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

disconcision:

twocubes:

disconcision:

twocubes:

i need to reread homestuck to check whether my initial reaction of “the story was really awful to aranea and she should have gotten a better deal” was reasonable…

i’d say that’s a definite yes, provided that we establish that the standard for comparison is vriska. i think the argument stands without this, but if we’re willing to give equal epistemic weigh to mind-aspect hypotheticals versus explicit timelines, consider the branch where vriska goes after bec noir, resulting in the certain deaths of terezi and karkat, and the probable deaths of everyone else. this is the same thing. the story tries to make game over a bigger deal (that this fails is a separate but highly-entangled story issue, see below), but it’s ultimately just another branching with only indirect impact on the alpha.

it’s weird that the story almost lampshades its mistreatment of aranea when meenah mentions after-the-fact that she’s rather not even run into aranea’s double ghost. this is imo doubly uncharacteristic on the part of meenah; both in that she would mean it, and that in she would say it if she did. i feel hussie dropped this as basically a brush-off for consistency’s sake, telegraphing that aranea is no longer even important enough to be mentioned again.

i guess a lot of this has to do with how sympathetic you find her. personally, i cut the betas lot of slack for dying young and being eternally confined to (what is debatably) a social-media hellscape. but the story didn’t try to sell the dismal fact of their circumstances as hard as it could have; another missed opportunity, as this much-maligned part of the story had a lot of potential as an odyssean katabasis.

even if you consider aranea’s background as less exculpatory than vriska’s, the fact is that her mistakes (unlike vriska’s) did not engender alpha casualties. the implied moral weighing of alpha- versus offshoot-casualties is unclear to me; we’re clearly supposed to read game over as worse than, say, the mass murdering of the beta ghosts, but at this point in the story death was devalued to mostly obviate the distinction.

more likely though the issue here is, as always, vriska. the way the story bent over backwards for her in act 6 is what makes aranea’s summary dismissal so eyebrow-raising. these are two awesome, utterly flawless awful kids with big damage which ultimately can’t excuse the awesome, utterly flawless awful shit they do. i almost feel like aranea’s role was as a kind of doppelganger scapegoat; an attempted emotional sleight-of-hand where she is symbolically punished not only for her own misdeeds, but for vriska’s as well, paving the way for the latter’s simultaneous forgiveness/resurrection. since death no longer serves this role in the narrative, the only real punishment is unpersoning. unfortunately this just makes aranea’s treatment sting more, because vriska was way, way better dead.

this seems reasonable; i will be honest that on the first read-through the thing that bothered me was maybe less sensible:

i really disliked how everyone hated her for providing exposition.

the story (in this specific aspect) was extremely meta-acknowledging. the fact that she was there to provide exposition and the fact that the way she did so was awkward (from a writing perspective) was essentially explicitly acknowledged by the narrative itself, and these were seen as reasonable reasons for people to dislike her

but like

in providing exposition, she was providing a crucial narrative service? the story couldn’t continue without her? hussie essentially stuck her with a shitty but necessary narrative job and denied her any comeuppance?

i guess that fits with the whole twisted-mirror-of-dancestor thingy (what with the whole hussie/vriska thing) but like

ultimately here she was excited about stuff that other people didn’t care about and the story and everyone contained in it conspired to hate her for it.

and that made me feel kind of shitty.

…at least that’s what i remember thinking at the time. i haven’t read that far in the story in many years…

relatable. let me extend my doppelganger scapegoat take: hussie (also) incarnated her as an avatar of his continued expository excesses, and then proceed to kick and eventually smite her down in an(other) act of misdirected self-flagellation.

(via disconcision)

An Interview with Gankro, Homestuck programmer

gaystby:

homestuckhiveswap:

by /u/DrewLinky

INTRODUCTION

The Homestuck community is diverse and broad in its scope, with an unbelievable amount of culture being nested in places that will almost surely never see the light of public attention. I’ve taken it upon myself to write a journal that documents as many elements of the fandom as possible, in an attempt to preserve our culture in case circumstances lead to its eventual destruction as time goes by.

To this end I’ve been conducting interviews for a few months now, trying to seek as much information as possible about various aspects of the Homestuck fandom. Alexis “Gankro” Beingessner is one such individual who deserves a fair amount of consideration due to his contributions to Homestuck. It is difficult to imagine many others who have contributed to the webcomic in quite the same capacity that Gankro has: while many artists and musicians have contributed their considerable works to the comic, Gankro was involved with a different aspect entirely, that of coding.

Seguir leyendo

I highly recommend reading the actual interview, if you wanna read Gankro’s responses instead of the interviewer’s paraphrasing. Otherwise, you kinda miss out on his voice. https://pastebin.com/J9bZyBy3

I would strongly advise against trying to use Andrew Hussie as a job reference. Background check people get really upset when one of your references is impossible to contact because they’re basically a drifter.

(Source: reddit.com, via mmmmalo)

Finally checked out 17776, very good, gives me first-time-reading-Homestuck nostalgia

jankystats:

dirkar:

With the undertale sans pronoun debacle going on i’m reminded of how much I love watching Japanese homestucks discuss the best way to translate a work of fiction so steeped in cultural nuance. Whether or not Jake would use grandpa pronouns and Dave keeping a liberal amount of katakana Americanisms are points of contention. Makes my linguist heart flutter.

Localization nuance, this is the kind of shit I live for. Would LOVE it if you ever wanted to post about this in English in more detail, btw :)

(via pink--dusk)

veawile:

bumush:

acebots:

acebots:

when someone mentions Pearl Discourse i always think about how the MSPA forums have had a series of Vriska Quarantine Threads for literal years now because otherwise every discussion eventually turned into a giant Vriska argument

case in point:

these threads last 100 pages, or up to 2500 posts each before a new one is made. so it could be much worse

the mere fact this vriska argument went on for 42,500 posts and still going is a good estimate of human nature

To be fair, those threads pretty quickly turned into freeform chat threads for (mostly) Vriska fans, with actual arguments taking up a very small fraction of the post count

(The MSPA forums had a number of threads like this – in some periods the general MSPA discussion threads would fill up in a day or two, and were basically treated as forum-based IRC channels for a group of regulars, leading the mods to propose minimum content limits on posts)

(via shadowpeoplearejerks)

“Andrew Hussie wants queer voters to engage in the democratic process with their chainsaws in the coming election” is just such a good phrase in and of itself.  People should say this every time there’s an election