unionhack:

unionhack:

unionhack: You know what? We all like to hee haw about Homestuck being bad and everything, but I legitimately was never as happy and enthralled with a work of fiction as I was when Homestuck was consistently updating I think we lost ourselves in the prevalence of cringe culture at the time and didn’t appreciate just what a marvel of modern storytelling Homestuck really was while everyone was busy laughing at the kids who painted themselves grey. If you think about the sheer enormity of it and the attention span of the average person, it is an honest to god miracle that Homestuck found any traction at all; but it did, because it told an interesting story about relatable characters in a completely alien setting and did so with unique, pioneering storytelling methods.

I honestly think that Homestuck should be widely hailed and praised for being the first story to properly use chatspeak and the widely misunderstood nuance of how people communicate on the internet. This is very appropriate, because Homestuck is a work that cannot exist in its entirety anywhere else except for the internet.

Anyone who has been on the web for more than a few years can tell you that there is a lot of subtext to text-only communication. We had to develop this subtext because it’s difficult to convey emotions without the use of audible speech. As silly as it sounds, the difference between “:3″ and “;3″ is huge and should be noted for anyone trying to understand how people on the internet ‘speak’ to each other.

Homestuck got that. The late 2000s/early 2010s were brimming with a bunch of corporate attempts at storytelling that tried to relate to kids with onslaughts of l33tspeak and dropping hundreds of instances of “omg” all over the place. Kids and teens aren’t stupid, they can very easily tell something is inauthentic.

Homestuck wasn’t like that. It was entirely authentic. It was written by someone who had first hand experience with not only the surface level of the internet’s communication stylings; Hussie knew about the intricacy that could be found in such simple things as capitalization, italicizing, bolding, changing colors, emoticons, and line breaks. He used that to make each and every individual character feel real in their chat dialogue, which is ordinarily a medium that some perceive to be counteractive to emotional communication.