I haven’t finished it yet (about 2/3 of the way through) but I’m pretty sure I’d recommend it no matter what happens im the rest, so:

Modern Cannibals is SO GOOD

It’s billed as Homestuck fanfic, which isn’t wrong, but its relation to the source material isn’t the one that’s usual for fanfic. It’s more like… a very good novel that just happens to be (in part) about Homestuck fandom, and that (more importantly) has a lot of delicious thematic, structural and tonal similarity to Homestuck despite looking totally different at first glance.

I’m hesitant to recommend it to people who haven’t read Homestuck only because of these resonances, which make an already great thing even better. Plot- and character-wise it works as a standalone.

It’s beautifully written, funny, emotionally raw and real (sometimes too real), irreverent, unsettling, disturbing, engrossing. Feels very Epilogues-esque. Not really like TNC in any deep way (I think?), but shares with TNC various elements not often found together (fandom as social environment and as spooky intense obsession, suspense, ambiguously supernatural horror). The author is apparently a full-time writer who writes fanfic under a pseudonym and wants to keep his identity secret, which is perfectly valid but does make me sad because I wish I could read his non-fanfic stuff too.

Apparently there’s … new Homestuck content, that’s causing … Vriscourse?  Time is fucking illusory, man

Haven’t read “Homestuck 2″ (lol) yet… given that the Epilogues were good and appeared to end everything on a high note, I’m worried that there’s nowhere to go but downhill (and, what’s more, going sharply downhill after a legitimately great quasi-ending would be very on-brand).  But we’ll see

Come to think of it, it was helpful when people told me I should read the Epilogues after I’d originally decided to ignore them, and similar advice (in either direction) would be likewise helpful here

Speaking of things I experienced a long time ago that I’m revisiting with Esther: Homestuck.

I’m really glad that Homestuck holds up after all these years.  It’s not perfect, of course, but the things I enjoyed about it in 2011 are still, almost one-for-one, things I have enjoyed while re-reading it in 2019.

This was a pleasant surprise, since the later stretches of the story were so reliably disappointing that it was hard to imagine the earlier parts had been much better.  It felt rational to think I was falling prey to grumpy-old-man syndrome, complaining about the exact same thing I used to like because I wasn’t the easily impressed youth who used to like it.  And maybe it was a plausible hypothesis.  Just not an accurate one.

If there’s a pattern in the cases where some work hasn’t stood the test of time for me, it’s that I liked the concept of the thing more than the thing itself, and could go on liking the concept in principle without ever revisiting its disposable concrete implementation.  Adventure Time was like this for “bizarre and unpredictable but not ‘edgy’ children’s shows”; Pacific Rim was like this for “the grandiose emotions and giant robots of anime transposed into Hollywood vernacular”; even Infinite Jest was like this, for “bizarre disquieting artifacts/experiences about bizarre disquieting artifacts/experiences.”

I enjoyed these things because they proved the existence of the categories they belonged to, by existing while belonging to those categories.  But I didn’t like anything else about them enough to revisit them once they’d served as proofs of concept.

Homestuck was not like this.  It’s not merely appealing as a concrete instance of an appealing category, because it’s hard to even describe what that category would be using only external referents.  It’s just itself, and you can’t throw away the concrete thing and still carry the essence around in your pocket.  And you wouldn’t want to, because the concrete thing is simply good as a concrete thing, too.  The jokes are still funny, the characters still lovable, even in a world where their very existence is no longer surprising.

neoflect:

rather than death of the author i subscribe to a critical framework i like to refer to as Schrodinger’s Author where the authors intentions are important except for when i dont like them

(via prospitianescapee)

Sometime on Tuesday I left the ecstatic haze of my Epilogues obsession and returned to the normal flow of daily life, but this morning I started thinking about a thematic cluster I still don’t grok, and it’s gnawing at me, so I’m making a post

(I woke up in a really nasty mood this morning, and that’s probably coloring the way I’m thinking about this topic, which is amusingly appropriate given the topic, actually)

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Some more Epilogues notes – mostly things I don’t entirely understand that I’m curious about, although in the course of writing this I realized some things that weren’t initially clear to me, so there’s those too

(Spoilers)

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epilogues interpretive notes

Spoilers.

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