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On 14 October 2013, Todd VanDerWerff's "How Homestar Runner Changed Web Series for the Better" appeared on the AV Club website.  The article examines Homestarrunner.com and its significance in Internet and broader popular culture, arguing that the gentle humor and mild absurdity of the early Internet series did much to position the medium for its current and rapidly mutating boom.  VanDerWerff also remarks on the earnestness and lack of cynicism that typify the site's offerings (bringing to mind an article on Humanities Directory, Christopher Bell's "The Ballad of Derpy Hooves: Transgressive Fandom in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic").  Overall, his reading is good, offering a compelling case for the site's continued relevance and the way in which it has established patterns of development that remain useful even now.

My brother, who is a young man of substantial talent and no mean insight, passed the article along to me, knowing that it would strike something of a chord with me both for being an example of the kind of popular culture study that I try to do in some of my work and for my own engagement with the material VanDerWerff references.  As a long-time nerd, and one who performs much of the nerdhood online, I am more than passingly familiar with Homestar, Strong Bad, and the others inhabiting the strangely entertaining world of the Chapmans' design.  I was gratified therefore to see both that the site has received serious consideration--and, however "serious" a site can be that is owned by the same people as The Onion, the treatment VanDerWerff offers is relatively serious--and that it is regarded as having particular importance.  It suggests to me that my tastes are not too far off from where they ought to be, and that is hardly to be devalued.

I stress the last because of my professional alignment.  As a scholar in the humanities, particularly one whose primary field is one that examines the old, I have been obliged more than once to justify my existence.  How I do so varies based upon who it is that demands such justifications of me.  For some audiences, I speak about my work examining the old as a way to understand the new; by looking at what we still use, we can figure out other things that accord with it through analogy to what has accorded with those things in the past.  For others, I speak to my work to facilitate the development of free and open inquiry among my students; by working to uncover the depths of things, I show that there are depths to even the most innocuous things, and that plumbing those depths affords more understanding of and therefore power in the world.  Sometimes, for some audiences, I take what I admit is a more egotistical and more...fraught...approach: the study I do positions me as a keeper of traditions, a bastion of older cultures in the evidently increasingly unstable world.*  While I might rather phrase it otherwise, it is in some sense true; by doing the work I do in the way I do it, I necessarily pass forward ideas that are held over from earlier times.  As such, I am a maintainer of traditions, even if I do not follow all of them.  For my tastes to be in line with what is to be perceived as an emergent tradition, then, helps me to have authority in particular ways that may well be useful to me as I pursue my agendas, open and otherwise.

What those agendas are...read what I write.  I have already revealed them.

*There is something of the Sophist in me (in several senses), as those who know me know.  I work to achieve goals; sometimes I do so through means I would not otherwise prefer.  Some ears do not ear certain sounds; to reach those who have such ears, I have to make sounds they can hear.