Homestuck themes discussion

The angle that I choose to view Homestuck through is that it is generally a story about authority on an individual, societal, and cosmic scale. A lot of the characters are defined by the way they interact with the authority in their life, and Sburb, Skaia, and Lord English all function as both a kind of loose personal authority as well as cosmic authorities. The way to "play Sburb correctly" as much as that is possible to do is to become a god and create a new universe which you can do with as you see fit. It is reflective in some sense of the transition from childhood to adulthood, although the story makes it clear that that transition is not always clearly defined, always desirable, or free of its own many, many dramas and arbitrary restrictions.

The authority reading also appends quite nicely to all the stuff about gender, the ideals of post-canon, and the stories more metafictional themes of "cultural detritus", if you want it to.

if you've read the commentaries (which there's a mod for in the unofficial collection, highly recommend!), i think it gets pretty easy to realize "ohhhhh... homestuck is an earnest attempt at making a good YA story," and a really big part of it is that homestuck's main theme is Growing Up. the idea that the entirety of sburb is this system with incredibly arbitrary rules, harsh expectations, and restrictive roles is meant to reflect on being a real teenager, growing up in real life, and needing to jump through all these hoops to "be an adult."

which is a big part of why homestuck starts off so "limited." characters can't speak irl, everything is built around really overcomplicated gameplay mechanics, and as the characters "grow up," those systems strip away. the older you are, the less the game effects you, because the game is made to turn kids into adults. which is why i think a really big part of that theme which people have only started coming around to recently is "and then you become the adult that makes other kids play the game."

since the other really, really big part of homestuck is that it's about cycles! parent to child, time loops, abuse, all of it. so, digesting homestuck like that, it's a story about kids who are forced to do stupid bullshit to grow up, and then inevitably turn around and make other kids do the same. the trolls relationship the humans are the most obvious example of this, but with the caveat that the trolls never actually got to grow up until the humans helped. does that make the trolls a metatextual parental figure for the humans...? also, how do the post-scratch kids, who are literally the humans parents, factor in? it feels like The Jumping On Point, thematically!

I like thinking about the different philosophical views on life that the characters tended to have and how that reflected in the way they decided to play the game. I always think about how the Beta kids decided to try and play the game as it went, where as the Trolls wanted to compete with one another right off the bat. The different ways in which Human society prepared the kids for the game VS the way Troll society prepared the Troll kids really showed to me at least how Sburb hadn't really accommodated for either kids at all. It's not an easy game to play or win.