betweengenesisfrogs:

Still reflecting on why I wrote my last big post–

One of my biggest frustrations with the Homestuck fandom has been seeing certain bloggers I used to really respect falling into that deeply cynical mentality I’ve talked about, where Homestuck, especially Act 6 and 7, is, dismissed as a meaningless work, a prank, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Again, ending gripes wouldn’t be so bad if they were saying that Homestuck was trying to achieve something and talked about why it failed to achieve it. But instead, these articulate bloggers fall back on the tropes of Homestuck as cruel practical joke, Homestuck as failure, Homestuck as decline and fall of an Internet Empire.

There is a point-blank *refusal* to think about why that might have come about, whether that’s fandom perception or the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

You have people who used to be really good at analyzing Homestuck refusing to analyze it at all. That always struck me as so, so weird.

But in retrospect, it makes a certain sense.

To recap: my take in the post above is that ending disappointment came largely from the expectations built up because of Homestuck’s long pauses. Most character arcs were fairly well-resolved *before* the last hiatus, but waiting caused an expectation of further development on those arcs, causing many people (myself included) to miss the thematic strengths running through Act 6 when read serially.

That said, one big change in the ending, and Act 6/7 in general is that it presented a *thematic puzzle* in addition to a mechanical one. Act 5 Homestuck did to some degree set up an expectation that the way to understand the story was to understand the mechanics of SBURB. Act 6, though, zooms out for a larger picture of the meaning of Lord English and achieving agency/escape within his oppressive system. It requires a more literary and less game-mechanical mode of analysis.

Plus, many Homestuck blogs focused on theory-blogging: using mechanics to predict future outcomes and solve puzzles. But Homestuck A) didn’t really engage with these kinds of theories after a certain point and B) was working toward a larger thematic puzzle, rather than a mechanical puzzle.

So I can understand how shocking it must have been for these folks when rather than answering the questions they were focused on, Homestuck answered different questions entirely. I can see how it felt like a betrayal.

It’s not surprising some of the people most heavily invested in the meaning of Homestuck would flip around and decide it’s meaningless, if they felt like it rejected their investment.

I want to say I recognize that disappointment. Like, I get why that was so frustrating, and I respect the anger.

But there’s a bigger picture. The notion that Homestuck’s ending is meaningless just isn’t so.  Act 6 Homestuck is staggering with the richness of its ideas. It rewards deep analysis with rich insight, and resonant themes for our time. For a look into these depths, the videos of OptimisticDuelist and TexTalks are incredible resources.

That’s also part of why I’ve written what I have: to show people who were disappointed by the ending what’s going on within it, and help alleviate some of the shock and disappointment of how it felt at the time.

It’s very deliberate that I ended my last post with an encouragement to read Homestuck’s ending again with new eyes.

It’s just a disappointment that I still see these lukewarm takes from people who used to dig into Homestuck with such vigor. Less often than in the past, though. Maybe the fandom view is changing. Those ideas might be starting to dissipate a bit. I hope so.

I don’t need this blog to be huge, but if I could help change the popular perception of whether Homestuck is worth one’s time, that would mean a lot to me.