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#excellent – @madjazzed on Tumblr
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Addiction is a powerful thing.

@madjazzed / madjazzed.tumblr.com

sideblog started as a home for my Describe Homestuck meme project and meta, now mostly used for reblogging fanart. i follow from @szgrey.
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xagave

HAHSHFDJ UR FINE but listen Erisolkat has been my otp for YEARSSSS I ship them in every quadrant they're so messy but they were literally MADE for each other <33333 Erikar? CANON. Solkat? CANON. Erisol? NOT CANON but that's because they're missing their auspistice (KARKAT) and by their powers combined do they make THE BEST OT3 THIS FANDOM HAS TO OFFER. ERISOLKAT!!!!!!!!!!!!! Do not separate them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#erisolkat#excellent
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ipsomaniac

Page 49/50: narrative insertion and the puppetry of focalisation

(See below for the relevant panels) On a second read, the technique of narrative insertion stands out as being indecently conspicuous. The narrator is constantly inserting himself, plus an incredible quantity of extra-diegetic detritus, into the narrative. The metaphor of “lurid proboscises sort of obscenely jutting into your unwilling face at an accelerating rate” applies. The seeds are sown early on for appropriated focalisation - the textual equivalent of being possessed by a whimsical yet domineering ghost (an apt image for the plasma-oriented John). On page 49 it is clearly John who is focalised - the narration appears to represent John’s personal opinions about Dad’s harlequins. But on page 50, who is focalised? Whence this random shit? Is it John who holds such stringent standards about fires belonging in fireplaces; who feels the need to insert a laughably awkward parenthetical pun into the word “categorically”; who waxes rhapsodic about the domestic myth of the hearth; or who can perfectly quote (and ironically misattribute) Shakespeare? Seems unlikely. This is not John; this is the narrator, who, we are reminded, is puppeting John. (Interesting that John’s back is turned as the narrator goes off on a performatively self-indulgent tangent - like a player character being paused.)

This kind of shift in focalisation is highly characteristic of Homestuck. Like a lot of techniques in Homestuck, it starts out on the micro or linguistic level but then metastasizes into macro/plot-level manifestations. The motif of narrator-possession starts out as little verbal spasms where the narrator runs off with the narration for a bit, but grows into one of the major themes of the story determining character arcs and plot.

It’s a reminder of another major tension in Homestuck: the ontology of characters as tokens or vessels to be controlled by the text/narrator/Law, rather than the psychological idea of a character, to which modern readers default, as a person-facsimile with a “real” interiority. At the beginning of Homestuck, the token-like qualities of the characters are deliberately highlighted, both as a reference to gaming and to lampshade the arbitrary, crowd-sourced, name-out-of-a-hat process of their creation. As the story continues, however, the latter type of character develops, to the extent that for most readers, Homestuck becomes a character-driven story. But that tension between character-as-token and character-as-person always remains, and it becomes a huge source of pathos: these puppets that we come to love and empathise with so deeply are always subject to having their strings seized, or cut. Also omg. The amount of - clutter - verbally, in page 50. It’s a travesty. Poor John.

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mmmmalo

Reblogging again because I realized that the mis-attributed pale fire quote is an echo of the disjoint between character and narrator voice that ipsomaniac outlined above – another fire that doesn’t seem to belong in it’s fireplace.

Also want to emphasize here that if we’re relentlessly subjective, all of the above should nonetheless express John’s /belief/ that he is a puppet, that his voice is not his own, that he does not belong in his own skin. Just as with Gamzee declaring himself the most important character in Homestuck and thereby declaring himself to be his own author-god, we have to insist that the narrator’s voice /is/ the character’s voice, even when (or especially when) that voice’s knowledge appears especially alien.

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ipsomaniac

Thanks for the additions malo! 100% on the role of misattributed quotations highlighting the disconnect - particularly since these quotes are almost always jarring in terms of register, i.e. a pointedly high-brow or philosophical insertion into the stereotypical “I hate my dad” inner monologue of a disgruntled teenager.

Your second point adds a really interesting dimension I hadn’t considered: that in these lapses in focalisation where the characters’ puppet-like nature is revealed, we’re simultaneously seeing a manifestation of the characters’ disordered psychology. Which is ironic - the moments that remind us of the characters’ ontology as empty tokens simultaneously suggest a complex and troubled psychological existence. These lapses point to both the realness and un-realness of characters and the world they inhabit. In this example, on the one hand you have the narrator’s ventriloquism reminding us that John is not real; he has no existence beyond the text, he is subject of and to the text. On the other hand, this disconnect between character and narrator voice implies John’s feelings of dissociation - thereby suggesting that there is more to John than is explicitly in the text; that John has a “real” psychological existence which the text responds to and manifests; that John in some sense is prior to the text and causes it to unfold the way it does. One thing that is tricky about Homestuck is the way it conflates and confuses exterior with interior, the systematic external world of the text with the characters’ turbulent inner landscapes. (In this you can see its kinship as a narrative with its distant formal ancestor, medieval and Renaissance romances such as Morte D’Arthur or even the Faerie Queene). Reduced to its very basic symbols you have a kid that is stuck within a home: the character is a token of a system that contains, controls and explains him. But equally, the home operates as a symbol of the kid’s mind: the system is the expression of the character’s inner world. The home contains the kid; the kid contains the home. System determines character; character determines system. (The involuted world of “Being John Malkovich” springs to mind.)

Glitching between these inverse truths, there’s a holographic quality to representation and impersonation in Homestuck. Characters and voices flicker from one persona to another and between planes of reality, alternately entreating system-first vs psychology-first interpretations. The irony of balancing these two modes of reading Homestuck is exacerbated the further in you get. On the one hand, as the text progresses, characters develop increasing psychological complexity and weight – in a word, characters seem more real. Psychological modes of interpretation are indispensable; it makes sense to understand the world as emanating from the mind. And yet, the more the text expands, the more evident it is that each character is an instance of an iterative sequence of ventriloquism and mimickry within a viral, duplicative system. So a systematic view of character that downplays the “reality” of individual characters and highlights their subjection to the laws that govern the text is equally essential.

As I said in my original post, I think this is one of the very powerful tensions at play in Homestuck. Because both the system-first and psychology-first readings are “true” and inevitable, you constantly end up with this sense of a text at war with itself; something struggling to break through the holographic surface and assert its realness. A horde of ghostly Pinnochios fighting to become real, despite being the product of a system that circumscribes their existence.

Maybe one thing to hunt for during my reread is the answer to Lord English. If the law of the text decrees “I WAS ALWAYS ALREADY HERE”, what is the opposing refrain that cries death to the author and the letter of law? (Is it, ultimately…. Fanfiction?)

#a+ meta#homestuck#excellent
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