#pgen

short version is, i'm cautiously optimistic! but this is a loaded question you've given me on a lot of fronts, so i'm gonna try to take it piece by piece.

to start with, the sudden revival of Homestuck^2 (now minus the squared) took me by surprise because to my knowledge, it was entirely dead in the water. my involvement with anything Official ended at Pesterquest, and pretty much the entire post-canon crew i was friends with in 2019-20 has moved on to greener pastures. i share a similar sentiment with @pochapal in that i would have put money on hs2 staying dead forever. i have, quite frankly, dreaded the inevitable day when official Homestuck media would resume production, because the fandom at large seems quite eager to sweep the ceaseless harassment and transphobia that ended hs2 under the rug and pretend that it just, like you said... never happened. when that california cafe used older Pesterquest-like character designs that omitted short chubby Terezi and black-coded Roxy, however well-intentioned and ultimately harmless that was, it felt like a sign of things to come. that, as you fear, the sharper & more personal queerness that we tried to bring to this series would be erased, in favor of something meant to simultaneously appease both tenderqueers and redditors, two sects of the fandom most responsible for the aforementioned harassment.

luckily, that really doesn't seem to be the case!

to your worry that James Roach was made director because he's "less problematic," i'll just say that's entirely the wrong way to look at it. it's not like WP (such that it even still exists) were cruising to get HS2 back up and running. by all accounts, James is the only reason it's happening again in the first place. i can't stress enough just how small an operation this Homestuck business actually is (or, at least, was when i was involved). this is not a Huge Corporation making cynical cash grab decisions. this is someone who cares about the material pushing to get something made where otherwise there would be nothing. check the new About page, where the principles of the so-called Homestuck Independent Creative Union are laid out in plain terms. this is something the original hs2 team fought for, so for this new version to start from there as square one is huge and a good sign of the possible longevity of the project.

next, let's talk about the question of this new team erasing the legacy of the old one. Kate Mitchell is on the record that she was reached out to about this new hs2, approved it, and declined to be involved. i don't know if the other writers were reached out to, but i have no reason to believe they weren't. this is a tremendously important gesture of good faith and goes a long way towards easing some of these worries.

but let's look at the composition of the team itself. do you remember The Perfectly Generic Podcast? originally hosted by future hs2 writer Kate, pgen became a flashpoint for community discourse, often opening doors between official homestuck and homestuck fandom. what made that show special was that, rather than relying on the imo tired genre of the liveread, pgen focused on a different topic each episode and explored it with one or two qualified guests. Kate's goal with the show was to encourage a more adult and quasi-academic discussion of homestuck, of its successes and its failures. if you weren't there, the weight i'm putting on pgen might seem overblown (not least because you can't find it anywhere anymore except on the internet archive). but it's not! when they decisively criticized the wild contents of the Skaianet debacle in episode 19, Andrew listened and worked to bring a more diverse group of creators into the fold. in the months after the Epilogues were released, Andrew issued a statement through pgen on episode 52 about how the Epilogues are meant to create bridges and offramps for the post-canon fandom. it's an essential piece for understanding the epilogues and their relationship to fanworks! that it wasn't included as the author's introduction to the Epilogues in the book version remains to my mind an astonishing oversight, but whatever. point is, pgen mattered to the folks in charge.

so let's look again at the writing staff of this new crew. James Roach first guested on pgen in episode 7, and would go on to be a regular. Haven, who did the Vriska and Roxy sprites in Pesterquest (and probably more stuff i don't remember), guested in episodes 81 and 87. Miles guested on episode 87 as well (unless it's a different Miles, i'm not familiar with their work and ugh this damnable linkrot). Floral, creator of one of my favorite hs fanworks & huge godfeels influence Liminal Space, first guested on pgen in episode 47, and would go on to be a regular (including once during my tenure as host to talk about Jade). on the technical staff side, Kohi built the hs2 website and has remained a backend mainstay both on the WP side and on Vast Error.

all of which is to say, if you were looking for a crew to cynically erase the past and appease the haters, these probably aren't the folks that'd be at the top of your list. of course, if you *really* wanted to cynically erase the past and appease the haters, you wouldn't bother reviving hs2 in the first place!

and that's the crux of the matter here. what cash is there to grab? what clout could possibly be chased? i struggle to think of a decision less obviously profitable and popular than continuing hs2 with a new crew right where it left off. i have to believe this is happening because the people involved want to make it.

so, yeah, i'm cautiously optimistic. i like this crew, i like the contents of the first upd8, and i'm glad as hell it's not a reboot! i'm grateful that by reviving hs2, the hs:bc crew have instantly yanked the epilogues & the post-canon project back into relevance in the broader community. and i always liked hs2 a lot! i was excited to see where they were going! i'm really looking forward to seeing more YIFFY!!!!!

but the thing is, this won't be the hs2 i wanted. i know that, and i'm not expecting it. my greatest hope for hs:bc, for this crew, is that they get the chance to take up the reins and drive this thing in whatever direction they feel most passionate about. if that winds up looking like the hs2 that was originally planned, great-- but more than anything, i want everyone on this team to feel just as empowered to leave a profound and personal mark on this series as the original team did, as i did working on Pesterquest. i hope the outline changes! i hope they take some really wild swings! i want to be surprised!! i want to be challenged!!!

above all, i want them to have the chance to pick a course, sail it, and see it through to the end regardless of what the public thinks. they deserve the chance that the original crew didn't get.

i have plenty of bitterness and cynicism in my heart over the events and circumstances of 2019-20, but as far as i'm concerned it has no place here today. i would never, ever wish the trauma and stress of that era on anyone. let the fandom at large react in whatever way it will, but i want things to be different this time. this is a second chance-- not just for hs2/hs:bc, but for all of us. even people who hate homestuck post-canon! this is an opportunity for everyone to choose to be better this time, and to push back when others might squander that opportunity. this team is not a group of celebrities, not an abstract fiction on the other side of the world, they are human beings who took a job. they've earned the opportunity to do that job, and they deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity that was so often absent a few years ago.

as to your last point, about june egbert and the toblerone. i've been saying for years that andrew's confirmation of june was less "the granting of a wish" than it was "a spoiler shared without input from the creative team." that there is any doubt about june's providence in hs2 can only be attributed to willful, aggressive ignorance on the part of people who refuse to engage with the written word in any way other than plodding literalism. the original team didn't unveil june ~immediately~ because they didn't think of june as a wish, they thought of her as a character in an ongoing story who needed time to develop naturally. i have never not felt entirely crazy about how thick everyone has been about this!

but will the new team make june canon? obviously i have no way of knowing for sure, but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that probably the answer is "yes, when they're good and goddamned ready." just, please, for the love of god, don't go after every upd8 like "where's june? where's june? why hasn't june yet????" this was one of the worst results of the toblerone spoiler and it put INSANE pressure on the hs2 team. so just... just let this story be what it is. let this new team make the homestuck continuation they want to make.

The Pitt S1 E10 "one must imagine sisyphus happy" / running up that hill