Biting off more than I can chew

[deerna]

I always wanted to write meta about homestuck, but I never had the chance. I felt like I wasn’t ready for that kind of contribution to the fandom: my English wasn’t good enough, I didn’t know enough, I was too much of a dumbass to actually try and produce smart commentary.

The fact that homestuck is so huge in the US and on the Internet while being almost completely unknown everywhere else has always driven me nuts, especially because I feel like there’s a ton of mainstream stuff - stuff with an international reach - that has been unwittingly influenced by it.

I even entertained for a brief moment to make it the topic of my Bachelor’s degree dissertation - I didn’t just because I was getting my degree already late as it was. But the urge always stayed. It grew even stronger as I started going to writing/storytelling school.

So the idea was to make a website where I can talk about homestuck in italian, to people who aren’t exactly into webcomics but are into storytelling, as a project for my WordPress course.

Fuck me sideways with a shark.

I wasn’t worried about the content because the Internet was going to come into my help, surely. There are so many people who are still into homestuck, especially now that hiveswap, friendsim and pesterquest are a thing; especially now that homestuck^2 is a thing. Fanadventures such as Vast Error are more popular than ever. I really thought it was going to be -- well. Not easy, but I thought I was going to find a lot of helpful stuff.

I had forgotten how many people hate homestuck.

In my experience, there are two kinds of people who can’t stand homestuck: the ones who have never gotten into it and/or were put off by the fandom at its peak obnoxiousness, and the ones who used to be fans but got awfully disappointed by it at some stage.

There’s a lot of negative criticism about the last Acts and the Epilogue. Even as I recall plot holes and poor management of some plotlines, I don’t remember it being this bad. There’s people accusing Hussie of protracting storylines and shit just because he wanted to make more money, of having written himself in a corner with the whole unbeatable villains matter and didn’t know how to cover his ass, that the Epilogues were written by other people because he didn’t give a shit anymore and he wanted to own the fans by mocking them.

I genuinely cannot tell if I’m too biased or if it’s a case of what I’ve been calling “cancel-critique” -- where since a piece of media isn’t absolutely perfect under every aspect like Mary Poppins it deserves to be yeeted in the outer ring of Paradox Space -- but I was horrified.

I’m not saying that things can’t be criticized, of course -- Homestuck isn’t perfect by any means and it’s crazy for anyone to demand perfection from a piece of media -- but to cancel a media multiverse on the base of a few hundreds of pages or a bad take from the Author is maybe a little drastic.

I often joke about the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is dead to me because of how they have written the relationship between Tony and Steve, and their treatment of Bucky, but I would never unironically say that the whole franchise is shit -- although you know what, never mind, it’s a bad metaphor, because the MCU was made to make money and it’s as experimental as a loaf of bread and while the people who have worked at it ain't soulless I’m pretty sure it started from a soulless place - but I digress. Again.

The point is -- maybe I’m just biased, but maybe a lot of people don’t realize how fucking big of a deal homestuck is. Just forget about the “cringe” and the plotholes for a fucking second, will you?

As a webcomic, it exploits the possibilities of the internet as a storytelling media and it goes hard at it with gifs, music, flash games, meta-textual and self-referential content. It started out by interacting with its fanbase in the most direct way possible, and never took its eye off it even later on. It took the most relatable experience from his target audience -- playing on the internet with a bunch of close friends whom you never met -- and crystallized it into an epic adventure. Its storytelling is terrible until it’s fucking amazing, until it turns terrible again because it’s starting to deconstruct itself and reflecting on its own inner workings. The Author makes itself known by continuously breaking the fourth wall until he gets murdered in his own comic; he quite literally gives the keys of the kingdom to pretty much whomever is bored enough to wield them by declaring all fanfiction canon and producing more official content based on alternative universes of his own creation. It created a fandom that it’s the single most creative entity I’ve ever met, with its cosplayers, writers, artists, podcasters, musicians, video-game makers; people who have made a career out of the experiences they made thanks to homestuck.

This project is overwhelming and it’s probably going to kill me. But it’s probably worth it.