I recently finished Homestuck.
It was awesome, like I really, really liked it. So now I'm gonna talk about it. I'm going to be guessing that you're somewhat familiar with Homestuck already throughout this but I'll try my best to explain things if you haven't read it.
Quick explanation: Homestuck is the 4th webcomic in a series called MS Paint Adventures created by Andrew Hussie. MSPAs work like sorta like those old text adventures, with every page having an image and text on the bottom, then the readers at the time would send in actions for the characters to do. Homestuck used to have the readers do this before it just became actions that Hussie made to make a more coherent story.
Problem Sleuth, the third MSPA expanded on this concept by adding gifs along with the images. Homestuck took this to the next level by having images, gifs, videos, smaller interactive panels and games. (Granted, you basically just walk around and talk to people in most of the games but its cool anyway.) It's recommended to read the MSPAs before reading Homestuck so you can get all the references. I didn't, but then I got tired of not getting it, so I went back and read them (because I originally started on the archive), and when I reread Homestuck with that knowledge (on the website when it was being rereleased), it was CRAZY.
The very general plot of Homestuck is that 4 kids play a game which is CONNECTED to the end of the world. The point of the game is to make a new universe, but there are a ton of problems throughout.
General stuff:
I think overall Homestuck has good writing and pretty decent pacing. The characters were pretty well written. It's not perfect but it's still really good. Like if you haven't read Homestuck you gotta check it out. I can't figure out a good way to segway out of this so I'm just gonna put another horizontal rule and hope it works.
I'm gonna talk about one specific scene.
If you know me then you probably knew this was coming. The scene I'm going to talk about here is the Note Desolation Plays. It is the second [S] page of Homestuck and is officially called "[S] ==>" This is one of the most memorable scenes in Homestuck, at least to me. It's very simple, John looks up from his mailbox to his empty neighborhood. There's a crane view of John, slowly zooming out, making him appear small. Then the title drop. The audio is ambience from the neighborhood: a windchime, a wind instrument (probably an oboe? I can't really tell.) and wind. There's a poem of some sort under the video. I'm not gonna lie, when I first time I saw this I got chills.
This one [S] page has an impressive amount of depth and foreshadowing to the story ahead. I'm gonna talk about it now.
The wind is alluding to John being the Heir of Breath. John, taking off the beagle puss, could have been called back with Dave and Dirk taking off their sunglasses to see unobscured as well. The entire flash reflects the loneliness and isolation of the early acts. "You have a feeling it's going to be a long day." Is a perfect closer to this and also references that a lot of Homestuck takes place in one day. It's such a simple scene but I just really like it, it's an amazing way to drive home what the first few acts of Homestuck are about, loneliness and isolation. Every beta kid has a scene like it, and I like that. You could say that it's a little repetitive, but I think it works very well to establish the kids' situations. I kinda wish that Homestuck kept this tone at least a little bit throughout the later acts.
Speaking of the later acts...
Act 5. You meet the trolls and learn about their society after being hinted towards it for like two acts, and it's pretty good. It dumps a LOT of information on you at once, so it can be a bit overwhelming. I definitely had a bit of trouble keeping track of who was who when I was reading it. The troll romance stuff is definitely a lot to keep track of when you first hear about it, but as I got used to it, it became way more understandable... that or I'm completely wrong about everything about the quadrants. Speaking of quadrants, murderstuck.
Around the end of Act 5, like half of the trolls get killed, one part of me thinks that it started because Andrew Hussie didn't really know what to do with the twelve new characters he had, so he killed them off. :( RIP nepeta i liked her. I liked what murderstuck did, it killed off Vriska, which was kinda necessary before the retcon, then she needed to come back, but I'll talk about the retcon later. So Murderstuck was pretty good.
Act 5 Act 2 is sorta where everything starts to go down, and I like it. Cascade was really cool to watch after the events being planned for like five hundred pages or something (That doesn't really sound like a lot now that I write it down but I don't want to go too high.) The vibes are a little different to the previous acts, but honestly I don't know if it actually could have kept the same vibe as the first few acts. The story is way bigger than at the beginning, so it makes sense why theres less ambient shots, they wouldn't really fit. But one place where I actually think they would have fit is when Caliborn explores his planet, I think it would have worked really well but whatever.
Anyway...
Act 6 (Overall)
is about half the story because of how it's divided up, with it having a ton of sub-acts and intermissions between it. It begins after Cascade and introduces us to the Alpha kids, and I like the Alpha kids. They're neat. They kinda bum around for a while before going godtier but that's alright.
I'm fine with the downtime in Act 6, with all of the stuff that happened in Act 5 and Cascade it was definitely needed for the Beta kids and the trolls to just hang out. I'm sure that when it was originally coming out, people probably didn't like it because it made it feel way longer. But from a story perspective, now it's completely fine, we get to see character stuff, and it's not like NOTHING is happening, the Openbound stuff was something. (Even if it was a little long at times, like seriously, I think if I hear Meenah's theme from the first one I might get flashbacks.)
Speaking of Openbound, the Dancesters made almost no impact on me. Like really, maybe I'm missing something, maybe I didn't choose all the dialogue with every different character when I thought I did, but man I don't care about these people. Everyone says they suck as people, and I guess I agree?? but I really don't care about them AT ALL besides Meenah and Aranea. Ok maybe that's a little unfair, I liked Latula and Meulin, they were neat, and it's not like I've completely forgotten about the rest of them, it's like very vague imprints in my mind of these characters.
Overall, Act 6 was pretty good in my opinion. If the first 5 Acts are 10/10s, then Act 6 is an 8.5/10 or 9/10 for me.
The retcon.
The retcon was interesting for me. Basically, the deal is John sticks his hand in the Ultimate Weapon and gets jostled out of canon. Now he can time travel, and it's shockingly not that confusing.
Anyway, while John beats the shit out of Caliborn. (Seriously, never knew John could go straight hands like that, mad respect.) Everyone dies. This is where I wish Act 6 would continue to Act 7. Then Terezi gives John a list of places in time to go to and change, so he does that, completes the quest on his planet, which he can now do thanks to his retcon powers. Then he flies up to the meteor with Roxy, who wasn't affected by the retcon and just pulls up, finally having a reunion.
Now, one thing that I've heard is that the people in Game Over aren't really the same people as the people post-retcon. That's not true, though. These people haven't had drastically different lives than they did pre-retcon, they literally are the same people. All the stuff that went down on the meteor went down the same way, except for Terezi and Gamzee's kismissatude being basically gone, if that's what I'm meant to infer. The only three people that you could say are majorly different than who they were pre-retcon (and even then, majorly different is a bit of a stretch.) are Terezi because she didn't have a kissmissatude with Gamzee, Jade, because that John was dead and post-retcon Davesprite was gone and Vriska, because she's not dead. EVERYTHING ELSE AND EVERYONE ELSE STAYS THE SAME.
I think for the most part the retcon was fine.
Is Homestuck really that confusing?
No, I don't think that Homestuck is as confusing as people make it out to be. I think the actually confusing parts are simply because of the time travel and how it's presented to the reader. Like for example, Lil Cals timeline, that's a little tricky to wrap my head around to be sure. But the comic itself and the plot? Not really. The biggest things I got confused by was caused by me not really paying alot of attention to some parts of the flashes, or simply forgetting.
Now when you try to explain some of the concepts of the story, it's going to sound confusing, but that's the same with almost every single other piece of media ever.
So no, Homestuck isn't as insanely confusing as some people make it out to be.
Trickster Mode
Trickster mode was interesting, it's when the alpha kids try drugs. I actually thought that Trickster mode was an entire act by itself but no, its just in Act 6 Act 5. I feel like I should put it out there that I originally read the trickster mode section at about 12:20AM to about 1AM. I think trickster mode is pretty good.
Closing thoughts.
Homestuck is unironically fantastic. I'm genuinely in shock about how good it is. So yeah Homestuck is peak, and I think it's gonna be even better on the reread because I'll be older, and i'll be able to see all the foreshadowing for what it is.
That's about it for this blog. Thanks for reading.
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