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Tunicate posted:When the trolls got introduced as twelve all-new characters. Actually, thinking about it, this is 100% correct. Homestuck became bad - or more accurately, it changed in a way that ended up irrevocably ruining it - in Act 5. Hussie has mentioned before that the trolls were always meant to be minor characters, a self-contained narrative explaining the origin of the beta kids' universe. And if you reread act 5 (the unparalleled best act of the comic that was never topped before or since) it feels like it. Hussie came into Act 5 knowing exactly what he would end up revealing about the trolls (they won their session, they created the current universe, but were cursed to never enjoy the fruits of their labor due to the creation of Bec Noir). I still think, to this day, the zodiac signs reveal is the single best reveal of Homestuck, the best and most intuitive and clever twist Hussie pulled off. It was always there, just staring you in the face the entire act, literally printed on every character's loving shirts, foreshadowing the final revelation that the trolls are the gods of our universe by using common symbolism and myth - since the idea of constellations were yet another way humans told stories for thousands of years beforehand - in a brilliant way. It's Hussie at his unparalleled best, Act 5, him firing on every possible cylinder. And it's because Hussie came into it knowing exactly what he was going to end up doing. He had laid the seeds of who and what the trolls were beforehand so Act 5 is just all payoff all the time in Act 5, and if you look at Act 5 as a self-contained work - and you should - it's really quite an impressive thing. Hussie has an editing problem (namely that he needs it, desperately badly), but Act 5 is Hussie coming the closest to being the level of edited Homestuck as a whole should have been. It's a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and with some significant - but not overwhelming - massaging Act 5 and specifically Hivebent works as a self-contained story. Act 5 is still great. It lays out the world of Alternia that's just so alien and weird with a culture that's almost-but-not-quite the same as our own, and Hussie ends up introducing twelve characters that were somehow all compelling or at least interesting in their own right. He comes up with a bunch of ideas that somehow feel totally disparate yet paradoxically cohesive like buckets and lususes and hemocastes there's just so many weird and fascinating and exciting elements of Alternia that make you want to learn more about it. It's great by itself but it's even better as a reflection and reaction to what came before - in contrast to watching John and company stumble their way through SBURB you watch people engineered literally from birth to be the absolute best at SGRUB, and it's the difference between watching a blind LP played by whoever Polygon's Doom guy is to watching a speedrun. It's refreshing. Act 5's narrative was Homestuck at its most constructed, and such strict comparative limits created a narrative backbone to make the story flow well. It moves, things are constantly happening, stakes are raised and lowered and raised again over and over and over and it's this rollercoaster ride. What'll happen next, you don't know, and it makes Homestuck appointment viewing. It's no surprise that Act 5 was when the comic went from "big" to "huge", because it's just twist after twist after twist after twist. And a lot of that is due to its absolutely huge cast. People talk about the huge cast of HS prior to act 5, but it didn't, not really. Acts 1 through 4 really only had four main characters. Oh sure if you want to be technical it already had a couple dozen characters at that point, but not really. The Felt stuff was in an intermission and safely ignorable. The Exiles stuff was segmented off and didn't seem like it was going anywhere anytime soon (and hey, guess what. It never loving went anywhere.) The trolls were weird chat colors and dumb typing gimmicks, a bunch of assholes who antagonized the main characters. And that's the thing, basically every other character besides the main characters were defined by their relationship to one or more of the main characters. The guardians and the sprites were all assigned to one kid and helped enable that kid's arcing and development. The only real exception was Davesprite, but that's more from Dave operating as a living breathing exception. There wasn't a lot of clutter in the story yet. So, really, Acts 1-4 were all about the main four kids and only the main four kids, and their big cast of supporting characters who were pretty much solely defined by their relationship to the main characters. And then we hit act 5, and the trolls. And everything changed. The John and Jade and Dave and Rose we had spent a thousand-plus pages learning about literally did not exist. Suddenly the story had twelve main characters, and even though a whole bunch of them ended up supporting characters defined mostly by their relationship to the "main" trolls, at the time we had no idea that was the case. The cast size suddenly and abruptly tripled, and because Hussie came into the story knowing exactly what story beats he was gonna hit he went loving nuts on the characterization. And suddenly, it was the new normal. After this steady, deliberate definition of characters via a web with four people at the center, there were twelve characters, and only twelve characters, this crazy dodecagon that had all these different lines bisecting it connecting various points. But the characters were all equally important, as far as we knew. I mean, obviously, Karkat was the most important, but it was just like with John and his group a first among equals situation. Without any distractions like plotting or a bloated side cast, and because there were so many main characters with so many connections and relationships with each other, Hussie would be able to craft these really compelling stories. Act 5 was excitement because you, the reader, had no idea who or what or why or how the trolls were gonna be important to each other. Everyone got their moment in the sun - I mean, Nepeta, the by-far most useless and pointless troll of the bunch, was the one who basically introduced the idea of the quadrants. Anything could happen and nobody knew who was important and who wasn't, who was safe and who wasn't. It was new and it was different and it was constantly, constantly surprising and intriguing. And, again, it was the characterization that carried act 5. The relationships formed and broken were what carried act 5, and because status was constantly raising and lowering between someone and someone else - with twelve teenagers, it's bound to happen - there was conflict to be mined, and in the process created layered characters. It's no accident that people commonly agree that Karkat is the most layered and best-written character of the entire comic - he had eleven other people to bounce off of and in the process, as the most main character of the trolls, Hussie formed a fully-featured person out of that crabby rear end in a top hat. The quadrants allowed for the idea of romance - something hinted at beforehand - a center feature of the comic, but still behind the safe walls of analogy and symbolism. Because trolls were not humans, we didn't have to think about thirteen-year-olds loving, and the idea of quadrants made shipping not only encouraged, but explicitly canon. And because of troll biology the typical counters to specific pairings - gay ones - didn't play, because trolls procreated without sex and didn't even have a concept of gender. It was a pure, paradoxically inoffensive look at romance, because there were four types of it and it wasn't done strictly out of biological necessity so fans could debate whether or not specific couples or groupings worked. And you didn't have to be gross about it or think about teens bonin' down, and you didn't have to be a giant fuckin' weirdo who talked about such dumb poo poo like OTPs or headcanon ships or whatever. You could just discuss it as a casual fan, saying stuff like "Equius and Nepeta would make a good couple". It made seeing where the story was going exciting because people like reading about people falling in and out of love and getting into and out of relationships, and act 5 hammered on that idea to a level never done before. So suddenly there was a way to be into Homestuck in so many different ways. You had your favorite troll, and your favorite pairing, and your zodiac sign troll, and you could wonder who was gonna get together and split up much in the same way that people used to watch soap operas. As an aside, this introduced the absolute worst elements of the Homestuck fandom - people who speak about it using its own made-up jargon because they're pretentious assholes (quadrants is a dumb loving phrase and symbolsim to explain a very simple, very human concept - there are different types of love and yes people have toxic relationships with each other - and if you use loving playing cards to explain basic relationships in real life you're an emotional cripple who needs to grow the gently caress up) who want to make being a Homestuck fan into a race to see how prosaic one human being can be. The trollsonas (along with the class aspects) meant that all the needy special snowflake nerds (and truly creepy assholes) suddenly had all the pieces they needed to write about their original characters do not steal fuckin each other in the rawest way possible, and that poo poo was grosserooney. But. It was popular, and it was what turned Homestuck into a loving juggernaut. People like choosing teams and sides and injecting their own ideas and spin, and Hussie saying that every single trollsona was now explicitly canon meant that suddenly it all happened and people's metatextual engagement with Homestuck went through the mother loving roof. Not only because Hussie gave them the tools to do so, but because Act 5 was so good that that level of engagement was itself inherently rewarding. The trolls were so compelling that making your own felt like something you not only were given permission to do but should because they were cool. But, again, there was a pureness to the trolls that allowed this poo poo to flourish. And suddenly, now Hussie has a Problem. The Problem is that Hussie ended up striking gold with characters that ended up arguably better written and definitely more popular than his main characters, despite the fact that those characters were created solely to service the main characters. The thing that gets lost in the shuffle was that outside of arguably Karkat none of the trolls were supposed to be focal characters on the level of the four beta kids, and in fact they were largely created so that the main would have yet a dozen more side characters who would chiefly interact with them and only them. But that couldn't work, because Hussie made them too interesting and compelling of characters in their own right and the invention of the trolls had pushed the comic's visibility to a level previously unimaginable. And, so, Hussie was left with a story that more-or-less wrote the trolls satisfactorily out of it by the end of Act 5 Act 1, or at least wisely redefined and contextualized their roles within the "main" canon (by revealing them to be creators of the beta kids' universe now living on an asteroid trying desperately to initiate the Scratch) in a way that redressed them as supporting roles for, again, the four main kids just like every other character outside of John and co. The Problem is that Hussie wrote them too well, and people had already formed too close of an attachment to those characters, and at this point the audience knew Karkat and the other eleven too well and was too personally invested with them collectively, knew their breakups and relationships and love and hatred (all basically new concepts that the trolls introduced alongside Hivebent). Sidelining them as originally planned would just piss off a majority of the fanbase, because at this point the audience often cared more about "their" troll (or even "a" troll) then any of the main four kids. Keep them safely segmented on the asteroid wouldn't work. Hussie tries to resolve these issues in Act 5, and the ways he does work but not as cleanly as he'd like. The first and most obvious of those solutions is that he, well, he makes all the trolls main characters. So instead of them being brought back from Hivebent in a support role you still get just as much if not more of the focus of Act 5 Act 2 on the trolls themselves and their problems post-universe creation and their relationships with each other and, most significantly, the four kids themselves. Hussie starts laying the groundwork for the first human/troll romance arc - Kanaya and Rose, arguably the best relationship Hussie comes up with in Homestuck's run - but as soon as he does that he crosses the Rubicon and all bets are off. Trolls are now definitively, unequivocally Just As Important as the main four kids - we paired off one of the first group with one of the second. This creates its own set of more minor problems though - suddenly, the main character roster has quadrupled. The comic starts experiencing its first issues with such a dramatically increased cast size (especially since the trolls bring over and make crucially important romance as a defining or crucial relationship trait) - namely, trying to service and honor all of them effectively. Hivebent worked because it was a closed system, where the trolls only had the other trolls (And technically their lususes but not really) but once the trolls were brought into the main universe? All those dozens of supporting characters, not to mention the main kids themselves, didn't suddenly stop loving existing and now they have twelve more mains to support and interact with. Huss tries to resolve this in various ways, chief of which is his decision to pare down the main cast dramatically. We can debate the validity of Gamzee's heel turn (and, despite hivebent Gamzee being my favorite troll of the bunch I have to admit his corruption was justified), Hussie basically turns Gamzee into a Way to Solve Plot Problems. He kills off or otherwise incapacitates a vast majority of the lesser known or less important trolls so Hussie doesn't have to write them any more and wrangle the cast size down, and then basically turns into just that - he's not really a character any more, just a guy Hussie places into the narrative when and if he needs Something Done. But this is later, and we're still talking about Act 5, where the Gamzee turn works and makes sense. And suddenly we have the second-biggest Problem of Homestuck, which is bloat. It's not as bad as how it would eventually get (post Act 5) but with all these new mains everything takes double or triple what it'd normally take to do anything and get anywhere because we need to see how everyone reacts to or resolves a Major Plot Point while still doing the good character work that is what people came to read in the first place, only with over double the cast. Homestuck has never been a focused comic but the integration of the trolls into the main narrative turned an issue into a full blown Problem. So, finally, we get to the Scratch and the three-year timeskip journey to get to the alpha kids universe, and all these brewing Problems suddenly come home to roost. Hussie has to make the alpha kids compelling while yet again temporarily phasing out the entirety of the "main cast" (to give the alpha kids the ability to sink or swim and capture the audience's attention). And, seeing the wild success of the trolls as new characters he attempts to create them organically as new mains over the awkwardness of side characters being so fascinating and engaging they graduated themselves to the main roster. Over having to do all this fitting and editing to make Hivebent characters main cast, just make the alpha kids main cast from the start and avoid all this unpleasantness. ...And this is where Act 6 falls completely to pieces. Hussie basically takes the way he wrote the beta kids, where they were defined by a slow build of gradual integration with a strong reinforcement that above all, these people are friends who enjoy hanging out with each other and the complete opposite of the trolls, who are this very quick build of just dumping them all into the audience's lap and their main frustrations are conflict, whether that be romantic or literal, and tries for a middle ground between the two. It ends up pleasing neither, because the alpha kids just come across as miserable whiny cunts who loving despise each others' presence. To be fair, this is because they're miserable whiny cunts who loving despise each others' presence, and I get the metatextual level of trying to define what a failure of session looks like. The problem is, nobody likes reading about worthless failures for thousands of pages. If you read comic book-rear end comic books and are a DC fan, DC basically has the same problem with Jason Todd. He's a character defined as the Robin Who Failed, and his solo book ever since he got revived is all about how he's a miserable failure who can't improve because then he's not a failure any more. He can never have arcs that stick or really improve because then that'd betray what he was fundamentally created to do - and that's fail. Hussie created four Jason Todds (well, three Jason Todds and Roxy) and then unleashed them in their own little universe to whine and mope and be passive-aggressive assholes all day. And suddenly, the slow, deliberate pace of the beta kids is a turgid slog with the alphas. The conflict that defined Hivebent is now a bunch of petty slapfights in Act 6. It also sucks because Hussie ends up borrowing/importing ideas that worked from Hivebent to incredibly diminishing returns. Chief among them was romantic problems. Hivebent's romantic and relationship troubles reflects the way thirteen-year-olds view relationships, down to the absurdly silly way trolls procreate. It's a loving bucket, it's the sort of weird and off idea that thirteen-year-olds would have about how sex works. There was a chasteness, a specific innocence to troll relationships that made the stuff Vriska did to Tavros or Equius did to Aradia more palatable, because it had that same sort of childish honesty that "Will you be my girlfriend, y/n" passed notes in middle school reflect at that age. But Hussie made the alpha kids sixteen-year-olds and suddenly we get Dawson's Creek horseshit in Homestuck. I can't just imagine people holding hands and filling buckets (Whatever the gently caress that even means), these kids are now hardcore fuckin'. The Volcanosmooch despite being a direct thematic callback to what Equius did to Aradia comes across as definitely sociopathic and almost rapey in how Dirk manipulates Jake, and suddenly it's not funny and weird ha-ha look at these weird trolls and genuinely disturbing. IT's a doubling down on the things that worked in Hivebent but changed just enough to be abjectly terrible just like everything else with the alpha kids. Because they're loving worthless. And suddenly Hussie's now scrambling to replicate prior success. He gives the alphas their own trolls - despite the fact that both Calliborn and Calliope suffer from a dearth of characterization for a long time so come across as exposition machines, especially the latter. The cherubs also don't work as characters the same way the trolls did and why they did where they have complicated interpersonal relationships with each other. Hussie tries, with the whole cherubs at war thing, but it doesn't really work because it's yet more exposition over actual character work. And then on top of that all the Problems from Act 5 come home to roost in Act 6. People are pissed off that Hussie killed off trolls they liked so he brings in Meenah and Aranea, the latter of which is created explicitly to be insufferably annoying. He explains it as Feferi done right (and she was) and a Vriska since the old one got killed. But that's not enough and it doesn't really adequately explain who these people are so he has to come up with the beta trolls, so suddenly we now have 12 more "main characters". He invents the dancestors, and he suddenly and inexplicably turns HIC into the number two or three biggest baddie in a painfully orchestrated and unearned way. He's doubled down on what he thinks works by needlessly and endlessly introducing characters that are bare or tiny remixes of previously established ones because thats what made Homestuck popular and suddenly the cast size has doubled or tripled/ It's absurd. But none of that works because people can see that Meenah isn't Feferi, they are two completely separate characters and the Feferi fans didn't really get the closure they wanted. So he brings in the dreambubbles so not only can dead characters suddenly hang around again, and it's at this point he's completely lost the thread. It's just insane, how the comic just piled on more and more and more and more nonsense and convoluted bullshit to please everyone, in the process pleasing nobody. And at the center of it all is the alpha kids, the Poochy of Homestuck. Hussie tried to create a situation where he'd introduce four mains from the start the same way he accidentally introduce twelve of them, not understanding why the trolls work and the alphas didn't, and in the process he made an unreadable mess of a comic. And to be clear, it might have still worked if Hussie was a better writer, he still might've pulled off the fundamentally wrong-headed conception of the alphas if he did it with the same level of craft that he used for the trolls but he completely and utterly hosed up the execution every single god-damned step of the way in Act 6. Basically: Act 5 is the best act of Homestuck. Act 5 also permanently ruined Homestuck, creating an untenable situation with Hussie desperately trying to capture that creative and popularity lightning in a bottle from Hivebent on.
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| ← # ? Jun 18, 2016 07:58 |
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