Selective Allocation of Imagination or, I Remember The Cursed Histories So You Don't Have To (Patreon)

A recent Eternal September update brought in a particularly beloathed part of Homestuck text, the Skaianet Systems cursed histories.

Let's talk about that!

This was always the plan to some extent. Eternal September takes place in this quiet part of Homestuck canon, this part of Homestuck which is best described as "scraping around the edges to get it all". It's set in Hauntswitch, a place which, as of now, has no information on the matter beyond "it's there, I guess". This is the place Skaianet occupies, too. It's cataclysmic in reputation, but the content itself is... really barebones, all things considered. I imagine there was a lot of gut reactions to Skaianet coming up in ES because of this.

A few weeks ago, I was talking about Meenah characterization with Veri of sburb.EXE fame before he got shipped off to war, and because of the way the conversation developed, I wound up recommending Veri read the Skaianet files. Veri's smart, sburb.EXE is one of the best comics out there. And Veri did wind up reading them, but the comedy of being told "hop on Hitlerstuck" was not lost on him, or the rest of the chat.

I stand by it, of course. When it comes to characterizing Her Imperious Condescension, this is where Skaianet excels. Skaianet is told in a very blunt way. Facts are just presented to the reader, characterization and feeling only present when necessary to draw battlelines for factional in-fighting. "Guy Feferi" becomes "Guy Fieri" through the same childish mumbling that mutated "Halley" into "Harley", and it is presented with equal gravitas as the death of Jane's husband at the hands of Harry Anderson.

It is exactly as I imagine a Meenah POV would be, blunt, always moving to the next thing, and deeply unprecious about making sure its story beats hit the right note. I can imagine her reciting this in adulthood in the same way the story visualized Meenah covering Aranea's mouth to tell the story of how her session ended - blunt, unprecious, always on to the next thing.

(There are maybe 5 panels of the dancestor session. This may be the only drawing of Meulin Hussie ever did.)

This does not play nicely with Homestuck readers. There's no big feelings, there's no poetry to it, there's only tone in the sense that tone is inescapable. Most of all, it overlaps with the preferred form of bad faith storytelling, the acontextual bon mot. This is something TV Tropes does out of habit, but it's also a common form for a story to take when being made fun of. This is neither good nor bad, really. Making fun of things is an important part of a cultural ecosystem.

If I told you out of context that one of the plots in Riverdale was when Jughead tapped into the astral plane to DM a tabletop game which coincides with Archie breaking out of prison, that'd sound insane, right? I personally adore that scene. It's peak. But this decontextualization of plot beats is an important tool in bad faith approaches.

You already know you don't like Riverdale, you already think Riverdale is insane and bad. You know that it's an acceptable target that it does weird, left-field things. (And if you do like Riverdale, welcome to the FUCKING resistance, sister!!!) So when you get that information, of course it becomes comedic. Jade Harley has a dog penis in the Homestuck Epilogues. Adolf Hitler is mentioned in the Skaianet cursed histories. It's a kind of thought-terminating cliche, right?

(Pictured: Peak fiction.)

These are things you know even if you've never read either, because they're the things people bring up when the topic itself has gone unaddressed for too long. Like white blood cells attacking bacteria, this rhetorical device ensures that no discussion can form around them. Many people only know that Jade has a dog penis in the Epilogues. Everyone knows it. "It's terrible", as they say. People laugh raucously at that fact in the same way they did attack helicopter jokes in 2016, and when they do, they laugh with you.

(They... are laughing with you, right?)

But honestly, Jade having a dog penis is something that doesn't even register if you've read it. If you haven't read them, you wouldn't be forgiven for thinking the Homestuck Epilogues are 160,000 words describing Jade Harley's red rocket penis and the way she uses it to fuck Rose into any given mattress, much to Kanaya's cuckolded distress. I wouldn't respect you for it. You'd be fucking stupid for it. But I would understand how you come to that conclusion. If you haven't read the Epilogues, did you know that this doesn't come up in the Epilogues at all? Yiffy is an exclusively HS:BC character. Did you know Kanaya isn't actually distressed about it? There is basically no drama about that in specific. The moment Yiffy exists, caring about her is unquestioned. If you haven't read the Cursed Histories, do you, personally, know exactly why Hitler showing up in the cursed histories is antisemitic? I wonder why.

But I'll tell you.

In the cursed histories, Hitler shows up to suck ass and ruin everything, but in the same way that Meg Griffin "ruins" a Family Guy scene. The joke is that he sucks, plainly, but this abstraction of the specific ways he sucks is a crucial part of the critique. It defangs the ways he was actually dangerous, it makes him an abstract evil. He specifically orchestrates the Holocaust as a means of getting back at Einstein. This is a heavily exaggerated version of such, but shifting the blame onto Jewish people, as the cursed histories unequivocally do, is a rhetorical technique used by actual Holocaust deniers. That is useful information to know, if you didn't already. It'll help you spot Holocaust denial in the wild, and it'll help you recognize how deeply normalized the idea is, even in being played for comedy.

But you'll notice, you might not have already known that if you weren't there for the discussions at ground zero. You probably didn't. I know this because I've had many conversations where "Hitler is in them, and that's bad" is the base level of understanding. It has to go deeper than that, though, right?

I think of it frequently as... signposting, not necessarily virtue signalling, but something adjacent to it. Ignorance signalling, perhaps. "X is bad because I heard it does Y bad thing and don't care to investigate further.", ignoring that storytelling is a much more contextual process than repeating a plot beat, note for not. It's an easy shorthand for understanding complex topics like the recreation of harmful cultural narratives. "X story does Y trope, ergo X story is bad for doing Y bad thing". This can be (and often is!) true, but that's where the discussion ends, right?

It's easy to understand why. Consumption is personality, it is morals. As much as I would like for this to not be the case, it simply is. I laugh too much every time some right-wing chuds have to socially maneuver themselves into a position where playing Hogwarts Legacy, the most slop game ever created, is somehow a righteous position and art worth upholding. I judge people with Hazbin Hotel and Danganronpa icons for having Hazbin Hotel and Danganronpa icons. You do too, let's not pretend we don't.

(Pictured: LOL, LMAO, et cetera.)

But I kind of resent that, right? Maybe this is because I'm an adult and have spent most of my life now getting lumped into a group with "Homestuck fans", but also, maybe this is describing a better, broader concept of "an unhealthy relationship to bad art". This is what Tumblr users who haven't quite learned to destigmatize mental illness will call "moral OCD", what AO3 users who just want to keep reading their slop will call "puriteenism", what people who specialize in culture war will call "virtue signalling", there's a lot of names for it and none of them are good, because each of them totally fail to address the behavior itself.

Really bad fanfiction is somehow more offensive to me. If I read more than a couple sentences of it I immediately feel a little tainted as a writer. I kinda believe that bad writing is something you can "catch".

Andrew Hussie, Formspring. September 9th, 2010.

My approach will be underscored by not really believing in any of these terms beyond that first one, describing an unhealthy relationship to bad art. Tumblr users love to diagnose others with disorders, if the disorders make them look bad in the discourse. AO3 users love to deflect critique of their writing by assigning a strawman identity to the critic. The culture war loves to pretend that people don't actually hold the beliefs they do, and merely perform them for social gain.

But each faction gains its ground competing to describe this phenomenon because it is broad enough that those ideals can be injected into it. It has a lot of assumptions baked in, but one of them is that consumption, be it reading, watching, listening, is comprised of complete passive agreement. I'm not one to claim projection. But in my opinion, this is very much telling on yourself.

A lot of mainstream media really isn't made to provoke thought. TV shows are oriented around the binge towards the season finale. Movies are made to sell more movies. Video games keep you placid and hooked up to the microtransactions machine.

There is other stuff out there. I love Itch.io for unique indie games that are worth thinking about past the moment you put them down. My personal favorite discovery of last year was MUBI, a streaming service that was curated specifically for the hipster film watcher in me, someone who will look at a 14 minute animated short built of "asparagus is rather phallic, isn't it" and say "fuck yeah I'll watch that".

But so much stuff is made with the thought of "just get them through the runtime, do anything to get them through the runtime" that it obviously dominates the school of thought with regards to how those things are processed. I watched all of the Cruel Intentions reboot TV series and came away with nothing to think about beyond "that sure was a TV show", and this point being made now.

There's an unshaken assumption that if you read something, you must fully agree with it, you must fall along party lines. And this plays strangely with a social feature I'd like to describe as "what were you at the devil's sacrament".

(Sometimes I wonder what Tumblr users who shift vocabulary like this feel. I wouldn't know. I only have $22,500 dollars because a

It's a sentiment I see quite a lot, it's a sentiment I participate in a lot. This kind of pride in not knowing what the fuck they're talking about, when attacking a strawman version of what they imagine, easy to defeat, easy to devalue, and easy to assert has no meaning in the end. But I don't think this is ever true, and I know this even when engaging in this behavior myself.

This is a tension at the heart of critique, one that goes back at least as far as the Nostalgia Critic, maybe further. Was there a time before then? Doubtful. The heroic, unsullied critic must be brought low by bad art. It is self-sacrificial to look upon something bad, to remember it so the pure don't have to. If it is martyrdom to watch Scooby-Doo (2002), then it must be sinful to watch Scooby-Doo (2002) and like it.

The function of ironically enjoying bad art is one thing. The social function of engaging with The Room or Bad Rats or a Corey Feldman album is the same: it is to say it is the outgroup, and we are the ingroup. They are not like us, they fail to meet our standards, and should be rejected.

This game is bad. It's cheaply made, it's difficult to find, it's largely forgotten, it's not fun, and for all those reasons, it's likely to vanish entirely. And that's why I wanted to preserve it. I believe in the value of failed art; art that is driven by carelessness, by unchecked and untalented ego, by spectacularly low-stakes greed.

It has a tendency to be novel, to be unpredictable, in a way that deliberate art never can. This is why it's so much fun to watch bad movies. No one would ever make this game on purpose. Something in the creative process needs to be fundamentally broken to get to this point.

Dan Olson, An American Tail: Fievel Goes To Video Game Hell

Enjoying bad art unironically is an entirely different, undeveloped skillset in a lot of people. This is a skill that I think is extremely useful - especially when that bad, lesser, outsider art draws eyes. It's why I think frequently about Rose Buddies, the McElroy podcast that was simply too good to live.

The McElroys live a weird life now, in 2025. But almost 10 years ago, Rose Buddies spent its time on reality television, a format and medium which glorifies the trash. Domestic abuse, violent masculinity, heteronormative sludge, that's the garbage that Rose Buddies lived within. That's so deeply at odds with the McElroys as they're known now, after the edges have been sanded off of them by an audience that was unforgiving about the slightest misstep. But Rose Buddies was great, and it was great because it gave the same shake to reality television that "high art" gets.

This is the core of my argument: Skaianet is worth talking about because it is not great, and because it is a tree in the forest of Homestuck. I don't love Skaianet, I don't even like Skaianet. But I love Homestuck. I don't just love Acts 1-4, I don't just like Hivebent, I'm not one of the weird, siloed off Hiveswap fans, I like Homestuck, with very few caveats. I recognize the flaws in Homestuck. But I do, fundamentally, like Homestuck.

And even then, I find Skaianet so unbelievably dull when it's not being offensive, and this is in no small part because Skaianet is not told with any of the panache or dramaticism that makes up a story. It's a bunch of bullet points saying... this happened, then this happened, then a character felt this way, and did this.

But that is interesting in its own right.

Returning to the exact moment Harry Anderson has claimed baby Fieri to raise him as an apprentice, but in this new timeline. Very little is different about this encounter. Life continues for Harry, as he attempts to raise this baby.

Andrew Hussie, 25-1965-HarryAdoptsFieriAgain.txt

This is what a lot of my notes resemble.

while an internet service provider installs/upgrades service for the internet at the shop, mary goes for lunch at the cafe. the trolls setting up internet are from the siliconvent. she decides to sit with jane, both to catch up with her work and also because it's someone she might know, technically. if you stretch the definition of know. they talk at lunch, and the troll keeping tabs on jane (as the deposed heiress to crockercorp) catches wind of tcs enterprise. jane mentions her son is watching the till while she eats. at the end of their meal, jane gives mary a little debbie swiss roll.

Me, Eternal September Outline.md

(Image from the Undertale art book.)

It's like looking at a sketchbook tour for writing. The vague shapes of a story that don't get seen, because they don't matter that much and change dramatically over the course of a product. Sketchbooks and drafts and notes are in an interesting place with regards to how valid they are as citations when interpreting a text. After all, nobody is citing Toriel's house drawing here in their Undertale AUs. Probably. No promises. And raising questions of what is and is valid parts of a text for interpretation, offering the choice to skip the intermission, to skip to the trolls, to skip the Epilogues, to skip over Skaianet, those questions are what Homestuck's been raising all along, right?

This gets back to the "scraping around the edges" description I brought up earlier. That's honestly how I think about a lot of what I want to put in the comic. Homestuck and Problem Sleuth both get described in terms of "ideas per page", and naturally, when you've got 10000 pages between the two of them, that's a lot of ideas, and not all of them are going to bloom in the same way, but they could. After all, deglazing a pan is how you get the flavor. (FOOD METAPHORS: 1 OF 2, AVERT SPIRAL IMMEDIATELY.)

(Screenshot from a BDTH liveblog on Discord.)

There's this concept in game design called "negative possibility space". It's a means of expressing "there was an expectation of something here, and it's not". A waterfall without a chest behind it. This is disappointing as a reader, but as a writer, this negative space immediately becomes more interesting, because I can put the chests behind the waterfalls - or, perhaps, something even more interesting than the expected.

I am often saying that in storytelling, what you don't do is just as important as what you do. I don't have many hard rules, but my number one tell that I've got something meaty on my hands is when I think "no, that's not right for this specific project". Identity is just as much being something as it is not being something else.

The tools you have for reading negative spaces in the text are weighted differently than reading the main text. Making connections, inferences, allusions, backfill, these are tools for reading that hew closer to creation than interpretation. What you infer, what you assume, these are places where you inject your own context into the text, these are all the self-reader in some way or another, not the author-other.

Perhaps to lead by example, Rufioh is a fairly thin character in Homestuck proper. He's not got much going on, in terms of screen time. A lot of who he is gets told to the audience directly, shown through interactions, and what there is of him is shown to be references to Dante Basco.

(What a winning smile.)

Did you know Dante Basco was in "But I'm A Cheerleader"?

He plays a gay man who is sent to the conversion camp setting, and escapes to live in a small LGBT group home. He comes back in the third act, as a way out for our protagonist and her altgirl love interest. Does this inform anything about Rufioh? Maybe. I don't know what movies Andrew has or hasn't seen. But it could, it could make the Lost Weebs into more than just a group of friends, and now Rufioh is a little less lean, characterwise. He served a role in society.

(Dante Basco's pretty good in it, real gem in an otherwise pretty corny movie.)

A negative possibility space is still a possibility space. There's a book I read recently on architecture, and one of the points it makes is that no matter what positive space exists, no matter how beautiful the text itself is, it's the negative space which matters, because this is what humans actually live in. Which is undeniably true of architecture. I would posit this is also especially true of storytelling. Things like shorthand, cultural reference, these are the tools a story is made from. You are led to make assumptions about things based on lived experience, even when dunked in the deep end of xenofiction. It's especially true in comics. The gutter acts as an enabler of assumption. The space between panels is a point where the story can't go, and the reader's imagination must go.

(There's a Scott McCloud panel for everything.)

This is the imagination at work. Clap your hands and Tinkerbell comes back to life. A story only works if you, in your mind, make it work. What's desireable to readers is the moments where the act of constructing the story is unconscious, sublime, you enter a flow and you forget it's a story at all. That's not to say this feeling is unassailable - some of my favorite Homestuck moments are when it does fuck with this flow on purpose.

It's like a sauce. (FOOD METAPHORS: 2 OF 2, WRITING RESPECT REVOKED.)

A properly emulsified sauce is evenly blended. Characters, facts, themes, all are one. A broken sauce will separate, and it becomes a disaster. You can pick out the oil, the roux, the cheese, maybe the egg inside has even scrambled. Similarly, a story that has broken becomes a scattered ball of facts.

(There was an image of a broken sauce here. I later removed it for your sake and mine.)

This whole post is kind of made up of vague outlines, gestures towards the core idea, but I hope it elucidates the point through that vagueness. But hopefully, by playing in this negative possibility space, by approaching the cursed histories in good faith, maybe I can put the chest behind the waterfall myself. The chest behind a waterfall isn't about the rewards it holds, really. It's about acknowledging the possibility space there. You, as a player, are seen and heard. The world you inhabit thinks the same way you do, and you are rewarded for thinking the same way the developers do. A nod of understanding.

Every piece of bad art provides an experience to learn from. A broken sauce still tells you about what was being made, what function it was meant to serve. But learning from them - actually learning from them, and not just avoiding the topic because you haven't learned at all - is more complex than a passive avoidance of the topic, it's difficult work. You don't learn anything by looking away from your subject.

"The worst sketchbook is an unused one." - Historical funnyman, Charlie Chaplin.

You are 100% sure Charlie Chaplin said that.