|
GunnerJ posted:Who is she? Tamsyn Muir - she wrote the Locked Tomb series. The blurb is ‘lesbian necromancers in space’ but I can already see a few similarities in the world building. It’s a fun series, and the second book, while weird as poo poo, is probably my favorite book I’ve read in years.
|
#
?
May 2, 2024 12:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 00:05 |
|
|
Dramatika posted:Tamsyn Muir - she wrote the Locked Tomb series. The blurb is ‘lesbian necromancers in space’ but I can already see a few similarities in the world building. It’s a fun series, and the second book, while weird as poo poo, is probably my favorite book I’ve read in years. it features a coolkid swordo character wearing a pair of plot-relevant shades, and a guy named john who created a universe from an old one so there's definitely homes stucks in there if you're looking for it.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2024 18:49
|
|
|
Back in the day, she co-wrote Promstuck (along with a bunch of other projects) with Shelby Cragg, who also illustrated her Gamrezi mega-fanfic The Serendipity Gospels. Which was kind of a prototype for TLT, as I understand it, and has some motifs in common with it. Its popularity as a Gamrezi shipfic also inspired Hussie to author the extremely anti-climactic and intentionally unpleasant canon Gamrezi in lategame Homestuck, which against all odds I am spoilering because we have a new reader here! And I have now said Gamrezi way too many times for a Thursday evening in 2024.
|
|
#
?
May 2, 2024 18:51
|
|
|
Tamsyn also said Gideon's shades are, somehow, the same shade Dave wears.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2024 02:24
|
|
|
I think you mean the same shades Ben Stiller wore.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2024 13:39
|
|
|
M_Gargantua posted:I think you mean the same shades Ben Stiller wore. Yup, right on his gaunt face.
|
|
#
?
May 3, 2024 19:09
|
|
|
I'm genuinely so pleased to see this thread is still going after so long. I think about it sometimes, and how much Homestuck mattered to me in general. Then I laugh a little. It was rapidly overshadowed by so much else, and fandom still exists just to be unhappy about its second half, its ending, and the author's anger at their own audience. What an experience it was. Also, what a totally inappropriate title this remains. :3
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 22:45
|
|
|
Hot take: if you hate the back half of the comic, you hate homestuck.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 23:02
|
|
|
Fender Anarchist posted:Hot take: if you hate the back half of the comic, you hate homestuck. I enjoyed it a great deal but hated the epilogue novel, simply because it deliberately engaged with the wrong aspect of why fans were asking for closure. In general, I appreciate Hussie, but it's obvious on the last two rereads that they were deeply upset with the often toxic relationship they had with their own fandom.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2024 23:05
|
|
|
I think it was fine. I read the entire thing from start to the then-current pause after "Do You Remember Me". Even after that, I liked [S]Collide. I also liked the epilogues even though they were silly. HS^2 is the only thing I didn't like at all so far.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 04:08
|
|
|
It's important to rememebr that Meenah rules.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 14:45
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:It's important to rememebr that Meenah rules. I believe the best girl is in fact Aradia. Scientifically provable.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2024 15:55
|
|
|
VERY COOL MAN posted:ideally playing an embarrassingly specific annoying joke gif and/or mp3 Digging through my old hosting, I found a couple of these:   Also have this decade+ old meme: 
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2024 16:35
|
|
|
Kazy posted:Digging through my old hosting, I found a couple of these: oh gently caress this rules. i need to go spelunk in some old HDDs
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2024 22:37
|
|
|
Zooloo posted:I enjoyed it a great deal but hated the epilogue novel, simply because it deliberately engaged with the wrong aspect of why fans were asking for closure. In general, I appreciate Hussie, but it's obvious on the last two rereads that they were deeply upset with the often toxic relationship they had with their own fandom. this is part of what makes it good to me
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2024 13:12
|
|
|
aegof posted:this is part of what makes it good to me It's also what made it good for Hussie. The animosity they had for their audience wasn't ill-founded, even if I personally think it was unnecessary. The MSPA forums were stupendously toxic in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like a CHUD. High volume posters were dueling for the social cachet of being the loudest voice to criticize Hussie, either for their aggressive plotting or for being problematic in increasingly narrow and personal ways. This made the act of writing itself an active conflict with the audience, and the epilogues were a combination of Hussie's (fairly simplistic) theory of plotting running at full speed into Hussie's beliefs about what was fair game in writing, all colliding together into a clusterfuck of weird, mean characterization and sudden janky plot moves. I don't like the epilogues, but I understand them and why they exist.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2024 16:35
|
|
|
The most recent HSBC update: pretty good, still amazed at how many months they’ve gone with “characters we like have a conversation on their way to do a thing we cut away from before the thing happens” instead of having a thing happen. Someone upthread said it was fanfictiony, and they’re right, but it’s at least very well-illustrated fanfiction. Zooloo posted:This made the act of writing itself an active conflict with the audience, and the epilogues were a combination of Hussie's (fairly simplistic) theory of plotting running at full speed into Hussie's beliefs about what was fair game in writing, all colliding together into a clusterfuck of weird, mean characterization and sudden janky plot moves. I can’t help but feel like Hussie’s work is due a critical reappraisal that isn’t so tied to the author/audience conflict narrative. It’s hard to resist, since it’s a classic internet drama that Hussie gleefully/mournfully encouraged for many years, but it’s a drag to see that way of reading their work overshadow what the stories do on the page. I especially feel this way about the “mean characterization” of the epilogues. It’s a disservice to Hussie and their cowriters to flatten all the interesting things they had to say about post-coming-of-age life in the age of Trump down to “Hussie wanted to antagonize readers by monsterizing their favorite characters.” It also had some pretty advanced ideas about plotting, imo, though I admit I’m easily amused by pretentious metafiction nonsense. Epilogues (and Psycholonials) aside, Homestuck itself gets this the worst—it’s got so many fascinating angles for analysis and a lot of extremely hot writing lessons, but most people get bogged down in examining how it got written in the crucible of the last gasp of pre-social-media forum culture. I wonder if that’ll ever change.
|
|
#
?
May 14, 2024 22:08
|
|
|
There's circles of people here and there who reject the pure author-audience-hostility narrative, but a good chunk of them were previously running hs^2 and, well, look how people received that.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 01:59
|
|
|
Beware: this very thread is so old that it contains material that may be a useful source for that kind of analysis.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 02:02
|
|
|
Zooloo posted:The MSPA forums were stupendously toxic in a way that is hard to describe without sounding like a CHUD.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 02:07
|
|
|
the mspa forums were toxic as hell because they were filled with often socially maladjusted (for a variety of reasons) teenagers getting heavily into a fandom they actually had the ability to influence and which engaged constantly with the audience as part of the ride the update schedule and infighting for minor social clout (did YOUR theory pan out? is YOUR incredibly slapdash literary analysis going to solve the latest big mystery via the clues you've found? what do YOU think the story should be driving towards? etc etc) demanded constant engagement and attention and so no one could or would take a break of course it was a huge loving mess
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 08:40
|
|
|
rko posted:The most recent HSBC update: pretty good, still amazed at how many months they’ve gone with “characters we like have a conversation on their way to do a thing we cut away from before the thing happens” instead of having a thing happen. Someone upthread said it was fanfictiony, and they’re right, but it’s at least very well-illustrated fanfiction. Have you listened to Homestuck Made This World? It was a podcast reading through the comic that ran a while back, one past reader and one new to the comic. They put forward some pretty compelling ideas about Hussie largely just playing around with ideas of canonicity, audience interaction, storytelling and so on more just without regard for what the audience wants rather than actively hostile to it. And that definitely sits better with me than the idea that Hussie was disgusted by his fanbase and going out of his way to upset them, no matter how annoying a gaggle of internet teenagers could get.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 09:31
|
|
|
Tenebrais posted:Have you listened to Homestuck Made This World? It was a podcast reading through the comic that ran a while back, one past reader and one new to the comic. They put forward some pretty compelling ideas about Hussie largely just playing around with ideas of canonicity, audience interaction, storytelling and so on more just without regard for what the audience wants rather than actively hostile to it. And that definitely sits better with me than the idea that Hussie was disgusted by his fanbase and going out of his way to upset them, no matter how annoying a gaggle of internet teenagers could get. Bongo Bill posted:Beware: this very thread is so old that it contains material that may be a useful source for that kind of analysis. Yeah guess what one of HSMTW's primary sources of fandom history was lmao
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 11:32
|
|
|
I also never got the impression that Hussie 'hates the audience' from reading start to finish, but I never interacted or knew of MSPA forums I guess. It sounds like a silly take on its face, like some sort of cope for when he did something in the story people didn't like. Like if he did something unpopular, then it was on purpose, like some sort of mastermind, instead of being a flawed human being that may not craft the perfect narrative sometimes. Granted, I don't have the context for whatever happened on the forum, but from an outside perspective it seems like a non-serious theory. dipwood fucked around with this message at 14:55 on May 15, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 14:53
|
|
|
I always thought Hussie loved the audience. He was also just a puckish jester who loved tweaking the nose of convention and subverting expectations. And this tendency is actually a huge part of why Homestuck's so funny and so compelling! Homestuck at its strongest was full of clever misdirects and abrupt anti-climaxes, too. Many of its best jokes are anti-climaxes, many of its best plot movements are twists, and a lot of its excellent pacing in the middle of the run comes from bold defiance of narrative convention. I think where it falls down a bit are the times in the back half of the comic's run where Hussie takes their eye off characterisation in service of a funny anti-climax or a wild subversion of expectations. IIRC the MSPA forums went down basically by accident and couldn't be recovered for the same reasons - the archive was lost when a web server failed, and Hussie was too busy eat/sleep/breathing Homestuck to spend mental energy recreating a vBulletin board from scratch.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 20:48
|
|
|
Here's an album of the images from the copy of MSPANotify that I dug out of an old HDD: https://imgur.com/a/NnnNhNZ
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 21:17
|
|
|
dipwood posted:I also never got the impression that Hussie 'hates the audience' from reading start to finish, but I never interacted or knew of MSPA forums I guess. It sounds like a silly take on its face, like some sort of cope for when he did something in the story people didn't like. Like if he did something unpopular, then it was on purpose, like some sort of mastermind, instead of being a flawed human being that may not craft the perfect narrative sometimes. I feel like I'm being done dirty here lol My reading isn't facile. It's an interpretation half-based on Hussie's own commentary on what the Epilogues were for as well as being on the MSPA forums at the time. The work started as audience interaction, and while that faded away in the plotting, the kind of general entitlement and concomitant aggression never left. Hussie interacted with the forums and responded to negative criticism in ways that showed a great deal of stress. I remember the vast and roiling conflict about racial-coding of the characters *after* Hussie idly said that they have no canon race and readers are free to interpret them however they please. This led to incredible vitriol on the forums, massive rants, and a level of toxicity that led to some bans. This was then followed up with the trickster mode joke of feeling CAUCASIAN, which was meant to needle at that drama. The lashback to that joke on the forums was so extreme and vitriolic that Hussie actually paused and rewrote the joke, then wrote an apology about writing the joke. This wasn't an isolated case either. The most vocal part of the forum audience was extremely aggressive and unpleasant, and there's no reason to suppose that Hussie was simply beyond it all--they lived inside that space, read it for sources, and felt its heat.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 21:45
|
|
|
I just want to remark that I've done interactive stories / comics for like seven years and my audience has always been very cool about everything, even during my own hectic scheduling phase. I've never had more than like a thousand readers at once or Hussie's tone or writing ability or pretty much anything else but that's also my point, I don't think it's just the nature of the medium per se I've never heard of any major heat coming out of the All Night Laundry or Awful Hospital or whoever fandoms, either, but I'll also admit to not being super informed or connected about anything so I could be wrong. Just anecdotally I've had whole stories basically rewritten by readers and nobody got entitled or weird about it, even the discord's greatest argument has been over whether or not jean memes are funny
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2024 22:23
|
|
|
I never understood the desire to try and decide what kind of relationship hussie had with the readers was the "real" one, because it's especially clear in retrospect that the answer is "all of the above." Part of what made the comic feel the way it did was that user commands made you feel like you were part of it, and even once those went away that feeling was replaced by the (not untrue!) one that "hussie is reading all of these fan discussions, and sometimes if you have a funny enough idea it might get worked into the comic". this rocked, and its why hs ruled, but also inflicted bloodborne frenzy meters onto a lot of people, who suddenly now felt like they had the ear of the author. People competing to be the Most Serious Plot Prophet and seeing 'foreshadowing' that never existed, or people arguing that they knew characters better than the author, etc. both of which hussie definitely couldnt help but egg on, by constantly retroactively creating foreshadowing from random stuff, or constantly talking about being a scribe for the platonic ideals of the characters or whatever. but nobody deserved how absolutely bugfuck homestuck fans could be towards hussie. I'm a little more negative on how the trickster sutff resolved than zooloo (sup zooloo), but part of that is just residual annoyance from when it happened. otherwise I roughly agree it was all just a mess, but a fascinating one, because all the stuff that made the comic/fandom explode and become toxic is the same stuff that made it get as big as it did, as become as good as it did. anyway, highly recommend the HMTW pod, it was a really fun way to sit and think about those couple years that I was deep in it studio mujahideen fucked around with this message at 01:46 on May 16, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 01:23
|
|
|
Lunatic Sledge posted:I just want to remark that I've done interactive stories / comics for like seven years and my audience has always been very cool about everything, even during my own hectic scheduling phase. I've never had more than like a thousand readers at once or Hussie's tone or writing ability or pretty much anything else but that's also my point, I don't think it's just the nature of the medium per se Part of it was definitely the novelty. Nobody was doing like MSPA at the time that it was blowing up, in terms of responsiveness/speed/tone. It activated a huge cross section of people into a relatively new way of engaging with an online comic. and people found all the acceptable boundaries in that period I guess. learned their lessons
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 01:26
|
|
|
Part of the reason I think Hussie had a less-than-favorable relationship with the fandom is because I am convinced the Caucasian joke controversy was deliberately manufactured in order to provoke the exact outcome that happened. There’s two components to this. First, the Caucasian joke was bad, just on its merits as a joke. It makes zero sense within the work, and only made sense as poking fun at the fanbase. There is something to be said about a work existing in concert with its readers, but if you weren’t following fan forums at the time, and even if you were but you weren’t part of The Discourse, the joke would just straight-up not land. Next, and more importantly, the joke that replaced it is good. Like, really good. Trickster mode characters are colorful in ways that normal characters are not, including having an obvious skin tone instead of the (supposedly) aracial paper white. Trickster mode makes you feel great, too, like you can just blaze through all your problems. Jane talks like a grandma. So, when an old-timey, colorful, manic person is asked to describe how they feel, of course they’re going to say “just peachy”. Masterful. It’s my theory that “just peachy” was written first, but then Hussie realized they had an opportunity to troll the fanbase. They swapped out the joke, put up the pages, waited until the fires got hot enough, and then swapped it back. Maybe they underestimated exactly how huge the reaction was going to be, and maybe they were genuinely apologetic (but not breaking kayfabe in their apology), but I cannot believe that someone with both Hussie’s comedic writing skills would gently caress up this badly, unless it was a ploy all along by someone with a history of trolling their fans. (Why, yes, I did appreciate Homestuck Made This World’s repeated discussions on how Hussie is so constantly steeped in irony that their motives are entirely inscrutable, why do you ask?)
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 04:17
|
|
|
I mean, Hussie did gently caress up a little by having clear racial descriptors of the characters that at least betrayed a subconscious idea of the characters being racially white. He then replaced those descriptors with gibberish which at least felt like him getting mad. It didn’t help you had an argument rolling their eyes at Hussie’s aracial claims (if memory serves he patted himself on the back a bit over it) versus shitheads harassing fan artists. Otherwise, the adversarial tone always felt like a bit to me. Dude was nose to the grindstone, and he likely didn’t have time to trawl the forums, especially after it stopped being a necessary component of the plot.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 04:50
|
|
|
I remember when he tried to use tumblr to just post things (like explaining what happened in Cascade) and gave up when people vandalized his posts (back when you could edit any posts you reblogged). I vaguely remember him saying something about not wanting to engage in the back and forth comments that were the social interactions on that site, he just wanted to have his posts easily shared by readers.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 05:45
|
|
|
The thing I remember about the "Caucasian" bit is that people legitimately upset about it seemed way less loud and obnoxious than the type of people elated that Hussie was finally sticking out to those SJW freaks at whom the joke was aimed. My impression at the time is that Hussie's retraction of the joke was motivated by their not anticipating the specific kind of toxic response from people who liked it.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 11:03
|
|
|
I wasn't hip deep in mspa forum drama, but the original joke just seemed like a sensible chuckle kind of pun. The idea that people took it as a canonical reading of their ethnicity positively or negative, was a very strange surprise.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 18:28
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:The thing I remember about the "Caucasian" bit is that people legitimately upset about it seemed way less loud and obnoxious than the type of people elated that Hussie was finally sticking out to those SJW freaks at whom the joke was aimed. My impression at the time is that Hussie's retraction of the joke was motivated by their not anticipating the specific kind of toxic response from people who liked it. This was definitely a part of what motivated Hussie to pay attention to it. But the fire was coming from all sides, so to speak, so I'm not sure it is "one answer" but rather a confluence of things. Given that our own memories are reconstructive instead of recollective, even Hussie might struggle to relate exactly how it felt. To pivot towards the general conversation here: Ultimately, knowing the exact social relationship between author and audience is an unattainable goal. Literary criticism and its theory are centered around a series of ultimately unresolvable arguments about what lens will provide the most useful or insightful reading of text, metatext, author, and milleu. Given our fragmented connections between these elements and our interpretations, critical theories are rather easy to both create and attack. (That's part of why I rapidly stopped doing any academic work in lit crit lmao) So I'm living in my limited perspective, staring out of the portholes that are my eyes and glancing back on the dim memories of my past, again and again, reflecting on a story that mattered to me--Homestuck. And in that act, I roved over time, checking out other angles, other ways of thinking. This mattered to me, and I wanted to think about how it mattered to others. They had a unique feeling, reading this work. These days, I hew to the old interpretation of audience antagonism, not because I'm sticking with an ancient gut feeling or initial intuition, but because over years and years of talking about Homestuck, I've come to believe that "steeped in irony" is an opaque veil, behind which almost any motivation can be attributed to the author. Consider the caricatures of the audience, the on and off again contact with social media, the criticism about making a game while producing the comic, and the toxic fandom. With these fragments clasped in my sweaty hands, I argue that there is more sincerity in Hussie's antagonism than irony, even if irony always plays a part. Having thought about this even more, I'm beginning to believe it is reliably both irony and sincerity, and we shouldn't hew to totally simplistic modes. I thus slide away from any certainty again, slipping into the quicksands of doubt, but hey, I do know this. This is a thread full of veterans who paid close attention. Largely, we were all there. What a ride. Zooloo fucked around with this message at 23:01 on May 16, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2024 22:38
|
|
|
Yeah, "irony" can definitely be argued as its own form of sincerity. Even if you're doing something ironically, you're still doing it, which means that, on some level, it is a thing you feel is worth doing. Saying you're doing it as a joke, or that you don't really mean it, can easily be read as trying to convince an audience that you're not the kind of person who would, for example, make a racially charged joke that causes your die-hard fans to implode. There's no such thing as ironic murder, right? I liken it to guilty pleasures. Yeah, you may say that there are reasons not to do the thing, and may say that taking pleasure from doing the thing is wrong, but you're still doing the thing and taking pleasure from it. Just own it! Eat that ice cream, you deserve a treat.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 20:30
|
|
|
quote:TT: The upper echelons of irony should always include measures of sincerity. And if the satirical practice is executed faithfully it will achieve something bona fide in its own right regardless.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 20:54
|
|
|
Oh god I just remembered the madman that went and finished the whole Pony Pals book defacing/meta story nonsense that Hussie started in Homestuck https://detective-pony.tumblr.com/tagged/page/chrono
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 21:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 00:05 |
|
|
isasphere posted:Oh god I just remembered the madman that went and finished the whole Pony Pals book defacing/meta story nonsense that Hussie started in Homestuck Possibly history's greatest shitpost, it's truly sublime
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 22:22
|
|