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im a week late to the news but theres a working homestuck mirror up including a mobile friendly version

https://homestuck.kici.moe/

https://mspa.chadthundercock.com/

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i dont normally do tattoo requests but oh boy, classpects

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It's always a trip seeing post-Homestuck webcomics try to emulate Homestuck's narrative structure without understanding that Homestuck's narrative structure only worked because of its extremely rapid update schedule. Like, yeah, you've got the whole elaborate acts-within-acts thing going on, but your comic has been running for nine years and you just hit the halfway mark on Act 1; I think maybe some reassessment is in order!

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i'm back into the homestuck bullshit and i am not normal about them

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davekat week day one

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im like 5 years late on this

patreon

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HAPPY 413!

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homestuck, for all its insanity, still has the best quotes, my favorite being “the circle of stupidity is complete”

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I'm like super normal and not unhinged in the slightest (I spent 3 days formatting, printing, and binding a niche internet story about sci fi football into a 280 page physical book)

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Post-postmodernism in Pop Culture: Homestuck’s Revenge

I recently saw an excellent video essay titled Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight. Though the title is opaque clickbait, the video is actually about major artistic zeitgeists, or movements, in film history. Flight describes three major movements:

Modernism, encompassing much of classic cinema, in which an earnest belief in universal truths led to straightforward narratives that unironically supported certain values (rationalism, civic duty, democracy, etc.)

Postmodernism, in which disillusionment with the values of modernism led to films that played with cinematic structure, metafiction, and the core language of film, often with more unclear narratives that lacked straightforward resolutions, and that were skeptical or even suspicious of the idea of universal truth 

Metamodernism, the current artistic zeitgeist, which takes the structural and metafictional innovations of postmodernism but uses them not to reject meaning, but point to some new kind of meaning or sincerity.

Flight associates metamodernism with the “multiverse” narratives that are popular in contemporary film, both in blockbuster superhero films and Oscar darlings like Everything Everywhere All at Once. He argues that the multiverse conceptually represents a fragmented, metafictional lack of universal truth, but that lack of truth is then subverted with a narrative that ultimately reaffirms universal truth. In short, rather than rejecting postmodernism entirely, metamodernism takes the fragmented rubble of its technique and themes and builds something new out of that fragmentation.

Longtime readers of this blog may find some of these concepts familiar. Indeed, I was talking about them many years ago in my Hymnstoke posts, even using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism,” though what Flight calls metamodernism I tended to call “post-postmodernism” (another term used for it is New Sincerity). Years before EEAAO, years before Spider-verse, years before the current zeitgeist in pop cultural film and television, there was an avant garde work pioneering all the techniques and themes of metamodernism. A work that took the structural techniques of postmodernism–the ironic detachment, the temporal desynchronization, the metafiction–and used them not to posit a fundamental lack of universal truth but rather imbue a chaotic, maximalist world of cultural detritus with new meaning, new truth, new sincerity. That work was:

Homestuck.

That’s right! Everyone’s favorite web comic. Of course, I’m not the first person to realize the thematic and structural similarities between Homestuck and the current popular trend in film. Just take a look at this tweet someone made yesterday:

This tweet did some numbers.

As you might expect if you’re at all aware of the current cultural feeling toward Homestuck, many of the replies and quotes are incredibly vitriolic over this comparison. Here’s one of my favorites:

It’s actually quite striking how many elements of the new Spider-verse are similar to Homestuck; aspects of doomed timelines, a multiversal network that seems to demand certain structure, and even “mandatory death of parental figure as an impetus for mandated personal growth” are repeated across both works. The recycling and revitalization of ancient, seemingly useless cultural artifacts (in Homestuck’s case, films like Con Air; in Spider-verse, irrelevant gimmick Spider-men from spinoffs past) are also common thematic threads.

As this new post-postmodern or metamodern trend becomes increasingly mainstream, and as time heals all and allows people to look back at Homestuck with more objectivity, I believe there will one day be a rehabilitation of Homestuck’s image. It’ll be seen as an important and influential work, with a place inside the cultural canon. Perhaps, like Infinite Jest, it’ll continue to have some subset of commentators who cannot get past their perception of the people who read the work rather than the work itself even thirty years after its publication, but eventually it’ll be recognized for innovations that precipitated a change in the way people think about stories and their meaning.

Until that day, enjoy eating raw sewage directly from a sewer pipe.

(Side note: I think Umineko no naku koro ni, which was published around the same time as Homestuck and which deals with many similar themes and then-novel ideas, will also one day receive recognition as a masterpiece. Check it out if you haven’t already!)

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i do think there is a lot to say on why homestuck’s fanbase is (to put it bluntly) so transgender in such a specific and interesting way. and i think its mostly to do with homestuck’s treatment of femininity vs masculinity in a way that is not typically done

femininity is presented as both something to save the world (space players and echidna, working with frogs, maids/sylphs presented as The Most Feminine classes and about creation/healing, despite it being said later on class gendering doesn’t matter, because it was written to matter at the beginning), while also being vicious enough to cause longtime and horrifying pain (kanaya and jade wield chainsaws and shotguns. the peixes line being as they are. its implied female trolls are culturally thought to be more cruel/violent on alternia due to condy’s influence via flarp being “for girls” as tavros is told. vriska. aranea’s help hurting everyone she tries it on.)

masculinity in homestuck is… frankly not aggrandized at all. it’s a reverse from the norm. every hypermasculine character we may have had a chance to look at has it ripped away in the end. bro strider dies to a little girl’s dog. lord english is first presented as a hypermasculine musclebound giant, then we meet caliborn and see the farce for what it is, LE is a little boy wearing an adult man’s clothes and screaming for people to take him seriously. and we do. until we notice that the clothes don’t fit quite right, and everything falls apart. grandpa harley was never alive. equius is the most masculine presented of any of the players, and… well. we’ve all seen equius. dad egbert is the only genuine show of masculinity in a truly positive light for john - and by extension the reader - to look up to, and he’s based around loving his own so much he makes cakes daily and tries to bond with him in any way he can, albeit often in ways that don’t really work. 

i don’t know. i think homestuck’s use of gendering is a fascinating aspect of the story. i think it helped me with my own personal experience of gender and the different aspects people can see gender through :] its cool to me

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Absolutely obsessed with this tweet

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a davekat comic about reconciliation

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As it’s been “retired” from the homestuck catalogue, it has now been made publicly available for free. If you want to donate some money that’s fine, but hardly required. The album is 7 years old at this point.

Thanks for coming ‘round again. I don’t know if people still use this site much but reblogs to spread the word would probably be good.

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i want to consume homestuck, uve convinced me.

BUT HOW IT SEEMS CONFUSING

do not worry!! here's a little guide.

DON'T read on the official website... the company that bought it didn't care about it and did an absolutely shit job at preserving it, most of the games and animations are broken and replaced by annoying walkthroughs or shitty quality videos.

download the unofficial collection! it's preserved not JUST homestuck but also all official homestuck media, like the soundtrack albums, bonus comics, additional websites and all kinds of cool stuff!

the unofficial collection has a ton of customization options for reading. i would absolutely recommend new reader mode, because it hides away any spoilers that could pop up. it'll also notify you when something new is revealed, like a new soundtrack album or bonus comic! that way, you experience things in the same order they came out originally!

there's also mods you can add to the collection- i recommend this one if you're reading with an audience or if you prefer to not see a lot of early 2000s gamer language (which can include ableist slurs)

then, just enjoy! and don't freak out if it seems confusing- advice that i found helpful is to consider homestuck a video game. when new words are introduced don't panic, just pay attention to how they're used-- each item/concept is usually explained and then practiced exactly like in a video game tutorial, so eventually you'll be a pro at all of the concepts you'd never heard before

have fun! :D

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Not that you should be looking to Andrew Hussie for advice on things, but he’s officially endorsing pirating his comic because the Homestuck website is utterly broken. The Unofficial Collection is now Officially Official

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Happy Homestuck Day, here's my favorite story about spotting a Homestuck in the wild.

So my actual job-job is scientific illustration specializing in Botanical Illusation, (or it was until 2018 when I got run over by a Karen while taking out the trash but that's a different story) and sometimes I go to Gallery showings, and there was one gallery exhibition hosted my my school that taught me Botanical Illustration.

It's a nice event and a typical gallery event- box wine, little cubes of cheese, exchanging of business cards etc. I'm going around the gallery, going Ooh-Ah at everyone's technique and compositional choices, until I get to one peice that's a phylogenetic tree of ancient water plants, with tweleve branches... colored in the hemospectrum.

Now, most scientific illustrators are 60+ because a lot of people get into it after they retire. It's not uncommon for me to be the only person under 50 at these events, unless Maryanne, the other Millenial in the Botanical Illustration program is there. So this little Artistic Homage is going entirely unoticed until I walk up.

Sure enough, it's by Maryanne.

And sure enough, Maryanne chooses that moment to walk up and say Hi, and I swivel around like a goddamn owl to face her, point at her cladistics tree and make the 8D face.

She immediately blanches.

Unfortunately, the head of our program sees, and sensing chicanery, demands "WHAT IS HAPPENING." Prof. Mervi is an extremely direct Finnish woman and I love her so much.

So I have a hot second to explain this.

"Maryanne's color choices are a reference to a Popular Novel, and it's really brilliant because the colors represent a hierarchy in the story, and she's arranged them so the hierarchy is reflected in the order of the Clades, with the highest-ranking color corresponding to the oldest clades. The highest-ranked members of the color are also the oldest members of the fictional society. It's a nice little cultural homage for us Young People."

Maryanne is relieved.

"Oh!" Mervi is pleased. "What is this book called?"

Maryanne is No Longer Relieved.

"It's an online comic book." I say.

"Yes, but what is the title?"

Maryanne is attempting to develop lazerbeam eyes so she can melt my brains before I intrduce our beloved professor to the weirdest thing 2015 had to offer.

"It's called Homestuck." You don't lie to Mervi. She can sense lies the way a shark senses blood in the water.

"That is a very strange title."

"It's a very strange webcomic."

This appeased Mervi and she went off to schmooze elsewhere.

"She's going to look it up." Maryanne says, terrifed.

"I garuntee she's seen weirder stuff than Homestuck."

The event ends, I go home and manage to forget this entirely, until my next class three months later. Mervi has come into class and is looking at everyone's works in progress, which is perfectly normal, until she gets to the table Maryanne and I are sitting at and she opens her briefcase, takes out a manilla folder like it's full of Classified information, and opens it up to reveal a printout of a screenshot of one of the most recent pages.

"This man is an exceptionally accomplished digital artist." Said Mervi. "The quality of his work has improved immensely in a very short period of time."

"Yeah Hussie is pretty great!" yelps Maryanne.

"You know him?" Mervi asks. "Do you think he'd be interested in being a guest lecturer?"

"I mean like, not personally?" Said Maryanne. "But he's uh. He's a pretty busy guy."

"You should send him an email anyway!" I say. "The worst he can say is No."

"Do you think people would be interested in seeing him lecture?" mervi asked.

"Yeah I'm pretty sure if Andrew Hussie gave a lecture here it'd be pretty popular." I said. Maryanne is slowly imploding beside me.

"Hm. I will send him an Email." Said Mervi.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hussie never replied, but Maryanne and I are still friends.

***

(If you found this story funny, I can't work as an illustrator due to aforementioned Hit-And-Run, so if you wanted to leave me a Ko-Fi or subscribe to my Patreon for more funny stories, I'd be extremely grateful)