i have got to find that post written in like march 2010 complaining that act 4 wasn’t as good as homestuck used to be

oh my god

One strange thing about the Homestuck community was that people were always claiming Homestuck had gotten worse, relative to some point of comparison that was constantly shifting – the glory days were in early or late 2010, they were in 2011, they were in 2012 – and although these looked similar on the surface to the standard hipster gripes found in every community (”before they sold out” etc.), there was a strange sense of fundamental truth to them.

I first read it in the fall of 2011, and when Act 6 started, I was one of the first people to start complaining that something felt off about it.  People told me to give it time, and I did, and then I felt vindicated when other people finally decided “yeah, Act 6 has really gone to shit” … even though people were deciding that years and thousands of pages after I did, at very different points in the story.  And even when I first joined the conversation, there were people who thought I was uncritically eating up low-quality content after a point, that it had stopped being good somewhere in 2011 as the schedule slowed down, or in late 2010 when everything started being about trolls.

People got off the train at drastically different points, but the fact that you eventually would get off the train started to seem like an inherent property of the work itself: it is very widely agreed of Homestuck that it “stops being good at some point,” even though there is little agreement on where that point is.  (As if to prove the rule, many/most of the relatively few people who were still on board in the last days were put off by the ending itself.)

I’m saying this after reading a post talking about how Homestuck (as in, the continued output of the media franchise now that the comic is over) has gone downhill, as illustrated by stuff that happened today, in 2017.  It sure sounds bad, as one would expect it to be, given how much time it’s had to decline!  (By 2030, “Homestuck” will be listed in some future president’s equivalent of the Axis of Evil.)

The explanation for this is probably something boring having to do with people valuing many distinct things in an expansive work, but a magical, irrational part of my brain wants to believe that a trend this steady is the sign of something deep and natural, like some geological cycle, and that one day, as with the passing of seasons and the rise and fall of empires, we (or our descendants??) will see Homestuck soar back into greatness.

fipindustries:

also, in case someone’s curious, im reading the entire homestalgebra tag AND my own homestuck posts because i got curious about tracking both our progress through act 6.

it feels like an episode of pinky and the brain, except pinky becomes more and more jaded as time goes on

Oh man, in 2011-2013 I racked up over 2000 posts on the official MSPA forums, largely Homestuck effortposting, and now I think it’s all lost to time, unless there’s an archive of that forum somewhere

(OP snipped bc long)

@discoursedrome

I’m not as negative on Hussie despite broadly agreeing with these points, but this touches on a lot of my feelings about him. He tried doing conventional work beforehand and he couldn’t, it just didn’t work out. What he developed in MSPA (from Problem Sleuth onward) was a method that worked for him, and it was popular because it produced something nobody else could do, a kind of art totally unlike any other art. But you see a lot in Hussie’s commentary the observation that he can’t stop, slow down, or look back. The reason his “traditional“ works failed is because he needs momentum to create; the reason Homestuck sort of went off the rails at the end is because the increasing complexity of the work and the administrative drama associated with it robbed him of that momentum and once he stops he doesn’t know how to start again. I suspect his brusque dismissal of criticism comes at least partially from a latent awareness that his momentum is fragile.

But I mean, it’s a success story, isn’t it? He’s a guy with a unique creative talent that’s totally incompatible with the normal process, and yet he found a process that worked for him and his work was very popular and successful. He can’t make anything but the thing he made, but nobody else can make the thing he made, and I don’t just mean that in a trite way, I mean nobody can even come close, it was a completely distinct narrative form. However real all these criticisms are, I’ll give that a standing ovation.

I agree – I guess it’s one kind of success story and I wanted it to be another.   Homestuck is a wonderful thing, but it’s one that makes its creator’s limitations very very apparent, especially towards the end.  Whereas I wanted it to hide those limitations more and more shrewdly as it went on, like Caliborn drawing a succession of circles with more and more right angles until you aren’t even sure anymore that he’s not just drawing curves.

Caliborn is fascinating in light of all this – he’s obviously relevant, but I don’t know what to make of the ways in which he is relevant.  He seems, transparently, like Hussie writing a direct portrayal of the “weird kid” element of himself I described in the OP, and making that portrayal the villain.  (Specifically, Caliborn is a portrait of a younger Hussie, one who was more “the weird kid” and also more of an edgelord – hence he gets lectured by the more mature narrator-Hussie on personal growth.)

One of the many odd things about this is that Caliborn is characterized by taking shortcuts, “cheating,” rather than doing the hard work of “real personal growth” – but Hussie is writing Caliborn at the same time he’s taking more Caliborn-like shortcuts than ever in his own work, throwing away hard-earned character and plot threads or capping them off with overly pat, unsatisfying metaphysical fixes.  The cherub concept seems like an obvious metaphor for some kind of “Jungian integration of your masculine and feminine elements” thing, but Caliborn doesn’t get integrated, just vilified and then decisively defeated by his opposite – a Caliborn-like, brute force solution to a problem of personal growth!

Indeed, turning the story into a morality play about doing things the hard, grownup way, at the exact time he’s failing to do that with his writing, feels like an attempt to “cheat,” to achieve growth simply by declaring that he has grown, rather than showing it through his actions.  Rather than domesticating Caliborn / “the weird kid,” making his strange impulses subject to the control of a more thoughtful adult deliberation, Hussie just becomes ashamed of him.  It’s the “I acknowledge my flaws, which means I don’t have to change them” approach to personal growth.  Hussie excoriates his own method and elevates the more conventional, respectable methods of his fans (via Calliope as a character, and via the large concentrations of fan-drawn art in the last sequences), but self-flagellation isn’t the same as growth, and pedestaling the fans isn’t the same as respecting them.

And this all seems so transparent, and so characteristically meta and self-aware, that it feels like it all has to be deliberate – but if it’s all deliberate, does he know he’s not really growing?

Weird, weird stuff.

(via discoursedrome)

I saw a post about the Homestuck game and tried to remember liking Homestuck.  I mean, I still like Homestuck – the parts of it I liked have not changed (well, except for the blue arms) since I read them back in 2011, and although my taste has probably changed, that’s not what’s making me see it this way.  I think what’s happened is basically that I’ve grown to dislike Andrew Hussie, and that makes it hard to immediately enjoy (as opposed to “enjoy by remembering how I used to enjoy it”) anything in his very distinctive style.

I should clarify – Andrew Hussie may well be a great guy if you know him in person, I have no idea and don’t mean to suggest ill of him.  By “dislike Andrew Hussie” I largely mean “dislike Andrew Hussie’s style,” but it’s more than that – maybe “dislike Andrew Hussie’s creative persona.”  His public comments on his work, and his pattern of behavior (in update schedule, interactions with fans, etc.) seems like it forms a continuous whole with the style.  I’ll just write “Andrew Hussie” in quotes, to distinguish this from the real human being.

“Hussie” feels very … limited.  There’s a brilliance to his style, but you get the feeling he couldn’t possibly create anything that wasn’t obviously created by him; you don’t get the feeling he ever learned the ordinary rules of art or fiction or humor or even the English language, although it’s easy not to care, since his breaking of rules is so often clever or interesting rather than just clumsy.  He can write, for instance, in this particular tone of ironic grandiloquence which is full of crunchy, tasty turns of phrase and arresting images and metaphors, but you don’t ever see him dial this down to an “normal,” unironic, subtler elevated style – you get the feeling he can’t do any of the constituent pieces on their own, just the whole thing, like a gesture he can do with his hands but can’t explain.  He has his own distinctive sense of humor, which is obsessed with fiction tropes (specifically, declaring that reality “should” follow tropes, whether it really will or not), and with lovingly detailed ribbing towards “bad” media.  This is often hilarious by anyone’s standards, but he does it – that specific brand of humor, down to the individual beats sometimes – more consistently and repetitively than anyone would unless they couldn’t do anything else.

“Hussie” also has a creative persona which resists all criticism and asks all to trust in the artist’s sacred creative vision.  This fits with the style: he cannot adapt to criticism, he cannot be what anyone else wants him to be, he can only do the one thing he knows how to do, and push it to further and further heights, and trust in the fact that the rest of humanity has generally been delighted with this eccentric performance so far.  The voice he uses when talking as “Andrew Hussie, creator of MSPA” feels not too distinct from “Andrew Hussie, the narrator of MSPA”; both write in a way that superficially feels very artificial, knowingly bombastic, hiding everything behind an ironic wink and an assurance that if you just relax and let yourself enjoy the show, the master magician will deliver.  This can be immensely frustrating, because you want him at some point to let up the act, to step out from the various ironic personae and “this is so much like that one bad movie” framing devices and talk to you straight, as a creative adult who puppeteers personae and framing for fun and profit.  But that never, ever happens.  Whether or not this is as deep as Hussie goes, it is as deep as “Hussie” goes.  Scratch the surface and you keep finding more surface; nothing is ever not a joke or a reference or a put-on, nothing is ever not implicitly in quotation marks (or more aptly, being recorded on a low-budget movie camera).  The hall of campy mirrors is endless.

If it isn’t already clear, I find this all very #relatable, and have often felt like I am doing tricks for the world in exactly this way.  But maybe it’s this that makes “Hussie” just so frustrating to me.  You want him to perform the final trick that is making the audience forget they’re at a magic show, to perform so hard he breaks through into the territory where you literally can’t tell his “acting” from anyone else’s “real behavior.”  I feel like I’ve reached that point in a lot of my, well, life, and it feels wonderful.  Whether he wants to or not, “Hussie” never quite gets there, and being who I am, it can be painful to watch.

Actually, he did get there, for a time.  Homestuck at its height can give you this feeling of transcendence, where every frame you can try to box it into does not fully capture it, and for a time “Hussie’s” style feels not notably limited but notably limitless.  The geeky, referential comedy is pulled off with such finesse that it feels like the work of some godlike being who’s whimsically decided to try its hand at a dorky webcomic and (accidentally, because it performs any act with equal godlike power) creates a dorky webcomic that is better than most things on planet earth.  The absurd plot, full of tropes and comic book powers, is somehow sustained by a crystalline deterministic structure of incredible intricacy which you feel you’d need a seminar course to fully understand.  The characters are crude cartoons, and yet they speak in such eerily animate voices you can’t quite believe any of them aren’t real people.  Everything works on every level of irony and non-irony, self-awareness and naivete, crudity and brilliance.  You stop checking Hussie’s antics for formal compliance with ordinary-person standards because he keeps passing your tests, even though he’s doing something clearly ridiculous.

Who cares if this weird kid’s fourth-grade teacher says he can’t do any of the homework and should be held back a grade?  He just proved the Riemann Hypothesis.  Admittedly, instead of concluding the proof with the customary “Q.E.D.” or Halmos symbol, he scrawled “OMG BUTT LAZERZ” all over the final page, but you see that’s actually a masterstroke of construction when one takes into consideration its echoes of his earlier work [five page explanation follows].  The weird kid is being being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  It is for his novel Stacey is Annoying Because She Keeps Asking Why I Get to Have Cookies Even When I Have Told Her a Lot of Times That My Mom Packs My Lunch and I Don’t Really Get a Choice, Also She Keeps Talking About Weird Girl Stuff: A Comic Opera (in Prose).  The synopsis doesn’t really do it justice, but read it, and you will understand.

uu: WHAT MOST GIFTED ARTISANS WILL TELL YOU. IS THAT. CIRCLES ARE BASICALLY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAW.
uu: TRUST ME.
uu: IT’S LIKE A PARADOX. A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT??
uu: SO I FUCKING CHEATED.
uu: I NAVIGATED THE IRRATIONAL PERIMETER BY MAKING A LOT OF EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, TOTALLY LOGICAL MARKS. FORMING A WHOLE BUNCH OF LITTLE RIGHT ANGLES.
uu: THE CHEATING PART HAPPENS WHEN I DO THIS A LOT. SO IT GOES IN A ROUND DIRECTION.
uu: THIS ONE CAME OUT WELL I THINK. BUT THERE’S ROOM TO IMPROVE.
uu: I HAVE THEORIZED THAT IF I KEEP MAKING BOGUS CIRCLES LIKE THIS.
uu: WHILE DRAWING MORE AND MORE ANGLES. BUT SMALLER. SO SMALL THAT YOU START CAN’T SEEING THEM.
uu: THAT THE ILLUSION OF THE CIRCLE WILL BE COMPLETE! AND PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IN THE FAKE CIRCLE. LIKE A BUNCH OF SUCKERS.
uu: I BET NOBODY HAS THOUGHT OF THAT CIRCLE STRATEGY. I THINK I’M THE FIRST AT THIS IDEA. AND BEST AT IT ALREADY.
uu: PEOPLE THINK I’M DUMB. ESPECIALLY THE VOICE IN MY HEAD.
uu: AND THEY MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT ME BEING DUMB.
uu: BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE SPECIAL WAY I DO THINGS. WHICH IS ALWAYS ACTUALLY. THE PERFECT WAY.
uu: I AM.
uu: A GENIUS!

But after 2011 “Hussie” was up to nothing except his old tricks, and those tricks got a little worn out, and “Hussie” was always – reliably, infuratingly – himself.  The finale was an animation about a frog, which the weird kid had been dreaming about for a decade – executed by a team of up-and-coming artists who had become his acolytes.  It was, sources quote him as saying, “totally epic.”  The weird kid’s next novel is also about a frog, because frogs are cool, but this one has a funny top hat and raps about how dumb Stacey is.  The new frog’s flow is impeccable, but the critics focus sensibly on other matters, and they are ruthless this time.

In my fullest period of Homestuck obsession, I frequently compared “Hussie” to Nabokov.  This was a cute way of elevating “Hussie” and making myself sound smart, but there’s a real similarity there: the arrogant, seemingly artificial public persona; the unique and somewhat cramped sensibility, which is always great without stopping to be good; the indifference to all creative work besides their own and certain cherished reference ponts; the endless self-satisfied running-the-hands-over the artist’s own prior work and pre-existing obsessions; the elevation of those obsessions, in all their petty particularity, to higher and higher reaches of formal brilliance and technical achievement.  (See also.)  They take the treasured trivialities of their former years and make them “worthy of legitimate attention” by associating them with ingenuities of formal structure; to coin a word, they’re “nostalgebraists.”

Nabokov fooled them all, and got his star on the canonical map in the end, but “Hussie” may never pull it off.  It feels, anyway, like he had a chance and then lost it.