FLORAL, Ugly Raisin Voldemort Baby: These next couple updates are such a joy, we had hit this strong stride with the characters at this point and were really ramping things up.
MILES, brushing his teeth: YES...
HAVEN, haven: This is like one of my favorites we’ve done, I feel like I say that with every update but this one was special to me.
FLORAL: The intention for this panel wasn’t always gonna be Percy, but we have been replaying Psycholonials pretty recently and it made sense to reference him. The most nobody guy possible. The faceless simp.
MILES: He doesn’t even get the benefit of colors now. He’s been flattened. His sinful mixels...
MILES: Swiss’ academic advisor, if I recall correctly, was first sort of jokingly conceptualized as a kind of hyper-buff Gojo from JJK, but it stuck pretty quickly. I’m pretty sure that was Floral’s idea! Anyway, it stuck. And it makes sense. How are you supposed to be a good role model for kids if you aren’t lifting heavy and looking aesthetic as fuark? Make no mistake, though, he’s got a brain on those gargantuan shoulders, and a whole head to hold it.
FLORAL: This is like “Swiss’ Very Bad No Good Day,” where every anxiety and fear knocks at his door and threatens his way of life, at least that’s what he probably believes. He’s that guy that if the very possibility of something arises it’s already happened and over, quite relatable honestly.
MILES: Yeah, part of the problem with being a guy who tries to plan for every eventuality is that you spend so much time thinking about how things could go wrong even as you fight with all your might for things to go right. And for a guy with so much energy, this leads to a lot of catastrophizing. It’s funny (and kind of relatable) because he’s in legitimately very good academic standing, grades probably on point as fuck, missing literally one meeting that he’s probably already forgotten he already made sure would go fine without him... but he’s sort of also in this space right now where being more or less left on hold by TC, and having just gotten into a fight with CT, has him feeling extra sensitive. If things aren’t right with his boys, then they aren’t right with his whole world.
MILES: Speaking of having a shitload of energy and academic overachievement and his fifth thesis, I realized that there’s some behind the scenes miscellaneous Swiss trivia that I did for an upcoming Q&A that I figure you guys deserve to look at early, considering how good you’ve been about supporting our beautiful comic. We were asked what the topics of Swiss’ previous four theses were.
MILES: I don’t want to blow Swiss’ spot up like this but here’s a little nugget of knowledge that I can drop: Swiss actually already did write basically a fifth full thesis, and it’s not the one he mentioned consulting with his academic advisor about; it was a beehiveural analysis (I’m Sorry.) on the application of microvibration via monocorn telekinesis in apiculture, but he got a little too carried away with it and it’s become a whole Thing for him. He’s holding onto it out of a combination of factors including: he got too excited writing it and wants to give it a pass for less impassioned language, he keeps stumbling onto new techniques and wanting to add more, he’s a little embarrassed that it doesn’t really fit the profile of his other four theses, he’s worried people will think it’s trivial, etc. He also just enjoys having this special bond with his hives.
MILES: Swiss’ previous four theses were: an analysis on the fraternity backgrounds of various Grand Prancellors and a proposal on how their subcultures affected the governance of the day (enthusiastically written, somewhat overreaching in its complexity but still well received), a treatise on bladework (a little too sentimental to be considered academically proper, but indicative of a real talent with the sword and well-appreciated by Honeyfall’s swordplay instructors and fencing club), a medical study that was so dry and unimpressive that Swiss would be embarrassed if I even mentioned it here, and a retrospective analysis on his experiences in cohort government he wrote in preparation for his final lap at Honeyfall that also ended up playing a decent part of his second campaign for Cohort Captain (he lost an immense amount of sleep over this one). Keep in mind you’re only expected to write one thesis, and it’s supposed to be turned in towards the end of your final lap of Gymnasikkou, which Swiss hasn’t even begun yet.
MILES: Like I said, more “trivia” than “stunningly insightful writer’s commentary”, but still thought it might be fun to include here!
MILES: You’re not supposed to use high-level shmoovement like this for anxiety purposes but Swiss is kind of an overachiever in all things. Also this gif is honestly hypnotic as hell.
FLORAL: This is one of my fave page turn gags we’ve done so far, just the hard cut to the image of him sitting in his very fancy tub with the curtains drawn for extra protection. This is what they call Visual Art.
MILES: Swiss’ dorm is honestly a pretty nice-looking, if slightly ridiculous, set up interior-design wise, but his brushroom is just completely insane. It’s such a frenetic mishmash of high art, and the Sword of Damocles over his toilet in tandem with the Thinker mural just makes me laugh every time I see it. This is a guy who takes himself so, so seriously that even a trip to go potty is a minmaxed-mixed-metaphor of self-improvement of the gravest nature. One should always be thinking. And scared, I guess.
MILES: Also we decided pretty early on that his desktop was gonna be blank with one folder that contains literally everything. I wish we could get a look at all the awesome plans and papers he has in there. A lot of people kind of freaked the fuck out at this particular image, which I found really funny because people were treating it as like... highly salacious pornography. It’s just art. But getting back to his Everything folder, I find it really funny that he has no shortcuts or applications in his dock at all besides the finder app and whatever he happens to have open at any given time. His computer usage habits are a mystery of the highest order, I guess. There’s also a pretty interesting internet browser down there.
FLORAL: The five @ was some truly demonic shit. Miles started typing that and Haven and I just were pulling out our hair in embarrassment.
MILES: I don’t think of Swiss as a patient young lad when the chips are down, and right now his whole world is crumbling. Which is funny, because if he knew how badly his whole world was GOING to be crumbling... Re: the five @’s, he needs his boys. @anyone is just something I think is extremely funny in general. The desperation of it, the fact that I’m assuming it kind of works by just sort of randomly selecting one person to @.
HAVEN: I feel like I haven’t seen anyone talk about how kind and brave she was to step in front of this slow motion train wreck and insert herself into the situation.
MILES: AA... thank you for your work in the trenches.
HAVEN: This is one of those lines that’s said very casual and we move along very quickly but it's just another quick view into her strange, strange life.
FLORAL: This is one of the moments I’ve been waiting desperately for. I have been so unreasonably excited to make period jokes in our comic. This one in particular was actually based off this poor kid in my Junior Highschool English class, when he very politely asked the class during down time how people with vaginas pee with tampons in. After that he got swarmed by like 8 teenage girls all at once ready to tease and educate him.
Anyways gotta love AA for bringing back that classic, age old misogyny.
HAVEN: What I love so much with this conversation is the casual worldbuilding here. We get a glance at a world with two separate races each with individual genders and views on them that are painted by that division. I’ve seen people respond to this log calling her a misandrist, and while I’d be pretty hard pressed to dispute that outright, what I wanted to be seen here is that AA is a bit of a misogynist herself, but towards men. The reader is a real human person from earth where patriarchal violence is the norm so seeing AA go off on a chud isn't really anything eyebrow raising outside of the fact that her perverted view on satyrs is seemingly built off of like, doujin stereotypes (makes you wonder where she learned it) but it gives you a weird feeling in your stomach because you’re starting see that the allegory and reality aren’t fully aligned. While Swiss is being sexist and misogynistic with his language he’s also on the receiving end of what in any other circumstance would be considered the same, but it's obfuscated by the alien layers of gender and racial identity on display here. Swiss’ insults lean more towards disparaging xenophobic comments on nymph identity and culture while AA simply insults their biology with her childish xenophobic disgust for how alien it is to her.
HAVEN: When we first wrote Swiss saying this I couldn’t even think of anything anyone could respond to this other than just bursting out laughing. I made a note when we wrote it that said something like “I don’t know how he ended up this crazy.” wait i found it
FLORAL: We wrote this and just kept laughing and laughing, tears in our eyes, because we couldn’t believe he actually just said all that.
MILES: This conversation in general was just psychotic. We wrote the entire thing in one sitting and were basically howling with laughter the entire time. Just sort of tapping into the kind of frenetic energy that two tryhards would bring to a no-holds barred battle of... I sort of hesitate to call it wits, because it devolves almost immediately into insane jumbled-up shit-slinging period-invoking bigotry, but you know what I mean. If we included screenshots of every insane thing that was said in the conversation we’d honestly just be better off posting the entire thing.
HAVEN: I love how much you can feel the smile on her face as she bullies a guy for being in the exact same position she is currently in. Swiss responds with his pride in Satyr Camaraderie while AA jabs back claiming that the nymphs' sense of community is superior; though notes that their overwhelming sense of faith could be considered a “fault.” What could this mean for this girl whom we already know lives in the midst of some “funnily crazy sororal shenanigans” ?
FLORAL: This part makes me want to hide in my hands. It’s all too much, Swiss might just be the saddest character in Homestuck history. Also hopeless, helpless and homieless… AA is soooo famous.
MILES: It’s just godawful. The things we do to our beloved characters so that you guys can have a comic to read is borderline child abuse. The really shit part about this is that after AA completely takes Swiss to task for being left on read by his closest friends in the world like a loser, he’s able to switch that back around on her and expose the fact that both of them are arguing alone in a chatroom while everyone else tries to have a life, and now they both look like losers. That’s not even really karma, it’s some other shit. It’s scary.
MILES: Del’fi was originally going to accuse them of “108 LINES OF CRAPOLLA” and we spent a little while afterwards editing the conversation to try and ensure we hit that number exactly, but it became way too granular and didn’t let us do the few changes we needed to do without becoming a big annoying fucking chore, so we scrapped it. Still, thank you so much for making them both shut up, Del’fi.
FLORAL: It hurts.
MILES: One thing that I do legitimately really admire about Swiss, even though he’s liable to being high-strung to the point of legitimate self-harm, is that despite regularly putting himself through mental hell he is just as easily able to wrangle himself back into control, pick himself up off the ground, and get back to business. I liked that we were able to show him hype himself up a bit even if he looks like kind of a doofus here. He’ll get his winning smile back once the camera gives him a bit of space.
MILES: Cutting away to a different door entirely, and a different terminal.
FLORAL: This joke is genuinely some bullshit because we couldn’t stop yelling “ THE DROP OFF!” in that damn clownfishes delivery. But whatever, we can’t help but be cute with it.
MILES: The Finding Nemo joke wasn’t originally even going to be in there but THE DROP OFF!!!! was such a common exclamation during our writing sessions that eventually we figured fuck it, just put it in.
MILES: Here we arrive at the first appearance of any of the Omega kids since Act 2 began! What’s really crazy is that Vrissy seems to be using TC’s computer... or one of them, anyway, to check in on Ly’lac.
MILES: This little snippet of chat-log, which isn’t even a two-way conversation so much as a brief galvanizing message, actually gives the viewer just enough information, and a LOT of questions, in a very short period of time. One of the main points is that Vrissy does appear to be working directly with TC to get the game started up, operating off his patented (except he wouldn’t really give a shit about patenting it at all) cha.OS technology. We also get a little hint as to the entry order.
FLORAL: AA is the most tortured and abused character in the story.
MILES: Somewhere out there she just felt a sharp, ulcerous pain in her stomach and doubled over on the ground in unexplained agony. But Ly’lac is having the time of her life, because Vriska, from acclaimed in-universe webcomic Beyond Canon, which you can find on beyondcanon.com (read it today!), is REALLY REAL! It’s absolutely tragic to see AA’s morphday gift cast aside as if it were useless trash but in Ly’lac’s defense, you’d also be flipping the fuck out if a character from your favorite webcomic suddenly messaged you and asked you to hop on the game with her and your other best friends.
FLORAL: The fact Meemaw is moving so slowly and Ly’lac could literally jump off whenever she wanted. We’ve done it again with the Visual Gags.
HAVEN: But she can’t just leave her Meemaw to fall off the edge! That’s the whole reason she even came out here! (other than ignoring her chores.)
HAVEN: I just Hope Ly’lac and Meemaw make it out of there in two pieces, or in one piece? Which would be preferable?