Space Out

So, what happened with me was this: I was actually around for when Homestuck was first releasing! However, I was also a literal child and very stupid (i am only mostly stupid now, thumbsup), and did not understand a single goddamn thing at the time. I've always been pretty averse to actually interacting with fandom, so basically, I saw the the fandom and got scared off HAHA. So I put Homestuck down and didn't think about it for years and years.

And then, in a discord server WHOLLY unrelated to Homestuck, I met a Homestuck fan who was like, big into Eridan. And their enthusiasm was pretty infectious! So I decided to revisit some of the eridan sections of Homestuck so I could properly engage with them, and, uhhh

By that point, I'd grown very accustomed to non-"fandomy" type media and literature. My real life bookshelf is basically all classics (to give you an idea: the odyssey/iliad/aeneid, the epic of gilgamesh, picture of dorian gray, narrative of the life of frederick douglass), and my favorite media usually requires extra research to fully comprehend (the secret saturdays, [prototype], psychonauts (1 only)). Secret Saturdays especially is so massively improved if you develop a curious, "let me google that" attitude, and [prototype] features a jigsaw plot that requires very careful reading/filtering out unreliable narrators to understand, and they were basically formative media for me, so yeah, I was kind of set up for success by my natural taste lol

on top of that, i was always the nerd in college who took weird, high-tier classes for my electives, instead of going for the ones that were "easy". So i've had asian art history and several tiers of western art history, philosophy, world mythology, and psychology up to a 3rd year level. I am also chinese! so things like eastern philosophy and eastern modes of thinking are very familiar to me, as are psychological concepts and artistic/historical allusions. Basically, I am a super nerd AND a hipster AND i think i am better than other people (that's a joke but i've genuinely been accused of that for just like. literally stating my education/preferences lol. so i figure i'll just own it). I'm also sad to say, but my favorite short story is Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace, so I was also already a postmodern-liker as well.

Anyway, to be clear, I am not immune to propaganda! I was a proponent of meowrails for a while. I believed Eridan was a weird incel for a while. I thought the dancestors were a joke for a while. I thought hussie made the ending shitty as a middle finger to the audience for a while. i was wrong about all of this! I will happily admit it. There's nothing wrong with falling for the facade that was meant to be dismantled by the viewer, as long as you're also able to own up to it and change your opinion when presented with new evidence :)

However, I am also pretty used to being a dissenting voice in fandom, in part because I am a filthy hipster, in part because all my favorite media forced me into that role, and in part because I simply love confrontation. It helps that I have an unpleasant personality and don't get along well with other fans in the first place, so I'm usually not moving within fandom groups, yknow? it's a lot easier to develop independent opinions when you are literally independent of the crowd.

As such, when I started looking at Eridan's chatlogs for the purposes of connecting with this other Homestuck fan, I went "waitaminute" and realized that all of this other Homestuck's fans takes were wrong. Needless to say, we are not friends. :)

Unfortunately, I also have mental illness, which means that when I came back into contact with the cognitohazard that is Homestuck, I wound up getting sucked back into it. If you scroll back on this blog far enough, you'll see that the first major step of that was joining a big Homestuck RP... I am an RPer I fear. You may have run into me on Dreambubble without even knowing it. And if you disconnected on me. Damn you

Anyway, the more I was immersed in that space, the more I started, like... actually rereading Homestuck? And the more I actually reread Homestuck, the more I realized that everyone in this god damn fandom is wrong (said as someone who was also wrong, and who might still be wrong). In Psychonauts, many of the characters have listed their favorite movies, and while I was running in that crowd, I made a habit of watching those movies. So I was actually really accustomed to jigsaw plots, reading into mythology/history, and intertextuality by the time I came to Homestuck. There was a moment of watching Serendipity where it kind of dawned on me that its themes mirrored Homestuck's in a major way. If you aren't accustomed to looking for it, you might not notice, but this was literally like all I'd done in Psychonauts for months (I watched two discrete Girls Gone Wilds for Psychonauts LOL i'm dedicated)

So, when did I notice that things were not what they seemed? pretty much immediately. Again, pretty much all my media experience prior to Homestuck primed me for reading between the lines, catching symbolism/allusions/intertextuality, piecing together a jigsaw plot, etc. I am Just That Bitch.

And the thing with Homestuck is, once you start pulling at its threads, you end up fishing up more and more and more. Like, taking Eridan for an example, when I started delving into him, I realized... huh... he and karkat... kind of have a Pale Thing going on together. And he also has this weird Red Thing with Roxy. But Roxy isn't the only alpha kid with a weird Red Thing. Jake has a weird Red Thing with Vriska. Does everyone have weird Romance Things going on?

There's also classpects. A big breakthrough for me was getting my hands on Hussie's book commentary. If you ever read it for yourself, it becomes so obvious, so quickly that this guy knows exactly what the fuck he's doing. Eridan ended up being the key again here, because Hussie makes his game extremely obvious where Eridan's concerned - he's clearly really genuinely fond of the character, especially in the book where Eridan is introduced, where his commentary is just as thoughtful and balanced as it is for anyone else - only for him to flip-turn in later books into thought-terminating, "haha look at what a loser he is! everyone should hate him!" stuff in the later books.

I don't remember exactly how I realized that the ending was shit on purpose. I've heard people say that HSBC/the epilogues make it really obvious, but I'm a picky canon purist and didn't care to read those, and I think my life is better for it. So as a result, what did it for me was, I think, a combination of noticing all these Weird Romance Things that were going on, plus all these weird prophecies - especially where Eridan is concerned, since Hussie speaks so highly of Hope - that never go anywhere, plus Hussie making the game really obvious in the book commentaries. I think I was also rereading the Caliborn/Calliope chess match at the time. Caliborn's entire modus operandi there is a shitty twist, right? He cajoled Calliope into letting him switch his king and queen's positions, but didn't actually do that, instead putting little hats on them to make it SEEM like he'd switched them around. He played entirely within "the rules" as a result, as his king and queen never made illegal moves, and instead the trick was his opponent's presuppositions. Because Calliope was expecting Trick A, she didn't notice that Trick B was actually that there was no trick at all.

And that's the shitty canon ending. Because we're all expecting Trick A of some sort - a happy ending, or a hussie-gets-mad-and-gives-up ending, or whatever kind of ending we were expecting to read, we don't notice that the ending is just... shit. It's just shit in-universe, for in-universe reasons. And LE's shitty twist is to make you think that it isn't.

In any case, it was all over from there. IF the ending was, in fact, bad on purpose, because it diegetically represents the victory of Lord English over the universe of Homestuck, and IF that shitty ending also serves as commentary on a meta level about how the forces of fascism usurp media and turn it into propaganda...

and IF all this Weird Romance Shit I noticed was, in fact, real, and IF these patterns of class and aspect I was noticing were also, in fact, real...

and IF an actual ability within the comic is the explicit power to make fake things real...

THEN that would mean...

that homestuck was written to have a shitty ending on purpose...

for the purpose of forcing the audience to reckon with propaganda and lies...

and forge a new and better ending using the power of hope.

And once I had that framework for reading Homestuck in mind, everything else started to click into place. And this became more and more the case as I started really delving into the intertextuality, Homestuck's foundational texts. IF all that stuff about Homestuck's ending is true, THEN that means that the rest of Homestuck is a puzzle box DESIGNED to show you the way to a true, happy ending. Everything you need is right there in the comic; hussie's book commentary helps to patch up the holes that would otherwise be hard to spot, and puts some things into hard text that could otherwise be up to interpretation.

To some extent, interpretation - and having interpretations that vary from each others' - is like, part of the game. Things are often kept vague and unexplained for a reason. But I am telling you. There is some really weird fucking SHIT in there. The more you look, the deeper it goes. Hal becoming a rabbit furry and making out with jesus is like, foundational to any true happy ending, and I literally could not explain that to you without first explaining literally everything else first. which is also the order i had to take to arrive at that answer. It's literally impossible to catch the hal stuff unless you understand classpect, understand karma, understand soul mates, and understand intertextuality.