HS:BC 

MILES: We do occasionally do this!  

KIM: Fans with a careful eye have probably noticed we’ve already taken the opportunity to touch up some of our old panels! 👁 In fact, we talked about some of the spiffied up new panels on our Patreon too!

We have been considering touching up some other old panels in the future as well, but it’s not a pressing concern since it’s mostly cosmetic. A good majority of the artists on the team have been working on this comic since the pre-reboot and we’ve been itching to give some of our old artwork a fresh coat of paint – the blu-ray HD edition!

ANDI: Yes, there’s a few panels of mine from the first run that I’d like to redo.

MILES: I think it’s the same take for both of them, which is the implication that the satyrs and nymphs directly reflect their feelings about their friends.  Whether or not that’s actually true is kind of in the eye of the beholder.

FLORAL:  Maybe he wouldn’t like everyone wanting to blow up Swiss? 

MILES: Real shit I don’t like that either.  He’s just a boy.

MILES: Our update pace is always going to vary with workload but we are trying very, very hard to make sure that you all get at least one Update per month.  Often we try to give you guys more, but as mentioned, there are all sorts of production issues to consider.  It’s probably easier to qualify how many pages on average per MONTH, which would be in the realm of 25-30.

FLORAL:  If only our patreon could let us quit our day jobs but that’s not something up to us.

MILES: Looks meaningfully at you.

KIM: Yeas. :)

FLORAL:  You’ll know when the time is right. 

MILES: Dirk pretty regularly explains his reasoning very clearly if you’d take the time to listen.

FLORAL: He did what he felt was true.

ANDI: Don’t you remember? He’s “doing this for all of us.”

MILES: Oh this is so good.  I kind of think Yiffy would be a pegatulp.  There aren’t really any hard and fast rules that’d codify this though so I could easily change my mind on this as soon as midway through answering these.

ANDI: My humble onion would be Stallion.

CHUMI: Hmmm pegatulp!

HAVEN: alkyrin to me 

FLORAL: Where’s Kim, I’ll agree with Kim.

KIM: I agree with everyone. :)

MILES: TC will be revealed... this year.  I think it’s safe to say that.  As for the rooms, yes, we are going to show every single kid’s room eventually.  You can’t be a kid in Homestuck and not have a room reveal!  That wouldn’t be proper.  I’m actually really excited to show off Vrissy Yiffy and Tavvy’s rooms.

MILES: She’s lived a long life and been inspired by so many things.

KIM: Circle.

HAVEN: Bubbles

ANDI: Old people.

CHUMI: Grandmas.

FLORAL:  Who the fuck is Meemaw?

MILES: HS:BC will finish.  I’m extremely confident of that. As for merch, YES!  I will let Kim and Chumi handle this one

KIM: Ohoho… Merch is definitely in our plans! Or rather, we all really, really want it to happen because the team also really wants trinkets of our funny guys too. I will find a way to. We must.

CHUMI: We’re working on it! We want it to happen! Believe in us.

FLORAL:  I literally just ordered like 100 stickers for Galaxy Con, be still.

MILES: A lot of the beginning stages of making HS:BC was about wrapping up the story beats that HS^2 was working with to ensure that the entire narrative flowed as smoothly as possible, so that was kind of the original priority, but almost immediately into the process the team began shooting off in their own direction.  A lot of our ideas started as kind of indulgent impulses that we realized just worked Very Well for the possibilities that The Story Thus Far had set up for.  It’s nice because so much of what already existed was only a template for launching into a realm of basically complete freedom.

MILES: Re: taking ideas from the original HS^2 story, the answer is not really, we’ve been doing almost entirely our own thing from the get go.  There are a very few scattered concepts that already existed prior to our team’s work, but it was kind of an internal point of pride for us that we were going to try to keep this as consistent a story as possible while also firmly ensuring that it was Our Story.  Maybe that sounds a bit egotistical but speaking honestly, when you get the chance to make your mark on Homestuck, you kind of want to do it as much on your own terms as you can (while also obviously standing on the shoulders of a fucking colossus, Homestuck The Comic), and our team is so supercharged with ideas that it was pretty obvious immediately we were gonna be okay handling the direction ourselves.

FLORAL:  I think ultimately you can’t tell someone else’s story, it has to come from some place within ourselves. 

MILES: My favorite dead guy is Equius.

ANDI: Aranea. Oh, and Equius. 

KIM: Feferi… 😔💔 I’ve always been a long time fan of the seadwellers since I first got into the fandom!

CHUMI: Another vote for Feferi… She was my favorite character as a kid! 

FLORAL:  I think Tavros was funneh.

MILES: This is another thing that’s going to sound EXTREMELY egotistical and maybe downright tyrannical but one of my internal Vibe Check Goals for myself, at least, is to do such a good job with HS:BC that they don’t really need to do any more direct Homestuck sequels.  Obviously that’s not up to me, and I don’t mean to say that we’d be purposefully writing into a position such that sequels are impossible (that’d be restrictive and dumb) but I do think of it as kind of a North Star in terms of guiding our desires for how this comic ends up.  I want this shit to be so good everyone’s like damn... they did it!  They did Homestuck!  Spin offs and series in the Homestuck franchise, though?  Still always room for that.  I mean Hiveswap and Hauntswich are still happening, and who knows what else might happen.  That might be more a question for Andrew, at the end of the day.

ANDI: I also think it’d be nice to have FRS try making something entirely new, something with our unique touch.

KIM: Not exactly pertaining to sequels – but I’ve talked about before a little dream of mine is to make a spin-off collaborative anthology-style comic book with new characters to explore Alternian lore would be really cool!

Also total agreement with Andi though! Making something new and original with the FRS crew would also be sooo cool. I love working with these guys on anything… My fwents… 🥺

FLORAL:  I have to ignore the question because of this Mr. Beast ass Andrew AU you just dropped in our laps. 

MILES: Because a bunch of insane murderers are chuckling darkly while we put our heads together to give you all the craziest comic we’re capable of making.  If you were looking for a serious answer to this I actually think it’s because it’s being made by people who were literally raised by Homestuck, understand it and adore it, and have talent out the fucking wazoo and the drive to spend huge chunks of their free time playing in the space because we Love It.  The answer is always love, man.

CHUMI: The secret is hard work and a lot of work calls that last 5+ hours!

ANDI: We spend so much of our off hours working on it, I can’t tell you how often our calls end up closing off around 2 am in the morning. But it’s an enthusiastic kind of sleep deprivation. It’s not the most ideal work ethic but this is genuinely what we mean by like… we LOVE THIS SHIT…

KIM: COS’ WE LOVE THIS SHIT, BAYBEEEE!!

FLORAL:  We are incredibly goated and can’t help ourselves from making super high production pages full of personality. 

MILES: This is so tough.  I feel like the balanced answer to this is that the satyrs are physical freakazoids from a species and culture that prides themselves on their insane athleticism but the nymphs are no slouches themselves and they have magic.  I feel like the nymphs clinch this, mid-dif.  If this was about hoofball (which is exactly what it sounds like) I’d say it’d be a handy (or hoofy, as the case may be) satyr victory, though. 

FLORAL:  CC and CT is balling the fuck out of everybody on their own team.

MILES: I feel like she’d be insulted that you even had to ask this.  Let’s say she made it through his entire catalogue while she was Helltiering.

FLORAL:  She watched Raising Arizona specifically and is now cursed forever.

MILES: We absolutely have real plans for more Derse agent shenanigans, and actually a fairly fun Prospit/Derse subplot planned in general, but I’m not sure if it’d be fair to say we’ll make them as relevant as they were in Homestuck considering how crucial Jack/Bec/Slick was/were to the original plot.  They’re still absolutely going to matter, though.

MILES: What do you think? 

FLORAL:  Naur.

CHUMI: Yes 🙂 

MILES: It would be absolutely silly to pretend that we don’t think about how our comic is going to be received as we make it, but I’d like to believe that for the most part we really do try to make choices based off of what we think is going to make a cool story.  I think we kind of knew that the Delta kids were going to be received well, because they’re just so, so good, and it felt like fanservice for US to even get to make them, but they’re also kind of critical to Dirk’s entire stated plan in the first place so it’s not like we put them in there JUST for us.  Still feels awesome that they get to be like, fully “ours” though.  That’s an enormous point of pride for us.

FLORAL:  We must remain true.

HAVEN: We gotta do us

ANDI: It’s a given but I do think it’s extremely fulfilling seeing any kind of discussion, enthusiasm and pretty much anything that expresses investment by the reader no matter the opinion. For example, dropping CC’s update was personally something I enjoyed looking over for reception, because we put EVERYTHANG into our characters, it helps to know that there are wondrous eyes on it than nothing at all.

FLORAL:  Regardless of what the fandom wants, it brings joy to see things in passing and instantly know we’ll make some people fall to their knees.

MILES: To answer this simply and in an even more general sense, the question of whether to abide by, iterate on, or subvert established Homestuckology is probably one of the main metatextual points of this entire work.  Homestuck is so dependent on its symbolic/representational language that to depart too far from that for no reason would be a discredit to our ability to make this a good Homestuck Story, but we absolutely do like splitting from the norm in ways that surprise and delight the reader and maybe allow them to look at old concepts in a new way.  

MILES: Real shit almost certainly not.

HAVEN: like never say never but don’t have any hope ok? can I say to not have hope. 

FLORAL:  *Carts out Mituna*

HAVEN: cart it back in. 

MILES: I feel like as an artist Dave fundamentally understands that AI shit isn’t really creatively-ensouled but I also honestly do not think Dave has the scruples necessary to actually disavow it in any meaningful way, even if he didn’t come to full political awareness in a post-scarcity “utopia”.  He probably thinks it’s funny as fuck.

HAVEN: He would absolutely be making some nightmarishly disgusting ai generated “comics” 

ANDI: The kind of material that feels like it might induce a form of infectious neurosis. The kind of repulsive visual vomit that means nothing, not even to him. Or anyone at all.

MILES: God As My Fucking Witness we will try to make this happen and are hoping to work our way towards this.  Please, please, PLEASE fund them when the time comes.  Seriously.  Remember that if they don’t get funded they don’t get made.

CHUMI: Definitely a big part of this is to show your support in the ways you can! One of the things we always consider about merchandise is how monetarily viable a character is, and we definitely use audience interest + engagement as a way to measure this. If you scream loud enough for merchandise… we cannot ignore…

KIM: If the deltritans don't get any plushies i will kill myself.

MILES: I think it’s important in the sense that Cherubs being linked to incredibly powerful and mysterious timeline-and/or-universe-altering artifacts is important to the nature of the Homestuck multiverse, but they’re not necessarily all that conceptually linked in a direct way, and they probably won’t have too much direct bearing on each other.

KIM: We also covered this a little bit in an old Patreon artist’s commentary when we introduced the Plot Point if you’d like to know more!

MILES: The Delta kids are obviously going to reflect back on Dirk and Rose thematically because... well, because.  But know that we really, REALLY did try hard during their development to make them believable as individual characters, their own people, members of species that have been running around for ten thousand years.  It’s an important part of the story we want to tell with them.  Of course, Homestuck is mind-bogglingly self-referential, and there are intentional AND unintentional ways in which these characters directly reflect the creators of their species (and other characters besides those two) because that’s just the kind of story Homestuck is, but if you get anything out of this question I would encourage you to really believe in their individuality.

HAVEN: this is like asking if starry night reflects van gogh’s character. yes, of course it does.

FLORAL:  Lock in with that pattern recognition baby. (If that is your strength, if not, I love you all the same.)

MILES: The process of developing satyrs and nymphs in general first started in like, June-July 2023, before the comic even resumed updating.  Then, the individual characters were all pitched at one meeting we had in I believe mid-September 2023; that was a really awesome meeting and we all had a LOT of fun, and that very meeting is where the basis of each of the 6 Deltas was kind of made True and Real.  Anyway, the first thing we did in a general sense is really try to get a clear idea of their species and cultures in general.  That was kind of the fertile ground upon which these guys were always going to grow, and we essentially designed the satyrs and nymphs entirely from scratch, to give these guys a context to which they’d all belong.  The nymphs were kind of conceptually creative from the getgo, but a big challenge was how to make the concept of Horse Boys into something that’d actually be fun and interesting to think about.  After getting their cultures defined (although the process is never done and continues to be tweaked to this very day!), the way these kids came about is that we thought about personality types that’d be funny and interesting additions to the cast as it stands.  With general Personality Archetypes laid out came the addition of hobbies, appearances, quirks, etc. which all kind of naturally built upon themselves, and recontextualized/changed former traits, as the momentum continued.  The actual visual character designs kind of varied; some of the characters were conceived of almost immediately with a design more or less worked out, and some of them took AGES (i’m talking over two years) to settle on, although the basic vibes were already worked out during that first meeting I was talking about.  Side note, can you please, PLEASE imagine how incredibly hard it has been for us to sit on these characters for anywhere from two to three YEARS?  Every time we get to put them on screen it’s an emotional cascade of relief.  Every time we get to introduce a NEW one is like... I don’t even know, man.  I can only pray you get to experience something like it.  Creative bliss.

HAVEN: very fun process, we made moodboards and google docs, and powerpoints and all sorts of stuff.

FLORAL:  Homestuck sprite iconography helped speed up our process because there are just some things that look too fucking crazy. Less options.

ANDI: *Opens wallet only for a moth to fly out*

A lot.

CHUMI: Divide the Patreon income by number of panels by our hours of work by number of team members minus any costs we have for the month! 

FLORAL:  Imagine if we had more… we could make even more panels.

CHUMI: It’s scary… He didn’t do anything. 

HAVEN: poor kid.

KIM: He’s just a boy…

ANDI: You… can’t do that….

FLORAL:  Kinda awesome /pos.

CHUMI: Everyone loves Cool Ranch. 

MILES: Just match the colors up I guess.

HAVEN: This question sparked a fierce debate amongst the team. I hope you’re proud of what you did to us.

FLORAL:  I was broken in the resulting kerfuffle. 

FLORAL:  TBH I believe we have a few, sort of like the OG comic did. Some of these ideas are based off of philosophy, some recognizing past themes of previous works, what it means to be online NOW, but also how people relate to the world around them and each other and much more! It’s one big conversation and that’s mostly why I’m being super vague right now because I think the readers should be a part of that discussion instead of told what exactly they should be seeing within the narrative.

MILES: I’ll have you know I actually wailed in ecstatic horror at the joy of receiving this question and the terror of realizing I might be compelled to actually answer it.  I feel like this is accidentally going to get so, so long if I’m not careful.

CHUMI: OOOHHHH it’s hard to choose between our guys… I think my favorite is Swiss though.

KIM: How can you make us pick a favorite child… My fave constantly jumps around but right now I am in Ly’lac mode.

HAVEN: AA.

ANDI: CC. CC. CC. CC. 

FLORAL:  LMAO ANDI!!!! So real, CC. and CT for me.

MILES: This is such agony.  How... am I to choose... if I was at gunpoint for this one I’d hesitantly settle on TC and AA but even as I type those answers it feels disingenuous and lacking, because I’m like, well obviously I can’t forget about CC, or CT for that matter, and who could forget dear Ly’lac and Swiss, our flagship freaks?  You might think that the order I just listed them out in is indicative of my subconscious feelings on them but I promise it isn’t.  They’re all so perfect in their own niche.  I cannot pick.  It really is like asking us to pick a favorite child.

CHUMI: HMMM Homestuck was my One and Only for a very long time, but I really got into Haikyuu during the huge pauses. Also dabbled in Dangan Ronpa and Fire Emblem!

ANDI: Probably the OFF game and other rpgmaker games like Yume Nikki and Mad Father plus all the other horror ones. Shortly after I was into Free! But that didn’t last too long. I tried to really get into Danganronpa but I couldn’t get invested in the somethingAwful forum threads because Idk, just took me out of it. But those were good and fun times.  

CHUMI: I consult my List and then send out an email! If they’re interested in working with us, we move forward from there! Then our patrons (SUPPORT US ON PATREON) vote on what topic they wanna see brought to life. Then we give our artists around 3 months to draw the illustration. It’s posted to our Patreon, and then 2 months later it’s posted publicly for all to enjoy. 

CHUMI:  Sheriff Dry Hops is right there. 

ANDI: Ohhh, maybe just one more bunny….

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: Ok let’s take a crack at this.  This is more based around playstyle and character’s they’d enjoy than around THEIR personality, but obviously there’s overlap.

Harry: Pikachu (he likes pokemon I guess.)
Vrissy: Watches a lot of competitive but doesn’t actually play.
Tavvy: Luigi (aggressive grappler.)

Yiffy: Little Mac (aggro, revenge mechanics)

Ly’lac:  Mr. Game and Watch (cartoons!), Snake (trap-zoning, bombs), Duck Hunt (zoning, cartoony)
Del’fi: Kirby (cute, aggressive, fun to annoy people with), Sephiroth (because he’s awesome.)

AA: Zelda (magic zoner.)

Swiss: Obviously Marth.  He only plays characters with swords.
TC: Sonic, Captain Falcon (frenetic, high-speed heavy hitters), Ness (aggressive rushdown/zoner hybrid, high complexity.)

CT: Bowser, Donkey Kong (heavy-hitting tanks, wrestling vibes.)

CHUMI: Everyone should just main Ike.

MILES: Yeah they are, haha.  Umineko is a pretty amazing VN and I know more than a few of us have read it.  As a story about stories, it’s kind of perfect for Homestuck fans who are into that aspect of what Homestuck is, and I recommend it highly not necessarily because it’s going to have direct bearing on HS:BC but because it’s a fantastic tool for boosting your media literacy about Meta, and also just because it’s an honestly incredible narrative.  Maybe one of the best ever.

HAVEN:  We love it a lot.

CHUMI: Auuooohhh… Beatrice…

MILES: Maybe!