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Today's Seals Are: DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (page contains constant screenshake, lag, flashing)
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guy sitting in front of me in class was vandalizing wikipedia and i kept reverting his edits as soon as he made them and he couldn't figure out why it was happening
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There's a particular quality to early-to-mid Homestuck that I really loved when I first read it, but which I tend to forget when thinking about the story retrospectively.
This quality of like . . . taking pre-established elements, and building larger structures out of them. And then repeating this recursively, as these larger structures now become "pre-established elements" unto themselves.
A camera zooming further and further out from the same central point, "Powers of Ten"-style.
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Homestuck is initially about the process of playing "Sburb," a fictitious base-building computer game.
The vast majority of comic pages in first 4 Acts are either about a character doing something in this game, or (if they are not yet a player) attempting to obtain and install it.
Everything else is secondary, at least formally, to this core activity. The main characters are always playing Sburb (or at least trying to), no matter what else they're doing. Dialogue is presented as a temporary side-stream overlaid onto the game; the characters play in silence unless they need to talk, and when they do talk, it's usually about the game.
This quality appears in the mechanics of Sburb. It's a game about combining things you have to make new ones ("alchemy"); about constructing a building by continually extending it at the edges; about making a tower that gets taller and taller, building on a pre-established foundation, using new components made from earlier ones.
And it appears, less literally, in the mechanics of the story. An element is introduced -- casually, weightlessly, accidentally -- and once introduced, it sticks. It gets brought back again and again, in a series of bigger and weirder riffs.
(John lived in a house, which we spent some time surveying. In the process, we learned about his father, who was his only caretaker. So now everyone has a single caretaker, and everyone lives in a house which we spend some time surveying. But with every iteration, the houses get bigger, the surveys grander, the caretakers more bizarre.)
Whimsical elements introduced very early on, like the "kernelsprite prototyping" mechanic, end up very deeply baked into everything. There's a palpable joy to the way the comic handles these things. A joy in doing something on a whim, and then committing completely to the bit, indefinitely; a joy in making mountains shaped like molehills.
This kind of dims away in the later, more "plot-heavy" portions that loom larger in my memory. There's a similar vibe to the way the plot elaborates upon itself, even much later on, but we lose this dynamic on the micro-level.
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