Hey Look At This Comic: Homestuck Beyond Canon (Again)
you know that first time in The People's Joker where she's doing her "worst thing that ever happened to you" stand up gimmick, just having Poison Ivy recite their tragic backstory while Joker stands there getting blitzed out of her mind on drugs and laughing hysterically?
I felt that, lol.
Homestuck has this... tone that's always appealed to me, one that's sort of in that wheelhouse. So much of the humor in Homestuck is deeply goofy, while gradually drifting, like an unmoored boat, towards a waterfall with a bunch of sharp rocks at the bottom. that's, to an extent, just dark internet humor. I've been around the block, I grew up with Perry Bible Fellowship; Andrew's penchant for shock jokes wasn't new to me at the point where I hopped on the Homestuck ocean liner (they called it unsinkable!). but often its jokes structurally involve a kind of escalation from funny, to fucked up, and back to absurdity again, and that has both always been my sense of humor, and certainly my experience of personal catastrophe. and what makes Homestuck often so resonant is the way past that point of absurdity it finds a personal or thematic resonance.
I mentioned, in my last post like this, that for a while Beyond Canon felt unwilling to push the audience outside its comfort zone, and could come across as outright fawningly apologetic for stuff that, not to put too fine a point on it, I watched my friends put their hearts into before HS2's cancellation. I also mentioned in that post, though, that one moment a few updates ago made me sit up, stop skimming, and pay attention. this joke, specifically (cw for pet death and also pet suicide I guess?):
this is pretty weird and morbid! what a fucked up little story! I love the structure of this joke. In a few lines we get this progression from a genuine exploration of Jade's traumatic experiences trying to live like a normal person on Earth C, which cascades into this weird, pretty upsetting anecdote. then it escalates further into the farcical image of the suicidal hamster. it's a propulsive joke, a vehicle with no one at the wheel, and structurally Rose and Kanaya's interjections underscore both this energy, and the true to life sense of a conversation-turned-frantic trauma dump. I've certainly both endured and inflicted a few of those in my life! and, of course, Kanaya's frustration acts as a second punchline to the scene, reminding us that the whole reason this argument is happening is cause Kanaya's mad that Jade fucked Rose behind her back. it's like if the Spongebob glass bones and paper skin gag was contextualized by cuckoldry.
that's enough to justify the joke, and it was enough to keep me actually reading rather than skimming like I had with earlier upd8s. it's a well formed gag that has sharp, uncomfortable edges while remaining, at least to me, very funny. that's Homestuck, or at least baseline writing sizzle Homestuck.
what pushed it over into more interesting territory for me, though, was the pages that followed, which delve deeper into Jade's choice to keep her and Rose's child "Yiffy Longstocking Lalonde-Harley" (pfftttthahahha) a secret. I love the art above of Jade passing Yiffy out through a window, menaced by shadowy claws all around. it's a fittingly fairytale image for the Witch of Space--a reminder of the weird multiple registers of this story about stunted adults who also happen to be universe-spawning gods. it also demands a serious reread of other elements of the chapter. Homestuck likes to operate on registers at once absurd and resonant, after all. like, Jade's comment about not wanting people to "bark at [Yiffy] while walking down the street", in the context of defending her action of impregnating another woman's wife, could be understood as her talking about specifically transphobic street harassment. it's just filtered through the Homestuckian absurd situation of Jade being a magical dog girl.
in that context, why have a whole riff about a suicidally lonely hamster? well, surely if there's a metaphorical pet dying of loneliness in the Homestuck Epilogues in particular, it's none other than Jade Harley. isolation is core to her narrative: one of the current demiurges of the metanarrative informs her that as a Space player lonely power is her destiny! of course this bizarre, disturbing, and unhinged anecdote would resonate with her to the point of becoming fixation. like, it's barely subtext right? not dying of loneliness is her stated reason for wanting to have a daughter. not wanting her daughter to suffer her same lifelong social isolation is her stated reason for keeping that daughter secret, even if it meant making a deal with a sugary devil.
it's that level of deeper resonance that makes the joke so characteristically Homestuckian, or Hussnasty if you will. I'm glad I jumped back on when I did. the writing feels more and more confident these days. which is great, because beyond this kind of sharp, multi-layered character driven humor, Homestuck's style is most defined by being unapologetically itself.
this review originally ran on Cohost May 23, 2024. you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon.
