#hs asks

[official-healing-souls-project]

how have i not followed this blog yet what

anyways HUGS YOU'RE WRITING IS SO AMAZING GSISGSISGSISJKSJ tell me when next chapter's done? (if you're okay w it ofc)

AVSSHSS THANK YOUU

the next chapter isnt being written yet, but i AM almost done with plotting everything for it, and im a quicker plotter than i am a writer, so perhaps maybe sometime in the next few weeks?

i can add you in the taglist if you want to be notified early on >:)

[heart-select]

Hey granny hart,how was your day?

uEE ARUUU;;;

i'm doing well!! hope you're doing well, been a while since i've been referred to as granny kjsnjgsndg hopefully you've been sleeping good!!

[approximateknowledge]

71 for the ask game :33

pitch da/ovejade

trust me

these 2 repressed-in-opposite-directions idiots need a healthy kismesissitude and it just *works* im dead fucking serious

dove<3<jade is meant to be they hate eachother because they think the other could be so much *better*. it's disappointment and frustration and "stop being such a repressed idiot/self-destructive people-pleaser!!!!" and they're both better off for it

(also ends up cracking dove's egg but that's a different hill im dying on)

[mindareadsoots]

Never apologize

[takemetoohigh]

Affectionate Harper is the softest thing ever🥺🥺

we love our affectionate giraffe.

beyond the physical affection she tends to give that we can see on screen, it’s also evident from the soundbites. she looks for Abby, quietly sneaks in a “you look good” at the dinner party, always tells her “I’ll just be a sec” or “I’ll come right back”. at the doomed Fratty’s meet, she was so excited to see Abby (albeit probably exacerbated by alcohol too at this point), asked if she’d had dinner... *big sigh* you know?

even when she’s in this circumstance when she can’t fully show it, she really is very affectionate, and, really, it’s heartwarming to know that she doesn’t have to hold back anymore.

[approximateknowledge]

I'm reading homestuck through the official source. why should i use the emulator? /gen

because flash died and all the [S] sequences and especially walkaround "game" sections are slightly to very fucked up. the emulator gives you the original experience.

[mindareadsoots]

Yeah...

I don’t want to drag on Homestuck^2 too much because I’m done reading it, and anyway HS^2 is half-dead from what I understand.

I for one actually liked Roxy’s storyline in the epilogues, because I liked the butterfly effect element of it. Characters can have very different lives or even be very different people depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Sure, a lot of her behavior in Homestuck Classic suggests that they’re a very pansexual cis-girl, but trans-Roxy was a popular headcanon back in the day, so the Epilogues got to explore that in various ways. It’s a neat exercise.

The representation question is still interesting because from what I’ve heard from people who do still like HS^2, that’s the main thing they’re attached to. They liked Roxy’s dual character arcs in the Epilogue and they’re excited for June Egbert. And if you’re part of that group of people who are starved for trans rep, I get that, but I don’t think it doesn’t count for much if it doesn’t make sense.

Honestly, I don’t even think the problem is the creative decision to write these characters as trans, the problem is everything surrounding them. It’s a little hard to write a compelling character study in the same story where I’m supposed to believe that a human woman named her children Vriska and Yiffany.

The whole point of adding minority representation is to create characters that people can identify with, but across the board, almost nobody in HS^2 acts like a person, so what are we even doing?

Vriska is a whole other complicated issue (so this is a normal day at the office with her).

You want to talk about trans rep not making sense, I literally don’t know what it means for a troll to be transsexual because it doesn’t make sense for trolls to have gender in the first place.

Any troll can procreate with any other troll, so why do they even have assigned gender at birth? What does it mean? What effect does it have on anything?

Hiveswap introduced another trans character by the name of Lanque, and he is also a piece of work, so the Vriska conversation nicely dovetails with the Lanque conversation. Vriska may be divisive but at least some people like her. Lanque is just a pure case of, “Oh yeah, this is the kind of trans rep people were hoping for lolol, psych!” 

I don’t know. It’s all just very frustrating to watch, which is why I decided I don’t have to watch it anymore!

[mindareadsoots]

lol, that kinda makes sense.

See, for me, the problem with the epilogues is that so much of it is clearly driven by authorial intent that character analysis feels pointless.

Like, we all know the real reason why Roxy is trans in the Epilogues. It’s because trans awareness has increased in the time since Homestuck ended, and trans-Roxy was a popular head canon, so they ran with it.

John gets killed because his retcon powers are too powerful, and so they needed to write him out of the story.

Jade is said to have a tail because people like drawing fanart of her with one, even though she doesn’t.

Jane is suddenly racist because most of the Epilogues was written in 2016 and 2017, so they decided to morph her into a fusion of Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton for some reason. 

Actually trying to analyze these characters within the story feels outright dishonest. It’s trying to make sense of a story that, at its core, doesn’t make sense because it’s deliberately written to be bad fanfiction.

And that SUCKS because this is also the story where they’re trying to be inclusive with more forms of representation! Homestuck^2 could have continued to be a platform for groundbreaking forms of rep the way Homestuck Classic was... but the story is bad so it doesn’t matter!