Thoughts and feelings, pages 43-110 (Patreon)

Hi! I've been kinda busy. As you can tell. 

Being the change you wish to see in the world is hard stuff! So instead of going over page by page, let's play catch-up, and talk more broadly about the last month of the comic. This one will also go out to all patrons, instead of just the $5 tier, as a means to say "hey, this isn't dead". 

PAGES 43-64: 

These two scenes are way, way more important than you'd think. They're both kind of down-tempo scenes, settling into Earth-C. Two notes from the June + Jane half of this update is that there's a scene where June walks into what used to be her bedroom, and there's a poster on the wall for No Mercy, a fictional movie within the Left 4 Dead 2 framing device. There's also a can of Arizona green tea with honey in it. That shit's delicious. But also, this specific can has Jonesy from Fortnite on it, because amongst my friends we have begun calling it Arizona Fortnite Tea, because it is something to drink while playing Fortnite.

On the Terezi and Rose half of this update, there's a lot of things going on here too, but the two things I want to specify are thus. The first is Rose being deeply into urban exploration. I take a lot of liberties with characters, but shockingly nobody's ever gotten my ass for urbex Rose. It just feels so right. 

The second is that the Slurpee was invented by Omar Knedlik, in the late 1950s. His soda fountain broke down, and he was forced to put them in a freezer to keep them cool. These inevitably became slushy, and well, people loved it. At one point, the prototype Slurpee model used an AC unit from a car. At some point in the world, we may have our car ACs making slurpees... A beautiful dream of a hedonistic future. Rose in particular is very concerned with history, too. It's clearly something on her mind as she settles into a "post-humanity" Earth, with the history both gone, and yet extremely present. 

Oh, in rereading these pages I forgot I put down nonbinary Terezi in here. I guess I should say something about this. I'm kinda playing fast and loose with identity here too. Terezi's sort of occupying an area a more label-oriented person would consider "demigirl". It's not a big deal to her, and it shouldn't be that big a deal to readers either. In narrative terms, there are bigger fish to fry, and in character terms, it's just not that big a deal to her either, I think.

Oh, sudden fourth thing: "Don't be an asshole." followed by Calliope slurping is a deep cut from the Shrieking Shack, the best podcast of all time. It's not even a contest. 

PAGES 65-87: 

There's always an impulse I have in writing this commentary to point out every time I start setting up dominos to be knocked down, but I always do my best to quell it. But in terms of plots kicking off, here's something I thought was cute of me to write: As soon as Jane tells Roxy to put some more meats on her pizza, she hears the knocking that we later learn is GCATavrosprite biting it, which kicks off the plot proper. 

Art note: The background of page 79 (Jane: Raise the dead.) is lifted wholesale from an MTG Forest card. I think it's the Unstable forest, I think it looks really good but it's kind of obscured by Jane raising the dead.

And then we get into Tavros teaching Jane a little bit of Alternian lore - that the VR sound in Tavros is a specific sound that just the "vr" sound doesn't carry wholly. I kinda like the way this challenges the way you read the comic - the written and the said are two distinct, different things and should be treated differently, like being written in the Alternian font. 

Page 84 ([S] Jane: Bother Karkat.) comes with a remix of Karkalicious that my wonderful friend Maxie made. Honestly, I'm genuinely pretty impressed with myself with how good the animation of Karkat sleeping came out, being just a single image, tweened and resized. 

PAGES 88-110:

Hot damn. I forgot I made this comic so good. 

While the first ~50 pages act as a reintroduction to Earth-C, pages 88-110 act as sort of a reintroduction to Jane. She's more or less the protagonist of Burning Down the House, and her arc in Homestuck left a lot to be desired, and then her arc in post-canon left even more to be desired. 

A lot of her characterization in Homestuck is wrapped up in her relationship with Crockercorp, which, while it works for Homestuck alright, it doesn't work so well here. In this set of scenes, I've started moving her towards what I'd consider the more compelling parts of her character - the innate skepticism, the tense and fraught relationship with masculinity and men, and most of all, her love for detective fiction. 

The pick I went with as Jane's detective of choice is Columbo, for a few reasons.

One is that I love him. 

The other is the subversion of story structure that Columbo provides aligns fairly well with the tendencies of Homestuck. A lot of events in Homestuck (especially Act 5 Act 2) are set up in a way where you see "here's where we will be, how do we get there", which aligns nicely with the Columbo structure of "here's who did it, how do we get him". 

The other other is the tendency for Columbo villains to be people with power over others. The common Columbo narrative is that someone does a murder to preserve their position of power, and placing Jane as the opposing side of that is interesting to me, since Jane's characterization in post-canon works is more overtly on the villainous end.

Maybe Dirk Gently is a stronger detective for Jane to imitate, given the nature of Dirk Gently? If I had thought more about this and not just jumped to my beloved Columbo, maybe this would be the case. Chalk this up as my only failure.

In a grander scheme, Jane's interest in detective fiction solves a lot of problems, mostly ones I made for myself by making a character I would consider tertiary the protagonist.

First and foremost, it gives her a grounding outside of Crockercorp fanaticism. It gives her a role within a story to drive things forward - a mystery needs to be solved, who is going to solve it? Well, Jane can. It's in her damn chumhandle. 

It also places her in the mindset of a common type of audience member - the "puzzle solver". This is a really common type of reader, one who grew up with adventure games, in which possibilities sprawl out, and then all get tied up easily. This is gestured at with a reference to JJ Abram's magic box TED talk on the page where she investigates the gift from Roxy. A lot of criticism got sent towards Abrams for this mindset, which is more or less the reason that Star Wars 9 was bad... I don't want to talk about this anymore! Wow!

Some notes for [S] STRIF---E:- This page purposefully echoes a lot of strife pages early in the comic - the most intentional one is actually Dave's repeated rooftop strifes with Bro, where Bro cuts through the UI of Homestuck and leaves Dave falling down the stairs in every encounter. Meenah slices through Jane's strife portfolio, and pierces Jane with the trident, pushing her down the stairs and out the window, since I think that Bro and Dave's relationship *is* actually fairly comparable to Meenah and Jane's. - The image on the TV is from Breaking Bad. It's a shot of Drew Sharp, holding his tarantula in a jar. This is a load-bearing pillar of the narrative. - The wallpapers in the hallway are Thomas Kinkade paintings, specifically Cobblestone Bridge, Mountain Majesty, and Summer Gate. These all look like shit and I hate looking at them and never let anyone tell you I never suffered for my art. - Inside the vending machine in the corner of the room is Neutriangles, a generic foodstuff from a game I made in 2018 and Special Dogs, from SSSS. Gridman, the best anime. - Ah fuck there's Fortnite Jonesy again. 

The Jonesy Fellatio Water Fountain, Now In A Corporate Apartment Building Near You.

PAGE 110: 

This is the last bit of notes for this section. This flash page is really, really cool. I love the ambient pages from early Homestuck, and doing one here just felt good. This one specifically mirrors page 82 of Homestuck, the title drop. 

The prose has some nice touches: One is the fairly invisible drop of "spiky seeds" and "stars overhead" - the names of the ending songs from FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative. This is kind of the level I like references existing on. While it's funny to post Jonesy fellatio water fountain, this kind of stealth drop is much more appreciated when others do it and I try to maintain the golden rule when referencing like this. 

While the bulk of the prose was basically done in one shot, I spent a lot of time waffling on which pull quote to use and misattribute. In the end I went with the one from Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel prize acceptance speech, which I like a lot, but here were some contenders:

- “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” - Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

- “How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.” - Theater of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud

- "Everything, finally, is a promise. What seems a lie is a ramshackle need, wishing to be born. Here. Thus and so." - The Toynbee Convector, Ray Bradbury

- "I saw now how meaningless / Life had become with the loss of all these things... / I wandered home though the silent streets / and fell into a fitful sleep / Escape to realms beyond the night / Dream can't you show me the light?"- 2112, Rush

And lastly, there's a secret page! I don't think anyone's found it, or if they have they didn't post about it. But since you're special, I'll let you know this secret here. 

Ah shit, I wrote way too much. Maybe I'll be more concise next time, whenever I remember to do one of these! See you then.