HOMESTUCK

what is homestuck?

that's the question, isn't it. reader, as much as it pains me, i will do my very best to tell you about homestuck. homestuck is a 8,000-page web juggernaut incorporating written text, mspaint illustrations, extensive flash-animated sequences, vine, and flash-animated walkaround minigames, written by bizarre egotist transgender juggalo andrew hussie and a whole bunch of other people. it started on april 13, 2009 and lasted for seven years after that, an ordeal which in its unfolding made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

it's a love letter or a hate-filled chainmail rant to a bygone era of internet culture: a coming-of-age story for the postmodern internet era, with all the 4channy recalcitrance you might expect from the cast's gaggle of 90s kids hitting 13 in the late aughts. it's also a gnostic mysticism-filled epic, a bard's tale on the doomed toxic yuri relationship type endemic only to middle school-aged larper 'girls,' an exercise in creating an alien species that works best as a weird satirical parody of late-stage usamerica, a confusing lesson in the rules of chess, pool, and time travel, a triptych on outdated computing technology, a bizarre and parenthetical retelling of the wizard of oz and peter pan, and more than anything, homestuck is about how it's hard, being a kid and growing up -- it's hard, and nobody understands.

it's like if you put a cast of abused and/or neglected kids into a traditional coming-of-age story with all the threats of death and magical spells and questioning the new uncomfortable requirements of adulthood typical of the genre, but gave them internet access, which was the primary way most of the characters interact with each other for a long time.

fascinatingly, it's an ophrys apifera situation, though -- the type of internet culture homestuck is holding a mirror to was on its way out even way back at its zenith, and nowadays it's not even close to reflecting modern internet nor modern tweenage netizens. the aliens that antagonize the human characters -- named trolls, no less! -- aren't asked to send selfies to prove their extraterrestrial heritage, the kids use an msn-type messenger, there's no way to send an image except through tinyurl! there's a character whose devoted gag is being a hipster, in fact, more than one. the most modern gui that a kid's computer has is a glossy windows vista-type. another character uses the defunt shortform video platform "vine" to make his art, and dumps the rest of his "how to draw" manga abominations on a deviantart page. remember deviantart? well, it can still be found in homestuck, where barack obama is still the president, leet-speaking trolls regularly terrorize the internet's chatrooms, and the r-slur is still an acceptable thing to say if you aren't choosing to read the unofficial collection's no-slur version since the original media's license was purchased, abused, and then dropped by a media corp.

it's a fantastic piece of fiction that makes such rich use of symbolism that i feel forced to accept that it is mechanically brilliant, yet its author's occasional lapse in revealing their grotesque internal biases in character-writing, as well as their steadily declining interest in collapsing their super-bloated omnidirectional narrative into a cohesive, fulfilling conclusion make the piece's quality suffer immensely. nonetheless, for a time, it inspired tens of thousands of mentally off-kilter young adults to throw their hard-earned post-recession cash into tubes of gray body paint and send their spinal cords out-of-wack bending over wacom tablets to make fanart of their favorite little nft-lookin' freaks as smexy white twinks. because it was mostly the dudes gettin' drawn. and still is. anyway,

characters

the character writing is, inarguably, one of homestuck's strongest aspects -- its female characters are, in particular, given especially good reception in that they were generally written as similar in competence and importance to their male counterparts, even moreso on frequent occasion. these characters, they're rich; they're believable; they're feasibly stupid and selfish and make goofy mistakes. the friendly and antagonistic relationships that exist between the extremely complicated networks of long-estranged family members, would-be bullies and victims, and age-appropriate will-they-won't-they mutual-or-one-sided pining pubescent casanovas is where homestuck tends to really hit its stride. or hit a wall; i don't know, i have opinions and am aromantic enough that the "shipping" bit of homestuck -- as inveterate as it is to the medium, what with the whole webcomic being about and inside of internet fanculture -- is pretty foreign to me.

nonetheless, a great deal of the characters are written so well (at least most of the time) that i almost tend to think of them as real people i knew when i was thirteen. like, 'oh, yeah, karkat, from sixth grade!' to be honest, though, the characters aren't even the part of homestuck my brain is the most autistic about -- it just so happens that they're so strong i feel like it's impossible to try and make a shrine about homestuck without mentioning them. i'm more interested in what the characters represent symbolically (and what they endure in their trauma narratives) rather than the characters as individuals, to be honest, but nonetheless, i'll get into it a little. they are practically old friends to me at this point after all.

the beta kids

the beta kids are our everymen, more or less. we are asked to view the earliest and some of the most abstract stages of the comic through their eyes and with their native familiarity with the concepts introduced. they're framed as very typical children, but it is this expectation and the reader's willingness to accept bizarre lifestyle quirks at the start which makes the later reveals of the beta kids' interpersonal struggles that much more intriguing.

to me, they're some of the most familiar and most likeable characters. john (june) is a silly goose who loves his friends, his movies, unintentional emotional dysregulation, and being a goober. dave is a (BLACK SERIOUSLY HE'S SO RACIST IF YOU DON'T TAKE HIM THAT WAY?! white dave fans explode how would you like him as that) rapping inner-city youth "coolkid" with a lot of psychological problems he thinks he's got under wraps by being ironic about them. he does not, in fact, have them under wraps. rose is, like, the quintessential weird bookish girl some of us internet transgenders may have been at 13 who thinks that she has her family and psychological problems under wraps because she's got them all figured out and knows how to deal with them. the underside of her wraps is also as barren as usamerican democratic integrity. jade is another weirdgirl strain who internet transgenders may also remember being, and is a silly girl who lives with her dog alone on an island and knows how to fire guns and disembowel people for taxidermy. normal kids!

if you already knew all that: sorry, but i don't actually have much else to say! i don't have a favorite; i love all of them a lot! i wish that jade and rose bechdel'd one-on-one more, i wish dave wasn't portrayed as white so much when his story is made a million times richer and less racist if he were black, i wish jade weren't fridged all the time because she's too op, and i wish june egbert being a tgal in her 30s was shown in hs2 already. a fun fact is that i used to hate rose for being so similar to me, because it made me embarrassed how pompous she looked for talking like how i did at the time...

the trolls

the trolls, as you might expect from their name, are a bunch of douchey kids mired in period-accurate internet tropes. they're a foil to the beta kids in how cartoonishly bad their lives are, not that we see much of that in-depth until later, non-canonical additions to the series come out, which i have yet to read and intend never to do so because they're so divorced from the canon by years of baking in the collective fanon brain-kiln they often do an enormous disservice to the characters themselves. moving on, though, these twelve troubled children are sure to piss off both zodiac believers and ignorers off alike with their complicated and nonsensical worldbuilding, frequent use of horrible slurs, and ridiculous depth that makes it hard to judge them as people, children, and tools of the narrative and arrive to a singular view on what each of them are.

if you already knew all that: i actually don't know if i have favorite trolls, either. it feels hard to judge them when so many of them are kneecapped by hussie being racist or ableist. i love terezi except for the occasional distastefulness of her disability's writing, i love tavros except for the fact he was never agential in his own life and his good ending is doing what vriska wanted him to do all along, i love gamzee except [CANON BEING ENDLESSLY RACIST AT HIM IT'S NOT EVEN HIS FAULT], i love vriska except she's just kind of difficult to read at times as a disabled little bitch. i do think her story being that she could be the hero only if she sacrificed everything and everyone to do it was good, but in a way, it sucks that we only see that idea presented in the form of "vriska is the hero" and it doesn't really leave an impact on anyone but terezi; we don't even get to know how vriska felt about it all in her later days in relevance. moving on, because i could probably talk about the trolls for ages. i have species-spanning gender meta thoughts the likes of which you would not want to waste cerebral calories on conceiving...

the alpha kids

the alpha kids are the post-scratch iteration of the children fated to play sburb, which means they're the beta kids'...alternate universe parents! wooo! spooky! mind-bendingly terrifying! truly the most horrific thing you could introduce in a coming-of-age narrative epic: surprise, these versions of your parents are young, alive, don't recognize you as their children, didn't raise you, and also incidentally idolize you because due plot hijinks, you were necessarily dead for their developing years despite being a cultural hero and role model prior to then...AND they're 15-16. they're raised at different points across time, alone, and their situations are more unmissably fantastical compared to their progenitors, but at least this time you've been attuned to realizing that the kids of homestucks' situations are fucked up no matter how chill they seem with it all.

i confess that i didn't care so much for them due to a lieu of personal beefs i have with the writing choices hussie (and co.?) made by this point in the comic. there are personal preferences, like not having a great deal of interest in the romantic quadrangles and tangles that the kids have amongst themselves even when i was comfortably in their age cohort, and more serious problems, like how shafted roxy and jane were in comparison to their male counterparts, to the extent that roxy got over her main problem, alcoholism, with no on-screen presence of it (merely an allusion or two to it already being done), and jane doesn't have an arc at all -- a weakness exploited by the epilogue-writers to make truly one of the most hateful, sexualized interpretations of a female character you'll find off the silver screen.

dirk's neuroses are both relatable and arguably "cool," but i wish he wasn't an unintentional rehash of the trope of "male character who's basically proven right all the time because he's just made more savvy or privy to better information by the author." jake's problems are nifty for a 'male' character to have -- unwanted advances, damsel-ification by the narrative, unwanted gendering, coping with the age-accurate difficulty of reconciling self-confidence and gender performance with an onslaught of undesired romantic attention, and so on -- but i wish he wasn't shafted almost as frequently as a female character is under dirk. roxy is cool in general, but the flaws she has basically never come up -- even her tenure as an alcoholic mother is ignored in favor of rose weirdly just blaming herself for it, which is never contested by anyone. jane's a cool, funny butch 'girl' who gets gradually divorced from her role as 'most important guy,' which is her birthright as progenitor of the protagonist, in favor of a buncha dudes! she spends a not-insignificant portion of her screentime not even being herself, which is fucking wild in general, but especially for it to go basically unaddressed.

it's not that i dislike them; not at all, it's just that out of every section of characters, they take the gold in "most wasted potential," followed only by the trolls' dancestors and ancestors, who don't make up enough content of the story by volume for me to feel their inadequacy so keenly, or who served their sparing purpose just fine enough for me to be fine with their general irrelevance.

the cherubs

for much the same reasons as my feelings towards the alpha kids are comparatively sort of tepid, i felt the same way about the cherubs. alright, so these guys are antisocial skull-headed aliens who live alone on dead planets until one party of the body's dual-consciousness -- the "evil one" or the "good one" -- dominates the other, controls the body, sprouts wings, and becomes guardian of some part of space which they claim as their territory while the loser deposits the egg somewhere and leaves in shame. sounds cool, aside from if you take issue with the reductive whiffs of biological determinism and relativistic morality there inlain, but let's assume you're not a huge tool like me.

they're more interesting to me as a couple of narrative symbols rather than as the characters they embody, even if calliope is very sweet and a somewhat endearing representation of homestuck fandom and caliborn is a funnily realistic rendition of a 13 year old boy who just learned a bunch of slurs off kiwifarms. i enjoy their relationship to the concept of all-powerful hope (escapism, fantasy, boundless potential). i enjoy that caliborn goes on to represent the destruction of the characters' universes, the violence of storytelling and plot, and the brutal requirements for conflict and death (all villains -- bec noir, gamzee, lil cal, bro strider, vriska's cruelty) are all him: english, the language, the embodiment of time -- which is to say the currency on which narrative necessarily runs on, especially one as trope- and reference-filled as the story he's dominating.

i like calliope most as a tragic, flat backdrop. i like her as the stage she represents as muse of space: the background on which time plays out, the medium onto which violence and plot is done. lord english wouldn't come to pass without the destruction of his "good" counterpart and her impending irrelevance. indeed, he reasserts himself over and over again across space because her role as passive canvas must permit it, and he when he falls, he falls into that slow, nearly-useless trap of a corner pocket in space pretty much ubiquitously, even if other iterations of him can feed off whatever timelines still stretch across existence. if caliborn is "evil," then calliope is "good" -- ever-present, nigh-imperceptible, frequently conquered, but unrelenting in her enduring nature. i don't fuck with the epilogues.

alternia

alternia is the unceasingly brutal home planet of the gray-skinned, horned, and otherwise humanoid trolls -- or, at least its post-scratch iteration after the "pacifistic" mollycoddling-infantilizing imperial culture was disposed of by the cueball-headed pedo-uncle parasite-style host of the ultimate villain of homestuck, the english language, in order to create a more physically violent culture suited to raise 12 specific trolls for the rigorous rpg-scaling path to godhood. got that? cool.

alternian society is stratified by caste, which is a genetic, physically-evident quality here, inspired loosely by the zodiac: blood color, which naturally manifests in time in the irises, may be evident in horn shape, and also when someone inevitably cuts you because alternia sucks. blood color ranges from 12 shades, starting at burgundy, the lowest rung of society, to fuchsia, the royal seat of the empire and to which only two members of the species belong at a time. it is cartoonishly violent, where upper castes are permitted to cull members of lower castes with complete impunity, where the special, genetically-preordained powers of telekinesis and superstrength are reigned in for service labor or warfare, where the heiress is expected to seize power through killing their other pink peer, and where no adults are allowed: everyone's raised by a wild animal, and the second adulthood sets in, they're shot off-planet to some new station in life that the comic itself never bothers to describe.

it's incredibly stupid. lower castes use different terms for common things like "kitchen" and "eyeballs" than upper castes, at least if the pissy 13-year-olds are to actually be believed on that front, because they're explicitly also trying to sound as alien as possible. popular culture, after existing for thousands of years, has condensed into a thick sludge where every movie title racks up a double-digit word count because there's so much content. lowbloods can't order the same pizza toppings as highbloods, for whatever reason. the organized religion is more like scientology given the same social credit rung as christianity. there are no defense attorneys, only prosecutors.

and, personally, i think it makes for a fun and absurd satire on american culture, whether or not its author penned it that way. wealth is pre-ordained by genetics, your parents are wild animals who you have to part-endure part-tame, there's too much stupid media to know what to do with, you don't know where your life is headed in adulthood because that part is left up to the whims of the societal powers that be, culture is maintained by literal bluebloods who have no actual interaction with the lower classes, and at the age of 13 you get the feeling that something very bad is going to happen to you in the future if you don't buckle down get to reproducing at some point on the horizon, as the government practically mandates boning down.

it's an interesting bit, i think, to compare the red-blooded, culturally-american beta kids with their range of domestic issues to the kids from hellmurder planet. john's suburban ennui where he's technically comfortable but missing something unknowable and thus living in a state of unrest, rose lalonde's construance of her deranged alcoholic mother's stabs at maladjusted parenting as a passive-aggressive mindfuck, dave strider's repeated physical and sort of sexually-charged abuse, lack of food and presence of weaponry in the house, and jade's troll-style "complete isolation, raised by a dog, and overseen by the static corpse of her elder" 'rearing' all make for interesting comparisons -- the trolls and kids meet each other at the decrescendo of their adolescense, at the point where they're impelled by sburb to process their issues and look backwards at a childhood they can never return to for answers.

like many components of homestuck, alternia is a funhouse-mirrored reflection of something else. and, as a certified critic of usamerican culture with a minor in hating, i enjoy the way it combines fantasy elements like magic powers and ghosts and antlered divine-right-having royalty with the mundanity of modern american life, like fast food megacorp "mcgrubbles," ubiquitously derided and underpaid janitorial labor, and the blase acceptance that all the conveniences of modern life were paid for in someone else's blood -- all with the knowledge that these horrors are cultural law, and we're all just entrenched in it.

sburb

sburb is the game that all these kids play which spirits them away from their doomed home planet and into a game world where everyone gets a personalized planet with secrets and puzzles to solve, xp-scaling enemies to defeat, a levelling chart to top, a magical destiny, godlike powers, and opportunities for personal growth aplenty. it is the creme-de-la-creme of escapist fantasies, the perfect medium for development both personal and narrative (perhaps hence the name of the game's functional zone being referred to as The Medium). it is the disgruntled and maladjusted teenager of usamerica's idealized coming-of-age journey, wrapped in rpg mechanics and fantasy/sci-fi-heavy writing.

it comes as no surprise, then, that i love it. i love the way it incorporates defunct computing hardware into the fabric of its gameplay, i love its hacky retelling of distant kingdoms of dark and light warring over creation, i love that it's absolutely soaked with gnostic imagery and narrative -- gnosticism is an extremely early collection of occult teachings. it has much to do with the nature of true knowledge and illusion and the violence required to meaningfully create and exist -- in fact, lord english's own denizen, (or the serpent-named-for-a-god present in the heart of every player's ordained planet and the presenter of their quest for growth), is yaldabaoth, creator of the material plane, which is generally regarded as an place of illusion in which we are physically imprisoned. like some kind of...narrative-weaver...

i won't argue that my fascination for sburb's related to how badly i wanted to play it as a kid. it kills your guardians as a rule for development (metaphor! wowza!) and invites you, on semi-frequent enough occasion, to fuse with something else and become the platonic idea of you plus something else, which means not actually still "you," which is a bonkers concept to go shelved for so much of the comic. it assigns you a cosmological role that's wrapped up in the way you think and act in the form of a single-syllable "class" and a loosely-defined abstraction of a concept (blood for relationships, ties, commitments, and potentially defining ideologies, for example). the reasons i enjoy sburb so much are at odds with the way it is examined by those who played it -- it is, again, related to the violence of storytelling: it flanderizes, it tells you there's only one "right" way to do anything and gives you little direction on the where and why, it's overly complicated, it bars its players from their worldly developmental period, it uses physical violence in interplay with psychological violence to demonstrate the intensity of the stakes and extent of the game's all-consuming power, it gives you a laundry list of tasks that can seem meaningless but which are apparently required to becoming your fullest self, it demands its players pay attention to politics that are largely fantastical, devoid of any real-world implications, and which are somewhat straightforward in their unraveling -- good guys versus bad boys.

despite the strengths and undeniable personality of the characters themselves, sburb, as a narrative vehicle and an unthinking tyrant over the lives of the players and the ways they grow into their preordained roles is something i can puzzle over for hours on end. and, just like homestuck, it is both brilliant and can kinda suck.