#i have met people who believe that hussie fucking up the comic

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

I've been reading some of your homestuck essays, I think they're really good! I would like to know what you think about post-retcon homestuck and the interactions between reader and author throughout homestucks publishing. I was not in the fandom at the time of it being published, but I find this to be a very interesting aspect of the comic!

I was only on the fringes of the fandom at the time, but even that was enough to recognize that the fandom was absolutely awful. Every bad story you've heard about the Steven Universe, Voltron, and Undertale fandoms has its roots in the Homestuck fandom.

Pretty much as soon as the webcomic got popular on Tumblr, Hussie was put under intense scrutiny for basically every decision they ever made ever. I'm not going to say that Hussie was a perfect individual who never did anything wrong, because Hussie is a human being and that's how it works, but it's basically impossible to overstate how much the fandom tried to make an enemy out of Hussie.

The fandom was convinced that Hussie was their personal LE, and that attitude continues to this day - like, for an easy example of the fandom harassing Hussie for Literally Anything, when he stated that all trolls were bi/pan, to the point where they didn't have specific words for single-gender attraction, comparing it to a "more exacting preference" like somebody who only dates fat people - but that even within that framework, Kanaya was undoubtedly a lesbian character - people insisted Hussie was being homophobic. Fucking homophobic! For confirming all trolls are bi/pan, except Kanaya, who's a lesbian!

Other examples include: calling Hussie homophobic for John saying he wasn't a homosexual and Karkat literally not knowing what a homosexual was, because again, all trolls are bi/pan. Calling Hussie racist for making the kids aracial but accidentally leaving references to Dave having pale/pink skin in (because Hussie is a biased human person who can't be perfect and who did try to be more inclusive as the comic went on). Deciding that the dancestors served no purpose except for Hussie to be mean to their audience. Like there are valid criticisms to be made of Homestuck, but anything that was valid, nuanced, or thoughtful was drowned under a deluge of incoherent accusations of every -ism and -phobia that the fandom could possibly muster, the fandom as a whole racing to see who could paint Hussie as the biggest monster, even as they were harassing them to make more Homestuck.

Not to mention this was the era of rampant, unchecked ship wars and fandom misogyny. Not that fandom misogyny has gone away, mind you, but it's slightly more in check now. This was the era of fandom where it was normal to be sent death threats for shipping the "wrong" ship, and fandom ship wars were often encouraged by media of the time (love triangles were HOT - think zutara vs. kataang, team jacob/team edward, danny fenton/sam manson vs. danny fenton/valerie grey) because it drove up engagement. Homestuck was not really interested in shipping wars and love triangles - while many characters had circuitous routes and false starts, many were also pretty clearly set up to have specific endgame ships. But the fandom wasn't trained to behave that way, and the troll quadrants + canonical bi/pan trolls + active role of romance in the story meant that the ship wars were brutal - and also, Hussie was getting harassed every step of the way for not making peoples' favorite ships canon, a major part of a larger trend of people constantly ragging on Hussie for things not going the way they wanted plot-wise, to the point where Hussie had to comment on it constantly on his Formspring.

And don't think I forgot about the fandom misogyny! Here's a hot take for the class: Vriska is literally just Girl Zuko. She's ostensibly a noble from an imperialistic, warmongering, fascist society with an abusive parent who raised her with strict expectations, who thinks she has to act much more evil and more tough than she feels in order to earn the approval of her parent/society, and who secretly has misgivings and feels really bad about it and was set up for a redemption arc.

And people HATED Vriska. Vriscourse was so bad that many Homestuck fan spaces banned talking about Vriska at ALL, because just the mere mention of her name would spark massive, endless flame wars as people argued whether or not she deserved her little redemption arc (spoilers: yes, it turns out death is cheap in Homestuck and characters changing, growing, and becoming better is a huge part of the story) or whether or not she was justified in doing the things she did. Genuinely, I think a huge part of this intense hatred and anger was just misogyny. God forbid women have Zuko's character arc.

It was also part of two other large trends in the fandom - the first was that, despite finding every possible reason to call Hussie -ist and -phobic they could, the fandom itself was, ummm... "of its time." For example, the original March Eridan stuff was pretty clearly meant to be funny because, look, man in a dress! Isn't it sooo funny when Eridan wears a dress? (No hate to the artist, this was a long time ago and I'm sure they're a different person now.) The fandom was also constantly goading Hussie on WRT which characters were fat, and while we can argue about whether Hussie is fatphobic because none of the characters are canonically drawn to be fat, I'm going to go to bat for them on this: people treat the Fat Vriska jokes as though Hussie is the creepy weirdo exclusively, but the fandom was goading them on and thought that shit was hilarious, because that was what early internet fandom was like a lot of the time - at the same time as it harassed and decried creators for being problematic, it would turn around and delight in shitting on women, neurodivergent people, POC, and fat people, and Homestuck was rampant with it.

The second trend the Vriscourse was a part of was one that also hasn't fully gone away, but it's better now - wilful ignorance of the actual comic's contents. I'm not talking about the usual fandom fare of noncanon ships or "x character is trans/autistic/etc. even though I know there's no canon basis," which is all pretty damn harmless, but I mean like, memes and fanon would override canon and you would be outright harassed for not playing along. There are STILL places to this day that will call you an actual fascist, genocide liker, evil and irredeemable, etc. if you try to stick up for Eridan, even though Eridan is actually the LEAST casteist highblood and his entire character arc is about how his shitty fascist society makes him deeply anxious and unhappy. Similarly, you can/definitely would be be harassed for saying you don't like March Eridan and/or think it's OOC (it is), and I have nothing but sympathy for Gamzee and Equius fans, who also get it really bad.

The most vocal parts of the fandom, if not the majority, were people who were generally uninterested in engaging with Homestuck on Homestuck's terms, instead dead set on making up a version of it in their head and harassing people who disagreed, including Hussie. Echoes of that persist to this day - Equius, Gamzee, and Eridan get it bad, but practically none of the trolls have fandom interpretations that actually line up with who they are - Kanaya is actually just Eridan's bully (and did nothing to help Tavros after she caught Vriska kissing him), but people portray her as Nice Team Mom. Feferi is a casteist hypocrite who loves classism and calling people the r-slur, but people portray her as bubbly equality lady. So on and so forth. Like, damn, I barely participate in fandom and I'm out here meeting people who think Karkat ACTUALLY hates his friends like he says he does.

And then, of course, these people went and harassed Hussie because actual Homestuck did not match up with the Homestuck that existed only in their own heads.

On top of all the fandom harassment, Hussie was also facing ballooning scope. Most of Homestuck was a single dude drawing, writing, and animating it, and they would update every two or three days, sometimes less. So from the get-go, Homestuck was an INSANE project that demanded an insane amount of work and time from Hussie, and as it went on, it only got worse - and fandom expectations only got bigger. Suddenly, Hussie had to be in charge of merchandise, in charge of vetting, hiring, directing, and paying third-party artists, planning animations months if not years in advance, creating entire sections of the comic that had GAMEPLAY, directing ACTUAL GAMES, etc. ... there's an argument to be made that Hussie should not have taken on a workload they couldn't manage, but at the same time, the fandom certainly wasn't telling them to slow down. If anything, they harassed Hussie for every update, and were furious when hiatuses needed to happen to plan and execute some of the bigger moments later in the comic.

There's a Sarah Z video out there on the creation of the Homestuck game, which I think is OK if you take into account that Sarah kind of has fandom brain and is a little biased against Hussie (and I guess Hussie did send a spurious legal threat which is pretty funny but, y'know, understandable that Sarah would be peeved), where it's really clear that Hussie was not ready for the kind of responsibility, time, and effort needed to manage a whole-ass video game.

So by the time Game Over and the Retcon roll around, you basically have to imagine that Hussie has so many irons in the fire that the furnace is about to pop like a balloon, and the people they were making the damn things for in the first place have been relentlessly harassing them for YEARS, and weren't even that interested in engaging with the actual story in the first place. I'd say the majority of the fandom to this day STILL does not understand Eridan - how do you think they would've taken his redemption arc, and especially the fact that he was set up to date Karkat and Roxy? Given the pattern of their behavior up to that point... they'd probably harass Hussie and call them homophobic.

This is why I genuinely cannot blame Hussie for turning on the fandom and truncating their story. Vriska got upgraded to main character and had her character development reset because fuck you, fandom, you couldn't understand her redemption arc in the first place so now you don't get one. DaveKat got (kind of) made canon but as a weird throuple with the Mayor because fuck you, fandom, you didn't appreciate any of the actual gay ships that were set up so now you're stuck with brutally OOC DaveKatMayor. Karkat and Jake have their plot threads left hanging because fuck you, fandom, you never even noticed all the prophecies and symbolism and character arcs because you were all too obsessed with screaming at women and took the dancestors as a personal insult, so now the guy who's supposed to defeat LE and the guy who's supposed to bring equality and forgiveness to all bloodlines don't even get to participate in any of the important boss battles.

People call Hussie a troll, and they really aren't. If you read their old Formspring, they're clearly deeply fucking passionate about the art of storytelling, and switch between bafflement, mild indignation, and playing along when people ask them stupid questions. But back then, they were always very serious and genuine when they answered questions asked in good faith, and I'm being 100% genuine when I say that I've learned about how to tell stories better by reading Hussie's Formspring. Over time, however, those stupid questions became more common, and often morphed into outright harassment, and in response to that, Hussie's answers became more humorous and facetious, and the fandom - who was already trying to find ANY reason to hate Hussie - started to paint Hussie as an unreliable trickster and liar who got their jollies by shitting on the fandom.

Honestly, in doing so, the fandom was what turned Hussie into exactly that. Again, I'm not saying Hussie was a perfect baby who did nothing wrong - there's a lot of stuff to critique and scrutinize about their writing, their biases, and what topics they found appropriate to joke about. However, I AM saying that they were also just a human fucking being who was trying to write a good story, who was harassed at every turn, mostly for things that actually weren't problematic at all, whose words and actions were always taken in the absolute worst possible faith, and that the fandom is not fucking faultless, and if there's anyone that I'm mad at for how bad Homestuck ended, it's the fans.

That's my hottest Homestuck take.

[valle-de-sombra-de-muerte]

Homestuck Reread: Act 4, Part 3/4 (p. 1669-1864)

Read the previous post here.

The second half of Act 4 starts here. And oh fuck no, it's the introduction of Hussie's self-insert.

Yes, it is a terrible idea. This whole bit should've died right here.

Hussie proceeds to recap the entire first year of Homestuck which really is just a big waste of time to read. If you're really lost about what's going on, you should just read all my reread posts up to this point instead! Which... actually isn't ideal because I'm not really writing a comprehensive plot summary here. This series of posts is mostly aimed toward people who are already familiar with Homestuck and have read it before. If you tried showing these to someone who has never read the comic before, they'll likely be confused. Err, fuck it, let's move on!

John is rightfully reluctant to listen to Terezi again. He typically shows resistance to commands only when they might put him in life-threatening danger. And since he finally decides to believe Dave's warnings, this counts as one of those situations.

I forgot to mention this in the last post, but Davesprite and Terezi's conversation was the first time "jegus" is used. Some people seem to think that this is the name of a troll analogue to Jesus, but really it's an in-joke between Dave and Terezi that gradually disseminates through their respective friend groups.

John's adversity shatters and he decides to start listening to Terezi again. It really didn't take much for her to convince him to do this. This is hardly portraying Terezi as some kind of "master manipulator." It's just another instance of John being a gullible moron.

Also, this will be the last conversation between John and Terezi until Act 6. Her conversations with the humans will be exclusively limited to Dave until that point. I guess she wasn't so serious about being John's "pal" after all.

Bro what do you mean you decide to name him? That's Rose's cat. You can't go into someone's house and rename their pets.

I do like that Davesprite immediately points out how dumb it was that John decided to listen to Terezi again.

John is such a massive fucking cunt. He's really going to disrespect the guy who saved his life like that? Even apart from that, that's his best friend, or at least supposedly.

Davesprite's reaction is entirely justified here. He's supplying John with useful info, only to be met with disinterested responses and being told to fuck off in favor of the other Dave. I really think "ok" is John's catchphrase, even moreso than Aradia's. Pretty much every time someone tries to talk to him about the game is met with him going "oh ok" or "wow ok" like some kind of spongehead.

This conversation is notable because Dave's entire persona is centered on being detached, aloof, and "cool" but here Davesprite sounds genuinely pissed. He doesn't even care about maintaining the facade because his "best friend" just revealed he doesn't even see him as a person worth talking to.

Dave thinks he can speak on Davesprite's behalf, which he's definitely not qualified to do. He spent four months living in a pointless reality offshoot with the full knowledge that everything in it is a mistake that needs to be rectified. Rose, the one person he had for company in that timeline, had to be essentially killed in order to fix the timeline. And even if there's still a Rose that currently exists, that single version of Rose he spent all those months together with was still destroyed by his actions. Her blood is on his hands.

All this is to say he's definitely not the same person as current Dave. They may share the same memories and past experiences, but everything Davesprite experienced past the point of divergence is uniquely his. He's his own individual.

That "yeah" right before signing off cuts deep. He is sick of John's shit. Not that I imagine John would notice at all.

Davesprite might be the most tragic character in this godforsaken story. Having Rose's death weighing on his conscious, being forced to mutate himself into a ghostly half-bird monstrosity, letting another version of himself live out the rest of "his" life. He did it all for the sake of making sure his friends have a future to live in, but said friends don't respect him or even like talking to him. To them, he's an extraneous copy of their existing friend. He isn't "real."

And the sad thing is that it's not just his friends who think that. Hussie didn't give a shit about him either. Wouldn't it have been crazy if this conflict was explored and Davesprite was a bigger presence in the story? If he was actually acknowledged as part of the team and the other kids had to learn to stop treating him as "the other Dave"

Well too bad because for one thing, Hussie cannot write convincing conflict. If two characters don't like each other, they simply ignore each other and don't speak. So instead of Davesprite being a ever-present source of awkward tension within the group, he's downgraded to an impotent background character. Tough shit, Orange Dave.

Oh yeah, the less said about Davesprite's ultimate end, the better. What a fucking travesty.

Dave really wants John to snoop around Rose's belongings. The little freak. At least he stops short of asking John to rummage through her underwear drawer.

Technically one of the journals does contain "important game stuff" but Dave doesn't know that. I bet he just wants to know if she wrote about him in her journal.

Dave is putting more effort into invading Rose's privacy than just about anything else prior to this point. Obsessed much?

My god, that "come hither" expression. Things are about to get steamy on Derse.

"Whipping Bugwinged Fuckall" is an amazing Kanaya quote.

Oh look, Sollux's first appearance. He and Kanaya should've talked more. It almost feels like they're co-workers and he's the guy she bugs for IT support. It's a fun dynamic.

Also, I guess Alternia has sex offender registries, which makes no sense. I feel like you'd get straight up killed by the drones for much less.

No I didn't leave this page open while the entirety of "Derse Dreamers" played. That would be silly. Also when I said things were gonna get "steamy" I obviously meant they'd get all sweaty from dancing. Jeez, what'd you think I meant? 😇

Cal is kicked out of the party for being a cockblock.

What are these "shenanigans" Davesprite engaged in to get the hammer from Hephaestus? Fuck if we'll ever find out.

Even though the two kingdoms are fated to fight each other and yadda yadda, there doesn't seem to be much enmity between them. WV is able to unify everyone with little effort.

[S] WV?: Rise Up is certainly a flash that exists. It serves as a follow-up to [S] Jack: Ascend, which I also wasn't really too enthused about. I didn't spend much time talking about it in the last post because I couldn't think of anything to comment about it. Which is strange, because you'd think the big flash to celebrate the comic's one year anniversary, as well as the one that introduces the story's main antagonist, would be a bigger spectacle.

But there's no action, no cool shots like in previous flashes, and ultimately Jack's "ascension" comes from the stupid bunny shit and not from any action on his part. The only real highlight of that flash is the killer tune that is "Black". Apart from that, it pales in comparison to previous flashes in the comic. Much of the same can be said about this one. At least "Skaian Skirmish" is a cool track.

When does this ever have a use? Just like with John, the only point of this whole alchemizing montage is to create a new outfit, computer, and weapon for Rose. The rest of these creations are useless junk.

I mention a new outfit, but the true irony is that the kids' best outfits (John's Vriska jacket, Rose's black dress, Dave's raglan shirt, and Jade's uhh... God Tier dress?) aren't even a part of these montages. For the first three, they're all acquired off-screen and we don't even know the recipes for them.

Trailing right behind Rose's montage, Dave gets his as well. Again, nothing of true value gets made here. These montages feel like Hussie padding out the page count. Seriously, who actually enjoys these parts of the comic?

The alchemiter can potentially create body parts, albeit at an exorbitant cost. Could you imagine if this was actually implemented? If one of the characters lost a limb or something and they got an alchemized replacement?

They could've done that with Vriska or Tavros so they wouldn't have had to use robotic prosthetics. Man, that would've been cool.

I like how this is essentially a "secret" SBaHJ page because it isn't available alongside the others and only appears in Homestuck.

The "most important thing"? My gosh, he really wants to get in her business.

Yes, Rose's story is overly florid, verbose slop, but it feels so similar to Hussie's usual prose when he's trying to be descriptive that I'm not even sure if this story is written to be intentionally pompous or not.

Has Hussie ever tried submitting something for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the contest to write the worst possible opening paragraph for a novel? I'd bet he'd win without trying. (If you've never heard of this before, look it up and go to the website to read the winning entries. They're hilarious.)

It is rather sweet that Dave likes the story enough to want to read more of it later, though.

Dave is able to figure out Mom Lalonde's intentions simply because he knows Rose well enough to tell when she's being dramatic. See, Dave doesn't even need to read Rose's journal to discover her true thoughts. He already sees through her well enough already (and she likewise sees through his act just as clearly).

The fact that Rose remembers "some things" about her previous self's existence sounds like something that should be investigated further, instead of being written off so abruptly.

Or is that "ok cool" a defense mechanism on Davesprite's part? Maybe talking to Rose is too painful for him, because she's not "his" Rose. Even if she retains all the memories from the future, she'll still never be the same Rose he left behind.

I really wish this was explored more. Davesprite and Rose never talk again after this conversation and it drives me insane. What if he actually tried pressing further about what she remembers about the timeline, trying to seek out remnants of "his" Rose? He could be trying in vain to reconnect with her, to apologize about leaving her to die, but all that ever happens is that he gets rebuffed.

And Rose might recall the moments she shared with another Dave in another timeline, but stamps them out as she continues to focus on the present and as she grows closer with Kanaya. Perhaps revisiting those memories of the doomed timeline, reliving the loneliness leading up to her demise, are too painful to recall. And Davesprite is a living reminder of them, so she pushes him away to make herself forget.

If only Hussie could write convincing and earnest tragedy. We were utterly robbed.

Dave makes it seem like Jade is the one who's going to freak out about the body. But somehow I doubt the girl who lives with the corpse of her grandfather, along with other taxidermied creatures, on permanent display is going to be fazed by another dead body. Yeah, I'm thinking Dave is the one who doesn't want to keep looking at his own corpse.

Also, I never noticed DD hanging out on the I-beam before. That's a neat detail.

This part of the Act is admittedly fun. Could it be because a lot of it had a healthy focus on Rose and Dave? It's amazing how much nicer the comic is to read when the focus is put on the stronger characters.

Unfortunately I already know that the next few upcoming pages are going to be one of my least favorite parts of the comic, so I'm not terribly looking forward to wrapping up this Act next week...

Read the next post here.

[bloodym3lody]

Homestuck

Please know that I’m probably not going to proof read this and it’s going to be very jumbled and probably make no sense. I’m just putting everything out there. I’m sorry.

So my relationship with Homestuck is a weird one. I got caught up on it right when Terezi was introduced and stopped reading a little while after the alpha trolls were introduced.

I was instantly in love with Homestuck and quickly joined the fandom. Homestuck was the first fandom I ever joined. I started on deviantArt and then made Skype accounts as Terezi and Gamzee. I would add other accounts and RP with them. That’s how I met 2 of my best friends at the time. One of them I eventually started dating and they are still my longest relationship. But more on that later. They convinced me to make a tumblr. It was very embarrassing. My url was applebees and my title was Welcome to Applebee’s. It was a Sollux and Dave blog for a while where I made way too many personal posts, like this one, and reblogged way too much Homestuck and aesthetic posts. I guess not much has changed besides the personal posts and the fandoms I follow. Anyways, I’m getting off track.

Homestuck helped me get out of my shell so much. Before it I would never imagine going to cons or cosplay. I could dream but I was never comfortable enough so do so. Terezi was my first ever cosplay and she will always hold a special place in my heart. Anime Expo was my first convention and it was amazing. That year was absolutely perfect. The fandom was still good and really close. There weren’t that many of us still. I still have my video of Bowman singing How Do I Live for the fans. I cried so fucking much. I love that song still. More on the fandom later. Homestuck helped me so much so I can never completely get rid of it. I still want a Homestuck tattoo just because it had such a huge impact on my life. It kind of made me who I am today. Comfortable enough to cosplay and go to cons and just walk up to people at cons and talk to them. Take pictures at cons hell just asking to take a picture of someone at cons. It got me into photography more. It made me want a better camera to get better cosplay pics. I now don’t do that as much but I still love it. Cosplay photography is one of my favorite things and I would love to have a career in it.

Homestuck changed my life in such a short period of time it’s crazy. Like I still get a craving for Faygo and the occasional slime pie. I still want to reread it even if it brings back bad memories. I still love the characters with everything I have. I still fight for it and the good parts of the fandom. I still own all of my cosplay pieces for every character I cosplayed. I still make dumb references. 4/13 is still very special to me. I still have all of the fan art I’ve bought over the years. I still have my fan troll and love her. I still own the first 2 books. Hell the first one is signed. Even though it’s an awful trash fire I love it. Even if Hussie does problematic things I still love it. There’s just so much this comic has done for me that I can’t forget about it and throw it out of my life.

Now for the negatives. That relationship I mentioned earlier was one. We dated for 9 months and knew each other for about a year before we started dating. I can’t look at Karkat or Tavros without thinking about them. There are things I can’t do without thinking about them. They were god I don’t know. Emotionally abusive I guess is the term. But they also helped me realize things about my sexuality. I realized I was bi when I started dating them. They taught me what asexuality was. They taught me what demisexuality was. They taught me so much about what it was like to be genderqueer and trans. They taught me a lot about sexuality and what to look out for in a relationship. They made it hard for me to talk to people online even though I’ve been doing it since I was 11. They gave me trust issues. They made me scared to ask questions. They gave me a lot of issues that I don’t want to get into. I still think about them.

The fandom is a hard point for me. I got into it when it was still a baby. Barely a baby but still a baby. It grew so much right after I joined the fandom. A lot changed. The people that started joining gave it a bad name. They did bad things. They started fights. They ruined property. They harassed people. The second Anime Expo I went to there was this Gamzee that would go around and randomly honk a horn in peoples faces. Just anyone they saw. Another instance happened at ALA the year after. A group of troll cosplayers decided to go into the pool with full grey paint on. It was coming off in the water and messing up the system and they just didn’t care. They stayed in the pool and just let it happen. Everyone was mad at them and told them to get out but they didn’t. Like who knows which brand they used but it wasn’t a good one and they obviously didn’t seal it or anything. At least use water proof stuff if you’re going in the pool or ask if it’s ok with the staff. They weren’t even doing it for pics just getting drunk and having fun. Like I understand if your an Eridan or Feferi wanting cosplay pics in the pool but they at least do it properly. Like the pool was shut down for the rest of con. It was bad. There’s more stories but this is getting waaaay too long.

People started avoiding Homestucks and calling them names. They would shun Homestucks at cons and want them gone. It’s very understandable. I was ashamed to be in the fandom. I didn’t want to be associated with it anymore. I stopped cosplaying the characters I loved. I stopped going to meetups. I stopped following the fandom. I just stopped all together.

I just have a lot of love for Homestuck even though it caused a lot of bad things in my life. There are so many other things that I’m not putting on this post, it’s just getting way too long and causing way too many memories to resurface.

It made me never want to be in a fandom again and I’m still not actively in a fandom. I mean sure I reblog things but I don’t make theory posts anymore or things like that. I don’t actively talk to people in fandoms anymore either. Like I love having online friends. Hell, I don’t even like calling them online friends but for the sake of this post I am. The last true online friend I had was 5 years ago and I really miss it. I have people on here that I would love to talk to and I’m sure one day I will but I just need to get over the anxiety of online talking again.

When Homestuck ended I couldn’t believe it. Everyone was talking about it again. I rushed to watch the end flash even if I had no idea what was happening. I cried. I laughed. I had relief. I had closure. I was ok. I was not ok. Just so many emotions happened that day. Now there’s an epilogue and I’m not sure if I can read it.

Oh my god all of the jokes and reference and weird Homestuck things. I still can’t believe buckets were a thing. Also all of the relationship stuff. I still have it all memorized.

It gave me confidence, joy, friends, community, love, freedom, and many more good emotions and things.

It gave me fear, pain, confusion, heartache, disgust, resentment, and many more bad emotions and things.

Homestuck has truly changed me life forever, good and bad. I love this comic and will until I die.

Happy 4/13. Happy 10 year anniversary to the comic that changed and impacted so many lives.

[dukeofriven]

So, you probably don’t care, but your rant about computers all sucking came up as “in my orbit” because I follow a lot of computer science blogs. The people tumblr is most likely to show your anti Computer Scientist rant to, is computer scientists.

Yeah I was pretty cranky when I wrote that. My quest to read everything Andrew Hussie ever wrote dumped me into a 1700 word article of his where he kvetches about Apple and a trip to Macworld in 2006. The first half is maybe the most infantile, exhausting, shitty thing he ever wrote. Worse than the HIC/Hitler thing, worse than Stoner Lou, worse than the racist chicken - it’s just one part boring to one part childish. It wasn’t until I was talking to @rahkshirock​ about it that I realized he was throwing an honest-to-god Karkat tantrum for a thousand words, ripping Apple to shreds in really lazy and strangely hostile ways. (Podcasts. He goes on and on about how horrible the very idea of a podcast is. It’s almost comically petulant.)So I got so sick of his shit and I vented about it to Tumblr then went back to the article. At which point he had, of course, calmed the fuck down and the second half makes some really good and valuable critiques about problems Apple actually had/has - but that first section was so specious and exhausting I just kind of lost it.I’ve been bitter about computers ever since my university days. There are, broadly speaking, two types of CS students: those who graduate knowing nothing about computers save that the devil machines are not to be trusted, and those who graduated knowing everything about computers and who feel that they (the student) should be worshipped because they posses the secret digital mysteries that lesser mortals are not gifted enough to be able to comprehend. (It’s a neurodevelopmental disorder that falls under a diagnostic umbrella called STEM-Up-Their-Ass Syndromes. It kills tens of thousands of promising personalities every year, and there is currently no cure.)The former type tends to live off the grid in shacks on mountains and occasionally posts some fragment of code via phone phreaking that is an incredible thing of beauty and will improve society as a whole, or else they, like Jonathan Gillette, know that computer literacy is the only way civilization can save itself from predatory tech companies and they do their best to teach some crumb of their wisdom to the common people before they go mad from the strain of oracular vision and vanish from the mortal plain. (Jonathan Gillette is the only reason I can get anything to run under wine. Though I retain essentially zero working knowledge of Ruby I feel his spirit forever at my back urging me onwards to at least try so as not to disappoint my pet ham).The other kind of CS student is among the worst specimens of humanity this side of Peter Thiel: they retain a deep sense of resentment because they were oppressed for their religious beliefs (Early-Day Conservative Weeabooism) in high school, think having a natural facility with math places them highly in a caste system of their own fevered imaginings, and are forbidden by their religion from applying deodorant because mortification of the flesh is a way to show their devotion to their church’s martyred founder. (A guy called Kevin Johnson, a COBOL programmer who preached his gospel unto Usenet from his parent’s basement in Plano, Texas and was taken from this world in 1993 when a large Bubblegum Crisis poster fell upon him and pinned him to the ground, where he subsequently drowned in a puddle of Crystal Pepsi - although, according to traditional ‘Cweeaboo’ beliefs, before his mortal body perished his true essence was freed from its sweat-slick shell by the Incorrupt And Perfectly Rational Pneuma of Bertrand Russell and stored in the Russian/Spanish subtitles on a bootleg betamax of the finale to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. The day this bootleg is rediscovered and played the rivers will run with ramune, the air across America will buzz with the sound of Tanna japonensis, and Anime Will Finally Be Good Again. (A splinter-sect of Cweeaboo, known as Conservadox Weeabooism, believes that it was not an Macross bootleg but a pristine laserdisc of volume 5 of The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and that on its discovery the rivers will run red with Jolt.))These CS students are almost universally white, cis-male, in need of a remedial course on fundamental hygiene tips, and think Deadpool is straight.If this sounds like a grossly unfair stereotype you are correct and I would normally never stoop to saying something so nonsensical, but in university I had courses in the Computer Science building and I encountered these people every single day. It was really rather incredible from a sociological standpoint: ‘oh my goodness how can you possibly exist as a real legal adult quick point me to the TV show you escaped from and I’ll help you return.’ But, no, there they were in the flesh, with thirty more waiting in the wings - they had some psychic power that told then if you had watched an anime at least once and they would pounce while you waited for class to start in order to interrogate you and ensure you had The Right Beliefs About The Choicest Waifus. They were in constant competition with the economics students for ‘conversation I am most willing to chew my own arm off in order to escape’ and are a good reason why I advocate for Misdemeanor Douchebaggery statues in institutions of higher learning across the continent.The first type of CS student will help you with your tech problems, never shame you for your hardware or the hows and whys of why you own it, will listen to your woes, and survived their CS program without murdering their fellow students - which probably qualifies them for sainthood. They often, but not exclusively, identify as female, tend to have a wicked sense of humour, and can usually debone and serve a sexist male like a Wimbledon Champion in under fifteen seconds.There is also supposedly a third kind of CS student, the so-called ‘ordinary person’ who is said to have graduated without making an ass of themselves at a party, runs the servers at their local insurance company, lives in a suburb, and finds The Big Bang Theory funny. I have never met such a person and have come to believe they are a myth created by car companies as the ideal buyer persona for mid-range sedans.Anyways since university I have approached computers and their advocates with great suspicion and mistrust. The last decade of rising technocratic malevolence has really only proven the correctness of my position: you’d have thought that weebs would have known better than to not only build a soulless android but also allow it to attend Harvard, but the Objectifying Women protocols were so wearingly on-brand that the apocalyptic hubris of the Zuckerborg Project isn’t all that surprising.Anyways, computers suck, and anyone who wants to make you feel inferior for using one kind of computer over another kind of computer is the sort of person who will try and convince you that there’s a meaningful moral distinction between Gatorade and Powerade. Also Andrew Hussie has, or at least had, a bee up his ass about podcasts that made him sound like an iPod-fixated Alex Jones and his rant on the subject is very hard to sit through.This probably didn’t answer your question, if you had a question, but I’m sure it created a lot of questions, which is all you can really expect from me.

[love-laika]

homestuck reread: act 5

sso , as a follow up to this post (jesus christ did i really write that over two weeks ago?), i figured i ought to post my thoughts while rereading act 5 of homestuck. obviously spoilers if you still care about that at this point

when most fans talk about homestuck today, they’re really talking about act 5. its when some of the more infamous aspects (trolls, absurd time shenanigans, ridiculously meta storytelling) come in full force. i also happen to believe it’s probably the best part of the whole story (well so far, i still have to reread act 6). before jumping in, pretty much all of my previous complaints remain.

The trolls are great. That’s really all there is to say on the matter! Seeing how their session plays out is really fun, especially since unlike the kids, it is aggressively abridged. It’s so short, I’m actually curious why Hussie chose to have it be an Intermission rather than Act 5 Act 1... or well, actually given the events leading to Cascade, that might not be true. It’s a nice meta way of signifying how the A and B sessions are intimately tied.

Either way, I thought it’d be fun to examine how I feel about each troll! 

Karkat - Everyone’s favorite, really. His ridiculous screaming rants and obsession with feeling important brushes over his intense insecurity. The obsession with hiding his blood (even after Alternia is long gone), insistence on being leader, past/future self-hatred... he’s got a hell of a complex. actually, the story shines a light on how he agonizes over every mistake he’s ever made, to the point where he dissociates his actions from himself by calling past/future him a FUCKING IDIOT or whatever. He’s a good boy

Aradia - On my previous read, I never thought much of Aradia. there wasn’t really anything in particular i disliked about her, she just never stuck. which of course is dumb, and past me is stupid for glossing over her. especially after going god-tier, she’s like... i can’t even really describe it. i guess is just safe to say i like alive aradia a lot because she’s just a little bit crazy

tavros - maybe its my bias towards vriska, but i kind of don’t like tavros. you know, maybe its some sort of reflection of how i feel about myself or something about how his coward schtick is annoying to me. (his raps are fun to read aloud though)

sollux - sollux is a complete asshole (basically to the end if i remember right), but even if he’s written to be unlikeable his position as a snarky jerk fits well within the troll group. though, surprisingly after his introduction he doesn’t do very much because he never interacts with the kids. his bifurcation gimmick though, and how its basically some absurd foreshadowing for act 5 as a whole is just. its so cool.

nepeta - nepeta has always been a favorite troll of mine even though she was basically born to die and plays no real role in the alpha timeline at all. despite this, fans like myself latched onto her because she’s a catgirl duh! the anime is inescapable. nepeta’s just cute bu her death scene makes me really sad... she didn’t deserve it! and being taken out by gamzee is just cruel. i guess this is what fanfiction is for???

kanaya - you know im starting to think my thoughts on all the various trolls were warped by the Vriska Distortion Field. I didn’t give a shit about the rest because vriska is the best!!!!!!!! this time around, i really noticed vriska and kanaya’s relationship sort of blossom all the way through act 5. its kind of touching after she had a pretty rough time in her own game after the Pupa Pan incident. kanaya’s great especially her transitioning from humorless broad to snark extraordinaire. i especially like to read her speech as just the most posh and practiced british accent Because It Makes Her Sound Sophisticated When Shes Saying Really Something Dumb Like Shout Pole

terezi - terezi’s gimmick is just so... so much. the obsession with justice and law (particlarly brutal troll law) makes her just totally silly. she hangs her stuffed animals from her treehouse. the blindness, the licking, H3Y D4V3-ness is a joy to read. it also helps that her harpsichord-led music is some of the best over the entire discography.

vriska - you know how i feel about vriska. you cannot beat her in a troll-off she is simply the 8est there is

equius - i don’t like equius! hes a creep! his gimmick is that hes a sweaty space racist! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! i really don’t understand people that get attahed to him! i wish nepeta got to spend more time separate from him!

gamzee - ah yes the most important character in homestuck. i like gamzee, but 

i dont like his position with fans as the fuckin yaoiest boy to ever live when hes actually a horrorcore clown murderer

how long he remains in the story. way longer than he ever should have stayed. i understand he has to do stuff for lord english and all that, but i kind of wished he died on the meteor. oh well!

eridan - ah yes the other space racist. eridan i can actually stand though because he’s basically every shitty boy you’ve ever met. he’s totally desperate and pathetic and then when he gets rejected he gets violent. for such a silly comic, i think it stumbles into something weirdly real there. eridan’s a douche until the very end. i also give him like chavviest voice i can muster. it is a blight on the queens english and i apologize

feferi - i really noticed that feferi is a little bit deeper than i originally thought! i always just thought of her as “the nice girl” but she can be pretty devious and even cruel occasioanlly. She has an interaction with Vriska in what of the Alterniabound flashes is just so... prickly? on both sides.

ANYWAYS when we get back to the kids, I’ll admit I don’t remember a lot of the details. john goes to explore skaia and spends a lot fot ime with vriska. dave builds up a ridiculous amount of money, rose fucks shit up, and jade eventually gets to start breeding frogs after fianlly entering the game. i can’t exactly explain why, but the pacing here just feels better. maybe its variey of environments and general avoidance of pointless distractions, but its a much easier read than the earlier parts. i mean, i guess id hope so after the comic has gone on for 3 years at this point i think. Act 5, in totality is about the same length as all the previous parts combined, but goes by way faster! it kind of sucks that you know, you have to dig through a lot to get to the good parts. but man those parts are really good.

ad then we get to the buidlup to cascade, the parts in doc scratch’s room. I feel like some of the realest shit is right here. vriska’s triumph/death just kills me every time. i kind of take john’s side here on her past. at the very end, when she really starts to show remorse and to wonder who vriska really is breaks my heart. terezi’s end as well. the culmination of their friendship and rivalry coming down to a single choice. kill her, or let her go and doom everyone. its sad in a way very little else is in the story (except maybe dave and rose’s suicide mission). even knowing what happens much later, it just... its so rough yall.

i remember crying reading most of these parts. i have very specific memories of it happening. i wish it was easier to show new people some of these parts because they are just ugh... so choice. im a sucker for it. also there’s the sotry of the troll ancestors, her imperious condescension, lord english, etc etc etc.

i dont have much to say about cascade, a lot has already been said by everyone else. it is almost certainly the climax, even if the story has a ways to go, and its a triumph! It almost feels like it should be the end of the story in some ways because of how it is the culmination of everything that has happened since the very beginning.

thats all i can really say about that without getting bogged down in minutiae. Act 5 is fantastic, period. Now that Lord English is here (or rather, he already was), a new arc begins in Act 6. It’s approximately around here where I caught with the story as it was coming out! I’m really really curious about how I feel about when reading it in one go because it’s also around this time that updates got slower and slower, due to increased production time, then the exceptionally troubled development of Hiveswap.

[speakingintothedarkness]

Old Memes and Memories

Hnn.... It’s been a while. 

Still with Liz. Briefly dated a trans girl long distance over teh interwebs but it went downhill. 

Still... grappling with gender, even though I’m way more comfortable with being not-cis than I was last time we talked about this, dear internet. 

I read a thing today. Its keeping me awake, and I have this weird feeling that if I tried to talk to anyone about it, it’d come off as... either inscrutible, offensive, or both.

Ugh it’s embarassing really. Fucking Homestuck. I know, what is this 2015? But seriously I had read that entire trashfire of a webcomic when it was being released and I only just learned about the epilogues so I figured I’d read that. 

It’s a bit weird. Go figure, right? Hussie is a weird dude who leans into his weirdness even harder than Dan Shive does. The entire thing is framed around a dichotemy, a choice that one character makes and all the action that follows comes from that choice. You get to make that choice for that character, but the story only really makes sense if you do it both ways. And, perhaps typically, even though this is the epilogue to a vast spanning story, somehow it’s not even really about tying up the loose ends. In fact, it leaves you with more than you started. The antagonist of the epilogue isn’t even the villain that was built up throughout the run of the comic and then never directly addressed. 

But that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is, of course, the trans question. 

In one of the two branching timelines, a character comes out as trans. In that timeline, he is given time to examine his gender with an understanding partner and winds up deciding on a full transition to being male. 

...but in the other timeline, the same character winds up being married to a straight dude and remains a woman, has kids and basically... goes as straight cis as she can. And its really hard to say which version of them is happier in the end. A bunch of shit goes terribly for both versions (either/both ways, this was not a happily ever after for pretty much anyone involved), but both versions wind up soliloquizing about how they struggled with their gender and are happy with where they wound up. 

This... is a thing that as a tran myself I know I’m supposed to be foaming at the mouth over. Implying that trans is a thing you can choose to be, implying that, if things had gone differently you might wish to not be what you are, even if specifically asked about it... these are cardinal sins. 

And certainly for some people, they’ve known on some level who they were their entire life. But... I am not one of them. I can point to the exact moments in time that pushed me towards this self-realization, three sentences that various people have said to me, and two life-decisions that culminated in me being forced to examine what all this meant. So I guess since I can’t sleep and this is a self-indulgent exercise to begin with, it’s mOtHerFuKiNg StOrY tImE hOnK! 

The first moment that led me down this road, the point that planted the first proto-seed of thought about my gender in my mind was, perhaps predictably, about a game. In this case a long-standing DnD game I’d played with my OC friends in the early days of my relationship with C before she decided she hated them and didn’t want me to spend time with them and that’s own fucking rabbit hole. 

In our game, our characters had become so intrinsically involved in the politics of the nation our game was set in, that we realized that going on adventures was irresponsible and might cause irreparable harm to the world. So rather than end the game, we statted up our characters’ children. To make things interesting, we randomized who got who. To my (at the time) mild dismay, I drew a girl, When I showed the others my slip of paper with the name “Tamora” written on it, one of my friends snorted “God, it’ll be hard to imagine you playing a princess.” And it.... stung. It hurt in a  way I’d never before experienced. My first brush with a now all-too-familiar sense of dysphoria. As if there were a part of me I’d never before examined that had its ego crushed. I don’t remember how I responded. 

Thing is, I played Tamora like a fucking champ. And no one ever made another comment about me playing a girl. I think I’d proven that I could convincingly play any role I wanted to. 

Which brings us to the second sentence. I’ve talked about this here before, a friend on an online game admitting to me that the gender of her character did not align with the one she was assigned at birth. It was both shocking and enticing. In a way its laughable now (we’ll probably get around to why) but at the time, I just sorta assumed that... I’d be able to tell? And S was...  she was as female and feminine as anyone I’d ever met. I’d never wondered for an instant. 

And those two things... those two moments. The pang of hurt, the desire to be perceived as a girl; and the sudden realization that there was a venue where that might be possible. That lead me to make the first of those life choices: creating a female character, deliberately this time, and dive into her so thoroughly that there were times where I was’t sure where she ended and I began. 

Things got a bit weird in all this. I mean, people asked me questions about myself ooc and I would answer as if I were a girl. Hell  I even gave myself a name in all that. Karen, if you can believe it. Its not the name I’m currently using. Who the fuck would name themselves Karen in 2018-19 right? 

But ultimately none of that really mattered, I’d so thoroughly compartmentalized my brain throughout all this that barely anything of my character in the Game leaked into my real life or vice versa. For all intents and purposes, “Karen” who played the game and the me who did everything else were two entirely separate people. 

And yet some of it must have seeped through because C noticed. Or at least, I’m pretty sure she did. She knew I was playing the Game, but I never talked about my character or her gender. She knew that that rp involved romantic and sexual subplots, but I never discussed them with her, nor she her own sex-rp’s with me. It was a sorta tacit polyamory with very specific confines that we’d agreed to in a purely theoretical sense some years back and then adhered to rigidly in practice while determiniedly never talking about it. 

But for all the fucked up shit, she knew me well, maybe better than anyone other than Liz has. I mean, we were a couple of woke 20-somethings in the Obama era, so lgbt issues were pretty forefront at the time. Guess they still are, we were just a lot more... hopeful about it. But she kept sending me articles about trans people. Like, human interest articles. 

There was one in specific that she got really... enthusiastic about, about this one trans-woman’s journey to self-discovery through WoW. C read part of the article to me out loud, culminating when the person in the article was confronted by her wife: “You can be a girl if you want to be”. She kinda repeated that a couple times, looking at me hard. And in retrospect, yeah, it wasn’t fucking subtle. But at the time... it was not a thing I was willing to examine. Like fuck, honestly I think there was a part of me that knew. I mean there had to be at that point, right? But I didn’t want to pursue it irl. I think I made up my mind that it would be something I’d approach the same time that I approached the poly question that was inevitably hanging over C and I at that same time: after we were married. So I just nodded and went “Huh, interesting” with a straight face as my at-the-time girlfriend all but told me that if I wanted to come out to her, she’d be okay with it. 

Never got a chance to see if she really would have been.

After we broke up, all this shit got put so far back on the back burner that... well hell, go back and read my first few posts if you have the fortitude to stand a lot of bitching. Like way more than I’m doing now. 

And I mean the funny thing was I was still playing the Game I just sorta figured that once... I got another girlfriend, that’d have to stop? That who and what I was in the game would stop mattering. Because I was monogamous right? Just like I was male and straight, and the fact that my character was none of those things meant that I’d have to put her out to pasture. So it didn’t matter that I’d been playing a lesbian ethical slut for the past five, six years, because once I was in another sanctioned cishet relationship, I’d have to put all this foolishness behind me and never speak of it to anyone ever again. 

Goddess alone knows if I even could have but I would have tried. I suspect it would have gone badly.

Instead... by almost comicallly random happenstance, I wound up with a poly girl. And after some initial winging about whether or not I wanted that, a part of my brain I’d been ignoring went, “Hey dumbfuck! You never cared when A--- slept around or when E--- was in another relationship, why should it matter to you that CR has a boyfriend?” 

And the rest of my brain took a second to process that and was like “E--- and A--- weren’t involved with me irl, only my character in the game.” 

And the first part was like “Oh yeah, smart girl, if that wasn’t a thing you wanted on some level than how come you fucking jumped into it with both feet in the game?”

And the rest of me rejoined rejoined, “I suppose you have a p--wait! smart girl?”

“Oh yeah, that’s a thing too. You probably better process that because this whole fucking thing is tied together like a goddamn giftbasket of deviancy. Good luck having anything resembling a normal life once you’re done untangling it”

And at that point there was no turning back. I’ve dragged my feet certainly, not... as much out of a sense of general reluctance as a bunch of worries about how my family (who I’m still reliant upon) will take it. But once that realization had occured there was no putting that bunny back in the box. 

Which I guess brings me to my point, if one can even say I have one. 

In a lot of ways this whole misadventure seems less like something that was always there and more like... a memetic virus that somehow burrowed into my brain, incubated for a few years and then burst forth from my skull like some horrifying amalgam of Athena and a chestburster. Like, if I had pulled a dude’s name from that hat... would literally any of this happened? If my friend hadn’t admitted that she was experimenting with gender herself would it have occurred to me to try? If I hadn’t created that first female online character, would I still think I was a man? Would I still be a man? I mean that’s the crux of all this. In the fucking Homestuck epilogue, is candyverse Roxy still a man like they are in the meatverse? Sorry, spoilers I guess. To them, the only real difference is an opportunity to prioritize their own self expression and gender identity. But Candyverse Roxy still has put thought into those things, just because of how and when they had the time to do so, she arrived at a different conclusion than he did in the other timeline. 

And yes, I know that the Meatverse is considered more cannon than the candyverse, and yes, Roxy is the only character  in the meatverse who isn’t being manipulated by Dirk’s mind meddling and therefore we can safely say that his epiphanies regarding his gender are genuine, more truthful and relevant to the character than the weirdness going on in the Candyverse. 

But... where does that leave me. Obviously we’re playing the  “what if” game on a weird scale here but, what if that series of events hadn’t occured? Would I still wind up roughly where I am, genderwise, by a different rout? Or would I have continued to labor under the false assumption that I was a dude... and would that assumption in this case even be false by any empirical standard? That’s the question that’s kept me up tonight. 

I think I can safely say that by the time I had constructed this Karen figment that it was a foregone conclusion. But.... if either of those two inciting incidents had gone differently... Ugh... I don’t know. I feel like some people would want to take my trans card away from me for even suggesting that there’s a universe out there where I’m happily continuing to think I’m a dude. Maybe there is... but ultimately it’s not relevent or true for me, because its not a thing that I can go back to now. In short: it’s simply not cannon.