#duskgala

For me, the thing that Homestuck did that made it special to me, as distinct from all the other webcomics that came out over the period from about 2008 on, was something I was aware of at the time and that I had some intuition as to why.

It's something like the feeling I get about people who read a lot of science fiction, or even just read a lot of science fiction -- a feeling that there's a pattern, that there's this sort of logic or "tension" to all the things people have made or thought up in that kind of story, a tension which is hard to explain unless you've "been there."

The science fiction stories I've read most often have a few things in common. They have a definite kind of "world," a set of values and experiences and ideas, which you get pretty used to and then when the author does something that is in some sense "wrong" with that world, that's part of the story. The reader reacts not merely by saying "huh," but by saying "of course, how could I forget about this?" The story's "world" and the reader's expectations are part of the same whole, and the story itself can evoke some part of the reader's knowledge of that world, so the reader's reaction has that feeling I've described.

This feeling is stronger, of course, in the kind of SF that most people read. What's more important here is that you know there isn't just one set of values which is common to many SF novels, you know that the authors are drawing on a large and wide and heterogeneous array of ideas. And it's because you know that the authors draw on such a wide array of ideas, that these things "come as a package," and that there's a "tension" between the set of things that come as a package and the set of ideas that the reader has. You may find the things in the package incompatible with one another in an ugly way; it's the tension between incompatible things which makes the package a package. And that's what you want to know about -- that "something" is there, or "the something" is there.

Here's the thing I want to get at with this essay: it's hard for me to define "Homestuck" and to identify with Homestuck, but at the same time I feel that the webcomic is somehow "about something."

The thing about Homestuck was, and is, the "tension" between the stuff that appears in the first place, and what you can guess about the world the author has chosen. It's the feeling I get when I look at things like "the character who thinks the others are stupid is the main one of the group," and notice that this character is the main character of the group and, more importantly, has a kind of praise written above the other characters, a kind of character flaw that gives him a kind of authority and special status within the group, and find that there's something sort of right in that: oh, so it's true!

Here's something else you find out pretty quickly about Homestuck. It's written for high school and college students, who have a lot of familiarity with certain kinds of things. A lot of the "tension" that one notices when reading Homestuck feels like it's already built into it: there's a kind of "bland" that feels like part of the package, because the story draws on so much -- I've heard it compared to "reading old Shakespeare," because the things the story draws on tend to have a lot of resonance in that way.

Here's the thing I think you can't quite get on your own, if you try: I think it's a very good webcomic. I don't mean that it's "well-written," which is the sort of compliment I think many people who aren't me would make. Homestuck is kind of "mediocre," but in a lot of ways I think it's really good at what it does, in a way which is difficult to put into words.

But, I mean it -- there's something there, something more than the sum of its parts, something which comes from this whole sort of background. And I say that it's good, but I'm saying it while also saying that the sum of the parts isn't quite good, either.

The most obvious sense in which it's "good" is that I think it's better than a lot of other stuff, including a lot of stuff that used to be popular -- Homestuck has a lot more going on than the average Homestuck fan wants to admit, and a lot of stuff which most Homestuck fans would take as seriously as I do. Homestuck is kind of like a big, messy story that's been reassembled out of smaller, more digestible things; it's easier to get into than it is to stay into, in the same way that a longer, complex story is easier to get into than to stay into.

This is not something I'm saying because Homestuck "used to be a lot better," or "has become worse" over time, or anything of the sort -- I'm saying this because I feel like I've learned more and gotten more out of the experience. I could put this down to a simple matter of learning maturity, or simply reading more of the "fluff." But I'm getting a different sense of the value of reading Homestuck from the one I got back in, say, 2010.

When I wrote the post I wrote way back then, which was entitled "Homestuck is good," my idea was that Homestuck was a story with a sort of internal logic, which was worth analyzing at some level for the sake of trying to figure it out. Reading Homestuck now, it still seems like a story that has a sort of internal logic. However, what's happened is this.

I read a lot of webcomics in 2008. I've read almost every webcomic that has had a significant fandom, in this time. This was the age of webcomics like Homestuck, Achewood, Karkat, Questionable Content, etc. There were a lot of them, and they were very popular. The people who liked those characters and stories and their fans talked about them all the time. Reading webcomics during this period was always a very crowded and noisy space. There were more webcomics being made than I could read in a year. And you could pretty easily tell which ones were really good, which ones had real talent, and which ones were just okay.

thank you!! <3

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