Thing theory, with which we’ll approach panels 15 through 17, concerns how people interact with objects. We will focus on how objects assert themselves as things: in the exceptions, by failing to work as expected, or by indicating something about their history and origin. Here, we see the nails, the sylladex, the fake arms, and the desk come to our notice.
For now, the failure of the nails, sylladex, and fake arms are the same: when placing the nails in the sylladex, the sylladex empties out the fake arms. There is a connection here, drawn between the cause (placing nails in the sylladex) and the effect (the sylladex ejecting the fake arms): circumstantial simultaneity, if you will. It is the sylladex shenanigans contained within Act 1 that define the system for the reader; it’s a satirical approach to the byzantine inventory management systems of some games, as well as to the unnecessarily confusing data structures of computer programming. At the same time, it suggests that John lives in a world of confusing systems he only really pretends to understand, and which reveal themselves to be unreliable when he tries to use them in intuitive ways. Whatever use John might expect to get out of the nails or the fake arms, he’s certainly not getting that use now; instead, he finds himself throwing up his arms in frustration.
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom with a frustrated look on his face- eyes closed, anime lines of frustration on his forehead. The captchalogue deck appears on the bottom of the screen; the hammer card is shown on top, but as the nail card is added, the fake arms spin out from the deck onto the floor. They land in front of the magic chest. John’s bed, with cake still atop it, sits in the background, as does the window, poster, and calendar.]
The desk, meanwhile, is an exception here. We see John motivated to use the desk- just not for its intended purpose. There will be more cases when John rejects the narrator’s commands. There was even one earlier where John rejected the suggested name, though that one was more ambiguous. Regardless, this marks a turning point. We see John struggle with the proper use of these things, and even with his own thoughts.
[Image description: A close-up of John’s head as he has his frustrated expression on- eyes closed, frustrated crease on his forehead- and his hands clutching the sides of his head. The animated image changes to show john staring out of the corner of his eyes at the desk, which has just appeared on the scene, sliding in from the right side of the screen.]
Finally, we watch as John combines the ‘hammer’ card and the ‘nails’ card into a ‘hammer/nails’ card; here, we the reader is alienated from the hammer and nails as things, as we see Homestuck applying video game logic to the use of these items. The objects have been de-familiarized to us, while John sees all this as normal. It’s not the only thing in his environment John sees as normal, that others might not. Again, the theme of alienation for John. We’ll revisit this one more quite a bit.
The structuralist lens breaks down a story into its component parts: the signifiers, which are the surface-level pieces of the text, and the signified, the concepts symbolized and represented by them. It highlights the inherent arbitrariness with which the signifiers connect to the signified, the rules with which the signs (the combination of signifier and signified) are organized, and the binary oppositions which often exist between the signs (and the contradictions, combinations, and resolutions that exist at the fringes of these binaries).
[Image description: John stands in his bedroom with a neutral expression. We see the dresser with its three drawers, with the cake and Dad’s note atop it. We see the Problem Sleuth poster above the dresser. John’s bedroom door, to the right, with the SBURB poster on it. To the right of the door, John’s bed, with a poster hanging on the wall above it. We see the CD rack at John’s feet. The captalogue card containing the rolled-up poster appears in the top left, on top of the two previous cards (whose contents are not visible). The captchalogue deck appears at the bottom of the screen.]
Here, we see that this poster (perhaps like the cakes?) is a BIRTHDAY ARTIFACT. The term ‘BIRTHDAY ARTIFACT’, which has not appeared before and (IIRC) does not appear again, is somewhat arbitrary. Many words could have replaced ‘artifact’. It is the proximity to ‘birthday’ that gives it meaning; this item is important because of why and when John has received it. He has not yet seen the poster, but its importance is guaranteed by the context within which it was received. Like Schrödinger’s proposed cat, the poster could be of interest to John, or it might not be, which he won’t know until he unrolls it.
This is itself suggestive of a binary opposition in Homestuck: BIRTHDAY ARTIFACTS, objects which are important because they are inherited from guardians or ancestors, and INTERESTS, things that characters care about because of something specific to their personalities or natures as individuals. John doesn’t know if he likes this poster, and he doesn’t enjoy the cakes. It’s worth keeping an eye out on which things are of interest to John, and which are instead artifacts which he has inherited.
The third literary critical lens we’ll be applying here is the historicist lens. In this lens, I’m including later strains of literary theory like New Historicism as well. I think they all aim towards the same thing- an understanding of the text’s place within a contemporary milieu, as a product of historical patterns and trends. There are many contemporary influences on Homestuck that are clear at this stage, but I’ll just briefly go over four of them.
Firstly, RPGs. In this series of panels, we see more of the captchalogue/sylladex system, something which until now could have been read as an odd one-off joke; it’s on the following panels that sylladex antics establish themselves as an essential part of the early acts (especially act 1). This is clearly an inventory system, one that John is forced to use rather than interacting with objects directly- this (along with the existence of the cursor) is an outlier in early Homestuck- later acts will mostly (seem to) dispense with acknowledging that the characters exist within a game of which we are the player, although it does come up in very important ways time and again. Suffice it to say, though, that RPGs are a significant historical influence on Homestuck. Getting used to the ‘vernacular’ is something one might need to do when playing a new game.
[Image description: An animated gif of John standing in his bedroom as he captchalogues smoke pellets. The smoke pellets captchalogue card appears on top of the fake arms captchalogue card, and John’s captchalogue deck appears at the bottom of the screen, showing the smoke pellet card appear to the left of the fake arms card, pushing it to the right. In the room we can see John’s bed with its ghost bedsheet and the cake atop it as well as his magic chest and window behind him. Through the window, we can see a tree- a recurring symbol for John. In front of him we see his desk with the computer and the SBURB beta. Behind him on the wall we also see part of a poster and a calendar.]
Secondly, we have our first mention of computer programming concepts. Hussie. The fetch modus used by characters to store items in their sylladex is explicitly stated to be connected to data structures- even the name, ‘Fetch Modus’, is itself suggestive of this. We’ll see programming come up many, many times in this webcomic- even concepts like ‘grist’ which have well-known non-programming meanings turn out to be connected to programming. It’s always worth keeping an eye on computers, in Homestuck, because Hussie applies their knowledge of computer programming (especially as it existed in the late 90s and early 00s) to many parts of Homestuck’s narrative.
[Image description: Same as the previous panel with John standing in his room, but now his eyes are shut in thin lines and there are the lines on his forehead commonly used in animation along with closed eyes to indicate frustration. The smoke pellet card vanishes and we see a flashing red ‘x’ appear on the fake arms card, indicating that they cannot be accessed due to John’s choice of data structure in his fetch modus.]
The third major historical influence depicted in these panels is Problem Sleuth. Before Homestuck, Hussie had published three other webcomics. Two of them, Bard Quest and Jailbreak, receive quite a few mentions and references throughout Homestuck, but Problem Sleuth, as the only completed, the longest, and the most successful of Hussie’s previous comics, is the one that deserves the most acknowledgment. Problem Sleuth, like Homestuck, quickly escalates from a seemingly boilerplate noir detective story to a fantastical, metaphysically more complex narrative which ends in godlike shenanigans. It is also important to understand that Homestuck’s ultimate fandom would end up skewing younger, queerer, and liberal than Problem Sleuth’s audience- among other important differences, given just how formative Problem Sleuth is to Homestuck’s DNA.
[Image description: A close-up of the Problem Sleuth poster on John’s wall. It depicts a character we cannot quite make out (and if we have not read Problem Sleuth, will certainly not recognize) sitting at a desk smoking a pipe and wearing a classic noir hat. The poster is situated above the cake on John’s dresser and to the left of John’s door, on which we can see part of the SBURB poster.]
Finally: Hussie was writing Homestuck in 2009. It was not their first sprite comic (it was their fourth). Sprite comics (as more extensively detailed here, it’s quite an excellent overview of what sprite comics were and why they’re important to understanding Homestuck) depicted an abstracted, simplified character design (in part due to the lack of art skill from their authors) in order to skip to the writing. A major advantage in Homestuck is that, despite the amount of work it took to make, it did not first require that Hussie spend years improving their artistic ability in order to convey character rather quickly and effectively- note how John’s glasses, buck teeth, and outfit conjure up a specific image (one different for every reader, perhaps, but a rather distinct image from the ones conjured by other characters). Hussie was not righting these comics in a vacuum, but in fact was inspired by and responding to a larger genre.
Understanding the influence of RPGs, computer programming, Problem Sleuth, and sprite comics on Homestuck is part of approaching this work through a historical lens. Homestuck did not come from nowhere- it was the culmination of Hussie’s education, his previous artistic work, his other hobbies, and the other creators and creators’ work that he had interacted with in the communities where he began producing such work.
