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GODFEELS DOUBLE ALBUM RETURNS

after a brief reprieve from the emotional roller coaster that was The Party, track A2 is here with a vengeance to teach us a thing or two about the origins of Harbinger Silverbark.

read it here!!

godfeelscanon

And so continues the neverending tale of...

we're back! at long last, godfeels 3.2A continues in earnest with track A2: "let me show you my garden." as the title might imply, we're finally getting a look at the EWL from the inside! what do you think so far? how about ████, huh? isn't ███ a piece of work?

a few words on the release schedule. unlike with the bridge, we're not setting strict dates or anything like that. the goal is to more or less mirror the update schedule of homestuck: beyond canon, aiming for one or two updates per month on a strictly "when it's ready" basis. the good news is, a lot of A2 is pretty close to ready! and it's going to be a lot of fun. we're working in a really unique register here, and i think it's going to open up Silverbark in a big way for folks.

so, if you want to get updates on when new chapters release and chat about them with other readers, join our discord! and if you have questions, thoughts, comments, or complaints about godfeels, feel free to hit up our askbox.

see you in the next one...

#godfeels #homestuck

Creep asker here: It’s from the chapter of Divergence Syndrome where Terezi and Dave get high together, chapter 6

AHA. so, unfortunately, i don't think i had a specific song in mind for this moment, but i was thinking of a specific scene. indulge me in a bit of a tangent here. i used to listen to a lot of east coast emo as a teen/early twentysomething, and a lot of those guys turned out to be raving sex pests. my favorite band for a very long time was Brand New, whose last three albums especially came out at really important moments in my life and influenced my art in much the same way that Car Seat Headrest does now (christ i'm such a stereotype). then in 2017 they released Science Fiction, and lead singer/songwriter Jesse Lacey got turbo me-too'd. there are ~problematic artists~ whose work i can still engage with, but in Brand New's case it completely ruined their music for me. after what i rationalized for years as a sort of archetypal persona inhabiting Lacey's lyrics was revealed to be just, like, him as a guy writing what he knows, that became all i could hear anymore. i adore the instrumentation and experimental arrangements of their later albums, but SO many of their songs are about longing for missed connections in an obsessive, often possessive way, sometimes to the point of religious crisis. which is hardly abnormal for a mainstream rock band, but with the context of the callout it's impossible for me not to hear those lyrics and wonder... is he talking about an underage girl he flirted with on tour once?

so, yeah, with Dave listening to Linkin Park earlier, i always imagined him putting on like Brand New or Taking Back Sunday or Finch. i wish i could tell you i wrote that scene thinking of Creep by Radiohead. but i have a horrible confession to make: i never really got into Radiohead. i tried listening to OK Computer back in the day but it didn't do anything for me, and i was the sort of person who let my first impression of a band completely define my engagement with them. HOWEVER. it very plausibly could have been Creep by Radiohead. it certainly fits the sonic profile that Terezi describes in that snippet better than a lot of emo stuff. who fucking knows what that goat was thinking man she's always just doin stuff

#godfeels #homestuck #godfeels askbox #radiohead #emo scene #dave strider music taste

something is happening here but you don't know what it is

#godfeels #homestuck #???

Please settle a debate between Me and My girlfriend. When Terezi said Dave put on a song of a long dead white guy crooning about how the girl he was stalking didn’t notice him, was that a reference to Creep by Radiohead?

it kills me to say this but you're gonna have to remind me what specific fic/chapter this line comes from. i have a vague recollection of what you might be referring to but a wide ctrl+f of the series hasn't turned up any results...

nervousyoungpup

went to the circus egotistica and all i got was divorced

yaoiwizard8

wuf wuf

personal-pumpkins

godfeels terezi monologue dequirkified

It's like you had a knife in your chest your entire life, but you thought it was just a part of you. And for all you knew, that was just how everyone felt. Always in pain, blood leaking everywhere. And every now and then someone would point at the knife and say, "Wow, that looks bad."

And you would say, "No, it's fine." And every now and then you'd hear someone talk about having a knife in the chest. And you would say, "Well, that kind of sounds like me, but it's probably not. I'm fine."

And you would go every day walking a little slower, speaking a little quieter, never feeling rested, watching everyone around you get by with ease. And you would ask, "Why can't I keep up? What's wrong with me? Am I just broken?" And you hated yourself for not being as good as them. Because obviously you were fine, right? You had to be, because the alternative was too much to consider.

But then one day it finally hits you. Someone says exactly the right thing, or you overhear exactly the right conversation and you realize "No. Actually, I'm not fine at all."

And you look down at the knife in your chest and you think, "Was it really this the whole time?? Could it really be that easy?"

And as you pull it out, you relive every little thing you thought was your fault. And it hits you that you thought you were fine all those years because you didn't know what else to call it. And then when it's out, and you finally see it for what it is. And you just get so angry.

"Why did it take me this long to realize I'd been stabbed?? Why didn't anyone say anything??"

And as you start to heal, you realize that you were the only one standing in your way. Because you were too afraid to admit that something was wrong.

But it's not your fault. It's no one's fault. It's just a sad, stupid, unfortunate thing that happened. And it isn't fair, and it hurts a lot. But at least you got the fucking knife out of your chest.

And the thing is, as much as it hurts right now...

I promise you it only gets better from here.

WHEN upd8

A2 fell on the backburner for a while due to life circumstances. but we're currently working diligently on a different godfeels project that'll be seeing the light of day in the near future. one might even call it an "upd8".

:)

#godfeels #upd8?#w8 and see kids :)

hms-no-fun

SURPRISE! it's time for chapter 5 of my other homestuck fanfic, Three of a Perfect Pair! what, you thought i'd abandon my road trip au forever? get real.

our intrepid trio at last arrives at their destination, but not without having one last awkward interaction with a clueless old guy first.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

SURPRISE godfeels upd8!

A2 continues with the first half of Verse 1, where our heroes wait impatiently for a certain harbinger to give them direction.

READ IT HERE!

#godfeels #homestuck #upd8

agent-xd

landscape from godfeels.

hms-no-fun

So, since the most recent update takes the form of a transcription of an episode of witchkind genesis, which we know to be EWL internal propaganda, how much can we trust it? It lying does not technically break the ashkiac (cannot spell that) framing device) as long as in some casual sense the episode was produced before the record began to play.

so, here's what i'll say. the akashic record plays as what i've been calling a paramniscient epistolary. which is to say, a story told in documents that also has a transmedial omniscient wandering eye that sees more than what is strictly contained in the documents. i wouldn't call A2 chorus 1 a transcription (beyond the very first section which is clearly "last time on" narration) so much as a novelization. there are choices being made about silverbark's internality that, at least in my opinion, go beyond what you'd expect to see in if this were just a straightforward transcription of what happened in the anime. it should be understood that legion edutainment like witchkind genesis are drawn from extensive interviews with the subjects involved, materials to which the producers of the show would have extensive access.

the question of whether and how much these adaptations bend (or break) the truth is a subject we'll be actively interrogating as the story progresses, but to press my hand on the scale: you're meant to take this as an approximately accurate representation of what really happened. it is not in the nature of an akashic record to present lies as if they are the truth, regardless of whether or not those lies were created "before" the record started playing (there is no "before" because it is playing outside of time, space, and all of the other aspects). if it is showing us something, it's because that something is the closest reasonable representation of a "perfectly objective record of the truth" that falls within the boundaries of the record's own personal stylistic tastes. it is supposed to be a concept album, after all.

put in more vulgar terms: i'm not gonna turn around and say "actually completely different things happened during this adventure and you were totally lied to" sometime down the line, because frankly that just doesn't interest me much as a storyteller. right now i mostly just want to explore silverbark's backstory, and believe me when i say we just don't have time to faff about making essential plot hooks out of every potential falsehood in literally her first encounter with the legion.

sam-keeper

I sort of come at this from another perspective. any documentary is inevitably going to have a point of view, any reconstruction has to make decisions. most importantly, anything can be seen as propaganda if you're disinclined towards its messaging.

like, the EWL as a matter of policy creates narrative records of its own history. we do this too, in the form of pbs documentaries, or npr history podcasts, or The Smithsonian. I suppose you could argue that this is different because there's a presumption of independence as opposed to open direction from state, like, political commissars or whatever, but like let's be real, even before the Trump administration started taking an axe to things in the Smithsonian, every few years there's been a controversy about how they neutralize the works of queer artists, for example. there's a lot of assumption in the west that some societies produce "propaganda" and others just produce "art" or "journalism" or "documentary", and I guess I want to push back on the idea that there's a firm line or that just because the EWL has a state apparatus for producing edutainment about its own history, that means it's more propagandistic or even remotely as propagandistic as a Prager U video.

the creators do come in with certain assumptions: that the heroic interventionism of Silverbark is positive, that certain narrative roles (hero, villain, familiar) have a weight to them that goes beyond the merely social, that Padua's schtick is really cool rather than really ridiculous, that Silverbark was right to join the Legion, &c. if I was looking for points of narratorial unreliability that's first and foremost what I'd be interrogating, I think. if I wasn't a SHAMELESS SHILL FOR THE LEGION!

how all this intersects with the Record... ahh I really have no clue, I never quite follow the mechanics no matter how many times Sarah explains it to me

hms-no-fun

So, since the most recent update takes the form of a transcription of an episode of witchkind genesis, which we know to be EWL internal propaganda, how much can we trust it? It lying does not technically break the ashkiac (cannot spell that) framing device) as long as in some casual sense the episode was produced before the record began to play.

so, here's what i'll say. the akashic record plays as what i've been calling a paramniscient epistolary. which is to say, a story told in documents that also has a transmedial omniscient wandering eye that sees more than what is strictly contained in the documents. i wouldn't call A2 chorus 1 a transcription (beyond the very first section which is clearly "last time on" narration) so much as a novelization. there are choices being made about silverbark's internality that, at least in my opinion, go beyond what you'd expect to see in if this were just a straightforward transcription of what happened in the anime. it should be understood that legion edutainment like witchkind genesis are drawn from extensive interviews with the subjects involved, materials to which the producers of the show would have extensive access.

the question of whether and how much these adaptations bend (or break) the truth is a subject we'll be actively interrogating as the story progresses, but to press my hand on the scale: you're meant to take this as an approximately accurate representation of what really happened. it is not in the nature of an akashic record to present lies as if they are the truth, regardless of whether or not those lies were created "before" the record started playing (there is no "before" because it is playing outside of time, space, and all of the other aspects). if it is showing us something, it's because that something is the closest reasonable representation of a "perfectly objective record of the truth" that falls within the boundaries of the record's own personal stylistic tastes. it is supposed to be a concept album, after all.

put in more vulgar terms: i'm not gonna turn around and say "actually completely different things happened during this adventure and you were totally lied to" sometime down the line, because frankly that just doesn't interest me much as a storyteller. right now i mostly just want to explore silverbark's backstory, and believe me when i say we just don't have time to faff about making essential plot hooks out of every potential falsehood in literally her first encounter with the legion.

GODFEELS DOUBLE ALBUM RETURNS

after a brief reprieve from the emotional roller coaster that was The Party, track A2 is here with a vengeance to teach us a thing or two about the origins of Harbinger Silverbark.

read it here!!

#godfeels #homestuck #upd8 #jade harley #silverbark

hms-no-fun

So when characters in godfeels say ‘all-mother’ do they mean skaia?

so it is specifically Lenore who says "all-mother" and that's because she comes from Repiton, the setting of Vast Error, where many trolls worship or at least passively acknowledge Kheparia, the all-mother of existence. Lenore also makes reference to the black depths, the toxic polluted oceans of Repiton filled with murder-frenzied leviathans. she also mentions a couple different soda brands, which in Vast Error are implied to be their equivalent to psychiatric medication. so in B1 when she has this exchange:

she's basically saying "you are mentally unwell and you need help," in the most derogatory fashion imaginable. actually no it's Lenore, she could be WAY more derogatory than that even at 13.

anyway yeah her referring to the all-mother is basically like any of us saying "thank god" or whatever

hms-no-fun

What the fuck was up with that worm, anyway

what the fuck WAS up with that worm?

what the hell, let's talk about the worm. here's the first scene involving said worm, for those who haven't read godfeels:

basically, at this point in the story, "J" is the residual pre-transition selfhood of June Egbert whose only remaining characteristic is suicidal ideation personified. this chapter, "the shadows left behind," takes place in ideaspace, specifically in June's mind, giving us a glimpse in the bizarre happenstances of his as-yet unacknowledged headmates. the arc of this chapter is all about "J" slowly realizing that they want to live, ultimately fighting against apocalyptic forces to achieve self-instantiation. i joke that they are the secret shonen anime protagonist of godfeels. anyway.

i've gotten a lot of questions about the worm over the years. it shows up one or two more times in the chapter to provide similarly off-putting philosophical dialogue, and then is never mentioned again. people wonder if the worm is a headmate, or a scion of antagonist Epigone, or some other weird thing.

the truth is, i wrote the little bastard to be ambiguous. certainly there's worm imagery elsewhere enough to compel some Connections. but everyone gets so fixated on the worm, they miss the general fabric of ideas that it exists as part of. so let's start from "you're bored and talking to yourself through me" and work our way out from there.

there's a running gag with J about "putting words in people's mouths." it happens a couple times this chapter. here's the first:

to my mind, this is partly a result of the blending between two headmates sharing a brain, and partly an extension of the powers of being A Narrator. Vriska, notably, is not able to this back at J. seemingly no one is, at least not without a lot of help. in saturday 2, when Epigone is making everyone sing the birthday song, J is the only one who shows any resistance. this notion shows up throughout the circus egotistica as well. i mean, really, this facet of J's character is kind of the entire reason that anybody survives the events of chapter 8.

let's remember that waaaaaay back in godfeels 1, when June kind of has a suicide attempt, she does so under the assumption that she won't just die but be retconned from reality altogether, so that no one will remember that she ever existed at all. J is June's suicidal ideation, you recall. so what happens when a person who wants to erase themself from reality decides they want to live? the full answer to that question is a story we're still in the process of telling, but i think it's safe to say that the inverse of erasing yourself from everyone's mind is imposing yourself on everyone's mind. this idea is drawing from a single line in the Epilogues that i can't be bothered to track down right now, where it's implied that John's retcon powers extend far beyond what we understand and might include manipulating reality itself (something that's demonstrated through him forming silly shapes in the clouds at the end of Candy, if i remember correctly).

but let's pare the scope back a little here. there's also the scene in chapter 8 where J is trying to figure out how to un-spaghettify Dave and Dirk (it's a long story), who have been rendered into little more than taut red and orange strings that extend infinitely into the abyss of June's mind. out of ideas, J starts talking through the problem by putting words in their mouths:

but they're not really just talking to themself, are they? even though J knows they're not real, it's like these snap personifications sort of get away from them by tapping into some essential essence of the person they're imitating. like, that doesn't not feel like Dave and Dirk talking, you know?

which gets us at last back around to the worm. what is the worm? well, a worm is a creature that burrows into the earth, exchanging nutrients with the soil. we know that symbols carry real weight in ideaspace, it being a realm of pure metaphor and all. i think it's entirely possible that by imagining a worm, and then putting words in that worm's mouth, J somehow conjures a verbal window into the metaphorical soil of their own mind. into the most primordial of truths about June's metaphysical relationship to retcon. about life and death, hope and despair, yadda yadda yadda. it never stops being J just talking to themself, but that doesn't mean that something else isn't speaking through them as well. "the dream in the dark place" is a pretty loaded phrase in godfeels, after all.

does that answer your question? do you feel like you know what the fuck was up with that worm now? i hope you're just more confused. either way, you're welcome.

godfeelscanon

godfeels upd8!

the party is over. all that remains is for a few final stragglers to find their way home.

read it here

godfeelscanon

what a strange and emotional night that turned out to be.

now: It's Time To Go To Space :)

#godfeels #homestuck

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