09/19/2022: New Microphone is in!

You heard that right! The mic is in the mailbox right now! I feel like John Egbert on his birthday, knowing that SBURB is in the mailbox with the little flappy flag thing sticking up (which, it should be noted, means there's outgoing mail, not incoming mail). Which is to say, I feel excited and like I have no idea what's coming my way. Unrelated, but I've been getting really hyped about Homestuck. I saw Jan Misali's video about it, and while it's all just about the mechanics of Homestuck rather than the plot, I appreciated the deep dive into Homestuck lore. Now I have something to point my friends to if they ever ask me about cool things in Homestuck.

Homestuck Brain-rot Disorder

I was about 12 when Homestuck first started in 2009, but I didn't discover it until I was about 15 / 16. I was in high school marching band, a freshman trumpet player who was an alternate. I was asked to instead be part of the color guard as the main character of our show. Yes, it sounds like fanfic, but it's true; our show was called Dreams and Nightmares, and I was supposed to be a little kid on an oversized bed with a giant teddy bear and a storybook, dozing off to Dreamland to have dreams and nightmares scored by a high school band. They probably picked me because, even as an adult, I'm short. 5'2", to be exact, and I bet that sold the illusion of a kid better than if I was of average height for a high schooler. Nevertheless, I had a great deal of fun!

What does that have to do with Homestuck? Well, one day, the Away marching band was queueing up right next to me, and I was bored, so I tried to make friends. Now, my social skills were (are) lacking, so I walked up to the percussion section and asked the best question I knew to make friends: "Do any of y'all like Sonic the Hedgehog?" And, suprisingly, it worked! I exchanged emails with a percussionist, and she eventually got me into Homestuck.

I think I discovered Homestuck at just the right time in my life. It's a coming-of-age story with lots and lots of technical lore that I loved obsessing over. My home-life at the time was... lacking in certain areas, and having a world to escape to that was funny, interesting, and made for my age range felt wonderful. I still have posters of Homestuck in my apartment, and it's nice to look back on it fondly.

Fun Facts with Grimbark:

  • This site is formatted like the Homestuck website!
    • The three shades of grey used are the same as Homestuck.com
    • The shade of yellow for the Nav Bar is the same as Pesterchum, the in-universe instant messager used by the kids.
    • The fonts used are Courier Standard and Verdana.
    • I wasn't sure what style of site I wanted, so I wanted to first emulate a site that I used to spend a lot of time on.
  • Grimbark is a reference to Jade Harley.
  • I once created a troll OC named Niwrad. He was an Olive blood with a two-headed wolf Lusus.
  • Using Better Discord, you can use this Pesterchum theme to make Discord look like Pesterchum!
  • If you want to read Homestuck, do not use the official release.

While I have been hyping up Homestuck for a while now, I do acknowledge that it has its own flaws. It's not perfect. Hell, some of its flaws are glaring and really bad. I won't list them here because people much more eloquent and observant than me have already pointed them out. The Jan Misali video linked above goes more in-depth into some issues, for example. It should also be noted that I was a sheltered kid who grew up in a rural, conservative area when I first read it. Lots of things either flew over my head or just didn't seem like problems at the time. As an adult, I notice things more, and I know there are issues with both the work itself and the author.

I'm going to compare it to the feeling that I bet a lot of Harry Potter fans felt when they learned more about JKR. I didn't read Harry Potter; I was a "mainstream = bad" type of teenager. Still, Harry Potter was a huge deal for a lot of my peers, and they wanted to live in the wizarding world. I absolutely see the appeal! However, as the author's thoughts and opinions were revealed or changed, many fans felt betrayed, scorned, and guilty for loving HP. It's painful to see that the author of a work that you enjoy turned out to be an asshole, to say the least.

It's confusing, you know?

"Do I need to stop consuming this work?"

"Am I a bad person for liking it still?"

"What, if anything, did I internalize because of this work?"

"What assumptions were made in this work that are harmful?"

"Am I supporting someone who either I disagree with or who would actively wish me harm?"

These are all questions that I asked myself and that I'm betting a lot of HP fans had to ask themselves. It's complicated, messy, and is unfortunately a case-by-case basis both by the works and by the person. My thoughts are that enough people took the fandom of Homestuck away from the author such that I can still enjoy it, but this will not be the same conclusion that others reach. And that's okay.

Today's Final Thoughts:

Death of the Author is a 20th century literary analysis concept in which the author's views, political stances, demographics, history, and other traits should not be given special consideration when judging a literary work or extracting a meaning from a work. In other words, the author's interpretation of the "correct" meaning of a work is merely one possible reading, and it is up to the reader to inscribe their own meaning onto it. When I first came across this concept, I was repulsed. "Of course the author's meaning is the right one!" I thought, "If their word doesn't mean anything, how can they tell us anything?" Now I understand that Death of the Author isn't meant to be the catalyst for chaotic readings. Rather, it's meant to allow readers some breathing room. We instill our own meaning on our experiences while reading. To me, this means that if the author is an asshole, I can ignore them and carry on. If the work itself stands up on its own two legs, that's all I care about. Sure, I will avoid supporting the author if they're an asshole, but I can still enjoy what I want.