Dream Muttman wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2019 4:07 pm
JakeMorph wrote: ↑Wed Dec 11, 2019 3:44 pm
what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.
I personally don't see how that's absurd at all. The whole point is a good chunk of fans are not interested in characters being retooled to be multi-purpose in the current narratives and there's nothing wrong with new characters being introduced. I know it's what I'm hoping for from the HS^2 new session.
I'm not even sure what you even mean by "re-tooled to be multi-purpose" in this sense? Every single character (with the exception of some of the flatter extras like the Alpha trolls) has multiple thematic threads making up their character and goes through multiple changes, developments, and retroactive character reveals throughout the course of the narrative. Thinking that a particular development is out-of-character is one thing I suppose but worry over characters becoming too "multi-purpose" just seems...as JakeMorph said, absurd, and on the verge of actively detrimental to the story.
In fact, just to keep up the pretense that we're still following this thread's main premise; Unpopular Opinion (apparently): Introducing new characters for every new topic or "purpose" the authors want to explore would in fact be bad writing and detrimental to the potential of the existing characters.
Introducing a character for the explicit purpose of "exploring/having a topic/representation" within an existing narrative is just tokenism (or something close to it), and it's almost always recipe for a bland character that will be quickly discarded in favor of the "real" characters. In real life (to use one example) Trans People (TM) do not exist,
people who are trans exist; people are not neat categorized embodiments of one issue or another, and introducing a character to essentially become one will come off as flat, because people have histories and any issue will have to be explored in conjunction with that history.
Which I think brings us around to my other point, which is that the purpose of writing Roxy or June as trans is not to "have a character that is trans", it is to explore ideas of gender and transition
in relation to those specific characters' specific histories and life experiences, and introduce new depth and facets of their lives to dive into. The cast of homestuck would not be nearly as fascinating as it is if this had not been done multiple times throughout both the Epilogues and the comic proper, and suggesting that new facets and "issues" be spun off into separate characters runs directly counter to this.
Like, take the exploration of Dave's terrible home situation and domestic abuse at the hands of Bro we got at near end of Act 6. The point of that wasn't to just have a thing about domestic abuse, it was to look at how that interlocks with what else we know about Dave, his relationship to the idea of "heroism", masculinity, his relationships and view of the world, etc. Introducing a new character to be Mr. Domestic Abuse Guy instead would have accomplished...what? Dave would lose a fascinating bit of character depth and we'd have a dull-as-shit throwaway character (which homestuck absolutely fucking does not need more of). And there are of course countless other sometimes drastic character developments and explorations throughout the comic: Rose's alcoholism, Jane's descent into fascism, Vriska's repeated attempts to turn over a new leaf, Aranea's heel-turn, John's (failed, heavily repressed) processing of his dad's death and own relationship to masculinity, etc. I fail to see how a character becoming trans is any different, and maybe I'm misunderstanding what people are asking here, but I can't take seriously the idea that any of those things should have been spun off into separate characters.
And I am totally open to new characters, and I hope we see more of the Epilogue kids and heck maybe some totally new people in HS^2! But they should of course be
characters and not mere vehicles to explore a topic of interest.