bigboyyoungman:

roachpatrol:

janecrockerofficial:

skeletonpope:

not-terezi-pyrope:

disneyhomestuck:

some of the reasons homestuck meets the requirements of a traditional epic!

homestuck is a finely crafted piece of literature that deserves serious discussion and recognition, and it bothers me when people won’t acknowledge that.

Homestuck is the most important piece of literature of the 21st century so far.

Fight me on that.

@janecrockerofficial

Ohhh, I absolutely love this!

I’ve compared Homestuck to Lost in the past, and I’ve oft seen Lost analyzed as a modern twist on the traditional epic. This just makes the comparison even more poignant!

Homestuck is such an incredible piece of literature. I wholeheartedly agree that it’s the most important piece in the 21st century so far. Absolutely.

I want to point out that the plot doesn’t just span civilizations, it spans both genre (space opera, urban fantasy, apocalyptic romp, let’s play, fable,) and medium (epistolary narrative, comic, webcomic, novel, video, videogame). It employs all the accumulated self-aware, self-critical traditions of the latter 20th century to launch into a uniquely self-aware 21st century narrative: it’s not a story that’s epic, it’s an epic about stories. 

The narrator struggles for control over the telling with his own metaphorical selves, he’s his own protagonist, deuderagonist, and antagonist— all with the acknowledgement that they’re only controlling the telling, that the story has always been what it is, that they’ve always been part of it, that they’ve always been inside it— and this is also a story that’s written, in significant chunks, by reader suggestion. Are we outside the story? Yes. Maybe. No. The audience is part of the theater, the bard is part of the crowd. 

What is Homestuck? By now, the question’s gone from joke to koan and it’s still a completely legitimate question. But if it isn’t an epic, it’s only because we haven’t invented the actual word for it yet.

This is lit