Homestuck review

Been a while since I've posted anything here. Apologies, been sick on and off this entire summer.

I've spent the last 2 months reading through Homestuck for the first time ever.  I had always heard of it as some massive monolith of internet subculture that I either was too scared to attempt to climb or psyopped myself into believing is a gay waste of time for 13 year old demisexual Tumblrites. Which... it IS, but I decided to read it anyways. TLDR; I liked it a lot but am very angry about the wasted potential involved with it.

To start, the most shocking thing I discovered while reading is how shockingly accurate the comic serves as a firmly dated snapshot into the 2010 internet. Ranging from the highly accurate portrayal of how teenagers talked to each other over IRC  chatrooms and forum clients alongside the dated 2000s and late 90s cultural references I was getting constant cultural whiplash while reading. This isn't a negative, quite the opposite in fact! It was really engaging and hilarious to read and experience but as the comic progressed into Act 6 it seemed that Andrew Hussie, the author, developed a sense of hindsight-influenced embarrassment about the earlier stages of the comic and mostly abandoned this aspect of the comic much to my dismay.

Homestuck feels as if you're watching a show performer do stupid pointless bullshit akin to a circus clown for laughs a solid 85% of the time. Then suddenly he will reveal that the balls he was juggling actually all landed perfectly to spell out the entirety of Shakespeare, leaving you completely flabbergasted at how the fuck this clown managed to pull this off before continuing onto throwing cream pies and honking horns. This escalating sense of joke-induced literary callbacks and double mobius reacharounds only gets more ridiculous and impressive up until act 5 where it reaches its zenith. The ending of Act 5 is such a perfect mountain of shit all stacked on top of itself to where it is about to teeter and fall apart but somehow doesn't, instead appearing as a beautiful 3D recreation of Rodin's the Thinker. The stakes are high but still understandable, the plot is complicated but still can be linearly followed and everything presented is either deep already or has endless potential to be explored in excruciating detail.

Andrew Hussie had a perfect stew brewing, he had been throwing ingredients into the pot over the past 5 hours and had been stirring throughout that entire time. It smells delicious and all he had to do was let it simmer for a few more hours but instead he just kept throwing more and more into the pot until it turned into an incomprehensible sludge of burned shit at the bottom of the pot and barely boiled starches at the top. This, I suppose isn't that surprising considering that Hussie had spent the previous 5 acts stacking the shit as high as he could and as in as complicated of a pattern as a could. This very quickly gets out of his realm of control in Act 6 and the Author, for some reason, appeared to be be broken down over years of regular author-to-fan interaction with teenage superfans. This begins to poison his work with an insufferable level of reader contempt and "FINE?! YOU WANT THIS?! HERE YOU FUCKING GO?!" moments. The quality comes and goes and you have to sit through hours of poorly realized character assassination/negative development, author vent shitpost characters lacking any depth at all, pointless coffee shop gossip sections of relationship drama and feelingsjams that don't actually go anywhere. These on top of the spite-induced interjection of even more characters and plot points alongside Hussie's usual self-masturbatory obsession with how amazing of an author he is is intolerable at times. It isn't AS bad reading it all at once nowadays but if one was live-keeping up with this I can 100% understand dropping it at multiple points during Act 6. The Dancestors are all completely pointless as characters, Roxy is the only good Beta kid, and almost every single section after the Retcon feels as if the author(s) are simply checking off a final to-do list on interactions and as many unresolved plot threads as they can handle before shutting the shop down due to declining sales.

It is positively infuriating to have a perfect storm of some of the best and most in-depth worldbuilding I've seen in a piece of media ruined due to the author's inability to not submerge himself into online fan discussions 24/7 and control his narcissistic urge to expand the complexity and depth of his work as much as he can as a sort of literary flexing. The ending of the comic left me feeling unsatisfied, angry, and yet still overall happy to have read it overall. I'm glad I didn't keep up with this when it was live (hell, I was fucking 9 years old when it first started!) but reading it all nowadays is a worthwhile experience imo and genuinely helped to put a lot of internet trends I was confused by into perspective.

If there's one takeaway you take from this nonsensical bitchblog it's that I am currently debating writing a AO3 fanfiction involving my own dysfunctional gaggle of fantrolls, though I am unsure if I have anything truly unique to say that hasn't already been touched on within the previous work. To have bitten me that bad with the creativity bug takes a genuinely infectious level of quality.

My classpect is an Heir of Hope, in case you were curious. I am a Derse Dreamer, Equius is my favorite character with Roxy as number two and Caliborn as number three.