Eternal: Write About Homestuck

by eternal on May 1, 2012

There’s a silly webcomic by a guy named Andrew Hussie that you might’ve seen if you spend much time around /co/ or Tumblr. (I don’t, but I’ve heard complaints). It’s called Homestuck and it’s a fascinatingly meta take on RPGs and youth. Though famous more for its formal gimmicks and odd sense of humour, there’s a deliberateness in the structure that points to certain themes. The comic operates well as parody for parody’s sake, but spend tens of hours reading through it and you’ll start to see more. If you’re willing to brave minor spoilers, read on.

First, a summary: Homestuck is about a group of teenaged internet friends playing a video game to save the world. But this isn’t the Matrix–reality and fiction don’t coexist. Logging into the game triggers a downpour of asteroids that destroys the Earth’s population just before the protagonists can escape. Yes, they escape into the game. Their goal is to “beat” the game and find a way to revive their planet.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t become the equivalent of reality. The characters are aware that it’s a game (and that it’s bizarrely structured like a tabletop RPG campaign). The game is still a set of rules, filled with its own ridiculous abstractions: the early chapters dwell on confusing inventory systems and an arbitrary level hierarchy. These gaming abstractions aren’t merely parody material for the reader to laugh at–they’re material for the characters to laugh at. The item synthesis system lets the cast create everything from jetpacks to a Bill Cosby laptop. We know that a Bill Cosby laptop is a ridiculous/awesome idea. So do they. We are watching people play a game.

So the comic’s postmodern knowingness works out for comedic purposes, but as the pages upon pages of IM chat logs build up (this is how the characters communicate), it’s hard not to wonder if there’s method to the madness. Hints are dropped: John, the first of the four heroes, rambles about his emotionally distant father’s obsession with clown dolls. The man keeps buying them as gifts, John says, thinking he likes them, when in reality they’re ugly and stupid. It’s all just a prank to make him writhe in embarrassment as he’s forced to recall his childhood fascinations. It is later mentioned offhandedly that perhaps Dad is buying presents for his child simply to bridge the gap between father and son.

What makes this suggestion a revelation rather than common sense is the fact that silliness is the standard in Homestuck. The reader is forced to suspend their disbelief within the first five minutes and ends up taking the silliness at face value. Create an elaborate plot to sneak outside and check the mail in search of your brand new game; crawl past your alcoholic mother’s wizard statues that she surely only bought to passive-aggressively irritate you since she knows you hate wizards. It’s funny when you read it, but there are moments when characters offer logical explanations for the chaos. Maybe it’s not just a prank, they realize, thinking back on their parents’ irrational actions. Maybe they see it that way because that’s what they believe.

The comic is ongoing so a central theme hasn’t solidified yet, but the coming-of-age thread continues. Each hero’s adventure begins by fusing household items and miscellaneous organisms to create spirit guides to help them on their quest. John ends up with his dead grandmother (fused with a clown plushie, if I recall correctly); Dave gets his older brother-slash-mentor and Rose gets her deceased cat/best friend. This is important. The spirit guides aren’t arbitrarily assigned: the were friends and mentors in real life. The premise of the game is to use the minerals gained from defeating monsters to build the hero’s house vertically until they can reach a portal in the sky. Every character begins at home–homestuck. The world is gone but your house is still there because it matters to you. Your friends are geographically out of reach–each of you ends up in a different in-game world–but you communicate through IM, just like you did in real life. There are unresolved tensions: John’s Dad’s study, the only part of the house invisible on the mini-map, symbolic of his fatherly elusiveness and mystery. Each character is introduced with a paragraph summarizing their interests based on objects lying around their room. It is not some fantasy RPG abstraction that defines the characters, but rather the posters in their rooms and objects in their houses. Need I say it? Just like real life.

[Paper-Flux]

It reminds me of Harry Potter and a longish article from The New Yorker that basically says that fantasy doesn’t have to take place in a foreign world. Often, especially in young adult stories like Harry Potter, fantasy is a mirror of reality. It’s not the intricacies of the lore and Latin spell incantations that turned the book into an icon–it’s the way Hogwarts mirrors school life. The authoritarian teachers and late-night pranks are exaggerated, of course, but at the end of the day they’re familiar to all of us. The farther I got into Homestuck, the more I felt that it was much the same. Here’s a vague approximation of a quote that pops up somewhere deep in the series: It’s hard being a kid. It’s hard and no one understands. A single sentence in a story of Tsukihime‘s length, yet it sticks. It’s echoed in a later arc when it is revealed that the game is deliberately designed to be played by children entering puberty. Romance is supposed to bubble up and mess with team unity. It’s no coincidence that the cast wrestles with the troubles of youth while trying to save the world.

(Umineko comparisons would be made if it weren’t for spoilers for both series. In a nutshell, both stories have characters playing the role of the reader and analyzing the “real” story for us. In Homestuck’s case, the characters provide meta commentary on their game. It raises the reader’s awareness that everything is deliberate and structured, perhaps for thematic ends.)

So what exactly is this game and why was it made this way? We don’t know yet, but I’ll stick to my theory that it’s a grand, hilarious, brilliantly hyperbolic coming-of-age tale. The whole idea of life being like a tabletop RPG is driven home by the countless allusions, and the few lines of thematic development stick out like a sore thumb (in a good way). This really isn’t The Matrix. It’s middle school life told as a game.

And while this post is more explanatory than evaluative, I should mention that the comic is actually good. What really makes it work in comparison to your average magical girl/YA fantasy coming-of-age narrative is the amount of fun it has with itself. The characters grow on you while you’re busy laughing. The whole story does.

~ ETERNAL
つづく

{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }

lapsarianalyst May 13, 2012 at 6:24 am

But this isn’t the Matrix–reality and fiction don’t coexist.

Yes they do, and the tightly knit relationship between the two is one of the major strains of Homestuck’s plot. From the characters’ perspective, yes, their world ends at the same time they enter the game. From an external, timeless perspective, their world and the world of the game were always inextricably intertwined. Their actions in the game continue to trigger events on earth, including events that, from their perspective, have “already happened.”

Interestingly, the game doesn’t become the equivalent of reality. The characters are aware that it’s a game (and that it’s bizarrely structured like a tabletop RPG campaign).

Why would we expect this? Should we expect people playing a computer game to become unaware that they are playing a computer game? (Of course, on another level, the Homestuck characters are game characters without knowing it — characters in a fictional computer game called “Homestuck,” which has multiple disks, a command prompt, and abstractions like “sylladices.”)

It’s funny when you read it, but there are moments when characters offer logical explanations for the chaos.

“There are moments”? One of the remarkable features of Homestuck as a work of fiction is its dual commitment to creating absurdity and explaining absurdity. How much of the “chaos” is not accounted for, in the last analysis? It’s easy to write a story that is chaotic because it’s incoherent; Homestuck is exquisitely structured and controlled chaos.

The comic is ongoing so a central theme hasn’t solidified yet, but the coming-of-age thread continues.

How likely is such a wildly heterogeneous story to have a “central theme,” when it so clearly serves as a way to unify a diverse range of ideas and creative experiments under a single roof? And how much is Homestuck really about “coming of age”? Some of the characters grow, yes. This is true of many characters in many stories. Many of them have not grown. John still exhibits near-Candide levels of naivete. The comic doesn’t give us anything resembling a psychologically plausible (or even recognizable) depiction of maturation; almost any real teenager would respond to such a quick sequence of traumatic events by curling up into a fetal position, not by learning programmatic life lessons. Homestuck’s characters act remarkably mature relative even to most adults — they don’t have much further to go. Of course it’s about teenagers having a big adventure and going through some heavy shit together, so it’s easy to look at the whole thing out of focus, from a distance, and conclude that it must be about “coming of age.” But to what extent is that really true?

And the comic is well into its third of three major arcs. If one theme were dominant, it would be clear by now (or something would be seriously wrong, artistically speaking). No theme is dominant. Homestuck is a glorious patchwork.

Dave gets his older brother-slash-mentor

Dave’s sprite is prototyped with a sword-impaled crow and a version of him from an alternate future, not with his brother.

This is important. The spirit guides aren’t arbitrarily assigned: the were friends and mentors in real life.

Not quite (this is a nice pattern, but as noted above, Davesprite breaks it). I think the real pattern comes from the fact that the Sburb kernel prefers to be prototyped with things that are either dead or soon-to-be-dead. The kernel plays on our need to make alive what is not alive, or to save what is doomed.

It is not some fantasy RPG abstraction that defines the characters, but rather the posters in their rooms and objects in their houses.

Why should this be surprising? The characters are characters, not abstractions. Some variant of this sentence would be true for any well-written computer game, too.

Need I say it? Just like real life.

The posters in my room and the objects in my house do not define me.

Often, especially in young adult stories like Harry Potter, fantasy is a mirror of reality.

Why bring this up in relation to Homestuck, which after all has one of the most remarkably intricate, bizarre, and generally unreal worlds to be found among recent fantasy fiction? Yes, J. K. Rowling’s success can be partially attributed to the fact that she wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays with wands (which unfortunately metamorphosed, in the latter half of the series, into a mediocre epic fantasy series carrying lots of schoolboy baggage). The bizarre, highly intricate, temporally convoluted, symbolically resonant, and relentlessly ludicrous events that happen to the characters of Homestuck are utterly unlike anything that has ever happened to you or me. Yes, there are similarities, such as the fact that the characters experience romantic attraction along the way. That is because they are people, and people experience romantic attraction (it’s hard to find a story entirely devoid of romance, just as it’s hard to find a story entirely devoid of food, water or shelter). That doesn’t mean that the strength of Homestuck is in the way it reflects banal adolescent life.

Why write fantasy at all, if the point is just similarity to common experience? Why not just write about middle schoolers? Because the fantasy situations are more “fun,” more “interesting,” more “intellectually stimulating,” and so forth . . . which suggests that some of the strength, some of the point, is in those extraordinary situations and not in the mirroring of ordinary reality.

The whole idea of life being like a tabletop RPG is driven home by the countless allusions

Allusions to what? Is life like a tabletop RPG? Does Homestuck suggest this? The comic involves many silly game mechanics (not allusions to anything in particular) because part of the premise is that it is a computer game (not a tabletop RPG) the reader is “playing.”

the few lines of thematic development stick out like a sore thumb

What is “thematic development”? In what sense are there “few lines” of it? You seem to be separating comedy from humor, but that’s never a good bet: “The difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant.”

It’s middle school life told as a game.

Thankfully, no. (Though if your middle school experience bore any resemblance to Homestuck, I’m jealous.)

Reply

lapsarianalyst May 13, 2012 at 6:38 am

“separating comedy from humor” (ha) was supposed to be something to the effect of “separating the serious from the comedic.” (Serves me right for being such a pedant. Physician, heal thyself.)

Reply

eternal May 22, 2012 at 6:35 am

Yes they do, and the tightly knit relationship between the two is one of the major strains of Homestuck’s plot. From the characters’ perspective, yes, their world ends at the same time they enter the game. From an external, timeless perspective, their world and the world of the game were always inextricably intertwined. Their actions in the game continue to trigger events on earth, including events that, from their perspective, have “already happened.”

Okay, I’ll give you that. That comment was mostly an aside to clarify that it isn’t a Matrix-like alt-reality story in which the characters move frequently between reality and the game.

Why would we expect this? Should we expect people playing a computer game to become unaware that they are playing a computer game? (Of course, on another level, the Homestuck characters are game characters without knowing it — characters in a fictional computer game called “Homestuck,” which has multiple disks, a command prompt, and abstractions like “sylladices.”)

People wouldn’t be unaware, but characters would (to an extent). I’m having trouble finding an example since I haven’t seen the .hack series, but you generally wouldn’t expect issues like the sylladices and in-game currency piracy to come up. A less meta story would have the cast playing a game but conveniently sidestep abstractions like the inventory system. The same goes for character interaction. If beating the game results in saving the world, the characters in a more serious sci-fi story would likely end up discussing the game as if it were reality, as opposed to doing things like messing around with the item synthesizer. My point is that the Homestuck cast ignores the narrative conveniences that characters usually make use of by addressing questions that could be brushed aside if the author wanted to.

“There are moments”? One of the remarkable features of Homestuck as a work of fiction is its dual commitment to creating absurdity and explaining absurdity. How much of the “chaos” is not accounted for, in the last analysis? It’s easy to write a story that is chaotic because it’s incoherent; Homestuck is exquisitely structured and controlled chaos.

Okay. I weasel words’d that one because I didn’t want to spend half the post proving that all or most of the chaos was explained. The point is that it is indeed structured and controlled chaos.

How likely is such a wildly heterogeneous story to have a “central theme,” when it so clearly serves as a way to unify a diverse range of ideas and creative experiments under a single roof? And how much is Homestuck really about “coming of age”? Some of the characters grow, yes. This is true of many characters in many stories. Many of them have not grown. John still exhibits near-Candide levels of naivete. The comic doesn’t give us anything resembling a psychologically plausible (or even recognizable) depiction of maturation; almost any real teenager would respond to such a quick sequence of traumatic events by curling up into a fetal position, not by learning programmatic life lessons. Homestuck’s characters act remarkably mature relative even to most adults — they don’t have much further to go. Of course it’s about teenagers having a big adventure and going through some heavy shit together, so it’s easy to look at the whole thing out of focus, from a distance, and conclude that it must be about “coming of age.” But to what extent is that really true?

And the comic is well into its third of three major arcs. If one theme were dominant, it would be clear by now (or something would be seriously wrong, artistically speaking). No theme is dominant. Homestuck is a glorious patchwork.

I agree that the story might not end up having a central theme. It’s vast. The ideas of magic as metaphor and the teenagers going on an adventure premise are what strike me as the closest thing to a theme, but it isn’t necessarily the main one and it’s unlikely to be the only one.

Although, don’t forget that character development and coming of age are different. The cast’s personalities don’t necessarily have to change as much as they have to learn something from their experience. At the moment, they’re still floundering about in their problems, so I suppose they haven’t come of age yet, if you want to be picky. But it would only take a few key lines in the ending to make the series thematically about growing up and dealing with teenage problems (I’m not saying that this will happen, but if we’re being precise, it certainly could happen). If that were to happen, I think there would be enough evidence scattered throughout the rest of the work that it wouldn’t feel forced. But that’s subjective.

Not quite (this is a nice pattern, but as noted above, Davesprite breaks it). I think the real pattern comes from the fact that the Sburb kernel prefers to be prototyped with things that are either dead or soon-to-be-dead. The kernel plays on our need to make alive what is not alive, or to save what is doomed.

Good point.

Why should this be surprising? The characters are characters, not abstractions. Some variant of this sentence would be true for any well-written computer game, too.

I mean that the characters aren’t defined by things like combat class or weapon or elemental magic. (Well, classes play a role in describing the characters, but it isn’t a role that the reader invents from prior genre experience, e.g. expecting the healer to be a gentle female, the thief to be a sly male, etc). You’d expect characters in a fantasy/sci-fi setting to have personality traits associated with that setting, but instead their traits are associated with the everyday objects of movie posters and ironic plushies.

The posters in my room and the objects in my house do not define me.

They certainly say something about you. This point is connected to the above one, though. The idea is that the characters are associated with and described largely by things from the real world, despite the number of fantasy objects or whatnot the author could have used. Talking about “Earth movies” in the middle of a fantasy/sci-fi epic isn’t the norm. It reveals John’s personality differently from similar stories.

Why bring this up in relation to Homestuck, which after all has one of the most remarkably intricate, bizarre, and generally unreal worlds to be found among recent fantasy fiction? Yes, J. K. Rowling’s success can be partially attributed to the fact that she wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays with wands (which unfortunately metamorphosed, in the latter half of the series, into a mediocre epic fantasy series carrying lots of schoolboy baggage). The bizarre, highly intricate, temporally convoluted, symbolically resonant, and relentlessly ludicrous events that happen to the characters of Homestuck are utterly unlike anything that has ever happened to you or me. Yes, there are similarities, such as the fact that the characters experience romantic attraction along the way. That is because they are people, and people experience romantic attraction (it’s hard to find a story entirely devoid of romance, just as it’s hard to find a story entirely devoid of food, water or shelter). That doesn’t mean that the strength of Homestuck is in the way it reflects banal adolescent life.

Why write fantasy at all, if the point is just similarity to common experience? Why not just write about middle schoolers? Because the fantasy situations are more “fun,” more “interesting,” more “intellectually stimulating,” and so forth . . . which suggests that some of the strength, some of the point, is in those extraordinary situations and not in the mirroring of ordinary reality.

Fair enough. I tend to see fantasy more for how it resembles reality than for how it differs from it, but both are valid. A mediocre example: I view Game of Thrones as a dramatic telling of what politics might have been like in a different time period in a world similar to our own, and I mentally equate the dragons with any arbitrary symbol of power (or perhaps a significant military technology). I don’t think that the dragons are metaphors for nuclear bombs or anything of the sort, but the series is more interesting to me for its relation to the history of human civilization than for its internal logic (which will probably become more important later; I haven’t read the books).

Allusions to what? Is life like a tabletop RPG? Does Homestuck suggest this? The comic involves many silly game mechanics (not allusions to anything in particular) because part of the premise is that it is a computer game (not a tabletop RPG) the reader is “playing.”

There’s an awful lot of playing going on. Sburb, Homestuck (with the command prompt and fourth wall and all that, like you mentioned), the fact that the website is a choose your own adventure game… I’m not saying that it’s symbolic (life being like an RPG isn’t a theme here, I don’t think), but it’s intentional and draws attention to itself. Hussie is certainly comparing life to the experience of playing a game but I wouldn’t argue that that’s the main point of the story or anything of the sort.

Oh, and while the reader is technically “playing” Homestuck as a computer game, the second-person narration is probably more common in D&D than in computer games. Either way, the point is that it’s some form of RPG.

What is “thematic development”? In what sense are there “few lines” of it? You seem to be separating comedy from humor, but that’s never a good bet: “The difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant.”

I suppose I was referring to explicit thematic development. The comedy is important, which is why I talked about how the comedic plot devices like the gaming abstractions are also there for a reason, even if that reason is a bizarre layer of meta that doesn’t work as a direct analogy for anything. I would say that there are only a few signposts in the text, but I can see why detailed analysis might uncover more.

Thankfully, no. (Though if your middle school experience bore any resemblance to Homestuck, I’m jealous.)

As stated above, this comes down to whether you see Homestuck’s chaos as significant in and of itself or if it’s a tool in a delightfully convoluted young adult story.

—–

Well, thanks for the comment. In closing, I’d like to clarify that I don’t see Homestuck as an allegory. There isn’t a direct correlation between the abstractions and the potential coming-of-age theme. However, I don’t think those connections are unreasonable to make. Homestuck’s ordered chaos is fascinating and I can’t help connecting it to reality. Maybe that opinion will change when the story is over.

And on another note, I apologize in advance for any potential typos. /2:35 am.

Reply

lapsarianalyst May 22, 2012 at 6:53 pm

Thanks for the response.

Okay, I’ll give you that. That comment was mostly an aside to clarify that it isn’t a Matrix-like alt-reality story in which the characters move frequently between reality and the game.

Yeah, I get that. I’m just being obnoxious.

Speaking of which, I want to apologize for the tone of my earlier comments. They were written in a Karkat-like spirit of “oh look, I found a person on the internet who I disagree with, time to harass him,” with the expectation of a similarly negative response. But since it looks like you want to have a civil conversation about it, I just feel like an asshole.

A less meta story would have the cast playing a game but conveniently sidestep abstractions like the inventory system.

Well, I think we really do need to distinguish between the two levels of game here. As we both know, Homestuck is a real webcomic with the conceit that the reader is playing a fictional computer game (called “Homestuck”) whose plot involve characters playing a doubly-fictional computer game (called “Sburb”). The levels here do bleed into each other a lot — for instance, the way that the Incipisphere seems to really exist (i.e., it’s only singly fictional, not doubly) despite how gamelike it is, the way things that seem like part of the Incipisphere mythology (e.g. God Tier powers) transfer into the world beyond the Incipisphere, and so forth. Some of these bleedings really are surprising in the way you suggest, like the way the characters are aware of “Homestuck” constructs (sylladex, strife specibus, echeladder) rather than just “Sburb” constructs (grist, alchemy, quest bed). Though even this is not too uncommon in games, at least in the context of tutorials and stuff.

I just I just want to make the distinction that the cast’s awareness of “Sburb” constructs should not be surprising. I haven’t seen .hack either, but if it doesn’t deal with game constructs, that seems more startling to me than what Homestuck does. If you are going to write about people playing a game, you should write about them dealing with game mechanics, right? I mean, that is what people do when playing games, right? There may be a tradition of not doing this (though are there really enough stories with this kind of premise to form such a tradition?), but it seems like such a basic gesture of realism that I can’t find it surprising.

If beating the game results in saving the world, the characters in a more serious sci-fi story would likely end up discussing the game as if it were reality, as opposed to doing things like messing around with the item synthesizer.

That’s a big if, since beating the game doesn’t result in saving the world. John learns this very early on, from Nannasprite, so there’s no reason the cast should labor under this misconception for any great length of time. The characters do learn the true (and highly important) purpose of the game later on, but by that time they’re also getting constantly told that they will inevitably fuck up various things in the future, which pretty much confounds all conventional notions we might have about the rational approach to their situation. (Comparisons to the way characters act in other stories here become more difficult to make, since you can’t ignore the fatalistic nature of the situation without distorting the situation beyond recognition.)

What I’m saying is, I take your point that some of the cast’s behavior (like messing around with alchemy) is frivolous in the way one would expect from someone just playing a game rather than experiencing it, but when you take into account that the characters really aren’t sure what the point of the game is, their behavior seems a lot more plausible. (The characters do get a lot more all-business later on when they begin to understand the stakes involved in their situation.)

But it would only take a few key lines in the ending to make the series thematically about growing up and dealing with teenage problems

You can probably guess what I’m going to say, which is that I accept that this could happen, but I wouldn’t like it if it did. The story is already enjoyable enough as a chronicle of a bunch of stuff happening to people (who happen to be teenagers); slapping a summary on it to the effect of “this is the sort of stuff that tends to happen to teenagers” would be a combination of trivial and reductive. (Trivial because any story about teenagers is probably going to include stuff like awkward romance just a basic concession to realism, and reductive because the story is largely about teenagers in exceptional situations, not ordinary ones.)

I feel like you are onto something with the notion that the jarring weirdness of Homestuck is analogous to going through puberty (or something like that), but I really think we need to acknowledge that the story subverts and mocks all sorts of coming of age tropes as well. That is, we need to distinguish between points where an analogy is meant seriously — maybe between the maddening chaos of Homestuck and the maddening nature of teen life (though, I dunno, my teen life really wasn’t that crazy) — and point where the failure of a purported analogy is the point/joke. I would argue that the latter is the case with the sprites, who are clearly meant to be psychologically potent aspects of the Sburb experience (your dead friends come back and act as mystical advisors), but who end up being pretty much useless for giving actual advice about the unique session depicted in the story. (And far from providing psychological mentorship to the human characters, they end up being some of the most messed-up characters in the story — Jadesprite is an distraught wreck, and Davesprite is possibly the most saddest instance of the “I’m not the real Dave” phenomenon, having heroically returned from a harrowing alternate future only to become a silly bird thingy whose existence everyone tends to half-forget.)

In fact, I’d say that the entire vaguely Joseph Campbell-style heroic-quest-as-personal-growth mythology is entirely subverted; for the human players, the Sburb quests don’t end up being the main task anyway, and even for the trolls, who actually finished the game, the quests don’t seem to have much psychological potency (note for instance the way Vriska mocks the hokey Sburb puzzles). Homestuck is definitely making reference to the sorts of “adolescence as hero’s journey” concepts described in that Adam Gopnik article you linked, but while Gopnik is presenting this concept as though it’s a novel way to explain the appeal of YA fantasy, Homestuck assumes that you’re familiar with such a theme in fantasy, then makes fun of it. Gopnik would, presumably, get the joke; people to whom Gopnik’s point is new would not.

(Here’s a relevant quote from a post by someone else: And the game-as-designed means that the story should be replete with symbolism revolving around art and creation, coming of age, working together, etc – which Hussie makes a point of subverting as much as humanly possible.)

Again, this is not to say that the story is not really about coming of age and teenage experience, but if it is, it is under many layers of John Barth-style “saying it mockingly so we can say it at all” postmodernism. This is an important distinction, since it’s the difference between something that gives us a tired, reductive analogy picture of life and one that gives us a more complex and respectable one. (Big claims for a comedy webcomic. But comedy’s a part of life, too. A life that seems silly as frequently as ours does cannot be accurately depicted without a good helping of parody, I think.)

This is one reason why I made a comparison to Madoka, since the two share this element of being parodies that strive to surpass their respective originals. After watching Madoka, which is honestly just a good story in addition to being a fun parody, one ends up thinking something like: “I just watched a magical girl show, took it seriously, and enjoyed it. Wow.” Of course Madoka would not be able to achieve this effect if it didn’t subvert, rationalize, or otherwise deal with the many stupid aspect of the genre. An explanation of Madoka’s appeal that doesn’t explain why it’s so much more enjoyable for a typical adult than a traditional magical girl show (say, an explanation along the lines of “going through puberty is really sort of like gaining magical powers you don’t quite know how to use or what to do with” — which is something I have actually heard suggested as an explanation of YA fantasy, see the comment about puberty here) would not be satisfying, and would not do justice to Madoka as a creative achievement.

You’d expect characters in a fantasy/sci-fi setting to have personality traits associated with that setting, but instead their traits are associated with the everyday objects of movie posters and ironic plushies.

My point was just that in a well-written game, the characters would have personalities that naturally related to their in-universe backgrounds. If their in-universe backgrounds are mundane, their personalities should reflect that. What I was trying to get across here and in my “posters do not reflect me” snark is that what you’re pointing out isn’t some sort of unexpected height of realism (true realism would have to acknowledge the limits of quick and easy personality correlates like the posters in someone’s room!), but just garden-variety competent writing, of the sort that is seen in plenty of novels, comics, movies, and yes games.

I tend to see fantasy more for how it resembles reality than for how it differs from it, but both are valid.

I guess I just like the differences because, for me, fantasy is a way of exploring all the ways life could conceivably be, but isn’t. It’s a generalization of the basic appeal of fiction, of wanting to hear about something that never happened (if you’re really looking for reality, why read a fake story about fake people? — or, to put it the other way around, all fiction is fantasy fiction in some sense). If, in reading fiction, we’ve already decided to enter the realms of the unreal, why not survey the territory in a bit more breadth?

I’m not saying that it’s symbolic (life being like an RPG isn’t a theme here, I don’t think), but it’s intentional and draws attention to itself.

Okay. I’m just wary of reading much into this. Homestuck is an attempt to tell an involved and somewhat serious story in a framework originally designed for utter silliness. (Have you read Jailbreak? If you want to see just how dumb the original story in this format was, give it a try.) The very decision to use such a format is inevitably going to raise questions like this: “since he’s depicting life in this format, is he saying life is like this format?” But I think it makes more sense to say he’s just depicting life in that format as an experiment in weirdness. “Telling a real story in the Jailbreak format” is a funny idea because the format seems so inapt, rather than the opposite. The novelty and craziness are the appeal, not the message.

Oh, and while the reader is technically “playing” Homestuck as a computer game, the second-person narration is probably more common in D&D than in computer games.

I take your point, but if one is familiar with the earlier MS Paint Adventures, it’s clear that the second person narration (along with the command prompt) come from computer adventure games. Jailbreak was a very direct reference to a typical sort of adventure game puzzle scenario. Problem Sleuth involved a lot of the same stuff but made things more RPG-like by introducing stats and RPG-style combat. Homestuck continues the trend, but that just means it’s a fusion of computer adventure games and computer/console RPGs, and the D&D feel is an inevitable artifact of that mixture. Granted, this interpretation depends on info about the earlier Adventures, but Homestuck makes references to them all the time, so it seems like it expects its ideal reader to be familiar with them.

Homestuck’s ordered chaos is fascinating and I can’t help connecting it to reality.

No, I agree, and I think there is something to the idea that reality is really a bit like Homestuck’s “ordered chaos.” I just think this needs to be distinguished from other very different sorts of analogies between fantasy fiction and reality (“adolescence is like a hero’s journey,” “life is like a game,” “adolescent life in fantasy fiction is essentially like adolescent life in reality with some extra flavor added”).

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eternal May 23, 2012 at 3:47 am

No need to worry about feeling like an asshole. Your argument made sense and I figured you were doing more than just messing around.

I’m not going to reply paragraph-by-paragraph because a lot of what you’re saying here makes sense. Broadly speaking, I think you’re right that I miscalculated a layer of the comic’s metafictional elements. The fact that some of the game’s mechanics don’t work as intended can be said to subvert the themes that one would expect from a story like this, so perhaps it isn’t so easy to ascribe meaning.

The novelty and craziness are the appeal, not the message.

This is where the comic leaves us, I suppose. I still believe that there are coming-of-age undercurrents, but for every undercurrent there seems to be something that draws attention to it and subverts it. Everything that we’d expect to be subtext turns into surface text, so analogies aren’t formed as neatly as in other stories. I can live with that. Of course there are other themes that emerge like the ones you listed, but none of them are definitive and they’re all based on which parts of the story the reader wants to emphasize.

Maybe the only certainty here is that formalist experimentation and postmodern awareness are used to stop meaning from being found through traditional metaphors and symbols, so the reader’s opinion of the story’s themes is based on whatever connections they make with what is already there. The signposts don’t quite work as signposts.

There is no clear line between little events and big events; a God Tier troll flapping its wings on Alternia sends a hurricane throughout Paradox Space.

Sentence of the day, more or less.

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lapsarianalyst August 9, 2012 at 2:54 am

To respond to this very very late — I think we’re generally in agreement, but I guess to me the playfulness and subtlety of Homestuck seems pretty much in tune with what I expect out of “good fiction,” and thus I can’t quite sign on to any proposal that it’s trying to make it hard for us to “find meaning” in it — for if that’s the case, then most of the fiction I find meaningful must have the same quality, and that seems mighty counter-intuitive. (We must not mean the same thing by “meaning,” if what’s meaningful to me is, for you, sticking out its tongue at searches for meaning.)

I guess I just prefer fiction that seems to me to have the complexity I see in life and psychology. One possible definition of the very silly term “postmodernism” as it applies to fiction is: postmodernism is when stories start to be written in such a way that acknowledges that people are aware of “stories” (archetypes, allegories, inspiring parables, themes . . . ). But of course, people are aware of stories, and so all of this tearing-down-the-foundations turns out to be just another brick in the pretty structure of Realism, just one more step on the road to reality. Vriska laughs at the puzzles in Sgrub, and we think: “oh, what a subversion.” But really: who plays computer games and takes them 100% seriously? “Fictional characters,” maybe. But not you and me. If “meaning” is to found in fiction, it’s in fiction about actual people — actual people with all their complexity.

John Barth, a writer I kind of love and kind of hate, has devoted a large proportion of his life to writing parodical/comedic versions of existing literary forms. And his parodic Hero’s Journey Giles Goat-Boy has more humanity in it than George Lucas’ bombastic Star Wars (though both follow Campbell’s formulas with equal rigidity). A writer I love almost unreservedly (though with a strong undertow of hate), Vladimir Nabokov, staunchly insisted throughout his life that “symbols” and “themes” and all other high-school-lit-class sources of meaning were absolute bunk and that art was all about the formation of beautiful patterns and nothing more. This hasn’t stopped people from looking for symbols and themes in his work (for indeed his proclamations about art and literature have an unmistakable whiff of trollish insincerity to them), but there is certainly a sense in which his own writing feels full of meaning, humanity, and the sort of rapturous delight you can take away from a book and bring along with you wherever you go in life, — all in a way that transcends one’s feeble attempts to analyze what is going on!

Let me just gesture towards the sort of thing I am talking about. Early on in my favorite Nabokov novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, two teenage siblings (14-year-old Ivan “Van” Veen and his 12-year-old sister Ada) begin a love affair, whose natural course is accelerated when Van falls while climbing a tree and ends up tangled with Ada in a fortuitous position that optimally facilitates cunnilingus. The tree in this scene is a “Shattal tree,” a fictitious species said to have been transplanted from Iraq, which sets up all sorts of “Garden of Eden” and (more specifically) “fortunate fall” resonances, ripe and ready to be explicated by a dutiful term paper. A little while later they encounter each other by chance, and we read:

Then Van and Ada met in the passage, and would have kissed at some earlier stage of the Novel’s Evolution in the History of Literature. It might have been a neat little sequel to the Shattal Tree incident.

Haha, what a joke, he’s making fun of 19th-century novels, everything’s a game and anywhere we might have been inclined to find “traditional” meaning (a chance meeting, a kiss — romance takes its course, ah how human!) we find subversion (they’ve already done much more). But we see this in a different light when we take into account that in the fictional frame, Ada or Ardor is Van’s memoirs, written with Ada’s assistance when the two are an old married couple. The two are exquisitely well-read and possessed of a sly mocking sensibility so of course they would describe things in this way. The real questions are at least one more level up — what does all this tell us about Van and Ada? What does it mean that Van would frame the Shattal Tree incident as a “Garden of Eden” scene? The characters are well aware of the literary context and literary effect of their choices — but after all, shouldn’t they be? — you and I are, aren’t we? And simple “meaning” recedes in the face of people and patterns and a real thing with real weight that we can recall in melancholy moments the way we might recall with fondness the conversational tendencies — irreducible and subtle and continually surprising — of a beloved friend.

eternal September 8, 2012 at 3:33 am

Thanks.

No sarcasm intended–I have never looked at postmodernism that way before and I’ll be sure to keep this in mind next time I encounter a metafictional story. You’ve reminded me of why I like lit criticism in the first place.

lapsarianalyst May 22, 2012 at 10:46 pm

To elaborate on the “thematic development” point, and to contest the idea that the themes are somehow deeply hidden under comedy or a sense of frivolity, here are a few things I would call themes (for a broad definition of that term — not all of these will be the same sort of thing):

1. What life would be like in a world in which accurate prophecy is commonplace. What would remain of free will in such a world. (Karkat says that the “Ultimate Riddle” has something to do with this stuff.)

2. Characters that are derivative of others in various ways: sprites, doomed timeline copies, robots, future and past versions within the same timeline, imitations as sincerest-form-of-flattery (Vriska and Mindfang), etc. How it affects one’s life to know one is just a copy of something else. Chains of characters in which each one spends their time feeling inferior to others, to the point that every link in the chain begins to seem absurd (the various Striders and spiders).

3. Building on both #1 and #2, what it is like to live in a universe in which almost every aspect of one’s life has some hidden meaning or explanation (the elaborate effect of Sburb on the kids’ lives even before their entry; the way the entire troll culture was affected by the troll scratch and the Felt’s goals). The exciting contrast between this and the frequent absence of (or boringness of) explanations in real life.

4. Irony and sincerity. Obsession with irony can blind us to opportunities for real communication (the kids’ assumptions about their guardians) but can also be a legitimate way to make the world more tolerable. Things like Nic Cage movies, furries, juggalo culture and cheesy RPG concepts are made fun of, but gradually incorporated into a growing, cleverly constructed mythos in a way that actually elevates them to a position of real impact. (The mockery helps defuse the reader’s sense that these things are dumb by assuring them that the author acknowledges the same point.) Relationship between the attitudes toward irony and sincerity displayed by various characters and that displayed by the text itself.

5. Overthinking and underthinking things. The intense contrast between characters who delve deeply into the specifics of their situation (e.g., Rose) and those who seem to take everything at face value (e.g., John). Between those who attempt to control their surroundings (e.g., Vriska) and those who go with the flow (e.g., Gamzee). The extent to which people with these different sorts of personality can be friends and lovers. Whether greater engagement achieves better results (everything seems to goes right for John, while the same is not true for Rose). What it is possible to be an obsessive, controlling nerd in a world that seems to be ruled by dramatic irony and bizarre chains of unintended consequences. Whether it’s worth trying anyway.

6. “Chaos” in the technical sense (chaos theory). Small features of the initial conditions have large effects on the eventual result. What you prototype changes everything. Dave sending Gamzee the “Miracles” video as a joke turns out to be responsible for an enormous piece of the overall story. Puns (“scratch,” “host,” etc.) turn out to have great significance. There is no clear line between little events and big events; a God Tier troll flapping its wings on Alternia sends a hurricane throughout Paradox Space.

I could go on, but I think that’s enough. I don’t think any of these are especially well-hidden.

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lapsarianalyst May 17, 2012 at 6:28 pm

Also, one can’t conclude from the fact that Sburb selects children as players and arranges itself to help them “grow” that Sburb is actually a *good* way to come of age, at least in any sense we would recognize as humans. If Sburb meant to produce functional adults, it probably wouldn’t introduce players to its ways by killing off their entire species, right? (Somehow I managed to get through middle school without *that* happening!) Expecting Sburb to turn you into a mature, healthy adult is like expecting the same from a deal with Kyuubey.

And note that many of the standard mechanisms of Sburb are not actually played straight at all. Because of B1 Jack’s uprising and the involvement of the Felt, the Sburb sessions depicted in Homestuck are abnormal ones, where the nice intended coming-of-age structure is disrupted, players complete their game objectives out of order or simply ignore them in favor of exploring the unique features of their situation (e.g. Rose), the sprites are mostly useless for dealing with the actual dangers the players face, etc. It is possible, yes, that there is a real coming-of-age theme on top of this — that the chaos of the disrupted game is supposed to be more like *real* adolescence than Sburb’s nice ordered plan. But even if we take this interpretation, we still have to conclude that some elements, like the sprites, play much less of a role in the players’ maturation than they are “supposed to” according to Sburb’s plan.

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eternal May 22, 2012 at 6:47 am

I’m not saying that Sburb would work realistically as a teenager training tool. It’s similar to the rest of the absurdity in the comic in that it can’t be compared directly to reality. It’s more the idea of it that I’m comparing: the idea that youth is like a game, and that you have to deal with a flurry of bizarre problems while trying to find shortcuts and explore as much as you can and deal with difficult personalities (in this case, people that are literally called Trolls).

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