prokopetz:

Upon reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with Homestuck – insofar as it’s reasonable to assert that there’s a singular “problem with Homestuck”, anyway – is that it’s trying to pretend it doesn’t have a point.

There’s a fine line between deliberately frustrating audience expectations as an authorial stance, and keeping everything suspended in a state of perpetual “irony” because otherwise the narrative would have to emotionally commit to something, and, like, caring about stuff is for losers.

Paradoxically, this might actually be a big part of the reason it managed to cultivate such a robust fandom at is height; when a narrative refuses to have an opinion about anything it’s showing you, you can read anything you want into it. It’s only when it actually has to construct an ending that you realise everything you found relateable about it was just you seeing shapes in the smoke it was blowing up your ass.

(That metaphor sort of got away from me there.)

The hell of it is that I don’t think it’s actually as vacuous as it pretends to be. It’s not that it doesn’t have anything to say; it’s that it doesn’t want to admit that it has anything to say. Insofar as it falls apart at the end, it’s not through a lack of imagination or a failure of narrative rigour, but through a conscious refusal to take the next step – even if that means literally ending the story mid-scene, because continuing even one moment longer would oblige it to commit to some sort of emotional resolution.