Does any other single piece of literature have a plot that is both as complex and elegant as Homestuck's...

>and then you can't do the same sort of retconning and non-linearity in print.
It should actually be easier in print, theoretically. Also, Homestuck almost never *actually* did the retcon thing, it was just a trope towards the end. Although the ending did take place in a totally alternate reality, which was strange and regrettable and felt retconny. I'll concede I didn't like that choice, and was really surprised to be let down after being on board for so many years.

I meant stuff like later go back and add John arms / oil spills / Terezi codes. The last part is doable -- basically choose your own adventure -- but serial readers go to experience the comic without all that and then have it added in retroactively.

>The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra
I wish Veeky Forums had the solidarity to actually make something Homestuck-esque. The huge numbers of writers and artists could pump out like a hundred pages a day if they had any direction.

>I wish Veeky Forums had the solidarity to actually make something

Veeky Forums's artist are bretty amazing, there's also a lot of good interactive web/game dev programmers on here I've worked with personally, unfortunately writing quality sucks

I've noticed Veeky Forums contributors fall into two really shitty categories

>purple prose poets

by far the largest group, usually write about their feelings, badly, in relation to some scene they describe

>memers

"LMAO NIGGER? TRUMP RAVIOLI CUMCRUST ANIME ZIZEK! xdd *crying smiley* *crying smiley*"
-Hypersphere, Dreamscape

to make something really epic Veeky Forums and whatever artists and developers involved would have to do something insanely organized and disciplined, with a fascist editorial system, something along the lines of that of Chinese horizontal hand scrolls, illustrated calligraphied manuscripts, or Golden Age illustrated children's stories, all packaged in an insane medium like TempleOS

We could do it together user. I could put together a simple website that would accept submissions and chronicle the story. It's not something I'd like to put time in only to have it be completely ignored, though. I'd like /ic/ and Veeky Forums support along with a discord server and serious discussions before starting work. I could probably get another web game developer on board myself.

I've written enterprise grade server stuff as well as a audiovisual/WebGL in lisp, I'm also very much into calligraphy and illustration techniques, and it'd be nice have this as a physical deliverablelike as an executable or OS bootloaded on a USB to be a tangible piece of literature, anythign hosted on a website tends to fall up its own bung imo

Fucking Finnegans Wake you plebs, everyone forgets this.

Can someone give me a tl;dr behind the Homestuck meme?

I missed it completely, both Homestuck itself and the amount of MLP tier hate that Homestuck brings.

what's the incentive for us, the hive, to contribute? Just for us to see three paragraphs fit into a story that we had no control over? We'd basically be writing an application in a paragraph, and that undermines everything artistic in writing, so your whole system self-selects non-artistics.

Sorry, I'll just write my own stuff and keep it away from Veeky Forums, which is not to say I think Veeky Forums hasn't profoundly affected my ability to write, it's just that I can't share myself with Veeky Forums because it's a fickle creature.

you sound like someone who only has ever consumed memes, t b h. Pathetic existence you got going.

Well I can't help with that very much myself. I learned a little C++ for a very specific purpose but have stuck with JS and its many libraries almost exclusively. If you really want to build a piece of software that doesn't feel like another VN engine, feel free to take the helm.

A Patreon for the founders, I guess. If that seems shallow, know we'll be creating an ambitious type of literature. The group-writing meme never deterred me, but I can vaguely appreciate that it does to others.

Group-writing is basically turning art into copy. Instead of having thirty different people creating their own thing, you'd censor anything other than your vision. While you might appreciate that I seem conservative in my approach to writing, it just won't work. If anything, you could have a collection of stories with some liberty between them, but to have one character written by multiple people? It just doesn't work, and any established novelist would agree.

Also, not trying to imply I'm an 'established' novelist, but I am locally published so I have a decent mind for the industry as it's relevant for the bulk majority of writers.

>what's the incentive for us, the hive, to contribute?

visual and literary forms, maybe something like a pictographic language or sets of alphabets can be created by council and then delegated to different sub-groups, this could be expressed as competition between authors and forms as an actual narrative device

I'd like to see oral narrative as a part of this as well

I do understand your gripes. Maybe its more that I'm not a perfectionist than anything. But I can refer to a site called FluidAnims (now defunt). It was primarily for stick-figure animators, but there was also a a section for writers using the same format.

Each writer created their own character within the world. They would challenge other writers, and and each would create a story where their character would best the other in a fight. The community would vote on which story they liked the best, and it would become canon in this universe. The same format ran for animators and produced some very watchable animations if you're ever bored. The weakness was that the world had no real consistency, only that the characters were called "Gladiators" and there were common allusions to the most popular ones.

Anyway, my point is that the writing can be barriered off in different ways to prevent clashes of ideology. There are plenty of possible formats when we can explore since we're supposedly dealing with something non-linear.

It's very complex, in a way that completely overshoots Homestuck. No one forgot it.

That example is satirically far from a coherent story. That could possibly, and I mean just barely possibly, pass for world-building, but that's not close to any development of plot or a functional narrative. That is a sequence of isolated events.

once again, this is world-building stuff. There's a huge difference between world-building and narrative.

Example for y'all that I know you can recognize: Pynchon gives histories for just about every character, ridiculous satires with lots of social commentaries about German generals, Soviet spies, African Schwarzkommando origins, etc. That's what y'all are talking about. The way that these characters interact with each other, the way he winds these ridiculous plots together, is his narrative and what happens in the present, and it's impossible to arrange different people having the same idea of how this happens, much more impossible that they write this functional plot concurrently but independently.

Nothing is impossible user

Follow your dreams, pal, I'm just being an egotistical asshole who considers himself above average writing-wise for Veeky Forums and would rather burn my own work than sell myself out for your project.

>world-building stuff. There's a huge difference between world-building and narrative.

4u

>Pynchon

is an english writer with an english reading audience, I'm talking about creating something almost completely alien

Let's say we worldbuild beforehand publicly. I have a multiverse-spanning world already outlined, and I'm sure others do too. We can go fucking insane with this world, I'm talking YUGE.

Now imagine we start in one corner of that universe, and on our platform there is one blank page each day. A picture and text, for example. You don't think a hive of people stressing over each page, driving it to perfection, could create a coherent story? A community stressed over fact-checking and staying true to characters? It should be an advantage, if anything. I'm more worried about the inherent "fan service" that will drive the plot.

Webcomic, started as text-adventure format, updated serially with reader-input-commands. This format mostly continued throughout on a surface-level but stopped having actual reader input early on. Story about four kids playing a game, that's kind of like supernatural augmented reality Sims / RPG with crafting. Earthbound is a big inspiration. Eventually moves toward story of 12 aliens (trolls) which overlaps original story with complicated connections between in terms of time / universe. It's thousands of pages, many of which are primarily text-based (a simple gif up top and then long chatlog below, for example). It has a good premise (better than my explanation), and continued to do some cool things here and there throughout, but went on and on adding layers and layers and being increasingly drama-heavy.

The hate comes from the fandom, for various reasons. There's the MLP-tier autists, the "in it for the porn" crowd (in different varieties), and a lot of people obsessed with the troll personalities. With that last group, a lot of people skipped the first three acts (of what was seven total, in which Act 7 was a very very brief epilogue) straight to the troll stuff, or just entirely didn't even really read the comic, just about the characters and got way, way deep in the rabbit whole of tumblr fandom headcannoning.

now THAT's a bait. Pynchon is radically heavy on world-building already, alienating a huge . You're talking about creating an alternate history textbook with a readership of thirteen family members depressed about their common connection.

once again, who's going to submit themselves to your fascist editing system? No talent will be drawn to you. You will only attract copy-writers. Who's going to submit creatively to YOU? What have you done? Why would someone else just sew their mouth to your ass and volunteer their own digestive system to your culinary taste?

>once again, who's going to submit themselves to your fascist editing system? No talent will be drawn to you. You will only attract copy-writers. Who's going to submit creatively to YOU? What have you done? Why would someone else just sew their mouth to your ass and volunteer their own digestive system to your culinary taste?
You're right, people on the internet would never spend their time writing stories set in a pre-established universe. MISSION ABORT!

>Who's going to submit creatively

thems fightin words for someone whose only written literature in English, mostly likely based on patterns someone else invented and made socially acceptable

You sound like you want to create a language, user. Like an experimental set of patterns that separate stories from different authors would follow. That's not really the topic at hand.

Whenever you seem a trove of people do that, it's following a universe created by one person or a cohesive team of paid people. What you're referring to is fan fiction, and it requires tens of thousands of followers to even begin a culture for it.
I just don't even know what you're talking about anymore. I'm a polyglot, but idk what that even has to do with this. Language is world-building. I've read more in the last three years in German than in English. And the English tradition of writing isn't radically different from any other languages, even, as of modernism, eastern languages.

Look, I'm I'm done arguing. I'm just a little bit drunk and older than you two (at least from what I've perceived). You guys prove me wrong. Don't listen to me. Just go through with what you want to do. Prove me wrong and make a name for yourselves, don't just be bitter anons.

...

I fucking loved it back when I was reading it. I don't think I ever finished it though, so I guess I can't post.
I must say that it is absolutely amazing if you can get past the SJW and NEET absolutely cancerous fan base. I love the way the plot works out, even if it is confusing and even pointless (due to complete time restarts and stuff) at times. I guess I'll finish reading it, which will probably take a few months to do, before I say anything further. After all, I don't know if it's complete shit past where I left off.

To add onto what said, there are two other crucial parts of it. One is that Homestuck was a truly multimedia story. It had its own original sound track (something like 20 albums) as well as longer animated videos at key points in the story. It brought it to life in a way you don't really see in most webcomics. The other major factor is how frequently it updated. In its heyday Homestuck updated every single day. As in seven days a week. And not only that, but there would be multiple updates per day sometimes. Can you imagine how addictive that gets? Later on updates slowed and became more sporadic, but even well into act 5 updates were pretty regular.

>One is that Homestuck was a truly multimedia story. It had its own original sound track (something like 20 albums) as well as longer animated videos at key points in the story.
This. The music was amazing and there was a huge, huge pool for the author to draw from. In fact, Unite Synchronization will forever be one of my favorite songs of all times. Not to mention the Undertale Dev was one of the main musicians, and though I haven't played that game, I've heard it hailed for its music.

Not only that, they literally had games in the story. As in, walkaround RPG's. I'm pretty sure it was unprecedented at the time, though many web comics have followed suit, like Prequel. But there was always something natural about the way Homestuck transcended its media without sacrificing any story.

it's garbage
i was a fan up until a year or two ago
it became retarded SJW bullshit
my 600k mario trollfic is better written than that steaming fucking turd
i even have a good homestuck ending in there

As a fan for six years I can safely say, don't bother. The ending of homestuck is the worst ending that I've ever seen. The author was tired of the comic and ended it in an incredibly sloppy way (which if you know about all the BS he's had to deal you can see why he didn't wanna spend another 5 months on the comic)

The ending is underwhelming, but I appreciated it in its meta way.

>The author was tired of the comic and ended it in an incredibly sloppy way (which if you know about all the BS he's had to deal you can see why he didn't wanna spend another 5 months on the comic)
Sadly this is the impression I got. There's doubt he had the talent to make a great ending. He had only written a book-series worth of Homestuck up until that point which was extremely satisfying.

My advice: enjoy [S] Game Over. Without spoiling anything, the execution and buildup is absolutely great, even if you might not be happy with the drastic circumstances it sets up for the home stretch.

>this guy hasn't actually read Ulysses and GR
>he's one of those people that hangs out on boards, finds out what is "patrician" and then posts it to pretend he's really smart and cool

Is there anything more pathetic than this?

>that pic
Thanks reminding me that that turd exists.