quote:

a 13-year-old boy and his friends play a cool new video game that yanks them into another dimension before sterilizing the planet with a storm of meteors

theyre thrust into the role of typical rpg protagonists in a rich “individually tailored hyper-flexible mythology” but it quickly becomes apparent that the “game” is using them to facilitate some higher purpose. one of the kids abandons her “quest” and begins tearing the world apart in search of clues.

during their adventure they’re contacted by aliens from another universe, in a completely separate timestream — they can see the kids’ entire past and future, up until the last few minutes of the game, when “the sky goes all weird” and theres the sound of a record scratch. at that moment something was flushed out of the kids’ game session and into theirs, preventing them from claiming “the ultimate reward” and sending them into hiding on a remote asteroid.

at first they harass the kids, blaming them for their predicament — mysterious messages the kids have been receiving since childhood turn out to have been authored over the span of half an hour — until an avenue for escape presents itself and they reluctantly start to work together.

a huge chunk of the plot is driven by characters’ differing reactions to predestined events. with characters inhabiting two separate axes of time, ontological paradoxes become commonplace; cause and effect are inextricable and the narrative freely jumps around to follow the threads between them. this can be bewildering if youre not paying attention (“are you taking notes? get a loving pen.”)

the story follows a classic adventure-game format, with each panel preceded by a “command” — in the early days of homestuck these were suggested by the readers — and followed by a few paragraphs of text. at first the commands are addressed to a single character (“John: Retrieve mail.”), but later we find more general commands applying to multiple characters in different ways (“Enter.”), or to the plot itself (“Descend.”). the format proves to be malleable: one character discovers a computer terminal on a post-apocalyptic planet that allows him to command the story’s protagonist. another character assumes the role of narrator for a while, taking up residence in the website’s banner, and the commands become his monologue. he keeps a scrapbook of panels from the story, allowing the reader to sift through them interactively and explore little tangents to the main plot.

images and phrases are recycled into a rich internal vocabulary of callbacks: a paragraph of purple prose written as a throwaway joke resurfaces as a prophetic nightmare (dreamt in morse code). words are milked mercilessly for their meanings, puns become plot points; a peculiar turn of phrase might hint at a vast secret being assembled behind the scenes. the kids’ actions and words at the start of the story establish synchronicities that resonate throughout their adventure: impaled birds, werewolves, characters missing an arm and an eye.

thats what homestuck is