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new scariest order of four words just dropped and it's “official homestuck discord server”

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"with this remake project, now your favourite game from 15 years ago with strong art direction and style can look like an unreal engine asset flip with ray traced lighting"

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How are we still having homestuck drama in the year of our lord 2024

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idk brah shes cool

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Day 247

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character fight #2

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happy 413

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June Egbert

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heard they got june egberts now ^_-

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Technically A Magical Girl! R2

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Sex freaks

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in honor of hiveswap friendsim coming to the switch here are some marvus doodles from a while back🙈🤭

and also a doodle based on a ponytown rp i had with a friend where uncle iroh chats with marvus about Various topics (shenanigans ensue)

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What is HS:BC's Fanontinuum?

I haven't posted on Tumblr in a very long time, but HS:BC is so good that I have to throw my stupidly triangular hat into the ring over today's upd8; how could you not be driven to analysis by the reappearance of a notably living Nepeta, let alone one accompanied by a discomfiting woobified Gamzee spoof? This shit is gold.

TL;DR: I think Paradox Space—the short-lived but widely-loved sister project to Homestuck, which published short comics written and illustrated (primarily) by fans to explore inconsequential 'what if?' scenarios—is returning in some form, finally capitalizing on post-canon's premise by explicitly exploring the relationship between canon and fanon in-text.

In [S] 8R8K, Vriska stole what little Light (truth, relevance, i.e., canonicity) remained in the Candy continuity and used her immense, largely unknown Hell Tier powers to escape the inescapable gravity of Al's Green Sun-Black Hole: the metacosmic event horizon that demarcated the existential boundaries of Candy, isolating it from the rest of canon 'for its own good.' The door of a child's bedroom, locked from the outside by an authoritative parent, now broken open. Consequently, Candy is (supposedly) speeding toward dissolution (total non-canonicity, the breakdown of existential meaning, the inability of any reasonable audience to give a shit, oblivion, etc.). When canon is taken from you, or you forsake it yourself, what are you left with? Fanon.

That's what Homestuck post-canon is About, philosophically and as an artistic endeavour: exploring (and in some cases, ratcheting up) the tension between canon and fanon. Asking what it means for something about a story to be true, relevant, and essential—if these things should even matter to anyone in the first place. In HS:BC, they matter a lot to two people: Ultimate Dirk and Al.

Ultimate Dirk and Al are aware of Homestuck. They are aware that, from our frame of reference, they are fictional characters in a webcomic, and that their continued existence as they understand it is contingent on our continued readership. Dirk believes the story should continue indefinitely because he doesn't want himself and his friends to fade into oblivion once the story ends and the audience moves on. Al is a Bible-thumping Protestant who thinks of Homestuck as an untouchable sacred text, a story with a defined beginning and end, told exactly as it needed to be by true divinity. Both are ideologically opposed to fanon because they don't want to lead meaningless, non-canonical lives where they and the people they care about are misinterpreted and flanderized.

According to Al, this house, which represents Homestuck as an existential frame of reference, has been shaped by "the beliefs and desires of those far beyond even my grasp [...] it is all that we are/were and its current form is representative of what those outsiders think we are/should be." In other words, this house represents fanon. In her mind, the canon house—AKA the SBURB logo, with its standard house-like configuration—was perfectly respectable. It was The Way Things Are Meant To Be. A lovely, traditional home. It has become towering, deformed, labyrinthine, and non-Euclidian. In her mind, the fanonized house is "abominable." Its growth is purposeless, divergent, and self-indulgent, unguided by sufficient meaning or coherent themes—the things that give a story and its characters social and artistic purpose. It is her goal to 'curb the growth' of the house and 'bolt the recalcitrant items of furniture (see: the characters)' into their proper places. She is a canon purist: she doesn't desire dissolution, but she also wants the fans to place the original text on a pedestal and to keep their grubby paws off it once they have. She wants to be preserved in amber and admired archeologically, a story passed down for generations that honours the intelligent design responsible for the creation of her literary world.

The premise of the Epilogues was creating an off-ramp from the highway of canon, inviting fans to imagine their own sequel. It wanted to blur the lines between canon and fanon by giving co-writers artistic authority over the official story, divesting Hussie of some of their "power." It wanted the story and the characters within it to be many ways, changing—living and breathing—forever. There's a lot to say about canon and fanon and Homestuck's post-canon as an artistic project, but I won't do that here. The important part is that fanon hasn't really been represented in HS:BC yet. The conflict between canon and fanon exists in the story, the project has presented its questions about the nature of canon and authority in art to the audience, but... nobody and nothing in the text has really represented fanon. Until now.

Enter the Fanontinuum. Why was Crowbar the one to come across Nepeta's inexplicable talk show? Because this sequence is a reference to one of the most popular Paradox Space comics, The Inaugural Death of Mister Seven.

When we join Crowbar in this Intermission, he laments the pointlessness of his existence. As a member of the Felt, he was created by SBURB for the express purpose of maintaining canonicity according to the dicta of Lord English's Alpha Timeline. The Inaugural Death (which was one of the few Paradox Space comics written by Hussie) followed Crowbar on an average day working as the third-in-command of the Felt. In Homestuck proper, the Felt don't need to be particularly deep or interesting people: they just need to exist, conceptually, to maintain the story's internal logic. In The Inaugural Death—a dubiously canonical comic posted literally outside the confines of MSPA—Crowbar and the Felt were given the narrative's undivided and unhurried attention, affording them a much greater degree of personality and interiority. That's something that supplementary material or transformative work can do that canon can't: dedicate a functionally limitless amount of time to examining any character(s) in any setting and configuration, just for the sake of it. For entertainment. For love. For hate.

So it's no coincidence that Candy!Crowbar, feeling shafted by the narrative in a continuity hurtling towards the point of non-canonical no-return, stumbles upon an extra-dimensional space referencing the dubiously canonical comic where he was the star. The paneling, the font, the shape of the speech bubbles: all of it is taken directly from Paradox Space's standard format. Haven's style clearly draws influence from J. N. Wiedle's work on The Inaugural Death and the visual style of Crowbar's narration directly emulates The Inaugural Death. The Fanontinuum is inarguably connecting itself to Paradox Space.

Before the update was posted today, several fan projects—from fanventures like Burning Down the House to fangames like Strife Project to fan animators like Project Soundpage—all posted variants of the same meme: "anyone else hear that ominous bell tolling???? 🤣🤣🤣 no?? just me?????? 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭." Clearly, the HICU has reached out to these projects with the intent to collaborate in some official capacity. I won't pretend I know how. These projects are in a much wider variety of mediums than webcomics and they're already ongoing, so it doesn't seem like a strict relaunch of Paradox Space. Maybe it's about hosting fan projects on an official site? Maybe it will also be like Paradox Space and there will be new dubiously canonical/explicitly fanonical comics? Only time will tell! Either way, this is exactly what post-canon needed, philosophically: fanon actually integrated into the sequel in a meaningful way, an oppositional force to canon and its dictatorial, antagonistic champions.

So, 1) what's the deal with Nepeta and Lil' Mr. Gamby, and 2) what and where is the Fanontinuum in-universe?

Nepeta is perhaps the most obvious avatar of the Fanontinuum. By their own admission in the author commentary, Hussie created Nepeta to be a largely irrelevant side character. Like Crowbar and the Felt, her existence was utilitarian, helping to build out the world and support the arcs of more important, more interesting characters. Despite the intended humility of her existence, Nepeta is widely beloved by the fandom. Arguably, she's the most popular of the irrelevant trolls. If there's one character the fandom at large would like to explore without the limitations of canon, it would be Nepeta. It's fitting, then, that she would introduce us to the Fanontinuum, a presumed existential frame of reference that allows fans to explore the potential of characters outside the stringency of canon. Lil' Mr. Gamby—a fusion between a hippy and the Joker—is clearly a reference to the eternally popular woobified version of Gamzee that exists in fanon: the poor, vulnerable, victimized Gamzee who was good at heart but brainwashed by Lil' Cal—a Gamzee who, by Word of God (again, Hussie's author commentary), never existed. Only in the Fanontinuum can such a wooby Gamzee be without threatening the suspension of disbelief, as he would if he were mischaracterized this way in canonical continuities. That's the double-edged sword of fanon: it has the capacity to suck and be stupid, just as it has the capacity to be really fucking cool and compelling. Gamby represents the former and Nepeta the latter. It's also worth noting that this Nepeta is wearing Dave-esque shades, clearly influenced by Davepeta, the most relevant version of Nepeta who introduced us to the Ultimate Self: the awareness of all possible versions of yourself, canon and fanon alike. The Fanontinuum are where these versions will finally collide.

Some people have assumed that the Fanontinuum is occurring in some sort of afterlife, but it was revealed at the end of the Intermission that this Nepeta is alive. While we can't say the same for the Nepetas in the audience with any certainty, I'm willing to bet that they all have normal eyes too. That means the Fanontinuum is not an afterlife in-universe, and these aren't Nepetas from doomed timelines. Other people have suggested that this is another dubiously canonical dimension akin to Midnight City. I believe that these are all living Nepetas birthed from the primordial chaos of fanon. The Fanontinuum is not any one place in space or time: it is the collective unconscious (or collective conscious?) of fans, an omnipresent void that different interpretations of characters can arise from at any time. Note that I do not say alternate versions, a term that would not be inappropriate but which does come with baggage in Homestuck: I don't believe that these Nepetas come from alternate timelines that branch off from the continuities depicted in Homestuck, HS:BC, or any other official Homestuck story. These are intended to represent Nepetas originating from fan discourse and transformative works with no strict relation to canon. They don't need history or reason or purpose, they just are. There's an almost cosmic horror element to it, really. While I'm proposing that the Fanontinuum is another existential frame of reference with no specific spatiotemporal location, it only makes sense that it would first breach HS:BC via Candy, a continuity critically low in canonicity and approaching the oblivion Dirk and Al associate with fanon.

So that's what I think about the Fanontinuum! Assuming I'm right, then this is exactly the direction I thought that post-canon (and HS:BC specifically) was going and needed to go, so I can't wait to see what happens next.

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13/04/2023

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How heavy do we fuck with the custom Dirk Strider Tripp pants™️.

A few progress shots and pictures of the pants themselves. All hand-painted.

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problematic caste gap