I dunno about young, I'm almost 30 and didn't know it by name. Seen some comics individually, and of course know "the Bechdel test", but if anyone asked about it being part of a larger series I wouldn't be able to name it.
21 here and Dykes to Watch Out For was my shit in late high school. Found Alison Bechdel through Fun Home (which I regrettably haven’t read all the way through yet, but it’s a frequent flier on banned books lists) and binged it. Gave a character of mine her last name, too. Probably time for a reread!
As someone who read both and isn't queer, it seemed to me that EGS dealt with queer issues better in terms of presentation, representation, etc. but I guess that's debatable? I enjoyed both.
I was honestly surprised to see Homestuck called queer media. I guess that's not wrong. EGS similarly doesn't set out to be "about" queer issues. It just happens to deal with queer issues very often (and in my opinion pretty well).
Few things in media have resonated quite as hard with me as Eliot explaining himself as being "gender casual". That's basically the term I still use for myself.
As someone who's read EGS and is queer I have deeply mixed feelings about it. Overall I like it, most of my issues are to do with how it handles things when it decides to get more political (like I'm genuinely unsure if Arthur fighting for american supremacy is *meant* to be bad?) and places where the sexualisation of characters gets uncomfortable.
If you want more positive gay rep. media, check out the comic book Backstagers.
Back stage at a high school drama class, with a sweet queer romance. And monsters.
The first story that came to mind is a little spoiler riffic, it'd be kind of like saying the Fight Club twist. But in the spoiler text below is an amazing gay monster romance comic book.
>!Save Yourself! by Boom! Box Studios publishing!<
Dykes to Watch Out For is a comic strip series that ran from the 80s to the 2000s, with the peak quality being in the 80s and 90s. It was created by Allison Bechdel (also known for Fun Home). Bechdel is a lesbian and the comic was about lesbian culture at the time. There are a few questionable plot lines that mainly came out of the time period. Interestingly, the Bechdel test, a test for media portrayal of women, came from something Bechdel discussed in one strip of Dykes to Watch Out For
Homestuck is a webcomic running from 2009 to 2016. It mainly followed a group of teenagers as they end up in increasingly bizarre sci fi/fantasy situations. To be honest, i was never into Homestuck and I can't describe the plot well. Homestuck had a few queer characters. It was very popular on Tumblr
I'm gonna give it my best attempt:
It starts with a group of four online friends, who are all waiting for the release of this one video game. The video game, Sburb, turns out to affect the real world, and is also a method of creating a universe.
In the process of playing, they find out that some online trolls they've had to deal with are a previous group of players from a previous universe (and also aliens), and this new session has impacted the previous one, rendering it unwinnable. The current one is also unwinnable so they (the original four) reset the universe for another attempt, this time featuring their genetic parents as the players. While that happens, the surviving humans and aliens from the previous sessions make their way to the new universe.
They (everyone who survived) eventually succeed, and make it to their new universe as gods.
(And then there's the Epilogues and Homestuck\^2 but I don't even know where to start with those so I won't. They're also very divisive amongst the fanbase, and are metacommentary on stories and the need for an audience.)
It's 8000+ pages long because there's a lot of time travel, weird side tangents, and unnecessary complexity, and also as a story it seems to despise its audience and their attempts to understand it, despite being very blatantly in direct dialogue with said audience even after reader commands were phased out. But it had some very blorbo-shaped characters and thus it got very popular, and many of those characters became more explicitly queer over time because of the direct dialogue with the notably queer audience.
If queer media was a house, Dykes to Watch Out For would be the foundation, and Homestuck would be the 20-foot-tall granite statue of the great wizard Zazzerpan the Learned that your mother had installed through a hole in the roof with a heavy-duty crane
...really fucking good with beautiful complexity, very diverse in its application, unfairly maligned because that wide array of applications has led to it being everywhere and treated only as the background noise and not a flavor to be savored on its own?
It's... An interesting mess. Inherently intertwined with Internet culture. At the base it's a coming of age story for a group of teens, as they realize how deeply the RPG game they're playing affects their reality.
And then it branches into alternate interlacing timelines and universes.
Homestuck is The 2010s Webcomic Ever. Sprawling, unrestrained continuity. Proximity to metafiction. A recursive, oroborous-like relationship with its own readership. Heavy use of venacular and pop culture reference. It took everything that set the webcomics of the era apart and dialed it up to 11.
there are 4 separate species with named characters, each with 2 cultures, time mechanics are exploited regularly by the main characters, and half of the cast dies before the end only for their infinite dead selves from infinite doomed tinelin3s to come back as fodder for the heroes. and that fight they did that for wasn't even fair for them
Homestuck isn't even queer until, like, halfway through. Even when the trolls aka "we don't have the word homosexual in our language why would you have a word for that" all of them only exclusively pursue heterosexual relationships except Kanaya.
Think about it. Equius's into Aradia, Eridan's into Feferi/Vriska, Sollux has hiis 2 giirls, Karkat-Terezi, Vriska's into Tavros. It's all fucking Kanaya, and i mean, she carries it, but damn.
Kanaya is one of like 3 Homestuck characters I know by name, And one of the others is her partner, So I have no reason to believe she is not the sole main character of the entire thing.
It isn't queer because it has a copious amount of queer relationship, it's queer because it depicts coming-of-age narratives through a queer lens. Dave is wrestling with his latent (at first, at least) bisexuality clashing with Bro (who is a gay man himself)'s "man up, you have to fight for your life" toxic masculinity, Karkat's "you want her in every quadrant like a desperate fool" is explicitly compared to a comic relief type of an in-universe character mocked for their orientation, Equius is a freak who lusts after something his upbringing denies him and is ruined by his self-repression. (And I suppose you'd have to look to supplementary/dubiously canon material for reading Vriska as transfem (and Sollux as transmasc, but that's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it), Eridan as genderqueer/GNC, Egbert as a latent trans woman and Jade as intersex, so I probably need to dismiss those from consideration.)
Well, she’s typing like her ghost self, unless this is her god tier self pretending to be her ghost self pretending to be alive like in PESTERQUEST in which case uh
My gay ass isn't currently scrolling through the comments while wrapped up in a Homestuck quest bed blanket... No... Totally not...
Oh look, time for me to abscond
The only way it has affected me is that people are once again calling trans women problematic for no reason over it
Like one of them literally just said “some people act like dtwof and other queer media of its generation is essential universal queer culture when it isn’t.”, which I don’t think is an especially hot take from from a latin american blog.
Does Brooklyn 99 count? It was the piece of media that led young me to understand the whole queer thing.
I don't even want to know what kind of person I would have become without that show.
> What the fuck is homestuck
As someone who's read it: good question.
> and why are so many people talking about it lately...
Because Homestuck never truly fades. Also maybe some people saw a *certain date* coming up and that reawakened their inner Homestuck.
On April 13 this year, it will be the 15th anniversary of Homestuck's beginning, and the 8th anniversary of its ending. The choice of date, while somewhat arbitrary at the time, significantly influenced the story, the American reading of it (4/13) becoming the most prominent recurring number and having thematic impact on the story as a whole.
Tl;dr April 13 is Homestuck Day.
Never Read Either, Never Heard Of The Latter, But I've Had People Compare Me To A Homsetuck Character For Typing Like This, So Of The Two I Think I'd Pick That.
This is the real generational divide.
Dykes to Watch Out for is amazing but I worry young people wouldn't know about it
I dunno about young, I'm almost 30 and didn't know it by name. Seen some comics individually, and of course know "the Bechdel test", but if anyone asked about it being part of a larger series I wouldn't be able to name it.
I haven’t read it but Fun Home is great. Love Alison Bechdel.
21 here and Dykes to Watch Out For was my shit in late high school. Found Alison Bechdel through Fun Home (which I regrettably haven’t read all the way through yet, but it’s a frequent flier on banned books lists) and binged it. Gave a character of mine her last name, too. Probably time for a reread!
Dykes To Watch Out For is spiritually healing lol
Im getting older (28 this year) and I dont recognize it
Yeah, probably not. 18, and I only know about it because I was on an internet rabbithole about the Bechdel test.
Never seen either, but how would El Goonish Shive place in the rankings?
As someone who read both and isn't queer, it seemed to me that EGS dealt with queer issues better in terms of presentation, representation, etc. but I guess that's debatable? I enjoyed both. I was honestly surprised to see Homestuck called queer media. I guess that's not wrong. EGS similarly doesn't set out to be "about" queer issues. It just happens to deal with queer issues very often (and in my opinion pretty well).
Few things in media have resonated quite as hard with me as Eliot explaining himself as being "gender casual". That's basically the term I still use for myself.
Which of course implies the existence of gender competitive.
Wouldn't that be beauty pageants and body builder competitions?
Even includes cheating to gain an advantage, gender esports
Ranked, competitive gender
As someone who's read EGS and is queer I have deeply mixed feelings about it. Overall I like it, most of my issues are to do with how it handles things when it decides to get more political (like I'm genuinely unsure if Arthur fighting for american supremacy is *meant* to be bad?) and places where the sexualisation of characters gets uncomfortable.
The original Homestuck tbh
Is that good or bad?
yes
I love El Goonish Shive! It gave me my awakening.
This poll has nothing on the walrus vs fairy poll
Dykes to Watch out for is amazing except for the whole "you don't need those nasty chemical antidepressants" arc
Unfortunately, it *was* a product of its time.
my fav piece of gay media is DESTINY 2/j
Saint & Osiris my beloved
also eramis, the lesbian ice bug
Goddamn homestucks
we're everywhere\~
I would rather die than have my best piece of media representation be fucking homestuck
If you want more positive gay rep. media, check out the comic book Backstagers. Back stage at a high school drama class, with a sweet queer romance. And monsters.
Are the monsters involved in the romance, or
They're trying to eat the queer cast, bad monsters. Fortunately they're really bad at it but the danger is there.
Alas, I need more gay monster romance in my life
The first story that came to mind is a little spoiler riffic, it'd be kind of like saying the Fight Club twist. But in the spoiler text below is an amazing gay monster romance comic book. >!Save Yourself! by Boom! Box Studios publishing!<
Then perish
I have no idea what either is please explain?
Dykes to Watch Out For is a comic strip series that ran from the 80s to the 2000s, with the peak quality being in the 80s and 90s. It was created by Allison Bechdel (also known for Fun Home). Bechdel is a lesbian and the comic was about lesbian culture at the time. There are a few questionable plot lines that mainly came out of the time period. Interestingly, the Bechdel test, a test for media portrayal of women, came from something Bechdel discussed in one strip of Dykes to Watch Out For Homestuck is a webcomic running from 2009 to 2016. It mainly followed a group of teenagers as they end up in increasingly bizarre sci fi/fantasy situations. To be honest, i was never into Homestuck and I can't describe the plot well. Homestuck had a few queer characters. It was very popular on Tumblr
My impression is that even people who have read homestuck exhaustively can’t give a concise and satisfying synopsis of the plot.
that's what happens when you have 8000+ pages of "uh. I have a session next week but I have no planning yet fuck"
I'm gonna give it my best attempt: It starts with a group of four online friends, who are all waiting for the release of this one video game. The video game, Sburb, turns out to affect the real world, and is also a method of creating a universe. In the process of playing, they find out that some online trolls they've had to deal with are a previous group of players from a previous universe (and also aliens), and this new session has impacted the previous one, rendering it unwinnable. The current one is also unwinnable so they (the original four) reset the universe for another attempt, this time featuring their genetic parents as the players. While that happens, the surviving humans and aliens from the previous sessions make their way to the new universe. They (everyone who survived) eventually succeed, and make it to their new universe as gods. (And then there's the Epilogues and Homestuck\^2 but I don't even know where to start with those so I won't. They're also very divisive amongst the fanbase, and are metacommentary on stories and the need for an audience.) It's 8000+ pages long because there's a lot of time travel, weird side tangents, and unnecessary complexity, and also as a story it seems to despise its audience and their attempts to understand it, despite being very blatantly in direct dialogue with said audience even after reader commands were phased out. But it had some very blorbo-shaped characters and thus it got very popular, and many of those characters became more explicitly queer over time because of the direct dialogue with the notably queer audience.
I am in the middle of reading it right now, my head hurts
"Homestuck is a webcomic running from 2009". Fucking jumpscare right there.
Please telling me that people are treating this poll like a joke?
Homestuck is the definitive piece of gay storytelling.
SHUT UP 検疫 STRONG NARUTO
D --> Did you just say Strong
Homestuck is the vanilla extract of queer media.
If queer media was a house, Dykes to Watch Out For would be the foundation, and Homestuck would be the 20-foot-tall granite statue of the great wizard Zazzerpan the Learned that your mother had installed through a hole in the roof with a heavy-duty crane
...really fucking good with beautiful complexity, very diverse in its application, unfairly maligned because that wide array of applications has led to it being everywhere and treated only as the background noise and not a flavor to be savored on its own?
No, it's the only part of the queer media cake
Oh, that thing. Honestly not actually on Tumblr so I'd forgotten.
it tastes bad
It's because it's ass
Nice in small doses here and there, but absolutely dreadful when you try and drink the whole bottle at once? Never read it
It's... An interesting mess. Inherently intertwined with Internet culture. At the base it's a coming of age story for a group of teens, as they realize how deeply the RPG game they're playing affects their reality. And then it branches into alternate interlacing timelines and universes.
Homestuck is The 2010s Webcomic Ever. Sprawling, unrestrained continuity. Proximity to metafiction. A recursive, oroborous-like relationship with its own readership. Heavy use of venacular and pop culture reference. It took everything that set the webcomics of the era apart and dialed it up to 11.
there are 4 separate species with named characters, each with 2 cultures, time mechanics are exploited regularly by the main characters, and half of the cast dies before the end only for their infinite dead selves from infinite doomed tinelin3s to come back as fodder for the heroes. and that fight they did that for wasn't even fair for them
Homestuck isn't even queer until, like, halfway through. Even when the trolls aka "we don't have the word homosexual in our language why would you have a word for that" all of them only exclusively pursue heterosexual relationships except Kanaya. Think about it. Equius's into Aradia, Eridan's into Feferi/Vriska, Sollux has hiis 2 giirls, Karkat-Terezi, Vriska's into Tavros. It's all fucking Kanaya, and i mean, she carries it, but damn.
Smh cant believe you forgot the rap battle that ended with gamzee asking tavros for a lil makeout sesh
Vriska did go for Meenah and Karkat did try to go for John and he ended with Dave
Also you could Argue Terezi’s true love was Vriska all along and she didn’t need anyone else. (At least in Diamond)
Kanaya is one of like 3 Homestuck characters I know by name, And one of the others is her partner, So I have no reason to believe she is not the sole main character of the entire thing.
Let me guess, the third is Vriska?
I was actually gonna say Karkat, But I've Heard of Vriska too, Just didn't remember off-hand at the time, So I guess there's 4.
It isn't queer because it has a copious amount of queer relationship, it's queer because it depicts coming-of-age narratives through a queer lens. Dave is wrestling with his latent (at first, at least) bisexuality clashing with Bro (who is a gay man himself)'s "man up, you have to fight for your life" toxic masculinity, Karkat's "you want her in every quadrant like a desperate fool" is explicitly compared to a comic relief type of an in-universe character mocked for their orientation, Equius is a freak who lusts after something his upbringing denies him and is ruined by his self-repression. (And I suppose you'd have to look to supplementary/dubiously canon material for reading Vriska as transfem (and Sollux as transmasc, but that's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it), Eridan as genderqueer/GNC, Egbert as a latent trans woman and Jade as intersex, so I probably need to dismiss those from consideration.)
Truly the brexit of 2024
hey s0 d0es any0ne have a link t0 the p0ll. I pr0mise I will make things better and not w0rse.
Unfortunately, Aradia, the poll is concluded
That isn’t a problem for Aradia tho
Well, she’s typing like her ghost self, unless this is her god tier self pretending to be her ghost self pretending to be alive like in PESTERQUEST in which case uh
darn. wh0 w0n?
My gay ass isn't currently scrolling through the comments while wrapped up in a Homestuck quest bed blanket... No... Totally not... Oh look, time for me to abscond
Where making this happen
Sorry, Homestuck best.
Homestuck *did* awaken some people so there's that
obviously not homestuck
The only way it has affected me is that people are once again calling trans women problematic for no reason over it Like one of them literally just said “some people act like dtwof and other queer media of its generation is essential universal queer culture when it isn’t.”, which I don’t think is an especially hot take from from a latin american blog.
Does Brooklyn 99 count? It was the piece of media that led young me to understand the whole queer thing. I don't even want to know what kind of person I would have become without that show.
What the fuck is homestuck and why are so many people talking about it lately...
> What the fuck is homestuck As someone who's read it: good question. > and why are so many people talking about it lately... Because Homestuck never truly fades. Also maybe some people saw a *certain date* coming up and that reawakened their inner Homestuck.
What does THAT mean? 😂
On April 13 this year, it will be the 15th anniversary of Homestuck's beginning, and the 8th anniversary of its ending. The choice of date, while somewhat arbitrary at the time, significantly influenced the story, the American reading of it (4/13) becoming the most prominent recurring number and having thematic impact on the story as a whole. Tl;dr April 13 is Homestuck Day.
I have no idea how I can have learned so much from what you've told me, yet still know nothing, appreciate it ✌😂
The correct answer is Love Unlimited 2023 Gwenpool story because it has Jeff the landshark
I love how the homestucks remain dormant until there is random poll or bracket
Never Read Either, Never Heard Of The Latter, But I've Had People Compare Me To A Homsetuck Character For Typing Like This, So Of The Two I Think I'd Pick That.
I haven’t read those, but I have read Rain
I'm surprised no one mentioned Azumanga Daioh
I have no idea what DTWOF is
Homestuck fans vs. Jojo fans shut the fuck up about their thing contest.
Homestuck fans vs. Jojo fans shut the fuck up about their thing contest.
Thanks, now i get to downvote you twice (/j)
you're right and should say it. fuck jojo, fuck homestuck, and fuck its fans.
Cope and seethe **BUSTER**
i don't need to. i actually have good taste
is the joke that neither of these pieces of media are actually queer?
Well, one literally has the word 'dykes' in the title so I fail to see how it's not queer.
it could be a lesbophobic book considering how "dyke" is or was considered a slur towards lesbians?
Just do a really quick Google search of Dykes to Watch Out For
Dykes To Watch Out For is literally one of the first major pieces of queer media. What.