The statements “Homestuck had a lot of problems that should be acknowledged for how and why they are bad” and “Homestuck was a genuinely excellent piece of media that gets a lot more criticism than it actually deserves” are not mutually exclusive.
My point with making this post wasn’t to claim that Homestuck is perfect and has no problems. I recognize that it has A Lot of issues and that those issues should be addressed! I am in no way defending Andrew Hussie’s poor handling of certain characters, concepts, or relationships and I think it’s important to criticize those things in order to have a better understanding of those issues.
THAT SAID, however, none of this actually makes it an objectively bad webcomic, and especially not for the reasons a lot of people give! Homestuck was, in its prime, so incredibly popular that it regularly crashed online forums whenever it updated. It had a HUGE fan base, you could barely go anywhere on the internet or at any convention without encountering something Homestuck. There were dozens upon dozens of fan comics and fan games, someone made an actually working version of pesterchum, there were MULTIPLE online roleplaying sites made JUST for Homestuck roleplayers, there were animated music videos and songs and so many lyric comics that it coined the term “lyricstuck” (actually it had so many aus IN GENERAL that even other fandoms started referring to human aus as humanstuck), and NONE of that is even remotely touching on the fanart and fan fiction that came from Homestuck. Like, I don’t know if you guys remember all this or not but Homestuck was BIG and it had A LOT of fans.
And… it kind of crashed and burned. It was a very long term project with a lot of people working on it towards the end, and a project that Hussie originally intended to be a one off personal comic grew into this monster that demanded an epic finale. And there were problems. He got screwed over by a company that took the money and ran, the updates were taking so long to produce that the hiatuses became their own meme (there was this whole thing about the fandom going absolutely mental during hiatuses, and it was true for the most part. with no new content people would circulate old theories and gradually flanderize the characters until the actual comic was practically unrecognizable to most of the fandom once it actually did update), and a lot of fans ended up getting pissed off and left.
It kind of left off on a sour note. People who used to be rabid fans were suddenly dragging the comic to Hell and back for being shitty and terrible when they used to adore it. People weren’t happy with the end product and they wanted to make that known.
A lot of the criticism I see now… actually has nothing to do with the social justice angles. Like don’t misunderstand me, it has problems. Homestuck was written by a straight white guy who started the project with the social justice education of your typical redditor. But he also listened to feedback and actively strived to get better. There were homophobic jokes (I’m assuming at the beginning because I don’t actually remember any that much later on? correct me if I’m wrong) but he actually handled teen exploration of gender and sexuality a lot better than most other media I’ve ever seen! There were multiple same gender relationships, multiple nonbinary characters, and the comic even ended with multiple canonical gay relationships (and a lesbian wedding, people seem to forget that for some reason).
The thing about the “CAUCASIAN” debacle is that, that’s actually one of the examples where he listened to criticism and actually changed the comic in response. He acknowledged that it was a bad joke and took it out. The dancestors were honestly a mess but he also acknowledged that they were kind of shitty and did his best to do better, and honestly there are a lot of examples of times where he fucked up, was criticized for it, recognized that it was shitty, and strove to do better. The thing with the medium, though, is that once it was in the comic it was in the comic.
And I’m not trying to defend any of that. Those are perfectly valid reasons to not like the comic. But there’s a difference between not liking a piece of media because of its problems and saying that it is objectively bad because of its problems. The Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and most other mainstream franchises have their own myriad of problems with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ablism, but they are all still considered to be excellent pieces of media.
A lot of people also rail on Homestuck for being “confusing” and “overly complicated”, that the characters are bad and the relationships are bad and the plot was bad. But… all of those are personal opinions. A lot of people don’t feel the same way and in fact love it for those exact things. And whatever you say about Homestuck you do have to admit that the worldbuilding was incredible, the art and music were beautiful, the characters were fun and engaging, and the medium broke so many barriers wide open. There are analyses upon analyses about how Homestuck defied medium boundaries in a way that wasn’t seen before, taking the format of a webcomic and adding videos and games and altering the website itself and creating links to other sites and utilizing so many things that the internet provides that could never really be done before. A lot of people considered it to be nothing less than revolutionary in how it handled it’s medium!
And being “long and confusing” isn’t much of problem either. A lot of people considered Homestuck to have attained Epic status at its height. The comic is so long it takes several months to read and it was one of the highest word counts of any literature in the english language, and at the time this was all considered to be an amazing thing! It touched on SO MANY different tropes, concepts, themes, and ideas that there was (and still is) a popular trend of connecting things from other media to Homestuck. It was long and convoluted, but honestly so are most of the most beloved Epic stories in history (the Odyssey for one).
And honestly? I don’t think people genuinely hate it for any of these problems. Between how popular it used to be and how many people who tear it apart now used to like it themselves, I think it’s more likely that a lot of the visceral hatred of the comic that we see now is based far more on… negative experiences with the fandom.
Because you also see the same thing happen time and time again with other media! Undertale and Steven Universe are some of the worst examples of this! Everyone LOVED the game and the show when they came out. Undertale was such a genuine and heartwarming game that it was a serious contender for Game of the Year (if it didn’t win outright, I can’t quite remember). Steven Universe was and still is a fantastic show with lovable characters and excellent handling of complex social issues in a way its target audience (younger kids and preteens) can understand.
And then… something happened. Suddenly Undertale was racist and tone policing. Suddenly Steven universe was fascist and homophobic. Both were torn to shreds for being “problematic” and “cringey” and eventually “cancelled”. These unique stories with an abundance of diversity and interesting characters and plots are being dragged down into the mud after previously being held up as the height of storytelling, and people aren’t evaluating WHY.
And honestly? That’s what this damn post was about in the first place. You are COMPLETELY missing the point by trying to prove to me that “actually Homestuck was bad :/”, because none of this is based on whether Homestuck is actually bad or not (which honestly? It’s not. It’s just not.) This is all, 1000%, based on this site’s collective need to separate yourselves from the things you used to enjoy because they were deemed embarrassing. This is about actually good comics and games and shows and the hard work and blood sweat and tears of creators who put years and years and years of time and effort into making content that are being trampled on by the fans who used to adore it because they did the math and they don’t want to be socially ostracized for liking something everyone else has decided to hate. This is about people conflating their own personal feelings about the media with the actual quality of the source material, and deciding that since the source material is Objectively Bad that means nobody else should be allowed to enjoy it without being mocked for it. THAT’S what this post is about, not just whether Homestuck is actually bad or not.
And before anyone decides to leave a smartass comment on this along the lines of “I didn’t read all that but Homestuck is trash lol”, YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM.
TL;DR: Homestuck has problems like every other popular mainstream media, and that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is still a genuinely good comic that pushed the limits of what a webcomic could do and has fascinating worldbuilding and engaging characters. The fact that everyone has deemed it trash has far more to do with people’s own perception of the comic than it does with the actual quality of it, as we have also seen time and time again with media like Undertale and Steven Universe. Ignoring all of this to tell me that Homestuck actually is objectively bad because it has problematic elements is completely missing the point of the goddamn post. You don’t have to personally like the comic, but at least let other people continue to enjoy it without being enormous assholes about it.
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