We need to talk about race in Homestuck.
Turn off your knee-jerk reactions, stop rolling your eyes at the people who are “over-reacting” and listen for just a moment.
I love Homestuck because it’s a safe space for me. As a queer reader, I’m surrounded in my day-to-day life by…
Know what? I don’t like this at all.
Around Martin Luther King day, what many would say to be one of the major boiling points in the homestuck fandom on the issue of race neutrality, Hussie made a post that gives his opinion on some of the exact things detailed here.
When you said “Hussie continued to insist that that the characters had no race. And then he said that anyone who said otherwise was a racist bigot.”? Straight up false. What he said was, “What does strike me as racist is when someone gets angry at the suggestion that they could be anything other than white”. Meaning that thinking they can ONLY BE WHITE NO EXCEPTIONS ALLOWED is a bad thing.
And regarding those slip ups like calling bro a “lame white rapper”? He also talks in that post about how maybe somewhere in what we now know as one of the largest works in the English language, while trying to focus on humor over race neutrality and social activism, he may have slipped up occasionally and dropped in a few racial qualifiers.
He says, “But the thing is, this position had so much more to do with adhering to the fundamental abstraction in this world than it had to do with making any sort of statement on racial harmony or anything like that. The point was never to make something perfectly air-tight in terms of racial neutrality, as a means to create some sort of socially conscious advocacy literature. If it was, I probably would have been more alert in those early stages to make dead certain little tipoffs on race didn’t bleed into the story during some of the more outrageous, off-the-cuff character rants.”
The point of homestuck is not to be what he describes as “socially conscious advocacy literature”. Does it suck that there’s not as much queer/race representation in mainstream media as there should be? Yes. Hell yes. But is it Andrew Hussie’s job, to provide you with that? No. Homestuck was never supposed to be “a solution to that problem” as you put it. It’s a story with a plot beyond the character’s sexuality and race.
Now, as for the matter of Trickster Jane. The whole CAUCASIAN thing was pretty hamfisted, yeah. I can’t say it was right make fun of parts of the fandom in what seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the outcry of “whitewashing”. But it serves to point out just how ridiculous it is. Nobody is now banned from picturing jane as african american or asian, etc.
The point I’m trying to make is that the characters weren’t aracial as a social statement. They were aracial because it wasn’t important to the story. It STILL isn’t. Hell. Maybe we see Jane’s skin color later and it’s some sort of hypercolor peach far beyond anything that can be considered caucasian.
Moreover, nobody was promised anything. If someone can point me to a document where Andrew Hussie promises representation of sexuality and race in Homestuck, I will eat a bag of rubber bands that I use for my braces and post a video.
Now let’s go back to enjoying our crazy-ass story.
That is good response.
Torchlight Yaoi Festivals: Hear me out.
Published
ugh 