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Shout out to the time I met Giancarlo Esposito who plays Gustavo Fring on Breaking Bad while badly dressed like Vriska Homestuck
when your art program’s closing message hits you straight in the heart and makes you stop and contemplate the state of it all
because of the huge response to this post, I decided to make a version of the art that includes the text
I’ve also uploaded this design to INPRNT, and all sales proceeds will be donated to environmental and humanitarian charities!
this is still going around with the old dead links - please help me share this version
So while I know that more than one writer worked on Hiveswap - there’s a Cohen Edenfield (about whom I know nothing) and the credits mention Ryan North’s name and a few other people’s - until I am informed otherwise it’s hard to think of it as anything other than Andrew Hussie’s brainchild. Nothing in it exists without his nod of approval.
I want to cycle back to something I wrote a couple weeks ago as a commentary on @roxilalonde ‘Gay Narratives and Andrew Hussie’s “Alternia”’ when discussing Hussie, to wit:
Homestuck, taken as a whole, is indeed progressive - inescapably progressive, even if it did not start that way, and not every part passes muster. Distinguish fandom celebration and backlash from the actual work and you find a seven-year long work of performance art in which art and artist were fundamentally transformed in the making
My point in the commentary (other than to defend Homestuck as a rare occasion in which cultural binomativity is celebrated, however imperfectly) was that the Andrew Hussie of 2009 was not the same Andrew Hussie of 2016 - that the gay-wedding-ending would not, could not have been written by the Andrew Hussie of 2009, or at the very least would not have been written with a fraction of the complexity and joy 2016 gave us.
And I feel like this is further proof of it, even if every scrap of dialogue is revealed to have been scripted by Cohen Edenfield, Andrew Hussie still approved this bit of business where one character tells another that it’s okay to tell people off if their appropriation of something makes you uncomfortable. The Andrew Hussie who still thought Damara Megido was funny in 2012* isn’t the same person in 2017.
And thank god for that, because I wasn’t all that great in 2012.
People change. People get better. And everyone who wants to behead Hussie for an imperfect work need to take into account all the ways he’s changed (and take a good hard look at their virtue five, ten years ago). That doesn’t mean ‘don’t critique Homestuck’ (because hot damn is there a shit-tonne of awful in the Dancestors. Damara and Mituna… just… sweet Jesus) but let’s also take a moment to at least acknowledge that change can happen.
*HOLY FUCK MEENAHBOUND CAME OUT IN 2012? NO WAY. NO FUCKING WAY.
"the barbie movie critiques capitalism!" i need y'all to understand and internalize that you can enjoy things even if they're not ideologically pure
yes insisting that matel's glorified toy ad movie is anticapitalist is a wild assertion. but it's also fine to enjoy the dressing-up-in-pink movie without ritualistic self-admonishment and shame. like, you can enjoy a thing and also be aware that the thing is not going to liberate us from the shackles of capitalism. both things can be true.