Striking close to home

Homestuck page 9859, Flash animation screenshot:

In three or so years of reading this comic as it came out in a single ongoing burst of creativity unparalleled in recorded history, and one year of waiting, and the last few months of trying to remember what was happening and who any of these people were while hungrily consuming each sporadic update, for the first time in the existence of this and several other universes, I'm suddenly afraid someone could die.

That's what those insanely bright cracks in the furthest ring from all imaginable universes do, right? It's Lord English tearing apart the absolute essential foundations of reality of this many-layered world, if I remember right? Breaking shit on a scale that is completely off the charts even in this world where everyone and their frog poops out universes.

I'm thinking (Hoping) that all the bullshit and infinitely redundant resurrection methods and sliding scales of character deadness have been building towards this climax where we suddenly find out people can die as unexpectedly and completely unarguably for real as, well, real life, and the stakes go up to make this, with an absence of hyperbole so extreme hyperbole can't even convey it, literally the biggest and most important conflict ever portrayed in a work of fiction.

Those were my immediate thought upon reading/watching/listening to today's update. We're watching who I think is real live Kanaya and who if memory serves is the original, long dead Vriska, who has changed so much since she died we may say the characters are meeting for the very first time. The ideas they have of who the other person is may be less important than the time and place of their meeting, where each of them are happy just to see another person.

And they embrace and watch super-outer space fall in pieces around them.

I think.

This has always been a problem with Homestuck, at least for me. It's really hard to keep track of what's happening and triple ultra hard to keep track of the characters and their relationships with each other. The long drought of '14 did not help at all, and the constant promise of Mr Andrew Hussie wrapping up the story soon has kept me from summing the enthusiasm to go on the full week, full focus, 24/7 archive tear I'm going to need to firmly plant the details of this massive, massive story in my short term memory.

And yet I keep coming back, for moments like this.

Moments where I don't understand anything but everything seems alive and vibrant with meaning and beauty and depth.

That is the least of what Homestuck does. It engages your heart without even trying. It's a lovely and fascinating and unlikely mess that makes demands on your time and energy like newborn quadruplets and twists your heart and blows your mind like a five year old. (Not that I've ever been a parent, but some of my best friends are.) And when it's firing on all cylinders? When you let yourself get in deep and genuinely understand it, genuinely care about it? I've been trying to find a way to write a cohesive review of the comic for the past year or so but it's just too much to take in. It's like writing about the world.

Except cooler.

So, it occurs to me now this blog format is perfect. I can do a Homestuck reread, like the cool people at Tor. You can expect some irregular updates, some mindblown gibberish, some mindless fan gibbering, some hopelessly clueless misunderstandings, maybe even some hard-hitting criticisms. Does that sound good, dear reader who's reading this in some unimaginable future where all these plans have already worked out or failed?

It sounds great to me.