#Hussie's Commentary

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Why The Ending Sucks

Ok I figured it out. Hear me out:

The entire comic has a running theme best summed up as "who is controlling the narrative, and why are we listening to them?"

Hussie plays a caricaturized version of himself that he describes as "buffoonish" and "oafish". Caricature!Hussie is well-meaning, but a dumb idiot who's incredibly biased in favor of certain characters and in disfavor of others (the most obvious example being his "love" of Vriska, but there's also the way he constantly disparages Eridan). As a result, you have to be VERY SKEPTICAL and VERY CAREFUL when approaching Homestuck's narration, because even when the "best" narrator is at the helm, he's not 100% trustworthy and incapable of giving the readers an unbiased view of the story.

I say "best" because, importantly, Hussie isn't the story's only narrator. He and Doc Scratch explicitly fight over control of the story - Doc Scratch, the child abusing predator who engineered Alternia's fascist murder society, whose shaping of its history is explicitly described by character!Hussie as "fanfic". He is then killed by Lord English, who is described by Hussie as embodying the "toxically masculine" and by extension, the patriarchy, and Caliborn explicitly takes control of the story. John even grapples with Caliborn's version of events, calling out how sexist and misogynistic and shitty it is.

So if we're keeping score: control over the narrative is LITERALLY wrested away from Hussie (who was already struggling to be unbiased) by fascists, abusers, and the patriarchy. It's stressed multiple times that Caliborn/LE are responsible for literally everything that ever happens; the reason the Game Over timeline ends the way that it does is because the alpha timeline is, in essence, the narrative LE is telling: the forces of fascism get to claim the new universe, thereby propogating itself, while friendship dies and all hope is lost.

Who's in control of the narrative, and why are we listening to them?

There are other minor examples of this, too: Aranea is an exposition fairy, and she's biased as fuck and wrong ALL THE TIME about her own teammates. Karkat's explanations and rationalizations are constantly tinged with his own self-loathing and self-blame. Sollux and Meulin are both prophets as per their Mage class, but are both so bogged down by their own emotional issues that the futures they pick out are actively harmful. So on and so on. At nearly every turn, you have to interrogate who's telling the story, what their motivations are, and what they're overlooking or deliberately obfuscating.

So given that this theme is so prevalent, and so thoroughly weighted toward "well, actually, maybe you shouldn't take narration at face value and should interrogate it and come to your own conclusions," it would be Really Weird for the story to go "actually, you can totally trust the narrative now because everyone gets a happy ending".

So, I know that it makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but here's my genuine take on Homestuck's ending:

The ending is shitty on purpose because the viewer is intended to take it as a dare to refute the narration and make something better.

Why are we letting character!Hussie tell the story? He's a biased idiot. Why are we letting the various avatars of LE and Caliborn tell the story? They're fascist, misogynistic, predatory assholes.

And - because Homestuck is a story about life - why are we letting idiots, assholes, abusers, and creeps dictate the story of real life? The world is full of forces that would try to take control of the story and make everyone else play along, represented in microcosm within the text of Homestuck. We cannot let those forces win.

So please go out and do something kind and hopeful and loving in the world today. Thanks for reading.

[mmmmalo]

Always curious to see that classpect has matured as an extra-canonical discipline to the extent that most writings on it don't spend a great deal of time mapping class/aspects definitions to the story beats on which they're originally based. Not a bad thing, per se -- it's a different discursive style, implicitly referring to the shared experience of Homestuck while discussing its artifacts as untethered archetypes, creating a wonderfully mystic mood. It's just my bad luck that my origin story is being more curious about the parts of Homestuck that classpect couldn't describe

[dingodad]

Why did they say this

Is it just a joke or

this is andrew hussie and this is homestuck and this is extracanonical commentary so it's just as much a joke as it is serious.

really i do not think this is such a wild departure from early homestuck's sense and sensibilities given that rose having a baby crush on dave before they knew they were related was an existing thread, and "something happened between them" does not imply anything nearly as sordid as some people have made it out to be.

what i take issue with is hussie's central assumption that they didn't know they were brother and sister in this timeline LOL. like. as they say, it's been 4 months, rose's stated goal in that 4 months was finding out as much information as she could before they sacrificed the timeline... it feels like kind of a big insult on rose to insinuate that the ectobiology wouldn't have been one of the first things she figured out, especially given that a) out of all the kids she has the deepest pre-existing understanding of what ectobiology is and b) as the seer of light you'd expect that she would have some insight into what exactly caused their timeline to go dark (no john means no ectobiology means the time loop is broken). like come on. what exactly are we saying rose was doing those whole 4 months while dave was hopping around being a big wanky hero

[maretriarch]

god remember in 2019 when the new homestuck writing staff were all like deranged twitter users and when anyone complained about the comic being weirdly politically charged now the response over and over was "homestuck was always political" imagine saying that to hussies face in 2009

[homestuckconfession]

the concept of the slur replacement project feels a bit like historical revisionism? especially considering how much i see people recommend it as the recommended way of reading homestuck. it's sanitizing down the more unpalatable bits of homestuck to make it seem more friendly and wholesome (which seems incredibly common among homestuck fans in general, especially among those who like to pretend the epilogues never happened, which is a whole other discussion i won't get into rn), and that just feels weird. not to mention the execution of it is very poor in general. the "future arachnids grip" joke is funny actually, and the change they made to make it "later arachnids grip" not only makes it a weaker joke (as it was initially a play on how the concept of gayness isn't really a thing to trolls), but also introduces an inconsistency in the writing, as it only does this change for vriska, drawing more attention to it. there's also a fucking... random bit where iirc for one line they replace a mention of bill cosby with... gnomeo and juliet? i think? which is not only a baffling decision that they don't, but is technically introducing an anachronism because that movie didn't come out until 2011. the writing they used to replace things in general just doesn't feel very homestuck-y, and it always feels clunky and awkward.

.

[relaxxattack]

you could maybe make a beforus jadeblood tradwife work but even then it still feels off...

yeah, exactly!

it's because trolls have a completely different history than we do-- i mean, obviously, they're aliens-- so the thing is they wouldn't have had a baby boom that caused gender roles to be reimposed on their (american) society in the 50s. nor would they have an explosion of trolls desperately idolizing those 50s now in backlash to societal progress. it simply wasn't a thing that happened for them.

they don't have that societal context at all, and therefore, it just doesn't make sense.

my post was a joke -- because i think if alternians did have a sort of social equivalent to a tradwife it would essentially just be equius -- but i don't think they really would have that.

tbfh i've (personally) gotten a bit tired lately of all the posts about how alternia totally definitely had the exact same bioessential mammal sexism as humans. because... that just doesn't make any logical sense to me. at all. nor is it interesting, or fun. "what if there was a planet where women were treated badly" oh you mean earth? you mean the fucking earth?

i get that sci-fi is supposed to mirror real-world problems. i just wish it took on a more interesting form than "what if we did violent earth misogyny, again". i would find discussion of scratch's effects on alternia more interesting if they didn't all just end up as Earth 2.

[lime-bloods]

Doc Scratch is an exercise in trust between reader and author. when he takes over Homestuck's narrative it's natural for us to distrust him on instinct: we were used to the other guy telling the story, who's this new guy and what are his credentials?

but by that point we already know that "the other guy" was just a fallible human; one locked in an attic by bullies and tormented by stuffed wolf heads, no less. the only reason we have to "trust" the first guy is because he's the devil we know. when Hussie calls Scratch's version of events "troll fanfiction" there's no real reason to believe that Hussie is "right" and Scratch is "wrong"; whether we choose to believe one author over the other is ultimately arbitrary. indeed, out of the two, Scratch is the only one with any real claim to "omniscience", even if it is partially compromised omniscience; so in all possibility we should believe him over the human one, right?

probably Scratch's main qualification for reliable author is that he does not lie. but if you already distrust this guy, what reason is there to necessary believe him when he says this, right? he could be lying about lying. so in truth whether we believe what Scratch says or not is, once again, totally arbitrary. like Rose's inquiries as to whether the Horrorterrors are evil or not, this is a fruitless line of questioning that ultimately achieves nothing. more important questions present themselves; why might Scratch be lying or telling the truth? what reason do we have to believe - or disbelieve - the things he says?

I've pointed out before that Scratch's policy of honesty reflects less on himself and more on Homestuck's narrative as a whole. Hussie's own commentary makes the exact same point: "...this is where some of his views as a nefarious alt-author figure start leaking out. If you imagine that his spiel here is being applied to a philosophy on storytelling, it tracks pretty well. [...] He isn't even that much worse than me in terms of things like authorial sadism, jerking the reader around in certain ways, self-indulgence." (Homestuck: Book 6, p. 388) So in deciding whether or not you "trust" Scratch, what you are really being asked to do is decide whether or not you trust Homestuck itself; you're being forced to either engage with Homestuck on its own terms, on the merits of its own themes - or to disregard the text entirely!

[co27]

i guess my question is why DOES nuance immediately become looked down upon when it comes to that one webcomic

[davekat-sucks]

hussie should've committed and kept daverose canon the whole time. idgaf about anything else.

[nintendont2502]

It's actually so so important that Alpha Dave Strider is kinda weird and pathetic. To me, anyway.

[eridan-ampora]

does anyone else occasionally just Forget about the human characters in homestuck or is this unique to whatever is wrong in my brain

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Do you think if the trolls all came back, like everything in the main comic did happen and they were alive again. Do you think Feferi would actually forgive Eridan? Or want to even be his friend after everything? I don't personally like the erisol and fefertasprite interaction…felt rushed…..so I just wanted to know your opinion if things were different! :)

Yeah, I think they would be! Feferi is one of the trolls who takes dying the least badly (relentless optimism) and Eridan does genuinely feel bad, which means a lot when it's Eridan. I think she really is genuine when she says she wants them to be friends and also that she's really not the type of person to hold a grudge, and like... death is SUPER cheap in Homestuck, it's really not the horrific, irredeemable, irreperable damage that it is IRL - and if you're talking about (Feferi) and (Eridan), then they're both dead (and irrelevent) now, so the score is kind of even.

In general, the fandom - I mean, people in general, really - tend to have difficulty divorcing themselves from other people. We tend to assume that the people and characters they like will hold similar opinions to themselves. This is how people who like Karkat and don't like Eridan can mentally gloss over or even block out their clear, close friendship, or how people who dislike Cronus can end up overlooking that Meenah actually takes his opinion seriously and unironically defends his wizard thing. Feferi really isn't mad at Eridan or upset about dying the way we probably would be, because she's friends with the horrorterrors, relentlessly cheerful, comfortable with death in general, and death is also just not really that big of a deal in this setting. "I'm really sorry about that, that was shitty of me" is honestly probably all the apology she needs, especially if they came back to life anyway.

[justsomeonenamedskyla]

why am i only realizing now that the "cal" in "lil cal" is short for caliborn wtf wtf wtfff "Lil' Caliborn" I NEED THAT THING DEAD HUSSIE YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME I'M GOING TO SOB UNCONTROLLABLY also "Lil' Hal" is one letter off from "Lil' Cal" (had this thought for a while but may as well put it here) what does any of this end up meaning? who knows i don't want to think about that right now. but you guys can go as crazy as you want, dw.

[dingodad]

tbh interesting the retcon inevitably came back up again bc it was just the other day re: something else entirely (it was doctor who) i was thinking about how retcons are something that audiences prime themselves to get mad about on instinct no matter how harmless or even benevolent they might be. but that primarily tends to be because a "retcon" is perceived as a new writer intruding upon something established by a previous creative which has come to be regarded as sacred, particularly in the field of comics. so imposing something you're calling a ""retcon"" upon homestuck obviously raises really interesting worthwhile questions about how possible it actually is for an author to "retcon" their own work (especially given homestuck's gimmick for pretending different parts of the story were written by different characters), and perhaps more importantly, whether it's even possible to apply "retroactive continuity" at all to a single ongoing story that had been planned from beginning to end. man i need to reread act 6

[homestuckconfession]

let's not forget Caliborn is canonically a proshipper

.

[kaywavy]

one of the best uses of the physical hs books would be using them to find the funny and/or cool looking panels way faster since you can just flick through the pages real quick till you see what ur looking for