Talk to Me Like a Small Child - What's This Homestuck Thing?

( psst. If you get bored silly and cant be assed to continue, skip straight to act five. You'll probably want to go back and reread, but dont give up on homestuck without at least giving the trolls a look)

 

Made it through 2. Doing 3. I am growing weary of the inside jokes about shitty gaming systems.

 

Dear M. Hussie:

I played Colossal Cave on a PDP-11 using a DECWriter. Your complaints about game inventory systems are noted. Now get the fuck off my lawn.

s/ the-rigs

 

Stay on until act five, I promise. I had the same feeling.

Or - youtube Homestuck reading. It should take less time if a guy narrates it for you. I got to act 6 the usual way, but I have been watching the videos to sort of go over what I missed before because there was a lot of clicking to just get to the interesting parts already.

 

Fucking time travel.

I fucking HATE time travel.

 

Then do I have some bad news for you.

 

So does Hearts Boxcars

 

I always get super excited when people I like start paying attention to things that I like :D

 

I get the feeling the author also hates time travel and is making this as convoluted as possible as an exercise in mockery. With that in mind, I'm willing to work through the thing.

I still fucking hate time travel, though.

 

I've read through the intermission probably 6 or 7 times and I still don't fully understand the time shenanigans, though on my last read through I felt I was just on the cusp of grasping it. Maybe I'm just stupid. Anyways, you don't have to get what happens with time in the intermission to understand the rest of the plot.

 

Yeah, the time travel in the intermission follows different rules from the rest of the comic's Weird Time Shit, IIRC.

 

I've never really understood the time shenanigans of the intermission. I honestly just kind of read along, being amused by the Problem Sleuth-esque madness and then it ends and I'm like "Well that made no fucking sense but whatever". Then again I've never had much of a mind for time travel and I honestly don't try to think too hard on it. Stupid fanfic is probably the first time I've ever decided to go "You know what I need to do. Think about how time in Homestuck works. AND THEN DO THAT FOR ROMANCE."

 

It helps set the tone for how time travel fits into the narrative:

Spoiler

It depicts the futility of trying to change anything in Paradox Space when operating within its rules, because cause and effect are fucked up in tangled self-creating knots.

 

While I'm complaining about stuff, I want to make clear that Hussie has done a fucking incredible job of presenting really complicated literary concepts. For example, he effortlessly has me treating/believing the human characters are "real" when they are obviously living in a cheesy Flash game universe. They are no more "real" than the sburbs game they are playing.

Reality? Hyper-reality? Shit, kids--that's straight up Baudrillard. Y'all are learning serious-ass Theory when you read Homestuck AND LIKING IT.

 

@rigorist fun story, homestuck was required reading at my university - we used it to explore alternative narrative structures, with a little bit of interaction theory thrown into it for fun.

 

sorry - one of my shift keys has died and i don't feel like fixing it just yet. apologies for the non-caps post.

anyway, the time-travel stuff feels over the top right now when he has so much else going on with questions about 'what is reality?' i get that time-travel is an over-used trope in bad f/sf and games, but he doesn't seem to have a new take on it. he's just over-using it to make fun of it. it seems a bit like his running joke about crappy inventory systems in games--it is kind of funny, but distracts from his more interesting (to me, at least) extended exploration of 'what the fuck is this reality you're talking about?'

 

if i still smoked weed, homestuck is something that would make me go ' whooooaaaaa . . . . dude ......'

 

i am loving this let's read pls continue commentating