#homestuck is shaped like itself

[maretriarch]

my "imagine this existing toy, but homestuck" series part: 376859

[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.

[nostalgebraist]

There's a particular quality to early-to-mid Homestuck that I really loved when I first read it, but which I tend to forget when thinking about the story retrospectively.

This quality of like . . . taking pre-established elements, and building larger structures out of them. And then repeating this recursively, as these larger structures now become "pre-established elements" unto themselves.

A camera zooming further and further out from the same central point, "Powers of Ten"-style.

----

Homestuck is initially about the process of playing "Sburb," a fictitious base-building computer game.

The vast majority of comic pages in first 4 Acts are either about a character doing something in this game, or (if they are not yet a player) attempting to obtain and install it.

Everything else is secondary, at least formally, to this core activity. The main characters are always playing Sburb (or at least trying to), no matter what else they're doing. Dialogue is presented as a temporary side-stream overlaid onto the game; the characters play in silence unless they need to talk, and when they do talk, it's usually about the game.

This quality appears in the mechanics of Sburb. It's a game about combining things you have to make new ones ("alchemy"); about constructing a building by continually extending it at the edges; about making a tower that gets taller and taller, building on a pre-established foundation, using new components made from earlier ones.

And it appears, less literally, in the mechanics of the story. An element is introduced -- casually, weightlessly, accidentally -- and once introduced, it sticks. It gets brought back again and again, in a series of bigger and weirder riffs.

(John lived in a house, which we spent some time surveying. In the process, we learned about his father, who was his only caretaker. So now everyone has a single caretaker, and everyone lives in a house which we spend some time surveying. But with every iteration, the houses get bigger, the surveys grander, the caretakers more bizarre.)

Whimsical elements introduced very early on, like the "kernelsprite prototyping" mechanic, end up very deeply baked into everything. There's a palpable joy to the way the comic handles these things. A joy in doing something on a whim, and then committing completely to the bit, indefinitely; a joy in making mountains shaped like molehills.

This kind of dims away in the later, more "plot-heavy" portions that loom larger in my memory. There's a similar vibe to the way the plot elaborates upon itself, even much later on, but we lose this dynamic on the micro-level.

[coridallasmultipass]

I've never done one of these before, am I doing it right??

( The bag is really cool, thanks @ender--slime !! )

Wow tho, finally found a use for the old Homestuck charms I made in like 2012 or 2013!! They were originally going to be another decoden phone case, but I scrapped that idea when I had a cooler idea for a Derse-themed 'the prince is awake' case, and then later got into different fandoms for the next cases.

(My favourite is still the teeny tiny Squarewave!)

I hot-glued some earring posts and stuck plastic backs on the Strider charms to pin them down. They of course all popped off the hot glue when I tried scrunching the panel in there, but I managed. I left the second white panel sandwiching the backs, so they don't tear up the bag itself.

I also offloaded four heavy Gurren Lagann charms that were hanging on my phone. They've been clattering around on my phone for a whole year, now. (Actually, just a few days shy of a whole year.) I'm feeling SO naked handling my phone without them causing a racket, now. They were so heavy and so loud. I might miss them already, but I don't know if I have enough flat Homestuck things to put on here yet? (I WAS going to like just draw and print my own collage or something. But I still forgot to get printer ink.) So. I'll probably take those off once I figure out how else to fill this with a unified Strider concept. ((I wish I knew the GL charm artist, but I bought them second-hand.))

I seriously have no idea what I'm doing at all, so I watched some videos, and one person put fairy lights, so I went and robbed my Valentine's tree of its red battery-powered lights for this. It had to be wrapped weirdly, and I was all pushing a pen in there to shove it into shape (and popping the charms off the earring posts again, sigh).

The shitty holographic foil wrapping paper I added kept getting torn, too, but it's gold and matches the hardware, so I had to try it. (I LOVE GOLD.) Maybe it will work better if I glue it down onto foam instead lol, but IDK if foam will bend to squish in there. And I threw on an extra M56 lanyard I had, just because?? I usually have a red one on my phone. IDK what else to use the lanyards for, besides my phone.

I still have a TON of handmade smuppet charms, but they all have charm loops baked into them, so I don't want to put those inside the bag. Maybe on the outside somewhere?? The orange smuppet in the bag was THE original I used to make the mold for the other clay smuppets. (Was going to make a smuppet charm bracelet, but never got around to chaining them together. Art college was rough, man. Left so many projects behind while flying back and forth.) I gotta think about it.

Anyway, yeah. Here's my first go at assembling an ita-bag panel.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

A HOMESTUCK MANIFESTO

I want to think about what comes next after Homestuck.

That’s a challenge to the world as much as a personal mission statement.

I want to see writers and artists and creators making the next Homestuck, taking its themes and binding them into new fabrics, giving life to new creatures even more beautiful and uncanny than the original species.

I hunger to see new forms of story and image evolving with Homestuck in their DNA.

This process is already underway. Homestuck is a massive boulder dropped into the waters of culture, and the full wake of its ripples is still to be felt. But let’s call attention to this process and ask: what would happen if we engaged in it more consciously? If we sifted through our feelings about Homestuck to create something new, deliberately, with great and wonderful purpose?

The tools we need are within our grasp. Homestuck presents itself as magic, but it’s a work constructed in time out of specific storytelling choices. So let’s understand those choices. Let’s understand how Homestuck did what it did, and use Homestuck’s tools to build art that grips the soul of future generations as strongly as Homestuck did ours.

What follows is not a traditional literary analysis. It does not cite its sources; it does not seek to give us a comprehensive understanding of Homestuck. If it does, it does so only to the extent it suits its larger purpose.

Our goal here, our quest, if you will, is not to understand the Homestuck that exists, but the Homestuck that comes next.

Let's begin.

0. THE WILD GARDEN

Let’s lay the absolute groundwork here.

Homestuck is constructed as a re-appropriation of itself. Or to put it another way, it’s a big improvisational move, a process of “yes and”-ing so hard it develops a sprawling continuity.

Tiny details are constantly re-contextualized to become part of something else. A joke might turn tragic. A silly aside might turn into something profound.

But it didn’t have to be that way.

It’s crucial to understand that what we experience as continuities were in fact choices made at specific times. Homestuck is a garden where seeds were scattered in every direction, grown en masse, then weeded down to create patterns and forms.

The shape of the garden is designed to conceal the gardener’s hand. But the gardener’s choices are there, every step of the way.

If we are to follow in its footsteps, what choices should we make?

Let’s talk about themes.

1. THE MEANING CRISIS

Nobody in Homestuck knows what they’re doing.

And neither do we.

All the old idols have broken down. The values we were taught in our childhood fail to measure up to the problems of the world we live in. We grasp after careers and lives we were told would make us happy and wonder why we’re left empty. The selves that we were told were us now fit us about as well as clothing we’ve outgrown. Crises loom, political, economic and environmental, and everywhere it feels like the people who are supposed to guide and lead us aren’t doing enough.

It's widening gyres and slouching beasts all the way from here to Bethlehem, is what I’m saying.

The reason people go absolutely insane for Homestuck is that it depicts this crisis of meaning. It shows the questions we might want to ask, and attempts to provide some kind of answer.

The protagonists of Homestuck struggle with what I’ve called “received narrative.” That is, they’ve inherited stories from their families, from the world, that they try to use to define their lives, and it doesn’t work. But these stories are so familiar that it’s hard to think outside them. They have to develop new stories by which to live. Sometimes they succeed, but other times they can’t escape the gravity of the ones they were given.

With me so far?

Great. Now understand that all this was improvised and discovered largely accidentally over the course of ten years.

Here’s a seed that became quite an impressive tree:

The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.

It’s a joke. But it was never just a joke. There’s an idea here of dissatisfaction with the stereotypical idea of American suburban life. Egbert here is looking for something more, dissatisfied for reasons they can’t fully articulate. This is typical fantasy protagonist stuff, but there’s something more here, too.

Eventually it’s redirected towards the idea that there really is an unseen riddler. But let’s put that aside for now.

This page, in its moment, says: your life is not the full picture. There’s something else out there, waiting, that’s going to change everything.

That's a potential set-up for a very powerful payoff. It gives us the sense that Egbert and all their friends are going to have to rethink what they know. That this suburban life is not going to be enough for them, that somehow or other they’re going to encounter something they aren’t prepared for, and they’ll have to find a new way of acting and being. That, try as they might to avoid it, they’re going to change over the course of this journey.

But to understand how they change, we need to talk about SBURB.

2. THE PORTAL FANTASY OF IT ALL

A lot of people like to joke that Homestuck is an isekai. I think it might clarify things to use the term portal fantasy instead.

Portal fantasy is simply the fantasy subgenre of characters, usually kids, going to a magical other world. Maybe they make friends, maybe they learn lessons and stuff. You know the drill. I don’t have to to tell you more because the story structure is already so familiar. That’s what gives it power.

Portal fantasy differs from the related Japanese genre of isekai in that isekai in its current form is much more heavily based on video games such as MMORPGs. In the most pervasive isekai narratives, protagonists are rewarded not so much for achieving personal growth as being able to exploit the game mechanics of a game-like system. That’s pretty different from your typical Narnia scenario.

The influence of portal fantasy is everywhere in Homestuck, especially in the beginning. We have nods to the fantasy films of the 1980s that gave us our contemporary idea of this story structure, such as The Neverending Story (itself, in its original book incarnation, a phenomenal commentary on the genre). Our protagonists are genre savvy; they recognize what’s happening here.

But it doesn’t fit quite right. The odd note is first sounded when Egbert asks Nanasprite if what they’re doing is going to save the world. They’re bit unsettled to learn the answer’s no, that something else is going on here. Next we have the fantasy worlds: the planetary lands each present a veneer of exciting adventure. But their inhabitants, the consorts, aren’t fully-realized people, they’re largely cute animals going through the motions, not really understanding the story they’re telling. The carapacians are a little better, but they’re still trapped in a fatalism that feels uncomfortable.

As things rev up in Act 4, we learn about doomed timelines from alt-timeline Dave and Rose, how your entire existence in this setting may be fodder for something other than you. When we learn the true purpose of SBURB and its froggy details in Act 5, we see that SBURB is more like a biological creature, mainly interested in its own reproductive desires. It was never really about the portal fantasy at all. The kids are just along for the ride.

So when we see that Rose wants to tear through SBURB, find out a way to escape fate, and snatch meaning from the jaws of futility, it makes sense. We’ve been given hints already that this is the conflict at hand: the characters vs the story that’s telling them. 

(Note: it’s certainly possible to have a reading that SBURB is not evil so much as empty, that it reflects what you bring into it, that its will for you is your will for you. But that’s also a difficult thing, right? If you lack self-understanding, it’s a struggle to bring about your ideal reality.)

What we haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all mediated through the lens of video games. Which makes perfect sense. Because where do we seek meaning, especially as kids? In imaginary worlds that make more sense to us than real life, that give us achievements to take pride in and clear objectives to pursue.

SBURB evokes mechanics from games like Final Fantasy. We see its players complete objectives, cast magic spells, gain power-ups with colorful costume changes. But unlike the narratives implied by traditional video game progressions, leveling up doesn’t mean you grow as a person or process your trauma. Later, in Act 6, when we meet a player who has made his life about winning the game (Caliborn), it’s horrific to behold. 

Homestuck is a portal fantasy, but it’s fundamentally a portal fantasy about games. It’s a portal fantasy that shows us how characters seek meaning in being the best at arbitrary game mechanics, but ultimately fail to find it.

So I guess…it actually is an isekai? Huh. Wild.

(But seriously, Homestuck is actually fairly prescient in predicting the ideas that come out of isekai and LitRPG. It’s engaging consciously and deconstructively with the weird ideas of self-fulfillment these genres are drowning in.)

So what might a Homestuckian work look like? It will almost certainly critique a false narrative we live by. It may comment on portal fantasy, or our personal satisfaction that comes as easily as playing a video game. But it doesn’t have to be limited to these things. It might talk about our popular TV shows and movies. It may take apart what’s flawed in Marvel, the latest triple-A game, or the modern dark fantasy novel. 

Among its tools will be discomfort. Showing a disconnect early on between our character’s expectations and their happiness can serve as foundation to build on, so that when the flaws of the genre narrative are revealed, it feels like the truth. We may see characters who accept their narratives passively, or rebels like Rose Lalonde, who chose to rip everything apart in search of something better.

These are only some of the possibilities.

When I tell you the stories we live by mislead us, what is your relationship to that? If you were to tear these received narratives apart, what would you focus on, what would you try to say? The art that comes out of this question will be deeply personal to the soul who makes it.

But here’s another question:

Just who is giving us all these narratives, anyway?

3. THE PARENT FLIP

The world we live in was not made by us. It was shaped by forces that predate us, over which we have no control and are born into the grasp of without the knowledge of how to escape.

For instance, our parents.

The guardians who raise us provide our template for how to interpret life. We spend a large part of our lives immersed in the world they built, believing as they believe, living by the values that they instruct us in, so that we might carry their goals forward to the future.

This is an effort that is certain to fail.

Because the problems of today aren’t the problems of twenty or thirty years ago.  At best, their messages can only to help in a limited way with the crises we go through as we live our lives. At worst, they actively hinder us from dealing with them productively.

If we are to escape the broken patterns of our world, then we need break out of the stories an earlier generation gave us.

How are parents discussed in Homestuck?

Initially? As jokes.

If we take our “future knowledge” goggles off for a moment, we can see that the early depictions of the kids’ parents are a goofy parody of standard parental tropes. Mom and Dad are nameless, faceless, exaggerated cartoon stereotypes, and conflict between them and their children is initially expressed through a silly video game fight.

There’s a seed of something real here, though. What we’re parodying is a familiar trope of tension between parents and children in kids’ fiction and YA fiction. But that trope exists for a reason. This conflict is rich with potential for any story about growing up. And Homestuck has smuggled the idea of it in as a silly RPG parody.

So we can extrapolate, for instance, that there’s tension between Egbert and their father in part because Egbert doesn’t know yet who they want to be, and that Rose and Mom’s relationship is awkward and contentious, with alcohol involved. We see that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable going on between Dave and his Bro, and Jade’s life in the shadow of a dead Grandpa suggests a psychology that’s not entirely a healthy one.

Understand that I’m not saying that all this was there from the start. Rather, a choice was made to develop these interesting possibilities out of the jokes, to tell a story about how parents that act like these ones might have affected their children.

A major turning point in this regard is when Egbert learns their father’s seeming clown obsession was the result of a failed attempt to connect with them. It’s quite silly, but it plays around with the idea of a gap in perception between parent and child. It’s also a sign the story’s starting to take more of an interest in character psychology, suggesting that what Egbert processes consciously is not the same as their deeper unconscious feelings. This in turn can become a setup for a portrait of Egbert as someone who represses things they don’t want to think about. From this moment, in the long term, comes June Egbert.

When the psychology machine revs up for all the characters in Act 4 and Act 5, it’s able to do so because this foundation was laid.

We also, as early as Act 3, get hints that the parents have intentions and personalities outside of how the kids perceive them. The original purpose is to hint at a larger conspiracy around SBURB, with Mom building a secret lab, Dad trying to investigate the mystery, and Grandpa jumping in and out of time. But what this suggests is that the psychology of the parents might at some point come into play.

But the most exciting development in the relationship between parents and children is Act 6.

The great role reversal. The parent and child flip.

How do you make your faceless parent figures into characters?

By making them kids.

We’re so used to this concept now t that it’s hard to remember how wild it is that Roxy is a teen version of a main character's mom. But the concept is genius. Meeting these characters on the same level forces our protagonists to understand them as people and reflect on their fallibility.

For us as readers, it adds detail and nuance to the cartoonish portraits we got in the beginning. Conversely, we also see what our protagonists might have been like as parents themselves—and turns it from a story of “parents just don’t understand” to a story of how people, despite their best intentions, can wound each other.

(The Homestuck Epilogues are a difficult text to evaluate, but one of the best things within them is Egbert’s arc in Candy, where we see how Egbert might have done as a parent, how their struggles with finding purpose in the world might lead them to embrace a narrative of parenthood yet struggle to have a good relationship their kid. It’s brilliant, and the culmination of everything we’ve talked about here.)

Thus the Homestuckian work of art will be concerned with themes of parents and children. It will play with the boundary between what children understand about their parents and what they don’t. It will show parents as people—fallible people, who make mistakes with severe costs, whose stories fail their children and themselves. It may build from a simple base of what children understand, or it may weave parent and child perspectives together. It may even show us how children fail when they become parents themselves.  It will show us the cycles we are trapped in, how we wound and are wounded by our context.

And it will force us to look for a way out.

4. CLASSPECTS AS SIGNPOSTS

Hey. You want to know a secret?

Come closer, and I’ll whisper it to you.

Classpects aren’t actually all that complicated. Ultimately, they boil down to one thing:

Symbols we can use to construct a self.

If Homestuck is about a crisis of meaning, then classpects are part of its answer.

What do we do, when the world gives us no story we can live by?

We make one. We make one out of whatever symbols and messages we can find and put together from the stories we’ve read, from the people who teach and inspire us. Such collages are powerful things. They give us a way out of the dark, they give us a sense of something we are and can be, where there was nothing before.

They give us, in short, a personal mythology.

Classes and Aspects have often been read as codes to be unpacked and solved. It might be more productive to see them as creative tools, signposts designed not to narrow down meaning, but to allow us to explore it.

For instance, the portrayal of Light in Homestuck is unique. As a symbol, it combines notions of brightness, knowledge, future, luck, wealth, and narrative focus. These things aren’t inherently linked out in the world, but they are here, and that’s a choice, and an interesting one. It encourages us to imagine connections between these concepts, and to see if they have any relevance to ourselves. Identifying with the concept of Light, in other words choosing to value clarity, luck, and importance, might be a powerful tool for finding one’s way in the world.

Classes play with signposts at an even more basic level. Sure, we can talk about what a Knight does in the context of the story.

But a knight is already a powerful symbol. We bring so much cultural context to it. The word conjures up images and narratives of devotion, duty, violence, the slaying of dragons, armoring oneself against the world, and the rescuing of princesses. If we put that together with a concept like Time, we get a distinct character. If we put that together with our own experience of the world, we can create powerful concepts for who we want to be.

Interestingly, this complicates what we said about SBURB. As much as our protagonists struggle to find meaning within it, there’s still something there that they can latch onto. Classes, aspects, denizens, even consorts and lands—these things don’t have to be devoid of meaning. We can choose to affirm them; we can build something out of them, and say, yes, this is me, this is myself.

But it’s a double-edged sword.

We are responsible for the narratives we choose to live by. And we may find ourselves falling into a narrative that hinders us more than helps us, that creates a self-destructive self.

What does it mean to believe deeply that you are a thief, that taking from others to benefit yourself is the best way or comes to you the most naturally? What does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you’re a prince, with all the attendant baggage of power and grim responsibility that comes with that concept? Or, to follow the path further, what does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you are a destroyer or must be destroyed?

If we are to escape the story we’re trapped in, we must take care, lest we trap ourselves in a story of our own making.

Homestuck never quite resolves the ambiguity around these symbols of self, around whether SBURB hurts or helps, whether classpects are things you create or things that create you. But this ambiguity is a productive one. It gives us symbolic tools we can use in the creation of meaning, and it shows us the side of them that should make us wary.

The work that is to come after Homestuck will be about symbols. It may show us how we seek them in popular culture, or the people around us. It may use some of the clusters of meaning that that we see in Homestuck, but it will not be limited to them. It will write its own language of symbols, joining Light and Time to notions like Memory, Need, Rupture, and War, and be filled not just with knights and princes but brigadiers, lancers, healers, druids, taxidermists, sentries and waifs.  It will build with tarot cards, enneagram types, and Babylonian gods. It will place all the signposts we’ve created in millennia of existence into new contexts and meanings.  

By such means will it show us a way forward.

There’s one kind of symbol we haven’t talked about yet, however.

The kind that holds a mirror up to the world.

5. THE POWER OF ALTERNIA

There’s a reason dystopias have been so popular in young adult fiction. Sure, they’re cliché now, but they speak to something raw and visceral.

When you’re growing up into a world that doesn’t make sense, it’s natural to find refuge in emotional extremes. Stories of blood and violence, fates worse than death, and governments that demand horrific things of their citizens speak to the anxieties of the adolescent mind. They validate the feeling that something is wrong—that the world we’ve inherited is broken and unfair and has no place for us. And they’re right.

Alternia taps into these dystopian feelings perfectly. What makes it so fun is that it’s an inversion of a teenage fantasy. It’s a world where there are no parents, where kids can have access to power and violence, where you can sit around and play video games and design your own house. It almost feels like a response to the “parents don’t understand” themes of the early acts.

But the dystopia’s there, and it’s sneaky. A land of lost boys and girls isn’t actually all that great to live in. It’s lawless, survival of the fittest, with children killing each other left and right. And the future adult roles most of the troll kids aspire to are a glamorous veneer over competition for slots in a fascist military hierarchy. Which is to say nothing of the blood caste system as a way in which the kids are taught by their world to abuse and exploit each other. Crushes, personal slights, competition for status, group dynamics, attempts to define identity – all these familiar teenage dynamics play out on a backdrop of maiming and murder.

Which is perfect. Because when you’re young, all those social interactions genuinely do feel like life or death, and adulthood a regime of exploitation and horror bearing down on you. Alternia is a heightened, exaggerated version of reality. It expresses an emotional truth, not a literal one, validating our most intense feelings and giving us a road map to understanding them.

No wonder so many people wanted to skip to Act 5 and get to the trolls.

(See also Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest, which explore these themes really really well.)

And Alternia, for a world where parents aren’t really a thing, tells us a surprising amount about the parental generation. In mid Act 5-2, Ancestors are added to Alternia’s wordbuilding, and we learn that as much as the trolls skipped having traditional parental figures, they were never devoid of role models. The deeds and exploits of notable figures throughout ancient Alternia gave them models to think about each other and themselves—even when those models were toxic ones. In a way, this isn’t so far from the human kids at all.

Furthermore, as time goes on, we acquire an origin for Alternia’s fascist worldview. Doc Scratch, manipulator of society, stands in for all those aspects of the world that work to create the false narratives we are born into, a true evil father figure – or uncle, if you prefer. And he's an extension of the ultimate evil father figure, Lord English, who controls not just Alternia but the timelines of the human children as well, whose belligerence and apathy give us aeons of toxic narratives and abuse. We see that story played out in Alternia in every interaction, in every moment, the beliefs its architects live by.

This is the power of dystopia—it can hold a broken mirror up to the world we live in.

Therefore the Homestuck that will come after Homestuck will worldbuild gardens of horror. It will not pull its punches but show us insidious societal systems and the effect they have on the people who live under them. It may depict fascism, authoritarianism, feudalistic tyranny, or all three. It will be unafraid to evoke blood and guts but use them to paint a picture of what we want, what we fear, and how we break under our false horizons.

As it depicts the path out, so, too, will it have its reverse side—it will show us all the hells and purgatories we’re trapped in.

6. SAILS TO THE WIND

Much has been written (including by this very author) about Homestuck’s metafictional aspects – the way it comes to foreground a more direct clash between character and narrative.

But the point I want to make here is that the metafictional angle wouldn’t work without these earlier choices. They allow the comic to talk about these concerns long before any notion of canon rears its head.

There are many ways of approaching these themes, and we don’t have to be limited to notions of Ultimate Selves and Beyond Canon to explore them. Such things are valuable, but they are only one retelling of the myth. If we are to make the next Homestuck, we must make our own.

I want to illustrate the space of possibility by offering some examples of works that explore similar themes. Note that I’m not saying these works were influenced by Homestuck in any way, but rather that they use some of the same tools to speak to the same questions, anxieties and concerns.

In trying to make what comes after Homestuck, we might consider:

Revolutionary Girl Utena, which foregrounds the archetype of the Prince as duelist, tyrant, and hero and dares its characters to break free from the false reality that shapes even these aspirations and dreams.

The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Houseof Leaves, whose core narrative concerns an twelve-year-old girl in thrall to an entity whose intentions are unclear but may be shaping the fabric of reality itself; which depicts the inner lives and uncertainties of her parents with just as much detail as they struggle, and sometimes fail, to make the right choices to help her; a story which, even in its incomplete form, explores a notion of a greater S.E.L.F that is not just you but also those who share something with you, where characters from other realities blur into transcendent archetypes in this one.

Digimon, perhaps the quintessential work of portal fantasy, not only Digimon Tamers, which steers the genre into a place of trauma, cosmic horror, and adults horrified by children saving the world, but also Digimon Adventure, which creates strong character arcs for eight very different children as they try to navigate a strange alien world, and shows us their struggle to reconcile with their parents as part of the process of understanding themselves.

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende,foundational text for Homestuck, which tells us not only about the rich possibilities inherent in reading oneself into fantasy worlds, but also the terrible potential for harm in making oneself an emperor over them.

Pale, by Wildbow, author of Worm, an urban fantasy story about three teenagers thrust into a world of magic and murder, a world where symbols literally create reality, where concepts like Carmine and Aurum have a powerful pull, where the Self is something that can be nourished or taken apart and put back together, a story where the parents are not just supporting cast but fully realized people forced to reckon with the ways in which they have deeply failed their children, and which contains perhaps the most thorough investigation of the question of “is it good for children to go on magical adventures?” ever committed to the page.

Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee,in which the giant robots we pilot through space become the symbolic manifestation of our inner selves and our way of bringing about our ideal reality, and, relatedly, We Know the Devil, in which the repression of those selves causes them to burst out from us in terrifying and glorious new forms.

Crow Cillers, by Cate Wurtz, an often trauma-filled horror comic in which a group of kids and, eventually, adults, tries to fight back against an ever-present death cult that has its grips on every corner, all the while encountering Psyforms, beings made of pure mind, while characters from television and cartoons dance in the margins and all the while the line blurs between audience and art until it becomes difficult to tell who created who—a story that asks what it means to find meaning in stories when the corporate entities that own them are trying to devour us.

It's a tragically short list, I know. But perhaps it conveys some of the angles we might take.

We can also look at works that are known to have inspired by Homestuck. There aren’t many yet, but there are a few.

Undertale is famous for its Homestuck influences, with parallel timelines, an idea of agency that persists across them, and a contentious relationship between player and character, but for my part, I’m just as interested if not more so in Deltarune, which seems to be slowly building a grand thesis about portal fantasy, where the kids' adventures in the Dark Worlds seems to be offering them an escape and helping them become their best selves—but hints at a coming challenge to that simple worldview in the question of who’s really experiencing that escape.

The Locked Tomb, by Tamsin Muir – This is the big one, that really shows what building on Homestuckian themes can achieve. It turns out there really is an audience for weird aggro formalism in scifi publishing if you make it sufficiently gay. But smartly, like Homestuck, the Locked Tomb builds its weird mysteries gradually, adding on layer after layer on the solid foundation of characters we can follow and get invested in. There’s so much to notice – there’s the highly categorized teenagers involved in a murder feud, there’s the constant whiplash of humor and tragedy, there’s the endlessly open spaces in the story to interpret and project on to.

But to me, what stands out the most is the portrait of God and his court as every bit as emotionally chaotic as the sniping teenagers. You go to heaven, and God’s making out in the corner with his friend group, and you look for the adult in the room but the adults in the room don’t know what they’re doing and they never really did. It’s a portrait of the parents, it’s a portrait of the Ancestors, it’s a portrait of the gods of the new world, and it’s exquisite.

The Locked Tomb gives us a world at war with its own mythological narrative, rich with angst and irony. It’s a worthy successor to everything Homestuck was doing. It shows us how much these themes can say to us, and it gives us a hint at how powerful Homestuck's legacy might be.

7. THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMESTUCK

There’s a lot of discussion about how to continue Homestuck. How to do it justice. What post-canon might look like, and what it might not. What fan comics, what fan fics, what semi-official works truly live up to the spirit of its characters and its multiverse.

To be clear, those discussions are awesome. I’m so glad those things exist, and it’s wonderful to see them unfolding.

But I don’t want the process to stop there. I'd be disappointed if it was only about adding to and re-articulating Homestuck itself.

I want this—

—This multifaceted, complicated, emotionally laden thing that is the experience of engaging with and creating with and interpreting Homestuck—

To go out into the world and to be infused into the world, to become waves spreading further and further. I want to experience the Homestuck artistic movement, the Homestuck school of thought. I want it to be an influence on the fiction of the coming generation of authors, and the next, and the next.

I want Homestuck to be one of those albums that's too obscure to be known by the general public, but everyone who listened to it went on to start an enormously successful band.

Homestuck can appear like a thing that was conjured out of the ether, but it isn’t. It’s a product of a particular time.

But that in itself is profound. When you create art, you reach back to all the things that have shaped you, and you listen to what the world around you needs, and you try to say what needs to be said. Which means you're a part of a history and culture that needs to say those things, which will be different from the things that needed to be told yesterday, and different from the stories that will be needed tomorrow.

There’s no otherworldliness to it, no platonic other reality. But for all I've talked about art being made of choices, there's still something transcendent here.

To make Homestuck—and to make art inspired by Homestuck—means being a node in a web formed of millions of people, where a light passes down the chain to you, and for the briefest of moments, you get to be filled with its presence, before it moves on to the next person in the chain.

That light isn't yours. Not really.

But at the same time, you do get to choose how that light manifests.

And to engage with that process consciously—to think deliberately about what we want to create—that gives us power and agency over that process, our sense of the world, and ourselves.

So let’s do this. Let’s make the thing that Homestuck is telling us can exist, the thing it’s paving the way for, the thing we know in our soul can come to be.

Let’s make the next Homestuck happen.

—Ari

POSTSCRIPT

“To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC

to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life… I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air…”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence....the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-turning to dust...This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

— Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"

“What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding... let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean…to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least…freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”

— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”

“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,

If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.”

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

𖤓

[nolonger100daysoftavvyfanart]

some people on Beyond Party were talking about this image from the commentary.

so lets talk about this image

Different head shape, (with the original hair still visible?):

The fact they went out of their way to change the head shape makes me think that this is an accurate-ish silhouette. They either have even less neck than the average homestuck character, or they have long hair at the back.

The hair at the top could imply a similar haircut, or maybe they just drew over it and didn't care that parts of the original were left behind.

They look a bit frog-like, but then again so did Geromy.

Different hand and arm shape:

We know GC has a a regualr-ish hand, so maybe they have a clenched fist here? But they don't used many closed hands in Sbahj, usually whatever they're holding just floats in their palm. Not always, though.

The arm is also more bulbous, so maybe they're wearing puffy sleeves? Is it a pirate costume? They're the exploding one, and the title says "Beyond Cannon", so maybe they're the pirate who shoots the cannons?

I might be reading too far into this.

Six panes instead of four:

Troll windows had 12 panes and formed the shape of the Sgrub logo, and their session had 12 players

Because of this, I think the window change in the Sbahj panel implies that the Deltritus session will have Six players.

Not the Deltritus grass or sky:

Deltritus usually has blue-green grass and a pink sky, but here its green grass and a blue sky. Maybe they're growing earth plants?

That said, it's a whole ass planet, so maybe the plant life *is* green in some places, and maybe the sky is blue sometimes.

Or maybe they just didn't care about changing the colours, since it's a joke, and one that isn't even in the comic itself.

Now, to reveal what GC really looks like.

Ok, maybe not exactly. But I am leaning towards fish-head at the moment.

[doomsdaydicecascader]

wow you’re the first person i’ve seen actually support the retcon, that’s cool

i’ve always been neutral on it but would you be down with explaining your opinions on the retcon?

so my number one feeling is that the way homestuck is most like a game is not in its framing or its many subsystems within itself, but in that homestuck is a challenge to the reader first and foremost. it challenges a lot of existing preconceptions about what stories are, what stories can be.

sometimes this is in some stupid ways, but a lot of the time, it's in very palateable ways. hussie describes stuff like the juxtaposition of the earthbound walksprite panels and hussnasty mode as a "creative power move", something that keeps readers on their toes, something which kind of prods at your expectations and why you have those expectations.

and it helps to ask, what challenge is homestuck presenting to me, the reader, by doing this. this is the repeated motion of homestuck, like. "oh, what, it's insane that there's a whole playable game", "oh, what, it's insane that the fallout and consequences of an entire session of the game is being given in just three walkarounds". rose's arc is a challenge to the idea of a "coming of age" story, how do you come of age into a world where the metrics for growth and maturity and adulthood are denied to you? what if "adulthood" and "maturity" were fake ideas all along? well, if nothing matters, maybe you should have a drink to rest your mind about it.

one of the most direct challenges is the challenge of what death means in a story - there are a lot of stories where death is a bad end for a character. an impactful enough character death can change culture around itself for as long as it remains relevant. but that's not what death is in homestuck. death in homestuck is the freedom from being in homestuck. this is most prevalent with its deployment of gnostic ideas - yaldabaoth's treasure being homestuck itself expresses this most directly. the creator has made a flawed world and encourages the suffering of its inhabitants.

death is freedom from this flawed world, and this is expressed in terezi: remem8er. characters who did terrible things, horrible things, unforgiveable things, can find peace in death.

and i think the retcon is far and away the headiest challenge, the final boss of storytelling in homestuck's terms, because it directly challenges the idea of continuity, which is, by the way, TOTALLY FAKE.

continuity isnt actually real, its a thing youre actively constructing as you read. the drawings, the words, the music, the animation, the gameplay - all these things can help shape the idea of art, but the art itself, that's produced by you, the reader. and i think this is a good time to switch over to talking about the never-ending story for a moment.

the never-ending story is a story about atreyu. he goes on a fantasy quest, one which involves the death of his beloved steed artax, the plight of the world of fantasia, and confrontations with the nothing, this devouring force which threatens to end it. and ultimately, he loses. the forces of the nothing are just too overwhelming for a fictional character to overcome. the stakes are too high, no ending could be satisfactory and not contrived.

but then he doesn't lose.

because the never-ending story, the movie, is about bastian, and the relationship and empathy he builds with atreyu as he follows him on his adventure, and bastian, as the reader, is capable of caring about atreyu and fantasia even as it's been reduced to nothing. and its bastian caring about it, and bringing his own context, his own experiences - the name of his dead mother - to the story, that allows it to be reborn as something that can be completed.

and then he rides on the big luck dragon falkor and barfs on the bullies from the start of the movie.

homestuck is doing the same thing, but filtered through the language of video games. if youre playing ff9 and lose to black waltz #3 or whatever, it's a video game, that's to be expected. just do better next time. you wiped on the trial, it's normal, regroup and pull again. youve got 90 minutes. and in that time, in that regression, you become the kind of person who could overcome that challenge.

and it's a powerful challenge! it's one most readers don't overcome, because they are still stuck in the terms of thinking about things in what they expect out of it, instead of what it is. and this is kind of the core idea of homestuck.

hussie put it the best themself:

Homestuck, as an examination of all forms of creative practice, whether cosmic or artistic, isolates the tension between perfect, celebrated idealization and specific, flawed instantiation. The purity of the ideal is what's initially sought, but the imperfection of the specific is what has true value. Conflict and suffering arise from the guilt and stress associated with overvaluing the former. Deliverance and humanity come from recognizing and embracing the latter.

and honestly, i like what the retcon does for basically all the characters it changes dramatically. people take issue with rose's alcoholism plotline being resolved with vriska_slap.png but i don't really, because rose's alcoholism isn't like, of itself if that makes sense. it's alcoholism as an extension of nihilism, in a way that doesn't reflect real alcoholism, but it doesn't have to. s'a story. things can mean things nonliterally.

and vriska regresses as a character, but i think this specific regression is the core of homestuck. you get the platonic ideal of vriska-ness, one who didn't see and feel the trauma she inflicted on tavros, one who has completely supplanted gamzee's role as the plot-mover guide in the alpha session. and one who only makes token gestures at reparations and atonement for her misdeeds. one who is still obsessed with being at the center. and between 2016 and 2019, i was so certain that she had died a heroic death in act 7 that it is an immovable core plot point of my own comic.

(homework: why would homestuck call act 7 the rapture?)

and like, those pre-retcon characters literally do still exist, they show up in remem8er. remem8er goes unbelievably hard on giving every single dead character in the comic the best catharsis available to them: deliverance from having to be in homestuck. and i mean that entirely sincerely! the best ending for a homestuck character is not being in homestuck. and that's a tough thing for people to get their minds around.

but again, it kind of comes naturally with taking homestuck as it is, and thinking intently about what it's doing, what conventions it's challenging and how it's challenging them. because sometimes it's deeply stupid (decade-plus of thought on the matter has not made the incest any more palateable or understandable)

but sometimes it's the best shit in the whole world

[larrythefloridaman]

My boy Crimson please

First of all, I'm going to state- within the context of the Rhetorical Device Homestuck AU that these analyses imply, I'm not actually certain the ciblings would be players, but sapient sburb constructs something weird and fucked up and unintended in the design of the game happened to. Those things are denizens or something to that effect that're acting wildly off-script. I feel they're too aware of and fundamentally enmeshed with how the medium functions to be ordinary players, even if we assumed this were a case of a set of godtiers from a successful session, and they very much started as abstract beings before Becoming people-shaped.

But "Not Applicable" is a coward's answer and I won't be resorting to it.

There are a couple of obvious answers one might point to on the surface level, which seem compelling at first, but upon closer scrutiny, actually fall apart somewhere along the line- kind of suitably for Crimson's whole deal, really. I don't actually think Crimson is a Thief of Heart, or a Bard of Space.

Thief of Heart appears obvious- his whole thing is possessing people, isn't it? But while theres definitely something to be said about Crimson and his being decent at scoping out people's feelings and the 'heartlessness' and some of his arc fitting with the thief's journey- lacking in their aspect at first (vriska being raised by just about the worst parental figure you can picture losing the lottery of birth about as hard as you can, and meenah feeling suffocated by the inevitable responsibility of leadership she'd inherit, leaving her without a 'life' of her own) and spending much of their arc stealing it for themselves- his whole thing ISN'T possessing people, thats just something he does, something gods do. Prism possesses people too, it just functions a bit differently. I think attributing his possession as a heart thing is sort of akin to attributing the trolls' psychic powers to their classpects, like they can certainly thematically connect, but theyre not like. one and the same. Tavros doesnt talk to animals because hes a Page of Breath he talks to animals because thats the psychic power he inherited bc that happens with trolls. Not everything is analog to a sburb thing. This is a case of thinking too directly and literally to me.

Bard of Space, then? Similarly obvious-feeling. He sure is destructive and he only ever does anything through proxies and indirect orchestrated actions, and he's the god of dimensions, and he literally tried to collapse the multiverse during the constants ordeal, right? I think this is also thinking too literally. The keyword here is tried. He failed, because he did too good of a job setting up his system to stabilize the multiverse to successfully destroy it, as such if this were his aspect he'd be a pretty objective failure at it- which while it isnt necessarily a strong argument by itself, i feel runs counter to a lot of the narrative point with him, that he in his rebellion stumbled directly into giving an award-winning performance of the role he was born to play from Prism's perspective.

I think the truth lies in splitting the difference- (passive like bard, stealing class like thief) a Rogue of Space- and assuming an Inversion happened somewhere along the line. Heres where we have to get into the weird half-remembered classpect theory shit ive been trying to delve into as little as possible with these-

So, classpect inversion is a decidedly theoretical state which can be inferred but not proven wherein, under select circumstances and with the right catalyst, a player's classpect can. Well. Invert. Their class flips to its counterpart along the active/passive scale and their aspect flips to the opposite in their aspect pair in a surface level manner, not entirely unlike how I've described a destructive class appears like the opposite aspect of what they actually are. The common example of this happening in homestuck canon to my memory is Rose's cynical and bitter phase leading to her going Grimdark after learning that their session of the game cannot be won- she is ordinarily a Seer of Light, a passive scholar class which shares comprehensive knowledge of their aspect with their teammates, which concerns itself with fact (bringing knowledge to Light, as it were,) and fortune. She retains these traits- but they become transformed through context and hardship into something resembling their inverse when she becomes disillusioned and frustrated by her and her friends doomed quest and elects to try to find a way to change their fate through going off on her own to break the game open, destroy it's constructs, create holes in it's systems, Voids where there was once substance, manipulated by the gods of the Furthest Ring, the void around the game's construct. She is still a Seer of Light, a seeker and sharer of knowledge motivated by doing right by her team, but she's started acting less like herself, and more as an active class of the Void aspect might, in service to that ultimate purpose.

Now, for how this applies to Crimson. The theft classes, Rogue and Thief, are concerned with the redistribution of their aspect, the Thief to themself, the Rogue to their allies. A Space player is one concerned with the big picture as much as they are the literal contours of space and dimension and physics, concerned with recycling and creation, propagation, a passive aspect that 'hosts the stage until the curtains fall away.' 'How they do something is nearly as important as what they do. At their best steady, impartial, and creative, at their worst detached and vague.' As the extended zodiac puts it.

If one were to place all of your attention on what crimson does in season 3 and Grands, some of that may sound like a strange way to read crimson- but the context which both season one and the nccts provide... clarifies a lot of behavior. Circa season one, Crimson behaved... quite differently. Reserved and detached, quiet, distant. Crimson didn't pick fights and grovel for allies indiscriminately like he does by the time Orange rolls around- he sized up threats, made deliberate powerplays, chose his battles, gambled confidently for advantages. A creature of a grander and more complicated nature, taking on a loose-fitting facsimile of humanity until, with time, it grew more convincing, developed a flair for showmanship.

These deliberate qualities of his personality and MO are also represented in the systematic approach by which he's organized and automated his godly duties, distributing the responsibility for holding up the multiverse across his patrons, a point of pride and responsibility Crimson took more seriously than one might expect, given we learn this through him trying to burn it all down out of spite, given Cobalt's failure to do the same became such a point of contention between them. Crimson, when comfortable (or at least at a reduced level of stress) operates heavily by a principle of 'work smarter, not harder,' and these qualities also get a chance to shine in NCCT4 and Majestic, wherein he takes an organizational role in keeping the different brackets communicating enough to prevent any major issues that could've been created through Prism isolating them, and a pivotal role in evacuating the Majestic cast from their crumbling world. He's also a nurturer, good with kids and animals, and even when he's possessing others, he acts as an excuse, as an empowerment, he gives them a new and impossible to ignore place in the grand scheme of things for a while, by taking their place. Be honest with me. Look me in the eyes. If Crimson hadn't possessed his suit The Guy would be spiraltier, not in the Grand Kerfuffle fighting Chartreuse in the very last streamed episode of CPUK.

The shift, the temporary Inversion, came with his bitterness with his lot in life and his increasing desperation to 'beat' Prism at this pointless suffering game by hiding and fighting and making deals and improvising to stay alive and unharmed and claim some kind of control over his own life, to buy himself time, after being trapped in Crimsonaut and Cobalt's presence made him feel even more powerless, becoming more involved and more ruthless and more active in his pursuit of a metaphorical escape from the threat of having his form and his life destroyed. The constants arc- from an in-universe perspective a cryptic and disastrous cry for help/threat that almost caused a multiversal cataclysm, from a narrative perspective a massive futile waste of everyone's time because almost nothing actually happened.

[zerodderty]

I think I figured out what I love so much about this current crop of Homestuck fan content

It is, by in large, a response to Homestuck. Not the fandom or individual parts of the work like beloved characters or unpopular plot points, but towards Homestuck itself, the hypertext webcomic that ran from 2009 to 2016 (with maybe an additional piece in 2019 depending on which way you slice it) that is for better or for worse a complete finished work. The decisions it made, the styles it took on, and the concepts behind it are well known and well-studied to such an extent that the value in pure replication for its own sake is almost zilch. And then what you're left with is a set of Homestuck shadows, these stories that in one way or another all emerge from the crop of Homestuck going "okay that was cool so what next", and the shape that "what next" takes feels much more deliberate and intentional than what came before it

Like, I adore The Locked Tomb quite a lot, but it is much more like an outcropping of where Homestuck fandom was at in 2012 and as such it's more of a snippet of Homestuck torn out and mixed together with a lot of other influences to create a work that is closer to how Homestuck felt when it was running than how it actually was. And to be clear I don't see this as a fault of TLT, quite frankly as an original work it is much stronger for its willingness to run out on a limb and be its own thing even if its influences still run clear and deep.

I really like calling Vast Error "Shin Hivebent", in the vein of Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla and Shin Evangelion (aka the Rebuild films), as a sort of Fresh Start on the concepts of Hivebent. Taking all the same motivations and narrative beats of the original but applying contemporary techniques and ideas (plus lessons learned from the original production) to the text, then letting new themes and reflections emerge naturally from the changes made.

You take the formula everybody knows, you apply a decade of hindsight and cultural change, then you watch and see how the work blossoms into something completely new, and study what that newness says about the original work's lasting cultural legacy.

While not every work takes the same rigorous "it's like Homestuck again guys!!!" approach of Sburb.exe and Home-skillet, I do think this entire current wave is very much in the vein of "Shin Homestuck", this fresh reimagining of Homestuck's core themes and ideas that serves both as an argument for why Homestuck is such an enduring work and an exploration of how Homestuck's ideas and themes might apply to a new generation.

Like I said, I originally thought this of Vast Error, and later on Sburb.exe became the main culprit, but I think Home-skillet stands apart in how it is clearly doing as much as it can to align itself with Homestuck's implicit structure and not just its explicit ones- Fred Ana and Neil all serve as immediate analogs of John Rose and Dave, but there's something different here- they're more childlike, a lot more straightforward and dopey than the (intentionally or unintentionally) witty internet heroes of yesteryear.

The closeness hewed to the template makes the divergences all the more interesting and while for a while I felt like this was just kind of pointless nostalgic wank I think the EOT2 flash is such a good statement for how this quieter approach can really set up these more plodding contemplative beats. Not much is happening there aren't huge shocking reveals, we know how the story goes anyways, so our eye gets drawn more to the softness, the little reunions and quiet uncertainties.

There's just something so *cool* about seeing the ways this whole fanventure scene keeps splitting and morphing, diving into a lot of the current big fanventures just keeps giving me this newfound energy to rant so many loud and public words about art and media ART IS SO COOL YOU GUYS FUCK

[paper-mario-wiki]

Your Trollsona is such a damn cool concept! I love the sheer insanity that the RPS unfolds into and I gotta ask, how does their Captchalogue and Fetch Modi work? Those are always another fun bonus way characters quirks are shown

Not quite!

The Sylladex object recovery and creation system is COMPLETELY separate from the RPS system.

Total mastery of the RPS fractal would be DESTRUCTIVELY OVERPOWERED, considering if you knew exactly how each object interacts with the other, you'd be able to instantly resolve any conflict with a single action no matter what. But this is near impossible because the RPS catalogue accounts for all possible concepts, not all possible objects. This is why a double-sided barcode is used instead of the typical hole punch system. You can't captchalogue a kick in the nose, after all.

Each line in the barcode represents a single binary digit. With each digit added, the amount of possible values goes up exponentially. Within only 10 lines in the barcode, 1024 values are possible. But what's even MORE exponentially gigantic is having it be double sided, because then it squares itself instead of just doubling itself. So a two-sided ticker tape with 10 bars on each side would be 1024^2, or 1,048,576 different values. And that's with a code that fits within the circumference of a nickel.

However, if you refer back to the gif with the ticker in it:

That's WAY more than a nickel's length.

And that’s an absolute necessity, because every possible concept must be accounted for. The system is pretty fucking wildly, multiversally, insanely gigantic. Hence the need for extremely dense data to get anywhere.

And even then, the bar code doesn’t actually grant you access to the item that its value represents. The only thing it does get you is access to all relative values, or everything that interacts with that object in a meaningful way. The RPS Chart acts as a gigantic excel spreadsheet which catalogs and calculates how one thing could reasonably negate, counteract, subvert, or otherwise destroy another thing, and vice versa.

You can't just KNOW where something is on a fractal, you have to find it. Like how theoretically you could find every single number combination within the digits of pi, but you'd still have to go looking for it.

Imagine it like playing the Wikipedia game, where you can only get from one place to another by clicking through links on pages, except instead of words with context on a screen, it’s dozens to thousands of arbitrary binary digits. The longer the code, the more quantumly hyper-specific the item.

You're going to have a lot easier of a time finding "cup of water" than you are "Betty McLaughlin's Red Diary From 1997".

This is why Kippyr has to spend as much time studying it as they do, because navigating through the chart with any amount of grace would take several human lifetimes to accomplish. However, with the Seer of Mind classpect, as well as their countless hours of diligent observation and experimentation with the chart, Kippyr is able to gracefully navigate through the fractals with the instinctual finesse of a sea turtle in an underwater slipstream.

NOW. Onto the topic of a Fetch Modus.

Kippyr is a slow adopter of it. Fetch modi are not a necessary element in the Homestuck world’s set of natural laws. For the majority of their life, Kippyr'd prefer to just use their satchel and pockets to carry all their stuff around. But as they progress further into Sgrub, and their session becomes more demanding and complex, they’d eventually develop one that works seamlessly with the RPS system:

The RPS Modi. The way it works is simple: Just throw the shape of the object which would beat the object you’re looking for. If you wanted Rock, you’d throw Paper, if you wanted Paper you’d throw Scissors, and if you wanted Scissors you’d throw Rock.

Simple! Just don't forget the hand shapes :^]

[haven-sys]

Birthdays!

Given that today is our shared birthday we're gonna make a point to list our individual birthdays.

@haven-sys Haven Coast System. January 23rd. This is the body's birthday and so it's the birthday we all share.

@dragongirltongue Myst: April 13. Chosen. Not only is it homestuck day but it's when she realized she doesn't want to go back to the jehovahs witnesses.

@haven-sys Risk: April 20. Close enough and the more fun choice.

@dragongirltongue Nova: May 26. The day it became aware of itself.

@robotgirldivinity Cari: June 11. Chosen. We're not sure when Cari came to be exactly but she likes the shape of the number.

@dragonboyfangs Markus: June 13. Close enough to when he came to us in a dream.

@arianagestalt Ariana. July 17. Chosen. We took a vacation to a lake and Ariana fronted for the entire time because she felt at home there.

@dragongirlfusion Cydra: September 7. Formation. Cydra didn't quite make themself known for a while after this point but it's around the time Cari and Zelda started feeling like Cydra was there.

@lordofthesky Lord of the Sky. September 16. Japanese Pokemon Emerald release date.

@dragongirltongue Skye: October 5. It's when we took ownership of the character design she claimed as her face.

@apcalypsearisen Aradia: October 10. Formation. She showed up on Oct 10 and decided that's her birthday but she's still an Aries because she invented being an Aries.

@freeengineerangel Tedra. November 17 she guesses. Chosen? It's when her tumblr blog was made so she guesses that's close enough to her formation.

@dyinggreenstar Green Star. October 21. European Pokemon Emerald release date.

@haven-sys Glucose: December 11. It's when he made his pluralkit and considers that close enough a dividing line from character to alter.

@koboldgirltummy Stick. December 23. Formation. This is when Stick came into being. She has considered moving it a couple days later for the funny.

Obvs we don't expect anything on any of these days but for those who like to send birthday wishes, here are our days.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Why the Alpha Timeline is the Alpha Timeline

I figured I'd make a post, since it's pretty subtle and I think it genuinely passed a lot of people by? Homestuck is made up of a lot of words, haha.

The alpha timeline is described by Doc Scratch, functionally, as "the timeline that causes LE to exist."

The path which alone has my absolute mastery is the alpha timeline, a continuum I define as that which boasts exclusive rights both to my birth and to my death, two circumstantially simultaneous events.

Aranea also gives the explanation that the alpha timeline is the one where reality is perpetuated.

AG: Reality itself is using you and many others to propagate its own existence. Strictly speaking, there is only one path to its successful propagation. 8ut it still permits you to make choices.

Caliborn also states that his quest as a Lord of Time is coming to terms with the inevitability that everything, ever, in all of time, will be because of him - that he'll be the one to shape it, including the circumstances of his own defeat.

uu: AS A LORD OF TIME. I THINK I'M GOING TO MASTER TIME. NOT WITH MY BRAIN. WHICH WOULD BE TOO HARD. BUT WITH MY INSTINCTS. uu: LIKE IN A WAY THAT WORKS WITH MY NATURAL IMPULSES. SUCH AS MY AMBITION. MY WILL TO COMMIT MAYHEM. MY DESIRE TO PUNISH THOSE I DESPISE. uu: SO IF I WANT YOU TO BECOME STRONG. SO YOU CAN CHALLENGE ME LATER. AND I SEE EVIDENCE. THAT YOU PROBABLY BECOME SUCCESSFUL. uu: I THINK TO MYSELF. WHY SHOULDN'T I BE THE ONE TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN? IF IT'S GOING TO ANYWAY. uu: I THINK PART OF MY PERSONAL QUEST. IS TO BECOME AT EASE WITH THE FORCES OF INEVITABILITY. uu: INEVITABILITY THAT ALL THINGS SHOULD AND WILL FALL IN MY FAVOR. THAT ALL CAUSALITY ANSWERS TO ME. AND THAT ALL OUTCOMES NOT ONLY SERVE ME. BUT CONSIST OF MY BEING. uu: SO I FEEL THAT. THE MORE I GROW IN POWER. uu: THE MORE STUFF IT SHOULD TURN OUT I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR. uu: UP TO AND INCLUDING. EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENS. uu: EVEN IF IT HAS TO BE. uu: RETROACTIVELY.

Aradia's stint as stewardess of the afterlife is explicitly described as "service to the lord of double death," and Dave explains that he acts instinctively - like Caliborn does - to fulfill the conditions of the alpha timeline. It's also worth noting that their classes, Maid and Knight, are roles that directly serve a Lord in the real world.

TEREZI: LUCK1LY YOU M4K3 4N 4DOR4BL3 H4NDM41D TO TH3 M4ST3R OF D34TH, 3SP3C14LLY 1N YOUR CUT3 CH3RRY P1X13 3NS3MBL3 ARADIA: you think so?

GG: well youre from the future right? GG: dont you know already if itll work? TG: yeah more or less TG: i never really studied how it went down all that closely TG: i just figured when the time came to sort it out the right thing to do would be obvious TG: like it is now TG: managing the loops is a balance of careful planning and just rolling with your in the moment decisions TG: and trusting they were the ones you were always supposed to make TG: by now im pretty used to having my intuition woven into the fabric of the alpha timeline

I'm starting with all that so I can explain that the GAME OVER timeline doesn't end when the time players disappear from it, like doomed timeline offshoots normally do, because it IS the alpha timeline: the sequence of events that causes GAME OVER to occur is the sequence of events that Caliborn/Lord English have chosen: one where (nearly) everyone dies, all hope of victory is lost, and his servant, the Condesce, gets to claim the Ultimate Reward, perpetuating the same misery and oppression in the new universe, and presumably all universes to come.

We see from Caliborn's chess match with Calliope that his (and by extension, LE)'s modus operandi is to follow the rules to the letter, while manipulating his opponent, tricking them with "shitty twists". It's always been explained that LE's actions have been "sanctioned by paradox space," that is, everything he's doing is explicitly allowed, nothing he's doing is against the rules - including the fact that he must be defeated. He has, via his mastery of time, perfectly engineered a situation where the only viable reality is the one where yes, he IS defeated... in the dream bubbles, by the dead and doomed, whom he sent to the dream bubbles in the first place via Condy, Jack English, and all the other boss fights. And his will, his ideals, are imposed on the new universe in spite of his defeat.

In a completely Watsonian read of the text, Lord English is an incredible villain because - subtly and unsublty - he IS basically responsible for every bad thing that ever happens, ever, to everyone. He has legitimately been the puppetmaster pulling the strings the entire time, pretty much all because Caliborn is a huge asshole who loves to hurt other people, and wants to do it as much as he can, to as many people as he can, for as long as he can.

But I think he's especially interesting through a Doylist perspective, through a reading of the text as a coming of age. Homestuck is a worth riddled with theme and symbolism, and thematically, Lord English represents everything that these kids need to overcome in order to mature into kind, empathetic adults who will be one day responsible for the care and oversight of a new universe. He represents selfishness, sadism, greed, destruction, oppression, fascism, murder, genocide, and hatred. And also literally the patriarchy.

And, you know what? Don't take my word for it. Here's Andrew Hussie's commentary from Book 6 Act 5 Act 2 Part 2:

Much of the logic [for who contributes to Lord English] orbits around these negative traits associated with men, or more specifically, the “toxically masculine” aspects often linked to certain male personalities. Dirk has a lot of these traits, which are central to Dave’s feelings of tension and abuse concerning his bro. The intellectual aggression, the power of assertion, the knowitall-ism, the mansplaining. That’s a lot of Dirk stuff when he’s at his worst. Equius shares a lot of those traits too, with some different points of emphasis. Both of them have this creepy-guy streak running through them, with strange or offputting interests, and seem to get a quiet kick out of making others uncomfortable through demonstrations of these fascinations. They are actually pretty similar characters in this way.

He's invited into the trolls' universe (and, by extension, the kids' universe) via the Dancestors, in an original sin kind of way. I'll let Hussie explain on their Formspring (emphasis mine):

We learn more about the troll race, as a once peaceful species and such before kid-ancestors as players scratched their session, though the short term relevance of this is mainly as a preamble to Scratch's religious story. Establishing an Eden-like paradise from which there is some departure through sin is sort of the boilerplate basis for religious lore. ... The failed players from peaceful Alternia made a classic "deal with the devil" move by causing the scratch after being given a choice by the mother of all monsters. (Echidna. Hey, she's a big snake!) By doing so they brought Scratch into their universe, and therefore all the things you'd expect that comes with summoning the devil.

The Dancestor's "departure through sin"? It was the fact that they couldn't get their shit together and grew up inside the Medium. That's why they're the age they are, 9 sweeps - adulthood by troll standards. They aren't kids anymore because that's the ultimate sign of having failed to do a coming of age. Symbolically, the Dancestors represent a prior generation of grown-ups that fucked everything up, leaving a huge mess for their descendents to clean up after. In fact, Doc Scratch even describes the alternate choice Echidna gave them:

The heroes could either accept their defeat along with the extinction of their race, and put no others at risk.

In other words, they could have stopped LE if they'd simply chosen not to Scratch. But once more, in line with their behavior up until that point, they chose the selfish option, and bore descendants into the world they ruined. They're immature, nasty, mean-spirited, cruel, callous, and shallow on purpose, because their role in the story is antagonistic. They're aligned (even if unwittingly) with Lord English, as they're the ones who directly invited him in via their failure to grow the fuck up.

There's also a reason why SBURB/SGRUB directly tie achieving godhood and reaching the Ultimate Reward to planetary quests fundamentally designed to help children mature. God-tiering is supposed to come at the end of one's quest, as achieving it directly teleports you to the Battlefield for the final boss.

AG: I really think how successfully they mature is tied to success in the game. It challenges the players in all the ways they need to 8e challenged to grow, which is different for every individual, and veeeeeeeery different for every race. AG: I don't think we were so hot at that aspect of the game. In fact, I'm sure we were quite awful. Hell, even I wasn't that gr8 at it! I actually just kinda fell ass 8ackwards into the god tier, to 8e honest.

And there's a perfectly functional Watsonian explanation for this - in order to increase the odds that the new universe will successfully propagate new universes, it's ideal to leave it in the hands of kind, mature people. But the Doylist explanation is, again, even more interesting.

Hussie has spoken extensively about the comic having always been about two things at its core: first, a creation myth... and second, a coming-of-age. These are complimentary themes, as Homestuck also makes statements about society and its effects on kids. In the real world, the kids of today become the voters, revolutionaries, and lawmakers of tomorrow. In Homestuck, they create, and are responsible for, a new universe.

I always saw HS as an exploration of young people developing relationships over the internet […] There’s a lot more to HS than just that obviously, but if there’s anything which it’s been about through and through, it’s modern kids relating to each other from afar, developing as people and growing up.

In fact, all the initial kids' entry artifacts are metaphors for "departures, loss of innocence, and sometimes the journey from childhood to adulthood outright." John biting an apple, symbolizing the act that cast Adam and Even from Eden. Rose breaking a bottle, the act of christening a boat, and an item integral to the main means by which she relates to her mother, alcohol - an adult substance. Dave hatching an egg, literally the act of bringing new life into the world. Jade shooting an effigy of her dog, both symbolic of Old Yeller, and of breaking a pinata, an act often done at quinceneras.

There comes a point in childhood where the child stops being a child - the safe, familiar, comfortable world that they knew stops existing, and they can never get it back. They are thrust into a world that is alien and massive, and forced to grapple with the weight of their future duties. They deal with losing their guardians and finding direction in their absence. They must decide how they want to grow up, and then are responsible for shaping the society that comes after them. In other words, SBURB/SGRUB in this metaphor represent adolescence.

Within that context, God-tiering is actually interesting because it symbolizes adulthood - a semi-permanent state that a child is supposed to reach at the end of their SBURB/SGRUB journey. And, in fact, it's treated that way - none of the characters reach god-tiering the "proper" way... and of our god-tiered characters, nearly all of them have some sort of emotional struggle with growing up too fast. Vriska with the expectations of her shitty society, Rose with her emulation of her mother, Dave with his abusive brother, and the Alpha kids with substance abuse (the jujus) and romantic drama.

Anyway, sometimes when Mario's running sideways he gets a star that makes him magic and invincible. OH. YOU MEAN HE BECOMES TRICKSTER MARIO. Yes, but less stupid. So for a while he becomes flashy and hyperactive and nothing's challenging anymore. He just starts barreling over mushrooms and leaping over pits as fast as he can, then gets to the end and jumps on the flagpole and that's it. Mario "wins". But the point is, he didn't really win. That magic star was actually devastating to his development as a human being. WHY. Because he skipped over many critical trials on his spiritual journey. Mario NEEDS to stomp on all those mushrooms. He NEEDS to bonk those bricks with his head, for the sake of his personal growth. By using the star, he is denying himself many powerful moments of catharsis.

Like... I dunno... seems pretty blatant to me!

So with Homestuck so firmly being a coming of age, and with the Dancestors - whose primary failure is that of unrelenting immaturity - being cast in an antagonistic role, doesn't that make Caliborn's position of ultimate final boss extremely fitting when we take this conversation into account?

You may be destined for bigger things, but you’re still an atrocious, stupid child. And you may have won the “game” with your sister, but that doesn’t mean it was the best thing for your development as a person. You had her dream self killed, which is not an opportunity your species typically gets. So she died prematurely, instead of allowing the conflict within you to settle itself naturally. In short, you forced your predomination to happen a little too early, and now you’re stuck. STUCK? Yes. Your personality is stuck in some sort of cantankerous prepubescent limbo. You are going to be a stunted, miserable tool forever.

He's literally a child who chose to stunt his own growth so that he could reap all the game's rewards for himself. Someone who so stubbornly desired the selfish, greedy, and immature option that he was willing to hurt himself to achieve it. Caliborn - and by extension, Lord English - is a direct symbol for the refusal to mature, to be kind, to care about other people. By including Dirk, Gamzee, and Equius at their worst, he also comes to represent misogyny, toxic masculinity, the patriarchy. He's the Condesce's master, and so by extension, he represents fascism and oppression; as Doc Scratch, he gets off on abusing girls, and so he also represents predators and abusers. And his goal is to perpetuate himself, his ideals, what he symbolically represents, down every successive generation. Much like how these cycles of abuse and oppression seek to perpetuate themselves in the real world!

And that's why the alpha timeline, the GAME OVER timeline, is the way that it is: it's one where Lord English WINS. In Lord English's version of the story, everything is fucked up forever. He might be defeated, as is the timeline's inevitability, but his politics, his bigotry, and his ideals live on.

Except.

Our Breath player gains a power that literally unsticks him from time.

Now, personally, I don't believe that the ending we got is the one that was originally intended. I don't feel the need to elaborate upon that here, but suffice to say, given how clearly and consistently these themes are set up throughout the entire rest of the comic, it just makes sense to me that the ending we got, where characters stay dead, never finish their character development, etc. etc., is a MASSIVE tonal and thematic departure, which smacks of external pressures and influences. Everything after [S] GAME OVER is soft canon to me for this reason. But there's things that survive in it that are really really interesting, so I'll mention some.

First, the pre-retcon versions of the characters still exist, as we see from (Vriska). That means that everyone who died in GAME OVER would not necessarily have stopped mattering to the plot. I firmly believe that the original ending would've seen Lord English confronted by the GAME OVER (characters), who would also have the most karmic claim to beating Lord English's face in. This would also satisfy his whole deal of playing by the rules - he knows he HAS to be defeated, he just gets to choose the circumstances of his defeat; without realizing that John's retcon powers can rewrite a timeline, he would've set up his own death to be in the bubbles, at the hands of the already-dead, while Condy claims the Ultimate Reward - thus making it so that he still wins in the end.

But Breath represents freedom, choices - and the retcon powers are something John gains mastery over after completing his personal quest, which we've established is directly tied, both literally and symbolically, into growing up and maturing. By becoming a kind, empathetic, mature adult, John is able to choose something else.

Second, that the Ultimate Self is brought up at all, which seems to me like it would mitigate the bittersweetness of the (characters) from GAME OVER staying dead - because, in my head, the original plan for the retcon was that it would bring everyone back, and therefore, all the (characters) from GAME OVER would live on through the surviving post-retcon gang, who will eventually achieve Ultimate Selfhood, as Davepetasprite^2 says they will. This would also directly mirror the words Godtier!Calliope gives to her counterpart:

CALLIOPE: bUt then... CALLIOPE: what shoUld i do? CALLIOPE: you don't need to do anything. CALLIOPE: be who you've become, and who i didn't. CALLIOPE: consume the fruits of an existence i could never understand. CALLIOPE: live.

Third, there's just so many outstanding plot threads, even for the characters that DO survive. Jake's prophesized to defeat Lord English, Dave never actually gets over his hesitance about time travel and defeating Lord English, Karkat has multiple means of bringing his dead friends back to life and doesn't say anything, Vriska and Terezi still aren't 100% reconciled, Gamzee's tragedy is never addressed, Jane, Dirk, Jake, and Roxy never really figure out their situationship, etc. etc. etc. ... to say nothing about all the plot threads left dangling for the characters that stay dead.

And finally...

Isn't that just kind of a better story? One where the kids get to grow, change, learn from their mistakes, and create a better, kinder universe, after defeating the avatars of cruelty, oppression, and immaturity?

Is it just me? Haha.

[davekat-sucks]

holy wow the height chart pics are actually in proportion and look good? i started my hs journey with friendsim and pq then went backwards to read homestuck for lore so im like the newfag to end all newfags. tironas route was so fucking weird bc i got really uncomfy with this toddler-shaped person who also acts a lot younger than everyone else, going into tyzias computer and seeing the stuff she stored in there, and then saying that's normal for her to see.

im sorry but you cant just do that shit with a character in this climate, you gotta give her some kinda outside proof of age like an id or colored eyes if you wanna make these jokes with tirona. like is she a kid or a dwarf? if shes a kid get her tf outta there. if shes a dwarf make it obvious so the adult jokes arent as uncomfy ffs its not that hard

You are forgetting that this is the same Alternia planet that has the rule "IF YOU DON'T HAVE SEX BEFORE REACHING ADULTHOOD, WE WILL KILL YOU." It's telling you that practice of celibacy is absolutely forbidden. Chahut's route even mentions there are trolls who are younger than Amisia who are in quadrants, which may imply trolls who could be as young as 3-4 Earth years old already knows what and has/had SEX already. Alternia is full of only kids and teens. Mostly anything can kill them if they aren't careful, have a class system that judges on who is superior over others, and have quadrants to help trolls not only for reproductive purposes, but also to make sure their violent nature won't kill everyone and themselves. Basically Alternia is full of horny and violent trolls.

Age gap romance is seen as negative when Karkat and the ghost of his friends (13 years old) meet up with the Dancestors (19). Dancestors like Meenah, Cronus, and Meulin are shown to be kind of creeps for hitting on the kids (or shipping the age gap for Meulin's case). It's not known if the age gap romance is also taboo on Alternia since the planet is only filled with kids/trolls. We don't know if something like 6 year old blueblood troll dating a 14 year old rustblood and vice-versa, is seen negatively amongst troll society. And troll society itself is already fucked up as it is.

[homestuckreplay]

100 Page Instant Retcon

(page 1258-1268; Snowman theories)

Clubs Deuce has a ‘hat full of bomb, a fist full of penis, and a head full of empty’ and a HEART FULL OF LOVE FOR CLOCKS. Never forget. Even when he is trying to be tough and scary.

Stitch is absolutely right about the C4, I checked it out and that stuff is explicitly designed as a ‘safety explosive’ that doesn’t detonate due to physical damage or heat, only by a shockwave emitted from within. To be honest Stitch’s surgical needle powers could probably do something there if he wanted. And considering Droog thinks Stitch is worth keeping alive and might be able to actively fight against Lord English, he might be one of the more powerful Felt members, maybe able to survive an explosion.

Page 1260 has a title drop! I really like ‘Don’t Bleed on the Suits’ as the intermission title, it hits the tone well and the double meaning of suits as playing cards and formal wear is on brand. Suits are already important to the younger two Egberts, and games are relevant in general, so the title is reflecting motifs from earlier acts which is cool. The line is also good in context because Droog and Stitch, with their mutual interest in clothing presentation and preparation, should absolutely go rogue and make their own gang.

Boxcars’ recurring Red Cheeks magazine (p.1221, 1262) seems like a reminder that the intermission is more ‘adult’ than the rest of Homestuck, with jokes about sex and depictions of graphic violence. I mean, as graphic as it can get given the simple shapes of the art, but we see bullet holes and pools of blood while fights in acts 1-3 just had characters get knocked out. And then we get the introduction of Snowman, which warrants the first flash page since the intermission’s opening and presents the hot noir femme fatale, who literally stops all the fighting and leaves everyone stupefied with her presence.

I’m really interested in what’s going on with Snowman as a character, but I don’t love the whole ‘women are Special and Different to so-called “regular people”’ and ‘it’s not okay to hit girls’ tropes this plays into, whether accidentally or otherwise. Comparing this to the ‘reveal’ that PM is a woman, where AR says it would be ‘quite a pity to blow up that tall attractive female’ (p.1107) and then blows her up anyway because the law is the law, I definitely think the intermission is consciously taking a different tone but in this particular case it becomes less interesting than the main story.

I understand the 8 ball symbolism, although it’s a BIG increase of scale to go from ‘this guy is slow’ and ‘this guy sees near future trails’ to ‘if you kill [Snowman] you destroy the universe’ (p.1268). Jumping between timelines is extremely powerful (gonna circle back to this in a minute), but I still wasn’t aware the existence of the universe itself was at stake. But if so, does this have something to do with Jade’s MAGIC 8 BALL?

‘You might consider smashing it, but you are a little superstitious about whatever ominous consequences that might have, even if the occult talisman in question is a cheap piece of garbage.’ (p.804)

I think destroying the universe is a pretty ominous consequence, personally. I don’t think Snowman is literally Jade’s 8 ball, but I think they have similar magic. And from the same page:

'You guess maybe it could be used as a reverse-prediction device, and always trust the opposite of what it says.' (p.804)

I think there’s a good chance Snowman is a double agent. Obviously she’s a chess piece and not a green man, and would have fought alongside the Midnight Crew within Sburb as they’re all from the ominous planet, but at some point defected. So she needs to stab Slick in the eye as she walks past to keep up appearances that she’s no longer working with him, and also as a general power play, because she was (is?) probably the true leader of the Midnight Crew (some sort of joker or wild card?) but we have already been told that 8 balls aren’t to be trusted, so her true allegiance could be to either gang, somebody else entirely, or only to herself, and she could be giving everyone different stories.

'The MAGIC CUE BALL on the other hand is said to make predictions with alarming precision and specificity. Unfortunately it lacks a portal on its surface that allows you to view the prediction.' (p.805)

And for what it’s worth, this could provide some clues about Lord English, who is surely the Felt’s cue ball, directing all of their moves. Based on this description, he has total knowledge of everything that happens in his domain (the whole universe?), shares this with nobody, and is both completely inscrutable and also hidden away, only communicating with members of the Felt (hence why Stitch needs to be locked away, and why Snowman wanted to become part of the Felt – he’s a very powerful person to have on side).

Anyway the crazy thing is, this whole Snowman scene only happened because Slick pulled Crowbar’s pin, and straight up undid everything that happened across the last hundred pages/twelve real time days. A great little time travel short story suddenly gone, with very little clarification on what, exactly, is different. I definitely think this will be undone by putting Crowbar’s pin back in a few minutes – but it is a reminder of how tenuous this story is and how these two gangs might be smart enough to carry out complex and effective temporal plots, but a single pin can make it all worthless. Feels like a power move from the author in some ways and a reminder to the reader that anything can happen, and also raises questions of which if any timeline is the ‘true’ one.

Also Snowman gets two lines of dialog in her flash! I barely noticed before, but this intermission is FILLED with dialog – it’s not presented in the chatlog format, it’s reported speech but quoted directly from ALL these characters. Which is interesting because WV, PM and AR don’t speak at all, but the chess people here definitely do. And out loud dialog has been so rare in the early acts – I think just Dave’s ‘Stop!’ (p.354) and Jade’s speech to her grandpa (p.919) – that it’s wild that I didn’t notice until now, and I’m interested to see if this change will carry over to Act 4, perhaps if/when John and Rose meet in person inside the Medium.

As a final side note, I noticed this Felt poster on Dave’s wall (p.312, 353) and it gives us a glimpse of missing member Cans, who is totally huge and jacked from the look of it.

[classpect-crew]

A Change of Pace

So I want to do something different with this blog. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m autistic. (Surely, nobody could have predicted this. I’ll take a moment for you to find your fainting couch.) That means I’d give my left arm to find a convenient and personally meaningful system through which to understand the world, preferably inspired by a piece of media that is a special interest of mine. For me, Homestuck’s Classpect system and cosmology can be that foundation, but I don’t just want to slap these categories and ideas haphazardly onto the “real world” and try to make it all fit. Nor do I wish to take the easy way out and just adopt or adapt one or more of the belief systems that inspired these systems and their context. (I tried out Gnosticism for a bit, but honestly, dualism doesn’t become me.)

Instead, I discovered a secret third option: experiencing Classpects on their own terms. “Tali, what the fresh hell do you mean by that?” Well, it’s complicated. The simplest way to put it is that I want to interact with the Aspects and what they represent as if they’re a fundamental part of our world, too. I want to use Classes as archetypes that exemplify how we interact with these Aspects. And I want to do all of this while letting the real-world application of these systems develop naturally, through practical experience rather than a monogamous marriage to the literature. I’ve meditated on the connections between Breath and Void while watching switchgrass rattling in the wind, for example. They share the quality of emptiness; they’re the negative space, the air rustling through tree branches or the gap in your memory where something once was, only visible in the absence of what’s around them. This isn’t a conclusion I came to by reading the comic or banging my head against the Aspect Wheel’s geometry. Although one could arrive at the same realization from either source, in this instance I let the Aspects speak for themselves, and then connected the dots.

This might get long, so here’s your courtesy readmore.

As my non-Homestuck friends know all too well (because I absolutely won’t shut up about it) I’ve been working on ways to expand the Classpect system into a practical, real-world framework that can be used and understood by somebody who’s never read Homestuck. In fact—and this is ambitious of me, I know—I take great inspiration from the development of daemonism as a contemporary practice. Daemonism has taken on a life of its own, separate from its origins in Phillip Pullman’s novel series, His Dark Materials. I can imagine the value of a real-world analogue of the Classpect system, which could open up new methods of introspection, development of one’s personal mythology, and perhaps even an analytical framework through which to understand the world itself. For those brave enough to crack open this can of worms, the possibilities truly are endless.

What might we discover by exploring our own stories through this kind of lens? What does it mean to be a Witch, or an Heir, or a Seer? Why are so many of us preoccupied with figuring out what we are, instead of what we want to be? That’s one of the many questions we should ask ourselves as we embark on this journey. Sure, we can pretty easily state what role a Hero of Space plays in the context of SBURB: they’re tasked with breeding the Genesis Frog. In the broader story of Homestuck, Space players ‘set the stage.’ But what about in our world? What does Space mean to you? What Aspects hold sway over you, and how does this shape your worldview? Your actions? Your identity? When I came up with the term Organic Classpect, it was my intention to explore this very concept. This feels like a fairly natural continuation and expansion of that idea.

You can meditate on Life the same way you’d meditate on the classical Greek element of Fire. You can learn to see its influence in your own life (no pun intended) and commune with it, increase or decrease its presence at will. Hell, I once made a sigil using the symbol of Life and charged it before going to run deliveries in hopes of making good tips that day. My first delivery was a grocery order with like, three small bags, and I got tipped $20 cash on top of the $8 I received in the app. If you understand Aspects as a source of power, and Classes as different ways of working with them, there’s so much you can do within this evolving framework.

I’d love to know what y’all think of this, because it’s something I care about very deeply, and I’ve been exploring these ideas for a long time.

[hms-no-fun]

something in particular from the chapter stood out to me: there is a conscious decision to use the term "upsilon kids" diagetically, within the text, to refer to the group that had for a long time been referred externally as "the upsilon kids" within the fandom. any reason why you decided to make that leap?

well, the fandom called them the upsilon kids because i told them to. i always wanted these four to stand as parallels to the omega kids from hs2/hs:bc, and as echoes of the beta and alpha kids from homestuck proper. canonizing the name "The Upsilon Kids" is part of a larger strategy on my part that i'll expound upon a bit here.

you'll notice a few key bits of information being repeated in different contexts in this chapter. nods to three years ago, six years ago, ten years ago, etc. this is a deliberate choice to hammer home the timeline that we'll be working on going forward. this will (i hope) become increasingly useful as the story goes on, and we learn more about these characters and how they grew and changed over time. a big running theme of 3.2 is the notion of being in the middle of a story. the cast of godfeels, like us, have found themselves dropped into an ongoing narrative whose particulars don't really have anything to do with them. so much of the shift towards space opera has been about making the homestuck regulars feel less like the center of the universe. these are stories that have happened, and will happen, regardless of their attention or participation, which will nevertheless have an impact on their lives.

the burning core of 3.2 is the timeline of the upsilon kids. i very much like the idea of projecting a narrative forward to give the reader a vague sense of what's coming. lost on samsaria at 16, returned to the ewl at 23, betrayed at 26, dana & lenore reunited at 29. this means that the question isn't so much what happened as it is why it happened, which is always the more interesting question for me to write about anyway. so, back to your question-- it might've been good enough to just mention that Dana and her friends used to be "intergalactic celebrities," and indeed earlier drafts did leave it at that. but celebrity is a really vague, fluid concept, and i actually think that by itself is a less interesting fact as a result. adding the note that they were famous as a group for a specific event which defined their celebrity is just that much tastier. it's personal, you know? and it being personal in turn elevates and complicates the nature of Jade's betrayal.

i think, also, the diegetic proper noun The Upsilon Kids also stands as an interesting parallel given what we learned about Dana's history in B1C1. repeated themes in different contexts.

there's a lot of exposition in these early chapters of 3.2, because we're currently in the process of shaping a mold. i want you to see and understand this shape from a distance, to broadcast what is and is not a going mystery, so that you have an idea what to look for once we get to the point that we're actually starting to fill that mold with something. there's more i could say about this storytelling philosophy but i'll save that for another day, i think :)