#reflauta

(To the tune of this song)

Worst case scenario

The world is ending?

The walls start to bleed?

There's monsters in the street?

There's always a place for you.

You're the savior of the lost?

Well, this is where you'll be:

Right here in the center of the thing.

See the red, see the red, it won't be long now.

And everything that you built will blow.

It's done. It's over. Enjoy what's left.

The streets are on fire, the whole city's a crime scene.

Everyone with a grudge against your kind is here.

You can't get away.

It's over. Enjoy it while it lasts.

1. The Passion of the Christ

2. The Brown Bunny

3. American Beauty

4. The Shawshank Redemption

5. Eraserhead

6. The Neon Demon

7. Gladiator

8. Aliens

9. American Pie

No, but I made it out of a much bigger mistake, one that ruined a lot of stuff I really liked before I noticed the mistake.

That mistake was getting into Steven Universe.

(I have heard it theorized that SU was a deliberate attempt to make a "safe" webcomic, one that could rise to prominence without subjecting the creator to dangerous levels of online harassment? But that's a question for the experts – I can find this and this and this, all over the place. But the above are all pretty old, and were written well before the fandom heated up in earnest, and it doesn't seem like the creator has really had time to answer the question one way or the other.)

Anyway I saw the first few episodes of Steven Universe, and I liked them a lot, and I started looking for more of it. And what I found was… things that looked a whole lot like the first handful of Steven Universe episodes, but with some big differences. (On the internet, this meant being confronted almost daily with people accusing me of "jumping to conclusions" when I, like, tried to convey that there were some things I hadn't concluded – I was just reporting what I had seen, which was sometimes different from the conclusions being held up as the obviously true alternative.)

And like, this was making me feel very confused. On the one hand, I loved the first few Steven Universe episodes I'd seen, and on the other hand, this thing which kept appearing in front of me and telling me "the thing you loved is wrong, the thing you loved is useless," and so forth.

And it turned out that "the thing I loved" was Homestuck.

I'm sure this isn't a big surprise. Homestuck, back in its own context, was a source of many confusing emotions for me; at the time that I was reading it people on the internet were constantly telling me I was "way behind the curve" for noticing Homestuck's various charms, and I wanted to shout "NO!!!!" in the exclamations of youths everywhere, I had been "behind the curve" long enough to notice Homestuck's charms and meaning and originality and all that stuff, I'm past the point of needing constant alarms to tell me I'm not yet seeing things correctly!

And yet, the alarms still rang, because Homestuck is wrong, it is useless, and its charms are cold and mechanical and soulless and without meaning, etc.

I never made it to Unicorn Boogie because, you see, the thing I loved was Homestuck, but I watched enough of the archive to see something really cool happen with [something].

I mean, Homestuck is a really cool story – so cool that it gets you thinking all over again about what it means to say something is "really cool" – although perhaps more so than the average person's experience of the world allows. If you find yourself thinking Homestuck is cool, you're thinking Homestuck is cool. If the world ends and only Homestuck is left, then that is cool. (And if you think all cool things are Homestuck, you're probably wrong. But, you know, as they say, "cool things are usually cool.")

It has a bunch of brilliant moments, and a bunch of brilliant characters and plot developments, and it keeps surprising you right up until the moment when you say "oh! you did it again! you blew my mind!" Plus a bunch of really charming little moments that you're unlikely to forget.

The animation quality is not the best, but it's pretty good, and the voices are always very distinctive. It's got a lot of very distinctive qualities that set it apart as Homestuck-ness.

The world it creates is really well-fitted to the way a lot of people act on the internet, which is to say, more "realistic" than "real life" but not quite as much so as you might expect. Although it has all of the qualities that allow you to imagine being in the same world as characters in Homestuck (as I did, for instance, while reading Problem Sleuth and then Homestuck), it's not real, you know? (It's kind of like playing an RTS game while someone is trying to summon a demon. "This has all of the trappings of an actual summoning ritual, but it's clearly not real and if you try to use your powers to take over the world – which is the point – you'll just end up wasting your magic.)

So anyway, I ended up enjoying it a whole bunch, and now I'm caught up and can't really go back. Which is a shame because in a lot of ways it's an even weirder, "more real" story than Homestuck.

And it's also an even weirder, more real story than it has any right being, because it's based on a web comic that hasn't anything to do with it at all.

But the real story is that, after I tried to do something "cool" and failed, I learned that the cool thing was Homestuck, and is still endlessly rewarding and capable of delivering in spades.

I don't know how much I can possibly recommend it. It's like a whole day and night of having all the favorite music in the world played at once, except it's like having your favorite music played at once, except it's also a completely unique and unrepeatable experience, except that's also true of your favorite music. Except it contains all of that plus it's also a great idea, a genuine work of art, and people are trying to interrupt you as you're having your great idea, because it's just not done the way they do it, except of course it is, because they're jerks, because they can be jerks, because there is no other way for them to be, because you cannot possibly think Homestuck isn't cool now that you've had an experience like this, but they don't want you to think that it's cool because you'll realize they're jerks, they just don't want you to realize that. Because that'd be disruptive to their great, unique, unrepeatable idea. Which doesn't even involve Steven Universe. Because you've already been exposed to the same stuff they've exposed you to, because you couldn't be on edge like this but you are. For a little while longer. A whole day and night. And then you sleep, and you wake up tomorrow and you go on with your life.