MILES, riding it, my pony: Hello and welcome to ANOTHER commentary... and this one’s a doozy, folks. We are, today, so so happy to present to you our shining platinum boy, Swiss, at last! It was so nuts to finally unveil himm... there’s so much to say about Swiss, and about Satyrs in general, so let’s get into it!!! Damn! Where do we even START!
HAVEN, Saddled and Swaddled: Our shining silver hero of something something. The inimitable Swiss has arrived, and the world has been forever changed.
FLORAL, throws him like a dart: Finally, Homestuck has the tail wags it’s always deserved.
MILES: Let’s start here, at a mysterious, familiar console... it seems to have 10 slots, but four of them are nonfunctional right now. I wonder what’s up with that! We’ve also got a satyr and a nymph on each big screen, for whatever that’s worth. Team leaders, perhaps? They’re more important in general? We spent a million years trying to figure out how to fit ten squares into one and felt like geniuses when we finally figured it out? Who knows. It’d take some kind of commentary to get to the bottom of that particular mystery. We also get introduced to a few more of the kids’ symbols!
FLORAL: It took us some time to design what the new panels would look like but it turned out beautifully!
HAVEN: You could run the world from a place like that.
MILES: Oh FUCK! It’s the man himself. And by man I mean boy. But this young lad has great things ahead of him... We’re introduced to SWISS ELYSI here, our very first full-screened satyr, and he immediately sets about capturing our hearts and minds with his snazzy little hops and his preening. I am so endeared of every one of these kids and I won’t be shy about saying that we care immensely that you all feel the same, so we won’t hesitate to deploy top-grade cuteness strikes against you.
FLORAL: We really do spend every meeting talking about how much we love our new kids. Slowly but surely Deltritus is becoming a whole picture.
MILES: We get our first Full Satyr Government Official Moniker here! We also get a hint that SOME Satyrs earn something called MANTHRONYMS, which I’ll describe here because I don’t think it’s all that much of a spoiler; particularly accomplished/famous satyrs can earn official titles or nicknames that they’re able to register with the government and add to their permanent record, marks of high honor in their society. Swiss, as people have no doubt come to learn, sees his own eventual acquisition of one as an inevitability. Right from the getgo, he’s letting you know he’s going to do great things and be soooooo famous and special.
MILES: We learn quite a lot from Swiss’ room intro infodump page, which is sort of fitting for Swiss as the kind of guy who would have no trouble telling you all about himself and his variety of aristocratic, classy interests. His political aspirations are at the forefront of it, and we learn he’s the cohort captain! Which is basically student council president for his graduating class. I’ll get into it more a bit later, but given the prestigious nature of his gymnasikkou, this is actually a pretty high position for a man of his youth. A very good start for his future in a society that definitely isn’t going anywhere, a society we learn is a meritocratic democracy presided over by a Grand Prancellor; more on this later.
FLORAL: We actually went back and forth quite a bit on which satyr should teach our readers about Satyr society first and it felt right for Swiss too ultimately due to his passion for it. No one is happier to be a Satyr as he is, it’s the core of who he is!
MILES: We also learn that Swiss has been waiting for a response from his friends for quite some time! Luckily, a guy like him? Well, he knows how to keep his cool.
MILES: We also see the SATRUVIAN ALKYRIN, and learn about the satyr morphotypes! It was really cool to start going into the basics of their awesome biology. I remember really specifically wanting to point out that with satyrs, the more furry/unguligrade legs actually begin at the KNEE; I wanted them to be different from the classical “goat guy” satyrs of Greek mythology because they’re... not goats! But it’s been hard to show that when everyone’s got their damn pants on. When we were getting into the concept of the satyrs we did feel it’d be fun to spruce them up with a bit of variety, and I spent a pretty decent amount of time trying to figure out like... low-lying powers each of the different morphotypes could have. There has been some of talk about aping My Little Pony but I did feel like pointing out here that... those are just the types of mythological horses they got! MLP didn’t invent that. And when Swiss gets his cutie mark- okay, that was a joke.
MILES: Anyway, because they’re already working with extreme strength as a default I didn’t wanna go too deep into other powers for them, because I think it clashed with the high biological variety and magical predilections of the nymphs, but I did wanna have a little fun with some new stuff to give people stuff to play with. There are more fun quirks of their biology that haven’t showed up yet that we wanna keep to ourselves for now, but it was definitely hard not to info-dump. So we didn’t not info dump.
MILES: From this magnificent effigy we learn that satyrs have Senataurs, which is like senators if they were more horse-themed. There’s that democracy we talked about earlier. When I asked for a Steve-O bust they said Miles you’re crazy. Miles you’re a madman. Miles you’re going to get us all fucking killed. And that’s okay.
HAVEN: I didn’t say that.
FLORAL: Some people didn’t know who the fuck this was and that’s sad. How soon we forget our rowdy masochist representation. They have no idea what they’ve done to this man’s junk.
MILES: Here we see Swiss’ replica of THE FRATERNAL BLADE, which looks kind of familiar and was apparently wielded by some kind of ANCIENT PROGENITOR GOD? Who could this mysterious deity be? Probably nothing to do with sunglass-wearing dudes who like swords.
MILES: Swiss’ Librarium section was really fun, for a number of reasons. First of all, I got to do the music for it, so I wrote a song I called UNIMPEACHABLE. Getting to join the Homestuck music canon was so sick, and if you can believe it I actually started learning to produce music JUST for HS:BC. I spent a decent amount of time learning FL Studio (which I still always call Fruity Loops despite never having used it until this year) and I obviously still have a long way to go, because the song is pretty rough, but I was really, really proud of how it came out; Mr. President from the HS Official Discord actually helped me do some of the mixing on the song to get it sounding a little cleaner, which I appreciated as a newbie. I saw someone on the HS Official Discord ask if Toby Fox did the music for this section, and that’s probably the single best compliment any song I ever make in my entire life is going to get. Whoever said that, I remember. It meant a lot to me.
MILES: I wanted to sort of emphasize Swiss’ affect of coolness with a slick, jazzy theme, and I had some shamisen plucks in there to emphasize the East Asian influences in Satyr society. I’ve definitely come to think of saxophone as Swiss’ Signature Instrument, whereas shamisen is more of a satyrwide instrument, and the main sax-melody (which I still like A LOT) in this song as Swiss’ leitmotif, so I hope someday we can see that woven into future songs as the HS:BC musical canon evolves to take on a life of its own in that same self-referential way that Homestuck songs tend to be. Having done one song, it really makes me wanna do a billion more, but I want to get a whole slew of other people into Homestuck first! Maybe I can noodle a few more out for some future albums... :J
MILES: ANYWAY, the Librarium flash was ALSO fun because we got to do so much more infodumping about Swiss and his thoughts on satyr society! We learn about Grand Prancellors, a little bit about the contentious history of back and forth wars between nymphs and satyrs, ancient slaughters, another mention of a mysterious satyr/nymph duo who rocked the ancient world with their schemes, the nature of satyr democracy, their love of rap, a whole bunch of awesome stuff! I feel like it gives a really fun little slice of Swiss’ thoughts and interests. The reaction to this was also pretty funny, because I saw a LOT of assumptions about satyr society from this page, and as time went on I think it became more clear to people that some of the more contentious beliefs here come off the way they do because of Swiss’ own young thoughts and narrative voice but I still wanted to touch on it briefly here, something that fell by the wayside here is that satyrs and nymphs have been at peace with one another for some time now! They keep to themselves, though.
FLORAL: For two species that were meant to battle to extinction, Rose and Dirk didn’t think hard enough about separating them by land and sea. Turns out it’s actually pretty easy to ignore each other and focus on their own societies. At least once they got out a couple thousand years of warring and almost endings of the world out of the way.
MILES: Around this section, we also learn a little more about the FRAT SYSTEM.
MILES: SORRY. The FRATERNITY system. We’ll go into more detail about this later, but to sum it up briefly, the FRATERNITY SYSTEM is a planetwide network of differently-specialized scientific artisanal and artistic communes satyrs spend the majority of their lives in. There’s probably a lot more I could say here but I want to hold onto it for now, because a bigger worldbuilding dump is probably coming sometime and I’d hate to jump the gun on describing it here!
MILES: We also see THE PLAN, here, more of Swiss’ chaotic power-mongering and machinations.
MILES: He has a lot of different thoughts about him and his bros. Seems like it took him a lot of work to settle on this configuration! I’m not gonna tell you what it means!
MILES: Swiss’ speed is so cute. Swiss is so cute.
MILES: Here, Swiss shows the audience that maybe he isn’t quite as cool and collected as he likes to project. This conversation was a lot of fun, partially because watching Swiss project this epic authoritative boss vibe the whole time and then spend an entire conversation sucking up to TC way harder than he even needs to is really silly. Their dynamic in general is great and I’m excited to show more as the comic progresses; as Swiss mentions a couple times at various points, TC’s got some real clout, not that TC seems to care about it all that much. I think that a lot of people are quick to map already-established Homestuck characters onto the Delta Kids as specific, direct references, despite a lot of that not being our intention at all (and again, I’d like to encourage people to think of these kids as their own people), but I can’t deny that part of Swiss and TC’s dynamic does hearken back pretty heavily to some of Equius’ longing for Gamzee to act more appropriately befitting his station. TC, as Swiss repeatedly points out, is some kind of generational genius, and the fact that he likes to fuck around all mysteriously silly definitely gets on Swiss’ nerves. Why is he not here at my whim?.
MILES: Swiss’ stresses aside, though, I hope it shone through here that these two have a long history of fucking around together. Their little impromptu slam-sesh was so fun to write and imagining the two of them freestyling together makes me laugh a lot. TC gently chastising Swiss for his impatience and Swiss immediately scrambling to project nonchalance is so funny because bro it’s not like TC doesn’t know you’re a crazy person. That’s why he loves you, silly filly.
MILES: In terms of plot details, we don’t get too much out of this, but we do learn that TC has been mysteriously busy with a few... outsiders. Savvy readers have already drawn attention to Swiss’ speculation on the number of newbies coming to this mysterious game, so I’ll try not to say any more and let people think on it themselves. TC then promptly vanishes once more to his “mysterious biz”, leaving Swiss only himself for company.
MILES: Swiss takes this really well.
MILES: When I first had the idea for SECRETARIAT MODUS and CLOPPY I felt like such a smug stupid asshole, and I wanted to be sure that the readers felt that same smug stupidity pouring off of every interaction with this bastard. Inconvenient data structures/inventory management systems are a Homestuck staple, and for this one I wanted to draw from a real one that a lot of older people might have memory of, the abhorrent beast Clippy, a virtual assistant from older versions of Microsoft Office. Clippy really was not that helpful at all. Thanks for nothing, Clippy, you stupid asshole.
MILES: We then get a beautiful view of Honeyfall Gymnasikkou! There’s more on this in the Artist’s Commentary I think everyone should check out, because we go a bit more into the aesthetic inspirations for satyr culture. Satyr culture does have a lot of hellenistic/grecco-roman inspiration, but there’s also a lot of Asian influence on their culture; Gymnasikkou is literally just a compound word of the Greek/Latin “gymnasion”/”gymnasium” and “gakkou”, both here used in the “school” sense. The Asian influence on satyr society isn’t just Japanese, either, but this particular campus tends to skew Greccoroman/Japanse.
HAVEN: With this panel we’re immediately bombarded with the idea that unlike our previous heroes, the Deltritans are living with and participating in active communities. The streets are not empty, and desolation’s instrument has not been played in some time.
MILES: Swiss also does a poetic little infodump about what Gymnasikkou actually is, mentioning that it’s a communal schooling/living situation ROUGHLY analogous to high school, but with more of a focus on beginning to nurture the specific talents of each individual satyr in addition to continuing their standardized education. He also drops the reveal here that Satyrs are communally raised! There’s a pretty constant theme in satyr society that your living situation, and your life itself, should be centered around learning and the pursuit of self-betterment, the MERIT aspect previously mentioned as one of the TWIN PRINCIPLES.
MILES: Another thing this update gets into is that Swiss has anxieties about being avoided by some of his schoolmates. His zeal... is perhaps a bit too much sometimes. Which makes sense if you sort of contextualize his position as being sort of like the insanely weirdly overprivileged student council presidents from anime. You want to know what his problem is? HE CARES TOO MUCH.
Haven: Swiss cares so much about his classmates and friends' health and loves them in ways that piss them all off, but for the most part it seems like he can walk the walk, so they let him get away with it.
MILES: I do love that his response to getting anxious and freaked out is to go suck down a bunch of coffee. That’ll help.
FLORAL: Finally The Mountain has entered the scene.
HAVEN: Best boy has arrived.
MILES: I love, love, love this conversation. Swiss and CT have a crazy ass relationship. I mean I guess CT has crazy ass relationships with everyone because he’s crazy in a particularly pronounced way, but Swiss is easily able to match him there and the shit the two of them get into is hilarious. Our first real introduction to The Mountain completely shakes the dynamic up as well; while Swiss is kind of obsequious and fawning over TC, he has a much more authoritative attitude towards his other best bro, acting as if he knows best and making all kinds of demands of him. CT, to his credit, handles this with the dignity of an insane murderer, chuckling darkly in the face of Swiss’ manic controlling ways and bossing him the fuck up. We get a little hint into CT and CC’s friendship too.
FLORAL: What I really appreciate about this conversation is how quickly it all falls apart, CT really went from bringing Swiss into his bosom to riling each other into a super screaming match. But say what you will, at least CT is engaging with Swiss.
FLORAL: Even if that means slamming his overprotective/jealous fearmongering in the trash.
MILES: This conversation also gets into something about Swiss that I like a lot about him and find pretty endearing, which is that although he can be super annoying about it, he’s actually a very protective and solution-oriented guy who cares a lot about the people around him, even if he gets way too overzealous about it sometimes. He thinks all the time about how to get his friends to do XYZ and it’s not usually for his own benefit so much as it is something he feels would benefit them (or them as a group).
FLORAL: The incredibly fast switch between rage to utter deflation, it feels like Swiss’ feelings are as mercurial as his blood. Maybe he can’t stay mad at a bro? Or may be he just realized how long he’s gonna have to wait to see that surprise.
MILES: Swiss is so cute man. He’s really trying his best. Even he knows that conversation went so shittily.
MILES: One of the things we really wanted to do with Swiss is give him at least one interest that was like... less overtly cultivated to be a Social Standing thing. It’s not that he doesn’t legitimately enjoy history and swords and politics and stuff like that, because he does, but his beekeeping is sort of his zen zone and falls kind of outside of his typical concern for his own image and political career. He just gets to help a bunch of tiny friends make delicious artisanal honeys, think about flowers, do a little gardening and chill out for a bit. He’s still a perfectionist about it though.
HAVEN: uh oh.