HUSSIE Q&A QUESTIONS - PART 3
“I try very hard not to think about the Professor because of his overwhelming sexual magnetism. Unfortunately, reading this question caused me to think about him, which will send me spiraling for weeks, but there's nothing we can do about that now.
Will we ever see him again? Yes, right now. This is bad news for anybody who was hoping to get anything productive done soon, and now must ride out wave after wave of euphoric rapture in response to this exquisite specimen.”
“Half way through.”
“In a way it's unfortunate to share opinions via interviews, or maybe at all, because it can amount to revealing an infinitesimal sliver of one's experiential totality, turning the mole hills of passing rumination into imaginary mountains of conviction and absolute certainty. There are ideas we share with others as one might handle a fidget toy, which then get mistaken for a pair of handcuffs. Works of art and statements made will populate the psychological profile of a cerebral apparition which happens to share the name of an author, and then some day that author may be asked to answer for the condition of somebody's private ghost. This can get a little awkward. There are millions of ghosts who share my name and I speak for not a single one. But I've also long since retired the practice of trying to train my phantasmal doppelgangers to do a better impression of me. As it turns out these ectosynaptic holograms comprise a fearsome legion far less governable than fandom itself.”
“It never crossed my mind for a moment that they would ever be made, and I gave exactly zero seconds worth of thought to them before The People willed them into existence. Even the Beforans in the story were never meant to be shown originally, but The People similarly forced the issue back then, but through a less orderly process. Homestuck hadn't invented democracy yet, it was just a twinkle in the Mayor's eye.”
“Since I don't release much, people probably get the impression I'm not doing much, but that isn't the case. The stockpile of concepts and works in progress is always pretty steep. In a way, Homestuck is the smaller visible part of an iceberg representing stuff I made, which includes a greater unseen volume of drafts in varying states of completion. The size of unreleased things, not measured by wordcounts or visuals, but lore, character counts, summaries, sketches, and other conceptual metrics, greatly exceeds the scale of Homestuck. I haven't been in a big rush to get any of this finished and visible to people for several reasons. There's a lot of "been there done that" with Homestuck, marking turf I'd rather not retread, and high on that list is speeding through production at the expense of... just about anything at this point. There's also the lurking concern in the back of my mind that releasing another work of any substantiality may amount to arming another doomsday device in the form of Fandom Two. But the gravity of this metaphor may mischaracterize how I feel about the perils of fandom, which I don't actually think is a body that difficult to commune agreeably with or pacify if so desired, and doesn't take an excessive amount of effort, however, it does take SOME effort. And any non-zero value for effort represents something which needs a time budget, and there are only so many hours in a week that can be applied to making and publishing New Thing, while tending to Fandom One so as to keep the peace, and while cultivating Fandom Two so as to avoid pioneering new kinds of war. When you consider how difficult creation alone is, even without adding the labor of juggling multiple fandoms, then you might understand why I wouldn't be in such a hurry to deploy new works...”
“This isn't to say I won't, and maybe that day isn't even too far off, but until then it's been occupying a fair amount of bandwidth taming whirlwinds once reaped from from sowing all this god damn wind. - John Egbert probably”
“I was aware of it, but the beginning of the story wasn't the time for any meaningful examination of what that meant, because it was being perceived through the eyes of a younger Dave in denial about what was going on. That denial is expressed to the reader through the fraught relationship's abstracted or cartoonish presentation, where abuse came across more like a form of slapstick, and given no further depth. The story couldn't communicate the seriousness of that situation until Dave himself understood it, because that's how these topics reveal themselves to the reader - through character arcs. What the story has to say about topics such as this is shown, not told, and the "showing" happens when the characters tell us how they feel about them.”
“I'll tell you what I told the feds back then, I have an air tight alibi, now please stop asking.”
“Much like the Beforan ancestors, this is another topic I never gave any thought to, as it would be difficult to name a sum of money that I could be paid to care about Beforan lore. It turns out the only force on earth that can get me to care even remotely about Beforus is the POWER OF DEMOCRACY. After The People spoke, at that point the only difficulty I had in drafting new Beforan lore was having to constantly wipe the tears from my eyes.
I don't have an answer to this, but I do have the same thing you all have, which is an array of puzzle pieces to think about. We know it can't be Doc, because he's the host for Lord English, and his job is to bring him into the universe by arranging its future destruction somehow. He only showed up in a scratched version of the troll universe, and his name also happens to be Scratch, which of course is a pool term as well as the term used for rebooting a universe. I don't think this was stated or implied anywhere, but in this sense it would be fitting if Doc only showed up in scratched universes, which means the pre-scratched versions of those universes would be cosmically designated for being scratched, to let Doc show up, so English could show up too.
So what guardian should Beforus have to signify this designation, as if flagging the universe for a post-scratch appearance of Doc?
What else do we have to work with? We have our pre-scratch universe, where earth has an omnipotent dog guardian, and post-scratch, suddenly it's a cat. Is this just unremarkable parallelism on my part, or does it point to a sort of rule, and what would that rule be?
Dogs have adversarial relationships with cats, and getting more specific, dogs are the aggressors toward cats. So what can we do with this? Doc, like the cat, is a post-scratch guardian, and he's just a talking cue ball. Do cueballs have natural enemies or aggressors? I can only think of one, and it's a stupid answer. A cue stick.
But on second thought, maybe this isn't so bad. Everything about Beforus is pretty lame in comparison to Alternia. Why wouldn't they have a first guardian that's an "omnipotent" cue stick that just sits there for millions of years doing nothing? It doesn't have a brain, so it can't meddle with civilization, so Beforus turned out that way. Remember it was said to be Doc's intervention that messed up troll culture and turned it more violent. But what can a cue stick do? Jack shit is what.
Something else about this which makes sense is it reminds me of how a virus works. A virus sometimes is a small stick-like object which only carries some pernicious DNA. It isn't sentient and has no real motor functions. It infects a host, then problems come later. The cue stick doesn't do anything, but discovering one on your planet should be like a cursed warning sign that your universe is fucked, but not even this version. The scratched version to come later is. This leads us to wonder if any of the Beforans encountered this cue stick and what they might have done with it. Did it make the rounds through the known cast? Did it make its way into the hands of the Draconian Dignitary? We know he likes to swing those around.
Is this good lore? Do we feel smarter or dumber for learning all problems in Homestuck trace back to a magic cue stick on an irrelevant planet full of shitty lore the author didn't care about? For that matter, did you even need me to figure this out? The pieces were right there staring you in the face all along.”
“There's no way I'm touching this question, because it's going to lead to bonus content where I have to draw all the Gamebro reviewers and start classpecting them. Absolutely nobody wants this.”
“I don't know anything about Skibidi toilet, but I just looked it up and all the characters and lore sound like something Hideo Kojima would come up with about 20 years after finally being checked into a mental institution.”
PART 4 GOING UP SOON.
