NOTICE: To view some of the larger images in this thread in full, right click/hold and open in new tab.
June: Lately I've been rereading Homestuck, in preparation to catch up on post-canon works I haven't read yet.
June: (Some examples of post-canon works you should read right now, in no particular order: Burning Down the House, Kittyquest, and godfeels, or: "i dreamed of feeling better"!)
June: As of writing, I've just finished the Intermission, the first one, where a bunch of gangsters fuck up a hotel and the leprechauns therein. Using the Unofficial Homestuck Collection I've also been able to check on then-present newsposts in real-time, which itself has been a very novel and unique experience.
June: Earlier tonight I posted the above on Mastodon and in a couple of Discord servers, and though it's a joke, it got me to thinking about a very real opinion I hold, which is that Homestuck's portrayal of time travel is simple.
June: Others have attempted to dismiss this claim as a result of it being the first piece of media I've read that heavily dealt with time travel (I hadn't watched Back to the Future until last year!), but this post made me reconsider.
June: The chart in question (accredited to "Grnr" at the time) is truly indecipherable to me, but the way the Intermission deals with time travel is fast and loose, while also being incredibly tight and defined by logic.
June: The fact that someone in 2010 went out of their way to map all of this out in a way that made sense to them is a testament to the lengths the Intermission goes to explain the rules of its time travel and reality-hopping.
June: Take for example these two much easier to follow timelines.
June: These timelines by Agrajag presents multiple timelines interacting with each other in a tangible way, enabling events that would not be possible were the timelines isolated.
June: This is something the Intermission is very good at teaching- the idea that time travel is never truly happening in a single straight lines, but rather consists of jumping through different paths and branches.
June: Davesprite is a perfect example of this in the main story of Homestuck; Davesprite cannot exist without the doomed timeline that made him feel the need to go back in time to prototype himself.
June: Using Sawbuck to travel back to before Midnight City (or whatever it's called) was even built, with Scurrilous Straggler seeing Slick's fine hat and choosing to wear it himself one day is an incredibly ridiculous situation, but if the reader catches on to the sequence of events it serves as a perfect tutorial for the later implementation of Davesprite into the story.
June: There's a lot of examples of overloaded time travel tutorials in the Intermission. Everyone interacting with the future and past trails are making the reader more and more familiar with the concepts of predestination and stable time loops.
June: The Intermission overloads the reader with these concepts in an extremely dense and concentrated part of the story all at once, in an environment where readers are not demanded to keep careful track of events as the ramifications of individual actions are not very vast. As a result, there's less pressure to fully understand everything that's going on, and the partial knowledge gained from what the reader sort of understood will help when things are truly introduced to the story.
June: The primary antagonist of most of the comic, Lord English, exists entirely as a set of several stable time loops that enable his existence! And I've never seen anyone be confused about that who's actually read the comic, because the comic prepares you for it.
June: I didn't really plan a conclusion for this, but I guess I should wrap it up because I'm trying to write more and all I'm doing is repeating myself.
June: In conclusion: Homestuck's time travel is easy baby shit if you actually read the Intermission, like any real Homestuck reader ought to do.