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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!)

hms-no-fun

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.

utopianparadoxist

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.

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