What Killed Homestuck?
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- Опубліковано 11 кві 2023
- A sequel to: • In Defense of Homestuc...
One year ago, I created a video essay titled “In Defense of Homestuck’s Ending.” In said video, I made an argument that the comic Homestuck had an incredible ending that masterfully used the comic’s themes of control over the narrative and the feeling of being trapped to create a beautiful ending.
But, in doing so, I ignored the rest of Part 4, which ranges in quality from actually decent to infuriatingly bad. For a lot of people, it didn’t matter what the ending said, thematically, because they’d already given up on Homestuck. The later years of the comic weren’t satisfying, and the ending didn’t fix the problems the comic had been struggling with.
Part four is…rough. Brilliant at times, but also often infuriating. For a lot of people, it killed the comic. But, as someone who actually like Part 4 more than most people, I don’t think Part 4 is what killed the comic.
I think, after rereading some of the later Homestuck chapters, I get why the comic died. And before I explain how, I first need to discuss a few characters.
Sources:
Homestuck Character Word Counts: dash-n-step.tumblr.com/post/6...
Attempting to explain and annotate Homestuck's Google Trends: / oc_attempting_to_expla...
MS Paint Adventures: Statistics: readmspa.org/stats/
Hiveswap: mspaintadventures.fandom.com/...
Quirk: mspaintadventures.fandom.com/...
Hiveswap Act 2 does not have any credits for any of the team members: / hiveswap_act_2_does_no...
A Brief History of Homestuck: • A Brief History of Hom...
Homestuck Sent Me A Legal Threat, And Then It Got Worse: • Homestuck Sent Me A Le... - Ігри
Happy to see the good response to this video! If you want to support me, check out my other video essays, or maybe play one of my games.
yo mr white (Parody murder mystery visual novel, Homestuck style humor) casey-jarmes.itch.io/yo-mr-white
Smoke and Mirrors (Serious murder visual novel, best thing I've made) casey-jarmes.itch.io/smoke-and-mirrors
Day of Apotheosis (RPG currently in Beta, about fighting an unkillable final boss): casey-jarmes.itch.io/day-of-apotheosis
Won't wrong with killing. when they all need to die. I don't see a problem. Killing things is fun. "I say let it die". jack is a spirit created through pure suffering. You may have remove him for now. But he will return again in a new person a new body. He never sleeps.
I believe that Terezi's coin flip was framed in such a way by Terezi as to be a final morals check on Vriska. It's wasn't "heads you stay here, Tails you go to challenge jack" it was "Heads you stay alive, Tails you go to the gallows" or "heads you stay in my life, tails you go away forever". Terezi KNEW Vriska would interpret it as "heads you stay here, tails you go to jack". The same way I used to interpret it. So Vriska cheated, that was her failing the morals check. If she could have resisted the urge to cheat, her natural luck would have kicked in and she would have lost the flip and not gotten to do what she wanted. She would have stayed alive. Terezi's coin flip was Vriska's last chance to prove there was some good in her worth sparing despite her ego and cruelty. By not cheating a simple coinflip, something entirely in her powers to do, she could have lived... She did not.
Honestly, staying could have even been interpreted as "Staying Together". There was no reason for her to face Noir alone.
But... she didn't just need to be a hero, she needed to be THE hero.
Vriska knew what Terezi was doing. She played into the game as a dare to her because she didn't think she would do it. Choosing heads was her way of saying, "no I'm not going to change my mind, let me go or make me go away."
That's why I'm so bummed that that moment will forever have a [?????] password thing on it. There was no other way that it could have went; Vriska was too far gone to ever choose to stay with Terezi over being in control of everything. The whole tragedy was that her beginning to change after meeting John came too late to affect her decision. But now, there's [????] implying that it *will* go another way at some point.
All the more reason for all new readers to use the unofficial collection.
..... you know to much. Just like it was Tereza. That made everyone kill each other throw. Mind control, an if it wasn't for John saveing vriska. Jack would have killed you all. Lol Tereza an vriska a thing. Ya right. It was all karkat. You know what a cancerus undieing God wanted most. Don't worry we have to kill a capitalistic bth. An save jack. This isn't over. Tereza acting gay. just to get in to candy. To re summon lord English. When being 2nd to the clown. You half wits. Why you never seen it coming. Don't worry Tereza comeing back with a hole planet. Makeing everyone think Vriska was the bad guy just iceing on the cake. Wasn't had she would have done most of the things her self.
Effing poetry.
On the subject of why hussie would have his self insert lust after vriska:
There was a running gag among the fanbase at the time(at least the chunk i was a part of) that Hussie wouldn't let vriska drop out of the narrative because he wrote his perfect waifu. So him acknowledging that in comic was the joke, and the characters within the story being unaware of the fandoms jokes is another layer of that. Is it a good joke? not really, but there's something to be said about how much of homestuck loses a lot of it's cohesiveness years after the end. At the time, many of us were laughing our asses off at how hard he committed to the bit in that section, simply because it was both an acknowledgement and a derision of something we ourselves were joking about.
Oh god. We will literally never understand Homestuck ever again simply because all of it is drenched in fan/creator conversation and the context to many of this will be easily lost like the Vriska listing, the “every troll is canon thing”, NepetaQuest, what exactly the alpha kids and trolls exactly mock, and far more.
You know, it's funny until it's true.
Pretty much anytime you see Hussie and horses in the same vicinity, assume it is a multilayer post-post-ironic inside joke that makes no sense anymore
@@iantaakalla8180 Not only that, but there's so much fandom space crossover that happened, that is now forgotten. Some of the music team used be part of the YTP community, "Vriska did nothing wrong" originated on 4chan (it in itself a reference to the debacle that was the dub the dew campaign), and so many other facets of other communities have been brushed aside. Nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of the tumblr sect even discussing its history, and then they completely bury/are unaware of any spaces other than their own while recapping the history of the webcomic(despite being late arrivals to the fandom themselves).
Many of the callbacks, jokes, and references were not exclusive to one part of the reader base but a myriad combination of all the discussions. Hussie was well aware of all of the conversations being had about his creation and addressed each one at some point, but because he began to focus on one group later on in the comics run time(the tumblr sect) a lot of the mentions to previous discussions got filtered through their lens.
Truly and forever, Tumblr is what killed Homestuck.
Ok I was there so I can actually answer this. So the whole thing with Hussie the Character and Vriska was a running joke that was a reference to his now-defunct Forumspring where people asked both stupid questions/jokes and legitimate questions about the lore/narrative. It started as a dumb joke made at the expense of someone who asked a dumb question about Feferi and whether or not she was overwieight, people thought this was hilarious so they kept referencing it in questions. This inevitably started to steer twards Vriska because of course it did. Hussie kept feeding into it so it became a thing. It's still cringe because he actually interacted with Vriska but it wasn't really weird if you were in the know. Which to be fair was pretty much 90% of all readers back then.
I was SO disappointed that the sylladex was never mentioned like ever again, I remember John sacrificed a system where he could pick and choose instead of having a stack system for his sllyadex to the amalgamation if the two so that if he needed to he could eject something from his sylladex as a form of defense and it was just, never used again. Think of how cool it would have been if when fighting the condesce he just suddenly hit her with like some random thing at mach 7
I think the problems with Homestuck stem from the fact it was originally intended to be a smaller, mostly improvisational work, like Problem Sleuth before it. Given that the acts are called acts, its not unreasonable to conclude there was originally meant to be three of them. Hussie wrote himself into corners a lot. His solution was always to switch to another plot tread that had been gathering dust for a while while he figured out what to do. Problem Sleuth was his practice, and Homestuck is where he mastered this. For example, why did the intangible house juju unstick John from canon? Because Hussie realized the asteroid crew weren't going to be functional when they got to the session. Rose and Terezi were both messes due to decisions made on the fly while they were on their journey. Everyone dies. John gets retcon powers. Do over. Everyone lives. That was the most obvious example, but there are others and this is a youtube comment and I don't feel like further elaborating.
On top of that, nothing lasts forever. Nothing is infinitely sustainable. Homestuck had to end eventually. Fuck The Simpsons.
There's also a running theme which bleeds into everything narratively, that he wanted to see how many ways a story could be metaphysically influenced from outside the 'boundaries' of the story's literal, physical reality. Narrative dominos - closed loops (powered up by time travel and dimension hopping into 'moebius double reacharounds'), butterfly effects, futile time wasting, retcons, glitches in reality caused by Caliborn's physical abuse of the game's software, the story directly invokes these concepts and has many characters highly aware of the tropes as they're happening.
Hussie even takes it a step further - placating fan concerns about his avatar's influence on the story, he had sworn to only involve himself about a yard's length into the narrative, depicted as him physically folding two omniscient sburb portals to be one yard apart, so Jade's ship can cross an enormous distance more easily, as the extent of his avatar's actual contribution to the narrative.
His 'proposal' to Vriska in the outer dream bubbles was just a gag about him trying to help Vriska by giving her the ridiculously OP ring, but because he is a weirdo about it, she loses the ring, and therefore he still doesn't influence the story, but clears up what happened to one of the rings.
@@Hugsloth metanarratives truly are the scourge of storytelling
I thought it was funny at least when John touched the Sburb source code and imprinted his arm onto dozens of random pages of the comic (which Hussie retroactively updated).
In my opinion I think that bringing Vriska back in a way undermined Rose impact as the light player. Rose could have taken Act 6 Vriskas place as the plan maker. Her character was already set up to be so anyways and she’s a main character.
Yeah. Rose could have done SO much more, she had a lot of potential!!
Undermining another character is Vriska's MO as a Thief of Light, worming her way into roles of importance over and over again, even when someone else deserves it more.
The scene where she meets the previous Vriska makes it clear that her getting this undeserved lucky break is absolutely NOT a good thing, she's shown to be the worst version of herself, in comparison to the original timeline Vriska who would actually deserve a second chance.
@@Cri_Jackal yet the entire story and EVERY character acts as if Nu-Vrsika is justified.
That scene was so tonally dissonant with itself.
and they just kill off OG vriska shortly after too!
It really does not come off like that scene was meant to show new vriska in any kind of bad light, instead showing OG vriska in a bad light.
An ending where she overcomes her alcoholism without the shoehorning of vriska’s influence and leads the charge wouldve been beautiful ueuuuueuueueu ….
I like act 6 a lot but a lot of people forget not just how long it is but the sheer time between updates being astronomical. The fact that Homestuck HAD an ending still kind of floors me, I remember existing in 2014 just believing it would remain a cliffhanger forever.
Honestly, Homestuck had unhealthily fast updates for most of it's run. The lengthy updates later on were painful, but the comic updated quickly in the times it wasn't on hiatus.
Is it weird I kinda wish it didn't these days?
Actually that would have been kinda clever for a story about "escaping a narrative."
yeah I think the fandom hit supercritical mass a few months before the gigapauses and was already in a cycle of internal controversies and dramas by then, so when the momentum stopped people were *thirsty* for a new fandom to move to. the gigapauses of 2013-2015 saw a whole proliferation of successor fandoms, notably stuff like Danganronpa, Night Vale, and OFF even well before Undertale ran away with the whole damn thing
i kind of wish it didn't update sometimes. like maybe there would've been some crazy fanwork ending that's better than what we got, but it didn't exist because we eventually did get an ending. idk, i'm coping lol
As for Vriska, I always remember this expression: "If a person is almost always shit, but can do something good - the fans rush with him and praise his good deeds, justifying the bad ones. If the person is normal, but with a little shit - the fans will belittle him for every wrong deed." Hm-hm-hm.
Thanks for the video, lots to think about.
You made me understand why I suddenly stopped enjoying Vriska post-cascade. She was supposed to die early, but Hussie kept her around for some reason and it diluted the message her arc was supposed to convey
You don't kill a spider that lays golden eggs
@@Dizerfullpower whether the eggs are golden is a subject of debate
I've said this since I first managed to finish the thing: Homestuck isn't a very good story. That isn't to say I didn't like it, or that I don't still like it, or that I'm not still mildly obsessed with parts of it. It had the highest highs of any webcomic I've ever read and gave us story moments and wild concepts I'll never entirely forget, but it also had the longest and lowest parts I've ever seen. When I talk about Homestuck, I typically say that it's hard to recommend. You can't read through all of Homestuck post-mortem purely out of enjoyment, you have to have some level of stubbornness to persist through the parts that simply aren't enjoyable.
Homestuck has some of the best written characters I've ever encountered, and must have featured hands-down the most interesting worldbuilding, power system, and overall mechanics out of any story on the internet. It also has some of the worst pacing I've ever seen, ranging from introducing way too many characters at once and not expanding on most of them all the way to spending hundreds on hundreds of pages doing essentially nothing, and a lot of creative decisions that simply don't make sense. I don't regret reading it, and I've thought many times about going back and re-reading it, but I've never managed to sit down with it again because those poor decisions weigh the entire thing down like a chicago overcoat.
I couldn't agree more
Every time I have seen anything related to this comic, my first impression is "contrast diarrhea", and it's very easy for anyone that is into visual design/art to call me a philistine for thinking this, but no. I don't know how hard it is to draw all that, I sincerely don't understand the great depths of creativity it takes to go from decently detailed, to neon shadow puppet theater and back again while a floodlight shines down on you from above. I just think it looks like somebody Jackson Pollocked a regular webcomic and then threw it into a blender.
And hearing that it's also accompanied by enough text to fill several regular novels and requires a companion wiki page does not improve my first impression. Was this all written by the same person that did the art?
@@Reddotzebra It's worth remembering that the name of the website was once "MS Paint Adventures." That stylistic choice to make it appear as though the comics were drawn in MS Paint informs much of the MSPA art style. It's all visible pixels and bright default colors, and certainly the art is high-contrast but Homestuck made a point to use colors thematically. Every character has a color palette, so to speak, and it actually aids the visual design more than you'd expect in an artstyle that doesn't differentiate silhouettes very much.
Of course I can't say anything too much in defense of the more realistic and off-putting panels given that the artstyle used there is officially referred to as "hussnasty."
At any rate, yes, it's (mostly) written and drawn by the same person, with a bit of help here and there towards the end. Yes, it's long. Think of it less as "the length of several novels" and more as "the length of one of those online 'webnovels' that are eventually published as six books." Yes, it's complicated. No, you don't need to consult the wiki while reading. As long as you have a decent memory and don't stop long enough to forget everything it's not all that difficult to follow along with what's happening. The wiki is more useful for recalling the fine details and making sense of things well after the fact. And learning trivia.
Ultimately, it's just a long webcomic. It's no harder to read than any other long webcomic, as long as you don't get caught up in the rough patches.
yeah, the characters are fun, there's a lot of fun concepts throughout it with the batshit game mechanics that somehow loop back around to kind of making a weird sort of sense later on, and anyone who thinks that Homestuck didn't fundamentally alter the culture of the internet especially in terms of it's humor is kidding themselves or just wasn't there during the heyday because it sticks out to me even now.
...but yeah, as an actual story it falls pretty flat overall. Also I haven't bothered reading it but from what I hear of "Homestuck 2" it might as well be a bad fanfic.
@@dimitribarronmore I honestly did not know that. Now there's a name I actually did hear back in the day. I just never checked it out. I was more of a "Bob and George/Sluggy Freelance" reader.
the fact I knew Vriska's character was going to go downhill the moment I heard she gets revived later on in the comic, I really liked how they ended her character in act 5 and wish it stayed that way :/
I've always considered Homestuck's failure to be just because Hussie finally hit his burnout limit and so he stopped enjoying what he was doing. He'd been writing the story for a long time, it had exploded into a size no one could ever have imagined, and everyone expected super quick updates all the time. That's a situation where you don't have time to review or edit, where you don't have time to properly think through your story beats and thematic ideas and have to throw them in half-baked. Hussie was stuck jumping from impulse to impulse, including impulses that came from interacting with the fandom, all without any opportunity to reflect, review and edit.
And there was never a way to fix the mistakes that had already been made, because it was already 'published'. If there was a way to do it without getting half the internet start arranging a hit on your name, Homestuck really needed to stop being arcs and start having e-books, where a real editor could go through each part and go back to Hussie so he had a chance to refine it.
never would have worked.
that experience wasnt something you could translate to a book.
Book doesn't work because the entire promise was the engagement with the reader, also the internet allowed the story in the first place.
As someone who got to speak to Hussie directly way back in the day, he claimed he didn't take any notes and somehow kept all of his lore and worldbuilding in his mind. If it feels like some things get forgotten about, it's probably cuz of that.
To be honest I see it less that he was burnt out and more like he didn't care anymore. He cared so little about his own story he let fans (probably the worst people to let write any part of your story) make sweeping decisions and changes because they found a fucking candy bar.
That the reason I hate Andrew Hussie, he had the gall to make me care, a lot, about the story, then he just gave up and let it be ruined further by the worst kind of people.
Fun fact: seeing John retcon everything and cause vriska to never die after Game Over is what caused me to stop reading the comic. Never came back lol.
Your honestly better for it.
not a bad time to drop off. imagine your own beautiful ending
Vriska being back from death YET AGAIN in HS:Beyond Canon is why I don't want to read it anymore. You did right by quitting early.
Homestuck is dead, long live Homestuck.
A while back, I had to confront my relationship to this comic after my little sister stumbled upon it and made it as much a part of her personality as I undoubtedly did back in the day. She had no way of knowing there had once been a living, thriving, and unbearable fanbase irrevocably attatched to this story. She did not know nor care for a game that was promised and failed to deliver still by the time she started reading. She never knew the intoxicating rush of an update nor the sobering dread of a pause. And still she found value in Homestuck, where I long since thought none would be left.
I think I owe it to her to go back and read Homestuck again.
that essay was super cool, very curious for the epilogues one lol
Let's not talk about the epilogues
Aside from the narrative reasons for vriska to stay dead, it also undermines a lot of her development. The reason that the dream bubble vriska has any intrigue is because she gains a level of self awareness due to the fact that she is totally removed from narrative control. She can't have what she wanted, so she has to change who she is. She's a great counterbalance to the dead vriska, who chose what she wanted over everyone else, rebuking change. She has to lose control, either by her own development or by being killed, to be good. To bring her back at that pivotal moment but to remove the loss of control and, actually, give her WAY MORE of it than she has ever had is just so damning. It also ruins the post-retcon Terezi, who's vaguely antagonistic but also deep relationship with vriska served as a poignant plotline. We have to assume that she just. Gave up?? On trying to separate herself from vriska or challenge her 'above the law nature', which received so much buildup in the chapters before (chapters unaffected by the retcon). This new terezi just goes 'oh. okay' and then goes back to doing anything vriska tells her which is so anti the rest of that act.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for homestuck. I developed my art skills doing homestuck fan art. Reading the comics gave me much needed escape during depressing times. Finishing the 500,000 reading was a huge accomplishment for me as someone who struggles a lot with concentration and executive disfunction. Looking back, I cringe, but I also have a lot of nostalgia for it. But I second what other people are saying that it did severely decrease in quality as it went on, and I think Andrew Hussie suffering burn out is a good explanation for it. Whether or not they are a jerk or just a person who got in a little over their head and reacted badly is a question that can be asked, but I don't care to answer.
the thing is, Homestuck doesn't have to be dead if we don't want it to be. It had a lot of good qualities, it brought me a lot of joy, and I'm glad it exists.
I'm on my third readthrough of Homestuck currently, and what eternally frustrates me about this comic is that it's so incredibly good a lot of the time, making me feels ways and engaging me in ways that no media has ever made me feel before or since, that when the comic is frustrating or boring it hits so much worse
I so desperately wish we could get a second draft of Homestuck that fixed most of its major issues, and I'm still waiting for something similar to Homestuck to emerge and wow me in the same way HS did
Also I disagree with a few of your criticisms, but the biggest one I wanna focus on is the idea that much of Homestuck fails due to not relating back to the plot
I think a lot of HS's charm and appeal comes from its silly diversions, this isn't to say I don't think that HS went too far however
ideally I'd keep things like the act 1 messing around and the act 3 intermissions and the crafting scenes, but incorporate or cut things like the fusion sprites and basically everything involving dream bubbles
Same. It would be nice to have a redo on some of the stuff from act 5 act 2 and have a better act 6. Starting from act 6 it just seems like there are many good external threats but the character just isn't there. It's mostly just Roxy, Dirk and Dave, John, Meenah and Vriska (who's presence just fills up space) and Caliborn (who's epic). Everyone else is just sort of there.
@@sumkindacheeto I think by act 6 Hussie was just tired of writing the comic and the creativity and pacing suffered dramatically. I'd remove the entirety of the dream bubbles and probably all of the dansestors (if we NEED Meenah and Aranea you can say they escaped their session like the beta kids did rather than dying and going to bubles). Skip pretty much all of the "time skip" really. The alpha kids need an overhaul too, while I love Dirk, the other three are pretty much wasted characters. You're right that in general a lot of the characters don't have much to do and sort of just stand there waiting to be given some sort of resolution near Collide. Also the retcon was a stupid idea, change that.
I'd say another huge issue with act 6 is that Hussie's existing problem with telling instead of showing gets so bad he had to create Aranea for exposition. Please SHOW us Caliborn going through the dead session instead of him having those terrible convos with Hussie.
Hussie changed the pacing and tone of the comic a lot reacting to the fandom's fixation on the characters too, and I think that was a bad idea overall, as it lead to a lot of pointless convos, and the alpha kids's attempts at melodrama just fell flat.
I've read somewhere that Meenah was written as a replacement for Feferi to please people that had her zodiac sign and felt she didn't contribute much to the plot. Maybe Hussie had an idea to at some point conclude Vriska's story and flesh out Aranea for that but that might be a stretch. The retcon might not have been necessary but worked well, except for the part where Vriska gets knocked out (, she has to die like the rest of the kids that didn't develop a character to progress the game in my view). The dancestors seem like just another layer of characters to cover for the lack of information that could have come from hivebent. (I guess lack of content is good for fan fiction). And the thing with Caliborn's character development is that he has no friends. What would there be to even put from his dead session? More of the Felt, exposition, Homosuck, John kicking over his house of cards? Just saying. (the cherubs as a race might need more canonical lore to explain the lord/muse aspect more, maybe).
@@sumkindacheeto Feferi was also a wasted character yeah. Not only was she not plot relevant, she wasn't even interesting with the little time she did have. Meenah was a way cooler character, only really held back by being from some of the most boring parts of act 6. I have mixed feelings on Aranea, I think if she made just a bit less annoying and she was taken out of the dream bubbles she could have been really compelling.
Post-gameover was enjoyable yeah, but it's overall impact on the story wasn't great. Not just bringing back Vriska, but wasting so much of our time by making the character development from pre-game-over pointless.
I don't think Hussie really thought through his worldbuilding during Hivebent, so yeah a lot of later HS and HS spinoff content was dedicated to covering for that. The issue with the dancestors is they contributed basically nothing, and were all just one-note bad jokes. I've never managed to get through the entirety of openbound.
It would have been much more engaging to sometimes cut to Caliborn attempting to complete some type of challenge in the dead session and learning its rules, while maybe foreshadowing some things he'd do as LE compared to what we got. Hussie is just the most annoying character in HS.
Have you read vast error? its a very faithful spiritual successor to Homestuck
Excellent video, Homestuck may have died, but it lives on in the dreambubbles as the fandom creates excellent fanventures, such as Cool and New Webcomic, Crow Strider AU and many others :)
My gods the Crow Strider AU is amazing. I love it.
Don't forget Vast error and you're someone. I also recommend Deltastuck
@@windego64 deltastuck?
@@Stargazer_Ley A parody of undertale. It's like Undertale x Homestuck if they give birth. The music is top notch
@@windego64 oh. Eh. I was never that much into Undertale. Like I watched it played but that's it.
You basically summed up all my feelings even if I think the biggest mistake Hussie made was wanting to be metta deconstuction as apposed to just exploring those themes in the story with the wonderful characters he came up with.
And the Epilogues and 2 are some of the biggest middle fingers to a fanbase that made him so successful. And such a naked scam for money and relevancy that I'm shocked it wasn't a plan by Vriska. Compleatly devoid of any of the charm that made HS so endearing. To try to keep the IP going past it's prime.
Vriska should've been dropped off with Jade, who was completely alone.
It brings her back, prevents her from sapping all of the growth from the meteor crew, and puts her in an environment where she might not be the clear top dog.
That's actually a pretty good idea. Although, forcing Jade to hang out with Vriska for 3 years might be worse than spending that time alone
i've always been of the opinion that jade should have taken vriska's place in the vriskagram recap.
it always felt significantly more in character for someone like jade to be considerate of the well-being of her friends than vriska tbh
No Jade didn't deserve to have to put up with her. Jade deserved so much better and it's heartbreaking what they did to her in the epilogues.
Thank you for touching on Vriska. She never really was my favorite. I didn't like her because she was mean and hateful to Tavros. And even though she had good qualities about her, she was just mean overall, including to the humans (including Jake English).
Poor Joke. Everyone's always mean to him
Well personally i was ok with Vriska and even liked her somewhat, I just disliked the fact that she was made into unfixable evil person. Like they could have her ending, pre time skip persona in the soul world (the one that was supper vulnerable) and after john time shenanigans give her actual actual arc where she would become better person as we clearly saw her becoming better when she was talking with john after killing Tavros, they could make john guide her like she had done for him (ofcourse he would give her psychological guidance where she gave him literal one)
Vriska was literally one of the only good things about ACT 6. Keeping Vriska around made reading Hometsuck post ACT 5 bearable.
Completely agree with many of these points, especially how reviving Vriska ended up ruining her character and how Hussie's feelings on the fandom and reliance on meta humor and narrative compromised the story. Though I think the "There is no disc 3" message is a callback rather than that.
P.S. Here's my obligatory "Justice for Spades Slick" comment.
Eriden should have survived and done shit alongside gamzee for awhile. Then he could join the condense later on. I think he could have made a good villian
really love how you emphasized the hanging dread homestuck writes so well and then ended the video announcing you would be doing an essay on the epilogues. 10/10
I always took hussie creeping on vriska being meant to satirize the fanbase - like with the caucasian jokes (when the kids aren't meant to be racially coded - they're not white, they're blank). But it's still weird that they would choose the vehicle for that comment to be their own literal self-insert
Like, I saw it trying to say "Look at this, isn't this creepy? Aren't you creepy for this?" - I feel like later acts had a lot of animosity towards segments of the fanbase weaved into it. Not unearned animosity, tbf.
It stems from a joke Hussie in response to a fan where he essentially went "no Vriska is MY WIFE" as an spur of the moment gag.
This became such a meme that it eventually wormed its way in to story itself, conveniently playing into the self insert's status as a parody of self inserts.
The one thing that a self indulgent story with a self insert main character is most known for, whether it be fan fiction or an original work, is the writer pairing their OC up with the baddest bitch in the story, the alt girl with attitude, the fan favorite waifu babe.
The punchline in the comic being that Vriska utterly rejects that bullshit rather than breaking character for the sake of falling for the OC, as would traditionally happen.
That sort of stuff far predates Hussie, the same desire to lampshade shitty self centered writers was what created Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff too, being a parody of some asshat who drew some shitty webcomic panels on a forum, Hussie clapping back with the first SBaHJ comic, blowing his art's shittiness out of the water.
I agree with a lot of points you have in this video, cause what killed homestuck for me was the jumping to a new universe with John and Roxy and how they just abandoned all the building character arcs with now dead characters. I would pinpoint it to where Vriska comes back like you said, but what is your opinion on Gamzee? Was he also a character with a bad arc/interpretation that affected others and the quality of the comic? Or was he more caught up in the failures to write others? Personally I liked him up until the part where he got dragged into Aranea’s stuff, since it kinda conflicts with the idea he serves lord English, and I hate what they did to him in the Epilogues. I'm looking forward to your video on that if you're serious about it.
Gamzee's weird. There are hints that he's being controlled by Lil Cal (see his fight with Terezi in There's Problems) but I don't think the comic ever does anything with that. He's just an asshole who does random shit, for the most part
My interpretation of Gamzee is that he is... A Clown
He's a Joke, a lot of the time a joke in bad taste, he is terrifying and ridiculous and silly and annoying and he(and the story) probably expects you to laugh but he's just as likely to disgust or annoy or terrify
He's just a clown, he doesn't make sense because he's a clown and Hussie has a weird fascination with clowns
@@caseyjarmes there are no hints, its tipical abuse apologism from the fandom
Yeah but heres the thing clowns do still have to make some sense. There are rules to comedy and with the whole harlequin theme throughout the whole thing you would think it would matter somewhat.
I guess the rule is that in the SBURB game there are no rules for Gamzee and that he serves Caliborn because of Lil Cal. The first rule is proven by his death in the epilogues, the second by a significant suckers page and him raising Caliborn/Calliope and supporting Caliborn.
I think what killed it for me was the way it wasted potentially interesting villains like Eridan and Gamzee in favor of shoving vriska down everyone's throat even when she outstayed her welcome. It doesnt help that shes a really annoying character on top of being an asshat
Vriska is one of the few good characters in Homestuck.
Eridan was never a villain though, just an asshole.
@@Jhud69 he literally killed two people and his entire race
I guess the best way describe Eridan is irrelevant. He is an asshole and he committed genocide because of wounded pride, but that does not mean anything when Lord English is the issue, and ultimately he did not matter. Even Nepeta and Sollux and the non-Meenah and non-Aranea alpha trolls did more.
And the sad part is that technically, this view goes against the intended reading because Homestuck is postmodern, and the imposition of Lord English is not supposed to happen, but his relevance still did not stick beyond whatever.
@@iantaakalla8180 yeah you're just repeating what I said. eridan was still a more interesting potential villain than lord english because at least he isnt a cardboard cutout villain like most of homestucks villains are. vriska was the exception to this, but i was not interested in reading about her being revived for the 1847027th time and the story making excuses for her to continue being relevant
i take back what i said about gamzee, he didnt really have any motivations he was two dimensional as fuck
tl:dr, homestuck villains boring, vriska annoying
The situation behind hiveswap makes me so sad. I never backed the Kickstarter and I didn't play the 2 parts until like a year ago and man they gave me the same feeling I had when I first started reading Homestuck. like wow I really really hope what pumpkin can get its shit together long enough to be finished, I NEED to know what happens after part 2. And seriously the music in those games is sooooo good, Ticket to Ride is an underrated Toby Fox masterpiece
it's such a weird situation, because hussie signed himself and the HS ip into several terrible legal contracts that have turned all chances at unshattering the franchise to nil. Viz acquiring HS publishing rights + What Pumpkin and then laying off most of his team and then rehiring a couple of them, just made the whole drudgy mess even murkier. I'm honestly surprised Hiveswap Pt2 actually came out at all, let alone in a polished and functional state.
I will never leave my act 6 hater bunker but I respect your candor and arguments
I honestly would have thought that to describe the issues Homestuck faced this well, this accurately, you'd need a four hour video. A ten hour video. A thesis. You did it in 40 minutes.
I can't deny that how much I loved Homestuck and how badly it disappointed me hangs over me, years later. It was foundational for me; I was at the perfect age for it. And now, I've read hundreds of times as many stories as I had then, have much more developed tastes. Other stories have become even more important to me than Homestuck was. But despite that, when I think about the complicated mess of even trying to understand why Homestuck failed, it makes me sad. I still love the early parts; I've reread them and know it. It gets even more frustrating thinking about how Homestuck deliberately left itself open only to use its epilogues just to bridge into a sequel that leaned harder into the metatextual anti-character arcs. I don't need Dave or John to have become heroes. You can write good character arcs without falling into those narrative expectations. I just wish it did that.
I can't be so bold as to say you've given me closure, but watching this video and thinking about what you've said at least feels satisfying, not frustrating. You did a good job. Thank you. Maybe your video on the epilogues will help me sort out my thoughts on those.
GREAT essay! I love Homestuck for what it did good, but as a hobbyist writer, I like to analyze where stories could be better. Homestuck is a massive, monumental piece, so explaining a rationalized take like this is very much appreciated, since its an intense feat to ground Homestuck from its massive scope.
I can imagine this comment section will have its own kind of backlash considering what day it is today, but I kind of interpreted this video as a sort of tough love on the comic’s anniversary, which I very much appreciate. 🏡🎂
this was really good! i wish we had more tough love analysis on homestuck rather than just looks back on the fandom or metanarrative waffling.
i feel like the last few parts of homestuck really suffers from a lack of tension. there are just so many ways for dead characters to come back or for them to still influence the plot post-mortem that it really eats at any sense of threat.
"It had good character interactions but it was JUST CHARACTER INTERACTIONS!"
I would like to point out that this part actually suggests certain parts of the story are Unsatisfying on purpose
Or at the very least that Hussie is aware of the unsatisfying nature of it and tries to pass it off as something on purpose because Hussie is weird like that
That was such a huge theme of Homestuck in my eyes before that part was even WRITTEN. Reading it was meant to in part be a fight against it. It's being antagonistic on purpose. And seeing it that way made me love so many of the things complained about here. Though, the lack of character development always hurt and made me yearn for more (I simply coped by making so many headcanons with the homies). The pacing starting in Act 6 also made me want to eat glass 💪🤭. So I read up til uhhhh idk a very little ways into act 6, then skipped a portion to peek ahead, then just started reading act 6 out of order because I wanted to catch up but I needed to read according to the amt of energy I had at the moment. Eventually I read it (mostly) in order (I still skip certain lame parts of act 6 but I've read them before at least 🗿). I miss the vibes of Act 4 and The (Midnight Crew) Intermission and Act 5 even but in a different way 💀.
One of the major themes of Hussie's work - even his pre-MSPA comics like Inappropriate Time for Ham - is that the observer must always be wrong, or on the wrong track, to make his punchlines and twists hit harder. He often lampoons that he did not - or would not - do or write what the readers *told* him to do.
He also brings it up in the printed book footnotes of Problem Sleuth, that his goal was always to refute the reader's ability to predict where his stories, characters, or jokes would go. If anything was shown as predetermined, he would obscure the trail of events leading to it as much as possible, to ensure the audience didn't accidentally predict story beats before he could reveal them. That level of obsessive narrative control + banter directly to the readers was obviously unsustainable, but was manageable for him at the time the MSPA fanbase was still relatively small.
If any moment could be considered Homestuck's 'death', at least in its originally intended format, it would be when the forums became too mainstream and he could no longer lead the story through user suggestions posted there, and started leaning heavily into ===> instead of the reader commands.
@@HugslothReminds of Doc Scratch's section which literally had a bowl with ==>'s on it.
@@JJ18355 It's funny how Doc Scratch is himself sort of a godly author insert but then Hussie's insert of himself meets Doc and it all goes pretzel shaped.
What killed Homestuck?
The abomination that is Homestuck^2
Really enjoyed this one.
I think I feel about the same way about She's Back. My enjoyment survived it but largely because I already had a deep hatred of Vriska so fathomless that the difference between her being alive and dead in the narrative were basically nil while the series was still presenting her as important. Honestly, now I'm a little more distant from it, I find it really interesting to see people articulating more sympathetic views of her (I have some leg issues myself and a history of getting bullied regarding them which rendered Vriska's treatment of Tavros basically unreadable, I decided to skip it the last time I reread Homestuck just to get through the chapter). I also thought the treatment of Jack here was cool. I don't often think about Bec Noir's perspective and it's kind of neat to see it laid out.
Yeah. Vriska's treatment of Tavros might have been a bit over the line for what is intended to be a sympathetic character. And if her arc concludes with the idea that she is not a hero and could never be one, it isn't too bad of a problem. But if she comes back, faces no consequences for her actions, and is then treated as the greatest hero in the universe, it really, really sucks. Like there's a few lines in She's 8ack where Tavros gushes about how awesome Vriska is and that just rubbed me the wrong way, even if it is in character for him.
@@caseyjarmes wait no way did Hussie make Tavros, a person who was horribly abused by Vriska, do 180 and adore his waifu again? What?
Honestly at this point just give me my fucking Gamzee happy ending. If everyone forgives the bitch then everyone should forgive the funny clown guy
Well for me problem was that while she was talking to john she was great character and we saw her becoming better even good person and whole Travos death could have been the breaking point for her to become ok person, but instead they turned her extremally evil, and lost he whole redemption arc.
Like she was the best character while with John, but with out him she was just a witch that for some reason was on good guys side.
Even at the end with her pre John time shenanigans (where she was with trident girl and horses) we saw that she could have been good character, we saw her breaking point and if that was much sooner and changed her it could have make her good and her revival would be nice and her helping with making final plan more natural.
same, I hated vriska's bullying over tavros and thought I would get over it in the reread
and nope, she's just as unlikeable as I remember
@@greedier-7661 YES. As someone who absolutely hated Vriska's guts I was impressed in how likeable and sweet her relationship with John was, to this day that's where Vriska shined the best for me.
So for her to "return" with Tavros in the afterlife was such a bad taste, like we return to square one with this character.
I started reading Homestuck back in 2012, but stopped sometime after the end of a big pause. Because... I realised I'd forgotten a lot and I was just confused over what was happening. It wasn't until 2020 that I decided to reread Homestuck and actually finish it. So, what killed Homestuck for me was a pause combined with its complexity. (The complexity itself not being a problem, because if you just read it, you have it all fresh in your memory. And a pause in and of itself does not have to kill something, but if you combine those two... That made it too hard for me to continue reading. Because. I didn't understand anymore.)
Wait, people weren't saying vriska did nothing wrong ironically???? Vriska doing like, the more explicitly horrible things we see in the comic is what makes her a character at all, vriska did everything wrong and I don't understand how people could like her without seeing that 😭 personally i love vriska as a character for this, I find her very very amusing and wish i could keep her in an enclosure for science :)
i loved every minute of this and i did not expect it to end on such a positive note, but i'm glad it did
Remember, Virska did literally everything wrong.
Dad Eggbert did nothing wrong.
Dad Egbert is a cinnamon roll
Everytime I think about Homestuck, I think: "Damn, I wish this was as well written as Madoka Magica!" And then I go rewatch Madoka Magica and it's glorious third movie again.
true dat
Homestuck is if One Piece was written by whoever wrote Seven Deadly Sins on crack
It's interesting to know Hussie wanted to subvert expectation, because Hussie said he had the ending planned since the beginning. The reminds me of another beloved show where the creators said the same thing and the backlash on the finale forced them to include an alternate version in the bonus features section hmm.... Anyway, a lot of us knew how we wanted it to end, and went along with whatever happened yet a lot of us are still unhappy.
The thing is, I am sure he didn't expect the backlash during Hiveswap, and frankly I'm glad it all came to light because his decisions made sense to me after that. Given how much the story developed, grew in popularity, and how much it was really influenced by fans in the beginning, it's still wild to think he went with his originally intended ending even if it meant destroying what was built. I'm a firm believer that you should have your ending and story beats planned, but you also have to give your story room to grow! Something you want your readers to get out of the experience is to have suspicions confirmed, rather than surprised out of nowhere or a deus ex machina (something he literally calls himself in the comic by the way). It's not bad to be "predictible" if the story choices are just. You WANT readers to be satisfied and come back. It's why I thought Vriska dying during the coin flip fight was excellent, why I reread certain acts, why I watch all the Enter flashes and especially Cascade.
I get he was trying to do subversion on purpose, and he has favorite characters too, and uses characters to parody fans, and he's the creator he can do what he wants etc etc. But, I'm at the point of how do I take him seriously reading this, especially with such a massive fanbase, where he won't even consider that growth? Act 7 was apparently storyboarded in 2012, four years before the comic actually ended. So I'm like, there's absolutely nothing that you'd change within those years? Absolutely nothing?
"The reminds me of another beloved show where the creators said the same thing and the backlash on the finale forced them to include an alternate version in the bonus features section"
What show was that?
@a.dennis4835 The only show that comes to mind that fits that description is How I Met Your Mother. That ending had such heavy backlash, they made a whole ass alternate ending that gave most what they wanted.
@@a.dennis4835I was thinking Steven Universe or Star VS The Forces of Evil
I think it’s important to note that , writing-wise, the narrator isn’t actually treated as the same character as the self-insert character Andrew Hussie. They speak completely differently, and the Narrator doesn’t have the jokey hyperbolic views of certain characters that Andrew Hussie has, like how Hussie treats Vriska like she’s the perfect being and treats Tavros like the scum of the earth. The narrator doesn’t think of the characters like that. The implication is that the real-life Hussie is supposed to be the narrator. Granted, self-insert Hussie is shown to literally write the comic during the first few recaps, but during those recaps, self-insert Hussie talks and acts almost exactly like the narrator, instead of acting like how his self-insert is during the later parts of the comic.
This leads me to believe that the in-comic Hussie ORIGINALLY was supposed to be a LITERAL self-insert- a representation of his IRL self in the comic- but then at some point he started treating self-insert Hussie as a hyper-flanderized version of his online persona. Like, as a parody of self-insert characters in other webcomics. Like how the beforan trolls were parodies of tumblr stereotypes.
What I’m trying to say is that self-insert Hussie is not representative of what actual irl hussie thinks, and they are not treated as one-and-the-same, except for in the first or second recap. They act and talk completely differently. Like, compare how the narrator talks to caliborn vs. how self-insert Hussie talks to other characters, and you’ll see what I mean.
Granted, it could have been made a HELL of a lot more clear that they are not intended to be the same, which would have likely improved a lot of the jokes regarding self-insert Hussie, but still. They’re not the same.
Homestuck really impacted me right in the crucial time of my life and honestly, it was a mess but I still love it
Yeah same
I agree that the kickstarter hiatus was the death of it. There was an interview at one point where Hussie said that the constant updates weren't a challenge, but a necessity. They said that if they stopped for too long, they'd probably lose track of what was going on. Which is... exactly what happened, I think. Having to stop work on the comic to focus on Hiveswap and the mess that was kicking them out of the mindset they needed to continue, and the ending just couldn't come together properly. I understand that exact mindset. I know with my creative works, if I stop I'll lose the ability to finish. I wrote 425K words in 3.5 months once (that's a little more than 4 book's worth of writing) because I knew that the second I slowed down even a little, that would be it. I had to keep going until the end. Hussie stumbled before the finish line and that was it.
I love Game Over. It's such a big thing, pushing the story to a point where it HAS to be retJohned, because things cannot continue as they are. Homestuck is no stranger to extreme and numerous character deaths, so something REALLY big had to happen to make RetJohn not just possible but necessary. Game Over is that. It also leads to my personal favorite moment in the entire comic: Terzeai's greatest triumph, perfectly characterized death, and John standing there thinking this is all a little weird. To me, that's the end of the comic in a way. Something unfinished, but full of potential.
A few other commenters also pointed out that Hussie never kept notes and mostly kept all the HS lore in their head, which adds up a lot with the theory of them getting burnt out too around the same time. I never considered that they kinda just lost steam and dropped the ball, but it makes perfect sense as someone who has to do the same "all or nothing" approach to my projects, lmao.
I think I was mostly infuriated with the ending/act 7 when it came out because it just left everything hanging. I was upset at how much stuff was left unexplaind and unresolved, and you just flat out didn't get to find out what happened to some characters.
My opinion softened on act 7 when the extended stuff came out, not because it rectified this problem, but because it focused on the least important aspects and just made John miserable for some reason. I didn't realize this was going to be a sign of things to come. But I accepted that act 7 was a good ending, even if it didn't have a denouement. Then they added more stuff, and it implied even worse things.
And then they added the epilogues which was when I officially gave up. I gave up. I spent ten years of my life just to have everyone character assassinated and/or miserable after all of that when I could have easily just made up my own post story. Dog dick Jade, long a joke people made about her but never seriously, ended up being put in canon as yet another change to make Jade's life worse off. They pull bullshit and kill John with literal narrative poison, which is rather appropriately named as it's making everything worse. I couldn't even read the damn things all the way because I was just disgusted and had to read a summary of them instead. All of this was to make way for a nonsensical, unnecessary even WORSE sequel, writers who just hated anyone who gave them any criticism at all and seemed to think edgy nonsense was deep. cuckoldry abounds, cheating, bastard children and just... I can't take it.
But what pissed me off the most was how those authors seeming to treat the work like it was a toy and the fans like they were ignorant masses who didn't know what was best. There's a limit to having a better idea in your head than what the fans come up with. It has to actually BE better. They pulled a JK rowling if she wasn't a transphobe which just felt almost insulting after the way they treated Jade already. They said "Oh it's okay if you don't like the canon, canon is only defined by the reader, you all have your own canon." Which is a bullshit copout answer to people being upset about your narrative decisions! CANON IS A POINT OF REFERENCE. No matter WHAT happens, everything you do in canon will be assumed as the default unless specified otherwise in anything fan made. Ugh... I went on yet another rant again, but my point was I used to want to recommend homestuck to people when they asked about it, but now I can't. I can't put people through what I went through even on an accelerated scale, let them grow attached to characters just to watch them turn into AWFUL PEOPLE for no reason, and have everyone who isn't awful be shit on by the narrative anyway! I can't do it, even if I warn them not to look at the epilogues and stuff, someone's bound to get curious eventually. It's better they didn't bother in the first place... sorry if this was too negative for this kind of place.
Homestuck is a story I quite like i enjoy it I made fucking OCS and roleplay it all the time
But all my friends agree there's at least a point where homestuck gets bad a part where the comic isn't as good for me it's late into act 6 but still my favorite part of homestuck is after I think it gets there act act 5 act1 X2 combo is that last moment where I feel like something great can come from 2 characters who I don't really enjoy (Jane and Jake) but it never delivers
So I stumble upon this video where I assume it will be about the dancestors or post recon vriska but it's about problems I didn't even notice because I care about characters and what doesn't get delivered and the meta stuff is kinda a thing to me but now I know even that is not finished delivery
But I don't think the fandom is dead yet there's still a few hundreds of us remaining and reading stuff on mspfa and making art and some try to fix the comic sometimes I like those and sometimes I don't
But no matter what viz media does with homestuck now I don't care we have some good shit somewhere to find
I feel like the comic also lost its horror as it went on, as it took itself as more and more of a joke.
Equius and nepetas death, for example. You know what will happen to both of them, but you're forced to continue to march on, and watch what unfolds, much to your assumed chargin/horror.
But it loses this and becomes more hateful of itself and becomes, to say, suicidal. And it does kill itself in a way by what your essay highlighted.
Hussie would frequently use Nepeta and Equius (along with the sprites) as punching bags to hammer in that 'some characters are just never going to matter to the story', or simply exist incidentally within the larger narrative. One common gag in his Formspring answers was that 'Nepetaquest' would never be a thing.
Rather than "horror" i would say "tension". Throughout the entirety of act 5 2 there's a sense of urgency as all the different plot threads start to pile up and then unfold. You also had a clear feeling of what was going on and could therefore judge how good or bad a situation was and have expectations that would then be confirmed or subverted.
Act 6 is just slow, confusing and never seems to go anywhere, so there's no urgency. The main characters dont even wanna bother fighting the antagonists, the 3 year journey makes their arcs and dynamics stagnate, while the alpha kids dont seem to have any goals or opposition or any kind of compelling force pushing them forward, leaving them relegated to teen drama shenanigans. Compare Grimbark Jade to Eridan or Gamzee, Jade literally just hangs around to bicker with her buddies and do smiley faces occasionally before getting beat by jake in a joke fight, while the troll kids where murdering each other and moving the plot forward and raising the tension every minute.
I think the easiest way to explain what killed it for me, as someone who actually didn't find the characters to be the best part, is to say that it lost the "adventure" aspect of "mspaintadventure". The first acts felt like they were so full of discovery and this weird videogame/spiritual mysticism and an exploration of this weird world he created, that is either dropped or mocked outright. The planets are shoved in jade's pockets to collect dust. The sylladexes and specibus that we spent so much time getting to know are completely stripped from the comic. To say that the first chapters "dragged on" is to miss that on every page, people were diving into the message boards to discuss the implications of what would happen next and strategize on the next move.
it is like is say "Homestuck is one of the best pieces of writing ever, But it fucking sucks"
Bravo! Bravo! I love the dedicated fans. Since I'm only an average Homestuck fan, I barely have much to say seeing as I barely understand surface level themes of the meta and all that, but I like how you could critique a character's flaws while still admitting that they are well written as characters. Caliborn is definitely my favorite character, his ruthlessness and ultimate savagery contrasts the rest of the casts nature. There's a lot about Homestuck I didn't understand before watching this video, and this really helped me appreciate the comic for what it is. Here's your subscribe, you earned it
Excellent video, really well describing the problems and beauty of a comic that means a lot to a lot of people, me included
How did I miss this on 4/13?
Glad you made this, it helps contextualize the problems that eventually birth the Epilogs and HS2
I want to make a small defense of the first intermission. It serves to establish homestucks relationship with time travel. You're introduced to various forms of time, timeline and alt universe travel. Is it a good use of time? Not really and a good rewrite might capitalize on that time and story better but eh.
I feel like they missed out on showing what happens with a world when sburb is done with genociding it, but yanno
What do you mean?
Isn't the Midnight Crew and the Mayor Gang showing exactly that? It gets colonized by the surviving chess people that build a new civilisation
@@nidhogg8446 I mean yes, but the question of how is really interesting. We know Spades is the literal reason the whole felt manor exist. The earth 1 had 4 exiles but they died too quick so we never actually get told much about how the whole process works.
Also it's another example of Skaia being really creepy but that's for personal rants
Well
I mean hey what the Writer destorys, the fans can rebuild, like that Crow Strider MSPFA, the Act 8, or the thosands of Rewrite fics all messing around
FANDOM MADE THIS GOD DAMN COMIC AND IT CAN END IT BETTER THAN HUSSIE EVER COULD
A way you can explain away the “Hussie Problem” is that you can say that Hussie has no actual control over the narrative, he’s just RECORDING the events. It would make sense if you buy in to Priest/Scribe theory, which states that Hussie is one of the 2 unknown canon classes, a Priest. A Scribe IRL is someone who records, and a Priest in this theory is the counterpart to this class. So ergo, in-universe Hussie has no control, he’s just recording it and sending it to people on a higher level of existence.
You had to do this on our holiday, didn't you?
Yep
Best thing to do on 4/13
Great video. I always have been confused about how, even after reading Homestuck 3 times, my conclusion always was that I liked it, but not all of it. I was never able to pinpoint the reasons.
I think you gave a lot to think about.
Hearing the track at the end of ur video brought such a heavy weight in my chest lol. I miss being 13 and binging this comic and going absolutely bat shit crazy with the fandom for every update good or bad lol
Like I genuinely believe I won’t experience another thrill inducing comic like this one and I’m ok with that
I used to have a widget that would pop up with a random HS character saying "Update!" whenever the site posted new pages. But the massive hiatus and infamous 'gigapause' killed almost all the fanbase's momentum dead
Very interesting video. It's been a long time since I've seen a nerdy video about Homestuck.
Homestuck is full of fascinating characters, however, I find that a big weakness is it can't seem to make its mind on whether it wants us to take the characters seriously, or see them as driving the plot. It kills all the trolls after making them all somewhat fun characters, and that's fine, but then it makes them into a joke... That is NOT fine because it kind of annihilates any suspense that we had. Why would we choose to care about Dave and Terezi, but not Davesprite, Nepeta, Sollux?
I think Aranea had a very poetic death, it's almost a dark reeflection of Vriska's original death. Vriska tries to be the hero and dies and becomes irrelevant, but she has enough remorse and inner conflict to not be a completely awful person. Ghost Vriska finds peace (...a total of 3 times, yeah, not great). Aranea with all her god complex got EVISCERATED, no second chances, and was banished even from the afterlife. Her relevance was deleted and nobody thought of her again, except perhaps for Meenah just a bit.
I think your analysis of ways to improve the meta, like HUSSIE killing the characters, it's very flawed. Yes, Hussie would be a more important character, but then it would be EVEN MORE removed from what the characters are doing. Even if I don't like how Game Over was "fixed" and we wasted so much time on those characters, I do love how that timeline was destroyed, a culmination of the failures of the cast. I think it would've been a lot more poetic if John hadn't revived Vriska and, instead, his little messages gave Terezi herself better tools to protect her teammates or herself, and we spent a bit of time seeing how all of that went down. Then we could still have post retcon Terezi's inner turmoil and the timeline we returned to wouldn't be unrecognisable.
It's obvious that something changed after the kickstarter, but I do believe the former pace of the comic was unsustainable. Hell, even the post-Gigapause pacing was ASTONISHINGLY fast compared to literally any other webcomic in the world. It was insane dedication, Hussie lived and breathed Homestuck pre-Gigapause, but after he started working with the homestuck team he suddenly had a life outside of the comic itself and it was going to slow down.
Unfortunately nothing inside the comic itself can save homestuck from the utter clusterfuck that was Hiveswap's development, the destruction of WhatPumpkin, and the release of the epilogues and hs2, this should be a case study in universities for the literal worst PR you could possibly do in game development. Hussie getting involved personally removed all plausible deniability that his simps had about him being simply ignorant.
FYI, back when I was a moderator on the Homestuck discord with 25k members, he personally demanded we hand over control to whatpumpkin and sack all our mods in favour of WP-selected mods, threatening legal action if we didn't.
Yikes. Has WP ever not been shitty?
People lay a lot of the blame on Hussie himself but I believe the circle that had entrenched itself around Hussie are far more likely the cause of his change in behavior.
Because HS basically took over Tumblr at its peak, much of his inner circle became Tumblr's most talented or well connected artists and bloggers. And they had a *very* commanding hold over him in the years the comic was concluding. When the comic did things Tumblr didn't like, it was an apocalyptic event every time. I *personally knew* a girl in the HS fandom whose *mental well-being* was DIRECTLY tied to Vriska's character, which was not a safe dependency to have in a story where a character can 'die' multiple times, in often violent ways (the manner of their death can also decide if said character is allowed to revive through ascension to godhood).
tl;dr HS fans were not mentally well in most circumstances and being around people like that 24/7 while collaborating on HS clearly altered his personality and attitude from the guy I met at TCAF back in like 2012.
@@Hugsloth Hussie is not a baby, he is responsible for his own abhorrant behaviour.
@@tipsy634 I'm not saying he isn't responsible for his behavior, just that he didn't used to be like this.
your Mayor analogy was fine, every now and then a few from the fandom whether by nostalgia or being unaffected by HS' issues, would resurge or make fan content on the internet for a little while akin to a revival then slowly fade back into the abyss
This is an amazing video and such a good watch!!!
I personally disliked how the narrative brought Vriska back to life. She should have stayed a ghost, failed to rise an army and learned from Aranea's mistakes. Then allow people to do their own thing, eventually the ghost army is brought together by Tavros instead of using mind control.
Free will was a big thing in the narrative before! Karkat tried to control his friends by bossing them around instead of coming up with a plan with all of them. Tavros tried to attack Vriska to stop her from going to fight Jack. If they all came together to form a plan to defeat Jack then Eridan likely wouldn't have abandoned hope, Vriska wouldn't have tried to fight Jack by herself, Gamzee... I'm not sure about Gamzee. I don't really know what Gamzee was thinking. But if Gamzee became a threat to them all they could have formed a plan together to neutralize him if he became a threat.
I am the only epilogues fan in existence i can't wait until the epilogues video
Thing is, by talking about it, brings more attention to it and can even bring new people to it. The video essays people do -like this one- make homestuck live on. Homestuck isn’t dead, it just has a smaller audience of which are new readers or people reminiscing of when they read it all those years ago
6:18 "A flaw of Homestuck is in its inability to tie up plot threads." We must have read different comics, then. My precise issue with that statement is that the first part of the comic has MASTERFULLY tied up numerous disparate, goofy threads into something meaningful and profound. And it was doing that regularly. With the introduction of Hiatuses, that ability seemed to vanish, which is why we're left with characters who arguably do not arrive at any meaningful resolution, so many things left in the air it's almost comical if it wasn't part of an actual comic and ultimately harsh disappointment for what could have been. Don't get me wrong, not tying up everything neatly isn't an issue per se in most cases, that's a fairly niche skill and writing desire/specialization in any case, but the fact that Hussie has become entirely associated in my mind with someone who could completely surprise you by combining things until everything fits together better than you could have ever expected, and then somehow STOPS doing that, intentionally or not, it leaves everything feeling like an incredible mess, simply for the standard they have set up previously.
That point where you felt the setups and payoffs diminished, is also the point where I think Hussie became a bit resentful of his audience. The 'I feel so caucasian' debacle spells it out completely. One light jab at his fanbase for arguing about canon skin colors, and they had a legendary meltdown that prompted him to edit the joke so they'd just stop ripping each other apart over it.
Tumblr HS fans had become the focused demographic of most metacommentary in Acts 4 to 6. Not to mention the endless rolls of dialogue for characters arguing about teen romance (and the 4 quadrants) that now in hindsight means absolutely nothing to the story, because it was added to stimulate a now-defunct fan subculture.
"what killed homestuck" Andrew Hussie. There, saved you 38 mins.
yeah pretty much
@@caseyjarmes Clearly there's way more in depth analysis to be done but...when it boils down to it, yeah. He could've done so much more but just went so totally off the rails with it, in my opinion.
@@chatdeblanc Yep. Also FYI Hussie goes by they/them
@@caseyjarmes AFAIK their last update on it was that they use any/all pronouns, at least as of Psycholonials release
i cried ngl great vid
I cannot deny the blurb for Act 5 filled me with immense catharsis
"MEENAH: dog aint she a little young for you"
Meenah, you absolute hypocrite... you're nineteen, do better.
The hiatus was so long that by the time they updated we forgot most events from the comic and the most expected things after hiatus didnt meet the criteria
It seems that all along,
you didn't need to fight the Homestuck.
It was too weird and random,
It died alone with its fandom.
17:19 Homestuck started as a collaboration between forum readers and an artist sharing authorship. Hussie felt he wants to take the story in a different direction, and wrote a story where his agency over the story was overwritten by all other participants in it. Hussie’s writing and formspring Q&A’s express snarky frustration with fan interpretations of the characters he put a lot of effort into shaping distinctly and deeply varied types of personalities and his irony obsessed dialog writing style seeped through into the actual narrative in which characters wrestle enforcing their interpretations on how the story and their role in it should be. Except for John, who doesn’t particularly care about how HE should be, he cares about a fun story. About putting the bunny back in the box. Silly cool macho shit. That’s why he’s the leader. Because he’s bland and simple and doesn’t have any demands from the author to how he should be. He just fulfills his role without contemplating on it, even when he’s stuck doing nothing but waiting for years on end. John can just roll with the damn story without editorialising or fanficing or making a drama about Hussie’s occasional edgy 2000’s webcomic jokes. He moves with the story, goofs off when the stakes are low, rises to the occasion when the stakes are high, and reacts simply to circumstances. He lets Homestuck be a simple story, where every single other element in it makes Homestuck as confusing long winded metatextual mess as possible. Hussie tries to balance his overthinking writing style with some simplicity by making his character an unimportant joke that barely interacts with anything. Like with Vriska’s first plan, I don’t think that quite balances anything out. It’s just more in a different way.
I think a big part of the difficulty for me when it comes to homestucks ending period was that a lot of the moments during part 4 as a whole, and especially the 2nd half of part 4, kind of blended together as this weird mess of moments that I lost all the connections to between pauses. Like I'm confident I read/saw everything in homestuck, but I hardly remember several of the things that happen during its final hours. So many of the details of what happens within the ladder half are inconsistent little blurbs that stuck from when I initially read them on posting days. Thus when the ending dropped all I could really say about the ending was "yeah that sure was a homestuck ending"
I think my biggest problem with Homestuck is how much it wastes your time. There are whole rogues galleries worth of characters who show up and impact nothing along with plot points that meander on for thousands of pages. The worst example of this is easily the Alpha kids. The comic spends thousands of pages on their weird, incestuous love square only to relegate them to side characters once the real main cast shows back up. Dirk gets a couple moments to shine but Roxy was the only alpha who ever felt like she was a part of the rest of the kids’ friend group. Most of the trolls were superfluous but the comic at least had the decency to write them out of the plot half way through.
Incestuous? I don't remember that part
@@zkme2734 it isn't. None of the alpha kids are related to each other but in the beta kids group, you have 2 pairs of siblings, John and Jade, and Rose and Dave.
i agree with pretty much everything you said here. vriska being revived was the worst writing decision in the entire comic. she was one of my favorite characters up until that point. her dream bubble arc was ehh but NOTHING compared to her being brought back and magically solving all problems.
holy shit, everyone dies on Homestuck, even homestuck itself
Hiatuses were definitely a killer, especially in a story bloated with so many details. I know I couldn't remember most of it even while the updates were regular. I remember being daunted by how long it took just to skip the chatlogs sometimes. I always felt a little guilty, but the dialogue was rarely so good that it could keep my attention for multiple straight pages of difficult-to-read colors. I know he's very flawed, but I still can't help but feel that Hussie was a story-vomiting genius. The way he could just toss in loads of characters, abstract worldbuilding, and still piece together coherent story arcs and satisfying crescendos along the way. It still thoroughly eclipses most writing I see in new media. Given all the psychedelic imagery and the Stephen King-like pace he spat those pages out, I struggle to believe the man didn't partake in some kind of substance to keep himself going.
If you look close at Jack's snaps, you can see that he isn't actually talking directly but rather his dialogue is being described in the second person the way it is in the rest of the comic (can't think of specific examples, but Spades talks like that a lot in the intermission). It's a really bizarre choice considering the snaps seem to be from Jack's perspective, implying he typed out narration describing his own thoughts and dialogue. It seems like it was an awkward way to keep Jack from speaking directly, which is a holdover from Jack's comic of origin, Problem Sleuth, which didn't have Homestuck's dialogue boxes. I like this way of presenting his speech because it makes him come off as this cold, silent killer, but it gets really awkward when mixed with the other styles of dialogue in the comic, as evidenced by the snaps (there's also a paradox space comic focusing on the Felt that runs into the same problem, where Doc Scratch speaks normally but Crowbar's dialogue is narrated second-person in the same conversation, and it's a little headache-inducing to read).
literally nothing killed homestuck, homestuck just...ended. they finished the game. I still feel awful for gamzee but AAAAAAAA
Excellent essay. I don't think I've ever seen anyone lay out Homestuck's death by a thousand cuts as you have. I would like to ask two questions though, specifically given your points about Bec Noir and the Retcon.
1. Do you think Homestuck, or at least Bec Noir, would've been better if Jack had died in [S] Cascade?
2. What is your opinion (if you have one) on TLCstuck: Double Death of the Author. When you said that the Retcon wouldve been better if John had fixed things right before [S] Game Over it made me think of DDotA.
1: Maybe? Depends on how it's handled. I like Jack's defeat, but it comes after Jack has been irrelevant for thousands of pages
2: Have not read it
@@caseyjarmes thanks for the response. I am curious though. What would you do with Bec Noir if you were rewriting the story? More specifically, at what point would you have him killed off (or defeated and spared, whatever floats your boat).
@@audreycardin3870 That's a tough question. Perhaps during Cascad, perhaps during his fight with John in Penis Ouja. I don't dislike how Jack is defeated, at the hands of PM with Jade's involvement. I just feel that ignoring that plot point for so long, and doing the same with other plot points like Spades Slick and Lord Jack, was detrimental to the comic
@@caseyjarmes Same here on that last point. The only other semi-viable path I can think of for Jack would be to remove/sideline the Condesce and have him keep his role as the main direct villain with Lord English remaining a more distant, overarching force. But that would probably just create more problems.
@@audreycardin3870 Lord English being such a distant threat is a bit of a problem, I'd say. Like Dave says at one point that he doesn't give a shit about fighting Lord English because he hasn't done anything to him. Although, to be fair, the kids do essentially ignore Lord English in the end
I dont think Andrew Hussie making a "Death of the Author" gag makes his author avatar any more narrativly important.
Let’s talk about the meta of how hussie lost interest in homestuck and handed it over to former fans for homestuck two and the side games and how that further killed the series not to mention the epilogues… hussie is the true villain for writing that thing
It's so painfully obvious that the retcon is Hussie being absolutely bunt out on Homestuck and losing all love they once had in creating it. They just wanted it to be over at that point. It was going to go back to what they had envisioned for the ending, regardless of how much the characters had changed and were incompatible with that vision. And then we had to endure it limping to the finish for another year (or however long it took). It's hard not to point at Hiveswap for being the cause of this lost love, but there could have been other factors like the length of the comic or overbearing fans.
I love Vriska and how her character evolved after her death. It was so insulting when she was apparently the solution to everything. I was so interested in seeing where the characters would go after the meteor trip; there would have been plenty of ways for [S] Game Over to be undone without invalidating everything that happened on the meteor. But no, Vriska is somehow the solution.
Not even gonna watch the video (I refuse to let a Homestuck node open back up in my brain) but I will answer the question: Nothing, it committed suicide.
Yeah pretty much
So the whole thing with Hussie the Character and Vriska was a running joke that was a reference to his now-defunct Forumspring where people asked both stupid questions/jokes and legitimate questions about the lore/narrative. It started as a dumb joke made at the expense of someone who asked a dumb question about Feferi and whether or not she was overwieight, people thought this was hilarious so they kept referencing it in questions. Hussie kept feeding into it so it became a thing. It's still cringe because he actually interacted with Vriska but it wasn't really weird if you were in the know. Which to be fair was pretty much 90% of all readers back then.
Remember, she did nothing wrong. 😔🙏🎱
TRUE!
Just saw this exact comment on a different video but the top comment said false inside of true.
Just like griffith
I mean….
Vriska did everything wrong
“what killed homestuck” I DID. NOBODY CAN STOP ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YOU!
You didn't. It killed itself and in a really dumb way.
I have never read a homestuck. Good video :)
Really loved this video!! Subscribed for that epilogues video altho that year long wait is gonna kill me lol
Reading the epilogues will most likely kill me
@@caseyjarmes This will greatly affect Casey Jarmes upload schedule
After thinking about it for a while I began to interpret Hussie's self insert character as someone similar to Caliborn in which he succeeded in completing a solo session of Sburb in some way and was gifted absolute power over the narrative which ultimately led to the creation of the overall Homestuck story as we've come to know. And in time the mechanics of Sburb would come full circle in creating another person with ultimate power over the narrative, Caliborn, who would then have the equal footing and power to kill the very author himself. It's the only way I could possibly justify and excuse all the escalating meta bs as it began to make less and less narrative sense.
Honestly I loved Game Over to bits on a re read. It was harder to see reading it live, but it was _amazing_ objectively
I actually liked the revival of Vriska because she is still the perfect foil to English, so it was somewhat fitting for her to face him down. It also made sense to me that Teresi would be devastated by having to kill her friend like that, and would want to bring her back.
That’s not to say it didn’t bring huge problems, and I agree with your analysis. But I read Homestuck only after the whole thing was done. So reading through the parts that had weird password stuff made the payoff pretty good after finally getting those passwords. John rewriting the narrative was cool, Teresi using her mind powers as beacons for John was also cool. But Vriska becoming not-terrible really doesn’t make much sense given where she’d left off. And I never thought about it, but you were right that so many of her previous plans blew up in her face. Maybe the reason that one worked better is because she’d finally put aside her ego enough to admit the plan could work without her in it?
At that point I’m just trying to justify it though. I liked it, it gave her a second chance, but you pointed out that she’d already had her final chance, and she acts super out-of-character after that point during the Timelapse.
She could’ve still played be a foil to English while being a ghost. It wouldn’t be too hard to rewrite the story so that ghost Vriska took living Vriska’s place at the head of the ghost army.
And Terezi feeling guilty works as a Watsonian explanation, but what I really need is a Doylian explanation. Why was this a good decision in terms of the story, how are the themes and character arcs better off now that Vriska is back?If the worldbuilding is getting in the way of a compelling story then you need to change up the lore. Maybe make it so that John’s retcon powers can’t make big changes, or change Terezi’s arc just a tad so that she’s able to recognize the person Vriska is. Anything that would prevent fully sacrificing the story.
Well now I gotta stick around to listen to ur opinions on the epilogues!!
I remember being extremely tired and disappointed by the time Game Over happened, and everything after just felt like a "oh god it's jumping the shark" by bringing Vriska back... I watched Act 7, the very final animation like 10 minutes before a class in college cause I wasn't as hyped to wait before I sat at home to watch how it would all end. I didn't pay much attention to the Hiveswap stuff way back then cause so little was known about it back then, but researching it now it really did put the nail in the coffin. I still appreciate Homestuck for what it was, not necessarily what it became towards its final moment. (also the soundtrack still slaps.)
great job brother, im all touched in here
sorry.
Hey, good video! Appretiate the Homestuck content in 2023, and a good discussion, too.
I don't think the comic "died" because of it's overall lowering quality. Sure, some people dropped off because they didn't like the direction/quality of the story, but most of it is probably due the fact that it slowed down and naturally became less relevant. It's also a bit strange to call a piece of fiction dead when it's ending still gathered millions of views on youtube. I'm not really sure what the video means by the term "killed", lol.
Personally, I still like Homestuck from start to finish, and I don't think a few poor writing desicions near the end (and general sloppiness of the second half) really break the work as a whole. I do think that acts 3-5 are peak Homestuck, especially right before the Cascade, and I do agree that bringing Vriska back is a pretty poor writing choice, possibly the worst story beat in the entire comic. I also agree that there are some characters that didn't need to be there or didn't receive enough attention to really develip. I just disagree that those things have enough gravity to "kill" a piece of media.
I also don't think that the issues you described about character count/unfinished story beats festered from the very beginning. It's precisely the fact that Homestuck was so good at tying things together that makes the first half so phenomenal (and the charatcer writing). Acts 1-5 feel like a clockwork mechanism, all the pieces and details just fall into place perfectly. Act 6 simply couldn't replicate that kind of storytelling, which is a shame, but the problem here, in my opinion, is execution, and not the approach. The first half is an example of this.
Jack noir's ark sees him start as a shallow character and eventually evolves into a super dangerous obstacle, he no longer requires depth, he is something to be overcome and not sympathized with in any way. It's a deliberate story telling instrument. I just found your channel today so I don't know your credentials and history but as a writer myself I feel you didn't explain the Jack segment as well as you could have.
This might seem blasphemous to say, but I gotta say it. Mayor should've died from Jack and that should've been the end of his character. Little dude didn't do shit after Cascade and was just Dave and Karkat's little buddy. PM being the sole survivor of Jack's rampage would've been cool.
Counter Point: He was happy in the meteor and if anyone deserves a happy ending in that comic is The Mayor