Hi y'all! I’m Rose, and I write, and sometimes draw, Homestuck stuff! Here’s a list of all the notable shit I’m currently workin on or have worked on, in case you’re curious!
Early June is a fic I write with @gendertrickster about June going back to retcon her own gender, and the consequences that ensue. Featuring a veritable cascade of genderfuckery and gayness, two disparate groups of current and former players race for a do-over, and the chance to set things right.
The Golden Mile is an intermission to the aforementioned fic, featuring a very different Prospitian Battleship crew, with a God-Tiered Davesprite and four formerly-fused trolls getting used to life, each other, and all the second chances they need.
My main is @rosegardenofeden, if you wanna follow me there for other related writing projects! I have a looooot more planned for the future, so please, stay tuned!
slightly more serious less flippant version of my post from yesterday: whether you ar doing so from a point of pro- or anti- nintendo or video games it is so silly to talk about whether ‘video games are more expensive now’ 'video games have always been this expensive’ when what you’re talking about is exclusively big-money titles that you’re buying on release day at full price. that’s not “video games”. that’s “video games made for current-gen hardware by activision/nintendo/EA/etc”. its like saying “Movies nowadays all have Iron Man in them”
many of the best video games of all time are made by one weird trans girl and available for free Free on itch.io. many more are made by two autistic finnish guys and available on steam for like $10. the “video gamse used to be even more expensive adjusting for inflation” thing is only true about usamerican kids who were playing the new nintendos at the time, to me as a kid “video games” were like ~$8 from a guy with a cd burner or when i was slightly older like $20 for three from the second-hand ps2 games bin. like its like when people make sweeping statments on Movies and they exclusively mean the MCU. get some fuckin perspective on the medium god damn
four 13yo internet friends play a video game with cosmic stakes that sucks them into another dimension. over a chat client, they meet a set of twelve alien kids who played the same before them and gradually realize that the cosmos operates on a system of self-closing timeloops and narrative inevitabiilty that’s pitting them against an immortal demon bent on destroying the universe
to be clear, this is how i’d give a casual synopsis, which is usually what people who act like explaining homestuck is really difficult are ostensibly trying to do. if i was, like, describing homestuck’s themes in a more analytic register, i would be more inclined to focus on how it’s a multimedia hypertext fiction bildungsroman deconstruction with several layers of metanarrative that’s ultimately focused on the experience of growing up queer and online in the 2000s through the frame of gnostic allusion, pop culture bricolage, and the author-audience relationship as seen through the lens of said author’s idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction
Can that be explained for someone who doesn’t know all the jargon? Not trying to be insulting, I just don’t know what a lot of that means.
main difficulty phrases/parts:
bildungsroman
gnostic allusion
pop culture bricolage
idiosyncratic quasiplatonist theory of fiction
so first of all i want to be super clear that, like, this ‘jargon’ is not simply obtuse for its own sake, but just like any specialized topic with centuries of theory behind it, literary analysis has developed its own vocabulary with which very specific and complex concepts can be communicated succintly
that said: a bildungsroman is a type of coming-of-age story that puts a lot of focus onto a certain notion of 'growing up’, a somewhat romanticized vision of the transition from 'childhood’ to 'adulthood’ with a strong focus on the emotional maturation of the protagonist. when i say homestuck is a 'bildungsroman deconstruction’, i mean that homestuck is, in some ways, an entry into this genre, but takes pains to highlight, interrogate, and sometimes outright reject a lot of the underlying philosophical assumptions that go into defining it.
gnosticism is a dubiously historical (as in, it is an exogenous post-facto grouping made of faiths and interpretatins of christian doctrine that is often described as though it is a coherent and continuous religious tradition) constellation of beliefs mostly bound togeher by a focus on personal enlightenment in the face of an illusionary or deceptive world and by a quasidualist cosmology separating an invisible, omnipotent divinity and a lesser, malevolent or flawed creator divinity ('demiurge’). homestuck is full of gnostic allusion, from the surface-level aesthetic incorporation of gnostic vocabulary and concepts (the monster yaldabaoth, a character’s username being gardengnostic) to a more thorough thematic engagement with the ideas of materiality being a deceptive shroud over an immaterial 'true world’, or malevolent/absent creator divinites emanating forth from higher-ranking ones.
bricolage is an artistic technique focused on repurposing and melding existing objects – 'pop culture bricolage’ here is me saying that huge parts of homestuck rest on the recontextualization and incorporation of both “low” and “high” cultural objects, aesthetic, visual, and narrative elements from stuff like saw, starsky & hutch, the sims, dungeons & dragons – allowing plot beats and images (sometimes, literal, jpeg images) from all these pop culture works of art to form loadbearing parts of everything from indivdiual panel composition to story arcs.
the 'quasiplatonist theory of fiction’ here is a reference to the beliefs about art and fiction that hussie expresses, with varying degrees of facetiousness, through homestuck and outside of it. i call it 'quasiplatonist’ as an analogy to platonic idealism, because a central element of it is the notion of the 'pure’, immaterial, 'essence’ of a character being separable from their depiction in the work and the circumstances of that work’s creation, and i call it idiosyncratic because hussie’s take on it is very singular and leads to some very strange conclusions.
Being an evil doppelganger has to be so fucked up like imagine meeting a better version of yourself. Some chain of events going differently that led to “you” being a better person in a way you can never achieve. Personally I’d have no other option but to try and kill them
It’s always “oh no my evil clone or twin or whatever is trying to kill me” and never How is my evil clone? Says a lot about society
Me, crashing the fuck out: you think you’re better than me? You think you’re fucking better than me???
My good clone, dodging a glass: I mean like objectively yeah
Literally nothing could’ve prepared me for learning that the reason Splatoon 3 has a world called “Alterna” is that Toby Fox jokingly suggested it to a Nintendo employee only for them to like it so much that they decided to use it, which is startingly similar to the backstory behind Hussie naming the trolls’ planet Alternia
i made this post back in 2021 and it convinced so many people who thought it was genuinely true that it actually started to spread as misinformation i would like to officially apologize for my actions
