It was Spring of 2009 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in High School) and I read a lot of webcomics. I'm not altogether positive how I heard about it, but there was this webcomic Problem Sleuth that I learned about (probably through Ryan North's blog on qwantz.com) and binged. In it kingdoms are united and divided, the Black Tower is fought to the top of floor by floor, reality turns out to be an illusion. They truly were, MS Paint Adventures. (Only not actually done in MS Paint. But truly adventures.) It was the most epic undertaking, reading-wise, that I'd undertaken in my entire life till that point. Almost 50,000 words over 1,673 pages; I just did the math and that's, 10.75% of Rhythm of War? Which as a single volume is like 90, 95% the length of the entirety of The Lord of the Rings, including appendices. But Lord of the Rings isn't heavily illustrated, and Stormlight Archive is only illustrated a couple times every hundred pages; Problem Sleuth has at least one illustrated panel every page, many of them animated, which invites a slower pace as you reflect and, like, fondly regard creation.
So yeah like I said it was till that point the longest single work I had ever consumed in a jot- (looking up Harry Potter wordcounts, stayed up all night reading those on their releases, days at a time- 250k+ words, that's... more than 50k for sure) but like I said, only illustrated once a chapter, and in Harry Potter they don't have to stretch a power cable from one end of the universe to the other, growing and shrinking it in a complex sequence of maneuvers so that it can be the right size to plug the AC in, so there.
Anyway.
So after I read Problem Sleuth (I binged it just after it had wrapped up I think, if not a little before) a few months later it turned out that its author, Andrew Hussey, was starting up a new webcomic in a similar vein, Homestuck. I... it's, the spellcheck isn't recognizing Homestuck as a word, it corrected me on how to spell Hussey's name but it's redlining this one, strange. It's HOMESTUCK why wouldn't it recognize- oh okay it has to be allcaps I see. Nope, not doing that. See, I made it one or two days into it (HS) and lost interest. Stopped reading, as I liked to say, when John Egbert was still stuck at home.
Flash forward half a decade, and Homestuck had become huge while I wasn't looking I guess, and even people who weren't wired into that '00s webcomic circuit were reading it, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing And A Half, and I'd checked back in MSPA on occasion I guess and read the sidecomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, but didn't know it existed in\ relation to Homestuck like it does, so I was very surprised to find that out when I did get around to reading Homestuck.
How I got around to reading that was this. It was Spring of 2016 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in college) and, Zootopia fever was in the air and Pokémon GO fever was a few months away and stuff was happening politically that had the opportunity to go very very differently but didn't, and, the webcomic Homestuck was ongoing and HOMESTUCK was NOW, but not now for long-- for for exactly 7 years after Homestuck launched (4/13/09 - 4/13/16), it was coming to an end. Yes buddy, an end, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing and Three Quarters. The adventure had been on Act 6 of 7 for half of its run, and Act 7 would take place in the form of a gargantuan like 25 minute flash animation, and maybe there would be one or two epilogue pages but that would be it, forever. I read that friends on Tumblr were rereading it to get ready, and I read that friends on Facebook were hyped about it, and heck and gosh and gee, why do I have so many GNC friends what does that say about me, and I just looked back through my posts at the time and there were totally a few Homestuck cosplayers in the background of the reportage I did of Fandomonium! I, and it was In The Water. I do hate when a secret is kept from me, and this seemed like a terrible secret.
And so I began the undertaking...
It's the present day. I'm flipping through my At-A-Glance for 2016 right now, its pages rich with pressed movie tickets from my multiple viewings of Zootopia and Hail Caesar and 10 Cloverfield Lane, and there's only one official reference to reading MSPA in the section I daily keep of the things I watch and make and read and play. April 13th, fittingly; a day upon which I also apparently played Tzolk'in and Halo Reach and explored the last-updated-in-July-of-1999-and-kept-in-pristine-condition-since-then babyname website alfabette zoope. That's the only official reference, but you can catch glimpses of references here and there elsewhere if you keep your eyes peeled and know what you're looking for. A Morse code decryptor written down the margins of April 1. April 16, a couple references to a "JADE FLUTE." Nothing that would mean much at all if you weren't in the know, but telling enough in context.
There's a reference just under the sole instance of the words "MSPA" to "North of Reality," a microfiction blog that was one of the things advertised in the MSPA adbar at the time. It was the first Patreon I ever signed up for, on my tight college budget. A new exclusive print-only limited run short fiction sent in the mail every month. I do hate when a secret is kept from me.
Flashback to a few months ago. Not even a flashback, let me just, tell you about it. Dropped my phone, shattered its screen, got a new one but finally with an old one I could take to work with me and use as an MP3 player, I could do that and listen to audiobooks and podcasts and maybe a little music, like I'd always figured would be a good idea but never had the wherewithal for, though I'd tried it before with an even older phone. Thursday June 2nd 2022, the daily in/out/cycle section reads like this:
a bunch of WRITING EXCUSES; TRENCH; THE BAD GUYS; I inadvisably start (so, 1st 45 min of) THE DARK KNIGHT because it's a good movie, even though I should really just go to bed
I'm soon listening to one or two other podcasts and make my way through an entire audiobook I'd downloaded to my drive back in 2018, and exhausting listening options rapidly which is great, but I learn about a podcast GAMES STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES which I'd somehow overlooked in my search for games studies podcasts till now (because my focus primarily lies in analysis of analogue games?) and make my way through that. Halo Reach is namedropped as "solving the Hamlet issue." It's great.
I make my way through the back catalogue of that with the alacrity of, like, I'm picturing the opening logos of BONANZA and the way the fire burns through that map, but fortunately for me GSSB isn't the only podcast on the Ranged Touch network. Michael and Cameron also host a podcast where they do serious literary analysis of Steven King novels (they're currently on Misery) and another podcast where they do the same thing to, Homestuck... It's called Homestuck Made This World, but that's not why I'm titling this post that.
So like, all this time I just assumed that everyone else, like me, got done reading Homestuck in April of 2016, and nobody ever thought of it again, but that's not true? There's still an active fanbase, not just of the weird and multitudinous ongoing spinoffs but of the original comic. It never even occurred to me that that might be the case.
So Homestuck Made This World. I rapidly made my way through the backlog of that. Michael was keeping up with the entire thing as it was coming out, Cameron is reading it for the first time for the podcast and getting a fresh take on it, and I...
I'm actually halfway between the two hosts. I told you half the story, but that was only half the story. I said I began the undertaking, up above, but if you assumed I finished it I... what's that thing Doc Scratch says, well anyway. I made it to the end of Act 5, halfway through the whole thing, and a little bit into Act 6 but not very far at all-- the same instinct reared up that I'd had when I first stopped reading, when it was coming out for the very first time; Act 6 just seemed like a remake of Act 1 which just seemed like a remake of Problem Sleuth. May have been the reason, or at least part of it? Because, like, if Homestuck were half shorter, I would probably have been able to get all the way through it by the drop of Act 7, but it wasn't, it was twice longer. I told you that in High School Problem Sleuth was the biggest thing I'd ever read? Acts 1-4 of Homestuck, put together, were already hundreds of pages longer than Problem Sleuth (a webcomic in which, I must remind you, the entirety of the universe is traversed several times over) and with a word count that is literally hundreds of thousands of words greater. Act 5 was longer still than those four acts put together. And...
Alright so at the time, it seemed to me (apparently misreading the events of the 13-minute long flash animation climax of Act 5) that the entire universe had been destroyed and all our beloved characters dead, the events of Act 6 taking place in a new universe with an entirely new cast that nobody ever talks about so must not care about very much. I don't know where I got that apprehension of things, but that was indeed my apprehension of things, yet scores of pages into Act 6, that it took place in a new reality created by the kids' Sburb session the same way that our universe was created by Sgrub of the Trolls'.
And anyway, by the time I'd got to it, it was too late. Act 7 had already dropped. I'd failed in my quest.
I don't regret giving up there when I did. If I do have a regret about it, it's that I didn't get to Act 6 by the time Viz media bought the website making it corporate, and the URL changed breaking many links and obliterating the forums entirely, and Flash was discontinued so a lot of the interactive elements in the comic had to be dropped or altered in form. The experience reading Homestuck now is entirely different from reading it in 2016. As was always going to be the case.
So anyway, I'm caught up to the events of Homestuck that they discuss in Episode 7 part 1 of the podcast, and suppose I'm going to keep going. I mentioned North of Reality being my first Patreon, in my way old baby days of being a patron, and well now Ranged Touch is my latest. Mmhmm.
There's something about Homestuck that invites this kind of reflection on it, the circumstances under which you read it for the first or the whateverth time. Sorry if I rambled, forgive me for writing ALMOST TEN PERCENT OF THE SINGLE WORDIEST PAGE OF HOMESTUCK here. Act 6 intermission 3, 2 intermissions past where I'm at so far. There was a break of 32 days in between the panel that preceded it and that one, and I cracked this thing out in like, .2 percent of that time, so like, if this were 10 times longer it would only have taken me a day to write. Sick.
Alright well I've got work in the morning, so, y'know. Goodnight.
