theseriousjester

[theseriousjester]

ive been going back and forth mentally abt "do i actually want to do this illustrated fic ive been fantasizing about writing/drawing" bc im feel particularly bitter @ homestuck again loll but i think. i do want to try and make it happen. for all the other gamzee fans... We Deserve It

[theseriousjester]

midway thru july when i was reading act 4 and listening to the hsmtw episodes about act 5 i had this moment of being like "maybe ive been too harsh to homestuck" and at one point i was like "'coffee shop au from the perspective of the coffee beans' is funny but idk if its fully the energy i feel abt homestuck anymore" but now that i am refreshed on the ending i can't argue with it. literally this is what the ending of homestuck is to me

[theseriousjester]

Thinking about making stickers to sell... idk where to advertise besides etsy and like. Instagram

[theseriousjester]

dropsy really is just the anti-homestuck. dialogue-free game about being a clown that nobody understands and everybody persecutes you until you get whisked away from all the haters to be with your loving alien clown family

[theseriousjester]

ms paint adventures and dropsy both originated on something awful in 2008 as choose-your-own-adventure games and each culminates in tackling and answering the question: "can clowns get into heaven?"

[theseriousjester]

gamzee

[theseriousjester]

guys i don't think i like homestuck anymore

[theseriousjester]

If you're reading this congrats it's your week

[theseriousjester]

homestuck made this world podcast Yet Again making me feel so validated for my Opinions lmfao. got to the part in ep 10 part 2 where michael brings up the fact that "has gamzee been under mind control since the end of act 5" is a question never answered in the comic + framing that as undercutting hussie's author commentary abt gamzee being self-motivatedly evil and cameron pointing out how weird it is that people argue so much about gamzees motivations when post-murderstuck gamzee only ever does things to advance the goals of other characters

[theseriousjester]

also i feel like ive made this post repeatedly already but i will say it again: "gamzee did all that for fun bc he's evil" is soooo much shallower and Less Interesting of a reading than "gamzee is forced by the narrative into doing certain actions regardless of his personal desires"

im still not done listening to hsmtw but im not under the impression that gamzee is ever shown to have any motivation beyond "he's evil and wants the world to end" like children's cartoon villain characterization and it also doesn't make... sense?

"gamzee tries to sabotage the story as a means of being ejected from it" is significantly more interesting to me altho its not the only read i can gel with but like. gamzee isn't Rewarded at any point for the shit he does, he's never given any motivation beyond "he's devoted to his evil religion" which is soooo shallow as i said, and also just not believable or compelling to me as characterization. "he's just soooo devoted to evil and thats why he keeps acting like that after getting shot and beaten up and bisected and immured etc etc" is just Not Interesting and it being seemingly the dominant fandom reading still is wild to me

in a story that is sooooo much about the illusion of choice and struggles of willpower its just wild to me that nobody considers the significance of a villain character getting progressively less and less dialogue + taking on NPC roles + literally redacting themself from the story

[theseriousjester]

people taking the author commentary at face value re: gamzee is even more irritating to me after learning the context that this is the same author commentary where hussie treats rose's mom at the start of the comic as if she is The Same Character as roxy in act 6. like idc if it's The Author's Commentary it's not a coherent exploration of the characters (though i do think it's interesting as Yet Another example of predetermination and inevitable fate as a throughline in homestuck)(you are the same person in every universe, you are defined not by your experiences but by your ontological You-ness, a fixed quality)

[theseriousjester]

they're making the omelas child go to therapy so it can learn about interpersonal accountability and realize the impact that its confusing and antisocial behavior has on the people around it

[theseriousjester]

kind of a calliope song..

do you love television as much as I do do you bury your head underground do you swallow down cartoons do you twist yourself back into a dream do you love to eat all the blackness and leave do you long to see some aspect of you reflected back in the shape of something cute do you ache to be something that never really hurts or could at least hardly feel worse than the thing in your skin and the skin that it is and the shape that it takes do you long to be reduced to simpler shapes do you long to be reduced to simpler shapes do you long to be reduced to simpler shapes

[theseriousjester]

whoaa

[theseriousjester]

what if you were a teen without friends and you started spending most of your time talking online to people in ways that caused you to Further self-isolate from people around you. and you self harmed a lot

likewise i think gamzee just kinda hits different if you spent 2012 getting frogboiled to a point of saying and doing things that disturb you to look back on years later. like idk i really dont Care about fictional violence in like a moralizing way but looking thru my old blog theres sooooo much art and posting that i just. would not want to engage in and makes me sad to see that i was doing at 15. particularly cuz i was not doing well overall at that time

[theseriousjester]

likewise i think gamzee just kinda hits different if you spent 2012 getting frogboiled to a point of saying and doing things that disturb you to look back on years later. like idk i really dont Care about fictional violence in like a moralizing way but looking thru my old blog theres sooooo much art and posting that i just. would not want to engage in now at this point in my life and makes me sad to see that i was doing at 15. particularly cuz i was not doing well overall at that time

[theseriousjester]

also like. godddd this is Not me saying that you cant read and get into homestuck after the fact. but i have seen some opinions from younger fans that are kind of baffling or at least Were baffling until i realized that many of them were not reading the comic as it came out and i have long felt that you are fundamentally experiencing homestuck differently if you read it years after its completion vs if you were following it in 2012. and its also been really nice hearing them talk at length abt this on hsmtw lollll