Was the weird, monstrous troll Mary and Lenore saw based off any specific troll design or did you just come up with it yourself?

well i should say first of all that the Mary/Lenore scene in B1 Verse 2 was written by Zoe (she just wrote up a thing about her work here) and touched up by me. so the big monstrous troll was her idea. i asked her for a response and this is what she gave me:

"I just sorta rolled with like, we already know that old highbloods can get pretty gnarly looking so it's gotta be a step beyond that, enough that it would stand out to Mary as remarkable, and I liked the idea of trolls that are more like fantasy trolls, just these hulking monsters that live underground.

the idea of the evil moon hurling rocks at the planet's surface was influenced by some other worldbuilding we've done, the solar Judgments of Fallen London, and maybe most prominently the insane sapient Psychedelic Sun from The Star Beast (Doctor Who). Actually in retrospect the idea of them living under the surface was probably partly ganked from Axile in Fallen London, which was scorched by the system's sun because it found the inhabitants repugnant. so it's sorta pulling from a bunch of sources in this sort of psychedelic science-fantasy mode."

my only addition would be that over the years there've been a lot of cool troll designs. insect versions, furry versions, softer versions, sharper versions, etc. i've always really liked the interpretive versatility given to audiences by Homestuck's abstracted and constantly changing artstyle. in a darker age there were many heated debates on the subject of troll biology, particularly among those desperate for a singularly Canon truth. no such truth can or should exist, but since when has that stopped fandom?

one of the big reasons i wanted Mary on the crew with Dare and Dave is to get an Alternian troll in the same room with a Repitonian troll and just, y'know, see what happens. there are a lot of canonical differences in their biology and cultures that i find fascinating, but in a larger sense i think they do a lot to build on some of the core ideas of Double Album. as often as possible, i want to avoid a reductionist reconciliation of differences in favor of an expansionist one. instead of having these two trolls come into conflict over, like, which troll species is "the real trolls" or whatever, i think it's much more interesting to instead say "actually there are infinity troll species and they're *all* real." and i think Zoe and i both wanted to fold fanon troll designs into that, to explicitly say that they're not all necessarily bipedal humanoids but that they can in fact be weird and monstrous. so of course, Zoe's fucked up subterranean hulk troll fit the bill perfectly.

i just want you to know that i read... i think Most of godfeels and had to stop because i was not enjoying it. but i think its really good and i really respect what you do. i think it's all too easy for people to mix up "this is not my cup of tea" with "this is bad and/or problematic". they dont take the time to see the artistry in it, why it is what it is, what it might be saying beyond their surface level read and the kneejerk reaction to it.

i also wanted to note that ive always been kind of scared of sharing fanworks for fear of writing "out of character" - and ive also even been afraid of it in original works. character isn't real and concrete, so anyone can decide something's out of character. so your exploration of that concept gives me more confidence as a writer. i really appreciate that and everything else you do. :)

thank you so much for this message! i'm glad you tapped out rather than force your way through something you weren't enjoying, that's a very mature response and something i wish more folks would recognize as a perfectly valid option. in fact i think pushing through and reading long after you've given up on the material, so to speak, is a great way to wind up angry at a writer for having "forced" you to endure such a trying experience. as i've said before, an author can't force you to do anything. you can close the book any time you like.

as far as the tension of "in character/out of character" goes, i think a lot of people in fandom struggle with the fact that "character" is very much in the eye of the beholder. sub-groups form within fandoms based on identities, politics, sexual predilections, etc, and typically gather around the fire that is their particular interpretation of a character. but from within that sub-group, it's rarely considered "an interpretation" so much as the obvious intended truth of the text. it's that intoxicating mood of finding people who share a perspective you rarely see elsewhere, like oh my god, you GET it, finally someone GETS it!

in homestuck fandom, for instance, quite a lot of people hate vriska and think she sucks, with a vocal sub-group of that sub-group still actively beating the drum that everything about her arc after [S] Game Over is the worst part of homestuck. but i love vriska, and my corner of the fandom very much organized around a full-throated defense of her. some folks think homestuck did tavros and gamzee dirty and that this is a fatal flaw in the text; when i countenance these people, i am convinced we read two very different comics. who's right and who's wrong? there are degrees. i can pull out any number of quotes from andrew hussie about the importance of vriska and the weenieness of tavros, but then, authors love to say things, and there's plenty of stories i love in ways that directly oppose to the authors' stated intent. the debate can never end because we are only ever talking about the version of a character or story that exists in our heads, based on the things that stuck with us when we read the thing (however long ago that was-- which is important because i find a LOT of people adamantly defending their headcanons haven't read the source text in a number of years. as time passes, your perception of the media you've experienced in the past morphs and distorts. someone who was right five years ago can be wrong today and not even notice the difference).

something i've realized in the last year is how much godfeels emerged from a very specific milieu, not just in terms of how we interpreted certain characters but in our approach to analyzing and talking about the text altogether. i believe most of the important stuff in godfeels is "in character" in most of the ways that matter, but it's built on a very specific meta that centered vrisrezi and transness and radical leftist politics and experimental hypertext. really, it's a post-Epilogues fanwork even despite the fact that godfeels 1 predates their release by a few weeks. and i think to this day a lot of homestuck fans haven't read the epilogues but have read fandom posts about how terrible they are (quite a lot of which will have either been written by teens, by people who already didn't like homestuck very much, or by one of the regressive stalkery weirdos prominent in the homestuck reddit/discord), and that misapprehension keeps them in the dark about just how many amazing tools the epilogues introduce to the homestuck formula that exponentially expand the expressive possibilities of attentive fanworks. and it of course elides the fact that the homestuck epilogues are a story about being in your 30s. i think we'll be getting a big re-appraisal of the epilogues in 5-10 years. it'll be the "twin peaks: fire walk with me" of homestuck, just you wait.

so these readers see my version of dirk being an unhinged murderous dick to a newly-out trans woman and go "he would never do that." then if i point at the epilogues, they'll say "i didn't read them/they're not even canon/that wasn't in character either." at which point there's nothing really to say, because we have two completely different perceptions of the text. who's right and who's wrong is almost always infinitely subjective, a circumstance that humans are notable for being very good at handling in a mature and politely discursive manner.

so i've got an "author's introduction" to godfeels baking in my docs to provide some context about the meta this story is built on, the milieu it came out of, that sort of thing. it won't make much of a difference in practical terms, but it'll at least be something i can point to.

in any event, thanks for this message. all i ever want is for people to give it an honest shot. i hope you can continue harvesting confidence from wherever it can be found. it takes a lot of audacity and backbone to be an artist, especially when you have something worthwhile to say. remember that you're not writing for the haters, you're writing for the kind of person, like you, who wants to see more stories like the thing you're writing. they're the ones who'll get it, they're the ones who'll stick around long after the haters have lost interest.