17776 isn’t homestuck you piece of shit stoner
let’s start from the beginning.
17776 is a miniseries written by Jon Bois, the greatest writer of our time. it’s gotten insanely popular in a very quick period of time, and it’s not at all surprising that this happened. i say that jon is the greatest writer of our time with very little exaggeration.
homestuck is a webcomic written by andrew hussie that started a bunch of years ago and then ran forever. it’s a sprawling piece of work with an incredibly dedicated fandom. it’s very much not my thing, but it’s an impressive piece of art that has already influenced a whole lot of artists doing work of their own, and probably at one point will be studied in colleges as a way of understanding 21st century art.
homestuck and 17776 have these things in common:
-characters, words, and other things that english text based stories have
-an incredibly confusing premise
-it’s funny and on the internet
-using multimedia to enhance the story that the piece is trying to tell
-written by white guys
that’s at least more than three things, i guess! saying that 17776 is “like homestuck” is a good way of trying to reccomend the piece to somebody that hates sports and has read homestuck, i can say that much. the level of weirdness is probably why the piece spread past the usual audience for jon bois pieces. but it’s not homestuck. they’re only similar in the most superficially possible way.
i hope that the people making this bad comparison don’t do what i expect them to do:
step 1: oh i like this piece let me look at the other things that he’s written
step 2: oh, these are Sports Things. that’s not for me
step 3: draw a picture of 3 satellites as skinny white dudes fucking each other
because 17776 is really as much sports as anything that jon bois does. the entire conceit of this piece is about football, but in the way that football relates to the human experience. his work looks at the existential horror of time and space and numbers and math and tries to find a way to make any of it beautiful. this is seen most directly in the “what is a catch?” article but shows up in all of his work, including my favorite piece by him where he catalogs ten periscope experiences.
you see this in Breaking Madden, especially in the chronicles of BEEFTANK, but also in the stories of the jersey names of the simulated players. it’s there in the Pretty Good series, where he tells stories about anything from the highest scoring basketball game of all time to a look at American television. there are so many episodes of this show worth watching that i can’t even pick two of them to oppose each other for the most convincing look at what kind of ground he covers.
“17776 is the new homestuck” is the same kind of garbage comparisons that you see when democrats on twitter compare everything in politics to fucking game of thrones or harry potter, as if the world view is so limited that they’ve watched exactly one television show and read seven books. or watched eight movies, because reading is hard. it cheapens anything that you have to say on the matter because you’ve already betrayed the narrowness of your ability to view media.
anyways, the point is: 17776 isn’t homestuck. it’s really good and you should read it and everything else that jon has ever written.
also, homestuck is shit and if i hadn’t heard of jon bois and heard this comparison first there’s no way on earth i would have read it. i said this on the internet and that makes it true.
