Unironically the Beta Trolls in Homestuck are a masterpiece of character design and writing.
12 new characters introduced fairly rapidly yet theyāre all memorable, distinct, 3-dimensional (some more than others, but still) and most importantly, beloved.
Honestly an inspiration and something writers and character artists should learn from.
I really enjoy how pretty much every Homestuck character is introduced with a particular format:
[an image of character standing in their bedroom]
You are NAME. You like ACTIVITY or ITEMS. Some OTHER RELEVANT TRAITS. Some ITEMS in the bedroom get DESCRIBED.
And I think the bedroom shots do A LOT of work in characterisation - like what do these kiddos do with a space thatās wholly their own?
Like you donāt even really need the blurb, just look at these two rooms side by side and draw your own conclusions:
There are legitimately a bunch of great lessons a writer or comic creator could learn from Homestuck about how to establish a character who immediately makes a strong impression. People so often get so tied up with the memes and meta around Homestuck, they seem to forget itās likeā¦ so well-written that millions of people will happily read conversations of these characters just talking about random bullshit like rapping or bad 90s movies and even in a format thatās *kind of hard to read*, simply because theyāre just that engaging with distinct voices (even if you take typing quirks out of the equation) and great character-based humour.
The way each character makes a really strong impression in the first pesterlog they appear in, for example, or Hussie not being afraid to give good or heroic characters traits that are awkward, annoying or a bit pathetic, or just dorky interests and hobbies. HGNH I could geek out about this shit for days!
explanation: a Quality Assurance Engineer is someone who (among other things afaik) does software bug testing, like in videogames or websites.
So the joke is that the QA tests the bar by doing a bunch of random unexpected things that might make it glitch.
Then when the first actual user of the bar does something that is normal and should have been accounted for way before the QA was called, everything goes catastrophically wrong because nobody bothered to think about anything other than ordering (and presumably profit?)
[image description: a tweet from Brenan Keller @brenankeller, reading: āA QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 bears. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd (random string of letters). First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.ā End ID.]
