#stuckbloggin

See, back in 2011, when Homestuck was at its peak popularity, mspaintadventures.com was getting over a million hits a day.  It outpaced a couple of the top news sites at the time put together--I think one of them was CNN.com, actually, but it’s been almost a decade, I can’t remember which ones specifically.  If you see cosplayers having minor PTSD breakdowns about gray facepaint, it’s because we were everywhere at conventions.  Homestuck fans roved in packs, meming incomprehensibly on people and generally making a nuisance of ourselves in the most well-meaning manner possible.

Hussie knew that he was about to drop thirteen minutes of footage on millions of rabid fans, in the form of a flash video that messed with the very structure of the website itself.  (No, seriously, it was mind-blowing at the time.)

So he partnered with Newgrounds, getting them to host the flash itself, hoping it would keep his own website from shattering into a million pieces.

Now, at the time, Newgrounds was one of the biggest deals on the internet.  It’s where every major Flash artist and video maker went to upload their creations.  It was a lawless wasteland, but it was also a creative bastion that got TONS of traffic, one that could weather almost any storm the internet could create.  Its owners were confident they could handle the traffic.

Boy howdy were they wrong.

Homestuck updated with half a dozen pages every day, so people were used to a constant flow of content, but by the time [S] Cascade was ready to drop, Hussie hadn’t posted any pages in a month and a half.  We were all on edge; the MSPA update desktop apps had been sitting there without pinging that whole time, we all knew something Fucking Massive was about to hit us, but none of us were prepared for what actually happened.

The mind-blowing nature of the flash itself is a story for another post, sadly, because we’re here to talk about everything else that happened that fateful night.

The night Hussie broke the internet.

The flash dropped.

Hundreds of thousands of people had their MSPA notification bots pop open, giving quite a few of us heart attacks.

Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people descended upon mspaintadventures.com to view the new flash.

And, within a handful of minutes, Homestuck fans had crashed Newgrounds.

The behemoth.  The titan.  Newgrounds had fallen before the collective might of a million stir-crazy webcomic fans.  Fortunately, however, several people had loaded the whole of Cascade on their computers, and decided to host a livestreaming party so other fans could see it!

And promptly took down livestream.com.

Hussie himself uploaded the animation to megaupload.com.

Megaupload was crushed under its weight.

Some of the more enterprising fans decided to record Cascade as a video and upload it to Dropbox.

Dropbox shattered under the blow.

I think this cascaded to a couple other websites, but the one most relevant to you, o Tumblr user, is that the Homestuck fanbase had a huge presence on this very website--still does, honestly--and the sheer number of people talking about the Cascade SNAFU crashed Tumblr a couple times.

This was unprecedented.  This wasn’t a DDoS attack, this wasn’t a virus, this wasn’t any kind of malicious assault on the hubs of the Internet.  This was just one single excited fanbase desperate to consume a piece of media that they’d been building up to for two and a half years of constant drip-feeding.  This wasn’t malice, this wasn’t trolling, this wasn’t an attack.

This was the day Homestuck broke the internet under the weight of its fandom’s love.

Well.

That was interesting.

A pair of cliffhangers, each terminating in a trip beyond Earth C.  Two converging stories.  Two converging states of narrative.

Seems we aren’t done after all.

I’ve seen a lot of people upset by the epilogues.  Truth be told, reading them was a deeply uncomfortable experience for me as well--though that was likely on purpose.  Most specifically, people are upset by characters acting out of character, their unpleasant fates, and the way the story has upended a bittersweet but mostly positive ending.

So let’s talk about the concept of the Ultimate Self.

This seems another game construct, to be honest, especially since not only is it always referred to with Capital Letters, it’s not actually about being your ultimate self.  It involves absorbing the memories and personalities and decisions of every alternate version of yourself to have ever existed, whereas lowercase “ultimate self” is a matter of self-actualization, of becoming the person you want to be.  In this manner, Dirk has become his Ultimate Self, a relentless, sinister puppetmaster concerned with altering the narrative to suit how he thinks it needs to go, and not his ultimate self, which would have been a supportive man who let his friends exist independent of his whims, as he expressed a desire to be in Homestuck proper.

What this means is that Dirk isn’t just high on omnipotence--he’s drugged out of his skull as a result of absorbing AR, Doc Scratch, and Lord English into his mind.

Dirk’s characterization feels derailed, definitely.  Jane’s as well, though that actually seems to have been at least in part the result of Dirk’s influence, unless I miss my guess.

But it doesn’t seem like it’s his ultimate fate.

Okay, maybe it’s this Dirk’s ultimate fate, but not every Dirk’s ultimate fate--and bear with me on this one, because if I’m wrong about this I’m gonna look real fuckin’ stupid.

You remember a few years back, when the Sherlock fandom was in denial about how bad the show had gotten?  How they were in such fervent denial that they concocted a whole conspiracy about how the terrible episodes in Season Four were just setup for a Not Terrible episode that would retroactively make everything make sense and be good again?  It was kind of sad, really.  But you know what the difference is between Sherlock and Homestuck?

Sherlock isn’t a story about stories, and Homestuck’s epilogues haven’t closed out their own story.

Hussie’s gone on record as using the meat-or-candy dichotomy as an analogy for indulging too much in one side or the other of a story’s contents.  Things go wrong if you oversaturate--too much candy leaves you empty and unfulfilled, too much meat leaves you sick and depressed.  You have to find a balance between the extremes, and in both of these epilogues, that balance is disturbed.

Meat!John dies a terrible, dramatic death at the behest of his omnipotent , controlling narrator.  Candy!John lives an empty, unfulfilling, unreal life, where the people around him are content in their irrelevance--and his omnipotent narrator prides themselves on detachment, on not interfering.  In fact, Muse!Calliope only directly takes action against non-Dirk entities a couple of times, most notably when somebody directly offends her:

But...you know who else was an omnipotent narrator?  Who took action, who involved himself, who interfered, but in ways almost entirely silly and harmless so as not to derail his characters’ agency?  Who was present, and cared (even though he was fuckin’ weird about it), as opposed to the ultimate detached narrator, but never took direct control of anyone, as opposed to the ultimate controlling narrator?

This weirdo.

There aren’t two omnipotent narrators in this story.  There are three.  (Four, actually, but since we last saw Caliborn being messily devoured by Muse!Calliope, I’m gonna leave him out of this for now.)  And you know what else is interesting?

There aren’t only two possibilities when you flip a coin.  It’s exceedingly rare, but sometimes a coin comes up neither heads nor tails.

Sometimes a coin lands on its edge.

Balanced between two possibilities, balanced between one extreme and the other.

People are getting all upset about Meat and Candy, trying to decide which is the “true” epilogue, but I think we might be missing the point.  I think neither is the true epilogue.  I think we’re going to enter a third continuity to some degree, and I think that’s going to be the key to stopping Dirk’s madness, to breaking down Muse!Calliope’s apathy.  At the very least, we’re about to enter a more balanced epilogue, even if it’s still just these two continuities--but I think Hussie’s point is that neither of these is a healthy state for fiction to be in, and that everything’s going to come together in the end.

Meat or Candy, huh...

That coin’s still in the air, people.  I’m putting my money on the impossible option three.