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Well, this is as good a prompt to detail what the hell I’m doing as any.

Apart from just getting a dash to follow tons and tons of homestuck blogs and homestuckers, I shooped together a background because I thought I might as well make this tumblr page useful.  How?  Not sure yet:

• A pulpit for the most justified of my crack IDEs and hunches?  Probably.
• A daily sample of the Romspec thread’s thoughts, conclusions, and questions?  Dunno, thought that’d be interesting.  Possibly.
• Homestuck-related reblogs?  Still not sure.  I don’t intend to avoid making this blog social, I’m just delaying reblogs until I decide to what extent it’s meant to be functional.

In other words, I have no idea what I’m doing.  Aren’t we all in the same position?

Time to answer the question I suppose.  I got into theorizing years ago, on the Narutofan forums.  As silly (and immature) as the premise seems on its face, they had a really nice subforum for theories:  every theory merited its own thread, in which people would argue for and against it with images straight from the manga to back up their arguments.  Sure, it was mostly filled with 13-year-old kids who couldn’t grammar any worse if they’d had a kunai or two shoved up their nostrils, but there were some nice, crazy, interesting, head-spinning, even correct theories there.  Like, there’s a thingy on Naruto’s uniform that seems to reconfigure itself or vanish to reflect the state of the seal on the demon inside him, how loose or currently non-functional it is, and the author hadn’t divulged a word about its function; a few people figured it out just looking at it and gathering evidence on their own.  Talk about an easter egg for perceptive readers.

Anyway, like many large fandoms, this one was full of shippers.  Tons of them.  And unlike the relatively well-behaved shipping community I’ve seen for Homestuck, this one had in-forum fanclubs that would insist that their respective ships were going to be super totally canon, and you were just biased to think otherwise.  Yeeeeaahh.  As a guy who was there for the theory section alone, this kind of annoyed me.  “Why don’t they just look at the evidence?  They can be fans of a ship and celebrate the idea of it without ignoring reality.  Nothing’s wrong with acknowledging your ship is unlikely,” et cetera.  Didn’t really vocalize any complaints, though.

I mean, you wouldn’t want to make an enemy out of the Sakura x Sasuke fanclub.  Practically suicide.

Anyway, one day something caught my attention.  A discrepancy.  Now, in the manga, the author had been laying down some very heavy setup for Naruto x Sakura for like, a few acts.  This was someone the hero specifically liked, and is pretty much guaranteed to win over at the very end of the manga.  (Kishimoto didn’t get very cute with the romance; he explicitly stated that he hardly cared about it, in interviews.  That pairing’s inevitability wasn’t exactly hard to see, for a trope-reader.)  And then there was a thinly-characterized (but admittedly adorable) side-character, Hinata, that had an unspoken crush on the hero that was played for laughs and a couple heartwarming insights into Naruto’s charisma/character.  You know it’s not going to quite happen, but it’s there.  (And shipped to hell and back.)

What didn’t gel was this:  There was a timeskip.  A several year timeskip in the middle of the story, where Hinata could have dumped her obsession, if Kishi really didn’t care about the romance.

Romantic subplots demand resolution, I realized.  You’re not going to introduce someone with a serious crush on the character, making advances, making the audience empathize with them, and then just have them lose noiselessly when the other side gels together, weeping in a corner.  That would just demand more resolution in turn on her part, which Kishimoto doesn’t care about enough to make part of his main plot.  So why didn’t he take that completely valid opportunity to have her outgrow her (still unspoken) obsession?

Because he wants to cash it in later, I realized.  How?

So anyway, I put some other stuff together with that and got it into my head that Hinata would sacrifice herself to save Naruto, declaring her love before she did it or as she died.  It all seemed to add up!  I wrote my theory, some people agreed that they couldn’t see it going any other way, some people refused to believe it (many on grounds that were transparently littered with shipping bias, which they admitted when I pointed out to them), and it eventually got lost in the deluge of old theories as the manga progressed.

I won’t spoil Naruto for you (for what that’s worth), but months later, it turned out that I was nearly right.  Just nearly.  It was pretty cool.

(LATE 2014 EDIT: And years and years later, I was proven wrong in another way (further Naruto spoilers). Felt I need to add that in here, even if the post I’m editing is the very first post I ever made on this blog.)

Anyway, that’s why I made the so-called “Non-Shipping Romantic Speculation Thread”.  (“Non-Shipping” was to divorce it from traditional emotion-driven shipping, which I somewhat succeeded at doing; that part’s since been discarded for the pretentious bullshit it was.)  I realized that you could glean massive non-rom plot events from simple romantic subplots, and vice-versa, advancing evidence-grounded speculation much faster and farther than you’d be able to otherwise.  A corollary of that, perhaps far more important, was a sort of meta-reading of the narrative flow to drive speculation:  What kind of events would be needed, in a story-based sense, at any given juncture?  How are certain subplot buildups meant to be cashed in?  That sort of thing.

So when I got fed up with the IDE/Theory thread for being spammed with a dozen joke/crack theories for every reasoned and grounded one, with no room for discussion/criticism thereof, I used the excuse of Hivebent’s sudden introduction of canon romance to fuel and kickstart Romspec.  It’s been more successful than I possibly imagined, pretty much embodying all the damn ideals I just got through outlining.  And we’ve been very right on many an occasion, while rarely completely and outright wrong.  It’s been a blast, and will continue to be so.

As soon as we get through this fresh month-long EoA hiatus, that is.  My life has felt roughly 65% Homestuck lately, so I haven’t the slightest what I’m going to do with myself.