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framecaught · 3 years

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[S] Cascade After the Death of Flash

Most of us familiar with Homestuck are familiar with [S] Cascade. This seminal flash animation concludes Homestuck’s fifth act and is still considered by many fans the most important, climactic animation in the comic (even ahead of its successors [S] GAME OVER and [S] Collide).

Many of us may also be familiar with the extraordinary circumstances of the animation’s release. A user called Vivi on the now-defunct MSPA Forums made a commemorative comic documenting the occasion, which, to my view, really captures the essence of the release-mythos. In short: On October 25th, 2011, Homestuck updated after a year-long hiatus with a thirteen-minute flash called [S] Cascade. As fans raced to watch it, the influx of pageviews crashed Newgrounds, the site where the flash was hosted. Hussie temporarily uploaded the flash to megaupload.com. Megaupload.com crashed. The Homestuck website crashed; the Homestuck forum crashed; livestream.com crashed as fans who had “gotten in” tried to stream the video; and, finally, the Homestuck fandom crashed Twitter. [1]

Today, it is hard to imagine Homestuck fans crashing Twitter. Back in 2011, Twitter was a lot smaller, and Homestuck was a lot bigger. But it wasn’t just the long year of building anticipation and the mad scramble to watch the flash which cemented [S] Cascade as one of Homestuck’s most iconic pages. The Flash itself is aesthetically ambitious beyond any previous flash in the comic [2]. Not only does it combine detailed illustrations contributed by fan collaborators with an absolutely fire soundtrack; it manipulates the traditional Homestuck “panel” in a completely unique way.

Among the various stunning moments in the flash, I find Bec Noir’s dramatic release of the red miles one of the most memorable. The YouTuber Precision F-Strike captures my same reaction when I watched [S] Cascade for the first time in this video around 1:20, exclaiming: “My screen is getting bigger! My screen is getting bigger!!” What made this “expanding panel” trick so dazzling upon my first watch? The release of the red miles marks the first instance in which [S] Cascade modifies the traditional size of the Homestuck panel. By no means does it mark the first time the comic as a whole has deviated from its own standard panel size; elongated panels, multiple panels, and links-to-panels have all been regular features of the comic up to this point. However, [S] Cascade is the first page to modify the panel size during a Flash sequence, changing in motion. This novelty, combined with the surprise of the effect, sets the reader up to expect a flash of epic proportions—and [S] Cascade delivers.

After expanding for the red miles, the panel never quite shrinks down to its original size. For the rest of the animation, the plot unfolds within an extended panel-space ripe for dramatic exploitation. At 2:53 the panel shrinks back down to show Bec Noir’s journey to post-reckoning earth, then grows again to get back into the action. At 4:22 it shrinks and breaks into multiple panels to illustrate Bec Noir wreaking destruction in the troll’s session. The proliferation of these moving rectangles mimics a film reel, reminding us that we have technically already seen these events, but underscoring their importance as a conglomeration of memories for the trolls.

Transitioning to the human sessions’ Derse at 4:38, the panel blows up again to its traditional size and adopts an exterior “wallpaper.” This “wallpaper”, as I’ll call it, shifts with the content of the Flash for the next few minutes. It shows the exterior of Derse as Rose and Dave fly through, then it takes on the red and yellow colors of the quest beds; the black and white colors of The Tumor; the red and blue colors of the “mass of two universes” device; and finally the fleur-de-lis pattern of the Felt mansion. During the sequence between Sn0wman and Slick, at 6:08 Slick’s bullet actually pushes out the corner of the traditional frame, extending it back into the full extended-panel space. Then again, during the climactic moment at 10:02, panels grow and shrink and replace others, flashing in time with the soundtrack, drawing the plotlines together and anticipating the finger-frame with which Jade creates the Fenestrated Plane. The animation finishes with John and Jade busting through the Fenestrated Plane, which cycles through the comic’s own panels, culminating the meta-referential panel distortion with this final act of “escaping” from and through the Homestuck panels themselves.

As a result of the extended panel-space established at the release of the red miles, we get to experience the majority of [S] Cascade’s action (and gorgeous artwork) on an enlarged canvas. Just as we go to the cinema to see movies on the “big screen,” Homestuck deploys its own big screen at the start of the flash. Then, all the growing and shrinking between segments contributes to the narrative flow of the flash. The “shrunk” portions leave room for the panel to blow up again once the next climax comes. I think the “wallpaper” effect employed mid-flash is especially effective, as it allows Hussie to continue utilizing the extended panel-space while keeping the frame small in advance of the Sn0wman’s death, at which point it expands again. It’s also important to note how Hussie manipulates our other preconceived expectations, aside from panel size, to enhance the animation’s drama. The website itself gets a special [S] Cascade color scheme and header. In the unfamiliar layout of this Cascade-ified website, readers prepare themselves for the best and the worst—then their expectations are thrown off balance again, for good measure, with the expansion of the panel and the big-screen execution of the flash. With all of this in mind, it’s easy to see how [S] Cascade generated such a massive response.

As you may be aware, as of January 2021 Adobe has discontinued its support for Flash Player, with all major web browsers following suit. This means it’s near impossible to run flash content on any normal computer, and it won’t be long before flash only exists in archival projects. Luckily, the new denizens of the Homestuck website have worked to keep all of the story intact despite the changing media landscape, with some interactive flash pages broken down into videos or screencaps and animations converted to embedded YouTube videos [3]. If you are interested in experiencing Homestuck’s flash content as originally released, a fantastic project called the Unofficial Homestuck Collection has worked to archive the entire comic in a custom browser which natively runs Flash (all you need is 4GB of space on your computer and some time for the assets to download). This archive has been invaluable for my art historical investigation into the comic [4].

As it stands, though—unless forced by a concerned friend to download The Unofficial Homestuck Collection browser—new readers to Homestuck can’t experience the Flash games and animations in their original format. The same goes for folks rereading the comic. In the case of [S] Cascade, significant losses must be mourned. The effect set off by the red miles (the surprise and novelty of your “screen getting bigger”) is hampered by the embedded YouTube format. When you open the [S] Cascade page, now, it presents you with a mid-flash thumbnail, a YouTube play button, and YouTube framing elements such as a watermark and title (pictured above). You can’t avoid already seeing the extended panel-space of the flash page with this new format. Even though the panels within the embed begin in their “shrunk” state and grow to fill out the video frame, the expansion can never be a surprise to the same degree it was in the original Flash format. Flash animations were unornamented by watermarks, titles, and scrubber bars. They were so indistinguishable from regular static panels and gifs in terms of size, image quality, and framing that this gag (pictured below) actually worked. The indistinguishable quality of flash animations from regular gif panels created the necessary environment for [S] Cascade to surprise us by suddenly growing and filling the screen. That drama is inevitably lost in the flash’s new format.

On the other hand, the YouTube format presents some obvious benefits for readers. For one thing, you can now scrub back and forth in the animation, pause it, and even see its timestamps. This is beneficial to any reader who wants to revisit key moments and enormously helpful for someone like me analyzing the animation in detail. I would argue that the inability to pause the animation in its original format contributed to its monumental quality—readers couldn’t pause to breathe, and the comic took merciless control over the pacing—but of course the inability to pause something is also terribly inconvenient. Furthermore, the video format solves an issue that plagued Homestuck readers (including myself) throughout the comic’s lifetime: it’s inaccessibility on mobile devices. Adobe Flash famously failed to transition into the world of mobile touch-screens after Steve Jobs decided not to support it on the iPhone, writing a letter denouncing the software for its errors [5]. With Flash no longer functioning, the reformatted pages in Homestuck are all compatible with mobile devices, meaning readers can now enjoy the comic while lying sideways in bed like we always dreamed. Among other considerations, Adobe Flash was a complete pain to work with [6] for many large-scale projects, and its technical limitations cannot be ignored. On the whole, the death of Flash speaks to a greater evolution in our 21st century media sphere—the growing importance of mobile browsing, the shift from web-hosted games to apps and game launchers, and the increasing “convergence” of platforms into all-purpose devices. While much of Homestuck’s impact and charm resulted from its innovative use of Flash, like the example I’ve given in [S] Cascade, the unique bubble of history in which Flash existed should be fondly remembered and effectively preserved as we continue to navigate the comic’s legacy.

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[1] I unfortunately can’t say I was around for the original [S] Cascade release (I started reading the comic about two years too late). However, even during the Gigapause, what I’ve called its “release mythos” was still widely retold. The events themselves are documented here: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Cascade_(Homestuck). Thank you to @imploder for having saved Vivi’s comic on tumblr!

[2] Hussie wrote about the making of [S] Cascade on his tumblr, now archived here: https://wheals.github.io/tumblr/tumblr.html#about-eoa5-part-1. This gives some insight into the massive undertaking. Previously, the longest animation in Homestuck was [S] Descend, an animation which Hussie calls “Cascade Lite” in his author commentary in Homestuck Book 3. [S] Descend was the first animation to significantly incorporate multiple plotlines moving along at once. Hussie describes this narrative style as an “action-collage” (also in the Book 3 commentary). [S] Descend was also (to my recollection) the first time Hussie significantly incorporated assets from contributing artists into an animation, which he explained was partially to keep the production moving faster. Ironically, during the production of [S] Cascade, organizing contributors turned out to be much more of a hassle—but ultimately Hussie deems the myriad of captivating art styles “a big plus” in his post.

[3] Although some are completely broken, now :(. RIP silly flute refrain.

[4] I seriously cannot overstate how grateful I am for this project.

[5] This article does a great job of explaining the history of Adobe Flash and its eventual demise.

[6] Hussie goes over some of the issues he had with the software in the post referenced at [2]

#essay post #homestuck analysis #media studies #adobe flash #homestuck cascade

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