A Safe and Apolitical Guide to Writing Homestuck Dialog
Prologue.
The first thing you need to know about writing is that anyone telling you how to do it is a liar and a con artist whose advice should be disregarded at the earliest possible convenience. The only universally good writing advice there ever was or will be is this:
Write.
Everything else is a fucking scam.
Part One: Homestuck Dialog
How do you write good dialog, Homestuck or otherwise?
Unfortunately, there is no easy or quick answer, no magic trick that'll make you immediately better PSYCH of course there's one simple secret that all the novelists don't want you to know because they're too afraid of your nascent power! What kind of low rent self help huckster would I be if I didn't have a morsel of precious wisdom to make all these words worth the ink they're not technically printed with? A lousy one, that's what!
Lean in close, dear readers, because I'm only going to say this once, and as per the terms of the contract you signed you are legally obligated to only partake of these words once. This is the kind of scoop the CIA pulls coups over, capische? So get cozy, grab a hot toddy, juggle around some motherfucking biscuits or cheese or whatever dumb edible matter you want to occupy your body with, and listen all of the way up.
We're all friends here. We've all read the hit indie cult classic webcomic-cum-multimedia-juggernaut Homestuck (©VIZ Media original oc do not steal). You know that dialog is its primary vehicle for basically all aspects of narrative conveyance, and that the rest is basically eye candy. Which implies, of course, that dialog is Homestuck's eye meat. And you're here to learn how to get knuckle deep into that eye meat and really make it sing, tenderize that bloody mash until it wins you awards and the adoration of literally dozens of strangers online. Well, the wait is over. Here's the secret:
its mostly about consistency. choosing a set of parameters and committing to them absolutely. it can even be a shitty set of parameters and a crappy character. but if you keep hammering away at that voice, people will say, damn thats some pretty good characterization there. i mean... they might be WRONG. but theyll SAY it.
"the advantage in being so obstinate with the profile you choose is then any deviation you make will be very noticeable. this is to your advantage, if you can control these deviations with purpose and precision. such deviations can serve as the pillars for character development. they cant happen without the consistency first. and ironically, without the consistency, they DO happen. for the wrong reasons. because you fucked up."
Wait. Hold up. Why is that in quotes? Why is that in Courier New?
Fuck, I just plagiarized Andrew Hussie.
Well, too late to turn back now! This is me committing to the parameters of my character, and if Andrew fucking Hussie wants to stop me he's more than welcome to try.
Anyway, what I rather brilliantly articulated up above is one of the overarching universal laws of Homestuck. We can talk about the atomic elements of HS dialog (chumhandle, text color, quirk), but these things in isolation aren't terribly interesting or insightful. We want to understand how they relate to the law.
The obvious fact here is that these atoms are affectations of character. Let's say I invent an original character on the spot and call him Dave Strider. Obviously he's wearing sunglasses. His text is red, he never capitalizes letters, he never uses punctuation, this boy is just way too fucking cool to be bothered with that shifty looking over control shift key
Now let's invent a second OC and call her June. Her text is blue and she never capitalizes letters, but she does use punctuation. she's also got a habit of splitting some words, like homo sexual, because she is a simple creature whose needs are few.
Of course you can tell them apart from the opposite text colors, but just the use of punctuation lends June a slightly more awkward and formal tone than Dave's cool unreadable exterior.
We could go down the list from character to character and examine all the ways they're different, but you're reading the zine of a podcast about a webcomic, you already know this shit. You know that YOU W1LL N3V3R CONFUS3 T3R3Z1S D14LOG with 2ollux'2 diialog, and you understand how their quirks manifest linguistically.
My own independently concocted wisdom is that these affectations are an excellent tool for differentiating characters long before we receive any other identifying information about them. Pick an affectation and stick with it consistently, you've got a character. Break that affection, hot damn my man, that's what I call character development! It's as easy as that.
But here we hit a brick wall. The conceit that all of Homestuck's dialog occurs in chatlogs is a diegetic justification for its formal weirdness, which puts us in a tricky position if we try to apply these tips and tricks to non-Homestuck fiction PSYCH AGAIN obviously I have yet another patented stone set truth gifted me from the mountaintop of my own cerebellum that strikes to the heart of this very conundrum! I offer it to you freely, graciously, and utterly without ego.
You ready for this? Here we go. Strap in.
Just don't write non-Homestuck fiction!
Stay here, where it's safe. Look at all these beautiful dancing figures on the wall. Oh hey, it's our dear friend Jane Crocker baking a delicious cake for all her friends. What hijinks will she get up to today? That's for you to decide, reader. Her story is yours to tell, and what other story could possibly be worth telling? I mean, fuck Hemingway am I right?
Anyway, let's talk about fanfiction.
Part Two: Fanfiction
Fanfiction as a term is largely a distinction without a difference. A horror story about a bunch of teens who get murdered at a summer camp might be derisively criticized as "derivative," but derivative of what? Of genre? Of Friday the 13th? Yet for all its unoriginality, we still wouldn't call this story fanfiction unless it was explicitly set in the Friday the 13th universe. Ugh, "universe." What a boring way to delineate the possibility space of art.
When we talk about intellectual property and copyright, we are talking about borders. Here is the border between that which is Star Wars, and that which is not. Disney has the exclusive power to decide who does and doesn't cross that border, whose art is or is not lawfully within the realm of Star Wars legally, and can mete out punishment accordingly. The corporations who control any given "universe" would like you to believe that their control is right and good and natural. They will tell you that a Pokemon fangame has to be taken down in order to protect the sanctity of The Brand, because within the labyrinth of copyright law a lack of litigation weakens one's stranglehold on an idea.
Please understand that the borders laid out by intellectual property laws are arbitrary, and just as with the borders between nations they only exist insofar as they are profitable for capitalists. That which is vague and ill-defined is anathema to the colonial project of capital, and so the possibility space of imagination must be arbitrarily sectioned, quarantined, controlled, and ultimately purified for consumption.
Fanfiction as a term is a distinction without a difference because it refers only to fiction that uses intellectual property without permission, and intellectual property itself is a false notion invented by capitalists for capitalists. In another era, Christians providing alternative interpretations of the Bible were executed by The Church because their ideas were dangerous. Only The Church could be allowed to decide what was or was not Canon, because a lack of persecution would weaken their stranglehold on an idea.
Which gets us well enough to Homestuck, doesn't it?
Here in early 2020, Homestuck is in the midst of a complicated conversation about canonicity as prodded by its own continuations. The Homestuck Epilogues are quite deliberately upsetting, and a vocal contingent of readers expressed disappointment that this is where their favorite characters wound up.
But it isn't really where they wound up, is it? Because it's fake. Nothing "really" happened, it's just a story.
This is the sort of gotcha that drives folks up the wall because it sounds like I'm saying "who cares, it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't matter, it's just some words on the internet!"
I've written nearly 200,000 words of HS fic in the last year, on top of hosting the verty podcast this zine is an extension of. Believe me, "it doesn't matter" is not what I'm saying.
There is a metaphysical roadblock when it comes to understanding a long-running narrative, because we are not wired to really internalize the fact that these fake people are fake people. This is not a bad thing. But the fanatical fixation one acquires over time can easily lead to an internal blending of reality and fiction. I mean, obviously right? I cry every time I watch [S] Terezi: Remem8er. I know that these are not real people whose tragic lives I'm reading about, but that doesn't matter. I care them. I cannot help this.
But there always comes a point in the relationship between you and a work of art you love when something changes. In the case of Homestuck (at least for some people), that change came with the existence of continuation media like Homestuck^2 and Pesterquest, which are written largely by people who aren't Andrew Hussie.
Once there was The Bible. Great. Perfect. Got it in one. But then a bunch of new kids showed up with The Bible...2! And it was nonsense garbage for babies. Real cuckold of a spiritual document.
Do you see what I'm getting at? We've done this song and dance before. We can talk about how human beings are phenomenologically predisposed to intellectual stasis and thus inherently skeptical of that which can be perceived as New until it has been proven either Friend or Foe, and we can talk about our recurring social tendency to defer to authority figures to tell us what's right and what's wrong when these kinds of questions emerge, but the results tend to be the same no matter how you slice it.
It's almost like an analysis of the material circumstances of a conflict can yield falsifiable insight into their causes and effects. Weird. Someone should look into that.
The Homestuck Epilogues propose a three-pronged model for understanding canonicity through Truth, Relevance, and Essentiality. These fall well in line with the preponderance of systems and hierarchies that make up Homestuck's hyperflexible mythology, but they haven't exactly stuck in quite the same way. There's a lot of insight to be gleaned in how these three traits describe the sense one has of approximate verisimilitude with regards to fanfiction, but-
No, "verisimilitude" isn't quite right. Pseudosimilitude? Hmm.
Anyway, these traits are squishy and subjective, they provide no firm grasp and deliver no divine truth. They're bullshit, is what I'm saying. And that's hard to reconcile in this world where corporations sue the fucking pantaloons off of anyone who so much as casts a covetous eye upon their precious Brands. The legal fiction of intellectual borders is The Church proclaiming canonicity, but Homestuck's Vatican is occupied by an absentee Pope.
This is a good thing, actually.
We live in uncertain and terrifying times. Most of the people reading this, I hope, have found themselves somewhere on the ideological spectrum of communism and are rightly interrogating our present material circumstances to understand the gargantuan clusterfuck we're stuck with. But it's vitally important that in this process we do not spare our critical gaze from the media we are surrounded by, even media we turn to as a passive comfort.
To do this, you have to divorce the aesthetics of the argument from its content. Distill the materialist framework to its barest essentials so that you are left with a lens that can be applied in an infinite variety of contexts. There is a reason that revelations about the widespread rot of capitalism tend to come one after the other. There is reason dialectical materialism has survived well over a hundred years.
If you can understand the motivation behind the aesthetics, you can understand the systems that brought them into existence. Once you start thinking systemically, you begin to escape the individualist lie of liberalism and recognize that you exist within a context, you are more than just your clothes and your hair and your text color and your typing quirk, you are a living breathing animal trapped in the company of your fellow brainwashed comrades. See the truth behind the shadows on the wall and attack the root cause of your suffering! Only then can you-
uhh
write good Homestuck dialog.
Wow, that was a long detour to say "understand character motivation" huh?
Epilogue.
There is no epilogue.
Go read godfeels.
