Let Me Tell You About Homestuck
Framed as a text based adventure, Homestuck uses hyperlinks to act as the input commands to move between pages. The characters are "playable," with the reader giving inputs such as "Be John" and the narrative switching to John's perspective. Some pages are also interactive, ranging from battle sequences to 8-bit adventures full of dialogue and character development. The characters of Homestuck are the "heroes" of their adventure, both as the protagonists of our webcomic and of the game they themselves are playing, a very real computer game, called SBURB or SGRUB, that lets them "level up" and manipulate their surroundings. There is one problem, this game is broken. Our heroes cannot win, so they decide to do something else. They rise up the levels, gain as much power as possible and reach the God Tier, then attack the game itself, specifically, a glitch in its data: a destructive loose cannon named Jack Noir that is connected to the game's own power source. As they challenge Jack and seek to protect their friends, their past and current actions come into question. The game forces a new set of labels beyond merely giving all the title of "hero," and the game links these new classifications directly to their godhood and immortality.
This "God Tier" grants immortality through death, but this type of immortality is not absolute, and the abstract wonder "am I a hero or a villain?" becomes an ever present threat. Immortal, unbeatable players would make a game unfair, while conversely, losing as an immortal and being forced to live for eternity in the desolate wasteland of an empty universe would be torturous, so God Tiers are given an out: they can still die, but only if their death is heroic or just. The first player of each group to ascend to God Tier, John Egbert​ for the humans and Vriska Serket for the trolls, show these circumstances first hand, and their actions toward both Jack and their allies demonstrate the harsh categories into which the game classifies everything: the good, the evil, and the inconsequential, while also giving us the bigger picture to remember the grey areas between everything.
