On My (Virtual) Shelves: Homestuck

 

"A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, 2009, is this young man's birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name!"

 

So begins Homestuck.

Homestuck is a phenomenon. It's not precisely a webcomic, although it started as one. It's not a video game, although there are games embedded in it and it starts with the obvious conceit that you are playing a videogame called "Homestuck"; the opening quote is the text of the first page of Homestuck. It's not an internet video, although there are video sequences. It is… HOMESTUCK.

What begins as a pretend-videogame following the life of a young man named John Egbert (after rejecting the "player's" initial choice of "Zoosmell Pooplord") as he receives presents, examines the geekily mundane world of his room, and anticipates playing a new video game called "Sburb" which is to be released that day, becomes an epic quest that spans time, space, and dimension with abandon and insanity.

I found reading Homestuck page by page tedious, especially on a laptop, but fortunately there is a marvelous alternative: Let's Read Homestuck, produced by Cooperation Laboratories (CoLab), a series of startlingly well-acted YouTube videos which put voices to the Homestuck strips.

When I say this is an epic quest, I mean EPIC. The release of a videogame literally portends the end of the world, perhaps of all creation – except that the four friends playing the game might, just might, change all of that.

Homestuck is a tremendously complex work, self-referential, so trope-heavy that it trembles on the edge of trope singularity, yet shot through with unique twists on every tired trope that the entire thing seems shiny and new. It has direct plays and references to internet culture, most obviously with the entirely separate alien race of "trolls" who, well, troll the main characters through the chat client "Pesterchum", at first in what appear to be purely random episodes of harassment, but which later become discussions of import reaching the cosmic level of importance.

The trolls are another set of players, on another instantiation of the same game. Except that their instantiation of the game created our universe. But ours may have created theirs. Or might yet create theirs. Somehow. Or together maybe both sessions of the game could end up making something better. With help from time-traveling gods, wandering vagabonds in a postapocalyptic world, and previous incarnations of each other, while opposed by demons, a nigh-omnipotent master of snark, and a berserk rampaging force called Jack Noir. And occasional interventions by Andrew Hussie, the creator, until he gets killed.

Seriously, the creator of the comic gets killed. But this isn't unusual, because Hussie racks up a death toll that would make George R. R. Martin blanch in fear. Death is semi-cheap in Homestuck -- there are ways to bring people back from the dead, sometimes – but there are also ways to kill people deader than dead, and some of the deaths in Homestuck are shocking indeed.

Homestuck's greatest strength is probably the characters – innocently cheerful and somewhat clueless John, cynical, sarcastic Rose, overly-cool and loquacious Dave, and adorably determined Jade, rage-filled Karkat with his hidden soft heart, hard-luck butt-monkey Tavros, arrogant and egotistical Vriska, refined and deceptively dangerous Kanaya, slow-talking stoner Gamzee with his deadly secret, all of them clear and distinct and real in a way that sometimes makes me wonder if I will ever write any characters as well.

The crudity of the original artwork is truly deceptive; this is the work of a master author, someone who knows how he wants to tell a story and is telling it exactly the way he wants it told. And he knows dramatics; he can manage to get across high drama, comedy, tragedy, heroism, Moments of Awesome, all with these apparently-crude drawings, sometimes to a degree that leaves me speechless.

Homestuck is also a work of incredible detail. Short conversations, images, or even single comments turn out to have great significance later on. The fact, for instance, that John is a fan of Nicholas Cage movies is not just a recurring motif (and sometimes annoying, just as any friend's obsession with some strange side-aspect of pop culture can be), but a plot-significant fact that will influence a huge number of later events. The details of each characters' room, and the posters and other objects we see as minor character-defining details take on vastly more significance later. Hussie doesn't just know his characters; his characters are themselves representatives of the universe he's building, and the smallest aspects of the way in which they are presented will loom sometimes terrifyingly large in later events.

Comedy in Homestuck ranges from the simple slapstick (initial attempts to use Sburb's world-manipulation capabilities, for instance, result in toilets being flung onto front yards) to the self-referential and to multi-layered ironic, with pop culture, classical literature, and multi-generational references being inserted with abandon. I'm quite aware that I'm missing various jokes as I read/watch/experience Homestuck, and at the same time I'm pretty sure I'm getting some jokes that the vast majority of readers will miss, because most readers aren't from my generation. Hussie isn't from my generation either, but he seems to be tremendously aware of earlier, as well as current, generations.

I am, at the time of current writing, in the relatively early parts of "Act 6", which is nearing the end of what's available but still with some distance to go. And I'm pretty well convinced that what I've been experiencing is one of the great masterpieces of science fiction/ fantasy.

I'm not sure how to nominate this for a Hugo – because I'm completely unsure what CATEGORY it would go in – but when Hussie completes this story, I'm sure going to try.

Click one of those links, and discover Homestuck!