if I get to a professorship I’ll start teaching homestuck
Comp Lit 373: The Nerd-Parodic Tradition From Cervantes To Hussie
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
Definitely possible, though the technological issues may stymie this; even if no one knows how to read old english, it’s easy to carry the text of Beowulf through the ages, but it’s harder to maintain the clusterfuck of technology (HTML, PHP, Flash, etc) that underlies homestuck
(eg the difficulties encountered in making offline backups; I know of only one person who managed to do so, and they aren’t sharing IIRC)
Is it difficult to make offline backups? I remember wgetting the whole thing once to make this video, but then all I needed was the images. Also, yeah, I can imagine Flash disappearing from the world and that being a problem
(via pluspluspangolin)
assuming that nostalgebraist is right and homestuck becomes high literature at some point in the future, it’s entirely possible that Guy Fieri and the Insane Clown Posse will be remembered more as fictional entities than as actual human beings
flowercuco asked: i cant wait for andrew hussie to morph into this incredible musician-slash-artist-slash-writer-slash-programmer-slash-animator and for academia to argue about what was and wasnt an "outside influence"
Andrew Hussie May Have Invented Anime, Says New Research
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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…
Is not having flash, etc even a problem though? I feel like lit buffs circa 2300 would relish the notion that this is some sprawling masterwork some of which is ~lost~ so as to make the scholarship that much more difficult to get a foothold on. Like it would probably be best if, say, half of the flash material stays around - imagine a 24th-century Wiki equivalent with a whole section on missing portions of Homestuck, with all this obscure speculation based on the material that they do have access to.
oh god
imagine if they had all of A5 except [S] Cascade
Whatever the story’s ultimate ending is, it’s probably going to be Flash- or HTML5-heavy, so there’s the possibility that the ending could be lost for all time and we’ll have generations of people who know they’ll never get that last update.
(via pluspluspangolin)
pluspluspangolin.tumblr.com →
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…
Is not having flash, etc even a problem though? I feel like lit buffs circa 2300 would relish the notion that this is some sprawling masterwork some of which is ~lost~ so as to make the scholarship that much more difficult to get a foothold on. Like it would probably be best if, say, half of the flash material stays around - imagine a 24th-century Wiki equivalent with a whole section on missing portions of Homestuck, with all this obscure speculation based on the material that they do have access to.
oh god
imagine if they had all of A5 except [S] Cascade
Whatever the story’s ultimate ending is, it’s probably going to be Flash- or HTML5-heavy, so there’s the possibility that the ending could be lost for all time and we’ll have generations of people who know they’ll never get that last update.
infinipause!
hundreds of scholars striving desperately to reverse-engineer the ending by piecing together all the foreshadowing and unfinished plot threads, endlessly arguing over whether this scene or that is actually plot relevant or just yet another reference to obscure early 21st century media or both
Also, imagine Andrew Hussie as this strange author-figure at that point. Like, most of what we can glean about him personally probably comes from stuff like Twitter, which I can’t imagine will stay well-maintained and archived for terribly long, and that’s to say nothing of his shockingly prolific and revealing Formspring run, which is already sort of tricky to track down.
Like, Hussie himself comes through a lot in Homestuck itself (literally!), so he won’t be a total enigma, but I can imagine that it would be remarkably frustrating to have this somewhat incomplete picture of an author of a Great Work that you can only glean through gratuitous author inserts.
Imagine SBAHJ being lost while Homestuck remains. Imagine people reconstructing an implied, approximate SBAHJ from Homestuck, like the Q source in Biblical scholarship.
(via ubourgeois)
aprilwitching replied to your post : I’m really getting into the idea of writing “The…
rob i am so into fake document fiction i am so into exhaustive fake analysis of imaginary works i dont talk about it too much but its something i like a ton & i’ll be really happy if you continue, for one
also is it me or is the description of the fake book series a little bit of a nod to/jab at homestuck
OK you’re convincing me – if my attempts to do Real Work tomorrow morning fail I will try doing some Writing Work (instead of descending into dissolution and binging obscure corners of the internet, which is what I usually do)
Also, yes, Homestuck is definitely one of the inspirations there (along with a bunch of other things – e.g. Tolkien and reactions to Tolkien from his contemporaries)
Not unrelatedly: some, but not all, of the fiction itself will take the form of fictional comment threads from a fan web forum
Pattern (in temporal sequence):
“the short charming one everyone kinda likes, mostly” / “the long monumental one with the rabid fans that people either love or hate” / “the strange forbidding one for devotees only”
E.g.:
Portrait of the Artist / Ulysses / Finnegans Wake
The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings / The Silmarillion
Homestuck Acts 1-4 / Homestuck Act 5 / Homestuck Act 6
(or perhaps Problem Sleuth / Homestuck / ???)
A Thornbush Tale / Chesscourt / The Northern Caves
Does any other have procedural generation of characters way homestuck does?
In homestuck there are 12 trolls who get traits from astrological signs. The Libra troll is blind and obsessed with justice, the Cancer troll is grumpy or shall we say crabby, the Leo troll loves cats, etc.
And there’s the 13 leprechauns of the billiards themed gang, the Felt. Each has a name that is a pun on their number, and a time power related to their name. For example number two is Doze (“dos”), and he can slow down… not that useful. 9 is Stitch (“a stitch in time saves nine”) who repairs cloth dolls that have wounds reflecting those of the gang members, thus healing them. And the non-leprechaun member, Snowman, is 8, so killing her destroys the universe.
Uh I’m just telling you about homestuck at this point, but like…. idk I’ve never seen this before. The Felt are not major characters, but the trolls are, and just generating a variety of characters like that is an interesting idea idk.
Last Call by Tim Powers has most of the cast generated off the Major Arcana of the tarot, and that’s true both from a Watsonian and Doylist perspective but sometimes in different ways.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton also has a Zodiac-based set of characters, including characters for each of the constellations (as in Homestuck) and also for the classical Astrological planets. The characters are less strongly (or at least less directly) connected to their concepts than the ones in Homestuck, but the connections are there. (I don’t recommend this book – I thought it wasn’t very good – but it is an example of what you’re talking about.)
(via jiskblr)
All of a sudden I’m having this vivid image of Rose Lalonde as Rustin Cohle
Problem is I can’t decide who would most naturally be Marty