Something I noticed in the Homestuck subreddit and with my own experience with the Homestuck fandom is the issue gatekeeping. Some of these people are okay with gatekeeping the webcomic from so called "newgens". And look, I understand wanting to keep the spirit of Homestuck or not wanting to deal with annoying fans, but in my opinion, gatekeeping isn't it. And the only types of people who should be gatekept from the fandom are assholes, bigots, and predators.
I partially talked about it in another forum, which you can read here: https://forums.serenesforest.net/topic/107375-sfs-teehee-thread-ii-desolation-of-serenes/page/4/#findComment-6156695
Let me tell you my experience with gatekeeping in the Homestuck community. It all started in a Discord server I made when somebody was talking about Homestuck. Out of curiosity, I decided to get into Homestuck myself. During some of the times where I talked about Homestuck, the person who made me get into Homestuck got upset at me because I didn't understand, and someone else had the audacity to quiz me on the webcomic. Also the former was annoyed over me shipping John and Rose (It was for a fanfic retelling of The Little Mermaid). When I was roleplaying as the characters, some of the people got upset at me because I didn't read the text carefully and analyzed the behavior of those characters, so it felt out of character, and I must admit, some of the things I did roleplay there was stupid and made people uncomfortable.
Looking back at what happened, HOLY CRAP that behavior was definitely gatekeepy, even if I was being annoying.
Do you have any experiences with gatekeeping in the Homestuck fandom? Share your experiences.
Don't ask why Geno hates Jade Harley.
Yeah, I think it's a fair point.
There's a lot of problems regarding this with The Homestuck Epilogues indeed - people endlessly participate in Epilogues discourses without reading the Epilogues.
I think one of the roots of the issue is the human brain is an amazing tool to instinctively connect dots and simulate things, so if we're reading enough about a story, we assume we do know the work, that our knowledge of it is equivalent to our knowledge of its main plot points. And that's a fair assumption to make! But we need to remind ourselves it is NOT the reality of the work.
Gonna quote a post I made in the AVPG forum:
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Oasis Nadrama - 25 November 2024
You should really get back to watching movies instead of pseudo-watching them through social capillarity.
I mean, I get it - I never watched the Star Wars postlogy yet I "watched" every minute of it because some properties are just this omnipresent and inescapable in the current social and cultural landscape. And I definitely don't feel the need to discover it now. (Hell, if anything, I feel even LESS interested in them now than I was before learning everything about them.)
But I fight against the illusion I truly know these works, because I DON'T. I didn't watch them. An audiovisual piece is more than a succession of story ideas.
But you could have liked Alien: Romulus. Or even loved it. Or hated it. Or found it boring. You never know. You never truly know how you'll relate to a given work. The other day I tried an old survival horror I heard much about, I was sure I was going to get bored to death, and it just CAUGHT ME, I fell in love with the game, and it was just a nice surprise and a good experience despite all of the game's weaknesses.
You never know how works of art will speak to your soul.
Pre-discovery communication is a bane on the audience's heart, it conditions and poisons all of our expectations.
And it is intellectually dishonest to become convinced you truly know the work and produce the most relevant commentary on it without watching it.
I mean, sure, some of your participation to the discussion will be relevant. But you don't know how the movie is articulated, how ideas relate to dialogue and to composition and to the duration of the shots and to the soundtrack, etc etc. Every work of art is a precise chemistry, it doesn't start and end with a story structure or even a screenplay.
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Read Alabaster here: https://mspfa.com/?s=236
maybe its a silly sentiment but i just wish people would be a little nicer. i totally understand WHY people would want to gatekeep, hell, even i want to sometimes, but what are they really achieving?? people who gatekeep just make the fandom environment that much more hostile, they're honestly doing more harm than these 'newgens' supposedly are. i feel like people have this sense of entitlement to the comic, and thats fine as long as theyre not an asshole about it, but they forget that they dont OWN homestuck. new people are allowed to read it. its not the end of the world that more people are getting into the thing you like, you shouldnt actively try to push them away.
what who said that
