hussie’s a genius: there is always hope

thricequeen:

You know how?

Hiveswap is set in the same universe as Homestuck, just a little bit before. That makes it essentially a prequel. And one of the main difficulties with prequels is that there’s an underlying sense of despair and hopelessness because you already know that everything is going to go to shit. It’s like having a friend spoil a TV series and then trying to watch it by yourself regardless. It’s not fun. There’s no anticipation. You know exactly how the future will play out, and it looks so, so dim, no matter how light-hearted the series tries to be.

But Hiveswap doesn’t have this problem. Why?

It’s ambiguously canon. We don’t know whether this is the same timeline as Homestuck. Here’s a quote from the Hiveswap site:

“Will Hiveswap have [insert my favorite Homestuck character here] in it?

While it does have some links to Homestuck canon, Hiveswap takes place before the events of the comic, in an all-new setting, with a lot of new characters to meet – more than 100 in all!”

Some links. Before. These words mean nothing when we’re talking about Homestuck. With all the timeline skips and retcons, what do before and after even mean? Just because the past is the same doesn’t mean that the future is. Homestuck makes this conveniently ambiguous. 

So we fans have something so, so rare. We have hope. We can hope that the meteors and the Glub don’t destroy Earth and Alternia. We can hope that Joey and Xefros and Jude live. It’s plausible. It’s extremely plausible because every timeline, including the one where everything turns out okay, is canon. And that’s what makes Hiveswap and Homestuck so good.

There is always hope.