#obama homestuck president

[eggwishing]

yaaayyyy!!! ( in case it isn't clear, that's a baby carrier hehe)

[mdantics]

I'm not going to explain this stupid crappy doodle lmao

[12angrypears]

Obama, Trump, and Biden play SBURB:

i can’t believe this is my first attempt at homestuck fanfiction:

—————————————

Obama: Alright guys, let’s be careful with our kernelsprite. We don’t know what it’s for yet and—

Trump: Barack, everyone knows what we do with a kernelsprite. We prototype it and get a guide. [tosses American flag]

USprite: [chitters patriotically]

Trump: Now that’s a good, honest hard-working American sprite. thats what this game needs.

Obama: Donald what the hell did you do.

Trump: I prototyped the kernelsprite.

Biden: hey guys there’s some weird looking African Americans out here waving American flags.

Trump: Look Barack, I told you I was popular with minorities. Even Sleepy Joe thinks so.

Obama: I don’t— Joe what are you doing? Not everything with black skin is African American. I don’t think those are even human.

Trump: Oh, so when I say I don’t see color—

Obama: Shut the fuck up or I’ll prototype you in the damn kernelsprite.

USprite: [chitters patriotically]

Biden: Hey I think they’re doing something—

Trump: Maybe you should prototype me! Can you imagine how amazing—and I’ve seen a lot of amazing things in my life other than myself—how incredible of a sprite I would be?

Obama: Oh my god.

Trump: No, no, hear me out. What this session needs is some good old Uncle Sam, and I can’t hardly—you probably can’t either—hardly imagine anyone better for it than the president of the United States of America.

Obama: Former president.

Trump: Former this and former that. Why don’t we focus on—

Obama: I can’t believe we destroyed the White House for this.

Biden: [muffled thud] Oh my god.

Trump: There goes Sleepy Joe falling down the stairs. You’d rather prototype him for our Uncle Sam project?

Obama: I don’t want to prototype anyone until we know what—

Biden: these African Americans are full of grist

Obama: Imps, Joe, just call them imps.

Trump: You want a president with grist? If you—when you put me in that kernelsprite, you’ll never believe how much grist I can bring to the citizens of this great country.

Obama: Grift, you’re a grifter Donald. What the hell is grist?

Biden: Holy shit!

[Bathtub crashes through the ceiling onto USprite]

Biden: Sorry guys, I guess I ran out.

AMERITUBSPRITE: God bless the US— [flushing noises]

[meggie-moo]

dave would literally pass out if he found out obama was the president that made gay marriage legal

[wombocombo4x3]

[S] Presidents: Cosplay.

[thatlittledandere]

Okay so I checked and the copypasta doesn't seem to have any spoilers so here it is (this is a repost because I can't find the original)

Karkat (true leftism)

[crazymuff1n]

These videos are getting too elaborate

[dingodad]

it's interesting to look at jane crocker's political career not always in terms of how it makes her a ""fascist monster"" so to speak - along the lines of homestuck's literal fascist monsters like the condesce and lord english - but in how it plays into the crucial fact at the heart of her character that she is "normcore". jane is a character of the context she was born in, the almost-exact midpoint of the barack obama presidency; superficially and popularly, a time of great optimism for a liberalising america, but through this facade of optimism a time which also saw a great deal of "normalisation" of deeply evil american imperialism both abroad and at home.

jane's love of the NBC's Parks & Recreation is emblematic of this. homestuck and parks & rec are similar in one respect, which is that p&r also began and ended over the course of the obama presidency - and like jane, p&r is deeply of that era. in many senses it is the ancestor to the "copaganda" of programming like Brooklyn 99 which took over its position of popularity into the trump era: at the core of its comic dynamic is the interplay between leslie knope, a progressive-liberal "girlboss" and champion of big government, and ron swanson, the hard-working, moustache-toting libertarian sentinel of private capitalist interest. but in the classic mode of liberal american thought, the core message of the show is that these two characters are friends. despite the complete incompatibility of their respective ideologies, the two must work together and make compromise at every stage, ensuring that the political landscape of america - implicitly the perfect state - never changes or progresses from where it is now. and it's telling that, despite being the liberal "girlboss" with visions of political ascendancy, jane's love and admiration is for the male character. like obama himself, swanson serves to put a friendly, sometimes goofy but always loveable face on american patriarchal hegemony.

because by the time homestuck had closed up and the post-canon had opened america had crossed that threshold from obama's presidency into the next, it's impossible not to draw parallels between jane's descent into xenophobia and the overt isolationism of the trump republican administration. but i think putting jane on this trajectory is also in a very real sense just as much an indictment of the democrat majority of homestuck's genesis; xenophobia is not a "trump problem" but rather an AMERICA problem, and in fact the political landscape of the late 2010s and 2020s is an inevitable progression of the kind of politics that were considered "normal" in 2011, not the result of some freak misstep of electoral probability in 2016.

[coridallasmultipass]

2023 checkin' in, and first of all this sucks, but second of all, what the fuck was I planning on doing with this? It sucks, there's nothing more I could have done with this. I think it's safe to say I did exactly jack fuckin' nothing with this, and unless it somehow becomes plot-relevant 11+ years later, I will continue to do jack-fucking-nothing with this. Past Cori can eat a fuckin' dick. (But save some for me.)

I drew human Eridan! Haha, his hair was very fun to draw. I might do something with this later?

[anachronistic-falsehood]

list of people they should invite onto the qsmp for the potential reset to make it considerably funnier

- taylor swift

- jesse breaking bad

- creator of homestuck andrew hussie

- 44th president of the united states barack obama

- jack manifold but he has to wear his blue coraline wig every time he’s online

- tommyinnit

- tommyinnit’s mother sarah simons

- lil nas

[txttletale]

can you elaborate on the reasons ? what criticisms do you disagree with?

criticisms i disagree with:

"they character assassinated jane" amiguita there was no character to assisnate.

"they character assassinated dirk" dirk is at his most interesting and likeable ever and is just about the only redeeming thing about these

"they were just written to spite the fans" if true tht would have been Epic, and Based. but they very obviously werent

"its too violent and sexual for cheap shock humour" did you. read homestuck, the web comic? what were you Expecting... also like it or not the sexual content isnt just random or gratuitous it is obviously trying to be a conclusion to the whoel coming-of-age theme of homestuck as a work.

"so-and-so is out of character" homestuck characters are malleable little dolls that can be rearranged to suit the narrative at a whim. this is true about all fictional characters ofc but it is like explicitly textually metaphysically true in homestuck

my criticisms:

the heavy-handed political messaging is fucking tedious and awful and so profoundly of its time in a bad way. its clearly a reaction to trump but it doesnt have anything interesting to say about him or fascism or racism or anything, really, except, um. Cheeto in the white house?. the whole Evil Jane plot is too stupid and contrived for the sake of the satire to take seriously but also its awful satire written by liberals who think fascism as invented in 2016 by the orange man

god can we fucking talk about how fucking embarassing the obama shit is. jesus fucking christ. for a start it's a callback to a running jhoke in homestuck that is straight up just super racist. and they decide to pivot from the joke being 'its funny that theres a black president', which is good, but they pivot it to 'obama seems so heroic and magical now that we're stuck with the Orange Man', which, admittedly, is better than Being Racist, but also sucks shit. he killed people amiguitas.

'post-canon' is cheap bullshit. like, the work makes a big deal about tryng to talk about What Canon Is, without ever acknowledging the concept of, like, IP law. claiming to just be a non-canon continuation like any other when it's made by people with the Official Exclusive Legal Rights just feels hollow and detooths any liberatory/deconstructive potential there. unironically my opinion of it would go up like tenfold if it had been actually published in AO3 instead of just joking about it.

in general i think that all of the attempt to deconstruct fiction or storytelling is rooted in a really weird and flawed model of storytelling. a lot of it seems to be taking an extremely long route to writing something bad on purpose and then saying 'see, if you wrote something like this, it would be bad'. Okay. i like deconstructive collapsing narrative shit in e.g. if on a winter's night a traveller because i think calvino has trenchant and interesting insights about literature and storytelling. i do think hussie also has those but they essentially dropped and explored all of them in homestuck and the epilogues just seem like an attempt to connect ohomstuck's disparate and contradictory approaches to Narrative into one overarching schemata and then crtiique that schemata, which i think is a doomed project that results in little of interest to me.

[eggwishing]

the president

[mmmmalo]

I haven't thought about homestuck in years but I began to reread it recently, and I remembered highly enjoying your analysis so I came to revisit, and I'm rather surprised by the turn it's taken. Genuine question to satisfy my own curiosity, how come your analysis shifted so heavily from possible trauma and teenage issues to homophobia, transgender readings of so many characters, and the grotesque?

First up, I'm moved that you thought of my blog when you revisited the story! Thank you for stopping by.

I think I would sum up the change as... various factors compelled me to reframe the way I approached paranoia in the comic? Like you said, I used to be all about character's individual psychologies: John with the fear of being judged, Jade with the latent hostility toward Grandpa, etc. But sometimes the fears were bigger than individuals. Homestuck cracked its first Obama joke in reference to Deep Impact, a movie about people for whom a black presidency is an event comparable to cataclysmic flooding. The poorly received Skainet Systems lore made a sly reference to racist birther conspiracies, asserting that Obama was born in another timeline instead of another country. Dirk lays out a story (which he outright states was gathered from conspiracy theorists) where a tyrant, who speaks a distinctly Black flavor of English, eventually floods the earth. Between instances like these, I eventually inferred that Homestuck itself takes place within a conspiracy theory -- and a self-consciously racist one at that -- which raised more specific questions about unreliable narration than Homestuck was already encouraging with its meta motifs.

At various points, characters make revealing Freudian slips -- Karkat summoned an image of Jade "making out with herself" when he was trying to critique what she was "making herself out to be", for instance. The pun revealed an embarrassing, private fixation. When I was still focused on character psychology, I had some luck finding Freudian slips that weren't openly teased, which provided further insight into the characters' psyches. After shifting into the conspiratorial mode, I eventually applied a similar idea to the story at large: if certain word choices in the narrative are designed to reflect proximity to certain societal hatreds, then finding them allows us to piece together the paranoid conspiracies about the hated groups in question, which structure the narrative. I whimsically dubbed this activity "Slurquest". The allusions to homophobia and transphobia found via this approach made it easier to spot the same motifs in individuals.

The recent turn towards "the grotesque" (by which I assume you mean porn jokes) basically amounts to me catching a fairly simple joke: why does Problem Sleuth combine a film projector with a contracting waste disposal pipe? Why are allusions to sun-blindness accompanied by torn up toilets? The answer is gay pornography, within its utility for shock: the old internet practice of linking people images of huge distended assholes, to their displeasure, for laughs. Terezi's sun-blindness is on some level a repetition of Hussie's old gag "the elf saw a picture of a penis and started to cry", with the red sun acting as an abstracted goatse -- this is why Dave, whose apartment is haunted by the Red Sun, is likewise haunted by Bro's gay pornography. This ongoing sun/ass symbolism makes it funnier when Dave uses the phrase "privy to what I flame broil below" to describe Terezi smelling his ass.

That's the short of it, at least

[jessaerys]

you can tell the age of a homestuck enjoyer by whether they prefer johnkat (endorsed by president obama) over davekat (2.0 web tiktok era psy op)

[conceptofjoy]

donald glover, fresh prince, and obama being the only explicit black people mentioned in a comic paints a very... i cant word this right its very sanitized? fresh prince turns into thresh prince and the synopsis is reduced to

and despite fresh prince being molded to survive scrutiny from white audiences in the 1990s, it still had themes of black class differences, systemic prejudice, exploration of the model minority myth, etc.

the point just kinda wooshed over hussie's head by making their class different with no middle ground like race to tie them together lol. and its not like alternia would let antihemospectrum rhetoric fly so it ends up painting their will smith as a bit of aaaaa..... . cough.

donald glover was a musician slash comedian at around 2009 and still is, and obama's obama. it feels like hussie chose the first nerdy black guy he knew to fill in for the roll of geromy lol. as for obama, he's the homestuck president right. but theres a whole thing about being black and in politics esp if they're a liberal. it was undeniable he was charismatic asf n he was using his rep as the 'cool president' to bomb more kids in the middle east, plus he even got two terms for it.

what im trying to say is that the directly inspired black parts of hs is very one dimensional. just kinda skimming the top layer and using that. same goes with rap, dj-ing... gamzee and meenah.......

its soooo white 20 something forums user in the late 2000's.

[nekropsii]

stupid question cause i know deep analysis is the name of the game here, but is there anything that causes you to react to fans like "its not that deep"? and not in the hating sense as with certain ships, i mean in the neutral "woah, slow down there" sense.

Oh, yeah, all the fucking time actually.

From my observation, a lot of analysts who just focus on the “main cast” (Beta Kids, Beta Trolls, Alpha Kids) have seemingly run out of things to say. Half the time I see analysis from the broader fandom, it is the most insane shit in the fucking world, and I really have to wonder if they realize that Homestuck was a piece of art made by a specific person during a specific time period, and didn’t just… Spawn out of the ether when they discovered it, with it magically sharing all of their extremely modern politics.

I might do deep analysis, but I kinda try to keep my feet on the ground. I’m not out here posting about Troll horns containing Jewishness or Eridan being a metaphor for the Obama Presidency or something, lol.