Your friendly neighborhood post-Homestuck Homestuck analyst. Warning: rambles constantly; has been known to fangirl uncontrollably about cosmic frog reality. We're doing this, man. We're making the future of Homestuck happen. She/her. Rogue of Light. Note: I am not able to respond to messages in anything like a timely fashion.
[Content warning for Apocalyptic horror and trauma, religious imagery, depression and suicidal ideation, emotional abuse and manipulation…
It's been a long time, everybody.
I'm doing well working at my day job and going to school lately. I'm really busy these days so I've stepped away from Homestuck for most purposes except for occasionally looking at fanart on Tumblr, and that's been a good place to be for a while.
But I've really enjoyed the recent HS^2 updates, and reading @bladekindeyewear's liveblog of them finally clicked some stuff into place in my head about how to put words to all this. The enormity of what I feel about Dirk Strider in the wake of the Epilogues and Post-Canon.
Taz, one of the greatest Homestuck essayists, returns in glorious, luminous form with this incredible and deeply personal exploration of the meaning of Dirk Strider in the year of our Karkat 2024.
I've often struggled to figure out how to write about the Homestuck Epilogues. This essay may go some way to filling that gap.
Not only does it lay out Dirk and Jake's epic metafictionally-fraught love story in crystal-clear detail, for me it also captures much of my own experience of being part of the community around Homestuck these last few years.
The highs and the lows, the uncertainty around what we do with the meanings we've been given by the Epilogues, and the beautiful things people have ended up making with them.
Strictly speaking, it doesn't 100% fit what I was talking about in my Homestuck manifesto, since it's technically a Homestuck fan adventure rather than a brand new work.
However…for a fanwork, it feels more like a new piece of Homestuckian art than many others I've seen?
I'm reminded of an old Hussie formspring response, where the question was about what would happen if siblings living in the same house played SBURB. Hussie's response was that one shouldn't try to solve this with the rules of Homestuck, but instead imagine the kind of story and plot that would suit such a scenario.
Desynced is like that - playing by its own rules. A lot of other fan adventures feel too stuck (ha) in adhering to the rules of SBURB and Paradox Space. Desynced is quite literally playing an entirely different game. It lets go of so much about the way a fan story is traditionally conceived, and brings in its own set of laws and ideas that fit its own story better.
Some things I like, in no particular order:
-The depiction of parents and children - Desynced knocks this out of the park by splitting the difference between faceless authority figures and relatable kids by playing with perception and letting the parents talk to each other as adults, even when they're faceless to their kids. There is some really phenomenal parent-child content here. The relationship between Kate and her father, for instance, is fraught and filled with missed conversations that break my heart
-That in 2024, everybody in the main group gets to be queer and trans from the very start
-That the protagonist kids are Zoomers, and we see that their interests tend not toward 80s movies but things like Minecraft and Discord chats
-That we seem to be building towards a "war in heaven" theme, where different members of the future gods and Carapacians will take different sides in a cosmic struggle
-The music, which is full of bangers and feels like the sequel to the Homestuck bandcamp page that I never knew I needed
-The total reimagining of Jack Noir, which seems like it shouldn't work, but totally does
-The genius way that the game's equivalent of Denizens tie into weird cosmic mysteries
-Alien kids who appear at first glance to be trolls but are quickly revealed to not be trolls at all (maybe they're tieflings)
-The way in this universe, Trollsonas only exist in connection to an obscure game called Hiveswap
-The fact that the fantasy land inhabitants, the equivalent of consorts, are more fleshed out and have their own lives going on instead of just being silly animals - which hints that we're taking 'their existence more seriously and sincerely.
-That when Desynced does "play the Homestuck hits," it reminds you of how good those narrative structures are. Examples include:
Ordinary internet friend group discovers they are all interconnected and inveigled in a vast conspiracy
Making sense of the rules of a confusing alternate gamey-reality that suggests a sense of purpose but doesn't give you instructions for achieving it
Oh, and also, you have to do this while the world is ending and you're about to die
Villain narrator makes fun of you, the reader
Alien kids interrupt your game session to ramble at you about how they know much more about the game than you do, but it turns out they're just a tiny bit ahead and they're as confused about most things as you are
Ascending to godhood helps you redefine your identity but also causes as many problems as it solves
It's like, woah, Homestuck was really cooking, wasn't it?
We're all so used to the Homestuck plot structures and conventions that I think it's very easy to lose sight of why we fell in love with it in the first place. Reading Desynced made me remember how much I love the premise of Homestuck. Desynced achieves this by detaching from convention and focusing on Homestuck's themes: parent-child relationships, the limitations of one's ideology, the double-edged sword of finding identity in fantasy, and more.
So yes, Desynced is a Homestuck fanwork. But if we're asking where a Homestuck literary movement might go in the future, Desynched offers us a really neat glimpse of part of the answer.
I highly recommend checking it out, if you're interested.
I want to think about what comes next after Homestuck.
That’s a challenge to the world as much as a personal mission statement.
I want to see writers and artists and creators making the next Homestuck, taking its themes and binding them into new fabrics, giving life to new creatures even more beautiful and uncanny than the original species.
I hunger to see new forms of story and image evolving with Homestuck in their DNA.
This process is already underway. Homestuck is a massive boulder dropped into the waters of culture, and the full wake of its ripples is still to be felt. But let’s call attention to this process and ask: what would happen if we engaged in it more consciously? If we sifted through our feelings about Homestuck to create something new, deliberately, with great and wonderful purpose?
The tools we need are within our grasp. Homestuck presents itself as magic, but it’s a work constructed in time out of specific storytelling choices. So let’s understand those choices. Let’s understand how Homestuck did what it did, and use Homestuck’s tools to build art that grips the soul of future generations as strongly as Homestuck did ours.
What follows is not a traditional literary analysis. It does not cite its sources; it does not seek to give us a comprehensive understanding of Homestuck. If it does, it does so only to the extent it suits its larger purpose.
Our goal here, our quest, if you will, is not to understand the Homestuck that exists, but the Homestuck that comes next.
Let's begin.
0. THE WILD GARDEN
Let’s lay the absolute groundwork here.
Homestuck is constructed as a re-appropriation of itself. Or to put it another way, it’s a big improvisational move, a process of “yes and”-ing so hard it develops a sprawling continuity.
Tiny details are constantly re-contextualized to become part of something else. A joke might turn tragic. A silly aside might turn into something profound.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
It’s crucial to understand that what we experience as continuities were in fact choices made at specific times. Homestuck is a garden where seeds were scattered in every direction, grown en masse, then weeded down to create patterns and forms.
The shape of the garden is designed to conceal the gardener’s hand. But the gardener’s choices are there, every step of the way.
If we are to follow in its footsteps, what choices should we make?
Let’s talk about themes.
1. THE MEANING CRISIS
Nobody in Homestuck knows what they’re doing.
And neither do we.
All the old idols have broken down. The values we were taught in our childhood fail to measure up to the problems of the world we live in. We grasp after careers and lives we were told would make us happy and wonder why we’re left empty. The selves that we were told were us now fit us about as well as clothing we’ve outgrown. Crises loom, political, economic and environmental, and everywhere it feels like the people who are supposed to guide and lead us aren’t doing enough.
It's widening gyres and slouching beasts all the way from here to Bethlehem, is what I’m saying.
The reason people go absolutely insane for Homestuck is that it depicts this crisis of meaning. It shows the questions we might want to ask, and attempts to provide some kind of answer.
The protagonists of Homestuck struggle with what I’ve called “received narrative.” That is, they’ve inherited stories from their families, from the world, that they try to use to define their lives, and it doesn’t work. But these stories are so familiar that it’s hard to think outside them. They have to develop new stories by which to live. Sometimes they succeed, but other times they can’t escape the gravity of the ones they were given.
With me so far?
Great. Now understand that all this was improvised and discovered largely accidentally over the course of ten years.
Here’s a seed that became quite an impressive tree:
The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.
It’s a joke. But it was never just a joke. There’s an idea here of dissatisfaction with the stereotypical idea of American suburban life. Egbert here is looking for something more, dissatisfied for reasons they can’t fully articulate. This is typical fantasy protagonist stuff, but there’s something more here, too.
Eventually it’s redirected towards the idea that there really is an unseen riddler. But let’s put that aside for now.
This page, in its moment, says: your life is not the full picture. There’s something else out there, waiting, that’s going to change everything.
That's a potential set-up for a very powerful payoff. It gives us the sense that Egbert and all their friends are going to have to rethink what they know. That this suburban life is not going to be enough for them, that somehow or other they’re going to encounter something they aren’t prepared for, and they’ll have to find a new way of acting and being. That, try as they might to avoid it, they’re going to change over the course of this journey.
But to understand how they change, we need to talk about SBURB.
2. THE PORTAL FANTASY OF IT ALL
A lot of people like to joke that Homestuck is an isekai. I think it might clarify things to use the term portal fantasy instead.
Portal fantasy is simply the fantasy subgenre of characters, usually kids, going to a magical other world. Maybe they make friends, maybe they learn lessons and stuff. You know the drill. I don’t have to to tell you more because the story structure is already so familiar. That’s what gives it power.
Portal fantasy differs from the related Japanese genre of isekai in that isekai in its current form is much more heavily based on video games such as MMORPGs. In the most pervasive isekai narratives, protagonists are rewarded not so much for achieving personal growth as being able to exploit the game mechanics of a game-like system. That’s pretty different from your typical Narnia scenario.
The influence of portal fantasy is everywhere in Homestuck, especially in the beginning. We have nods to the fantasy films of the 1980s that gave us our contemporary idea of this story structure, such as The Neverending Story (itself, in its original book incarnation, a phenomenal commentary on the genre). Our protagonists are genre savvy; they recognize what’s happening here.
But it doesn’t fit quite right. The odd note is first sounded when Egbert asks Nanasprite if what they’re doing is going to save the world. They’re bit unsettled to learn the answer’s no, that something else is going on here. Next we have the fantasy worlds: the planetary lands each present a veneer of exciting adventure. But their inhabitants, the consorts, aren’t fully-realized people, they’re largely cute animals going through the motions, not really understanding the story they’re telling. The carapacians are a little better, but they’re still trapped in a fatalism that feels uncomfortable.
As things rev up in Act 4, we learn about doomed timelines from alt-timeline Dave and Rose, how your entire existence in this setting may be fodder for something other than you. When we learn the true purpose of SBURB and its froggy details in Act 5, we see that SBURB is more like a biological creature, mainly interested in its own reproductive desires. It was never really about the portal fantasy at all. The kids are just along for the ride.
So when we see that Rose wants to tear through SBURB, find out a way to escape fate, and snatch meaning from the jaws of futility, it makes sense. We’ve been given hints already that this is the conflict at hand: the characters vs the story that’s telling them.
(Note: it’s certainly possible to have a reading that SBURB is not evil so much as empty, that it reflects what you bring into it, that its will for you is your will for you. But that’s also a difficult thing, right? If you lack self-understanding, it’s a struggle to bring about your ideal reality.)
What we haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all mediated through the lens of video games. Which makes perfect sense. Because where do we seek meaning, especially as kids? In imaginary worlds that make more sense to us than real life, that give us achievements to take pride in and clear objectives to pursue.
SBURB evokes mechanics from games like Final Fantasy. We see its players complete objectives, cast magic spells, gain power-ups with colorful costume changes. But unlike the narratives implied by traditional video game progressions, leveling up doesn’t mean you grow as a person or process your trauma. Later, in Act 6, when we meet a player who has made his life about winning the game (Caliborn), it’s horrific to behold.
Homestuck is a portal fantasy, but it’s fundamentally a portal fantasy about games. It’s a portal fantasy that shows us how characters seek meaning in being the best at arbitrary game mechanics, but ultimately fail to find it.
So I guess…it actually is an isekai? Huh. Wild.
(But seriously, Homestuck is actually fairly prescient in predicting the ideas that come out of isekai and LitRPG. It’s engaging consciously and deconstructively with the weird ideas of self-fulfillment these genres are drowning in.)
So what might a Homestuckian work look like? It will almost certainly critique a false narrative we live by. It may comment on portal fantasy, or our personal satisfaction that comes as easily as playing a video game. But it doesn’t have to be limited to these things. It might talk about our popular TV shows and movies. It may take apart what’s flawed in Marvel, the latest triple-A game, or the modern dark fantasy novel.
Among its tools will be discomfort. Showing a disconnect early on between our character’s expectations and their happiness can serve as foundation to build on, so that when the flaws of the genre narrative are revealed, it feels like the truth. We may see characters who accept their narratives passively, or rebels like Rose Lalonde, who chose to rip everything apart in search of something better.
These are only some of the possibilities.
When I tell you the stories we live by mislead us, what is your relationship to that? If you were to tear these received narratives apart, what would you focus on, what would you try to say? The art that comes out of this question will be deeply personal to the soul who makes it.
But here’s another question:
Just who is giving us all these narratives, anyway?
3. THE PARENT FLIP
The world we live in was not made by us. It was shaped by forces that predate us, over which we have no control and are born into the grasp of without the knowledge of how to escape.
For instance, our parents.
The guardians who raise us provide our template for how to interpret life. We spend a large part of our lives immersed in the world they built, believing as they believe, living by the values that they instruct us in, so that we might carry their goals forward to the future.
This is an effort that is certain to fail.
Because the problems of today aren’t the problems of twenty or thirty years ago. At best, their messages can only to help in a limited way with the crises we go through as we live our lives. At worst, they actively hinder us from dealing with them productively.
If we are to escape the broken patterns of our world, then we need break out of the stories an earlier generation gave us.
How are parents discussed in Homestuck?
Initially? As jokes.
If we take our “future knowledge” goggles off for a moment, we can see that the early depictions of the kids’ parents are a goofy parody of standard parental tropes. Mom and Dad are nameless, faceless, exaggerated cartoon stereotypes, and conflict between them and their children is initially expressed through a silly video game fight.
There’s a seed of something real here, though. What we’re parodying is a familiar trope of tension between parents and children in kids’ fiction and YA fiction. But that trope exists for a reason. This conflict is rich with potential for any story about growing up. And Homestuck has smuggled the idea of it in as a silly RPG parody.
So we can extrapolate, for instance, that there’s tension between Egbert and their father in part because Egbert doesn’t know yet who they want to be, and that Rose and Mom’s relationship is awkward and contentious, with alcohol involved. We see that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable going on between Dave and his Bro, and Jade’s life in the shadow of a dead Grandpa suggests a psychology that’s not entirely a healthy one.
Understand that I’m not saying that all this was there from the start. Rather, a choice was made to develop these interesting possibilities out of the jokes, to tell a story about how parents that act like these ones might have affected their children.
A major turning point in this regard is when Egbert learns their father’s seeming clown obsession was the result of a failed attempt to connect with them. It’s quite silly, but it plays around with the idea of a gap in perception between parent and child. It’s also a sign the story’s starting to take more of an interest in character psychology, suggesting that what Egbert processes consciously is not the same as their deeper unconscious feelings. This in turn can become a setup for a portrait of Egbert as someone who represses things they don’t want to think about. From this moment, in the long term, comes June Egbert.
When the psychology machine revs up for all the characters in Act 4 and Act 5, it’s able to do so because this foundation was laid.
We also, as early as Act 3, get hints that the parents have intentions and personalities outside of how the kids perceive them. The original purpose is to hint at a larger conspiracy around SBURB, with Mom building a secret lab, Dad trying to investigate the mystery, and Grandpa jumping in and out of time. But what this suggests is that the psychology of the parents might at some point come into play.
But the most exciting development in the relationship between parents and children is Act 6.
The great role reversal. The parent and child flip.
How do you make your faceless parent figures into characters?
By making them kids.
We’re so used to this concept now t that it’s hard to remember how wild it is that Roxy is a teen version of a main character's mom. But the concept is genius. Meeting these characters on the same level forces our protagonists to understand them as people and reflect on their fallibility.
For us as readers, it adds detail and nuance to the cartoonish portraits we got in the beginning. Conversely, we also see what our protagonists might have been like as parents themselves—and turns it from a story of “parents just don’t understand” to a story of how people, despite their best intentions, can wound each other.
(The Homestuck Epilogues are a difficult text to evaluate, but one of the best things within them is Egbert’s arc in Candy, where we see how Egbert might have done as a parent, how their struggles with finding purpose in the world might lead them to embrace a narrative of parenthood yet struggle to have a good relationship their kid. It’s brilliant, and the culmination of everything we’ve talked about here.)
Thus the Homestuckian work of art will be concerned with themes of parents and children. It will play with the boundary between what children understand about their parents and what they don’t. It will show parents as people—fallible people, who make mistakes with severe costs, whose stories fail their children and themselves. It may build from a simple base of what children understand, or it may weave parent and child perspectives together. It may even show us how children fail when they become parents themselves. It will show us the cycles we are trapped in, how we wound and are wounded by our context.
And it will force us to look for a way out.
4. CLASSPECTS AS SIGNPOSTS
Hey. You want to know a secret?
Come closer, and I’ll whisper it to you.
Classpects aren’t actually all that complicated. Ultimately, they boil down to one thing:
Symbols we can use to construct a self.
If Homestuck is about a crisis of meaning, then classpects are part of its answer.
What do we do, when the world gives us no story we can live by?
We make one. We make one out of whatever symbols and messages we can find and put together from the stories we’ve read, from the people who teach and inspire us. Such collages are powerful things. They give us a way out of the dark, they give us a sense of something we are and can be, where there was nothing before.
They give us, in short, a personal mythology.
Classes and Aspects have often been read as codes to be unpacked and solved. It might be more productive to see them as creative tools, signposts designed not to narrow down meaning, but to allow us to explore it.
For instance, the portrayal of Light in Homestuck is unique. As a symbol, it combines notions of brightness, knowledge, future, luck, wealth, and narrative focus. These things aren’t inherently linked out in the world, but they are here, and that’s a choice, and an interesting one. It encourages us to imagine connections between these concepts, and to see if they have any relevance to ourselves. Identifying with the concept of Light, in other words choosing to value clarity, luck, and importance, might be a powerful tool for finding one’s way in the world.
Classes play with signposts at an even more basic level. Sure, we can talk about what a Knight does in the context of the story.
But a knight is already a powerful symbol. We bring so much cultural context to it. The word conjures up images and narratives of devotion, duty, violence, the slaying of dragons, armoring oneself against the world, and the rescuing of princesses. If we put that together with a concept like Time, we get a distinct character. If we put that together with our own experience of the world, we can create powerful concepts for who we want to be.
Interestingly, this complicates what we said about SBURB. As much as our protagonists struggle to find meaning within it, there’s still something there that they can latch onto. Classes, aspects, denizens, even consorts and lands—these things don’t have to be devoid of meaning. We can choose to affirm them; we can build something out of them, and say, yes, this is me, this is myself.
But it’s a double-edged sword.
We are responsible for the narratives we choose to live by. And we may find ourselves falling into a narrative that hinders us more than helps us, that creates a self-destructive self.
What does it mean to believe deeply that you are a thief, that taking from others to benefit yourself is the best way or comes to you the most naturally? What does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you’re a prince, with all the attendant baggage of power and grim responsibility that comes with that concept? Or, to follow the path further, what does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you are a destroyer or must be destroyed?
If we are to escape the story we’re trapped in, we must take care, lest we trap ourselves in a story of our own making.
Homestuck never quite resolves the ambiguity around these symbols of self, around whether SBURB hurts or helps, whether classpects are things you create or things that create you. But this ambiguity is a productive one. It gives us symbolic tools we can use in the creation of meaning, and it shows us the side of them that should make us wary.
The work that is to come after Homestuck will be about symbols. It may show us how we seek them in popular culture, or the people around us. It may use some of the clusters of meaning that that we see in Homestuck, but it will not be limited to them. It will write its own language of symbols, joining Light and Time to notions like Memory, Need, Rupture, and War, and be filled not just with knights and princes but brigadiers, lancers, healers, druids, taxidermists, sentries and waifs. It will build with tarot cards, enneagram types, and Babylonian gods. It will place all the signposts we’ve created in millennia of existence into new contexts and meanings.
By such means will it show us a way forward.
There’s one kind of symbol we haven’t talked about yet, however.
The kind that holds a mirror up to the world.
5. THE POWER OF ALTERNIA
There’s a reason dystopias have been so popular in young adult fiction. Sure, they’re cliché now, but they speak to something raw and visceral.
When you’re growing up into a world that doesn’t make sense, it’s natural to find refuge in emotional extremes. Stories of blood and violence, fates worse than death, and governments that demand horrific things of their citizens speak to the anxieties of the adolescent mind. They validate the feeling that something is wrong—that the world we’ve inherited is broken and unfair and has no place for us. And they’re right.
Alternia taps into these dystopian feelings perfectly. What makes it so fun is that it’s an inversion of a teenage fantasy. It’s a world where there are no parents, where kids can have access to power and violence, where you can sit around and play video games and design your own house. It almost feels like a response to the “parents don’t understand” themes of the early acts.
But the dystopia’s there, and it’s sneaky. A land of lost boys and girls isn’t actually all that great to live in. It’s lawless, survival of the fittest, with children killing each other left and right. And the future adult roles most of the troll kids aspire to are a glamorous veneer over competition for slots in a fascist military hierarchy. Which is to say nothing of the blood caste system as a way in which the kids are taught by their world to abuse and exploit each other. Crushes, personal slights, competition for status, group dynamics, attempts to define identity – all these familiar teenage dynamics play out on a backdrop of maiming and murder.
Which is perfect. Because when you’re young, all those social interactions genuinely do feel like life or death, and adulthood a regime of exploitation and horror bearing down on you. Alternia is a heightened, exaggerated version of reality. It expresses an emotional truth, not a literal one, validating our most intense feelings and giving us a road map to understanding them.
No wonder so many people wanted to skip to Act 5 and get to the trolls.
(See also Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest, which explore these themes really really well.)
And Alternia, for a world where parents aren’t really a thing, tells us a surprising amount about the parental generation. In mid Act 5-2, Ancestors are added to Alternia’s wordbuilding, and we learn that as much as the trolls skipped having traditional parental figures, they were never devoid of role models. The deeds and exploits of notable figures throughout ancient Alternia gave them models to think about each other and themselves—even when those models were toxic ones. In a way, this isn’t so far from the human kids at all.
Furthermore, as time goes on, we acquire an origin for Alternia’s fascist worldview. Doc Scratch, manipulator of society, stands in for all those aspects of the world that work to create the false narratives we are born into, a true evil father figure – or uncle, if you prefer. And he's an extension of the ultimate evil father figure, Lord English, who controls not just Alternia but the timelines of the human children as well, whose belligerence and apathy give us aeons of toxic narratives and abuse. We see that story played out in Alternia in every interaction, in every moment, the beliefs its architects live by.
This is the power of dystopia—it can hold a broken mirror up to the world we live in.
Therefore the Homestuck that will come after Homestuck will worldbuild gardens of horror. It will not pull its punches but show us insidious societal systems and the effect they have on the people who live under them. It may depict fascism, authoritarianism, feudalistic tyranny, or all three. It will be unafraid to evoke blood and guts but use them to paint a picture of what we want, what we fear, and how we break under our false horizons.
As it depicts the path out, so, too, will it have its reverse side—it will show us all the hells and purgatories we’re trapped in.
6. SAILS TO THE WIND
Much has been written (including by this very author) about Homestuck’s metafictional aspects – the way it comes to foreground a more direct clash between character and narrative.
But the point I want to make here is that the metafictional angle wouldn’t work without these earlier choices. They allow the comic to talk about these concerns long before any notion of canon rears its head.
There are many ways of approaching these themes, and we don’t have to be limited to notions of Ultimate Selves and Beyond Canon to explore them. Such things are valuable, but they are only one retelling of the myth. If we are to make the next Homestuck, we must make our own.
I want to illustrate the space of possibility by offering some examples of works that explore similar themes. Note that I’m not saying these works were influenced by Homestuck in any way, but rather that they use some of the same tools to speak to the same questions, anxieties and concerns.
In trying to make what comes after Homestuck, we might consider:
Revolutionary Girl Utena, which foregrounds the archetype of the Prince as duelist, tyrant, and hero and dares its characters to break free from the false reality that shapes even these aspirations and dreams.
The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Houseof Leaves, whose core narrative concerns an twelve-year-old girl in thrall to an entity whose intentions are unclear but may be shaping the fabric of reality itself; which depicts the inner lives and uncertainties of her parents with just as much detail as they struggle, and sometimes fail, to make the right choices to help her; a story which, even in its incomplete form, explores a notion of a greater S.E.L.F that is not just you but also those who share something with you, where characters from other realities blur into transcendent archetypes in this one.
Digimon, perhaps the quintessential work of portal fantasy, not only Digimon Tamers, which steers the genre into a place of trauma, cosmic horror, and adults horrified by children saving the world, but also Digimon Adventure, which creates strong character arcs for eight very different children as they try to navigate a strange alien world, and shows us their struggle to reconcile with their parents as part of the process of understanding themselves.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende,foundational text for Homestuck, which tells us not only about the rich possibilities inherent in reading oneself into fantasy worlds, but also the terrible potential for harm in making oneself an emperor over them.
Pale, by Wildbow, author of Worm, an urban fantasy story about three teenagers thrust into a world of magic and murder, a world where symbols literally create reality, where concepts like Carmine and Aurum have a powerful pull, where the Self is something that can be nourished or taken apart and put back together, a story where the parents are not just supporting cast but fully realized people forced to reckon with the ways in which they have deeply failed their children, and which contains perhaps the most thorough investigation of the question of “is it good for children to go on magical adventures?” ever committed to the page.
Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee,in which the giant robots we pilot through space become the symbolic manifestation of our inner selves and our way of bringing about our ideal reality, and, relatedly, We Know the Devil, in which the repression of those selves causes them to burst out from us in terrifying and glorious new forms.
Crow Cillers, by Cate Wurtz, an often trauma-filled horror comic in which a group of kids and, eventually, adults, tries to fight back against an ever-present death cult that has its grips on every corner, all the while encountering Psyforms, beings made of pure mind, while characters from television and cartoons dance in the margins and all the while the line blurs between audience and art until it becomes difficult to tell who created who—a story that asks what it means to find meaning in stories when the corporate entities that own them are trying to devour us.
It's a tragically short list, I know. But perhaps it conveys some of the angles we might take.
We can also look at works that are known to have inspired by Homestuck. There aren’t many yet, but there are a few.
Undertale is famous for its Homestuck influences, with parallel timelines, an idea of agency that persists across them, and a contentious relationship between player and character, but for my part, I’m just as interested if not more so in Deltarune, which seems to be slowly building a grand thesis about portal fantasy, where the kids' adventures in the Dark Worlds seems to be offering them an escape and helping them become their best selves—but hints at a coming challenge to that simple worldview in the question of who’s really experiencing that escape.
The Locked Tomb, by Tamsin Muir – This is the big one, that really shows what building on Homestuckian themes can achieve. It turns out there really is an audience for weird aggro formalism in scifi publishing if you make it sufficiently gay. But smartly, like Homestuck, the Locked Tomb builds its weird mysteries gradually, adding on layer after layer on the solid foundation of characters we can follow and get invested in. There’s so much to notice – there’s the highly categorized teenagers involved in a murder feud, there’s the constant whiplash of humor and tragedy, there’s the endlessly open spaces in the story to interpret and project on to.
But to me, what stands out the most is the portrait of God and his court as every bit as emotionally chaotic as the sniping teenagers. You go to heaven, and God’s making out in the corner with his friend group, and you look for the adult in the room but the adults in the room don’t know what they’re doing and they never really did. It’s a portrait of the parents, it’s a portrait of the Ancestors, it’s a portrait of the gods of the new world, and it’s exquisite.
The Locked Tomb gives us a world at war with its own mythological narrative, rich with angst and irony. It’s a worthy successor to everything Homestuck was doing. It shows us how much these themes can say to us, and it gives us a hint at how powerful Homestuck's legacy might be.
7. THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMESTUCK
There’s a lot of discussion about how to continue Homestuck. How to do it justice. What post-canon might look like, and what it might not. What fan comics, what fan fics, what semi-official works truly live up to the spirit of its characters and its multiverse.
To be clear, those discussions are awesome. I’m so glad those things exist, and it’s wonderful to see them unfolding.
But I don’t want the process to stop there. I'd be disappointed if it was only about adding to and re-articulating Homestuck itself.
I want this—
—This multifaceted, complicated, emotionally laden thing that is the experience of engaging with and creating with and interpreting Homestuck—
To go out into the world and to be infused into the world, to become waves spreading further and further. I want to experience the Homestuck artistic movement, the Homestuck school of thought. I want it to be an influence on the fiction of the coming generation of authors, and the next, and the next.
I want Homestuck to be one of those albums that's too obscure to be known by the general public, but everyone who listened to it went on to start an enormously successful band.
Homestuck can appear like a thing that was conjured out of the ether, but it isn’t. It’s a product of a particular time.
But that in itself is profound. When you create art, you reach back to all the things that have shaped you, and you listen to what the world around you needs, and you try to say what needs to be said. Which means you're a part of a history and culture that needs to say those things, which will be different from the things that needed to be told yesterday, and different from the stories that will be needed tomorrow.
There’s no otherworldliness to it, no platonic other reality. But for all I've talked about art being made of choices, there's still something transcendent here.
To make Homestuck—and to make art inspired by Homestuck—means being a node in a web formed of millions of people, where a light passes down the chain to you, and for the briefest of moments, you get to be filled with its presence, before it moves on to the next person in the chain.
That light isn't yours. Not really.
But at the same time, you do get to choose how that light manifests.
And to engage with that process consciously—to think deliberately about what we want to create—that gives us power and agency over that process, our sense of the world, and ourselves.
So let’s do this. Let’s make the thing that Homestuck is telling us can exist, the thing it’s paving the way for, the thing we know in our soul can come to be.
Let’s make the next Homestuck happen.
—Ari
POSTSCRIPT
“To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life… I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air…”
— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”
"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence....the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-turning to dust...This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
— Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
“What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding... let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean…to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least…freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”
— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”
“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.”
I want to think about what comes next after Homestuck.
That’s a challenge to the world as much as a personal mission statement.
I want to see writers and artists and creators making the next Homestuck, taking its themes and binding them into new fabrics, giving life to new creatures even more beautiful and uncanny than the original species.
I hunger to see new forms of story and image evolving with Homestuck in their DNA.
This process is already underway. Homestuck is a massive boulder dropped into the waters of culture, and the full wake of its ripples is still to be felt. But let’s call attention to this process and ask: what would happen if we engaged in it more consciously? If we sifted through our feelings about Homestuck to create something new, deliberately, with great and wonderful purpose?
The tools we need are within our grasp. Homestuck presents itself as magic, but it’s a work constructed in time out of specific storytelling choices. So let’s understand those choices. Let’s understand how Homestuck did what it did, and use Homestuck’s tools to build art that grips the soul of future generations as strongly as Homestuck did ours.
What follows is not a traditional literary analysis. It does not cite its sources; it does not seek to give us a comprehensive understanding of Homestuck. If it does, it does so only to the extent it suits its larger purpose.
Our goal here, our quest, if you will, is not to understand the Homestuck that exists, but the Homestuck that comes next.
Let's begin.
0. THE WILD GARDEN
Let’s lay the absolute groundwork here.
Homestuck is constructed as a re-appropriation of itself. Or to put it another way, it’s a big improvisational move, a process of “yes and”-ing so hard it develops a sprawling continuity.
Tiny details are constantly re-contextualized to become part of something else. A joke might turn tragic. A silly aside might turn into something profound.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
It’s crucial to understand that what we experience as continuities were in fact choices made at specific times. Homestuck is a garden where seeds were scattered in every direction, grown en masse, then weeded down to create patterns and forms.
The shape of the garden is designed to conceal the gardener’s hand. But the gardener’s choices are there, every step of the way.
If we are to follow in its footsteps, what choices should we make?
Let’s talk about themes.
1. THE MEANING CRISIS
Nobody in Homestuck knows what they’re doing.
And neither do we.
All the old idols have broken down. The values we were taught in our childhood fail to measure up to the problems of the world we live in. We grasp after careers and lives we were told would make us happy and wonder why we’re left empty. The selves that we were told were us now fit us about as well as clothing we’ve outgrown. Crises loom, political, economic and environmental, and everywhere it feels like the people who are supposed to guide and lead us aren’t doing enough.
It's widening gyres and slouching beasts all the way from here to Bethlehem, is what I’m saying.
The reason people go absolutely insane for Homestuck is that it depicts this crisis of meaning. It shows the questions we might want to ask, and attempts to provide some kind of answer.
The protagonists of Homestuck struggle with what I’ve called “received narrative.” That is, they’ve inherited stories from their families, from the world, that they try to use to define their lives, and it doesn’t work. But these stories are so familiar that it’s hard to think outside them. They have to develop new stories by which to live. Sometimes they succeed, but other times they can’t escape the gravity of the ones they were given.
With me so far?
Great. Now understand that all this was improvised and discovered largely accidentally over the course of ten years.
Here’s a seed that became quite an impressive tree:
The streets are empty. Wind skims the voids keeping neighbors apart, as if grazing the hollow of a cut reed, or say, a plundered mailbox. A familiar note is produced. It's the one Desolation plays to keep its instrument in tune.
It’s a joke. But it was never just a joke. There’s an idea here of dissatisfaction with the stereotypical idea of American suburban life. Egbert here is looking for something more, dissatisfied for reasons they can’t fully articulate. This is typical fantasy protagonist stuff, but there’s something more here, too.
Eventually it’s redirected towards the idea that there really is an unseen riddler. But let’s put that aside for now.
This page, in its moment, says: your life is not the full picture. There’s something else out there, waiting, that’s going to change everything.
That's a potential set-up for a very powerful payoff. It gives us the sense that Egbert and all their friends are going to have to rethink what they know. That this suburban life is not going to be enough for them, that somehow or other they’re going to encounter something they aren’t prepared for, and they’ll have to find a new way of acting and being. That, try as they might to avoid it, they’re going to change over the course of this journey.
But to understand how they change, we need to talk about SBURB.
2. THE PORTAL FANTASY OF IT ALL
A lot of people like to joke that Homestuck is an isekai. I think it might clarify things to use the term portal fantasy instead.
Portal fantasy is simply the fantasy subgenre of characters, usually kids, going to a magical other world. Maybe they make friends, maybe they learn lessons and stuff. You know the drill. I don’t have to to tell you more because the story structure is already so familiar. That’s what gives it power.
Portal fantasy differs from the related Japanese genre of isekai in that isekai in its current form is much more heavily based on video games such as MMORPGs. In the most pervasive isekai narratives, protagonists are rewarded not so much for achieving personal growth as being able to exploit the game mechanics of a game-like system. That’s pretty different from your typical Narnia scenario.
The influence of portal fantasy is everywhere in Homestuck, especially in the beginning. We have nods to the fantasy films of the 1980s that gave us our contemporary idea of this story structure, such as The Neverending Story (itself, in its original book incarnation, a phenomenal commentary on the genre). Our protagonists are genre savvy; they recognize what’s happening here.
But it doesn’t fit quite right. The odd note is first sounded when Egbert asks Nanasprite if what they’re doing is going to save the world. They’re bit unsettled to learn the answer’s no, that something else is going on here. Next we have the fantasy worlds: the planetary lands each present a veneer of exciting adventure. But their inhabitants, the consorts, aren’t fully-realized people, they’re largely cute animals going through the motions, not really understanding the story they’re telling. The carapacians are a little better, but they’re still trapped in a fatalism that feels uncomfortable.
As things rev up in Act 4, we learn about doomed timelines from alt-timeline Dave and Rose, how your entire existence in this setting may be fodder for something other than you. When we learn the true purpose of SBURB and its froggy details in Act 5, we see that SBURB is more like a biological creature, mainly interested in its own reproductive desires. It was never really about the portal fantasy at all. The kids are just along for the ride.
So when we see that Rose wants to tear through SBURB, find out a way to escape fate, and snatch meaning from the jaws of futility, it makes sense. We’ve been given hints already that this is the conflict at hand: the characters vs the story that’s telling them.
(Note: it’s certainly possible to have a reading that SBURB is not evil so much as empty, that it reflects what you bring into it, that its will for you is your will for you. But that’s also a difficult thing, right? If you lack self-understanding, it’s a struggle to bring about your ideal reality.)
What we haven’t mentioned yet is that this is all mediated through the lens of video games. Which makes perfect sense. Because where do we seek meaning, especially as kids? In imaginary worlds that make more sense to us than real life, that give us achievements to take pride in and clear objectives to pursue.
SBURB evokes mechanics from games like Final Fantasy. We see its players complete objectives, cast magic spells, gain power-ups with colorful costume changes. But unlike the narratives implied by traditional video game progressions, leveling up doesn’t mean you grow as a person or process your trauma. Later, in Act 6, when we meet a player who has made his life about winning the game (Caliborn), it’s horrific to behold.
Homestuck is a portal fantasy, but it’s fundamentally a portal fantasy about games. It’s a portal fantasy that shows us how characters seek meaning in being the best at arbitrary game mechanics, but ultimately fail to find it.
So I guess…it actually is an isekai? Huh. Wild.
(But seriously, Homestuck is actually fairly prescient in predicting the ideas that come out of isekai and LitRPG. It’s engaging consciously and deconstructively with the weird ideas of self-fulfillment these genres are drowning in.)
So what might a Homestuckian work look like? It will almost certainly critique a false narrative we live by. It may comment on portal fantasy, or our personal satisfaction that comes as easily as playing a video game. But it doesn’t have to be limited to these things. It might talk about our popular TV shows and movies. It may take apart what’s flawed in Marvel, the latest triple-A game, or the modern dark fantasy novel.
Among its tools will be discomfort. Showing a disconnect early on between our character’s expectations and their happiness can serve as foundation to build on, so that when the flaws of the genre narrative are revealed, it feels like the truth. We may see characters who accept their narratives passively, or rebels like Rose Lalonde, who chose to rip everything apart in search of something better.
These are only some of the possibilities.
When I tell you the stories we live by mislead us, what is your relationship to that? If you were to tear these received narratives apart, what would you focus on, what would you try to say? The art that comes out of this question will be deeply personal to the soul who makes it.
But here’s another question:
Just who is giving us all these narratives, anyway?
3. THE PARENT FLIP
The world we live in was not made by us. It was shaped by forces that predate us, over which we have no control and are born into the grasp of without the knowledge of how to escape.
For instance, our parents.
The guardians who raise us provide our template for how to interpret life. We spend a large part of our lives immersed in the world they built, believing as they believe, living by the values that they instruct us in, so that we might carry their goals forward to the future.
This is an effort that is certain to fail.
Because the problems of today aren’t the problems of twenty or thirty years ago. At best, their messages can only to help in a limited way with the crises we go through as we live our lives. At worst, they actively hinder us from dealing with them productively.
If we are to escape the broken patterns of our world, then we need break out of the stories an earlier generation gave us.
How are parents discussed in Homestuck?
Initially? As jokes.
If we take our “future knowledge” goggles off for a moment, we can see that the early depictions of the kids’ parents are a goofy parody of standard parental tropes. Mom and Dad are nameless, faceless, exaggerated cartoon stereotypes, and conflict between them and their children is initially expressed through a silly video game fight.
There’s a seed of something real here, though. What we’re parodying is a familiar trope of tension between parents and children in kids’ fiction and YA fiction. But that trope exists for a reason. This conflict is rich with potential for any story about growing up. And Homestuck has smuggled the idea of it in as a silly RPG parody.
So we can extrapolate, for instance, that there’s tension between Egbert and their father in part because Egbert doesn’t know yet who they want to be, and that Rose and Mom’s relationship is awkward and contentious, with alcohol involved. We see that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable going on between Dave and his Bro, and Jade’s life in the shadow of a dead Grandpa suggests a psychology that’s not entirely a healthy one.
Understand that I’m not saying that all this was there from the start. Rather, a choice was made to develop these interesting possibilities out of the jokes, to tell a story about how parents that act like these ones might have affected their children.
A major turning point in this regard is when Egbert learns their father’s seeming clown obsession was the result of a failed attempt to connect with them. It’s quite silly, but it plays around with the idea of a gap in perception between parent and child. It’s also a sign the story’s starting to take more of an interest in character psychology, suggesting that what Egbert processes consciously is not the same as their deeper unconscious feelings. This in turn can become a setup for a portrait of Egbert as someone who represses things they don’t want to think about. From this moment, in the long term, comes June Egbert.
When the psychology machine revs up for all the characters in Act 4 and Act 5, it’s able to do so because this foundation was laid.
We also, as early as Act 3, get hints that the parents have intentions and personalities outside of how the kids perceive them. The original purpose is to hint at a larger conspiracy around SBURB, with Mom building a secret lab, Dad trying to investigate the mystery, and Grandpa jumping in and out of time. But what this suggests is that the psychology of the parents might at some point come into play.
But the most exciting development in the relationship between parents and children is Act 6.
The great role reversal. The parent and child flip.
How do you make your faceless parent figures into characters?
By making them kids.
We’re so used to this concept now t that it’s hard to remember how wild it is that Roxy is a teen version of a main character's mom. But the concept is genius. Meeting these characters on the same level forces our protagonists to understand them as people and reflect on their fallibility.
For us as readers, it adds detail and nuance to the cartoonish portraits we got in the beginning. Conversely, we also see what our protagonists might have been like as parents themselves—and turns it from a story of “parents just don’t understand” to a story of how people, despite their best intentions, can wound each other.
(The Homestuck Epilogues are a difficult text to evaluate, but one of the best things within them is Egbert’s arc in Candy, where we see how Egbert might have done as a parent, how their struggles with finding purpose in the world might lead them to embrace a narrative of parenthood yet struggle to have a good relationship their kid. It’s brilliant, and the culmination of everything we’ve talked about here.)
Thus the Homestuckian work of art will be concerned with themes of parents and children. It will play with the boundary between what children understand about their parents and what they don’t. It will show parents as people—fallible people, who make mistakes with severe costs, whose stories fail their children and themselves. It may build from a simple base of what children understand, or it may weave parent and child perspectives together. It may even show us how children fail when they become parents themselves. It will show us the cycles we are trapped in, how we wound and are wounded by our context.
And it will force us to look for a way out.
4. CLASSPECTS AS SIGNPOSTS
Hey. You want to know a secret?
Come closer, and I’ll whisper it to you.
Classpects aren’t actually all that complicated. Ultimately, they boil down to one thing:
Symbols we can use to construct a self.
If Homestuck is about a crisis of meaning, then classpects are part of its answer.
What do we do, when the world gives us no story we can live by?
We make one. We make one out of whatever symbols and messages we can find and put together from the stories we’ve read, from the people who teach and inspire us. Such collages are powerful things. They give us a way out of the dark, they give us a sense of something we are and can be, where there was nothing before.
They give us, in short, a personal mythology.
Classes and Aspects have often been read as codes to be unpacked and solved. It might be more productive to see them as creative tools, signposts designed not to narrow down meaning, but to allow us to explore it.
For instance, the portrayal of Light in Homestuck is unique. As a symbol, it combines notions of brightness, knowledge, future, luck, wealth, and narrative focus. These things aren’t inherently linked out in the world, but they are here, and that’s a choice, and an interesting one. It encourages us to imagine connections between these concepts, and to see if they have any relevance to ourselves. Identifying with the concept of Light, in other words choosing to value clarity, luck, and importance, might be a powerful tool for finding one’s way in the world.
Classes play with signposts at an even more basic level. Sure, we can talk about what a Knight does in the context of the story.
But a knight is already a powerful symbol. We bring so much cultural context to it. The word conjures up images and narratives of devotion, duty, violence, the slaying of dragons, armoring oneself against the world, and the rescuing of princesses. If we put that together with a concept like Time, we get a distinct character. If we put that together with our own experience of the world, we can create powerful concepts for who we want to be.
Interestingly, this complicates what we said about SBURB. As much as our protagonists struggle to find meaning within it, there’s still something there that they can latch onto. Classes, aspects, denizens, even consorts and lands—these things don’t have to be devoid of meaning. We can choose to affirm them; we can build something out of them, and say, yes, this is me, this is myself.
But it’s a double-edged sword.
We are responsible for the narratives we choose to live by. And we may find ourselves falling into a narrative that hinders us more than helps us, that creates a self-destructive self.
What does it mean to believe deeply that you are a thief, that taking from others to benefit yourself is the best way or comes to you the most naturally? What does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you’re a prince, with all the attendant baggage of power and grim responsibility that comes with that concept? Or, to follow the path further, what does it mean to tell yourself over and over that you are a destroyer or must be destroyed?
If we are to escape the story we’re trapped in, we must take care, lest we trap ourselves in a story of our own making.
Homestuck never quite resolves the ambiguity around these symbols of self, around whether SBURB hurts or helps, whether classpects are things you create or things that create you. But this ambiguity is a productive one. It gives us symbolic tools we can use in the creation of meaning, and it shows us the side of them that should make us wary.
The work that is to come after Homestuck will be about symbols. It may show us how we seek them in popular culture, or the people around us. It may use some of the clusters of meaning that that we see in Homestuck, but it will not be limited to them. It will write its own language of symbols, joining Light and Time to notions like Memory, Need, Rupture, and War, and be filled not just with knights and princes but brigadiers, lancers, healers, druids, taxidermists, sentries and waifs. It will build with tarot cards, enneagram types, and Babylonian gods. It will place all the signposts we’ve created in millennia of existence into new contexts and meanings.
By such means will it show us a way forward.
There’s one kind of symbol we haven’t talked about yet, however.
The kind that holds a mirror up to the world.
5. THE POWER OF ALTERNIA
There’s a reason dystopias have been so popular in young adult fiction. Sure, they’re cliché now, but they speak to something raw and visceral.
When you’re growing up into a world that doesn’t make sense, it’s natural to find refuge in emotional extremes. Stories of blood and violence, fates worse than death, and governments that demand horrific things of their citizens speak to the anxieties of the adolescent mind. They validate the feeling that something is wrong—that the world we’ve inherited is broken and unfair and has no place for us. And they’re right.
Alternia taps into these dystopian feelings perfectly. What makes it so fun is that it’s an inversion of a teenage fantasy. It’s a world where there are no parents, where kids can have access to power and violence, where you can sit around and play video games and design your own house. It almost feels like a response to the “parents don’t understand” themes of the early acts.
But the dystopia’s there, and it’s sneaky. A land of lost boys and girls isn’t actually all that great to live in. It’s lawless, survival of the fittest, with children killing each other left and right. And the future adult roles most of the troll kids aspire to are a glamorous veneer over competition for slots in a fascist military hierarchy. Which is to say nothing of the blood caste system as a way in which the kids are taught by their world to abuse and exploit each other. Crushes, personal slights, competition for status, group dynamics, attempts to define identity – all these familiar teenage dynamics play out on a backdrop of maiming and murder.
Which is perfect. Because when you’re young, all those social interactions genuinely do feel like life or death, and adulthood a regime of exploitation and horror bearing down on you. Alternia is a heightened, exaggerated version of reality. It expresses an emotional truth, not a literal one, validating our most intense feelings and giving us a road map to understanding them.
No wonder so many people wanted to skip to Act 5 and get to the trolls.
(See also Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest, which explore these themes really really well.)
And Alternia, for a world where parents aren’t really a thing, tells us a surprising amount about the parental generation. In mid Act 5-2, Ancestors are added to Alternia’s wordbuilding, and we learn that as much as the trolls skipped having traditional parental figures, they were never devoid of role models. The deeds and exploits of notable figures throughout ancient Alternia gave them models to think about each other and themselves—even when those models were toxic ones. In a way, this isn’t so far from the human kids at all.
Furthermore, as time goes on, we acquire an origin for Alternia’s fascist worldview. Doc Scratch, manipulator of society, stands in for all those aspects of the world that work to create the false narratives we are born into, a true evil father figure – or uncle, if you prefer. And he's an extension of the ultimate evil father figure, Lord English, who controls not just Alternia but the timelines of the human children as well, whose belligerence and apathy give us aeons of toxic narratives and abuse. We see that story played out in Alternia in every interaction, in every moment, the beliefs its architects live by.
This is the power of dystopia—it can hold a broken mirror up to the world we live in.
Therefore the Homestuck that will come after Homestuck will worldbuild gardens of horror. It will not pull its punches but show us insidious societal systems and the effect they have on the people who live under them. It may depict fascism, authoritarianism, feudalistic tyranny, or all three. It will be unafraid to evoke blood and guts but use them to paint a picture of what we want, what we fear, and how we break under our false horizons.
As it depicts the path out, so, too, will it have its reverse side—it will show us all the hells and purgatories we’re trapped in.
6. SAILS TO THE WIND
Much has been written (including by this very author) about Homestuck’s metafictional aspects – the way it comes to foreground a more direct clash between character and narrative.
But the point I want to make here is that the metafictional angle wouldn’t work without these earlier choices. They allow the comic to talk about these concerns long before any notion of canon rears its head.
There are many ways of approaching these themes, and we don’t have to be limited to notions of Ultimate Selves and Beyond Canon to explore them. Such things are valuable, but they are only one retelling of the myth. If we are to make the next Homestuck, we must make our own.
I want to illustrate the space of possibility by offering some examples of works that explore similar themes. Note that I’m not saying these works were influenced by Homestuck in any way, but rather that they use some of the same tools to speak to the same questions, anxieties and concerns.
In trying to make what comes after Homestuck, we might consider:
Revolutionary Girl Utena, which foregrounds the archetype of the Prince as duelist, tyrant, and hero and dares its characters to break free from the false reality that shapes even these aspirations and dreams.
The Familiar by Mark Z. Danielewski, author of Houseof Leaves, whose core narrative concerns an twelve-year-old girl in thrall to an entity whose intentions are unclear but may be shaping the fabric of reality itself; which depicts the inner lives and uncertainties of her parents with just as much detail as they struggle, and sometimes fail, to make the right choices to help her; a story which, even in its incomplete form, explores a notion of a greater S.E.L.F that is not just you but also those who share something with you, where characters from other realities blur into transcendent archetypes in this one.
Digimon, perhaps the quintessential work of portal fantasy, not only Digimon Tamers, which steers the genre into a place of trauma, cosmic horror, and adults horrified by children saving the world, but also Digimon Adventure, which creates strong character arcs for eight very different children as they try to navigate a strange alien world, and shows us their struggle to reconcile with their parents as part of the process of understanding themselves.
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende,foundational text for Homestuck, which tells us not only about the rich possibilities inherent in reading oneself into fantasy worlds, but also the terrible potential for harm in making oneself an emperor over them.
Pale, by Wildbow, author of Worm, an urban fantasy story about three teenagers thrust into a world of magic and murder, a world where symbols literally create reality, where concepts like Carmine and Aurum have a powerful pull, where the Self is something that can be nourished or taken apart and put back together, a story where the parents are not just supporting cast but fully realized people forced to reckon with the ways in which they have deeply failed their children, and which contains perhaps the most thorough investigation of the question of “is it good for children to go on magical adventures?” ever committed to the page.
Heaven Will Be Mine, by Aevee Bee,in which the giant robots we pilot through space become the symbolic manifestation of our inner selves and our way of bringing about our ideal reality, and, relatedly, We Know the Devil, in which the repression of those selves causes them to burst out from us in terrifying and glorious new forms.
Crow Cillers, by Cate Wurtz, an often trauma-filled horror comic in which a group of kids and, eventually, adults, tries to fight back against an ever-present death cult that has its grips on every corner, all the while encountering Psyforms, beings made of pure mind, while characters from television and cartoons dance in the margins and all the while the line blurs between audience and art until it becomes difficult to tell who created who—a story that asks what it means to find meaning in stories when the corporate entities that own them are trying to devour us.
It's a tragically short list, I know. But perhaps it conveys some of the angles we might take.
We can also look at works that are known to have inspired by Homestuck. There aren’t many yet, but there are a few.
Undertale is famous for its Homestuck influences, with parallel timelines, an idea of agency that persists across them, and a contentious relationship between player and character, but for my part, I’m just as interested if not more so in Deltarune, which seems to be slowly building a grand thesis about portal fantasy, where the kids' adventures in the Dark Worlds seems to be offering them an escape and helping them become their best selves—but hints at a coming challenge to that simple worldview in the question of who’s really experiencing that escape.
The Locked Tomb, by Tamsin Muir – This is the big one, that really shows what building on Homestuckian themes can achieve. It turns out there really is an audience for weird aggro formalism in scifi publishing if you make it sufficiently gay. But smartly, like Homestuck, the Locked Tomb builds its weird mysteries gradually, adding on layer after layer on the solid foundation of characters we can follow and get invested in. There’s so much to notice – there’s the highly categorized teenagers involved in a murder feud, there’s the constant whiplash of humor and tragedy, there’s the endlessly open spaces in the story to interpret and project on to.
But to me, what stands out the most is the portrait of God and his court as every bit as emotionally chaotic as the sniping teenagers. You go to heaven, and God’s making out in the corner with his friend group, and you look for the adult in the room but the adults in the room don’t know what they’re doing and they never really did. It’s a portrait of the parents, it’s a portrait of the Ancestors, it’s a portrait of the gods of the new world, and it’s exquisite.
The Locked Tomb gives us a world at war with its own mythological narrative, rich with angst and irony. It’s a worthy successor to everything Homestuck was doing. It shows us how much these themes can say to us, and it gives us a hint at how powerful Homestuck's legacy might be.
7. THE APOTHEOSIS OF HOMESTUCK
There’s a lot of discussion about how to continue Homestuck. How to do it justice. What post-canon might look like, and what it might not. What fan comics, what fan fics, what semi-official works truly live up to the spirit of its characters and its multiverse.
To be clear, those discussions are awesome. I’m so glad those things exist, and it’s wonderful to see them unfolding.
But I don’t want the process to stop there. I'd be disappointed if it was only about adding to and re-articulating Homestuck itself.
I want this—
—This multifaceted, complicated, emotionally laden thing that is the experience of engaging with and creating with and interpreting Homestuck—
To go out into the world and to be infused into the world, to become waves spreading further and further. I want to experience the Homestuck artistic movement, the Homestuck school of thought. I want it to be an influence on the fiction of the coming generation of authors, and the next, and the next.
I want Homestuck to be one of those albums that's too obscure to be known by the general public, but everyone who listened to it went on to start an enormously successful band.
Homestuck can appear like a thing that was conjured out of the ether, but it isn’t. It’s a product of a particular time.
But that in itself is profound. When you create art, you reach back to all the things that have shaped you, and you listen to what the world around you needs, and you try to say what needs to be said. Which means you're a part of a history and culture that needs to say those things, which will be different from the things that needed to be told yesterday, and different from the stories that will be needed tomorrow.
There’s no otherworldliness to it, no platonic other reality. But for all I've talked about art being made of choices, there's still something transcendent here.
To make Homestuck—and to make art inspired by Homestuck—means being a node in a web formed of millions of people, where a light passes down the chain to you, and for the briefest of moments, you get to be filled with its presence, before it moves on to the next person in the chain.
That light isn't yours. Not really.
But at the same time, you do get to choose how that light manifests.
And to engage with that process consciously—to think deliberately about what we want to create—that gives us power and agency over that process, our sense of the world, and ourselves.
So let’s do this. Let’s make the thing that Homestuck is telling us can exist, the thing it’s paving the way for, the thing we know in our soul can come to be.
Let’s make the next Homestuck happen.
—Ari
POSTSCRIPT
“To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC
to fulminate against 1, 2, 3
to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life… I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles… I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air…”
— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”
"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence....the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of re-turning to dust...This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
— Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
“What we need is works that are strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding... let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean…to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least…freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.”
— Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918”
“These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.”
My thoughts on Homestuck^2 returning (now rechristened as Homestuck: Beyond Canon):
I like it! It makes me happy to see. Feels like something is healing.
I like the simultaneously more casual and more independent vibe. I want to think it'll encourage the audience to act a little more reasonably towards the project and the people who are working on it. We can only hope.
I don't need Homestuck: Beyond Canon to be the continuation of Homestuck or address personal narrative grievances or answer unresolved questions. Instead, I'm just happy to see a group of passionate artists and writers building something in Homestuck's conceptual space with creator endorsement, and I'll be curious to see what they come up with.
Also! While the friends I made through the fandom have been invaluable and continue to bring me great joy and I have no idea who I would be today was it not for the fandom, I want to emphasize that even if I had sat alone in my room and reblogged the occasional upd8 meme and that was IT as far as my social ties from Homestuck went? Homestuck still would have made my life richer and more interesting.
RE: previous posts: My own feelings about Homestuck Made This World (a podcast that has been a big part of the Homestuck discussion lately) are complicated and I kind of want to articulate them.
On the one hand, HSMTW allowed me to see Homestuck more clearly. To simplify a lot, the hosts are media studies scholars whose relationship to Homestuck is not based on an emotional attachment so much as just finding the comic interesting. As a result, they often argue and challenge its ideas, particularly the work’s ideas about itself.
What I found helpful about their approach was that it helped me to take a step back and get some perspective, to get outside of Homestuck to understand Homestuck, if you see what I mean. It helped me understand that what Homestuck does, how it affects my view of the world, isn’t some ineffable magic from outside time, but is the result of certain rhetorical and narrative strategies, not all of which are obvious from the way the comic talks about itself. The insights available from this are fascinating and many.
On the other hand, HSMTW doesn’t really do justice to how it felt to be part of the Homestuck communities I was in. There was a dream - and still is, I think, but it burned brightest a few years ago - of using the conversation Homestuck started to make something that could profoundly change the conversations we were having online, in the world, in ourselves. At times it felt like we were fighting against a heavy tide, but we believed in that world, believed in the importance of that fight. It was a collaboration, it was storytelling, it was building a new world together.
That work is still going on, but one of the biggest hopes was that Homestuck^2 could be a central light of that movement. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed, and that’s a tragedy.
That’s one of the things that’s disappointing about how Homestuck is often viewed: that that story is rarely told. HSMTW doesn’t really tell it, largely because its hosts are interested in other things.
So if you’re looking for an understanding of the techniques Homestuck uses, the pros and cons of those techniques, the relation of Homestuck to literature, and the debates context around Homestuck in its day, then I recommend the podcast. But I think other angles are needed if you want to understand what Homestuck is to people and what the most active members of its literary movement were and are trying to do. It’s just the start, but I hope that OD and Sarah’s responses go some way to giving more perspective on that.
making this its own post so as to not be like, makin the real big good post All About Me or w/e. but re: last reblog, about the homestuck renaissance and all that
im like. really proud to be a small speck of that lineage. i wasnt around for the shit, im not claimin i was. i was neither a creator nor anyone catching flack during that era. but with podfeels… i dunno.
if the homestuck renaissance was the flame, then podfeels is an ember of an ember. its small. tangential. arguably entirely unoriginal.
but i hope that with it, me and the rest of the podfeels crew can do that era’s memory some level of justice. maybe even land on some dry brush, help the fire spread a lil. get back some of its old fury.
i dunno. theres a lot of art that’s inspired me in my life, but nothing quite so constructively. and i hope that podfeels lets us pay it forward a little.
Post-postmodernism in Pop Culture: Homestuck’s Revenge
I recently saw an excellent video essay titled Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight. Though the title is opaque clickbait, the video is actually about major artistic zeitgeists, or movements, in film history. Flight describes three major movements:
Modernism, encompassing much of classic cinema, in which an earnest belief in universal truths led to straightforward narratives that unironically supported certain values (rationalism, civic duty, democracy, etc.)
Postmodernism, in which disillusionment with the values of modernism led to films that played with cinematic structure, metafiction, and the core language of film, often with more unclear narratives that lacked straightforward resolutions, and that were skeptical or even suspicious of the idea of universal truth
Metamodernism, the current artistic zeitgeist, which takes the structural and metafictional innovations of postmodernism but uses them not to reject meaning, but point to some new kind of meaning or sincerity.
Flight associates metamodernism with the “multiverse” narratives that are popular in contemporary film, both in blockbuster superhero films and Oscar darlings like Everything Everywhere All at Once. He argues that the multiverse conceptually represents a fragmented, metafictional lack of universal truth, but that lack of truth is then subverted with a narrative that ultimately reaffirms universal truth. In short, rather than rejecting postmodernism entirely, metamodernism takes the fragmented rubble of its technique and themes and builds something new out of that fragmentation.
Longtime readers of this blog may find some of these concepts familiar. Indeed, I was talking about them many years ago in my Hymnstoke posts, even using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism,” though what Flight calls metamodernism I tended to call “post-postmodernism” (another term used for it is New Sincerity). Years before EEAAO, years before Spider-verse, years before the current zeitgeist in pop cultural film and television, there was an avant garde work pioneering all the techniques and themes of metamodernism. A work that took the structural techniques of postmodernism–the ironic detachment, the temporal desynchronization, the metafiction–and used them not to posit a fundamental lack of universal truth but rather imbue a chaotic, maximalist world of cultural detritus with new meaning, new truth, new sincerity. That work was:
Homestuck.
That’s right! Everyone’s favorite web comic. Of course, I’m not the first person to realize the thematic and structural similarities between Homestuck and the current popular trend in film. Just take a look at this tweet someone made yesterday:
This tweet did some numbers.
As you might expect if you’re at all aware of the current cultural feeling toward Homestuck, many of the replies and quotes are incredibly vitriolic over this comparison. Here’s one of my favorites:
It’s actually quite striking how many elements of the new Spider-verse are similar to Homestuck; aspects of doomed timelines, a multiversal network that seems to demand certain structure, and even “mandatory death of parental figure as an impetus for mandated personal growth” are repeated across both works. The recycling and revitalization of ancient, seemingly useless cultural artifacts (in Homestuck’s case, films like Con Air; in Spider-verse, irrelevant gimmick Spider-men from spinoffs past) are also common thematic threads.
As this new post-postmodern or metamodern trend becomes increasingly mainstream, and as time heals all and allows people to look back at Homestuck with more objectivity, I believe there will one day be a rehabilitation of Homestuck’s image. It’ll be seen as an important and influential work, with a place inside the cultural canon. Perhaps, like Infinite Jest, it’ll continue to have some subset of commentators who cannot get past their perception of the people who read the work rather than the work itself even thirty years after its publication, but eventually it’ll be recognized for innovations that precipitated a change in the way people think about stories and their meaning.
Until that day, enjoy eating raw sewage directly from a sewer pipe.
(Side note: I think Umineko no naku koro ni, which was published around the same time as Homestuck and which deals with many similar themes and then-novel ideas, will also one day receive recognition as a masterpiece. Check it out if you haven’t already!)
not to be That Bitch, but in 2018-2020 we were doing extensive literary analysis of homestuck. the perfectly generic podcast, the videos of optimistic duelist, the articles of storming the ivory tower (which go back even further!), and the radically transformative works that emerged out of the homestuck epilogues, themselves just as much a critical interrogation of their source text as they were simple fiction. many of us involved in these projects came to be involved in the postcanon, whether that was homestuck^2, pesterquest, or any number of other projects that evaporated before they could make it past the development phase because the general homestuck fandom was so directly, willfully hostile towards everything we did that the constant harassment broke almost everyone involved.
it was and remains in vogue to hate on the epilogues and their defenders. it was and remains in vogue to say hs2 always sucked and is bad. people love to point at the cursed/problematic things in the postcanon as if homestuck was not chock full of cursed/problematic shit from the very beginning. it’s an obscene woobification of what is a very mature and challenging text. all while the entire context of the postcanon’s creation has been memoryholed, all the work we did, the love we put into that work, all the ways we were trying (and quite often succeeding considering how many currently-popular fan creators got their start in our spaces) to elevate the discourse on the comic to something closer to intellectual rather than reactionary.
because the thing that’s just been completely ignored by history is that we were always critical of homestuck and the epilogues. everyone acts like it was just some circlejerk, as if we weren’t ADULT fans engaging with this work AS ADULTS and as such could praise and criticize homestuck simultaneously. everyone wants to throw the whole fucking thing out because there’s slurs or because ableism or because it’s, i don’t know, a webcomic about cartoon children. they act like it’s a sin to point at this work of art and say “that’s art.” like how dare you act like homestuck is good. “why are we talking about homestuck in [current year]?” we did entire episodes of pgen about the ableism, sexism, racism, we called out andrew after the skaianet debacle and you know fucking what? she LISTENED. people act like we just fucking conned our way into working on official stuff, as if this wasn’t a movement that took place over years that andrew hussie themself paid attention to and engaged with in earnest. several of the best chapters of the epilogues only exist because andrew HIRED queer people from this community to give it a once-over after skaianet.
the epilogues are a complicated, challenging text that no one is obligated to like. they are MEANT to be divisive. but so many people in this fandom adopted a willfully ignorant and puritanical stance against even reading them, with all the dedication of a genuine political conviction. everyone complained about the pacing of the hs2 project and never cared to see the impossibility of what they were doing from THEIR perspective, tasked with telling not a story that they personally owned but continuing on from the epilogues. everyone involved in hs2 had deeply complicated feelings about the epilogues, including the ones who WORKED on them! i love the epilogues, i love hs2, but they both have a lot of problems that are worth discussing. but i also know that hs2 is the way it is because they were trying to do it in a sustainable way, with limited updates and strict word count limits. all the discourse about the epilogues/hs2 is so frustrating because i guarantee you that i, the arch defender of both projects, have far more incisive & specific criticisms of both than 90 percent of the haters.
why is it so hard to talk about this fucking comic without turning into a bunch of bickering preteens? why can’t we talk about the problems of the text while also admitting that homestuck is genuinely good? it’s funny, entertaining, thought provoking, emotionally resonant, painful, beautiful, unlike anything else. it’s easily the most influential story of the internet age and you can see its influence EVERYWHERE, in webcomics, in cartoons, in indie games. but a handful of bigoted clout chasing redditors insisted that, for instance, a grown ass woman selling “nudes” (literally just topless pics, not even showing hog) behind a paywall was, like, an evil thing for someone involved in hs2 to do. fuck off. fuck off. grow up. they got mad at her for not reposting BLM fundraising links on twitter, because she was too busy GETTING TEAR GASSED PARTICIPATING IN PROTESTS. just a terminally bad faith immature illiterate subsect of the fandom that successfully drove out nearly every adult who was trying to engage with a text that was important to them, erased all their contributions from the history except as like “they were the mean ones who did the bad things and now they’re gone and it’s not worth talking about.” new fans come into the homestuck reddit and discord and just get hammered over the head with that message before they even get a chance to reach their own conclusion, so it’s just this inherited act of refusing to acknowledge that not too long ago there were people that andrew hussie CHOSE to try to help steward this series forward, for REAL reasons that MATTER.
i hate that every conversation about homestuck, every video essay, every article, doesn’t even get to the part where they talk ABOUT HOMESTUCK, its themes, its ideas, its formal experimentation, its complex problematics, because the spectacle of fandom drama is better for clicks and doesn’t require the real work of actually engaging with a text on its own terms, because it’s popular to say homestuck bad. i don’t bring up homestuck all the time in my critical writings as a bit, it’s genuinely relevant to SO MUCH MEDIA because it does things nothing else does. every time travel story, every multiverse story, everything that touches on growing up online in the 2000s, getting over being an edgelord, everything about witnessing our slow descent into fascism, nine times out of ten homestuck did it better or at least more interestingly. it does so many different things, in so many different ways, and if you just give it time and attention and a willingness to actively read it, it’s unbelievably rewarding! because it IS a text that requires work to appreciate, and i get if that’s not your thing but also no one is making you pay attention to the people doing that work.
multiple queer people got chased out of our careers and we’ll probably never see an official continuation of homestuck in any form ever again as a result of this fandom’s cruel, petulant response to what we were doing. congratulations assholes, your official merch is now a bougie cafe in california where terezi is no longer short and fat. all the edges have been sanded off and the official face of the story looks like stock anime trash. of course we made mistakes. of course there were problems. but this was less than twenty people, all of them perpetually broke, handling a project that made very very very little money, and y’all acted like we were a fucking megacorporation with power and reach and influence.
the most heartbreaking thing about OP’s post is that i agree, someday homestuck will be re-evaluated and accepted as a great work of literature. but i fear that history will be defined exclusively by white cis male academics like the folks at homestuck made this world, who seem completely ignorant of the work we did and have zero interest in engaging with it despite the fact that andrew hussie agreed with us enough to hire us to take over. no hate to hsmtw but it is very frustrating that they and other similar projects face nothing of the scrutiny we did, that they feel no obligation to search for prior discussions on the subject, that they’re willing to just throw the epilogues out and refuse to engage with it on the terms it presents (and also i’m a little miffed that in their last episode they described godfeels as “a transgender john fanfic” like come on). my fear is that the literary history of this story will settle the way so many literary histories have: erasing the work of the dearly passionate, flawed, committed, messy queer people that elevated this text in the years after its conclusion, kept it relevant, taught a little generation of artists how to engage with art critically, all because it’s easier, cleaner, and more convenient to do so. and because the credit for that literary elevation is just sitting on the table for anyone to grab.
anyway read homestuck, read the epilogues, read hs2, play friendsim and pesterquest, read godfeels, read liminal space, read jaderoute, read omelette route, read house of dirk, read ink black appendices, read through shadowed eyes, read kittyquest, listen to old eps of pgen, watch od’s videos. you cannot understand modern homestuck without engaging with fanwork and any literary history of this story will be incomplete without that.
I think I’d like to chime in here to echo Sarah’s heartbreak and fury with my own experience of the fandom harassment, because I know a lot of people wonder why optimisticDuelist doesn’t post on his youtube channel anymore. While these days the reason is that I’m very busy with a full-time job and grad school and barely have the time to breathe, let alone record and edit audiovisual content that doesn’t pay enough for rent, it isn’t exactly the reason I first *stopped* posting.
The extent of the trauma the fandom’s brutality to, frankly, mostly my trans girl friends inflicted on me indirectly, simply as a consequence of having to watch it play out and having to try to be there for them and care for them as they got hurt over and over and over and FUCKING over, was in fact so massive that at one point, it put me in the hospital and almost got me institutionalized.
The fact that it got that bad for me is why I left Hs^2, ultimately, and during that transition it was kate gamblingant, the local fandom meangirl bogeyman, that made sure I kept getting paid from WP for my participation in HS^2 MONTHS past the point when it was clear I would not be contributing much of anything to the project and was in fact probably a liability to it!
And Do Not get me wrong and start some bullshit anti-WP discourse with my wording: I am under the vague impression that offering me that kindness was something everyone on the team was on board for. I just also know for a fact it was Kate sounding the loudest horn on that call.
And why? In the hopes that that little bit more money would be just a little more stability for me as I recovered from that psychological breakdown. Because she wanted me to be safe and healthy and taken care of, as much as she could manage with our extremely limited resources. Because that’s just the sort of extremely kind and caring person she was to me, every step of the way.
And Let’s Be Super Goddamn Clear:
I barely got harassed during the period of time Sarah’s describing, and that was partly because I was less interested in advancing new ideas about Homestuck in ways people would pay attention to and talk about than I was in making sure everybody liked me enough that I wouldn’t get too much mean shit. I very deliberately crafted my online persona to be very very very outwardly kind and polite and gentle and non-abrasive.
If Kate’s firebrand approach to the Homestuck conversation was channeling the spirit of the Homestuck/Undertale model of Mean Girl, then I was always really deliberately presenting myself as a non-threatening and non-confrontational Fuzzy Boy, as a preemptive defense mechanism to the backlash and hostility I ALWAYS feared would come for me from moment one.
And my survival tactic worked. Even as I worked on HS2 and publically affiliated with pgenpod, nobody ever really seemed to think to give me shit *directly*. I just had to watch people do it to my friends.
Having to deal with the cognitive dissonance of that fact, knowing that this fandom that was turning so vicious over the Homestuck Epilogues tarnishing the comic’s original supposedly progressive values that they were acting in defense of…was also sparing me in a sense, and that part of the reason why was PROBABLY that I visibly present as a boy online instead of some uppity girl?
Was just one of many angles through which my experience of the fandom became something so dissonant and alienating I didn’t know how to talk about it. It’s hard to explain how broken it made me feel the culture of Homestuck actually is, or how many times I started thinking about doing something stupid and inflamattory and mean just to get people pissed off at ME TOO FOR ONCE, GOD DAMN IT.
I did have one memorably creepy little dudebro haunting me in DMs for a while, acting sycophantically nice while also occasionally trying to “"Present ideas”“ that were invariably barely thought out reactionary right winger bullshit. But he was a bad actor from the reddit, not even an entity that qualifies as one of the Homestuck fans that were so earnestly and savagely furious at WP for the Epilogues from a progressive or leftist angle.
Shoulda just blocked him, but what can I say? I’m hopebound and at the time I was very invested in Being Kind and Hearing People Out and Giving Them Chances To Learn New Ideas, and being determined to offer that kindness to conservative Homestuck fans I thought could benefit from sincere conversation ultimately turned out to be absolutely devastating to my own life. Sometimes its better to just be a bitch, who could’ve guessed!
Eventually that guy posted me on a list with the other hs2 writers and made a death threat joke about it shortly before we were all due to make a public appearance, prompting the mental health spiral that eventually put me out of commission in the HS space for years. But really, he was just some loser fucking dweeb, and it was only happenstance that he put me over the tipping point.
It was, in fact, mostly watching what happened to *Kate* that so unsettled me. To the point that even saying her name here feels wrong, a betrayal. Because she left this place deliberately, and as far as I’m concerned, none of you people even deserve to hear her name anymore after what this community did to her.
There aren’t words for the kind of frothing at the mouth, choking on the poison in my own heart, deeply bitter Rage I feel on her behalf when I think about those years. It’s not healthy or even fair to every individual in the fandom, of course. I obviously need to go to therapy over it. But what therapist do I fucking go to who could fucking understand this shit??? I’m LITERALLY a mental health professional, and it’s taking me YEARS just to unpack and try to move past this trauma trying to think myself through it. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to explain it to some random professional.
THAT’S what killed my fucking channel! I ended up with some kind of selective goddamn mutism when it comes to talking about Homestuck in any professional way that involves interacting with this community, trying to talk around the social realities of dealing with NDAs and the harrassment and the things in the future I hoped we’d get to show you and the things in the past of the comic that I always hoped people would rediscover and genuinely embrace and all sorts of other things I could never figure out how to talk about, after a certain point of complication and infinite heartache. I still WANT to talk about the comic and characters and story and themes and I can still sort of sometimes *write* about it, but I don’t know how to use my voice to TALK about it without my brain at some point derailing into just, fucking, this PAIN and this ANGER that are inside me about 2019, always, every second of every day.
And it’s particularly heartbreaking to have to say that to me, because…
Look, Sarah talks about the Homestuck Rennaissance as something that started in 2018, and in large part that’s true. But its true because that’s when her and Kate entered the scene, and Kate in particular did SO MUCH networking and connecting people together in the scene that she was basically responsible for the analysis scene during that period actually taking off as a noticeable zeitgeist.
But that isn’t when this shit started for *me*. *I* started working on Homestuck analysis in 2016 with Apotheosis and Creation Myth directly in the wake of Act 7, and my first video on Homestuck explained went up on January 2017.
I was here a couple of years early, MOSTLY banging the war drums that the epilogues WERE INDEED A THING THAT WAS EVEN COMING, and that there WERE INDEED meaningful things going on inside the context of Act 6 and 7 that contextualized the comic’s ending and improved the readings of things like davekat and dirkjake and rosemary’s relationship executions!
Because back in those days, THOSE were the big debates that were going on. And those were very fun years for me, where I made many friends in the fandom I still deeply cherish and treasure the memories of, even though frankly it feels like I lost most of them to the vitriolic division of the post-Epilogues fandom and the many ways I hurt and failed far too many people I cared about in my messy attempts to grapple with my traumatized brain and broken heart at the time.
But they were also deeply lonely years for me, because most of my friends were…from precisely the fandom asking the questions I was trying to answer, and my brain was already racing ahead imagining the post-Epilogue, post-canon future of the story.
Back in 2016, I was already imagining timelines in Earth C with the kids in their 20s, having adventures across quantum realities and figuring out life and love and their trauma and sex and all these other things I was so excited to embrace and explore in my own adulthood, in lockstep with them, since I had been from the moment I fell in love with this thing.
But even though I had friends who were homestucks, I didn’t *really* have friends who saw the vision of the future *I* was seeing. Except then I met Kate, and *she* fucking got it.
The first time I was on PGENPod was, unironically, the first time I felt really seen and understood and embraced in full for what I was saying I thought and believed about the story of Homestuck.
I know I had a lot of fans who believe my theories and friends who were supportive of my readings and encouraging of my passions, even back then, but Kate made me feel like she could SEE it the way I could see it. She saw what I was saying and said that she believed me, and not just that, but believed IN me, to the point that SHE was the person who connected me and Andrew and brought me into the fold for HS^2.
She told me once that it was partly my content that inspired her to do PGENPod and see this space as something worth thinking about in a deeper, intellectual way. It is hard to describe what that kind of validation meant to me after 2 years of working in the dark, entirely off the fumes of my own hype and the memory of my heroes.
It’s even harder to describe how it felt when the fandom took the joy of that memory and smashed it to pieces, poisoned it irredeemably by simply burying it under the onslaught of all the pain Kate had to endure simply as a consequence of having been as passionate and in love with this thing as me, and choosing to express it a little bit differently.
The fact that in a way, it feels like everything that happened to her is my fault, for inspiring her into making a mistake as profound as believing in all of you.
Do you understand it? How fucking crushing that is? Do you understand that even saying this is just pointless, shitty man whining from a boy who barely got any flack, compared to what Kate got put through?
…
In fact, I started and continued my channel VERY SPECIFICALLY as a way to survive the Trump years, because Homestuck is SO fucking good that I legitimately believe it was a story capable of bringing our culture together to fight back against the darkness that I saw coming, and holding onto that was the only way I could survive those years psychologically at the time. Call me nuts or too into it for that if you want, but at least I had SOME kind of hope for the future in the face of oncoming fascism, and between that and nothing I prefer the possible laughter-worthy insanity.
THAT is the kind of potential I saw in this space, and holding that kind of faith is what made my channel possible. That is the kind of hope I was trying to reach for. That is what I meant when I made my channel’s catchphrase "Keep rising”. I thought we were going to save the world, god dammit, and everyone else was going to have to watch and boggle in awe at how fucking amazing and ridiculous we were, with all our love and passion.
How far we fell short of that dream, I guess.
And yet, it is in fact so good that a substantial part of me still believes that, even now, after everything. There’s no fixing what happened to Kate, and yet somehow I still can’t let go of this love and faith I have for J00n and Roxy, for Dave and Karkat, for Rose and Kanaya and Calliope and Dirk and fucking Jake. Fix me up with the clown paint and put me in front of the Undertale mirror, I guess.
You wanna know the funny thing? The really hilarious joke at the center of this intellectual holocaust of empathy and basic human decency?
I don’t even believe the Epilogues are all that mean spirited. I basically think this entire fandom is completely, just…wrong about that. Understandably wrong! I certainly understand the pain the Epilogues inflicted, even if I will never ever ever agree that the response the fandom took was appropriate, even as I look back and think it was probably inevitable. I still think it’s wrong.
You know why I think Dirk is as mean as he is in the epilogues? It’s because this fandom is fucking mean about Dirk, WAS mean about Dirk consistently and enthusiastically for the span of 2016-2019 in between the end of the comic and the release of the epilogues, and the epilogues were a reflection of us in the first place.
What keeps coming to my head is this fandom’s fucking obsession with Dirk killing himself. The way it’s not just a trope, but a joke to us. The way I spent those years seeing post after post after post after post pairing him with Caliborn–a genocidal homophobe and misogynist–or John–a more masculine, more “normal” guy who still carried the baggage of being coded as “straight” by comparison to Dirk or Jake.
Both kinds of content regularly featuring both Caliborn and John just being fucking assholes to him. The subtext and punchline often being that Dirk deserves to be with someone who’s an asshole with him.
Because it’s funnier and easier than engaging with the very complex and difficult but also very mutual and sincere and complicated (and plenty funny and capable of including mutual assholery) dynamic that already canonically exists to be read between him and Jake.
Oh but also, I remember one piece of fanart of Jake putting a picture of Dirk in the garbage, setting it on fire, and sending him a picture of it.
Any one of these pieces of fanart is just a whatever shipping post or joke, who cares obviously. But in totality, honestly?
It turned interacting with content about Dirk, as a gay-aligned man with struggles with self-hatred, suicidal ideation and chronic guilt/anxiety myself, into a brutal gauntlet of merciless homophobia.
A culture that thinks if you fuck up a little too much as a consequence of being messed up as a gay teen, you kind of deserve to be punished for it forever. That after a certain point, the best thing you can do for everybody is decapitate yourself and spare everybody the trouble of dealing with you.
Homestuck might have Dirk decapitating himself a lot, but he does it in moments of perceived necessity, mostly to save the lives of the people he cares about.
On the Epilogue’s Earth C, there are Dirk dolls with detachable heads. In the snapchats we see the kids throw Dirk a birthday party where Dave fucking beheads one as a Piñata while Dirk is watching.
Remind me why Dirk should care about any of these people?
Remind me why he should care about any of you?
Remind me why I should, when he and I are so similar.
The callousness with which Dirk’s life is treated originates in the fandom, not in the comic. The epilogues just reflect that fact back to us.
And in the same way, I could trace back almost every major character conflict in the Epilogues that pisses people off back to undercurrents of discourse and jokes the fandom was perpetuating in that stretch of 2016-2019.
There was a time when I wanted to do that, and I didn’t because there just wasn’t ever a moment to breathe or sort out all my thoughts and anxieties enough to figure out what I wanted to say, precisely because the vitriol of the fandom made every day an exciting new splash of some secondhand retraumatizing for like a solid year there.
Now I’m just stating it as a fact, along with the fact that multiple Homestuck^2 writers were explicitly and publically on the record literally advancing empathetic readings of the characters and expressing desires to see them happy.
I barely knew anything HS^2 was planning back then and I certainly have no idea now, so DO NOT TAKE THIS AS COMMENTARY ON THE DIRECTION OF THAT NARRATIVE AT PRESENT, but I think it’s obvious that the hideous state of affairs of the epilogues was always meant to be temporary and transitory to some extent. It just never got to finish the transition to anywhere because, yknow, pure hatred smothered it. Even though we were literally right there, literally telling everyone it’s what we were doing. I understand why the backlash happened anyway, but it’s still deeply frustrating.
Sigh. At least the fanfic scene is great, as Sarah helpfully outlined.
Even now, I am trying to figure out ways to start putting content up on the youtube channel regularly again. To continue writing my fics and hoping that when i post them they excite and move people and help shift the fandom culture’s inertia, just a little, in a direction that could eventually somehow, someday, take us back to that dazzling energy I remember so well from the 2013 era, when I was just some nobody fan enjoying fanart and loving bladekindeyewear and dahnithewitchoflight’s and lildurandal and whoever else’s posts.
I’m still here. I still care. I still love and want this. I just wish people could be fucking kind to each other and to the story that’s bringing us all together. It’s such a shame how that feels completely impossible.
I've been thinking a lot about both optimisticduelist and sarah's posts over the last few days, and I'm grateful for them putting into words something that really needed to be said. I can relate to some of the feelings outlined here, especially the feeling of it being difficult to speak about Homestuck because of all the reactions there might be to what you say. It takes a hell of a lot of of courage to talk about your trauma on the subject, and it means a lot to hear these things I've felt about the larger fandom recognized and validated. They're under no requirement to do that, but it made me feel less alone. So thank you to them, seriously.
I'm not as aware of the fanwork scene as I used to be, but the fan response work that folks like @optimisticduelist2 @hms-no-fun, @sam-keeper and others are doing is incredibly cool and feels like a continuation of the conversation Homestuck is having. Even if that work doesn't change the whole world at once, it's part of what Homestuck's legacy on the world is going to be.
Back in 2016 and 2017, OptimisticDuelist's videos and sam-keeper's articles helped it crystalize in my mind just how good and important Homestuck was at a time when it was hard to see past the negativity. Similarly, reading works like Godfeels and OD's Pumpkin Path series showed me the layers of meaning available in the Homestuck epilogues and revealed to me where that conversation is going next. As I go forth into writing my own fantasy fiction, I'm going to be drawing on ideas talked about in OD's videos, ideas from the Epilogues, and ideas from the Pumpkin Path and Godfeels. Even if OD doesn't make any other videos (and of course I will be an enthusiastic audience for them if they do), this body of work has had that kind of impact on me and will continue to.
Homestuck post-canon was and is an attempt by some absolutely brilliant people to take the ideas Homestuck was working with and say something incredibly important with them. I'm grateful to have been given an opportunity to talk about that. I hope that story will continue to be told.
Also! While the friends I made through the fandom have been invaluable and continue to bring me great joy and I have no idea who I would be today was it not for the fandom, I want to emphasize that even if I had sat alone in my room and reblogged the occasional upd8 meme and that was IT as far as my social ties from Homestuck went? Homestuck still would have made my life richer and more interesting.
MC ESCHER x HOMESTUCK - happy 413!!! (TITLES: Weightlessness in the Canonical / Horrorterrors in Cue Ball / A Perfectly Impossible Cube / i warned you about the penrose staircase bro! i told you dog!)
Despite all the words I’ve poured out on the subject, I don’t think I ever completely cracked Hussie’s endgame.
One year out from the Epilogues, and the question of what The End of Homestuck means feels even more complicated.
Granted, there’s a lot I feel like I understand (I’m so happy to see most of the fandom be on the same page about stuff like Dave’s arc or the meaning of the Gnostic references), but Hussie’s goals for the original end of the comic remain elusive, much like the man himself. Possibly deliberately. I’m eagerly looking forward to his final batch of commentary, where, in many years, we’ll finally get his own take on the subject. Probably.
I saw someone say recently that the Epilogues improved Homestuck – that as an ending, Act 6+7 is incomplete, and relies on the Epilogues to give Homestuck a definitive final statement.
On the other hand, I’ve also heard plenty of people say that the Epilogues ruined Homestuck, altering its final meaning to something unrecognizable.
Maybe there’s a way to make sense of both of these things?
The more time goes by, and the more I read of Hussie’s own thoughts on his work, the more I become convinced that Homestuck’s central thesis is the rejection of existing narratives. Or, to put it in other words: Fuck clichés.
This takes many forms, from Dave’s “there’s a vampire in the closet oh fuck get in the minivan” riff to Hussie’s emphasis on women as active drivers of plot to Dave’s own rejection of toxic masculinity. It’s also the main plot arc of Act 6 + Act 7: we escape Lord English, controller of the total narrative.
But these inherited narratives are insidious things. It’s hard to escape their hold over our brains. We live in a society, even when we start all over and try to build a new one. We might, for instance, see someone echo the same toxic ideas about authority and power out of a feeling of necessity. So the theme of the Epilogues is Act 6+7’s theme inverted: how are we still bound by these narratives?
From Divine Comedy to Divine Tragedy, revealing and reflecting each other.
My feeling is that Hussie wanted to express both of these things as Homestuck entered its final stages. He chose to tackle one, wait a while, and then tackle the one that was far more difficult to render compellingly.
This is how I make sense of the utopian, gnostic themes of late Act 6 + 7. They present a sincere aspect of Homestuck’s message: tear off the ideological chains of your mind. Transcend to the Pleroma. Build a new world. But this Gnostic hope was always going to be followed up by a statement on the difficulty of doing just that. For the power of the Demiurge is great, and his illusions deeply rooted in your mind.
I used to get in all sorts of debates as to whether Act 6-6-5-Act 7 (Ending 1 of Homestuck, if you will) was good or bad. Maybe that’s not the right question, though? Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, or it never mattered.. I think it would be kind of impossible to tell, anyway. Because what Hussie left us with in 2016 was a thick stew of fascinating ideas to dig into and discuss and try to understand. Act 5 was a mechanical puzzle, challenging us to figure out how the world of SBURB worked; Act 6 a thematic one, challenging us to become better readers who engage with Homestuck’s metaphors and themes. Given the level on which we understand these things now, I think we resoundingly succeeded.
And when we started to ask the right questions, then—only then—were we ready for the Epilogues.
It’s true that the Epilogues have a certain feeling of primacy now. That’s inevitable, given their role of deepening the conversation and their at times shocking content. But I think it would be a mistake to read them as more important than the first ending.
Because I think Homestuck genuinely believes in the importance of that escape. The other reason for that three-year pause? Maybe it was to give us time to draw our own conclusions. Both in the sense of wrapping our minds around Hussie’s thematic puzzle, and in the sense of creating our own stories to follow the ending. Because if English’s narrative, aka Homestuck, is the thing we’re escaping from, then to follow the gnostic vision of escape is to enter the Pleroma of fan creation. The actual, canonical nature of Earth C is a multiverse of fan interpretations, reaching in every different direction, many of them offering hope, a utopian society, and/or the possibility of major growth for our characters. Those didn’t go away after the Epilogues. For my part, I read quite a few Davekat fics that still stick with me after all this time, informing how I understand the characters. Guess what? Homestuck explicitly grounds them as significant.
To put it in Rose’s terms, these timelines and stories may not be essential, but they are true and relevant.
Now, fandom is not perfect. (Understatement of the century.) Fan writers hold onto clichés and toxic narratives as much as anyone. One of the goals of the Epilogues is to offer a counterpoint to that vision as well—to show the dark side of redemption arcs, marriage proposals, and coffee shop AUs.
But at the same time, the three-year feast of storytelling made possible by the Final Pause remains an important, and explicitly heroic part of the Homestuck multiverse.
(It’s been a treat to see how the community has responded to the darker points raised by the Epilogues as well. A great example is Sarah Zedig’s Godfeels series, which returns to the idea of Earth C as a place of meaningful growth and change (for June Egbert, especially), but recognizes the difficulty of making that change when the people you know are stuck in their own ideas of what the world should be. I’m looking forward to reading more works in this vein going forward.)
All this suggests an intriguing possibility: that the dissatisfied feelings many walked away from the original ending with may have been deliberate. Not to say that there aren’t some pretty satisfying arcs in Act 6. But perhaps some were left open and ambiguous, even frustrating, on purpose: to point us in the direction of filling those gaps. Fertile, untilled ground for the fanonical imagination.
Is that good storytelling? I have no idea. What I do know is that there’s nothing else like it out there.
And honestly? I’m really glad something as weird as Homestuck exists.
