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Additional or alternate names:

  • Bete Blanche (contest-submitted name)

By Willow Ascenzo wellmanicuredmusic Bandcamp wellmanicuredman SoundCloud YouTube YouTube wmm_ebooks Twitter qubeley Patreon Rust Servant Previous track by this artist Violet Mariner Next track by this artist.
Cover art by Myotishi rosieberry Tumblr rosiemonomi Twitter myotishi DeviantArt.
Released 4/2/2012.
Duration: 2:31.

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Tracks that reference Teal Hunter:

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Artist commentary:

Willow Ascenzo:

Teal Hunter was sort of the middle child of my three Homestuck music contest submissions. Even now it's still my least favorite of the three songs I submitted. Why Radiation picked it along with my other two, I'll never know. I certainly wasn't expecting it to be chosen. With over a thousand submissions I'm sure there was no shortage of Redglare songs for him to choose from. Maybe the $20 I slipped him when I submitted my songs had something to do with it But his ways are not our ways.

When Volume 9 came out, a lot of people looked at Radiation's arrangement of Stress by Buzinaki and started noting similarities between it and Teal Hunter. Radiation wrote about why the two songs sound similar in his commentary for Stress. If we're going to talk about "what sounds like what", then I'll lay my cards on the table and state that Teal Hunter was begun as pretty much a direct reference to 00 Gundam from the Gundam 00 soundtrack (if you can't tell by now, I really like Gundams). When I started the piece, the first draft was more or less a low-rent version of that song, in the same way a cartoon that wants to parody Indiana Jones would get a song that sounds close to John Williams' Raiders March without being close enough to qualify as plagiarism. So I just kept fiddling with it until the two melodies sounded different. By the time I got to the final product and had added the buildup in the beginning, the two had nothing but their rhythm and syncopation in common.

Teal Hunter's original title was Bête Blanche, a play on bête noire, a French phrase literally meaning "black beast" that the fan name "Bec Noir" is most likely a reference to. As evident, the song was originally allocated to PM, the one Exile powerful enough to battle Jack Noir to a stalemate.

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