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News post from James. Here are a few key things, among others:

• The publishing deal with Viz has been “restructured”, which James says is a good thing.
• Beyond Canon will get a new site, and Homestuck.com will be redone as well since l, as well all know, that site is kind of a disaster.
• While there won’t be hard copy books for the rest of the series, there are still plans to release the rest of the Homestuck author commentary.

So for the New Year celebrations, SAHCon deez nuts put out a showcase of various fan projects. I'm involved in one of them, an audio drama adaptation of Sarah Zedig's godfeels! Our trailer had to be cut short for time constraints but the full version is out on our channel:

https://www.homestuck2.com/story/533

upd8 I like that roxy and john appear as just blank faces with one or two features to harry anderson

This update felt like a callback to early Homestuck.

Give it to me straight, my fellow meatheads and candy asses. Is H:BC actually worth a damn now? I'm seeing lots of positive reactions to the new stuff, and the fact that Hussie is involved again is very encouraging, but like many of you I was burned hard by the Epilogues and now I'm afraid to love again.

Hussie is in fact not back, but the creative team has changed so that James Roach, responsible for a lot of the music of Homestuck, is in charge. Personally, I believe he's less hostile to the fanbase than the previous What Pumpkin team is, which results in a pretty different tone. I would check his team's updates to Beyond Canon, and if you like them, keep reading. It's definitely different than before, but it's not an outright match for canon Homestuck.

This was a few days ago, but the Vast Error Team has joined the Homestuck Independent Creative Union, effectively them involved with official Homestuck projects now.

Er.

Isn't Kate Mitchell a part of that?

Kate worked on Snowbound Blood for the Deconrecon folks but is no longer involved. From what I've seen it seems she's essentially washed her hands of involvement in Homestuck-related works after the years of harassment campaigns she faced from various parts of the fandom.

I'd heard Kate Mitchell got kicked out for doing a bunch of very troubling things? Was it a harassment campaign, or was it just consequences? You know what, don't answer that. I'm going to give up trying to understand What Really Happened. This is a quadrants, bucket memes and being told about stairs account from now on.

Do the Prospitians and Dersites remind anyone else of Spy Vs. Spy?

No, she wasn't kicked out. I haven't followed her in a few years now because I have more serious reasons to dislike her that aren't fucking nonsense fandom beef, but between recollection of what I saw as part of the Pgenpod community and being fedi mutuals with her for a time and what I know from more recent discussions with other contacts, I feel I can pretty safely say that she left the team for Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon due to a combination of:

• a multi-year harassment campaign emerging out of the pan-fandom purity culture that had developed on Tumblr^note spiraling out from a fucking Voltron ship war of all fucking things over the preceding few years (which had a massive moment of breaking containment just a few months before the Epilogues happened due to, ironically enough, the Tumblr porn ban) that targeted her because she pushed back against "i saw goody proctor dancing with the devil"-ass accusations of the Epilogues' authors; and
• union busting from the corporate types involved in the Homestuck brand at the time. This is also the big reason why HS^2 had multiple hiatuses under the original team.

The HICU is essentially what the HS^2 team was fighting for, not that the public would have known that at the time considering the fucking NDAs they were under. And with that shit going on behind the scenes at the same time as that horrendous harassment, no fucking wonder she reached a point of "fuck this shit, I'm out".

I appreciate the input from someone who actually knows Kate, I guess. She's such a designated fandom Hate Sink and whenever I hold my nose and dive into the Tumblr miasma to find out what happened, I see people shouting "RECEIPTS!!" and posting dead links to someone's Imgur, followed by other people going, "HOLY SHIT, I CAN'T BELIEVE KATE DID THAT."

But even if every nasty thing I've ever heard about Kate is untrue, I've developed a strong dislike of the Fandom VIP phenomenon. The more Homestuck strays from Hussie's ultra-idiosyncratic vision and becomes a bunch of "elevated" fandom headcanons, the less happy it makes me.

Do you remember that terrible Episode IX spec script where Rey turns out to be a droid because of course no woman untrained human could learn to use the Force that fast? That's how "post-canon" Homestuck feels to me. A sequence of too-online writers not building on the story, but rejecting Hussie's reality and substituting their own, for the edification of increasingly specific fan communities (grubscars!!).

That's why I'm still not too eager to see what James Roach is doing, especially if Hussie really isn't involved after all. Even if there are new characters I'd like to get to know better, like Harry Anderson Egbert and Vrissy. That and James Roach was a dick to me on Twitter once.

Is it just me or has like half the discussion in this thread the past several pages been about fandom drama?

This is an MSPA thread, yes.

I never got Spy vs. Spy feelings from Prospitians and Dersites but now that you mention it, it would kind of fit in a way. There's probably some minor Agents who are each other's archnemeses as they go between Lands pursuing utterly irrelevant objectives.

I really like the Carapacians. I'm glad so many of them managed to get a happy ending after, uh, everything, finally enjoying some peace and no more disasters. Or the ones from the Kids' sessions get to, at least.

I wonder how it is for them in null sessions? Do they just end their war (both hot and cold) and then live day-to-day?

There really wasn't much to talk about aside from fandom drama. Official stuff was kind of dead for a good while it's only been in the past year that we've been getting anything of note.

Spy vs. Spy retreoactively taking place in the Homestuck multiverse is a really funny thought.

Edited by SatoshiBakura on Jan 29th 2024 at 8:26:56 AM

I guess the real question is, are White Spy and Black Spy in blackrom? Is Gray Spy their auspistice??

Now I really want some future Kid to have a Spy Vs. Spy poster in their bedroom.

Is it too much to ask to maybe dial it back? It kinda feels like drama importation up to a certain point.

One hell of an upd8

> (Be Yiffany Longstocking.)

oof damn rose what a bitch you are trying to take vriska's title?

Kanaya: "You fucked my wife, so guess what, I'm going to fuck the Earth! That's right, this is what you get! MY SUPER LASER PISS!"

Sburb is really a trauma engine, huh?

Clicked through some of the upd8s for a little furtive peek at what's going on. God damn, the art is really good. Everyone has such great designs.

Temptation rising.

It does kind of bug me that the now-adult characters still look like kids in their sprites, though.

Well thats when we are in the adults perspectives, considering the hero mode sprites of the adults look different from the kids pov, I am sure it will in normal sprites too.

I read the update. It was surprisingly good and compelling, but... Yeah, I don't think the setup was or is salvageable for me. This still isn't for me, only now I'm disappointed by that. Oh well, my loss!

I would ask what Hussie was thinking, mandating the old team do this soap opera bullshit with and around Yiffy, except I think the answer is clearly just 'LOL'. The 15 years thing and character assassination of Jane are the walls I can't hop over here.

(Not really a spoiler for the new stuff at all except in pertaining to the update in subject matter.)

Edited by RaichuKFM on Feb 12th 2024 at 9:33:24 AM