would you recommend homestuck to someone who knows next to nothing about it or is it more of an internet cultural phenomenon where You Just Had To Be There? the way you describe it and its fandom always sounds so fascinating!!
it's tricky because this is a bit like asking a fish if it'd recommend swimming to someone who doesn't have gills. you're going to get a heavily biased answer from someone who has never been in that position. It's near impossible for me to even imagine what the experience of being a fresh homestuck reader in 2026 would be like because Being In The Homestuck Fandom is just kind of what I did for the entirety of my teen years. I have not properly revisited the comic yet since moving on from that era of my life (i have doing this penciled in for 2029) so how different it may feel in a contemporary media landscape/to an adult perspective isn't something I can speak on at this time.
that said i do think there is a lot about homestuck that is good and interesting and worth seeing. As a work in and of itself, I absolutely would recommend it to many people, but it's absolutely not for everyone. it's on my recommendation list for my sideblog since truly so few things can compete in terms of engaging and different and strange and fun female characters.
I think the most important thing to understand when going in to homestuck as a new reader is that it is essentially an incomplete and fundamentally incompleteable text that completely buckled under the weight of its own narrative bloat in its twilight years now being kept on life support. If you read homestuck you need to do it with the mindset of enjoying the experience and not in hope for any sense of real satisfaction when you're done. I know there are a lot of people who would never consider the idea of going into something permanently unfinished or that otherwise fails to stick its landing, especially not something as long and meandering as homestuck. But I'm a big believer in engaging with and enjoying unfinished works, personally.
If you're following my blog and you resonate with my opinions on things enough to ask for them, I think there's a very high chance that the actual content of homestuck is stuff that will appeal to you. Here a few things about homestick that i think make it worthwhile as a work, in no particular order:
it's really fucking funny man
it's kind of The defining Internet Friends piece of media. Homestuck his hard and fast with the tumblr crowd in no small part due to the fact that there really was nothing else in the media ecosystem at the time that was structured around these sort of social relationships and still kind of isnt anything else honed in on it. These characters exist primarily as text on a screen to each other despite being the most important people in each other's lives, and the unique facets of intimacy and isolation associated with that are central and significant. Like the titular Stuck at Home-ness is ultimately about being the kind of kid who grew up on the internet.
It's constantly, shamelessly referential and even at times derivative while still being completely unique. There's a real collage-like character to homestuck both visually and in terms of its content and it is far more than the sum of those parts. Something I've repeatedly critiqued in the past is referential works who use their audience's familiarity with what they're referencing as a shortcut to/substitute for actually having their own substance. But I think homestuck kind of ends up in the opposite situation where the references it makes are not super well known to the people who ended up being its core audience, which results in a work that feels meaningfully grounded in a specific cultural frame of reference without allowing that frame of reference to supersede anything about the characters and setting, or carry any of its weight. I don't think there's anything else quite like it in that aspect.
It was revolutionary and boundary-pushing in its use of a multimedia format and deeply influential on a huge and varied crop of other creatives. There's a lot to be learned from seeing why firsthand, especially if you have any interest in producing your own body of creative work
i really like works that feel like they could only ever be the deranged brainchild of one determined sicko who has nobody to tell them no. and homestuck is definitely one of those. Stuff like jojo's bizarre adventure or zero escape or ryukishi07's work share that same element, where you're just sitting there like. okay this is insane and i have no idea what's going on but lets see where the dog is going with this. I like weird shit where i can't always understand what's happening or why that i never in a million years could have dreamed up myself.
The Beta Kids Are Real, They Are My Best Friends, And I Will Kill Or Die For Them.
anyway that's a lot of words but homestuck is a complex beast with a deservedly controversial reputation. I want anyone who does read it to have the highest possible chance of getting something out of the experience, and I think a lot of expectation setting is necessary in that regard. Good luck, should you choose to go through with it.
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