☠️ brandon sandersons allegiance and contribution to the mormon church puts him on equal foot as rowling (not necesarily super endorsed)
Hmm. Mostly disagree, I think. 'equal footing' seems straightforwardly wrong, anyway - Rowling has personally thrown her public profile and financial resources into making Britain more transphobic in a way that's genuinely more consequential that any other single person I can think of whose not directly setting policy. Genuinely personally influential in a way very, very few people are. Sanderon tithing to the Mormon church is bad, obviously, but he's hardly a tireless propagandist for it, and I doubt his donations are making much direct difference in its day-to-day awfulness.
I’ve been reading FIPindustries’ Introduction to Magic, an urban fantasy work written entirely as the notes of wizard to her new apprentice. This is a wonderful format, because it means you’re interfacing with the world entirely through the ideas people within it put out. It lets an author look at how a character would want to present their ideas, and then also how they might reveal thoughts and feelings they meant to keep hidden.
In speculative fiction, this also means the author can avoid flattening the world they’re creating by presenting Word of God style objective ‘facts’, and instead filters it through how other people think about the world and the oddities that exist within it. At its cheapest, it means an author has a way out of seeming contradictions without breaking the story itself (‘yeah, turns out the character was just wrong!’), and at its richest, it adds a depth to the world the audience is going to be spending time in.
The magic we’re being introduced to in FIPindustries’ work functions as, essentially, an extension of existing human pursuits. ‘Writing’ is a basic form of magic, putting lines on a paper that transfer meaning through time and space, and the use of runes are an extension of this principle, simply making the lines on paper have different effects. This is but one example, but in all cases, ‘magic’ is a skill, something people are already becoming good at, taken in a direction legible to us as ‘magic’.
Honing a skill to that kind of level takes a lot of effort, and that can mean that other things can kind of fall by the wayside. So as powerful as a mage might be, they can find themselves on the outskirts of society simply because they haven’t had the time or ability to get their shit together.
This brings us to Maria Bellanova, the writer of the texts of the first Arc of Introduction to Magic (with minor annotations by her would-be apprentice, Katerina), and she is a mess.
For all that she is very prickly and explicitly has little desire to let her apprentice into the life she’s lived, discouraging questions about her past, she cannot help but spill her history all over the page (along with the stains of her alcoholic beverage of choice (or just nearby)) the moment she puts pen to paper. Even despite herself, her need to share some of the stuff that she’s been through, that’s been done to her, to be, in some way, understood, comes through even more clearly than the lessons she’s meant to be imparting.
For all that she explicitly scoffs at the idea that she might have “deep repressed trauma about my childhood”, some of the anecdotes she shares about her early life make it very clear that she was mistreated pretty badly when she was young, and this has had a profound impact on the rest of her life. Her childhood was taken from her, but it went further than that.
Maria Bellanova seems very alienated from the concept of childhood, with the fact that her own was taken from her leaving her entirely unable to relate to it in others. This means she struggles very much with figuring out how to teach and guide the orphan she wants to be her apprentice (not helped by the fact that Katerina comes across as younger than she actually is). The fact that she seems to resent the fact that she has to do this figuring out raises the question of why she’s even bothering with this whole thing. Why is she putting herself through a process she’s bucking against the whole way through?
The anecdotes and the little stories that go through the early lessons circle around that question, revealing more than Maria means to, but still serving as a protective layer between her and genuine emotional vulnerability, flinching away (and reaching for the bottle) whenever that spiral comes a little too close to the core of what this is all about, why this text exists in-universe at all.
Throughout the early chapters, she’s been vaguely abusive to Katerina to keep her out of her way, and make sure she doesn’t get underfoot, and then catching herself as if realising that this is kind of shitty. She does seem to want to do this right, to not treat this girl the way her mother treated her, but she doesn’t seem to know how to break the cycle of abuse. It’s only in her last chapter of Arc 1, where she has to sincerely ask a question that her prospective apprentice could well say no to, that she has to look the part of herself she’s been avoiding in the eye and dare to be emotionally vulnerable.
Because the truth is that Maria, the woman who has been introducing us to this world’s magic, speaking knowledgably and authoritatively about the nature of the world, needs help.
youve probably already mused about this in the past but do you think cascade could work as the actual ending of homestuck? like is there a way in which homestuck could be read as a complete narrative with a somewhat satisfying ending if we were to consider cascade or its whereabouts the place where it ends? how much retooling would it need to work that way? is it even possible?
Oh now we're getting the REAL asks.
From a technical standpoint, I actually think it's totally doable to do a cut of Homestuck where Cascade is more-or-less the ending. Homestuck doesn't have nearly as many load-bearing elements as it seems to have at first glance. For instance, I think even the trolls can be cut from Homestuck altogether with minimal structural harm, as long as Vriska's game-breaking role is shifted to Rose. Hussie claimed his original vision for the story was for Cascade to be the climax, and Act 6 to be a relatively short denouement that would mostly involve cleaning up loose ends. That actually tracks with where he left the comic when Cascade ended. The unresolved stuff at the end of Cascade is:
The Scratch has created a new universe, which the players are all heading to. This fresh universe is where they will be able to complete the game.
Lord English!
Lingering mysteries about the kids in the new universe, who have been hinted at a few times throughout Act 5 (most notably regarding Liv Tyler the bunny, which shows up with a note from Jake, IIRC).
Bec Noir is still around, even if neutralized by PM.
I'm pretty sure this is it, not counting one-off lines like Rose playing the rain that are pretty structurally nonessential and could be excised easily or brushed off with some lampshading ("Wow isn't it funny we never played the rain!" -- I think Hussie actually does specific one anyway). There are also a few hints that HIC might have a role in the new universe, but I would likewise describe these as nonessential.
Looking at this list, it's easy to see both why Hussie thought he could end the story quickly and why he failed to do it. With the powers at the disposal of the main cast, going into the new universe and completing the game should be trivial. Hussie probably thought he'd quickly introduce Jake, Jane etc. in a nostalgic callback to the beginning of the story, then round up everyone for a final fight against Lord English/Bec Noir/HIC to put some fireworks on the ending. Cascade really had trimmed down the expansiveness and complexity of the story significantly, which made these few lingering plot elements seem so surmountable.
In actuality, though, Hussie quickly became mired in introducing the new characters. I think his problem was that he was struggling to reengineer the emotional stakes of the story. There's a desperate reek in the early parts of Act 6 where he is pleading for readers to care about the new kids. With the original kids, he took his time introducing them and let their personalities emerge organically over infrequent chatlogs while most of the action centered on John-as-reader-insert doing dumbassery. With the trolls, Hussie treated them like jokes and gave them over-the-top personalities with ridiculous, murderous drama, which fit the speedrunny way he introduced them. But the new kids are in this limbo where he wants to get them working (like Jar Jar) quickly, yet is giving them personalities that are at worst nondescript and at best Dave 2: Davier. (Roxy is the exception here.) They wind up having a lot of very cute, very cloying chatlogs that read super forced and I wonder if their failure to immediately get off the ground is why Hussie felt the need to spend more time with them, linger on them, until Jake winds up with one of the highest line counts of any character in the story despite saying exactly 0 things of value total.
Worse, though, is the villain situation, because it's directly tied to the story's stakes. Hussie has to make Lord English a more significant threat than Bec Noir, despite working at base with only a few references to him from Spades Slick and Doc Scratch. It's from this we get the laborious cherub stuff, the expansive dream bubble stuff (Lord English being able to double-kill ghosts is his major establishing moment of threat), and the general need to make this whole section of Homestuck feel as weighty and monumental as the first half.
The problem with Cascade is that, even though it doesn't resolve the plot, is resolves pretty much all of the emotional stakes and tension in the story. The idea of going quickly from Cascade to a final fight makes sense on paper but it doesn't make sense emotionally. That final fight would wind up as flaccid-feeling as Collide eventually did feel. Hussie's kudzu-plant expanding Act 6 reads to me as an attempt to rebuild to the level of tension that existed before Cascade, one that eventually failed because he got tired with the project and phoned in the climax anyway.
So, getting back to the original question, I think if we're to end Homestuck at Cascade then it really needs to END at Cascade, narratively as well as emotionally. Cascade does an admirable job cutting down Homestuck's plot threads from 100 to 4, but it really needs to cut them down from 100 to 0. This is a lot trickier than it seems because Cascade is, in the context of the narrative, not a moment of victory but a moment of... quitting. It's hitting the in-universe reset button. It's triumphantly hitting that button, but it cannot actually achieve total plot resolution without fundamentally changing what it actually is.
You can slim things down. Lord English can, believe it or not, be cut entirely. Prior to Act 6 he exists only in a handful of lines. Doc Scratch can be reframed as the ultimate evil himself, rather than simply its servant. He already is a pretty good villain in his own right.
Bec Noir is trickier because there's not really a good opportunity for the heroes to fight him. I wonder how necessary that is, though. It's not like Homestuck was ever a story where things got resolved by flashy cinematic fights. PM getting the ring is a satisfying, climactic moment in its own right; does she have to get locked into eternal stalemate with Bec Noir? Can she maybe just defeat him the moment she gets the ring? It's an unconventional ending, but one that makes sense in the concept of Homestuck. Given Collide, that's probably a superior way for the climax to go anyway.
That leaves the new universe kids. They can also probably be cut pretty easily. I'm fairly certain Liv Tyler is the only direct contribution they make to the pre-Cascade story. It'd take some changes to account for that, but not many. Alternatively, since we already can't get past the fact that Cascade is just a reset button press and not a resolution in and of itself, we could leave them in as characters who show up, briefly, in an epilogue of sorts, framed solely through the POV of the original kids. (i.e., forgo all the "Your name is JANE CROCKER etc.) Maybe don't even give them lines. Leave it to the fandom to come up with their personalities.
The way I'm envisioning this is that we end the story as quickly as possible after Cascade, and by that I mean literally 15-20 pages where we show everyone speedrun the new universe with their incredible god powers, maybe with a few cathartic final conversations between the surviving members of the cast. The longer you go on post-Cascade, the longer you're going to be tempted to go on, to make its new elements breathe in their own right, and when you do that it's only a matter of time before you get sucked into the Act 6 Vortex of bringing back meaningful stakes, which you have to do from Ground Zero.
I'm actually a big fan of Act 6, which is where I feel like Hussie gets a lot meaner, a lot more combative with the readership, with some fascinating results. Most of Act 6's failures stem from the failure of its ending, which is a separate issue caused by Hussie losing interest in the project after the Hiveswap debacle. But if you're doing Act 6, you gotta really DO Act 6. You can't just do it halfway. All or nothing.
More Nano Banana sillies. This time @fipindustries Jenny and Peter. I'm quickly finding myself unimpressed by its limited ability to iterate compared to the other state of the art models, but it's free and generous and good at a wide enough variety of styles.
The titular Jennyffer from Jennyffer, featuring Jennyffer (and Peter (from Jennyffer)). Had a lot of fun watching this today, but mind the content warnings.
Jennyffer is, of course, a product of Fip Industries (Fipindustries)
(1810)
Sorry lads, I gotta do it. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Although Hades 2 was probably my favourite thing I played personally that released this year. Experienced E33 through two youtube playthroughs.
14. Favorite book you read this year?
Earlier in the year I actually finally listened to the entire Expanse series on audiobook, and I enjoyed it immensely, so maybe something from that. Although it was all so back-to-back I would struggling to distinguish which one was my particular favourite. I enjoyed most towards the middle of the series.
Lots of webnovels I wanted to read but didn't. Maybe I'll get better at that in 2026.
My print edition of There Is No Antimemetics Division was also a very fun read, although it reminded me that as much as I like the ideas QNTM explores, his stop-start sort of episodic narrative style is a bit of an acquired taste at times.
question for writers, after finishing a long and involved story where you became very attached with the characters, did you ever felt the temptation to revisit those characters? maybe not in a sequel but perhaps a short story or scene, but decided against because it would feel disrespectful to the ending of the story?
I tend to accept a finished story as such, and as I have gotten older this tendency has only increased. I think it is healthy, albeit in some ways difficult, to accept that things pass. If a story is well-done, satisfying, and has a clear and comprehensive ending, then I am usually content to let it be. Indeed, sometimes I even feel strongly about letting it be, for the reasons you insinuate.
In fact, to discourage my magnum opus from being bastardized, I've designed The Curious Tale so that it would be thematically and circumstantially impossible to sequelize or reboot without breaking the canon. It is my artistic intention with this story that, once it is finished, it remain finished forever. I can't explain why or how without being spoilery, but this is a dear and deep-seated part of The Curious Tale's purpose to me.
On the other hand, if I get attached to one or more characters, naturally they do sometimes take on a life of their own in my mind—and all the more so if the story lends itself to this openness.
With the way your question is worded, I'm not actually sure if you are referring to the idea of revisiting characters from an external story (i.e. by writing fanfiction), or to the idea of revisiting characters from a story of one's own.
If you're talking about one's own work, I can't give a clean answer, because I don't have any finished long-form works. However, the short-form stuff that I've actually finished, I have rarely if ever returned to. My intent is usually to write a story that nicely ends and doesn't easily brook a continuation. Of course, you can always force one, or you can create an out-of-continuity moment, or you can go back and fill in gaps from the past. But I usually don't do that, and in any case my point is that I usually mean to be done with a story once it's done.
I have wondered, from time to time, if there isn't some subconscious force at work here for this very reason, playing a modest role in keeping my stories perpetually unfinished so that their horizons are never closed off. Even though I know how After The Hero ends, and the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel too, foreknowledge is somewhat different from actually recording it in ink. It's like the difference between knowing oneself to be mortal, and actually dying.
Anyway, on account of not having finished any of my big stories, I haven't actually experienced your scenario yet. I will say that Galaxy Federal is meant to be a big, modular fictional universe, and that my intention is that it be easy and potentially commonplace for characters from one story to show up in another story.
If you're talking about writing fanfiction of somebody else's work, I usually have no desire to do that. It's not really how my imagination works. I'll often think about such characters, but I'll rarely "take over" them. In my entire life, I can only recall five fanfictional works that I've ever actually laid down any ink for—although it seems inevitable that I'm forgetting a couple.
[TANGENT: If you are wondering: 1) a Star Trek fanfic when I was a kid, although this was all original characters, except for Scotty for some reason, lol; 2) a Radical Dreamers fanfic in my early-middle twenties, again with all-original characters, except this time for the extremely obscure character of Merkid; 3) a Final Fantasy VI fanfic built around Celes that has been rattling around in my head for most of my adult life, featuring the actual leading characters from the game (plus some OCs of course) involved in an actual sequel; 4) a fanfic from the Troubles centered around Nahiri from Magic: The Gathering, telling a sequel to the events of Shadows Over Innistrad block and, in later years, also retelling the bungled story of War of the Spark; and 5) a one-off Legend of Zelda scene I wrote a couple years ago of Link speaking with the Goddess Din about why her corner of the Triforce always seems to be associated with great evil. There's also a sixth one, which I have never laid down ink for, which would be a sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, featuring JM Colt in command of her own starship, following a lead provided by Vejur's incredible info-dump at the end of TMP. Most likely, this is going to end up as a Galaxy Federal story someday, assuming I live long enough to write it.]
There are a few asterisks worth noting:
First, the number five only refers to serious efforts, and doesn't include the countless little unserious, off-the-cuff "doodles" that I write or otherwise record from the position of my delighted, absurdist, surrealistic sense of humor. I'm talking about little jokes, fun little moments, etc. Even though they do get recorded into a physical medium, I don't think such flourishes really qualify as fanworks in the spirit of your question (or under my definition of fanworks), even if one might argue that they do count as "revisiting."
Second, Empire on Ice, despite being a comedy, is very much a "serious effort" and is essentially one giant revisiting of the After The Hero cast in an alternate continuity.
Third, as a kid, I did have a well-fleshed paracosm that included a number of external fictional characters, such as Huey, Dewey, and Louie from DuckTales. But these daydreams certainly were never recorded into any physical medium, and thus weren't "fanworks" to me. (Here I'm putting a lot of weight on the "work" part of "fanwork," but as an artist that is a valid and important distinction; I consider internal creative experiences like daydreams not to be works.)
Fourth, I would like to do a Super Metroid original story ROMhack someday, and this would definitely count as a serious effort, a fanwork, and a revisiting of the character of Samus Aran, but my purpose in this is not driven by a desire to revisit Samus (vis-à-vis your question) as much as by my desire to tackle a new medium (ROMhacking) and, more importantly, to pay homage to the formative Metroid experiences and feelings of my youth. So it doesn't really qualify on those grounds, I think.
Anyhow: Asterisks notwithstanding, creating fanfiction is not really my thing. If a character sticks in the craw of my psyche, usually one of two things will happen: Either the character and their hook will remain as a relatively formless patchwork of daydreams and emotions, or I will spin them off into new original characters or fold them into existing original characters. The latter, spinning off, is something that has held true for me as an adult because of the dissatisfaction and disaffection that comes from the fact that I don't own other people's characters and don't control what happens to them canonically; in my adulthood this has put me off of fanfiction in general. I would much rather do my own custom characters.
Speaking of daydreams, I do frequently daydream about characters, more so my own but also to a lesser extent those of other creators. I don't personally think this really counts as "revisiting," especially if we connect the idea of revisiting to the act of crafting a fanwork in a physical medium as mentioned above. But I will definitely take a character like Silence or whomever else and imagine them in their own little out-of-continuity moments (or prospectively-addable-to-the-continuity moments) quite often! Albeit less so in more recent years, with my mind not working so well.
I have also physically written scenes on occasion which aren't intended to go in the work they're associated with. I wouldn't personally classify these works as fanfiction or as alternate-reality / alternate-universe fiction; they are just standalone out-of-continuity scenes; but I do think they satisfy the spirit of your question in the sense of "revisiting," if not the part about "after finishing [the story]."
There's also something else to consider, and this gets back to the heart of your question: "Revisiting" a work, and the characters in it, in a new composition, has a cost. Fictional worlds age; they have a life-cycle—one measured not in years but in storytelling. The weight they accumulate from worldbuilding and continuity interdependencies eventually becomes unbearable. The tacked-on nature of new plotlines eventually ruins the original form and profile of the story—almost like literal tacked-on additions to a once-beautiful building. And enfranchised fans become more and more implacable over time, falsely projecting their own earlier experiences in life with these stories onto the material of the stories itself, and ultimately rendering virtually all new stories unacceptable. (Although the problems with enfranchised fans are, strictly speaking, extraneous to the aesthetics and integrity of the story.)
If you'll humor me a short rant: I wish we had more original storytelling. I'm pretty averse to the comic book model of nothing ever truly ending. To me, this endlessness strips a story of its coherency and thus its meaningfulness. I'm also a hard sell on prequels, as prequels are usually too referential to the original material to stand stably on their own, and, worse, they necessarily change the original material in unintended ways; ergo, an impingement. And I'm downright hostile to reboots, notwithstanding that sometimes reboots are good in their own right, as a reboot feels very much like a groundhog day phenomenon to me—while also overwriting the original.
All of these problems apply mainly to the large, official, systematic revisitings of stories, much more so than to the kind of personal, one-off revisitings that you mean. Nevertheless, I have read enough fanfiction to know that fanfic authors often do perpetrate these same kinds of problems. I remember reading a Final Fantasy VI fanfic once; it was a sequel to the game, and there was "a new enemy," and the villain's name was "Dave" or something, and I was thinking to myself, "You've murdered this game and are kicking its corpse. Fucking DAVE is never going to out-Kefka Kefka."
And, you know, my stance on all this is that people should write whatever fanfiction they want to write. I'm not the Emperor of the Universe, and if I don't like a fanfic then that's my own problem, and I'm not going to say or do anything to shame people for indulging their passion. I love for people to make art, whether or not I like it. But, certainly, I wouldn't want to do anything that I would see as disrespectful to a story that I cared about enough to return to in a fanwork. I would want any "revisit" to be done with care, at least by my own standards for what that means.
Wrapping it all together, I think my final answer to your question is this:
I usually don't revisit characters if the story they're from has a satisfying ending. However, I think about, and daydream about, fictional characters fairly often. If a character deeply resonates with me and sticks in the craw of my psyche, I'll probably spin the interesting parts of them off into a new or existing original character. I do sometimes physically write out-of-continuity fiction, but usually it remains in my imagination. And I have only written "serious effort" fanfiction a few times.
Finally, here are some leftover crumbs, mostly about Samus Aran (who was originally my running example in my reply to your question), that didn't make it into my response but may still be interesting:
For example, back in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, I ship Link and Ilia really hard...
That's a whole topic in its own right, but one for another day! 😂
Just to go off on a tangent about that: For example, with a character like Samus Aran, whose stories are basically missions in her career, with each story ending implying further adventure to come, there's essentially no constraint on future storytelling for her, because her story hasn't finished yet, and in the meantime she has become an icon and a legend. (I haven't played Metroid Dread yet, so no spoilers on that one. 😅) Not that I would want Samus' story to be endless like comic book superheroes' are; rather, the end of her story simply hasn't come yet. And I know that, corporately, it never will. Even if the franchise falls dormant, it will be revived in the future. That's business for you. 🙄 But the good thing about the future is that I can pretend that it actually will end for her someday. I can headcanon Samus as either retiring from bounty hunting at some point or perhaps meeting her end on a mission, and no one can prove me wrong.
This part is important to me. Samus means much more to me as a character if I can imagine her as a living, breathing being and not as a tool for corporate moneymaking. Real human beings have a lifespan.
But most stories do not have this open-ended, episodic-esque structure to them. Most stories are meant to be completely self-contained. Or at least it used to be so, before this contemporary moment of corporate conservatism and consumer crassness causing constant reboots and sequels, with new IPs nowhere to be found.
Lol, can you tell how salty this makes me?
Samus is a good example, so let's stick with her for now. I watch a lot of Super Metroid map randos, where Samus is forever delving into Zebes in a sort of PUBG-esque Valhalla. And people are still making copious fanart of Samus all the way in 2025, making her one of the only beloved fictional characters from my youth for whom this is true. And Samus is the central inspiration for my character Mereidi Basilisk in Galaxy Federal. All of which is to say that I am exposed to Samus a lot, and I think about her a lot. And she delights and inspires me. Yet I have never desired to write fanfiction about her.
Which is true!, notwithstanding the bit about wanting to do a ROMhack game featuring her someday. Sometimes a character can stick with you but you never want to touch them. Which is another way of replying to your question...
