i cant believe we watched dave’s bro kick his ass so hard that dave’s record icon (a representation of his Self) was broken in two and almost nobody realized what we were seeing for a long time
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.
Since the ending sequence of Homestuck in April 2017, and even well after the establishment of a canon aftermath for its main characters and the confirmation that there will be a further Epilogue, I’ve seen a sentiment among Homestuck bloggers and the Homestuck fandom that I find very frustrating, one that persists well into 2018.
The sentiment goes something like this:
“Homestuck is a meaningless work by a flippant, irreverent prankster (Andrew Hussie) who dropped his commitment to the story at the last second, and made fun of his fans for expecting there to be a meaningful ending. Furthermore, he continues to harm and belittle his fandom in the creation of Hiveswap, and only continues his work on Homestuck-related projects to exploit his audience.”
Not only is this idea wrong, I find it disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, and actively detrimental to an understanding of Homestuck as a work. While it comes from an understandable frame of mind – the feeling of disappointment many of us felt at the end of Homestuck’s pretty short and to-the-point Act 7 – it actively ignores the main reason *why* that ending came across as disappointing at first glance. Namely, it ignores the role serial storytelling – a necessity at that point in Homestuck’s existence – played in creating misleading impressions of where the story was going among fans. Furthermore, it completely ignores how well the story arc of Act 6 Homestuck generally works when taken as a whole.
It demonstrates a very shallow understanding of Andrew Hussie as a storyteller, conflating his in-story persona with the actuality of a creator who demonstrates nothing but work ethic and commitment to his creation.
It ignores what actually happened with Hiveswap, which is that despite a frankly horrific set of circumstances that nearly prevented it from being made, Hussie was nonetheless able to gather a small team to create a game studio that delivered on every promise it ever made to Kickstarter backers and created a pretty solid, fun, and novel adventure game, with more installments and a rich evolving mystery on the way.
Finally, this interpretation completely misunderstands the way the idea of narrative is being used in the ending of Homestuck, not as a cudgel to beat off fan desire for thematic completion, but as a tool for delivering a thematically powerful narrative that draws parallels between the specter of Lord English and the way stories themselves are used as tools of oppression.
Homestuck isn’t perfect, and neither is Andrew Hussie. But by and large, this popular perception of him is flat-out wrong, an exaggeration of whatever flaws he brought to the creation of Homestuck, and contributes to a misunderstanding of its ending. Indeed, I’d argue it is, in some ways, part of why Homestuck has rarely been acknowledged as a significant work of art. To understand why Homestuck is important, first we need to be able to acknowledge what it achieved.
Here’s a daring notion: overall, Homestuck was and is pretty damn good.
I’m really pleased that my last post (the Homestuck manifesto) resonated with so many folks’ experience of Homestuck and the fandom, whether it helped you understand why opinions were so torn, rethink your disappointment with Homestuck, or find others who feel positively. It feels good to connect and have that perspective validated.
An interesting minority of responses pointed out negative aspects in Homestuck, whether perceived or otherwise, by implication suggesting that I had missed them. I think this is misreading the post a bit, focusing on surface details. As I said in the post, I’m not interested in pretending that Homestuck doesn’t have flaws (although I suspect we all might have different ideas of what those are.) What I’m frustrated with is the pervasive mentality I railed against in that post that Homestuck is meaninglessly bad and there’s nothing worth celebrating about it. In fact, there’s a hell of a lot worth talking about.
This doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the flaws – but first we have to get beyond a really surface-level reading of what the comic is and what it’s trying to achieve. I firmly believe a work can both be flawed and have aspects worth celebrating. Furthermore, effective criticism requires an understanding of what a work is *trying* to achieve, whether you think it succeeds or fails.
Right now, I don’t see nearly enough discussion of that when it comes to Homestuck, and it’s a shame. That’s what I’ve tried to remedy here.
sorry for the shitty pic(full view to read it) but in the new homestuck books theres a little note on the kid’s lands and their possible quests! roses land was damaged by the chalk from the islands that got into the water, the gears on daves planet had amber in them causing them to be stuck, and jades planet was in a nuclear winter
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
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)
So–yesterday was Homestuck Day, and by that I mean it was the nine-year anniversary of the first posted page of Homestuck. You may have noticed your entire dashboard going into a maddened, dismaying frenzy. People you thought were your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your family, all of them infected by a virus that transmits through gray facepaint and Vriska memes.
Well, okay, I kinda got a little weird there. My purpose in making this post is actually to advise you to read Homestuck–hell, read Jail Break and Problem Sleuth first, if you want, they help you to understand what the hell is going through the author’s head. But read it, especially if you want to be a content creator, because reading Homestuck is a transformative experience–in that it will transform how you understand, process, and create fiction. It pushes…boundaries. It pushes the boundaries of storytelling, of character interaction, of audience participation, of the medium itself–of several mediums themselves. The actual story has some severe execution problems late in the game, but I am firmly of the opinion that Homestuck is gonna be taught in college in fifty years alongside other great works of fiction throughout the history of mankind.
Moreover, it’s helpful to understand the people making content that are Filthy Homestucks. Your favorite artist is a Homestuck. Your favorite cartoon is made by Homestucks. Your favorite indie game was made by Homestucks. You’d be surprised how large a percentage of you this is true for. Homestuck, for better or for worse, is important, and I highly recommend the experience of reading it.
If you wind up buying gray facepaint and pointy anime shades as a joke, all the better.
I cannot stress how strongly and emphatically I agree with every word in this post.
Homestuck is also an excellent excercise in character voice
writing pesterlogs in particular gave me a very big “aha” in understanding how voice creates character nearly as much (if not more!) than character creates voice.
i'll apple your turnover 