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.
