voxette-vk replied to your post “Finished the Epilogues at last.  I’m sure I’ll post something longer…”

I know almost nothing about Homestuck. Is it worth reading from the start?

It’s something that inspires such strong and specific opinions, and has such a distinctive and indescribable self-contained vibe, that it actually feels hard and unfamiliar to advise someone on the topic of “is Homestuck worth reading” from a completely blank reference frame.  Like one of those population ethics puzzlers about the unborn.

(“Is Homestuck good?  I dunno.  Is living good?  It definitely has parts I wouldn’t wish on anyone … ”)

But I can definitely say that reading Homestuck, like living, is a very interesting experience.

I recommend it, personally.

Finished the Epilogues at last.  I’m sure I’ll post something longer about them sooner or later, but just wanted to make this post to mark the occasion.

That was … not something I would have ever expected to happen.  Like, it’s not even that it was good, although it was.  I guess?  I mean, I had a wonderful experience reading it.  But it’s not that –

It was captivating, even when I didn’t know whether I wanted to be captivated.  It was captivating even when I wanted to cringe away from the screen, when it seemed to be jumping five different sharks at once, and then coming out on the other end oddly unscathed.  Captivating even when it was mocking its own captivating-ness –

It was immensely long, stupidly intricate, impossible to describe satisfyingly to anyone who hasn’t Had The Experience, embarrassingly awkward and undignified even as it ascended to dizzying heights of symbol-weaving metafictional self-satirical ingenuity.  Raw, electric, overwhelming, like touching some cosmic wellspring of pure creative energy.  (“What do you mean, ‘is this the right webpage?’  I told you, ms paint adventures dot com.  Oh, you mean, does the thing I described as ‘like touching some cosmic wellspring of pure creative energy’ really start with a joke about naming someone ‘Zoosmell Pooplord’?  Look, uh –”)

This is Homestuck again.  The feeling, I mean.  It’s very, very different, because it had to be – because this is how something has to be, to make me feel like this, not in 2011, but in 2019.

Among other things, I keep thinking about something @fipindustries wrote a while ago:

no but jokes aside, frustration with the development hell that was hiveswap and being sick of working on homestuck by the end got the best of him, there is a very clear tone of bitterness and distaste for everything he’s doing by the end. (someone should count the amount of times the characters say “who gives a fuck” throughout act six) that he is barely trying to hide behind a layer of “positivity” and “self acceptance” that catered to his remaining audience by the end. but i feel that his complete withdrawn from the internet  is a good sign.

i still hold hope (because that is what i foolishly do, always) that old, brilliant, mad genius hussie can comeback (obviously not with hiveswap, that has long ago stopped being his baby).

who knows, maybe he tries to tackle a smaller project again, maybe he returns from a completly oblique direction and next time we hear of him he’ll be making a series of shitty board games with ridiculous abtruse rules that if you play in the right sequence they reveal an underliying story about jack black traveling back in time to the middle ages to become shreck, maybe hussie will marry dante basco and the sex tapes of the honeymoon are what “homestuck 2.0″ was all along, who knows.

I didn’t hold out any such hope at the time, but I guess maybe I should have.  He’s actually doing this, man.  He’s making this happen.

There’s no place like home.

Q: So… Is Nepeta actually scratching him or is Gamzee slashing his face on purpose just to be fucked up?

A: He is slashing his face on purpose. Because I didn’t think the erotic submissive asphyxiation fetish death was fucked up enough, I thought a little bit of self mutilation was in order.

I hope at this point people realize that when you punched your Homestuck ticket, or really anything I’ve worked on, you were signing up for something that runs the risk of getting pretty fucked up. Practically everything I’ve done outside the confines of MSPA has been considerably more bizarre.

I’m capable of containing the impulse to do bizarre shit when I want to. If you look at some big stretches of Homestuck, you will observe something that is quite tame, often cutesy, and even at times bordering on accessible. But then, to create a well manicured and widely palatable product was never the mission here. It was about exploration, high diversity of concepts and execution and all that, and I guess above all, fun for me personally. (and YOU!) So there are vehicles built into it to support my more usual fare.

The primary vehicle for that was Hivebent, and the entire troll presence in the story in general. It began with a pretty messed up premise. The establishment of a colorful cast of kids from a violent race of psychopaths whose entire civilization centers around brutality and murder, and watching how kids from such a culture relate to each other and come of age. Hivebent began with dark notes relative to Homestuck, and only got darker. The scene with Vriska and Tavros in her quest cocoon was an example of the escalation in fucked up shit. Present events are even further escalation. It was always going to get much worse before it got better.

If you got into this story more recently without knowing anything about me or what I’ve done before, and feel the story would be better suited without the inclusion of the more bizarre elements, or the downright NASTYTIMES, all I can say is that’s not who I am or what you signed up for.

Do you know about Humanimals? […]

I spent a while looking through my offline copy of the old Formspring specifically for this quote from 2011, and it’s as relevant as I remembered

deusvulture:

I think that what makes the epilogues feel to me like authentic, pre-A6 Homestuck is that Hussie finally found a way to break genuinely new barriers around the narrative. Ever since Cascade (and certainly ever since the Cherub reveal), Homestuck had kind of been treading water, trying to find new ways to mess with the html, mess with the narration, more and bigger walkarounds – all just tired riffs on framebreaks that had already been done in Act 5.

But quality novelistic prose while doing away with pictures, frank depictions of sex and politics and adulthood, widening the chronological and emotional scope of the story - is an actual framebreak, a really effective one, by far the most effective one since EOA5 IMO.

(via resinsculpture-deactivated20221)

it’s easter and the Big Man is – somehow, impossibly – back

Finished Meat, starting Candy

I know I’m not actually dreaming – I’ve done the reality checks, but more importantly I’ve been through a full subjectively experienced afternoon/evening/night/morning since this started, and REM cycles never last more than ~1hr (and elapse subjectively in approximate real time).  But, in a really enjoyable way, the Homestuck Epilogues feel just like the kind of thing that happens in a dream.

You know?  The dreams that are at first superficially realistic, except that they don’t seem fully aware of what’s present and what’s past, and present you with an experience that would have been ordinary some time ago but very implausible right now?  But then the experience quickly diverges from anything resembling your IRL experience of that thing, because it’s become the vessel for the distinctively oneiric package of intense and inscrutable emotions and images the dream wants to throw at you?

The ones where it’s like, “oh, huh, there’s a new update for a webcomic I used to like, which ended over two years ago?  might as well read it, I guess?  hmm, this is … different.  it’s about … well, it’s about a lot of things, really, jeez, wow, this time the webcomic is about … (I feel tense) it’s (I feel alive) it’s abOut How MY soUL is COnsuMing itselF (it’s so beautiful – – ) (my god)”

That kind of thing happens a lot in dreams, or at least in my dreams.  I guess sometimes it happens in reality too.

nostalgebraist:

I’m only near the start of the Homestuck epilogues (“Meat” flavor specifically) but they are … good??

Or at least, they’re playing up some of the specific strains within Homestuck that I liked the best, and they’re well-written and funny, not exactly the same way the original was, but in the way you get when someone is a talented fiction writer and just so happens to be writing Homestuck fanfic

this is really good