Post-postmodernism in Pop Culture: Homestuck’s Revenge
I recently saw an excellent video essay titled Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight. Though the title is opaque clickbait, the video is actually about major artistic zeitgeists, or movements, in film history. Flight describes three major movements:
- Modernism, encompassing much of classic cinema, in which an earnest belief in universal truths led to straightforward narratives that unironically supported certain values (rationalism, civic duty, democracy, etc.)
- Postmodernism, in which disillusionment with the values of modernism led to films that played with cinematic structure, metafiction, and the core language of film, often with more unclear narratives that lacked straightforward resolutions, and that were skeptical or even suspicious of the idea of universal truth
- Metamodernism, the current artistic zeitgeist, which takes the structural and metafictional innovations of postmodernism but uses them not to reject meaning, but point to some new kind of meaning or sincerity.
Flight associates metamodernism with the “multiverse” narratives that are popular in contemporary film, both in blockbuster superhero films and Oscar darlings like Everything Everywhere All at Once. He argues that the multiverse conceptually represents a fragmented, metafictional lack of universal truth, but that lack of truth is then subverted with a narrative that ultimately reaffirms universal truth. In short, rather than rejecting postmodernism entirely, metamodernism takes the fragmented rubble of its technique and themes and builds something new out of that fragmentation.
Longtime readers of this blog may find some of these concepts familiar. Indeed, I was talking about them many years ago in my Hymnstoke posts, even using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism,” though what Flight calls metamodernism I tended to call “post-postmodernism” (another term used for it is New Sincerity). Years before EEAAO, years before Spider-verse, years before the current zeitgeist in pop cultural film and television, there was an avant garde work pioneering all the techniques and themes of metamodernism. A work that took the structural techniques of postmodernism–the ironic detachment, the temporal desynchronization, the metafiction–and used them not to posit a fundamental lack of universal truth but rather imbue a chaotic, maximalist world of cultural detritus with new meaning, new truth, new sincerity. That work was:
Homestuck.
That’s right! Everyone’s favorite web comic. Of course, I’m not the first person to realize the thematic and structural similarities between Homestuck and the current popular trend in film. Just take a look at this tweet someone made yesterday:
This tweet did some numbers.
As you might expect if you’re at all aware of the current cultural feeling toward Homestuck, many of the replies and quotes are incredibly vitriolic over this comparison. Here’s one of my favorites:
It’s actually quite striking how many elements of the new Spider-verse are similar to Homestuck; aspects of doomed timelines, a multiversal network that seems to demand certain structure, and even “mandatory death of parental figure as an impetus for mandated personal growth” are repeated across both works. The recycling and revitalization of ancient, seemingly useless cultural artifacts (in Homestuck’s case, films like Con Air; in Spider-verse, irrelevant gimmick Spider-men from spinoffs past) are also common thematic threads.
As this new post-postmodern or metamodern trend becomes increasingly mainstream, and as time heals all and allows people to look back at Homestuck with more objectivity, I believe there will one day be a rehabilitation of Homestuck’s image. It’ll be seen as an important and influential work, with a place inside the cultural canon. Perhaps, like Infinite Jest, it’ll continue to have some subset of commentators who cannot get past their perception of the people who read the work rather than the work itself even thirty years after its publication, but eventually it’ll be recognized for innovations that precipitated a change in the way people think about stories and their meaning.
Until that day, enjoy eating raw sewage directly from a sewer pipe.
(Side note: I think Umineko no naku koro ni, which was published around the same time as Homestuck and which deals with many similar themes and then-novel ideas, will also one day receive recognition as a masterpiece. Check it out if you haven’t already!)
not to be That Bitch, but in 2018-2020 we were doing extensive literary analysis of homestuck. the perfectly generic podcast, the videos of optimistic duelist, the articles of storming the ivory tower (which go back even further!), and the radically transformative works that emerged out of the homestuck epilogues, themselves just as much a critical interrogation of their source text as they were simple fiction. many of us involved in these projects came to be involved in the postcanon, whether that was homestuck^2, pesterquest, or any number of other projects that evaporated before they could make it past the development phase because the general homestuck fandom was so directly, willfully hostile towards everything we did that the constant harassment broke almost everyone involved.
it was and remains in vogue to hate on the epilogues and their defenders. it was and remains in vogue to say hs2 always sucked and is bad. people love to point at the cursed/problematic things in the postcanon as if homestuck was not chock full of cursed/problematic shit from the very beginning. it’s an obscene woobification of what is a very mature and challenging text. all while the entire context of the postcanon’s creation has been memoryholed, all the work we did, the love we put into that work, all the ways we were trying (and quite often succeeding considering how many currently-popular fan creators got their start in our spaces) to elevate the discourse on the comic to something closer to intellectual rather than reactionary.
because the thing that’s just been completely ignored by history is that we were always critical of homestuck and the epilogues. everyone acts like it was just some circlejerk, as if we weren’t ADULT fans engaging with this work AS ADULTS and as such could praise and criticize homestuck simultaneously. everyone wants to throw the whole fucking thing out because there’s slurs or because ableism or because it’s, i don’t know, a webcomic about cartoon children. they act like it’s a sin to point at this work of art and say “that’s art.” like how dare you act like homestuck is good. “why are we talking about homestuck in [current year]?” we did entire episodes of pgen about the ableism, sexism, racism, we called out andrew after the skaianet debacle and you know fucking what? she LISTENED. people act like we just fucking conned our way into working on official stuff, as if this wasn’t a movement that took place over years that andrew hussie themself paid attention to and engaged with in earnest. several of the best chapters of the epilogues only exist because andrew HIRED queer people from this community to give it a once-over after skaianet.
the epilogues are a complicated, challenging text that no one is obligated to like. they are MEANT to be divisive. but so many people in this fandom adopted a willfully ignorant and puritanical stance against even reading them, with all the dedication of a genuine political conviction. everyone complained about the pacing of the hs2 project and never cared to see the impossibility of what they were doing from THEIR perspective, tasked with telling not a story that they personally owned but continuing on from the epilogues. everyone involved in hs2 had deeply complicated feelings about the epilogues, including the ones who WORKED on them! i love the epilogues, i love hs2, but they both have a lot of problems that are worth discussing. but i also know that hs2 is the way it is because they were trying to do it in a sustainable way, with limited updates and strict word count limits. all the discourse about the epilogues/hs2 is so frustrating because i guarantee you that i, the arch defender of both projects, have far more incisive & specific criticisms of both than 90 percent of the haters.
why is it so hard to talk about this fucking comic without turning into a bunch of bickering preteens? why can’t we talk about the problems of the text while also admitting that homestuck is genuinely good? it’s funny, entertaining, thought provoking, emotionally resonant, painful, beautiful, unlike anything else. it’s easily the most influential story of the internet age and you can see its influence EVERYWHERE, in webcomics, in cartoons, in indie games. but a handful of bigoted clout chasing redditors insisted that, for instance, a grown ass woman selling “nudes” (literally just topless pics, not even showing hog) behind a paywall was, like, an evil thing for someone involved in hs2 to do. fuck off. fuck off. grow up. they got mad at her for not reposting BLM fundraising links on twitter, because she was too busy GETTING TEAR GASSED PARTICIPATING IN PROTESTS. just a terminally bad faith immature illiterate subsect of the fandom that successfully drove out nearly every adult who was trying to engage with a text that was important to them, erased all their contributions from the history except as like “they were the mean ones who did the bad things and now they’re gone and it’s not worth talking about.” new fans come into the homestuck reddit and discord and just get hammered over the head with that message before they even get a chance to reach their own conclusion, so it’s just this inherited act of refusing to acknowledge that not too long ago there were people that andrew hussie CHOSE to try to help steward this series forward, for REAL reasons that MATTER.
i hate that every conversation about homestuck, every video essay, every article, doesn’t even get to the part where they talk ABOUT HOMESTUCK, its themes, its ideas, its formal experimentation, its complex problematics, because the spectacle of fandom drama is better for clicks and doesn’t require the real work of actually engaging with a text on its own terms, because it’s popular to say homestuck bad. i don’t bring up homestuck all the time in my critical writings as a bit, it’s genuinely relevant to SO MUCH MEDIA because it does things nothing else does. every time travel story, every multiverse story, everything that touches on growing up online in the 2000s, getting over being an edgelord, everything about witnessing our slow descent into fascism, nine times out of ten homestuck did it better or at least more interestingly. it does so many different things, in so many different ways, and if you just give it time and attention and a willingness to actively read it, it’s unbelievably rewarding! because it IS a text that requires work to appreciate, and i get if that’s not your thing but also no one is making you pay attention to the people doing that work.
multiple queer people got chased out of our careers and we’ll probably never see an official continuation of homestuck in any form ever again as a result of this fandom’s cruel, petulant response to what we were doing. congratulations assholes, your official merch is now a bougie cafe in california where terezi is no longer short and fat. all the edges have been sanded off and the official face of the story looks like stock anime trash. of course we made mistakes. of course there were problems. but this was less than twenty people, all of them perpetually broke, handling a project that made very very very little money, and y’all acted like we were a fucking megacorporation with power and reach and influence.
the most heartbreaking thing about OP’s post is that i agree, someday homestuck will be re-evaluated and accepted as a great work of literature. but i fear that history will be defined exclusively by white cis male academics like the folks at homestuck made this world, who seem completely ignorant of the work we did and have zero interest in engaging with it despite the fact that andrew hussie agreed with us enough to hire us to take over. no hate to hsmtw but it is very frustrating that they and other similar projects face nothing of the scrutiny we did, that they feel no obligation to search for prior discussions on the subject, that they’re willing to just throw the epilogues out and refuse to engage with it on the terms it presents (and also i’m a little miffed that in their last episode they described godfeels as “a transgender john fanfic” like come on). my fear is that the literary history of this story will settle the way so many literary histories have: erasing the work of the dearly passionate, flawed, committed, messy queer people that elevated this text in the years after its conclusion, kept it relevant, taught a little generation of artists how to engage with art critically, all because it’s easier, cleaner, and more convenient to do so. and because the credit for that literary elevation is just sitting on the table for anyone to grab.
anyway read homestuck, read the epilogues, read hs2, play friendsim and pesterquest, read godfeels, read liminal space, read jaderoute, read omelette route, read house of dirk, read ink black appendices, read through shadowed eyes, read kittyquest, listen to old eps of pgen, watch od’s videos. you cannot understand modern homestuck without engaging with fanwork and any literary history of this story will be incomplete without that.
