Why do people like CaNWC?

In a recent interview with popMatters, o commented on the reasons that Cool and New Web Comic has been so successful in gaining a following and uniting the Homestuck community.



i thing the main reason the community likes the cool and new web comic is because it gives them EMOTIONS. when there favorite cool and new characters die, or makeout with each other in love or are being meaned to by there daddy or risk their lifes to dance with hams, it makes people cry a lot. but they LIKE too cry: this is a fact which you learn when youve became a web comic maker.

I would like to expand on this a bit. It’s clear that while CaNWC has become really popular, some people don’t “get it.” And that’s understandable enough, people have their own tastes and CaNWC especially is purposefully made to seem shitty. But there is legitimately more to it than that, and I would like to offer my perspective on why I think it works for people like myself.

I’ll try to keep this mostly spoiler-free, beyond the general basic premise, to show why something so stupid is taken so seriously.

Cool and New Web Comic offers much more than you might assume at first glance. On the surface, CaNWC is a shitty retelling of Homestuck with ironic “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” humor. The corruption of this world leads to plenty of shenanigans involving roller coasters, furries, BDSM, and ham, and the writing for this matches it perfectly in some subtle ways. As Homestuck composer Rubs Juice said on twitter:

there is a flawless and beautiful logic to the grammatical errors within cool and new web comic. that cadence is -remarkably- funny like “the roler coasted will crash because it hass no end, but that is how come its fun;” using “how come” in place of “why” is a gut laugh kids say “how come” to ask questions. sometimes adults do too, informally. but it’s always interrogative; it’s always “why” in question form using “how come” to mean “why” within an answer context is mind-bendingly funny both in how simple it is and how surprising it is. it’s good i’m just baffled by how good the shitty writing is behind this dumb piece of garbage. i wish my brain had the capacity for making this trash

So a lot of the appeal is due to the absurdist humor, but there’s more to it.

Underneath that shitty appearance, there is actually a very serious plotline going on that is strictly adhered to. It isn’t just people doing random things, there are rules to the madness, which is made abundantly clear by the presence of Rose Lalonde, who has been inexplicably spared from the corruption that has taken hold of the rest of the world, as she tries to survive.

At its core, CaNWC isn’t a comedy, but a drama. Maybe even a horror.

The closest thematic comparison that comes to my mind is essentially the reverse of The Mask. Instead of a cartoon character living in the normal world, we have a normal character trying to live in a cartoon world.



You’re probably familiar with the Jim Carrey comedy (and hopefully not its awful sequel) which tells the story of Stanley Ipkiss, a man who finds a mask that the Norse trickster god Loki was banished to. When this mask is put on, it transforms the wearer into a living cartoon character, granting them incredible powers but removing all impulse control.



But while the movie was a straight comedy, the original comic book was a psychological horror.

The wearer wasn’t simply impulsive, but insane and sadistic. If the wearer isn’t careful, they can easily kill even their closest friends as a joke, giving them a dynamite cigar and watching their head explode à la Bugs Bunny, or drop an anvil on someone’s head and make their skull cave in. The drama of the series was generated by the characters needing to keep the Mask out of evil hands while desperately holding on to their own sanity.

Similarly, in CaNWC the mere existence of Rose adds weight to every action characters take. Something that would otherwise just be a stupid meaningless joke turns into something terrifying, disturbing, and perverse. Even though everything is presented as extremely goofy, everything is just as dangerous as it is in normal Homestuck, if not more so, and left alone people are sure to do terrible things both to each other and to themselves.

Because all of these actions are being taken seriously, CaNWC is not simply a retelling of Homestuck either, but its own original story. We have long since abandoned the original storyline, and are instead looking at a unique session under very different conditions. In spite of the shitty circumstances, SBURB itself more or less strictly adheres to the original rules, and the world is well crafted. There’s clearly some narrative that’s happening behind the scenes that we can only speculate and theorize about at this point, and that adds a huge mystery to the story on top of that, and because we are all familiar with the canon version of these characters, o doesn’t need to waste as much time introducing us to the cast of characters and more or less skip right to the plot.

I could go on, but not without entering spoiler territory. Suffice it to say, Cool and New Web Comic has more to it than it seems, with good humor and writing that knows its audience. Like o said at the beginning, people can get invested in Cool and New Web Comic because it’s found a very clever and unique way to get readers invested into what’s happening with the characters, able to bring something to the table for all readers.