#alphi apexis

[godfeelscanon]

Hiya, now I am almost certain this will be greatly expanded on in the future, but I wanted to ask about the diversity of Universe Engine sessions, and how much they can range from one another. Now, we as homestuck fans are aware of the differences caused by player inputs. As well as tertiary differences such as quest bed v. quest cocoon.

In godfeels canon, how far does this extend? Do kingdoms sometimes resemble corporations? Instead of planets, do lands exist sort of as one large plane? More succinctly, my question would be what are the fundamental similarities between UE sessions as you interpret them?

I can understand you may want to keep the powder dry on this but I'd love to see your thoughts

with love, "why is june white"-anon

the big point of reference here is vast error. in a lot of early fanworks, the rules of sburb/sgrub were taken to be universal (or omniversal as the case may be). vast error breaks the mold by presenting a version of the game that operates on an entirely different set of logics. where sburb has you move your entire house into the medium before the reckoning, VE's game has its cast move the entire planet of repiton into the medium. classpects operate somewhat differently, the game constructs are far more varied, and that's just what i can remember from not having read it in a couple years. this sparked my imagination as someone who can't help but start drawing conclusions from two entire data points. what does it mean that this is still metanarratively "the same game" as sburb despite so many consequential differences?

this was the original animating idea behind the development of the extracosmic witchkind legion. a society of outcasts and orphans from the universe engine, whose goal broadly is to help others who are trapped in sessions of their own. on paper, every single character in the ewl is a survivor of somebody's fan session/mspfa. it hasn't really come up much yet and might not be wholly feasible to commit to to the extent i imagine it, but in my head it's not even that there are lots of different species and shapes and sizes of people but that they're also all drawn in completely different ways. you get a hint of this with the upsilon sprites, where Lenore is drawn without hard outlines to match xamag's style in vast error. Dana, meanwhile, has kind of an akira toriyama look to her. Alphi is sort of a fraggle muppet. and Edie is a dog.

so this naturally extends to the universe engine itself. i imagine that there are certain pillars that remain true in most (not necessarily all) sessions. in the same way that trolls and humans are "keystone species" that naturally and independently emerge throughout the extracosmos, things like sprites and denizens and alchemy and skaia are pretty consistent. think of it in darwinian terms. there are tens of thousands of bird species that are all wildly different in form, but biologically most of them are pretty similar. zoom back farther and think of how virtually every living thing on this earth shares a common ancestor and, as such, has most of the same skeletal structures, just squashed and stretched by evolution over time. i imagine that the universe engine operates on a similar logic, with each subsequent generation of universe inheriting traits from prior versions (think of how the warhammer of vrillyhoo is a relic of an ancient session from a whole other universe & species that predates all the trolls). metatextually you could probably say that the common ancestor of the universe engine is homestuck, but that's only true from our limited perspective. the big bang occurred so long ago and the paradox is so infinitely complex that cosmic natural selection has occurred quintillions of times to the point where a single seed has grown into an entire forest bigger than everything that's ever existed put together.

given this, the job of the EWL is to have a broad understanding of the constants and variables inherent to the universe engine. there are very specific rules about what sessions they can intervene on, how many people can be sent in, and how much knowledge they can gather about the session before going in, but i'm afraid that's the stuff i want to keep the powder dry on, to borrow that wonderful turn of phrase. suffice it to say, the rankscipline system exists in part to delineate hyper-specific varieties of expertise, such that squads can be dynamically assembled and balanced to most effectively respond to the conditions within any given session.

you're right that this will be greatly expanded on in the future, though i must warn you: if you're hoping godfeels will be more specific about the rules and regulations of sburb than homestuck was, you're gonna have a bad time. there will be a lot more information but there will never be An Answer, if that makes sense. the EWL only exists as it does because homestuck left so much room for interpretation, it's the metaphysical linchpin of this entire operation. my goal, as writer, is to expand the walls of the garden and increase the ways and methods by which we might explore it. hard and fast rules will almost always have some kind of exception.

[hms-no-fun]

what's your opinion on fictives of characters in godfeels who haven't really broadly been definied yet? obviously i doubt you'd be judgmental based on other opinions you've expressed but id really like to hear your perspective on this

it's been interesting, that's for sure! i was fully prepared for folks to either be disinterested in or actively dislike my OCs, so for them to not only be broadly liked but also introjected to multiple systems frankly came as a really vindicating surprise! one of the reasons i parceled out info about the upsilons so slowly over 3.1 was to give them a psychological presence in the reader’s mind from a distance so that, when they became an actual narrative presence, they’d have a context within which to understand and theorize about them. apparently it worked! so that’s cool.

i’ll start by saying that my approach to fictives across the board is pretty much the same as my approach to any other fan in the discord. i may have written the source material, and i may know things about these characters that no one else will for a long time, but the characters i’m writing aren’t the fictives in my readership. does that make sense? my knowledge of Edie, for instance, doesn’t have much at all to do with any given Edie fictive because said fictive already exists; and if that Edie fictive exists, i have to assume it’s because something in the text resonated enough to allow for her introjection; thus that fictive, IN MY NON-AUTHORITATIVE OPINION, is a snapshot of that particular system’s (or someone therein’s) conception of Edie at the moment of her introjection. and that’s really fucking cool actually???? like, just from a purely practical standpoint, you have NO idea how useful it is for me as a writer to have such direct barometers of the audience’s perception of a character at any given moment in their story! the fact that there are so many upsilon fictives running around makes me really happy & excited to finally get to 3.2, not least because generally y’all aren’t too far off characterization-wise. which, you know, is one of those things that tells me i’ve done my job well and that i’m on the right track with my schemes and machinations... and that’s the least important thing i get out of the arrangement!

sure, it can be surreal reading back over a server channel where one Lenore, two Edies, two Danas, and half a dozen Junes are all theorizing about Silverbark’s behavior amongst themselves, but would it really be a materially different circumstance if they weren’t fictives? i don’t blink when a bunch of furries start awooing in a server i’m in. i don’t even blink when furries start awooing in real life! i mean, god, what’s the alternative? redditors?? fuck that shit, i’ll take the plural homestuck queers any day of the week.

there have been times when i’ve seen a fictive just be completely outright wrong about a characterization or detail, and i’ve really had to resist the urge to correct them. like what am i gonna do, say “you’re wrong about who you are”??? it wouldn’t just be a spoiler to correct them in most cases, it’d also be... idk, insulting? at least it seems like it would be insulting. i’m certainly insulted when cis people tell me i’m not performing femininity correctly! and there is a part of me who finds that worrisome. the truth come out eventually, you know? and there’s some stuff we might not be getting to for another year or more. what happens when a fictive solidifies their sense of self around a misconception that doesn’t get disproven for months and months?? what do i do if a fictive insists that my interpretation of their source character is wrong when they’ve lived as that character for a while?????

these are the kinds of breathless paranoid questions that always come up among artists with or in a fandom. and there’s a reason for that, you know? when i first started the godfeels fanserver, i was EXTREMELY wary. plural folks, kinnies, obsessive fans, they’ve got a bad reputation for causing drama! or well, they do among artists who consider themselves Normal wink wink nudge nudge. but what i found the more time i spent in the fanserv was that, like every category of identity, there’s nothing inherent to plurality or fictivity that guarantees immaturity or emotional volatility. there’s a part of me that wants to point at how many plural folks in fandom circles are teens or in their early 20s, and that generally online drama is a result of adults and children being expected to share all of the same online spaces... but that youthfulness holds true for the godfeels community and i’ve found y’all to be a remarkably mature readership!

it’s not helpful to point at circumstances outside of one’s control as the reason somebody is “bad” or whatever. if the problem is cultural conservatism, or artistic malnutrition, or an individual trauma response, or a simple misunderstanding, or just outright vindictiveness, you address THOSE things. and it’s my responsibility as an artist who chose to create a central community hub for my readership to do my best in addressing any situations that might arise with empathy and compassion. frequent users of any community hub like a discord server develop habits based on the rules of the space and how they are/aren’t enforced. if for instance you go to the HSD [do not do this under any circumstances even as a joke], you’ll find that positive discussions about most fandom projects get swallowed up by ridicule almost immediately- and not just ridicule of the project in question, but often of the person who posted it too! this creates a self-perpetuating environment of hostility where the best way to get in the good graces of community leadership is to be an edgelord. for my money, that’s why the homestuck fandom is Like That.

i’ve tried to encourage the exact opposite of this, as inspired by the success of the late Perfectly Generic Podcast server (where the godfeels fanserv’s vibes-based rules are largely taken from, may she rest in peace), and i think that’s worked out well overall? because now when an issue arises within the community, more often than not the consistent users naturally de-escalate the situation! granted, the godfeels fandom as such isn’t particularly big, and the necessary wordcount buy-in to even GET to my OCs is high enough that it naturally selects out a lot of folks who might have caused problems, so this level of community stewardship is a whole hell of a lot easier to accomplish than it might be otherwise.

wow, this answer went way off the fucking rails. what the hell was i... oh yeah! you asked me my thoughts on fictives of characters we don’t know very well yet. here, let me answer that for you.

i think fictives are beautiful, and i wish them the world. my dearest hope for any fictive, regardless of what is Known about their source character, is that they grow beyond their lateral connection to the source material. not abandon it, necessarily! but what i find so existentially fascinating about fictives isn’t really all that removed from one of the major driving forces of godfeels: one’s capacity to become Yourself. who is Edie, or Dana, or Lenore, or Alphi? who were they at 13? at 21? at 29? compare the youngest self with the oldest self and you might not even be able to tell that they’re supposed to be the same character. one reason godfeels has become such an ensemble production is precisely because much of said ensemble has undergone some amount of change, and given homestuck’s obsession with The Ultimate Self i just find that too compelling to not explore at length.

so like, if a Dana fictive is out of character from my perspective, that’s great! in case it wasn’t clear from the text of chapter 8, i am Not A Fan of unchanging & all-consuming character archetypes. in point of fact, i believe that divergence is a virtue. i believe that identity is a buffet at a playground for everyone. i believe that any person who chooses to live truer to themself than they were raised to do is braver than every cop and every troop on planet earth. i believe that human culture is an ecology of change. i believe that deciding you are a Finished Person who has learned every important lesson and acquired every necessary skill is tantamount to taking up early residence in your own grave. so really, my dream is to live in a world where EVERY fictive is as spectacularly in or out of character as they like! the hope with the Risk/Dare & Angel Dirk chapters was to give all readers, but especially fictives, a context and toolset for handling divergence conceptually, philosophically, narratively, emotionally, personally. because i don’t think it’s just the characters of this story who compel introjection, but the nature of the text itself- so, by extension, all i want is for any given fictive to feel permitted to become whoever it is they might be now that they’ve left the source text. i would vastly prefer a legion of singularly feral Edies over a well-reasoned community consensus on what Is or Is Not in character, you know?

which isn’t to say that the facts don’t matter or that i dislike reasoned community discussion btw! i love close analysis and eager back-and-forths trading text snippets and piecing together the godfeels mysteries pepe silvia style. but i believe there is room for both. there must be.

so, uh, in short i guess: you’re doing great and i’m very proud of you. keep up the good work.

[hms-no-fun]

at what point did you consider the upsilon kids being a thing to put in the story? and also, what inspired their creation? were they characters originally intended for something else salvaged for this or were they all godfeels originals?

originally, gf3 as a whole and 3.2 in particular were meant to parallel and comment on homestuck^2, which is why we've arrived at these dual narratives of split parties out in space. after Yiffy's reveal in canon and the subsequently entirely predictable fandom explosion, another fan adventure popped up- Kittyquest. i haven't read much of it, but i could tell immediately that it wanted to present a version of "Jade's daughter" that was an immense departure from Yiffy in just about every way. considering my feelings on divergent interpretations of June, this only bolstered my sense that "Jade's daughter" carried a sort of chaotic metanarrative weight, like some kind of evolutionary wildcard building off of Jade's own origins as the "combo breaker" of the betas.

the gf3 prologue sets up a lot of the basics- Jade is keeping secrets from her friends, and she has an enemy named Dana who wants to find her daughter. i didn't know much about the upsilons yet besides the fact that i wanted to have a distinct group of kids who mirrored the omegas in hs2, and i knew that their story would largely play out in flashback. i was never entirely sure how important their story would be in the longterm, because my original plan was to keep a lot of this stuff sidelined until it became relevant. there were a lot of narrative arenas post 3.1 i had in mind that were initially meant to be fairly brief, in fact. it wasn't until my collaborators and i started discussing the possibilities of all these arenas (like the EWL, Samsaria, the Comet, & post-destruction Earth C among others) that we really started to understand the scope of what we could do with this story, IF we resolved to do it right.

i've said in much older asks that until we open up the fanserv and released chapter 8 part 1, i was pretty convinced that i'd finish 3.1 and then release my outline for 3.2 onwards and bid the whole thing an ignominious farewell. it was the readership's overwhelming embrace of 3.1's original elements including my OCs as well as my collaborators' unbridled enthusiasm for the project (for instance Julia, the Dana whisperer, is in the midst of writing a godfeels ttrpg based on the EWL. i did not ask her to do this, she just wanted to. i don't even enjoy ttrpgs!) that convinced me we could take this thing to the finish line.

so, okay, the upsilons. i didn't really have much of a plan for them until writing chapter 4, which as i've said in the past was a big turning point for the story. i needed a couple EWL characters to fill out the background and i needed to hint at some of the EWL's nastier tactics re: memory erasure, which is how we wound up with Burning Romeo and Lenore Lehart. Lenore was just gonna be A Person In The EWL, and maybe she'd be tech support for other characters later on. but as it became clear to me just how unsatisfying it felt to have Jade and Davepeta keep secrets and be effusive, i knew something had to be done. in a way you could read this like VV (whose presence as the narrator i knew about since "The Silverbark Epilogues" chapter of the gf3 prologue) monitoring the narrative through me and reacting in real time to Jade et al's refusal to let anything slip with the nuclear option of a forced implanted memory. hence: the scene of the upsilons crashing onto the mysterious planet Samsaria.

i knew that there would be a new planet central to the plot going forward, mirroring the function of Deltritus in hs2, and i knew that Dana and Edie were stuck there together for a long time... but what about the other two? there needed to be four of them, after all, and i knew that they all needed to be equal to each other in terms of depth and personality.

i'll admit that when i published chapter 4, i didn't know much about Alphi and Lenore. i invented them both pretty much on the spot, perfected Lenore's quirk in one go (you'll notice that when she uses ellipses she always uses four dots...), and then looked at Alphi and was like. yeah, you know what? big muscly salamander-looking lizard lady with six arms who has kind of a stereotypically brutish demeanor. it took a bit of fine-tuning but it's amazing how fast their dynamic crystallized for me... and it's from them that a lot of the flavor of the EWL really emerged, as i sought to understand how and why there would be a group of four wildly different people assigned together like this. their mismatchedness inspired me to take a vague idea i had and run with it, namely the meta conception of the EWL as an orphanage for victims of their own personal MSPFAs.

i've never really salvaged an idea from another project for godfeels, i think at least partially because i have another project called sunset war that is almost exclusively a series of salvaged ideas strung together to make a coherent universe (no idea when/if this will see the light of day fwiw, no time soon certainly)... but also because the base template of homestuck is already so rich, not to mention the additional complexities that godfeels brings to that template, i've never really felt like i needed to bring in outside ideas. if anything i'm so overwhelmed with possibilities just emergent from the narrative as it exists i genuinely don't know how we could possibly use it all. which is to say, we definitely won't use it all, which is a really nice place to be from a storyteller's perspective.

instead, the personalities of the upsilons sort of emerged as a response to their place in the narrative. Dana, obviously, was conceived as being Dirk-esque in some way. once i decided that Lenore was an upsilon, i had to figure out why she was still in the EWL but Dana wasn't. i knew Dana was banished in some sense, but it wasn't until then that i knew Lenore was at least partially responsible for that, and for the events that broke up the upsilons three years ago. from there i had to figure out why this happened, and once i arrived at a why the rest of it all sorta fell into place.

my approach with new characters is probably the worst that it could possibly be? because most of the time i don't even know these new characters exist until they write themselves into a scene. for instance i had no plan for Osepheus and his crew when they were introduced, but once they took the stage i found them all so weirdly charming that i elected against killing them and instead trying to find a place for them in the story. so i sat with them and thought, okay, where do they fit in this tapestry, what purpose do they serve, and how i can i tailor their personalities in such a way that they produce a tangibly necessary narrative friction with that purpose.

it was the same with Alphi. once i had Lenore, Dana, and Edie, i knew there needed to be some kind of combo-breaker that wasn't Jade-descended. so i decided to challenge myself by introducing her as a big loud boisterous creature who speaks in broken english (which is historically my least favorite type of character in a scifi setting) whose traits would eventually be... well. i can't say very much here at all, can i? that'd be spoilers.

this is how i go about worldbuilding, i guess. i know that my strength as a writer is dialogue and at least to an extent characterization, so i have to assume that most of the narrative action will play out through dialogue. with that in mind, all the interesting ideas in the world don't matter a lick if the characters aren't fun or compelling to read. i understand that this big space opera bullshit is only interesting insofar as it contrasts with the cast of characters we already care about, which is why i think it actually wouldn't have been possible to graft an already existing story onto what came before-- because the setting, the plot, all the various arcs and beats we've got planned, they're designed to make the best use possible of the cast we have. it's all designed with the knowledge of how one experiences stories. if my stuff is digestible at all (which it certainly seems to be given the number of comments i've gotten saying basically "i've never even read a book and you got me to read 400,000 words of homestuck fic in a week"), it's because i try to make the moment-to-moment reading experience compelling. if the characters aren't fun to read, if their dynamic isn't frictive or otherwise evocative, then you just get bored and zone out. say what you will about the schlock of dan brown's providence, the man knows how to write a readable book about abstract bullshit!

anyway. all of this is to say that 3.1 was in many ways the proving ground for and chrysalis of 3.2. i always knew that if i could get through the end of chapter 8 and still have the will to keep going, everything after would be a victory lap. maybe that seems pompous or ill-advised, idk, but i'm REALLY excited to get to the rest of this story. i can't wait for you to properly meet Dana, Edie, Alphi, and Lenore (the big DEAL as i like to call them in my own head :P) as they were thirteen years ago. they started from an ill-defined place, but they've since come through to be some of my favorite characters in this story. i hope you'll feel the same way, but the fact that you even thought to ask whether the upsilons existed before godfeels in the first place suggests that i've got nothing to worry about.