So what is homestuck about?
four 13yo internet friends play a video game with cosmic stakes that sucks them into another dimension. over a chat client, they meet a set of twelve alien kids who played the same before them and gradually realize that the cosmos operates on a system of self-closing timeloops and narrative inevitabiilty that's pitting them against an immortal demon bent on destroying the universe
to be clear, this is how i'd give a casual synopsis, which is usually what people who act like explaining homestuck is really difficult are ostensibly trying to do. if i was, like, describing homestuck's themes in a more analytic register, i would be more inclined to focus on how it's a multimedia hypertext fiction bildungsroman deconstruction with several layers of metanarrative that's ultimately focused on the experience of growing up queer and online in the 2000s through the frame of gnostic allusion, pop culture bricolage, and the author-audience relationship as seen through the lens of said author's idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction
Can that be explained for someone who doesnât know all the jargon? Not trying to be insulting, I just donât know what a lot of that means.
main difficulty phrases/parts:
bildungsroman
gnostic allusion
pop culture bricolage
idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction
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.
It's not difficult to explain homestuck, it's difficult to explain homestuck without sounding like an insane person
okay, but that's not true. my initial post does not make me sound like an insane person, it makes me sound like a person describing the plot of a webcomic
