jankystats:

revolutionarygays:

it’s so funny to me how much the homestuck fanbase changed in 2011-2012

like, initially hussie’s audience was largely just nerdy webcomic fans until it kind of branched out and was comprised mostly of those geeky ass cishet dudes who argue about power levels and call themselves gamers and shit

however, around hivebent the fanbase shifted immensely and a lot of teenagers and young adults – esp girls, and esp LGBT ppl – got super into the comic to the point where it pretty much blew up

and a lot of the geeky cishet dudes who followed the comic the longest were super bitter about it and talk at length about how “gayness” and “tumblr” and “shipping” supposedly “ruined” homestuck

however… for the great majority of homestuck’s popularity and updates it was a character-driven story with a super cool concept that carried the story but was largely never explored in-depth. we know very little about the setting (alternia, earth, etc) or the intricacies of the game mechanics (classpects etc) but we DO know quite a bit about the characters’ relationships and interactions

and that’s what kills me! tbh, character interaction and character development was ALWAYS one of hussie’s biggest strengths as a writer. it’s so funny that weirdo nerd guys who care exclusively about classpect nonsense, game mechanics, etc and proudly proclaim the “only ship they care about is john/roxy” don’t like the way the comic turned out

whether they were the intended audience or not, homestuck was never meant to be the type of media they’d really enjoy. i don’t know why they expected back to back epic fight scenes and explosions and grand heterosexual romances instead of hundreds of pages of insecure teenagers talking about their feelings. that’s always been a huge part of what homestuck was.

So this is a good portion of what I was trying to say in this post

That post was phrased pretty terribly, I got made fun of for it, and I totally deserved that

But also, I think I had something of a point

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I’m saying that, most of the early jokes in this thing were 90% Early Randomcore humor, Newgrounds humor, first-wave Internet Funnyman humor, people-who-liked-the-TNG-recuts humor

yes this was always going to be a more Expansive Story than two dudes sending each other gay jokes over IRC, but the early stuff was not written with any expectation or foreknowledge the entire project was going to wind up inexorably tangled in Tumblr Youth Culture

It wasn’t Intentionally Silly Juxtaposition Humor because all early jokes and references were supposed to only be stupid throwaways, but it was Intentionally Silly Juxtaposition Humor because that was a major aesthetic of the group this was initially written by and for

(sidenote also we shouldn’t make the mistake of conflating the Cynical Internet Dude Humor of 2009 with the Cynical Internet Dude Humor of 2017, those are very different things, and this is literally a story built around a central conceit of Internet Trolls as benign annoyances)

but like, the process of breathing earnest meaning and resonance into a long list of Ironic Silly Internet Dude Jokes is a major descriptor of Expansion-Era Homestuck, it was a very cool thing to watch happen, and it was a process informed and shaped by though not wholly reducible to this major shift in audience

It was cool to see someone do that kind of thing again, quickly and transparently and deftly, in an after-the-fact analysis post, even if I didn’t think that analysis post necessarily reflected the original context the Charles Barkley misattribution was presented in.

(also endnote I am convinced the most Of Its Time aspects of Homestuck are a. halfway-explicit, mostly-failed Attempts At Being Post-Racial and b. a central conceit of Internet Trolls As Benign Annoyances)