All Hail The Glow Cloun

so I don't know how long you've been around in Homestuck fandom but there was a point during one of the early hiatuses, before the alpha kids and everything were introduced where a post-game theory that spawned a lot of fic was that everyone would just sorta.

Get dropped back into their original universes like nothing ever happened.

Like obviously that got jossed to hell and back, but honestly I kind of adored the concept.

So the fic there goes,

The trolls get dumped back on alternia. Everything sucks. They have a couple perigees before ascension and Karkat spends nearly all of it freaking the fuck out because, y'know.

And ascension comes around. Gamzee has a plan, you see. He's been doing some reading. Things are so much clearer now. It's so much easier to make sense of things sober.

Because palemates are sacred. He doesn't know how he missed these passages before. Must've been pretty fucked up. Anyhow, palemates are sacred and good as family, and anyone who lays claw on family, rust to tyrian, the church horde will fuck that person up.

So all Gamzee has to do is get Karkat onboard the church fleet and he'll be fine. This is a "Karkat gets adopted by the cult of the Mirthful messiah's fic."

Karkat obv thinks this is a stupid idea but he's gonna die one way or the other so~

And then they get on-fleet and Gamzee is called to see the grand highood who's descendant he is, and Kurloz is Very Sad that Gamzee doesn't have a palemate with him because Karkat is gonna be in hiding until they can get him registered as Gamzee's moirail.

And then Gamzee meets Kurloz's moirail, the best-kept secret in the church fleet. Because Kankri fucking Vantas is not only not executed, he's painted fucking Mirthful and has been spending the last several hundred sweeps very gently guiding the church and by extension the entire empire into a kinder, gentler form. Meanwhile Kurloz has spent the last several hundred sweeps very gently convincing Kankri that some trolls are annoying enough to deserve culling. Neither of them really get it, but they're doing their best. Imagine if a staunch conservative American politician fell head over heels with a hippie time-jumped from woodstock, but also killing your way out of a problem was socially acceptable as a form of conflict resolution.

Gamzee and Karkat, who knew both what alternia was like pre-sgrub, and Beforan Kankri and Kurloz, both exchange the shadiest fucking looks and decide to never mention it again. Gamzee has a few dozen crises of faith but this is a "we're ignoring all the shit I didn't like post-cascade" fic so they're not irreconcilable crises. He probably gets in a lot of theological arguments with Kurloz for the rest of his life.

Anyway the rest of that fic is about Karkat becoming Clown. I'm a little sad it won't get written at this point because it was fun.

The prequel is about Kurloz and Kankri and I swear I was planning it well before 2020. I stopped writing Homestuck or planning new fic in like 2018.

It was very much a riff on the lion and the mouse, playing into kankri-as-christ(flawed) and also one of my favorite tropes "you're my enemy but I have a duty of care and I'm not even going to do a shitty job because I have pride if nothing else and also I'm going to heal the fuck out of you out of spite."

So there's a plague sweeping alternia. Some kind of pox, like a full on bubonic thing. Alternian healthcare is almost as bad as American healthcare, even pre-ascension in the early centuries of the Condesce's reign, so it's spreading out of control and killing a disproportionate amount of lowbloods. I like the (head ?)canon that Kanaya has some amount of first aid/medic schooling, so translate that up to the Dolorosa having an amount of herbalism/hedgewitch/healing woman knowledge, translate that to Kankri being incredibly fucking stubborn about saving as many trolls as possible and getting himself a reputation as a miracle worker and prophet.

Until the Grand Highblood, newly risen to power, falls ill and none of his priests or medicullers are able to do anything to stop the progression of the disease until one of his younger Acolytes (Sirrah, not yet titled Infernal, one of my oldest and most loved fanclowns, a right bruiser butch bastard of a disaster lesbian and who I want to be when I grow up) in her desperation goes and does the thing Kurloz hasn't been able to do for sweeps, tracks down Kankri, and begs him to come and heal her brother.

Anyway that's the first chapter, the rest of it is Kurloz's recovery and Kankri trying to heal this asshole and also not get his stupid ass killed and also the fucker won't rest for five fucking minutes

There's a little coal inside that diamond, but adversity is the spice of life.

When I'm writing things there are pivot points where things change from canon, and GHB and Condy is one of them. In HoM (and pmuch any other fic I write that involves the church or the empire in some way) Kurloz and Meenah were a complicated sort of kismessitude/moirallegiance. They always start out that way, and it always comes down to two questions. When did Meenah ask Kurloz to put her before the church?(she nearly always does) and what was his choice when she finally asked?

In HoM she asked way, way too soon. They were both young, both freshly come to power, and Meenah didn't understand Kurloz's relationship with the church at all.

She saw the church as a resource, and Kurloz's position as Grand Highblood as an extremely successful con. She understood that he had to maintain a certain image to maintain control, but she didn't understand that he was sincerely and wholly devoted to his duties as the head of the church. He cared for her in their weird way of caring for each other, but she couldn't stand that the church would always come first.

She wanted to be his first and only priority, he brushed her off, she pushed harder, he broke ties with her.

When he broke contact, the empire was still growing. Church-controlled territory was valuable but relatively small, and extremely well-guarded by subjugglators, and the total conquest of alternia came much slower without purplebloods as the backbone of the imperial police state.

The sufferer's rebellion proceeded nearly unchanged, slightly more successful than in canon. Without the total control of the subjugglators, the condesce couldn't just destroy all mention of the rebellion wholesale. So more midbloods were swayed, more lowbloods remembered, and when the summoner's rebellion kicked off(20-30 sweeps before HoM), it was semi-successful, especially when a certain mutant-red soldier started climbing the ranks.

For the church, things looked a little different. A number of trolls decided living under church rule was better than living in an active warzone, so the smaller church territories were relatively prosperous until the empire decided they were too prosperous to ignore any further. About 10 sweeps before HoM starts, the church starts seeing active conflict, and while the church enclaves were full to bursting with powerful, dangerous trolls, they didn't have the sheer unlimited numbers to hold the line for more than a few decades. They might still be holding out though, if they hadn't lost Gamzee.

Gamzee was pretty fucked up when he was brought into the church, but Kurloz was enamored with the idea of a legacy. He'd never taken more than a passing interest in mentoring one of the church wrigglers until Gamzee. But Gamzee had been so fragile and so sick when he came to the church, and he'd been Kurloz's own descendent, Kurloz took a special interest in him, despite not being part of the Lusus clade. He grew up into a strong, highly trained laughsassin with schooling in diplomacy and administration as well as fighting. He was probably the equivalent of 18 when he was given command of the squad he was leading when he was captured. Losing Gamzee about broke Kurloz's spirit, and it was a heavy blow to morale for the rest of the church too, because he had been well-known and well-liked, and it had been a commonly accepted thing that he was being raised to succeed the current Grand Highblood. There were rescue attempts. Gamzee never found out about them. There were raids on seadweller strongholds that were expensive in terms of resources and lives. Ultimately, Kurloz was pushed into taking risks that he knew better than to take, and without Kurloz's leadership, the rest of the church crumbled in one genocidal sweep. Meenah gave purples the lime treatment, set herself up in the church territories as a benevolent dictator who saved the trolls there from brutal purpleblood slaughters, and when the other half of the war didn't go her way, gave the last purpleblood she had as a 'present' to Karkat. She doesn't really know trolls that don't act like she would, and she would have taken full advantage of a young, beautiful concubine gifted to her over peace talks. She'd been sure that Gamzee would have torn his throat out by the third day.

so I don't know how long you've been around in Homestuck fandom but there was a point during one of the early hiatuses, before the alpha kids and everything were introduced where a post-game theory that spawned a lot of fic was that everyone would just sorta.

Get dropped back into their original universes like nothing ever happened.

Like obviously that got jossed to hell and back, but honestly I kind of adored the concept.

So the fic there goes,

The trolls get dumped back on alternia. Everything sucks. They have a couple perigees before ascension and Karkat spends nearly all of it freaking the fuck out because, y'know.

And ascension comes around. Gamzee has a plan, you see. He's been doing some reading. Things are so much clearer now. It's so much easier to make sense of things sober.

Because palemates are sacred. He doesn't know how he missed these passages before. Must've been pretty fucked up. Anyhow, palemates are sacred and good as family, and anyone who lays claw on family, rust to tyrian, the church horde will fuck that person up.

So all Gamzee has to do is get Karkat onboard the church fleet and he'll be fine. This is a "Karkat gets adopted by the cult of the Mirthful messiah's fic."

Karkat obv thinks this is a stupid idea but he's gonna die one way or the other so~

And then they get on-fleet and Gamzee is called to see the grand highood who's descendant he is, and Kurloz is Very Sad that Gamzee doesn't have a palemate with him because Karkat is gonna be in hiding until they can get him registered as Gamzee's moirail.

And then Gamzee meets Kurloz's moirail, the best-kept secret in the church fleet. Because Kankri fucking Vantas is not only not executed, he's painted fucking Mirthful and has been spending the last several hundred sweeps very gently guiding the church and by extension the entire empire into a kinder, gentler form. Meanwhile Kurloz has spent the last several hundred sweeps very gently convincing Kankri that some trolls are annoying enough to deserve culling. Neither of them really get it, but they're doing their best. Imagine if a staunch conservative American politician fell head over heels with a hippie time-jumped from woodstock, but also killing your way out of a problem was socially acceptable as a form of conflict resolution.

Gamzee and Karkat, who knew both what alternia was like pre-sgrub, and Beforan Kankri and Kurloz, both exchange the shadiest fucking looks and decide to never mention it again. Gamzee has a few dozen crises of faith but this is a "we're ignoring all the shit I didn't like post-cascade" fic so they're not irreconcilable crises. He probably gets in a lot of theological arguments with Kurloz for the rest of his life.

Anyway the rest of that fic is about Karkat becoming Clown. I'm a little sad it won't get written at this point because it was fun.

The prequel is about Kurloz and Kankri and I swear I was planning it well before 2020. I stopped writing Homestuck or planning new fic in like 2018.

It was very much a riff on the lion and the mouse, playing into kankri-as-christ(flawed) and also one of my favorite tropes "you're my enemy but I have a duty of care and I'm not even going to do a shitty job because I have pride if nothing else and also I'm going to heal the fuck out of you out of spite."

So there's a plague sweeping alternia. Some kind of pox, like a full on bubonic thing. Alternian healthcare is almost as bad as American healthcare, even pre-ascension in the early centuries of the Condesce's reign, so it's spreading out of control and killing a disproportionate amount of lowbloods. I like the (head ?)canon that Kanaya has some amount of first aid/medic schooling, so translate that up to the Dolorosa having an amount of herbalism/hedgewitch/healing woman knowledge, translate that to Kankri being incredibly fucking stubborn about saving as many trolls as possible and getting himself a reputation as a miracle worker and prophet.

Until the Grand Highblood, newly risen to power, falls ill and none of his priests or medicullers are able to do anything to stop the progression of the disease until one of his younger Acolytes (Sirrah, not yet titled Infernal, one of my oldest and most loved fanclowns, a right bruiser butch bastard of a disaster lesbian and who I want to be when I grow up) in her desperation goes and does the thing Kurloz hasn't been able to do for sweeps, tracks down Kankri, and begs him to come and heal her brother.

Anyway that's the first chapter, the rest of it is Kurloz's recovery and Kankri trying to heal this asshole and also not get his stupid ass killed and also the fucker won't rest for five fucking minutes

There's a little coal inside that diamond, but adversity is the spice of life.