#against lazy cynicsm

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Toward a Critical Re-Evaluation of Homestuck, or: A Prayer for Andrew Hussie

(aka Off-the-Cuff Homestuck Thoughts #7)

This might be a manifesto.

Since the ending sequence of Homestuck in April 2017, and even well after the establishment of a canon aftermath for its main characters and the confirmation that there will be a further Epilogue, I've seen a sentiment among Homestuck bloggers and the Homestuck fandom that I find very frustrating, one that persists well into 2018.

The sentiment goes something like this:

"Homestuck is a meaningless work by a flippant, irreverent prankster (Andrew Hussie) who dropped his commitment to the story at the last second, and made fun of his fans for expecting there to be a meaningful ending. Furthermore, he continues to harm and belittle his fandom in the creation of Hiveswap, and only continues his work on Homestuck-related projects to exploit his audience."

Not only is this idea wrong, I find it disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, and actively detrimental to an understanding of Homestuck as a work. While it comes from an understandable frame of mind - the feeling of disappointment many of us felt at the end of Homestuck's pretty short and to-the-point Act 7 - it actively ignores the main reason *why* that ending came across as disappointing at first glance. Namely, it ignores the role serial storytelling - a necessity at that point in Homestuck's existence - played in creating misleading impressions of where the story was going among fans. Furthermore, it completely ignores how well the story arc of Act 6 Homestuck generally works when taken as a whole.

It demonstrates a very shallow understanding of Andrew Hussie as a storyteller, conflating his in-story persona with the actuality of a creator who demonstrates nothing but work ethic and commitment to his creation.

It ignores what actually happened with Hiveswap, which is that despite a frankly horrific set of circumstances that nearly prevented it from being made, Hussie was nonetheless able to gather a small team to create a game studio that delivered on every promise it ever made to Kickstarter backers and created a pretty solid, fun, and novel adventure game, with more installments and a rich evolving mystery on the way.

Finally, this interpretation completely misunderstands the way the idea of narrative is being used in the ending of Homestuck, not as a cudgel to beat off fan desire for thematic completion, but as a tool for delivering a thematically powerful narrative that draws parallels between the specter of Lord English and the way stories themselves are used as tools of oppression.

Homestuck isn't perfect, and neither is Andrew Hussie. But by and large, this popular perception of him is flat-out wrong, an exaggeration of whatever flaws he brought to the creation of Homestuck, and contributes to a misunderstanding of its ending. Indeed, I'd argue it is, in some ways, part of why Homestuck has rarely been acknowledged as a significant work of art. To understand why Homestuck is important, first we need to be able to acknowledge what it achieved.

Here's a daring notion: overall, Homestuck was and is pretty damn good.

Here are some reasons.

1) Being Forced To Tell the Story Serially Over a Slow Drip Messed With the Experience for the Reader

I can hear the bristling now. "I hated the ending," I can hear some of you saying. "It left me cold and unsatisfied, and damn it, that's an objective fact. Who are you to take that away from me?"

Actually, I'm not trying to take that away from you. Like, you're allowed to have been disappointed. I just want to point out that it might be a better ending than you gave it credit for, and explain why it came off the way it did. If you're interested in hearing me out, read on. You should know that initially, I was disappointed, too.

But after rereading Act 6 and the whole narrative leading up to that ending? I changed my mind. Rereading, I found it pretty satisfying, making a great deal of sense, capitalizing on major themes, and delivering a meaningful ending for most, if not all characters

I'll talk more about *what* I think the narrative is doing in a bit, but here's why I think it was misread, by me among many others.

Serial reading fucks with the quality of a story experience. I feel like this is a pretty uncontroversial statement. The problem with serial storytelling is that stories build on themselves, drawing on themes and ideas from earlier on to make a powerful build-up to moments of catharsis. This is the nature of story and character development. However if you're getting a story as little bits and pieces, it is much more difficult for this to happen. You lose track of these threads.

More dangerously, it's very easy to develop a set of expectations around a narrative while it's in pause mode. Little moments - intended to be part of a larger flow of ideas - completely dominate one's thinking for as long as they hold the stage. This is a common thing in fandom, especially webcomic fandoms, who deal with the slowest-drip narratives.  Again and again I've seen expectations generated during webcomics' hiatuses lead fans to disappointment with the results, simply because those results have nothing to do with what was expected during one of those moments of downtime. El Goonish Shive, Sluggy Freelance, Gunnerkrigg Court - I've seen it in webcomic fandoms again and again, that the dashing of narrative expectations seemed like a betrayal of the story when read at a drip pace, but made perfect sense when viewed as a whole story.

This is not a problem Hussie was ever unaware of. Here’s an excellent discussion (among many) from one of his early Q&As that takes on the problem in detail:

The longer I do this the more I'm struck by how radical the difference is between the experiences of reading something archivally vs. serially, both for the reader, and the author if he's prone to sampling reactions frequently as I do. For the reader especially, I think the experience of day to day reading is so dramatically different, they might as well be reading a different story altogether.

The main difference is the amount of space between events the reader has, which can be filled with massive amounts of speculation, analysis, predictions, and something I guess you could call "opinion building", which can have both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, these readers become more closely engaged with the material than archival readers can be, zeroing in on details and insights which might be overlooked otherwise. On the negative side, I think that excess mental noise the space between pages allows can potentially be a bit suffocating, and put a strain on the experience the material was intended to deliver.

The archival reader always has the luxury of moving on to the next page, regardless of how he reacts to certain events, and thus can be more impassive about it. That internal cacophony isn't given time to build, and if there are reservations about a string of events, whether due to shocking revelations, or questions over the narrative merit of something, or really any form of dissatisfaction, all he has to do is keep clicking to see how it all fits together, and can make a more complete judgment with hindsight.

He goes on to discuss a specific example of how this played out for the readers:

The recent pages [the start of Horrorstuck] had me particularly conscious of the nature of serial delivery. [Eridan's betrayal] was rolled out over the course of a weekend, first with Feferi, then Kanaya. When Fereri dies, this registers as one extremely dramatic event. Cue the waiting, speculating, worrying and all that. When Kanaya dies a day or so later, it registers as a second dramatic event! Again the scrutiny begins which the space allows. Is this all too much? How do I feel about this narrative turn? Is this setting a trend for a bloodbath? Does that serve any purpose? The reader projects into the future, does a little unwitting fanfiction writing in his head, and may not like what he sees! All this activity becomes the basis for opinion building, which is sort of the emergence of an official position on matters, good or bad, which is only able to flourish in the slow-motion intake of the story. That official position can be a very stubborn thing, especially when it's negative, and seriously textures the way additional developments are regarded. It's really hard to shake a reader off an entrenched position on a matter, even when it was formed with an incomplete picture.

Reading the same events in the archive is quite different. Very little of that inner monologue takes shape. And while the events are still shocking, and the reader may raise his eyebrows a mile high, he then simply lowers them and keeps reading. In fact, because of the reading pace, I would suggest these two deaths actually register as only ONE DRAMATIC EVENT! One guy snaps and kills two characters. In the flow of straight-through reading especially, it is quite startling, tension-building, and can only serve to propel the reader into further pages, at a pace which suspends the experience-compromising (augmenting??) play-by-play.

Hussie would return to this topic again and again, including here and here and here and h8re.

This is in incredibly valuable insight for anyone who creates stories over the long term, especially  webcomics. You may or may not agree that Homestuck's finale is well-executed, but I think it's hard to escape the fact that the response to Homestuck's ending, indeed, to most of Act 6, was hugely influenced by these factors. Why? Because the experience of Act 6 and 7 was more affected by hiatuses and the speculation problems they create than any other part of Homestuck.

It's hard to remember these days, but one thing that Homestuck was known for from about 2010-2013 was its absolutely preposterous rate of updates. I'm pretty sure that *was* the initial fuel for the fire that made Homestuck a huge fandom. What other website could you go to see a huge chunk of a story drop on you so regularly? No other webcomic had people using Update Checkers, programs designed to check the RSS feed of Homestuck and tell you within the minute that it had updated so you could check it out before your friends spoiled everything to you. What other webcomic ever needed such a thing? But the first era of Homestuck fandom was predicated on the idea that the comic would update every couple of days, sometimes once a day, sometimes *multiple times in the same day*. No wonder it got so huge so fast. It was an experience unlike almost anything else out there.

Around 2013 this began to change. Homestuck began having large hiatuses, the famous "pauses," and though Hussie indicated the story was working its way towards the finale, it ultimately took until the 2016 anniversary to complete.

Interestingly, it's around 2013 or so that we started seeing frustration with Homestuck break out into a large phenomenon, with many people arguing that the comic had stopped being good, and it's after the largest of these pauses, the Omegapause before the end of Act 6 and Act 7 updates, that we had the famous ending backlash.

The fact that very few people seem to have considered this in their analysis of whether Homestuck is good or not is absolutely staggering to me.

Given these factors, we would expect to see some of the enthusiasm taken out of the Homestuck fandoms during these periods, and strong opinions on where the story should go next, and, lo and behold, that's exactly what we see. The common sentiment is that Homestuck "stopped being fun during Act 6." Well, yeah, it's a lot less fun to have a comic that updates rarely than a comic that updates with loads of content very, very often. That doesn't necessarily mean the content got worse. And yet I see no one asking if this altered our perception of the story.

2) Serial Reading Problems Are Worsened In an Experimental, Twisty Story

This hiatus problem was exacerbated by the nature of Hussie's storytelling. I'd describe his writing style as "affectionate teasing": testing and pushing readers' boundaries, aiming for strong emotional reactions, constantly working to defy and mess with expectations, but ultimately working towards a rich character-based story. Hussie's work whiplashes between humor, horror, worldbuilding, action - it's intense and disconcerting at first, but once you get familiar with it, you see these that all these elements build toward a coherent whole.

I'd argue that this storytelling style is *uniquely* well-suited to long-form reading and endangered by drip-feed reading.

Because when you read piece by piece, you experience whiplash slowly, and that’s not everybody’s kink. Pieces that are meant to work together take on a different tone when read on their own. As discussed above, continuous events seem like separate events when read on their own, and this creates a *false* expectation of where the narrative is going. Furthermore, it's not as much fun to be teased or messed with in slow motion. The expectation that there will be satisfaction and resolution disappears when the current update is all you can think about. This, not a deficit in storytelling, is what created the feeling of "Homestuck’s not fun anymore." But it was the same affectionate, gently teasing storytelling as ever. But this only comes out when the work is re-read.

This is exactly what happened in Act 6 Homestuck. Events seemed like they would go on forever, when in real story terms, they went on for moments. Take the notorious Trickster "arc" (I can't even call it an arc - it’s more of a sequence if anything). Today it's remembered as an unendurable gauntlet of Hussie pushing buttons. The reality of it is, though, if you read through it, it's like Hussie pushing buttons for all of five minutes, like half a chapter from a novel. Literally all it is is: The Gang Gets High on Magic Candy > They Do Stupid Things > Blackout. Mostly it's an excuse for some serious character development *afterward* as the Alphas discuss the bad decisions that led them to this place. It may or not be perfect, but it's definitely a lot more reasonable when you see it's a quick tangent.

Act 6 is full of things like this: events remembered as horrible slogs that are really quite brief in retrospect.

This is brought home when you consider that events in Act 5 – hell, even Acts 3 and 4 – also brought on strong negative responses from the fandom - it's just that they were quickly buried under a story that was quickly moving on to other things.  Here are some strong fan outrages from those days I can name off the top of my head:

--This interlude with the trolls is too long, nobody cares about the trolls, Hussie has abandoned the human kids --Nobody cares about troll romance, switch back to the kids --Jade hasn’t been seen onscreen for ages --Vriska’s creation of Bec Noir shows that she is too powerful a character, she will never face comeuppance --John is dead again and Vriska killed him??? --Killing Feferi, Tavros and Kanaya? That’s too many deaths --I thought Feferi was supposed to unite the troll races! You’re telling me that’s not going to happen? --Kanaya is dead??? Fuck that --Scratching the timeline? What, Hussie, you’re going to reset everything and ruin the story? --Equius should have gone out with more dignity, this is a betrayal of his fans --Nepeta shouldn’t have been murdered, this is a betrayal of her fans --Gamzee used to be cute, now he’s a murder machine, this is a betrayal of his fans --We never found out what happened between Gamzee and Karkat? Why won’t the narrative switch back and tell us? --Nobody cares about Doc Scratch --Nobody cares about these stupid Ancestors, switch back to the trolls --Vriska is DEAD? This is a betrayal of her fans

And so on. Reading Hussie’s old Formspring archives is a graduate class in this era of Homestuck fan frustration.

And yet today Act 5 is universally remembered as brilliant, thought of by many as “the time when Homestuck was great.” In my book, while Act 6 does take on different themes than Act 5 (focusing more on the protagonists’ psychology and failures), and thus may not be to everyone’s taste, the biggest difference between the two is that during Act 5, the twists and turns of the story were thought of as part of a unified whole, because the story was barreling along too fast for these complaints to stick around for long.

Given that Hussie has always been aware of the challenges of serial vs archival storytelling, I feel like the relentless output of the first five acts was in part an attempt to mitigate those problems. As if by shoveling content into the mouth of the behemoth, he could propitiate the ravenous fandom horrorterror and thereby stave off the descent of the Infernal Internet Speculation-Expectation Monster that was prophesized to devour all.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t stave it off forever, and lo, in 2013 did the IISEM descend with its glistening tentacle teeth, IA, IA, IA! CHOMP CHOMP.

It astonishes me that in some quarters folks talk about the 2013-2016 pauses as if they were something Hussie wanted, when by all evidence he tried desperately to avoid them up until that point. I don’t need to explain that these hiatuses had to do with restarting the whole process of creating Hiveswap and building a game studio from scratch, right? I don’t need to explain that he got screwed over and these were circumstances outside his control, right? Let’s assume we’re on the same page there. If not, I suggest you look into the matter before assuming these hiatuses had anything to do with creator apathy.

After a certain point, Hussie faced a difficult choice. Unable to keep up the rapid-pace storytelling, he could change the storytelling to make it suit a serial reader, or he could focus on making the story the best it could be for an archive reader.

I think he went for the better option: aiming for the archive reader. If you’re going to argue that he should have put the emphasis on the serial reader: which serial reader are we talking about here? The one who started following in Homestuck in 2010, like me? The one who started after Horrorstuck, and viewed it, but not the end of Act 5, as a complete whole? The one who joined during late Act 6? How the hell would you decide that? Whose experience is the one to privilege?

The only option that really makes sense is to aim for the version of the story that will be around the longest and experienced by the most people: the archive that is the complete story of Homestuck.

Ultimately, I don’t think he could have changed his style of storytelling anyway, and to do so would have been to lose the combination of humor, madness, and surprises that brought us all to Homestuck in the first place. Forced to reckon with a difficult situation, he focused on making his kind of story the best that it could be, and I think Homestuck is better for it.

Given his awareness of the problem as expressed above, I’m sure Hussie knew proceeding over the long term would stoke a lot of resentment in the fandom. But he went ahead and did it anyway, because his goal was not to live up to a certain set of expectations. His goal was to tell what he saw as the best possible version of the story. I have an immense respect for him for that.

3) The Last Pause is the Deepest (or: Omegapause Killed the Character Development Star)

The final hiatus problem I want to point to is that in terms of the narrative arc of Homestuck, the final pause, the Omegapause, came at the most inopportune time for readers to get a sense of the conclusion of that narrative.

Basically, many character arcs in Homestuck were concluded *before* Collide and Act 7. Before the Omegapause. Indeed, Hussie brought many long-running arcs to an end in a very satisfying way during the “conversation” sequence before the final fight, from Dave’s long-needed conversation with Dirk about Bro to Rose’s finally getting to meet and befriend Roxy, to Game Over!Terezi and (Vriska’s) reunion. In narrative terms, Collide was not the climax, even if it might have been perceived to be. The climax was the Retcon sequence preceding the conversations – the desolation of Game Over, our surviving protagonists’ despair, then victory in the form of negotiating with the Denizens, representatives of Skaia, to create a timeline in which victory may take place, both in game terms and emotional terms. The conversation before the final battle showed us an emotional victory – victory in game terms was really just icing on the cake, or an echo of that emotional victory.

The trouble is, having a long pause before the final battle sequences created the false perception that the conversation was merely the prelude to the climax: that, in fact, the climax had not yet taken place. For us serial readers, it was easy to conclude that there was further character development to come.

Well, in some ways there was, and in some ways there wasn’t. Dirk and Dave got to have another big moment in Collide that drove their themes home, while Rose and Roxy had basically already done their thing earlier and just got to fight alongside each other. Meanwhile Vriska and Caliborn’s arcs really culminated in Act 7, and some, like John’s and Ret-Terezi’s, were complicated and continued by the Credits aftermath and probably won’t be brought to a final end until the Epilogue. There’s a degree of variation, which I enjoy. Collide does serve some functions: characters who were at an emotional distance from each other (for instance Jane and Jake), got to fight alongside each other and start building back their friendships.  Overall, though, the bulk of emotional entanglements got resolved in that conversation, making the Retcon the load-bearing piece of Homestuck’s climax.

This is why the Omegapause was the most dangerous pause: because it built up an expectation that things would further develop from there with new entanglements and complications, instead of aiming towards a tying-off of plot elements into a conclusion.

I remember what *I thought* the post-Omegapause sequence was going to be: a showdown between the kids and Lord English as he entered the game session through Bec Noir, Spades Slick and Lord Jack. I expected there would be a twist, and I expected one or more of our protagonists would die. I was thrown for a loop when I realized the story had basically been almost over, with no last twist, no “secret final battle” of kids vs LE in sight.

But as I reread the ending of Act 6, I realized: that would have been so much stupider than what actually happened. The fact that the kids don’t directly face LE and Vriska does is one of the most brilliant parts of the ending, and on the reread I rapidly fell in love with the Homestuck’s conclusion. What had thrown me off was the fact that I developed my expectations during a period where it looked like we were further from the end.

But in retrospect, Hussie had been saying all along that we were very close to the conclusion – it was just, at that moment, very easy to get the wrong impression.

Rarely do I see anyone taking anything like this into account.

I do think we could have benefited from more character development after the pause, if for no other reason than to overcome these problems and make the victory feel a little more grounded, and I do feel like certain characters (Jane comes to mind) got more limited and abbreviated endings. But these are minor points for me in the overall arc of Homestuck’s narrative, which in my experience establishes its conclusion very, very well.

4) Homestuck’s Ending Is a Glorious Queer Gnostic Account of Escaping from Narrative Oppression (and Yes, Virginia, it Has Character Arcs)

Okay, so I’ve written a lot about *what* I love about the ending of Homestuck elsewhere, going on for pages and pages, which you can read here and here. For now, let me just attempt (as absurd as it is) a quick summary.

Homestuck in Act 6 parallels many different motifs to drive home the idea that escaping from Lord English’s domain is an escape from a cosmic oppression, and serves as a metaphor for escaping and defying real-life oppressions and hegemonies. These motifs include Gnosticsm, queer identity, pluralism, and a metafictional examination of the controlling role of the narrative that is Homestuck itself.

Gnosticism is an ancient early alternate version of Christianity that posits a false reality created by a false creator, the Demiurge Yaldabaoth, who rules over human beings but whose domain it is the Gnostic’s quest to escape. The Demiurge styles himself a Lord God (often the very same one from Judaism and more mainstream Christianity) and an artist but is in fact incompetent and limited in comparison with the true harmonious reality. That he was able to create such a false world was a cosmic accident caused by angel-like beings known as Aeons, who existed perfect symmetrical pairs until an asymmetry caused Yaldabaoth’s creation. Sophia, the asymmetrical Aeon is our path back to that perfection. Furthermore, the false world is the world of flesh and matter and material things, while the true world is the world of ideas, symbols and archetypes, a place of divine Platonic form. By knowledge (gnosis) we become our true selves and are set free. Gnosticism is anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and devoted to each human being’s quest to connect to the divine on their own terms.

Gnostic motifs proliferate everywhere in Homestuck, especially Act 6, from such chat handles as GardenGnostic, TimaeusTestified, and TipsyGnostalgic to basically everything about Calliope and Caliborn, including and especially their role in the finale. Act 7 depicts Caliborn as trapped within the realm he is created, destined for power but ultimately doomed to it, destroyed in the perfect moment where Calliope, his counterpart, brings his domain to an end.

Caliborn’s realm is the sequence of time loops and set of worlds that brought Lord English into being, but it’s also the narrative Homestuck that depicts those events and worlds. He complains about the narrative Homestuck, argues with its author, and tries to make his own version, just as a demiurge would. (Secretly, because of his cosmic influence, he’s more of an influence than he realizes. He places limits and boundaries on these worlds in the form of the narratives he perpetuates, and is obsessed with sexist ideas, exploitation, and themes of masculinity, importance and power. That the heroes escape this realm in which he has control is also them escaping these narratives that have been placed upon them.

This is the sense in which Dave says “we don’t have arcs.” As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not Hussie rejecting the idea of giving his characters meaningful stories (this is largely a false impression generated by the Omegapause weirdness), as shown by the fact that Dave himself has one of the best, strongest arcs in the whole story. What Dave means, and what Dave’s arc is about, is that he had to let go of the false ideas, false narratives placed on him by the world (Lord English’s world, the Demiurge’s world) in which he lived. He did this by understanding the abuse he suffered from Bro (a Caliborn-esque figure) was wrong, and by overcoming his internalized homophobia to realize the value of the relationship he’d found with Karkat.

This is a frequent motif in the final pages of Homestuck. Queerness is represented as a way of escaping the patriarchal, conservative God of the Demiurge, and that these revelations about Dave appear in parallel with the final departure from the domain Caliborn controls is no coincidence. Queer relationships and identities build in the ending of Homestuck into what Hussie tongue-in-cheek called “the gay singularity.” This growth in queerness is represented as growth toward meaning, and further queer figures like the non-binary Davepeta appear as idealistic mentors to teach our heroes to understand their cosmic circumstances.

At the same time, the growth from a material world to a world of ideas is represented as the heroes taking on God Tier identities that embody aspects—ideas that are literally the building blocks of the universe. To know yourself as an aspect is to know who you are, and by knowing who you are, you become an idea that is divine. This all takes place at the same time characters grow towards queerness. To know your own queer identity is also to become divine.

And, at the same time, the characters leave the narrative. Everything that was Caliborn’s – his worlds, his time loops and influence— is left behind by the characters as they move into the realm where they are heroes, leaders, and gods. They pass through a door that resembles the weapon that he used, that is his narrative, the weapon shaped like the symbol of Homestuck, the weapon that *is* the narrative Homestuck. It is a weapon against him because he stays behind, on the other side of the door. Lord English can never leave. He’s in the dark pocket of the black hole forever. Caliborn enters a realm that appears to give him power—but he never comes out. He’s trapped by his own limited idea of who he is and what the world should be.

This is a fantastic, culturally resonant, and very Gnostic ending.

And as to Vriska—I’ve seen many people say that Vriska’s retconned revival gives her too much power and agency, but I actually think it strikes the perfect balance. The story understands what she wants. But it’s not on her side. I have a lot more to say about her (perhaps l8r), but here’s the most important thing: Vriska can’t leave, either. She gets what she wants: the ultimate fulfilment of her identity as The Hero. She gets to Kill the Bad Guy. But at a cost she is incapable of recognizing. Like Caliborn, she never gets to go on to be a fulfilled, happy patron of the new universe. She is always on the inside of the door, stuck inside Homestuck. And the fact that we’re asked to observe her breaking off her relationship with Terezi to go out in a blaze of glory? The fact that we’re asked to compare her to another version of herself who’s let go of her ego, whose bond with Terezi is the most important thing in her life? The fact, that in her eyes, she comes up better, but in ours, she comes up short? How incredible is that?

Neither the Hero or the Villain, trapped in their own ideas, trapped by their own ideas, can ever be free.

It’s a pretty good ending, is what I’m saying.

5) Against Apathetic Lazy Troll Hussie

So, back to that perception of Hussie I discussed earlier. The idea that he’s a flippant, irreverent prankster who never cared about bringing his story to a good conclusion.

By now it should be clear why I don’t really buy that line of thinking.  The sheer effort put into Homestuck after the pauses began, the level of thematic complexity Homestuck was going for at the end—these belie the idea that he was apathetic or lazy or wanted to piss off his fans. What seems obvious to me was that he was committed. He devoted himself to driving towards an end he was personally satisfied with, whatever anyone else thought of it, and chose to accept the consequences of having to tell it over the long term.

I could see how it might be easy to get the impression that Hussie’s a very frivolous, thoughtless guy, when his in-story self is a ridiculous, flighty orange goofball. But come on. That’s mistaking the persona he uses for comedy with his actual self as a writer. Reading any interview, Q&A session, or discussion with him reveals how much thought he put into every moment of Homestuck, and above all, that he was committed to putting an incredible amount of effort into it from the very beginning.

He was also committed to challenging himself and bettering his work, whether that meant trying new experiments (flash games, new animation styles, splitting panels and dialogue, messing with formatting, letting the villains take over the website, etc., etc., etc…) or rethinking his work to take account of a larger, more diverse perspective, as we saw with the developing queerness and introspection of characters like Dave.

Yet he knew that not all experiments would be received well. He chose to accept that, to not wallow in the familiar but to take on new things regardless of in-the-moment reader reactions. As he put it:

I guess I just believe in sticking to your guns as a creator. It doesn't mean you completely ignore what people have to say or fail to take it under advisement, but pandering and caving into critics for fear of diminished appreciation is the wrong way to go. Staying the course with your vision doesn't mean you'll do everything right, but if included in that vision is serious, concerted exploration, you can only benefit as an artist. Adversaries to this cause should be regarded as villains.

There are two ways to do the "obstinate douche bag" thing as an artist.

One is in vehement defense of stagnation. Some artists I've encountered do this, and it's completely indefensible. It's as low as you can get, creatively speaking.

The other is in vehement defense of exploration. This is just the opposite. This is a posture everyone should strive for, and these artists are the ones people should be most inclined to offer their attention and support.

That's just how I feel about it, and I come from a zero-BS standpoint on it all. This isn't a job for me, and I'll never modify my approach to protect a bottom line. If it was just a job, I guarantee I wouldn't spend every waking hour doing it. It's kind of a strange personal mission I'm on, which I happen to make money from, and that's cool. People are welcome to come along for the ride.

There’s a deep, deep irony to me in the fact that some talk about Act 6 Homestuck like it was a stagnant period in Homestuck’s development, when in fact, it was one of its most creative and experimental periods. This is true both of its structural and visual experiments, where messing with form finally revealed itself to be central to Homestuck’s major themes, and of its storytelling experiments. It’s understandable that diving into the kids’ psychological problems was a shift, and not everyone was down with it, but the very fact it was a shift shows that Hussie was trying new things. It would have been easy for him to stay in a comfortable place doing the same things he did in Act 4 and 5, but instead, he began to ask different questions and take the story someplace new. And honestly? Act 6 took a long time to pay its full dividends, but I loved where we ended up in the end.

(What kept us from enjoying it in the moment? The pauses. Once again the pauses.)

But for me, the thing that most puts the lie to the idea of Lazy Hussie is the sheer fact of Act 6’s existence itself.

Consider how easy it would have been to drop Homestuck completely when things got rough in the middle years. Consider how many webcomic authors would have done just that. I can name many webcomic hiatuses where the webcomic never came back.

But Homestuck did. Not only did it return, it returned spectacularly, scorchingly, with the shocking and dynamic Game Over, with Caliborn’s claymations, with two spectacular, full-length animations, one of them lovingly-hand drawn. It returned with metafictional shenanigans and glorious queer Gnostic themes. Hussie kept going, and kept experimenting all along the way.

This is the furthest thing in the world from laziness.

And the same is true for Hiveswap. It astonishes me how much I’ve heard Hiveswap talked about as a debacle or a betrayal of its fans. Despite having horrible problems dropped on him, the sort that would ruin any other Kickstarter, Hussie spent the next few years working to make sure he met the promises he’d made to his fans. He did.

My dudes, Hiveswap is real. It exists. It delivers on every promise that was made about what it might be: it’s a fun, pretty, point-and-click adventure game telling a new story in the world of Homestuck. It’s creative and clever and updates an old style of gameplay by letting you put things on things to your heart’s content. It’s certainly more accessible than Homestuck, and not yet as structurally complex, but given future installments, there’s plenty of time for it to grow into something rich and thorny. And rather than see this idea go under, from basically nowhere Hussie worked to bring together a small, diverse team of queer artists and creators to make this thing happen.

Again, not exactly laziness.

That’s why it angers me when I see people calling Hiveswap (somehow?) a betrayal of Homestuck fans, or advocating pirating Hiveswap or demanding their money back because it doesn’t live up to some weird set of expectations they placed on it. Maybe during the periods of drought and ambiguous release dates, both for Homestuck and Hiveswap, it made a little sense to be skeptical of Hussie making promises, but now?

It’s basically spitting in the face of a creator who kept working in the most difficult circumstances, and the small, insanely hard-working team who made it possible, over something that they’ve handed to you exactly as you specified right on your doorstep in a gift-wrapped box.

I’m not saying you can’t critique Hussie or his storytelling. He’s definitely a weird dude with a lot of quirks (Which is perhaps the only kind of dude who could have made something as quirky as Homestuck.) I think it’s fair to say he hasn’t always communicated well with the fandom. But the reaction to him these days is totally, ludicrously, out of proportion, beyond anything that would be a useful critique.

A related question is whether Andrew Hussie is burnt out on Homestuck.

Well, maybe?

It’s certainly true that since 2013ish he’s stepped away somewhat from communicating directly with his fans. But 2013 is also the time when Homestuck fandom was at its most massive, its most full of infighting and meaningless arguments, and its most overwhelming to keep up with. I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to hear more of his insights, but it’s pretty understandable that he wanted to step back a bit under the circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s burnt out. I mean, he seems to be living his best life, posing glamorously with his fidget spinners and Minion t-shirts. Not exactly hiding in a cave. Rock on, dude.

If he is burnt out on Homestuck, though, that makes what he’s done with Homestuck and Hiveswap all the more impressive.  That he brought them this far, and wants to see them keep going and keep doing well, when he could have let them drop unceremoniously a long time ago. If he’s delegating some of the work to others, all the better. I can think of nothing better for an artist who’s burnt out and ready to move on than to find people he can trust to keep the things he started going into the future, and that, I think is exactly what we have in What Pumpkin, Viz, and Homestuck’s artistic team.

But even to assume that he’s burnt out is to presume a lot about his mental state from some very scant data. By many other indications, he wants to keep engaging with Homestuck. There’s an Epilogue to come—a capstone for those last few ambiguities surrounding the timeline, John and Terezi. And he’s getting the Homestuck books re-published with new commentary through Viz—so maybe that’s where he wants to have his conversations with his audience. And he’s still the creative director of Hiveswap itself. It’s very possible he’s not burned out—if anything, wants to keep building the world he created in Homestuck and seeing where he can take it next.

Ultimately, I think people’s ideas about Andrew Hussie say a lot more about their lingering feelings about the ending of Homestuck—a backlash brought on by the pauses he had to work with—than anything about Hussie himself.

6) The Conversation Around Homestuck

Homestuck is a goddamn triumph.

There are certainly critiques I could make of it. But they pale in light of what Homestuck is: is one of the most rich, genre-bending, experimental, character-driven, hilarious, innovative, metafictional, transcendent, optimistic works on the Internet—to say nothing of how it dwarfs much of the rest of literature.

Ultimately, I think Hussie was right: as an archive, as the story it is from beginning to end, Homestuck stands. It’s a rich, meaningful work with a meaningful finale, and it’s right there to be read by anyone who wants to read it. In that sense, Homestuck was and Homestuck is. It doesn’t really need me to defend it. Nor does Andrew Hussie.

So why did I write all this? Why did I write everything I’ve written here on this blog?

Well, mostly for Homestuck’s readers. For fans like myself.

Because I still see people who came away from Homestuck feeling totally burned and abandoned by its creator, when that was anything but the truth. Because I still see people who feel like they can’t escape an awful negativity about this comic, about the ending of something they passionately loved. I want them to see that it doesn’t have to feel that way.

And because I want Homestuck criticism to be better. Because I see prominent bloggers, some of whom I really respect, taking so little of this stuff into account. I want to see people talk about Homestuck’s place in literature, in internet culture, without discounting how circumstances shaped how it was perceived. I want to get away from a lazy cynicism—that cynicism everywhere online—about whether stories can be meaningful at all. A cynicism that Homestuck is the very antithesis of through its themes of transcendence and hope.

I think for some people, Homestuck is that weird old obsession they cringe at. The ghost of teenage fandoms past. Which is fine. It’s reasonable to want to move on. But it frustrates me when I see the same cynical, cringing attitude affecting how people feel—or feel like they’re allowed to feel without social stigma—about the work Homestuck itself. I’m not interested in cringe culture.

I frankly don’t have time for it when Homestuck’s as good as it is.

Don’t get me wrong, I want Homestuck to be criticized, too. I want to hear what its flaws are. I think that’s also an important part of the conversation. But don’t tell me it’s a pointless, apathetic work, that it’s just the product of laziness. Because we know better than that by now. Because we need a better conversation than that. Don’t tell me that Homestuck doesn’t have Gnostic themes. Tell me how it uses them, and how it could use them better. Don’t tell me Homestuck’s meaningless. Tell me how it strives to be meaningful—because it does, in every aspect of its storytelling—and tell me where it succeeds, and where it fails.

That’s the kind of conversation I want to have about Homestuck.

You may not agree with the things I’ve pointed to here—you may think that Homestuck’s ending is much more flawed than I do. But that’s totally fair. All I want to say is this:

If you were holding off from letting yourself enjoy Homestuck, or if you once enjoyed it and wish you could enjoy it again, or if the experience of the ending left you feeling disappointed and frustrated and burned out…

Give it another read, especially Act 6 and 7.

You might be surprised how much you like what you find.

[dmgrundy]

[56] Le Salaire de la Peur / The Wage of Fear (1953, dir. Henry-Georges Clouzot)

Holed up in the colonial margins (a stand in for Venezuela, shot in Southern France), a cross-European cast of cynics act as the paid flunkees for the union-busting, private police-enforcing, virulently extractivist US American ‘Southern Oil Company’, transporting two trucks loaded with nitroglycerine along 300 miles of virtually impassable mountain roads in order to contain an out-of-control fire resulting from an explosion on a distant oilfield. ‘The Wages of Fear’ was, of course, an undoubted influence in terms of shot construction, situational tension-building, and grim atmosphere on a large majority of (particularly American) thrillers to follow: to pick one technical detail, this may be the first appearance in film history of a particular breed of zoom, establishing a kind of nervy relation of part to whole, environment to scene, that became de rigeur in the 1970s. It’s a film with the memorable fascination of a nightmare, as its drivers manoeuvre the nitrogylcerine-bearing trucks at breakneck speed over bumps in the road, over rotten wood, through a vast pool of oil, and so on, in a series of increasingly dangerous and desperate set-pieces. While this situational tension is what’s led to the film’s reputation, the narrative and emotional relations of its characters are perhaps just, if not more telling of its vision: a Céline-like cynicsm, total and overbearing, in which American imperialism is by no means the film’s only target; a structurally misogynist vision, exemplified in the relation of Mario (Yves Montand) to the film’s only female character Linda (Véra Clouzot). This brutalised, masculinist sexual politics is based on the disavowal of affection and physical eroticism between men, manifesting in the romance between the younger, brash, tough and cynical Mario and the older, circumspect, apparently charismatic Jo (Charles Varnel), enacted in misogynist dismissals of any ‘feminine’ weakness, whose physical expression can ultimately only be violence, taunting and the code of the toughest—as when Montand strikes Varnel down, proclaiming ‘it may be not be right, but I’m the strongest’; or when the death of their other two companions on the road is dismissed as par for the course, part of the hazard of the job, another indifferent moment in the battle to survive. Cluzot’s unremitting cynicism, like that of Céline, extends to those in authority—particularly the corruption, brutality and quest for profit of colonial authorities—but unthinkingly (or, what’s worse, deliberately and thinkingly) reinforces racist and misogynist assumptions and envisions no other future: a brief scene of workers agitating against yet another death in the oil fields is greeted with the lazy ‘what’s this, a revolution?’ as our ‘heroes’ wander onto the balcony in their underwear, and the brief shots of Brazilian native occupants in shacks or wandering the streets that open the film and that appear at various points in the narrative are presented with a kind of unseeing landscaper’s touch. Beyond a cynical expose of the workings of North American imperialism in the South of the continent, the film’s position is that of the cynic—the ‘exposée’ of all forms of power and ideology as both venal corruption to be judged and the Social Darwinist order of things—whose apparently clear-eyed vision in fact blinds them to the actual operations of racialised, gendered and imperial power. These characters, exiles from the sub-proletarian fringes of the imperial centre, whether in France or elsewhere (and note the profusion of languages in the film’s opening section), are motivated by a desire to escape the place they’ve ended up, stuck without money for airfare, but their place of origin—remembered with a tint of nostalgia, the casual patriarchal swagger of a whistled Maurice Chevalier tune or an outdated metro ticket—is no more than a pipe dream, the cynical pathos of that outdated metro ticket in the bloodstained fingers of an anti-hero arbitrarily driven to their death in the film’s final shot. The dying, oil-smeared Jo, trying to remember what lies behind a fence on the Parisian street on which he used to live, proclaims ‘there’s nothing’. But of course, in reality there’s something: not the sub-existentialist struggle, not the nihilist absence of value, but the quest for oil, money, the exploitation of periphery by centre, the planned underdevelopment, the rapacious extractivism of a centuries-long imperial project and its attendant, structuring myths. The stripped-down tension of the film’s major part is what’s remembered—particularly as the more explicit depictions of U.S. imperialism, allusions to gay sexuality, and the like, almost all occur in the film’s opening sections—but this apparent cutting away to the ‘truth’ of the matter is its own sadistic fantasy. Clouzot may reject pathos and sentimentality as the lies by which imperialism cloaks its own brutality, but the film’s alternative is close to a sadistic revelling in that very same brutality, a situational irony which leads, not to outrage or anger, but a kind of pleasurable frisson which ultimately throws up its hands to proclaim, with Jo, ‘there’s nothing’. Thus, the films ends with a kind of coda: a totentanz juxtaposing a barroom dance in anticipation of Montand’s survival and return, and Montand’s own dangerous ‘dance’ with truck on road leading to its careening over the side, soundtracked—in a film that’s otherwise virtually without music—to the tune of a mythologised European imperial elegance destroyed by successive world wars, Strauss’ ‘The Blue Danube’. If Clouzot’s cynicism served him well in explorations of the hypocrisy and yes, misogyny, of provincial and metropolitan France—the school of ‘Les Diaboliques’, the courtroom judgements and media circus of ‘La Vérité’—here, it becomes a modus operandi that has more in common with the structures it purports to critique than it (or its devotees) might care to admit.