hot new homestuck theory reveals that in addition to inventing anime, andrew hussie also invented metafiction
Raising my eyebrows, here. I like Nabokov, and yet I suppose I read a lot of ~lowbrow~ (whatever that really is) books.
icanfeelyourcontempt replied to your post: “I would be kind of surprised if Hussie was a Nabokov fan because he…”
Also plenty of people with “high-brow” taste would have trouble getting through Pynchon… “low-brow” taste is not necessary to dislike it, and I doubt it’s sufficient.
Certainly – I mean, for instance, I dunno what my taste is, but I like Nabokov and cannot stand Pynchon.
(I had a weird phase where I forced myself through the entirety of Against The Day just to make sure I really disliked Pynchon, and the answer was … yes)
I don’t think “Hussie is too lowbrow for Nabokov” is the right way to put it, but the impression I got from that Formspring answer is that Hussie thinks of “dense prose” and “fun to read” as being mutually exclusive, which seems like it would rule out Nabokov
(This isn’t a purely genre / litfic thing – my interpretation also predicts Hussie would not like Elizabeth Bear, for instance)
All that said, Hussie demonstrably loves writing highly stylized text that takes some work to parse but is also hilarious, and I can easily imagine him laughing his ass off while reading Pale Fire, so idk
psybersecurity-blog asked: I would be kind of surprised if Hussie was a Nabokov fan because he seems to have lowbrow literary tastes based on this formspring exchange: "Have you ever read Gravity's Rainbow? It seems like it'd be up your alley, what with the complex plot, storytelling, etc." Hussie replies "I've heard of it and I've read some snippets. It does seem a bit dense and kind of heavyhanded though. At the risk of raising myself above a great and accomplished novelist, I kind of like to make my stuff fun to read."
Yeah, I remember seeing that ask too, and I agree. For some reason I still have a hard time giving up the idea that the “admire harlequins” / Pale Fire quote thing was just a coincidence.
Since there was so much interaction with readers at that point, maybe the command and quote both arose from some Nabokov fan on the forums or something? (The commands came from readers, but Hussie wrote the narration, so someone would have had to mention that quote to him at the time, maybe in a forum signature, who knows)
I must have made a post about this long ago, but Esther’s started reading Homestuck (:D) and that reminded me of it
In this early page of Homestuck, we have one of our usual misattributed quotes:
“The moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun.” -Mark Twain
You are almost certain Mark Twain said that.
Of course, Mark Twain didn’t say that. It’s a line from Timon of Athens, a relatively obscure Shakespeare play, and thus most famous not for being a Shakespeare quote, but for providing the title of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. The novel is named after a poem that plays a central role in it, which has a couplet describing its own naming:
(But this transparent thingum does require
Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.)
It seems much more likely that Andrew Hussie was aware of the “arrant thief” quote as “from Pale Fire” rather than “from Timon of Athens.” Has he read Pale Fire, or just heard the quote? No idea.
But where things get eerie is when we look at the previous page, which has the command “John: Admire harlequins.” This sounds very much like another imperative:
I honestly believe this was probably not a coincidence.
The resulting story has a number of Nabokovian motifs: butterflies (the wings of the God Tier trolls), chess, puzzles whose resolution lies in seemingly innocuous details (”diluvial”). (All of this is almost certainly a coincidence.)
While recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth, I received a home delivery of painkillers from a young woman. I was struck by the shirt she wore, black with a large colored sign from the Zodiac.
“This is a sign used by the early Homestucks,” she said.
A dazzling shower of colored graphics appeared before me, like some numinous flash animation, and I realized: we are living on October 25, 2011. All apparent events since October 25, 2011 have been an illusion created by the Black Iron Prison.
“This is mind-blowing!” I exclaimed.
The girl shrugged, and replied matter-of-factly: “Weird time shit.”
Also, I want to be clear that when I write negative things about Homestuck I’m not trying to participate in, like, the conversation that people currently engaged in Homestuck are having
I was very emotionally invested in Homestuck in 2011 and 2012, and started feeling let down by where it was going, and started thinking about that a whole lot, to the point that “why I don’t like recent Homestuck” became its own obsessive interest with its own kind of emotional investment – I would think about on the subway every day, I rewarded myself after my oral qualifying exams by writing a giant “Act 6 is bad” post which at the time was this deeply comforting activity, like my perfectly natural state somehow
I lost that obsession as well, eventually, and just started skimming the updates or not even reading them. If I say anything about it at this point it’s partly getting back in touch with my “special interest in bitching about Homestuck,” and partially looking back on my whole trajectory with this weird thing that I used to love hating, and longer ago used to love a great deal – I mean, I felt blessed when I discovered it in 2011, a few weeks before moving to a new city where I knew no one, because now Homestuck was my companion and its characters, in some sense, my friends, and being suddenly alone was fine because I wasn’t alone, I had Homestuck
Uh, anyway, I am several levels removed from being able to comment constructively on Homestuck like a receptive, interested audience member at this point
turboshitnerd replied to your post “homestuck” “spoilers” [[MOR] i couldn’t sleep anyway and am a…”
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“homestuck” “spoilers”