What the Hell is Homestuck (video essay)

[Music] happy 413 today is the anniversary of the beginning of homestuck which is also the anniversary of the ending of homestuck it's a complicated story with a complicated history it started a lot of friendships and ended just as many it created new online communities launched careers and changed anime conventions forever when i decided to do a video for the anniversary of homestuck i knew it had to be a topic that would be interesting to people regardless of whether or not they had any history with the story and there's really only one question that can be asked by both people who haven't read the comic and people who have and that question is what the hell was that hello i'm hawkwood and i'll get to it in a minute but we obviously can't talk about a shitpost webcomic from 2009 until we discuss the cultural relevance of a fictitious satirical traveler's tale from the 1700s specifically travels into several remote nations of the world in four parts by lemuel gulliver first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships or it's more common title gulliver's travels trust me this is related to homestuck gulliver's travels is a literary classic which means even if you haven't heard about it you've heard about it it's referenced in the league of extraordinary gentlemen earthbound star trek friggin digimon doctor who fables and that studio ghibli movie with the castle in the sky you might also know it from a tv miniseries starring michael from the good place or from a movie that jack black apparently did the gist of the thing is that our boy gulliver goes to some weird places he meets small people big people science people dead people horse people and he goes to japan it's an absurd and fun adventure story and you can enjoy it without thinking too hard about it which is exactly what i always did and that's the problem apparently enjoying it without thinking too hard about it is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do but that's our fault for not reading it in 1726 you see it turns out context matters a lot of those silly and absurd characters are actually direct illusions that a reader in the 1800s would immediately recognize for example the extreme political divide between the high-heeled and low-healed factions mirrors the real-life divide between the high church and low church of england also walpole is there it's not subtle the story as we experience it today and the story as it existed before are incompatible gulliver's travels changed by being removed from its original context you can still enjoy the story but unless you've got a stack of literary essays and history books by your side you're not enjoying travels into several remote nations of the world in four parts by lamiel gulliver first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships you're reading gulliver's travels and that is the hell it has to do with homestuck [Music] homestuck is a hell of a lot of things and if you've read it you've got opinions about it it was created by andrew hussey half of the team behind those star trek tng edits from over 10 years ago that i'm assuming most of you have never seen and it breaks my heart hussy described homestuck as a shitpost epic which is fair but that description is really only helpful to people who have already read it and it's probably a gross simplification of what might be the largest web comic in history it's a bit like saying star trek and gulliver's travels are both about sailing and just like gulliver's travels homestuck is also a literary classic which again means even if you haven't heard about it you've heard about it it's the reason why hotel pools are closed during anime conventions it's probably how a lot of people learned about kickstarter and if you like undertale well you get the idea if you leap down the troll hive of learning about homestuck you're likely to encounter the meme let me tell you about homestuck it's from the pov of people who haven't read the comic and it illustrates the complexity of the narrative by having them encounter it for the first time and make funny faces it's a bit like having a fundamental understanding of newtonian physics and then being introduced to quantum mechanics for the first time or thinking you know a lot about lord of the rings and then learning about the simarillion or some third needlessly complicated that people won't shut up about you know you really shouldn't ask but it looks like they're having fun over there and even though you're cringing with secondhand embarrassment you know in your heart you're a little bit jealous but if you can clog your way through the meme in order to beat a straight answer out of somebody's troll sauna their reply to the question what is homestuck will likely be different depending on the context in which they experience the story much like how gulliver's travels can be described as either a story about going to weird places a parody of travelers tales or a political satire of 18th century england homestuck can also be described in one of three ways corresponding to its plot its medium and its context obvious spoiler warning for homestuck not that i think it'd make a difference so here we go [Music] remember jumanji homestuck is basically jumanji it's a story about a bunch of kids who play a cursed game that up a lot of and they have to go on an adventure to finish the game in order to unfuck everything now imagine that jumanji is a piece of meta-textual literary comedy there are memes everywhere and instead of screwing up a small town you've screwed the multiverse it's like that the story centers around four thirteen year old online friends in their attempt to play a game called suburb it's a beta version of an online co-op house building simulator rpg where winning the long tutorial rewards you with getting ezekieed into the game world which is good because everything outside the game world gets exploded by meteors a lot of the narrative revolves around being frustrated with optus game mechanics and trying to either learn them or break them this can range from being dumb jokes to being serious plot relevant retcons one of the running gags in the story is a game faq where one of the characters is writing and detailing the game mechanics and how they maybe work it's also worth noting that you can mess up really bad and this happens a lot this has consequences by the way homestuck is told non-linearly because of course it is the chat logs between the kids are often out of sync and it may take a lot of pages before you actually get to the same chat log again from the other point of view you're just as likely to encounter a quick image of something crazy that hasn't happened yet and isn't going to for a while this is a recurring trait of homestuck the multiple timelines can span hundreds of years and intersect at various points and not always in order and not always in obvious ways speaking of time there's a lot of it what starts as a story of four kids quickly becomes a story about four kids 12 trolls 12 other trolls four kids and two cherubs not to mention the midnight crew the felt and you get the idea explaining anything else about the story really seems pointless because it's not going to make a lot of sense without a full recap of the comic and if i'm gonna do all that in this video maybe in another one if you ask me nicely like and comment but if homestuck is about anything it's about failing and trying again as many goddamn times as it takes [Music] if gulliver's travels is a direct parody of the traveler's tales literary genre then homestuck can only be described as a parody of point and click and text adventure games these used to be hella popular and now they're not in these games the player would issue commands to a character through the computer mouse or keyboard ordering them to interact with objects solve puzzles or speak with npcs the world of homestuck is both a celebration and a mockery of the genre with andrew hussey acting as the game engine itself and the story taking the form of a pseudo-interactive webcomic he would post a panel on his website and forum users would vote on what the character did next essentially creating a single player out of a group of internet users hussey would reply with a new panel illustrating the result of the command and oftentimes mocking the player for their stupid suggestion or just straight up refusing to comply while there was certainly a larger narrative in mind the purpose of this style of creation was to write an emergent story that formed organically through author reader interaction eventually moved away from this direct reader submission style once the fan base became too large however homestuck would continue to be affected by the reader in less direct ways the story was built as a conversation between the author and the audience and homestuck was always aware of the activities of its own fan base beyond the simple webcomic format and its looping animations the story of homestuck is also told through lengthy internet chat logs between the characters this eliminates the need to draw enormous chat bubbles record voiceovers or balance dialog tags in large blocks of text if we're talking narrative density this is efficient as occasionally the story is broken up by spectacular flash animations with game inspired music and better art these tend to be saved for more epic parts of the story but there are plenty of exceptions when fans try to sell people on home stuff this is what they show [Applause] [Music] and then sometimes hussy just uploads a full playable game because why the hell not as you can see this is a multimedia of disparate art forms which i hope goes away towards explaining what makes explaining it so hard to explain it's not a web comic it's not a book it's not an animation and it's not a game it's i don't know it's homestuck homestuck had already been running for two years by the time i got into it i'd seen the cosplay groups around conventions and really needed to know what was up with those gray skinned kids with the candy corn horns but when i tried to look it up online everyone said the same thing it's boring in the beginning even now people will throw on the disclaimer that it only gets good a thousand pages in it's very long every fan of homestuck will tell you it doesn't become homestuck until later and every fan of home stuck is wrong like most new readers i speed ran those first acts i wanted to get to the alternate timelines and the aliens and all that good sci-fi but that's just what happens in homestuck that's what people remember and it's what they talk about but that's not what homestuck is that's just the fun and silly parts of gulliver's travels it's a cool story with no heart removed from its original context it's fine and it's okay to like it but it's not the same story now that i'm rereading homestuck i'm learning to appreciate those earlier pages it's less about plot sure but it's more about character and mood it's more about tone in context it turns out the answer to what the hell is homestuck is simple and obvious and it's in the first panel homestuck both the webcomic and the story begins on april 13 2009 the boy in his room is celebrating his 13th birthday this gives him a birth year of 1996 commonly considered the last year you can be born and still be labeled a millennial it's worth noting that hussey himself born in 1979 is also born in the final birth year of a generation gen x the author and the first character framed the entire millennial generation between them cementing homestuck as a purely millennial text obviously this could be a coincidence but when you read enough footnotes from hussey and the print versions you get the idea that literally everything in homestuck is on purpose i honestly wouldn't be surprised if i'm only doing this video because he planned it that way being a story about millennials means that homestuck is a story about being online millennials were the first generation to grow up with the internet and it changed how we view information privacy porn music and most importantly friendship my generation grew up being told that every person online especially every pretty girl is secretly a middle-aged psychopath seeking to lure us into a dark alley and murder us for some reason our parents warned us against putting any personal information online because that would let the murderers come to us see the internet was new and that meant it was scary but it wasn't new to us it had been there since we were kids and it was ours parents didn't understand that online friendships could matter as much or even more than the ones irl the kids in homestuck have never met and they're closer to each other than they are to their only living relatives they know each other's birthdays and embarrassing tastes and aspirations they see through each other's personas everyone knows that dave isn't the person he's pretending to be and he knows that they know but they play along until it's important to call him out on it because that's what real friends do for millennials the internet offered freedom that the real world didn't i grew up outside the city limits of a small town you could say i was stuck at home i stayed in my room because that was the only place that was mine i didn't want to leave because it would mean a confrontation that i'd rather not have i didn't have very many opportunities to make friends or meet new people but online i could i was in high school in the early 2000s when the internet was becoming what it is today there was a time before youtube and before facebook and before web-based chat applications phones looked like this texting was possible but it wasn't the default means of communication instead we used downloadable chat clients like msn and yahoo messenger and most importantly aim america online instant messenger was a hell of a thing it was probably the first time i created a username i was third meow get it you could choose your own personality and type the way you wanted to talk your friends each had their own typing quirks did they use punctuation did they capitalize their sentences did they say law or ha-ha the kids in homestuck and especially the trolls exhibit this in all its glory the chat color tells you if it's dave or jade you don't have to look at the screen name to know if it's car cod or vriska just look for the caps lock or the eights with chat clients when you were online you were online you were sitting in front of the application available if anyone wanted to chat and able to set an away message if you weren't it was always running in the background waiting letting everyone know that you were there you had a presence on the internet it was a place you were aim was simple and mostly just text but it was powerful you could choose your own identity you could customize your text color you could change the sound that happened when a friend came online so you could always tell who it was and god damn did that sound have a physiological effect when your crush came online your day got a thousand percent better a friend's online sound could erase a bad day in an instant you could even export the chat log if you wanted to keep it and surprise it looks just like the pester logs in homestuck you developed in jokes and memes you had secrets there were that would bother you and you'd have to block them it was just this whole thing and it was beautiful and it was ours homestuck is about that feeling homestuck is that feeling it's about contradiction we're the generation with the most information and the least control there's more money than ever and we have less of it homestuck recognizes us spurb is a game you can't play it's an epic that doesn't take itself seriously love is also hate and both and neither you can finish the game and still lose dying makes you stronger being asleep teaches you more than being awake guardians are antagonists it starts with those first thousand pages it's quiet the kids are just walking around interacting with their shitty environments alone they feel like outsiders in their own home they look forward to those moments when they can escape back into their room where their friends are waiting for them online so they can hang out and maybe try to play a game if everyone's schedules lineup that's what the hell homestuck is it's what the internet was real friends and real love in this real place because no matter what our parents told us we knew it mattered

Channel: Hawkwood

Views: 1,493

Rating: 4.9779005 out of 5

Keywords: homestuck, 413, 4:13, john, dave, rose, jade, what the hell, hell, what, home stuck, jack noir, becnoir, bec, hawkwood, video essay, essay

Id: qVbPr04ugPc

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021