Happy Homestuck Day, here's my favorite story about spotting a Homestuck in the wild.
So my actual job-job is scientific illustration specializing in Botanical Illusation, (or it was until 2018 when I got run over by a Karen while taking out the trash but that's a different story) and sometimes I go to Gallery showings, and there was one gallery exhibition hosted my my school that taught me Botanical Illustration.
It's a nice event and a typical gallery event- box wine, little cubes of cheese, exchanging of business cards etc. I'm going around the gallery, going Ooh-Ah at everyone's technique and compositional choices, until I get to one peice that's a phylogenetic tree of ancient water plants, with tweleve branches... colored in the hemospectrum.
Now, most scientific illustrators are 60+ because a lot of people get into it after they retire. It's not uncommon for me to be the only person under 50 at these events, unless Maryanne, the other Millenial in the Botanical Illustration program is there. So this little Artistic Homage is going entirely unoticed until I walk up.
Sure enough, it's by Maryanne.
And sure enough, Maryanne chooses that moment to walk up and say Hi, and I swivel around like a goddamn owl to face her, point at her cladistics tree and make the 8D face.
She immediately blanches.
Unfortunately, the head of our program sees, and sensing chicanery, demands "WHAT IS HAPPENING." Prof. Mervi is an extremely direct Finnish woman and I love her so much.
So I have a hot second to explain this.
"Maryanne's color choices are a reference to a Popular Novel, and it's really brilliant because the colors represent a hierarchy in the story, and she's arranged them so the hierarchy is reflected in the order of the Clades, with the highest-ranking color corresponding to the oldest clades. The highest-ranked members of the color are also the oldest members of the fictional society. It's a nice little cultural homage for us Young People."
Maryanne is relieved.
"Oh!" Mervi is pleased. "What is this book called?"
Maryanne is No Longer Relieved.
"It's an online comic book." I say.
"Yes, but what is the title?"
Maryanne is attempting to develop lazerbeam eyes so she can melt my brains before I intrduce our beloved professor to the weirdest thing 2015 had to offer.
"It's called Homestuck." You don't lie to Mervi. She can sense lies the way a shark senses blood in the water.
"That is a very strange title."
"It's a very strange webcomic."
This appeased Mervi and she went off to schmooze elsewhere.
"She's going to look it up." Maryanne says, terrifed.
"I garuntee she's seen weirder stuff than Homestuck."
The event ends, I go home and manage to forget this entirely, until my next class three months later. Mervi has come into class and is looking at everyone's works in progress, which is perfectly normal, until she gets to the table Maryanne and I are sitting at and she opens her briefcase, takes out a manilla folder like it's full of Classified information, and opens it up to reveal a printout of a screenshot of one of the most recent pages.
"This man is an exceptionally accomplished digital artist." Said Mervi. "The quality of his work has improved immensely in a very short period of time."
"Yeah Hussie is pretty great!" yelps Maryanne.
"You know him?" Mervi asks. "Do you think he'd be interested in being a guest lecturer?"
"I mean like, not personally?" Said Maryanne. "But he's uh. He's a pretty busy guy."
"You should send him an email anyway!" I say. "The worst he can say is No."
"Do you think people would be interested in seeing him lecture?" mervi asked.
"Yeah I'm pretty sure if Andrew Hussie gave a lecture here it'd be pretty popular." I said. Maryanne is slowly imploding beside me.
"Hm. I will send him an Email." Said Mervi.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hussie never replied, but Maryanne and I are still friends.
***
