THERAPYSTUCK
If you haven’t noticed a trend towards what MSPFAs got popular in 2020…I guess I should spell it out. Wish Fulfillment is the name of the game in 2020. People are dissatisfied with how Post-Canon is going, they wish it wasn’t like how it was, and they wish that there was more…catharis. You know, a work that allowed their blorpos to rest easy, and get over their issues, and be friends again, and all that jazz. In fact, a common trend around this time was saying that the characters in Homestuck needed Therapy. Well, Well, Well…what do we have here? It appears to be THERAPYSTUCK, a fanadventure that’s about exactly that. The Homestuck cast get Therapy. Also, there’s the Therapist who’s like, an carapacian, which is neat to see a carapcian to be in the main protagonist role.
Art Style is in practically the House Style for MSPFA for this period, aka the house style for Homestuck^2. Again, something something I wonder if it brings it more legitimacy as a comic and makes more people want to read forward if it looks like something people know about something something. Well, I guess it’s not ENTIRELY the art style for Homestuck^2, but it is *very* similar. I’m not trying to judge it for using the art style; after all, every single other thing seems to use that art style of colors that pop but not to an absurd degree, grounded, realistic movements and presentations of where each character is relative to each other, not an abstract way of depicting characters in scenes, no outlines/line weights to worry about, etc. You know. The works. That’s what I’m talking about.
But also I think around this time you can see a more emphasis on…like…the fans wanting to choose what happens in the story? Because that was a bit of the implied promised by the tagline that Homestuck^2 originally went with, “by fans, for fans.” Even though it’s pretty much made explicitly clear by the Intro to Homestuck^2 itself that Fan input would not in fact ever be considered for the direction of the story, and that’s just fine to me, at least to me NOW. Back in 2020, it was different matter altogether. I bring this up because you would think that Therapystuck would have it’s own ideas about what Sollux would talk about, but instead they put it up to a poll, and I wonder if that’s one of the factors that made this Fanadventure popular. Like, they listened to fan feedback on which character should be explored from Sollux’s point of view, and which character should Sollux get closure, or at least begin to work towards closure with.
I don’t know about this one. I think, at the very least, the overwhelming sheer popularity of this fanadventure is indicative of that wish fulfillment thing I was talking about, atleast for the 2020 fandom. I wasn’t gripped by it in any case, but that’s just me.
