12-2025 artist/writer commentary
We have the Patreon commentary from the Artists and Writers of Beyond Canon for the introduction of Swiss! As per usual, I’m going to try and extract anything I think is particularly plot-relevant for us to know under the cut, and leave the full enjoyment of said commentary for those who subscribe to Homestuck’s Patreon. (These are labelled "11-2025" commentary on Patreon presumably because they come after and cover October's panels, I've titled this 12 because it's come out on Dec 2nd to keep my labeling consistent.)
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Chumi, rejoicing with our Satyr reveal: The long awaited… Swiss Elysi! We’ve also waited years to introduce him, granted the same is applicable to all the Deltritans LMAO. Let’s talk about our beloved boy! Kim, at the maid cafe: The first of our Satyrs to be properly introduced!!! I feel like people had a pretty good idea of what a Satyr was gonna look like LOL, but their species did go quite the several iterations as well! Likewise with our Nymphs, we’ll go more in depth on how we developed them once we meet all of them ;) But for now, behold – SWISS ELYSI!!!!
Alright, we have some of our earliest designs for Swiss, and WHOA.
People mentioned Julius Caesar being alluded to by Swiss's room, style and obsessions, and these early designs I'll paste some of below definitely evoke it, along with what looks disturbingly similar to a Bitcoin symbol to me in that first one (EDIT: oh my gosh I'm dumb it's a Bluetooth icon thank you @psairztey for the reply):
I'm not posting all the art, just here what's the most relevant potentially for correlating Swiss Elysi with all this roman and laurels Caesar stuff.
Kim: We all had a pretty solid idea of what his overall style was gonna be like to be honest. The hardest part was honestly just his hair. I know the One thing we felt really strongly about was that he had to have the classique Homestuck hair swirly.
Hmm. I wonder if that means anything.
Here's another one with a different spin on his Symbol:
Kim: Concept art Back when he used to be more of a gold boy… Swiss is just all about satyr pride though, it made more sense for his jewelry to match his now trademark silver-y text color instead… Oh hey, you can see an old iteration we were experimenting with for his sign in this too LOL.
SO HUH. The introduction of literal Gold to his design isn't going to calm the Light vs Life debate, especially if the wrist-wraps used to be green. Gold could be perceived as very Light-aspect colored, especially if it's only being used to accent here, but we can't break its associations with Life and wealth and status, with Feferi and Her Condescension. Feferi's gold accents too lend a lot of credence to those arguing for Life for Swiss, and though I can't say it's a decided/settled issue given the complex pile of allusions surrounding his character and especially of Pride which I associate more with Light than Life, I'd say on the whole this evidence gives the Life aspect a lot more ammunition to intensify the contest even if the team decided to downplay the Gold in favor of Silver later. (Ie. you could argue that they wanted to downplay Life associations by running that back, etc, but we can't possibly say for certain.)
Skipping down through more of the design process for Swiss, etc, there's definitely a lot of fun stuff if you subscribe to the Patreon that I'm leaping over as usual...
Kim: Swiss’ whole deal is like trying to assert himself as the guy who (supposedly) has it all together, and that lil’ bit of personality reflects in how he styles himself as well. But, of course, not everything goes his way as much as he’d like it to… just like his stray little cowlick that refuses to stay in place.
I think we managed to gather that from our experience with Swiss so far, I've probably said it more than once in different words as I've been liveblogging. Draw what classpect implications you may from that facet of his character being reiterated. Skipping further...
Oh, they show a bunch of the photographic inspirations for Honeyfall Gymnasikkou Campus, and even a theoretical layout for the whole place. I can't say whether that's going to become relevant plotways later, like if the whole campus is brought with Swiss and he has to style himself a leader or... nah, it's probably not going to break pattern THAT hard.
Miles: I was really excited to try and tackle Honeyfall because it was our first Satyr Environment and I wanted it to really SELL Swiss’ particular corner of their society. An all-in-one living/education system of high prestige, that clearly pulls a lot from grecco-roman styles felt like a great intro. There are a lot of other cultural influences on Satyr culture than just hellenistic, and I’m excited for us to get a chance to hopefully show off more of the Asian-inspired stuff, but you can definitely see it a little bit here.
There's more of this here that's highly interesting, though doesn't tell us anything we haven't already read into.
OOH THIS IS NEAT:
Floral: With this initial concept, I was trying to apply our own Deltritus design language that I loosely worked out!
You could practically put LIGHT and VOID next to each other for Satyrs and Nymphs theming right here, appropriate for City On A Hill versus Abyssal Lovecraftian. Heck, some of that Nymph = Abyss/Void association you can find in Hollow Knight and Silksong!
Continuing... whoa, they really evolved the concept of the map of the campus... I wonder if Swiss really is going to be have to be running about this place before his entry into Shurb? Or is it going to have some relevance afterward somehow?
According to them, a Loft for his residence and its verticality was done as something fitting for the setting and also fun and new for Homestuck, I'd agree with them on that, the house layout definitely feels new to me.
Floral: For furnishing Swiss’ quarters I tried to imply as much of a cultural range as possible with items at hand. While Dirk’s initial interests revolved around Japan and Plato, with Swiss’ particular school taking after Greek and Roman architecture, we felt like (from his perspective) he’d want to imbue his little boys with every possible philosophical perspective, from both East and West. Considering Dirk is a guy from the future where people have been extinct for over a 1000 years, I think human culture only has reality to him in the ideas they form and aesthetic. It also may be an overcorrection to the lack of culture in Earth C, where the basis of human society is late 2000’s America and… only that.
Oof. Does that read to me as a condemnation? Shots fired? Heheh.
I know it's fitting that the Homestuck kids would create a society that looked similar to where most of them grew up and lived and actually enjoyed, and it WAS thematic in a "return to normality" after the whimsical chaos of the Game and escape from the Story that was the ending of the original Homestuck, sure, but it was definitely a boring option compared to some of the whimsical complexity they COULD have given to modern Human-and-Troll Earth C society in the Epilogues, though the Catnapped bonus already started to address how they were just aping the aesthetic they grew up with without having the authority or experience to properly reckon with forming it into effective governance and that the PEOPLE who inherited Earth C deserved to shape the planet moving forward into the future as opposed to its Gods. Other details during HS2 like people choosing not to take up the personal flight technology that Roxy pushed because the people almost reverently wanted to relegate flight to the Gods who came back, which could be seen as the very presence on the stage of the Gods at all stunting Earth C's further development... hmmmm. Hard to tell how much from back on Earth C is really good thematically and how much is an attempt to correct and make up for thematic and setting-building mistakes and laziness during the Epilogues that teams disagreed with or felt a need to explain to the fanbase... eh, I don't wanna get into that. Back into the rest of the artist commentary!
In contrast with Ly’lacs chaotic jumbled room, Swiss has precisely cultivated his living space to create an atmosphere of cultured dignity. What I really, really like about this, though, is that little aspects of his more hyper enthusiasm still pop through: his Sword wall is so, so unrestrained. Like, it looks nice, but it’s SO many swords. You can tell he couldn’t decide on which ones to put up and probably spent ages thinking about it. And also he has an insane vision board behind a private curtain that takes up like half of his living room wall.
Probably spent AGES THINKING about which swords to put up where with his space to communicate the right meaning? Has "The Plan", an insane VISION board???
There is no WAY you're going to sway me away from thinking Swiss is a Light player at this rate.
--HUH. We've gotten to the three Busts, and apparently one of them wasn't Elon? (Surprising, given there's some stuff that I omitted that links to a bunch of Top Tech Visionaries and Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg in some of his theming collection imagery I skipped over in this post.)--
Kim: I helped contribute drawing the fucked up abominations that are the busts in Swiss’ house. I tried my best to emulate Andrew’s style of busts, but I think mine might be comparably too detailed... But y’know what, that adds a different layer of humor to them LOL. I think the Steve-O one is my favorite. Chumi: For those wondering, it goes Steve-O, Vin Diesel, and I BELIEVE… Will Arnett. Miles: Yes! It’s Will Arnet, here, with one T, and it’s pronounced “Will Arneigh”. Because, you know. Horse. Bojack. Satyr. They’re horse guys. Maybe you’ve picked up on that by now. I was so happy that we got to continue the sort of forgotten Homestuck trend of weird ass scary busts of real celebrities.
So, Vin Diesel is definitely an attention-grabbing actor though not as attention-desperate as Steve-O, characterized by masculinity and success (even contractually obligated success), and Will Arnett... is the voice actor of Bojack Horseman. I feel like these choices of star are possibly either MORE or LESS emblematic of Swiss's classpect than I thought, and I can't decide which.
Floral: The major consistency between all these pieces is they are as seemingly expensive and opulent as possible. Like Mile’s said, this is not the normal living situation for Satyr’s of Swiss’ age. It’s so pretentious and self aggrandizing!
Swiss Elysi is such a freaking Light player, come ON people. (It's okay we're all taking our bets as the details pour in.)
Chumi: Onto the panels!
Oh finally!
Yes Swiss Elysi hopping around in front of the mirror was SO cute.
His practiced winning smile, his cute enthusiastic lil smile, his concerned frown... anything relevant here, lemme skim a bit...
However, it’s the pro-side of returning to some ye classique Homestuck simplicity! So we can get these panels out to you, our dear lovely readers, faster!
Very appreciated! They've been able to have tons of fun making story for us by setting up these rooms ahead of time for the likes of Swiss and Ly'lac, prepping sprites, etc, and it's paying off in the update pace, which I'm sure many (such as those who don't have the stress of liveblogging) are greatly appreciating. :)
We have the full extracts of the full-size book covers in the bookcase flash. I'll let anyone else who has Patreon access come up with any breakthroughs in that respect, maybe y'all can relay them to me when you get a chance?
MILES: Swiss’ Librarium section was really fun, for a number of reasons. One of the most exciting ones for me was that I got to do the music for it, so I wrote a song I called UNIMPEACHABLE.
That title just says Light so hard to me, I'm just sayin'.
MILES: I wanted to sort of play up Swiss’ affect of coolness with a slick, jazzy theme, and I had some shamisen plucks in there to emphasize the East Asian influences in Satyr society. I’ve definitely come to think of saxophone as Swiss’ Signature Instrument, whereas shamisen is more of a satyrwide instrument[...]
Yup, his affect of coolness, almost a desperately clung-to one.
Chumi: Ah yes, the PRIME CONFIGURATION. We’ll talk about satyr romance later, but Swiss clearly has some big (and very very secret) plans.
Noted, noted. I'll go ahead and add Satyrical ⍺/β/⍵ to the tags for this post.
Kim: I like how he’s still trying to keep his Winning Smile as he’s gritting his through this conversation teeth LMAO. Oh Swiss… Just Barely holding it together.
Hehehehh. Wait that doesn't tell us anything else we don't know about his desperation to portray a certain image, it's just hilarious. (Seriously, the meaning and portrayal versus the actual doing of a thing is a difference Meenah and Vriska have discussed (regarding Aranea too) as a huge difference between Life and Light, back in original Homestuck.)
Scrolling through Cloppy, Swiss's attack stance and animation...
KIM: [...] If you look closely our team’s satyrsonas also cameo in here too… ^_^
Andi: Ah yes, the many satyrs of the school. Fun fact:
This satyr was a satyr Andrew drew a long time ago. They named this guy Tuck.
Oh cool! With at least one additional image I'm not sharing, just cause this is a neat detail and not plot-important. (I'm mainly including the shot of the teams Satyrsonas to emphasize that THEY weren't important and, if we couldn't guess earlier, probably won't be important when Shurb starts either.)
I also get to include this note explaining the dots on their face patterns and some having darker skin color:
Chumi: ANYWAY… Gettin’ another look at other satyrs is always interesting! Look at these chumps, just sleeping the day away. It’s nice to get a look at characters outside of the main cast, and this panel specifically had us do a little brainstorming on general satyr appearances. We decided the satyrs should be tri-colored (white, grey, and black) and their markings should reflect real horse patterning. Kim: I think it’s sooo cute that the satyrs can be patterned. Bro they are funny horseys… Which, in a way, makes it even funnier that Swiss looks the way he does LOL.
Chumi: Additionally, their coloration doesn’t have to stay consistent (ie their ears can be a different color from their face, etc). There’s freedom in being a silly horse!
So you're telling me that Swiss was modeled to deliberately contrast with the potential variety in Satyr appearance by being STARK WHITE all over??
Tell me that's not influenced by him being planned as a Light player's design, come on.
Regarding the BEES and honey-making to round out the Artist Commentary:
Miles: I’m copying this from the Writer’s Commentary, but one of the things we really wanted to do with Swiss is give him at least one interest that was like... less overtly cultivated to be a Social Standing thing. It’s not that he doesn’t legitimately enjoy history and swords and politics and stuff like that, because he does, but his beekeeping is sort of his zen zone and falls kind of outside of his typical concern for his own image and political career. He just gets to help a bunch of tiny friends make delicious artisanal honeys, think about flowers, do a little gardening and chill out for a bit. He’s still a perfectionist about it though.
Biased emphasis mine. I'll forgive all you Life player truthers, though, you may win this out in the end, who knows. (Light Light Light)
One last bit of plot detail:
Chumi: People have been speculating regarding what this is. All will be revealed in due time, but that’s a really long tongue. I think Swiss is gonna be mad…
So an unexpected and unwelcome guest, then.
Okay, on to the Writer Commentary. I might have to sit back and take a break before this one, juggling too many plates...
Finally back, let's see how fast I can knock out the Writer Commentary...
MILES, riding it, my pony: Hello and welcome to ANOTHER commentary... and this one’s a doozy, folks. We are, today, so so happy to present to you our shining platinum boy, Swiss, at last! It was so nuts to finally unveil himm... there’s so much to say about Swiss, and about Satyrs in general, so let’s get into it!!! Damn! Where do we even START!
God damnit this one is going to take me some work to get through isn't it. AUGH! Oh well, I can't complain too much about more plot and content and juicy details, that's solely an issue for like, livebloggers, not everyone else.
HAVEN, Saddled and Swaddled: Our shining silver hero of something something. The inimitable Swiss has arrived, and the world has been forever changed.
YEAH AND JUST TEASE US ABOUT THE HERO TITLE Y'ALL TOTALLY KNOW, RUB IT IN, GAAAH XD
(Yes "shining silver" might mean Light I know and sounds kind of Knighty but they'd say this anyway probably don't worry about it)
MILES: Let’s start here, at a mysterious, familiar console... it seems to have 10 slots, but four of them are nonfunctional right now. I wonder what’s up with that! We’ve also got a satyr and a nymph on each big screen, for whatever that’s worth. Team leaders, perhaps? They’re more important in general? We spent a million years trying to figure out how to fit ten squares into one and felt like geniuses when we finally figured it out? Who knows. It’d take some kind of commentary to get to the bottom of that particular mystery. We also get introduced to a few more of the kids’ symbols! FLORAL: It took us some time to design what the new panels would look like but it turned out beautifully! HAVEN: You could run the world from a place like that.
Hmm... and they don't comment on probably-Jane's finger on the button.
Ly'lac and TC seem to have collaborated to write the Shurb code in ~PTH so they're possibly considered the instigators or leaders, or in the Satyrs' case the roles of leader and instigator are split.
MILES: Oh FUCK! It’s the man himself. And by man I mean boy. But this young lad has great things ahead of him... We’re introduced to SWISS ELYSI here, our very first full-screened satyr, and he immediately sets about capturing our hearts and minds with his snazzy little hops and his preening. I am so endeared of every one of these kids and I won’t be shy about saying that we care immensely that you all feel the same, so we won’t hesitate to deploy top-grade cuteness strikes against you. FLORAL: We really do spend every meeting talking about how much we love our new kids. Slowly but surely Deltritus is becoming a whole picture.
Yup, they've been itching to show us all of these goobers.
MILES: We get our first Full Satyr Government Official Moniker here! We also get a hint that SOME Satyrs earn something called MANTHRONYMS, which I’ll describe here because I don’t think it’s all that much of a spoiler; particularly accomplished/famous satyrs can earn official titles or nicknames that they’re able to register with the government and add to their permanent record, marks of high honor in their society. Swiss, as people have no doubt come to learn, sees his own eventual acquisition of one as an inevitability. Right from the getgo, he’s letting you know he’s going to do great things and be soooooo famous and special.
He really, REALLY cares about the famous and special part, and that (in my opinion) his things be SEEN as great rather than anything in particular he might want to accomplish in particular rather than reaching those heights. I don't want to bang on the Light vs Life thing too hard here (oh yes I do who am I kidding), but it really comes down to the meaning of an action versus the satisfaction in the acts themselves, like that discussion Meenah had about Aranea or whatever that I already mentioned that is probably not replayed on Homestuck.com again yet.
MILES: We learn quite a lot from Swiss’ room intro infodump page, which is sort of fitting for Swiss as the kind of guy who would have no trouble telling you all about himself and his variety of aristocratic, classy interests. His political aspirations are at the forefront of it, and we learn he’s the cohort captain! Which is basically student council president for his graduating class. I’ll get into it more a bit later, but given the prestigious nature of his gymnasikkou, this is actually a pretty high position for a man of his youth. [...]
Yep-- aristocratic, classy, political, prestige, these are all the Lighty sides of a high position rather than the Lifey sides that have more to do with power, wealth, actually exercised influence et cetera.
FLORAL: We actually went back and forth quite a bit on which satyr should teach our readers about Satyr society first and it felt right for Swiss too ultimately due to his passion for it. No one is happier to be a Satyr as he is, it’s the core of who he is!
Now THIS is VERY interesting. So Swiss wasn't singled out to be Ly'lac's mirror from the very start for Satyrkind (I'd use that to argue against those who say his Classpect should reflect something of Ly'lac's like a justification to jump from a Doom to a Life character being evidence that he's Life instead of Light, etc), and in fact there was some significant mulling over in the team as to which Satyr should be the Satyrkind Poster Boy we first meet. Ly'lac is admittedly almost a strange Nymph poster girl to ease us in, because she is in many ways very un-Nymph-like in her love of Satyr technology and in her relative childhood (pre-metamorphosis) compared to her peers, which I think played to our benefit given the alienness of Nymph society and workings as it allowed us more of a bridge through her un-Nymph-like interests to relate to her and understand someone who was connected to things we could relate to more readily before getting into Nymphs perhaps more arcanely situated like AA, in my opinion. (And let's not get into CC's whole situation, a subversive individual who's best revealed in initially-misleading steps.) Satyr society and technology and culture is so readily understandable in comparison, however, that we don't need someone who's oddly "un-Satyr-like" as a lead-in.
MILES: We also see the SATRUVIAN ALKYRIN, and learn about the satyr morphotypes! It was really cool to start going into the basics of their awesome biology. I remember really specifically wanting to point out that with satyrs, the more furry/unguligrade legs actually begin at the KNEE; I wanted them to be different from the classical “goat guy” satyrs of Greek mythology because they’re... not goats! But it’s been hard to show that when everyone’s got their damn pants on. When we were getting into the concept of the satyrs we did feel it’d be fun to spruce them up with a bit of variety, and I spent a pretty decent amount of time trying to figure out like... low-lying powers each of the different morphotypes could have. There has been some of talk about aping My Little Pony but I did feel like pointing out here that... those are just the types of mythological horses they got! MLP didn’t invent that. And when Swiss gets his cutie mark- okay, that was a joke.
I can't help but think that when they were writing this, they knew we would either soon or have already gotten the page where LY'LAC seems to have earned her Cutie Mark and had her shirt symbol appear as soon as that gap in her purpose was fulfilled by getting her hands on The Latchkey wand.
MILES: Anyway, because they’re already working with extreme strength as a default I didn’t wanna go too deep into other powers for them, because I think it clashed with the high biological variety and magical predilections of the nymphs, but I did wanna have a little fun with some new stuff to give people stuff to play with. There are more fun quirks of their biology that haven’t showed up yet that we wanna keep to ourselves for now, but it was definitely hard not to info-dump. So we didn’t not info dump.
Ooh, more yet to be discovered? Some of it perhaps not directly romance-related even.
Skipping around to anything potentially relevant: first regarding the Steve-O bust:
FLORAL: Some people didn’t know who the fuck this was and that’s sad. How soon we forget our rowdy masochist representation. They have no idea what they’ve done to this man’s junk.
(In case anyone wants to project anything additional onto Swiss from that, IDK)
Then eventually we come to the bookshelf section where some of the text was copied over from writer commentary to artist commentary, with some additional info here like:
MILES: ANYWAY, the Librarium flash was ALSO fun because we got to do so much more infodumping about Swiss and his thoughts on satyr society! We learn about Grand Prancellors, a little bit about the contentious history of back and forth wars between nymphs and satyrs, ancient slaughters, another mention of a mysterious satyr/nymph duo who rocked the ancient world with their schemes, the nature of satyr democracy, their love of rap, a whole bunch of awesome stuff! I feel like it gives a really fun little slice of Swiss’ thoughts and interests. The reaction to this was also pretty funny, because I saw a LOT of assumptions about satyr society from this page, and as time went on I think it became more clear to people that some of the more contentious beliefs here come off the way they do because of Swiss’ own young thoughts and narrative voice but I still wanted to touch on it briefly here, something that fell by the wayside here is that satyrs and nymphs have been at peace with one another for some time now! They keep to themselves, though.
I had guessed that they were existing at peace with separation, but some had crazy conspiracy theories like the Satyrs and Nymphs existing in split timelines where they'd destroyed each other despite the mass cross-cultural influence and shipping of artifacts across the divide by our core players and others linked by Cha.OS, or the like. I mean, props, but I didn't buy them: Seems unless "they keep to themselves" was meant to be a subtle hint, there's FAR less likely to be shenanigans going on in THAT particular respect.
And yeah, Swiss's narration on each book was clearly tilted in favor of his biases when we read them on the bookshelf.
FLORAL: For two species that were meant to battle to extinction, Rose and Dirk didn’t think hard enough about separating them by land and sea. Turns out it’s actually pretty easy to ignore each other and focus on their own societies. At least once they got out a couple thousand years of warring and almost endings of the world out of the way.
Then the FRAT system:
MILES: SORRY. The FRATERNITY system. We’ll go into more detail about this later, but to sum it up briefly, the FRATERNITY SYSTEM is a planetwide network of differently-specialized scientific artisanal and artistic communes satyrs spend the majority of their lives in. There’s probably a lot more I could say here but I want to hold onto it for now, because a bigger worldbuilding dump is probably coming sometime and I’d hate to jump the gun on describing it here!
I'll have to skimp on quoting so much as I go forward, but there are a lot of juicy paragraphs like this where they're effectively saying THERE IS MORE TO EXAMINE HERE BUT WE WILL SHOW YOU LATER DON'T WORRY.
We see The Plan, and the ⍺/β/⍵ Prime Configuration:
MILES: He has a lot of different thoughts about him and his bros. Seems like it took him a lot of work to settle on this configuration! I’m not gonna tell you what it means!
Yeah, bless anyone's hearts who didn't recognize those ⍺/β/⍵ symbols for what they meant.
MILES: Here, Swiss shows the audience that maybe he isn’t quite as cool and collected as he likes to project. This conversation was a lot of fun, partially because watching Swiss project this epic authoritative boss vibe the whole time and then spend an entire conversation sucking up to TC way harder than he even needs to is really silly. Their dynamic in general is great and I’m excited to show more as the comic progresses[...]
Mhmm, Swiss seems to stake QUITE A LOT on what TC thinks of him and says, to the point that it feels as if Swiss is being led around pulled by a pinky finger hooked into his collar really easily by him. There's, probably an easier analogy or idiom I could come up with than that mental image. Probably.
[We don't intend to map these dynamics onto existing Homestuck character dynamics as often as people seem to think,] but I can’t deny that part of Swiss and TC’s dynamic does hearken back pretty heavily to some of Equius’ longing for Gamzee to act more appropriately befitting his station. TC, as Swiss repeatedly points out, is some kind of generational genius, and the fact that he likes to fuck around all mysteriously silly definitely gets on Swiss’ nerves. Why is he not here at my whim?.
This is a bit interesting, although I think as I remarked at the time we saw this in my liveblogging this REALLY IS a new character dynamic we haven't quite seen in Homestuck, where Swiss is desperate for approval but trying to downplay it, and TC very CLEARLY knows what's really up and uses that to lead him around by the nose-- THAT was the idiom, by the nose! Dammit! --but anyway, I hadn't thought that perhaps Swiss is intimidated by TC's status too and doesn't want to doubt or undermine someone who's somehow made it a whole lot higher than Swiss despite all Swiss's work.
MILES: Swiss’ stresses aside, though, I hope it shone through here that these two have a long history of fucking around together.
Sure did! It was fun to glimpse.
MILES: In terms of plot details, we don’t get too much out of this, but we do learn that TC has been mysteriously busy with a few... outsiders. Savvy readers have already drawn attention to Swiss’ speculation on the number of newbies coming to this mysterious game, so I’ll try not to say any more and let people think on it themselves.
I get the feeling this is more allusion to the idea that TC is more plugged in than most about the involvement of not just Nymphs but the Candy Kids, just like AA has purportedly communicated with Vrissy and knows she'll be playing according to Ly'lac's first conversation directed at Vrissy.
HAVEN: With this panel we’re immediately bombarded with the idea that unlike our previous heroes, the Deltritans are living with and participating in active communities. The streets are not empty, and desolation’s instrument has not been played in some time.
You know, that IS odd. Sollux and Dave eschewed the communities they were scrunched up with in their apartment complexes / hives, but at least SOME of our heroes aren't such loners, and it's clear that even a relative loner like Ly'lac for example has exchanged QUITE a lot more postage and parcels with her friends than even the Beta Kids managed to in their time perhaps, though not as many of those parcels' contents necessarily survived unexploded. AA is able to send things to Ly'lac quite regularly it seems. In addition, that earlier note about TC's status made me think that his gigantic building compound MAY OR MAY NOT be filled with actual other Satyrs... it could be a solo techno-castle deal, could be populated with robots for all we know (not unbefitting a Void player if Equius is anything to go by), and it absolutely seemed remote and isolated from what we saw of nearby Satyr society, with only one inroad and an ominous Transylvanian double-staircase entrance. (Isolation being another Void-ism.) Hmmmmm.
MILES: Swiss also does a poetic little infodump about what Gymnasikkou actually is, mentioning that it’s a communal schooling/living situation ROUGHLY analogous to high school[...] He also drops the reveal here that Satyrs are communally raised! There’s a pretty constant theme in satyr society that your living situation, and your life itself, should be centered around learning and the pursuit of self-betterment, the MERIT aspect previously mentioned as one of the TWIN PRINCIPLES.
(I don't think Miles meant "the Merit aspect" as an Aspect, which would be Light in context, but take it how you will.) This is clearly Dirk Strider's influence on society, no doubt. But as to Satyrs growing up communally, yet apart from parents, I wonder if this reflects the ideal situation that Dirk wishes he were raised in, having grown up all alone in his island apartment?
MILES: Another thing this update gets into is that Swiss has anxieties about being avoided by some of his schoolmates. His zeal... is perhaps a bit too much sometimes. Which makes sense if you sort of contextualize his position as being sort of like the insanely weirdly overprivileged student council presidents from anime. You want to know what his problem is? HE CARES TOO MUCH. Haven: Swiss cares so much about his classmates and friends' health and loves them in ways that piss them all off, but for the most part it seems like he can walk the walk, so they let him get away with it.
Huh. This probably has something to do with whichever Class he is.
FLORAL: Finally The Mountain has entered the scene. HAVEN: Best boy has arrived. MILES: I love, love, love this conversation. Swiss and CT have a crazy ass relationship. I mean I guess CT has crazy ass relationships with everyone because he’s crazy in a particularly pronounced way, but Swiss is easily able to match him there and the shit the two of them get into is hilarious.
Noting that The Mountain is particularly crazy of the trio of Satyrs, not that we didn't kind of know that already.
[...] Our first real introduction to The Mountain completely shakes the dynamic up as well; while Swiss is kind of obsequious and fawning over TC, he has a much more authoritative attitude towards his other best bro, acting as if he knows best and making all kinds of demands of him. CT, to his credit, handles this with the dignity of an insane murderer, chuckling darkly in the face of Swiss’ manic controlling ways and bossing him the fuck up. We get a little hint into CT and CC’s friendship too. FLORAL: What I really appreciate about this conversation is how quickly it all falls apart, CT really went from bringing Swiss into his bosom to riling each other into a super screaming match. But say what you will, at least CT is engaging with Swiss. FLORAL: Even if that means slamming his overprotective/jealous fearmongering in the trash.
Hmmm. I mean I can't interpret much more from this other than the Satyrical ⍺/β/⍵ we already guessed at, but Swiss's attempts to project dominance over The Mountain DO seem to, not so much fall onto deaf ears, but fall onto the ears of an elephant like a stinging wasp who is going to ignore you and let you do it until you sting a spot sensitive enough that he can crush you with one mighty flap of an ear. Also that Swiss's busybodying can be considered KIND of caring but also self-centered, which... honestly gives me Maid vibes?
MILES: This conversation also gets into something about Swiss that I like a lot about him and find pretty endearing, which is that although he can be super annoying about it, he’s actually a very protective and solution-oriented guy who cares a lot about the people around him, even if he gets way too overzealous about it sometimes. He thinks all the time about how to get his friends to do XYZ and it’s not usually for his own benefit so much as it is something he feels would benefit them (or them as a group).
This bit suggests a class even more passive than a Maid though, like an Heir or the like, and he's definitely more likely the passive pair of a class set than the active. Augh, we're getting into the territory where we knew less than we thought we did about a couple classes whose positions we got wrong on the Class chart and that's throwing off my ability to classguess.
FLORAL: The incredibly fast switch between rage to utter deflation, it feels like Swiss’ feelings are as mercurial as his blood. Maybe he can’t stay mad at a bro? Or may be he just realized how long he’s gonna have to wait to see that surprise.
Are Heirs kind of mercurial? They seem to be, if John and Equius are anything to go by.
Alright, the writer commentary has the same quote that was lifted earlier into the Artist Commentary on the bees interest, a special interest that wasn't about social standing but more a relaxing hobby because having his life be 100% about that would be exhausting...
And then what we now know as a tongue appears from the side and we're left with the Writer Commentary ending with this line:
HAVEN: uh oh.
Phew, that's all for now! The Artist Commentary parts I skipped over were particularly fun and perhaps enlightening on the structure of Swiss's surroundings and their inspirations, so if you want to chip in a bit to Homestuck's Patreon I recommend checking that out. Now I'm going to go relax and there will probably be a Beyond Canon upd8 tomorrow before I've fully recovered or something. XD
