I watched jan misali’s video about Homestuck a few times, and it’s got me thinking.
I’ve often seen people talk about negative examples of the ways fandoms tend to treat characters differently from canon. The common examples being “why has this random [probably white] [probably male] character with two lines become the fandom darling????” to “this character mentioned french fries once. she has non-potato based examples of her personality!” But people don’t often talk about positive examples?
For context: I only ever got up to the beginning of act 6 of homestuck. I never actually got up to the bit with Mituna in it. My first introduction to him was fandom.
Now, it’s totally possible that the section of fandom I ran into was unusual in it’s level of, uh, good Mituna characterisation/opinions? But he was treated as an actual character, and not a joke. A lot of the time, there was an exploration of how having a TBI sucked, but it was usually [wiggle hands] from the inside view? It was “it must suck for people who have a TBI, how pitiably inspirational,” it was “habing a TBI is, personally, sO INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING.”
So, I don’t know why I was surprised when I found out how Hussie wrote him in canon, but, uh, I was? I had gotten used to the fandom interpretation, and gone “presumably people have fleshed him out a bit more than he was in canon, but he surely wasn’t purely a joke.”
Anyway: even if fandoms some time take really weird interpretations of characters, at least sometimes they take offensive joke characters and turn them into sympathetic characters with personalities and motivations.















