so first of all i want to be super clear that, like, this 'jargon' is not simply obtuse for its own sake, but just like any specialized topic with centuries of theory behind it, literary analysis has developed its own vocabulary with which very specific and complex concepts can be communicated succintly
that said: a bildungsroman is a type of coming-of-age story that puts a lot of focus onto a certain notion of 'growing up', a somewhat romanticized vision of the transition from 'childhood' to 'adulthood' with a strong focus on the emotional maturation of the protagonist. when i say homestuck is a 'bildungsroman deconstruction', i mean that homestuck is, in some ways, an entry into this genre, but takes pains to highlight, interrogate, and sometimes outright reject a lot of the underlying philosophical assumptions that go into defining it.
gnosticism is a dubiously historical (as in, it is an exogenous post-facto grouping made of faiths and interpretatins of christian doctrine that is often described as though it is a coherent and continuous religious tradition) constellation of beliefs mostly bound togeher by a focus on personal enlightenment in the face of an illusionary or deceptive world and by a quasidualist cosmology separating an invisible, omnipotent divinity and a lesser, malevolent or flawed creator divinity ('demiurge'). homestuck is full of gnostic allusion, from the surface-level aesthetic incorporation of gnostic vocabulary and concepts (the monster yaldabaoth, a character's username being gardengnostic) to a more thorough thematic engagement with the ideas of materiality being a deceptive shroud over an immaterial 'true world', or malevolent/absent creator divinites emanating forth from higher-ranking ones.
bricolage is an artistic technique focused on repurposing and melding existing objects -- 'pop culture bricolage' here is me saying that huge parts of homestuck rest on the recontextualization and incorporation of both "low" and "high" cultural objects, aesthetic, visual, and narrative elements from stuff like saw, starsky & hutch, the sims, dungeons & dragons -- allowing plot beats and images (sometimes, literal, jpeg images) from all these pop culture works of art to form loadbearing parts of everything from indivdiual panel composition to story arcs.
the 'quasiplatonist theory of fiction' here is a reference to the beliefs about art and fiction that hussie expresses, with varying degrees of facetiousness, through homestuck and outside of it. i call it 'quasiplatonist' as an analogy to platonic idealism, because a central element of it is the notion of the 'pure', immaterial, 'essence' of a character being separable from their depiction in the work and the circumstances of that work's creation, and i call it idiosyncratic because hussie's take on it is very singular and leads to some very strange conclusions.
2087
stormborns
yousharknotpass
