Postproduction in Homestuck and Beyond, Examined as Designed
Homestuck, among other things, is well known for having a robust and diverse creator culture. Illustrators, writers, and other artists have been drawn to the comic and the tools it provides. A large set of characters, sprawling worldbuilding, skilled use of symbols; all tenants of great science fiction and fantasy work. There is something about Homestuck that doesn’t just ask to be transformed, but demands it. In fact there are many things. From the literal narrative of the comic itself, to the promotion by Hussie himself and “official” post-content, Homestuck as a comic--as a subculture--is set up as an iterative and creative stepping stone.
There is a joke that Act 1 is the equivalent of an introduction to Java and C++ with a cast and characters. With the sylladexes, kernels, and other game-type tech he adds to the world, he definitely draws from his background in computer science. In fact, one could very much presume that the same philosophies that lead to the proliferation of open source coding and places like GitHub, played a part in creating the collaborative and iterative (in a good way!) culture in much of the Homestuck fandom today. The idea of constant creation, and almost more important, recreation, is a major theme even in the comic itself. The creationism of each universe being a product of SBURB and the players from the previous universe, handing over the reins to a new cast (and new author figure) in an everlasting spiral, is perhaps the most overarching evidence of this. Each part that then goes into the game only exacerbates this, from the sprite prototyping, to the personal medium lands, classpects, troll hierarchy, speciby and so on, all allow for easy and deeply personalized experiences to be remade into the universes of the game and plot. Both Homestuck and his previous work of Problem Sleuth are based on the goal of escaping those systems through escaping the narrative to another level of “reality,” and as seen in Homestuck^2, that level can be both “higher” and “lower” in the eyes of different characters.
But before I expound on how it applies to the culture of Homestuck specifically: what exactly is postproduction? “As its name suggests, this is an aftermarket world of preexisting forms that are in effect remade by the designer who stands in the position of the user, which is to say as the recipient or consumer of an existing work. But unlike traditional ideas of consumption, the object of postproduction is no longer simply consumed or used up, but rather extended, remade, and transformed. In this way, postproduction adds value to the product, occasionally through new use value[...] but it more often gains in symbolic value.”2 Essentially, it’s when those who were initially consumers of a work become creators of new content, based on or continuing from the original work, and those continued works only add to the overall power of that work. In graphic design this is common through reinterpretation, deconstruction, reconstruction, and often republication of ideas into new forms, which give new meaning and activation to the “original” concept. It also has roots in areas like programming and coding, where open source (or ripped) software is shared, edited, and reshared as an almost inherent part of the culture. When an environment facilitates these new works, it can grow beyond anything a single person, or group, could make alone.
The structure of the medium, in that the literal comic as hosted, is also to be considered. In the early stages of Homestuck, Hussie relied on command suggestions from a forum of fans from his previous work, until the amount of submissions would become cumbersome. Discussion about the comic was still welcome and facilitated on the MSPA Forums until several server issues caused them to be lost to time in 2016, but that kind of feedback loop set the stage early on for the call-and-response style of narration and fandom culture we see echoed today, with the Toblerone-canon wishes and having comic artists, musicians, and writers that were active fans themselves. As these teams of artists began building more and more of the content of Homestuck and Beyond it, we enter the eclipse of Production by Post Production. In this new landscape of control, they are equally an author as a designer, whom “in the realm of postproduction is a producer or orchestrator of frameworks, systems, and actions that enable design to happen. The traditional role of the designer as the sole creator of a work has been displaced; usurped by “contributors,” sometimes thousands of them.”1 This is similarly mirrored in the fandom at large through far reaching fan projects, such as Calibornstuck and the Homestuck Redraw, which invite fans to submit drawings to replace the thousands of official panels. These simulate other design projects like One Frame of Fame (2010), reanimating an original music video with over 34,000 still webcam photos of volunteers, and epitomizing crowdsourcing as a method of collecting content and collaboration.
We see similar things like this all the time in fandom, as artists create work that adds meaning to the source material and extends it’s life. Again, allowing “graphic designers” to stand in for designers of art, writing, and other media: “Today’s designers simply produce now and ask questions later. It is symptomatic of a younger generation of graphic designers who have in essence created a market largely by themselves and targeted to people like them. This torrent of production is accessible and circulated around the internet on various sites… This is the twenty-first-century version of show-and-tell, or more appropriately, make-and-post - a visual, self perpetuating archive of millennial portfolio culture.”3 The creation of these fanworks is rapid, passionate, and often, completely free of charge. Less about making the largest profit and more about sharing their creations, thoughts, and interpretations. What is special to Homestuck is how accepted and involved they are into the “post-canon” of the comic proper through means such as the appropriately titled Beyond Canon continuation. As who makes the decisions in what happens in “official” material becomes more obscured and shifted, the idea of a single, overpowering author is diminished. Through the text of the comic itself, control over the narrative is debated, argued, and fought over, and anyone can come out the victor in the heart of the reader. The discussion of what is “canon,” both in the literary sense of narration, and that of power and control wielded by the characters themselves, challenges straightforward acceptance of what is written.
Which naturally leads into what Beyond Canon means as an extension of this philosophy. As Hussie has said in his letter to the fandom, “by deploying [the epilogues] as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires.” He has given the title of Creator of What Is Canon to a new group of fan storytellers and artists to continue telling the stories they choose, while at the same time obfuscating what the worth and power of “canon” is. What is closest to this platonic ideal of “canon,” of what is true, essential, and relevant, is not what decides the value in work. As aptly said by Bourriaud, “these artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary.”4 The work that is created by fans isn’t “an amateurish supplement to a stable, professional core, but for a fundamental transformation”5 of that medium and of that story, and both the same inherent value as an original creation. The postcanon stage of Homestuck opens a new understanding to a traditional playing field, and it's for us to see what rules we can break and new games we can make.
1,2,3 - 26 Blauvelt, Andrew. Tool (Or, Postproduction for the Graphic Designer) (2011)
4 - Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2007), 13.
5 - (Blauvelt, 2011)
