Does Homestuck hate us for reading it?

I think there's an extent to how much you're "supposed to" read into Homestuck. Can you read in further? Of course. Always. People may say it's cornplating but shit, I didn't see that plate of corn either, please tell me about it.

Personally, I think there's a line when you start trying to insist that some of these really little or niche things are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT INTENDED. Sure there's a chance but sometimes the curtains really are just dicks. Never intended to be anything more, but I'd still like to hear how you think they connect into the story.

Maybe that's a bad example to use in a story that literally has plot relevant colored curtains for each act.

I think Homestuck can make fun of its fans on occasion without straight up "hating us for reading it". Homestuck is a big story with a lot of big things to say about the relationship between story and reader; sometimes those things are gonna be "hey, read closer, there's more here than you think!" and sometimes those things are gonna be "haha, nope, you're reading into the wrong thing!"

I don't even think those two attitudes are necessarily at odds with each other. Even if we do assume that the text making fun of Calliope is supposed to seriously hurt our feelings as fans, I don't see why shutting down some interpretations means it thinks we're wrong for having interpretations at all. I mean after all isn't that what a story does as it unfolds? It closes some doors in the process of opening new ones?

Generally agree with JakeMorph's take.

I also feel like any reading of Homestuck, especially in terms of how it thinks of it's readers, has to take into consideration the sheer amount of time it was actively updating. I think it'd be impossible to write something for seven years without your feelings and attitudes towards what/how it is supposed to be read changing, especially with the size and voracity of the Homestuck fandom. I personally don't believe Homestuck is supposed to be a spiteful work, and I think it's possible to read it in a positive and constructive way as opposed to pessimistic and destructive.

Homestuck always had a back and forth active relationship with its fans even long after actual reader input suggestions stopped. some of that was teasing and antagonizing and sometimes it was heartfelt and maybe a little awkward but overall is not Hateful. It’s challenging and it probably will upset you at some point but it’s ultimately glad you are there to experience it because what good is a story if no one is ever going to hear it? Even if it is at points extremely stupid.

Tangential but I tend to think it's pretty funny when the curtains are dicks. Like the page where Dave delivers a speech about the ironic subtleties of Mr. T jokes and only mentions that Mr. T is in thong and handcuffed to a near-naked Chuck Norris as an afterthought. Or when Vriska calls the riddles of Sgrub boring because she's already figured out that the theme is reproduction (hence the statues of kissing crocodiles looming over Tavros's puzzle), so she cuts to the chase and calls Tavros over to make out. Some readers might find secret sex jokes to be an unsatisfying resolution to the grand sense of mystery that Homestuck cultivates (and that dissatisfaction feeds the sense that they are being antagonized), but I just kind of laugh when Oblong Meat Products Tumble Into Places They Don't Belong.

reading posts before usernames really caught me off guard this time because I was about three sentences into the above reply before I started to think "hey, this guy sounds like he's read malo"

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Homestuck is (among other things), a long-form conversation between author and audience. The forums and fandom continued to be an influence on what is said on the page long after reader submissions stopped being used. A lot of the clamor about "author spite" comes from people who, imo, were mad that the story didn't play out in a way they envisioned. But even the most contentious events (like the dancestors for example) carry important discussions and arguments.

But yeah if you liked Gamzee at the start that is on you. That guy sucked day 1.

Andrew Hussie likes fucking with people. I concur.

I honestly don't think it's any more complex than that. I have never seen a valid claim to Huss "hating their fans" within the text of the story, it's always just story decisions that the person speaking doesn't like or which are jokes that didn't work on them (which, true to form, I've never been a fan of the "Huss creeps on Vriska" gag).

Even outside all this, I'd characterize Hussie more as negligent or dismissive than outright hostile towards the fandom. Certainly someone who makes...a lot of mistakes. Like, a lot a lot. But my strongest impression in all that has always been one of Hanlon's razor, just a rich kid trying his best but not being well-equipped to handle the hot potato in his hands.

re: JakeMorph Lmao! I'm digging that aspect of the forums tbh, the way you can read a whole conversations without glancing at the right columns for names is kind of refreshing. Like overhearing a conversation with your eyes closed

I agree with what a lot of other people have said but I think there's also a fundamental undercurrent of readers often taking themselves and their own ideas wayyyyyyyy too seriously. Like it's offensive and targeted and all about THEM if something changes (or grows) in a way they don't like or didn't expect.

Like the example of Gamzee at the beginning of the comic versus the end: the trolls don't fully get introduced until the beginning of Act 5. Murderstuck happens around the end of Act 5. So you have about 2000 pages of "early Gamzee," and then twice the amount of pages of that are Act 6, where Gamzee actually does things. Interesting things! He just struggles to be a Tumblr SexyMan Villain because now he's distasteful and unpleasant (which wasn't far from his early way of acting, just now openly and actively malicious instead of harmless). Which is honestly a genius flip on that trope.

And I feel comfortable saying this because I also read The Serendipity Gospels and was a GamKar fujo when "Palemates for Life!" was written (sheds tear for middle school me). But just because I liked it doesn't mean that it was accurate to the story and the actual character that was written - and actively being written! I think if the alternative to fans sometimes being a little butthurt because they guessed wrong or forgot the story was still ongoing is a story where nothing ever changes... then yeah fuck them fans. Save it for the fic.

Homestuck is a meta heavy story, which means it has to grapple with the way it itself gets read, that's just a part of the genre. You could argue that something like Umineko is VICIOUS towards readers, actively painting large groups of fans as active, stupid, and malicious sheep. But because if anything Umineko asks for a lot more from readers than Homestuck does, they're ready to bridge that gap and figure out if it really is talking about them personally, instead of latching onto a "fan insert" as a representation of Everyone In The Fandom. Calli doing something silly isn't calling every fan an asshole lol.

I truly believe that any work that puts stroking the ego of it's audience first is doomed to failure Because it can never challenge them. It can't risk offense, it can't risk pushing them to reconsider, it can't grow and have the reader grow with them. It has to center the reader as someone who is always right... it's patronizing, and really just treats the reader as an idiot! I think it's actually a big issue with a lot of books these days... if you don't follow e-flux/haven't read Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism it really dives into how catering to the audience has actually hurt us more than anything. It's a dense book but Isadora Neves Marques wrote a great article that touches on some of it's big points: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/155/677214/how-to-be-responsible-irresponsibly-on-art-beyond-immediacy

re: alexis

Totally agree. I feel very strangely about the way that people are very insistent that anything that they don't like in a story is out of character, especially when it comes to Homestuck1 (? I guess?). Like how can it be out of character? The author wrote it! On purpose! The author created the character! Maybe it's more that you, as a fan, created a persona or a version of this character in your head and then got disappointed that it didn't turn out to be real.

Some of the best parts of Homestuck flat out would not exist if Hussie had been focused on doing what the fans wanted. Some of Hussie's earliest fans were people who came from Problem Sleuth and their other work, some of whom were almost certainly disappointed when the story turned out to be very different from their other work. That doesn't mean that everything past, say, act 2 is out of character, or that Hussie hated those early fans. And yet there are still people out there saying that everything past Game Over was an asspull and was written out of spite or just because Hussie wanted to be done with Homestuck.

The epilogues are certainly a bridge, or an offramp- Hussie makes that clear- but I don't think that it's malicious. I think it is a sincere meditation on what it means to be an epilogue, and in Candy especially it does a lot to interrogate the positioning of suburban picket fences as utopian happy ending. I find it genuinely moving, and the idea that it's a fuck-you to Homestuck fandom paints Homestuck fandom as a monolith with the same opinions, beliefs, and wants from the text.

re: alary

ur head is so huge and so awesome i wanna see more of ur takes

lots of great responses here. i want to circle back around to the OP's point about circumstantial simultaneity. maybe this is my own bias but i've always understood that term to be a broad narratological concept for helping the audience to understand that events displaced from each other in linear time are still meaningfully connected to one another. it is, essentially, a technical term for what's occurring in-fiction when an author parallels seemingly unrelated events for the sake of the audience.

like in a movie with multiple timelines, you might have a ticking clock scenario happening on one layer while a big fight is happening on the next, and the film is rapidly cutting between them for maximum dramatic effect even though in-fiction they might have occurred many years apart. "circumstantial simultaneity" quantifies that symbolic relationship as something that carries material weight within the text itself, to the point of being something characters in the story can take advantage of to their own benefit. but that doesn't mean that all the circumstantially simultaneous events in homestuck are equally meaningful. in any text, there is always a point at which symbolic analysis starts to break down.

calliope is an echo of the ideal "good" reader, one who yes-and's the text, and i think her trying to read into the penis ouija is important to establishing that even a good reader can miss the mark when they lack cultural/historical context or are too enthusiastic in trying to suss out every possible way in which it's brilliant. i don't think homestuck hates us for reading it, but rather that it has an opinion on how seriously we should take it: at times, very; at other times, not so much. everyone pushes too far in one or the other direction eventually, like a bathysphere sinking too deep for the pressure rating of its hull. the adversarial nature of homestuck is just the text's way of reminding us that no framework of meaning can be applied universally to every single situation, and sometimes you just have to be willing to shrug and say "yeah that's just there because they thought it was funny"