karkat and sollux were basically best fucking friends with huge messy humiliating crushes on each other and i feel like somehow not enough people ever really got around to exploring the potential there even though it was one of the earliest and most obvious ships amongst the trolls
like. karkat, who already can’t separate his feelings for others into quadrants, is simultaneously envious of, worried about, and comfortable with sollux. he wants his friend to take better care of himself and wishes he would move closer so they could see each other more, but is also petty and rude and insulting in that way teenage boys so often are. he’s bitter that sollux is better at coding than he is, but also admires him for this fact, but also resents that such skill is wasted on a hot mess like sollux, but also wants the best for his good pal. meanwhile sollux teases the hell out of karkat because (1) he’s an insecure asshole to basically everyone and (2) he wants to push karkat to be better, which sollux knows he can be.
they know each other well enough that they are able to be at least kind of open with their genuine feelings, even if in a fairly roundabout way mixed with dark humor and deprecation of both themselves and one another. they’re basically always black flirting – sometimes as a joke, sometimes because they’re actually pissed at each other, and sometimes to cover the legitimate concern and affection they share. and no matter how vitriolic they get, they’re always reassured of their friendship because they’re just a couple of miserable, dorky 13-year-olds clinging to each other in the face of their uncertain but surely unpleasant fates at the hands of the harrowing world in which they live.
The really hilarious thing about Homestuck as a media franchise is that it’s successfully transformed itself into a completely straight example of the exact genre of media it was originally made to parody.
Let’s back up 35 years. Before sports sims, before MMOs, before first-person shooters, the new hotness in gaming was a genre that explored widely varying settings, but always with a curiously similar premise: you’d be trapped in a familiar location for some contrived, bullshit reason, and would have to devise an equally contrived, bullshit means of escape, typically by solving moon-logic inventory puzzles. Some games would change up the objectives from time to time, but they’d always return to the basic room-escape (or building-escape, or island-escape, etc.) framework for large parts of their length.
At the time, these games were known simply as “adventure games”, though in contemporary parlance this is often expanded to “point-and-click adventure games” in order to distinguish them from their purely text-driven predecessors and more action-oriented descendants. For a solid decade, point-and-click adventure games were the unstoppable 900-pound gorilla of PC gaming, far and away the most popular genre by sales, with the more challenging – some would say “obtuse” – examples of the type serving as badges of gamer pride in much the same way that being into, say, Dark Souls clones does today.
(The genre would abruptly vanish from both the sales charts and public consciousness during the mid 1990s for a variety of reasons, among them market oversaturation, competition from newer genres like first-person shooters, and also a whole lot of corporate sexism, but that’s another story!)
To the subject at hand, if that description sounds familiar to you, there’s a couple of reasons why that should be so:
1. It’s the genre of games that Andrew Hussie made his name parodying, first with his early interactive webcomics like Jailbreak and Problem Sleuth, and later with the opening acts of Homestuck itself.
2. It’s also the exact genre that Hiveswap occupies.
It’s my experience that a lot of younger gamers are under the impression that Hiveswap is some sort of exercise in turning the metatexual weirdness of Homestuck’s early acts into a working game engine, but nope – it’s just a totally straight example of the exact pre-existing genre that Homestuck was making fun of in the first place.
hey i feel like steves the only who actually really like consuming media and comics and he probably binge watches tv. which means even tho he doesnt know a lot of older references hes still one of the younger avengers and ends up more in the know of current popular culture
basically what im saying is steve rogers read homestuck
peter: okay so in this comic theyre being chased by a dog god and this big evil puppet so to escape they smash through the astral plane and into another dimension and- hey why arent any of you listening to my plan?
tony: probably because none of us know what youre talking about kid
steve: no no i get what youre saying. so basically thanos is our lord english and-
peter: wait you know who lord english is? did you read- oh my god you did- i gotta oh my god i have to text shuri right now
tony: WERE A LITTLE IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS RIGHT NOW
peter: steve shuri wants to know what your classpect is Right Now Immediately
So–yesterday was Homestuck Day, and by that I mean it was the nine-year anniversary of the first posted page of Homestuck. You may have noticed your entire dashboard going into a maddened, dismaying frenzy. People you thought were your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends, your family, all of them infected by a virus that transmits through gray facepaint and Vriska memes.
Well, okay, I kinda got a little weird there. My purpose in making this post is actually to advise you to read Homestuck–hell, read Jail Break and Problem Sleuth first, if you want, they help you to understand what the hell is going through the author’s head. But read it, especially if you want to be a content creator, because reading Homestuck is a transformative experience–in that it will transform how you understand, process, and create fiction. It pushes…boundaries. It pushes the boundaries of storytelling, of character interaction, of audience participation, of the medium itself–of several mediums themselves. The actual story has some severe execution problems late in the game, but I am firmly of the opinion that Homestuck is gonna be taught in college in fifty years alongside other great works of fiction throughout the history of mankind.
Moreover, it’s helpful to understand the people making content that are Filthy Homestucks. Your favorite artist is a Homestuck. Your favorite cartoon is made by Homestucks. Your favorite indie game was made by Homestucks. You’d be surprised how large a percentage of you this is true for. Homestuck, for better or for worse, is important, and I highly recommend the experience of reading it.
If you wind up buying gray facepaint and pointy anime shades as a joke, all the better.
I cannot stress how strongly and emphatically I agree with every word in this post.
Homestuck is also an excellent excercise in character voice
writing pesterlogs in particular gave me a very big “aha” in understanding how voice creates character nearly as much (if not more!) than character creates voice.
