It's 4/13 and 4 days ago I finished posting Karkat Vantas vs The Evil Gods, a fic that I've been percolating for more than a decade and am very proud of, and which readers so far seem to have quite enjoyed! So this is me enthusiastically doing jazz hands at my baby. HEY THERE MY FRIEND DO YOU LIKE
1. Humanstuck, vigilante/superhero AUs, eldritch gods, possession/exorcism, religious horror, hurt/comfort and drama?! Alternia City as Basically Gotham?!
2. Riffs on the Winter Soldier/Turns Out The Guy You Love's Not Dead But He Came Back Wrong?! People slowly recovering from horrible dehumanization and learning to be people again through the power of many different forms of support and love?! People negotiating messy poly situations?! Pale Gamkar, even, perhaps?!
3. Copious shenanigans of Space and Time?! The ever-increasing urge to beat Doc Scratch's smug little "Hee Hee Hoo Hoo" ass with your bare fists?! Goddessdemonangel in a sundress?!
3. Ensemble casts whose backstories could sustain multiple spin-off fics each?! And the personnel forms I fabricated and filled out for every single one of them because I've lost control of my life?!
WINTERSOLDIERSTUCK WEDNESDAY WSUNDAY BE UPON YE. If you've been on the fence please consider checking out my huge and fully-illustrated brainchild (with an eye to the tags and warnings of course) because I had a lot of fun and think it turned out pretty sick! Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Further xenotroll shenanigans: "splickedy gets predictably in the weeds about clowns" edition
“Your words, (hm).” Jade frowns, chews on what she means to say, looks at her papers again. “Trolls, you take small words, and…” she makes a move of her fronds like she’s squishing and crushing at something between them. “Makes big words! Long words. It’s harder for me! But fun!”
She’s learned her shit a little since the last time you talked—’fun’, she says, meaning a little laugh of a joke between hatefriends, not a real holy riot. You think the wordy shit she’s up to sounds mad motherfucking boring, but it’s not your business how a motherfucker gets her globes off, you guess. You nod and wait for her to get around to the point of her point.
“So,” Jade says, marching on forward, tapping at her papers. “The…Dark Carnival.” She sounds it out every part one after the other, ‘fatal-funny cullpit of the messiahs’, like how a corpse dismembered and all laid out turns into pieces instead of a whole troll.
“Dark Carnival,” you say, putting the corpse back together to show her, fast and fluid how it’s supposed to flow.
“Dark Carnival,” Jade repeats after you, choking just a little on the shift of chirr into click. “Okay! What does that mean?”
Turns out it’s harder than you would’ve figured, making explanation of this shit. You’re called on to clear up “cullpit”—the explaint of that one makes Jade wrinkle up her nose in human disgust, not peeling up her lip from her flat teeth, but otherwise a whole lot the same as a troll would do. Then you take apart “Grand Highblood” for her, and the names he was given, the things called out by the congregation. King of Colors and Holy Hilarity and Mirthful Majesty.
“King,” she repeats, and breaks it up like she breaks apart everything, dismembers it in her flat plant-eater fangs, making shapes in the air with her clawless hands. You never will quite get used to the way these squishy little motherfuckers bend an extra time in their extra fingers, how they’ve got just flat little chitin plates instead of claws. “Little he-empress?”
You never did think of how those pieces fit together. She’s sure as shit not wrong though. “Damn, yeah,” you say. “Guess so, sister.”
Jade seems all manner of delight over that. She laughs big and fearless so it shows all her flat plant-grinder fangs, and yells something out to the other room, something with your moirail’s name in it. Karkat’s head pops around the corner so quick you know he’s been fretting himself in the next block over—the other humans show up too, and Jade says something in Human, sprinkled-in Alternian words like sparkles of stardust mixed in dirt. Empress and King and King but broken into its pieces. Strider and his blue-eyed flighty buddy raise brows and make faces that make you laugh as much as Jade did; the one Kanaya’s preening at covers her mouth like too polite to show off my fangs and laughs too, saying something at Kanaya that makes her turn a shade of green and pick her claws at her hair.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gamzee Makara & Karkat Vantas, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Implied/Referenced Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Characters: Jade Harley, Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara, Dave Strider, Beta Kids (Homestuck)
Additional Tags: Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Language Barrier, Xeno, culture clash, Wildly gratuitous deep-dives into xenosociology and linguistics ahoy, Alternate Universe - Feferi Took Over, Did i make a glossary of which alien noises map to which human 'oh' 'aw' and 'uh' sounds, yes i did and I'd do it again!!!, i cannot be stopped
Series: Part 2 of Aliens Sure Are Weird
Summary:
“Guys, hey, come on,” Jade says. “Troll language is much more specific about stuff like this, when he says stabbed he could mean something different! Karkat,” she switches to Alternian, bending her human vocal structures in painful-sounding ways but still doing a much better job than Dave, all things considered. “Stabbed, stabbed, or stabbed?”
You know you didn’t teach her the distinction between “poke hard with a non-strife-allocated object”, “stab lightly to show somebody not to fuck with you”, and “impale to kill”. Humans don’t even have that distinction. It’s a fucking miracle they get anything done.
“…Stabbed,” you say, carefully enunciating like a fucking liar.
I hope nobody is tired of reading incredibly self-indulgent “what if trolls were like 400% more alien” culture clash fic, because I’m sure not tired of writing it lmao
Winter Soldier Gamkar has hit 100K words and 6 completed chapters and a whole lot of supernatural bullshit and Reminding My Traumatized Boyfriend What Kindness Is nonsense. Thanks to the co-writer groupchat for reading the first draft and 1. convincing me not to half-ass my scene planning, and 2. helping me figure out Karkat's Whole Deal, lol. Clandestine military experiments.....a comic book classic...
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You don’t know what the thing you were fused with used to be. You call it the Cancer, in your head, to yourself, but some part of you knows it’s a whole fucking lot older than the concept of names. It died so long ago, there wasn’t a word for death yet.
Any of its corpse that washes up into your reality is just skeletal detritus; the assholes who experimented on you couldn’t find any consciousness to bore into your skull like the Scratch did to Feferi and Eridan. They had to fuse it into your flesh to wring power out of its remains, and it’s only through some hideous joke of luck that it took and you’re still alive to bitch about it.
It could be worse. You could be a rotted, mangled corpse in an unmarked grave.
They’d almost seemed surprised that you were pissed, when you found out about that little wrinkle after the fact. You regret a lot of shit in your life, but savaging the asshole who changed you—who killed dozens of stupid kids before you—isn’t one of them.
You don’t know who has it worse, really. Feferi and Eridan don’t show much sign from the outside that anything was even done to them—but for all the double-takes you get on the street, you don’t have to listen to voices and whispers. There’s no living, scheming forces trying to push you to do anything, there’s just a vast, echoing emptiness in the back of your head. Sometimes when you sleep, you find yourself in the place where it lives—or where it died. An endless, quiet walk through an empty shell the size of a thousand cathedrals, rotting and half-consumed.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
*Relationships: Kongo Unsui/Hiruma Youichi/Anezaki Mamori *Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Bisexual Awakenings, Emotional Repression, Polyamory, Canon-Typical Quarterback (And Manager) Mindgames, Dysfunctional Family, College is for figuring out you're not straight OR emotionally okay: the fic, …..Unsui deserves to date two people Agon struck out with simultaneously: the fic, It's not exactly hurt/comfort but, Hurt/Validation, isn't a tag
Summary:
Agon’s jaw works like he’s biting his tongue. “I didn’t hit you that hard,” he says, but Unsui knows his brother, deeply and painfully and inconveniently, and he knows the rare, uncomfortable edge of uncertainty in his voice.
“Yes,” says Unsui, coldly. “You did.”
*Full list at link
Bonus: just some dudes having a very civil discussion :)
Agon should get scruffed like a puppy every so often when he gets punchy. it wouldn't fix him but it would make me very happy.
Hi!!! I’m obsessed with your “aliens sure are weird” series omg. I looove when writers make the trolls super different and strange and you’ve done it so well!! And also all the linguistics stuff, really cool and interesting as well 😊 anyway hope you have a good day, I’ll just be over here hoping you write another installment ;)
lololol doing my best, boss! Multiple people said I should stop holding back and just indulge myself in copious moiraillegiance nonsense, so I'm. Indulging.
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You take in the shitty production values, the way the two guys on the screen are circling each other—the bad, tinny music. The way Karkat’s face went bright red when he recognized what you were watching—oh. Oh!
“Oh shit, this is going to be educational!” you say, delighted.
“This is porn,” says John, because apparently he doesn’t realize the two can be the same thing. Dave is looking straight ahead, but his face is going really pink around the ears. Rose and Kanaya are making gimlet eye contact and not looking at the screen at all, so who knows what’s up with that.
“It's pale, for moirails,” Karkat says, distracted from whatever hissing argument he’s having with Gamzee. "I thinked—I thought, 'porn' is for fucking?"
“It is, for humans!” you say. “But humans don’t have moirails.”
“No,” says Karkat, and drops his face into his hands to click-growl something too muffled for you to make out. Lifts his face again to say, “<No, humans sure the fuck don’t have fucking moirails, huh?!>” Apparently just in general aggravation, to the world at large.
Gamzee is in the next room over, sitting on a big squishy-looking pillow in a kind of cross-legged sprawl that makes it really clear how his legs don’t bend in the same ways human legs do. You’re delighted to realize, for the first time, that troll feet are padded like their palms. You hadn’t thought about it—the chitin claws cover almost the whole toe the same way they cover pretty much the whole finger, and they don’t seem to spread a whole lot, so it’s easy for your brain to read them as hoof-like and move on. But there’s little beans down there!
Alien contact really is just the gift that keeps on giving. What a good day already.
Karkat is occupied bustling and hustling around greeting people like the bossiest little mother hen—(And take off those, the fucking foot-clothes, my hive is clean, don’t you put shit and dirt on the ground! Put them here, by the, tss, the, damn…in-and-out place!)—so you stroll over into the other room and lower yourself onto the floor to watch whatever it is Gamzee’s looking at.
You kind of thought maybe he’d started movie night early, but he doesn’t seem to be watching a movie. He has something that looks a lot like a normal human tablet propped up on a table, and he’s watching what looks like a live feed of a huge room full of other trolls, with a guy at the front talking.
“<—(A sentence subject you must have missed) is the funniest (implied:warning-shot-level danger) motherfucking make-mess the (something)s could do to make want,>” says the troll at the front of the crowd, succinctly proving to you that Gamzee is not the only troll who seems to think more verbs is better and sentence order is a pointless invention. The guy talking doesn’t sound exactly the same, but he stretches his hums and chirrs and growls out and piles his clicks together in a really similar way. “<We’re all (body parts?) up in the air, down up our (whole/entire) motherfucking horns in dirt. (Some kind of noun with the food-descriptor ‘sweet’ in it) on our (body part again? It sounds like a compound word of ‘face’, sort of) and that isn’t a motherfucking mistake. It’s no motherfucking mistake, brothers!”
Gamzee says some kind of emphatic imperative verb—in a polite, subordinate inflection, which is pretty unusual for him. On the screen, a few other people do the same thing, mostly saying words you don’t know—one of them you hear says “<Say it, motherfucker!>” and another one says “<Yes, brother, yes!>” with the heaviest subordinate inflection you’ve ever heard. Somebody else honks a bike horn.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kongo Unsui/Hiruma Youichi/Anezaki Mamori, One-Sided Kongo Agon/Hiruma Youichi, Kongo Agon & Kongo Unsui
Characters: Kongo Unsui, Hiruma Youichi, Anezaki Mamori, Kongo Agon, Lots of cameo Enma Fires and Saikyou Wizards throughout, …………………………and Musashi
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Bisexual Awakenings, Emotional Repression, Polyamory, Canon-Typical Quarterback (And Manager) Mindgames, these people can't be normal about shit to save their lives, Dysfunctional Family, Agon and Unsui's Convoluted Brother Emotions, And also. parent situation., College is for figuring out you're not straight OR emotionally okay: the fic, …..Unsui deserves to date two people Agon struck out with simultaneously: the fic, It's not exactly hurt/comfort but, Hurt/Validation, isn't a tag
Summary:
“What,” says Unsui, and is keenly, painfully aware that whatever stoic expression his face might have locked itself into in his shock, his cheeks are damningly warm. One part of his mind demands, do something, his plan is working, you’re losing! The other part says, your first kiss was a cackling bastard of a man, because he thought it would make you more likely to lose to him at football.
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Kongo Unsui gets kissed by a man. He's proud to say his performance as a quarterback doesn't suffer at all, in the…extensive aftermath.
Hiruma Youichi makes a move, and then does what he does best, which is scramble like a motherfucker and improvise an offense from scratch.
Anezaki Mamori analyzes the situation, and politely intervenes.
Kongo Agon has a goddamn crisis.
