Homestuck.

[rax]

So, because my housemate Nicole has been begging me to for months, once the semester ended I finally gave Homestuck a try. I have strong and mixed feelings! That I will try to keep minimally spoilery but there's no way I can completely avoid it. At the very least probably most of it will mean nothing to you if you have no idea what's going on in the series, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

So, what is Homestuck? It's a web...fiction-comic-thing by Andrew Hussie, which starts here, though don't click that and follow it just yet. The conceit, according to his helpful for-new-readers page, is that you are playing a text-based adventure game by typing commands, and then the comic is what happens when you type those commands. Earlier comics he did like this were based on user input (Pokémon folks will remember the Black Adventures comic which I hadn't realized was based on this but totally is) but Homestuck, especially after the first bits, seems to be mostly a story he is telling and ignoring user input. I don't even see a place on the site to give user input anymore. As far as I am concerned, that is fine; I tried to read one of his earlier things based on user input, Problem Sleuth, and the beginning was so terrible I gave up.

Anyway!

Here are some reasons that you should maybe read this thing:

• It does really interesting things with the medium of storytelling; it uses flash (including game sequences you play), sound, text, animation, and the actual fact of your clicking between panels as crucial parts of the process of what it's doing. I find this really neat and not something I've seen before. If you're interested in playing with media in this way, I do recommend checking this out.
• It's also super meta. Metafiction is not everyone's favorite thing, but if it's one of yours, oh man, you should at least give this a shot.
• Some of the characters will grab you and cause you to have strong feelings about them, and you get to watch pretty much all of them grow and learn, which is pretty great.
• There are all manner of references to video games that I find hilarious. There are also references to movies but I find them neutral because I haven't seen any of them and don't really care, but if you are into pop movies from the 80s, oh man.
• The world-building is clever and way more consistent than I expected it to be.
• There is tons of content and you can catch up gradually if you'd like, or skim everything and them jump around to follow the threads you most care about in more detail.
• Oh my god there are so many building blocks that fit together over time and make you go ohhhhhhhhhh
• The troll relationship structure is so amazing. Spoilers.
• People you genuinely care about will still die when that's what the story demands.

Here are some reasons that you should maybe not read this thing:

• The beginnings of each section are so boringly and blindlingly terrible that if I hadn't promised Nicole I would try seriously to read it I would have given up after ten pages. God the beginnings are awful and crude and boring and slow. The beginnings after the first one are even worse because now you're invested in the story and want it to continue but what is he doing? He's expositing according to a bad formula again auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughh. (Maybe the formula works for some people, but I had so much trouble. I still haven't read most of the beginning of act 6 I just don't caaaaaaaaaare)
• Sometimes Homestuck demands more of a reader than you actually want to put into a webcomic. One of the characters (fortunately, a minor one) talks in morse code. No way, man. I am not decoding Morse code for a webcomic, even one I like. I just don't know what that character is saying.
• It will take you 10-20 hours to catch up. Seriously. Low estimate.
• I'm pretty sure the comic is super inaccessible in terms of, say, screenreaders.
• A lot of the story is told in chat logs, and everyone talks in different colors, some harder to read than others, and many of the characters have intentional affectations along leetspeak lines that make their dialogue harder to read. This is occasionally really awesome when clever double meanings arise 8ut far more often is just annnnnnnnoyyyyyyyyinnnnnnnng. ::::(
• Like almost any webcomic, the art starts bad and gets better.
• There are places where it's so meta that you are kind of just tapping your foot waiting for him to get back to telling the fucking story. Some of those places last more than a hundred pages.
• People you genuinely care about will still die when that's what the story demands.

So should you read it? I dunno? I am glad I did and keep thinking about it because I mainlined it all in like two days while sick, but I don't recommend it without reservations because of all the frustrating parts. What I will say is that it's definitely awesome even if it isn't always good, and if you decide to give it a shot but aren't hooked by it at first, just power through for a while and see if you start caring after a while. If you still don't care once you're past the first act or two, well, sorry. But I know I'm not the only person who was like bored bored bored bored HOOKED NOW, so it's worth a shot.

Comments

[eevee.livejournal.com]

I read it. I read it all. I read it all the way to the end of act 5. And I don't know why.

Problem Sleuth was good. It got a little wacky at the end, and the bit in the middle with the plugs was boring as all hell, but it was a cute idea that reminded me of a type of game I enjoy and it told a zany but coherent story.

Homestuck is not the same thing. It makes some light nods here and there, but I cannot believe that any of what's going on is remotely related to audience participation. And I guess that would be okay, except that the medium itself is now an experiment in making me not want to read it: the white text on white, the increasingly novel and irritating flavors of chatspeak, the abbreviation of all sixteen major characters to every two-letter acronym possible with four letters (so now I have to remember that "green text guy" is the same as "GG" is the same as "guy who likes spiders" is the same as "karkat" and also that this person probably has some kind of personality; what the hell is this, a bad logic puzzle?).

And even that would be kind of worth it, if the story had any kind of payoff. And it does not. There are no predictable rules to this universe; things merely happen and I'm expected to say "ahh, how cool". I feel like I'm reading the writings of a man in a psychiatric institution who once saw an episode of Doctor Who while on acid. And the longer the story goes on, the more it reads like bad fanfiction of itself.

Even the fans don't seem to care about (or comprehend?) the plot; I see nigh constant conversation about how cool the trolls are due to being emo incarnate, but if there're people talking about what's happening, I sure can't find them.

It wouldn't matter, shouldn't matter, except that Problem Sleuth was a good and clever thing, and it's a shame to see its author encouraged to veer further into the incomprehensible. I suppose, too, a mockery is being made of genuine crazy scifi. I feel like I can now empathize with how Twilight makes vampire fans feel.

[rax.livejournal.com]

It is a bad logic puzzle and that part is _super frustrating_. I personally disagree that there aren't any predictable rules and I like the plot; that said "bad fanfiction of itself" is kind of true in places (how many layers is this frickin' thing going to have) and if I didn't get connected to the characters the way I did I would probably be tired as hell of it. I'm kind of astounded that you got that far if you didn't care. I'm simultaneously impressed and sorry.

I... avoid fandom, basically. I entirely avoid homestuck fandom. But I talk about what's happening plotwise, and what connections those things imply, with the people I know who read it and I find that rewarding.

I also hate Doctor Who, so our tastes on this might just be orthogonal. I may even have bad taste here. Scifi is decidedly not my genre. Terrifyingly, if you're right about the connection, that may make me understand Twilight fans who are like "Whatever, I find your old vampire stories boring and I like this one." I am not sure I wanted that understanding, ever, but there you go. :)

[eevee.livejournal.com]

I tried to care, because I could imagine a hypothetical alternate telling of the same core story that was interesting, and I was hoping that Homestuck might become that. But it's just gotten worse and I finally can't bring myself to even look at Act 6. Maybe it'd help if I didn't think the trolls were by and large completely intolerable.

Admittedly I don't look for fandom; my sample here is "whatever noise made it my way". So there's less plot noise than troll noise, I guess.

Doctor Who is not exactly consistent with its 50 years of different writers, which is kinda why I used it for a metaphor. H2G2 could be a better contrast; the rules are completely arbitrary and everyone knows it and the books outright say so, but nobody cares because it's still clever and entertaining and is a story about people which is what scifi ought to be.

Maybe that's why I don't like Homestuck, then: the plot and the characters are both bumbling around independently, and the plot sneaks up and sticks to the characters briefly when they're actually necessary to drive it forwards. Plus most of them are annoying, so I have nothing to root for except the end of the universe, and even that doesn't work.

[rax.livejournal.com]

See I actually found it a story about people which is why I liked it! Some of the people are dipshits but some of them I really liked watching grow and change. However if that part didn't work for you then augh I bet it's terrible. :( A lot of it is decidedly either arbitrary or feels arbitrary enough that the difference doesn't matter. Sorry that you wasted your time!