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.
