I appreciate the work of the Hiveswap/WP writers and the collaborative fan-fuelled nature of the Homestuck-verse a lot.
That said, I can't pretend that the shift to almost all Homestuck media being written by guest writers other than Hussie, and his latest statement about handing the franchise over to the fans implying that this will most definitely continue, means that Homestuck media minus Hussie will become the new norm.
And, look. Hmm. This is hard to phrase.
I think that as much as I appreciate the work that is being put in and the products that we are getting, there is a reason that Homestuck came to mean so much to me in the first place, and that reason wasn't necessarily the setting, the plot, the characters or the themes, although all of these were the product of that reason. The driving force was always the imagination and innovative authorial wit of Hussie himself. And I miss that. While the new stuff is good and fun, I can tell where it is lacking something. Often in collaborative works that Hussie has written only a part of, like the epilogues, I can identify his specific segments by how much they grip me alone. I can *tell*.
And while Homestuck and mspa always involved the readers, it was always a collaboration between readers and author, the author being Hussie. It feels like half of that formula is almost missing now. The new content written by other authors is building off of his world and characters, but I can feel a sort of slip off of that in tone that comes from his not being directly involved.
And I don't want to sound ungrateful to the WP writers! They're great! But they can't help not being Andrew Hussie, and despite everything, Hussie's writing is sort of the magic sauce that I feel I'm looking for. Nobody could have written Homestuck except him, and the writers imitating it just don't feel innovative in the same way.
Not sure about a solution to this, I mean, Hussie is free to take a step back if he wants to. I just feel sad that the franchise is moving further as further away from being actually written by its creator and author, because as that happens, I feel less engaged, and the products feel increasingly... Homogenously alien to me. This is especially true of the friendsim stuff. Hiveswap has always been a particular sort of different sauce, and besides he wrote the storyline for both it and the epilogues. For as great as friendsim was, excluding the routes Hussie wrote, it's definitely where the different writers stood out to me the most.
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