At this point I’m starting to get surprised that Homestuck got as widespread and popular as it is. I realize the majority of the fandom that I know and somewhat fear didn’t really explode into being until the trolls arrived, but there had to have been a decent number of readers before that. Not only returning readers from the previous MSPAs but new ones who were absolutely intrigued.
However, the comic is so ludicrously confusing, so stylized, so abstract and so fucking goddamn non-linear that I’m kind of surprised that it got as much attention as it did.
I feel like I’m trying to read the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (first line: “Once upon a time there was a moocow”) while trying to interpret a Kandinsky painting and a Duchamp ready-made simultaneously. It’s weird and confusing and meaningless and gorgeous and hard to follow and yet so superficial in many aspects.
But I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised that people like it. It’s not like Portrait (or Ulysses, for that matter) was UNpopular in the time it was written, it just had a lot of hurdles getting to some of its audiences. Duchamp helped champion the entirety of Dadaism, a whole fucking art movement.
I suppose that’s one of Academia’s greatest lies: For something to be artistically meaningful, it must be too advanced for its contemporary audience and thus ignored until more thoughtful students of the craft come along and discover how wonderful and influential it really was.
Not that academia is an inherently terrible structure/system and must be completely obliterated, no no. But there is a lot of elitism that goes into it and that’s how we’ve gotten most of the literary/art canon that is largely incomplete and diverse as the current Congress.
We need to stop perpetrating the lies that 1) all difficult to consume media is inherently influential and meaningful, 2) all True Art ™ is unappreciated and scorned when it’s being created, 3) that Popular Fiction (aka Genre Fiction, aka “Not Literary”) is lesser than Literary Fiction by virtue of it not necessarily being dense, character-driven, naval-gazing ambiguity, and 4) that dense, character-driven, naval-gazing ambiguity cannot exist within Popular Fiction and appeal to a mass audience.
Because my English Major and Art Minor is telling me that Homestuck is just as complex and worthwhile as all of the boring and repetitive “influential” shit I was forced to study for exams. It just so happens to have toilet humor in it.
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