*adds “vriska” to blacklist*
doghaircoat-deactivated20201130 asked: Your post about Act 6 really helped to explain why I haven't been enjoying Homestuck the same way since Cascade, try as I might. I really hope that Hussie has done some reflection on this. Act 6 unraveling to predictable and bland writing doesn't have to be the end for him; if he explores upon/expands his unique style and characterization strengths that made Problem Sleuth and earlier Homestuck so entertaining, I really think he can continue to fill this niche with even better works.
I’m glad you liked the post. To be honest I don’t have much hope for Hussie at this point – the bad transition in his writing style coincided roughly with a large rise in the size of his fanbase, and even if that was a coincidence, I don’t think he has much reason to decide he’s been doing things wrong. From his perspective, everything in the last few years of Homestuck has “worked,” in the sense that it’s led him to have a big fanbase and start a functioning merchandise / game company and so forth. It’s hard to argue with that kind of feedback.
(Although I do wonder if it’s still true that he’s been too busy to ever go back and read through the whole story? He said that sometime back in Act 5, though of course he’s read parts of it for the published books. Maybe at some point Andrew Hussie will actually read Homestuck for the first time and think “wow, damn, some parts of this are a lot better than others.” Could happen.)
turboshitnerd replied to your post: doghaircoat asked:Your post about…
I feel like Hussie would be way more forgiving of any missteps than an objective person though. Also he seems to have his own inscrutable metric for quality which seems frequently to have coincided with many people’s but isn’t actually tied to it
Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. I’ve noticed that a number of times when asked about some of his more baffling choices, Hussie says something that amounts to “I dunno, I just thought it was funny,” and it always makes me think “for someone capable of being utterly hilarious on a pretty regular basis, it’s kind of surprising how awful / bizarrely strained / etc. your sense of humor can be sometimes”
Such heights and such lows, and it’s actually impossible to tell whether he sees a difference
a race of butt people who unearth the code from an ancient temple and decide to play SBUTT
You know, I’d made the Homestuck connection myself, but I hadn’t realized that naturally the species playing SBUTT would have to be, in some way, butt-centric
I think if I ever meet Andrew Hussie in person, the only ethical course of action will be to stare him in the face and say, with solemn gravitas, “I have written so many words, on the internet, about your decline”
Anonymous asked: I follow you for your stellar sense of humor but all this talk of homestuck has me wondering - how hard is it to get into the fandom? How would I start? It's like a webcomic right? Teach me, great roach!
OH MY GOSH LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK.
um in brief, it isn’t hard to get into the fandom. the hard part is getting out of fandom, because it rewires your brain, and the next thing you know you are in home depot quietly snickering at their display of colorful buckets. you will never leave this stupid, alien hell.
so, okay, for starters, the webcomic is hosted at mspaintadventures.com. it’s all free! how cool is that. if you want to listen to it as a sort of illustrated radio drama, there’s voice-acted videos on youtube which are damn good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRIYrrZMGwY
the general plot is: what if minecraft and jumanjii got together and made a deal with satan. the game ‘sburb’ would be the unclean devilchild that writhed, bubbling uncleanly, from the summoning circle. it is this game that four snarky teens start to play with each other and it is this game that basically fucks everything up, for ever, for everyone.
it’s super great.
so, the story is divided into different ‘acts’, like a play. acts one and two introduce you to the four starter characters by way of pretending to be a really, really shitty point and click adventure game. it was started as a forum comic, i think, and so it was guided by fan suggestion, with an extra helping of authorial sass. some people think it’s a slow starter, but you should hang on until rose lalonde shows up, because she is amazing, and if you don’t like reading her dialogue then you can go get fucked. the plot kicks in from there: they’re all gonna play a game together, etc, they gotta install shit and round up their other friends, etc etc.
act by act, the adventure unfolds across space, time, and alternate dimensions, ultimately encompassing twelve alien trolls, twelve OTHER alien trolls, twelve MORE alien trolls, two alien lizard people, multiple copies of the same ornery NPCs, four more humans, and four OTHER humans. plus even weirder shit. it’s a clusterfuck.
anyway, good luck, godspeed, drop me a postcard when you wake up at an anime convention next year wearing gray paint and a miniskirt.
There’s something I find very comforting/inspiring/something-like-that about the convention in certain cartoon universes that everyone is hyper-competent and hyper-productive, whatever their other flaws.
Like in Homestuck, where everyone is portrayed as totally dysfunctional and yet when it comes to planning and executing complicated and difficult tasks they never run into trouble (except when that trouble has the potential for an interesting subplot).
It’s clear that this kind of choice is driven by the goals of the work in question (you can’t have wild cartoonish explosive stuff happening all the time if everyone is having productivity issues) and not intended to make a broader point, but it ends up feeling like it makes a broader point. It’s a nice ideal, a thing to wish for and maybe work towards – that we could all still have all our flaws but at least be able to do stuff with no trouble.
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I usually don’t get all that emotionally invested…
whats interesting is, i think i would consider myself a person who gets emotionally invested in fiction pretty easily, but while i thought homestuck was rly fun for a while its…not something i ever had strong emotions about.
and i mean like…i remark on this as kinda weird bc ive had strong emotions about twine games. heck, ive had strong emotions about, like, infomercials and mario kart, probably.
Most of my emotions were related to thinking “please keep Tavros safe” (man, did that one not go well) and also to the sense of ominous dread that built up as Act 5 went on (which made it feel like if the protagonists didn’t end up utterly doomed it would be this wonderful, joyous miracle)
Almost done reading Narbonic but I probably shouldn’t read it while I’ve got the morbs because it’s hard to enjoy morbid comedy in this mental state
Like as if her adorable comic about mad scientists weren’t already fridge-horrifying enough, Shaenon Garrity had to go from depicting “mad scientists” in a cliched, generalized way to depicting the kind of “madness” that creates mad scientists as a specific, awful-looking mental illness, thus implying in retrospect that several of the main characters have been in this awful mental state for the entire duration of the comic
She and Andrew Hussie should have a morbidity-off sometime
Reading about Don Quixote being written as a potboiler and being a bestseller in its time, winning enduring fame despite being a parody of a genre no one reads anymore, etc. makes me wonder if Homestuck will be considered a literary classic someday. (If this sounds absurd, remember just how fun and silly a lot of “classics” are – especially if you go more than a century or two back – and how they often contain numerous referential jokes they contain which are now lost on all non-expert readers)
I’d give it at least a 25% chance of happening. Complicated, popular in its time, explored a new format, unique style, plenty of period-specific references for future scholars to research, may end up seeming much “deeper” than it is once a lot of the jokes become incomprehensible – it’s got all the makings of a classic