i'm working on godfeels. it's an ongoing homestuck fanfic that asks- what if john egbert transed to june egbert less than a year before the start of the epilogues? the result is a lot of interpersonal strife, physical trauma, ptsd, tender t4t sex, evolving friendships... and a war on the moon that leads into an omniverse-spanning space opera about a version of jade harley who has been adventuring in space for thousands of years and now is a leader in the magical girl military group called the extracosmic witchkind legion.
so anyway i'm working godfeels 3 part 2, which might more accurately be described as "godfeels 2" as i'm treating it like a jumping-in point for new readers who (presumably) have not read homestuck. which is not an easy task for an over 400k word ensemble narrative that also takes as read the entire 8000 page run of homestuck itself. but it's coming along day by day, made somewhat easier by the fact that my goal is not to make sure that everyone knows everything, but that everyone knows enough. i think it's less important that you understand what trolls are or why godtier powers work that way than it is for you to understand why our characters are invested in the present-tense events of the narrative. what is jade's motivation? what is jake's? terezi's, roxy's, dirk's? if you can understand some substantial vertical slice of their character spine, their motivating verbs, the tenor of their interpersonal history, then you as a hypothetical new reader don't need to understand the Lore, because you understand the characters. and godfeels is, first and foremost, a character drama-- even though it has ballooned far beyond its slice-of-life origins into the high concept metanarrative superstructure it has become.
"but i thought you said godfeels is about june" well it is. but that's part of why i'm thinking of 3.2 as the beginning of a new section, because june's taking a backseat. 3.2 when it's released will be presented as two separate fics: 3.2A and 3.2B. at the end of 3.1, our cast had a bit of a civil war and wound up splitting into two distinct factions. we'll be following the perspectives and relevant flashbacks of both parties, jumping from A to B in an alternating fashion. once our present tense characters have settled into their new environments, we will be spending quite a lot of time in flashbacks that fill out a bunch of new/modified characters that we as yet don't know a whole lot about. in particular: a six-armed lizard woman called alphi apexis, a fighter named dana straten, jade's daughter edie halley, and a troll dyke named lenore lehart. here's the them:
PLEASE NOTE that these sprites are not necessarily how these characters will look in the final version!!! this art btw is by janet girlpillz, who contributed a lot of work to the final chapters of 3.1. she's great! we've concepted a lot of stuff for 3.2 that i'm really really excited to show people, but we'll get there when we get there. you'll note that these four characters have distinct stylistic variations between them. one of the big ideas we'll be playing with is the notion that every possible homestuck fanwork exists on a cosmic continuum (what homestuck^2 referred to as "the fanontinuum," though they never had much of a chance to elaborate on that concept before hs2 got shut down). this extends far beyond what you'd normally imagine as "homestuck fanworks" though, because there are quite a few which completely eschew the cast and setting of homestuck in favor of borrowing only its systems or ideas or even just aesthetics. so every member of the EWL is, functionally, the survivor of someone's fansession, is someone's precious blorbo OC. to whit: alphi comes from a universe heavily influenced by the works of jim henson, so she looks a lot like a fraggle. dana, on the other hand, comes from a universe with an artstyle influenced by akira toriyama-- which makes sense considering how much her focus on physical combat resembles the ways combat is treated in dragonball z.
we don't have a timeline for when 3.2 is finally gonna start. i'd originally hoped to get it off the ground by august 8th of this year (8/8, naturally), but i couldn't work on godfeels AND get my video essay about Tunic finished at the same time. since the latter is the one i can actually monetize, i had to focus on that. now that that's out, i've finally been able to spend time in the godfeels factory again. progress has been slow, though, because beginnings are slow. at this point the most substantial goal i have is to start releasing before the end of this year. but it'll be next year, i think, when it really starts to take off. once we've got a couple chapters finished my hope is to set up a website to host everything in a much more dynamic form. we'll see how that goes, won't we?
anyway read godfeels, even if you haven't read homestuck. a fair few folks have and they've come away completely normal. i promise
