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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.“