Storming The Ivory on Homestuck again (I’m sorry, I am just fully embracing this blackrom crush now, why bottle up my resentment)

Cascade is, from the standpoint of the narrative, effectively a kind of Trickster Mode. Cascade represents a really dramatic set of leaps forward in the GAME THAT THE CHARACTERS ARE PLAYING where a lot seems to get resolved but very little beyond immediate game construct concerns are really fixed. God Tier gets a similar treatment: God Tier is positioned early on as a thing that will solve the problems of the players. Later on, however, this is called into question in a number of ways, such as the conversation where Karkat and Dave discuss the Gift of the Gab ability and Karkat’s assumption that it allows God Tier players to better communicate on an emotional level. It’s a great example of game abstractions taking the place, for the characters, of actual real attempts to deal with all the emotional baggage that they’re left with over the course of playing this awful fucked up hellgame.

[…]

And Homestuck as a narrative is difficult because the characters resist our own ideas of what’s best for them–our assumptions about whether or not they should complete their quests, who gets to count as the “real” version of a character, and what constitutes a sufficiently heroic and epic victory. (How dare they not heroically sacrifice themselves for our dramatic enjoyment! How dare they not resolve all of their problems in a neat and tidy way!)

[me, explaining that you and I should be treated as entirely interchangeable substitutes for other versions of ourselves who have had profoundly different experiences, rendering the difference between more and less mature instances of the same person moot, because we are all mere contributors to the same bodiless, timeless, immortal Ultimate Self – an insight I gained after getting permanently and non-consensually fused with another completely distinct person]: this is what real, tough personal growth looks like, without any fantasy bullshit quick fixes,

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Act 6 gets a lot of punishment in the fandom, and the ending of Homestuck has received a similar beatdown, and in a sense I can see why that’s the case, because ultimately Homestuck is a difficult, complex, and, yeah, literary work. But we’ve been experimenting with form and narrative for about a century now in literature. The idea of texts needing to follow absolute standards of Good Writing died pretty much the moment Ulysses hit the presses.

sorry sterne, sorry defoe and richardson, sorry shakespeare, sorry murasaki, sorry cervantes, sorry dante, sorry rabelais, sorry scoffing scholar of lanling, sorry every other pre-20C literary innovator, but actually, in this “retcon” timeline, everything followed perfect rigid conventions until the joyce nation attacked, and none of your funny little ideas ever caught on

Satisfying endings, esp. in serialized fiction

jonomancer:

This is in response to http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/143321851339/lovestwell-nostalgebraist-the-most-common

@nostalgebraist

Hi. I’ve been thinking about the question of what makes a satisfying ending, because I’m also trying to learn how to tell a good story. So this is party a response to your thread and partly me trying to work this out for myself. The post turned out really long because I don’t have time to make it shorter.

My theory, short version: The ending has to be an answer to the question that the rest of the story was posing.

When an ending is unsatisfying to me there’s usually a sense that the question the author thought needed answering was different from the question I thought needed answering.

Mild spoilers for Homestuck and for Floornight below the cut.
If you haven’t read Floornight I recommend reading it! Despite my criticisms it’s a very original and fascinatingly weird science fiction story.

Keep reading

This is really interesting – for one thing, it makes me aware of some specific ways I could have done the Floornight ending better.

This suggests it’s a good framework to keep in mind generally.  The way these kinds of discussions usually go is that a bunch of people don’t like an ending because it didn’t wrap up some thing or things they specifically cared about.  But on the other hand, “tidy little bow” endings that methodically wrap up every loose end can feel artificial, and get criticized for that reason.  So from the author’s perspective, it feels like: “I’m not supposed to wrap up everything, and anything I don’t wrap up will dissatisfy someone, so there’s no ‘right answer’ and I’ll just strive for ‘not ideal but not terrible.’”

But as you say, rather than throwing up one’s hands like this, it may be better for a serial writer to at least think “what it is that my readers are currently reading to find out?”  (Often, I think, the problem is that the ending was planned from the beginning, but the events right before the ending weren’t; the ending makes sense as the culmination of the entire story, but doesn’t seem to flow from the recent events that ought to have been setting it up.)

The Homestucks as Generatorland Shitposts

castellankurze:

shitpost generator

John Egbert:  you cant drown in a sea of beard oil

Rose Lalonde:  i gaze solemnly out of the car window. droplets of rain slide down and collect on its surface. the pigeon-grey sky is clouded over and thick with cold crisp moisture. i turn to you and say what we have both been thinking: i want to acquire chaos

Dave Strider:  im going to go back in time and understand knives

Davesprite:  i saw a bird once and you can’t tell me they dont experience hell

Jade Harley:  the goal: interact with furries

Jane Crocker:  i’m a jaded teenage girl. i’ve been through shit that you wouldn’t even dream of. i escape friendship

Roxy Lalonde:  *sees another human being* time to fill the void left by death

Dirk Strider:  (leading you on a tour of the house) and here is the room where i draw heterosexuals

Jake English:  (leading u on a secluded path thru the woods) yeah i guess you could say i escape wolves

Aradia Megido:  why cant we all just get along and love death

Tavros Nitram:  i’m not like those other guys. i endorse monsters?

Sollux Captor:  According to all known laws of aviation there is no way a bee should be able to get along with others despite differing opinions about friends

Karkat Vantas:  im just small and i thrash on the floor and yell about it?

Nepeta Leijon:  do you think i think deeply about fursonas?

Kanaya Maryam:  i’m fun. i’m flirty and cute. i’m gonna feed off actual flesh?

Terezi Pyrope:  im trapped in a babies r us right now which is substantially worse than a toys r us. i havent seen daylight for months and i cannot escape. please rescue me from baby hell so i can once again pretend to be dragons

Vriska Serket:  your fave is problematic: they pretend to care about everything good in the world

Equius Zahhak:  one thing ive learned is that its surprisingly difficult to endorse milk

Gamzee Makara:  a bumper sticker that reads: honk if you sell meat

Eridan Ampora:  (reclining in an antique armchair and sipping a thick black liquid from a wine glass) ah. i suppose its time to betray civilization

Feferi Peixes:  i love fish because they love my aesthetic

Calliope:  dear diary….today i am going to romanticize homestuck

Caliborn:  do you hear the people sing? singing the song of angry men? it is the music of me when i disregard good things

Andrew Hussie:  im going to write a modern version of romeo and juliet where they both worship horses

(via dharma-initiative-official)

I should not keep posting about how I think some new Storming The Ivory article is bad.  We get it, I don’t like that blog.

But this new one is … really bad, and it’s about Homestuck, which is a topic where I don’t think I come in with unusually strong biases, unlike some other topics like Undertale, and … auughhhhh “social construct” is not an unfamiliar concept, you do not somehow have to be ignorant of this widely known concept to dislike the ending, people who talk about character arcs aren’t necessarily expecting rigid rules, and even if they did the rigid rules might not be Hero’s Journey rules which have their own specific problems that one can critique in specific without necessarily critiquing “rules” in general, who even is the audience of this post meant to be, it’s either extremely patronizing or aimed at a very weird specific subset of people, what the fuck

I’m sorry

deusvulture:

nostalgebraist:

Ngl, though, Homestuck Act 7 is gorgeous and 90% of it is really enjoyable if I just forget about most of Act 6 and think of it as the conclusion to a much earlier version of Homestuck, which is apparently what it actually is (”I actually storyboarded it about four years ago”)

Yeah, this is me, too. Frankly, I’ve actually had ideas bouncing around in my head about an “abridged edition” of Homestuck that left in everything from Acts 1-5 but dramatically cut down on Act 6 (rough idea: leave everything up until the “Descend” montage animation where we see the alpha kids leveling up on their planets, then take a hatchet and leave only what’s necessary in order to maintain continuity with both that and Act 7). Depending on how much reduction you could get without seriously affecting continuity, I think you might end up with a better story.

It’s a project for someone with much more knowledge and dedication than me, though :p

That’s an appealing idea, although I think it’d run into the more fundamental problem that the most plot-crucial parts of Act 6 are also the most controversial and make the most references to their own internal structure.

There’s no way to make A6A6 better (or less bad) by cutting it up – there are probably various little bits that could be cut, but basically you either include A6A6 or exclude it.  Including it would mean you’ve hardly abridged at all, and excluding it would mean the reader sees lots and lots of void session / intermission waiting around and then … bam, it’s just suddenly over.

(via resinsculpture-deactivated20221)

Ngl, though, Homestuck Act 7 is gorgeous and 90% of it is really enjoyable if I just forget about most of Act 6 and think of it as the conclusion to a much earlier version of Homestuck, which is apparently what it actually is (”I actually storyboarded it about four years ago”)

nightpool replied to your post “mercurialmalcontent replied to your post “I am kinda surprised I…”

I think the Christian parallels are a little specious? Like self-sacrifice in general is obvious a huge component but I didn’t see anything other then that that pointed to Jesus?

Keep reading

mercurialmalcontent replied to your post “I am kinda surprised I haven’t seen people angry at (or having other…”

I think any drama that was going to happen about that probably already happened wrt The Sufferer.

Cut for being an especially direct Homestuck ending spoiler

Keep reading

I am kinda surprised I haven’t seen people angry at (or having other emotional reactions to) Alt Calliope being a Christ figure?

That Homestuck theory also mentioned the line about real people not having characters arcs, and –

I’ve often said things like that when arguing with people who think that good stories always follow rigid arc structures for all their major characters.

(There’s a whole family of related ideas I disagree with – “everyone has to be paired off at the end,” Freytag’s pyramid as a prescriptive thing, the “dramatic breaks” that BYB used to talk about, that image set explaining that the Homestuck ending was bad because it “broke rules” … )

But, “real people don’t always have character arcs” is not the same thing as “there is no bad way to write a character.”

I’m not going to claim that the Homestuck ending “wrote characters badly” because I wasn’t following the story closely enough by the end to pass judgment.  But in general, when people say “this character’s arc wasn’t finished,” they often just mean “I wish the author had used more of this character’s potential,” not “the author didn’t follow the rules.”

Real people don’t have endings either, except for death.  There are cases where, for one reason or another, you never hear from/about a person again after a certain point.  But even then, something happened to them after that point.  And fiction has the potential to let you see whatever parts of a person’s life the author chooses; if and when you “never hear from them again,” that’s because the author made a choice.

Not providing you with “closure” is sometimes the right choice.  Sometimes it’s even the right choice because it feels more “real.”  But “closure never happens in real life” is just plain false.  People enter and leave relationships, jobs, self-concepts.  No one ever just stops in freeze-frame because they’ve hit “the ending.”

There’s a related point I want to make which I can’t without sounding really pretentious, in the “I’m a ~writer~” way.  But here goes.

A lot of Act 6, mostly the later parts, look a lot to me like the product of a certain temptation that is familiar to me.  One that I felt while writing the later parts of both Floornight and TNC, and gave into probably more than I should have in both cases.

It’s the temptation to use the fact that “shit has gotten weird” in the plot to justify writing choices that aren’t very good, even on the story’s own (strange) terms.  The fictional world is “breaking apart,” so why shouldn’t the writing break apart, too – form fitting content?  This can be done well.  Sometimes writing choices that are objectively lazy, from your perspective as a writer, are also the right choices for knocking the reader off-balance in a certain desirable way.

But of course, once you recognize this possibility, you’re going to start doing motivated reasoning, talking yourself into the idea that this or that lazy choice is oh-so-conveniently a good one.  You can always talk yourself into rash and sloppy writing because “the plot is getting too wild for subtlety” or “I have to surprise the readers somehow”; you can always talk yourself into not resolving things you’ve set up because “the story is about uncertainty” or “things don’t resolve in real life.”  But is any of that really true?  When you set those things up, is this the sort of thing you hoped to do with them?

Certain interpretations rub me the wrong way because they seem like they’re enabling this behavior.  Sure, if someone’s mind was blown by a writer’s lazy choices, their mind was blown, and that’s just a fact.  But sometimes it looks to me like people are teaming up with the little devil on the author’s shoulder.