#james roach

[dukeofriven]

To Ravel-Out The Weaved-Up Follies: The Decline and Fall of Homestuck^2

[I first started this essay a few months ago during a strange, brief resurgence of Homestuck^2 discussion that vanished almost as quickly as it began. Because my brain is A Wretchedly Uncooperative Thing this essay has stayed in draft form, being picked at, until—naturally—Homestuck^2 surprised us all by relaunching with a completely new team at its head. I’ve decided to push myself to publish this anyway, because I still think the core of my thesis is correct. So, keeping in mind that this leaves the starting gate slightly later than I would have wished (not knowing I was in a race), let us commence.]

___________________________________________________

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. -Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 “Once upon a time there was a Boojum——" the Professor began, but stopped suddenly. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he said. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." -Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, 1893

Several posts about Homestuck^2 have started to crop-up… adjacent to my dash. I'm not attaching myself to those posts because it seems rude, but their points are largely an attempt at revisionism of the fate of Homestuck^2. Understand I'm not using the term ‘revisionist’ pejoratively: it is common, even sensible for artists to look back at failed projects and try to pick up the pieces and derive some value from them. I’ve done it myself, many times. Nobody likes to say "I entirely wasted my time, my passion, and my creative energy for [X] days, months, years.” It is important to look at a failure and see what you did right, treasure the parts that were worth treasuring.

But equally I don't want to go too far in rehabilitating what was, undeniably, a failure. There's a lot of critical theory being brought-up, a lot of talk of Homestuck^2 from a standpoint of post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, trying to engage with what Homestuck^2 was as a platform for ideas. A habitus, if you’ll forgive the jargon, what Bourdieu famously called (in a Hussie-like masterwork of language) “the structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.”

I get it. I get what the Homestuck^2 team was trying to do intellectually: where their minds were at, the hostility they faced, the vitriol they were harmed by. I get it.

But that's not why Homestuck^2 failed. Homestuck^2 did not fail because it dreamed too big, or was too intellectual. It did not fail because its themes were not worth exploring, or because its lens was too meta: for most of its original run, after all, Homestuck is nothing but an interrogation of Homestuck. Its brains were not why Homestuck^2 failed. The problem was its execution. The problem was its heart.

There's a lot to be said about not giving fans what they think they want. The internet drowns in coffee shop AUs where everything interesting about a franchise's characters has been vulgarly ripped from the text, leaving a drama-less, tension-less pablum where everything is stagnant and unchanging, everyone gets along, all the romances are cute and smooth, and you can burrow in the comforting ooze of artistic and narrative death. Give fans exactly what they want and frequently nothing creatively meaningful will result. Fandoms famously resisted both The Empire Strikes Back and The Wrath of Khan when they first released because they pushed characters to change, and yet they grew to be beloved as fans realized that what they thought they wanted and what it turned out they could enjoy were not as alike s they assumed. There's nothing wrong with showing fans that there can be more to a story that just doing the same thing over again, retrenching into the pablum wastelands of growth-free comfort fics.

But when asking whether Homestuck^2 did or did not gave fans what they wanted or needed, we must first raise an important establishing question: which fans? That is to say: who was its intended audience? Who was Homestuck^2 written for?

At its peak, Homestuck Classic had millions of readers and a million page-hits a day. There was a whole contingent of fandom who came only for the trolls (in some baffling cases actually skipping the first four acts of the story to jump right to into Act 5). There was another contingent who loved the video game parody, there were Problem Sleuth junkies, and in the early acts there were the suggestion box obsessives: all of these were readers who were fans of parts of the story but largely stopped reading Homestuck as the story got more concerned with the complex nature of stories and narrative itself. Homestuck^2 is clearly not for them—as indeed Homestuck Classic itself had not 'been' for them for much of its run. Homestuck^2 is also not for new readers: if you haven't read the Homestuck Epilogues through at least twice, if you don't remember all its major plot points and the plot points of Homestuck Classic, it makes no attempt to onboard you and is, probably in-arguably, outright impenetrable to those not already in the know. It’s not impossible—there were SBaHJ fans who onboarded with the first context-free SBaHJ and went ‘yeah, I can vibe with this’ and never knew or cared that it was a reference work for something else— but it doesn’t seem likely that many people ‘jumped on’ the Homestuck train with Homestuck^2. I think Homestuck^2’s writers would agree that Homestuck^2 expected you to know the lay of the land. So: nobody new was likely going to read Homestuck^2, and (given its density of Homestuck call-backs) neither was it for more casual Homestuck fans. Homestuck^2 was not even for the truly otiose Andrew Hussie diehards: Hussie was only tangentially involved in the project, they weren't writing it, and there's seemingly no references at all to Barty's Brew-Ha-Ha or Inappropriate Time for Ham, so that's a full seventeen readers it also likely turned off (sorry, comrades. One day…)

So who, then, was Homestuck^2 for? Its intended readers seemed to be those who read the Epilogues and loved them. This is a complicated issue: for those who weren’t there, the Epilogues were… controversial. I defended them at the time: I liked them, even admired them, partially because I believed with the fervor of a zealot that there was still something else to come. I called this final entry ‘Pumpkin.’ Homestuck, a story that always rejected binaries, surely was not meant to conclude with over-the-top Candy and/or grim, dour Meat. I knew in my heart that Pumpkin was coming, where John rejected both of these dark and crazy futures and found a third way in which his friends grew up and matured without losing themselves and their friendship: not a story without conflict, but surely the prime timeline as existed in general fandom imagination could not accept Dirk’s grotesque, manipulative suicide, breastfeeding Gamzee, brutal civil wars, and Dirk and Jane becoming so cruel and hateful. Surely that was set-up to pay-off a better future later: after all, like its author, Homestuck abhorred a binary.

But Pumpkin never came, and now I look at the Epilogues and I find lot in it (for lack of a better term) ‘edge lord showboating.’ It feels like reading 90s comics all over again, including the bits with cannibalism. A lot of bleak and miserable things happen in the narrative, and I find myself asking ‘do they happen because they should, or just because they could?’ (And how many times can one franchise treat Jade Harley like absolutely garbage?)

But if the Epilogues had a true and golden virtue, it was their framing as intrinsically being fan-fiction: Meat or Candy, this was not the 'true' continuation of the franchise (as much as that means anything), this was speculative futures, not much different from Doc Scratch’s story of the Vriska/Noir battle. A one-shot, in other terms, an elseworlds: not a definitive statement about What Homestuck Was From Now On, but an experiment in tone and structure. How far can you push Homestuck before it doesn’t feel like Homestuck any more? (Turns out not nearly as far as you might think.) A lot of people didn’t notice, however, or perhaps simply didn’t care: the Epilogues ripped the Homestuck fandom apart. Homestuck Classic often did things in bad-taste as part of its odd charm: Gamzee’s codpiece, Jack playing dress-up after slaughtering a nice couple on a date, Caliborn’s cartoonish misogyny. Some bits land, some don’t, but for fans—I think for many, if not most—the Epilogues crossed a line that they were not comfortable with.

In some quarters the Epilogues are reviled, and I honestly can not fault people who found them off-putting. They are: intentionally so, provocatively so, and it should be okay for people to be put off by them without insisting that the haters ‘just didn’t get it.’ Often they did: they ‘got it,’ they just didn’t like it. It ‘squiked them out’ as we used to say, and the writers had to have known it would: discomfort is the nature and partial purpose of provocative art.

(Sidebar: Epilogue writers, you wrote a plot-line in which 16-year old Homestuck Act 6 protagonist Jane Crocker grows-up to become a racist dictator who has a cuckolding sexual relationship with Gamzee Makarra that involves kin-play involving public breastfeeding.

Sorry Andres Serranos acolytes, that’s not going to go down super-well with the majority of people, not because they are uptight suburban prudes but because they liked Jane Crocker and felt this outcome was not grounded well in the character they knew: only the obtuse would act shocked and try and argue it was due to a lack of sophistication. You took a gamble, you took a risk, you faced the outcome. You fucked around with ICP Hitler breastfeeding cuckoldry and you found out.)

So: who was Homestuck^2 for? It was for people who had read Homestuck multiple times, had read the Epilogues multiple times, and wanted a sequel that involved those Epilogues.

That is… a small audience. A very small audience. I counted myself among them, but had no illusions that its reach was ever going to be very large. Homestuck^2 was never going to be the Second Coming of Homestuck as a sui generis cultural phenomenon: seemingly by design, it was deliberately written for an insular audience who liked a controversial and difficult interpretation of a famous story and wanted more of that interpretation. So the Homestuck^2 team wrote for them: they came to the table with big dreams and big ideas. They came to the table with lots of critical theory under their belts: they knew their Barthes and Baudrillard, they could reference queer theory and the legacy of post-structuralism, they were the sort of people who knew how to situate Homestuck in post-post-modernism and what that meant for the nature of its exploration of stories.

They had an audience, and they had a plan. They were going to give the fans what they wanted.

So after much hype and fanfare, after interviews and the Tumblr equivalent of a press-junket—which saw the new team saying how excited they were to tackle Homestuck’s legacy, how many great ideas they had, how much having a diverse team was going to see Homestuck ‘done right’—Homestuck^2 first published on the 25th of October, 2019, releasing 32 pages.

We start in the glittering majesty of space. The camera swoops in among the stars, barrelling towards a rushing spacecraft (every frame of Homestuck^2 looks great, the visual arts team's work is its unquestioned highlight). We aim at a viewport in the spacecraft’s hull and slowly the Muti-Narratively-Dimensional Ubervillian Dirk Strider comes into view. Fresh from his triumph in the Epilogues, continuing his wicked schemes, he looks right at the camera, and—speaking directly to the audience—he voices the first line of dialogue in Homestuck^2:

"Surprise, bitch."

…

There is…

…

… there is no coming from back that.

There is no saving it.

It is the 25th of October, 2019, and Homestuck^2 launches with its own death-rattle. It stumbles out of the gate like a beautiful racing pony catching its delicate hoof on the sharp, treacherous edge of an unwieldy analogy and tumbling into the indifferent soil of hard reality, shattering all four legs and immediately marking itself for teary euthanasia at the hand of the devastated young girl with the violet eyes who raised it from a foal and dreamed of making Nationals.

We have established that Homestuck^2’s potential audience was small. The people who were most likely to like it were already an insular, distinctive group who had bought-in to what much or all the Epilogues had to offer. Homestuck^2’s opening-day crowd did not need to be sold on the word of the Lord—they already believe it: they came to see their first glimpse of the promised land.

And in its very first conversation with that audience, in its very first words, Homestuck^2 makes the most spectacular miscalculation of tone since 2013's DmC: Devil May Cry—or for those of us of who remember the 90s: ‘Dirk Strider’s about to make you his bitch.’

There's nothing wrong with starting a story with a villain, there's nothing wrong with a villain being a contemptible heel to its audience, but Homestuck^2 spends its opening 32 entries—which, at over 7600 words are longer than the prologue to the Homestuck Epilogues—jumping between Dirk’s smarmy conversations with fellow characters and a monologue to the audience, pages infused with an arrogance and condescension that is downright enervating. The text is frequently dense, so dense it feels like chewing your way through a plank of wood. It is actively tiring to read: I bailed on my first attempt at reading Homestuck^2 when it originally dropped because I just did not have the energy to squint at my screen and read that much orange-on-off-white text.

It is, to be clear, contemptuous. Dirk did much the same in the Epilogues, but the locus has changed. In the Epilogues Dirk taunts the reader with the changes he is making to the story: he knows they object to his manipulations, and he preens as good villains do. But in Homestuck^2, Dirk speaks not of his changes but of the very existence of Homestuck^2 itself. He treats his audience as inherently hostile to the entire existence of the work they have just shown-up to read (or even support via a Patreon), a hostility that culminates when he ‘opens’ a suggestion box and receives the suggestion ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck,’—which he at-once rejects and goes on to monologue some more.

Dirk is talking to an audience who isn’t there. He is speaking to everyone who didn’t like the Epilogues and objects to Homestuck’s 'sequel' directly following them: but that audience isn’t reading Homestuck^2. They bailed in advance, and any who did try and keep an open mind likely jumped ship the moment the comic started by calling them a bitch and implying they’re idiots. The only people likely to read past the fifth page are those who already bought-in to Homestuck^2’s plan: and they are greeted with some 32 pages and 7600 words of the comic’s villain re-litigating and justifying that plan over and over and over again to people who nominally already agreed with him.

It is draining. It is annoying. It is boring to read.

There’s so much you could critique about Homestuck^2’s choices: from Rose cheating on Kanaya to impregnate Jade to Jane Crocker going full Trump and keeping kids in cages. Equally there’s arguments to be made that Homestuck^2’s very premature cancellation inhibits any ability to judge the story fairly: like any serialized narrative stopped mid-way, we have no way of knowing what narrative payoffs were supposed to be. Decisions that seemed baffling on page 8 might prove brilliant and bold by page 8000. But we never got to page 8000, because Homestuck^2 made one crucial error:

It started by telling its audience they were fools for not being smart enough to appreciate how brilliant Homestuck^2 was going to be, and then spent a majority of some 7600 words repeating itself like the worst self-pitying incel you’ve ever had the misfortune to be trapped with at a party. If only the ungrateful could realize how smart, handsome, and well-educated I—Homestuck^2—am, the love I deserve will come flowing in. I’ll show them all.

Homestuck^2 never recovered from that first, fatal error. The rest of its choices, good and bad, are almost irrelevant in the face of that opening broadside, that hostility, that tedium. Homestuck Classic earned its walls of text and at least knew how to space them: Hometuck^2 took its audience forbearance as a given and opens with a lecture on its principles and quality like an unusually snide abstract on a sociology paper. Homestuck^2 essentially began by telling its audience to leave unless they were willing to give it carte blanche, to roll over for its brilliance from the first, to accept in advance that its intelligence and virtue were first rate. So the audience did leave and it never came back and eventually the whole thing collapsed via artist infighting that was so rancorous and possibly subsumed by NDAs that to this day no one has ever halfway adequately explained what happened at the end.

But that ending was preordained from the beginning, for the balance was hopelessly incorrect.

So to anyone trying to write a revisionist history of Homestuck^2 in which its downfall was the fault of readers who simply didn’t ‘give it a chance,’ who didn’t appreciate its themes, who couldn’t grasp (or didn’t care to grasp) its intellectual bonafides (not to mention its extraordinary self-assurance that it was going to be queer Homestuck ‘done right,’ which is a whole essay about a priori reasoning in and of itself)... in other words, a history in which Homestuck^2' downfall happened because people just didn’t ‘get it,’ I’d like to sum up my counter-argument succinctly:

People didn’t like Homestuck^2 because you wrote it bad.

[Afterwards:

There is something bitingly funny about the ‘return’ of Homestuck^2 with the announcement that, from what I can gather, seemingly every person involved with the original project was fired (or, as they’d probably insist, refused to come back). Dirk’s preening, overwhelming arrogance, that ‘Dirk: Stop Making Homestuck’ prompt, will forever haunt the original team’s unwieldy vision. “I’d bet you just looove for us not to make Homestuck anymore” the team said, with all the confidence of an entrepreneur dismissing safety regulations before climbing into his homemade submarine, and boy were lessons learned. My problem with the return, however, is that I don’t know who genuinely wants to see the story of Homestuck^2 finished: the remaining cadre of die-hard patrons who still have enough goodwill to want the promise of the story’s finale fulfilled is microscopic. I’d argue there’s more people waiting for the conclusion of Wizardy Herbert, and I’m the only person I know who has ever read it. What I mean is: as a choice to revive a struggling franchise it doesn’t make much sense, and further—if it is not clear—I don’t think this is a story worth finishing. What is to be salvaged? Jane-the-Dictator, Rose’s cheating, Obnoxious BabyVriska, Dirk Strider the monster? The problem with Homestuck^2 is that Pesterquest happened, and those who played it went ‘this—this is the kind of story we were hoping for, not your edge lord showboating.’ And we only got one Pesterquest and Homestuck^2 limped on for another year reviled, ignored, and eventually forgotten. When it died, most people didn’t have any idea, because the drama never crossed their screens: nobody was talking about it any more. As my best friend noted, give us more Paradox Space. Give us more stories with joy and some sense of fun, something not written by people who often felt like they had an ‘End of Evangelion’ style hatred of Homestuck, or at the very least took the old joke that Hussie was ‘trolling’ his audience at face value. (Writing a good story with twists, set-backs, and tragic moments is not trolling, it is just writing a good story.) Homestuck^2 never felt like it understood that: it was rude and iconoclastic for no more compelling reason than it thought that was meaningful. But then I think the legacy of Epilogues has been extremely toxic—part of the positivity towards Pesterquest was that it let the Epilogues go, featuring a triumphant moment where YoungDirk confronts his Epilogues self and goes ‘I don’t have to be a huge wanker, actually, I can stay a character people can stand and even love again.’

Do that, new team. Pesterquest is named-dropped on the new site more than once, and my dream is that its cast arrives and overthrows the corrosive toxicity of the Epilogues, banishes it to the far realm of underbaked elsewhere ‘what-ifs’ along with every DC cannibalism story and that time Peter Parker’s radioactive semen gave MJ cancer.

The Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are, at this point, not worth salvaging—but I’d happily see them formally buried.]

[exoid-the-locomotive-monarch]

>be a webcomic

>decent popularity and critical support from the fans at the start

>immediate drop in quality over next bunch of updates

>fans hate it

>gets so bad writers and artists are harassed to the point of leaving the team

>endless controversies between writers acting shitty on their personal Twitter account to fans to accusing discord mods of being 4Chan nazis

>comic loses half its funding 8 months in

>bimonthly updates 4 months in return to the sluggish once a month updates from the start

>pause 14 months into the comic’s intended 5 year run.

>announce a month later indefinite hiatus

>radio Silence for THREE YEARS AND NINE MONTHS

>be almost 4 year anniversary of the webcomic’s start, 17 days away to be exact

>drop 4 DOZEN pages

>new director

>new writers union

>new EVERYTHING even the title of the comic changed

>the “it’s so over” from the fandom supercharges back into “we are so fucking back”

>its name is enough to scare half this website into shock

>look at tags

[d4w9s]

Hours in the future, but not many…

[bladekindeyewear]

Why are all of John's friends trying to gaslight him constantly? He was proven right about Candy and yet they all still treat him like he's nuts. Especially Jade.

But John ISN'T right. The Candy timeline being a "funhouse reflection" doesn't justify his proposed assertions and actions. I went into deep detail about that in my liveblog post, person by person. Just about all of the adults are wrong in important ways (besides Karkat), and are proving themselves wrong in that very conversation-- but John is the MOST wrong, the furthest from the point of this story, the most obviously suffering from his shortcomings as a person.

You get the sense you may have missed something.

This line, as everyone is standing over him, isn't just a joke about what's going on behind them all... as I covered in my liveblog post, it's a key statement about the core mistake John is making. About how ever since he arrived on Earth C, he's been looking for "true meaning" everywhere outside himself when it has to come from within.

ROXY: john did you listen to a single fucking thing i said to you JOHN: yes! JOHN: like, okay, you were right. JOHN: this place IS real.

In their argument in this update, Roxy and John alluded to their home conversation toward the end of the Candy Epilogues, when John was trying to insist that everyone's actions made no sense and that this timeline didn't mean anything... and Roxy dismantled his assertions. That just because the Candy Timeline was so strange and intentionally read at first like poor fanfiction -- likely because it was born from CALLIOPE'S fanfiction, the Meat version of Callie wearing the Ring of Life who is constantly said both in the Epilogues and Homestuck^2 to have been drawing events on her walls that sound suspiciously like the events of Candy -- that doesn't mean the Candy story, that a noncanon fanfic, isn't real or doesn't matter. Just because some of the events seemed absurd from John's point of view, OUR point of view, didn't mean they didn't have underlying reasons... right down to Yiffy's name as we discovered in this update from Karkat's insight that Jade was naming and treating Yiffany like the child she imagined she'd have had with Dave without his involvement. Just because it's not the "original author's" method of characterization doesn't mean that fan characterizations hold no worth, that fan stories hold no value.

John is right that all the former heroes in the Candy Timeline (besides maybe Karkat) have made a great many HORRIBLE decisions, giving in to their insecurities and neuroses and past trauma. But his solution is to ditch all the consequences of their "fanfic" story, consign it to the trash bin, and instead pursue "relevance" as if a new adventure, as if something more "Canon", would would be best for everyone... mainly himself. That allowing fanfics to be real, or making a difference in their own world despite their flaws, is "too much freedom".

JADE: john... this is what i mean. JADE: you have no idea what it is you actually want, do you? JADE: being happy to you is just chasing after whatever it is you dont already have. JADE: and we know how that always turns out. JOHN: what does THAT mean? JADE: it means, john, that you're going to drag harry along on this big awful adventure and then, itll end! JADE: and even assuming it ends well, he might get what, one good year with you? JADE: maybe two? JADE: until you get bored and angry and avoidant all over

JADE: john... JADE: you cant actually believe everything will be fine if we just leave, right? JADE: no matter where you go, john, youre still going to be... this. JADE: i wish saving you WAS as easy as snapping our fingers and going off on some other adventure, JADE: but well never be 13 again. JADE: and... looking at you in that old outfit makes me nauseous. JADE: you were right, a lot of the time i dont like it here, and i DEFINITELY dont like whats happened to us. JADE: but its our own fault, and now its all we have left to work with.

Jade proved herself one of the "craziest" ones here in this update, with us seeing the real reason she chose a name as absurd and offhand-Dave-Strider-joke-like as Yiffany Longstocking, and in particular with the way she wants to CONTROL her child to live the life she THINKS is best for her from Jade's own experience, living a "normal" life vicariously through her, rather than letting Yiffy live the life she actually WANTS to live. She deserved Yiffy's final, parting "FUCK YOU!".

But the point she's making about John here is TRUE, and is even more important.

John has been constantly defining his self-worth by adventures outside himself, listless and depressed and UNCOMFORTABLE in his own being, thinking that happiness and fulfillment and satisfaction is something he has to go out and find on some sort of story quest. His time in Sburb was the only time the world around him was doing the heavy lifting of convincing him that he had meaning. But he was never comfortable JUST BEING HIMSELF. Never confident in BELIEVING in himself, by himself. Quests and chasing goals given to him were only ever temporary patches over his own insecurity, his feelings of wrongness in the very act of existing as the person he is.

"no matter where you go, john, youre still going to be... this."

"You get the sense you may have missed something."

John is so wrong, so horribly inconsiderate to everyone in this update, so insistent on the next dose of adventure even if it means consigning the entire timeline to the trash bin, because he is MISSING the key thing that would actually make him really, truly happy. Confident, fulfilled. Satisfied enough to live for OTHERS, like his child, more than just for himself.

Which is why the update ALSO gave him a GLIMPSE of what he was missing, what he needs to find INSIDE himself -- not outside -- in order to love himself.

And what he needs to find inside himself... is HER.

June Egbert would love herself enough to start truly living for herself and others. To believe in herself enough to show herself off so confidently in the stage's spotlight, to know she's a Hero beyond her prior inner doubts. The dead version of John in the Meat timeline seems likely to become her first, but the lesson is the same. John keeps trying to look for a way to "escape" his problems, causing all sorts of issues and insensitivity because he can't escape himself, and this is the true key to the self-acceptance he's been avoiding.

That's been the slow, steady, Andrew-blessed drumbeat that's been building in the background ever since the beginning of the Epilogues. It wasn't just a Toblerone wish, that was only the final excuse. Andrew had been talking obsessively with others about this repressed-transfem interpretation of John throughout Homestuck ever since fans brought up the idea before the Epilogues, before the Toblerone, and HS^2 and Beyond Canon's writers (and the Epilogue's cowriters) have all been standing with Andrew on this idea. The fact that Candy was so "weird" and non-canon was never what was actually making John "miserable" for so long. He's still projecting blame for his unhappiness onto that idea instead of seeing the truer way to be herself. It's been hinted at and reiterated throughout the new stories, and confirmed by its authors:

That's just the biggest key to JUNE'S issues, though, not everyone else's. From now on, all the heroes who were left behind in Candy -- possibly with help from those in the Meat Timeline who believe in them -- WILL SAVE the Candy Timeline from dissolving into the ether.

ROXY: john... i know things didnt work out the way you thought they would but we cant just up and fuck off???? ROXY: i feel it in my gut, we can save this place, we have to!

Together, they WILL prove the overarching theme that our drive to create fanon and fanfics and fan characters, that the wild and disagreeing interpretations on what could happen next (or what could have happened) that live on after the story in the reader's hearts, that the versions of these CHARACTERS that live on in our hearts, matter just as much or more as the grip of plot relevance and "canon" by a tyrannical author. That being trapped in a "story" necessarily tortures them for the sake of dramatic impact and that the characters deserve to be freed from its clutches. The overall message of the original "Homestuck" -- it's in the very NAME -- was that the heroes had to ESCAPE THE STORY to find true happiness instead of simply winning by its rules, by a tyrannical storycrafter like Lord English's rules. Homestuck's original ending was too strangely executed to spell out that lesson for most people. Homestuck's sequel is making that message EXPLICIT so none of us who stick around will miss it.

And Beyond Canon has been REALLY good at convincing me that they're going to pull that lesson off RIGHT. :D

[turntechgothhead69420]

the worst kind of middle schooler

[davekat-sucks]

that john gender discourse ask make me remember when a friend wanted me to draw a trans guy john drawing for them because it was a headcanon and i got death threats for it because “june is canonically a trans woman”, mind you i knew nothing about homestuck at the time so i was confused and looked up to see if it was true before i could tell the requester about why they made me date a canon trans girl as a trans guy and it wasn’t true at all, the internet just told me from the research that i did was that june was a popular headcanon, so i feel the need to say to the people who think june is canon just because it’s popular is that popular headcanon in a fandom doesn’t = canon or means that it is canon

Seems like those people didn't even try to give a source that June Egbert was supposedly going to be canon because of a Toblerone wish SIX years ago and James Roach claiming it was planned all along in an AMA Dec 2023 (despite that other Toblerone wishes were granted that were near the same year that June wish was first requested). As well as the fact because it will happen in Beyond Canon, which is part of DUBIOUS CANON, it's not really like official canon canon like the base webcomic. Not only that, Andrew Hussie, who was the lead director of the HS2/Beyond Canon project, left the team and it was revealed the sequel was a money laundering scheme. Hussie was in debt to Viz Media so he hired freelance writers and artists and lied to them that they were making something new. People can also say because he's not running the sequel anymore, it can't really be considered as canon or official, even if it was passed down from him to someone else. The man should have stayed with what he started and see it through to the very end. People cling onto this thinking it is canon, when it isn't, even with the tease of a silhouette. It ain't official or real unless it's fully shown in the medium that it claims it will happen. Even then, because of the questionable history and background from Hussie himself and the placement of June's arrival, it's both kind of shitty to make it happen on something that was ran by a shitty person and are only doing it recently for the sake of pandering. It's not like a genuine love to have a trans representation or surprise that the transition was planned all along.

[hms-no-fun]

I know you said you're cautiously optimistic about HS2, but the newest blog post has me kinda worried. The talk of "fixing the fans broken trust" and how even the new writers don't like a lot of story decisions that were made by the old team seem really off to me, like it's throwing the old team under the bus. I want to expect good things from HS2 but when the people working on it don't seem to like the story as it stands right now it really just seems like they might bend over backwards to appease the shitty side of the fandom. What do you think about this whole thing?

this is in reference to the october 30th 2023 news update on the hs:bc website. i give the date because the news posts don't seem to have individual links atm, so if you're reading this in the future you might have to scroll back.

to your worry that the new team might bend over backwards to appease the shitty side of the fandom, i wrote at length in my prior hs:bc post about why i don't think that's gonna be a problem. i'd also caution against reading too much into what james says about the attitude of the hs:bc team at large, for reasons that should be apparent by the end of this post.

i think it's perfectly reasonable to take a diplomatic position towards a fandom that is historically very hostile to this continuation. a lot of people haven't read the epilogues/hs2 and hate on them anyway because of what they've been told they contain, and refuse to question those received opinions on principle. many who did read them seem to have been inattentive or otherwise needlessly aggressive, sometimes owing to a baffling refusal to accept the premise of postcanon. plenty of others maybe just need a reason to think that homestuck is for them again. for this project to succeed, the fandom at large needs to be given a reason to revisit the epilogues/hs2 from a position of safety and critical distance. i have my own barbed opinions about this state of affairs, but it is what it is.

i understand and to an extent share your misgivings over that Q&A post, but it simply is not james roach's job to relitigate the conduct of the hs2 team. to even broach the subject in more than a general sense would constitute the opening of a massive can of worms, because the truth is muddy. mistakes were made on all sides, some worse than others, and to really contextualize where the hs2 team were coming from you'd need to explain the history of the hs fandom, the leadership of the reddit/discord, the overall tenor of twitter post-2016 and especially leading into/during 2020, the history of pgen and the homestuck renaissance, the lack of PR training or oversight or guidance from anyone at WP, the history of audience hostility in homestuck, and on, and on. for what it's worth, i think that context is essential-- but i don't know that anyone working on this project ought to be the ones to tell it (nor do i think they want that responsibility), and a brief casual Q&A post as a halloween treat is certainly not the place to publish it.

and ultimately, none of that has much at all to do with hs:bc. they are not beholden to or responsible for the choices made by the hs2 team. they have been entrusted with the reins of this story, and with that trust comes their own admitted desire to take it in different directions than what was initially planned. the hs2 team did this to the outline andrew hussie gave them; it's only fair that the hs:bc team has the same leeway over the outline they inherited. acknowledging fault in prior leadership, admitting disagreement over past creative decisions, is an olive branch to a largely skeptical fandom. i bristle at some of this because the hs2 team were my friends and i'm very protective of their work and that moment in history, but that isn't james roach's (nor the hs:bc team's) cross to bear. his choice, as the new public face of homestuck, is to move forward rather than linger on the past. it's good that he's burying the hatchet, frankly. i'm sick of that fucking thing.

love it or hate it, agree or disagree, the hs:bc crew has to exercise diplomacy right now. they've reopened the patreon and want to sustain this project for the foreseeable future, ideally without subjecting the workers to intensely traumatic levels of scrutiny and harassment. this involves clearing up miscommunications, admitting fault, gesturing at shared disagreements over story direction, and otherwise putting on a friendly face for strangers. and let's be clear, i know for a fact that plenty on the original hs2 team had a panoply of disagreements with the choices made in the epilogues! the operative condition here is not unquestioning devotion to / hatred of prior material, but a willingness to build upon that prior material constructively regardless. that's what matters most to me, and i have every reason to believe they're taking the constructive route.

i'll end this saying what i've been saying from the start. the measure of this project's success or failure should be taken in the work itself. if james roach blanket dismissed the prior team, but hs:bc constructively evolved in a way that didn't invalidate or undercut prior material, i'd still consider us oldschool hs2 fans the winners. i wouldn't be HAPPY about it, but the art is what we're all here for, and it's the art that people will remember. i think often about how the showrunners of the tv series LOST insisted from day one until the very end that everything in the show had a scientific explanation, despite the fact that they *always knew* this was a bald-faced lie. they told this lie because ABC did not want to fund a fantasy show and would've canceled it otherwise. some fans to this day decry the lack of scientific explanations in the text of the show, even when you point out that the promise of such explanations was false from the start.

point is, there are material realities to leading a creative enterprise. james roach has put himself in a genuinely dangerous and scary position, a fact that's easy to forget with how casual and welcoming his posts have been thus far. but this is perhaps the single most mismanaged property of the internet age, and there's no walking that back without stepping on some toes. over-correction is expected and probably necessary. if it ruffles your feathers, that's fine-- but let the work speak for itself, and judge it on its own merits. all this other stuff is ancillary and will inevitably fade into the distant fog of time.

[pascalishere]

is beyond canon actually worth reading. the overwhelming consensus I’ve seen is that it’s The Worst Thing To Ever Happen And James Roach Should Kill Himself but I’ve learned not to take what fandom bloggers have to say seriously. Just please tell me it’s interesting, nobody is too OOC, and that it’s going somewhere. That’s all I ask.

[homestuck-music-tournament]

Pipeorgankind

Album: coloUrs and mayhem: Universe B Composer: James Roach Leitmotifs: Showtime, Warhammer of Zillyhoo, Explore, Black, Doctor, Lifdoff, Harlequin Characters: June Egbert, LoWaS

You may know this from:

[S] [A6A6I4] ====>

[S] Heir of Grief: PLAY (From MSPFA "The Crow Strider AU")

[siphonophoresupernumerary]

Hold on where the fuck are these allegations against James Roach for being a predator. I figured since my ignorance was block worthy I should swallow my indignation and educate myself on what the issue is, but I can't find anything! What's going on!

[jonayariley]

My Thoughts on Homestuck^2

I say this as someone who has been fairly critical of the Epilogues and Homestuck^2 - I think that HS2 (or Homestuck: Beyond Canon as it's properly called now) has the potential to be something positive again. I was really excited for HS2 at first (after not super loving the direction the Epilogues went in) but got really burned out on it. But I'll say a few things on why I think this can work:

Greater transparency in terms of what's going on with it. I think that James Roach and crew are in a position to be really up-front about what's going on and what's to come, and I think they've done that. James has always struck me as being a pretty even-keeled guy, and having worked with him in the past on both Friendsim 2 stuff and when he presents at SAHCon, yeah - definitely a solid choice in terms of organization and being willing to communicate.

I think there's a lot of room to bring the plot around. I'll admit I wasn't a huge fan of everything that was happening in HS2 (weird pacing, focus on Vriska stuff, weird cucking plotline, out of character stuff) - but I really think there's a way to judo throw that shit around into something good. My take has always been "meat and candy are two divergent, slightly-unreal timelines and there's something else going on here" and some of what I saw in the last couple upd8s seems to confirm this. Personally I think that could work well, and the theme of collapsing reality in on itself could work. The fact that the new upd8 starts off with some stuff I thought they'd forgotten about bodes well.

Writing so far is good - feels balanced, good character writing. It feels Homestuck-y but also it feels like its own thing, which I think is a good thing. Also, solid choices for writers - seeing @floralmarsupial on the list alone has me very excited about what's to come!

Art is good too! Very nice balance of styles and some really solid panel work! Nice use of limited motion in classic Homestuck style combined with a good combination of Act 6 bean style and sprite style.

So far, reactions seem to be pretty positive. In the past, some people were profoundly NOT NORMAL about HS2 - going so far as to harass and attack the folks working on it. I can't express how profoundly not okay this is! So far, I see folks being pretty positive about it overall, and I think that's good. The folks who don't like it are not liking it in a normal, not-harassing-the-crew way, which is good.

I trust the team involved - I've worked with several of the people involved on my own projects (Chumi, Kim, James) and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the other folks involved. Like, this is a solid core to build a team around. Kim doing art direction is a good thing.

On a related note, hearing that this is a truly independent thing with creative control in the hands of the current team is a big thing. I have good reason to believe that this is 100% genuine, and that the direction "Homestuck community involvement" is going in is a positive one. It's a process, but it seems to be moving in a positive direction.

Good community involvement, less adversarial feeling - James has been reaching out to the community at large in a way that feels much more open than HS2 was doing before. HS2 got to the point where it felt like it had this contentious relationship with the fandom where it wasn't just challenging readers within the context of the text, but challenging them as readers and fans of the work (if that makes sense).

There seems to be a real commitment to doing this thing in a way that isn't exploiting the artists, writers, and other creatives involved. To working with people in a fair and open way and allowing them to guide the creative vision of the work. And tbh that's one of the most positive signs I've seen from this whole process.

Remains to be seen how things shake out in the long term - especially with stuff like the upd8-to-upd8 pacing (something I felt like was really broken in HS2) and how some of the more contentious aspects are handled.

But I feel hopeful about this, and I would absolutely not have said that two or three years ago. Like, ngl - the whole thing with Jade/Rose/Kanaya hit me hard enough to make a whole divergent post-canon AU

(read Negotiated Consent and its sequels Ways of Being and This Sudden State of Mind, btw - I'm still quite happy with them)

but I've had time to think on this a lot and time to become significantly more involved in well-known Homestuck stuff (specifically Friendsim 2 and co-directing Stuck at Home Con) and, like... idk I feel like the annoyance got replaced with a kind of "I really wish things could be better" bittersweet feeling, because at the end of the day this whole thing is important to me, and there's a lot of folks in this fandom who aren't shit-ass individuals who harass creators, and I think the relationship between author(s) and work can be something good and positive.

So yeah, I would describe myself as "cautiously optimistic" about this whole situation. Homestuck is a work with a lot of baggage - both textually and in terms of fandom/creation history. I don't think that can just be wiped away, but also I do believe it can move in a better direction, and there's clearly still a lot of folks who would like to see that happen.

And yeah, I guess in my heart I'm still one of those people too.

[cosmosemporium]

The Homestuck Beyond Canon Patreon post (where James Roach tells an intriguing tale of fancy bars) made me experience A Thought.

Perhaps Queen is partial to an appletini? Where battery acid is unavailable, perhaps the sweet sweet 'tini (of the apple variety) could be a plausible choice.

[bladekindeyewear]

I'm not sure if you are aware of this or if it actually affects your theories at all, but in an AMA on Reddit, James Roach said about the "One who fights to preserve" phrase: "I copy and pasted the class and aspect descriptions directly from the document andrew gave us. I will never fuck around about class and aspect that is my solemn vow. Well actually I might, but not that time." So I expect this description is at least fairly central to how a page works, if not their exact definition.

OH SHIT THAT'S SUPER IMPORTANT THANK YOU. I didn't expect them to have dropped the 100% FULL DEFINITION of a class for the FIRST TIME out in Patreon Writer Commentary land, and now I have to take it much more seriously. Going to your source now:

ErinsHere: Recently James revealed that a Page is "One who preserves"- was that an intentional drop of Canon Classpect Information? Can we expect to see more of those in the future? And, if so, do y'all have access to a classpecting resource bible, or are you working off of headcanon like the rest of us? JAMES: The exact wording is “one who fights to preserve”. I copy and pasted the class and aspect descriptions directly from the document andrew gave us. I will never fuck around about class and aspect that is my solemn vow. Well actually I might, but not that time.

Yup. Alright, that debunks my King Arthur view FOR CERTAIN and still most likely places the Page as the passive counterpart to the Knight, using this Active/Passive designation:

One who exploits their Aspect as a weapon, wielding it like a honed blade.

One who fights to preserve their Aspect (EDIT: and fights to preserve using their aspect? It's pointed out by ashercrane that he leaves the end open in the AMA, but didn't back in the Writer Commentary, so this may or may not be part of it).

The shared action verb would be to Fight, not to Exploit. Which feels odd to me, but mainly from unfamiliarity and my earlier doubts that personally "fighting" was meant to be so closely associated with Pages anyway. It still makes sense as an Action Verb for the pair in my book. (If they indeed ARE still a pair.)

This makes sense as a custom Active/Passive dichotomy like the Thief and Rogue definitions do, instead of using the "does" vs "invites" dichotomy language that the Prince and Bard's do. It also means that even if Pages can fight to preserve their Aspect for others, and sometimes make it available for others (as was commented that Grandpa Harley seemed almost to have intentionally given Jade a fuckton of prototyping options), fighting to preserve Hope in general -- theirs, another's, or just the concept/Aspect itself -- is the main point of the class. I'll keep that well in mind.

The Maid, though, was suggested to be a passive but powerful servant to their aspect (on a panel that reconfirmed the Knight "wields [their] aspect like a honed blade"). Isn't that too much of an overlap with the Page? Does the no-fucking-around policy apply back there too, or because that was page 278, well before the Beyond Canon team took over from the original HS^2 team on page 408, is this the implication that Maids are passive a misleading exception or something we should take literally? Because if so that could completely rearrange my chart, as I've mentioned before. Even if you take "serve" as a pun that lets one serve out the aspect, we've seen Pages do quite similar, as they might be able to under this new definition too... and Sylphs are Healers, so what are THEY paired with? Aren't THEY passive? I'm still not sure how best to rearrange the chart in the view of passive Maids, which is part of why I've resisted it for so long, but IF this retroactively confirms that alt!Calliope was being extremely literal about passive Maids and Sylphs aren't just the ACTIVE version of Maids which would seem... extremely fucking weird given how Sylphs have seemed as passive as Maids so often that it's been almost hard to tell which is more active if they're paired... guh, I need to resolve this confusion at some point and I can't wait for more info to trickle in that allows us to clarify all this.

(It's also STILL possible that Maids and Sylphs are "passive" compared to the other classes, but that Maid is technically the Active part of the pair, from Calliope's phrasing... but now that we have clear language debunking one of my existing class conceptions explicitly I'm starting to doubt that a whole lot harder.)

The true and full arrangement of the Class Chart, what the Active/Passive pairs are and their shared purposes / action verbs are, is incredibly important for Role Inversion theory. A new class chart arrangement definitely doesn't DEBUNK the theory by default -- it conceivably could, just, not yet -- but it DOES shape the way that we would need to apply Role Inversion theories both retroactively (ie. Did Maid/Bard inversion happen, or a different inverse pair? Will I ever make time to revise the Aradia Inversion post to sound less oversmug and sure of myself? Wait, I think I already did, that's damning...), AND going forward. Which will be especially important in the new Deltritus session if/when any of the characters we meet struggles with potential role inversion and going against their aspect and themselves. Which is practically a virtual certainty at least once, so it's pretty damned important for us theorists to have an accurate idea of what to expect from any given inverted Hero Title.

Stay tuned as I'll be doing my best to decide how to sort all this the fuck out as updates roll out and my liveblogging analysis continues. I'm also up for discussing any suggestions, especially well-justified ones with evidence, for revisions to the class chart that I've left stagnant for so long.

(EDIT 2: Wait, could Maid’s serve and Page’s preserve be intentional paired puns?)

[davekat-sucks]

The crab tanks during the war

Classes have no set moves or abilities

WE SWEAR THERE ARE HUMANS IN PART OF THE TROLL ARMY Souce: trust us

Yiffany having she/her pronouns despite the fact she originally was going to be a they/them

Faggy Uncle Dave done on purpose.

Davekat pandering because homos are better than lesbos. Why else every same-sex female relationship has been turned to shit lately?

Page class being described of one who fights to preserve their aspect.

James talking about the Space aspect.

Mech Noir piloted by the original Jack Noir.

Troll rebellion sign that Karkat and Meenah have to represent their faction.

[semidailymeulinleijon]

day 43

[homestuck-music-tournament]

Made of Time

Album: coloUrs and mayhem: Universe A Composer: James Roach Leitmotifs: None Characters: Aradia Megido