Scrapped story arcs, or, how TIR developed

Posted: 2025-11-17

The very first story of TIR is Coastline Middle School Mysteries, but there was one before it called Hillslope Mysteries.

If you had been on my site for longer, you might have seen that story tucked in the last page of the stories page; or you might even remember the time when the comic was front and center, the first thing you see when opening my site. But now I had removed it entirely because it was old and cringe and scrapped anyways.

It was because TIR started as a Homestuck fanventure featuring my OC, whose name is… you guessed it… Sparky. Full name Sparky Donuts, indigoblood. She was friends with the twelve beta trolls, but before then, she lived at Hillslope, a little town. Her backstory was that she solved a mystery in Hillslope, and then everyone else died in the process so she moved out and met the beta trolls one by one.

She would then do stuff with her new friends, such as playing FLARP with Eridan (forming Team Garbage) against Team Charge and Team Scourge, going into a treasure hunt with most of them, along with Aradia's ghost, thwarting one of Eridan's attempts to destroy Alternia, and finally entering Sgrub with them. There was also a storyline about her ancestor the Deserter, who deserted the Condesce's army and blasted herself into space.

Later I decided to change this whole story into an original story, deleting everything involving the other trolls, and The Iron Ragdoll was born. The Hillslope arc was harder to transfer, because the adults weren't just mysteriously in space in this new world. They are just here with us, like a normal world. So I came up with a bunch of weird justifications, like Hillslope was a government orphan welfare program, the program wasn't completely for orphans but also for kids whose parents can't afford to raise them, Peacock pulled Sparky out because he married Amber… Convoluted stuff. And then I deprecated it, transferring all Hillslope residents into Coastline Middle School; and finally wiped it entirely — it's safe in my Git history anyways.

Here's a list of the original Hillslope residents.

As you can see, they all had 6-letter names. Sparky was actually renamed from Lightningtail, one of my first OCs ever, with multiple forms and iterations; Sparky is merely troll Lightningtail.

There are no sea-dwellers in this town, because obviously. I had a storyline where a violetblood I forgot the name of came here and was a bitch to everyone here, and Sparky got all smitten over her while combatting her internal bi-phobia LOL. I could never get the design of the violetblood pinned down so there it went.

Project Boomerang was in the development soon after the transition from Homestuck fanventure to TIR happened, and the story for Jerboa was that he got sent to Hillslope after his parents disappeared. So that's technically the oldest story I have. And very consequentially, since old story = young me = bad writing, it's one of the least developed, since I still do not know yet who was even the perpetrator behind his parents' kidnapping and murder. But I feel this story would have lots of potential, and I am in love with its message: that technology cannot be truly neutral; especially cutting-edge ones, they're always politicized and scientists have to compromise some of their principals to actually do research and advance technology.

The entire superpower system was created to justify Sparky's superstrength, which is such an integral part of her character. Cosmo's ceruleanblood mind-reading too.

Homestuck will damn you for life.

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