Psycholonials is an episodic visual novel by Andrew Hussie that released from February 3, 2021 to April 20, 2021. It's a weird alternate history novel where influencers create an opportunistic clown cult that borrows anarcho-socialist aesthetics. I do not recommend this novel.

The story takes place on the island of Nantucket during the early 2020 pandemic and it follows two young adults, Zhen (“Z”)¹⁾ and Abby. One day, Zhen goes drunk driving and crashes, which escalates to her stealing a police officer's gun and killing him. She would end up hiding in Abby's mansion, resetting her online identity using a “clownsona” and dedicating herself to the Jubilite Manifesto's ideology.

A godhead, Riotus of Whimsiphae(Whim-ziff-eye), communicates with Zhen as she invents a gender triangle²⁾ and Pranxis.³⁾ Once her warrant goes public, she kills more cops in broad daylight, then rallies the cult to back her in a shootout on the island. The cult proceeds to seize the island, calling it “New Whimsiphae”, and their influence would go global. However, the issues of post-revolution start to surface.⁴⁾

With this newfound power, Zhen would demand the execution of the people that wronged her.⁵⁾ As their island militarizes, she plots to colonize Martha's Vineyard, but gets interrupted by a failed insurrection, which causes her to declare war on the United States. This heavy-handed decision would make Zhen stop to realize what she just did, gives up control, and flies out to Fiji to live out her married life with Abby.

During the credits, the Jubilite movement goes through a revolving door of Supreme Honkifices claiming the Jubilite Throne, but are subsequently assassinated. If the player decides to reload, presumably to interact with the Sword of Damocles, they'll be greeted with Zhen's long-winded message in a bottle on how she is perfectly fine with the ending that she finally chose for herself.

The general idea for Psycholonials would surface in a 2019 zine of Hussie's Discord messages, where he related to clowns and proposed a left-wing clown movement⁶⁾ over vague drama.⁷⁾ As the pandemic began, Hussie started a draft, imagining revolts in this scenario, on April 20, 2020⁸⁾ and reportedly finishing it before a certain police brutality protest on May 26, 2020 made him rethink publishing the story.⁹⁾

Ultimately, he went through with the idea and hoped it would be “worth reading” for people that actually went through the pandemic. Hussie would proceed to post cryptic imagery onto his social media accounts in late 2020, presenting himself as an e-boy and clown, before unveiling the trailer on December 20, 2020¹⁰⁾ and the second trailer once all chapters had released on April 20, 2021.¹¹⁾

• Psycholonials was published by “The Silence Mill”, revealed to be a shell company in the state of Delaware for possible tax evasion.¹²⁾ The name has since vanished as the game became free.¹³⁾
• Zhen is a second generation immigrant, whose parents are initially depicted as these ominous grey corpses with blood pouring out of their eye sockets, like a stereotypical creepypasta figure.
  • Her father was a first generation immigrant that probably overworked himself to death, causing his mother to go insane and Zhen to drop out of college in a similar panic. Her mother later caught COVID-19 and died on April 20, 2020. After Zhen drops the lifestyle, returning to the name they initially chose for her, she began seeing normal visions of her parents appear in the clouds.
• Early in the story, Zhen mentions being cancelled, harassed, and hospitalized¹⁴⁾ for a vague incident where she was accused of being homophobic on the internet. By the end of the story, she believes that her former classmate, Candace/Joculine, initiated the cyberbullying campaign against her after she pushed her aside and weaponized virtue signalling so strangers would follow suit.
  • It's implied that the two were previously in the same fandom, most likely Homestuck, which has led to a popular theory that Candace/Joculine had this unrequited “kismesis” relationship with Zhen, where she dragged Zhen into petty Homestuck shipping drama to cancel her, presumably for being negative or neutral towards some of the fandom's mainstream same-sex ships.
• The story's depiction of social platforms is rather generous. You'd think that Instagram would shut the account down once she became implicit in murder, but her account just kept growing and growing.
  • Furthermore, the police never locks the island down to conduct an island-wide search party for her, but this is easier to overlook since we aren't reminded of it every time skip.
• During the embargo, the island doesn't seem to have any mutual aid, production, support system, or any semblance of community that would be critical to an embargo. This issue is mostly glossed over with a treaty and non-aggression pact with the United States, possibly highlighting that Zhen does not actually change the status quo with their lack of structure or post-revolutionary state.
• In the sixth chapter, we would finally learn that “Psycholonials” means “psychic colonialism” as Riotus reveals that he was using Zhen to propagate his civilization, noting that civilized planets are spread too far apart for any sort of colonization to occur, thus requiring psychic communication.
• Zhen reenacts that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater scene of Revolver Ocelot's gun spinning for a full minute before conducting Joculine's summary execution, but the delivery kinda falls flat.
• In a recent Homestuck community survey, over 3/4ths of the respondents didn't read Psycholonials.¹⁵⁾

• Psycholonials - The front page of Psycholonials.
• Psycholonials with Gio's Commentary - A transcribed, text-based version. Be warned that text that isn't in the boxes is actually Gio's commentary, meaning, not from the game itself.