Revisiting Homestuck in 2020: Act I
Covering the first act while exploring the tone, style, and the few introductory main characters.
I previously posted an introduction for this journey that may be helpful if you would like more context or just a better idea of Homestuck in general. Also, if you’re reading this and are interested in reading along with the comic, you can start here. This entry will summarize and discuss Act I from beginning to end (pages 1-249). This act consists of a lot of walking back and forth and establishing in-story game mechanics, so please bear with me as this will be mostly summary.
Act I: The Note Desolation Plays
“A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, is this young man’s birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name! What will the name of this young man be?”
It all begins with these lines and a goofy looking child, things that I’ve found often confuse and deter new readers who were not already fans of MS Paint Adventures. The text is presented as interactive, yet the reader has no control during the process of reading it, especially well after the forum game is over. It’s a learning curve.
After his sprite rejects the suggested title ZOOSMELL POOPLORD (funny), we learn that this young man’s name is John Egbert. John’s interests include “really terrible” movies, programming computers unsuccessfully, paranormal lore, and amateur magic tricks. The author delivers this information with a concise biography and simple visual evidence. Posters of Ghostbusters, Con Air, and Mac and Me decorate his walls, appropriately. Playing off John’s sprite having no arms, his next task is to retrieve some from his magic chest.
Almost as immediate as John’s introduction, we also receive the first mentions of the “captchalogue” and “sylladex” mechanics, fictional jargon replacing “collect” and “inventory” very, very loosely, as it takes these a step further by incorporating the logic of data structures in programming (e.g. stack, tree, array, etc.). This is done to make equipping/using items a challenge in itself. John’s sylladex has a stack structure, which follows First In, Last Out logic, and four captchalogue cards in which to store items. [I know it sounds convoluted and pointless. It is, but I have to talk about it because it comes up surprisingly often, at least in the early acts.]
John cannot use the fake arms yet because they are at the bottom of his captchalogue deck. He finds a note from his father on his dresser, as well as another “birthday artifact:” a poster of the feature film Little Monsters. He also learns he is able to combine two cards in his stack if they are adjacent, and he uses the hammer and nails in this way to hang up the poster.
A notification appears above John’s computer, signaling a message on Pesterchum, the chat client that characters use to contact one another.
His chums consist of turntechGodhead, tentacleTherapist, and gardenGnostic, handles which are converted to initials in chat. Note the use of letters that also denote DNA bases. This may or may not be important. We can see John’s chumhandle is ectoBiologist, a testament to his love for Slimer that breaks the aforementioned pattern. TG messages him.
The real strength of Homestuck’s writing comes through in these pesterlogs. Each character’s text appears in their signature color, so it is always clear who is typing regardless of the shortened chat handles. The author also makes use of unique typing quirks to differentiate the personalities between them. For example, John types in blue, always lowercase, with standard punctuation, while TG types in red, always lowercase, but with no punctuation save for when he deems it necessary for emphasis. John is polite and enthusiastic, while TG is irreverent and laid back. Their quirks and their diction work in tandem to create distinct voices and facilitate the dynamism between every interaction.
After catching up and engaging in apple-juice-piss banter, TG tells John to check the mail for the game that he and his friends have been waiting for, the Sburb beta. Unfortunately, John looks out his window just in time for his dad to pull in the driveway and bring the deliveries inside with him. He can’t risk this encounter due to his dad’s tendency to “monopolize hours of your time.” John’s father’s appearance is that of a faceless gentleman with a pipe and a fedora, an absurd, silent presence whose interests include baking excessively, doting on his son, and collecting harlequins.
TG informs John that their mutual friend tentacleTherapist is eager to play the game. He also takes the time to criticize his stack sylladex modus and advises him to at least allocate his strife specibus, meaning assign a permanent weapon type to his inventory.
Killing time by messing with his sylladex, John creates a “clever disguise” by combining the beagle pus glasses from his magic chest and a birthday cone hat. He looks awesome. He can use this to sneak past his dad and secure the package.
On his way, John finds a gift twice his size waiting for him in the living room. Another present from dad. This time it’s… an enormous harlequin doll. It has no arms, so John’s next command is to retrieve those fake arms from earlier, of course. Pesterchum is blinking when he returns to his room, introducing us to another character, tentacleTherapist or TT, who types in lavender. Her messages are verbose and clever, using standard capitalization and punctuation—very different from the two boys. TT asks John about the beta and passive-aggressively makes fun of him for fearing his benevolent father. John continues his quest and attaches the arms to the harlequin doll using icing from one of the many cakes strewn around the house, which he thinks is pretty hilarious and worth the effort. He must stay on task, though. He checks his dad’s study and encounters the usual dad paraphernalia as well as a stray captchalogue card, which he takes.
In a last ditch effort to avoid his father, John goes outside to check the mail, just in case. It’s empty, of course. However, peeking into the car, he can see a green package with an envelope underneath it. From his position outside, he can also see his dad baking in the kitchen. Another package, this time red, and an envelope with the Sburb logo sit on the counter nearly concealed by the steam.
John has no other choice but to confront his father. This encounter initiates a strife between the two as John attempts to evade another birthday cake being forced on him. Like many events in Homestuck, the strife is an interactive flash, but the outcome cannot be affected by playing it.
After creating a distraction by dropping Colonel Sassacre’s text on some smoke pellets, John collects the package, the envelope, and his dad’s PDA and retreats upstairs.
TG pesters John again and they argue about Matthew McConaughey’s contributions as an actor, further establishing John’s tastes and TG’s pretentious attitude. While the Sburb beta is installing, John investigates his closet for some knowledge on data structures. He finds a free “fetch” type modus, which he can then switch between his stack modus at will, giving him advantage when using a FIFO (First In First Out) structure would be more efficient than FILO and vice versa. However, in an effort to reach the red package in his deck, he accidentally expels the PDA, shooting it through his window and into the yard.
When he is finally able to open it, he learns that the package is a birthday present from TG: a worn, dirty stuffed rabbit. John is exalted by this. It is the exact same prop from the movie Con Air, the one that Nic Cage gripped with greasy fingers in a pivotal scene.
The beta finishes installing. TT messages John this time. She informs him that she has run the host application and has successfully connected to his client version. John doesn’t understand what this means, but he goes along with it.
In a meta turn of events, TT is now controlling John’s real-life environment through a Sims-like server. The commands switch to her perspective as she interacts with the items in his room. Just like the sylladex modi, Sburb’s user interface is populated with Hussie’s fancy neologisms, but it ultimately functions the same as any building simulator. TT struggles with the controls before expanding the walls of John’s room and deploying a machine called a totem lathe.
TT informs John that he should be able to act as a host for another player once he installs the host application, which was to arrive in a separate envelope. John recalls the mail in the car that is presently out of reach while his dad is out purchasing more baking supplies. While John and TT examine the other two devices dropped in the house, gardenGnostic pesters John and we get their first conversation. It turns out that the green package is a birthday gift from GG, solving the mystery of each piece of mail’s origins. GG quickly signs off as she hears an explosion outside of her home.
TT’s wireless connection blinks due to the severe weather where she lives, causing her to drop the bathtub she was moving onto the stairs. The house is in complete disarray at this point and tensions are growing. John is able to activate the device called a “cruxtruder” in the living room by whacking the top with his sledgehammer (no, we don’t know what a cruxtruder is yet). This action starts a countdown on the machine from 4 minutes and 13 seconds, generates some kind of floating erratic orb, and extrudes a blue cylinder referred to as a cruxite dowel.
TT learns from the Sburb GameFaqs that this orb is known as a kernelsprite and needs to be prototyped with two different objects. John allows her to pick up the enormous harlequin doll and merge it with the sprite. He then goes upstairs to the alchemiter on the balcony, uses the cruxite dowel to power it, and creates 3 green cubes, or “perfectly generic objects.” The kernelsprite starts losing its mind over something. John looks through his telescope, only to find a meteorite hurtling toward his exact location. And the rest of the world, he guesses. The timer ticks, 3:10.
Just as his dad is pulling into the driveway, John runs back to his computer to contact his chums about the development. TT loquaciously describes the sense of doom she has been getting from other players’ GameFaqs, and tells John he might as well go ahead and complete the alchemizing process by trying the totem lathe. The machine carves the same cruxite dowel into a “totem” shape. TT loses connection again, leaving John on his own.
We are introduced to TT herself, standing in her bedroom much like how we found John. Her name is Rose Lalonde, and her interests are as follows: “rather obscure” literature, creative writing, Lovecraftian horrors, psychoanalysis, and knitting. Rose captchalogues some of the objects around her room into her “tree” sylladex, which sorts items alphabetically. She collects her knitting bag, laptop, violin, and grimoire before climbing to the observatory to seek better internet connection during the storm. Again like John, Rose dreads an encounter with her mother, who she believes lives only to spite her. In the observatory she can see a shower of meteoroids overhead. With 40 seconds on the clock, she reconnects to John.
Finally, John places the totem he created on the alchemiter. As it scans the object, a blue tree of cruxite instantly appears and drops an apple directly into John’s hands. These events all culminate in a dramatic flash animation as John takes a bite of the apple, bracing for fiery impact.
The curtain draws. The scene changes. Years in the future, we witness a wayward vagabond stumbling through the desert.
Notes
While much of this act is inconsequential and a slog to get through, there are jokes (and facts) mentioned offhandedly that Hussie continues to thread into the tapestry as the story grows. It’s also difficult to not be charmed by the humor and art style, even ten years later, which is an accomplishment that many webcomics cannot claim. Categorizing each character by their chat color and finite interests would seem like a crude choice at first. On the contrary, the reader very quickly gets a sense of humanity and empathy for them, even as cute little sprites with limited expressions. Here we formally meet only two of them, leaving TG and GG a mystery. We are also presumably cliffhung upon John’s demise.
Act II begets the meat.