I think we should work on demystifying homestuck.
-It's not unapproachably long. If you can spend a month reading/watching whatever else, you can also spend a month reading homestuck without difficulty.
-If you pay attention you can understand it just fine. There's a lot of moving parts, but it's like a clockwork: if you don't get something despite paying attention, it will most likely fall into place later.
-There's filters for the desktop app in case you don't wanna see the era-typical edgelord humor of the first half, but honestly sometimes it adds to it. (The Future!ArachnidsGrip bit is good. Sorry.)
-It is flawed!!! That's true!! But this website is constantly on about how no media is irredeemable and how you should read things that make you uncomfortable and analyse why that is and still recognise the value in it.
-kill the part of you that cringes 👍
-IT IS GOOD. Older fans, stop with the "hoho it ruined my life" and "homestuck sucks!!!" jokes. It has compelling (extremely queer!!) characters, and an interesting, tragic narrative told in a comedic way.
-Vriska was thirteen. VRISKA WAS JUST THIRTEEN.
- most of the backlash against is based on its fandom having been annoying and toxic some years ago, even though by that metric you should also be reacting the same way to pretty much every other pop scifi classic, including Star Trek, Doctor Who, everything Douglas Adams and Alan Moore ever did, and (dear Lord!) Star Wars
Going back to the complexity thing, it's not actually that difficult to understand. Pretty much everything is explained very clearly, it's complex enough that I would suggest not putting it down for long periods of time if you can but it was originally read like that so it's definitely doable.
There's a lot of diagrams and explanations for everything happening without feeling like overwhelming exposition. A lot of it's also based on callbacks, but remembering them all is far from a requirement. You won't understand every reference, even to things within the comic itself. That's just how it goes.
It's more an experience that flows over you than a story demanding you maintain notes.
Yes! This!
I read Homestuck for the first time a bit more than a year ago. I started reading mostly as a joke and without any expectations to like it or even get all that far into it.
But it was kind of neat. So I kept reading. And kept reading. And it kept positively surprising me and being fun and interesting and in the span of less than a month I made it through the whole thing. Wasn't even trying to. I just got hooked and wanted to know what happens next so I read a few pages every afternoon.
Then after I was done reading I kind of had a crisis about how I think about media because of how good some of the parts I really liked were. There is so much that Homestuck does extremely well that I have have never seen in anything else I've read/watched/etc but it works. So many rules for how stories ought to work that get thrown out the window in some ways and it works brilliantly.
If you can't tell already this webcomic is my special interest. I've never had a piece of media become a special interest for me before but somehow Homestuck managed to and it has lived rent free in my brain ever since.
Obviously it's flawed like everything is. But overall it's good. Like legitimately you will probably have a good time.
And also, side note: The characters are great. And I do genuinely mean most of them (the main cast at the very least). Everyone is interesting. That's the one thing probably know already but it's worth mentioning.
What I'm saying is you should give Homestuck a chance actually.
