An absolute must-listen, Homestuck Made This World is a podcast by two academics (one of them also being the creator of the experimental horror game The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo!) analyzing and recontextualizing Homestuck.
A quite in-depth perspective that also tracks a large part of the history of Homestuck, with a lot of funny moments and an overall balanced view of the work, its flaws and its strengths.
https://rangedtouch.com/homestuck-made-this-world/
I would also recommend their Patreon bonus episodes, exploring various adjacent works and thematics.
HOMESTUCK MADE THIS WORLD - BONUSODES
1. Con Air
2. Problem Sleuth
3. The Neverending Story
4. Little Monsters
5. Hook
6. Armageddon
7. Promstuck
8. Saw
9. The first ten episodes of Lost
10. Fan Animations
11. Knight of the Burning Pestle
12. Detective Pony
13. Paradox Space
14. Massive Q+A
15. Animal Man
16. Arrested Development
17. Psycholonials
Read Alabaster here: https://mspfa.com/?s=236
i started two sentences with "anyways,", d'oh!
didn't you know repeating sentence openers is a bannable offense? you're fucked, buddy.
I listened to the podcast up until around they got to the halfway point of homestuck, either on cascade or like an episode after, i don't exactly recall. a lot of the contextualization stuff was interesting but good lord it constantly felt like they were just doing a really bad job at a lot of the stuff that Wasnt Specifically That. like setting aside my big disagreements with a lot of the analysis, others have gotten into that, something that bugged the shit out of me how often there were interactions that went like
cameron: yknow this part sucks ass and i hated it and i dont want to think about it because its so stupid and shitty and everything about it was garbage from the ground up heres my elaborate detailed thoughts on why its bad [proceeds to enumerate thoughts and reasoning]
michael: you know thats interesting a lot of people actually really liked this part me included actually its really cool but yeah your opinion is valid [zero further elaboration or discussion about why anybody might have liked this at all]
maybe this is just like, a product of how cameron and michael differ in their podcast-presence idk i havent listened to anything else theyve made but it really came off like, really annoying lol. not even directed at cameron, more than anything it made me annoyed at michael, not cuz hes Insufficiently Defending Homestuck but because this dynamic produces no interesting conversation whatsoever, either with the text or with his co-host. it always gave me the impression that michael was uninterested entirely which sucks cuz hes supposed to be The Homestuck Guy on the podcast!! it kills half the dynamic of The Homestuck Guy and The Not Homestuck Guy
thats my like hyper specific niche complaint out of the way (i have more complaints but theyre not for this specific post) anyway i think i would still recommend listening Some Amount if u absolutely want some of that Contextualization Juice in particular but if you want like, good analysis of the text or a close reading or whatever theres way better places to go.
