green means clean

waiter! more quirky lil bosses with tragic elements to them please!

hello tumblerinos i never acc finished the movie ididnt like it

I am fucking. Obsessed with the menu of this Asian fusion place on Uber eats. Hold on.

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.

dashie

> ascend

WHAT IS THIS THIS MAKES ME SAD <\3

dirk strider

i pray to vengeance on the sixth string of a guitar

(from this weeks speed draw :3)

Serval (Leptailurus serval), MELANISTIC, family Felidae, Amboseli National Park, Kenya

Photograph by nicolas.urlacher.photographer

If you asked me to describe this beast I would have to say that it is “not entirely unlike a cat”

Cat drawn from memory

why does autofill want me to go evil mode

“why do you ship them? I thought the ship wasn’t canon?” bro we’re talking about fictional characters, who don’t actually exist in real life, from a media that focuses solely on fictional events that are not real either. so what if these two made-up characters didn’t kiss in their source material? they have lots of nasty gay sex on archive of our own and thousands of novel length slow burn enemies to lovers fics written about them. the fanon content at this point far exceeds the whole canonical franchise. the problem isn’t “it’s not canon” the problem is that you don’t allow yourself to let go of canon and enjoy the wonder of fan contents that are just as good / valid

come here

this is my first time seeing pre-scratch designs for the trolls and wow these fuck hard