#minda reads homestuck
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Hmm
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Ask Compilation 09/10
Welcome, thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy!!
Impressed that you managed to catch up in one day, to be honest. I haven't done a full reread yet, but I tried rereading Minda's OOTS liveblog last year, and I think it took the best part of a week?
Thanks - I'll add 'em to the list!
Cheers, guys! It's good to be back, and I'm touched that this blog has become a part of people's lives like this. 😅
I didn't really come up with any new theories while I was gone - I had a lot on my plate, and to be honest, I only really come up with theories while I'm reading or rereading the comic. ADHD-induced object impermanence strikes again!
I still think Life is going to be 'healing-themed' or 'nature-themed'. The former is one of my favorite flavor of powers, and the latter I'm so-so about, but I'm sure Homestuck could find a way to make it work!
I'm starting to think this dang 8-ball isn't as prophetic as I thought, and it's actually just a regular 8-ball. Damn red herrings!
Perhaps. The troll modi tend to say some pretty obvious things about their users - Karkat's is pointlessly masochistic, Aradia's is paranormal, and Gamzee's is a trip.
I don't know about the kids though. Sure, John's modus is meandering, like him - and Jade has multiple modi, because she likes to break the established patterns. I'm not so sure about the Derse kids - their modi are simple data structures, and don't seem to say anything about their personalities, unless I'm missing something obvious.
The full liveblog tag is more for archival readers, so meta posts, which are only really relevant at the time they're posted, don't really fit - but I'll give them their own tag going forward!
I caught some of Con Air on TV, once. It's exactly as over-the-top as you'd expect from this scene, and I kind of love it.
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Hmm...
So, somebody who writes in grey all-caps is looking for a Dave...
How did Karkat end up in vampire world?
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Never apologize
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Yeah...
I don’t want to drag on Homestuck^2 too much because I’m done reading it, and anyway HS^2 is half-dead from what I understand.
I for one actually liked Roxy’s storyline in the epilogues, because I liked the butterfly effect element of it. Characters can have very different lives or even be very different people depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Sure, a lot of her behavior in Homestuck Classic suggests that they’re a very pansexual cis-girl, but trans-Roxy was a popular headcanon back in the day, so the Epilogues got to explore that in various ways. It’s a neat exercise.
The representation question is still interesting because from what I’ve heard from people who do still like HS^2, that’s the main thing they’re attached to. They liked Roxy’s dual character arcs in the Epilogue and they’re excited for June Egbert. And if you’re part of that group of people who are starved for trans rep, I get that, but I don’t think it doesn’t count for much if it doesn’t make sense.
Honestly, I don’t even think the problem is the creative decision to write these characters as trans, the problem is everything surrounding them. It’s a little hard to write a compelling character study in the same story where I’m supposed to believe that a human woman named her children Vriska and Yiffany.
The whole point of adding minority representation is to create characters that people can identify with, but across the board, almost nobody in HS^2 acts like a person, so what are we even doing?
Vriska is a whole other complicated issue (so this is a normal day at the office with her).
You want to talk about trans rep not making sense, I literally don’t know what it means for a troll to be transsexual because it doesn’t make sense for trolls to have gender in the first place.
Any troll can procreate with any other troll, so why do they even have assigned gender at birth? What does it mean? What effect does it have on anything?
Hiveswap introduced another trans character by the name of Lanque, and he is also a piece of work, so the Vriska conversation nicely dovetails with the Lanque conversation. Vriska may be divisive but at least some people like her. Lanque is just a pure case of, “Oh yeah, this is the kind of trans rep people were hoping for lolol, psych!”
I don’t know. It’s all just very frustrating to watch, which is why I decided I don’t have to watch it anymore!
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lol, that kinda makes sense.
See, for me, the problem with the epilogues is that so much of it is clearly driven by authorial intent that character analysis feels pointless.
Like, we all know the real reason why Roxy is trans in the Epilogues. It’s because trans awareness has increased in the time since Homestuck ended, and trans-Roxy was a popular head canon, so they ran with it.
John gets killed because his retcon powers are too powerful, and so they needed to write him out of the story.
Jade is said to have a tail because people like drawing fanart of her with one, even though she doesn’t.
Jane is suddenly racist because most of the Epilogues was written in 2016 and 2017, so they decided to morph her into a fusion of Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton for some reason.
Actually trying to analyze these characters within the story feels outright dishonest. It’s trying to make sense of a story that, at its core, doesn’t make sense because it’s deliberately written to be bad fanfiction.
And that SUCKS because this is also the story where they’re trying to be inclusive with more forms of representation! Homestuck^2 could have continued to be a platform for groundbreaking forms of rep the way Homestuck Classic was... but the story is bad so it doesn’t matter!
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Yeah, that makes sense for Jake.
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Yeah, I don’t know.
Finn’s character has changed so much that if you asked me what his classpect would be at the start of the series, it’d be very different than what it is now.
As for the rest of the cast... making Marceline a Blood hero sounds on the nose, but I do think it fits with her tsundere willingness to form attachments to hero.
PB is definitely Light.
Jake is maybe Breath? idk, he’s a weird dude, and he’s around so much you can make arguments for just about anything.
#adventure time#minda reads#minda watches adventure time#in between#asks#at asks#homestuck#minda reads homestuck#hs asks
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Found
As for the question of whether or not Donald Duck is a vriska, I mean maybe, lmao
If you made one of those Vriska alignment charts with Pure Vriskas in the top left corner and chaotic evil Vriskas in the bottom right, Donald probably would make it onto the chart, just closer to the bottom right.
#homestuck^2#homestuck epilogue#homestuck#minda reads homestuck#minda reads#in between#asks#hs asks#infinity train#minda watches infinity train#it asks
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As a concept, that idea is intriguing. The reason why the Epilogues and HS^2 don’t work for me is that they are trying to prove that “canon” as a concept is overrated. That you can still tell a compelling story without being tied up in the minutia of what did or did not happen previously. But for me anyway, they have inadvertently proven the opposite. They have demonstrated why canon actually is important.
Jade’s tail is always my go-to example for this sort of thing because it is literally easy to see. Jade did not have a tail in Homestuck. I know this to be true because Homestuck is told in a visual medium, and it is never shown or even suggested that she has a tail.
You might argue that Jade’s tail was just hiding under her god tier robe the whole time, but that’s bullshit and here’s why. God tier robes adjust themselves to the anatomy of their owners, as we see with the trolls and their wings and horns. We even see it with Jade’s dog ears, so I’m supposed to believe that her god tier outfit cut out holes for her ears, but she just had to walk around with a tail stuffed down her trousers for three years? Yeah, no. That’s absurd. That’s not even retconning, that’s gaslighting.
Whether or not Jade has a tail doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but the writing in the Epilogues and HS^2 is full of problems like that. I can’t take it seriously as a continuation of Homestuck because I keep getting pulled out of the story by things that just don’t add up.
Forget the word canon for a moment. Homestuck has used and abused that word to the point that it is now meaningless. What I really mean when I say HS^2 doesn’t feel like canon is that it doesn’t feel like something that could happen to these characters.
There are so many retcons and baffling character decisions that I just can’t get invested. Either I’m left asking why characters would act so stupidly, or I’m wondering how long it’ll take for the next writer to swoop in and change everything again so they can start telling their story now. The characters in HS^2 barely even feel like characters anymore. They are merely empty vessels into which fan-fic writers pour their hopes and dreams.
The realization I had about Homestuck^2 shortly after I stopped reading it is that it’s trying to be a story about fan fiction, in much the same way HS was always said to be “a story about stories.” And HS^2 doesn’t paint a very inspiring image of fan fiction.
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I’m not going to go back and look at the Patreon stuff. Somebody gave me a link to some of it last year when I was still reading HS^2, and it was... fine I guess. Jasprose is my least favorite character from Homestuck though, so the fact that they got a big focus in the patreon updates immediately got on my nerves.
I’ll update the table of contents on some mythical day, possibly
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Yeah, somebody eventually explained that to me off stream, and that’s slightly less baffling, but...
Alright, look. Homestuck? I think we need to have a conversation about representation.
I know that the Company Line is that “These characters have no official race, so you can imagine them however you want,” but there is a big difference between that and actually writing a character with a black perspective in mind.
This is something that Homestuck has been criticized for for years now, but it feels especially relevant today now that systemic oppression and racial representation are in the news at the moment.
Saying that you can draw fanart of Roxy with darker skin is nice and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that she acts and sounds like a nerdy white kid. She is written that way because it reflects Andrew Hussie’s experience as a nerdy white kid. This applies to all of the humans to a greater or lesser extent. If you ignore their character designs entirely, they all come across as very, very white. There are even a few explicit references that betray this intention, like an early line of dialogue where John teases Dave for his “white boy rapping.” (This line may have been retconned out after Hussie decided to make the kids non-racial.)
It’s easier to apply some non-white racial coding to the trolls because all of them have a history of systemic oppression and caste racism that informs their characters in ways that can be allegorical to the real world, but the human kids don’t have that kind of baggage written into them.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it feels a little disingenuous to then turn around and expect brownie points for saying, “I never said Hermione wasn’t black.”
It’s also worth mentioning that Roxy probably has the whitest character design out of any of the Homestuck kids. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen somebody with curly hair try to sculpt this shape on top of their head. So I get what the artist is going for, but it still doesn’t really work.
Anyway, I didn’t mean for this to turn into an essay bashing Homestuck for its minority representation. You don’t need me to tell you that Homestuck has been amazing for its LGBTQ rep. But the “fill in the blank” racial identity feels very lazy by comparison.
#homestuck^2#homestuck epilogue#pesterquest#homestuck#minda reads homestuck#minda reads#in between#asks#hs asks
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I enjoy getting asks like this.
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Equius’s Pesterquest chapter came out last week, and I feel like it serves as a good example of why this whole “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” approach to canon at best disinterests me, and at worst makes me want to drop Homestuck and put it behind me.
It may seem weird for me to say that after reading a story with such low stakes, but in truth that’s exactly the problem. (Full spoilers for the route btw)
To recap what happens, the player character attempts to retcon-jump back in time to see how Equius broke his horn, and instead finds themselves experiencing three contradictory sets of events simultaneously. It’s a neat representation of the fact that Equius’ broken horn has always been a mystery that wasn’t meant to be solved. The Paradox Space comics had a running gag that Equius lost his horn in different ways whenever we saw him at a younger age.
This kind of storytelling can work very well. Most famously, Heath Ledger’s Joker gives several conflicting stories about how he got his signature scars, and the fact that he doesn’t give a straight answer informs his character way more than actually knowing his backstory ever would. In PQ’s case, I’ve seen people interpret this scene as a demonstration of Equius’ nature as a Void player. some things about him are simply unknowable. And while that is a valid interpretation, the scene has much wider implications, which is where I start to run into problems.
The route serves as a microcosm Homestuck’s post-canon status. The Epilogues featured two entirely different narratives where characters went through different arcs, and in Equius’ route we see the player character budge up against the uncertainty of post canon.
The intention, and it is a noble one, is to say that all character interpretations are valid, that you should feel free to explore these characters and this story however you see fit without feeling guilty or being told that you are “wrong” for thinking about them in a certain way. And this is true even (or rather especially) if Hussie himself disagrees with your interpretation.
The problem I have is that, to me, the whole premise sends the opposite message. Saying there is no answer is itself an answer, and so I just don’t see the point in digging into post canon any further. It’s not exploration, it’s wandering aimlessly through a fog.
Equius’ is a perfect example of this problem. There is absolutely no point in speculating about his horn. In fact, doing so in the Pesterquest route gets you a bad ending. The player literally gets punished for trying to learn more about Equius’ backstory. Truthfully, Equius’ horn was never important to begin with, so it’s not like PQ has stolen some topic of heated discussion, but now it feels like all of canon is in that same category. Sure, you are free to imagine whatever crazy story you want to about Equius’ horn, or come up with ideas for where the characters will be when they grow up, but it doesn’t matter.
None of this matters.
These are all fictional characters.
None of it’s real.
Why are we still talking about it?
That’s the rabbit hole I fall into whenever people try to explain the appeal of post-canon, and it’s why I keep coming back to Karkat’s quote about the dangers of messing with the meta-narrative. People talk about how much freedom we have as fans now, but I just get a sense of agoraphobia.
Now, just to be clear, I do think that fans should be free to interpret a story any way they wish, but I don’t think the story itself should or even can help us along the way Homestuck is attempting to. Fandom is essentially a shared experience. We all read the same story, but we process it differently, and those differences changes the meaning of the story on an individual basis, which we can then share with each other.
But if the story itself is just an amorphous mass of potential, then there’s nothing to hold onto, nothing to get invested in. There’s nowhere to start a discussion, and there’s nowhere for one to go. Pesterquest sends a clear message that we shouldn’t care about what happened to Equius’ horn, so what should we care about instead?
If I find an answer to that question, I’ll get more enthusiastic about HS^2, but at the moment I’m just going through the paces. I want to see what happens just to know what happens, and that’s not investment in the story, that’s indulging a sunk cost fallacy. I’m enjoying Pesterquest immensely because it’s giving me the kind of character deep dives that were my favorite part of Homestuck Proper, but after Pesterquest is over, HS^2 needs to be going to need a story in front of its collection of meta-themes for me to care about it.
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I guess so.
Really though, I just called the Drowned Man’s bluff.
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