I saw a post about the Homestuck game and tried to remember liking Homestuck. I mean, I still like Homestuck – the parts of it I liked have not changed (well, except for the blue arms) since I read them back in 2011, and although my taste has probably changed, that’s not what’s making me see it this way. I think what’s happened is basically that I’ve grown to dislike Andrew Hussie, and that makes it hard to immediately enjoy (as opposed to “enjoy by remembering how I used to enjoy it”) anything in his very distinctive style.
I should clarify – Andrew Hussie may well be a great guy if you know him in person, I have no idea and don’t mean to suggest ill of him. By “dislike Andrew Hussie” I largely mean “dislike Andrew Hussie’s style,” but it’s more than that – maybe “dislike Andrew Hussie’s creative persona.” His public comments on his work, and his pattern of behavior (in update schedule, interactions with fans, etc.) seems like it forms a continuous whole with the style. I’ll just write “Andrew Hussie” in quotes, to distinguish this from the real human being.
“Hussie” feels very … limited. There’s a brilliance to his style, but you get the feeling he couldn’t possibly create anything that wasn’t obviously created by him; you don’t get the feeling he ever learned the ordinary rules of art or fiction or humor or even the English language, although it’s easy not to care, since his breaking of rules is so often clever or interesting rather than just clumsy. He can write, for instance, in this particular tone of ironic grandiloquence which is full of crunchy, tasty turns of phrase and arresting images and metaphors, but you don’t ever see him dial this down to an “normal,” unironic, subtler elevated style – you get the feeling he can’t do any of the constituent pieces on their own, just the whole thing, like a gesture he can do with his hands but can’t explain. He has his own distinctive sense of humor, which is obsessed with fiction tropes (specifically, declaring that reality “should” follow tropes, whether it really will or not), and with lovingly detailed ribbing towards “bad” media. This is often hilarious by anyone’s standards, but he does it – that specific brand of humor, down to the individual beats sometimes – more consistently and repetitively than anyone would unless they couldn’t do anything else.
“Hussie” also has a creative persona which resists all criticism and asks all to trust in the artist’s sacred creative vision. This fits with the style: he cannot adapt to criticism, he cannot be what anyone else wants him to be, he can only do the one thing he knows how to do, and push it to further and further heights, and trust in the fact that the rest of humanity has generally been delighted with this eccentric performance so far. The voice he uses when talking as “Andrew Hussie, creator of MSPA” feels not too distinct from “Andrew Hussie, the narrator of MSPA”; both write in a way that superficially feels very artificial, knowingly bombastic, hiding everything behind an ironic wink and an assurance that if you just relax and let yourself enjoy the show, the master magician will deliver. This can be immensely frustrating, because you want him at some point to let up the act, to step out from the various ironic personae and “this is so much like that one bad movie” framing devices and talk to you straight, as a creative adult who puppeteers personae and framing for fun and profit. But that never, ever happens. Whether or not this is as deep as Hussie goes, it is as deep as “Hussie” goes. Scratch the surface and you keep finding more surface; nothing is ever not a joke or a reference or a put-on, nothing is ever not implicitly in quotation marks (or more aptly, being recorded on a low-budget movie camera). The hall of campy mirrors is endless.
If it isn’t already clear, I find this all very #relatable, and have often felt like I am doing tricks for the world in exactly this way. But maybe it’s this that makes “Hussie” just so frustrating to me. You want him to perform the final trick that is making the audience forget they’re at a magic show, to perform so hard he breaks through into the territory where you literally can’t tell his “acting” from anyone else’s “real behavior.” I feel like I’ve reached that point in a lot of my, well, life, and it feels wonderful. Whether he wants to or not, “Hussie” never quite gets there, and being who I am, it can be painful to watch.
Actually, he did get there, for a time. Homestuck at its height can give you this feeling of transcendence, where every frame you can try to box it into does not fully capture it, and for a time “Hussie’s” style feels not notably limited but notably limitless. The geeky, referential comedy is pulled off with such finesse that it feels like the work of some godlike being who’s whimsically decided to try its hand at a dorky webcomic and (accidentally, because it performs any act with equal godlike power) creates a dorky webcomic that is better than most things on planet earth. The absurd plot, full of tropes and comic book powers, is somehow sustained by a crystalline deterministic structure of incredible intricacy which you feel you’d need a seminar course to fully understand. The characters are crude cartoons, and yet they speak in such eerily animate voices you can’t quite believe any of them aren’t real people. Everything works on every level of irony and non-irony, self-awareness and naivete, crudity and brilliance. You stop checking Hussie’s antics for formal compliance with ordinary-person standards because he keeps passing your tests, even though he’s doing something clearly ridiculous.
Who cares if this weird kid’s fourth-grade teacher says he can’t do any of the homework and should be held back a grade? He just proved the Riemann Hypothesis. Admittedly, instead of concluding the proof with the customary “Q.E.D.” or Halmos symbol, he scrawled “OMG BUTT LAZERZ” all over the final page, but you see that’s actually a masterstroke of construction when one takes into consideration its echoes of his earlier work [five page explanation follows]. The weird kid is being being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is for his novel Stacey is Annoying Because She Keeps Asking Why I Get to Have Cookies Even When I Have Told Her a Lot of Times That My Mom Packs My Lunch and I Don’t Really Get a Choice, Also She Keeps Talking About Weird Girl Stuff: A Comic Opera (in Prose). The synopsis doesn’t really do it justice, but read it, and you will understand.
uu: WHAT MOST GIFTED ARTISANS WILL TELL YOU. IS THAT. CIRCLES ARE BASICALLY FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO DRAW.
uu: TRUST ME.
uu: IT’S LIKE A PARADOX. A SHAPE WITHOUT ANGLES. WHAT??
uu: SO I FUCKING CHEATED.
uu: I NAVIGATED THE IRRATIONAL PERIMETER BY MAKING A LOT OF EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, TOTALLY LOGICAL MARKS. FORMING A WHOLE BUNCH OF LITTLE RIGHT ANGLES.
uu: THE CHEATING PART HAPPENS WHEN I DO THIS A LOT. SO IT GOES IN A ROUND DIRECTION.
uu: THIS ONE CAME OUT WELL I THINK. BUT THERE’S ROOM TO IMPROVE.
uu: I HAVE THEORIZED THAT IF I KEEP MAKING BOGUS CIRCLES LIKE THIS.
uu: WHILE DRAWING MORE AND MORE ANGLES. BUT SMALLER. SO SMALL THAT YOU START CAN’T SEEING THEM.
uu: THAT THE ILLUSION OF THE CIRCLE WILL BE COMPLETE! AND PEOPLE WILL BELIEVE IN THE FAKE CIRCLE. LIKE A BUNCH OF SUCKERS.
uu: I BET NOBODY HAS THOUGHT OF THAT CIRCLE STRATEGY. I THINK I’M THE FIRST AT THIS IDEA. AND BEST AT IT ALREADY.
uu: PEOPLE THINK I’M DUMB. ESPECIALLY THE VOICE IN MY HEAD.
uu: AND THEY MAY BE RIGHT ABOUT ME BEING DUMB.
uu: BUT WHEN IT COMES TO THE SPECIAL WAY I DO THINGS. WHICH IS ALWAYS ACTUALLY. THE PERFECT WAY.
uu: I AM.
uu: A GENIUS!
But after 2011 “Hussie” was up to nothing except his old tricks, and those tricks got a little worn out, and “Hussie” was always – reliably, infuratingly – himself. The finale was an animation about a frog, which the weird kid had been dreaming about for a decade – executed by a team of up-and-coming artists who had become his acolytes. It was, sources quote him as saying, “totally epic.” The weird kid’s next novel is also about a frog, because frogs are cool, but this one has a funny top hat and raps about how dumb Stacey is. The new frog’s flow is impeccable, but the critics focus sensibly on other matters, and they are ruthless this time.
In my fullest period of Homestuck obsession, I frequently compared “Hussie” to Nabokov. This was a cute way of elevating “Hussie” and making myself sound smart, but there’s a real similarity there: the arrogant, seemingly artificial public persona; the unique and somewhat cramped sensibility, which is always great without stopping to be good; the indifference to all creative work besides their own and certain cherished reference ponts; the endless self-satisfied running-the-hands-over the artist’s own prior work and pre-existing obsessions; the elevation of those obsessions, in all their petty particularity, to higher and higher reaches of formal brilliance and technical achievement. (See also.) They take the treasured trivialities of their former years and make them “worthy of legitimate attention” by associating them with ingenuities of formal structure; to coin a word, they’re “nostalgebraists.”
Nabokov fooled them all, and got his star on the canonical map in the end, but “Hussie” may never pull it off. It feels, anyway, like he had a chance and then lost it.