The first hit of Homestuck is free

by Doctor Science

In recent months my primary fresh fandom has been Hawaii 5-0, but now that Season 2 has begun we've broken up. It's not me, show, it's you --

Steve McGarrett (back to camera) has a few questions for a witness. You can't tell in this still from episode 2x03, but the guy's arm is in a sling. Also, it turns out he hasn't done anything wrong.
-- but I'll talk more about the militarization of American TV police in another post.

So being in the market for a new fandom, I decided to check out the Sprogs' latest interest: Homestuck by Andrew Hussie (AH) at MS Paint Adventures. It started out as a webcomic about an interactive game, I guess, but by now I'd have to call it a web narrative, or indeed a web *epic*. I really hope to see it nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story next year; IMHO it certainly deserves to win, not least because it's really science fictional.

A young lady stands in her bedroom. Due to a violent storm, her house has just lost power, along with her wireless internet connection. This has severed her link to a popular video game she was playing with a young man at a critical moment. That young man is relying on this young lady to reestablish a connection somehow. See full-sized at MS Paint Adventures.

Most webcomics have a set number of panels in certain sizes produced on a more-or-less-predictable schedule. Homestuck pages can be:

- single images
- animated gifs (as above)
- with narrative text
- or chat logs, some very lengthy
- small Flash games
- some pages include music or other sound
- every once in a while, there's a major Flash page -- a mini-movie that may be 2-3 minutes long

When AH is in the groove, he'll often post 5-10 or more simple pages per day. Homestuck started on 4/13/09 and is 4100 pages (!!) long so far.

For the big Flash pages, he has to go on a several-week hiatus. To do these pages, he has help from an art team (made up of fans whose work he's liked) and a music team, also made of fans. The music is complex and interesting enough to be worth downloading and even paying for, and I gather it's become a significant source of revenue for AH and the music team. It looks to me as though Homestuck might be onto a new business model for serialized narrative, one where the readers or viewers are the customers, not the advertisers.

The reason I'm posting about this right now is that Homestuck has been on hiatus since 9/6, and the next Flash will be posted October 25. I've been reading since last week, and I "only" have about 1000 500 pages to go to be caught up.

That's a lot of reading. It's worth it because Homestuck is an incredibly complex and gripping narrative, and wonderful science fiction. It starts out kind of slow -- you can afford to move pretty quickly through most of Act One. (The acts get longer, and then much longer, as you go on.) What you get includes:

• at least 2 alien species, at least one of which has a fully-developed non-human psychology and biology
• and when I say "biology", I mean sex-and-romance system. It has to be explained with *charts* -- and possibly interpretive dance.
• a very large cast of fully-realized characters. This is not a single-protagonist or single-POV story. In fact, it has more "featured" or "starring" characters than, say, Hawaii 5-0, and balances them much better
• half the characters are female
• of the 16 (!!) characters I've really gotten to know so far, none -- despite the way they're drawn -- is a cardboard cutout. Even the ones I think are awful people (for general uses of the term "people", just go with it) have times when I can see where they're coming from; no-one is nicer or more "good" than people actually are. Many of the characters are annoying, in the way that actual human beings (etc) that you have to deal with can be annoying. Especially since they're mostly supposed to be 13 years old -- not everything about them is realistic, but their annoyingness sure is, as is the R-rated language some of them use
• timey-wimey stuff and lots of it
• comedy, drama, silliness, romance, banter, tragedy. Epic.
• Lots of fic, mostly on the Archive of Our Own
• cosmic struggle

I must admit that following the story has been made easier for me because the Sprogs have read it all already. I keep asking them questions in IM -- sometimes I feel like I'm the deaf old lady sitting in the row behind you at the movie, asking her daughter what's going on. Sprog the Younger is all smug because she was the index case in this household: first she got her older sister interested, now me. bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

To give you an idea of how moving Homestuck can be, here's the Flash movie from the end of Act Two:

direct YouTube link

It's not terrifically spoilery, but you can see something of the scope of the story in time, space, and emotion.

Click the link, you know you want to.

um, yeah, this is kind of how it works. By cellcow.

Comments

[Chuchundra]

I don't know. I got about a half hour in and bailed.

[bluefoot]

I too gave up on Hawaii 5-0, for several reasons:

- After stellar work on Lost, Daniel Dae Kim is less than a sidekick. What's up with that?
- Nearly all the native Hawaiian characters are either comic relief or criminals.
- Hanging people off roofs or beating up a guy in a sling to get a confession doesn't make you a bad-ass, it makes you an a*hole.
- Back in season 1, when it looked like the theft from the evidence locker was going to come out, the team went to back up McGarrett to the governor. When Kono was accused, the rest of the team has hardly acknowledged her existence, despite their culpability. Whatever the excuse for the storyline, it basically says that she (brown woman) is worth a lot less than McGarret (white guy).

I'll get my mindless entertainment somewhere else.

[Laura Koerbeer]

Okay, I am trying Homestruck. I am definately i "What the heck is this mode?". It's probably a generational thing--I don't like reading a computer as much as I like reading a book, I don't like the artwork which strikes me as cold and soulless, I don't like having to arrow up and down the page becaue I can't see it all at once. And I don't likethe way the story progresses because it isn't progressing in the way I am used to.

I don'
t mean this as critisism. If anything I am criticizing myself. I thik this is one of those cultureal change things like when silent films were invented and some people just didn't like them because they were used to picturing the stories in their own heads while they read. I get glimpses every now and then of a whole world of literature on line that is new and creative and, to me, alien.

Probably stay alien, too. I'm still tryig to figure out how to use my very basic no frills cell phone.

[wj]

bluefoot, I'm betting that Kono is on an undercover assignment. Whether keeping the rest in ignoriance is really necessary to support her cover is not obvious.

[anon]

Whoa. After a couple of hours it really does become awesome.

[Doctor Science]

For those of you who are having trouble getting into Homestuck, it has been suggested to me that THIS is a good place to start. It's almost at the end of Act Two, there's a bunch of actual action, then it moves swiftly into Act Three.

Also, this particular page contains one of my favorite lines.*g*

anon, where was the Awesome Tipping Point for you? Point to a spot on the Handy Map!

[Gary Farber]

I really hope to see it nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story next year [....]

Best to show up at the Business Meeting to vote for continuation of the category, since unless the BM votes next year to continue it, it's scheduled to automatically terminate in 2012.

The BM previously concluded that, in essence, there wasn't enough knowledgeable nominating or voting going on.

What the 2012 meeting will do, I wouldn't predict, as I'm no longer on the main mailing list that discusses such matters.

WSFS Constitution as of 2010.

[ral]

Doctor Science, I just want to thank you for pointing me to Homestuck.