06-2024 Writer Commentary

JAMES, Director: Hello and welcome to the writer’s commentary for this month. What month is it. Time is meaningless. I am in a HS:BC meeting right now and Floral’s mic keeps cutting out and it's always at the most important part of the sentence. “I think it's really important how Roxy-.............................. and I think Rose didn’t-................... She really took- ...................... Jane- .............................. at that point.”

FLORAL, censored: I knoooooow it’s so bad ToT. Everyday is a struggle for me.

MILES, Elden Lord: I’m popping into this commentary almost an entire week after the aforementioned meeting... maybe time IS meaningless.  What’s not meaningless is this month’s updates.  Let’s get into them, shall we?

MILES: Imagine you’re deep into a gaming sesh, tummy rumbling, victim of a blockade because of a war you have and want nothing to do with, and your breastest bro has finally promised you some sweet, sweet relief in the form of much needed gamer fuel.  Imagine the joy in your heart as you hear him knocking at your door.  Now imagine how that joy would curdle as you found yourself face to face not with a handsome DILF, fast food in hand, but some guy who can’t take a hint and a psycho you haven’t seen since you were 16, who is still 16, and they’re both dressed for the renaissance fair.

All that is to say that I think Sollux’s reaction is pretty warranted here.

JAMES: One thing we all agree upon is that Sollux just needs to keep being there. He’s just trying to live a normal life and everyone keeps bothering him. Sollux is passing time until one of the many baddies in his life comes by and enriches him in some way. One question I get about Sollux all the time is “how old is he?”

That's a great question. I don’t know. I don’t think he knows either.

MILES: I liked this bit a lot.  There’s been a lot of logistical fuckery both behind the scenes in the “writer’s room” (we do not have a room, give us more money and one day we could maybe afford a room) and in-universe around like... where everyone actually Is, where they’re Moving, what they’re Doing, so it seemed only right to have some of the characters fall victim to that confusion.  There are some stories where everyone seems to magically know what everyone else is doing at all times, and it felt nice to contrast that by allowing John and Roxy to share a moment of guilt over the Classic Homestuck Guardian Gaffe of letting your kids get into extremely dangerous situations without any supervision.

JAMES:  Well like all good children they’re supposed to be stuck at home.

MILES: And here we finally are.

There’s been so, so much buildup to this fucking thing, so we wanted its introduction to be suitably grand, busting out of its burlap sack and the very confines of the page itself as if to say “I AM FUCKING IMPORTANT”.  And be assured, dear reader: even though The Plot Point itself is just the little dot in the middle, it is.

It’s also really, really fucking cool.  Kim was the main architect of the stabilization-machine’s design, and he did a fantastic job putting together what Callie pretty succinctly describes as a masterpiece of “cherubic-lalondian tech”.  As they later mention, much of the design of this device in-universe was compelled by strange, inexplicable premonitions that they shared with Roxy, neither of them fully aware of its purpose.  It must have been quite the dev-cycle, but unfortunately we probably aren’t going to hear too much more about it.

MILES: Thus begins Callie’s infodump.  Vriska, for her part, goes from that oh-too-relatable feeling of sweet, sweet vindication to the creeping realization that for all Callie’s expositing, neither they nor anyone else actually knows why they even brought Vriska here in the first place.

On the writing end, it was kind of funny trying to jam in as much dialogue as I possibly could about things we basically already know for the setup to that reveal.  Obviously Callie is just doing their job in trying to get Vriska up to speed, but I think we’ve all sort of had that sort of grating experience where someone starts lecturing you and it becomes clear to you that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.  Even I got sick of it; I was originally going to try and write DOUBLE the amount that actually appears in this section, but I decided to edit it way down because nobody in-universe or out of it actually wants to hear all that shit.

We don’t need a talker.  We need a DO-ER.

MILES: THE [S] PAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God it felt good to get this out.  We may have mentioned this somewhere, but originally, this was just going to be a series of (still very cool) gifs.  But when we saw it all together, we thought “fuck it, let’s go for broke”.  We wanted to measure our abilities, as it were, and Kim blew this shit out of the water yet again.

I could say so much more, but everyone probably wants me to shut up.  So I will.  I will shut up, for one topic, and then I will immediately start talking again.  Other writers, take it away!

JAMES: No you basically said it all there. The track uses a handful of other hyper-relevant themes. I want to say it was on purpose. I talked about some of the choices in other places, but for these short little cutscene style [S] pages I thought it would be cool to do some sound effects. Homestuck doesn’t have many. This was an issue that came up during hiveswap production all those years ago. We tried to do it homestuck style and for short ones like this it kind of just doesn’t work. Maybe we can find a balance.

Also nobody ever tells you how inconvenient it is to type brackets all the time I’m going back to calling them flashes.

MILES: I told you I’d be back.  Anyway, here we get back into the fact that nobody knows what’s supposed to be happening here.  This is sort of an artifact of taking over the writing of this project from another team (although we did have access to the original outline), but I think it made a lot of sense to us that a character tucked away in the Candy timeline (even guided by mysterious visions and borrowed intuitions [borrowed from whom, I wonder...?]) wouldn’t necessarily be able to wrap their head around the pure, potent purpose of The Plot Point wow that’s a lot of P.  I’m P-ing all over the place.

MILES: This last bit with Sollux was fun.  

Also I have a confession to make, which is that for a very long time (I’m talking over a decade) I wasn’t really all that big a fan of Sollux.  Didn’t get the hype.  Over the past year, though, I’ve had a chance to actually write him out a lot more, and the love has burgeoned within me like a beautiful flower, watered rather infrequently by Mountain Dew: Baja Blast and fertilized with ground up crunchwraps.  I think the idea of this dude who is sort of marooned in time and space shrugging and accepting that his lot in life is to hang around and play video games while his girlfriend travels through the multiverse, ignoring all the stressful shit outside, is just very funny.  He lives a life that is in a lot of ways pretty normal compared to all the drama going on around him, and being able to ground the rest of the cast with arguments about snack rights and whether it’s xenophobic or reverse-xenophobic for an Alternian troll to make fly-by-night assumptions about humans using chips for sex rituals is a lovely role in the ecosystem of this story.  It’s not all he’s destined for, but it’s been enough for me to come around on the guy.  I hope he gets his delivery, someday...

JAMES: I think that happens with every character. Maybe if I did what every teenager asked and put Latula in I’d fall in love with her character. Could this finally be such-and-such’s time to shine? So-and-so’s big chance? Almost assuredly no.

MILES: Ah fuck, we forgot to write it!  Ahhhhh.  Oh man.  Shit.  I guess we’ll never know.

MILES: Oh sweet, nevermind!  Looks like Al is gonna show us!  Everybody say “Thank you, Al!”  Say it.  Say it out loud, right now.  I’ll know if you didn’t, and so will she.

JAMES: thank you, Al

MILES: She doesn’t seem all that happy about it, though... I wonder why?

JAMES: with these last few updates I feel like I have less to say in general. I just want to let them simmer, you know? A lot has been cooking and it is finally time to just sit down and eat.