I Guess I Sort Of Hazily Understood That There Must Be People Out There Who Type Like Kanaya Consistenly And Sustainedly But That Still Didn’t Prepare Me For Seeing This

I probably won’t be saying much about Homestuck even though it’s updating again because I’ve completely lost track of what’s going on, and it doesn’t look like it’d be worth the effort to figure it out.

verdigrisvagabond:

You know, with the new update introducing claymation, we now know that the reason it took so long was because there was a medium he had yet to apply.

And it made me wonder, what if this is a new trend for Homestuck?

In six months, Andrew Hussie releases the next panels as beautiful watercolors.

A year from then, Andrew Hussie mails a lovingly hand-drawn animated flipbook to every Homestuck reader.

Three years pass. Andrew Hussie has an opening at an art gallery in downtown Manhattan, where he exhibits abstract mixed media sculptures and calls the whole show “Act Six.”

Another Five. Andrew Hussie tours the world with his ballet company. The man who plays Dave Strider is America’s new sweetheart.

After your kids have all left for college, you wake in the middle of the night. There is a noise. You walk downstairs, a baseball bat in your hands in case of an intruder. You turn on the lights. Andrew Hussie stands in your living room, surrounded by empty paint cans, replacing your curtains. What is this? you ask. The update, he says.

(via roachpatrol)

turboshitnerd replied to your post:

I probably won’t be saying much about Homestuck…

It took me reading some forum posts to actually realize what was going on. They were all weirdly acting like this update was an amazing revelation instead of borderline nonsense but I guess it’s kinda both? (as usual)

basically: lil cal’s juju “soul” (and therefore lord english) is made of the souls of caliborn, arquiusprite, and half of gamzee

How is it possible to … care about this?  (Serious question, I’m not just sniping cynically, although I am doing that too)

“Oh my god, half of Gamzee?  I had my money on 3/7 of Gamzee”

“The fascinating themes of this highly symbolic work of web fiction really come across in the way 2/5 of the main villain is made up of the even more minor fusion of two minor characters”

dammit i thought i was jaded along every possible dimension and yet, after a bunch of stuff i had absolutely no interest in, hussie managed to locate my locus of feels nonetheless

hussssssieeeee (ah, how wistful i feel saying that)

I’m actually … not reading the Homestuck updates anymore.

The curse has lifted.

fierceawakening:

sugarbeta:

fierceawakening:

zephra85:

Others have said this way better than I have, but I still feel like expressing myself on this subject.

There *IS* a difference between liking and/or enjoying a villain and condoning their actions or behaviour. 

(I will also say that the next part of what I’m saying is entirely speculation, I don’t have links or proof or receipts for this part. It’s just observation and the like.)

It seems like a good chunk of people who sympathize with, favor, or enjoy the antics of villains are most likely writers. That makes sense to me too, because the people most likely to understand a villain are the ones that look at things from their perspective. For writers, we NEED to get in the head of the villains as much as we do the heroes. We NEED to flesh them out, understand them, see things from their perspective. Because the villains are pretty much always equal parts to the story as the heroes are. I mean, how are you going to give a crap about the hero if you don’t give a crap about who or what s/he overcomes? In my opinion the villains are just as much a part of the story as the heroes are if not moreso, because where would the heroes be if they had no villains to overcome?

Which is where I feel a lot of villain sympathy comes from. Or even just a simple understanding, sometimes it even goes as far as empathy depending on the situation. An episode of a television show that gives a flashback to a villains tragic backstory can trigger a lot of responses. Thinks like ‘aw man now I feel bad for him/her’ to ‘wow things make so much sense now that poor person’. Sometimes this can go even further, to things like ‘I completely understand why they want revenge now after everything that’s happened’. 

From what I’ve seen this can trigger a lot of backlash. Mostly this idea that sympathy or understanding instantly equates to ‘condoning the actions of’. A lot of ‘oh my GOD how can people be on the villains side now?!’ or ‘their sob story doesn’t make up for all the terrible things they did!’ From what I’ve seen on the internet and Tumblr, most people don’t feel this way at all though if they sympathize with a villain. Being able to empathize with a villains pain doesn’t mean the person actually agrees with anything said villain has said or done. It simply means they understand. It’s also true that fans can occasionally take the attitude of ‘they’re just MISUNDERSTOOD obviously they’re precious babbus who need to be protected at all costs’ for villains they like. But to be honest; I’ve followed the tags for several shows and movies over the course of my Tumblr tenure, and this sort of attitude is very VERY rare. Most fans of villains completely understand these characters are horrible and would never condone their actions in real life. They simply enjoy their antics and such from a fictional perspective. It seems to me that compelling storytelling VS real life conditions get mixed up quite a bit on the internet, and people seem to not understand these are two very different things. 

There’s also people who enjoy villains exactly for what they are. For all their flaws and horrors and nuances. They don’t NEED a tragic backstory to find understanding and/or enjoyment from these characters. I myself can fall into this category quite a bit, and I think this comes from the writer in me. To me, a villain is just another character that’s been fleshed out. Someone on equal standing as the hero. Another character for a story who’s a means to an end. I don’t NEED a tragic backstory or ‘noble at heart’ intentions for me to like a villain. I enjoy what they have to provide from a writing perspective, AKA a force to be reckoned with, or a bane to the hero. 

Ehh I wish I could say this more eloquently. I know a few others who probably could. I just got tired of the ‘for anyone who likes this villain HERE’S ALL THE REASONS YOU SHOULDN’T’ posts in the tags I follow. People are allowed to like villains without having to explain or defend themselves or being told they’re wrong 24/7. 

Also, I can’t speak for anyone else, but

For me, I love villains because they offer us a completely different look at an established story.

What if the heroes are wrong? What if the values they defend aren’t the right ones or the best ones? What if they miss relationships between their enemies, see nothing but rage and anger in characters who feel joy, love, grief? What if the things the standard stories teach us to value as good aren’t, or are missing something?

I don’t like violence or love abuse. I just love creating stories where violence means something different from what we’re used to. I love asking what that means. I love making people uncomfortable in ways that make them think.

I love asking what the story’s shadow looks like, and wanting to hear that story told, too.

I feel sad and frustrated when all that gets… Crumpled up like a ruined piece of paper, and tossed aside because some people think only certain stories are okay to tell.

Yeah, stories are more fun and more rewarding when you’re allowed to pick at all sides of it and ask questions. The idea that doing that is misguided or bad is kind of hinky. Believing the heroes just because they happen to be the ones telling the story? Come on, now. :v That’s no fun.

Besides, everything doesn’t have to be a Good Example of a Valuable Lesson to be worthwhile. There’s something weirdly conservative (not sure if that’s the word I need but my vocabulary has gone to shit) about the attitude I’ve seen that stories need to always offer a particular commentary on an issue or have a particular moral that condemns and lifts up all the right things, or else it’s problematic crap. Kind of tangential to the OP, but I feel like that attitude underpins a lot of the policing that goes on in fandom with how we’re supposed to engage with villains.

I’ve had the same thought too, about it being weirdly conservative. It’s often presented as an SJ-style concern, about teaching or training people properly about avoiding abuse or violence. But it has this weird effect of dictating that stories have an approved moral, which is very like a very traditional kind of story.

There’s a related demand that you see, where people say things like “of course your characters can do bad things, but you have to make sure the narrative condemns them.” I have related concerns about this. It does the same “making the story have a message” thing, in the same kind of way.

What if the story is about getting into the mind of a truly evil character? Can you hint that you know this, or are you a moral failure as a writer if you don’t stop your narrative at whiles and go “NOTA BENE: FRANK IS BAD?”

I mostly agree with this – I often get frustrated with allegations that a story “doesn’t sufficiently condemn” a given character’s bad behavior, because I’m not sure what that would add.  The story is just words on a page (or images on a screen, or whatever); it was created by an author (or group of authors), but you’ll probably never meet them.  Adding “NOTE BENE: FRANK IS BAD” doesn’t really change whatever other good or bad qualities the story would have as words on a page or w/e.

Ultimately, it either is or isn’t an interesting portrayal of human behavior.  If the human behavior is not good, indicating awareness of this doesn’t really change the portrayal.

I do think the one problem here is that if you don’t include “FRANK IS BAD” you can get … well, extreme Vriska fans.  That is, people who see a character who does bad stuff and just uncritically accept that character’s entire viewpoint.

But a subtlety here is that this kind of behavior is often itself a result of expecting bad behavior to be signposted; a lot of the “Vriska Was Right”-type stuff I’ve seen seems to be based on a perception that we’re supposed to be more forgiving of her flaws, and more credulous toward her viewpoint, because she’s portrayed as more of a “main character” and less of a figure of fun than, say, Tavros.  People don’t realize that you don’t have to just “believe the heroes just because they happen to be the ones telling the story” (as sugarbeta put it above), and treat the lack of a “FRANK IS BAD” label as indication that Frank can’t be bad, or else someone would have told us, right?

If there weren’t that expectation of “narrative condemnation” out there, people would realize they have to puzzle out morality in fiction for themselves, and I suspect a consequence would be less Vriska Was Right stuff.

(via funereal-disease)

skwrk:

i read all of nostalgebraist‘s “floornight” and the completed section of “the northern caves” today. overall i really liked both of them. 

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while reading floornight, i kept getting the distinct impression of “whoever wrote this must be an absolute genius”. which is interesting, because after i read it i saw that nb wrote about this work that he considers it low-quality and that it was written “just for fun without thought”. so either nb is extremely self-effacing, or some sort of technique he’s using is an easy way to impress me.

another thing about floornight is that it very vividly feels like whoever wrote it has had a lot of experience with psychedelics, and i do know that this is in fact true. maybe if you do enough psychedelics, it becomes a lot easier to make works of art that appear to be crafted by a genius. the fact that nb described this work as “inspired by the muses” is super super interesting to me given my established philosophy/religion.

i said in my review of hpmor that one of my favorite qualities, especially in written fiction, is what i call “novelty”, which is sort of just having a ton of surprising structures that can’t be reduced to cliche. like, a lot of popular, even acclaimed stories can be reduced to a collection of existing tropes, and are simply packaged in a way that is appealing for whatever reason. (one random recent strong example: the movie “boyhood”). but in floornight, and also hpmor, you get this nonstop assault of situations which seem like they are totally new combinations in plot-space that had yet to be discovered. floornight kind of even succeeds in being novel in a fractal-like structure, which is imho Pretty Much The Greatest Thing Ever and leads to a wonderful sensation which makes me feel like i’m on lsd. by this i mean that the overall plot is novel, the structure of each scene is novel, each sentence is in its own way novel, the metaphors and descriptions are novel. or at least that’s how it felt to me. (this is a hard thing to explain.)

another aspect of it i really liked is that the story feels kind of like a puzzle - you can imagine that the whole chaos is derived from a somewhat logical set of axoims, but they are never actually laid out in front of you. as far as i can tell, this actually is the case? in general i am a big picture guy who reads fast with not too much regard to comprehension, so i’m not completely sure of everything that was going on. i got to the end and i feel like i got about 50% of it all, which i am pretty satisfied with. i can imagine that going back and re-reading it for 100% would be fun and rewarding, but i probably won’t do that because opportunity costs.

i always wished “stories that are also puzzles” was more of a thing. i imagine one of the reasons it’s not is because it’s very hard to pull off. the story “fine structure” on qntm.org did it, but the author overestimated his audience and ended up having to explain everything in a Q&A at the end. the movie “primer” is a similar situation. homestuck tries to do this, but hussie is pretty bad at getting the reader to know even the stuff he’s meant to know, so it doesn’t really work. the movie “mulholland drive” is kind of like this, but no one can agree on the answer. floornight might be the best executed version of this i’ve seen in a while. i was confused the whole time, but somehow it was an enjoyable confusion, not a frustrating one, and i always felt like if i needed to i could slow down and i would get everything.

overall i’m really impressed with how many of my buttons nostalgebraist was able to push. psychedelica, puzzles, henry darger, multiple levels of reality, stories where everything is backed by a logical structure, apocalyptica, mundane people ascending to godhood. i wonder if there is a common element that makes a certain type of person appreciate all these? (maybe it’s just “homestuck”) 

the last bit of praise i want to give is that i thought (avoiding spoilers here) the tone of the ending was an absolutely hilarious and ingenious way to wrap everything up, and i’m surprised i’ve never really seen a story do that before.

my only real criticism is that it felt like some of the weird stuff was kind of shoehorned in there and not really fully integrated with the story as well as it could have been, like the tribe of children, the transgender bit, and the self-referential bit. i enjoyed these and liked that these existed, but they also felt kind of crazy-for-the-sake-of-crazy and unnecessary. 

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as far as the northern caves: i really enjoyed what’s there so far, probably even more than floornight. not too much to comment on yet. 

one thing i will say is that comparing the completely inexplicable, incomprehensible story-within-a-story northern caves to finnegans wake is sort of doing an injustice to finnegans wake in my eyes, a document whose existence is really not that hard to justify, and of a nature that i encourage. but whatever.

(personally it all makes me think of louis wain) 

also, i get the feeling that it’s headed into some sort of supernatural / psychological horror territory. i kind of would be pleasantly surprised if nostalgebraist avoided this approach and instead continued the metafiction as a more reality-based exegesis, just sort of exploring the question of why people sometimes make weird things. but i’m probably alone in that.

This is both very flattering and very interesting.  Thanks for writing it!

About Floornight being “low-quality”: a strange thing happened where the story ended up being much better, in my estimation, than it should have been given the amount of effort I put into it.  There were many cases, say, where I ended up with plot elements I liked without ever remembering having invented them, or realized that a plotting problem had been solved without me ever putting in any effort to solve it.

Part of this is no doubt that I set up the story deliberately to avoid all of what I consider my weaknesses.  For instance, I suck at real-world background research, so I tried to create a setting, plot and characters that would necessitate as little of that as possible.  (The reason that certain characters only have last initials, rather than full last names, is literally that I didn’t want to commit to the background details a last name would connote.)

Another, possibly more important aspect is that I ended up having what I think is the same experience Andrew Hussie had with Homestuck, which is that if you write serially and continually add new elements just because you feel like it, the whole package will end up having lots of desirable properties that you didn’t intend to put there.  For instance, you can reach a level of complicatedness such that you essentially can do no wrong: things that merely make sense appear “brilliant” because they fit into such a complicated structure, while things that don’t make sense get the benefit of the doubt, because one feels there’s probably some weird technicality somewhere that explains them.  Creating a setting in which what the Homestuck fandom calls “weird plot shit” is the norm allows you to get a lot of bang for your buck, as a writer.  (The Northern Caves is much harder to write than Floornight, in part because it is so much smaller of a story, and so I feel if I make mistakes people will actually notice them and feel dissatisfied.)

I’m sure there are older examples of this phenomenon, although I’m not sure what they are, and everyone in my social circle seems to default to Homestuck when talking about this.  (It seems like a lot of examples of serial, complicated, partially made-up-on-the-fly stories are often cited as failures, to a much greater degree than Homestuck is considered a failure.  The TV show Lost is one obvious example.)