The Ancestor thread

I'm going to have to be a naysayer.

Zael wrote:

Yes, get rid of the Condesce who is also a canon ancestor.
That makes complete and total sense, you people who are too busy thinking iside of the box.

You speak as though taking away the canon Condesce takes away the very idea of there being a Condesce. It doesn't. If Fefcestor isn't the Condesce, we get some other Condesce. Someone who is faceless, nameless, and pointless. Someone who is just there, completely coincidental. Someone who won't end up serving Lord English and going to Earth and being Betty Crocker.

Which brings me to another set of points.

Lord English does not exist. There is only Lord Neo, and last I remember he works in a completely different manner than Lord English. Which means Condesce won't end up working for him, and Handmaid/Demoness will have a completely different story. And we won't be making Earth and humans, either, because the 14 trolls playing SBOARD are a very different set of people than the 12 who played SGRUB.

So I think that the lesser of two evils is having our ancestors be the ones who influence history rather than changing the canoncestors.

Well...to be honest, there is no real difference in what we're saying. Both of us want to keep the canoncestors as out of the picture as possible. If there is a Condesce, we can just have her be a background character, nameless, not elaborate on her. Then it doesn't really matter if she's canon or not, because she's just an occasionally dropped name, anyway.

There's that. Oh man I feel kinda deflated.

Though still, what of the Handmaid?

Well, what of her? Throughout the canon history she's known by the trolls of any time period only as a legend. There's no reason our trolls have to be any different in that respect. Basically what I'm saying is, she's a legend, it's kind of irrelevant to the lives of our trolls whether that legend is true or not.

Or the Handmaid could have ended up being some sort of Indiana Jones-troll! Obviously, if we're keeping the canoncestors to the background, if mentioned in any significance at all, she wouldn't necessarily crop up much, so I don't think the legend of the Demoness would be necessary.

As for Lord Neo/Doc Net, they have significant roles that need work. We have a lot on them, but not in relation to a redo session, or interactions with the ancestors and/or general troll culture lore, if that's even applicable.
We should make a unique Lord Neo/Doc Net thread, just to get their info up and sorted, but I'm bringing them up here because it pertains to the canoncestors and fancestors we're juggling.

Well, we seem to have decided the issue in this thread. I can either lock it and get it out of the way or convert it into Lord Neo discussion. Any opinions?

Keep this thread up for ancestor discussion not related to the sufferer issue (we still need to figure out how the different ancestors stories cross paths with each other, HOW they're related to the canoncestors, etc) and start a new thread for Doc Net and Lord Neo.

I still say we keep them.

Moved because I am a derp and only just noticed that this was in the wrong section. XD

Who'd approve if I wrote a short story about Mazemind? Also, I like our ancestors, but would approve keeping the canoncestors minimal background characters. I figured that's why Mazemind, The Vigilant/The Traitor, and The Hetaera joined the /struggling remenents/ of the Sufferer's movement post-execution as opposed to whoop whoop lots of interactions. I figured they knew it was kind of a doomed move but at that point didn't really care?

Eh? I thought part of a reason for the Vigilant's betrayal was that he thought he could make a difference by taking his employer out of the political/rebellion equation pre-execution and turning over any intel he had to the revolt.

That's not to say he would have interacted with the canon members of the revolt much, if at all. The revolt was described as "massive" and used as a benchmark for comparing rebellion sizes to, at least by Mindfang. I figure it would be easy for even a highblood defector to get somewhat lost in the shuffle. I doubt the Sufferer or any other leaders would even see him more than say, a brief interview about what he knows. Which is part of the irony built into his public execution: the establishment was treating him and the other highblood traitors executed at the event as far more important than they actually were because of their locations on the spectrum.

Oh, right, yes, makes sense. I think Mazemind personally wasn't really sure how helpful she could be, but also figured that nobody would be more helpful at taking down/avoiding war machines than the person who, you know, invented them. She was mostly following the Vigilant's lead.

Man, I want to do more chats with them sometime. Do you have skype?

I do, but I like to use it mostly for personal stuff...

Pesterchum?

Pesterchum's good with me. I thought you couldn't use it though?

I can when I'm at home, not school. Luckily, it's a weekend! PM me your chumhandle and I'll hit you up on Nisaba's account in an hour or so.

May I add something? If this is still something being discussed...

I had originally made The Temperant, Aerona's ancestor, to be our game's Sufferer. Looking at the other ancestors stories, she could have been aided by The Rhapsodist in telling her views to other trolls.

I'm not sure if we've even agreed on this, but quite frankly I like the idea of the canon trollcestors just being completely... "deleted", so to speak, from existence. They simply do not, and have never, existed in our session. Do we really NEED a HIC-like troll? If we did, why not Zael's ancestor? She isn't high a blood color as the HIC's, but hers is still very high.

We need an HIC-figure because we need a troll empress and stuff. I suppose we can relegate the Empress to being a NPC role?

Well, none of them are exactly PCs anyway, since the rp's taking place in the present-day, and all this ancestor stuff is mostly backstory. Unless we choose to make it more important I suppose.

I prefer the idea putting our characters within the existing framework of history. I like the canon history the way it is, and I'm far more interested in seeing where our particular ancestors fit into it and how they dealt with the situations that are already there than just sort of re-creating it.

Uh, Abaddon is supposed to WORK for the Condesce, not be the Condesce.

I don't see a problem with the canon ancestors existing. This is an AU in which the game and the players are different, but that's not to say it's a completely new world. I also don't think we should just have one of our ancestors be "This sessions Sufferer," it seems cheap and ripping off canon. All the ancestors should be original and reflecting our own characters, not copies.

Agreed with MGLVNA on this one.
Though I do like TDL's idea of the Rhapsodist going around with the Temperant for whatever reason. How that would fit into his...government spy thing, I don't know in the slightest. I might need to rework his spiel a bit...
One thing we can copy from canon is the canoncestors' tendency to mirror the journeys of their descendents somehow. If anyone else wants to do that, of course.

Oh, I took it as a given that that's what they were for.

...although I don't seem to have worked much parallelism in as of yet. XD

If we don't use the canoncestors, I don't see why a Sufferer role needs to be fulfilled since it didn't have much, if any lasting impact in shaping troll society as we know it now like the Summoner did. Not to mention, if we keep him in, his memories would just be wild ideas instead of memories of a pre-Altered Alternia since we're the ones playing the session, not the canon trolls.

That ties into another thing; Alternia being altered. This implies that there was some form of reset, either a Scratch, or something else like Lunar's Net idea from way back. Since we're apparently basing our trolls off trollverse we know from canon, we'd need the Demoness since she was the one instigating conflict and helping shape the violent troll culture. Though that ties into needing Doc Scratch, and her coming from a meteor, which she wouldn't because the canon trolls (if we're keeping them) aren't the ones playing the session, we are.

Lastly, I'm confused as to why we're putting so much detail into the ancestors. Currently they have no relevance to the story as we seem to have it planned, other than being related to our characters. If we're not doing a Scratched session, then what purpose would they serve and where would they come in and be relevant to the session?

To comment on and add to what Zero said, I think it would be best to make our ancestors much more relevant. The key way in doing this is a restarted, or Scratched session. As more of Homestuck unfolds, the more likely it seem that sessions that come anywhere near success in creating a universe tend to have a redo session within the current universe. Both examples of sessions we have in-canon speak to this.

I personally am a big fan of bringing back a restarted session for SBoard, which would make Doc Net and Lord Neo relevant again, as well as bring in more opportunities to develop our character's ancestors.

For people who are unfamiliar with the concept, basically the A1 trolls (the A2 ancestors) fail their session, and make a deal to scrap the current session in favor of a newer, potentially more fruitful one, and in turn they restart their universe and bring about Alternia as we know it in A2. So far, so canon. BUT, unlike the canon, the idea was to incorporate Doc Net by having him ensnare the A1 trolls and taking them out of time and space, in an almost dream bubble-like net that prevents them from accessing the new session. Unlike in canon, the A1 trolls are still alive. The catch is, they left their planets from their sessions and hints of their work behind as clues that the A2 trolls come across as their session unfolds.

Once in the Medium, the A2 trolls with dead dreamselves would be able to possibly come across the A1 trolls in dream bubbles, and this could add to the Seer of Dreams' powers in that she, Shayla, connects with the A1 trolls faster than everyone else. The ultimate goal, along with completing the game of SGrub, becomes accessing the A1 trolls and bringing them into the new universe at the end of the game along with the rest of our players. This could open up the opportunity for tragic sacrifice, mistrust of the game mechanics, or general confusion as the true purpose of the game unfolds.

Now, as developed with Katrika, the White Queen is a servant of Doc Net. My initial impulse is that she's a sort of replacement for the in-canon Demoness, in that she's utilized to encourage the violent culture of the A2 trolls' culture. Perhaps that's not what she's intended for, or if Katrika even wants to play her that way, but it's just an idea I have. Also, for the movers and shakers of the A2 ancestors, this opens up roles for our ancestors to fill in. We don't necessarily have to have a Sufferer/Summoner figure in EXACTLY the same way (and we couldn't, anyway - we don't have a mutant blood that would be raised by a troll mother, so it wouldn't be exactly the same no matter how we slice and dice it) but we would be best to bring up a way in which the troll culture comes to having the adult trolls of a certain age be moved off planet. This is also an original encourager for the finding and playing of SGrub for our trolls, in case you guys forgot - a lot of our trolls are coming of age and will be moved off planet, so this game is kind of seen as a last ditch effort to reconnect with old friends, rebuild burned bridges, and cherish each others' company one last time.

I know, it's a lot to read, and I'll probs make this all its own thread, but it's relevant to the ancestors the most, and I thought it'd be best to put it all out right here. My idea is the bare basics - I'm by no means saying we HAVE to do it this way, but the last time I proposed it, everyone liked the idea save one person, which was later revealed to have been a misunderstanding. With the final group of participants all present, I wanted to bring the idea back to center stage and see if it's still a good one.

PLEASE NOTE we can change things. Nicekat, I know your biggest goal out of all of this is to get a successful, not-too-complicated session out of this with lots of character-driven plot. This can still happen, but it's seeming more and more likely that to get the ancestors involved and even obtain the state of Alternia that we want to start our session off in will require a bit of finagling. Zael, if you don't understand any of this, feel free to ask - everybody, please give this a good read-over at least twice, to make sure you know what I'm trying to propose before any sort of confusion breaks out.

(And I'm not trying to "call people out" in the above paragraph, I'm just including acknowledgements towards people who had particular issues raised in the past regarding these sorts of details in the session. Because I still remember what you guys have said, and I'm trying to work with it all.)

TL;DR, well GO BACK AND READ IT ALL, DANG IT!!!! >:]