==> HS: Examine Narrative
Homestuck's story seems simple enough. Hussie describes it as "a tale about a boy and his friends and a game they play together," and this is not at all off the mark. The first official page of Act 1 was posted on the 13th of April, 2009, and as of March 2013 it has reached Act 6 of the total 7 planned Acts. Each Act, like that of a play, contains rising and falling action, script-like text, and intermissions. Much more prominent than this resemblance to theatre, though, is Homestuck's both visual and narrative similarity to video games. The narration, written in second person, mimics text-based adventure and role-playing games. The site's interface even contains hyperlinks that allow you to "save" and "load" your game, i.e. mark your place in the story and return to it at the click of a mouse. The characters themselves are presented as somewhat cartoonish and vague avatars that lack a strictly defined appearance, allowing readers to impose their own interpretation of each kid's physical traits upon their understanding of the story. Likewise, their skin has been left blankly white and their races have never been purposefully defined. On his tumblr, Hussie states that "they are canonically a-racial, and elude concrete bodily proportions through diversity of stylistic representation. You decide what they are! The thing you decide is right." It is the readers, here, who are given power to decide 'who' these characters are, what they look like, and where, to an extent, they come from. Though their personalities are well-defined within the comic, everything else is considered by its author to be under the jurisdiction of the fans to decide. There is no single correct interpretation, and this purposeful lack allows for fans to interact more actively with the story and its characters. It is in the empty places in a narrative where avid fans begin to build a fandom, out of a desire to forge a greater understanding of the fictional world they love. This can be seen in other fandoms such as that of Harry Potter, where absences in the canonical text have inspired fans to construct their own ideas of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff House, of the escapades of the Mauraders and the childhood years of Hogwarts' professors. In Homestuck, however, Hussie has deliberately constructed this lack of information in a way that is both simple and highly significant. The postpostmodern character exists for a reader to interpret as much as for the story's own purposes. Making key characters appear undefined forces an immediately in-depth response from any individual who engages with the text, as they place their own assumptions onto the blank avatars supplied by the comic. Homestuck was always designed to be directed in part by its fans as well as its author.
The story begins with a 13 year old boy named John Egbert, who has just received a new video game, SBURB, in the mail. He is excited to play this game with his online friends, Jade Harley, Rose Lalonde, and Dave Strider. The four have never met face to face, and communicate over what seems to be a vast geographical distance via the internet using a chat client referred to as Pesterchum. This chat client has been brought into the real world by fans, and is now used by tens of thousands of Homestuck readers. Each of the beta kids, thusly named due to their playing the beta version of SBURB, is affiliated with a parental figure whose presence in their lives may range from hands-on to aloof and mysterious. In a later Act it is revealed that their guardians are in fact both their ancestors and descendants, due to the intricate machinations of paradox space within their game session. Homestuck's representation of the self and individual identity is highly fluid. In later acts of the story each of the kids is discovered to be the "ectobiological" sibling of another, and their guardians' identities are likewise constructed and imbued with duality. In the alpha session of SBURB, first depicted in Act 6, readers are introduced to the alpha-incarnations of these guardians, who become dynamic characters in their own right and are shown to be distinct from, yet still similar to, their original forms. The troll characters, introduced in Act 5, experience a similar distinction with their ancestors. At Act 5's onset these ancestors are seen as figures of mythology and fantasy, but in Act 6 they are given a new form as the "pre-scratch" trolls, again both like and unlike the "post-scratch" trolls' version of their own ancestors. The distinction between post- and pre-scratch selves works in essentially the same way for both the human and troll characters. For example, Rose makes reference to her mother, Mom Lalonde, who appears officially in the story shortly after kids' entrance into the medium. In Act 6, Mom Lalonde is reborn as Roxy Lalonde, who due to certain paradoxes in time and space is both Rose's mother and her daughter.
To complicate the idea of selfhood further, within the paradox space of the medium exist many timelines, some of which have been doomed by a violation of the rules of timetravel or a failure of a character to act as they are supposed to. In all of the kids' and trolls' sessions there are presumably many doomed versions of each character to accompany the one successful character around which their plot within Homestuck is centered. Dream selves, another version of each character which exist on serparate planets and awaken when the 'real' characters are asleep (pictured in the gifs above), likewise complicate an unambiguous understanding of the individual self.
The layers of this aspect of the story are complex, but the outcome is simple: you are you, but you are not the only you.
The first four Acts of Homestuck centre primarily around the four kids, detailing their entrance into the game, their ascension through the first gate of each of the Lands in which they are playing, and the myriad conflicts which arise throughout, not the least of which being the destruction of Earth which comes about through meteor shower just as they enter into their session. These four acts encompass roughly 3000 pages, a sizeable number by any standards. While bite-sized information is often considered to be a hallmark of the digital age, sprawling stories like Homestuck have found their audience as well. In his book Digimodernism, Alan Kirby address the subject of these "endless narratives," saying "such extendedness in turn suggests endlessness as its narrative structuring principle, and makes its implied reader/viewer the fan-geek, who has the time and inclination to learn the infinite details of this active universe." (Kirby 161) This assertion certainly seems to ring true with Homestuck's fans, who, as stated above, engage with the narrative and its universe on an attentive and oftentimes devoted level. Homestuck's extended page count is not incidental, and as it works to facilitate the vastness of the storyline it is supported by the prevalence of the "fan-geek" in online communities, who does not balk at the time required to interact with the text in full but instead values the potential to become fully immersed in its "active universe." Kirby goes on to contrast postpostmodernist endlessness with its predecessors, drawing a distinction between it earlier methods. "Digimodernist endlessness derives its possible existence from old forerunners, but its shape and detail emerge from the social, cultural, and technological specificity of the electronic-digital world. It’s distinctly new," (163) Endlessness in the postpostmodern era is made possible by what Kirby refers to as "opening and closing" of stories, with the creation of cyclical "escape-capture-escape-capture" plots that keep readers and viewers interested and allow anyone to access the story at any point and be entertained without the necessity of having experienced anything before or after that point. This lack of plot continuity is not so pronounced in Homestuck, whose story does not start and stop as sharply as he describes, but the relative endlessness of its narrative is undeniable. Homestuck takes the size of the endless narrative and uses it to tell one complete story that remains exciting despite without needing to rely on defined and disconnected mirco-stories to give it its bulk. As well, its treatment of linearity in its storylines is anything but traditional. Characters travel backwards and forwards through time, exist simultaneously on multiple planets and within memories, and engage in opening and closing conflicts on a level which, while not as lacking in plot as Kirby describes, still allows for constant action and engaging narrative.
==> What is this? Some kind of Ulysses?
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