This is the last part of a short series written by Victoria, who you can follow at @arachonteur. You can also check out Burning Down the House, her Homestuck fan project.
“I killed those guys because they were awful. Everybody is awful these days. It’s enough to make anyone crazy.”
American juggao, Shaggy 2 Dope
You are 100% certain Shaggy 2 Dope said that.
>Psycholonials routinely fails to depict any character other than its protagonist with empathy.
So this is really the thing that sticks in my craw. The thing that grinds my gears. This is why I’m writing this.
The narrative wants to hate Z. It desperately, terribly wants to convey her from the same angle you would a character like Walter White. Someone whose lifetime of bad decisions ends explosively and dramatically.
But it can’t. It’s limited by its perspective. The story never moves away from Z. There are no clowns with speaking roles that aren’t mutinous scumbags, and even Z’s future-wife, Abby, who has the leverage to end the story in Chapter 9, takes a backseat to Z’s long, extended breakdown. This makes a decent amount of sense – Z is the protagonist, villain or not – but the core of making a character like this work is in their impact on others, and outside of Z and Abby, it’s questionable how many characters in Psycholonials are even sentient.
I hinted at Percy’s existence earlier, and now it’s time to talk about Percy. (This is difficult.) Percy is one of the few named characters with speaking roles. He’s a schlubby gamer boy, and he’s murdered in the middle of the story. He’s one of the few characters that’s not just a prop that can hold a gun, and he’s… well, even when he’s in the story, he’s a non-presence. He gets played and pushed around and used as a fall guy by Z until he dies, and after that, his relevance in the end is that his dead face is used as Zhen’s lock screen, and he gets a horse named after him. This is one of the “good ending” beats.
To go back to the Breaking Bad comparison, when Walt does something shitheaded, there are stakes at play – Walter White’s actions affect others directly, and the reactions of those characters are the soul of conflict. Walter getting involved with Tuco in seasons 1 and 2 leads Hank into the line of fire with the cartel, and leaves Hank with trauma, and he has to forge a lie to justify why he was gone for so long that results in involuntary hospitalization. Hank is a cop, and doesn’t deserve sympathy for that, but he is still a character to be engaged by – he’s got things going on other than just “is there.”
This sort of call and response with the world around them is totally nonpresent when it comes to Z, to the point where one of the driving questions in Chapter 9 is whether Z will experience any consequences for this, at all. (She doesn’t.)
Clowns die en masse in war against Massachusetts citizens, in war against America, and in war against themselves, but it’s never a loss, except for when it personally affects Z. Z literally cares more about the death of Abby’s horse, David Hasselhoof, than she does about the dozens of clowns that die in Chapter 8. It’s a consequence, but not a loss. And it tries this despite the fact that you, the reader, whether you want to believe it or not, are more like the clowns that die one after another than Zhen.
The final beats of Psycholonials proper is Zhen confronting her form as a “successor”, a space ghost clown that Riotus was training to be named Z, drawing the Ben Solo/Kylo Ren line between Zhen and Z. In the final confrontation with Z, she (Z) directly frames you, the reader, along the lines of any given clown that gets killed over nothing.
Z offers Zhen a choice, between a sword and a crown. These two shapes are quite literally painted in the stars. While the obvious metaphor is that the sword is to be taken up against the United States, and the crown would be to rest on her laurels, it’s not – the sword quite literally a sword of Damocles. Zhen can run away from her issues some more, and have to live with the fact that she destroyed America, that some day this sword may fall from the stars and kill her, or take the crown, and return to endless praise and writing more Homestu– I mean, leading more clown armies.
The game has teased the reader with interactivity for quite a bit, and in the last moments, it finally “gives it” to the reader, in a sort of corny way. You can make your choice on what you think Zhen could do, and both options are wrong to choose, because the thing being expressed here is actually, “don’t tell Zhen what to do.” Even if you agree with Zhen, the story berates you for having an opinion at all.
While Hussie wants to portray fandom as a cult – and in the right/wrong hands, this can be the case – it’s just a simple fact that by default, it’s not. It’s a community like any other, and communities are made up of people, for better or worse. Community can be a thing leveraged by abusers without necessarily being a cult. After Zhen runs from the fire that she started, the throne of Supreme Honkifex and assumed control over the nation of Whimsiphae is up for grabs, and a terrible succession war starts. Those who attempt to succeed to the throne of Supreme Honkifex – a role synonymous with creative control over Homestuck – are mutinous scumbags, snakes, and clout chasers.
The very first Supreme Honkifex after Mizzlebip fakes their own death is a reference to Sugarshoe, from Whistles, whose only appearance in Whistles is to be a mutinous scumbag and overtake the circus after the old ringleader dies, and the credit sequence is jam packed with clown ascension and assassination.
(Actually, this bit is really really funny – all the new clown popes are drawn over historical leaders, and their assassinations drawn over depictions of their fall. At one point, the infamous photo of Stalin and Yezhov is referenced, but in the place of Yezhov, Stalin is erased. It’s pretty funny.)
The Jubilites are doomed to eternal warring because they do not seek what the wise sought, but instead just chase the crown. They’re murdered in quick succession because the lust for power does not run solely in one person. Anyone who would challenge Zhen’s authority is de facto evil, and only wants the crown for themselves. And then the last role to define is Mizzlebip, someone who was loyal towards Zhen the whole time. Mizzlebip is the only character to make the run to successor intact. It’s Mizzlebip, in the end, that takes the crown from the stars, and spreads the Whimsiphae lore to a bunch of other planets using psychic powers.
Remember that Jubilites are shorthand for Homestuck fans, and the title of Supreme Honkifex, in this read, is shorthand for control over Homestuck. Even Mizzlebip, a character who is sycophantic towards Zhen to the point of insanity, plots and schemes into getting Zhen out of the picture.
While Psycholonials ends with a 10 minute animation of Abby and Zhen living happily in Fiji, far away from the fires they started, the actual last beat of the story is a recounting of Joculine’s arc.
While the reasoning never really comes up in Psycholonials proper, there’s a trick. After you complete the credits, and Zhen makes the choice to not return to the Jubilite nationstates, the game replaces your saves with a letter that loads you into a letter from Zhen to Joucaline. This letter is kind of rambly, but it’s got a couple of coherent theses. In order:
- Islands are pretty great because their borders are natural and imposed by the ocean, as opposed to the fake borders of the United States. (Sure.)
- America was rightfully destroyed. (Yeah.)
- People get mad at poorly-handled topics in media because they are fundamentally unhappy people who need to log off. (???)
- Love cures all wounds. (I guess.)
I’ve kind of avoided the topic because it’s difficult to contextualize, but I did put “questionable takes on cancel culture” in the content warnings list. So you can’t really blame me for this.
Psycholonials uses the word “anti” a lot. Like, a lot. A lot a lot a lot. In the context of the story, it’s mostly synonymous with “hater” – an aspect derived from the K-pop influence on the story – but in the last letter, it shifts strangely. Fandom writ large doesn’t use the word “anti” the same way band fandoms do.
“Anti” can mean a lot of things. It’s purposefully truncated for maximum applicability, it’s a nice shibboleth. If you don’t already know what it means, the way it’s said conveys its meaning. Nobody wants to be an “anti”, those guys all bring the mood down with their virtue signaling and their demands to not be fucking weird for 10 minutes. I have no desire to try and drill down and specify what “anti” could be short for here, but it kind of speaks to what the biggest issue with Psycholonials is.
Joculine is characterized as having cancelled Zhen in the past. The facetious thing Zhen says to characterize her is, word for word, “um actually, its about holding certain individuals ACCOUNTABLE for their previously PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR!!”. It’s shallow, and it’s almost… strange. The position that Psycholonials takes regarding media criticism is that this kind of outrage is fake, made up and amplified to try and find meaning in an intrinsically empty existence, and the desire to be this way can be solved with love.
I don’t even know how to begin with this, other than in one way. This is going to be a strange comparison at first, but JK Rowling wrote a manifesto a while back.
Not a lot of people actually read it, and it’s obvious why – it’s a hateful little rag. But the pattern that stuck out is that when JKR repeated a well-travelled talking point, it was eloquent and confident. Worded in ways that are difficult to argue with, because of the TWERF song and dance being so codified. But that manifesto isn’t just talking points, repeated with the kind of platform that JK Rowling has. She also attempts to make points of her own, and when she does, they’re borderline incoherent. I’m not going to repeat any of them here, because the words themselves aren’t comparable – the condemnation of colonialism isn’t comparable to noxious transmisogyny.
But it’s kind of similar in this way: Psycholonials wants you to know it knows imperialism is bad. Capitalism is bad. The United States is bad. Colonialism is bad. But it gets to the dubiously-real “cancel culture”, and all it can muster is “you are just mad because you are angry.”
This is the last beat of Psycholonials.
>Wow, okay, why are you recommending it then?
I’m not one to only recommend things I think are perfect. We’re all better than that, right? You’re smart enough to recognize that a recommendation isn’t a flat, point-blank approval of every single bit of something. Art is made by people, and people are flawed, and more often than not, those two facts are directly related.
As critical as I’ve been of the narrative’s tendency to extremely empathize with only Zhen, I do like Zhen a lot. She’s no Vriska, but you know. Who could be.
The way her mental illness overlaps with her voice as an author is something I really valued seeing depicted, since it’s a difficult thing to actually express without coming off as corny as all fuck. The moment where Zhen declares war on the US is also extremely… it is Extremely. It’s a haze of real, genuine anger and despair that I think is resonant and cathartic, even if the correct thematic choice is to backpedal off of it immediately. It’s almost compelling enough to make you want to take the crown ending, just to see that fury, that burning anger made good on.
Almost. By the time the choice actually comes up, the metaphor is too obvious to actually take the crown ending.
I also didn’t talk much about the successor plot, because well, I just think it’s good, with very few qualifications. It’s a cool thing that Riotus, the stand-in for inspiring authors of the past is also an open, outright colonizer. It’s a good way to convey a complex idea – the authors who are considered great are measured by the expectations of the culture they live in, cultures which condone and support things like colonialism. It’s also cool to me that Zhen, despite always taking the sword choice and denying her role as clown pope, still has a successor form that must be confronted and destroyed. People, against all good judgment, are inspired by Hussie’s work, myself included, and remembering that all creators you like are just Some Guy is a worthwhile thing to be reminded of.
I also like it on a purely craft-driven level – I like the art a lot. It’s easy to chump on the mixels (<- really funny phrase) but even when panel-to-panel art quality isn’t the key, Andrew Hussie isn’t a bad visual artist. The game always looks a specific way, and sometimes, it’s even good. But even when it looks bad, I can respect it because it’s a choice! Nothing else looks like Psycholonials. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing to you, it is a thing! And by god, the story is full to the brim with insane clown designs.
My favorites are Mizzlebip and her many iterations as Secretary of Jape, Chamomile Giddyup, and Uncle Imbroglio.
And the soundtrack is great! There’s a lot of comparisons to Joker (2019) that people make when it comes to Psycholonials, and I’m certain the soundtrack being primarily driven by cellos didn’t help. But honest to god I think a large part of why the ending took so long to fade on me is because of how extremely good the soundtrack is. The final remix of Ephemeral Muse is stellar. (Hehe. Stellar.)
At the end of the day, Psycholonials is a dour, miserable little thing. It’s a salty, cruel goodbye to a work that took up a lot of people’s lives, then crashed and burned, really dramatically.
Maybe that’s worth enough on its own?
Indie Hell Zone 
I finished Psycholonials recently and was looking for impressions on the story online and found your piece. As someone who has little knowledge of Homestuck and whatever Hussie’s past media or internet exploits are, I found Psycholonials to be an acerbic but nuanced and powerful take on the whole social media shebang, its relation to politics, and its attendant ills. So after having read through the 3 parts of your analysis what I think is that you read way too much into the Homestuck connections and this leads to what I think is an pretty reductionist reading of Psycholonials. At points you also seem to conflate Zhen’s perspective, which is clearly unreliable and extremely skewed, with the game’s overall perspective, which is very different.
Before getting into my takes I should lay out my views on the VN first. I saw much of the VN as a character study of Zhen: basically the Zoomer version of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver or the students from Lindsay Anderson’s If… Zhen is really an irony-poisoned terminally-online political nihilist masquerading as a leftist, with justified righteous fury directed at the social structures she resides in, but she herself has no proper cohesive ideals or articulation of them since much of her political agenda manifests as a vague cynical anger which is more destructive than constructive. Her manifesto is nonsensical, something she straight-up admits during her breakdown in the ending, and she is clearly not fit to be the political figurehead of a movement. I think it’s clear by the end that even if she makes valid points about the state of the world, she has no solutions for them because her trauma, her opportunism, her cynicism, and her nihilism leads her to translate everything into its most violent and destructive outcomes. And the VN is mainly about what happens if you take such a person and have the entire world bow to her perspective, let everything go her way: what erupts from it? Like Travis’ impotent and anger-driven shootout at the end of Taxi Driver, like the fantastical school shootout at the end of If…, Zhen’s revolution can only end in meaningless downfall and vague violence. The main difference is she has one lifeline in the form of Abby to drag her back from the abyss. And escapism makes sense for her as the ultimate solution to her problems because Zhen is in no mental state to take accountability. As the world caves into her clown world, as she sees the distorted outcome of every mad objective being granted to her solipsistic viewpoint, breakdown and the requisite seclusion & healing is really the only possible ending.
So I found your points regarding the superficiality and underdevelopment of the plot, which leads you to read the Hussie subtext into the story, weird. Actually the plot is pretty logical and thematically cohesive, just in a way that exaggerates reality and has it reflect psychology rather than verisimilitude. Yet most of the chapters follow a similar, predictable structure. Zhen faces some trouble, escalates it in the worst possible way but manages to get out of it, and arrives at a new state with more trouble, more problems, and a larger and larger scale, all until the house of cards comes tumbling down on her. The Deus Ex Machinas are a part of that, because even though the story is social satire, it is moreso psychological analysis. A good comparison is Bojack Horseman which is a show where the main character constantly gets into trouble but is usually saved only for him to dig himself deeper into the whole. From a plot perspective Bojack also has its fair share of conveniences, some played as jokes, but as the character always responds in a way that develops his character and his psychology, these conveniences never get in the way of the primary thrust. So when you talk about Abby’s parents dying you say you don’t think it lands because “the narrative wants us to care”. Actually I don’t think the narrative wants us to care about Abby’s parents dying. It wants us to care about Zhen’s shenanigans finally coming home to roost, directly damaging the one person she cares about, exactly at the tipping point when she’s ready to sever all ties with Zhen. It is about Zhen coming to terms with the closing sphere of real violence around her which is the direct result of her political nihilism.
As for this: “And the answer is that this is not a story about killing cops and raising a clown army to very justifiably get the United States’ ass, but a story about Homestuck, and its impact on specifically Andrew Hussie.”
It could be about Andrew Hussie. I have no idea. But first and foremost it is about Zhen, who the author’s viewpoint is positioned against throughout the whole game. And it is not about Zhen raising a clown army taking down the US because Zhen is the worst person to raise a clown army even in justified defence.
“In turn, things that don’t make sense in the literal story make more sense in the nonliteral one – it makes more sense that Zhen could just leave New Whimsiphae without being killed instantly by the United States death machines if you read it not as “Zhen is leaving the Jubilite armies behind” but as “Hussie is leaving Homestuck behind”. The US has had people killed over less, and this kind of “nobody cares, really” thing really forces the end when it comes to this kind of analysis.”
This once again conflates Zhen’s POV with Hussie’s. Psycholonials is already from the start a world which caves in to Zhen’s worldview. Her ‘paradise’ or ideal end is one where she escapes all accountability and detaches from the internet toxicity that was eating her alive while reinforcing her real connections. It could be a statement on Homestuck, but it also makes sense from the standpoint of character study, such that to leap from one to the other, in a work where the authorial POV is plainly set against the character’s POV, is going to be an inevitably reductive take.
“It’s a shame – a lot of the literal beats hit are extremely interesting. At one point, Zhen, after getting COVID and taking a bullet to the leg, gives a clown named Joculine the role of second in command. While I’ll be talking more about Joculine later, at this point she provides an interesting question. She repeatedly asks Zhen, “what’s next?” which, in the text, is about a revolution that threatens the stability of America. It’s an extremely interesting, complex question that could be answered through the medium of interactive fiction. But it just kind of pisses Zhen off, because she doesn’t know. It pisses me off because it’s only a question about “If a revolution succeeds, what would happen next?” in the most vapid possible way – it’s as much, if not even more, a question of “what happens next in Homestuck?”,which is not nearly as important a question.”
This is just a really weird point where you attack the text for not being what you want it to be, but read into what you think it really is as the reductive Hussie subtext, then get mad that it is the latter when it is neither of those things. This moment is neither about Hussie ‘asking what happens next in Homestuck’ nor about the answering of a ‘complex question like a revolution that threatens the stability of America’. It is about Zhen. Zhen’s answer is vapid because Zhen’s political motivations, at their core, are vapid — a point which the entire game has been trying to make. She has only known destruction, escalation, and lashing out at the world, so why would she care about the real dimensions of a revolution she wants nothing to deal with? Rather, she executes Joculine because she sees the same nihilism and opportunism in Joculine, a clout-chaser whose motivations are possibly about as shallow as her own, whose control of the movement would probably lead to the same doomed ends as her own (which the string of assassinations depicted in the ending serves to reinforce).
Then for the whole section of “Psycholonials, despite being wrapped in trauma resulting from it, refuses to critique its past.” — this is where you conduct the most gratuitous reductions of the text. Mainly taking lots of stuff that are more reflective of Zhen’s psychology as somehow indicative of Hussie’s inability critique himself. It’s just so weird how much your analysis moves to everything around the text while soundly ignoring what actually goes on in the text, even when Hussie does not seem to be making half the points you think he’s making, given they are delivered through the limited unreliable POV of his heroine.
Like for example: “Despite being wrapped in Homestuck, very rarely is the actual text of the Jubilite Manifesto, the stand-in for Homestuck, explored…There’s a few moments – the Manifesto’s gender triangle is pretty similar in nature to troll romance, a lens for the world so shockingly coherent that people still use it. It’s hard to not think of that as a parallel to Homestuck, but critique, from any angle, is shockingly missing. ”
The Jubilite Manifesto is plainly a nonsensical doctrine that Zhen came up with (or dreamed up, depending on your interpretation of the dream scenes) whose irony-drenched vague anarchistic proclamations is indicative of how little she has thought things through, while she opportunistically invokes leftist tropes and themes to attract easy clout. That it is unexplored is because its exploration is not important to the narrative, only that it apparently has enough pull with Zhen’s audience to hoodwink them into rallying under her.
“Pranxis is effectively just praxis, but with clown bullshit – in the text of Psycholonials, this is stealing from the rich. There’s that aforementioned crypto scam – this is what pranxis is. It’s shallow, in a way that seems almost purposeful, coming from an author who once infamously put paragraphs of pirate-themed pornography in their story for the sake of characterizing a character who was, at that point, a secondary character who was slated to die within pages. And it’s understandable, to some extent, but it’s disappointing. It’s afraid of its own stakes, and is more interested in presenting the story of the Homestuck fandom and its massive reach, and its impact on Hussie than anything else.”
Uh, like, throughout the story isn’t it clear that Pranxis is more vague nonsense given a Marxist verneer, that Zhen came up with to justify any and all forms of opportunistic shenanigans under the veil of a social movement when what she’s aiming for is gaining clout? One doesn’t have to make this weird detour all the way to Hussie’s motivations when Zhen’s motivations and psychology for utilizing such a concept is pretty obvious.
And now moving on to the next section:
“The narrative wants to hate Z. It desperately, terribly wants to convey her from the same angle you would a character like Walter White. Someone whose lifetime of bad decisions ends explosively and dramatically.”
I don’t know whether the narrative wants us to hate Zhen. I know it wants us to analyze and understand her motivations and actions in all their problematic, rage-infused, nihilistic glory. The story is way more descriptive than prescriptive. It gives Zhen the ultimate playground to realize every one of her mad desires. And it tells us that the outcomes will naturally be destructive than constructive, with her burning out, no matter how righteous the cause one fights for. But whether this translates to Zhen being ultimately someone one should hate is a different matter.
“But it can’t. It’s limited by its perspective. The story never moves away from Z. There are no clowns with speaking roles that aren’t mutinous scumbags, and even Z’s future-wife, Abby, who has the leverage to end the story in Chapter 9, takes a backseat to Z’s long, extended breakdown. This makes a decent amount of sense – Z is the protagonist, villain or not – but the core of making a character like this work is in their impact on others, and outside of Z and Abby, it’s questionable how many characters in Psycholonials are even sentient.”
This is true, but it never moves away from Zhen because the entire story is about Zhen’s solipsism and the hole she digs herself into. The story doesn’t fathom the impact on other characters except Abby because Zhen doesn’t fathom the impact of other characters. Percy is a non-presence because Zhen sees him as one, even in death where all he becomes is a symbol for the ‘point of no return’ for her. Notice the part in the car where the narrator, channeling Zhen’s thoughts, ignores whatever Percy says and dismisses it as some emotional stuff: this indicates that it is Zhen screening out the world around her, rather than the story reducing his role simply because he’s not an important character. Zhen isn’t a character in Breaking Bad, a story which is about a man trying to balance his own crime and hubris against an external reality. The approach to depicting Zhen’s world is closer to anime like Lain or Evangelion or the Monogatari series: reflecting interior rather than exterior reality. The world of Monogatari is equally absent of personages because the main character doesn’t witness them, alienated as he is. Zhen doesn’t recognize others other than Abby and conducts her revolution in the same detached way she creates a social media presence: because the story wants to depict her alienation, and is about her alienation, not (just) about the detailed mechanics of a political revolt or whatever other political themes ornament the hellscape of Zhen’s mind.
“The game has teased the reader with interactivity for quite a bit, and in the last moments, it finally “gives it” to the reader, in a sort of corny way. You can make your choice on what you think Zhen could do, and both options are wrong to choose, because the thing being expressed here is actually, “don’t tell Zhen what to do.” Even if you agree with Zhen, the story berates you for having an opinion at all.”
The final choice is less about berating the reader than indicating the final break from solipsism that Zhen undertakes. Throughout the story the choices are framed as part of the larger dream-narrative that might either be a delusional self-justification of all her actions or genuine space imperialists trying to fuck with her mind. Either way, both are unhealthy for her in the long run. The choice is a final opportunity for Zhen to throw the one relationship she has left into the fire, but that she ultimately chooses is to show how she’s gone beyond viewing herself deterministically, as a puppet making increasingly bad decisions for herself, to one who has a chance at choosing love, social relations, which defeats alienation, nihilism, and cynicism.
And when we come to the last part dealing with the message bottle, you once again shift Zhen’s words purely onto Hussie. That is, reading it purely as Hussie’s words despite it delivered in the limited viewpoint of his heroine whose ending is a Pyrrhic victory of sorts while she tries to piece herself back together mentally in a life of seclusion from the world, whose only answer to larger things is a messy sort of self-acceptance because that’s what she can muster and finds important for herself now.
“Joculine is characterized as having cancelled Zhen in the past. The facetious thing Zhen says to characterize her is, word for word, “um actually, its about holding certain individuals ACCOUNTABLE for their previously PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR!!”. It’s shallow, and it’s almost… strange. The position that Psycholonials takes regarding media criticism is that this kind of outrage is fake, made up and amplified to try and find meaning in an intrinsically empty existence, and the desire to be this way can be solved with love…But it’s kind of similar in this way: Psycholonials wants you to know it knows imperialism is bad. Capitalism is bad. The United States is bad. Colonialism is bad. But it gets to the dubiously-real “cancel culture”, and all it can muster is “you are just mad because you are angry.””
And this really gets to the core of your whole approach in this analysis: the expectation that Psycholonials is somehow supposed to be a grand leftist statement on politics, when it is in fact more of a character study of a trauma-ridden political nihilist whose left-leaning political commitments are hypocritical and empty shouts into the void. Thus tellingly you say “the position that Psycholonials takes regarding media criticism…” when it is rather the position that Psycholonials takes to general political nihilism caused by being terminally online. Not to mention it doesn’t really say anything about cancel culture, only what Zhen (who as you know is characterized as incessantly paranoid and damaged) sees as cancel culture, a view whose manifestation is a symptom of her own troubles rather than any overarching statement. So throughout the analysis you see failure with Psycholonials’ grand political themes (which it wasn’t even aiming for in the first place, being a more intimate story) and, being dissatisfied, proceed to create this weird simulacra where everything in the text is replaced with paratext, where everything sidesteps a more reasonable character-driven explanation and points straight to Hussie. I mean, I guess it’s a valid opinion to have, but it’s also excessively hermetic and requires a reductive, almost kabbalistic approach to the text which reduces all the nuance and character study to an elaborate decoding of it all being the whining of some dude about his old fanbase and his old webcomic. Truthfully, I have no idea what Hussie did to create such a team of excavators to obsess about him that much, but really makes me wonder what sort of insanity Homestuck unleashed upon the world. Perhaps if I do ever read Homestuck I will also become a Hussie-hermeticist, but for now I can’t help but feel that you’re missing what is there for emptier air.
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As someone who has read Homestuck, I want to chime in to agree enthusiastically with your criticism of Victoria’s review. It’s ironic that she projects so much of her own experience with and need for catharsis w/re: Homestuck onto the author, to whom she then attributes the exact confessional project she’s undertaken here.
I think your read on the text is much better, adoraworldtranslations.
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