characters hussie hated, and characters hussie loved

This is a really weird way to view fiction. It's a story. He doesn't hate any of the characters. If he hated a character they wouldn't be in the story.

ithink he likes to do a bit of trolling

I mean Tavros does get a win in the end. He was integral to recruiting the ghost army when Vriska could't. I feel like if Hussie really hated Tavros he could've just had Vriska do it successfully?

I don't remember it's been a while since I read it rip. And I do know Tavros was picked on a lot, maybe I don't remember the intensity of it.

Also I wouldn't say hate, but I feel like Gamzee became a super flat character as the comic went on. I feel like he could have had a lot of nuance.

Also the retcon making Vriska regress in character sucked. I didnt like it when I first read it, I felt bad for ghost Vriska :( but at least it's being addressed in the sequel. And "I'm... normal now" is absolutely hilarious dialogue from Vriska hahaha

I think a big issue with these things is people don't really understand how classpects tie into the story at a base level, so they see the way the narrative treats Page's and Witches and such and go 'wow I can't believe hussie hates these characters' like it's both a joke and a narrative point that all of Tavros' development happens off screen because he's a page. Is that necessarily good writing? That's for you to decide, but it's not some like. secret hatred he has of the characters.

The idea that Hussie killed off characters based on who he did and didn't "like" is the most long running and stupid and annoying myth in the fandom's history. I don't even want to call it a myth, because it doesn't even have some mythological basis - unless you count when people genuinely couldn't tell Hussie was joking when he said he killed Feferi for having an annoying quirk. It's more of a conspiracy theory founded on a total lack of appreciation for the craft of storytelling.

Homestuck was never going to introduce 12 new characters and then keep every single one of them. That would be insane. Yes, of course the trolls who died got less character development - but doesn't that tell you that maybe Hussie knew from the beginning that they were side characters, and had no intention for anyone to get attached to them as if they were main characters? Why is it Hussie's responsibility if some readers expected more from a certain side character? Maybe more importantly, even if Hussie just straight up "didn't like" those characters, who cares? Why do they have to like the same characters the readers like? Why do they have to like any characters at all? Not all characters are for liking, and liking or disliking the characters isn't everything that fiction is about anyway

i'm going to be really honest. this is not limited to hussie. i think homestuck is awesome because it really allows macro levels of pretty much all of the cast (which is a massive cast in a massive story rarely seen in any other forms of fiction) but unfortunately the downside of that is it's inevitable some characters will get substantially less time to shine simply because you can't focus everything on everyone. does that mean he likes any character more or less? who's to say. i wouldn't necessarily say they dislike tavros, sometimes its really fun to have a character you write that's kinda cringy and goofy that you beat up on.

all of this to say: because of homestuck being the way it is, it's a lot easier to tell which characters she at the very least favors enough to give the spotlight, but as a working creative (and i'm sure others will say the same) sometimes you just write characters you really hate and sometimes that shows through the paint. and maybe that's intentional and maybe it isn't. but when you watch a movie, it's not like you see a character with less screentime and think, wow they must've hated that guy. and, again, maybe they did! or maybe they just didn't have room in the story to make their presence larger.

i say this, obviously, as feferi fan #1, a character who i mentioned in another thread that hussie has outwardly stated he didn't enjoy writing, but i still don't think it's necessarily Obvious in the text that he hates her. she had a presence in the story that was important for her smaller role and then it ended. do i wish that role were larger? sure. but i don't really blame hussie for that. personally.

me seeing oomf said hussie was joking when she said she didnt like writing feferi's quirk: jk. lol. hehe. lol.

See I think the fact that people accuse hussie of randomly loving Vriska when her classpect is 'the thief of light' and she's constantly stealing the spotlight is people just straight up not understanding what the story is about

@alex I mean I guess that's just my interpretation, maybe I'm totally off base 😭 but if we're being so so honest about quirks and their level of annoyingness to both read and write there's no way in hell Terezi isn't riiiiiight at the top of that list. And the author clearly loved her a lot!

I can admit Meenah having basically a toned-down version of Feferi's quirk suggests that Hussie knew something about the quirk wasn't working, though I think it's just as likely they realised it looks Bad On the Page than they just hated writing in it. Feferi's quirk is something that's really clever in execution (it's her sign! how cute is that!) but can very easily fall apart if you just, like, write it in the wrong font haha. So I can totally see why Hussie might have been eager to try it out and then changed their mind - but I very much protest the idea that it actually had anything to do with her being killed off and removed from the playing field 😔

andrew does not hate tavros, it's just that tavros is not an important character outside of vriska's plot lol

there's this thing homestuck fans do where they don't really recognize that "death" is a more complicated thing in homestuck than in most stories. a lot of people treat deaths in homestuck like they do with say, tv shows. on tv, characters die for a lot of reasons. in fact, characters dying as a part of an intentional narrative arc is really more the exception than the rule. characters die on tv shows because the actor wanted to do a different job, because of contract negotiations, because of the difficulties in scheduling actors to appear on set, because the showrunner had run out of things to do with the character.

that's not really how death in homestuck works - death in homestuck, once the dreambubbles are established, acts as freedom. this goes back to a lot of the gnostic influence on the comic, see: yaldabaoth and abraxas being invoked by name, the idea of the flawed author who constructs a flawed world that must be escaped from, it's literally in jade's name. the approach gnosticism takes towards resolving the inherent contradiction between an all-powerful, world-creating god and the struggle of existence is that the demiurge, the creator-god, creates flawed worlds in their flawed image. the afterlife, then, is an escape from this flawed world, and homestuck is really no different from standard gnosticism in this way.

but it's layered in another way atop that - dying in homestuck is freedom from social pressures, and it acts almost like handing over characters to the fandom. the characters that live on in the dreambubbles get fandom wishes granted. one of the first dreambubble pairings we see is karkat and nepeta together, something that would have never happened while they were alive. things like the crowd of cosplaying trolls in ministrife evoke cosplayers who would do absurd things like "sailor moon!damara" and "maid!equius". the ghost army, rising upon the corrupt author figure evokes the crowds of cosplayers at conventions.

this whole thing creates a meaning where the best way to do homestuck is to get in, get shit done in the story, and die, where you can try to be at peace. it's why terezi: remem8er starts out the dreambubble world tour on eridan, of all people. eridan was one of the worst kinds of bastard the story had to offer, and even he gets to have his moment.

it's not necessarily "hussie hated these characters" with that in mind, it really feels more like "hussie did all they wanted to with these characters, and put them in a toybox for fandom to play with like the end of toy story 3"

also they're her characters so they kind of have the right to decide which characters matter or not lol. it's her webcomic

At the end of the day, the cast of Homestuck is just a bunch of OCs. If you hated your OCs, why would you write about them? Hussie clearly cares about the characters they created, and that’s why Homestuck exists.

I’ve seen very few people appreciate the fact that Vriska as a thief of light actively steals the relevance (light) of other characters and funnels it into her own. she forced herself back into the story and into hussies heart by what amounts to her own will and power. people only see the surface level result and assume Hussie just put her in more to troll people.

@JakeMorph in response to this ( https://www.fruityrumpus.com/forums/reply/689774fbc24c58e6534ffa10 )

I don't think that murderstuck was just to kill off characters Hussie didn't like. Where I got the impression that Hussie didn't like characters like Tavros is the fact that these characters seemed well written, but after a while, got annoying to read, even if the character is still likable. Tavros was a very enjoyable, endearing character when he was first introduced, but later on his entire personality became being annoying. And then he becomes a shitty device to move the story along when he just shows up with an army for vriska, does a few dances, and then gives up his entire control over it, which he's barely credited for.

I could be wrong, but to me towards the end, it just felt like some of the characters were written to be unlikable even when they weren't.

personally i think hussie should've hated more characters. imagine a world where the only character they actually liked was sollux. think of how powerful sollux would be. think of the great things sollux could do. imagine how beautiful sollux's adventures would have been, guys. imagine the ways he would have journeyed and quested and succeeded and thrived. imagine how delightful his words would be to read, how hilarious his jokes would be because he'd get all the good ones. imagine your favorite homestuck quote, but sollux said it. such things can only exist if you hate all your creations but one. do it for sollux.

I actually thought about this for a bit and I think the character Hussie hates most is Hussie

I would like to redact the word "hate". I think the word hate is a little harsh. Hussie doesn't hate his characters. it just seemed to me that he purposely let some of his characters that originally were supposed to be interesting, and turned them into huge nothing burgers. I'm not talking about characters that didnt get screentime or were killed, it just seems to me that every character he wrote was supposed to be more interesting than they are, then pulled the rug out from under them.

I think Vriska was definetley set up to be a controversial character, but I think it was more of the fandom response at the time that made them decide to do the author-self-insert proposing to Vriska bit. I find it hard to believe that Hussie genuinely hates any of her OCs in homestuck given how much care was put into writing them, I think it's more getting irritated with misinterpretations. One of my friends who was in the fandom back in like 2013 literally told me that they didn't read the actual comic as a teenager and got into it through comic dubs and fan depictions of the characters, and that this wasn't uncommon at the time. So you had a lot of fans who did not actually read the comic, which I think would be pretty frustrating as an author.

@sirlywebmester I don't think Tavros' personality changed, I think he was just (intentionally) put in more situations to push him, and couldn't handle it. Also, it isn't very surprising for thirteen year olds to be annoying. Most of the homestuck player characters would be annoying to deal with irl. I love Terezi, but if she ate my good colored pencils we would have some serious beef.

@cubecrow

First of all, thank you for the excerpt; it was surprisingly interesting to read.

Second of all, does Andrew Hussie go by she/her now? I always thought that she(?) went solely by he/him