Martintox Presents: Disorder Reviews
Rating System
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HOMESTUCK
Rating System
I have a new album and a new Disorder Reviews blog. I have recently recovered from a stroke, and I am now in serious debt.
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HOMESTUCK
Author: Andrew Hussie
Publication Span: 13 April 2009 - 13 April 2016
Genre: apocalyptic science-fiction fantasy hyperlink action adventure coming-of-age drama comedy
Since 2007, Andrew Hussie has been managing the website MS Paint Adventures, on which he has published webcomics such as Jailbreak and Problem Sleuth (2008-2009).
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In the realms of media and advertising, one of the most critical elements on the path to long-lasting success is that of customer loyalty. Any artist or brand is bound to retain a core audience through the years, but in many cases, it can be sufficiently fickle that any deviation in the formula will make a sizeable portion of it desert to other pastures. Just how long can someone feed their devoted fanbase shit and have them come back for more? Andrew Hussie may have given us an answer through his flagship webcomic Homestuck. In the 7 years required to complete it, readers have had the opportunity to watch it fall apart inside and outside of its universe, one page at a time. During this time, the comic has experienced multiple hiatuses as well as many controversies involving, among others, plagiarism, a fanbase so poisonous that it became the bane of many conventions, and a Kickstarter that raised 2.4 million dollars for a video game only for The Odd Gentlemen to use the money for a King's Quest title instead. The mere fact that this work still had a moderately sizeable audience by the time it had hit its conclusion may be the most damning empirical proof of sunk time fallacy, but most importantly, it's the first time that someone has pulled a story out of his ass over the course of a near-decade so as to keep his gravy train rolling. For this reason, Homestuck may well be the most successful social experiment of the Internet era.
To discuss this intricate literary pyramid scheme, the only option is to start with the initial premise. Four kids begin to play a computer game titled Sburb, only to discover that they have caused the destruction of the Earth in doing so; their only option is thus to complete the game, which will allow them to create a new universe and find a home there. The first four acts out of seven, which encompass a bit less than a fourth of the webcomic's total pages, mainly focus on these characters' journey through Sburb. Incidentally, they make up the only part that is anywhere near acceptable as a conventional form of entertainment, as it allows Andrew Hussie to make use of his sole talent -- doubling down on every stupid idea he has -- so as to make the slowly expanding lore as batshit as he wants (see: any of his previous comics, all of which are much shorter). By the time Homestuck reaches Act 5, its scale has hit an unsustainable level, and it only gets worse from there. My theory is that the muse Calliope hit the dank Dionysian kush too hard one day, and spoke to Hussie so as to make him believe that he is somehow able to write and animate an epic. Hussie, being too smart of a conman to be fooled by a Greek thot, played along and intentionally over-complexified his story to see how long his fans would fall for it. To ensure he had the last laugh, he then went out and named a superfluous character after her.
Homestuck's sheer length is not its sole flaw (far from it), but let us say that it does not make its many other issues any easier to digest. Reading it as is, without having experienced the wait in-between each update, is the closest the layman will get to experiencing schizophrenia. Serious moments will often have jarring, overextended comical digressions interspersed, even near the very end, where the tension is supposedly at its peak; some characters receive a dramatic backstory or setup only to appear as a one-off joke with little actual relevance to the plot; finally, since Hussie is also a proponent of accelerationist storytelling, he makes recurring use of time travel to enlarge an already excessive cast of characters (some of which appear far into the second half) and make the reading experience all the more convoluted due to the interaction between more than a half-dozen different timelines, some of which also have little relevance shortly after their introduction. I rarely bring up the idea of objectivity, mainly because it's a given that my opinions are impenetrably correct, but I feel the need to stress it here because it takes a very special form of denial to pretend that Homestuck is a functional story in any form, as opposed to a shitpost that spiralled out of control about a third of the way through. Then again, who is going to read a webcomic with over 800k words, 4 hours of Flash animations, and endless pages of chat logs and flimsy teen romance drama with an incomprehensible narrative that jumps between time periods faster than a weeaboo responds to a negative review of Monster Musume, just to argue otherwise? For all we know, the Homestuck Wikia is filled with completely erroneous information, and no one would be the wiser -- the fans may be too afraid to double check.
If it hasn't already become clear by this point, the plot is, let's say, "heavily improvised". However, dissecting it in greater detail will take a sizeable amount of time, and thus it's better to cover the other, more general flaws beforehand. What sets Homestuck apart from other webcomics is its hybrid format: most of the "pages" actually consist of images or short animations, with an associated separate piece of text. Not that much can happen in a given page, but it can be expressive in a way that is distinct from a standard multi-panel comic page. There have also been multiple extended Flash animations, generally for large events or to close out acts, as well as some exploration games. It's certainly a unique and elaborate format, but mashing multiple mediums together doesn't mean much if you can't use any of them meaningfully. Remember those pages with short animations? What I've neglected to mention is that many of these animations are actually quite static, and often come with a wall of text in which two prepubescent teenagers talk about an ongoing love dodecahedron or a piece of lore from 2000 pages ago that may actually become important now. Fans will use such cases as an example of Homestuck's complexity, but it doesn't really mean much; I, too, can take a one-off joke from an early review and pretend it's part of the Disorder Reviews continuity. If a neophyte scam artist such as I can tell you this, then you can be sure that Hussie has mastered this type of misdirection for the purposes of pretending he's not putting on his audience.
In terms of presentation, the visuals are actually the best part of the comic by far, with colorful locales occasionally brimming with architectural creativity, so I won't dwell on them for too long. As for music, Homestuck is host to a team spanning dozens of contributors, all of whom follow Hussie's ethos by recycling melodies so efficiently that David Suzuki would tell them to chill out. If you hear a memorable melody in there, you'll be sure to hear it about 12 more times -- not through the entire 20+-album catalogue, mind you, but in the same record, as many of them last upwards of one hour, if not almost three in some cases. Multiple hours of overblown amateur orchestral pieces with sloppy use of chiptune keyboards so as to extort an easily impressed consumer base? Damn, I must have found the inspiration for Nier: Automata's music! I've mentioned before that Toby Fox took inspiration from his work on the webcomic when composing the soundtrack for Undertale, and it's precisely for this reason, though he would surpass all of the team's efforts thus far by using a maximum of 9 melodies for more than a hundred songs.
Before digging into the plot, one last tangent regarding hiatuses. When it comes to stalling for time, Hussie is the master among his webcomic contemporaries: after a couple years of mostly consistent posting for the first five acts, he's decided to see just how long he can keep his readers (who, by that point, are primarily masochists) waiting. First, it's a 2-month break shortly before the end of Act 5; after that, it's another 2-month break soon followed by a year-long hiatus, as well as a 3-month pause a couple months after that. Think that's enough by now? Oh, how naïve a battered soul can be: have two months of activity and an 8-month pause for the road. In the absolute, this doesn't remotely compare to masters such as Kentaro Miura, but what you have to bear in mind is that a whole year is more akin to a half-decade on the Internet; that is enough time for any sensation, no matter how large, to fall into oblivion. Homestuck has been on hiatus longer than it took for Toby Fox to make Undertale, and yet, it's still managed to remain more relevant than vaporwave. That alone says all about Hussie's fans.
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Stay tuned for Part 2 of this mega-review, coming soon.
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Stay tuned for Part 2 of this mega-review, coming soon.
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