really great catch. immediately brings to mind black and white as “vessels” for each other, and the omnipresence of the white mount.
really great catch. immediately brings to mind black and white as “vessels” for each other, and the omnipresence of the white mount.
Doing some reading back on Mindfang’s sections of the comic for the wiki - the ancestors now all have their own pages - and it’s fascinating to find out that the independence of land dwellers from sea dwellers was even more explicit than i remembered. I always point out to how counterintuitive it might be for the Grand Highblood to have the authority to execute Dualscar despite caste seniority, but Mindfang makes it sound exactly like a “you tell my boss and I’ll tell yours” situation when she discusses reporting Dualscar’s own crimes directly to the empress.
Doing some reading back on Mindfang’s sections of the comic for the wiki - the ancestors now all have their own pages - and it’s fascinating to find out that the independence of land dwellers from sea dwellers was even more explicit than i remembered. I always point out to how counterintuitive it might be for the Grand Highblood to have the authority to execute Dualscar despite caste seniority, but Mindfang makes it sound exactly like a “you tell my boss and I’ll tell yours” situation when she discusses reporting Dualscar’s own crimes directly to the empress.
Damn, I really need to take a proper look at the latest book of commentary, because I’ve spotted some really good stuff in the process of skimming over this part of the comic - this quote I put on the ancestor page for example was a really great discussion and confirmation of stuff I’d already been thinking about for years.
On this Mindfang page Andrew again basically confirms the existing interpretation with some authorly insight:
This also gives us a better sense of caste roles. Since purples are the highest land-dwelling caste, they end up functioning as the brutal enforcers of all laws pertaining to all lower land-dwelling castes, in any way they see fit, which due to their clowny nature obviously ends up being kind of capricious and not entirely logical. We see many signs later that this is exactly how the Condesce likes it, and she sees great value in outsourcing the mechanisms of authority through these nuanced layers of power, with the nastiest clown-thugs sitting at the top. Even sea-dwellers like Dualscar, who technically outrank all purple bloods as the reigning aristocracy of the planet, still have to defer to maniacs like the Highblood when it comes to navigating the dispensation of authority for all lower castes. Which isn’t ideal for them, since clearly engaging with them at all carries some risks. But the Condesce doesn’t care if a few high-ranking violet bloods end up getting arbitrarily whacked by her beloved clown muscle.
The bit about the Condesce deferring power over to clown thugs is, again, just bang-on exactly what I’ve been saying this entire time. It’s nice to know, at the very least, that Andrew hasn’t totally forgotten every single thing that was going through his head when he wrote this comic, which was dangerously close to the impression he was giving in the prior books.
Really hope these keep being made despite everything!
I think the distinction between the Highbloods’ authority on Alternia and that of the Condesce is that while the land dwellers seem to have at least some form of complex government and various mechanisms in place to enforce that government’s laws, such as the legislacerators, the Condesce rules totally by force. She doesn’t have the legal authority to tell a lowblood or a clown what to do; but anyone who doesn’t do what she says can be easily overpowered physically, and even someone who can withstand physical attempts to silence them will be outlived in the typical hemospectral fashion and become irrelevant to her in the blink of an eye.
Sort of like the classic distinction between a parliament and a monarchic institution - but with the added threat of the imperial drones which, in the sense that they are much like attack drones employed by imperial powers on today’s Earth, also add the angle that the sea dwellers are alike to a foreign government occupying the land dwellers.
You know, it might not even be that Andrew remembers much about writing Act 5; it could be that rereading Mindfang’s journal is just doing a really good job at jogging his memory as to what Alternia was about. It’s sort of a masterstroke of worldbuilding, and I think Andrew himself describes this quite well in a part of that Book 6 page 309 quote that I left out of the article:
[…] this isn’t a rabbit getting pulled out of a hat, it’s an answer to some questions that were implicitly being asked by the story, and the answer was already kind of boxed in by a lot of pre-established lore. This is pretty much how worldbuilding in general works. You build a world, then the world keeps seeming to ask these implicit questions, and many of the answers are shaped and confined by the facts already spread out on the table. This process leads to results which are: interesting! Arguably more interesting than if you just pulled some ideas like this out of thin air. These ideas arose naturally and logically from a continuously emergent framework, which makes it all feel more sturdy, and perhaps explains why this facet of the story was very successful in capturing people’s imaginations.
All the “new” things we learn from Mindfang’s stories are really things that we should have already been able to guess based on the things we already knew - which is exactly why all of this commentary just has me going “well duh, I figured that out all on my own!” Telling a second parallel story about a second parallel set of trolls was just a way of sealing with glue the cracks between the foundations already laid by the first story about the first set of trolls. No wonder it was so successful in capturing people’s imaginations indeed!
This idea that a world should be architected by shining a mirror back on the parts that have already been built has always been one of my strongest philosophies, and I think it’s something that Homestuck, a story whose second language is patterns and repetition, excels at. I think having this put into words goes a little bit of the way toward explaining some of what felt like Hiveswap’s shortcomings to me: even though originality is always a virtue in telling a new story, sometimes a sequel that does a poor job of synergising with its predecessor is even more egregious than a sequel that contradicts its predecessor outright.
You need to strike a balance between building windows into new avenues of storytelling and placing more bricks on the wall you’ve already established, or you run the risk of building a greenhouse instead of a cottage.
Actually, I’ve been thinking about something a lot in the past few weeks that comes dangerously close to straying outside the focus of this blog, but it’s so pertinent to this epiphany I’ve just had that I absolutely need to write it down. It’s about my experience making and playing with fantrolls, but it easily applies to working within the pre-established world of any work of fiction.
There are essentially two extremes I’ve come across when it comes to the development of fantrolls (and it’s worth stating before anything else that, because this is the world of original characters, where any kind of originality should be held above all else; there’s nothing wrong with living in extremes if you prefer it that way, but the existence of extremes will always indicate the existence of a middle ground, which is where I prefer to stay).
The first extreme is the “canon-defiant”; the fantroll who has no intention of ever living in the real, “canon” Alternia. The highblood who works a job at Wal-Mart to pay for food for his two pet dogs. What’s been built here is all windows and no bricks; a glasshouse is perfect for keeping various kinds of plants alive, but no human would ever want to live in one.
The second extreme is the clone of a canon character. The author has observed the canon Alternia, noted its character archetypes - strong, cultured bluebloods, messy, jovially bellicose clowns, and nervous workmanly lowbloods - and attempted to build characters out of these existing pieces. This is a house made totally out of bricks, with no windows; it’s a woodshed, great for keeping inert stacks of firewood out of the elements, but totally inhospitable to living things. Many criticise Hiveswap’s underwhelming cast as being made up totally of this kind of character.
A great case study in avoiding these extremes can be found in the practice of making “sessions” of fantrolls that was once popular in the scene. I think a great example for proving this point would be a session based on horror movies. We’re making six fantrolls, just to keep things simple - rust, gold, jade, cobalt, purple, fuchsia - so we choose six horror movies; Hellraiser, Alien, The Conjuring, Stephen King’s It (the original miniseries, counting it as a movie for the sake of this exercise), Friday the 13th and A Quiet Place. So which movies go to which castes?
No doubt your immediate thought is to make a purpleblood based on Stephen King’s It; but in doing that, we’ve created a woodshed character. We already know purplebloods are clowns, and we’re creating a character based on that established fact. So we need a way to assign these movies to castes of the hemospectrum without our existing knowledge of the canon biasing our decisions. What do we do?
We do exactly what Andrew Hussie did with his trolls; we put them in order. So for the sake of the this exercise, let’s use their release dates.
By creating these “random“ but natural associations between our sample group and the castes of the hemospectrum, we’ve instantly opened up a million new creative pathways to ourselves, simply by working from our own ideas into the existing canon, rather than trying to build straight up with the canon as a foundation. Knowing what we know about the purple caste, what would a troll inspired by The Conjuring be like in that role? How could aspects of the film A Quiet Place be applied to the ruling class of the Alternian empire? We’ve reached a middle ground where the idea isn’t already written for us, but there’s plenty of room for us to use what has already been written for us as pieces to build something unique.
In this sense, the canon trolls of Homestuck are a perfect set of fantrolls; an absurd assertion on its own, but Andrew’s use of the zodiac as a springboard to create a new world is genius on the same level found in Mindfang’s journals. Picture how the trolls would be if, instead of laying them out in order, Andrew had created Alternia’s class hierarchy by putting the signs in the order they “seem” like they should go; for example, since Aquarius is depicted as a manual labourer, it might go at the bottom, while Gemini represents Castor and Pollux, heirs to Spartan royalty, so it goes at the top. For starters, the sea dweller/land dweller divide we know would not exist. There would be no neutral caste in the middle of the spectrum responsible for the species’ reproduction. Archery and nude art of anthropomorphic animals would not be the staples of upper class artistry. Alternia would be a boring world where everyone does exactly what we expect them to do, because it would be built purely on preconceptions. Just like the world built in Mindfang’s journals, the strength in the whole concept of Alternia comes from the fact that it was “shaped and confined by the ideas already spread out on the table.“
This thesis can easily be expanded out to describe speculative fiction as a whole. The writer of great science fiction does not begin the process by inventing a new law of physics; they take an existing speculation, a question, an idea - say, the possibility of faster-than-light travel - and then work backwards and build a story out of the way this speculation might affect the surrounding world - for example by revolutionising interstellar trade but changing the way humans interact forever by constantly putting their timelines at odds.
I actually came here to discuss a new angle on Black Hole Theory, which has basically sat untouched since about this time two years ago, but this worldbuilding stuff did what it does best and distracted me and now it’s late. So I’ll try to gather my thoughts on the other thing for tomorrow.