You're right, it just needs a soul!! That was some pretty sound advice, thanks! I wonder how he did it? The man is basically a genius! A pioneer! No one has come close to that sort of comic yet. Well 17776 was similar in a way (Which is really surprising since the author had never read homestuck) but the whole genre of hypertext fiction is still in its baby phase. Homestuck is the biggest thing in the genre right now, with 17776 being the second most notable. Am I forgetting any comics?

I don’t many follow other pieces of hypertext fiction avidly, so I wouldn’t know, but yes 17776 was great! Really though, hypertext or otherwise, as long as your story has a soul and you know what you want from it, it will draw people in. Hussie just struck a particularly juicy goldmine with his style, his knack for foreshadowing, and culture-remixing powers. Seriously though, he’s so good at incorporating elements of old and new cultures into his work.

Speaking of foreshadowing, that’s also a thing you can notice after looking at Homestuck for a while- He’s good at setting foreshadowing with figures, not with characters. Lord English is foreshadowed as far as Act 1, during the Title Intro with the narration pondering about a pupeteer in John’s life, something behind the scenes manipulating his life. Given Jade’s screen name has been gardenGnostic and the references to Light ever since Act 2, it’s notable that Hussie always had a Gnostic base for his story, but he didn’t make Lord English to begin with.

He just set up the idea of a Yaldabaoth-like figure to oppose the characters of the Comic, a role which, if I recall, was filled by Betty Crocker to begin with! But as the story evolved, he added complexity to it- And so, rather than make up new characters and tack them onto the story haphazardly? He made new characters to fill in the blanks he’d already set up. Allowing him to expand on the ideas he wanted to tell, while perfectly fitting his Setting.

That is a hugely impressive thing to do, and since it allows him to set up retroactive foreshadowing, a lot of things seem to have just been planned from the VERY start. And while many were? A lot of the more impressive ties were simply that. Figures. Concepts. Hussie is AMAZING at distilling characters and concepts into their raw basics- And through that, all he has to do is tease these concepts… And then fill the holes with more specific details that fit the mold of the story as it progresses.