Reproduce and adapt: Homestuck in print and digital (Re)Incarnations

Publication history

The plot of Homestuck is notoriously convoluted, but for our purposes, we only need a general overview as it relates to key concepts that are affected by the different versions of the work. In short, four friends play a video game, which triggers the apocalypse. The story spirals increasingly out of control as the characters shift through different layers of reality and the universe that defines them, altering the timeline, engaging in metafictional hijinks and ultimately rewriting the narrative that controls their existence. After much struggle, the characters defeat their antagonists, create a new universe and finally escape into it.

The most important elements to take from here are the metafictional incursions of characters into the shape of the comic itself and the issue of timeline rewriting. As we will see, these themes often occur in the places where archive demands adaptation.

Homestuck, originally hosted on the Web site mspaintadventures.com, began serialization on 13 April 2009 and ended exactly 7 years later on 13 April 2016. It is composed variously of text-heavy chat logs, simplistic and stylized images, animated gifs, animated videos with music, hyperlinked branching paths and interactive games with puzzle sequences. The interface at times expresses the metafictional aspects of the story, such as when the site is reskinned to represent the metafictional takeover of the narrative from characters able to hijack the comic itself (e.g. Doc Scratch’s Interlude [Hussie, 2018c: 3764–4081]). On the release of its credits on 25 October 2016, Homestuck totalled 8124 pages composed of 14,915 panels, 817,929 words, and 4 h, 12 min and 18 s of audio-visual animated content (Bailey, 2018). Its erratic serialization and the strong fan culture also heavily affected reception of the work over the course of its publication, a method of serialization that was possible through its status as a self-published webcomic on the creator’s Web site (Nakhaie, 2021). From its interactive elements to its multimedia approach, Homestuck has been described as ‘the first great work of Internet fiction’ (Knode, 2012).

But the Internet is not the only place it has existed. The earliest effort to put Homestuck into print began in 2011 when TopatoCo began to publish Homestuck as print comics. Book One (2011), Book Two (2012) and Book Three (2013), covering the first three acts, were as far as TopatoCo got before the project ceased. A year after Homestuck’s completion on 6 October 2017, another effort at print publication was announced, this time from VIZ Media, which also announced its acquisition of the webcomic (VIZ Media, 2017). This time, all of Homestuck would be printed.

And with VIZ’s purchase came a retooling of the mspaintadventures.com site. On 2 April 2018, shortly before the release of VIZ’s Homestuck Book 1: Act 1 and Act 2 (2018), the mspaintadventures.com Web site was renamed homestuck.com (Hussie, 2018a). Its pages were renumbered, and its Flash games and videos were replaced with still images and external YouTube uploads. While archival copies of the Flash content remain, and while the new Web site has not dramatically changed the work, Homestuck as it was from 13 April 2009 to 1 April 2017 no longer exists. Rather, Homestuck now exists as a print reproduction and a ported digital archive, both of which necessitated changes due to technological differences.

Theoretical backgrounds

In a sense, Homestuck across its different iterations is what Bryant (2002) calls a fluid text, existing in multiple versions and ‘flow[ing] from one [version] to another’ (1). To Bryant, ‘macroscopic revision’ with ‘substantial rearrangements and substitutions’ suggests a version, while ‘fine-tuning’ or ‘microscopic revision’ does not, and the revisions ‘reveal a strategic pattern of revision evinces some reconception of the function of the work itself’ (89–90, emphasis in original). The flow between versions, therefore, requires discrete forms through which there is continuity. Andersen (2015) argues that, while Bryant suggests that adaptation may be part of a fluid-text analysis, he does not explore this possibility; to Andersen, practically speaking, the idea of a version should be limited to items ‘meant for public consumption’ and where ‘the author and/or his publisher assume direct responsibility’ (133–134). By this definition, Homestuck constitutes a version. Like the movement of Egan’s ‘Black Box’ from Twitter to print and other more ‘permanent’ publication mediums, Homestuck in print and in digital porting is the same work, intended for public consumption and under the responsibility of author and publisher. However, while Andersen is highly attentive to the materiality of Egan’s ‘Black Box’ in its various forms, Homestuck proves a particularly complicated case due to the changes required of its multimedia forms, which muddles the line between linguistic and bibliographic revision.

Hayles (2005) frames the transfer of content from print to electronic form in terms of ‘materiality’, defined as ‘the interaction of [an embodied text’s ¹ ] physical characteristics with its signifying strategies’ (103). This materiality then also defines the user’s (reader’s, player’s) interaction with the material, determining their experience of the work. Therefore, whether a digital work is produced in print format or ported to more current technology, its materiality must change. A codex – that is, a physical object made of a sheaf of pages stacked on top of each other and bound along the spine, requiring a reader to turn pages and examine their recto and verso sides ² – is not a Web site, and Flash is not HTML 5. Hayles describes these as translations, but another potential tool for understanding changes in a work as a result of material difference comes from adaptation theory.

Hutcheon defines adaptation as ‘repetition, but repetition without replication’ (2013: 7). In other words, when one work adapts another, it derives from the adapted material in a way that also transforms that material in one or more ways. She acknowledges the complexity of such a definition and describes adaptation from three different perspectives:

1. As a ‘formal entity or product’, adaptation is ‘an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works’, which she also calls ‘transcoding’ (2013: 7). An adaptation must be announced as having a relationship with material that it is derived from and transforms.

Hutcheon does not only use the concept of ‘medium’ (film, print, video game) but also ‘modes of engagement’ in her theory. These modes are showing (most associated with audio-visual media), telling (most associated with textual media) and interacting (most associated with video games) (2013: 22). Mode and medium together cover the axes on which a work might be adapted from one form and into another.

So, are the printed or ported versions of Homestuck adaptations? In the first sense of a ‘formal entity or product’ announced as an adaptation, yes and no. On their page advertising their print publications, the book series is described as ‘[a] full-color, hardcover collector’s edition of the landmark webcomic’ (VIZ, n.d.). The product description further announces that Homestuck ‘has been immortalized on dead trees with notes from author Andrew Hussie explaining what the hell he was thinking as he brought this monster to life’ (VIZ, n.d.). Thus, VIZ does not announce the print version of Homestuck as an adaptation. Instead, they bill it as a ‘collector’s edition’ and an ‘immortalization’ of the work, much in the same way that a DVD with director’s commentary might be advertised: a new release, but not an adaptation.

The announcement for Homestuck’s porting, on the other hand, does at times describe it as an adaptation. While Hussie’s news post on the subject describes the work as ‘porting’ the content and as ‘preserv[ing] the original content while updating its delivery’, it also refers to it as a process of adaptation three times (Hussie, 2018a).

This brings us to adaptation as a ‘process of creation’. In both print and port, the basic content has remained constant; it is not a reinterpretation or recreation in the sense of adapting characters, events, or words. Rather, considering medium of transmission and modes of engagement as all places where adaptation might be found, we can see that printing or porting both did and did not require the ‘(re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation’ of Homestuck.

Consider the media least changed by these processes. Still images and print were minimally affected by being turned to print and even less affected by porting. For the porting, Homestuck started on a Web site and remained on one: an unlikely candidate for adaptation. And while the printing process involved some reorganizing of how image and text were arranged in relation to each other, such changes in editions of print-native works are usually considered to be revisions to the bibliographic code, not adaptations. Thus, while the digital and print are different mediums materially, as mediums of text and image, they did not at first glance reinterpret or recreate as adaptation does. Likewise, the modes of engagement seemingly did not change: Homestuck did not suddenly become a television series. In isolation, these segments suggest new versions, not adaptations.

But Homestuck is more than just text and image, and there are modes of engagement not immediately apparent when we reduce the description to the media under examination. By examining where the modes changed in the new versions, we can see that Homestuck’s printed and ported forms are not adaptations but contain sites of adaptation, often with significant consequences. These sites complicate any attempt to draw a firm line between reproduction, archive, and adaptation.

Interaction and digital interfaces

As noted, Homestuck, at least in its web incarnation, is a heavily multimedia production. Veale (2019) argues that in Homestuck, the materiality of the content with which readers engage affects ‘the physical and mental processes required of [readers] as they negotiate the text that frames the story’ (1028), engaging readers across modes by demanding a variety of kinds of labour from them. Glaser (2020) specifically argues that Homestuck, even in the parts that are not literal gameplay, remediates and parodies video games throughout with mechanics that invite reader interaction and comment on video games and game culture (106). The mode of engagement is part of the storytelling.

This remediation of games is accomplished by the digital medium’s potential for interactivity. From hyperlinks to selection screens, Homestuck’s interfaces shape a readerly experience that remediates different kinds of gameplay. The dominant conceit of the narrative, indeed, is that it is a text-based adventure game in which players input commands that then trigger text responses from the game, depending on what is said. This is expressed from the very first page of the comic, which states, “What will the name of this young man be?” and offers the hyperlinked option “> Enter Name.” (Hussie 2018c: 1).

On initial serialization, this was literally an interactive element of the narrative where readers ‘played’ the game by making suggestions. Even after the choices were made, the continued use of ‘>’ (the greater-than sign) throughout the narrative is a persistent remediation of text-based adventures (Glaser, 2020: 102). Homestuck also emulates text-based adventure games with use of the genre's characteristic second-person narration. After the command, ‘> John: Captchalogue smoke pellets’ is given (Hussie, 2018c: 8), the next page reads, ‘You stow the SMOKE PELLETS on one of your CAPTCHALOGUE CARDS in your SYLLADEX’ (9). Combined, a remediation of ‘gameplay’ is created: when a reader clicks such a hyperlinked marked by a > that indicates an input of a command, then moves to the next page that uses the second person narrative that would be generated by their input command, they are also ‘playing’ the adventure game by ‘selecting’ the next action and reading the resultant text.

Other elements of the digital interface create further game-like interactivity. Aside from having to ‘select’ commands to ‘play’ the text-based adventure, players must also click open Pesterlogs that display dialogue between characters. While this is not the level of interaction that comes with most games nor the full suite of ‘aural (music, sound effects), visual, and kinesthetic provocations’ of active gaming (Hutcheon, 2013: 51), it does remediate the common gameplay experience of needing to select characters to trigger their dialogue to display.

Finally, there are the ‘select screens’ introduced in Act 6, where the reader ‘chooses’ which character to ‘play’ as (see for example Hussie, 2018c: 5137). Although the reader is not actually playing the character, and the sense of choice is artificial because the player is expected to go through all characters before moving on (as the bottom command text on one page, “> I selected all those characters. Time to move on.” [Hussie, 2018c: 5084], indicates), these remediate select screens that occur in various video games.

In some cases, the select screens do not even offer a choice, such as with a set of three select screens (Hussie, 2018c: 6382, 6397, 6405) where a reader is only given one functional link each time. This is due, in the narrative, to Caliborn shoving stardust into the Act 6 Act 6 game cartridge, thus breaking the ‘game’ Homestuck that the reader is ‘playing’, interfering with the metafictional part of the narrative. These sections are therefore both linear and interactive, as they allow the player to interact with a remediation of a broken game cartridge – something familiar to anyone who grew up on old consoles, part of the ‘technonostalgia’ that Glaser considers a key feature in Homestuck (2020: 99). The game even adds aural elements of a glitched game (the game beeps when an invalid option is chosen) to the visual and kinaesthetic elements, creating an interactive experience of denial of choice.

In addition, ‘walkaround’ gameplay segments emulate different games. For example, one mimics the point-and-click adventure game Myst (Hussie, 2018c: 4820–4827), while others (e.g. 2792) mimic Earthbound and similar RPGs, and some (e.g. Hussie, 2018c: 1358) have players collect items and even fight enemies. In these walkarounds, rather than games being remediated, they are embedded in the comic and played both by the reader engaging with the interface and by the character playing Sburb.

The readers of Homestuck, therefore, are also its ‘players’ through the game’s remediation of different kinds of gameplay, both in the Web site interface and the use of playable games. The pre-port digital Homestuck mimics text-based adventures in structure and, in its interface, has readers ‘play’ the narrative by selecting commands, clicking open text boxes, and using character select screens. This interface then becomes a feature that can be played with to express the metafictional narrative. The story also lets readers act out games through walkarounds that emulate point-and-click adventures and RPGs, letting them play as characters playing Sburb. Homestuck uses the showing and telling modes for much of its narrative, but it also develops an interactive dimension through its interfaces and embedded games.

Interaction and the codex

Such interactivity, of course, cannot be reproduced in print. Instead, the print version of Homestuck presents alternative kinds of interactivity, remediating four-panel comics rather than text-based adventures and allowing new ways of navigating the work through features of a print codex.

Tabularity is the physical characteristic of a material object that allows for multiple directions of approach. Vandendorpe (2009) asserts that, in the context of reading, ‘[l]inearity designates a series of elements that follow each other in an inviolable or preestablished order’, while with tabularity, ‘readers can visually access data in the order they choose, identifying sections of interest beforehand, in much the same way as when looking at a painting the eye may contemplate any part’ (22). The written word is generally experienced in a linear manner, but a document with headings and subheadings enables a reader to take a tabular approach by hopping freely between sections. This kind of movement is often associated with hypertextual and multimedia works because these works often offer a variety of possible entry points and allow readers to follow multiple paths through the work, but it can also exist in print when a printed object exists as one physical unit that can be ‘entered’ at any point, as through an encyclopaedia’s index.

As hypertext, Homestuck’s Internet incarnation has all the tabularity anyone could ask for thanks to its index and page search function. But the print incarnation of Homestuck is also tabular as a codex: in contrast to a scroll’s linearity, a codex provides multiple visual points of access and free navigation to any point with its pages. In the print iteration of Homestuck, these visual tabularities create interactive potential of a different variety than that offered by a Web site’s interface.

Changes in the way that image and text are set out on the page would ordinarily be referred to as revision between versions, not adaptation. The images and text are not changed; only their layout in relation to each other. Yet this layout change also transforms what was the primary interface on the digital platform, and this interface was part of the remediating of text-based adventures. As a result, any change to the interface also remediates the text-based adventure games that Homestuck parodies. For example, in several instances, the panel–text structure in the webcomic has been reorganized on the page to follow the four-panel structure of a comic, with images boxed in by a black border and narrative text unboxed below (see for example a comparison of Hussie, 2018c: 1486–1488 in the webcomic to Hussie, 2018b: 95 in the print edition).

In the webcomic, these specific pages are instead several pages, one panel each, with no border and a hypertext link of either command text of the next inputted action or an arrow to move to the next page. But here, while the text commands (which eventually reveal themselves to be the commands of characters in the story and therefore dialogue) remain, the hyperlink arrows are gone. They no longer serve a purpose, as the reader no longer requires them to move from page to page. To a degree, this creates a change in mode: while the command text itself remains alongside the use of second person, the reader no longer ‘inputs’ commands to move forward. They interact by turning pages, not clicking through, meaning that the ‘game’ is not enacted by readers through interaction with hyperlinks but shown to them. With this, the text-based adventure game is remediated less as a(n interactive) hyperlink adventure and more as a (shown) comic book narrative.

The restructuring of the layout also creates a relationship between image and specifically dialogue that enables visual tabularity. Pesterlog texts, when opened, can often be quite long, requiring the reader to scroll down and so lose sight of any text or image that does not fit on the screen. The scroll bar is, as Vandendorpe (2009) has noted, the modern incarnation of the scroll of old (139); it creates a linear relationship between what is above and below. One must view the panel first, then scroll down and read the text. In contrast, the printed Homestuck tends to ensure that image and text are experienced side by side in significantly less linear structures. It blocks off the chatlogs in thick yellow boxes beneath images or even, at times, embeds panels within the chat log boxes.

In one case (Hussie, 2018b: 208–9), two variations seen here are pragmatic choices; in the first, the image is embedded into box’s structure where the dialogue lines are short enough to fit, while the long spread of text in the next section fits more readily under than beside the two images that it relates to. But other meaning is created through this relation: where in the digital edition, the image of Dave appeared above his conversation with Calsprite, now the image is locked into the box with the conversation, inviting the reader’s eye to move from it to the dialogue and back without ever escaping the frame. This visually mirrors the way that Dave has been trapped with Calsprite for 4 months. The panels above the conversation with Rose, wherein Dave discusses escaping the dead-end timeline into a more productive one, then come to visually show Dave striving to escape the trap. We see a similar structuring in the panel of John creating the paradox clone children, which trapped within the chatlog box of his conversation with Karkat (Hussie, 2018b: 385): this conversation discusses how Paradox Space traps everything in causal loops. By visually restructuring image and text, the book enables free play between image and text, rather than the consistent pattern of image above text that resulted from the Web site interface.

The colouration along the fore edge of the codex also provides an option for tabular interactivity unavailable to the webcomic. While a reader can see the Internet Homestuck along its ‘fore edge’ through the date of publication of each page or the bare textual content through its list of pages and search function, the actual ‘mass’ of Homestuck cannot be beholden all at once. But the book has a literal fore edge that does let you behold the whole of the volume at once, and that fore edge offers visual cues for new entry points into the text (Figure 1).OPEN IN VIEWER

Perhaps the most immediately obvious feature is the thick yellow line toward the tail end of the book, marking out a white span that is coloured consistently throughout the book, which is the author’s commentary. More significant for reader navigation, the fore edge creates a secondary index of points of view. Along the top edge of the print comic, there is a thin bar of multiple colours. This, when flipped open, proves to be a bar of colour around the page number of the comic on the Web site (e.g., Hussie, 2018b: 208‐209). These bars have two functions: first, should someone wish to examine the page on the Web site, that person need only type in ‘www.homestuck.com/story/’ and then the series of numbers presented there. Second, and more significantly for interaction arising from the codex form, the colour corresponds to the point of view of the section. To find all portions of the text from Dave’s point of view, a reader can just look for bright red. By looking along the fore edge, therefore, we have an index that is unavailable within the comic itself: we can find every single section that is from a character’s point of view merely by looking for that character’s colour. This is far beyond a ‘character select screen’ that might choose one of four paths at a few points in Act 6’s narrative: it is an organization of the entire webcomic around character perspectives.

This provides information not accessible on the Web site itself. Not only does the Web site lack such an index, but also, in sections where there is no prose narrator to indicate point of view through address to a specific character, the exact perspective of a scene is not always clear. And this information provides a new potential way of experiencing the work. A reader could choose to follow only one character’s perspective, hopping between their sequences, or a reader could choose to compare how different points of view are structured. Without anything that might ordinarily be considered adaptation, the printed Homestuck adds possible interactive modes to pages that are by default in the show/tell mode even as the interactive remediation of gameplay is lost. It both reproduces and adapts.

Remediating games and let’s plays

But of course, hyperlinks are not the only form of interactivity in Homestuck: there are also the walkaround games. These games often focus on building the world and characters rather than the plot. They provide engagement with the ‘heterocosm’ of the comic, the ‘spectacular world of digital animation that a player enters’ (Hutcheon, 2013: 51). Through the heightened levels of interactivity that these game segments offer, the player enters and interacts with Homestuck’s worlds. In the case of ‘[S] Act 4 = =>‘ (Hussie, 2018c: 1358), the game introduces the reader to John’s new game-generated world by having the reader play as John playing Sburb, letting John and the reader ‘discover’ more about Sburb’s world together through interactive gameplay.

This game presents a reader with a world of four separately loaded regions, mechanics for battle with game-constructed enemies, and a puzzle in the form of items to collect and deposit; through these mechanics of ‘play’, it offers the reader an experience of Sburb, complete with NPC interactions and hints about plot details. The game underlines terms in NPC dialogue to signal key features of the world now being mapped out, such as ‘Fireflies’ (stuck in the sky, needing to be freed by John) or ‘The Slumbering One’ (Typheus, a divine figure from whom John is supposed to get his ultimate quest). This is also how key text is often visually emphasized in video games to help guide player understanding of the world and how they might advance through the plot.

Yet, with respect to actual progress in the narrative, the reader cannot make any meaningful choices to advance the plot in this game. ³ Regardless of whether the reader-player chooses to deposit John’s Dad’s hat in the parcel delivery system to be returned to him, Dad Egbert will find that hat rising out of the parcel delivery system later (Hussie, 2018c: 1729–1731). Thus, nothing the reader does in the game really matters for advancing the story. This itself expresses a theme in Homestuck: an inevitable course of events that permits dead-end variations is a key part of Homestuck’s heterocosm because the characters of Homestuck exist within ‘Paradox Space’, which is defined by closed temporal paradoxes. These paradoxes are primarily causal loops, and even grandfather paradoxes that do not initially appear to be causal loops end up being ones because the grandfather paradoxes create the causal loops. Thus, while characters in Paradox Space have free will in the sense that they can make divergent choices to make an infinite number of alternate timelines, those timelines will always lead back to the main one and always would have done so, making Paradox Space a predetermined universe. As one character puts it, ‘ANY HOPE THAT IT COULD HAVE PLAYED OUT DIFFERENTLY OR THAT YOU COULD HAVE AVOIDED THIS WHOLE MESS WAS ALWAYS JUST A RUSE’ (Hussie, 2018c: 1903).

Thus, during walkaround games, the player-reader of Homestuck and John-as-player of Sburb are not only both ‘playing’ Sburb; they are both living out Paradox Space’s conception of free will. They both can do anything they like, and anything they do is part of the story, but events will always unfold as they have always unfolded, so their choices do not matter. This is one of manifestations of how Homestuck ‘repeatedly frustrates the user’s desire for explicit interactivity, inviting and then curbing the type of agency promised by many new media projects’ (Chute and Jagoda, 2014: 10). Readers kinaesthetically experienced Paradox Space’s conception of choice and free will in the walkaround sections.

In print, however, this gameplay experience of interaction cannot be remediated for readers. Rather, the print publication remediates a related gameplay phenomenon: the Let’s Play.

A ‘Let’s Play’ is most commonly a video recording someone playing a game, with commentary and/or a video of the player’s face as they go through it. But Let’s Plays can also be static in the form of screenshots with accompanying text describing someone’s playthrough. In essence, a Let’s Play is the archiving of person’s experience of a game. This is what the print version remediates when it provides screen captures of the walkaround (Hussie, 2018b: 1–30). This Let’s Play demonstrates battle and grist-gathering once at the start, then ignores both. It presents all text except chat logs through screen captures of the game itself, as a static Let’s Play is likely to. The reader thus changes from player of Homestuck the game to an observer of someone else’s Let’s Play of the game.

The printed version therefore adapts the content of the walkaround in two ways: on the medium level, it adapts the walkaround from an interactive mode to a showing/telling mode, and on the level of remediation, it adapts it from gameplay to Let’s Play. This Let’s Play version is, essentially, the ‘Alpha’ instantiation of John’s adventure, the one that allows the progression of the timeline in Paradox Space, rather than any of the cast-off dead ends. As a result, the reader of the book no longer experiences an embodiment of the elimination of redundant timelines or the exploratory filling in of the universe. The metafictional parts of the story, so reliant on digital interactivity, cannot be reproduced and instead are adapted into the shown experience of reading another person’s archived playthrough.

In the transition of the digital-born Homestuck into a print medium, adaptation and reproduction co-exist and mingle. The reorganization of images and texts in relation to each other, were this a transition from one print publication to another, might only be called revision. But additional consideration of the digital interface of the Web site edition invites us to see these also as sites of adaptation, as the interface’s remediation of gameplay is adapted into the interactivity that derives from a codex’s potential for tabularity. The game sections’ interactive embodiment of meaningless choice becomes the unadaptable: that which must be completely converted to show and tell because it is impossible to maintain as play. Instead, Homestuck as a printed work remediates a different element of gaming culture, the Let’s Play, which is an archive of a player’s experience of a game.

Homestuck ported: Interactivity and metafiction

We turn now to the porting of the Homestuck Web site begun on 2 April 2018. As technology progresses, older digital works inevitably risk destruction by obsolescence. Approaches to this potential loss this have been discussed, such as Grigar and Moulthrop’s (2018) suggestion of preserving digital works by documenting the experience of ‘traversing’ the work, which also preserves the cultural and historical context, not unlike a Let’s Play. Research has also been done on various archives’ and libraries’ efforts to preserve digital-born works (Clark et al., 2020; Taylor, 2004; Weston et al., 2017) and the difficulties such archives face, as well as possible solutions (Broussard and Boss, 2018; Grigar, 2021). Aharoni (2021) has discussed how, while individuals digitize content of obsolete technology, the content’s now-obsolete hosts (VHS tapes, in this case) are also preserved and take on special meaning. But for websites, this kind of preservation may be impossible, as new iterations will often overwrite old.

Here, I look Homestuck’s attempt to escape digital obsolescence through a port nominally in the same medium of a digital space. While the shared medium suggests there is little place for adaptation in a ported version, we find that, for Homestuck, the change from Flash Player to other technology does indeed create sites where the mode changes. These adaptations primarily affect the metafictional aspects of the narrative, as expressed in changes to the site interface or interactivity. The effects on the mode of engagement show how porting, like print, must at times adapt rather than reproduce Homestuck, here in the name of accessibility and preservation.

As noted above, the Web site was initially called mspaintadventures.com, and its games and animations were Flash files (mostly) hosted on the site. The 2018 rehaul of the site, conducted by VIZ Media, was intended to make it more accessible, both on mobile devices and general, and to ensure that when Flash was no longer supported, the videos and games on the Web site would not disappear (Hussie, 2018a).

Thus, the new default form for the walkaround game segments removes risks of obsolescence and ensures that these segments can be accessed on mobile devices by adapting them. The Flash games are still technically made available (although Flash is now obsolete) through the instructions, ‘** To see this content as originally intended, view on a Flash-enabled device’, and then a link that can be clicked (for an example, see Hussie, 2018c: 1358). While the Flash version is described as the intended format, it is no longer the default, and in place of the Flash games, the reader is provided with a speaker button to click to trigger music and is given a series of image panels to navigate through in sequence, taking the reader through the game in a series of panels just like those used by the print publication for the walkarounds. Thus, as in print adaptation, interactivity drops, and the narrative theme of pointless free will changes from a kinaesthetic, interactive experience to that of a Let’s Play. ⁴ As in print, we might consider this adaptation.

Other cases of differences after porting may instead be thought of as changes to bibliographic codes through reorganizing the interface. However, because the interface is the primary space where the metafictional elements of the story are expressed, some purely bibliographic changes can affect the mode by which the metafictional narrative is expressed, making the archival adjustment also a site of adaptation.

The ‘GAME OVER’ Flash acts as climax for both Act 6 Act 6 Act 3 (A6A6A3) and Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 3 (A6A6I3), switching between the Act and Intermission. In this sequence, many major characters die, and Caliborn, a character with metafictional power who has hijacked the narrative, gets beaten up but continues to assert control over the story. The URL for this page formerly ended with ‘GAMEOVER’ (an aberration, as the end of the URL for Homestuck pages was usually the page number) but now simply ends in ‘6901’. ‘GAME OVER’ is now the title of the YouTube video instead. This is akin to a change in the bibliographic, rather than lexical, code because the text stays the same, but its relation to the rest of the text changes, here in the location of information within the hierarchy a webpage. While the URL of a page itself frames the entire content of the webpage, the title of a video embedded into the text is framed by the rest of the page. Thus, the GAMEOVER joke/comment now has a structurally less significant (in terms of interface) but more obvious location in the video title. However, a video title is not unusual: all the Homestuck videos have titles. No special, metafictional story element is indicated when ‘GAMEOVER’ is part of a video title. Thus, this change affects the mode because rather than showing a metafictional ‘game over’ for Homestuck the comic through aberrations at the level of the URL, it tells the reader this information in the video title.

Aside from this shift in frame from page URL to page/video title, the expression of ‘GAME OVER’ moving between the Act and Intermission is also altered because of the differences between an embedded Flash video and an embedded YouTube video. The Flash video moves between two site skins, a green one made by Caliborn for A6A6A3 to mark his metafictional takeover of the narrative and the grey default site skin used by A6A6I3, the reassertion of original narrative in the ‘margins’ of the intermissions. During the animation, characters and objects are occasionally knocked out of frame by the action of the event. This animation uses the Web site interface to show movement between the different parts of the story and the fictional and metafictional levels of the narrative. For example, at 2:33 (Hussie, 2018c: 6901?fl=1), the image of the planet escapes the supposed frame of the video and even covers up the navigation links at the top of the page, but the background is grey, indicating that this is in the Intermission outside of Caliborn’s direct control, not Caliborn’s green-skinned main act.

This kind of playing with the interface is technologically unavailable for an embedded YouTube video. The YouTube video always exists within the frame of a visible, defined player; the timer bar and title may eventually disappear, but the small logo in the corner always remains, a reminder that the video is from YouTube and not part of the Web site. The site interface cannot be altered during the video because the YouTube video is wholly external to it.

In addition, in the Flash version, a reader cannot progress until the video ends: the link to the next page will not appear until the end of the video, after Caliborn clicks the curtains closed and permits continuation of the narrative. This reinforces Caliborn’s domination over the narrative through his metafictional powers. In the ported version, however, the link to the next segment of the story remains at the bottom the entire time. Thus, there is no site-wide visual shift in frame to match the narrative shift, and the reader can move to the next video without being subject to the whims of a fictional character. These are not changes to the medium, but they are changes to the mode, because the reader is no longer stuck in Homestuck at the whim of its metafictionally empowered characters during these segments. Just as showing the metafictional power is adapted to telling the reader of it, so too is forcing the reader to interact with the characters’ metafictional power adapted to a telling of this power.

A similar change occurs in the Trickster portion of the work. When the characters are turned into Tricksters, their semi-metafictional status is marked most overtly by the reskinning of the site into garish neon colours, a running header bar of sweets and a moving background banner (Hussie, 2018c: 5714–77). This is a Flash-heavy sequence, where Flash videos are automatically triggered on a page loading, so when the reader clicks the next page, they have no control over an ominous Trickster faces zooming in and taking over the entire panel (Hussie, 2018c: 5735). This arc is also marked by a series of (deliberately annoying) minigames where the reader is asked to move characters across the screens by clicking or tapping keys. The final of these is the request to ‘HELP DIRK ESCAPE TO THE SIDE’ by pressing an arrow key 1111 times as he inches across the screen (Hussie, 2018c: 5759), which is especially frustrating to readers because, after the 1111 presses are done, the reader is then asked to play again and given the options of ‘NO’ and ‘FUCK NO’ buttons – only for an attempt to hover over either cause both to be covered by a giant ‘YES’ button that restarts the Flash. The sheer annoyance and agony of the gameplay – if the YouTube recording is a marker, a player must press the button rapidly for over a minute and a half – is a kind of interactivity that kicks you in the face.

The overall consequence is that this sequence is one of the most inaccessible portions of the story both in terms of technological obsolescence and players with visual or aural accessibility concerns, where readers are helpless to loud noises, ugly colours, and tiring minigames. Tricksters are, after all, metafictional figures and so can interfere with the interface and coerce the reader as they please.

With the movement from Flash to YouTube in Homestuck’s porting, all this changes, as a YouTube user has much more control and autonomy. A YouTube user can move around within a video and pause it – and perhaps more importantly, can choose to play a video if they wish and refuse if they do not, avoiding uncontrollable flashing images and annoying noises. The reader also no longer needs to click Dirk to the side 1111 times, as this Flash minigame becomes a video Let’s Play. This spares the reader the experience of clicking repetitively for 2 minutes while awful music plays, only to have control ripped away. These are adaptations in the sense of a reinterpretation and recreation that changes the mode: the experience is being shown to the reader, but it is no longer something the reader is made enact. The reader is neither implicated in events nor subject to them; they are an extra, embedded layer removed, thus reducing the power of these metafictional elements over the very subjects they point towards. But these adaptations also make it much more accessible while preserving the essential narrative.

Hussie did not mislead in describing the porting as an adaptation: while in many cases, the porting only recreated images and text in a newly coded, visually identical Web site, there are sites in the narrative where the change in the underlying technology required adaptation from one mode of engagement to another. This was most prominent in metafictional sections that relied on the interactivity made available through Flash’s integration with the webpage’s interface and ability to host gameplay. These adaptations increased accessibility at the necessary cost of fidelity; much of Homestuck was reproduced, but some had to be transformed to be preserved.

Conclusion

Homestuck was in many ways built exclusively for the Internet, but where there is a market, there is a way. On the Internet, Homestuck’s interface remediated different types of games, and its walkaround games created a link between the pointless choice of gameplay that cannot change events and the pointlessness of choice in Paradox Space. In print, lacking these dimensions of interactivity, Homestuck instead created new relations between text and image and employed indices of character and event to enable new ways to navigate the material. With this, it shifted emphasis from associations with text-based adventures, an electronic form, to associations with the print-born form of the four-panel comic. The print Homestuck could not replicate gameplay interactivity, so instead it remediated Let’s Plays, the archive of gameplay and still an important part of gaming culture. Reproduction and adaptation occurred together as some elements had to be adapted in medium, others in form, and others still were reorganized in terms of bibliographic code.

The ported Homestuck that stands at present also both adapted and republished its narrative, and this has had the strongest effect on the modes by which the reader engages with the metafictional elements of the story. Changes in page URLs and videos alter metafictional events like the GAME OVER, and changes in embedded content alter the framing of sequences that move between site skins, adapting showing to telling. Further changes in interactivity alter the force of impact of metafiction-heavy sections such as the Trickster arc by no longer making readers subject to and involved in them: interacting becomes showing. The ported Homestuck is not greatly altered in raw content from earlier Internet versions of Homestuck, but in what has been altered, this version instead makes Homestuck more accessible and enduring in the face of technological changes.

But there are other approaches to preservation, such as Bailey’s (2018) offline archive from readmspa.org and Bambosh’s (2020) downloadable browser. These two fan-created versions take a different approach to recreating the webcomic. Many elements that the print and ported versions adapted in mode were instead recreated by these fan creations using other technologies – an attempt at a recreation of Homestuck as these readers experienced it. This attempt to archive an experience of Homestuck goes so far as the Bambosh’s browser’s choice to, for example, allow improvements in elevating the sound content to 2020 levels rather than mid-2000s midi levels – but only as an option. If a reader of that archive wants the old mid-2000s midis, Bambosh has made sure that part of the older Homestuck experience, too, can be preserved. These archives of course have their own sites of adaptation; they are ports themselves as downloadable files that run on your computer, after all. But where the print and ported Homestuck appear to favour adaptations that are likely to be stable in the long term, these two fan creations instead favour a recreation faithful to their makers’ experiences, even as they have to use different technology to create these unofficial versions of Homestuck.

Homestuck across its different iterations is certainly a ‘fluid’ (Bryant, 2002) work. And while Andersen (2015) distinguishes adaptation from version on the basis of authorial and publisher responsibility, arguing that adaptations should be considered ‘derived from and secondary to’ literary works (133), those boundaries blur for Homestuck. All versions are under authorial/publisher responsibility, yet there are clear sites where only ‘adaptation’ provides the vocabulary necessary to understand the consequences of material difference across version. As a fluid work, Homestuck does not have an adaptation but rather flows over the line that distinguishes republication from adaptation, because its republications include adaptations.

Homestuck is neither the first nor last of its kind. Digital-native works will continue to be produced for print publication, and anything on the Internet will continue to need to be ported to survive as the Internet’s underpinnings change. This is particularly important because the electronic nature of digital-born works existence may mean that records of prior version are erased with the release of new iterations. With attention to the changes in reproductions and archives of digital-born works, especially at sites of adaptation, we can better understand their implications. An archive cannot preserve everything. Attention to where the archive may adapt allows us to identify what remains outside its record.