You Are Not Alone

It's the night before the end of Homestuck.

There are other things going on in my life right now, but that's the one singing note of tension that keeps coming back to me. I'm planning to wear a Homestuck shirt tomorrow to campus, and drop everything to look at the finale as soon as I can.

Homestuck, obviously, has been important to me. It won't stop being a fandom when it's over, but the impetus for obsessive reflection about what it means to me will be gone - we'll have the end to talk about, after all.

Homestuck was the first fandom I really got into - I'd read fanfic other places, sort of desultorily because it was free and more about characters I liked. But Homestuck let me reach out and make friendships and talk to people about stories and their nature pretty much as things happened. It was the first really immersive fan experience I'd had, and the first fanfic I wrote. The experience of being in fandom has been a massive and transformative thing for me, letting me connect with a whole bunch of talented, kind new friends.

And fandom has a really interesting relationship with Homestuck - the narrative was originally driven by fan prompts, fans have been involved with art and music and merchandise, and it changed some of how fandom is done. It's been kind of a wild ride.

Part of the reason it grabbed me so much was that it opened the door to talking about stories with more people in different ways - and to talking about the specifics we look for and the shapes they can take with no interest at all paid to originality, because this was after all transformative works. And one of the conversations that came up around Homestuck, and came up repeatedly, was at the core of Homestuck itself: the ways in which we reach out and connect.

The interpersonal narratives in Homestuck are, at almost every level, about knowing that you are not alone. They myriad ways that's expressed are a gift in and of itself. And for something that starts with a bunch of isolated kids, it's a gift seeing them all gain strength from that connection.

It reminds me of what I love about Person of Interest: a repeated refrain of "in the end you're all alone and no one's coming to save you," with the characters then proving over and over with their actions that someone indeed will come to save them. For those characters, the emotional growth is in unlearning their isolation and slowly growing to trust each other, but they're adults and more jaded and it's a slower process.

In Homestuck, the kids don't have quite as engrained in them the idea that they're alone, and there's more joy and hope in their learning, and less of a focus on their unlearning. One of the reasons that the fandom is so obsessed with Homestuck is that the very nature of fandom, and particularly Homestuck fandom, means that those people who are caught up in the culture around Homestuck also get to reach out and feel that they are not alone.

Homestuck has brought people together in remarkable ways, and I'm not quite ready for it to be over.

Fandom part something

One of the interesting things that has stemmed from the corner of Homestuck fandom to which I pay attention is the surge of literary criticism.

Casual, lengthy, in depth literary criticism that examines motifs and characters and mines them for all they are worth. It's generally referred to as 'meta,' since it is discussion of the story that does not directly relate to speculation about future events. It does not typically make negative statements about the original work, either, which may be a reason the word 'criticism' is shied away from.

To illustrate:

• Take your high school English class around the time you had to read The Yellow Wallpaper
• Take the worksheet or quiz with questions on it like "Who was Jennie? What was her relationship to the narrator?"*
• Burn it.
• Instead
• At least one group of people is hotly debating it as a feminist critique of late-19th century treatment of post-partum depression.
• Someone is writing a story from the perspective of Jennie.
• Someone is writing about it as reflective of the social unrest in England throughout that time period.
• Someone is writing about it as reflective of the untenability of separate sphere ideology in an industrialized country.
• At least six people are writing commentary on it that I can't even fathom.
• Now make the source text all about teenagers kissing in space and you have the part of the Homestuck fandom that I follow.
• It is like having a huge fantastic book club that only ever discusses one book.

This has been incredibly inspirational to bear witness to, to say the least. I think the Homestuck fandom has contributed more to me being a critical reader than most of the rationalist stuff I read, largely because it is explicitly about examining literature.

So I'm going to start an exercise: on Sunday, I'm going to post a short story. On Monday, I'm going to post about the thought process that went into it and what certain aspects of it are derived from. I will repeat as needed.

This serves a whole bunch of purposes: I will have a place to put fiction too short to submit to other places, or that I have no interest in submitting, or that have been submitted to contests and they don't mind me reposting. I will have a log of the thought process that went in to it. And, down the road, when I have perspective on them, I will be able to read the pieces with fresh eyes and read the though process and judge how successful I was at incorporating the ideas I wanted to incorporate and what subtext I might have included unknowingly.

*To be fair, my high school English class did discuss its historical context as well, in terms of how women were treated for 'hysteria.'

Fanfiction

At the last meeting of the Victoria Writers' Society I attended, I ended up talking to someone a bit about fanfiction and how it can be a great way to re-contextualize a work as well as standing well on its own. It can be, and the Organization for Transformative Works has great information about various authors feelings about fanfiction, legal proceedings related to copyright, fan culture, and recently some interesting stats on the percentages of people who identify as fans who create fanworks.

The fanworks themselves can be utterly amazing, and I gushed at length about a couple in particular. She suggested that she might look some up herself, and, while I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet, I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet.

Fanfiction is like any other sort of self-published work. Some of the stories are absolute gems written by people who know their craft and get other people to read them over for errors. Some of them are adolescent wish-fulfillment posted before the pixels are dry. As everywhere else, the latter outnumber the former rather spectacularly.

So here is my short, incomplete list of recommendations. These are not necessarily those stories that I love best, but those that I feel both stand alone as literature and are stronger and more interesting because of their context as fanfiction.

First, Strider's Edge, by tumblr user Paratactician

It is the combination of Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It is set in Oxford, and we are informed that most places mentioned in the story map to real places, though names have been changed.

Strider's Edge kicks off with an A. E. Housman poem, the whole of which foreshadows the entire story, and only part of which is included in the text itself. The story itself is difficult to summarize without giving away all the important bits, but the one at the top of the story is "It was a Tuesday late in September when I went up to Oxford University." The story follows the adventures of John Egbert as he grows up, meets new friends, falls in love, and is peripheral witness to several murders. The solving of the murders is not central to the plot.

One of the central themes is that all things are repeated: this is addressed explicitly in one of the interesting conversations about literary constructs that occurs in John's Tutorials sessions, as well as being a central facet of the way the story is presented and integral to the fact that this is fanfiction.

Second, One of Our Submarines, by Luka Grindstaff

It should be no surprise to anyone that one of Luka's stories ended up on this list: I adore Luka's comic Kagerou so much that I am writing fanfiction of it myself.

One of Our Submarines is summarized as "Sollux Captor, recently drafted into the Service of Her Imperious Condescension, discovers a secret community of Helmsmen hidden inside the Imperial communications network. Meanwhile on Alternia, Karkat Vantas is up to his goddamn nook in revolution."


Yes, it makes more sense initially if you have already read Homestuck, which it is a fanfiction of. It is also not complete yet.


One of Our Submarines explores what it would be like to be a sentient and formerly autonomous computer system, the horrors inherent in that transition, and storytelling entirely via chatlog.


Third, General Vantas Gets Hitched, by Jesse Hajicek

I probably link Luka and Jesse entirely more than I should, but I deeply admire both of them as writers.

General Vantas Gets Hitched, whose full title is "General Vantas Gets Hitched, or, The Limits Of Bilateral Diplomacy: A Black Powder Romance," is a deconstruction of the rather silly trope of two men forced into an arranged marriage. This trope is a reasonably recent convention, largely in anime and fanfiction, but this story is also a wider deconstruction of arranged marriage stories in general. It is, as everything else on this list, Homestuck fanfiction, and is summarized as "In which a mutant too famous to cull is dropped like a grenade into the midst of the peace process, a foolish monarch proves himself secretly shrewd, the power of friendship functions as a force multiplier, and it is discovered that in the Great Game of espionage, the dealer does not always win."



It, as One of Our Submarines, is easier to get into as a story if you have read Homestuck. General Vantas Gets Hitched follows the titular General Vantas as he navigates the very alien human culture he finds himself in the midst of.


It is somewhat less an experiment in storytelling than the other two, as well, but where it finds real strength is in the characterization. All of the characters are quite plausible 'what ifs' if the main plot of Homestuck had not disrupted the characters lives the way it has.


Oh, and happy Independence Day, Americans.

Fandom, part two

I don't read Kristen Britain anymore.

Not because I don't like her writing: Green Rider was excellent, First Rider's Call was a delight to discover a couple years later, and The High King's Tomb left me hungering for more in the series.

Because I wanted to know when I could get my hands on the next in the series, I checked out her website. All authors should have websites: especially ones that they update with the release dates of their next books. As I browsed around, looking for extras like Sherwood Smith has on her site (she has maps!), I found Kristen Britain's FAQ, and her response to fan-fiction.

It confused me, at first. Fanfiction does not affect your copyright as the author, since, uh, you created it first, and everything is automatically yours. Most fanwriters will prominently label their works with at least the name of the original work, if not your name, because they want other fans to be able to find it. They label them as fanfiction. Of course, anyone trying to sell fanfiction is doing something illegal and violating your IP and should be reported, but non-commercial fanfiction is generally treated as falling into slim grey fringes of Fair Use.

But that's the legal stuff, and has very little bearing on my decision.

Fanfiction is, at its core, a love letter to the original work. People write it because they can't get enough of the world, they want more, they want to explore an aspect of it that won't be further explored in the text (like someone's ambition to become a pirate which is derailed by plot). Saying that it's all unwelcome seems very much a denial of your fans' emotional investment in your work. Obviously they will never be as connected as you are as the creator, but does that mean no one else is allowed to fall in love with it?

I thought that was king of the point of writing. Kristen Britain's answer to the question of fanfiction struck me as very much a refutation of the validity of fans loving her work. Anne Rice behaved very similarly and was higher-profile, but I stopped reading her for other reasons, so this is prompted by Kristen Britain's stance. From what I've read, we're supposed to buy her stuff, read it, and care about it only as much as necessary for us to buy the next one and not one iota more.