Several People Are Typing

6^th of August

On Twitter today, the hosts of Perfectly Generic Podcast announced that they were going conduct a wide-scale survey of the Homestuck fandom to get a better idea of its demographics. This is an exciting prospect--I’ve considered the idea of conducting a census of sorts a number of times, but always doubted that it would gain the traction it needs to be truly representative of the fandom as a whole.

That does lead into a problem with the current survey, which is that users on Reddit and the HSD are concerned about any sort of bias that might come with how it’s being distributed. As it’s being developed by Perfectly Generic Podcast, there was fear it could be aimed more towards the sensibilities of the Twitter crowd than the fandom as a whole.

Thankfully, after taking the survey myself and questioning others on it, this doesn’t appear to have really been the case. There might be some bias in who actually responds to the survey--which is mostly unable to be helped--but the questions themselves are all pretty well standardized. The main problem we’ve had with it on the subreddit and Discord server is that they missed a bunch of community events: the Great Reread wasn’t mentioned at all as something people might have participated in, as an example. They didn’t even include SAHcon on the list, which we found kind of strange to not include¹.

Though I can’t recall other surveys like this from the past, what sets this one apart is that it’s obtained some sort of validity through endorsement by WP officials like Aysha. It was posted on the subreddit which prompted some concern about how invasive the questions might be, to which Makin provided a bevy of tweets from officials saying that more sensitive information would be used only on an internal basis. It’s unclear how much this might have reassured people who were participating.

The hosts of the podcast have stated that they’ll release some of the results publicly, which is good. I was concerned that the information would be completely proprietary; this survey is curious in that it’s probably got the widest reach out of any survey in the modern fandom environment. Each community may conduct its own surveys, but this is the first one I can recall that’s going across every branch of the fandom (excluding /hsg/, which doesn’t properly exist anymore). For the HSD’s purposes, Makin announced the survey when it became available. I’m sure that more people than just myself are curious to see what the results are.

Nothing more for today.

13^th of August

We’ve been waiting for an official announcement about new Homestuck content for some weeks now, due to come out today. To be sure, we got a post, but we wouldn’t necessarily call it an announcement. The post, nothing more than a gif, has prompted some interesting responses on both sides of the fandom. The Twitter side of it seems excited enough (though there’s a lot of confusion about what it’s about right now) while the subreddit and Discord are somewhat miffed.

My personal response and the sentiment I saw the most was along the lines of, “What the fuck is this?” Typically when one receives an announcement you expect to see some actual information about it, and content like this is usually associated with a release date, some details about what it actually is, etc. With this, however, we received basically nothing. It was less of an announcement, and more of a teaser for an announcement. Naturally we’re not very excited about this.

To be clear, it is a good thing that we’ve received a promise of upcoming content (or at least, that’s what we think this is). However, What Pumpkin historically has been terribly mismanaged both internally and with regard to public outreach. This seems to be a continuation of that problem, because the way in which this “announcement” was administered is completely terrible. As a rule of thumb, you should always underpromise to people and then overdeliver in order to satisfy them as much as possible.

What happened today was overpromising and underdelivering, and we’re tired of seeing this pattern play out so many times with What Pumpkin over the years. It would have been far more effective if they hadn’t said anything and just dropped the gif, perhaps with a mysterious quote from the comic or a mere hint of what’s to come. It frustrates us that there are so many simple, easy things that WP could be doing to excite its userbase more and to draw attention to itself, and they consistently mess this up. We’re not sure exactly why this happens, but it’s agonizing to watch them shoot themselves in the foot. They need a better public relations person or they’re going to continue squandering their social capital as time goes by.

The conversation was addled somewhat by a development which is very unusual: Makin has closed mspa-lit with the following message: “okay it's time / to close this channel for the summer / as an experiment / you will thank me when the eternal september comes.” True to this, the channel has stayed closed since (with a brief few minutes that he opened it to talk about a TV show he was watching).

This has been met with less of a response than I would have expected, but one that is no less complex: no one has been screaming or particularly excited by the development, but there is no less of a range of tolerance or acceptance for what’s going on. Some users like Kreuz or Tyr are more disgruntled than others, to the point that it may cause trouble for them. I’m personally worried that this will cause certain users from both #general and #mspa-lit to outright leave--Tera has outright said it might do this, for example.

On the other hand, certain users such as Jade and $trider have been extremely receptive and positive about the development. There’s been a lot of activity in #general since we’ve all been forced to share a space, and I’m hoping that it will continue. Two potential explanations present themselves: it could be that this is just temporary weirdness through people interacting who don’t normally do so, or it could be a sign that we need to start consolidating channels due to reduced activity on a holistic level. We’ll see what happens over the course of this “experiment.”

Nothing more for today.

14^th of August

The results of the Perfectly Generic Podcast survey were released today. The full information available is actually quite revealing, and though we were expecting some of these results, it’s still fascinating to see the demographic structure of the fandom at large. With nearly 5,300 responses, it was way more successful than most of predicted it might be. It’s not going to be a perfect representation of the actual community, but it’s likely that we won’t see another survey with this degree of outreach for a while, if ever.

Some of the results in brief: the survey confirmed for us that there is a large degree of minority users, insofar as sexuality and gender are concerned. Racially speaking, white people are by far the largest number present, followed by Asians. Minors make up roughly a third of the respondents, and there’s actually a not insignificant number of people over the age of 30 (including a handful who are above the age of 40). Interestingly, respondents who claimed they were white also suggested that representation in media is not as important to them, while minors (especially transgender individuals) feel that representation is extremely important to them.

I fully recommend that people go and read the results of the survey themselves, it’s an illuminating study and I’m extremely glad that the effort was taken to conduct it. Even more impressive than the reach of the survey itself is its composition, which is to all appearances completely professional. I’m not sure if they did in fact have a professional, or even just someone with a lot of experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if such was the case. I’m really hoping that this will be turned into a regular affair, possibly annually, so that we can get a moving snapshot of how the fandom looks over time.

For our benefit, at the very end of the survey it gave special thanks to people who distributed the survey to their communities. On the list are Aysha, optimisticDuelist, and to our surprise Makin. We weren’t even expecting any recognition for his part in distributing the survey, but the fact that they included him is quite nice in my opinion. Ever since I became involved in the Discord server, I’ve been worried about the rift in the Homestuck fandom between the major websites, but things like this give me some faint hope that more open exchanges and interaction might occur in the future.

On a different note, I mentioned that Kreuz and Tyr were being somewhat rambunctious about mspa-lit being temporarily merged with general. This continued into the morning, and while I slept those two and a number of others--no less than five, some of whom left as a result--were gen-banned for causing a disturbance, like shitposting or just being an all around dickhead.

Kreuz in particular gives me some pause. Interacting with him has been a distinctly weird experience in the past, if not outright unpleasant. I don’t wish to trash him necessarily, but it seems that he never stops complaining about things that often turn out to be trivial. Anervaria described the situation well: “Kreuz is a dissatisfied user following the change but it's just that he is always dissatisfied about everything.” With this in mind, when he becomes particularly upset his behavior can become somewhat toxic.

With this all in mind, there is a question of what to do with him that no one quites know how to answer yet. The easiest answer is just to ban him, but is this appropriate? Some mods commented that we’ve done so for less, which is objectively true. I’m not sure why I’m so reticent to pursue this option, given that information. Wadapan did come forth to say he gave Kreuz an ultimatum: “I gave him a day / he has one day to change his ways / to blossom into a new user.” For his sake I hope that Kreuz takes this up, but we’ll see. It’s been almost three years since I joined the server and he’s been like this literally since I arrived, so I’m not exactly optimistic. Nonetheless, time will tell what happens.

Nothing more for today.

26^th of August

A lot of things have happened in just the last few days. On the 13^th, I mentioned that we received a teaser for upcoming Homestuck content, with details coming later in the month. On the 22nd the announcement proper was made: Pesterquest is up on Steam and will be released on the 4^th of September. It is a direct followup to the Hiveswap Friendsim, but this upcoming title will involve characters from Homestuck proper.

For this reason alone I would expect it to enjoy more success than the Friendsims did, but there are cogent points that suggest it may not work out: Makin is already pessimistic because they removed the Homestuck label from the game’s name for seemingly no reason, which will make it harder for fans to discover on their own. We have no way of knowing whether Fellow Traveler’s outreach will be enough to counter this, but past experience gives us little faith in word of mouth to make games popular.

We earnestly hope that we’re wrong and Pesterquest enjoys great success, but we’re also worried that if the game doesn’t do well, it’ll discourage What Pumpkin and all people associated with these projects from making more original content. In the post-Epilogues environment, original content is sorely lacking and we’re deathly afraid that any project not performing well could disturb the momentum the authors have built up.

This aside, Pesterquest is slated to come out on September 4^th, which is pleasantly close. It’s hard to properly gauge how excited people are for it, but on all of the main platforms at least it seems that most are at least mildly looking forward to the new content. The project’s director and lead writer is credited as Aysha Farah, and as with Friendsim there’s a wide variety of people who are writing individual episodes.

One of the people writing episodes is Griever, who was contracted for the job. Though it was initially painful to see him in this position, I took an opportunity to reach out to him and try to bury the hatchet. It’s still a bit awkward and others will feel more strongly about it, but there’s no use in staying angry about it forever; I genuinely hope that the new game is well-received, and I made it clear that I have no real ill will towards him. For those in the HSD reading this who were themselves upset, I hope that they can also find it in them to put the altercation behind all of us. At the very least, a modicum of tolerance would be preferable to hostility.

The next thing of importance: on the 24^th, Hussie ended up releasing an essay through Pgenpodcast with regard to the future of Homestuck’s narrative, and how it might be handled. The full text is rather illuminating, though dense. The long and short of it is that he did in fact intend for the Epilogues to serve as a sort of bridge material from old Homestuck to whatever comes next. More importantly, though, is that he says he wants the fandom to be more or less in charge of determining where the story goes next.

This by itself is rather cryptic, but the general consensus is that he’s removed himself from the position of determining what’s canon as opposed to fanon. Thus, all interpretations of Homestuck’s content are to some extent valid. The official content that might get released is being largely handled by other people (especially Aysha Farah it seems), but it seems he’s encouraging the fandom to have a more active hand in how the media is shaped creatively.

I’ll return to that particular idea in a moment, but as an aside: yesterday was Hussie’s birthday, and for it he organized a mini-ARG. At some point in 2010, there was a picture of him standing in front of a cave holding a Toblerone chocolate bar. I’m not sure how this garnered the attention that it did, but in 2018 there was a followup image of him sitting in front of the same cave, now with a small pile of Toblerone. To celebrate, this year he left a crate of individually signed Toblerone bars for fans to find.

Naturally, in less than an hour people discovered the location (Point Lobos in San Francisco) and went to claim their prize. The first fan to make it was a Twitter user named Milk Conspiracy Theorist. They took four bars and there was some talk about distributing them further across the bay area of California, but I’m not sure what came of this. The rest of the toblerone, at the time of writing, is assuredly gone by now.

This was a very fun and lighthearted fandom engagement, and everyone I could find was enjoying the simple mirth of the occasion. It was nice to have something fairly uncomplicated and silly to do, and it feels like Hussie has been emerging just a little bit for the first time in quite a while. However, we all soon learned that this revelry was not to last.

Unbeknownst to me before now, there’s been a steady increase in desire among various sections of the fandom considering the main protagonist of Homestuck to actually be trans, citing a number of formative discussions and issues that are touched upon throughout the comic that hint at the kind of things that trans people experience or go through. This iteration of the protagonist is generally referred to as June Egbert (alternatively Joan, but unless general consensus changes significantly June will be the name I stick with).

As part of this movement and in light of Hussie’s very fresh post about letting the fandom decide how the comic goes, Milk Conspiracy Theorist mentioned their support for June Egbert as the newfound identity of the protagonist. This is all fine, but Hussie swooped in and informally made the change canonical himself. The simplest and most likely answer is that he was just trying to be funny and supportive, but this is at odds with the post he made literally the day prior detailing how the fandom should collectively be handling the direction of Homestuck’s canon.

This has led to some deliberation among members of the fandom, specifically concerning how to keep track of Homestuck canon and fanon now. There are a lot of people who are happy about this direction because there are particular pieces of the story--and especially its characters--that they feel strongly about, and subsequently have ideas about how to treat them. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of people who are upset with the change because it renders the idea of validity and canonicity itself irrelevant (I’ve sporadically seen claims that “Homestuck is dead” because of this development, disregarding the fact that it’s officially been over for more than three years at this point).

The June Egbert movement has also attracted the attention of some who feel that the protagonist doesn’t need to be reenvisioned in this manner. To be clear, there are only a scant few people who are actively against the idea; more commonly, such detractors simply don’t feel too strongly about the idea one way or the other. The unfortunate thing is that this latter group has been lumped together with those more vociferously opposed. As it goes though, I’m very happy to say that the discourse has been kept to a complete minimum, with only a bare couple of individuals really trying to incite any actual drama over it.

The vast majority of fans across all major social media platforms are at least pleasantly accepting of the change, and many of them are outright over the moon with it. It’s a unique time in the fandom’s history that so many people share the same outlook on a topic, and I’m hoping that it’ll continue to inspire some measure of peace and understanding between the disparate factions we have today.

Indeed, between all of these things it’s been a rather busy time for the fandom. There’s only one more thing to speak of, and though minor it’s exciting in its own right: the Epilogues are being released in physical book form. This could explain the delay in the release of the books for Homestuck proper: the Epilogues are already completely in written form, which means they’re a prime candidate for being released as a proper book. Homestuck itself has to go through an editing process in order to be ready for physical print, which we can easily imagine being more intensive than whatever they needed to do for the Epilogues.

The book in question, as confirmed in the essay that Hussie released on Saturday, will in fact contain both of the Epilogue paths in the same book. To make it exciting, they’ve made it so that you have to flip the book upside down in order to read one or the other. This was an instant purchase for me, but I’m not sure how many other people went for it.

Largely speaking I’m hoping as many people as possible will support the Homestuck products that Viz puts out, not even to speak of What Pumpkin’s ongoing projects. We’re all hoping that the things coming out heralds even more to come in the future. I might be projecting overly much in saying this, but it feels as if there’s an uneasy feeling in the air concerning Homestuck’s future as a property. In the HSD and assuredly elsewhere, I’m sure people want it to succeed, but there’s a lot of confusion about the direction it’s going in now. Hopefully we’ll have some more answers in the weeks to come.

Nothing more for today.