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.

Fiction As Learning Tool

Do you remember in Health class when you had to watch Degrassi videos?

I ask this in full expectation that it's a universal - I know we watched some in Canada and some in the U.S., and expect that everyone in North America at least had to watch episodes of TV about pregnant teenagers as part of either class or homework at some point.

But that's not where I meant to start.

I'm taking a class right now called Technology and Social Responsibility. It's all right up my alley, from the discussion material to the class meetings on Twitter, and it's made me think about how we establish stakes in issues, and the power stories have. Because this is a university class about technology and social responsibility, we don't have Degrassi to watch: mostly we read relevant articles, but one session we did have to watch episodes of Black Mirror. I'm not particularly a fan of the show, aside from it's odd prescience in one incident, because it shows such an unrelentingly bleak view of our future with technology. I've found myself making reference to a lot of other novels and TV shows, though, such as Person of Interest and Orphan Black, because they also extrapolate on current issues with technology and IP and ideas of ownership and privacy. And the reason I come back to them is this:

Fiction answers the question "why should I care?" before it even raises the issue it addresses.

Some of the things we're talking about in Technology and Social Responsibility are easy to think of in the abstract, because so many of the issues sound science fictional and like a future problem, but a lot of the issues we're talking about, such as if we really own our own DNA and how secure our data is, are things that impact us right now. There are current court cases about these issues, not least the FBI fighting with Apple over whether we're allowed effective encryption on the devices on which we store our whole lives.

Fiction makes these things real, and immediate, playing out the consequences of treading wrong in a way that's easier to hold on to than an abstract thought experiment. Fiction allows for exploration of worst-case scenarios without explicit fear-mongering.

And for me, at least, fiction shows me the things I want to work to prevent.

The Hunger Games

So, I just saw The Hunger Games tonight, but I'm delaying this post because, well, there are spoilers, and I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to see it in theatres still.