Let us tell you about Homestuck

Discussion in 'Fan Town' started by Wiwaxia, Apr 12, 2015.

  1. Nobody's Home

    Nobody's Home I'm a Greg Coded Tom Girl

    In the homestuck ARG thing, wherein the Whatpumpkin website redirects to a website called skaianetsystems.com, there was this text, idk exactly where it was on the website, that contained a long ish real person fanfic that details the Condesce's various exploits on earth

    Contains it is big real person fanfiction with ppl like charlie chaplain, hitler, and einstein
    Turns scientific breakthroughs during their time as simply tech laundering done by the Condesce with meteor and troll tech

    I haven't read everything but thats what I got so far, I hear there's more Hitler stuff which like, eugh
     
    • Witnessed x 5
    • Informative x 4
    • Agree x 1
  2. Charlie

    Charlie I got no strings to hold me down

    Um, I'll just link it because it's dense and honestly it's escalatingly worse. There's just so much bad stuff in it that it's hard to summarize, honestly.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T0fYoFGqmJzzXXhufnePvwqdwddzmp1LtV-IXSNOm0A/preview#

    Preview:
    1955 - RIP Einstein
    Einstein (76) is writing more bullshit pacifist poetry, scolding the world for its evils. He takes a break to play his violin badly. He really sucks. Chaplin (66) smashes through the window of his posh residence. He's been training, getting his ass back in gear. He's in peak physical condition again, incredibly limber. He knows about his complicity in the holocaust. He despises Einstein for his weakness, gives him strong, accusatory lecture. Einstein is blubbering mess. He runs through house, throwing papers around containing all the chicken scratch fake math he keeps on hand to seem legitimate. Chaplin catches him, smacks him around. Ends up breaking his neck. He thinks about exposing him to the world. But no. It would make everyone sad. Also, that's exactly what Hitler would have wanted.

    But that's just a small taste, like it's really as bad as people say which I didn't expect. Hitler's in it. A lot of historical figures are. So are Trump and Obama.
     
    • Informative x 3
  3. The Frood Abides

    The Frood Abides Doesn't Know Where His Rug Is

    Just adding my voice to the chorus of "what the fuck" here
     
    • Agree x 9
  4. Jemmy

    Jemmy Don't Do A Hit

    deeply baffling to be fucking frank
     
    • Agree x 1
  5. Birdy

    Birdy so long

    this is stupid. I don’t care about any of that bullshit.
     
    • Agree x 5
    • Like x 1
  6. Penumbra

    Penumbra hiding under cloth

    I would have been better off not knowing that existed
     
    • Agree x 8
  7. Charlie

    Charlie I got no strings to hold me down

    I'm just tired because 'Jake english is complicit in the holocaust' is real discourse now.

    It's all stupid bullshit I'm going to ignore in context of Homestuck but it's also such a bad idea. I can't imagine a single person who wanted this
     
    • Agree x 14
  8. Aondeug

    Aondeug Cringe Annoying Ass Female Lobster

    I guess people who hate Homestuck and want it to be verboten to speak of might want it but like

    Yeah.
     
    • Agree x 2
    • Like x 1
  9. Birdy

    Birdy so long

    happy 2019 homestuck should’ve ended 6 years ago
     
    • Agree x 8
    • Witnessed x 1
  10. Raire

    Raire Turquoise Helicoid

    ... I’m just. Going to ignore this. I can’t deal with it.
     
    • Agree x 7
    • Witnessed x 5
  11. Codeless

    Codeless Cheshire Cat

    ...well fuck. Is it even a good idea to do a HS cosplay anymore?
     
    • Witnessed x 3
  12. context-free anon

    context-free anon Well-Known Member

    i'm so fucking glad i jumped ship in 2015
     
  13. turtleDove

    turtleDove Well-Known Member

    My stance on it is "I am ignoring it, because it reads like someone's RPF Condie fic that accidentally/'accidentally' got splashed in public".

    I have some doubts about whether Hussie actually wrote any of it, but I'm not sure how much it'll change anything if it turned out he didn't. (A lot of it really doesn't read like him, it reads like someone wanted to tie up 'loose ends' and explain what HIC had been doing between when Alternia died and she died. And like that someone really wanted to toss in every single big-name historical figure they could think of that had any relation to tech, comedy, or having shaped the world today. Also like they really don't like Jake.)

    Like - it crams in just about every single major historical figure during the periods covered that it can? And goes "hey, Calamity Jane was a female cherub!" and "every guy who laid eyes on Condie and spent significant time around her was obsessed with her if they were of age, because she's Just That Hot", and "Condie advanced Earth tech by using SkaiaNet to slide Alternian and SBURBian tech into the world" and "Houdini was part of a secret organization of assassin magicians who were fighting to try and sabotage Condie and SkaiaNet". Plus a lot of Jake being incompetent and marrying a lot of women and having at least one kid with them before his wife died tragically. (According to this fic: Jake is Obama's grandpa! Also the father of the street magician that John was fascinated with!) And, yeah - it turns Einstein into a fraud and that Hitler totally knew that he was one and that Hitler's antisemitism was a means of 'getting at' Einstein during a period where Einstein was babysitting Hitler, Laurel, and Charlie Chapman, and that Hitler getting into power was the fault of Jake and Condie and SkaiaNet.

    Even without the Surprise Hitler, it's a hot mess. (There are hordes of Fieri clones, which Condie creates using a giant tank full of Hardy's sperm, and also she spends her first few years on Earth wandering around and murdering anyone she encounters then eating them until Calamity turns up and shoots her.) With the Surprise Hitler, it's a hot mess that's in incredibly bad taste and reads at best like whoever wrote it doesn't know anything about why WWII happened or why maybe touching WWII is a really bad idea for anyone unless it needs to be included.

    As far as cosplay goes, I'd say it's still as good an idea as it was before? I don't think anyone's been pulling their HP cosplays because of the nonsense Rowling's done - and the Thing did get yanked pretty quickly, from what I've heard; it's possible that it wasn't supposed to be there at all.
     
    • Agree x 7
    • Informative x 2
    • Useful x 1
  14. Gee

    Gee the mail never fails

    Just my onion: I think it's a Hilarious cringe fest and cannot empathy why everyone is up in arms.

    Note: I don't want to understand it either.
     
  15. Codeless

    Codeless Cheshire Cat

    Yeah. Part of that is being german and by necessity more careful about that shit. Im glad it got pulled and I hope we find out how it even got there.
     
    • Witnessed x 2
    • Agree x 1
  16. Kathy

    Kathy Well-Known Member

    From what I saw on the summary of things the stuff getting pulled down was part of the arg - those often operate on timers.

    Like here's the thing about arg's an in-character supplementary texts from a pr perspective, right. they're supposed to drum up excitement and speculation for a big announcement. see the overwatch arg for sombra. they can go on too long though, and then undermine the hype and build resentment. also see the overwatch arg for sombra.

    launching an arg is a big thing, it requires a lot of coordination, and you can bet that after it went live whoever was responsible was watching the homestuck tag like a hawk for the reception.

    you put the thing you want people to dig up into the files, it's supposed to breed excitement and speculation and theorycrafting so that when you sprinkle in the next bit of info people feel like they're solving a mystery but

    there was no mystery here. like aside from the fucking flabberghastingly awful content it's a pisspoor arg. i'd expect the thing with the meteor to be the *end* of it, the thing you're supposed to have put together to be excited for the 20th anniversary of homestuck, and like, doing that *now* is incredibly weird timing.

    The only other mystery is who the fuck made this and all of the breadcrumbs there point at hussie - the wizard files, the hand-drawn sbahj comic held by a white male-looking hand, etc.

    Like I would bet, having done pr things for a launch before, that this was supposed to be a preamble to the announcement of hiveswap part 2. and there's maybe a nugget of it in there - maybe the cherub portal is a legacy of the people who were working with Calamity for instance

    but across the board this is just kind of insultingly incompetent. the writing quality in the history documents, content aside, is awful. it reads like it was written by someone who has no concept of how to tell a story, but with bonus "the jewish refugee who had his work destroyed by nazi's and had to flee was actually responsible for the holocaust and could have stopped it at any time" and actual nazi conspiracy theories sprinkled through it.

    So like, while it has succeeded in generating a lot of engagement with the homestuck tags, the only people on twitter i've seen actively celebrating it are open pedophiles, nazi's and nazi-adjacent individuals. The rest has been confusion, hurt, anger, and people being like "well that fucking sucks my city now".

    I would be extremely unsurprised if viz media pulls out of the deal at this point as a result of this blowback and hiveswap just falls through the cracks.
     
    • Informative x 4
    • Like x 1
  17. turtleDove

    turtleDove Well-Known Member

    The abysmal quality of the writing is most of why I don't really think this is Hussie's writing, yeah. Say what you want about how Homestuck ended (and we all have), but the man does know how to actually tell a story and how to create a plotline that at least makes sense while you're reading it. Whoever wrote this, uh, doesn't and it really, really shows - most of the events in the fic just raise more questions than they answer and don't particularly make sense even in context.

    Frankly, considering how incompetent this is and that there's no actual mystery or build-up to anything, I'd be suspicious of anything that actually points to it being something that Viz or Hussie were behind. I wouldn't believe it to be impossible for someone to have shoved it into the site's code, especially since Viz had to have the site completely rebuilt due to the fact that Hussie...built it in such a way that probably made professionals weep; there's opportunity. I have no idea wtf the motive would be, though, unless it's lashing out at Viz or trying to make the franchise or Hussie look bad. And I'm too tired to really want to try and work out wtf went down and why.
     
    • Agree x 6
    • Informative x 1
  18. vuatson

    vuatson [delurks]

    Well, that all looks terrible. I’m just gonna go back to rereading Golden Age and hope that neither Hussie nor anyone else with actual creative authority over homestuckverse canon had anything to do with this.
     
    • Agree x 3
  19. emcapi

    emcapi Well-Known Member

    me @ all of this is just
    :why:

    :whybig:

    :shynautica:
     
    • Agree x 5
  20. emcapi

    emcapi Well-Known Member

    i would say the text files do read as Hussie-esque.
    but it strikes me more as "extremely early Hussie," like, possibly even pre-Homestuck, back when he was doing dumb offensive shit like Humanimals, whatever that thing i can't remember that was named something like "Special Olympics" was, etc.
    does this seem like the sort of dumb shit he would write? ABSOLUTELY.
    is it dumb shit that he actually intended to become public/canon? VERY UNLIKELY.
    dude's smart. i would think he would be smart enough, especially with all the past controversies that have cropped up, to realize this is in the category of dumb shit that would be extremely bad PR.

    which begs the question: if he was responsible for this, could it have been INTENTIONALLY bad PR? is he sufficiently fed up with maintaining the Homestuck/Hiveswap empire that he wanted to intentionally tank it?
    my conclusion: maybe??? ~15% chance.

    perhaps this was "dumb shit that Hussie wrote" that he shared with some of his co-conspirators for shits and giggles, and one of them thought it would be funny to include as part of this whole ARG thing, and he absolutely never intended it to become public.
    my conclusion: possible. ~55% chance.
     
    • Agree x 3
    • Like x 2
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