Congrats on act 1! I'm glad you seem to be enjoying it by now. Do you know anything about the other characters already? I noticed you mentioned Can Town.
Thankee thankee! I’ve been enjoying it all along…like many others I have been convinced that Homestuck is an epic read, worthy of the time commitment. And like many others I was warned that the first act would seem like it was going nowhere for a while, but was important to the whole. (I’ve convinced many people to read Lord of the Rings by saying similar things about the Shire —my mantra is “the slow peace of the beginning is crucial to the ending; if you love fantasy but feel like quitting, hang in there until you reach the Prancing Pony in Bree and then decide.”) So I was having fun with my own frustration, if that makes sense — knowing the semi- or seeming- pointlessness of some of this was part of its charm and impact. The one thing i did NOT know at first was how interactive the story was during its creation: that the commands John was following were being submitted by readers and selected by Hussie. With that context, some of the stuff that was head-scratchingly strange on first encounter can now make me laugh, as much at my own perplexity as at the contextual silliness of it all.
My intro post described what I knew about the story coming in — I read somewhere past the intro of the Vagabond, nine or ten years ago, but have very little memory of the plot. (I’m also confused about how to judge how deep into it I got, the first time, because the story’s now doing some jumping around time-wise.) Some tiny bits are coming back to me as I read, other things are remaining opaque — for instance, I remembered creepy harlequins and weird machines in John’s house, but I had no memory of the Kernelsprite, or the Apple in the meteor sequence. (The Applecalypse?) I remember that there WAS a Can Town, that seemed unconnected to everything else and contributed to me drifting away from the comic, and a Vagabond that named himself Mayor, but no other details come back to me.
I know a little about the main four kids; though I know I “met” Rose and Dave, I’m not sure if I ever learned more of Jade than what I saw in the early Pesterlogs. I know Dave is “cool” and his bro is a dick; I know Dave eventually gets deeply involved in time shenanigans. I know John does eventually grow in Daunt and Power, but it takes a while, and he never really stops being a dork. I know Rose is often the Brains of the Operation. And I know very little about Jade!
I also have zero idea what role the trolls play in the story, or how or when they are introduced, or what lies between This End of The World and the trolls’ entrance. I know a handful of troll names, with a trait or two to attach to each, and that’s it. (Aradia = psychic. Karkat = angry [and funny]. Terezi = blind? Vriska = tangled. Gamzee = scary. Was there a Ferry/Fairy something? That’s all the names I can think of right now.) Oh, and I know trolls come in different flavors of blood, and have a pecking order based on that, and that they are not raised by parents but have some sort of caretaker monster instead.
Beyond that, I know there’s magic of various sorts in this universe, and affinities with the elements, and adventure-gaming abstractions, and zodiacs and symbols and classifications and hierarchies. Battles of good and evil and madness. Death and ghosts and duplicate selves and pocket dimensions and time loops. I know the names of a few important villains and objects and events, with almost no context for them — no specifics about the who and what and when. It’s kind of like hearing that there’s things named Anduril and Lothlorien and Saruman in LOTR, yknow? Until you’ve read the story, those “spoilers” means nothing.
So yeah, I’m not a completely blank slate but pretty close, and we’re rapidly catching up to the point where I have no idea what will happen next!
Thanks for the ask! Would you like to tell me when and how you encountered Homestuck, and what your Act 1 impressions were?