P: For this commentary, I thought we’d try something a little different again, and so I’m really happy to welcome a member of our art team to give us some of his thoughts on the update!

K: Hi everyone! I’m Kim Quach, the artist for chapter 9 of Homestuck^2 and also the character designer for Yiffany. I gotta say, Andrew was right when he said we were all going to love Yiffany. As soon as I designed her, she instantly became my favorite character in HS2 (but that might just be my bias, hehe). I had no idea what kind of character Yiffany was going to be before I was assigned to design her, but once I was given a groundwork of her character I already had a clear vision in my mind of how I wanted her to look. Before I started drafting my own design sketches for Yiffany, I was given some key elements for her character and an ancient design draft made by Andrew Hussie. I’ll just tell you, Yiffany looks completely different from Andrew’s initial concept, hahaha.

P: You might already be aware of this from his Instagram account, but Andrew Hussie is a grown man who does not know how to dress himself. So, in all honesty, the less said about the original Andrew concept for Yiffany the better. Since we were inviting Kim to contribute specifically because we all love his character designs so much, we wanted him to have as much freedom as possible to make something that he would enjoy drawing. I think this was a pretty good call. Kim’s outfits are to die for.

K: For her design, I had a solid idea of what kind of outfit I wanted her to wear. I was given a few key points for her design: she’s in a boarding school uniform, she decidedly wears shorts instead of a skirt, a messy tie, and that she wears her uniform badly. My particularly favorite detail is the too-big untucked shirt, haha.

P: Something that might be surprising to the readers is that, prior to the month of May, Yiffy didn’t have a final design. So there was this period of about a week or so where people were drawing fanart of a character that not only had nobody seen, but of whom no canonical representation had even been decided upon. In a limited sense, the fan discussion around Yiffy formed part of the design process, but I really do mean a limited sense. A lot of the designs that we saw were quite lovely—a majority of them fell into a category I sort of loosely identified as “sad girl”. I think a lot of people already identified from her background that Yiffy would have a lot of angst potential, which is very true. But Homestuck has a habit of taking what the reader thinks they want and saying, um, well, have you considered that maybe what you want is this instead? And in guiding Kim’s design process, we very consciously decided to go this route: Yiffy the sad doggy girl in a sundress gave way to Yiffy the angry doggy jock in soccer shorts. Not to toot our own horn, but judging by the reaction I think it’s fair to say that this turned out pretty well.

K: I thought it was really cool to see the fan speculations! I honestly hadn’t seen any before I designed her at all, so I came into the drafting process with a completely blank slate. I don’t think we had a text color picked out for Yiffany just yet either as I was laying down the colors. Though, I liked the idea of her being on the warmer side since a lot of the HS2 kids were already on the blue-adjacent end (hence the salmon accents on the first few iterations). I really love the bold red we ended up with a lot though, it really shows the character’s strong personality and energy. She was also initially going to be wearing chucks, but in the design room Pip suggested she be wearing cleats to complete the jock look. Honestly, it’s one of my other favorite parts of the design—it brings a lot of character to it!

P: All of you people out there who just wanna get fucking stomped on by a girl… I got you covered, I guess.

K: If I had to say what was the hardest part of designing Yiffany, it was actually her hairstyle. (Does her ears and tail count as part of her hair too?) I think how a character styles their hair really defines their personality, so I wanted something that would reflect that. My idea was that her hair was short, wild, and loosely styled. It’s out of her face, but not something she would care to maintain. I think the most interesting part about her hair was translating it into the trademark Homestuck style. While I did have my own idea for her hair, abstracting it and seeing how fans would interpret it was the fun part I was looking forward to! I couldn’t decide if I wanted to keep Yiffany’s ears white or black. White seemed like the obvious choice, but the black balanced out the design more. Everyone agreed the black complimented her a lot more, and so it was! Plus, hey, she looks sick as hell, hahaha.

P: Right, hahaha. I think my favorite part of her design is the piercing on her (dog) ears—the red accent up there is just so fun. Oh, and plus, she has a tail, so there’s going to be a lot of expressive potential there that we haven’t seen in a human character before. We all really did fall in love with Yiffy the moment Kim started working on her. There’s something about seeing a character “in the flesh”, as opposed to just a list of plot points and traits, that really helps you begin to treat them as a living breathing creation.

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K: Working on the panels themselves was a really interesting creative experience! I was given an outline of what the writers wanted to be key for every panel, and I boarded and revised the sequence accordingly. Funny enough, the hardest part about boarding this was actually the first panel. Though, I think that’s a given with any kind of storyboard sequence. The first panel of a storyboard is what leads into how the rest of the boards would look like, and you have to plan the rest of your boards accordingly for a visually smooth experience.

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P: So in this scene, Jane is working on her eulogy for Gamzee’s funeral. She doesn’t have very much luck in this endeavor because I frankly could not think of anything reasonable for her to say in contemplation of the life of That Guy. She starts off trying to riff on some poem from Lord of the Rings (I think?), but she stops at the precise moment that I realized that there isn’t a rhyme for “honking”. I didn’t say fiddlesticks when this happened though.

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K: After the boards, the next step is laying down the color script. The use of color throughout this chapter is especially vital as the blue and red signify each of the core characters featured in this chapter. I wanted to use color as a way to convey the control and emotional intensity of each respective character.

P: Right, we established early on that the main idea of this update would be the conflict between Yiffy and Jane, and so the colors were deliberately chosen to reflect this. Pay attention to how the blues and reds interact throughout the scene, and you get a pretty good picture of the dynamic at play.

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K: Oh man, this panel. HAHA. My given notes for this shot were that it had to be below the waist and for what Jake was carrying to be obscured. I didn’t intend for this panel to be as fanservice-y as it was, but here we are.

P: A lot of people gave us “grief” for this one, saying like, oh I can’t believe how in-your-face the fanservice is in this comic now, and to those people I have to say that it was a genuine accident. A happy accident, maybe… Look. Have you considered it’s appropriate that Jake’s ass is just SO jutting out and impudent that it somehow muscles its way into the shot even without any of us intending for it to? This is how Art works, okay? Okay.

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P: I think one of the most insidious things about Jane is that she very often says things that could appear, from a certain angle, to be entirely reasonable. I mean, what she says here about Troll society does reflect some of the beliefs about their culture that even Troll members of the cast expressed in Homestuck proper. That’s the difficult thing with people like Jane. You have to pay very close attention to where the logic is taking you, because in their hands logic becomes a very dangerous tool indeed. It’s deductive reasoning with an agenda. Hannah Arendt pointed out in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that it was this inhumane aspect of logic which characterized a lot of the totalitarian developments in Europe in the 20th century. I think it’s important for people to understand the fact that logic is not like, say, an encyclopedia; it’s not a repository of knowledge that you can access and consult, it’s not a collection of facts. Logic in fact has very little to say about the Truth of Reality—logic simply is a tool by which one deduces information from information that already exists. It’s a process, a machine. And, depending on the raw material that is fed to it, logic can potentially pump out a load of hot garbage. The danger is that it’s internally consistent hot garbage, and that’s the thing that gets you.

Fascism is a weed which has to be ripped out by the very root, because it festers and perpetuates itself by way of this logic. At its core are some cancerous “truths” (the truth of which have no actual importance—they are often deeply untrue) from which everything else proceeds matter-of-factly. And you can’t debate the subsequent “truths” which get deduced from the preceding ones because, to the fascist, they are as self-evident and consistent with reality as saying that 1+1 must necessarily be 2. Once the baseline “facts” are established, that’s already too late. The entire sorry process, that ends up with people getting killed and stuff, is already a given by the time the initial “”“”“facts”“”“” are established, because this process consists entirely of items further down the dark path of syllogism from where it started. This is what Jane is doing.

And so you have to get at the core, then. You have to dismantle the axiomatic foundation. You gotta dismantle the concept of like, the number 1. Because they’ve encoded hatred into these axioms, upon which they’re trying to build the entire mathematics of a way of looking at the world.

Um, anyway, let’s talk about Yiffy some more. I miss her already and she hasn’t even shown up yet.

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K: This panel has me shaking in my boots in excitement. It’s probably one of my top favorites of this update. THERE SHE IS!!!!! AND HER SICK KICKS!!! A small detail that I particularly like is Yiffany’s body language here because it’s very telling of her character. Meanwhile it conveys a sense of defeat, her posture here is still very dominant.

P: turns to the camera Hello lesbians. Glad you could join us.

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P: Jake has been married to a multiuniversally acknowledged cook for like, [NUMBER] years (I’m not looking it up), and yet the best he has to offer is fucking. Microwave mac and cheese or something. You KNOW that stuff came out of a can. It’s just unfathomable that this man can be endured by anyone.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we dedicate our time and affection to people like Jake English? Well, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of whatever must in want of a romantic partner to utterly disappoint. Jake is like, the embodiment of the entire history of male anticlimax. He contains multitudes and they all STINK. And yet we cannot look away. He is a vacuum, empty space, devoid of anything, and so we cannot help but be pulled in. He’s a black hole of human sentiment that yawns ever wider and gorges itself on its own vacuousness. We pour our attention, our care, our three lovingly prepared square meals a day, our everything, into this gaping maw just hoping that something will come out of it.

Or maybe… maybe it’s that there’s just so MUCH going on in there, the complexity is so great, that it collapses under its own density to form that selfsame singularity. What appears to be emptiness is more like an all-encompassing acceptance, a space into which all can be welcomed because all has already been welcomed. There is no external reaction because the internal world is already complete, a universe of significance beyond an event horizon from which there can be no egress, and relative to which there is only one direction: inward.

Anyway, none of this fucking matters because the garbage mac and cheese is gonna get yeeted out of there in like three pages, I BET you.

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K: At least give her a utensil, Jake!!! Isn’t Jane the queen of spoons and forks?!

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K: This panel is particularly amusing to me because I love the idea of Jane woefully mourning while looking at THIS picture of Gamzee, lmao.

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P: Another wonderful Homestuck onomatopoeia. There’s something objectively funny about objects entering the shot onomatopoeiaically. Bonus points if it’s a sound that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense: the more outrageously onomatopoeiaicized the better, IMO.

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K: Okay, now THIS is another one of my favorites for this update. The big money shot! There’s lots of things that I love about this panel. One, there’s Yiffany in it and she’s cool as hell. Two, I’m a big fan of drawing angry expressions. I actually had to tone down my initial drawing for this because I had to figure out a way to keep it within the Homestuck style, haha. And three, I’m also a sucker for extremely bright colors. As the overall hues shift into red and the searing light from the doorway encapsulates the panel, I wanted the colors to reflect Yiffany’s emotional intensity and dominance over the scene.

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K: NOOO!!! JANE HOW COULD YOU!!! Meanwhile this panel makes me so upset for Yiffany, I like the colors used in this shot a lot. This is when the two colors start clashing against each other here, fighting for control. The warm hues are violently responding with Yiffany’s emotional state as the cooler hues start closing in on her.

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K: As Yiffany falls unconscious, blue becomes the dominant color of the scene. Jane is back in control.

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K: I swear these ass shots are not intentional.

P: First Jake had one, and now Jane gets one. Its_equality.gif.

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K: The scene becomes darker and the blue encapsulates around Yiffany as any hint of warm colors dies out in this panel… This panel also makes me really sad because I feel for Yiffany’s rightful anger and frustration… I really hope to see more of her in the comic soon, and see what antics she gets up to!

P: Me too.