#james reads homestuck

[cemeterything]

obsessed with how dave and rose are both clearly very intelligent and knowledgeable kids with an impressive range of vocabulary and degree of articulation who mostly use those skills to find increasingly esoteric and convoluted ways to call each other gay. the absolute teenagerness of it all.

[popomerrygamz]

Sorry for the Homestuck 2 hot take, but I really like James Roach’s new direction for the project. You can really feel the joy behind it, makes it feel fun again.

[art-spren]

the good news: I'm still here hi

the bad news: all I have to offer is this fucking sofa meme again

[beardisable]

HAPPY 10/8 BITCHES

WE ARE OFFICIALLY COOKING AGAIN

[dyscomancer]

it's cool that they're updating Homestuck^2 with a new team that actually cares about the material, but I can't really get excited about it given that the new stuff is a continuation of the prior narrative, which was this awful mess created by actively spiteful individuals who hated the original comic

[carbonated-roses]

Nobody:

Literally not a soul:

My brain late at night: Homestuck a modern finnegans wake

[manglednatalia]

Marvus is such an interesting specimen. Dude seems pretty aware of the narrative and does whatever he wants, nothing can stop him. While he still has the time to do some backstabbing especially after long enough that the player lets their guard down, I did get big brother vibes from him towards Joey. She wants to confess to him and he's like "dw you've got this". Wonder what other tomfoolery he'll commit

[petvles]

Never thought id be reading the word upd8 again in the year of our lord (copia) 2023 but here we fucking are i guess

[crappy-homestuck-confessions]

Sometimes I fear these confessions reaching someone official and it being put into official work.

.

[jupitercl0uds]

just started listening to my favourite song for the first time in months and. oh. oh my god. i forgot why this is my favourite song. this is so good

[cemeterything]

gotta say i appreciate homestuck for refusing to ease me into the time travel thing or give me any warning and instead just drop-kicking me straight into temporal shenanigans and expecting me to sink or swim. it's kinda fun to read a story that feels like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands in a bathtub.

[autumnal-fracture]

live footage of me like 5 minutes before i fall back into my homestuck phaze

[homestuckteam]

MARCH NEWSPOST

Posted on 5 March 2024 by James

Hi, James here. New website with a new URL, but your old bookmarks should work fine too. Update later in the month as usual. Some great bonus material up on Patreon, and as a special treat we’re releasing this month's writer’s commentary to everyone. As usual, there is new unvaulted patreon content too. If you are even a little interested in the writer and artist commentary check it out. It is very fun to do, so I hope it's fun to read. Some of the team set up a tumblr to serve as an alternative to twitter if that's a little more your speed. You can find it here.

So, new website. Big changes! Brand new content editor on the HICU's end, and a brand new front end for all of you. Means that we can do some cooler website stuff, quicker and easier. For example: you see that little gear icon in the bottom corner of a comic page? Go ahead, click it. I won't spoil the surprise here, but you'll see what I mean. That's the type of cool website functionality we'd like to start adding on a frequent basis.

"How frequent", you may ask? Well, with the new website, we're also testing out a new channel for user feedback. We're introducing a new website roadmap to give insight into those feature development timelines. And hey look, you can submit ideas for new features! Technology is amazing.

Not much else to report for now. As usual if you have a question or concern I will try my best to get back to you in the usual places. Have a good one.

[weirdmageddon]

everything about the homestuck stuff is making me really gleeful like. we are so fucking back. and i still cant believe i was shitting on postcanon earlier on twitter and then LITERALLY 2 minutes after i post it, i see homestuck tweet that they updated after three years while going hey the old drama people are gone and we got a new writers union and james roach and beloved big name fans to finish it with james “yall know i just do the music right” “closest contact homestuck official had to the fandom” roach as new director and basically owner of the homestuck ip. and 3 of the people on the team are people im mutuals with, longtime with floralmarsupial, so i know how good they are as creative forces and people. and multiple fans reading the update thought the dialogue was much funnier than the updates before it or even the entirety of postcanon. some homestuck fans dont want anything to do with it, thats how badly postcanon burned the fandom, which is understandable, but this feels a lot bigger than homestuck: beyond canon (previously homestuck^2). being run by people who we feel closer to and more trusting of not to make awful decisions and whose content we know is good because we went to Homestuck High together

[queerplatonicshipshowdown]

The Finals!

Camilla Hect and Palamades Sextus (Campal) from The Locked Tomb vs. Jessie and James from Pokémon!

Propaganda for Campal:

They're two people who have spent their whole lives together and are hopelessly devoted and loyal to each other. While some people do read their relationship as strictly romantic or platonic, it has way more going for it through a QP lense! They've been lifelong friends, and in their culture are essentially non-romantic life partners as a necromantic wizard and his bodyguard/champion. It's actually strictly taboo for them to engage in a romantic relationship because of this. But nonetheless they remain close to and devoted to each other, going so far as to use necromancy to keep each other close after one of them dies, and then going on to share a body until it becomes physically impossible to do so any longer. So they burn both of their souls to merge together into one new entity, creating a walking metaphor for queerplatonic partnership. They endlessly support and encourage each other, they're a perfect team when it comes to both peaceful study and combat. They know each other inside and out, long before they had to share a body, they were inseperable. They're two halves of one whole, literally, and nothing about that intense closeness and partnership is written to be romantic! Especially because other, similar characters in the series ARE written to read as romantic, and there's a distinct tonal difference to those relationships! Basically, they're two peas in a pod, two halves of a whole, clearly not quite platonic with it, but certainly not romantic either.

The author of The Locked Tomb has a long term queerplatonic partner! She even dedicates the books to him and signs those dedications with a <> (which is a Homestuck reference, denoting a non-romantic partnership that a number of fans associate with QPPs!). You can feel the influence of her own experience with queerplatonic attraction in a lot of the series, but it really comes through especially in Cam and Pal!!

Propaganda for Jessie and James:

Have you seen them

As a side note, I highly encourage making propaganda for your fav! I reblog propaganda as long as it's not in the tags or comments. You can even make your own post as propaganda, and as long as you tag me, I will reblog it!

I can't wait to see the winner! Thank you to everyone for supporting and voting in this tournament!

Come check out @transgenderswagcompetitions, where I'm hosting the Transgender Swag in Books tournament! That tournament is expected to begin 3 weeks after this one ends.

[familyabolisher]

haphazard assortment of thoughts on the unwanted guest:

firstly, it really does have to be said—crazy good, probably my favourite of all the tlt short pieces, and i say that as someone who lost my mind over as yet unsent for like a week. excellent conceit and excellent execution, just a really gorgeous piece of writing. the play format of course reminds me of what abigail says to harrow in htn—that the river bubble is a ‘play [she’s] directing’—the inside of one’s head as a stage in which other actors can intervene & whereby mileage can be gotten out of Symbolism as immediately “real,” tangible presences that the kind of realist baggage that a more quotidian prose form would usher in would probably falter in accomplishing. it’s a lot!! i think even if i wasn’t already a tazmuir writing style defender (contra the insistence that she’s yknow homestuck fanfiction serial numbers filed off hack) then this would have had me floored anyway. 

the play format also works in the way that muir’s general dexterity in form and willingness to really make use of craft as a technical space where discourse can be generated always works—i’m talking about the ‘fanfictiony’ voice in gtn which manages to say something both about fanfiction and about the text itself, the use of the dramatis personae as a space where atmosphere can be established and plot points hinted towards (thus blurring the lines between what is and is not diegesis), the drastic shifts in style between different close thirds, the shifting from third- to second- to epistolary first-person, the use of poetry both diegetic and not (the noniad, the epigraph poems…), the mimicry of the ‘voice’ of the king james bible in the nona epilogue—she never stays in one place for too long and she never seems to stick to one central style or form, and it really works in her favour. insofar as tlt as a whole is a very ‘patchwork’ kind of work, building itself up from its big big index of references and intertexts and memes with hugely variant levels of ‘prestige’ or legitimacy attached to them, the ‘patchwork’ use of form really works in muir’s favour. however i am also fuming because i was right in the middle of writing a tlt fic which jumps into a play format two-thirds of the way through and now my idea doesn’t look ORIGINAL but ANYWAY—

& i really do need to flag my good friend vee’s mercy/augustine fic, which makes use of a similar conceit and pulls it off masterfully—i am deeply jealous of vee’s talent and i think the unwanted guest makes this piece (from 2021!) shine even more, if anything.

i am DYING to see where muir is going with the use of hamlet, of all things—dulcie quoting it to palamedes immediately catapulted my mind back to abigail’s reference to ‘that undiscovered country’ in htn. obviously muir likes to drop contemporary (or contemporarily canonical) references and turns of phrase all over the place, but the attention drawn to the quote as diegetically referential (“I like that. Is it from something?” / “Yes. It’s complicated.”) has me wondering about a) the survival of ‘pre-res’ literatures ~over the river and like WHY and b) what a thematic interlocking of tlt and hamlet can do, here…….real aveheads remember cytherea ophelia theory where i tried to use ophelia as a point of reference for teasing out some arguments about cytherea and death and aesthetics and white femininity and whatnot. all of which is to say i need to sit with this hamlet reading a lot more but i love it, i am so here for it.

of course ‘kissing or feeding, we can’t be sure’ calls to mind ‘how meat loves meat,’ alecto biting harrow’s mouth by way of a kiss…and the general thematic throughline of, you know, certain practices of love as practices of consumption, naberius later being figured as the ‘meat’ in question contains echoes of this eroticism which ofc guides the contours of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, eroticism as a currency of power, we know all of this stuff because it’s all over the text but i am just thumbs-upping it from the sidelines

the coffins had me thinking of utena’s black rose arc, which is a fun link to make considering the equivalent moment in the main body of nona is also referencing utena, ie. with the ‘rules’ of the duel being that cam has to get the handkerchief out of ianthe’s pocket as kind of an equivalent to skewering the rose. i feel like the tlt/utena overlap is pretty self-explanatory but it’s just fun to see the fingerprints all over lol

i think a lot of this was treading old ground thematically (erotics of consumption, dog motifs, we’ve seen it already!) but i will say that i did Yell Out Loud over ‘who's she got dawdling behind her but that creature—tugging visibly at her leash like an overeager dog.’ reminded of the other memorable use of ‘leash’—’even the devil bent for god to put a leash around her neck’—and, of course, the endless parade of commonalities between gideon & alecto. anyway there’s not really anything in this line that we didn’t already know about gid as a character, thematically speaking, but i point it out because it inflicted +100 psychic damage when i read it. gideon as a ‘creature’ is particularly slimy, & sort of puts me in mind of ianthe's tendency to talk about what appears to us as 'butch masculinity' (as opposed to the more effete masculinity of augustine or even babs) with a notably derogatory slant (the 'hurtful threats of sexual violence' line comes to mind); i don't know that i have much to say about it here specifically but it's an interesting one that i think informs the kirianthe dynamic pretty heavily (especially when held up against, like, harrianthe ... ianthe has a kind of respect for whatever harrow's gay and stupid gender is Doing (at least insofar as she can mould it to her own desires; i'm thinking of the dios apate forcefemme scene lol) in ways that i don't think she has for kiriona? but this is v off-topic, lol).

i have never been especially taken by dulcie as a character but i think this may finally have forced me to fold and admit that she’s great. her haters!!! her agonies!!! camilla would have to cook!! the balance between levity and sincerity was really well-managed. & i love the double meaning of “unwanted guest” as both palamedes intruding on ianthe’s mind palace and naberius setting up shop inside of her.

i need a week to sit with where this idea of the consumed soul as being literally ‘digested’ such that it can begin to ‘inhabit,’ however immaterially, the host body, or like to alter the characteristics of the host body such that to carry out such a consumption is to kind of kill yourself as well, slots in with lolita theory. or like, i need alecto right now. i am however reminded of chew, a short story that muir wrote in 2013, which also plays with these ideas of sexual assault as a forcing of a part of yourself meaningfully ‘into’ another person, and cannibalism as the reenactment of such a process, figured in the story as kind of a reclamation or at least an assertion of permanence—“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.”—which the unwanted guest seems to kind of, play with in reverse? i don’t know, but i’m interested—as ever—in where muir wants to take these ideas of rape and consumption and absorption that she’s got in her hands.

i keep returning to…i hesitate to say ‘parallels’ because i think that imposes a narrative onus that i’m not actually that convinced by, but these, like, commonalities between babs and gideon. gideon is played off against so many people (cristabel, loveday, alecto being the big ones) that it feels kind of inane to add another person to the pile, but like…they’re the two who get got in canaan house, they’re both ironically ‘false’ cavaliers and expressions of the ‘truest’ or most paradigmatic form that cavalierhood ‘can’/’should’ take, they both have unconventionally gendered names (‘babs’ is a shortened form of ‘barbara,’ it is a typically feminine name imo) and (by our standards) somewhat unconventional genders (gideon is butch, babs effete)—and of course the unwanted guest places a lot of emphasis on the coercive ‘making’ of cavalierhood (the reference to babs being ‘fixed’ were he to have a disability! ianthe’s glib ‘society really is to blame’ comment—ironic, obviously, but not wholly untrue) not dissimilar to the emphasis that gtn puts on cytherea moulding gideon into the state she comes to be in at the end. babs and gideon as the two possessed corpses in nona, obviously. two wildly diverse but ultimately converging trajectories! a dialectical tension between their fundamental ‘opposition’ (as by-the-book cavalier vs whatever gideon is doing) and their fundamental ‘sameness’ whereby the dialectic is resolved in their mutual deaths. also just, of course, continuing the throughline that muir has had going for a while now, of gender/gendering as a set of coercive enforcements loyal to a hegemonic structuring of the world.

that’s all i’ve got, i think. just. really good everyone say thank you tazmuir