Sorry but i have to butt in with the wording choice here. The unofficial collection is not “pirating homestuck” - Homestuck is a webcomic. Homestuck is free to read. Homestuck is free.
The only thing Viz has hold of are publishing and marketing rights, and we all know they’ve been leeching on the property while doing nothing to aid the upkeep of the site they legally promised to manage. It’s a corporation interested only in whatever is the most profitable at the time — that being recent manga releases, not archiving webcomics from the 2010’s they purchased to turn into print books. It fucking sucks. And I’ve already said this before: it would be all the more beneficial to Viz if people had to buy the books to read Homestuck.
The flashes were never converted into anything but shitty blurred YouTube videos, I don’t even know if most of the games are still playable, and *I* was one of the people to point out the search function was randomly breaking the site, which led to the screencapped post. (You got an error trying to reach pages from google, and also from trying to search pages with the in-site engine. I still don’t fucking know what’s up with that.)
The unofficial HS collection is a community effort to emulate and preserve the way Homestuck was meant to be read before it got mishandled by a disinterested corpo board. Hussie isn’t a Viz manager and this isn’t the first time they’ve acknowledged the company’s fuck-ups - just recently a bunch of minor gifs and icons used in the comic were broken and they had those fixed. It’s kinda silly to act like we’re not watching an author with little control over their work wrestle with people who don’t care to keep it online in real time.
Anyway, go torrent the homestuck collection. It has a reward-unlocking system for new readers (it keeps extra content like paradox space out of sight until you reach the point where they were released in the story) all the music albums, track covers, and occasional composer commentary too. You can adjust the comic’s font, line spacing, site theme & play all the flashes in-app. There’s a bookmark function. It’s pretty good.
