my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

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.