover the danger of knowing in advance that only a drop of their race's ocean will make it off-world, because if all Nymphs know that, then it makes sense that many would conspire to BE one of those Nymphs, perhaps by joining into The Great Combiner or such.

They keep referring to the Great Combiner as "GC"!

HAVEN: "A few things here sound familiar. And the language used seems quite specific. Let’s keep this in the back of our minds, chums." Yeah we have to keep the language in mind to be sure of exactly the person being referenced here, in case it's an Ancestor Nymph and not Rosebot, because even though it sounds a whole lot like Rosebot we have to cross-reference it with other examples that'll use the same language to be sure. And it'll be an interesting detail if it were to turn out that ROSE were indeed "excommunicated" from her own race, willingly or otherwise.

Okay, so reading back I... certainly used a lot of quotes, though still only a bare fraction of the full articles... and I may not have typed substantially LESS than I did in like, the supposedly-larger Artist/Writer Commentary posts I used to make. But I liked this format, and that just shows you're not losing much! Again, if you love Beyond Canon like I do, consider supporting the Homestuck Patreon and reading these for yourself! :D Talk to you next upd8!

Do I need a tag for The Great Combiner? I'll add one just in case.

Starting with the Artist Commentary, a huge long one about Jadetok.

They're starting off about everyone's outfits. Kanaya was wearing a mourning outfit earlier in the trip, but they wanted to change that as the Meat Ship trip progressed to indicate that instead of just hurting, she's also preparing for the confrontation and feeling more "righteous determination".

They had LOTS of different dress concepts that are very entertaining to see if you want to unlock the Artist Commentary for yourself, but I'll include the "she came here to slay right?" design they settled on:

Dave's mellow style feels natural to me, doesn't deserve as much remarking on, though you can see the designs in the post. For Jake and Jane they went a lot more "(FLORAL:) 70's retro futurism [...] but with a sexy, genderfluid twist. Jake is the jilted heroine afterall." Jake's outfit during that sequence is definitely adventurey and classic-sci-fi and gender-non-conforming and fitting IMO, it's silly to me but at least fun to see him in and something he totally WOULD try out wearing.

Roxy had a TON of options floated, and I love a ton of them. "(ANDI:) The space agey stuff was something I wanted to lean in more for Roxy. I dunno, it feels fitting for the Schooner, they’re all kinda larping a little yknow?" They wanted to make sure he was dressing in a way that "(KIM:) clearly shows he's comfortable with himself.It was a big note from the writers that they wanted to have Roxy’s new look reflect that he's happy to be who he is without having to hide." They wanted "boldness, stylish but easy to wear, but also the perfect fit when Roxy would be ready to confront Dirk." He does look pretty stunning as a result:

(Again, highly recommend checking out all the different variations that Roxy could totally still rock anytime imaginable, canon or fanon. Also you get to see how hard they debated whether or not to include the thong straps.)

There's so much good art here, folks.

Anyway, then there's the whole paneling out of the Jane/Jasprosesprite^2 sultry dream sequence in Midnight city. Everyone cheers, us included. Jane waking up blushing with her little glassesless dot-eyes.

Kim: Oh me, oh my! The face fanning… she’s so old lady core. [...] Kim: What’s interesting about this particular Jane is that we wanted to show how she’s distinctly different from herself in the Candy timeline. One of the notable differences being her body type! The way she has carried herself between the different paths she has taken in life clearly reflects in how she presents herself – one world she’s uptight with having control and politics versus one where she hasn’t fallen too deep into that rabbit hole and is surrounded by her friends. Of course, there’s still core things about her that still makes her Jane, but how will she evolve from here…? How will her environment affect her? Hmm!

Yep, her letting herself gain weight in the Meat timeline I always felt and mentioned reflected a healthier attitude towards her Life aspect. (Doom is associated with control, rules, inhibitions and self-restraint, etc, when contrasted with Life.)

They don't go into it at all here, but just me, I've been thinking... it feels unlikely having not happened for so long, but with Jane's sexuality being broadened by dreams of Jasprose, and Roxy having transitioned to a guy, is Jane ever going to consider seeing if Roxy might work as something other than a friend...? They've been rock solidly non-romantic forever so it seems exceedingly unlikely, but... just a distant possibility I guess.

They show us the full-size version of that silly underview profile icon Jade has on Jadetok:

Floral: I pitched Jadetok A While Back, like before we had finished [S] 8r8k even (?), and it came up when Haven mentioned wanting to get Jane and Jake back on the ship. It just felt like the most succinct way of handling what would be a very low stakes “retcon” but more importantly showing the change on the ship since Jade has been freed from Al’s control.  It was also a fun and saucy little wink to one of the most controversial parts of original Homestuck, which was always a gamble to make but one worth making. Make readers consider the utility of this spectacle within the story especially as we move forward. Jadetok is different from Vriskagram though because I don’t think it actively contradicts or rewrites what has happened in the story, but shifts focus away from these private one-on-one moments prevalent in hs^2 to big fun group hang outs. 

I did like that it made the entire Meat trip feel much much MUCH less lonely, and much much MUCH more communal.

I also suggested starting this sequence with Jane to show that Catnapped hasn’t been erased from relevancy. A lot of people left the last meat update with Vriska escaping Candy scared things from the EPILOGUES had been retconned away but nothing was touched from that. Since the Vrisual Novel, we’ve been preparing people for Jasprose having a larger plan in the works.  As implied in the revised newspaper clippings, in the end Jane and Jake woke up from their excursion the day before their own disappearance with a need to leave with their friends instead of being left behind. This is the only real contradiction from what’s been previously laid.

On to the actual panels of it...

Apparently the image in the portrait back-right is of Tom Selleck, and is just the sort of thing that Jake English would have around his ship.

First day of freedom:

Haven: With this one I was talking to Floral about how it's kind of funny that she’s very clearly overwatering the little sapling. She’s very excited to be out and about and a little overeager for growth and change.

Oh, here's an important bit... the sequence with Jade and Roxy "cooking up a little surprise! ;)" scienceways with colorful-liquid-filled beakers:

Haven: This visual was a reference to the constant marg towers from the 28 year old in chicago video [that they based Jadetok and its opening on]. I wonder what the surprise is? And for whom?

This means that a future cut to the Meat Ship can have their collaborative science (or drinkmaking?) effort pay off somehow in the future instead of just being a one-off nod to him and her being science pals! Yay!!!

Floral: This is one I penciled and finished Jade and Jane for and then had Chumi help out in clutch. “Gotta have my janey” still fucking kills me. But this panel was also supposed to show the stark contrast in opinions to Jane’s sudden shift away from her grossly anti-troll politics! She’s nice again! Isn’t that nice! Nobody would consider that to be a big crock of shit right? Chumi: Ahaha… Oopsie! [eto bleh . jpg]

Jade and Roxy are apparently much more accepting of Jane's sudden shift away from anti-troll politics than Kanaya and Karkat are (at first minimum), and maybe Dave too, hard to tell from his lack of expression but he's in the back standing in solidarity with them.

Then the panel of Roxy freaking out at Karkat and Dave releasing their romantic tension in the laundry room again...

Then the catwalk:

I had no point of reference to know that Jade was making a "kpop finger heart" here until it was pointed out here and I looked it up.

I didn't catch here until they pointed it out that the flowers are shaped like a dog.

Lots of ref details they give on the hyper-detailed injured Karkat.

Okay they talk a whole lot about that, I can't blame them. Cmon, I need to control myself, skip to something actually plot relevant and not just something irrelevant I missed...

Little Prince sleepover, Jade's """blowoff""" gesture (can't believe I have to worry about Tumblr autocensoring me nowadays, bluh)...

Chumi: A rare pair! It’s nice to see Jane and Kanaya in relative vicinity of each other after what went down in Candy. Note the subtle 108… The colors… Hmmm…

I can see Terezi and Vriska's colors, but why Sollux's? That yellow doesn't match any of the Candy Kids either. Is Sollux still relevant in some way I haven't recognized yet?

Moving on... Dave has belly hair, Karkat injured again, Jade rocks out:

Chumi: My magnum opus…. My favorite panel…. I was so happy to be able to make this panel real. I have nothin’ else to say. MY GIRL IS HAPPY AND ROCKING IT OUT… Life is worth living after all…! Also Dave is there, hiding behind the curtain because this ain’t about him.

Chumi: AND ANOTHER ONE! Dave and Jade’s relationship was one of my favorites in Homestuck proper, and I feel like they’ve been put through the wringer recently HAHA. It’s just nice for them to have an awkward, but nice moment together after everything that’s happened. They haven’t forgotten that they’re the best of friends :’) 

Probably, but at the same time I still think there are some open things about Jade's attitude, some of the reasons behind why she was a bit pushy even in the Meat timeline (and more importantly leading up to it in the time that was shared) that she ought to express for this to be a finished issue, but that's up to opinion I guess, and it's more on Jade's end of things than anything Dave really needs to say about it or add to it. Maybe she'll talk about it with someone else.

Moving on again, they talk about the Lucky Star rotoscope animation a fair bit...

Kim: The dance really was the perfect cherry on the top for this flash nailing the concerningly over saccharine feeling that flash was increasingly building up to. The music working perfectly in tandem with what we needed as we get further and further into Jadetok, it gets increasingly faster and chaotic. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch the behind the scenes on the music made for this flash made by MEMODEMO! Even if Jadetok had some ominous undertones to it, it was so sweet getting to see everyone have a nice time hanging out together though. Especially for some character combinations we haven’t really gotten to see interact with each other that much! I hope Jadetok was an entertaining and intriguing experience for everyone as we build into the next step of our story… See you in the next commentary!

The way they say "over saccharine" in combination with "ominous undertones" is a good way of hinting that there are still serious issues with the Meat ship group that need to be addressed as they prepare to enter into this conflict, and that all this sweetness was combined with hints of a bit of sour we need to endure before it's all finished. We got to see all the fun they're having together, the communal bonding, to have a proper sense of cohesion so when we address the lingering issues it's not like it's tearing all of that apart.

PHEW, OKAY. ON TO THE WRITER COMMENTARY FOR JADETOK. Almost done for the day, just hang in there, Boots! Update coverage and commentary in one, it's been busy, and my stomach still needs a while more to heal before I'll be at a hundred percent.

MILES: We seem to be picking back up with Jane and Jasprose; this was discussed earlier but revealing that Jane and Jake have apparently been on the Meat Ship/Life Ship this whole time was an early priority for us.  We debuted that in spectacularly arbitrary fashion after Karkat and Calliope’s chat earlier in the comic, but we felt the need to flesh it out a bit more, and part of that meant returning to the rainy streets of Midnight City to meet up with Meat Jane where we last saw her, which is to say being antagonized by a whimsically psychopompian Jasprose.  Instead of escorting Jane to the land of the dead, however, Jasprose’s purpose seems to be kind of the opposite: giving Jane a chance to earn a place back in the world of the living, “life” here being a sort of fly-by-night improv metaphor for the road back to belonging in the story.  After all, as mentioned in the page right before this sequence,

I think they handled it really well, personally.

We got into this earlier, but whatever crescendos and twists and turns this story ends up going through, it wouldn’t make sense without the presence of the other two of Dirk’s closest friends.  Even Jasprose seems to be in on that action; there’s a lot of interesting coinciding of metatextual agendas of people you might not consider to all be on the “same side” when you look at the variously informed degrees to which Jasprose, Davepeta, Vriska, Dirk, Rose, Al, and even John have been working simultaneously together and against each other to shape the story and bring all the characters together.

Both Johns, even the "currently" "dead" Meat one, almost seem to have been working towards this result, yeah. Increasing unity, increasing Blood, can only mean a potentially better end for all concerned IMO, including Rose and even possibly Dirk.

One does have to wonder whether Dirk’s goodbyes to Jane and Jake in the epilogues were really meant to be the last time they all met or if they were, in the provocative fashion of a villain, meant as a galvanizing Fuck You to get them to follow him into the wild frontier of another story (who can claim to know the intricacies of his ego?), but regardless of his intentions it’s better for all involved (and us as readers) that they get their asses in gear.  MILES: It might be tough for Jane to leave Earth C behind, though, considering that Dirk’s parting gift to her was The World Itself.  This is a younger Jane than we’re used to in Candy, over a decade less far along down the road to cryptofascist caketocracy, but how is she supposed to escape it now?  Maybe Jasprose has an answer for us.

MILES: Damn okay I guess that’s one way to do it. Jesus.  Can you blame her, though?  Jane’s so dashing in that suit.

Sorry, I had to include that whole joke in full! XD

Cutting it to bare essentials and paraphrasing here, even though there's obviously going to be a ton of interesting stuff in this set of commentary too if you want to unlock it early. So... Jane wakes up... they link back to Catnapped to remind people that it all indeed happened, if dreamlike now...

To return to (and further complicate) my extremely muddy and impromptu metaphor about death vs. life being approximately equivalent to absence from the story vs. presence within it, I feel pseudointellectually smugly behoovedized to remind you all the sleep is the cousin of death, and dreams, lifelike or no, are more or less just flashes and fragments of life within that slumbering death. You could argue that almost everything that happens on BOTH Earth C’s (not just Candy’s) is subject to the dreamlike quality of being supplementary to what’s “really happening” or at the very least, what’s MEANT to be really happening, what “matters”, flashes of unconscious instinct secondary to the Real Life of the majority of Homestuck’s Actual Stage.  

If it sounds like philosophical BS, it's not just that-- it's the Light and Void dynamic that's pretty much canon to the entire comic, up to and including how Void is connected to dreams, the dream bubbles, and sections of the timeline that become irrelevant to "the story" while Light covers those "important" or closer to the "onscreen" and "canon". Those with Life are usually the only ones with the license to exist in the Light unless Life is given to the dreaming dead explicitly, like with the Ring of Life or how Feferi (a Witch of Life) had the Horrorterrors set up the Dream Bubbles they'd all share on the meteor and subsequent trip. Life and Light are different flavors of existence/relevance/living, and Doom and Void can both be flavors of death in a literal and narrative sense. The Light/Void and Life/Doom dichotomies are being related, here, as they ought to be. Even the extended zodiac quiz's Aspect wheel has them next to each other, however much stock we ought to put into said wheel. (Which I honestly don't know.)

MILES: I may have mentioned this before, but if you want to consider the point of Homestuck as a Milieu/Skaia’s Will or whatever you want to call it to be the reproductive cycle of Sburbian universe creation, then what’s the real importance of a postgame paradise planet?  If anything, I’ve always kind of viewed them as consolation prizes to the victorious players, a tiny corner of the new cosmos they’re free to fuck around in while the really important work of multiversal perpetuation continues bazillions of parsecs away, completely uninterested in their personhood or politicking.  So much of Earth C itself is muddled, undefined, an empty reference to what came before it, self-referential and kind of plastic and lifeless, and part of this might be because the Mandate Of Heaven, as it were, the Creative Force around which Homestuck’s metaphysics is centered, isn’t really THERE.  It’s focused on Deltritus, or generally just wherever the next game will be born. Earth C is basically a retirement home for former world-breeders.

Earth C's paradise future and home for the post-game players was never meant to be elaborated upon very much in Canon, in "Light", and the spotlight thrown on it by the Epilogues that was so monkey's paw, trapping the players in the tendrils of A Story again... frankly did a real disservice to the breadth of possibility and freedom that was on offer, IMO. And it was kind of MEANT to, which is philosophically interesting, but SUCKS for those of us who really wanted these kids to be happy in the paradise they created. Beyond Canon has to play on that, but I'm glad it's done so much to try and fix that to some degree, too.

Anyway, this was a really long way of sort of riffing on a lot of what “waking up” here might represent for Jane, who jolts back to the reality of action in the limelight from the slumberland that was the mess on Earth C.   MILES: I guess I should probably emphasize here that this whole spiel is more of an in-the-moment reflection on this segment as it pertains to the story in general and less a tool for explaining what exactly it is that we were thinking when we wrote this, but I do think it’s still fun to think about.

Doom into Life, Void into Light, Dreams into Waking. It's all very intentional and very much coded into the Aspects. Life is the power and privilege of the living to exist in the Light if they so choose and change things that are Important. I'm not surprised one of them went on this tangent.

Okay hopefully we both have to post and paste less, onto Jadetok, what sort of plot-relevant clarifications and revelations are here in this commentary...

(MILES:) There’s maybe not all that much left worth getting into on the Meat Ship, considering the years and years of buildup put into it, but revisiting these characters and their shenanigans and vibes and general circumstances, especially considering the aforementioned freshly revealed presence of Jane and Jake, felt pretty necessary to get into one last time.  A way to catch up with them, while we prep their landing strip.

I figured we were in the closing parts of their journey here or what we'd see of it given we were already given hints of the likes of Jane Crocker being an Exile at a terminal for Swiss, but this is some confirmation that we're almost done catching up. ALMOST. That "landing strip" is a biggun if I had to reckon.

There was a lot of talk about establishing the Delta kids firmly before we started expanding to the full scope of the meat timeline. We didn’t want to linger on these guys…. just…yet. No internal world, no single update or huge all-cast pesterlog, but something engaging. Something to make us all smile.

So we're going to be continuing a bunch more establishing of the Delta Kids before we cut back to things they're doing on the Meat Ship that may have tangible applications for the session to come, the Meat Ship folks' last bits of planning, preparation, and emotional setup.

The science bottles with Roxy and Jade again:

Floral: Roxy and Jade’s mutual interest in science actually being mentioned? MILES: Wonder what this is for…

Another hint that this is GOING TO BE RELEVANT (which I'm super excited for!) and we don't know how yet, but between both commentaries saying stuff like this they're pretty much guaranteeing that it WILL come up. (I see Roxy, John, Dave and Dirk colors with some brighter-than-Jade in a graduated cylinder, but that doesn't tell me anything more about what it could possibly be for yet.)

The tensions they faced as mentioned earlier with not everyone being quite on board with Jane's attitude switch initially:

Luckily they were able to reconcile their differences offscreen with little to no complications, and Earth C doesn’t really matter right now.  They’ll be fine, Swifer’s got it or whatever.

Mhmm, makes sense; I don't think there's going to be TOO much tension with this new-attitude Jane, but between her and Kanaya I wouldn't be surprised if there was still a bit of friction they may or may not resolve.

Lots of fun and bright happiness in the Jadetok, which was sorely needed IMO:

(FLORAL:) I think while it made sense that the general tone of the meat crew was a little dour with the looming arrival, this showed there is still joy when you seek it out and have fun.

These folks naturally HAVE joy when they experience things together, and it's important to capture that, because if they didn't enjoy each other's company then why would they be fighting so hard to reunite each other? It's important to me that everyone in Beyond Canon on the protagonists' side is fighting for a HAPPIER FUTURE, and for that to really be felt we need to understand the happiness they can achieve together even on a long ship trip to a conflict destination.

Roxy ditching the dysphoria hoodie-- they say it's understandible he went through his "baby hoodie" period to present masc, and now he's coming into his own and Kanaya's shedding a tear of happiness for him.

Jake's outfit... I mean it's fun and on-theme, but also I'm kind of shocked they're implying he's keeping it, it's so absurd. XD Opinions will be opinions.

Regarding the Little Prince and the characters reacting differently to its contents:

(FLORAL:) Jade is just outright refusing the choices made in the story, which I like because it shows what she values.

I honestly can't remember anymore the way The Little Prince went and I'm too lazy to reread it, and plenty of people have done much better analyses on what The Little Prince means for Homestuck^2, so infer from Jade's attitude whatever you wish, clarify in the replies to this maybe, I'll leave it to The Little Prince experts out there instead of me.

Then there's a bunch of Jake they take a look at:

There’s a volatility and intensity to Jake that’s a bit escalated, here, in tandem with his newfound swagger.  How’s he been holding up after opening his heart up to Dirk so emotionally only to be shut down with such brutal precision?  What’s he thinking?

Well he's clearly talking to Brain Ghost Dirk, which they're being coy about but is obviously true, so it depends how real THIS version of BGD is compared to the Candy version-- possibly more real, and more inclined regardless to help Jake give Dirk the what-for.

What else relevant...

They show Jade and Dave's reconciliation and how the fact it happens off screen is "just a wee bit tongue and cheek ain’t it?". For the Meat versions of them, again, I have the personal feeling it's more about what Jade is feeling than anything that has to be specifically resolved between her and Dave anymore, or what Dave might think about attitudes Jade holds that he wouldn't have any real insight into I think.

Okay, the writer commentary ends with one weird note:

MILES: Hey, what did she mean by this?

I thought it was just kind of a catchphrase for ship arrival, but if THEY'RE going to highlight the importance of it, we need to scrutinize what it might mean. See WHO on the other side? Who is she talking about seeing when they get there that she'd want to be documenting this for? I doubt highly that she knows anything about Yiffy, that's too juicy not to keep her a surprise from Jade, so is it Vriska... or John/June? I feel like John/June is potentially more likely who she's addressing that statement to, with the letters retroactively burned up, and some hint they've been given that WE AREN'T YET PRIVY TO about who they'll meet when they get there?

I wouldn't know about any cultural references they might be making, so let me briefly see what I can quickly look up...

"See You on the Other Side is a stock phrase for farewells, especially ones where the parties may not meet each other again."

Of course, they're combining the artist and writer commentaries this time because the update in question is "pretty short, but stuffed to the gills with meaning".

Omfg there's great concept art of the Nymph Babies here. EXCELLENT concept art. Like there's a confused Yiffy playing with one, it's so fucking cute.

Birth and impending death in the same frame. (Definitely some meaning in that juxtaposition, especially in likely-Doom-player Ly'lac's proximity IMO.)

It was going to be a pretty goofy nothing Flash until they decided to bump up the drama and stuff more in, but they kept the goofiness alive in the first half. (Personally, I think it was a wonderful bait-and-switch IMO, my only practical complaint is that I had to watch that long goofy first half of the sequence SO many times rewatching the flash to make sure I caught all of the last part.)

Omfg there's a bunch of great unused concept art.

Into the flashback: The commentary is giving us a LOT of explicit context into the likely history of the matter, alongside some riffs of course.

They're using he/him pronouns for the Uni-Nymph. So that was intentional historical pronoun-use by Del'fi.

His ears and hooved feet might have been more of a permanent thing, less shapeshifted-on-demand like Del'fi does.

.........................their prayer/devotion self-hugging gesture is meant to form the shape of Dirk's glasses across their chests. God damnit.

No answers on the mysterious pillar spy, just a wink and a nod.

The pegatulp's arrival, confirmed to be connected to the Barley Frat as alluded to by both Del'fi and by Swiss's bookshelf. They were going for much more happy than ominous. (Though I think they managed to accomplish both.)

I'll direct quote here because this is crucial: "MILES: Floral got into this already a little bit in the previous 4koma [Bonus Comic], but it looks like this pegatulp and the Narwhal were very, very close for a while.  He’d never stand for this kind of betrayal, but his struggles were in vain...  Also, if you look closely, you’ll see his wings resemble those of an albatross!  Wonder what that means..."

I'm pretty sure that the background in that one panel of the Abyssal Anchoresses taking him into the sea was showing the Dirk Strider Moon in the far back, but they don't give any specific clarification in the Commentary, so they probably didn't think we'd misinterpret it. (The glasses-shape DOES poke out of the sides in a way a glaring Meemaw face wouldn't, thinking about it they would have drawn it differently, so I'm even less confident in my earlier theory; they would have mentioned it here if Meemaw was even a possibility.)

HOOOOOLY SHIT. THEY'RE SHOWING US ORIGINAL CONCEPT ART FOR THE YOUNG NYMPH ANCESTORS, AND ARE SHOWING US TWO OF THREE (the third is blacked out for now), both very similar to and somewhat different from what we eventually got!!! Even some excerpts from their initial backstory concepts.

Their backstory gives the Ancestors full names, blacked out. Unknown if they have "Last Names" or just the obfuscating Epitaphs hiding them, or both. The first name of the one who put The Great Combiner to sleep is blacked out-- short enough that it COULD be Rose, but I'd still put heavy odds on the Third Nymph Ancestor being the culprit.

The backstory concepts list The Great Combiner as the head of the "MALEFIC NORTHWESTERN POLYCRUEL", a pun which I think reinforces the (in-my-opinion) Blood-like idea (possibly Thief-of-Blood) that everyone subsumed into her was considered part of an enormous relationship, as well as Instrumentality or whatever other analogues there were.

Even more later concept art and fanart, including a cropped art piece showing all the kid Nymphs and ancestor Nymphs together.

The spiral horn poking out of Ly'lac's Shubhurb actually IS The Narwhal's horn, trapped through the ground. The concept art shows the logistics of how this makes sense.

"Haven: Unfortunately Meemaw’s fate was determined before Ly’lac was even finished being designed." T_T Haven insisted on the one-munch gag which I agree was super fucking funny.

"FLORAL: It’s so funny people realizing she never had eyebrows." I'm glad they're amused that we caught that.

"[ANDI:] Nymph morphology is a result of their environment", and The Narwhal's evolving form is influenced by his upbringing, his confinement, and his nymph nature all together.

Regarding the ink-filled pipes we saw, "He’s already being used for his blood as a type of fuel, an energy."

Starting with Artist commentary first as usual because it's lighter... and has everyone's celebrations up front on finally getting to share beloved Ly'lac with us.

Haven: Act 2 starts! Kim: IT’S HERE!!! SHE’S HERE!!!! The first of the Delta kids!!! Chumi, excited to dive into Act 2!: The long awaited…. Ly’lac of the Final Applause! Please clap everyone!! We were so excited to introduce her, literal years of anticipation!!  Floral: We’ve waited so long for our girl…. So glad everyone gets to enjoy her now.

It's excellent as expected to see them so excited!

Anyway, let’s get to it! You guys are probably all curious how ~Nymphs~ came to be… And we’ll get into it just a little bit in this commentary, BUT! We want to wait until we show the rest of the Nymphs first before we do so there’s no spoilers. 😉

Understandable. It seems they're going to talk about some of the specifics of Ly'lac's design evolution though!

Ly’lac concept art by Andi “Strovi” Haven: This is a pre-Ly’lac Ly’lac, this is Nymph No.1 before there were any actual solidified nymph characters. But to me this is the first Ly’lac. Kim: Ly’lac was the first of our nymphs to be made too, of course! She was essentially our guinea pig since she was essentially our idea of The Most Base Nymph everyone would be introduced to. And as you can tell, she has gone through a LOT of changes since then!

There's more I'm omitting, but as you can see the squiddle-head and the skin color being based on Grimdark Rose's were big initial inspirations. They go further into how they considered integrating Lilac-colors into her design, how they decided the skin needed to be even darker...

Haven: [...] Wrt the red accent, a design motif I wanted early on was for them to each have an accent color that was the main color of another nymph.

That's interesting. I wonder if that prior plan, since abandoned, is going to have some plot relevance.

They went with something a little more "blue collar" as they put together where her personality was heading... the overalls, work-themed outfit, etc. Until finally:

Haven: All New All Different Ly’lac. She’s sharper, she’s cooler, she’s edgier, she’s more skull-like which funnily enough makes her resemble roses squid shirt more than when she was round. Anyway, I love her. She's like a delicious ink filled gusher. [...]

Chumi: We have landed at current Ly’lac…. Our hexagonal girl… Kim: It was at this point Haven proposed the Nymphs would have some more distinct shape language between each other! [...]

We've already seen a preview of that with AA seemingly having what looked more like a full Squid head rather than squiddle in her silhouette, we'll see. There's even a long gif they provided in this Artist Commentary of her design evolution from start to finish, it's neat to see if you opt in!

The idea of a hexagonal head is also fun from a design perspective, I like how they went with that.

Haven:  Ly’lac’s house! In our notes it was repeatedly referred to as a castle but our final design looks more like a wizards tower. It looks like a burgeoning sprout emerging from the sea. A similar shape appears on Ly’lac’s face when she uses magic!

Oh that's right! I completely forgot that there was a thin arcane symbol that appeared over one of her eyes when she tried (and failed) to use magic. I didn't connect it to the "sprout" (Lifey?) shape of her house, but that's exactly it:

(Mirrored above and below the eye.)

The surrounding area is a field of spikes in a candy colored sea. Visually it brings to mind the long-term nuclear waste warning marker “Landscape of Thorns”. In some of my older notes her house was going to look like a nuclear cooling tower.

Sure, just stuff more Doom in there.

There's more about the building and environment design inspirations, about Meemaw, the Caretakers (even some Mom Lalonde design influence mixed into the tentacle princess inspiration apparently, reinforcing even more that the Nymph race is like all the childhood fantasies of Rose Lalonde's brought to life), a scrapped pet for Ly'lac who'd died multiple times, different sleeping options for Nymphs including a floating water bubble on a stem:

Andi: I figured since they were creatures of the arcane, they could sleep in orbs, meditating or “connecting” to certain dream planes. But that was just workshopping. I think we decided to let them just sleep normally. I thought it’d be cool if they were LITERAL dream bubbles. 

Just reinforcing the Nymph/Horrorterror connection, that's fun.

We get through a bunch of designs for her room, up through the final one...

Haven:  Ly’lac’s room! Covered in slime and just kind of generally trashy, you immediately get the impression she’s someone who doesn’t take care of herself very well. The general vibe in here in is like a dungeon or a sepulchre of some kind. Her plants are dead or dying, her dresser is shaped like a coffin, weapons strewn about, slime lazily slopped about and placed in protective circles around the places she spends the most time, online or in bed. The screen has been hung in a way that every time she goes online it’s like she's looking at another world through a noose. The feng shui here is absolutely terrible. The screen is also facing the window so you know she has trouble seeing it with the glare. Ugh, UGH just awful. I love it. Floral: Fell in love with Ly’lac’s room. We spent a few different art jams piecing every part of it together, Haven taking care of the bulk of it. The noose around the computer, the dead garden and the slime we set our hearts on. 

Plenty of depression (not caring for herself well) and Doom here, as well as the idea of the slime being in protective circle patterns around certain places which I hadn't noticed to presumably keep the Voices at bay while she's doing most of what she does.

Leaving this quote here:

Chumi: The team all played Yume2kki together! I forget if this drawing was inspired by that, or if we were inspired by the drawing to play together. Either way, super cute!!!! It was my first time playing anything Yume Nikki related. Andi: And I’m so glad we did! I love Yume Nikki/2kki and that whole fangame scene. Seeing these nymph-tsukis was really cute. Go watch Yume Nikki videos by  gobou RIGHT NEOWWWWWWWWWWW. Haven: Ly’lac to me is like a YNFG protagonist, I gave her Madotsuki’s rug as a shout to that. 

I've experienced basically nothing of Yume Nikki and don't know the tropes, so y'all who know the source material better can take what you will from those intentional references being mixed in.

There's stuff about the app designs, the evolution of the Denizen design they chose for the Set icon... about Nymph app icons in general having a focus on "anonymity" (fits in with Void)...

Cha.OS's design process, obviously as an equivalent of Discord but with a much more Old Web look and IRC inspiration...

Later, regarding our glimpse of AA's silhouette behind Ly'lac when she's reading her chat:

Haven: The best girl has appeared. There’s not really anything else I can say at this time LOL.  Floral: UWAAAAAAH such a cute Ly’lac. Oh how perfect she is.  Kim: The writers conveyed that they wanted AA to look ~ominous~ for this panel. She kinda be aura farming tf out of this panel too… and for what reason…

That's about it for relevant Artist Commentary, with plenty of goodies left out for those of you who want to pay to opt in. Next we have the Writer Commentary if I have the energy to get through it...

More excitement from the team over getting to reveal Ly'lac finally:

Miles: [...] I mean, honestly we’ve been sitting on Ly’lac for two years.  It’s just that her Imminent Reality became a lot more apparent to us early this year, which was very scary.  But in a really, really cool way.  We’ve been white-knuckling it waiting to finally reveal her to you all, so August was a moment of immense triumph for us.

Mhmm, I can imagine the internal excitement over all the new players' final designs and natures coming together and how they'll get shown off, play off each other, it's always a really fun process when you put a TON of workshopping into some new Homestuck (fan) characters, I can say from some shared experience that didn't pan out into anything so I won't go into.

She is 15, she was named when she was 13 just like everyone else. It’s new, but nothing is really new, everything is just spun up from something we already know, just flipped or reversed or inverted or rotated in some way. We’re at the Waluigi stage of Homestuck themed simulacra now.

I lost track of the exact age of Ly'lac here in our terms even if it was mentioned earlier so this is worth noting I suppose. I also forget exactly how old the Omega Kids (humans+Vrissy) are but it's probably similar.

Haven: Originally her title was “The Fell Omen” but Miles reminded me that’s a thing from elden ring so that was nixed pretty quickly.

Hah! I'm glad, the one they picked is better. (They're both Doom-y obviously, but "applause" also kind of feels like it plays into her cartoon interests, the appreciative celebration at the curtain draw.)

Haven: Something about getting a new “Your name is X and you Y” is just so fun. Ly’lac’s everything is built around beginnings and endings. It was Floral’s idea to have her be a cartoon fan and that really tied it all together.  Floral: It feels like every major kid in Homestuck has to be tied to some art form in some shape or form, and to finally have a slapstick cartoon expert feels like the natural next step for a girl who is essentially John’s successor. 

Interesting interesting interesting.

Skipping over some stuff... Oh, regarding her arming herself with bombs:

Haven: This little weirdo only feels safe when she isn’t.

Heheh, that's a great way to put it.

Regarding her getting and immediately accidentally destroying the Mechanical Lotus:

Haven: Nothing is unkillable before Ly’lac, even things that aren’t even alive to begin with. MILES: Writing Act 2 has been a blast thus far, and the writers rooms have resounded with laughter even moreso than usual since we got here.  This was one of the sequences that really cracked us up and just felt so quintessentially Ly’lac.

Again, more Doom (and in a perfectly hilariously depicted manner).

Then we have her message from tinnitusChakra...

MILES: And here we get our first glimpse of the enigmatic TC.  At this point, we haven’t had any conversations between two of what we’ve been calling the Delta Kids yet, but a new voice joins their chorus, and he’s... pretty gøød vibes.  He’s moving a mile a minute, introducing a few key concepts to get the reader’s gears turning, and wishing Ly’lac well.  Unfortunately, he’s unable to provide the kind of comfort to Ly’lac that she expected from him, because like everyone else in this damn comic he’s apparently all hyped up about playing some stupid computer game. MILES: Some dreaded stupid computer game... Haven: What a chill bro. It’s fun that the two purple kids seemingly get along so swimmingly.

Hmmm... still doesn't tell us much about TC in general, not even the dialogue. As for how they're saying it failed to provide comfort, the writers elaborate:

Haven: More familiarity, more lack of surprise. So now we know that nymphs are largely a prophetic species, their entire society is centered around knowing how things are going to end before they even begin. They know the punchline before the setup, they probably suck to watch movies with. Floral: Just the right end to Ly’lac very first impression! I really do feel like Ly’lac is such a fun departure from our usual hs introductory characters because while she shows the typical desire to avoid fate, she also doesn’t take any actions at all that lead to Homestucks usual self fulfilling prophecy.  MILES: Seriously.  She couldn’t be less enthused to be doing this.  But I can’t say the same for us, because I cannot WAIT to see where she goes!

A Doom player actually largely managing to procrastinate and postpone and avoid the actions that ought to lead to the Doom that she knows is foretold and inevitable. Iiinteresting, but doesn't tell me anything specific yet; just something else to keep in our back pockets while we try to figure out what the fuck her Class could be.

Continuing on...

They mention Cha.OS as an overt Discord parody of course...

More hype about auguryAside's first one-sided conversational appearance:

Haven:  Best girl is here. “When you turn the page and see a wall of red text you instantly know you’re about to read some bullshit.” was something that came up during a discussion about Dave and I laughed when I realized the same applied to our dear sweet auguryAside.

Heheheh.

Anyway, this passage is yet another retreading of a classic Homestuckian Tradition, which is getting extremely bothered by a bunch of people on your birthday and sort of ignoring them in favor of informative faffing about.  Luckily AA knows how to stand up for herself and demand the attention she so rightly deserves.  Unluckily, Ly’lac’s avoidance is a powerful thing.

Yup, nothing like a depressed Doom player to intentionally avoid conversation and other obligations.

Here's something interesting...

Haven:  Ladies and germs, the negging master has arrived. Everything she says is coated with a bizarre combination of carefulness and aggression. She’s clearly trying to get Ly’lac to do something that she thinks or rather knows Ly’lac is probably going to try to avoid doing. She keeps casually insulting Ly’lac but immediately will try to renege and assure her that everything is okay actually. She also seems to be in a bit of a rush, which is paradoxically paired with her apparent inability to keep things brief.

Hmm. I have to think more on the mix of carefulness and aggression, but everything else seems in line with our Sylph of Time guess, where she can be naturally somewhat destructive but intent on healing and not causing damage, combined with a Sylph's long-windedness especially now combined with Time, etc.

Haven:  AA is so kind, she’s getting weirdly excited at the prospect of Ly’lac getting older and changing. Where Ly’lac only finds interest in the destination, AA seems to be invested in journeys.

Doom is more about results/consequences, Time is more about the process/journey? Yeah that fits.

Moving on to the description of Ly'lac's retirement home neighborhood:

Haven: There's a lot of fun puns and wordplay here.  So Ly’lac lives around people at the end of their lives and has been here since the beginning of hers.

Yep, more Doom and/or Life-Doom dichotomy stuff.

Ooh, useful terminology clarification:

Haven:  And with this we now have a few nymph anatomical words: UPPER ORGANON, something like a brain probably? The INKSTONE which probably works like a heart from what I can tell? Their MANTLE which is just what the top of a squid's head is so there's an easy comparison. And the glossy little boba eyes on top are their PANOPTICS.

Good to know what those two words were specifically standing for, I was confusing Upper Organon for Mantle to some extent.

She gets the present with its explosive anti-tampering hex knocking out the caretaker and:

It’s not a hard task and the prize is a birthday present, but now Ly’lac’s procrastinating (cunctation) nature has been challenged. She’s been given a task that requires her to get up and move. Well played.  And with that we end our commentary thus far. 

You know, all this time I never tied the obvious depressed/Doomy deferral/procrastination to that literal part of her username we decoded ages back.

Alright, looks like that's it for commentary this time! Nothing especially radically important, just some fun side ideas and reinforcement of what we've observed and guessed so far. There's of course more entertaining discussion to be had if you subscribe to the Patreon and read the actual posts though, as I've reiterated.

Again starting with Artist Commentary first as usual:

Chumi, I’m running out of openers: Hey all, welcome to the commentaaaary! This month we’re talking about MORE LYL’AC, FRAF user commands, and that lil’ snippet of that special someone… Let’s get into it!  Kim, has not run out of openers: This one’s a fun one! We’ve been itching on wanting to bring back reader commands for a long time now! Tryna think how it would work… How quickly could we pump out these unique reader command panels… It was a little tricky, but we did it! We did it all because we wanted the people to be able to experience a little bit of that og Homestuck fun! Floral, going as The Craft For Halloween: This update really proved the joys of spritework, even with the more advanced animation, things are so much more simplified. 

Ah right, this was the part where they took a bunch of user inputted commands for Ly'lac!

Some really funny concept art for Meemaw doing her thing in here. Decomposition of how they did her fetch modus's disarming method... oh, on the tripwire mine like I thought:

Also you just know this makes waking up Ly’lac in the morning a real pain for The Caretaker. 

Right, I'd been wondering about that. :D

A reused reaction gif-- Alchemy, which was always planned to use that exact symbol that's atop the Alchemiter, unsurprisingly:

Haven: Early on we drew up that Nymph eyes would turn invert when they used magic [...] They also have those symbols creep up on their skin when they charge up and the result of combining both effects is a pretty sick visual if I do say so myself. 

That's a detail I hadn't noticed when she triggered the alchemy, huh.

Then there's D.N.Alkyrin, which unfortunately the artist team doesn't QUITE explain why it has female-presenting characters if Satyrs are supposedly an all-male race unless I've misunderstood something or male Satyrs can grow chest udders okay I wish I hadn't thought of that distinctly plausible possibility

Haven:  It’s just eternally funny to edit human ears off of characters. Miles: It’s funnier still that this was literally the first look anyone got of the satyrs.  Our rambunctious boytoys introduced as a gaggle of (admittedly peak) anime teenagers was something we were very “Should we... actually do it this way?” about, for approximately five minutes before the hilarity of it outweighed any real trepidation or sense of propriety.  Also I’ve said this a lot but DNAngel is really fun and worth a watch and also Extremely Homestuckian in its themes of Maturing and how hard it is to be a kid and grow up and how nobody understands and so the fact that we were able to slip it into the comic feels great for me.  And hopefully for you too.  Anyway I’m running away again.

skipping down a bit--

Haven:  Symbol reveal on this delicious looking bottle of liquid something. Chumi: It looks suspicious…

Yep, Time and black widow spider vibes simultaneously, Time player colored, "this is the one who is the Time player" being written out so blatantly for us that we can't help but think it, etc.

The part with the user commands appearing behind Ly'lac:

Haven: This part with the user submitted commands made me laugh because I had drawn a KYS command being sent to Ly’lac visual gag a long while ago and  I was so happy we got to use it this early. Sorry Ly’lac.

Yep, they knew EXACTLY how a fresh user command submission box would probably go down.

They talk a bit about the (amazing) primordial Rose Lalonde imagery as imagined and conveyed by "a very small Meemaw who is so much older now and looking back", with the hood covering her face and Meemaw adding in a second Nymph-like set of eyes.

Ly'lac making a dopey face after wasting time nostalgically reminiscing on all the contents of her room:

Panel 865 by Floralmarsupial Chumi: Ly’lac’s lil dopey face is CUTE!!! Floral: She soooo cute, I wanted to bring some whimsy to this panel and the original sketch was made by Haven after pitching the idea. It was such a perfect face, I was so happy to finalize it.  Haven: I have 100s of dopey little Ly’lac drawings so it’s always a convenient pleasure to be able to get one in the comic.

--Which they provide a sketch for, and also compare to page 2697 from Homestuck:

I'll include this particularly hilarious sketch next:

Floral: This was a fun bit of visual gag, the original thumb was in sprite mode with the symbols over her computer but this was way funnier. 

They also show us the sketch of her bomb defusing poses before she slipped, which ended up very close to the end result.

Floral: These poses were so good.

[...]

Haven: Kim really knocked this one out the park, it turned out so damn good. Kim: I had a lot of fun making this little sequence! I made her extra cute here, hope u don’t mind. Chumi: I don’t mind at all…. Please do it more.

(Pausing here, back after an appointment... aight had my lunch break and everything)

They talk about making the slip leadup gif intentionally shitty to emphasize the stupidity/slapstick of it, then the actual fall animation where they had to get the timing JUST right... I always have to give the Beyond Canon team TONS of credit for the animation improvements, they really nail and improve upon Andrew Hussie's old impeccable sense of comedic gif timing.

That was about when we cut away... Here's an initial concept art of TC before what they decided upon in-comic:

Chumi: Our mirthful purple boy!  Kim: Now who could this possibly be… Nahh, must be no one important. Chumi: Alas, we can’t talk about him just yet… Miles: He’s busy!  I love whenever my sketches end up in an artist’s commentary and I get to sneak in here for a little bit.  Kim took my concept and made it sooooo delicious but I do still have a lot of fondness for the first one I sketched up with TC’s face specifically stylized to match his Naglink wizard icon.  Anyway... I’m running away again.

I think it's important how much emphasis there is on how happy and chill and amiable TC is while he is -- most likely -- knowingly initiating the apocalyptic downfall of all civilization except for his friends and whoever else is lucky enough with The Game to escape and win.

The Artist Commentary ends with notes about the architecture of TC's building and our first glimpse of Satyr high-tech civilization behind it. On to the Writers' Commentary.

Floral, yippee!!: This was an especially fun update with all the user commands we took from the FRAF forums.  Miles, playing Pokemon Legends ZA and getting emotional about Feraligatr: Seriously!  It was so, so incredible to be able to help FRAF launch the forums in the first place and to see that come to life, so getting to actually tie the comic back in was just a delight.  What a return to form... and it’s not the last time we’re going to do it, either, so if you haven’t yet, I’d really consider checking the forums out.  At any rate, seeing the influx of answers was just fantastic. Haven, playing Pokemon Legends ZA and getting emotional about Heracross: The month of Ly’lac continues with an exciting return to reader submissions. This update in general was like a trip down memory lane. We get to reminisce about old homestuck and Ly’lac gets to reminisce about her own life. Floral: Being able to let people interact with Ly’lac was so fun to watch. All of them where helping her in her ultimate quest to avoid 

--the sentence ends with "avoid", I think they forgot to write/paste in the end of that. Avoid her responsibilities and talking with her friends, probably.

Floral: Enter key player, Meemaw. As we imply later in the update she’s been around way longer than any other elder in the complex. 

Yep, relevant if for little else than to establish the potential Nymph evolution cycle and give some glimpse of the history of Rose Lalonde she's given. For all we know, more relevant in the future if she ends up prototyped or something. I totally buy that she's a "key player" in whatever events will unfold in Ly'lac's proximity, at least while she's on-planet.

Floral: That damned voice again.  Haven: Always with the voices. Miles: Homestuck is full of voices telling poor, innocent player characters what to do and pissing them off and just generally getting them into all sorts of trouble, but we’ve never seen one that could be averted by slime before.  Also interesting to note that Ly’lac is loath to face the call of THE VOICE and yet perfectly fine accepting prompts from a bunch of degenerate Homestuck fans.  Just kidding guys I love you.  But I wonder what that means... what is this THE VOICE, anyway?

Interesting delineation of "THE VOICE" vs "the voices", and how presumably the perfectly generic ooze is meant to be used in protective circles to deal with specifically one of them. I had assumed up until this writer commentary that Nymphs in general had discovered through its Alchemy availability that Perfectly Generic substances had a (potentially Voidy?) benefit of insulating minds from external meddling, but I hadn't quite considered that this might be a Ly'lac-specific thing beyond it being possibly Terezi at her command console. Of note as a reminder that there was ESPECIALLY a ring of ooze around her computer to keep her safe from "The Voice"'s influence while she interacted with her friends. Hmmm. Could it perhaps even be Dirk Strider or Alt!Calliope's narrative influence that it helps protect from?

Miles: Speaking of which, here officially begins the first user prompts since the beginning of HS^2 and the first forum prompts since... shit, I don’t even know when, over a decade?  I’m so old now, dude.  Been on the Homestuck train for over 15 years, since I WAS 15.  It’s like the train from Hiveswap Act 2 but instead of meeting a bunch of trolls you’re running into a bunch of people dressed up as trolls, and artists, and amazing fanworks and batshit fandom legends and romantic interests and legitimately some the best friends of your life and opportunities to grow and the chance of a lifetime and... wow, a lot.  Considering all that, it just felt right to get the fans back in on the prompt action a bit.  Happy to have you guys here.  Now let’s see what you cooked up...

Time to have some fun poking at our choices here.

Oh, Haven veers into a huge informative tangent-ramble partway through here:

Haven: [...] Anyway while we’re on the subject of alchemy I was saying in the previous commentary about how many loops deep we are with Homestuck wrt “Character Alchemy” starting from John, to Karkat who is presented to us like some kind of “Evil John” then to Jane who is presented like a “Girl John” and then to Meenah who is like an “Evil Jane” er wait would you say maybe Aranea is the evil Jane? Or maybe you’d say none of that is true and all those characters are just their own original unique selves and nothing about the characters we’ve met before is meant to tell us how to read them. Well that aside we have little baby Ly’lac here and she is very clearly obviously Rose Influenced but through the power of “Reverse Character Alchemy” maybe, just maybe... you might see she has a little John in her. Now I'm not saying she’s “John Lalonde” or anything but in Homestuck memetics are like conceptual DNA that help us see what kind of disease a character may contract later in the story, and Ly’lac has picked up some of Rose’s and John’s memes.

This is interesting stuff, and also definitely a true reading of the original Homestuck, the way so many characters were deliberately designed as warped reflections of existing characters, even if they were uniquely themselves too. They'd share common memes and common moments, panels would reflect and rhyme, et cetera. We'd be deliberately drawn to the similarities and contrasts in their initial establishment so that we had a better character base to draw upon for the actual unique character to be built; it was a great way of introducing new characters in a way that kept us stepping off from familiar ground as a starting point and continuing to draw metaphorical comparisons between characters as they evolved through their stories, especially between our sessions' "main protagonists" as is mentioned above.

Miles: The bit about turning useless gold into valuable lead also makes me laugh, I’m pretty sure that was Haven’s idea.  We turn it into a surprise tool that will hurt us later, and it also gives us a little opportunity to show off nymph alchemy (no, guys, remember, it’s chemysteries now) which works... kind of similarly to Skaian alchemy.  

YEP GEE I WONDER WHY? (Because it's meant to be the Nymph component combined with Satyr technology to first create The Game's technological alchemy in the first place, is what I'll continue to allege theoryways. Again, note the identical symbol used to what's atop an Alchemiter.)

Floral: It was honestly so funny to see people point out which Homestuck ship the “dark hair guy with the blonde guy” line had to be talking about.  Haven: Yeah, Nepdave. <3

Huh? Huh. Wonder how they figured that.

Miles: Showing off CC’s incredible taste in finely-aged satyrical anime was another aim here;

OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT WE JUST ANSWERED MY PREVIOUS QUESTION FROM THE OTHER DAY -- Ly'lac's mystery shipper girl friend is CONFIRMED to be CC, who is either genderfluid or catfishing! I didn't expect to find confirmation in the writer commentary of all places!!! See, critical info like this is why I do these partial importance-focused react-readthroughs of the Patreon commentary for those of y'all who aren't paying the subscription to follow it live.

Anyway, y'all deserve the full quote:

Miles: Showing off CC’s incredible taste in finely-aged satyrical anime was another aim here; having all these characters you guys don’t get to see for who knows how long leads us to desperately trying to find ways to sneak in little snippets of their dialogue and personalities wherever we can, up to a point, because unfortunately a little restraint is necessary, but god... DAMN is it hard sometimes.  I know I speak for the entire team when I say we really, really adore these kids, and I know you guys will too.  They’re just really fun.  They’re on some next level shit.

Skipping forward a bit:

Miles: Weird, MORE emphasis on the fact that these impulses seem different from the usual communications from THE VOICE.  It’s probably nothing.  Also, we apologize for Ly’lac calling your suggestions dumb as fuck, but in her defense you did tell her to kill herself.  You’re all accountable for that one.  If anything happens to her it’s on you.

We ought to take note of how they're emphasizing there's an important difference here, but that pretty much goes without saying.

There's a nuance I didn't pick up on on this page, so focused was I on the Gumby reference:

Miles: A lot of what needs to be said about this page is more or less spelled out on the page itself.  I’d honestly suggest just going back and rereading it.  Really internalize that message.  Here’s the link. Miles: What hasn’t been said yet is that the first time Haven showed me this drawing I went “AWWWWUUHHHHHHHHHHHH” out loud because seeing Ly’lac do a drawing of her and TC as Gumby characters being friends and having fun makes my heart explode with happiness. I love their love.

I COMPLETELY MISSED how she specifically used their text colors for this drawing. That's incredibly heart-melting.

Following this Haven goes on an incredible ten-paragraph rant on how it is to be a kid online arguing about cartoons and relating to them, and struggling with what was meaningful to you not resonating with others... but it's not plot-relevant so I'll leave it for subscribers to enjoy.

I will bring up this later line I'm skipping to because it's funny though:

Miles: Ly’lac has had a pretty rough run of “keeping her stuff from exploding” today. First someone destroyed her precious mechanical lotus, and now someone’s crumbled her wand.  They need to stop doing this to her.

Heheheh.

I've already said that this alludes to the purpose of the Satyrs' and Nymphs' existence to be to play and build The Game together as they're about to, but the writers add just a bit more here:

Floral: We used the most roundabout interpretations of this line but overall the meaning remains. And if the meaning remains shrouded still that’s ok! We’ve already mentioned this concept twice, we’ll probably bring it up again at some point. Maybe.  Anyways who the hell is Squermes? Miles: Some old person, probably nobody. 

Seems that makes them an Ancestor candidate, potentially. Heck, we don't know MEEMAW isn't an Ancestor. Although since this is unlikely to be a Scratched session, we can't necessarily tell if the three Satyrs and three Nymphs who play this game are meteor children OR have meteor ancestors. The Candy Kids we've imported into the session were all naturally born, no meteors involved-- if anything, Vriska's forcible entry to Deltritus was like their meteor impact all on its own. And it was always implied that not all players who actually succeed at the game HAVE to have been meteor-born paradox clones, though some of the most important sessions will have those and scratched sessions almost certainly (WITH ancestors to flop with).

(Also when I read the comic I misread "OUR INEDIBLE MAIDEN" as "OUR INDELIBLE MAIDEN", because my mind processed the first spelling as ridiculous, and we hadn't yet established clearly that Nymphs consume their dead.)

We see Meemaw's communicated vision of Rose Lalonde:

Miles: Here we begin to see legends of some other old person who’s probably nobody, and the first sign that the many, MANY generations of intelligently-designed Deltritans still retain some inkling, mythological or otherwise, of those who designed them.  What they actually know is clearly shrouded in mystery, but ideas are hard to kill, and they grow with time.  It’s been many thousands of years, and apparently the idea of Rose has morphed into something wicked cool.  Not that Ly’lac gives a fuck.

And we get to the ~PTH tome Ly'lac and TC worked on to build the game:

Haven: Oh how exciting it is to take something you love and add onto it with your friends.

Miles: The ~PTH TREATISE is something I was really excited to get to, and if someone didn’t prompt it we already planned to have it in anyway.  An ominous tome, a collaborative code written by a satyr and a nymph from long, long ago, and used today to inspire the work of another satyr and nymph to complete the creation of the ultimate game.  Not only is this a really fascinating glimpse into the lives of two historical figures of some significant import (to be further commented on in that update’s commentaries), but it’s also a very, very eye-catching item for anyone who knows anything about Tomes That Matter in Homestuck. This is the kind of hefty mischief Ly’lac and TC can get up to if left to their own devices. It’s also a pun that I’m really proud of.

Haven: It’s so great to get to come up with puns endlessly for like 2 years and spin them into a plot.

So yeah, the historical Satyr and Nymph who caused disaster together as described on Swiss's bookshelf are likely the same as the ~PTH authors, and very possibly Ancestors of some sort, is what I'm picking up here.

Skipping onward...

Miles: In general, getting to reengage with the silly banalities of Roomscamperage in Classical Homestuckian style is just so so fun and one of the absolute best things about getting to reintroduce new characters.  I think I already said this in the last commentary, but it really bears repeating, here and textually.  It IS awesome to look at stuff in your room.  Sometimes I worry that some people might take this line as a facetious statement, but it really isn’t.  It’s awesome to be back to classic early-act Homestuck shenanigans.

I'm like, in full agreement here... in a more poorly done fanventure or a story less thought out than Beyond Canon with less developed characters planned, some of this room engagement with its mix of plot/character relevance and character silliness could have been banal and tropey. But our trip through Ly'lac's room was genuinely entertaining and fascinating and reminded me of how much I love Homestuck, and I have to thank the talent and love within the Beyond Canon team for much of that.

Skipping a bit further, we have the first Memo (IRC modchat log) where all of Ly'lac's friends are speaking:

Haven: I was so hyped for this one. Floral: Hell yeeeess, the way we were sitting on these kids for so long, and they’re finally all here together.  Miles: Seriously, the joy we had getting this out is only matched by the joy we had writing it.  This was the first real multi-participant log and marked the official point at which all of our Delta Kids had Really Spoken for the first time.  Like I said earlier, every chance we have to show them off even a little is something we cherish, because letting you guys fall in love with them, even if you can only see a bit of them, brings us so much happiness. Miles: Also it’s just a completely silly little slice of everyone’s personalities.  We remain proud of this log to this very day.  Which I guess is only like two months after it came out.

Floral: AA stocks are so high, she always gets the last word in. 

There was definitely some humor and revelation in the multi-character log, finally getting to see the personalities of some of our other mystery kids, but honestly I think it hit harder for the Beyond Canon team than it did for the rest of us. The Mountain's introduction and CC's last bannable rejoinder with AA getting the last word in was all golden. However, there just was too little of a slice of most of these characters to get a clear idea of each of them. Swiss, for example, has become MUCH MUCH clearer in retrospect in this log after his formal introduction. I expect it'll be similar for most of the others-- knowing (for sure now) that CC is a Satyr-cosplaying Nymph going he/him with the Satyrs and she/her with Ly'lac for instance.

Our first look at TC doesn't tell us much they're keeping it CLOSE to the chest:

Miles: Here we get our first glimpse of TC, and wow.  Look at that luscious mane!  Those long ears, that floofy tail, those muscular arms, that impeccable monitor setup.  He’s busy alright.  Busy being awesome...!  It’s too bad you can’t see him too well, or what he’s looking at at all, because both would surely delight the senses.  Alas, that’s for us to know, and for you to find out later. 

Then they get into the architecture and how they appreciate the beauty of Deltritus, this world that Rose and Dirk established these civilizations on, which I'll only quote most of:

Miles: [...] I’ve said it before but Deltritus is honestly a stunningly beautiful planet, and one of the things we wanted to preserve was that beauty, for both the Satyrs and the Nymphs; a gorgeous, multicolored planet where the coral is vibrant, the chlorophyll is bluer, skies are pinker, water is... also pinker.  Or purpler, as the artistic license may be.  The point being, we wanted all their homes to be places of beauty that really highlight how lovely a world it is that Rose and Dirk stumbled upon, and how much each of the two species love their home and the different ways in which they integrated with their surroundings.  I sure hope nothing happens to this beautiful world... maybe those shooting stars streaking through the sky will bring everyone who sees them good luck!

...because I honestly hadn't noticed the shooting stars' significance when we first saw TC's house, as people ARE already starting the game besides our protagonists, and the meteors are already beginning to fall.