homestuck & the end of history

Impossible to think about going back and reading Homestuck now. Which is funny because Andrew Hussie, creator of Homestuck, always said that’s what he intended people to do - the serial format didn’t do it justice, an archive crawl is how it should be read. But unless you were there watching it unfold the whole thing will always be incomprehensible.

I remember Hussie describing his work process to us on the blog - he would get up every day and start working on Homestuck. He would work on Homestuck for sixteen hours and then go back to sleep. Once his house flooded - he was in the corner with his laptop on a pile of boxes, water creeping up the floor, working on Homestuck.

So much of this is about memory - of a time in my life that is otherwise difficult for me to reconstruct. Like a lot of people I would check the website multiple times a day, especially when something big was going on - and he would actually update multiple times a day, often with very big updates. Or a whole miniature Gameboy game for you to play. And you and all the people in the forum thread where you discussed this would be appropriately blown away.

There have been different eras of posting in my life. Right now I have the sense that we are on the cusp of a new one - can smell it in the air. Trump is gone and people are beginning to notice that Twitter has gotten worse - retreating to the DMs - I think with Biden in power there’s an impulse to revert to the Obama era of smug liberal feminist-blogger hegemony. I have never quite moved in sync with these.

There was a Homestuck period where it was if not the main at least one of the biggest things I paid attention to - though I was never on Tumblr and as a result never fully plunged into the notorious twilight world of fantrolls and cosplays - bathtubs stained with grey face paint - far too much erotic roleplay - this was also the era of Sherlock and Doctor Who. Can’t imagine rewatching these either.

Then I had a D&D blog - the OSR people were the only people using Google Plus. Which was actually super useful for the thing we wanted to use it for and I still mourn its passing. Also a certain guy turned out to be a psychopath so there was really just no salvaging the thing. Patrick Stuart is still plugging away though. And somewhere in here we enter the Chapo Zone - dirtbag left Twitter which leads to me having a podcast and engaging in constructive political activity.

But that was all far more contingent on the lad Bernard than I expected - why Chapo just does movie reviews now. My guess is we’re going to see more interest in Substack and “heterodox” opinions - perhaps a return to the vaguely libertarian internet we had before social justice? Freddie deBoer’s post about how the important thing in writing is to be interesting - broad-based disgust with Liberal Media pablum translating into a general appetite for the new and esoteric, whatever it is - seeing more occult stuff as well -

Will future historians actually do archive crawls of all this stuff and try to reconstruct it? Seems prohibitively difficult - no way to capture the experience - why I liked Fake Accounts, because for all its flaws it at least told you what it was like to be alive at exactly this moment -

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So Cerebus the Aardvark started as a Conan the Barbarian parody with a funny animal protagonist in 1977 and ran until 2004, getting progressively more high-concept and self-serious until its creator Dave Sim was literally founding his own religion and writing its holy scripture in cartoon form. It is widely considered one of the greatest comic books of all time.

It has a lot in common with Homestuck. They are both hugely long - Homestuck is often compared in length to Ulysses by tryhard fans. They are both formally innovative to a degree that nobody else has repeated. Sim works with panels and lettering - I remember a sex scene with some extremely suggestive Os. Hussie of course has the whole online palette to play with - Flash animation, minigames, point and click adventures - pretty sure he made a fortune off the music sales alone.

They are both composed of pastiche. Every Cerebus character is pulled from a different genre - Groucho Marx and Mick Jagger show up in caricature form and play major roles in the plot - there’s a Batman parody called the Cockroach who keeps changing what superhero he’s supposed to be - this is taken to the point where it stops being funny and starts seeming like some private thing of the author’s that he is compelled to work out. Like he really just wanted to draw eighty panels of Jagger doing silly puckered lips.

Hussie always said “this is parody” whenever he did something the fans didn’t like, which was increasingly frequent. So the whole thing started as an adventure game - that format was maintained long after the point it became a constraint. Bits and pieces harvested from pop culture - the luck dragon from the Neverending Story - the bunny rabbit from Con Air - what in retrospect seems like a tiresome early 2000s game of “spot the reference bro”.

But then as the work goes on the pastiche starts to take on a life of its own - the characters develop their own reality, their own motivations - people get emotionally attached - and this creates tension, because the improvised world of the story is not robust enough to hold it, and because Hussie flatly refused to acknowledge that he was writing something anyone could ever take seriously. Even though he was dedicating literally his entire life to it.

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This is where the fan fiction comes in. First Hussie invented “the kids” - four teen protagonists, like the main bunch in Avatar, who had to save the world by playing a magic video game. John Rose Dave and Jade. They were a bunch of loveable scamps and, as with the Avatar characters, people immediately started writing fan fiction about what if they kissed.

Hussie saw this and who knows what was happening in his mind - did he realise what he was unleashing on the world - but he decided he could use it. Tumblr was just beginning to come into play and Hussie was from the pre-social-justice SomethingAwful Internet - there used to be more of a culture of finding the worst content possible just to laugh at it - he profited enormously off the fan fiction crowd but I think he always wanted to hold them at arm’s length.

So he invented “the trolls”. These were a set of grey-skinned aliens, twelve in all, based on the signs of the zodiac, who were designed as Tumblr bait from the ground up. Where humans have just one type of romantic relationship, love, represented by the heart - they have four distinct types, represented by all four playing card suits. Love, hate, bestfriendship and a kind of platonic polycule thing. They also have distinct designs that make them easy to cosplay - but they’re grey, so you have to use grey facepaint. Hence the bathtubs.

We have to talk about sex here - sorry but we gotta do it. There is no getting around the fact that people wanted to have sex with these characters. The comic was in fact not horny at all except in a deliberately dreadful way - one of the trolls has a creepy thing about drinking the milk of very muscular horses - but that doesn’t stop people.

It’s all very anime - the teen protagonists with special powers, who, please don’t ask exactly how old they’re supposed to be, because you will not like the answer - the JoJo style fight scenes with creative use of specific moves - the random humor which very much gets in the way of the plot because instead of working out the logic of a specific scene they’ll just rely on “it’s a joke, stupid” and throw an exploding purple monkey at you -

The troll arc is what caused the comic to expand well beyond the scope of what Hussie had originally intended. But he refused to cut any of the content that he had originally planned to make way for the stuff his new fanbase demanded.

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Webcomics are dead now. When I started reading Homestuck there was a sense of - if this is what we’re doing now, how much better is it all going to be in ten years? What else is going to happen?

Turns out nothing. I remembering reading Scott McCloud in like 2008, talking about all the amazing potential the internet held for the graphic novel form - infinite scrolling, animation, even just gifs -

At the height of the 2000s webcomic boom I must have been reading nine or ten of them. Dr. McNinja, Wonderella, Scary Go Round - okay, were these good? Maybe not. Again this was “awesomesauce” culture - the height of “nerds are cool”, before Gamergate happened and they all got shoved back into their little holes even as Dungeons and Dragons became a normie activity. Pre-Trump of course. I don’t want to overstate how bad they were either - maybe just cringe but still fun.

(Achewood on a whole other plane of course.)

I was reading comic books as well - Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. was coming out around then. Segue from the 90s comic culture when the greatest writers of the medium were at their peak - Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman lol - underground stuff as well, the R. Crumb culture of what’s the grossest thing I can draw - into the indulgent webcomic world - but even at the time you could see people starting to think about commercialisation -

And watching the Steven Moffat TV shows - in retrospect this is where the first cracks started to show. Can’t understand Moffat without understanding Obama - at first you think he’s a genius but then you realise he’s just playing one on TV, using the same flashy tricks over and over, but no ability to think about how or why something works - great presentation but how come you can’t remember any of his best lines -

Homestuck ends in 2016 and the ending is dogshit. The comic meanders on past the point where anyone can remember what’s happening - we get hyped up, it seems like he’s preparing us for the most epic denoument imaginable - what could it be? what’s inside the mystery box -

- but wait, first we have to find out what the deal is with the other four kids that you didn’t even know about until now. And the other - literally twelve more trolls, wringing more blood from that stone I guess. One of them’s a social justice warrior, because those come into existence while the comic was being made. Hussie got into the sweet spot -

There was a period after Tumblr SJ culture had just started to infringe on popular attention, before Gamergate, where you could make fun of them without being deemed a Nazi. Then for a while you couldn’t even do a parody. Then the Chapo boys worked out you do it from a Marxist perspective and it’s actually good again. So now the pendulum has swung back and you can once more take pot shots at the idpol left -

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And then Hussie put the comic “on hiatus” for a full year so he could instead work on a video game that was supposedly the sequel to the comic, which he started writing before he could finish the comic. He raised something like a million dollars in Kickstarter money - biggest Kickstarter of all time, I think - and gave it to a video game developer - but he didn’t get a receipt so they just took it all and spent it on cocaine. That’s not literally what happened but pretty close.

Which is hard to understand unless you understand the mindset of the indie comics guy.

Dave Sim I think developed full-blown paranoid schizophrenia from smoking too much weed - in no way infringed on his considerable creative talent - he did however develop his own syncretic religion based on fusing the best bits of Christianity, Judaism and Islam - also he believes women are literally energy parasites from another world. Specifically his ex-wife. The main bad guys in Cerebus are evil feminists who hate free speech. If you read the individual issues you can see him slowly losing his mind in the letter pages -

- it’s not actually good or normal to spend every waking moment working on a comic that you somehow still insist is just a bit of self-indulgent fun and not to be taken seriously by anybody. This is unfortunately the kind of brain that a lot of writers have - Philip K. Dick in his tin shack on amphetamines seeing faces in the sky -

I don’t know if he just burned out. It’s basically impossible to remember what happens in the last like, year of Homestuck. There’s a brief Flash animation to wrap it up and they all live happily ever after.

So unless you were there in like 2011 watching it unfold in real time and having your mind expanded with every new revelation - I don’t think it’s possible to revisit the experience.

In theory everything on the Internet is archived for all time - a permanent record of cultural detritus - but even when the links still work and you can still physically read the posts, the atmosphere is hard to reconstruct. We are already forgetting what it was like to have Donald Trump as president. And Donald Trump killed the stuffy feminist-blog era that came before - and the feminist-blog era buried the lolrandom era - and underneath all that is like, fucking Usenet or whatever -

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Homestuck only ended four years ago.

The webcomic archive crawl is already an obsolete format. Don’t have the patience for it. Sickening to think about clicking through all those links one by one - requires a level of dedication that I don’t have any more -

Is the death of webcomics a consequence of politics taking over the Internet? Non-fiction is taking the place of fiction in publishing stats - all the Tumblr people now work for the Democratic Party and devote their erotic roleplay energy to Kamala Harris -

The part of my brain that kept track of what was going on in Marvel Comics now committed to understanding the Labor Party - back issues replaced by snappy Jacobin articles on X social movement in Y obscure nation - now I know about Pedro Castillo instead of Moon Knight -

No way for Andrew Hussie to anticipate this - but he wrote a comic that could only be consumed at a very specific moment in history, on the assumption that moment in history would last forever. And then it didn’t.

And by the time the video game, or what was left of it, came out, the world had moved on. I think he made a Homestuck 2 at some point - I did not read it.

So now reading Homestuck would be like rereading Cerebus or like, watching movies from the 30s - an effort to understand a different time - requiring exertion of will to bridge the interpretive gap between then and now - but it’s so recent we can’t do it yet. Might have more patience in thirty or forty years - then its flaws will be the forgiveable idiocies of the past, back when people didn’t know any better - and we will find forgotten virtues in it -