IT’S HARD AND NOBODY UNDERSTANDS: Annotations and Commentary on Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck By Fletcher Wortmann Version history: 1.02.14, V0.82. More revisions. Added proper citations to Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace that I’d somehow forgotten to include first go-around. I suspect this will be the final revision of this document for some time, likely until Andrew Hussie finishes the comic. As of right now, I’m partway through annotations on Act 6, as well as some additional reading on critics and thinkers whose work seems relevant to MSPA. When Homestuck is finished, I hope to release v0.9 of the annotations as an eBook, with complete commentary on Acts 1-7 of the story. Thank you all for your suggestions and support through this project! 6.28.13, v0.81. Did some cleanup, correcting spelling and grammar errors. Added sources by Jenkins and Kennedy about the protagonist as audience cipher in modern media, and how John relates to this trend. Noted a telling moment in Jade’s Alchemization binge as suggested by Silthead on Tumblr. 4.14.13, v0.8. Posted annotations through Act 5 Act 2. INTRODUCTION: It’s a webcomic. It’s a serial illustrated novel. It’s a record label for indie electronica. It’s the worst RPG sourcebook ever. It’s Infinite Jest meets Scott Pilgrim meets 4Chan. It’s Suda 51’s game adaptation of David Lynch’s remake of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. It’s one of those Scholastic Book Club videogame novelizations/”strategy guides” they made in the 80s for stuff like Castlevania, about the greatest videogame of all time, except the videogame doesn’t exist. It is a memetic parasite that drags its host into isolation and obsession like something from Lovecraft. Homestuck, brainchild of MS Paint Adventures mastermind Andrew Hussie, is the story of John Egbert: a kid playing a videogame that can alter the fabric of his universe. With the help of a co-player, who interferes with John’s environment using a giant green cursor, John builds a portal and enters a videogame world - complete with vicious monsters, hapless villagers, and a heroic destiny. Together, John and his friends set out to conquer an evil kingdom and take their rightful places as rulers of a new realm. And that’s when things go wrong. Catastrophically wrong. The circumstances of the adventure, the “rules” of the game, are complex and frequently obscure. Time-travel, parallel worlds, alternate selves and extradimensional travel eventually come into play – and Hussie trusts his audience to read between the lines and parse out his world’s dizzying mythology. At the same time, the complexity of Homestuck’s universe is matched by the ceaseless innovation of Hussie’s storytelling. Homestuck does things with words and pictures I have never seen before, in comics or any other medium, ever. The formal experimentation here allows Hussie to play with perspective, continuity, and metatextuality – in ways that deepen the story’s exploration of adolescence, creativity, solipsism, irony, and the conflict between free will and determinism. For these reasons, Homestuck is very difficult to get into, and even veteran readers may miss critical information. I’ve written these annotations with a new reader in mind, and I hope you’ll find them helpful in orienting yourself in Homestuck’s dizzying world. What this guide is not: Up ‘til now, despite it’s massive, loyal and financially lucrative base of readers, no one’s attempted serious criticism of Homestuck. This is a vast and intricate work, and one worthy of serious consideration by diverse intellects. I am not diverse intellects. I’m working off of a three- year-old undergraduate degree in English Literature and a couple of Wikipedia pages. There are entire schools of criticism that could be productively applied to Homestuck that I’m just not qualified to employ. What I’m trying to do here is start a conversation about the work, its merits and its flaws – but it’s only a start, hopefully not a conclusion. This also means that I have not attempted to catalogue every instance of a particular turn of phrase or image composition over the course of the series. Such an undertaking might be useful, but it’s beyond the scope of what I, one bro, can accomplish. In addition: this document is not intended an apologia for Homestuck or for Hussie. As I’m sure Hussie would be the first to admit, Homestuck is an experimental and improvisational work, and as such is vulnerable to digressions and to editorial oversight. When I notice contradictions, or unclear storytelling, or problematic themes, I will point them out and pick them apart and try to make sense of them in the context of the whole. Homestuck is deeply flawed, but even its flaws can be instructive. And that’s why I’m convinced that critical analysis of Homestuck is so important. Homestuck, as both a text and a phenomenon, is unprecedented. If you are interested in the bleeding edge of comics storytelling and graphic lit, you need to read Homestuck. If you care about the future of popular fiction and serialized fiction, you need to be reading Homestuck. If you’re a major publisher and you despair of readers supporting your work in an age of rampant piracy and free digital content, you need to be reading Homestuck. It’s a steep climb, and we’ll be making it together – I hope I can keep you from missing a step and taking a tumble. But if you do, remember, you knew exactly what you were getting into. I warned you about stairs, bro. I told you, dog. What this guide is: I have an academic background in literary criticism and creative writing. I’m also a longtime comic book fan, and I’ve done some reading on sequential storytelling. So my criticism of Homestuck will focus on a couple of areas: - Recurring themes (some of which I listed above, some of which we’ll explore over the course of these annotations), particularly engagement with and criticism of contemporary internet and youth culture. - Character development and subtext. I’m of the DotA, close reading school, so we’ll be picking apart little stuff (turns of phrase, off-hand moments) to see what it implies about the characters, intended or not. - Sequential storytelling. Like I’ve said, I’m a comics fan. The MS Paint Adventures format isn’t quite like anything else I’ve encountered in graphic literature, but Hussie employs many of the tricks we see in print comics and traditional media – or finds clever ways to incorporate sound and animation. With all that out of the way… …let me tell you about Homestuck. THE ANNOTATIONS: ACT 1 1901 – …the opening words instantly transport me into a new world. All the words that come after in each work do no more than give me further information about a realm I have already entered. The words are radically inaugural. They are the creation, in each case, of a new, alternative universe. These words are a miniature, secular, all-too-human version of God’s “Let there be light” in Genesis. - J. Hillis Miller, On Literature.1 From the very beginning, Hussie’s Homestuck alludes to the mechanics of videogames and interactive fiction, while denying the reader any kind of meaningful participation in the narrative. This is a fundamental rule of the story’s presentation: Homestuck is told in the second person, with the audience as “player,” directing the actions of the characters in the story. Except obviously we aren’t actually controlling anything – Homestuck is a comic, not a videogame, and no matter how badly we want to we can’t choose this beady-eyed fellow’s name. And the format is unique as well. You get one “panel” per “page” – but this single unit of storytelling (very handy for annotation purposes, incidentally) could be anything from a still image, to a short animation, to an interactive game, to a music video. Text and art are usually separate, and many pages feature simple illustrations but huge blocks of text. The other unique thing about Homestuck is that the reader will always move forward by clicking the link at the bottom of the page; the mere process of proceeding through the narrative implicates the reader in its progression in a way that, say, reading a book or a comic doesn’t, and the author will employ a variety of ingenious ways of exploiting this over the course of the text. Moving on: Homestuck was published on April 13th, or 4/13. 413 is kind of the LOST number of Homestuck, appearing again and again so suggest some kind of creepy cosmic synchronicity. I tried, and eventually gave up, on 1 J. Hillis Miller. On Literature. New York: Routledge, 2002. 25. documenting every instance of this number in the comic. But they are there if you want to look for them. 1902 – “Zoosmell Pooplord.” Already we’re getting into “trolling,” which, for the uninitiated, is a very peculiar sort of perversity in discourse unique to the internet. The practice is named after troll fishing, in which a net is let out to drift through the ocean, allowing passing fish to entangle themselves. Online trolling started when clever agitators learned to set traps on message boards by posting particularly incendiary comments, then to sit back and enjoy the chaos as infuriated commentators tried to engage with their nonsense. From here, trolling has expanded to encompass any exploitation of the anonymity and reach of the internet to stir up trouble.