Haven, face stained with tears of joy: Act 2 starts.
Floral: The way it was killing us sitting on Ly’lac since like… February? So glad to see her in the limelight finally.
MILES, on alien tides, also just realizing that the way we write out these initial name intros kind of feels similar to the types of titles that nymphs have, which is a cool coincidence: I mean, honestly we’ve been sitting on Ly’lac for two years. It’s just that her Imminent Reality became a lot more apparent to us early this year, which was very scary. But in a really, really cool way. We’ve been white-knuckling it waiting to finally reveal her to you all, so August was a moment of immense triumph for us.
Haven: First unit of time dropped for a new species! “Tidal turns” what is that equivalent to? It doesn’t really matter! The tides come and go quite often. We have entered a scary new world of non-specificity and vague gestures, you don’t need specifics anymore, this isn’t your first rodeo. She is 15, she was named when she was 13 just like everyone else. It’s new, but nothing is really new, everything is just spun up from something we already know, just flipped or reversed or inverted or rotated in some way. We’re at the Waluigi stage of Homestuck themed simulacra now. As an aside, in the original draft for literal months it said like "It just so happens that today [DATE PUBLISHED] is the day her GRAND METAMORPHOSIS begins [...]" which made me laugh every time I read it. We ultimately didn’t even define the day but it’s already publicly agreed upon her birthday is August 1st, which would make her a Leo aw that’s cute. In your fanart of Ly’lac as a troll remember to make her an olive blood (in fact i’m pretty sure one of the first speculative fanarts i saw of gavageCunctation actually did make her an olive blood, shout out to whoever did that. you win a genuine Homestuck Comics No-Prize). It’s also the birthday of Calamity Jane! Which doesn’t mean anything at all but it’s a fun coincidence right?
Floral: Haven had constructed these measurements of time a while back and of course it was perfect. All these edgy nymph teens being allowed to act like their existence was sooooooo long and drawn out.
MILES: It was interesting to think about what units of time a species living under the sea would use, considering many of them might go months at a time without seeing the stars, so we figured that tides was probably one of the better ways for them to measure that; subtle shifts in the level of the sea itself that they can feel with their super sensitive Squish Organs, which I definitely didn’t just make up.
Being real, I don’t think any of us actually have a decent idea of how long a tidal turn actually even is. Like, the tide changes 2x a day on earth, and that’s probably Approximately similar on Deltritus, but that means the unit they use to measure time is MEGA small. We all thought it was really funny that they’d just have this incredibly arbitrarily minute unit that nobody’s actually all that clear on and is incredible inconvenient for using to measure large periods of time. Alternians had awkward 2.166666666 solar sweeps, nymphs have tiny little grains of sand in the hourglass of life.
All you really need to know is that she’s 15, okay?
Haven: Originally her title was “The Fell Omen” but Miles reminded me that’s a thing from elden ring so that was nixed pretty quickly.
Haven: Something about getting a new “Your name is X and you Y” is just so fun. Ly’lac’s everything is built around beginnings and endings. It was Floral’s idea to have her be a cartoon fan and that really tied it all together.
Floral: It feels like every major kid in Homestuck has to be tied to some art form in some shape or form, and to finally have a slapstick cartoon expert feels like the natural next step for a girl who is essentially John’s successor.
It also gave us a chance to revisit some of our fave cartoons as kids which… idk if the kids even know about Catdog anymore.
MILES: The Homestuck Room Intro always feels like a kind of character baptism of sorts, and being able to write up our own for our own little baby made us very very proud mamas and papas. There’s a lot to be said about whether or not it’s worth retreading this kind of ground, but being able to introduce a new kid with the same kind of shenanigans that greeted us at the very beginning of our own Homestuck Journeys so long ago just feels like such an enormously cool rite of passage for us. Like, damn. Ly’lac is REALLY REAL.
Haven: A new spin on an old classic. I was pretty excited to get this gag in here.
MILES: And we’re doing an arms gag, too. So there!
Haven: We’re here with a gag that is just straight ripped from Rose’s intro. This part of the loop has big text on the screen that says “This Track Is Now Looping.” It’s not exactly the same though, right? Some of those numbers used to be letters, but the numbers that replaced them are also familiar, everything here is so familiar. It’s set up in a way where even though Ly’lac is wholly new she sparks feelings of nostalgia anyway. It’s like coming back to your hometown after being away for years. A lot has changed but it’s still the same somehow. You know the deal, you already know what’s about to happen.
MILES: And the formula chugs on. But you know what, it’s FUN. Homestuck is all about formulas, whether referencing them, flipping them on their heads, or just repeating them ad nauseam for decades, and what’s weird is that even writing a section that’s more explicitly HS-referential than HS:BC has already been up until this point, it still doesn’t get old. Maybe I’m just old, and clapping my hands in delight at references to media from half my life ago is my fate as a late-millennial, but whatever dude.
MILES: Also the text on this one command looks kind of weird but it’s probably nothing.
Haven: This little weirdo only feels safe when she isn’t.
Floral: Both Miles and Haven have a gift for writing the narrated sections, I love the pacing of this joke.
MILES: I LOVE WRITING THE NARRATED SECTIONS! That’s another thing that’s great about whenever we get to write the kids; the informative whimsy, the slight irreverence, the union of the character’s mindset with the occasional abstract individual personhood of the narrative voice in Homestuck... it’s a delight to play with. The adults in Homestuck have in a lot of ways moved past the gamey nature of it, but for these young protagonists it’s a necessity.
Haven: I fucking love coming up with shit moduses (modii?)
Floral: Ly’lac’s modus is one of the first things that was thought up about her, due to the level of… unuseful mayhem to it. When Haven suggested it it was like yep immediate co-sign.
MILES: It’s widely known that a fetch modus must needs be as horrible and clunky as possible. As horrible and clunky as saying “must needs” instead of “needs to”.
Haven: Nothing is unkillable before Ly’lac, even things that aren’t even alive to begin with.
MILES: Writing Act 2 has been a blast thus far, and the writers rooms have resounded with laughter even moreso than usual since we got here. This was one of the sequences that really cracked us up and just felt so quintessentially Ly’lac.
MILES: And here we get our first glimpse of the enigmatic TC. At this point, we haven’t had any conversations between two of what we’ve been calling the Delta Kids yet, but a new voice joins their chorus, and he’s... pretty gøød vibes. He’s moving a mile a minute, introducing a few key concepts to get the reader’s gears turning, and wishing Ly’lac well. Unfortunately, he’s unable to provide the kind of comfort to Ly’lac that she expected from him, because like everyone else in this damn comic he’s apparently all hyped up about playing some stupid computer game.
MILES: Some dreaded stupid computer game...
Haven: What a chill bro. It’s fun that the two purple kids seemingly get along so swimmingly.
Haven: More familiarity, more lack of surprise. So now we know that nymphs are largely a prophetic species, their entire society is centered around knowing how things are going to end before they even begin. They know the punchline before the setup, they probably suck to watch movies with.
Floral: Just the right end to Ly’lac very first impression! I really do feel like Ly’lac is such a fun departure from our usual hs introductory characters because while she shows the typical desire to avoid fate, she also doesn’t take any actions at all that lead to Homestucks usual self fulfilling prophecy.
MILES: Seriously. She couldn’t be less enthused to be doing this. But I can’t say the same for us, because I cannot WAIT to see where she goes!
Floral: Now for Update 18!
Haven: a Discord pastiche... Eek! Ly’lac’s naglink is very late 90’s/early 2000’s AIM coded, similar to her taste in cartoons! She’s a bit outdated.
Floral: BOOM. We are living in the future. This feels like a moment out of our personal lives since most of us lived that messenger pilgrimage.
MILES: Coming up with cha.OS as an extremely overt Discord parody felt almost too on-the-nose, but honestly it just kept working out in so many ways, visually, thematically etc. It felt kind of bad to leave the older AIM/MSN-likes behind, but as Floral said, we are living in the future now. There’s also just so much more we want to do with group-chats and we’d like to try and keep Homestuck semi-zeitgeist-relevant in the way that the OG comic was.
MILES: As a side-note, Andi did a fucking phenomenal job designing the cha.OS UI. It looks so cool, I hope we get a functional one soon.
MILES: In the new era of an Official Homestuck Discord, this is more relevant than ever.
Haven: Very serendipitous of us to write this before the discord was released.
Haven: Best girl is here. “When you turn the page and see a wall of red text you instantly know you’re about to read some bullshit.” was something that came up during a discussion about Dave and I laughed when I realized the same applied to our dear sweet auguryAside.
MILES: Fuck. Yes. Welcome to AA’s wild ride. Ly’lac is getting ranted at by all sorts of wacky friends today, and they’re all delightful and I love all of them and I hope you do too. You wouldn’t leave them on read like Ly’lac does, right? I sure hope not. Anyway, this passage is yet another retreading of a classic Homestuckian Tradition, which is getting extremely bothered by a bunch of people on your birthday and sort of ignoring them in favor of informative faffing about. Luckily AA knows how to stand up for herself and demand the attention she so rightly deserves. Unluckily, Ly’lac’s avoidance is a powerful thing.
Haven: Ladies and germs, the negging master has arrived. Everything she says is coated with a bizarre combination of carefulness and aggression. She’s clearly trying to get Ly’lac to do something that she thinks or rather knows Ly’lac is probably going to try to avoid doing. She keeps casually insulting Ly’lac but immediately will try to renege and assure her that everything is okay actually. She also seems to be in a bit of a rush, which is paradoxically paired with her apparent inability to keep things brief. Also isn’t it fun that the first boy to message her calls her “bro” and the first girl to message her calls her “sister”?
Haven: AA is so kind, she’s getting weirdly excited at the prospect of Ly’lac getting older and changing. Where Ly’lac only finds interest in the destination, AA seems to be invested in journeys.
Haven: The idea of AA watching Ly’lac walk around her room chuckling at her posters and rolling around on the ground in frustration after blowing up her new gift all while being in the midst of some unknowable crisis is just so funny.
Haven: There's a lot of fun puns and wordplay here. So Ly’lac lives around people at the end of their lives and has been here since the beginning of hers.
Floral: It feels appropriate that our first example of nymph society is an old folks home. I also personally appreciate it since how elderly live is usually ignored. Almost like the thought makes most people uncomfortable.
Haven: And with this we now have a few nymph anatomical words: UPPER ORGANON, something like a brain probably? The INKSTONE which probably works like a heart from what I can tell? Their MANTLE which is just what the top of a squid's head is so there's an easy comparison. And the glossy little boba eyes on top are their PANOPTICS.
Haven: Aw AA’s first gift to Ly’lac has arrived, topped with birthday balloons! Also her squidmom is outside! I mean her CARETAKER. What is with that trail of ink behind her?
Haven: oh ew. The adult actually in charge of Ly’lac’s care and development has been violently repelled by AA’s gift. It’s not a hard task and the prize is a birthday present, but now Ly’lac’s procrastinating (cunctation) nature has been challenged. She’s been given a task that requires her to get up and move. Well played. And with that we end our commentary thus far.