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It also seems kind of lovely that he's basically describing his complete failure to direct his fanbase, and hanging out the new creators he appointed to take all the heat in his absence, as being somehow noble and wise rather than lazy and irresponsible.
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Nov 13, 2021 21:26
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Feels like Hussie at his most grandiose and least perceptive. Universalising his experience of being at the head of a vast and multifarious fandom to "fandoms are cults" just feels like projection of his own history with Homestuck into a general maxim. That said, I get why he feels this way. Back in the day 4chan Homestuck fans found his address and sent him like, a box of dildos or something, and at the time everyone played it off as a joke, but honestly, what a creepy experience. He always used to project a persona like an enthusiastic ringmaster who gloried in that sort of thing - now you wonder if he's looking back on it and thinking, what the gently caress was that? What strikes me more than anything is that at some point, the collaborative spirit with which he created Homestuck, sourcing contributions and pursuing creative relationships with community members, turned adversarial. As always happens with large fandoms, you got a small group of people who decided they hated him for imagined slights, which probably made that dynamic fraught, and then the stuff with the game studio's repeated ructions gave people justifiable animus, and maybe made that sort of continued collaboration impossble. But that's all specific and historical - and he treats it in this interview like it was the inevitable sweep of history. Maybe he's right in part - I know of no large fandom that doesn't have at least one small sect who've decided that they hate the creator for any reason they can find - but other problems seem to be specifically connected to his own actions in a way he doesn't want to acknowledge.
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Nov 14, 2021 00:56
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hes right
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Nov 14, 2021 01:51
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Android Blues posted:Maybe he's right in part - I know of no large fandom that doesn't have at least one small sect who've decided that they hate the creator for any reason they can find - but other problems seem to be specifically connected to his own actions in a way he doesn't want to acknowledge. It definitely kind of feels like "if I'd done anything I would have been responsible for the results, but I did nothing, so I'm not."
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Nov 14, 2021 02:14
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Rand Brittain posted:It definitely kind of feels like "if I'd done anything I would have been responsible for the results, but I did nothing, so I'm not." Yeah, pretty much. I think he sees a glimmer of truth, fandoms do get weird and given sufficient size there will be sub-groups who choose to harass creatives on the project just for the thrill of bullying someone, but it's all obscured by the desire to post-facto justify "this would have happened no matter what I did". His decisions around the game studio specifically and the way that controversy was handled probably exacerbated the situation badly, but he turns away from that repeatedly in the interview. Then there's all the other stuff drip-fed over the past few years, like the disastrous failed ARG where one of the plot points was that Hitler wasn't really anti-semitic and was just a patsy for a global conspiracy - which I think Hussie wrote because he thought it was funny, without realising he was recreating the exact rhetoric of racist conspiracy theories as a Homestuck easter egg. There were a lot of eminently avoidable mistakes!
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Nov 14, 2021 02:56
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Fandoms are the worst thing thats ever happened to media and its enjoyment.
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Nov 14, 2021 02:59
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ArfJason posted:Fandoms are the worst thing thats ever happened to media and its enjoyment. I'd argue that'd be capitalism myself
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Nov 14, 2021 03:10
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that interview is pretty self-serving, as if hussie didn't invite the wave of interest, but fandoms loving suck shackling any part of your self-perception to the contents of creative media you didn't make is dangerous at best and horrible at worst, all the more so when it's not a complete work
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Nov 14, 2021 03:13
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Jen X posted:that interview is pretty self-serving, as if hussie didn't invite the wave of interest, but fandoms loving suck Also felt like he found the cult analogy to be very clever and cutting the way he kept bringing it back up. Not entirely wrong, just kind of annoying.
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Nov 14, 2021 04:13
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ArfJason posted:hes right Yeah, pretty obviously
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Nov 14, 2021 04:26
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Oh, for pity's sake. Extreme fans are horrible invasive people. Many of the people in a fandom are just hanging around going "ooh this is like Sandy Koufax first appearance rookie year", only they're doing it about books, comics, media instead of sports. There is nothing inherently soul distorting about arguing which November day Holmes met Watson on.
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Nov 14, 2021 05:00
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Oh, for pity's sake. Extreme fans are horrible invasive people. Many of the people in a fandom are just hanging around going "ooh this is like Sandy Koufax first appearance rookie year", only they're doing it about books, comics, media instead of sports.  I think it's a defensive motion by Hussie to paint it that way because it minimises the fact that at least some of the animus towards him is based on actual material problems - like the Sarah Z correspondence, where he said that What Pumpkin had removed an artist's name from the credits on Hiveswap, despite them contributing work that was used, because they were "causing problems" at the studio. There definitely are unpleasant obsessives about there who have been weird about the dude for years (and, in more recent years, about WP staffers), but the grandiose analysis about all fandoms being cults just seems like a dodge around the fact that a portion of Homestuck's fandom woes are materially related to things he has, or hasn't, done.
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Nov 14, 2021 05:23
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fandom doesnt really mean anything. the internet didn't invent large groups of fans. tumblr didnt invent anything. people were holding massive gatherings to talk about trains, and stalk them around the state or whatever a hundred years ago anything you think has been invented is only because you're capable of constantly being able to see it whenever you want, not because it didn't exist when you couldn't
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Nov 14, 2021 10:49
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all the worlds evils have existed before, serial killer fans were a thing long before the internet, but that doesnt mean that the ease of accessibility to columbine fan forums and tumblrs isnt a worrying prospect, and the fact that there is this hyperfocusing on random individuals (influencers, youtubers, twitter posters, etc) that have no real way to deal with the tidal waves of attention and obsessive following like celebrities do (who often have pr teams and security details) not to mention the immediacy through unbelievably fast internet connections and the massive community hubs that dwarf any old time convention is something very characteristic of our agressively accelerated consumption era. The NFT scam has existed before (e: i dont remember what the name of the scam was but basically convincing someone thru a third party somethig is worth a lot), sex scandals have existed before, mass scrutiny has existed before, pandemics have existed before, identification through brands has existed before. It is foolish to believe ourselves so unique that our ills are sui generis, amd while theres nothing new under the sun we keep finding new spins on the old classics in very worrying ways. also the man's right. ArfJason fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 11:02
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yeah but theres a difference between serial killers (doing murder), nft dipshits (doing scams), sex pests (doing sex crimes), and fandom people (hyperfocusing), which is that the problem with the first three is act itself, and the problem with the latter is about its economy of scale (one person cant possible live up to expectations of an insane amount of dedicated fans, who all want different things from them) we can work against societal ills that involve singular bad behaviors, but the problems with 'fandom' are just symptoms of masses of people all being interested in the same thing. its super useless to talk about 'fandom' being the problem because whats the next step? nft scams are a problem, you deal with the scammers. a single 15 year old sending hussie weird emails isnt a problem, its a problem because 1600 15 year olds are spamming him for attention. we can easily say how we as a society would deal with killers/scammers/rapists, but Being A Fan Of Something isn't the actual problem with 'fandom' theyre completely different things, its silly
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Nov 14, 2021 12:22
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ArfJason posted:(e: i dont remember what the name of the scam was but basically convincing someone thru a third party somethig is worth a lot) goldbricking, I think
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Nov 14, 2021 12:31
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hussie literally describes the problem with his approach in the article, with the whole cryptid bit. he both relinquished control over the fandom stuff, while clearly loving to indulge people to go wild about it (see: most of the latter half of homestuck). im sympathetic to him in the way that im sympathetic to anyone who hits the sort of insane criticality of attracting an oversized fanbase for a single person to handle, but him trying to wrap it up into some grand unifying theory of how This Says Something About Society is super eye-rolly.Rand Brittain posted:It also seems kind of lovely that he's basically describing his complete failure to direct his fanbase, and hanging out the new creators he appointed to take all the heat in his absence, as being somehow noble and wise rather than lazy and irresponsible. this too. its not impossible to rein in a fanbase somewhat (if not completely, obviously. theres always weirdo freaks out there who do creepy poo poo). but part of the Hussie Character during homestuck was about being a mysterious person who always lived in the bit and took it too far. he wrote himself into the comic proposing to vriska and poo poo. it was funny, but its not hard to see why people would poorly follow what they thought his example was. sometimes you have to stop doing a bit and just say what you feel, which is "hey cut that poo poo the gently caress out. its unacceptable." studio mujahideen fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 12:32
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hussie's "tumblr had me feelin like the white jim jones' aside, i will say there are fandoms that are like cults, and its the weird poo poo like the 30 year old minecraft youtubers who aggressively cultivate rabid fanbases of preteens. but nobody is doing that poo poo by accident, and its a completely separate problem from some 17 year old tiktok kid blowing up and then getting cancelled in a 48 hour period
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Nov 14, 2021 13:10
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Varinn posted:economy of scale im agreeing with you there. also im not talking about the killers themselves but rather their followers, and before someone posts this, im not drawing an equivalence between homestuck fans and columbine fans, i was saying that even poo poo like that existed before us, its just been made so much more easily accessible by our current communications heavy landscape for both likeminded people in that group and for outsiders to be exposed to them to adegree never seen before. also never did i say that the solution to any of these problems are even remotely similar, nor did i even at all talk about solutions. wht im getting at is that these problems arent unique but thanks to our specific technological moment, were seeing them amplified in new, worrying, ways.
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Nov 14, 2021 13:12
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Varinn posted:hussie's "tumblr had me feelin like the white jim jones' aside, i will say there are fandoms that are like cults, and its the weird poo poo like the 30 year old minecraft youtubers who aggressively cultivate rabid fanbases of preteens. but nobody is doing that poo poo by accident, and its a completely separate problem from some 17 year old tiktok kid blowing up and then getting cancelled in a 48 hour period lol i was about to mention poo poo like Dream too but decided i was veering a bit far from my original point.
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Nov 14, 2021 13:12
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ArfJason posted:im agreeing with you there. yeah i think we generally agree. i just bristle at the extremely common "well, fandom is the problem" refrain. not out of some defense of the concept, but because it obscures the people that could actually have big effects on curbing these problems. especially when its someone like hussie saying it, bc hes one of those people lol theres no step 2 to 'the problem is fandom', but there is for 'how can creators/influencers work to shape their fanbases, and how much responsibility is it fair to assign them before its asking too much'
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Nov 14, 2021 13:20
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Varinn posted:there's no step 2 to 'the problem is fandom', but there is for 'how can creators/influencers work to shape their fanbases, and how much responsibility is it fair to assign them before its asking too much' I'd add that different social media do seen to have different atmospheres, a matter of interface as well as audience, and Tumblr was bad because of the impossibility of having a conversation, while keeping the entire conversation visible to people who jumped in. Twitter has the same inherent problem, plus monetization distortions. The overriding "anger equals eyeballs equals profit" is, in my opinion, the thing making fandom, and a lot of other things, worse. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 16:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Well said. Yeah. Like you I've been in various fandoms for a long-rear end time and while there were always ructions, it used to just be dweebs quietly sharing fanfiction on forums or webrings or analogous outlets. The format of sites like Tumblr or especially Twitter, which is almost like a Brownian motion collider designed to produce the most incendiary takes on anything, precludes long conversations or at least makes them difficult to have, and also makes them harder for third parties to find and share. Like, a conversation like the one everyone's having on this page could just barely exist on Tumblr (but it'd be confusing enough that most people wouldn't read and share it), and flat out I think couldn't exist on Twitter. To bring it back to Homestuck, Hussie probably did the fandom's general tenor no favours by shutting down the MSPA forums, which were popular and widely used and where gentle nerds could talk about their favourite quotes and moments ad infinitum, and sending everyone into the wildlands of social media.
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Nov 15, 2021 03:04
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I agree with Hussie's point and the cult-issue totality, but I dislike of how he abdicated his own personal responsibility in any of it, and how little care or understanding he shows for why this kind of thing happens and is happening worse than ever. The posts before explain and understand a lot of the nuances of the problem and how it forms. Hussie's right, but he could help by being someone who can explain how it happens first-hand, and give some useful advice for 2020-times content creators on how to handle it; instead he just has that angry hostility for all things fandom. Christ, I don't know, he probably just needs to go to therapy and process it. Part of my disagreement is my own anxiety with wanting to put out my writing and how paranoid modern social media makes me. Tangent, I've been looking at some of the algorithm art-makers lately, and I start to wonder if another Homestuck will eventually end up as easy as scanning your own art style to an algo (or generating one) to auto-generate pages, and you can do music easier than ever with it already berserk-abundant for use, on top of developing music-generators.
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Nov 15, 2021 05:18
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I think my final take is that Hussie could certainly have stood to go over things he should have done instead, or choices he could have made to defuse the bomb, both within the story and outside of it as someone who transitioned from writing based on audience input, to fully developing his own everything, to relinquishing control right back to fans but even more so, he's in a unique position to give insight into the process and the pitfalls along the way; what story choices does he think exacerbated things? Were there times when he regretted things he did with the narrative? How about his own persona as a character within the comic? Have his opinions on canon and ownership evolved even further? and so on instead he just kinda says "fans suck" and nothing about what to do with that, because not making any media isn't exactly a viable option, and you can't exactly filter for only having stable fans once you get past, like, genre, quality, and presence of bigotry he's not wrong at all that gigantic (mostly online) social communities centered around specific media properties can be extremely volatile and can turn cult-like if not handled carefully, but he doesn't offer any insight or input on how to stop or fix it Jen X fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Nov 17, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2021 05:36
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But Hussie was never a musician. Algorithms are all very well, but he didn't have the skills to come up with the basic melodies, far less the orchestrations. Like, there are AIs that can write, but they aren't generating Columbo, far less Shakespeare. Part of the magic of Homestuck is that he got artists who were better than him and musicians that were better than him to work for free... Or, as they would have said at the time, for love. Homestuck would not be what we love it for without a lot of free contributions. And Hussie ought (he won't) to acknowledge that. You don't get Cascade with Hussie alone.
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Nov 15, 2021 05:38
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Jen X posted:instead he just kinda says "fans suck" and nothing about what to do with that, because not making any media isn't exactly a viable option, and you can't exactly filter for only having stable fans once you get past, like, genre, quality, and presence of bigotry Yeah. He's someone I'd love to talk to about the entire process from the technical standpoint to hear his insights, but he's weird about writers and he just seems to want to be angry about cultbrains.
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Nov 15, 2021 05:45
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Arsenic Lupin posted:But Hussie was never a musician. Algorithms are all very well, but he didn't have the skills to come up with the basic melodies, far less the orchestrations. Like, there are AIs that can write, but they aren't generating Columbo, far less Shakespeare. Yeah, for sure. Homestuck was always of the fandom and enabled by the fandom, and at one point he celebrated that and viewed it as an essentially collaborative work. I'd even go so far as to say that, beyond the high quality music and additonal art and entire games (!) that his collaborators produced for the comic, that sense of "things the fans say and dream up and want have an impact on the story" was what generated a large part of the comic's popularity. Memorably, Tavros being in a wheelchair was a fanon idea that Hussie ran with; so were oodles of other things, even past the point of him taking audience commands or involving new collaborators. I think there actually was a point where he planned on doing the music himself (there's an old composition called something like hauntjam.mp3 that I think was an unused track he wrote for Homestuck?) but ultimately the extravaganza multi-media scope he wanted the comic to have wasn't achievable by a single person. He needed collaborators, and almost without exception those collaborators were fans who left their own thumbprints on the work.
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Nov 15, 2021 05:46
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If you think you're going to want to reread Homestuck at some point, you should probably redownload "The Unofficial Homestuck Collection". (If you weren't aware but are somehow still reading this thread, the Viz conversion from Flash to YouTube screwed up the visuals and broke several links.) quote:The Unofficial Homestuck Collection contains a complete database of the Homestuck Bandcamp, up to the most recent album. Want to know more about the crazy song you just heard in that Flash animation? Follow the link and see what's up! If you so choose, you can even enable an inline media player that legally streams the music directly from the source. You can try not to get lost exploring the twisted web of Homestuck's discography, but it's inevitable.
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Feb 14, 2022 16:26
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Arsenic Lupin posted:If you think you're going to want to reread Homestuck at some point, you should probably redownload "The Unofficial Homestuck Collection". (If you weren't aware but are somehow still reading this thread, the Viz conversion from Flash to YouTube screwed up the visuals and broke several links.) Does this have a mod that translates trollspeak into something that isn't quite so exhausting to read? I somehow managed to start rereading this and the first page where Terezi starts trolling Rose has ground that to a halt.
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Feb 15, 2022 10:16
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The exhausting quirks that make you hate the ones employing them is intentional! This is why Feferi is the worst character.
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Feb 16, 2022 02:35
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I think the typing quirks are funny and useful when the trolls are still firmly of the "internet troll" variety and not actual characters we're supposed to care about. Reading their typing has been deliberately made obnoxious, which was fantastic when we were supposed to hate them, but it sticks around even when the narrative wants us to care about them as more than antagonistic jerks. It very quickly turns from a gimmick that makes me hate the character for being difficult to read to one that instead makes me hate the comic itself for being difficult to read.
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Feb 16, 2022 02:53
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Gamzee makes my eyes hurt.
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Feb 16, 2022 03:22
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Looking back, I'm kind of disturbed at how good I got at reading dialog in that poo poo. Like why should that ever be a skill I develop, what did it displace in my brain.
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Feb 16, 2022 13:44
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Gamzee makes my eyes hurt.
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Feb 17, 2022 00:27
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I hit the point where the trolls become the main characters and I think I am done with my reread. Not just because of the typing quirks, but also because I am now forced to care about twelve additional characters who feel like a distaction from the actual plot. I distinctly recall asking a friend “who’re these assholes” when I hit this particular spot during my initial readthrough, which she did not answer because she was busy planning her husband’s funeral, but since there are no corpses involved this time I think I will just bail.
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Feb 17, 2022 10:04
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I swear there was a browser extension going around at the time that would un-quirk the trolls pesterlogs. Probably long gone by now though.
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Feb 17, 2022 10:12
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Thinking about how one of the characters in Homestuck was a "haha them dumb sjws who say triggered too much" joke
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Feb 17, 2022 18:28
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kankri was a bullying rear end in a top hat who used woke rhetoric as a shield for his cruelty. those people are real and they’re common, they’re just kind of quaint in light of all the contemporary Nazis e: if we adapted his character for this brave new world of “like seven years later” then he’d probably be a TERF Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Feb 17, 2022 |
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Feb 17, 2022 18:36
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blastron posted:I hit the point where the trolls become the main characters and I think I am done with my reread. Not just because of the typing quirks, but also because I am now forced to care about twelve additional characters who feel like a distaction from the actual plot.
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Feb 17, 2022 19:39
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