Floral, yippee!!: This was an especially fun update with all the user commands we took from the FRAF forums.
Miles, playing Pokemon Legends ZA and getting emotional about Feraligatr: Seriously! It was so, so incredible to be able to help FRAF launch the forums in the first place and to see that come to life, so getting to actually tie the comic back in was just a delight. What a return to form... and it’s not the last time we’re going to do it, either, so if you haven’t yet, I’d really consider checking the forums out. At any rate, seeing the influx of answers was just fantastic.
Haven, playing Pokemon Legends ZA and getting emotional about Heracross: The month of Ly’lac continues with an exciting return to reader submissions. This update in general was like a trip down memory lane. We get to reminisce about old homestuck and Ly’lac gets to reminisce about her own life.
Floral: Being able to let people interact with Ly’lac was so fun to watch. All of them where helping her in her ultimate quest to avoid
Floral: Enter key player, Meemaw. As we imply later in the update she’s been around way longer than any other elder in the complex.
Miles: It’s awful when the most curvaceous, gorgeous, elegant woman you’ve ever seen gets a tummyache.
Floral: That damned voice again.
Haven: Always with the voices.
Miles: Homestuck is full of voices telling poor, innocent player characters what to do and pissing them off and just generally getting them into all sorts of trouble, but we’ve never seen one that could be averted by slime before. Also interesting to note that Ly’lac is loath to face the call of THE VOICE and yet perfectly fine accepting prompts from a bunch of degenerate Homestuck fans. Just kidding guys I love you. But I wonder what that means... what is this THE VOICE, anyway?
Miles: Speaking of which, here officially begins the first user prompts since the beginning of HS^2 and the first forum prompts since... shit, I don’t even know when, over a decade? I’m so old now, dude. Been on the Homestuck train for over 15 years, since I WAS 15. It’s like the train from Hiveswap Act 2 but instead of meeting a bunch of trolls you’re running into a bunch of people dressed up as trolls, and artists, and amazing fanworks and batshit fandom legends and romantic interests and legitimately some the best friends of your life and opportunities to grow and the chance of a lifetime and... wow, a lot. Considering all that, it just felt right to get the fans back in on the prompt action a bit. Happy to have you guys here. Now let’s see what you cooked up...
Miles: We had kind of a chuckle at this one. The abstractitude of it.
Haven: Oh? It seems Ly’lac is something of a scientist herself. Kind of. Alchemy is basically magical science. Anyway while we’re on the subject of alchemy I was saying in the previous commentary about how many loops deep we are with Homestuck wrt “Character Alchemy” starting from John, to Karkat who is presented to us like some kind of “Evil John” then to Jane who is presented like a “Girl John” and then to Meenah who is like an “Evil Jane” er wait would you say maybe Aranea is the evil Jane? Or maybe you’d say none of that is true and all those characters are just their own original unique selves and nothing about the characters we’ve met before is meant to tell us how to read them. Well that aside we have little baby Ly’lac here and she is very clearly obviously Rose Influenced but through the power of “Reverse Character Alchemy” maybe, just maybe... you might see she has a little John in her. Now I'm not saying she’s “John Lalonde” or anything but in Homestuck memetics are like conceptual DNA that help us see what kind of disease a character may contract later in the story, and Ly’lac has picked up some of Rose’s and John’s memes.
Miles: We love, love, love doing puns and plays on words, so coming up with “Chemysteries” was such a delight, we just all thought it felt awesome to say. Try saying it out loud. Chemysteries. It’s like, what if science was magic? What if there was another even cooler word for alchemy? Well now there is. I know this isn’t exactly mindblowing insider information into the symbolism of the comic or anything but I gotta highlight the little things too. Besides, it’s better than the godawful Fullmetal Alchemist joke we also insisted on sneaking into this page. Don’t get me wrong, I love the joke. But still.
Miles: The bit about turning useless gold into valuable lead also makes me laugh, I’m pretty sure that was Haven’s idea. We turn it into a surprise tool that will hurt us later, and it also gives us a little opportunity to show off nymph alchemy (no, guys, remember, it’s chemysteries now) which works... kind of similarly to Skaian alchemy.
Floral: It was honestly so funny to see people point out which Homestuck ship the “dark hair guy with the blonde guy” line had to be talking about.
Haven: Yeah, Nepdave. <3
Miles: Showing off CC’s incredible taste in finely-aged satyrical anime was another aim here; having all these characters you guys don’t get to see for who knows how long leads us to desperately trying to find ways to sneak in little snippets of their dialogue and personalities wherever we can, up to a point, because unfortunately a little restraint is necessary, but god... DAMN is it hard sometimes. I know I speak for the entire team when I say we really, really adore these kids, and I know you guys will too. They’re just really fun. They’re on some next level shit.
Haven: I can’t lie, I smiled when I saw this in the thread.
Miles: This prompt was a treat. It’s not really how I would have put it, but it’s important to remember our victims. We’re glad you guys agree. Let’s all try to do better in the future.
Haven: Yeah, there was no way we weren’t going to use this one.
Miles: Leave her alone!
Miles: Weird, MORE emphasis on the fact that these impulses seem different from the usual communications from THE VOICE. It’s probably nothing. Also, we apologize for Ly’lac calling your suggestions dumb as fuck, but in her defense you did tell her to kill herself. You’re all accountable for that one. If anything happens to her it’s on you.
Haven: Ly’lac is so clever, most simpletons would think their friends are giving them gifts with the intent of getting them to use them.
Floral: Oh might this be a refrance?
Miles: It’s important to note that we at Furthest Ring Studios fully emphasize that you should handle any mysterious liquids with the utmost caution and never, EVER consuming unknown substances. That being said, just drink it dude.
Miles: A lot of what needs to be said about this page is more or less spelled out on the page itself. I’d honestly suggest just going back and rereading it. Really internalize that message. Here’s the link.
Miles: What hasn’t been said yet is that the first time Haven showed me this drawing I went “AWWWWUUHHHHHHHHHHHH” out loud because seeing Ly’lac do a drawing of her and TC as Gumby characters being friends and having fun makes my heart explode with happiness. I love their love.
Haven: I’ve been thinking about what I would say about this panel for a while now and I still am now so forgive me if this goes too long or doesn’t make any sense. When I was writing this page I was thinking about being a kid online, which is hard btw. If you haven’t heard, it's hard and nobody understands. Sometimes it’s so hard and frustrating it makes you feel like you’re going to explode. I was remembering how when you’re a kid online sometimes you end up in a place where everyone clearly spends a lot of time thinking about and discussing cartoons and comics (which you love, on account of being a kid) in a very serious manner (so awesome). And all the people you talk to (or more accurately, simply observe because it’s easier to simply watch and learn the rules of engagement lest you say something embarrassingly childish) are older or opinionated in ways that make them seem wiser or at the very least authoritative. You want to talk to them about your own comic and cartoon opinions which largely revolve around the idea that these cartoon guys could be like yourself. You see a lot of yourself in these cartoons because you are also constantly walking into rakes, slipping on banana peels, emerging from piano rubble with your teeth replaced by the keys etc. But they disagree and dispute your claims unilaterally. Worse than that; your claims are accused of being the way they are solely because of your own emotional investment in their validity. Sometimes you’re mocked or brushed aside for these ideas you have and sometimes your opinions are met with snide patronization. They tell you that as nice as it may be to imagine such a thing, it’s just too unrealistic. Despite this you stay and decide to continue discussion, which devolves into argument, which devolves into pure semantic nonsense. If they tell you the way a character moved doesn’t align with your view of them you’d reply that none of the characters are actually moving because it’s a cartoon where 24 images are being shown in rapid succession to imitate motion, which is useless pedantry but pedantry and semantics are the only languages that seem to hold sway here. Sometimes they’d tell you there is no way that is what the original creator intended when they began working on it and while that may have changed over the course of the show we can’t ask them about it because they’re not here anymore, and in the rare case they were here and at some point said “yeah sure why not” that doesn’t really mean anything because you can’t take them that seriously. There’s no way they actually meant what they said if it corroborates a narrative that misaligns itself with our own separate (but equal) interpretation of the cartoon or comic which is (of course) wholly grounded in truth. You end up going in circles with this group over this for some time, you keep coming back even though the more time you spend here the less you’re even enjoying being here. Why are you even so invested in this? It’s not like any of this is that serious right? It’s just comics and cartoons. They say you’re acting like a dumb emotional kid and that really stings because you actually are a dumb emotional kid. This burns you out and one day you just give up even trying to talk about it. You forget the whole thing and move on because even the mention of it made your face feel hot with embarrassment. Then one day you aren’t a kid anymore but you return to it because it still does undeniably hold a special place in your heart. Now you’re the older person online seeing kids in the position you were in back then from the other side and they actually have their own little subcommunity here. It feels good to see that kids who fall off cliffs and leave holes in the shape of their silhouette, who eat hot peppers and involuntarily scream out bursts of flame and the like are all still here and they’re saying a lot of the same silly stuff you used to say.
Though it does make you a bit sad that you didn’t have that back then. I wish Ly’lac had something like that.
Miles: Ly’lac has had a pretty rough run of “keeping her stuff from exploding” today. First someone destroyed her precious mechanical lotus, and now someone’s crumbled her wand. They need to stop doing this to her.
Floral: We used the most roundabout interpretations of this line but overall the meaning remains. And if the meaning remains shrouded still that’s ok! We’ve already mentioned this concept twice, we’ll probably bring it up again at some point. Maybe. Anyways who the hell is Squermes?
Miles: Some old person, probably nobody.
Miles: Here we begin to see legends of some other old person who’s probably nobody, and the first sign that the many, MANY generations of intelligently-designed Deltritans still retain some inkling, mythological or otherwise, of those who designed them. What they actually know is clearly shrouded in mystery, but ideas are hard to kill, and they grow with time. It’s been many thousands of years, and apparently the idea of Rose has morphed into something wicked cool. Not that Ly’lac gives a fuck.
Haven: Meemaw old as hell! 😂
Haven: Oh how exciting it is to take something you love and add onto it with your friends.
Miles: The ~PTH TREATISE is something I was really excited to get to, and if someone didn’t prompt it we already planned to have it in anyway. An ominous tome, a collaborative code written by a satyr and a nymph from long, long ago, and used today to inspire the work of another satyr and nymph to complete the creation of the ultimate game. Not only is this a really fascinating glimpse into the lives of two historical figures of some significant import (to be further commented on in that update’s commentaries), but it’s also a very, very eye-catching item for anyone who knows anything about Tomes That Matter in Homestuck. This is the kind of hefty mischief Ly’lac and TC can get up to if left to their own devices. It’s also a pun that I’m really proud of.
Haven: It’s so great to get to come up with puns endlessly for like 2 years and spin them into a plot.
Floral: What do the critics ever know.
Miles: Fucking nothing. Sea Cow and Tuna is fine art.
Haven: This made me laugh. Cow and Chicken was some real Slop cartoons. It’s all love though. 🫶
Floral: Moving onto the next chunk!
Haven: She’s so real.
Miles: In general, getting to reengage with the silly banalities of Roomscamperage in Classical Homestuckian style is just so so fun and one of the absolute best things about getting to reintroduce new characters. I think I already said this in the last commentary, but it really bears repeating, here and textually. It IS awesome to look at stuff in your room. Sometimes I worry that some people might take this line as a facetious statement, but it really isn’t. It’s awesome to be back to classic early-act Homestuck shenanigans.
Floral: The greatest offense you can bestow onto Ly’lac is to ask or expect any kind of attention from her. It’s overwhelming!
Miles: Luckily she’s magnanimous and opulent.
Miles: The fact that this coincided almost exactly with the release of the Official Homestuck Discord was a complete accident but it’s extremely funny.
Haven: I was so hyped for this one.
Floral: Hell yeeeess, the way we were sitting on these kids for so long, and they’re finally all here together.
Miles: Seriously, the joy we had getting this out is only matched by the joy we had writing it. This was the first real multi-participant log and marked the official point at which all of our Delta Kids had Really Spoken for the first time. Like I said earlier, every chance we have to show them off even a little is something we cherish, because letting you guys fall in love with them, even if you can only see a bit of them, brings us so much happiness.
Miles: Also it’s just a completely silly little slice of everyone’s personalities. We remain proud of this log to this very day. Which I guess is only like two months after it came out.
Floral: AA stocks are so high, she always gets the last word in.
Miles: Uh oh.
Miles: Annnnnd there’s the stupid pun we set up way back then. Boom. Pure literary genius.
Miles: Here we get our first glimpse of TC, and wow. Look at that luscious mane! Those long ears, that floofy tail, those muscular arms, that impeccable monitor setup. He’s busy alright. Busy being awesome...! It’s too bad you can’t see him too well, or what he’s looking at at all, because both would surely delight the senses. Alas, that’s for us to know, and for you to find out later.
Miles: We end with a glimpse of wherever it is that TC lives, and damn. It’s enormous! It’s also in a distinctly different style from the much more vibrant thriving Satyr metropolis bustling in the distance behind it. They’ve got flying cars, they’ve got a giant Horseshoe arch, they’ve got solarpunk city skylines... I’ve said it before but Deltritus is honestly a stunningly beautiful planet, and one of the things we wanted to preserve was that beauty, for both the Satyrs and the Nymphs; a gorgeous, multicolored planet where the coral is vibrant, the chlorophyll is bluer, skies are pinker, water is... also pinker. Or purpler, as the artistic license may be. The point being, we wanted all their homes to be places of beauty that really highlight how lovely a world it is that Rose and Dirk stumbled upon, and how much each of the two species love their home and the different ways in which they integrated with their surroundings. I sure hope nothing happens to this beautiful world... maybe those shooting stars streaking through the sky will bring everyone who sees them good luck!