In that case, then, the "death as a good ending because you're no longer in HS" is essentially a big lampshade hung on the nature of fiction itself? I can't help but feel like that has to tie into something less thematically self-referential, but I admit sometimes the comic gets really into its own narrative sandbox and that goes a little over my head. Thank you for the response though, and have a good weekend!
yeah! like, i think a lot of the purpose of homestuck is just to be self-referential. and i think hussie agrees! take this formspring answer for example:
So what is the idea? I don't feel like elaborating on it THAT much now, because I would probably type forever. Basically, it's about building an extremely dense interior vocabulary to tell a story with, and continue to build and expand that vocabulary by revisiting its components often, combining them, extending them and so on. A vocabulary can be (and usually is) simple, consisting of single words, but in this case it extends to entire sentences and paragraph structures and visual forms and even entire scenes like the one linked above. Sometimes the purpose for reiteration is clear, and sometimes there really is no purpose other than to hit a familiar note, and for me that's all that needs to happen for it to be worthwhile. Triggering recognition is a powerful tool for a storyteller to use. Recognition is a powerful experience for a reader. It promotes alertness, at the very least. And in a lot of cases here, I think it promotes levity (humor! this is mostly a work of comedy, remember.) Controlling a reader's recognition faculty is one way to manipulate the reader's reactions as desired to advance the creative agenda. In this case I'm not exactly sure what that agenda is all the time, and in truth there probably isn't any serious agenda there. This story, though at times seeming diabolically put together, is still pretty light reading after all. if anything I'm just striving for a certain pitch in density with the all the multithreaded symbolism and endless internal reference. Think of it as a symphony and everything I've referred to as belonging to a vocabulary are really just notes, working together in a really complicated harmonic structure.
this is a thing stories already do, building a vocabulary out of plot beats and callbacks, characters facts and themes, i've described storytelling before as "like building a pyramid and then slowly, piece by piece, taking it apart" - it's sometimes used derogatorily, like when a callback is a little bit too obvious, to be an obvious callback in the third act (see: crazy ball in psycho goreman, the thing that sparked this line of thought originally)
but homestuck takes this idea really, really far, in that it will actively redefine what these beats mean solely for the joy of doing so, and so you can only really trust what a story beat means in the context of what it means in homestuck. i think its really cool. the only thing ive ever seen that does something similar is petscop, it's a very cool thing to do that i dont think a lot of people really catch on to, and it can create something that lasts even if people dont understand why it works the way it does
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