Episode 41: I Was The Story Boy

Kate returns to the show, welcoming Michael Lutz to discuss his piece for Waypoint, “How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.” Topics: Conversational fandom. How to talk about Homestuck to normal people. Is Homestuck a video game? Hamlet on the Holodeck. Jane Crocker and real actual fascists. Striders and masculinity. Vriskas. Other people’s computers. Vast Error.

Listen to Game Studies Study Buddies, Michael’s podcast.

Listen to this episode at https://perfectlygenericpodcast.com/updates/episodes/41

Transcript
Kate: The Perfectly Generic Podcast contains spoilers, occasional adult language, and Vriska. You've been warned. Thank you to our incredible patrons, [PATRONS], for your generous support per episode.

[intro]

Kate: We choose to stan Vriska, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. This is the Perfectly Generic Podcast, I'm back from my one-month break, you cannot kill me. And I have a wonderful guest with me this week, Michael Lutz, who's a reporter with Waypoint, and other things.

Michael Lutz: I'm a freelancer for Waypoint, yeah.

Kate: A freelancer, yes. [laughs]

Michael: That's, that's the way to put it.

Kate: Who isn't a freelancer in 2019?

Michael: Basically, yeah. Yeah. Hilariously, this is the first like, freelance piece I've done, like paid freelance. Like, I've done sort of like, academic pieces before that are usually sort of just, you know, done as — the big secret to anyone listening, if you have no idea about how higher education works, and academia: you don't get paid —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: For, like, a good portion of what you're writing. So, most of the stuff that I have online is just stuff that I have like, written out of the kindness of my scholastic heart. [laughs] So, in many ways, academics are the eternal freelancers. But then — so yeah, I freelanced this for Vice — which, I mean, it's Vice now, was Waypoint. Waypoint forever.

Kate: Yeah. Right, I refuse — I mean, you know, Vice — I'm glad they publish interesting articles on occasion, but it is Waypoint forever. You know when you do something charming and independent, it pretty much always gets swallowed up and labeled by some sort of corporation that's run by an awful person.

Michael: Yes, yes, yes. We're integrating the verticals, as they say.

Kate: It's very synergistic.

Michael: Relatedly, this is now a Vice podcast. I'm sorry, but like, the infection is spread through me.

Kate: Damn. [laughs] Alright, well, everybody, Gavin McInnes now owns this podcast.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: We're gonna be talking about men's rights this week.

Michael: Oh, man. Here to talk about Homestuck, Gavin McInnes.

Kate: [laughs] He'd like Caliborn, I think.

Michael: Oh god. Yes.

Kate: [laughs] So you wrote what was one of the major pieces of media critical reception to The Homestuck Epilogues, after their release. But first, whenever we have someone new on the show, I like to ask, what went wrong in your life, that you're now on a podcast about Homestuck? Like, what is the history, what is your story with MSPA? How did this start?

Michael: So... My mistake was, I got on the internet, I guess. I read webcomics throughout, like, most of — so I first became, like, probably what you would call "extremely online" in maybe middle school. And I got big into webcomics. There was a time in my life, like in late high school, where I had a sort of like — this was in the, sort of, early 2000s, and we had an, I don't remember what they called it, sort of like, office skills class? Where basically, you just like, went through a textbook and it taught you how to use, like, Microsoft Word, and Excel, and all of the sort of Suite applications. I guess, to make you a good office worker eventually. But it was literally like, the class was like, go in and do this many pages of this textbook, and it was all stuff like, open up Microsoft Word. Look at how to make a table. Make this kind of table. Then, like, save it and send it to the teacher. And that was it, and then I would have, like, 45 minutes left, where I was just on the computer.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: And I would read webcomics. And so, at some point, I ended up getting pointed to MS Paint Adventures. At the time, which was just starting, I think, Problem Sleuth. And I don't remember when Problem Sleuth started, precisely.

Kate: It was 2008. I remember this because this was pretty much identical to my story. This is —

Michael: OK.

Kate: Also when I started reading MSPA.

Michael: Right. So, I read through Problem Sleuth, and it was a good time. Problem Sleuth is great, everyone should go read it. And then Homestuck started. And I was like, oh, I liked Problem Sleuth, I will continue to read Homestuck. And by this point I was in college, and then, you know, and then I read Homestuck to the end — somehow, right? — live, like, and it drove me slightly insane. But —

Kate: Yeah, it does that.

Michael: Right, but I can also remember, very distinctly, the moment where I realized Homestuck was a thing, and like, a thing specifically for me, cause, you know, I liked Problem Sleuth, I thought Problem Sleuth was great. Problem Sleuth did not worm its way into my head, the way Homestuck did. And for a long time reading Homestuck, and by a long time I mean basically about the first year, I was reading it as if I were still reading Problem Sleuth. So I was like, reading things, and laughing at all the jokes, and it helps that the first, you know, three acts or so are kind of light, in terms of what goes on later. But I wasn't really paying that close attention, until [S] Descend.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Right, and that was like — I had kind of, like, started noticing the plot picking up in really interesting ways prior to that, but again, I was still kinda like, "oh, this is Problem Sleuth, it's just gonna be wacky fun. And then Descend happens. And Act 4 ends. And I was like, wait, holy crap.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Like, there is something being planned here. And then of course, like, immediately, the trolls come in and all hell breaks loose, in terms of what exactly is going on in the body of people who are the readers of Homestuck.

Kate: Yeah, and the narrative structure just turns into this sprawling, uninhibited thing.

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: You know, like, Descend was described in the author notes as the moment when the story begins to get raw, red meat shoved directly into its gaping maw.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: Which was phrasing that ended up quite relevant.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: [laughs] But it is, you know, it was a moment for me as well, where it was just like, "OK. So this is not just the next, like, silly MSPA that's gonna, like, do its clever little puzzle shit and then get out of the way for the — you know, whatever was coming next.

Michael: Right.

Kate: Because, like you, at the start of reading Homestuck, I was thinking, oh, well this is fun, this is a little clever puzzle box, and then it'll be done, and then there'll be the next one, and I was already looking forward to the next one. Because that's sort of how it seemed to be structured. And then, it didn't die.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: And we are here now, ten years later, with it still firmly not dying.

Michael: Mhm. Somehow —

Kate: Somehow.

Michael: It keeps happening.

Kate: [laughs] It is, as a wise philosopher once said: you can't fight the Homestuck.

Michael: Yeah. [laughs] Yeah, that's sort of like, how I got into Homestuck proper, and I didn't, like, I — I think, probably, a lot of our discussion is going to orbit to some extent, like, questions of fandom and sort of what that means, because the head that they gave to my piece was... what was it, precisely? Like, "How Homestuck," was it defined? Or changed?

Kate: "Defined What It Means To Be A Fan Online."

Michael: Right. "Defined What It Means To Be A Fan Online." So, that was — so the interesting thing about freelancing, of course, is that — or writing, I think, in most capacities, is that unless you are an editor, you're not picking your own headlines.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And so I actually wrote at the top of my draft, like, you know, just give this whatever you think would be a good title, because I don't know what to call this.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: I don't know how to talk to you about what I'm trying to say about Homestuck.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: But by focusing, kind of, on the fandom angle, I think that sort of frames the ways that a lot of people were coming to that piece and thinking about it. And, I will also admit that, like, you know, I had very much drifted away from the Homestuck fandom, since the comic proper had kind of ended. Because that's just sort of my style, right, I can be into something if it's live, but I tend not to linger. And then, you know, I just kind of — Homestuck stuck in my mind, I thought about it, I was like, "man, that was some interesting stuff," cause the ending was a fine ending. Or, like, I mean, at the time, when it ended, I was like, well... I mean, the comic had to stop somehow.

Kate: Yeah. [laughs]

Michael: Like, it might as well have stopped this way, where everyone is kind of alive and together and happy. And, I don't know, people are kind of getting ready to do things that they might really enjoy? Fine, right. Like, these people have been through some miserable stuff, just like, let's stop.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And then of course, here we are, years later, and the epilogues drop, and I start reading them, and I realize, like, oh crap, like, something really cool is happening here, and like, I shouldn't have turned my, like, eyes away from the fandom —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: In quite that way, because that brought me back into seeing exactly how this story has been, in some ways, about that fandom, and sort of — what it means to build up this community of readers around a central text in a really fascinating way.

Kate: And I mean, in the end, like, the Epilogues were the, sort of, final step in the process of the comic achieving this state of symbiosis with its readership —

Michael: [laughs] Right.

Kate: Where, you know, they — the epilogues were substantially written by people who had written Homestuck fanfiction in the past. Much like, sort of — I would say, like, Hiveswap Friendsim, the visual novel series from the year before the epilogues, was sort of a trial run of that, almost.

Michael: Mhm. Right. And then the games, of course, I had sort of like — I've had my eyes on the games, but I haven't finished the first episode of Hiveswap, please don't yell at me. This was because I'm really bad at episodic games.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: I can't stand it, like — [noise of disapproval]. Homestuck itself was enough. But I did play through that, and I knew that the friendsim routes were going on, and I realized, oh, this is like, part of this, like — this is not just, like, I don't know, Andrew Hussie sitting back here, scribbling off all these troll names, like, there's a sort of like, weird little community industry of people who are, in sort of official and unofficial ways, like, perpetuating the story and this fandom in a way that is just really, really cool, and I think, like, probably one-of-a-kind, really.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Michael: In terms of things I've seen online.

Kate: [laughs] It's been a remarkably unselfish way to shepherd a story that was mostly, during its heyday, constructed alone in a cave with a box of scraps.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: [laughs] Like, to, you know, incorporate this vast array of new voices, and you know, voices who have really different perspectives on Homestuck than Andrew did. To, you know, tell new stories, using the sort of — the building blocks, the language of Homestuck.

Michael: Right, exactly. So, I just want to talk about this, because I think it's a really interesting crystallization of a lot of — so another thing I guess I should probably box out here, when I'm talking about academia, is that I am a Ph.D., in English literature. So I have a very, sort of, highly trained, sort of, technical vocabulary. I have all the stuff that you internalize when you go through the disciplinary process of grad school and write a dissertation for seven years, right. And within academia, there is a sort of movement that is broadly called "fan studies," that is sort of the segment of, sort of, culture studies and pop culture people, pop culture studies people who are interested in fan work and fan production, and kind of how that thing works. But I am not trained in that, and I just sort of, you know, in my own time had been thinking about Homestuck, and reading, and then I — when I was reading the epilogues — I should, I guess, also say that I was at a conference, I was in an academic conference —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: And the epilogues dropped, and I spent probably an hour and a half sitting in a hotel lobby room, reading the epilogues. Like, this is how quickly these things grabbed me.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Because, all of the things that I had kinda been thinking about Homestuck, just sort of off and on, in the years since it ended, were locking into place, in ways — I was seeing how the epilogue was like, accounting for things that I had thought about.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And sort of, in a really exciting way. It's not often that you feel like the work is actually speaking back to you in this very pointed way. And then I thought, like, oh this could never have happened online — or, like, this could never have happened before online, right.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: That's what's so weird about this, and that's when, kind of, the thesis statement of the Vice piece, Waypoint piece, clicked. Where I was like, oh, here's how I can, like, do my academic thing. What I think is sort of my academic, sort of, purpose, is not necessarily just to, like, do my own obscure research into Shakespeare studies, and all that stuff, but to take things that are kind of like, weird and abstruse, and explain to people why those things matter. Or why they're interesting, or why they're important, even if you don't have to go read Hamlet, I can tell you a few things about why Hamlet is just a really interesting thing, for existing. And, so this was when I had my moment like that with Homestuck, where I thought, oh, here is how I explain to a person who has not read Homestuck, and who maybe wouldn't even want to read Homestuck, why Homestuck matters.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, for — I think the epilogues were tremendously vindicating of the perspective that this is a work of literary merit that's worth analyzing in the literary fashion.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: And I would say, in general, a sort of comprehensive own of the "it's not that deep" crowd.

Michael: [laughs] Yes. Oh, because, yes, no, this is — oh, it is so deep. Like, when I was working with my editor on the piece at Waypoint, Austin Walker, I was like — sort of like, just sort of complaining to him, I was like, I could write a book on this thing, man. Like, there is so much going on here. And then, so when the piece goes live, I get some people in the fandom who are like, "oh, how could he have not talked about this."

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Like, "it's just some person coming in from outside the fandom," which is like, you know, basically true, in terms of like, what I had detached myself from. But then also it was like, do you realize how hard it was to write about this thing for a major publication?

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: In a way that is not going to, like, just have them terminate whatever they're doing with me right then and there?

Kate: [laughs] Right, because you do run the extreme tightrope walk of sounding like a crazy person, when you talk about Homestuck.

Michael: Yeah! Right, and so, like, that's — and I — and, you know, you see that in the piece as it stands, where I'm trying to grapple with that, because I have to say, like, here is what Homestuck is about. And then here's a few of the things I'm not telling you, to give you a sense of exactly what's going on here, right —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Let's talk about the trolls, let's talk about the giant muscle skeleton, right, let's talk about the clown. The fucking clown.

Kate: [sighs] God, fucking clowns.

[pause]

Michael: So, yeah, and then that was like — the sort of happy consequence of people raising those concerns is that then, I got to like, meet all of you, basically.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Like, this entire circle of folks. And I'm gonna give a special shout-out to Pip, who gave me just an incredible list of things to kind of, like, boost in the replies to my piece, just because I wanted people to be able to see — ok, you know, like, I've told you this story about what Homestuck is doing, now you can see, kind of, this in action.

Kate: Mhm. Pip just left my house like five minutes ago.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: [laughs] Yeah, and you know, it's — I don't understand the sort of exclusionist philosophy of, well, "nobody from outside can come in and notice what's happening here."

Michael: Right.

Kate: Like, I fundamentally don't get that. Like, I guess because I'm sort of like a Homestuck evangelist.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: Like, the idea of more people noticing this and engaging in this conversation is really gratifying. Because it prevents conversations from getting stale, it prevents lines of analysis that aren't correct from being calcified.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And I wanted to talk a little bit about Homestuck in sort of a three-part way, which is the past, the present, and the future.

Michael: OK.

Kate: And, the past is in terms of where Homestuck draws from. And I wanted to start this with this sort of provocative listener question from Maplestrip on Discord: "is Homestuck a video game?"

[pause]

Michael: [heavy sigh] Why do you do this to me?

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Well, let's say it is, because I wrote about it for Waypoint. [laughs]

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: It's — if you — it's under the Vice gaming vertical.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: I guess, the interesting thing about Homestuck, sort of broadly construed, is that Homestuck is a narrative.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: Like, that is the best way I can think of to describe, like, what it is?

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: And, like, if you wanted to be, like, even more specific, I guess you could say, like, multimedia narrative. And, like, there are parts of that that are like — that mean it is a little gamey. Now, the system as a whole, I don't know, like, the thing is — if someone wanted to call it a game, right, I would read that paper.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Right, I would read that article as an academic, if someone wanted to be like, "here's how I'm going to define this idea of what a game is and here's how I'm going to explain how Homestuck, you know, fits these qualities or what have you." I would be interested in hearing that. But, like, my sort of like, at a blush take would be, this is a — it is a story about what happens when a story moves between different media.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: And what that kind of means for the whole experience, and what — how the story gets told.

Kate: See, my proposal is that Homestuck is, in fact a game, and it is a text adventure. And, you know, Homestuck obviously, like the earlier MSPAs, draws heavily from the whole genre of text adventures, and it is presented as one, visually. You know, you — and the commands, originally in the work, were submitted directly by users, right.

Michael: Right.

Kate: It's a text adventure run by one central source, with inputs submitted by a wide degree of people. It's effectively like, writing The Odyssey, but like Twitch Plays Pokemon-style.

Michael: Right.

Kate: Where, even after the direct submissions to the narrative prompt stopped, the way the story progressed, even if you weren't literally typing in a box and hitting submit to try to pick what the story happened next — People still were, they were just doing it in conversations on Tumblr, or 4chan, or Twitter, or in real life.

Michael: Oh! Hot damn. I just realized, I've already read the article that makes this argument, but it's not about Homestuck, because it was written like fifteen years before Homestuck started.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: There's a book, by an academic named Janet Murray, Janet H. Murray, it's called Hamlet On The Holodeck, and I just remembered — so, I have another podcast that I'm on, I'll shout it out later, but it's called Game Studies Study Buddies, and it's where my friend Cameron Kunzelman and I, we're both academics, we read game studies books, and we just kind of discuss them. And it's a very similar sort of thing to what I try to do generally. Making something weird and obscure accessible.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: And, in our episode on Hamlet On The Holodeck, there's a chapter in that book where Janet Murray talks about — so, the book is very interesting cause it's very, sort of, speculative, she's sort of at the — in the early 90s, kind of at the beginning of the internet age, and she's saying, here's all the weird ways that these new technologies can impact the way we talk about stories. And, part of that is talking about how stories work in games. And she has this sort of weird moment, maybe about halfway or two thirds of the way through, where she sort of speculates about a narrative that is being told communally in real time, essentially.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: And I remembered, at that moment, when I was doing that podcast with Cameron, and you can go back if you listen to this episode, I think he kept most of this discussion in, I'm like "oh crap, this is Homestuck."

Kate: [laughs] Uh huh.

Michael: Right, so, OK, like, retroactively, yes, Homestuck is a game. There we go.

Kate: [laughs] And, you know that, of course, there are elements that are much more traditional games, right, where you get walking around, and pixel art, and you press a button to make dialogue come up, right. But in general, I would say even in the moments when that — the gameplay interactions are most abstracted, it's still a game. It was a game that got played through once, and you can't change how it was played.

Michael: Right, right. It's Undertale! [laughs]

Kate: [laughs] Yes! Exactly. And you know, obviously, Undertale is one of the many works —

Michael: Yes.

Kate: — of media that, you know, pays a heavy homage to Homestuck, and was sort of inspired. You know, there's a whole classification of media now that is sort of the second wave of the Homestuck experience, even if it's not directly a Homestuck fanwork, even if it's not directly by someone who worked on Homestuck, although many of them are. You know, there is — it has already shown a sort of transformative effect on the way that stories are told in media.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And, you know, it's been influential first in things like animation and gaming, but you see just this year, like three individuals whose origins in writing online were publishing Homestuck fanfic have published novels, right.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: It's, you know, this is — we are sort of in the beginning stages of the echoes of this work's influence.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: And it is important to, you know, remember what it does pay homage to, because, I think, in a lot of ways, you look at, you know, like, the Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure game for the way that it's sort of clever, and trips over you, and you know —

Michael: Right.

Kate: And it's a little bit, it's a game — We talked about it on a past episode as the Dark Souls of webcomics, because it is very difficult to read. It is actively reader-hostile in a number of occasions.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: And I've started to think of it as sort of a thing where, it really is like, you don't read Homestuck so much as you *beat* Homestuck.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: Like, you do not let it — its ridiculous wear you down.

Michael: That is a great way of putting it, because yeah, no, the — it is not hostile to the reader in, like — I've read things that were hostile to the reader, but the author didn't know that they were being hostile to the reader.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Right, like, Homestuck is very good at making, like, the hostility toward the reader feel like a part of that experience —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Of like, oh! Like, troll romance being kind of like, one of the first big moments —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Where I remember reading that live, and this was of course, like, when you start to see the big fissures in the readership over who is like hell yeah, troll romance, and people who are like, oh no, troll romance. And then he forces you to read it twice.

Kate: [laughs] Just to really internalize it.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: And, you know, you also see this with elements like, I mean, the trickster mode arc is —

Michael: Oh god.

Kate: Is horrifying, and part of the way that it achieves that horror is by being absolutely oppressive to look at, listen to, read, and think about.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: And, you know, also similarly, like, all of Caliborn's sort of takeovers of the narrative. Like, you have to read a, like, teenage Reddit edgelord's opinions on anime girls.

Michael: Mhm. [laughs]

Kate: Like, to continue consuming this story. And it just, it feels like you are paying a tax.

Michael: Yes. OK, yeah, so Homestuck: game.

Kate: Homestuck: game. Very, very — I give it, you know, sometimes interactive, sometimes not. Not enough water.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: And so the present of Homestuck, we're in, I mean, the epilogues are a very strange thing. They're an exceptionally strange thing. And I think we're all still, even, you know, over a month on, about a month and a half on, we're still sort of reeling from, what on Earth do they mean for this work? Right, like, how much — there's still — it created, it basically subverted the expectations of a tidy, J.K. Rowling-esque epilogue.

Michael: Oh yeah.

Kate: By answering no questions, creating five hundred more —

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: But like a J.K. Rowling epilogue, and this is the only time I will compare the two, it did make a lot of people very upset. [laughs]

Michael: Yes. [laughs] I, oh man, so again, like, when I was reading this epilogue, first at an academic conference, and then as I was on the train, heading home, and I couldn't sleep, and it was an overnight train — I had never done that before, it turns out I can't sleep on trains, that's a thing I learned. Like, reading the epilogues on my phone, and just reveling in how much this was like, doing the Rowling, like, but with a wink.

Kate: Yeah, right, it's, you know, it's something that's extraordinarily aware of like, what it's doing, and the pitfalls of coming back and meddling with a work that is so close to people's hearts.

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: It's sort of a — there's — it was sort of a tactical nuke directed at people who felt possessive of Homestuck. I felt it was sort of, like, a declaration of war, almost, of like, well, here's your ideas about Homestuck, we are going to do our best to attack the ideas — like the quote "wrong ideas", or the different ideas, that you've had. And in a way it's almost — it's a challenge of do you even take this seriously. And I think a significant portion of the fanbase, a significant portion of readers, just — their answer to that was no. I do not take this seriously. I refuse to accept that, you know, this character that I cosplayed six years ago is a fascist now, right?

Michael: Right. God, I remember when I got to that part in the epilogue, I was like, well I guess we're in it.

Kate: Yeah, we are — oh, we're in it now. Yeah. And, you know, but the thing is, is that — and I know that that's challenging and that's difficult — but sometimes also you grow up and your real actual friends become real actual fascists.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And you need to — and that is actually something that I haven't seen much of in media before, this, you know, realization that like — these young characters, they do change in radical ways. And they don't always change for the better, right, like a happy ending doesn't mean that you have to stop... going to therapy. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Yeah, no, it was very — one of the other ways of thinking of it, right, is like, if J.K. Rowling, instead of like writing just that short little epilogue at the end of the Harry Potter series, and then I guess doing The Cursed Child or whatever, then wrote an entirely new seven-book series, but instead of sort of being like young adult fantasy fiction, was like, then the weird, fucked-up, Alan Moore-like, I'm gonna deconstruct the hell out of this—

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Version of the Harry Potter epilogue, right. And that's, that felt very, sort of, pressing and real to me, as someone who, you know, started reading Homestuck, in college, like, my second, third year? Second year of college, no I guess, yeah I would've been a sophomore, and then, like, I got a Ph.D.! Right, I'm 30!

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Like, and I have watched all of this stuff happen, and I, like, I was reading The Homestuck Epilogues and I'm like, ah, fuck! I'm John!

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Right, like, I'm becoming John!

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Right, and growing old!

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And the world is getting really bad!

Kate: Yeah, it is! The world is getting really - and you know, for me, I found that, I mean you know, in the story itself it sets out some rules, for what counts as a story, as a Homestuck story. You know, it's gotta be relevant, it's gotta be essential, and it's gotta be true. And the relevance does come from it not stagnating as a story about, you know, big teen feelings and big teen problems. Like, it already told that story, about big teen feelings. It did it fantastically. There are, as it turns out, things after that in life.There are problems after that, and they are bigger, and messier, and very very serious. And they felt very relevant to me, by, you know, talking about those, like — that ennui of adulthood, that difficulty with people that you used to know changing, and drifting apart from you, and the ever-present struggle against fascism in our real actual lives.

Michael: Right.

Kate: [whispers] Ah, god.

Kate: And then there's Dirk, also, who is not —

Michael: And then there's Dirk.

Kate: And then there's Dirk, who's not particularly relevant to my life, but manages to worm his way into every conversation anyway. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Yeah, no, Dirk was very interesting, I mean especially because, seeing — as someone who has kind of always seen Dirk as Dave, but without all of the neuroses that make Dave, like, not horrible, right — All of these kind of like, Dave's worst impulses, then kind of uninhibited, like the sort of, the irony, the weird obsession with artifice, and so on and so forth, but then like, cleared of all sort of ethical obligation, or like, consideration.

Michael: And then we have, you know, like — Dave as, kind of, weird homonym — that's not right, homologue for the author himself, right.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Right, Andrew's talked about how Dave and he are very similar in sort of, their orientations. Then, like, what happens when we have, at the end of this story, a person who is kind of the worst version of the author we had before —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Deciding, "let's go again!"

Kate: [laughs] We have to, you know, to remain — and this is a sort of fascinating thing, because, the most common criticism, I think, of the Homestuck ending was, "well, I don't know what happens now." Right, like, "I have questions, I don't know what actually, like — I have specific, mechanical questions about what happened in the plot." That the ending of Homestuck, you know, in its beautiful sort of ballet fashion, like, left totally unresolved. And the answer to that was, like, Dirk taking on the duty of, I can answer these questions for you, I can provide you more plot —

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: But it will disrupt the like, quiet happy ending, right?

Michael: Right.

Kate: But it's a — and, you know, Dirk's struggle in the end is like, the struggle of any author looking to continue a long-running work, is that you — it's Arthur Conan Doyle bringing back Holmes after killing him.

Michael: Right.

Kate: You know, it's — I can not — I do not know how to quit this. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Right, and I think it's a testament to the work, that — and this is something that has always been very, very fascinating to me about Homestuck in general — is that even, like, the worst characters have these weird, relatable qualities about them, or like, the ways in which you feel sympathetic.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: So even though Dirk is being this huge asshole, and taking over the narrative, and doing what I think is just this horrible thing, it's — when he explains to you how he rationalizes it to himself, right — like, if I don't do this, if good could come of what I did, then would I be in the wrong for not doing it? Would that be just as bad, right, you can understand how someone who has placed their entire value in, kind of, like, just bound up in "how useful am I being," but also like, "I have to tell people how to be useful," right —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Like, "I need to be in control of people so they will *like* me."

Kate: Uh huh. I mean it's a very "I read the Wikipedia page on utilitarian philosophy" —

Michael: [laughs] Yes.

Kate: You know, view on how to run the entire universe.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And I think in a lot of ways, it continues, sort of, Homestuck's fascination with this, you know, masculine entitlement —

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: Is the primary villainous force. You know, my friend Aysha says, like, everything in Homestuck happens because of toxic masculinity or Vriska.

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: And I think that's pretty close to correct.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: [laughs] And, you know, that point that you were making earlier, about Dirk being Dave without the — with these encumbrances, that make him... bad, effectively.

Michael: Right.

Kate: That encumbrance is his, in my opinion, my estimation at least, that encumbrance is that Dave has learned how to not be as confined by his conception of gender and sexuality, whereas Dirk is sort of trapped in it.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And, like, Dirk is, in sort of like — becomes the embodiment of toxic masculinity, after the previous ones are sort of systematically defeated one by one.

Michael: Right. Right, it's kind of like — and then in the weird, of course, like, absurd Homestuck way, all of those previous embodiments of toxic masculinity — and I mean specifically, right, of course, like, Lord English, have had weird splinter versions of him already in them —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Right, because that's how Homestuck rolls.

Kate: Yeah, Homestuck prefers to just spin a ton of plates in the air and, you know, let them all crash to the ground but catch one and be like, look, I caught one. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Yeah.

Kate: This was foreshadowing.

Michael: Right, the epilogues are sort of very clear about, like, having this bifurcated structure of two choices, right, we're either going to have the version of this story, or like the continuation of the story, or the way of seeing beyond the story, that is this, like, toxic masculine, entitled, like, "I have to do this because no one else will" —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Kind of thing. Or, the more passive, but also like extremely chaotic, but also potentially like, something good could come out of that struggle —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Against the rising fascism.

Kate: Yeah. And, like, in the end, you know, the idea that candy is irrelevant is subverted by the end, right. Like, candy, for me, it was this huge, like, journey. It was a trudge, it was so miserable, and then like, right — you know, and then, at its sort of climactic moments, it breaks apart in this really gratifying way.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And like, part of that is symbolized by, like, relevance returning. And part of relevance returning is Vriska returning. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Yes. Oh god, I am so glad there was more Vriska.

Kate: Oh, god, I was just sitting there the entire time, and I was just like, "I'm just waiting for Vriska. I'm just waiting for Vriska." And then they answered my prayers by giving me not one, but two Vriskas.

Michael: I know, when Rose and Kanaya have their own Vriska, I was like losing my shit on the train, I was also of course very tired, but I was like, I can't believe this!

Kate: Just, naming your child, who is an exact genetic clone of your ex, after your ex, is —

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: I think, again, further proof that this work understands lesbians —

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: — in a more direct, and perhaps blindingly direct and shameful way, than most other media ever has. Because that is the most lesbian thing I've ever heard in my life.

Michael: Oh my god.

Kate: [laughs, sighs.] Plus, we get — on this episode — this podcast, there legally has to be a discussion of Vriska every episode.

Michael: Mhm, of course.

Kate: It's part of the rules.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And, you know, for — there was this very — like, Dirk is so obsessed with this, like, self, and the dialogue with the self, right, to the point where he's sort of endlessly exhausted by it, where he created an AI version of himself to discuss with. And Vriska is very much sort of the, like, foil to Dirk, throughout this entire adventure of the epilogue. And previously, in the work, she'd been shown to outright hate interacting with herself, or outright hate her past self, or the idea of a version of herself that made different choices or had different circumstances, because of her feeling of obligation to being who she is, right?

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And that melted away after a regrettable clown makeout —

Michael: Ugh.

Kate: Because it happens to — it happens to the best of us. [laughs]

Michael: Mhm. Who among us has not had a regrettable clown makeout?

Kate: I — like, seriously, if you have not, at some point, made out with a clown and regret it, like — you will, at some point, I'm sorry.

Michael: It's one of the many times in which Homestuck is very accurate to the actual experience of growing up and living your life.

Kate: Yeah. [laughs] That clown regret. But you know, that's part of like, what makes the ending of Candy so cathartic, is seeing Vriska actually introspect.

Michael: Mhm. Right! Yeah. Like, Vriska has been sort of like, so stuck on basically like what the story has been telling her she needs to be —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And then it's just like, well fuck! I guess, like, now that I'm here, and there's another me, and the baby is me.

Kate: [laughs] Out of all of the fanworks, cause a number of fanworks were referenced in The Homestuck Epilogues —

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: And "The Baby Is You," I would argue, is definitely one of the most satisfying callbacks.

Michael: Yeah, no that was, like, the weird, like, shots of nostalgia for old — so, the most active I was in sort of like, Homestuck fandom, as the comic was live, was the SomethingAwful forums thread.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: And just that — so that meant that, like, you know, I haven't necessarily seen every single, like, Tumblr meme from that point in time, but a lot of them filtered in. And so, I ended up, you know, pulling in — because for me, I was always kind of like, one of the theorycrafter fans. I was always like "oh, and here's what's gonna happen next," you know, blah blah blah, right.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: So a lot of the, like, Bladekind Eyewear posts would filter my way, and just seeing all of the fan theories that get referenced in the epilogue, where it's like, aw crap! Rose is turning evil! Aw, crap! Or like, not really aw crap, more like, aw hell yeah, like —

Kate: Yes. Yeah, hell yeah.

Michael: Dave Strider is a transmasc icon!

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: I remember that. Like, and I was just like, I loved that! Right, I loved having all of those little things, like, validated and fulfilled, in just this totally unexpected way.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it was tremendously gratifying to see this, you know, call and response element to, you know, some of the — to lines of analysis of Homestuck, to people thinking about, and even those that were, quote unquote, "wrong," still contributed to the discussion in a way that, like, advanced everyone's understanding of this work and its characters.

Michael: Yeah!

Kate: And you know, that's part of why, like, I've always tried to avoid predicting, mostly because trying to predict anything about Homestuck is a really good way to be wrong, [laughs] —

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: Basically, at all times. But I still do love engaging with other folks' predictions. And that actually brings us to sort of, to the future.

Michael: Oh!

Kate: Like, what is Homestuck's broader impact on the future of hypertext media, on one silo. And after we talk about that, I want to talk about, what do you think or want to happen next with this media. So first, like — we got one listener question that I didn't put in the outline, but it was about 17776.

Michael: Right right right.

Kate: Like, a sort of similarly multimedia-structured hypertext work. And do you think, like, that is going to be a more common method of media creation, moving on? Or is it, in the end, just sort of too weird and inaccessible to ever become more than a unique thing?

Michael: I — hm. I think it is probably going to become more common. Right, because it's not like people younger than us are getting somehow, like, less online.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: And I think that's the biggest barrier to entry, is sort of, what is kind of your experience, with fiddling around with weird textualities on a screen?

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Right, like how willing are you going to be to put up with that, what is kind of — if it puts up a weird little, like, puzzle for you, are you going to be able to like, fiddle around with it and figure it out.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: I think we're definitely going to see more of it, and I just don't know exactly how it's going to come about, because both 17776 and Homestuck feel so weirdly out of the blue —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: In a lot of ways, where it's just like, this *thing* just kind of happened, but they've definitely —

Kate: One of the things that I would say, to take a sort of contrarian perspective, one of the things that I feel, like, undermines this kind of media, is this very modern conception of — to put it simply, people don't have their own websites anymore.

Michael: Mmm.

Kate: Like, and people make things, and they live their lives, and they create massive amount of contents, and then they put them on other people's computers, right.

Michael: Right.

Kate: They put them on these big platforms, you know, that have their own set of rules, and are very structured, and accept this kind of content, and don't accept this kind of content. And I see a lot of, you know, people, like a lot of artists, who make art and they put it on Twitter. They put it on Tumblr, and that's, like, that is where their work lives, right?

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And, with writing, that's a lot harder, right? It's a lot harder to have writing get any sort of traction on platforms like Twitter, or Tumblr. And these silos, that people have created for themselves, right, where they write these works, and they — there's walled gardens of social media, and it impacts writing very poorly.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And, you know, I do fundamentally think that, you know, for there to be a explosion of creative and innovative hypertext works, and things that actually use the full potential of the internet, people need to get their own websites.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And put their things on their own websites, right.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And because something like Homestuck just fundamentally couldn't work on somebody else's thing. Like, the first MSPA, the very simple MSPAs were once forum comics, right —

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: But even Problem Sleuth outgrew that. Even Problem Sleuth couldn't work as a forum comic.

Michael: Right. And I guess that's sort of like, the second half to what I was saying, where, you know, like — I was being, I think, sort of consciously utopian —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Because I would like for that to be the case, but it also does come down to like, who is going to have the resources, or, I mean, including like, the time to like, manage your own website, and like — in an age where this sort of specifically is becoming harder and harder to do, right.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: As you say, like, getting any sort of eyes on something that is not on one of the big platforms.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: So.

Kate: And then, the second part of this, sort of, discussion on the future: what do you want, now, from — cause that's, this is a big question, but like, the epilogue is no kind of ending. And that's on purpose, right, like meat and candy do not a meal make. It is not a complete meal.

Michael: Right.

Kate: What do you want, or expect, from Homestuck in the future?

Michael: This is — to go back to your thing about predicting Homestuck —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: This is where I falter. In some ways, kind of in retrospect, I feel like when I was theorizing about Homestuck as it was live, I wasn't even doing that because I wanted it to be correct —

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: Because I wanted that validation. It was almost like, theorizing was my form of fanfiction, right.

Kate: Yeah!

Michael: Right, and in many ways I do this professionally now, right. Writing about Shakespeare is now my professional form of fanfiction.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: But, if I had to, like, look forward into the future of Homestuck, one of the things that I think is really great about it, and this is maybe going to sound very bizarre, is — and this is already happening — the way it's kind of embraced the troll.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And not just because, like, obviously people love the trolls, but I think, the reasons for which people love the trolls. So to go back to Harry Potter for a second, right, this is something that I really appreciate about Homestuck, Harry Potter has the house system —

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: With the four houses of Hogwarts, and after Harry Potter got big, every single sort of like, Harry Potter rip-off had some version of that, right. The Hunger Games, which sort of overstepped being just a rip-off, right, had its various districts. The people from here are like this. They have these qualities, so on and so forth. The trolls are kind of, what if society were structured in this way?

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Turns out, it would suuuck.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: But, the way that fans react to trolls is very useful to compare the way that like, oh, if I'm gonna talk about Harry Potter houses, right, like, I'm a Ravenclaw, because I'm smart and good at riddles, or I'm brave, or I'm rich and racist and evil.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Just sort of like, these weird — positive qualities, and when I say positive, I mean in the philosophical sense, like, they're sort of like, outward expressions of some sort of ideal.

Kate: Uh huh.

Michael: What the trolls, I think, are really interesting for, is the way that the kind of lore around them inverts this, right, like — you are this particular caste, which means you have these characteristics, and here is all of the personality disorder you're going to get because of that.

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: And I think that is very validating, actually, for fans who can thereby, sort of, get a vocabulary for telling stories about, like, here's what it means to be a marginalized person in the world, right —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: For having this sort of mismatch between interior self, and sort of like, desires for yourself and what society is willing to allow you to do. And I think the trolls are, like, so — seeing, kind of, post-Homestuck stuff really go into the trolls has been really cool, because I'm like — all of the Friendsim trolls, and sort of their various, I guess — I don't understand, OK, how there are so many types of trolls still?

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: But there are. And it's weird, like, somehow, Homestuck gave us this engine generator for like, infinite character types, right.

Kate: Yes. Well, and that's the thing is, it's a big box of Legos, right, it's a big tub of Legos, where you can make characters by saying they're, like, you know — with the twelve different types of troll, you know, with the twelve different aspects, with all the classes, with —

Michael: Right.

Kate: The, you know, sort of almost procedural system of, like, creating planets, and denizens, et cetera et cetera, you get all of these accoutrements that lets you easily, like, define a character, like, with a vocabulary that a bunch of other weirdos already speak.

Michael: Right, yeah, and so, another fanwork that was like, brought to my attention by Pip, that I think is really cool, is something like Vast Error, the fanadventure, which is —

Kate: Ha ha! I do that.

ML Ooooh, yeah, it's —

Kate: [laughs] I edit that.

Michael: Yeah, but like, the way that Vast Error is and is not like Homestuck, right —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: It takes the way that Homestuck told a story, and pieces of that story, and tells something different.

Kate: Mhm.

Michael: Right, like, I think that is, just, it's really, really, cool, right.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: It is really awesome.

Kate: And I mean, like, I'm doing something that's like, another level of, like, ridiculous, which is that it's a spin-off game of the fancomic, that's based on the spin-off game of the actual comic.

Michael: Oh, OK.

Kate: It's so many levels of recursion deep that it sort of disappears up its own fandom asshole. [laughs]

Michael: [laughs] Well, I mean, we're going there, so.

Kate: Yeah, exactly! I think that's actually part of it — we didn't touch on this earlier, but part of what makes it hard to talk about or write about Homestuck, especially in serious contexts, is that it's — we almost touched this, but — it's kind of *shameful*?

Michael: [laughs]

Kate: Or, at least, like, talking about or being enthusiastic about Homestuck gets you really close to a lot of things that are commonly seen as shameful.

Michael: Mhm.

Kate: And you have to put aside a lot of shame to be publicly enthusiastic about Homestuck, especially because of like, how many people know of it only because of the massive and ravenous fanbase of its heyday.

Michael: Right. Right, like, so there's all of that connection, and if I try to tell you about Homestuck, I have to be like, so there's this character named Equius, who is super racist, but he's really nice —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: And also, like, [laughs] But, it requires you to learn to kind of, like, distance yourself from the characters, or like, certain normal ways of approaching these questions or issues. It, like — it trains you to read it, right.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: And if someone has not been trained to read Homestuck in a certain way, then you can just — as you said at the beginning, you sound like a crazy person.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Cause you have to be like, OK so this is, the thing I'm about to tell you, is actually not that important, but actually this one particular element is one of the most important things in the entire comic. Right, like this clown? He's really not that important —

Kate: Yeah. This *fucking* clown.

Michael: But, he's actually super important because he's always there.

Kate: Uh huh. He's just important by designate.

Michael: Right.

Kate: He's just default important. You know, the idea that some characters are effortlessly relevant, and some have relevance thrust upon them.

Michael: Yes.

Kate: And that's actually part of, that's part of the epilogue, was that John is effortlessly relevant, even when he's not trying.

Michael: Right.

Kate: And that's something that other characters are actually quite jealous of, who have to try harder than, you know, the male protagonist, to be a relevant figure.

Michael: Right, and like, the way that the Epilogue makes John an actual character —

Kate: [laughs] Yeah.

Michael: Because, he had been much of a cipher throughout Homestuck proper.

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Precisely because he was kind of made to be just, consistently relevant, and sort of identifiable. And then the Epilogue is like, alright, story's over buddy, now who are ya?

Kate: And he's like, "No, I didn't want that."

Michael: Yeah! Exactly.

Kate: "I didn't want the story to be over. I was the story boy!"

Michael: "I was the story boy," the John Egbert story.

Kate: [laughs] Let's see here. I'm gonna do one more, the traditional short question, before we head to our outro. Nerdylesbiab asks on Discord, who is best girl?

Michael: [sighs] Uh. I mean, why are you, [frustrated noise]

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: This is like the "is Homestuck a game" question, but there's actually no right answer —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Because they're all best girl?

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Like, I mean, my initial response, of course, because she's there living in my head, was just of course Vriska.

Kate: Right.

Michael: But then I had to be like, oh no, oh no. But, Kanaya. Like —

Kate: Yeah.

Michael: Oh, Terezi! Oh, no —

Kate: [laughs]

Michael: Oh, Rose! Oh, Rose was like the first character where I was like, ah yeah that's me, right; before Karkat showed up and I was like, oh I'm Karkat, I was like oh I love Rose.

Kate: Absolutely same.

Michael: But, so, I just — they're all good. They're all so good.

Kate: [laughs] Alright, and that's our show! So you can find this show at perfectlygenericpodcast.com, on iTunes, Spotify, the Google Play store, Overcast, wherever you get your podcasts. We have three live shows coming up this year, the first one is going to be in Renton, Washington, at the Berliner Pub, it's an all-ages show, Saturday, August 3rd, 4:13 PM. The next one is gonna be in either Durham or Chapel Hill, somewhere in that triangle area, Saturday October 26th. And the final one will be in Staten Island on December 5th. And you can find information on all these shows, and RSVP, at perfectlygenericpodcast.com/live. You can support this show at patreon.com/pgenpod, and I'd like to thank our Skylark patrons, [PATRONS], for their generous support per episode. You can find me at Twitter.com/gamblignant8, that's for my Homestuck account, or Twitter.com/KateMitchellWA if you want opinions on Overwatch league, and also my run for public office, which is, you know, mostly a fun exercise. Where can folks find you, Michael?

Michael: You can find me on Twitter, @WarrenIsDead. You can also find me on my podcast, Game Studies Study Buddies, which you can get at through Twitter through @rangedtouch, like the D&D move, all one word, and then I have a website, if you want to check out more of my writing or any of the games that I've made, and that is correlatedcontents.com.

Kate: And you can find a link to the episode of Game Studies Study Buddies discussed here, about Hamlet On The Holodeck, in the description of this episode, and you can find those other links mentioned, also in the description. Is there anything you want to plug?

Michael: No. Not specifically, I just plugged everything I got.

Kate: Alright, cool. Just go check out everything. Next week, Dia rejoins us, we're gonna do an episode about lesbianism, because I've been away for too long, and —

Michael: Aw.

Kate: We've gotta get really specific on it.

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: Thank you so much for coming on, Michael, I really appreciate it.

Michael: Oh, thank you for having me. It was so great, and I am so glad that, like, you're doing this Homestuck podcast, and sort of doing in many ways what I would like to do in other areas, right, you're bringing the Homestuck kind of out, into sort of digestible chunks for people like me, like the post-Homestuck Homestuck.

Kate: Aw, exactly!

Michael: Right.

Kate: It's been, you know — for me, it was actually a very similar situation for me, like a year ago, when — cause it wasn't the Epilogue that brought me back in, it was Friendsim coming out the year before. Where I just dove back in and was immediately like, oh my god, there's still a party going on here. Like, it's still happening —

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: There's still all of this advancing thought, and there's still so many perspectives that are talking about and engaging with it. And it's been really gratifying to get to listen and talk about all of those perspectives on this show.

Michael: Yeah.

Kate: And with that, I'll see y'all next week. Bye.

Michael: Bye.

[outro]