MILES, chuffed from NYCstuck: Hello! We are BACK, baby!!! And ever-so-happy to be here.
FLORAL, on Facebook Marketplace: Smiles, it was so good seeing everyone but now we gotta talk about one of my fave updates.
HAVEN, one year older: It’s good to be back! This is (probably) coming out on my birthday or the day after! Maybe! What a great update to discuss for such an occasion!
FLORAL: The build up to this update was so fun because so many fans had been crying and praying for a month to see these two finally talk. And that makes sense, because in a way this conversation (and Del’fi’s general circumstance) has been one of our prominent through lines within Act 2. What the hell is going on with this guy?
MILES: Oh shoot indeed...! We open up with a couple certified freakazoids and they waste basically no time showing us the bombastic nature of their friendship. Spending the intro of a conversation between two new people just Flavoring their relationship and conversation style for the audience is always fun, and this one particularly has a lovely high-octane energy to it courtesy of CT’s obliterating intensity and Del’fi’s desire to keep the fire blazing. There’s even a bit in this intro section where the two of them sort of overtly spell out a lot of their dynamic.
MILES: See? We also get a look at CT’s surprise, which is a very charming, high-quality selfie of him in his new mask, and the debut of a filetype that allows us to make yet another horse-pun for satyr bullshit. Or horseshit, as the case may be. Pretty quickly, however, the conversation turns to the issue of Del’fi’s interrogation into CT and Swiss’ last disastrous conversation. Del’fi spends a lot of this early half of the conversation encouraging CT to beat up and enslave the satyrs around him, urging him to be more confident and assertive, were such a thing even possible.
HAVEN: “gas or sum hay or whateva” when you have to roleplay with a fire themed guy but you’ve never ever seen fire.
FLORAL: This was a log that was honestly really important to me on a personal level, it took serious time for us despite being such a silly and whimsical conversation for a good half of it.
This beginning part and the later, earnest part were probably the easiest though.
FLORAL: Raise your hand if you picked up on this being a poop joke. I was trying to be conspicuous.
MILES: Constipicuous.
FLORAL: I love derp mountain. I can hear the exact inflection he’d have whenever I read it. But here we are, with another “puzzle piece” regarding this web of feelings and relationships between these kids. That while Swiss is begging to be consoled by CT, Dagger is pushing to support him through his embarrassment.
It’s funny how everyone loves to come to Del’fi with news, but this is what he takes seriously.
MILES: We also finally get a look at CT’s mysterious coach.
FLORAL: Showing his undies was suggested because I kept thinking of how those guys in Princess Mononoke looked when they were being thrown around.
MILES: A lot of this conversation actually is just a pretty high-octane game of deflection between CT and Del’fi, about friendship, the game, their surroundings, and ultimately the issue of Del’fi’s continued anonymity. Their enthusiastic roleplayed roughhousing eventually turns serious as CT more or less drops the pretense (while not dropping the violent textual kayfabe) and demands an answer, which leads to one of the more touching moments in any of the conversations we’ve had between the Delta kids thus far, even if it’s also one of the hardest to swallow:
FLORAL: This whole part is the foundation of this update, this escalation. This is such a fun log, but the whole time you can see CT avoiding thinking about Swiss’ words. They may have successfully put off this conversation entirely if Del’fi hadn’t jokingly brought TC into the conversation.
MILES: There’s a lot of really tough emotions swirling around in this one. A lot of the way we write CT and Del’fi is predicated on the feelings of really, really connecting with a person online in the sort of intense, almost dangerous way that can happen when you make an online friend and feel like you’re finding a real escape from your current circumstances in your relationship with them. For reasons we only touch lightly on now with CT, and get more into with Del’fi in the coming pages, both of these kids are pretty anxious and dissatisfied with certain aspects of their IRL lives. That feeling of getting to be “real” with someone online in the way that you can’t be in person is probably familiar to a lot of readers who discovered the magic of having an Online Life and Online Friends compared to the social constraints of your whatever your IRL circumstances/persona are; it’s a beautiful thing to have this space to play in. Of course, it also introduces the issue of having to confront within yourself the reality of these two existences, and as we grow and flex them both we begin to sort through those two selves and try to triangulate the truth of who it is we really are from it. Ideally, you reconcile and integrate them, and become authentically Yourself reflected in both realms, but it’s still hard, and I think at least for some people, it involves a lot of... I almost want to say dismantling of lies? Or at least, the dismantling of Restraints, the lies of omission that we tend to wield unconsciously as kids in this space when first given the privilege of partitioning out which parts of ourselves we want to be known by in online vs irl space. There’s a real need to be sure that you’re becoming Yourself online, and not a character, and it’s scarily easy to become a character before you even realize it’s happening.
MILES: Anyway, that was kind of a weird rant, but the point I’m getting at here is that a lot of the core of this conversation between these two friends, ESPECIALLY from Del’fi’s POV, is driven by a lot of these feelings. Del’fi getting to be authentically himself with CT emotionally, and also to play this character as a satyr, is this really precious experience for him, but at the same time, there’s so much about the Premise of Dagger that isn’t authentic at all, or is at the very least predicated on a pretty large lie of omission. There’s this dear and REAL aspect of who he gets to be with CT that is wrapped up in the complicated anonymized construction of his aforementioned Character, which we get into a lot in the coming pages/next update, so I won’t go into it much more here, but behind all that, from both ends, is the yearning for something Real. CT, for reasons that will become more apparent later, also blazes desperately for the Real, and the anxiety CT and Del’fi both suffer at the possibility of trouble in paradise hangs kind of sadly over the end of this conversation. More on this later.
MILES: Ultimately, the two settle on a truce: CT will get the full truth eventually, Del’fi has more time to just Be Dagger without having to step fully out into the light for now. CT is satisfied with this, and Del’fi is relieved, but the tension is only really being kicked down the line. It’s hard, being a kid online and growing up.
FLORAL: Miles has said what is some very complicated feelings very beautifully. Del’fi as a person is in such a precarious situation and hopefully this log gave the audience a clearer view to what is earnestly happening internally for this character that seems otherwise unserious and guarded.
Also what the hell is up with the horse.
MILES: Because we aren’t unfathomably cruel, though, we end the conversation with more crazy cameraderous cuteness. Even if it is just to remind Del’fi of everything he’s scared he’ll lose. Maybe we are a little cruel.
FLORAL: They genuinely so cute. As they roleplay murdering and flashing everyone.
MILES: The “playing with CT” face to “back to reality” face transition always hurts me.
FLORAL: I enjoyed this rush back to reality for him. We also wanted to make a point that, despite CT’s extreme show of violence and comforting himself with any betrayal brought to justice with death, CC’s major concern with meeting up is the death of The Mountain. They are very much two peas in a pod and it was important to express this point of sad confidence for him.
MILES: Del’fi’s first, in-character intro is interesting because it does a bit more work to show that, like any good writer, he’s trying to write what he knows. The degree to which Dagger Tartarus IS Del’fi, vs a character that he’s uncomfortable with and even has a little contempt for, is played with a lot in this update, but I always liked this bit for its very clear parallels to Del’fi’s actual life. There’s also a clumsy chuuni masculinity to it that I feel really dearly about. I hope this doesn’t feel condescending to say, but the degree of almost satyrical (Ha ha.) manliness in here being a sort of “gender chicken” attempt at brushing up safely against masculinity in the context of playing out a caricature of it feels... I don’t know. Authentic to the experience of being a kid and trying to figure stuff like this out.
FLORAL: I think it says a lot about how gender works on Deltritus considering Dagger’s circumstances are completely flipped, in the sense of going from a prisoner to a warden. The position of someone fighting to escape and prevail versus being the person to maintain the status quo.
MILES: Mostly just putting this in here to contrast with what was already said about the previous kayfabe intro. I do love the detail in here of 2000’s era leetspeaky livejournal cuteness being a classical dialect. If there’s one thing artists are going to do it’s succumb to the siren song of nostalgia and glaze their childhood just a little bit. It’s our right.
HAVEN: I love “teh dignified dialects of yore” Ancient nymph society of leetspeaking nobles, long since lost to time. With Del’fi as one of the last speakers of this dialect as well as someone who so clearly and proudly represents their forgotten culture, perhaps they can continue to survive in memoriam.
FLORAL: I just think Del’fi is the goat.
MILES: More of us getting to make up insane pun-words for our alien species. That’s honestly one of the most fun things about the Deltritans, as a writer. I want it on the record here that I was pretty firmly towards having it be spelled out one-wordedly as “LEETHEX” but the worry was that people would read it as “leeth-ex” instead, which I get. I just think leethex is cooler. But the joke came across in the end, which was the point. Also very big fan of “uslurp”. God, we’re good at this.
MILES: Look, if you’re gonna be a lonely Homestuck character, you’re GONNA have inanimate objects you talk to in such a way that the audience is concerned for your mental health. And this segment is honestly really fun.
MILES: This segment also gives us a little tiny preview of Del’fi’s shipping tastes.
FLORAL: I feel like if you have a roleplay character, you have to have them doing some damn rp silliness. I just think the use of necromancy so a child can have a dance party is so cute.
FLORAL: Just pretending to be the most evil person alone in your room.
MILES: I love these drawings... they all say so much about the different friendships they represent and the stylistic differences are just fun. Also, I’m sure this is in the artist’s commentary, but did you know that CT’s incredible Hokuto no Ken/Baki-esque drawing of Dagger and The Mountain is a real charcoal sketch done physically by Floral? I’ve seen it in real life and it’s dazzling. It’s also bigger than you might think.
FLORAL: I had to get in character. No way The Mountain is drawing in photoshop.
FLORAL: It was funny watching people speculate that we wrote this part after the previous update dropped because of the all the heated discussion but this has been here for months and months. We tricked you. Bwahahaha.
MILES: Salinear congregoop... another fantastic term born of the realization that we needed to have an excuse for Del’fi having a cauldron that functioned as a liquid receptacle while also being In Da Damn Water. We settled on brine pools for that; a nice little trick of density that allows there to be liquid acting like a liquid inside of liquid.
MILES: SURPRISE IT’S KARKAT! Or, you know, someone who talks in all caps and is hanging out with someone else. I think this is the first time anyone’s had two people on the same terminal talking to them at once.
HAVEN: The first hero to have two exiles is someone who’s living a double life, how fun!
MILES: Getting to Del’fi’s yaoi sanctum is a moment that we were so excited for everyone to see. Hop in the artist’s commentary if you want an exhaustive list of all the details. As I said there, I’ll say here: the point of this room was to really clobber the viewer over the head with how egregiously yaoiful the room was, and I’m pleased to say that we got exactly the reactions we were hoping for. Karkat is predictably blown away.
MILES: Well what’s this...! More mentions of the Uni-Nymph, and also more references to the way that nymph authors occasionally publish work amongst satyrs under pseudonyms/assumed identities. Sound familiar?
FLORAL: Ouran was such a foundational anime for me (after Fruit Basket, Kiss Kiss Fall in Love lives in such a deep part of my brain. Being able to revisit our childhoods through these kids has been so fun. Using this media to pick apart this kids psychology is such a great device. The way we see art reveals our own values, who would have thought.
MILES: That’s what little boys are made of!
Floral: He’s fucking crazy,
MILES: Karkat literally cannot help but get into slapfights with men over who gets to control the keyboard/penis book/etc. It’s all he knows how to do.
MILES: Bobo’s backdoor featuring prominently in this one.
MILES: And here we come across a repeat of an extremely classic MSPA joke, which is to say the comic the readers are familiar with existing in-universe as its own, slightly different thing. I guess we already debuted this, so the real reveal here is: SURPRISE! The Beyond Anon is actually Del’fi!
MILES: Another interesting reveal that Del’fi has been hiding the fact that he’s the author of Ly’lac’s favorite webcomic from her. There’s so much that Del’fi keeps at arm’s length...!
MILES: And here we ended with another ever-so-slightly passive aggressive call for reader input through the FRAF forums. This became even more special as it was also incorporated into the festivities we recently held at NYCstuck, so in addition to all the crazy submissions we got through the forums we also got a bunch of incredible submissions in person that I actually have in a physical notebook with me right now at my very own house!
MILES: One of the things I hope I’m not too out of line when I talk about it here is that unfortunately, a LOT of the suggestions we got on FRAF were pretty fundamentally misunderstanding what kind of submissions we (and, in-character, Del’fi) were asking for, or they just weren’t playing as much in the space as we were hoping they would. Like, Del’fi is here asking fans for suggestions regarding HIS webcomic, Beyond Canon, which is not the same thing as Homestuck: Beyond Canon, but the vast majority of the FRAF submissions were suggestions for the plot of HS:BC itself, regarding people and details in Del’fi’s actual life (he’s anonymous!), not really adhering to the kayfabe of Being Beyond Canon Readers, asking for yuri (look at Del’fi’s room. Come On Now.), or some combination thereof. Maybe this is on us as writers for not making it clearer!
Floral: We stayed up till like 1 AM figuring out how to do the panel so people would be able to get into the headspace. I think introducing the cast really helped.
MILES: On the plus side... we did get some good ones, and a whole bunch more that were admittedly more on-task from the amazing audience at NYCstuck during our panel. But I’ll talk more about that in the commentary when those suggestions actually show up!