2019-04-11 16:25:39 ¶ ● ⬈

lime-bloods:

> > CG: THIS GAME IS KIND OF A GAME OF A MILLION GUIDES.
> > CG: EVERYWHERE YOU TURN THERE’S ANOTHER WAY TO FIGURE OUT WHAT’S GOING ON, SO PLEASE, GO SECRETE ME AN EARTH RIVER THROUGH YOUR STRANGE HUMAN TEAR DUCTS.
> > CG: YOU’VE GOT SPRITES, EXILES, GUARDIANS, CONSORTS…
> > CG: TIME HOPPING FUTURE SELVES, MYSTICAL DREAM ORACLE DOPPELGANGERS…
> > CG: AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH, YOUR PARTICULAR GROUP OF PLAYERS IS LUCKY ENOUGH TO HAVE US TO GIVE YOU THE SCOOP ON STUFF.
> > CG: THROUGH A SORT OF SUBVERSION OF THE WHOLE DAMN THING.

> this particular tirade of karkat’s seems a particularly egregious hint that Homestuck’s author is dead and that the task of interpreting it lies in the hands of the reader.

> in fact if I didn’t know better, I might say that those last two lines are telling us: “given the online new-media nature of Homestuck, I, the author, am also here to interact with you, the reader, and provide further information about my work, thus subverting the entire concept of death of the author itself by allowing the author’s own words to influence interpretation of the text”

well shit, in a subversion of a subversion, Andrew’s commentary on this page pretty much vindicates this reading of the conversation:

> The first four lines Karkat says here literally sound like they could be a disgruntled Homestuck fan talking smack about me as they scan backwards through the story. Which sounds like a funny thing for me to say—and it is—but it’s also not that remarkable, since at any given moment Homestuck is full of surrogates for various factions of the readership. Basically any character who is viewing the actions of other characters on a screen can be seen as a consumer of that story through some form of in-canon digital media. Whether they type in character commands like the exiles, or use Trollian to skip around the “archive” in a nonlinear way like the trolls do, for the sake of “adventure analysis” or to heap scorn on those involved, every narrative-viewing character is temporarily filling the role of the Homestuck reader from a certain angle.