2013
03.21

Homestuck [BlackCatula]

Okay, so…Homestuck.

You’ve heard the name. You’ve heard…things. 14-year-old kids talk excitedly about it in the back of the class as they fill binders full of their John/Dave yaois. Convention-goers mutter about people in gray makeup with candy-corn horns and police light-colored glasses roving around and forming photo groups. Bryan Lee O’Malley offhandedly mentions Scott Pilgrim and Homestuck in the same breath. But no one seems to be willing to try and explain what Homestuck even is, much less tell you if you’ll like it.

In the simplest of terms, Homestuck is an ongoing web comic that is infamous for it’s frequent updates (usually in small batches of 3 to 6 pages at a time, as often as every day). It’s about some kids who play a video game that triggers the end of the universe, and they have to play through the game’s story until the end, whereupon if they defeat the Big Bad, the universe will be saved. Simultaneously, in another galaxy, a group of aliens called “trolls” (first introduced under the guise of internet trolls) have also started a session of the game, and through the use of advanced technology make contact with the kids, ultimately to work together to understand why the game (and subsequently the universe) is broken.

To reiterate though, that’s the plot in only the simplest of terms. Homestuck has only been alive for a few years, following the popularity of creator Andrew Hussie’s other web comic foray, “Problem Sleuth”, but the comic already boasts nearly 8000 pages, 150 unique characters, and more tangents than your overdue trig homework. One reason the comic is so big is because many of the pages consist solely of a single panel with no text that can be read through rapidly. Other pages consist of a series of short animated gifs, intimidating walls of dialog, fully realized Flash animation sequences, and even fully playable Myst-style games loaded with extra dialog and easter eggs and crazy foreshadowing. The sheer size and scope of the comic, coupled with it’s enormous cast (that 150 is NOT including alternate “doomed” timeline selves, clones, robots, etc), is so deeply fleshed out that it can take any sane person months to catch up from the beginning, even with speed-reading, if any retention of continuity and cohesion is expected.

Seeing as this article is written for an animation blog though, I’m gonna talk mostly about the animation seen in Homestuck. The first thing that needs to be mentioned is Hussie’s simplistic, MSPaint-driven style. Characters are usually rendered with minimal detail, which ultimately makes animation and sprite reusability much easier. In both the gifs and the full Flash sequences, “noodle arms” are frequently employed (often very spastically), and most everybody’s skin is paste white (not Caucasian white, though there is an inside joke on that matter). Backgrounds and some foreground items (usually props or weapons) will sometimes use colorized clip art from various sources. What makes the animation quality though, is the way all of these sparse or “shortcut” methods are brought together to form an animated sequence.

All of the Flash sequences are accompanied by original, fan-composed or commissioned music, and are used as the basis for the direction of the animation. Sometimes, in the case of more intense or introspective moments, a more detailed art style is used as well. Overall though, the Flash animations are usually used for distinct action sequences, usually involving several different points of view or concurrent plotlines. A lot of quick cuts and flashing transitions will occur throughout them, and it’s strongly recommended that anyone prone to bouts of epilepsy stay away from Homestuck, because quick-flashing, vibrant colors are a series staple, especially where the animations are concerned.

Taking all of this into account, Homestuck boasts some of the most perfectly-timed and well-executed Flash sequences in recent memory. Most of them are used to magnify one small, critical piece of the plot, as opposed to expanding the plot as a whole. Each sequence can last anywhere from less than a minute to the grandiose “Cascade” sequence, which carries on for well past the 10-minute mark. The animation sequences are one of the biggest highlights of the comic, so much so that waiting for the next one can and has driven fans to various forms of stir-crazy insanity. Nearly every Flash animation ends in a way that only raises new questions, and they’re all but guaranteed to excite and confuse the poor reader/viewer with a new series of twisty details to flail over (a great example would be *SPOILERS* Dirk very suddenly losing his head *END SPOILERS* at the end of an animation in Act 6). http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=007138

Okay, so it’s questionably artistic and takes forever to read because of all the backstory and legend and world-building, but what makes Homestuck so amazing? What sets it apart from other web comics or animated things? The answer is in the characters. We meet the characters and see their interactions at first through a detached, game-based narrative, where the viewer seems to be the one putting in commands for John to do, then later we start seeing more a more dialog-driven approach, all of which is handled through color-coded chat logs between the characters. As anyone who spends a lot of time talking via IM to “internet friends” can tell you, this is a very easy way to learn how to connect and understand a person in a way that in-person contact cannot. Since we’re able to connect and understand the way these characters grow, we’re able to attach to them that much easier, which drives the way we feel about the events that go down in the story. We seem them struggle and learn and grow and make mistakes and suddenly the quest to complete the game becomes personal for us. It’s that character-driven story that makes Homestuck endearing.

Well, that and the fact that the frontman for ICP takes on a preisdential role, Betty Crocker is a power-hungry industrialist corporation driven by an alien sea witch, a guy with Kamina glasses slices a meteor in half with a katana, a black-robed servant stabs his queen and steals her magic ring then fuses with an immortal god-dog and sets out to cause all kinds of untold damage all because he didn’t want to wear a funny hat, and two enormous cosmic snakes have violent glowy starsex that ends in mpreg as a juggalo clown in purple pajamas with fake pixie wings watches from the background. That’s all kind of endearing too.

Ultimately, Homestuck is a thriving mass of constant world-building and character development, and the Flash animations are super impressive. Is it accessible or recommended for everyone? Absolutely not. It requires hard dedication and an ASS-TON of reading before you even really get into it. But it is one of the most important webcomics on the scene right now, and it is, after all, popular enough to overfund a Kickstarter for a video game spin-off by about $1.7 million OVER its intended goal, so it can’t be all that bad, can it?

…can it?

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