apologies if you’ve written this somewhere before, but in a couple of these #sarahposts you refer to a retcon you made in gf1, what was the change?
oh yeah! i don't think i've really extensively documented this anywhere, so i might as well do so here. let's start with the boring shit and cover the history, then i'll give you the full breakdown of what changed.
so when i wrote gf1, i had no sense that i would ever want to go beyond the realm of this one fic. but i DID have this idea of "the ultimate ultimate self," an entity that contains all selves which is never mentioned in homestuck. funny that THAT’S my first big canon divergence, rooted so deep in the philosophical. obviously the big existential kick of gf1 is this idea that retcon is somehow eroding john's connection to that ultimate ultimate self, or at least to his ultimate self generally. the extent to which this is TRUE remains to be seen, john/june is never an objective arbiter of their own subjective existence, but it is an important idea for the series nevertheless.
the other key ingredient is that for a long time i planned on doing my own audio drama adaptation of godfeels (as i mentioned at the end of this video). obviously i never got around to doing this myself and eventually abdicated responsibility to the far more capable hands of the podfeels team, but i did get as far as adapting godfeels 1 for a podfic (which is what they used for podfeels 1). so i took that opportunity to modify a few things to bring gf1 more in line with how the series’ cosmology had evolved.
RIGHT SO, what are the differences? well, they're almost if not entirely exclusive to the narration. and right from the start, we have a big addition:
[left is my original draft, right is the published version]
when i wrote gf1 i put ZERO thought into how long after homestuck proper it took place. remember that i wrote and released this before the epilogues came out, so it was only later that i adopted the timeline and framework of the epilogues. if anything i wrote gf1 thinking they were closer to *my* age at the time, meaning like 27-28, which might have caused me problems down the line. but this addition is also important because (as i rant about in this recent post) i think it's easier to swallow questionably in-character dialogue when you know that this is six years and change after homestuck. i still don't think the overall timeline gets emphasized enough throughout... honestly ALL of godfeels before chapter 8 lmao. looking back i was shockingly negligent in this respect.
what else?
lol ok sure
this was a pretty substantial addition owing to the fact that back then i really wasn't interested in writing anyone but the betas, and even then i mostly just wanted to write about june and jade. obviously that changed, so i wanted to do a better job of setting up dirk's murky relationship with june. ditto with june and terezi's murky romantic tensions.
this is The Big One. i’m not even sure i could tell you the precise significance of every change here, beyond the obvious one. would you believe that this was before i thought of X as a distinct character? but i still had the sense that the antagonism of the third person narration here was rooted perspectivally, and it’s my opinion that john at the pits of his worst depression is closest to X, the part of himself that judges his every action against the assumed perfection of all his friends. after june comes out and takes charge of her identity and Things Happen, i see X as reflexively turning their judgment outwards (though still with a core of self-resentment), which is how we eventually get the circus egotistica.
big changes here obv
some simplification of text here plus some additions. is the narration here describing jade’s voice breaking through john’s dissociation, or is it something more cosmic? either could be true...
minor alterations here, plus a probably too-cute stinger banging the drum that This Is An Ongoing Series Now Actually
and as far as i can tell, that’s it! very minor changes for the most part, but it’s the little details that get you every time :)