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:

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!)

i think that, while there are a lot of people who disparage homestuck because of unfair reasons, like the fandom being cringy or hussie making a fool of himself, there are also a lot of valid, object level critiques of the text that make it so that the story is actually legitimatly kind of bad in a way that feels justifiably aggravating.

because while it is indeed very meta-modern and steeped in new sincerity during acts 1-5, and probably even a portion of act 6. it seems like eventually it dips back squarely into old, passe, cynical post-modernism by the end of it. it has the alpha kids as a more bitter, cynical representation of what the protagonists of the comic are. john eventually reaches the conclusion that con air just flat out sucks. vriska gets a huge rant about how hussie is a terrible story teller with his fake outs and his sikes and what not, and everyone sounds so tired and done with it, and hussie himself sounds so tired and done with this story by the end of it. and the thing is you cant do that, you cant deconstruct your way into new sincerity and then take a step back and be like “but actually its all stupid and there is no meaning, fuck you”.

all the emotional resonance of its new sincerity gets lost, is like it pulls the rug from under your feet. it feels like a slap to the face after the emotional resonance of the first half of the story.

to be fair, near the very end it does sort of try to recapture a feeling of optimistic “whatever we make our own meaning” happy nihilism, what with the sprites squared like jasprose and davepeta, or the character of calliope finding meaning and hope in the muse of space, but too little too late and in a way that feels halfassed and disharmonious with previously established themes and plot threads. much as it tries, it cannot recapture the magic lost.

and then come the epilogues that do go back to try and do the whole oscillation thing, and to their credit they do manage to ellicit genuine powerful, meaningful emotions but again, it comes after act 6, and even the epilogues refuse to give an actual conclussion to the story by ending on a cliffhanger which leads into “homestuck 2 beyond cannon”.

and what better way to indicate that this is all a meaningless waste of time than that?

I strongly disagree with the assessment of the Epilogues here. The Epilogues end the story conclusively. Sure, Dirk has conducted a clockmaster series of insane little bits and pieces crashing down Cascade style to manufacture a “The Story Continues” ending, because as the most powerful arbiter of irony, cynicism, and disillusionment within Homestuck, Dirk cannot allow the story to end. But the story is over. John’s final conversation in Candy with Roxy is the powerful, final note of catharsis that conclusively ends what Homestuck is about, even if the “plot” continues. Plot versus catharsis, that’s the underlying tension of the Epilogues, inherent in the Meat/Candy split. It’s why the Epilogues deal so much with John’s “removal from canon.” That’s what I mean in my original post about metamodernism taking the innovations of postmodernism and using them to posit new meaning.

Much of the dissatisfaction I see people express regarding the Epilogues is rooted in concerns of fandom: Characters are treated with disrespect. The humor is irreverent. The tone is darker and cruder. These are the things I think time will wash away as unimportant to the Epilogues as art. New readers engaging with Homestuck aren’t going to become “attached” to characters like Jake and Jade and Jane the way serial readers steeped in the fandom’s intricate mythos and headcanons did, and subsequently won’t become emotionally hurt by how those characters act in the Epilogues.

As an example of what I mean, one of the replies to my original post has a long discussion about Dirk that goes like this:

If you see the Epilogues as a mirror, it distorts your reading of them. The way the characters act is a reflection of you or someone you know, and you’re going to have a personal reaction to that. But somebody reading Homestuck for the first time today or 20 years from now won’t have that experience, or that reading.

Going back to the original discussion of all the -modernisms, I wonder if a story must conclusively reject cynicism to be avant garde. When David Foster Wallace brought New Sincerity to the fore, he was waging a holy war against “irony poisoned” authors like Bret Easton Ellis who were the logical intellectual outcome of postmodernism. But Infinite Jest is a bizarrely structured book that, at first glance, seems to end abruptly and without resolution to any of its plotlines: the classic postmodern ending. Only someone who rereads the book, i.e. sincerely grapples with it and tries to understand it, rather than consuming it once and spitting it out (Infinite Jest itself being a scathing critique of single-use consumerist culture), will see the somewhat facile trick DFW has played: The beginning of the book is actually its ending, with answers to all the major questions; you simply didn’t realize that the first time you read.

DFW would eventually become the most postmodern creature of all by leaving his final book, The Pale King, an unfinished uneditable monstrosity after his death. Bret Easton Ellis, and fuck even Thomas Pynchon, are still alive; BEE dropped a new novel this year. The thorn of postmodernism is not so easily extracted. Is there not something innately meaningful in the fact that Hussie, after succumbing to disillusion and crapping out a rushed, lousy ending to Homestuck proper, came back for the Epilogues to truly grapple with it once more?

This might not be the most deep well put together take, especially given i haven't made a habit of rereading homestuck which, honestly, I should at some point because in my experience?

A lot of the takes with it always struck me as weird even reading it at the time that it was actively updating. I do not, in fact refer to Homestuck 2, having not read it in the least. I want to but at the same time, It feels...

Well I think the best way i can put it is that having read the epilogues and having had a complete blast, a sequel never felt relevant or needed for the story that was told? Like...I undoubtedly missed things in it, i don't doubt that for a moment, but reading homestuck, I never particularly felt it was incoherent or lacking in points even going up to the original ending.

Whatever it's going towards with the larger thematic points, I never read it as incoherent or anything. For a story that actively and early on grappled with Narratives and dealing with them or not, and precisely how you interact with that narrative dictating how it plays out, a lot of the stuff that started happening to the end didn't feel any less sincere or irreverant or anything like that.

Like one of the earliest moments in the comic, relatively mind it's still a ways in, involves Rose going "Actually fuck this I refuse to engage with the narrative Sburb is doing" and then the consequences of that.

John fucks up and in doing so dies, creates an entire separate timeline that has critical impact on the "main" timeline.

The Trolls, forces beyond the Beta Kids understanding at the time, actively fuck with them in various ways and in doing so direct how they act in funky ways and it's like...

The narrative constantly builds up and out in a spiral from the earliest point, and every revolution ends up bringing in more and more context and understanding to the central theme and story going on and then we reach the epilogues and it goes

"Well Here's A Split timeline where each half influences the other in weird cyclic ways. The Narrative is a central thing that people are either trying to escape, control, or otherwise make use of. The characters, as they always have, are trying to deal with forces above them that they do not have full understanding of (But critically have SOME understanding of) and here's how that plays out"

And it's like...The only way Homestuck ends is the same way that it's always played out. You learn more about the wider world, you look at the narratives (which is framed functionally as the final all encompassing force that influences you from above and it's "author") things spread and fall apart as you go on because, as the story constantly likes to make clear, your choice of how you engage or don't engage with things, and your reactions can be good or positive and always transformative and the choice of how you do that is always on you and whether it's good or positive it's still a choice that YOU make even when the choices are constrained and...

I dunno where i'm going with this really. I've always thought homestuck was good, that it's a work that's worth genuinely engaging with, even if it is also a LOT to take in.

Like the amount of vitriol thrown at it for being bad has always struck me as weird cause like...The comic ended in 2016, 2019 if you want to include the epilogues as part of the main comic, and people are STILL actively engaging with it, arguing about how it worked or didn't, why this worked and it's like...

Unfortunately for haters, it's doing the job of all good art and making people bitch, moan and argue about what it's doing or not.

this idea did not leave my head for a month so i knew i had to draw it or else

just when i thought my comics couldn't get dumber... i surprise myself 👭

yeah that's exactly what i was saying

(suddenly serious) what i was saying was that Dungeon Meshi has some really well-written characters that also have flaws. half the cast constantly gives Laios shit for being socially awkward, Laios forgets about the basics of human decency a couple of times when interacting with Izutsumi, the funny late-story villain squad are 80% convicted criminals, basically every character is a bit racist in some way, and, yes, Marcille, everyone's favorite silly little disaster lesbian, gets the "ick" about Tall-men portraying the characters in her favorite romance novel because she thinks they're too ugly and pouts about the idea of Falin (her dear beloved Falin) wearing clothes that she would be happy and comfortable wearing because "that stuff is for men"

i feel really silly talking about this but a weird thing that happened for me when the Dungeon Meshi anime took off and the fandom really exploded was seeing how weirdly cutesified a lot of fan depictions of the characters was. the "canon versus fanon" of it all, if you will. a week or so ago there was a bonus comic drawn by Ryoko Kui that got spread around Twitter about a What If situation in which Laios got eaten instead of Falin, and people were shocked about the idea of the party basically immediately giving up on the idea of saving Laios, including at least one "why does the writer think she knows so much" joke (i'm hoping it was a joke), which really baffled me because it just made sense to me that the party initially wasn't all that close to Laios (besides Falin, obviously). the relationship of the main cast is something that grows over the series. please read that carefully: the main cast does care for one another, they care for Laios, it's just that it's something that is developed over the course of the manga... and even that idea was too much for some fans

i'm probably going to sound really snobby, but i think there's a lot of people who are more fans of the fanart than the actual series...

i was mainly being silly when i was like "yeah let Marcille be weird about gender" but i was also kind of serious because it kind of is a prominent part of her character. it speaks to the world she lives in, what she values and finds important, and if you think about it, it actually speaks a lot to the subtext around her and Falin: Marcille hates "gross things," Marcille hates being uncomfortable, Marcille thinks women should be girly, and men should be masculine, and yet she willingly journeys down into a gross dungeon and eats weird monsters in order to save Falin, a woman who likes bugs, fucking around in the dirt, and pants. what do you think that implies about Marcille?

i appreciate writers that don't smooth all the rough edges off their characters. in Kui's case, we all know she's put massive amounts of thought into the world Dungeon Meshi takes place in, and the views of her character reflect all these thoughts. i don't think Marcille being "conservative" is an accident- i would go so far as to say that i don't think the "contradiction" of Marcille's love of Falin is an accident. i think this is all the sign of good writing, and i think it's a diservice to the writer to try and make these characters more "palatable" (and fit all the corny "found family" memes lol)

maids // vol. 1

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(that AU) Delirious in Dungeon

Dunmeshi Episode 1

Inspired by this post, which should probably be the themesong of our game...

New Sailor Moon zine coming soon…❄🔥

They always understood the assignment, we just didn’t get it.

So I had a massive realization about Peni Parker after watching ATSV. Originally many were mad that she was super different in her movie debut which I get going from her clear Eva inspiration to just being anime.

When she briefly appears in “Across” she looks more accurate. (just being depressed)

A lot would think that she’s now gonna stay like this to fix their error but if you get to the end of the film…

Her smile and drive restored. Why is that? 

Cause they were never trying to make her Eva, she was based on Gurren Lagann the whole time. Her jacket being made up of Simon’s color scheme inverted. She even LITERALLY wears it on her sleeve. Like they really wanted to make sure we got it this time.  

Look at the mech when you put them side by side. But this isn’t even the kicker…

She’s doing the iconic Gainax pose at the end of the film. On top of her mech with something loose to epically flow in the wind. *chefs kiss*  Yes she’s crossing her arms I went frame by frame.

The reason I like this is cause in mecha the protag always goes through depressing stuff. That’s what Eva is built around. So by taking her in that direction she’s now a love letter to genre, Eva being included in there rather than being the only thing referenced.

Also with this knowledge the Spot looking kinda similar all of a sudden…

Wait it’s all Gurren Lagann? Always has been. With that in mind, you know what that means with him right around the corner.

TL;DR: Peni was a reference to Gurren Lagann the whole time which is just a love letter to everything mecha. 

THEY UNDERSTOOD THE ASSIGNMENT SO HARD, WE JUST DIDN’T GET IT.

assassin gyaru 💗🩷

Tumblr Top Ships Bracket - FINALS

This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with many of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement, and refrain from harassment.

LETS WIN THIS

My Investment in these is often passing, but I do wanna point out that basically every other Sulemio challenger has been both closer with this quantity of votes, and also kept going back and forth for a while there.

so you know

ermangarde hgnghngh lessing... let me marry ur sister please please please please please pl

Lessing this is a reasonable thing to ask

TOTK - Eternal (part 2)

part 1 here