For panels 23, 24, and 25, we will apply the lens of feminist literary criticism. We consider the relationships between women, women’s relationships to men, as well as gender roles and how they are mixed or enforced. In these panels, John refuses to eat cake and goes to check a message from turntechGodhead.
[Image description: John Egbert sits at his desk. Behind him we see his bed atop which sits one of his birthday cakes as well as his magic chest and fake arms on the floor. To the right of his desk is the CD rack. On the desk sits his computer and an issue of Game Bro magazine. Above the computer, there is a speech bubble containing an ellipsis, indicating that John has received a message on his chat client.]
So far, we have seen that John rejects certain interests that he perceives as related to his father (birthday cakes) and prefers other interests. While we’ll revisit all of these interests heavily throughout the comic, at this stage, one might reasonably divide these interests into the feminine (i.e. baking) and the masculine (gaming, programming, action movies, and stage magic). Even the name of the magazine, “Game Bro”, reveals something of its contents, tone, and intended audience. This is not the first time that the idea of gendered activities will come up in Homestuck.
[Image description: John’s computer desktop. The icons here include a desktop computer labeled ‘System’, a worm-looking thing with a green tail and a neutral expression, labeled ‘Typheus’, and two yellow busts with one smiling and the other frowning, labeled ‘Pesterchum’. We also see several computer programs John has written in ^Cake (Caret Cake) and ~ATH (Til Death). Between names such as ‘FUCK FUCK FUCK’ and ‘AAA...AUUU...UGH’, it is obvious that John finds programming frustrating. The desktop wallpaper/background depicts a scene from Ghostbusters, maybe? Pesterchum appears on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, blinking yellow to indicate that John has been pestered.]
Despite his supposed interest in programming, we see here that John is not very good at programming- again, an interest that is implicitly coded as masculine so far (this is a complicated matter which we will be returning to periodically as we meet other programmers). His failure to write code perhaps reflects something about John’s relationship to gender and gendered assumptions he makes and applies to himself? That remains to be seen at this early stage, though. Another thing work noting here is that while the depiction of Typheus does not suggest gender, the name does: Typheus was a male monster in Greek mythology: a dragon with a hundred heads, created to defeat the gods when they tried to take over from the titans that came before them, he was the consort to Echidna, “mother of monsters”. Perhaps, then, John will be follow this male role model (unlike Dad, whom he mostly seems to disdain in the way teenagers do with their parents)?
[Image description: An animated version of the previous panel, the cursor clicks on Pesterchum, opening the client to the right of the screen. ‘Pesterchum 6.0′, ‘Chat Client’, it reads at the top. In John’s Chumroll, we see his chums: turntechGodhead, who has a smiley face to the left of their name indicating that they are online, tentacleTherapist, and gardenGnostic. Beneath that, the ‘Pester!’ button. Underneath that reads ‘MyChumHandle’ followed by a black field in which we see a smiley face to the left of John’s handle, ‘ectoBiologist’. Finally, at the bottom of the Pesterchum chat client, we see six options for ‘Mood’: ‘Chummy’, ‘Palsy’, ‘Chipper’, ‘Bully’, ‘Peppy’ (all of which have the same smiley face icon and all yellow buttons, and ‘Rancorous’, which has a red angry face and is itself a red button.]
On this panel, we see the initiation of the first interaction between the first and second character Homestuck introduced to us. Although we don’t know it yet, the first interaction between characters in Homestuck will be one between two teenage boys (as far as they know, anyway...). Why introduce us to two male characters first? Male characters are privileged narratively in most fiction, given more attention and more interiority. Homestuck is, in many ways, an exception to this, but gendered assumptions, gender roles, and sexism do pervade the work- even though, as we’ll discuss eventually, the idea that this conversation is one between two boys will eventually be complicated.
Let’s take a look at panel 22 through the lens of deconstruction. Deconstruction approaches stories by seeking contradictions within the text. What are the gaps, the ironies, the breaks, the digressions, the frame, the marginalia, and the ambiguities? Deconstruction also considers how texts relate to themselves, and how the reference other texts.
It looks for points of condensation, where the diction used brings together complicated, contradictory ideas; there is a serious interest in etymology. How might one word take on many meanings? The task of deconstructionist criticism requires close reading.
[Image description: Close up of the calendar in John’s bedroom. The window appears on the left, with the tree branches visible through it. To the right, the calendar. The top of the calendar depicts an image of the SBURB spirograph logo with a stylized green house logo at the center. The bottom of the calendar shows the ‘April’ page. ‘APRIL’ is written in all capital letters. Below the word ‘April’ you see the month itself, with individual boxes for all the days. The 10th of April has a square with an ‘x’ drawn that connects the four corners. Above the red square with an ‘x’ is the word BETA written in all caps with an exclamation point following it. On the box for the 13th of April, there is a simple smiling head drawn with two dots for eyes, a simple ‘u’ for a smile, and a cone placed on the head depicting a party hat. All of these drawings are in red marker.]
Right away, we see that the comic here includes a link to the ‘beta’ version of Homestuck; the story labels the link as the ‘SBURB beta’. Here we see a marginal text outside of Homestuck proper being used to provide meaning to it; while we often see references in Homestuck, outright links such as this are rarer. This links to the Homestuck BETA, a prior version of Homestuck that Andrew Hussie began on April 10th, 2009. The Homestuck BETA is animated to a much greater degree than Homestuck. Each panel would appear to be treated as a frame in an adventure game, thus taking more seriously the supposed frame story of homestuck. (Even in my discussion of this, you see my use of ‘frame’ for two different meanings; the deconstructionists would approve.)
Importantly, Homestuck here identifies SBURB and Homestuck as, in some sense, the same thing. The game of SBURB is the story of Homestuck, which is to say, the game is the webcomic is the game. It is all one story. This is not the first time the Homestuck characters will need to worry about being inside a game and inside a story, nor is it the last time the plot will touch on the topic.
The narration mentions that the three days since the BETA launch have become a bit of a sore subject for ‘you’; so far, the second-person pronoun ‘you’ has referred to John, who the reader is being, but it can also be read here to refer to readers who had read the Homestuck BETA when it came out and have now started reading a reboot of the story. (Additionally, it might suggest Hussie as a reader implied by the ‘you’ as well, for whom the three days since the BETA began might have become a sore subject as it become clear how difficult it would be to animate every panel of such a long webcomic.)
We should also examine the use of ‘marked’. The narrator says here of John: “You marked your birthday, the 13th of April. Another day you marked was supposed to be the arrival date for the highly touted SBURB BETA LAUNCH.” ‘Marked’ can mean to designate via some mark, as John did with his calendar, as shown on this panel, but it also might mean to notice, record, or otherwise observe rather than merely measure- to mark a day or other time period might mean to experience it.
If we look at its etymology, we find West Saxon mearcian, meaning ‘to put a mark on’ and Anglian merciga, meaning ‘to trace out boundaries’. If we consider the former, we might think about the idea that John must not only mark the calendar to indicate his birthday (and the beta’s arrival day...) but that he must put a mark on the birthday itself; John must use his birthday to make a mark on the world, and indeed, he will. Additionally, John will trace out the boundaries of his birthday- he has a very long day ahead of him, and understanding the exact timeline of it will challenge even him, and once it ends...well, the boundaries of this 04/13 matter quite a lot for John, Homestuck, and the reader.
Today, we’ll be using the lens of ecocriticism to look at panels 18, 19, 20, and 21. Ecocriticism considers nature, the way people interact with it, the setting, the use of animals, and the specter of environmental disaster. To begin, let’s start by considering the setting and the role of nature in it.
Here, eighteen panels in, it’s becoming clear why this story is called ‘Homestuck’. John Egbert has yet to leave his home. In fact, he has yet to leave his room or consider leaving his room. Why is the setting of this webcomic this young man’s house? Part of that is simply that it is easier to draw this single room, of course, but as the story continues, this setting will figure into the story’s larger themes. For now, it serves to keep things simple, and silly, and to prevent the audience from questioning their expectations- of course this sprite comic will take place entirely within this room. That’s not unexpected or unusual- it’s downright pedestrian.
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom. To his right, we see the bed with the ghost bedsheet and the cake sat atop it. Behind him, we see the window. To his left, we see the magic chest, the calendar above it, and the fake arms in front of it. In front of John, we see his desk with computer and SBURB beta sitting on it. In the top left of the screen, we watch as the animated cursor clicks on the ‘hammer/nails’ catchalogue card, bringing it to the bottom left of the screen, and then watch as the cursor clicks on the ‘poster’ card underneath it, bringing it out to sit to the right of the ‘hammer/nails’ card.]
In fact, it’s only on the next panel that the setting slightly shifts in an important way: the window leaves our field of vision. As John applies the hammer and nails to the rolled-up poster to hang it on the wall, the story leaves behind that barest glimpse of the outdoors in favor of examining John’s posters. Movies depict an outside world, but they can be viewed while inside, far from nature. Posters, still depictions of these movies, are even further removed from nature. This added level of abstraction only further cuts John off from the reality outside of his room.
[Image description: John stands in his room. The blinking green outline on the wall and the cursor indicate where John will place the poster, overlapping with the Problem Sleuth poster slightly. At the bottom left of the screen, we see the pink hammer/nails and the rolled-up poster cards which blink the same shade of green as the blinking outline on the wall. Behind John, who is facing the screen, we see John’s door with the SBURB poster, his bed with the ghost bedsheet and cake, and the Con Air poster behind his bed.]
(I’m skipping over the Con Air panel here just because I couldn’t think of anything deep to say here relating to ecocriticism about a movie I’ve never seen, but you’re free to reblog this with some analysis if you have any.)
Thing theory, with which we’ll approach panels 15 through 17, concerns how people interact with objects. We will focus on how objects assert themselves as things: in the exceptions, by failing to work as expected, or by indicating something about their history and origin. Here, we see the nails, the sylladex, the fake arms, and the desk come to our notice.
For now, the failure of the nails, sylladex, and fake arms are the same: when placing the nails in the sylladex, the sylladex empties out the fake arms. There is a connection here, drawn between the cause (placing nails in the sylladex) and the effect (the sylladex ejecting the fake arms): circumstantial simultaneity, if you will. It is the sylladex shenanigans contained within Act 1 that define the system for the reader; it’s a satirical approach to the byzantine inventory management systems of some games, as well as to the unnecessarily confusing data structures of computer programming. At the same time, it suggests that John lives in a world of confusing systems he only really pretends to understand, and which reveal themselves to be unreliable when he tries to use them in intuitive ways. Whatever use John might expect to get out of the nails or the fake arms, he’s certainly not getting that use now; instead, he finds himself throwing up his arms in frustration.
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom with a frustrated look on his face- eyes closed, anime lines of frustration on his forehead. The captchalogue deck appears on the bottom of the screen; the hammer card is shown on top, but as the nail card is added, the fake arms spin out from the deck onto the floor. They land in front of the magic chest. John’s bed, with cake still atop it, sits in the background, as does the window, poster, and calendar.]
The desk, meanwhile, is an exception here. We see John motivated to use the desk- just not for its intended purpose. There will be more cases when John rejects the narrator’s commands. There was even one earlier where John rejected the suggested name, though that one was more ambiguous. Regardless, this marks a turning point. We see John struggle with the proper use of these things, and even with his own thoughts.
[Image description: A close-up of John’s head as he has his frustrated expression on- eyes closed, frustrated crease on his forehead- and his hands clutching the sides of his head. The animated image changes to show john staring out of the corner of his eyes at the desk, which has just appeared on the scene, sliding in from the right side of the screen.]
Finally, we watch as John combines the ‘hammer’ card and the ‘nails’ card into a ‘hammer/nails’ card; here, we the reader is alienated from the hammer and nails as things, as we see Homestuck applying video game logic to the use of these items. The objects have been de-familiarized to us, while John sees all this as normal. It’s not the only thing in his environment John sees as normal, that others might not. Again, the theme of alienation for John. We’ll revisit this one more quite a bit.
The critical lens we’ll be applying to panel 14 is the Marxist one. Marxist literary criticism approaches literature as though it is nothing but a commodity. Art is part of the societal superstructure- something which arises from the material base of society, both in its form (because art requires materials to make) and in its function (because authors and readers alike are influenced by their material conditions). Its concern is with the work as a commodity, as a product of class, and it looks for evidence of the superstructure within the text.
[Image description: John stands by his bedroom window with a neutral expression. The bed with the ghost bedsheet appears in the top left corner of the image, with a cake ARTIFACT atop it. The window in the center right shows a tree with some leaves on it. In the top right we see the wall calendar, below which sits John’s magic chest. To the left of the chest, on the floor, we see nails. In the bottom of the image we see part of John’s computer and chair while the rest of the desk is covered by the captchalogue deck, showing John’s cards: the newly acquired hammer, the rolled-up poster, the smoke pellets, and the fake arms. The hammer card appears in the top left of the image, superimposed on the three other cards which are themselves superimposed on the bed.]
On this panel, we see John acquire some tools. However, rather like the previous objects John has captchalogued, we have not seem these items in use. What we do see in use is John’s sylladex, which has so far been reliably storing John’s objects- except that John can no longer access previous items, once he has acquired new ones. Like any consumer, John can continue to acquire more and more things, but he finds that his ability to make good use of the previous ones shrinks as he gains more.
This panel is the final one where we, the reader, can maintain the illusion that John’s sylladex is something which works in his favor. The narration has already hinted that John’s fetch modus may become a source of frustration, especially because he does not understand it. If we look at this through the lens of class and material, perhaps something can be said here about divorcing the consumer from the products of their labor- most eaters don’t know how their food is made, most clothes-wearers don’t know how their clothes are made...and so on. John’s understanding of data structures is too limited to make or improve upon his fetch modus, so he is left to struggle against it. This is not the first time the comic will posit that John is disconnected from things- from family, from masculinity, from suburbia, from reality- in ways that leave him frustrated and unhappy.
The structuralist lens breaks down a story into its component parts: the signifiers, which are the surface-level pieces of the text, and the signified, the concepts symbolized and represented by them. It highlights the inherent arbitrariness with which the signifiers connect to the signified, the rules with which the signs (the combination of signifier and signified) are organized, and the binary oppositions which often exist between the signs (and the contradictions, combinations, and resolutions that exist at the fringes of these binaries).
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom with a neutral expression. We see the dresser with its three drawers, with the cake and Dad’s note atop it. We see the Problem Sleuth poster above the dresser. John’s bedroom door, to the right, with the SBURB poster on it. To the right of the door, John’s bed, with a poster hanging on the wall above it. We see the CD rack at John’s feet. The captalogue card containing the rolled-up poster appears in the top left, on top of the two previous cards (whose contents are not visible). The captchalogue deck appears at the bottom of the screen.]
Here, we see that this poster (perhaps like the cakes?) is a BIRTHDAY ARTIFACT. The term ‘BIRTHDAY ARTIFACT’, which has not appeared before and (IIRC) does not appear again, is somewhat arbitrary. Many words could have replaced ‘artifact’. It is the proximity to ‘birthday’ that gives it meaning; this item is important because of why and when John has received it. He has not yet seen the poster, but its importance is guaranteed by the context within which it was received. Like Schrödinger’s proposed cat, the poster could be of interest to John, or it might not be, which he won’t know until he unrolls it.
This is itself suggestive of a binary opposition in Homestuck: BIRTHDAY ARTIFACTS, objects which are important because they are inherited from guardians or ancestors, and INTERESTS, things that characters care about because of something specific to their personalities or natures as individuals. John doesn’t know if he likes this poster, and he doesn’t enjoy the cakes. It’s worth keeping an eye out on which things are of interest to John, and which are instead artifacts which he has inherited.
The third literary critical lens we’ll be applying here is the historicist lens. In this lens, I’m including later strains of literary theory like New Historicism as well. I think they all aim towards the same thing- an understanding of the text’s place within a contemporary milieu, as a product of historical patterns and trends. There are many contemporary influences on Homestuck that are clear at this stage, but I’ll just briefly go over four of them.
Firstly, RPGs. In this series of panels, we see more of the captchalogue/sylladex system, something which until now could have been read as an odd one-off joke; it’s on the following panels that sylladex antics establish themselves as an essential part of the early acts (especially act 1). This is clearly an inventory system, one that John is forced to use rather than interacting with objects directly- this (along with the existence of the cursor) is an outlier in early Homestuck- later acts will mostly (seem to) dispense with acknowledging that the characters exist within a game of which we are the player, although it does come up in very important ways time and again. Suffice it to say, though, that RPGs are a significant historical influence on Homestuck. Getting used to the ‘vernacular’ is something one might need to do when playing a new game.
[Image description: An animated gif of John standing in his bedroom as he captchalogues smoke pellets. The smoke pellets captchalogue card appears on top of the fake arms captchalogue card, and John’s captchalogue deck appears at the bottom of the screen, showing the smoke pellet card appear to the left of the fake arms card, pushing it to the right. In the room we can see John’s bed with its ghost bedsheet and the cake atop it as well as his magic chest and window behind him. Through the window, we can see a tree- a recurring symbol for John. In front of him we see his desk with the computer and the SBURB beta. Behind him on the wall we also see part of a poster and a calendar.]
Secondly, we have our first mention of computer programming concepts. Hussie. The fetch modus used by characters to store items in their sylladex is explicitly stated to be connected to data structures- even the name, ‘Fetch Modus’, is itself suggestive of this. We’ll see programming come up many, many times in this webcomic- even concepts like ‘grist’ which have well-known non-programming meanings turn out to be connected to programming. It’s always worth keeping an eye on computers, in Homestuck, because Hussie applies their knowledge of computer programming (especially as it existed in the late 90s and early 00s) to many parts of Homestuck’s narrative.
[Image description: Same as the previous panel with John standing in his room, but now his eyes are shut in thin lines and there are the lines on his forehead commonly used in animation along with closed eyes to indicate frustration. The smoke pellet card vanishes and we see a flashing red ‘x’ appear on the fake arms card, indicating that they cannot be accessed due to John’s choice of data structure in his fetch modus.]
The third major historical influence depicted in these panels is Problem Sleuth. Before Homestuck, Hussie had published three other webcomics. Two of them, Bard Quest and Jailbreak, receive quite a few mentions and references throughout Homestuck, but Problem Sleuth, as the only completed, the longest, and the most successful of Hussie’s previous comics, is the one that deserves the most acknowledgment. Problem Sleuth, like Homestuck, quickly escalates from a seemingly boilerplate noir detective story to a fantastical, metaphysically more complex narrative which ends in godlike shenanigans. It is also important to understand that Homestuck’s ultimate fandom would end up skewing younger, queerer, and liberal than Problem Sleuth’s audience- among other important differences, given just how formative Problem Sleuth is to Homestuck’s DNA.
[Image description: A close-up of the Problem Sleuth poster on John’s wall. It depicts a character we cannot quite make out (and if we have not read Problem Sleuth, will certainly not recognize) sitting at a desk smoking a pipe and wearing a classic noir hat. The poster is situated above the cake on John’s dresser and to the left of John’s door, on which we can see part of the SBURB poster.]
Finally: Hussie was writing Homestuck in 2009. It was not their first sprite comic (it was their fourth). Sprite comics (as more extensively detailed here, it’s quite an excellent overview of what sprite comics were and why they’re important to understanding Homestuck) depicted an abstracted, simplified character design (in part due to the lack of art skill from their authors) in order to skip to the writing. A major advantage in Homestuck is that, despite the amount of work it took to make, it did not first require that Hussie spend years improving their artistic ability in order to convey character rather quickly and effectively- note how John’s glasses, buck teeth, and outfit conjure up a specific image (one different for every reader, perhaps, but a rather distinct image from the ones conjured by other characters). Hussie was not righting these comics in a vacuum, but in fact was inspired by and responding to a larger genre.
Understanding the influence of RPGs, computer programming, Problem Sleuth, and sprite comics on Homestuck is part of approaching this work through a historical lens. Homestuck did not come from nowhere- it was the culmination of Hussie’s education, his previous artistic work, his other hobbies, and the other creators and creators’ work that he had interacted with in the communities where he began producing such work.
The point of this analytical exercise is to apply different critical lenses to my re-read of Homestuck. The first post introduced this project using what is, in some ways, the most tepid, gentle kinds of literary analysis: reader-response criticism. It applies the lens of “how do I feel, what do I think”. This next lens, Psychoanalytic Criticism, applies mostly outdated theories of how human psychology works! Still, if anything will reward looking for the hidden symbols...that hold all the meaning...it’s Homestuck.
Here, not for the first time in these early pages, we see the role of the id, the ego, and the superego. We, the intrusive command prompt running in John’s head, are the id. We tell John and his friends to squawk like an imbecile, bleat like a goat, etc. and they must choose to listen or not to listen. On this page, John, the ego, negotiates between the ceaseless demands of the id (the audience), the superego (the narration), and reality (the Earth on which he lives which contains things like closed magic chests containing arms). The theme of the audience commands and narration being similar to intrusive thoughts will come up again and be revisited in more than one form, via the Exiles and Doc Scratch.
Let’s momentarily touch on Freud’s notion of the anal fixation. When children fail certain tests of maturation, (Freud believed, erroneously) that they retain certain maladaptive personality traits as a result. For example, some people whose parents are overly harsh/demanding during potty training may develop an anal-retentive (obsessed with order, neurotic, respectful of authority) personality. By contrast, parents who are overly permissive/lenient may raise a child who struggles to consider the feelings and internal realities of others, inclined to give away or share things, disorganized, messy, and rebellious- an anal-explusive ‘pooplord’ who gives all of his friends gifts, scrawls strange drawings all over his walls, and strifes with his father over cake, perhaps. John’s ‘hilarious antics’ in his room do end up lots of arms in cakes and exploding smoke pellets. The question of how grown-up John is will be revisited frequently in this story, since it is a story about teenagers.
Here, the narration (John’s superego) might seem to be concerned with our/his moral development: we’re protecting John, but are we teaching him how to live in the world independently? We’re coddling him. But why does that matter? If this is the voice of John’s father (an authority figure) telling him how to behave respectably, perhaps it’s a voice suggesting that John should be embarrassed that he needs us- and we will, soon enough, vanish from the story altogether, as though were were merely a part of the prologue, or demo version of the game. Perhaps the narration (superego) is trying to protect John (ego) from the commands (id), despite knowing that the commands (id) have more power over reality (reality). (As we will learn later, this narration may be connected to any number of specific, canonical observers of John...or it may not. Hard to say just yet, in this re-read.)
Finally, I think it’s worthwhile to take a detour to discuss archetypes. Here we learn that John is neither a SKILLED MAGICIAN nor a CUNNING PRANKSTER...yet. Both of those are things he’ll be by the end of the story. In Carl Jung’s original examples of archetypes that are present in the collective unconscious, the magician and the prankster seem to fit perfectly. The wise old man (in Jung’s conception) is an experienced, knowledgeable wizard, a powerful male authority figure, or a doddering old fool. It is a man in good standing whose experience and wisdom set him apart, or whose age & experience have left him unable to participate in society- both things that we will eventually see happen to John. Meanwhile, the trickster defies the normal social order using special knowledge or clever tricks to upend the status quo- something that numerous character in Homestuck do, but which John does especially well in one notable instance. We’ll be keeping an eye on our Hero of Breath as he tries to pluck these archetypes from the collective unconscious.
I can’t remember when I started reading Homestuck. This is as much about the vagaries of memory as it is about Homestuck’s influence on my life- and the way in which I first was introduced to it.
For months, I’d been fascinated by TVTropes. The website had a tone that appealed that version of me- my pastself, if you will- and so I ended up reading a lot of articles there which led me to discover a lot of new media. Homestuck was probably the most significant.
When I first came across the page for Homestuck, there were mentions of Problem Sleuth, of how Homestuck was fourth in a line of comics, of how similar and yet different it was from Homestar Runner...my memory of this page might not even fully reflect any point in its history. Certainly, the current page doesn’t resemble this half-reconstructed fever dream.
John Egbert, as a protagonist, is defined by his sense of alienation. Of the four major characters of early Homestuck, John is the one with the least external conflicts. His issues with his father pale in comparison to other familial strife faced by the “beta” kids. He lives an ordinary life in the suburbs. He could be anyone- an Everyman.
Yet John is homestuck. He is alone, isolated, and apparently with the exception of his three online friends, lonely. The comic never harps on this point, but it’s clear that something about John’s mundane, stable existence disconcerts him- something which I very much related to.
My early experience of Homestuck was being prepared for a story about an apocalypse, and being in the kind of headspace where it seemed like a good analogy for just how difficult and alienating I was finding college.
As I embark on this Homestuck re-read, each post (covering some unspecified number of panels) will approach Homestuck using a different literary theory. They will not be unique (I’ll likely start to alternate through some well-known critical lenses soon enough) but they will be part of my attempt to think about Homestuck in new ways. For this first one, we’re talking about reader-response criticism, which means we’re talking about how I experienced Homestuck’s first few pages.
The thing is, at this point in the comic, readers were truly submitting commands. The names of the first four protagonists of the comic were selected based on reader submissions, as were the initial commands given to the kids- for at least three acts, if I remember correctly.
I didn’t know this at the time- I thought the commands were indicative of Hussie’s humor, which disagreed with me. They are, of course, as Hussie did choose them- but they are an expression of a larger context. There were other, similar comics based on reader-submitted commands; these were called quests. So what happens when divorced from their original context? What happens when you read Homestuck, as I did, without knowing anything about Hussie’s previous (and frankly horrifying, painful) work?
You respond to John’s interests as though experiencing a kind of characterization you’ve never seen before. John resembles a real person, because of his INTERESTS which are CAPITALIZED so that you know that this is a FUN STORY and JUST A GAME and not a DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT PIECE OF MEDIA THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER.
As someone who had never really played the sorts of games or been exposed to the programming concepts or really even the Internet meme culture being referenced in this comic, my experience of Homestuck was meeting a group of characters who resembled real people, but were wildly different in new and interesting ways. The narration felt funny in a self-aware way, which appealed to my lingering adolescence. John’s antics are charmingly unrelatable while still being relatable, and the general- air of incompetence produced by the reader-submitted commands just made it cathartic to read. So I kept playing- and now I’m here, revisiting. Let’s begin.
