The Homestuck Bechdel Analysis

Before we begin this post, I feel it prudent to make a confession. It's probably not even a confession, since it's likely that everyone knows it already-- more like an admission of guilt regarding a crime of which I have already been accused, or at least suspected. There is... a web comic. No! Not a web comic, exactly, or at least, not only a web comic. There is a long, multi-arc narrative spanning a wide range of different styles of expression, including traditional web comics, interactive puzzle-solving games, gorgeous animation scored by a multitude of experimental musicians, long-winded chat logs delving into the nature of causality, and equally long-winded chat logs probing the nature of alien reproductive biology. There is a thing called Homestuck, and it is a silly thing that I love dearly.

I'm going to assume that all readers of this post either A) already know about Homestuck and keep themselves up-to-date with every twist and turn of its labyrinthine plot, or B) don't know about Homestuck and don't particularly care about spoilers for a web comic about children playing a video game. I suggest that you stop reading if you are a member of group C), Homestuck novices who are just beginning their incredible journey through paradox space, and wish to remain untainted by spoilers about who kisses/murders/blinds/cripples/resuscitates/retroactively brings about the existence of whom. This post will involve all the spoilers. ALL of them.

Especially this one!

For those of you who really don't give a fuck about this Homestuck bullshit, could I entice you with some statistical analysis and also maybe some feminism? Because that's pretty much all I do on this blog: drone about statistics, drone about feminism, drone about feminism using statistics, etc. That might explain why nobody leaves any comments! Well shit, that was a hell of a mystery, that no one thought was a mystery, and didn't really need solving. But damn if it didn't just get solved. So good work, me.

The thing about blogging about feminism is that it tends to get depressing. You wind up talking about the lack of female role models in childrens' media, unacknowledged societal double-standards, all the subtle pressures that make it difficult to prosecute rapists, and a ton of other totally woeful shit. But there are success stories out there! And lately, I've realized that one of the feminist victories is, unexpectedly, Homestuck.



Homestuck isn't really set up to be any sort of victory for feminism. It's a web comic exploring the themes and tropes of the video game genre, and video games tend to have a poor track record with positive or varied portrayals of female characters. Sometimes male authors have trouble writing realistic female characters, and Andrew Hussie is a dude. Male authors run the risk of underthinking their women-- usually by excluding them from the story completely until they need a love interest to show up-- or else overthinking them into some forced amalgamation of tough-girl badassery and hyper-sexualized sassery. It's like they're walking around with big neon signs pointing to them saying "THIS IS THE FEMALE CHARACTER!!!" The ladies never feel like normal human participants in their stories.

Hussie avoids a lot of the problems inherent in trying to write a "strong female character" by doing something sort of obvious, but nonetheless pretty rare: he makes half his characters female. Every new crop of characters introduced is split precisely down the middle: two boys and two girls, then six boy trolls and six girl trolls, then two more girls and two more boys, then one girl cherub and one boy cherub... the only major group of characters introduced that doesn't feature balanced gender representation are the Midnight Crew and the Felt, and even then, we have reason to believe that not all members of the Felt are necessarily male. Because Homestuck features a metric fuck-ton of characters, the result of the fifty-fifty gender split is that Homestuck features half a metric fuck-ton of female characters. With so many ladies playing so many different roles in the story, it frees any single female character from bearing the burden of representing her gender as a whole. Nobody has to be a paragon of feminine virtue; they just have to be themselves!

This isn't even half of them.

And in addition to writing a ton of ladies into his story, Hussie writes ladies who sound like... well, normal people. They have distinct personalities and quirks. There are some female characters who passively react to the actions of those around them, and some female characters who take a very active role in shaping and/or ending the lives of others. Plenty of women in Homestuck fill traditional female "helper" roles, guiding and assisting their teammates, but there exist several noooooooota8le exp)(is)(puns to that rule whose motivations are more self-centered. They're just as likely as their male counterparts to be involved in pivotal, plot-critical developments, and also just as likely to spend a lot of time fucking around and doing pointless funny shit. Their voices feel remarkably natural and unforced. It's quite refreshing!

Rose's analytical tone is subtly snarky and a tad self-consciously overwrought; clearly feminine without being an exaggerated stereotype. Her early chatlogs remind me of the way I used to write in high school. Rose is a fully-formed character in her own right, not just a token extra or John's default love interest. Even if John gets more cool fight scenes and Flash games, it's Rose's exploration of SBURB that reveals critical information about the game and moves the plot forward during the first few acts. Interesting tidbit about Rose: she's the first character to be drawn in Hero Mode, as she takes her leap of faith off the waterfall right before entering the Medium.



Jade can be a little bubbly and goofy, but that goofiness doesn't manifest itself as stupidity. Since Jade was the last of the four main characters to be introduced, her whole deal for the first two acts was to be the mysterious one who speaks in cryptic riddles-- not exactly material for a well-rounded character. But Jade really comes into her own as a SBURB-player after she enters the Medium. She wrangles all the past and future versions of her friends into communicating sensibly with respect to one another's timelines, and takes the lead in their plan to initiate and then somehow survive the universal hard-reset. I often forget how much I like Jade, and then I re-read some of her conversations with Karkat and I remember how smart she really is. Certainly by the end of Act 5 (yes I linked to that, how could I NOT link to that?) nobody can accuse Jade of sitting on the sidelines waiting to be rescued.

Now, even though Jade and Rose individually are two realistic female characters with active roles to play in their story, the fact of the matter is, they pretty much never talk to one another. Hussie notes in his commentary on this page that Jade-Rose conversations are so rare throughout Homestuck that the lime-orchid color combination looks strange to him. Reading Hussie's observation made me wonder: how does Homestuck fare on the Bechdel Test? For those of you who don't know and are too lazy to click the link, a work of fiction passes the Bechdel Test if it:

1. Includes at least two named female characters...
2. Who have a conversation with one another...
3. About something other than a male character.

It's kind of a famous test. Obviously, the Bechdel Test isn't the be-all-end-all measure of whether a story is pro- or anti-feminism. It exists more to call attention to a deficit in media in general. Twelve Angry Men isn't necessarily a misogynistic story just because it doesn't pass, and Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge isn't necessarily a shining beacon of feminism just because it does pass. It's also common to judge a long-running serial story on what percentage of its installments pass the test, rather than with an overall pass-fail grade. Homestuck would certainly pass, but with what percentage of passing conversations?

The recent Year Four Megapause gave me ample time to thoroughly re-read all 6000+ pages of Homestuck, and this time, I kept track of each conversation's page number and Bechdel Test status in a giant spreadsheet named after my strife specibus (FncyStatKind.xls). I marked each non-passing conversation a 0 and each passing conversation a 1. The resulting average reflects the overall Bechdel-pass conversation percentage for Homestuck. I didn't expect it to be anywhere near 100%, nor would it need to be to earn a stamp of approval. The cast of Homestuck, as mentioned previously, is split 50/50 between men and women, at least among our SBURB-playing protagonists. Assuming that any character has an equal chance of talking to any other character, we can calculate that there is a 25% chance of any given communication being between two female characters (0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25).

UPDATE! I fucked up! When a story has four characters, two female and two male, there is only a 1/6 chance that any given conversation occurs between two women, NOT a 1/4 chance as I previously stated! The chance of a F/F conversation is fluid, and increases as cast size increases. Check out the new, CORRECT math on that in my other post!

It's natural that two women will sometimes talk about a man, so I'd say there's some wiggle room on that 25% figure as a Bechdel benchmark. For example, a 20% pass rate would mean that when women talk together, there's a four-fifths chance that they're talking about something other than guys. Sounds like a reasonable target for our Homestuck Bechdel Analysis. Now wouldn't it be great if I just told you the results right now? This post already rivals the Legends of the Hidden Temple one for wordcount. I should just get to the point already! This is a STATS blog, why do I always bury the lead in layers of blubberous exposition? People don't read my blog for namby-pamby subjective analysis, they read it to get HARD FACTS-- facts with numbers in them! Let's skip to the end already!

PSYCHE! As is painfully obvious to anyone with a brain, we aren't going to learn what those numbers are for hundreds, if not thousands more words. So let's take a few dozen paragraphs to really explore the subtle differences between male actions and female actions in Homestuck. See, when male characters take actions that move the plot forward significantly, they usually act without forethought, based on their subjective emotions-- think about Eridan murdering Feferi and Kanaya in a fit of frustrated rage, or John messing around with all the ectobiology equipment before he really understood what he was doing. On the other hand, female characters act as the result of careful planning and observation of how their actions fit into the big picture, often directing the actions of their male co-players. John, the supposed leader of the party, is constantly following the directions of women, be it his server player Rose or his extraterrestrial patron Vriska. It's a fascinating counterpoint to the overarching narrative of Lord English coercing female characters to serve his will throughout time and space, especially because the forces aligned against him are led partly by alternate-universe counterparts of the women he once controlled, which lends credibility to the theory that...

OH GOD IT'S 21.6 PERCENT! AS OF THE END OF ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5, 21.6% OF CONVERSATIONS IN HOMESTUCK TAKE PLACE BETWEEN AT LEAST TWO WOMEN AND COVER SUBJECTS OTHER THAN MEN! IT'S A VERY RESPECTABLE 21.6%! PLEASE STOP MAKING ME PUNCH MYSELF IN THE FACE!

That's 8etter.

Okay, so, now that that figure's out there on the table where everyone can see it, let's look at how the Bechdel percentage changes from act to act. I get the sense that Andrew Hussie is a decent person who, as the popularity of his narrative exploded, started paying more attention to the ramifications of his portrayals of different races, genders, and orientations. Hussie's response to the people complaining about his removal of the "caucasian" joke is one of the best things I've ever read, anywhere, and it pretty much sent my respect for the guy through the roof. Homestuck might not be about race relations, but damned if Hussie's gonna let his creation perpetuate a shitty status quo when it comes to race. In the same way, no aspect of Homestuck is overtly about feminist issues (at least until Porrim shows up), but it feels like Hussie's made a conscious effort as the story moves forward to give his female characters more and more interesting, important things to do and say.

ACT 1: 0% of the conversations in Act 1 pass the Bechdel Test. To be fair, there are only two named characters in Act 1, Rose and John, so you can't even really have a conversation between two women. I wondered if perhaps Rose's GameFAQs walkthrough counted as a Bechdel pass-- she's talking about figuring out the game, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that a woman might read her walkthrough someday. But that only happens in an alternate universe in the future (or more accurately, the past), so it doesn't count for the purposes of Act 1.

ACT 2: Still sitting at 0%. Rose and the as-yet-unnamed Jade have their first conversation, but it's about John and what they plan to get him for his birthday. Act 2 contains plenty of little hints and suggestions about Jade, but she's still a mysterious plot point, not really a character yet. We don't get an explanation for her weird behavior until Act 3. Fun fact: during my first read-through of Act 2, I asked my brother (who was much further ahead in the story), "Is this gardenGnostic person some kind of witch?" Now I understand why he laughed so hard at that.

ACT 3: FIRST UNAMBIGUOUS BECHDEL PASS! They mention John, Dave, and good old Grandpa Harley, but this conversation is clearly a case of Rose and Jade talking about SBURB. Act 3 is also our first introduction to the trolls, and thus, the beginning of a beautiful friendship responsible for many Bechdel-passing conversations to come. We don't yet know that Kanaya is a lady, or whether trolls can even be ladies, but her contributions to the chatlogs help to raise Act 3's Bechdel Pass Percentage to 12%. I think it's also important to mention here how I categorized "repeat" conversations, since they show up a lot in this act. Pesterlogs are often revisited in Homestuck, once from one particpant's perspective, and again from another's. Since each repetition of the conversation reveals new contextual information, I count both as unique conversations in my bookkeeping, whether that means two passes or two fails.

INTERMISSION: There's only one female character, so it's sort of a foregone conclusion that the Intermission has a 0% pass rate. It's worth mentioning that of all the characters introduced in the Intermission, Snowman is second only to Jack in number and significance of later appearances. (I don't consider Lord English a character that is introduced during the Intermission-- how can he be introduced, when he is already here?)

ACT 4: Act 4 only has a 10% pass rate. We meet another female troll, though overall, she tends to talk to the boys more than she talks to the girls. Jade and Rose talk together a little more, though most of Jade's conversations are with Dave, since she's his server player and she needs to get him into the Medium. Even though the chess people don't speak in chatlogs, I did take WQ's and PM's discussion of their plans into account when calculating the score for this act. It's two ladies making plot happen, in the absence of any dudes. It counts.

ACT 5 ACT 1 (Hivebent): Hivebent racks up a Bechdel pass score of... 42%??!? What? Okay, so part of the reason the score jumps so much during Hivebent is because I count each individual page containing any portion of a conversation as an individual conversation. And Hivebent wraps up with a long conversation between Aradia and all her alternate-timeline selves, one that spans 24 pages. But even if we only count that as one conversation (and everything but the first page is more of a lecture, anyway), Act 5 Act 1 still gains a very high score of 25%. It makes sense that Hivebent scores so high: we now have six major female characters in play, whereas we previously had at most four (and usually just two). In addition to the main plotline of how all the trolls came to play SGRUB, Hivebent chronicles the long and bloody cycle of revenge played out between Vriska, Terezi, and Aradia, and its far-reaching consequences. Their conversations and confrontations up the Bechdel percentage considerably. Also, it's signficant that Hussie puts the answer to the biggest yet-unanswered question about Homestuck-- so what is the point of this game, anyway?-- in the words of a female character.

ACT 5 ACT 2: This act introduces some of the most intense storytelling in Homestuck, and gains a Bechdel pass percentage of 17%. It's during Act 5 Act 2 that the kids put together their plan to escape the doomed game session, and both Rose and Jade have a lot of Bechdel-pass conversations with Kanaya to that effect. We get our first glimpse of both the Green Sun and dream bubbles in this act, and they're both introduced in conversations between women. It's also in this act that Rose goes grimdark. It's interesting how Rose's grimdark transformation compares to other similar "hysterical broad goes off the deep end and gains dark magic powers" story arcs-- Dark Willow, Jean Grey, you know the tune. It's true that John expresses his concerns to Rose about her detachment from the party, but the most intense and repeated concern-meddling comes from Kanaya, so the conflict avoids feeling like a strong-rational-male voice admonishing some chick not to give in to her weird, dangerous lady-feelings. And even though Rose's grimdark language is incomprehensible to others, she remains in control of her faculties and acts with reason, if not always with patience. Rose's descent into grimdarkness doesn't turn her against her friends or corrupt her soul; it fulfills the character development we've been anticipating ever since we met Rose.

Have I mentioned that I just learned I can put GIFs in these posts?

CASCADE: Contains no spoken conversations, doesn't really have a Bechdel pass percentage, and it's not really an act. But. BUT. Remember how Karkat said that Jade's "overly emotional," "whimpering" dog-self would be completely useless? Remember how Dave admitted that when push comes to shove, Jade would probably be a liability in battle? Somebody who just needs to be protected? WELL GUESS WHAT HAPPENED, BITCHES. Actually, in this case, bitches is sort of literally what happened, in the most awesome way possible.

ACT 6 ACT 1: 12% Bechdel pass percentage. Since it's a universal reset, we've lost many of the female characters we've come to know and love, but we've gained three new ones! Jane and Roxy talk together a lot more often than Rose and Jade did. Roxy and Jane feel like real "BFF-sies," whereas Jade and Rose seemed more like friendly acquaintances. Of course, in what may be a Homestuck tradition, their first conversation is about what they plan to get Jake for his birthday. But the sarcastic way they talk about it and the fact that they swiftly change the subject from BOY PROBLEMZ to the fate of the universe makes me wonder if this whole conversation isn't a subtle, self-aware nod to the Bechdel Test? I wouldn't put it past Hussie.

ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1: We dip back into the single-digits here with a Bechdel pass percentage of 9%, though the majority of the words spoken during this intermission are spoken by women, if not always to women. Jade spends a lot of time explaining relativity/spacetime to John. There also are a lot of large-group discussions on the meteor, which can be confusing to quantify as passes or failures. Typically, if two or more women are talking together, even if there are men present or if men interject, I count the conversation as a Bechdel pass.  For example, this portion of the conversation counts as a pass, because Aradia and Rose talk about funerals, and Aradia and Terezi discuss Aradia's demeanor. Dave and Sollux talk too, but the ladies carry the bulk of the conversation. The continued conversation on the next page, however, is not a pass, because Karkat takes hold of the conversational reins in a big way.

ACT 6 ACT 2: The Bechdel pass percentage creeps up to 19% in Act 6 Act 2 as the relationship between Roxy and Jane gets a little more fleshed-out. Interestingly, a significant number of Jane-Dirk and Roxy-Dirk conversations revolve around how each girl feels about her relationship with the other one. Part of the deal with the Bechdel test is that it highlights the unspoken assumption that men don't care about whatever it is that women talk about with one another, so the fact that Dirk takes interest in his two ladyfriends' ladyfriend-issues is a nice change of pace. We meet Aranea and Meenah in this act, but they don't start talking yet. The only female alien contributing to the Bechdel pass percentage is good old Calliope, and she contributes a lot! In Act 6, Hussie seems to be delegating more and more exposition-dumps to the ladies. You could see this as a bad thing-- when women talk, it's walls of lecture-text that nobody wants to read. When men talk, it's pithy quips and dick jokes that please everyone. But I don't see it that way! Calliope can cheer me with long, detailed explanations of SBURB's passive-active class system any day ^u^

ACT 6 INTERMISSION 2: Aranea starts talking. The Bechdel percentage jumps up to 23%. Get used to this; it becomes a pattern.

ACT 6 ACT 3: The Bechdel pass percentage for this act is a solid 20%. There's some weird Freudian stuff going on during the events surrounding Dirk: Synchronize and Dirk: Unite. Roxy and Jane both get brutally impaled by the Red Miles, while Dirk flies around on his rocket board kissing everybody to revive them, basically hopping through dimensions and high-fiving aliens like a boss. I guess I could get miffed about the idea that our heroines have been slaughtered in a sort-of sexual way and now await salvation from the literal kiss of a male savior, but for some reason, I just can't get too angry about the fact that the most competent, badass, masculine hero in the party is the gay guy. Forget the rainbows, this is my gay pride flag. Plus, I mean, can you say catchiest song in the Homestuck discography? I can't get mad at that song.

ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3: This is the intermission with all the Meenah walkaround games, so there are a ton of Bechdel-pass conversations-- 28% of all conversations in in this intermission, in fact! When you're playing as a woman, pretty much half of your conversations will pass. Also, Act 6 Intermission 3 is when this happens:

The Flighty Broads and their Snarky Bechdelometer explodes!!!

ACT 6 ACT 4: Well, there aren't exactly any conversations in this very lovely Flash, Bechdel-pass or otherwise. It does show Roxy and Jane working together, which is nice. But this animation is all there is to the act. So, for our purposes, it's a wash.

ACT 6 INTERMISSION 4: Even though this act is all about Calliborn, it starts out with a chatlog between Roxy and Calliope. Of course, Calliope is long dead, and cannot respond. But Roxy doesn't know that. This intermission doesn't have much conversation between females, but it's so short on any conversation at all that it still gains a Bechdel-pass score of 15%. Let's take a minute to appreciate just how terrible Calliborn is. The villains that we "love to hate" are usually charismatic and flashy, often outshining their heroes; just look at how much fanart people make for Loki as compared to Thor. Calliborn is the opposite of likable. He's an insufferable tool whose every blunt, obnoxious sentence fragment further alienates him from the reader. Calliborn makes Joffrey look like Tyrion. I've never before met a villain about whose eventual defeat I will be so pleased as I am about Calliborn's. And I'm gonna stop this train of thought before it gets too... spades-y.

ACT 6 ACT 5: We are rapidly catching up with the present! Act 6 Act 5 gains a whopping Bechdel-pass percentage of 31%, largely thanks to Calliope's long dream-conversation with Roxy. Even if you have to use a Morse code translator to understand some of it, it still counts! Jane and Roxy talk a lot at the beginning of the act about Jake. These conversations don't count toward the Bechdel percentage, but they give valuable insight into Jane's state of mind during her breakdown. The sense we get isn't "Jane sure is hysterical over these boy problems," but rather, "Man, being a teenager is complicated and hard, and I can relate to these issues, because feelings and confusion over said feelings is not a uniquely male or female phenomenon." This act is also where we get a glimpse of the Condesce's crafty plans. Until now, most major villains (excluding Snowman/the Black Queen) were male, but now we got some evil ladies brewing their evil schemes, and mind-control-recruiting other ladies to put those schemes into motion. Another fun fact: In response to of the Maid of Life's god tier appearance, my brother said that he thought the Maid outfit looks better in red than in beige-- referring, of course, to Aradia's Maid of Time getup. Looks like the Condesce and my brother have similar tastes in fashion!

ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5: A lot of things we've been waiting for come to pass in this Intermission. The Beta kids reach the Alpha session, the ghost armada led by Vriska and Meenah reaches the X that marks the spot, and most importantly, Aranea explains how cherub sex works. And because there are more women than men listening to her lengthy explanation, this act has a 34% Bechdel-pass percentage. When two female characters non-verbally communicate how sick they are of listening to a third female character talk, we have officially gone full-Bechdel-Inception. And if paradox space ever arranges a meeting between Aranea and Calliope, we will have reached the Bechdelpocalypse.

So. As of the end of Act 6 Intermission 5, an overall 21.6% of all conversations take place between two or more women, and cover subjects other than men. Homestuck does a great job of including female characters in a wide variety of roles, and giving them interesting, important things to do. More authors could take a page out of Andrew Hussie's book-- the easiest way to write believable, interesting female characters is to write a whole bunch of them, and see where they take you. Half the world is female. Is half your cast of characters female? Homestuck is a feminist victory without even really trying to be one, which is the best kind of feminist victory, because "ladies doing the same amount of interesting stuff as the guys do" shouldn't be a difficult goal for a narrative to reach. It should be second nature. And at least in the wild world of Homestuck, it totally is.