Episode 59: Homestuck is a Society

Musician Molly.Noise joins Sarah Zedig to discuss Homestuck through dialectical materialism. Topics: Speedrunning Homestuck. Ideology. Capitalism on Earth C. Homestuck's Ayn Rand.
Listen to this episode at https://perfectlygenericpodcast.com/updates/episodes/59
== Transcript ==
Sarah: The Perfectly Generic Podcast contains spoilers, occasional adult language, and DIRK. You've been warned. This show is supported by listeners like you on Patreon; we'd like to thank the following Crockertier patrons for their generous support per episode: [names].
Sarah: Homestuck is a society and we live in it. Welcome to the Perfectly Generic Podcast.
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: I am your itinerant host, Sarah Zedig. Hello. I'm here, and with me is my friend and my girlfriend, Molly.Noise, hello Molly.
Molly: Hi Sarah.
Sarah: Hi!
Molly: Can I say first off, hello to all the good folks in Americaland and beyond!
Sarah: You fucking brown-noser. Uh, 'kay. So, hi. So this is a podcast about Homestuck, where we talk about the webcomic Homestuck. So there's some developments, as listeners know, Kate Mitchell is pulling away from this show a tad to do other things, for reasons. And I have joined the cast?—that's a way to put it—of semi-permanent recurring hosts of the show. So I'm doing this week and then I'm doing next week; the week after that will be the Chapel Hill live show, which we'll have more information about at the end of the show. And then I'll be doing the two weeks after that. And there'll be some other hosts doing stuff from then on. So yeah! That's sort of where the show is. I'm excited as a fan of the podcast to see how things differ with a bunch of different voices doing more consistent episodes, because we're all bringing very different perspectives here. Obviously, my previous episode that I hosted was about Twin Peaks, where I just had a dozen books open in front of me that I was quoting from. And today we're gonna talk about Marxism and dialectical materialism.
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: So there's a bit of a theme going on with my episodes, I guess. I'll be sure to rectify that eventually. But before we get into anything specific, we need to talk about this week in Homestuck. And it's not huge news, just that in Pesterquest, the Kanaya and Karkat routes have been announced, and their sprites are public information on twitter dot com. So that's exciting. It's cool to see that they are going back to the Friendsim way of doing things, when going to the trolls, having two routes together instead of doing one at a time. It'll provide a lot more meat for us lowly consumers of Homestuck media.
So I feel like there's not much to say about that, besides the fact that they exist. I'm excited to see how the reader fucks with Alternia, and what that's gonna look like. I guess we'll see. So now, we're gonna—I guess I'll talk to my girlfriend.
Molly: Are you even allowed to do that?
Sarah: I mean, no one's stopping me. Every time we have a new person on the show, we like to ask them, what the fuck went wrong with your life that you became a fan of Homestuck? 
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: The answer in this case is me, I know.
Molly: Well, I started dating this American. And she had these books on her shelf. And they're the story of some dumbass kids who are playing a video game. And it all kinda went downhill from there. I mean, I—
Sarah: Look, we're not talking about Penny Arcade. Get to the part where we're talking about Homestuck.
Molly: [Whispering] Oh, Jesus Christ.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Molly: I'm having flashbacks to like 2006. So with Homestuck, obviously, I visited you in Oklahoma, you had the books, you'd mentioned it before, and I think I opened up MS Paint or whatever—the website—and was just like, hm, let's see how long the archive is. Nope, not reading that. That's just too long, that's like some of the manga or anime series that have been going since 1972 and have like 14,000 episodes and 809 characters. Or some Chinese epic that has 108 main characters. I'm just like, "I'm good." You know, I'm glad that people like this, I'm sure it's very very nice, but there's a lot of stuff I don't need to do in my life, and this is one of them. It's a phenomenon I like to think of as a kind of narrative inertia. You can see this in problems facing any long-running TV series, or any particularly long-running video game, like say, World of Warcraft, where the more elements you introduce, the longer the series goes on, the harder it is for a person to get into it. I'm sure there's probably a proper term for it. And you then either have to appease people coming into it, by doing more monster-of-the-week individual isolated stories, or you have to appease long-term fans by just kind of continuing on the main story, and it's basically an impossible thing to do both, so.
Homestuck being finished is really nice, because it means I could kinda go "ok, at least it's not going to get longer as I read." But anyway, so I looked at this, and I visited you, and I sat down, I was like "ok, I'm going to read these bloody books." And I didn't read the commentary by Hussie, because I was just like, "well, I'm gonna do that on the second read-through." Which I will be doing, probably next year.
Sarah: Of course.
Molly: I want to read the actual paper form because it has his commentaries. But I didn't really get it. And then, about three weeks ago, four weeks ago—sorry, I haven't been sleeping great—I was like, you know what, I'm gonna read this. So I said, right, I can't really remember everything that happened, so I'm going to start from literally page one. And over about two weeks I read the entire thing and the Epilogues.
Sarah: Yeah, you did do that.
Molly: So that was a bout of insomnia, a kind of semi-still ongoing thing, where I haven't been sleeping great, and I was like, you know what, I need to just engage with something for a long period of time to keep my brain active, and also to tire me out, and why not read the weirdest meta-modern epic, greatest play, video game, novel, of our period of history. So what went wrong is a number of failings of my faculties which led me to go "well, why not."
Sarah: I also wrote a hundred thousand words of fanfiction and you said, "I want to be able to read this."
Molly: Yeah, you wrote Godfeels - can I say Godfeels on the show? Is that a [unintelligible]. You wrote Godfeels and I was like, am I going to actually read that?
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: And I was like, you know, I'm not really going to understand this too well. Like, I don't like not getting certain resonances. And this is like, a serious problem in philosophy as well as in some fictions, whereby you're like, "oh, I want to read this person, so I have to read Kant. If I want to read Kant, I have to read Plato. And you just end up practically in ancient Greece and you just kind of read forward in time. So with Homestuck, it was very much—with Godfeels, I was like, "I kind of should read Homestuck first so I really understand what's going on here." And I'm not really sure it was worth it—no, it was definitely worth it, I'm very glad, I got a lot out of it, but at about the halfway mark, I was like, "am I really doing this just to read Godfeels?" And the answer is no, I'm reading this to read Homestuck. I got to read Homestuck, and then I got to read Godfeels. Which is, you've actually written it in such a way that you could probably just come into it in media res and just figure out what's going on. I actually don't want to spoil it. Certain things that happen would be slightly hard to figure out, but I think you can kinda get it from context. It's not too mired in lore.
Sarah: Yeah, I've gotten some comments saying some people were able to get it without having read Homestuck, which is wild to me. But yeah, so you read all of Homestuck in two weeks. And that's a feat that just boggles my mind. So the first question that one must ask... 
Molly: [Laughs] Mhm...
Sarah: What did you think about it?
Molly: Um... eight out of ten.
Sarah: Eight out of ten?
Molly: That's all I have to say—that's it. Eight out of ten.
Sarah: Uh huh.
Molly: Look, all art can be—pure empiricism. All art is objectively observable, and you can just graph it perfectly. It's an eight out of ten, that's it. Everyone understands that, right?
[Pause]
Sarah: Yeah, well that's our show! Thanks for coming in! [Laughs]
Molly: Thank you, bye! It's been lovely to be here. What do I think of it, oh my god, there's too much to say on it.
Sarah: You could do at least fifty episodes of a podcast on it if you really wanted to just go hog wild on a motherfucker.
Molly: Are you familiar with the twitter account, "Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies?"
Sarah: No.
Molly: OK. So there's a semi-serious... short version, there's a lot to read in Gremlins 2, and you could spend more time talking about it than the entire length of the film, you absolutely definitely could. With a work as large as Homestuck, there's so much to talk about. Everything from how it evolved internally, in the way it was composed; the behind-the-scenes stuff, the changes in the kind of readership and in the author; the development of the language used; how it's this perfect snapshot of a time in which we were transitioning away from a less centralized web to a more centralized one. So at one stage, most flash animation was on Albino Blacksheep and Newgrounds and stuff, and then everything just became YouTube. Social media was more disparate, there was more blogging things, people mostly interacted socially via discrete chat things. Like, you had six different chat clients, or I remember having Pigeon [?] at one stage, to tie together all my various friend groups...various chat applications, and then everything became Facebook and Twitter. So it kind of is this snapshot of a period of time which is very hard to talk about without going into huge, volumous details about like, "well, at one stage you had nine friends and they used three different chat applications, one which was by Microsoft, one which was this small company called Google. And..." Does everyone remember GChat?
Sarah: And America Online!
Molly: Yes, I would've had friends, and like. You hung out on forums, and you never really—this is a really weird thing to say, you might know someone by reputation. So I remember, like, I was having flashbacks when—the conceit that Sburb is— "S-burb"? "Sburb"?
Sarah: It's never said out loud, so you can say it however you like.
Molly: So the conceit that Suburb is a video game is kinda played with interestingly, and never fully winnowed through. But what I thought was really interesting was, when we were reading the characters reading strategy guides, and we're seeing the characters writing strategy guides, it reminded me of, there's a maybe not-too-well-remembered video game, "Severance 2," "Severance: Blade of Darkness" or something, it doesn't matter. But I remember being a teenager and finding strategy guides online, and almost getting a feel for the writer, and kinda garnering that they had a reputation online? This is a person I never met, who I only knew via their writings on a video game that we had both played, and only years later going and looking that person up. And there's something about Homestuck, that it very much captures the feel of a time I grew up in online. That's the best way I think I can put it, at least in the initial 2000 pages or so, and then it evolves into all these other things. And, oh there's so much. There's so much!
Sarah: Yeah. There is, there's so much! There's a lot to talk about.
Molly: Oh, dear god.
Sarah: And it definitely does that for me, the feeling of this lost era, where everything was on these—I can't remember the hosting site anymore, but there was a make-your-own-forum...
Molly: Oh, like Angelfire, or feckin'...
Sarah: Yeah, stuff like that. Geocities was another one, there's so many of those. At a time when there was no centralized place on the internet, it was just, you found your little corner, you found your weird little closet that was full of all the other smelly nerds that liked the things that you liked, and...
Molly: I actually—oh, sorry, go ahead.
Sarah: You engaged in all of this weird rambly nonsense with people who were like the kings of their own little fiefdoms. I remember when I was on this Legend of Zelda form that I think was called...oh, it doesn't fuckin matter. I was on a Zelda fanfiction forum for a long time.
Molly: [Gasps, then whispers:] We can swear.
Sarah: I've said swears multiple times already, Molly.
Molly: I'm Irish, I didn't notice. Sorry, go on.
Sarah: You're Irish, you say them so often you don't even—they're like salt and pepper. Yeah, I was on this fuckin forum for forever. And there was a mod there whose name was Poe, and they were there long before I ever was around. And a few years ago, I decided to investigate that forum and see what was going on. And that guy was still there! Still an angry mod.
Molly: Wow.
Sarah: And it's weird to realize that those little corners of the internet still exist, when I spend most of my time on Discord, or on Twitter.
Molly: This is great, I just realized this anecdote is basically me boasting about how someone told me how clever I am, so this is kind of a Socratic dialogue thing.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Molly: But basically, a friend of mine—Rob, if you're listening, which you're definitely not—so a friend of mine, Rob, came back to me a few years ago. We hadn't really talked for about two years because of the transitioning. Not that we had fallen out, just, various factors had conspired. And he said to me... he basically said that I'd mentioned this thing to him a while ago, 'cuz I was really bitter and angry and cynical at one stage (lol, y'know, that's completely changed). But I'd kind of been giving it to people for not—my approach to people was very bad at one stage. But I'd kind of been berating him and others for spending too much time on Facebook or whatever it was. Not because I was like, "damn kids of today," or whatever, he's a bit younger than me. But I was basically saying to him that the way—Facebook and Google and these various companies, they exist to sell advertising. That's their whole thing. They sell space to advertisers, or they sell adverts, or whatever it is. So there was this ongoing tendency that you'd see towards making a one-size-fits-all platform for X, getting everyone on there, and then just monopolizing their time, basically trying to encourage more and more people to spend more and more time there. So instead of having a specialized platform—a good modern example would be Letterbox, which is specifically for reviewing—
Sarah: Yeah, for movies.
Molly: I'm not being paid by Letterbox, although I did actually pay for their service now 'cuz I want to see my goddamn stats. I'm currently winning among all my fans on Letterbox for most films watched, because I'm a monster, but whatever, that's not the whole thing. Look, it's not a contest, unless I'm winning, in which case, I am winning.
Sarah: No, it's absolutely a contest. That's what it is to be a human being under late capitalism in the year of lord 2019.
Molly: The year of our lord, Waluigi. But what I mean to say is that, he came back to me and said that he'd noticed that amongst his younger siblings, they didn't go anywhere else on the internet. The internet to them was just Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other places. And something of the predictability of that interaction was probably a feature in it. 'Cuz, it used to be, you'd go and you'd Google, I don't know, something... y'know, something kids look up, like mycelium growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa—I don't know, whatever it is—and you'd find someone's weird blog and you'd read something, and you'd have no idea what it's attributed to, and you'd read all that stuff and you'd go off and you'd come back and you'd bookmark it, and now everything is like, if you want to look something up, you go to Wikipedia, which is... there are issues with Wikipedia.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, there's a handful of issues.
Molly: There are quite a number of significant issues. And then, if you want to go to YouTube, or Vimeo—Vemeo?—Whatever the hell it is. And if you want—everything has become centralized, everything has been turned into, "if you want X, you go to Y." And there's some good things about that? You know, you can just find pretty much everything in some places, but there's also some really negative elements to it. Homestuck reminds me of a time before that was a thing—I am also really amused that like, when I went to watch, I think, is it the last video? Or the second to last video that happens in Homestuck—
Sarah: Collide?
Molly: Yeah. It brought me to Newgrounds, I'm not sure which one it was, and then I remember reading that—
Sarah: Oh, that would be Cascade.
Molly: Oh, ok.
Sarah: And that's the middle one, at the end of Act 5.
Molly: OK, yeah. But it's one of the last big videos that's in Homestuck—'cause remember, I just blitzed through this. So I remember—mhm?
Sarah: Well, Collide is on Youtube.
Molly: Which one's on Newgrounds?
Sarah: Cascade. That's the end of Act 5.
Molly: Yeah, I know, but I was saying, for me, that wasn't a very short—so you're saying "oh, but that's how many thousand pages later." I'm like yeah, I know, everything's very compressed for me.
Sarah: Yeah, I know, I'm just saying, "towards the end of Homestuck," you're talking about literally the midpoint.
Molly: This is true, this is true. The point I'm getting at here is, I remember it brought me to Newgrounds, and I was like, I haven't been here in a long time. [Laughs]
Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
Molly: Shoutout to anyone who played [?] Arena. But...
Sarah: Shoutout to people who've been fans of Egoraptor before... before he became a millionaire.
Molly: He's a millionaire?
Sarah: Probably not. I don't know. He's the heir to the Game Grumps fortune.
Molly: I've never watched the Game Grumps.
Sarah: Oh, I watched it religiously when I was younger. I've always had such excellent taste. I find it interesting, talking about the collapsing of interests, there's a bit of that that's actually reflected in Homestuck, where everything that's happening in the Beta session in the bits of Acts 1 through 4, it's very much 2009. By the time you get to Act 6, and you're in the Alpha session, you're on a version of Earth that's very much like Alternia, post-scratch, where the Condesce and Doc Scratch and everyone have bent over backwards to poison Alternian society, and they're doing—the Alpha session is the same thing, where the Condesce is there, and is trying to poison human society and bend it to her will. And there is this interesting thing of like, everything is branded Crocker. Everything is part of this one corporate monopoly. And one of the more unsettling realities of Earth C is that all of these children, these literal children, became gods of a new world, and just recreated the best version of society that they could figure out. And Jane is just like, "well, I'm the heir to a corporation. I guess I'm gonna bring that on over into Earth C, into our new utopian future that we get to make from the ground up. Guess what, everybody, we're already in late capitalism and we just started."
Molly: Well actually, I think there's a—what's that Marx quote I rather like, basically to do with, what do you plan to do after the revolution? If you don't really plan on how you're going to proceed, all the old crap just reemerges. I think it does actually literally translate as crap. And there is something in that, actually, that's—hang on, one second, we got a question, can I pivot into these?
Sarah: Go for it! Go for it.
Molly: So Strawb on the Discord asked, "What are your thoughts on the way life is like on Earth C, with it being described as having no real economy since all things are freely alchemizable,"—alchemIZiable? Al-CHEM-izable?
Sarah: Yeah, alchemizable.
Molly: —"...and the way the populace seems to "play out" capitalism?" And this kind of dovetails nicely with bakedpotatocat's question, "The late Mark Fisher stated "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." How does this idea play out in Homestuck, especially when looking at Dave and Jane's arcs and the Epilogues?" And this was something I really thought about, the idea that... that there's this amazing failure of imagination, in effectively a post-scarcity economy, to build something other than a pseudo-capitalist regime. Because they just don't—they're teenagers, they're kids, they really can't conceptualize some sort of alternate economic order. Now obviously, the prologues don't really go into it too much. Sorry, prologues. The Epilogues—I keep doing that, my god—The Epilogues don't really go into it too much, like, the exact nature of what's going on with wage labor and exploitation. And this kind of question has to do—like, in a post-scarcity economy, would some people not just run bakeries for the hell of it, even if everything can just be summoned more or less from the air. And I think it's like... the answer to this is kind of interesting, that like, people need to realize that right now, we don't need to be doing capitalism. You actually don't need a post-scarcity economy to step beyond capitalism. There was a fantastic gif on twitter a few days ago, I haven't researched the exact numbers so you're going to have to forgive me, but it showed over the last hundred years, military spending of various countries, and if you read Marx talking about the backwardness of Russia—this is, he was talking about various European cities, and he was talking about how Russia is this massive carceral police state with a huge-ass military, and the military's basically non-productive. It doesn't produce anything. Obviously, a military prevents someone from coming across your borders and taking all of your shit. But if you make a gun, and you give that to a guy, and train a guy on how to shoot people, he doesn't produce anything. That doesn't feed back into your economy. And the [?] similar.
Sarah: Well, okay, listen, if you teach somebody how to use a gun, you feed them for life, because then they can go shoot the fish.
Molly: [Laughs] Now, we're leaving aside questions of imperialist plunder. But imagine you just have a large standing army and a large police force. They don't really produce anything, they're just a huge drain on the economy. I can't remember the name of the South American political [?] who said this, but they said that basically every jet fighter and every bomb has to be regarded as food stolen from someone's mouth.
Sarah: Oh, that's good.
Molly: Yeah. And really, you can look at your government for example, spending money on some kind of bizarro stealth ship with a railgun, that has ammunition that it doesn't buy because it's too expensive, but it's still making like six of them. Is it a [?]-class destroyer or something? I can't remember, sorry, I didn't prepare adequately, my apologies. You know, you're on a Homestuck podcast...
Sarah: It doesn't matter—oh, you didn't prepare adequately, fuck you, shut the fuck up bitch. Get the hell—get off my show. [Laughs]
Molly: Sarah, how can you do this to me?
Sarah: Didn't prepare adequately.
Molly: But my point is—darling. [whispered:] I will talk to you after the podcast. [Laughs]
Sarah: Uh huh. Uh huh.
Molly: My point is that there's something really bizarre about Earth C, and really that should cause us to reflect on our own world that like—our various countries, Ireland does actually have a military budget. Our air defense plan is, I swear to God, "call England." Or call the nearest friendly neighbor. Because we don't have jet aircraft, we have helicopters, which is like, a whole other thing.
Sarah: That's fine.
Molly: But we still do spend money on the military. We still do piss money away that could be better used literally doing anything else. Like, what is a country of five million people going to do if some larger power invades? We don't have nukes.
Sarah: Well, of course.
Molly: Sorry, I should say—ooh, actually, hang on. If anyone's listening, we officially, wink wonk, don't have nukes. Fuck around and find out, though, right? [Laughs]
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: No, in all seriousness. When you look at our own planet's currently existing social order and currently existing military order, we have a bunch of ostensibly friendly countries with massive standing militaries, nuclear arsenals et cetera, these all cost money to run, these are a nonproductive sector of the economy, they suck up huge amounts of capital, they suck up human lives. What is a soldier in peacetime but an unfulfilled human life, almost? I'm sorry, if you're a troop during peacetime and you spend all your time drilling with arms, and you do anything for warfare, what have you done, exactly? You've been made into an unused weapon. Earth C is appalling in its stupidity, but our own planet's actually kind of fucking worse. Like, we could reformulate things and feed and house everyone and we'd have money leftover. I'm sorry, I'm not proposing any kind of utopianism. This is a reason I spent the last like twenty fucking years reading political philosophy, because I was really concerned with the question of, why the hell are people starving?
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: And that takes twenty-odd years to answer, because it's not a simple answer, unfortunately.
Sarah: No. No. This is something I think about a lot, with, functionally, what does Sburb do? And it's curious to me how this game always picks adolescents.
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: And it basically gives them their own little hero's journey.
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: Y'know, the whole point of the classpect system is to simulate a hero's journey that they get to fulfill on the path to creating the universe that they get to be gods of. And within the construct of Sburb—somebody brought this up in the comments of one of my videos, asking—'cause early on I said, they're trying to escape from the confines of a controlling system that they have no feedback in, something something capitalism is bad, you get it.
Molly: Yeah.
Sarah: And someone said, well what is your opinion on the consort economy, and Dave creating a stock exchange? And my answer to that is, that's not capitalism in the same sense, because it's funny money. It's Monopoly money. It's explicitly stated that this is not money that serves really anything, it's a game construct that is meant to hinder your ability to progress fast. And actually, kind of the whole thing with Vriska is, she's a cheater. And she kind of teaches everybody, one way or another, that the only way to win the game is to cheat. 
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: And it's interesting to me that a lot of the people who were instrumental in recognizing that the system is both unfair and exploitable were then sort of scuttled off into the corners, and the people who were more willing to let that slide and just sort of recreate the conditions of the world they grew up in were the ones who came to power on Earth C, essentially.
Molly: That's—hmm.
Sarah: But I know you wanted to go on a tear about Mark Fisher. And I... Is that right? Hold on.
Molly: Mark Fisher? Yeah.
Sarah: Who was it? No, was it? OK. My brain did a backflip.
Molly: Oh, do you mean Max Stirner?
Sarah: That's who I was thinking, I'm sorry. OK, yeah, I'll let you go on that tear in a second.
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: But I—early on while you were reading the Epilogues, you sent me a screenshot of the "martyr died and said fuck" speech, and I really loved your reaction to that, where you just said this is Mark Fisher on capitalist realism, this is Marx and Engels on religion, this is fucking ideology, this is on the presentation of the subjective as natural. I can't even summarize all the things this is a summary of.
Molly: Yeah.
Sarah: And that was sorta the moment where I'm like, I really want to have you as a guest on this podcast.
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: Because you're looking at this thing immediately through the lens of ideology. And we sort of pitched this episode as, looking at Homestuck through the lens of Marxism and dialectical materialism, and we're thirty-odd minutes in and we have yet to hit that mark.
[Both laugh]
Sarah: So, to get sort of into that territory...
Molly: Yeah?
Sarah: Do your best to summarize dialectical materialism, as succinctly as possible. [Laughs]
Molly: OK. So we first really need to go back to the Socratic dialo—no. OK.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Molly: Go read The ABCs Of Dialectical Materialism if you want to get a really quick grasp of it. But it's... there's nothing mystical, or there's nothing spiritual, or fanciful in how to understand the world. You start with the material conditions and consciousness emerges from them. So if you want to see why two countries are at war, you don't need to invoke complicated narratives between gods or something, you need to look at, well, what materially is driving that war. And it's not that you ignore ideology, it's just that you recognize that ideology is a product. In the same way that consciousness emerges from the brain and the brain is a part of the body, ideology emerges from culture and from a kind of superstructure built on top of a kind of base, and the base is material reality. So why is it that Europe conquered—why is it that Britain developed a certain way during the Industrial Revolution? Well, you have to look at where they are geographically, climate, access to material resources, and so on and so forth. You have to look at population explosions. Oh ok. Why is it—classic example would be why is it that... [quieter] oh, I'm trying to think of, what's a perfect example? [back to full volume] Why is it that people in given country A developed given technology B? And it's like, ok, did people in this country have access to the materials to produce it? I mean, it's...
Sarah: Well, what you're essentially getting at is the sort of classic Carl Sagan idea of, "in order to bake a pie, you must first invent the universe." Everything is a result of its material circumstances. So when we're talking about what a dialectic is, we're talking about essentially, the process of Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
Molly: Yeah.
Sarah: Where you have essentially, for lack of a better term, a fact that you are proposing. And then there is its opposing force, rhetorically speaking, and then the two come together to sort of create a new understanding of things.
Molly: Yeah, that—
Sarah: I know that's not, I know that's not the—
Molly: Yeah, I'm so bad at summarizing. I'm so sorry. [Laughs]
Sarah: It's—well this is the thing, is that we're talking about a subject that's the centerpiece of literally centuries of writing at this point. And it's not easy to summarize. I mean, I did my SAHcon panel, was about metamodernism in Homestuck. And I spent the first 45 minutes of that just trying to explain what the fuck metamodernism even is.
Molly: Yeah.
Sarah: Because you can't really start at the endpoint, and it's almost the same conversation, really, 'cause it's basically setting out the idea of, "here's an ideology. Here's the ideology that rose up out of the ashes of that ideology in opposition to it. Here is where we are right now, where we are looking at both of those ideologies and trying to pick the best things from both of them, essentially."
Molly: Yeah. I mean, historical materialism is a certain way of looking at history. And it's rooted at Marx and Engels—everyone forgets poor Engels, and he wrote some fantastic books—but it's basically rooted in looking at history via the lens of class struggle. Not in exclusion to all other things, but looking at that in its primacy. That basically, and in the modern era it's workers and bosses, proletarians and bourgeoisie. It's their oppositional desires and needs. You know, you want to work as few hours as possible and get paid as much as possible, and your boss wants to extract as much labor from you as possible and pay you as little as possible. So these are contradictory desires. And that tension can express in a lot of ways, and that's kind of the origin of class struggle. And historically, you could be looking at ancient Rome and you could be looking at—yes, I know there were multiple classes in ancient Rome, but let's look at Plebeians and Patricians. Patricians want the little fucking people to go work the fields and stay the heck away from them with their dirty hands, and the Plebeians would like more food and less being murdered by barbarians. Again, ok, I'm being glib. So, dialectical materialism—the thing is, I often say dialectical materialism or historical materialism, because if I say Marxism, instantly like 20% of my audience goes "oh you're a communist and you're shit because Stalin was bad." I'm like, not everyone who's a meta-Marxist likes Stalin, and for the record, fuck Stalin. But that's a whole other thing.
Sarah: You've lost the entire audience. Every teen who listens to this podcast—
Molly: [Laughs] I mean, how many Homestuck Tankies are there, really?
Sarah: Listen, this is the thing, what I have learned in my brief time in this fandom is to never be surprised by the population that makes up the fans of this—
Molly: That's fair.
Sarah: So I want to ask, then.
Molly: Yeah?
Sarah: Why is it that you evoke questions of dialectical materialism in relation to Homestuck? What is it about Homestuck that brings it to mind for you?
Molly: Um... oh! I mean... Oh, ok, so I mean... There's so much going on there. That's such a big question. You can't do this to me.
Sarah: Oh, I'm sorry, did you come onto this podcast not expecting to have questions that you had to...?
Molly: No, how dare you request to me. And also, listen to this. There's a number of ways you can interpret what goes on in Homestuck. And there's the idiot brain, which is like, "it's just a story!" And I'm like, [begin sarcasm] yeah, you're right, sorry, how you interact with the story is absolutely natural and normal, and has nothing to do with the context in which you're raised, and you know, it's not that you're a subject that reads a text and meaning is generated in the interaction. No no! You just garner immediate understanding of all things, and reading it across, or intertextually or anything—that is in relation to the text—is a complete fool's errand. [end sarcasm] The reason I read Homestuck the way I do is because of all the bloody other things I've read, basically. And so, I would look at it via a number of different lenses. Some of them would be kind of like... I'm kind of reading a lot of critical theory, Adorno and others... you know, the dreaded Frankfurt School.
Sarah: [Laughs] Postmodern neo-Marxist.
Molly: I swear to god, if anyone calls Adorno a fuckin postmodernist, I'm like, "you don't know what words mean, you child. Go back and learn how to read, you fucking idiot."
Sarah: [Laughs] [Sarcastically] How dare you impugn upon the good name of the Doctor Jordan Peterson.
Molly: [Sighs] Frogboy McCanada. Anyway, so. There's a number of different readings. Look, I remember being a teenager, and someone said, "oh, you know, the feminist reading of this, and the Marxist reading of this." And like idiot brain, I was like, "why would you read it as a Marxist or a feminist? Just read it." And that's the... OK, so, the ideology of [???], the ideology of the time, the moment we live within a—again, most of the people listening to this live in the Anglosphere, most people live within countries that are more or less liberal in their outlook. And for the record, in the United States, both the Democrats and the Republicans are liberals, in the sense that they believe in capitalism, they are idealistic rather than materialistic, and so on and so forth, so I don't over-dwell on this. So that ideology, the ideology of the ruling class, is one that most people are intimately familiar with. So most people in the United States don't, for example, intrinsically believe in feudalism. They don't believe in the divine right of kings, for example. While someone living several centuries earlier might've actually—that was how they viewed the world. And they think of that as normal and natural. And so there's a tendency, especially when you're young, or if you're older and kind of stupid, to think that the way you view the world is natural, normal, and eternal, rather than contingent, historical, and temporal.
Sarah: Of course.
Molly: And so when I was younger, I didn't understand why you'd try [to] read it a different way. And then I realized that what I thought of as the normal, natural, and default reading was effectively a Liberal reading. So there's a number of ways to read a text, and the reason I tend to lead into a more Marxian reading, a more dialectical materialist one, maybe one that looks at things from a position of like, "oh, what is the social function of this text, or what does this mean"—is because I've read all these bloody books and I may as well utilize all this knowledge I have. Which... [Laughs] I gained for some reason at some point. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to spend my early twenties reading Lenin, but here we are.
Sarah: Here we are.
Molly: So it's more that this is like, one of the lenses that you can use to view the world, and I think it actually might be more enlightening. So with Homestuck, I think there's a lot going on in it, and it's not necessary for an author to have put certain ideas in their work, and then you go dig through it and find these diamonds. That's a very childish understanding of how to critically read a text. It's more that you're reading through the things that they just naturally put in there. In Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, all the bad people are dark-skinned and come from the east and the south. That's just right there, folks. Y'know?
Sarah: Yeah, ideology expresses itself consciously and subconsciously.
Molly: Exactly.
Sarah: And just because a reading was not intended, does not mean that it isn't present.
Molly: Yeah.
Sarah: And to pick a much simpler example, June Egbert was not intended, but it's a reading of the story that is very supported by the text, to the point that when the Toblerone happened—
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: —Andrew was like, "yeah." And that's the thing, as Kate said in the previous episode, there's not a thing that Andrew's ever done in his life that he didn't want to do. And so, it's not as if that was a reading that was impressed upon him forcefully by the various SJW cucks who are working at What Pumpkin these days. 
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: But instead, it was an idea that it's like, "yeah that's a good reading." Like, a good author is aware of the fact that once their work exists in the real world, it no longer belongs to them.
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: And this is the classic thing that bugs me about a work that gets popular, and when the author becomes very much the focal point of the discourse about it—looking at J.K. Rowling, for instance.
Molly: Mhm. Yep. [Laughs] Wizards that shit themselves, oh my god.
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: Sorry, go on.
Sarah: —Making the classic mistake of assuming they get to decide what is and is not canon. And I think one of the things that Homestuck does really well is play with the idea of what canon even is, and sort of textually acknowledges that no, everything is canon, and lays out these parameters for what is and is not, approaching canon: relevant, essential, and true. Which, there is a debate as to, yes the Epilogues are not, quote unquote, "canon," and they are meant to be foregrounded as fanfiction, but they're still on homestuck.com, which gives them a level of legitimacy that any other fanfic does not have. But...
Molly: The thing is, Homestuck has a mythological flair to it. And there is like, what, nine different origin myths in the Greek mythos? There is no canonicity in mythology. I mean, even the notion of canon—correct me if I'm wrong here—comes from Catholicism. Right?
Sarah: Yeah. No, it was an attempt to boil down what—basically get the Christian story straight. And like, canon has always been a political tool.
Molly: Exactly. And like obviously, they removed the best bits, you know, like the Nephilim and stuff. Seriously, is there—oh, it's not important. What I'm saying is, the notion of canonicity is such a curious one for me, because historically, it's been a political and religious weapon, and in the modern era, it's things like Disney getting to dictate who can and cannot write their stuff. At one stage it served the feudal order, and now it serves capital. It's never been something we should be overly worried about. But if you look at various—it's not that you can say that, someone can send up authoritatively and say "oh, you know, it doesn't matter at all, whatever, anything goes" when you're describing the Greek myth, and therefore there's no such thing as a wrong description of a quote unquote, "creation myth" in Greek mythology or any other one. It's just that getting hung up on which one is the "true" one is kind of missing how pre-Christian—I'm sorry, I will confess a fairly solid ignorance of Judaism, by the way—but it's getting hung up on how pre-Christian religion formed itself, and how it thought about the authoritive nature of its myths. Like, I don't think people had arguments about—you get what I'm getting at here.
Sarah: [Laughs] Yeah, it's—
Molly: Sorry, I don't dwell too much on it, but the notion of canon, to me, has always been a really curious one to debate. Like, people who read comics, fantastic example. Like, my dad would've read a lot of golden age Superman and Batman and stuff, and he stopped reading in the '80s. So for him, the canon ended in about like, I don't know, 1975, 1980, or something. So if someone said to him—I don't know, if he's talking to someone for whatever reason, he's not a huge comics nerd, but if he's talking to someone and he made and offhand reference to something, he's like oh, you know, Krypton or something, and someone said to him, "oh no actually, in the modern canon, Superman is actually born in Detroit," he'd go "right, fine, I don't care." 
Sarah: Right.
Molly: In his head, that story has not changed. And trying to insist that, you know, some dipshit living in Taiwan, writing a modern version of Superman, decided that "no no he's now actually a human, he's born in Detroit," and that my dad should now update his internal model of how that narrative works—is just kind of missing how humans interact with stories in the first place. And I mean, not to mention that like—Godfeels, like, sits in my head in the same way the Epilogues and all of Homestuck does. And you know, it reads pretty well. I mean, look, obviously bad fanfiction can kind of strike you that its tone and character are wrong, or it kind of miswrites the characters. But I think yours is pretty well-written, I mean, I kinda have to legally say that, don't I?
Sarah: [Laughs] Well, thank you.
Molly: But, it is actually really good.
Sarah: I mean, in a separate, similar thing—
Molly: Yeah?
Sarah: —reading House of Dirk, that's another one that has sat in my brain as like, something about it just feels right. And there's this weird quality to when fanfic gets it right. Where it sort of slots in with the official material. And it's hard to—but yeah, the idea of, "the new thing comes along and ruins the old thing," is a very young-person's-way of looking at how media functions. And like remakes, you know, I get frustrated at Hollywood—
Molly: [Whispered] Oh god.
Sarah: —movies constantly being remade, or sequels coming out. It's time for a new Top Gun, apparently!
Molly: I swear to god, I just want to throw the compiled Cultured Industry, by Adorno, at them, and be like, "read that. Please read that. Please read this. Everyone, just read this, this is written in the '30s and '40s, it just describes how culture is produced by like, a soulless fuckin industry, stop buying this shit, stop, like, we need to burn capitalism to the ground so our stories stop getting regurgitated like baby food." Anyway.
Sarah: Oh it's so interesting to me how—I always say those specific words—how all of the ongoing questions about media, and how media affects us, and who controls media—we talk about them as if the internet has galvanized this conversation and we're in this crisis of conscience. People were talking about this, people had the same questions about television in the '70s. You go back and you read... oh, I can't remember, I'm not like you, I don't have this photographic memory for these people. But you go back and you read media critics of the '70s, and they're saying the same shit about television, and the evolution of photography. You go back even further and you get people saying the same shit about modern art.
Molly: Do you mean, like, Berger's "Ways of Seeing," when he talks about mechanical reproduction?
Sarah: Yes, that's definitely one of them.
Molly: Right, yeah yeah yeah. They're available on YouTube, by the way. The book's good, but Berger's "Ways of Seeing" is—just watch it, ok, it's not very long. It will help you understand things better. Please. It's very accessible, by the way. One good thing to say about the Brits is, when they do philosophy well, it's very understandable. They're not like the French and Germans. I love my French and German philosophers, but holy shit do they get obscurantist at times.
Sarah: Of course.
Molly: Yankees too.
Sarah: So I want to give you this opportunity to go on your—
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: —your Max Stirner rant.
Molly: OK. Azmoda asked, on the Discord, "which character is the Max Stirner of Homestuck?" And my answer is, for the love of god, the only reason anyone knows who Max Stirner is, and I will say this a thousand times, is because Marx and Engels ripped on him in The German Ideology, he's a hack, no one should ever take him seriously, no one should ever read a damn thing he wrote, he was incomprehensible, obscurantist, and mystifying. Do not take him seriously. I swear to god. Anyone who says "that's a spook!" or any of his other gibberish notions—
Sarah: [Laughs]
Molly: I hate him so much, Sarah. Look, I'm saying I went and I read "The Ego And Its Own"—is it "The Ego And Its Own"? Look, it doesn't matter. I read The German Ideology, I was like, "oh I don't really understand Max, maybe I should give him more of a chance." I went and read his goddamn stupid book, and I regret it. I regret it more than anything I've ever read in my entire goddamn life. I regret it more than any bad film I've watched, and I've seen Lake Placid. Which is, by the way, the worst film I've ever seen.
Sarah: I saw that in a drive-in theater when I was a kid.
Molly: Oh yeah, no, I went to the cinema—oh, sorry, actually, let me put this in context: I have seen Battlefield Earth in the cinema.
Sarah: Oh my god.
Molly: Max Stirner was worse to read.
Sarah: Wow.
Molly: OK? It's gibberish. It's not good philosophy, and it's not even good writing. And no I didn't read it in the original German because I'm not learning German to read fucking Max fucking Stirner. Anyway, my point is—who is the Max Stirner of Homestuck? I'm really bad with goddamn names. This is why I'm going to reread Homestuck for like three times. Like obviously the core cast are good, but I'm really bad with, like, the troll names.
Sarah: Oh yeah.
Molly: And part of it is, I try to pronounce it, and I don't, I just kind of skim over it mentally. So I'm going to say the fish boy with the trident—
Sarah: Eridan?
Molly: Eridan. Thank you very much. Eridan is the Max Stirner of Homestuck—
Sarah: I KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO SAY ERIDAN!
Molly: 'Cause he's SO. FUCKING. ANNOYING.
Sarah: God. [Laughs] I knew it.
Molly: And he needs to—[Laughs] How did you know it? He has the same, like, annoying look on his face.
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: It's only because I hate him so much.
Sarah: Oh, that's fair. That's totally fair. Eridan stans can jump off a bridge. A bridge that's not too far off the ground, let me be clear, not like a mortal—not like the Golden Gate—I'm talking about like a bridge over a brook. But it's a brook that's really cold and, you know, there might be some glass in there. Just like, jump off of a well-considered bridge that will make you think about what you've done wrong with your life. Anyway, let's talk about Dirk really quick. I fuckin' hate Dirk, and he's consumed my brain.
Molly: [Laughs] Yeah?
Sarah: This is a fella—this is apropos of nothing—this is a fella who just talks his way into every damn corner of everything, and I find his presence in the Epilogues one of the most infuriating and brilliant things in literature, generally.
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: Because, you know, it's essentially just the "martyr died and said fuck" idea, obviously, but I just—the idea of somebody taking over a narrative with the explicit purpose of, "if nobody becomes the villain, our story ceases to become relevant, and everybody stops existing in any familiar way."
Molly: Mhm?
Sarah: Just, it's endlessly fascinating to me, from a perspective of like, understanding how narrative functions materially. It's got me thinking about like, to be a storyteller is to be a sadist. Because fundamentally, you have to enjoy making these people that you love hurt.
Molly: Mhm.
Sarah: And I don't know if this has fuck-all to do with anything related to the subject that we've been talking about, I just felt obligated to bring Dirk up, just to roast my own ass.
Molly: Oh, you felt obligated to bring up Dirk? Or...
Sarah: Dirk felt obligated to assert himself into this episode.
Molly: [Laughs] Dirk is now in charge of this goddamn podcast.
Sarah: Yeah.
Molly: Sorry, can I just dial back really quickly?
Sarah: Please, please do.
Molly: If anyone has gained anything useful from reading Stirner, congratulations. I've said this before with people, politics is not a fandom. You can read anyone and, as I said before, you're a subject, you read a text, the interrogation—that point in which you interact with the text—is where meaning is created. So if you got something valuable out of reading something, that's good, my displeasure nonwithstanding. But if someone's like, "Oh, Stirner's my favorite philosopher!" It's like someone saying Rand is their favorite philosopher. I'm like, I can't take you seriously, you sound incredibly dumb. But even then, when I read Ayn Rand, I remember kind of this communication of this idea of essential selfishness. Like, the idea that you can't just completely martyr and give up all of yourself. And I was like, "oh that's kind of interesting!" I don't know if it's some short essay or something. And then like, I read anything else by her and was like, this woman's a fucking monster. This is just like, convoluted "let's justify exploitation" kind of stuff. And "I'm really mad at the Bolsheviks for stealing my family's shit."
Sarah: Right.
Molly: But, you can still get good things from bad writing. And you can still get good things out of bad authors. It's just that... [whispered] I don't really know how anyone can get anything good out of Stirner. [Full voice] But I don't begrudge anyone who did, you know?
Sarah: Yeah, sure. I think that the Ayn Rand of Homestuck is Jane Crocker. That's my hot take, and that's our show! [Laughs] So let's see, you can find us on Overcast, iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and more, and at pgenpod.com, or @Pgenpod on Twitter. So, Perfectly Generic Podcast is going to be live from Chapel Hill, North Carolina on October 26th, with Cro, Aysha U. Farah, and Kate Mitchell. I am actually going to be in attendance at this show, I am not going to be on the stage, obviously, but I will be there. So if you want to throw eggs at me—
Molly: Be nice to my girlfriend or I'll fly to the United States and beat you up. Sorry, you were saying?
Sarah: Yeah. If you want to make fun of me for my opinions, I will also be politely, calmly, cordially booing the panel on the stage, as one must do. Because the thing is that these people, these hacks and frauds, they need an antagonist if they are to truly thrive. So I've volunteered myself for this position, and I invite you all to join me in this. I'm being facetious, please don't boo them at this fucking show. I will beat the hell out of you. I will be—I will act as a bouncer, which will be interesting, because I am not built for that, but we'll see what happens. Anyway, that show is coming up on October 26th, and that's gonna be a good time. Parking's gonna be an issue if you're planning on going, so take the time limit very seriously. There's also gonna be a live show on December 5th, with Kate Mitchell, optimisticDuelist, and Goomy. So RSVP and get tickets at pgenpod.com/live. The music for this show is by Goomy, and you can find links to more of their music in the description! You can support this show on patreon.com/pgenpod. Patrons get access to thirteen bonus episodes and counting on [I]ntermission, and I might actually be having some additions to that in the near future. Your support is shared equitably with everyone who makes each episode possible. At the end of the show, we like to thank our Skylark-tier patrons for their support: [list of patrons].
Molly: Thank you, darlings.
[Outro music begins]
Sarah: So, Molly, where can folks find you?
Molly: Oh, I'm on Twitter, at @ImPureNoise. Let's see, what else shall I give out... find me on Twitter, everything's centralized there. Actually, I'm on Bandcamp—oh my god, what the hell is my Bandcamp—look, it's all linked in my Twitter. Find me on Twitter. Just Google Molly.Noise, and... I think I've sufficiently scrubbed the internet of all pre-2017 photos, so you can do that quite safely. Yeah! And you can find, then, my Bandcamp, or I think you can find Instagram and stuff. It's not important. You'll find me there, and from there, all things flow.
Sarah: Yeah. We should've mentioned before that you're a musician. But yeah, so you're a musician, you do good—
Molly: Allegedly.
Sarah: Oh, shut up, you do good music. So, next week on Pgenpod, I will be back to talk about gender in Homestuck. Which is a topic that [sarcastically] there's not really much to go on there. And next on [I]ntermission, Kate and Xtine are gonna be talking about... fuckin something. So get ready for that... y'all.
Molly: [Laughs]
Sarah: Thank you so much for listening to the Perfectly Generic Podcast. This has been hell, and I'm glad to be here. I hope you all have a pleasant rest of your lives.
Molly: [Stops laughing.] Thank you for having me.
[Both laugh]
Sarah: OK.
[Music fades out]
Category:Episodes
Category:Perfectly Generic Podcast