character coherency vs character quality (Patreon)

"Yeah I'm thinking that its dope asf that the river turns rocks smooth" - defunct tumblr user cuteitem

CALLIOPE: it is not done out of malice. it is done out of love.CALLIOPE: it is a kind of love that erodes, a rolling love that turns the rocks smooth beneath its eternal flow.CALLIOPE: a love that cannot abide by the beauty of jagged rock.CALLIOPE: a sick kind of love that you can only have from this distant vantage point.

-- burning down the house page 744

there's something appealing about it, isn't there? this idea that under consistent enough force, even jagged rock becomes smooth, and loses the jaggedness of its original

on 4/13 i put up the first section of an arc about june and calliope on lowas. let's talk about what june's up to! mostly, having a derealization/depersonalization disorder. but that's like, only kind of the deal.

one of the things i think about a lot is the difference between a more coherent character and a more compelling one. this is pretty often seen as one and the same, but i don't necessarily think it is innately. like all writing advice, it depends on what you're going for, but i really think that a character who is internally consistent is a worse one than one which is not.

of course, there are characters who i really enjoy who are pretty simple mechanically speaking. kiruko from heavenly delusion is a classic unbreakably kind character, even after experiencing a sexually violent betrayal, she is primarily, very kind. and i adore kiruko. chuck mcgill has one trick and it's "he is driven into his neuroses by jimmy slipping" but it works out. but that's not always the right thing, right?

june egbert is a big idea. the protagonist of one of the biggest webcomics ever is a trans woman, but only dubiously so - there is no text, there is barely subtext, but it's a big swing out of left field that lets fanworks go wild. that is INTERESTING. your own personal june, your own personal favorite june ship that wasn't available before, because rose is a lesbian, the inherent variety of cultural narratives surrounding trans people, there's a lot to sort through. this leads to a lot of ideas, and with the absence of any meaningful text to cover it up, the base notions are exposed. people construct their own june narratives, and well, it's dope asf how the river turns rocks smooth.

there's this little hobbyhorse i have, it's a little bit petty of me - i think a lot about people who don't like homestuck but insist upon writing homestuck fanfiction. after homestuck^2 started, every few weeks a new one would pop up, an mspfa borne of people being upset with post-canon. teams often ballooned into the double digits, since they took anyone and everyone. they're more akin to angry mobs than teams of artists, really. and this was only reinforced by lengthy preambles with every artist's sona or sonas sitting down and giving you the shittiest little pep talk about how you shouldn't like post-canon and they're here to save you from having to suffer through an artist's vision, instead of a committee of people blorboposting.

this is all really petty hater shit, but ultimately, what interests me is that a lot of them want to do june stuff. the goodwill is there, and everyone wants to give what homestuck^2 did not, do not look too closely at why homestuck^2 did not. june egbert is to post-canon what tolkien is to fantasy, in my opinion - any relationship between the two is at the very least informative and potentially very interesting. even an absence of june is interesting, the choice to abstain. and a lot of june stuff is really, really safe, comfort food. sarah zedig, of godfeels fame, called this approach "hairclips june". it's not june-as-narrative, but june-as-shibboleth, and that's its own kind of interesting. you do june because june is the good thing to do. sometimes that's enough, june can exist without needing to have a story told about it, and this is appealing!

it's appealing specifically because you can't do a narrative wrong if you dont do a narrative at all. every bit of specificity that exists alienates a character further from the reader, and so becoming more and more general - a design, a set of shapes - you are encouraged to see more and more of yourself in the character. this induces a sense of ownership, and is only emphasized by things like fictionkin feelings, edits that change character races, etc etc etc. and that's an interesting thing to unpack. in the words of snowflake jake, specificity be the enemy of unity. and then he let out a pirate's growl.

-- some scott mccloud book. i dont remember which one this is in. probably understanding comics.

there's not a lot of choices i actively regret making narratively in bdth. in terms of workload mustered? yeah absolutely, god damn. making comics is hard work. but one of those regrets is depicting characters outside the narrative before the english fight in ways other than sprites, the platonic ideal of those characters. they're drawn fairly often - they have bodies, expressions, things that push them further from their view of themselves.

but back to june. it's this, the safest june that interests me, and it's the safest june that i think i am the most invested in rejecting. and so in bdth, john is weird and messy. he is actively rejecting himself, he's living life in third person. it's difficult to remain invested in the world once you know it's fake, right? john has had the "it's all a dream, stop caring" reveal. and he has to go on like that. it's the same disillusioned, dissociative episode that drives him through the candy timeline - but it's the same disillusioned, dissociative episode that brought him to not cry as he found nanna's remains, after rose died in front of him after game over, that lets him coast through fighting caliborn like it's nothing. it doesnt even happen after he plays a dirge for his friends.

"would estrogen have saved her" is a good question to ask and sometimes the question is yes, but as of writing, he's been on it for... somewhere between 1 and 7 years, and he is doing worse than ever. and this isnt a failure of estrogen, the problems are deeper seated. the first thing every trans woman ever makes note of is that her tits hurt. but the second is how much easier it is to cry over things that wouldn't even occur otherwise.

perhaps it's interesting in itself that even now he can't bring himself to do that. it's just not in-character for him. that seems to go against what i was just saying about characters being idiosyncratic and ever so slightly incoherent, but adhering to axiomatic character traits prescribed for yourself like that becomes an idiosyncracy in itself, these ways in which we make rules for ourselves, then break them as we see fit, the way we push against certain expectations and make concessions to others, that i find compelling.

"it doesn't all make sense, or resolve or coalesce because we don't all make sense. everyone is the illusion of order, constructed brick by brick out of chaos." - octoling pop idol, marina iida.

you are 100% sure she said that