Homestuck has ended

[kane_magus]

As of today, on its seven year anniversary, Homestuck has come to an end.

All I'm going to say about it is that if you haven't read/watched/listened to/played this webcomic/video game/anime Internet thingy yet, go do that, from the beginning. If you've already done all that, well, go do it again. That's what I plan to do.

Well, that and also continue to wait for Hiveswap. And maybe read Paradox Space if that (properly) starts up again.

(EDIT) Actually, I think I'm going to go through Problem Sleuth first, as I haven't read that one at all yet, and then go back through Homestuck again. (/EDIT)

And here, have some awesome music:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[dmjewelle.livejournal.com]

I tried, I really did, I must've gone through the first chapter at least twice, and I couldn't finish it. Please, please tell me what makes Homestuck such a cultural icon.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah... the beginning is all over the place, and not too awfully interesting, mainly because Homestuck started as the same sort of thing that Jailbreak (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=1), Bard's Quest (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=2) (neither of which were finished), and Problem Sleuth (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=4) were, which was a kind of story-by-committee thing where Andrew Hussie would let the readers decide what happened next. That is to say, from what I understand, there actually was a parser thing, like in old-school text adventure games, that allowed readers to type in suggestions of things for the characters to do, and then Hussie would pick the best/weirdest/stupidest responses to draw as the next page.

For Homestuck, this was the case until Hussie eventually did away with the whole "user commands" thing and started developing the story on his own. I don't know the exact point when he fully took over the story for himself, or how far into the "real plot" that point was, but in any case, for me at least, it was around when the characters (John especially) finally stopped randomly screwing around and started playing the Sburb game and made it into the Medium that it started getting something resembling an actual, coherent story, which is when it started getting better, in my opinion. (For reference, John is in the Medium as early as the beginning of Act 2, but it isn't until Act 4 that all four kids make it there, and I know the "user commands" stuff had stopped well before then. Also, from Act 4 and onward, the Acts become a whole lot longer than the first three were [not counting Act 7].)

Some fans of the old style from the previous comics, who enjoyed the user-driven nature of it, thought that when Hussie took it over on his own was when it jumped the shark, of course, but I have to disagree.

And then the trolls start showing up, around Act 4. That's another shark jumping moment for some, but I thought the trolls were great, for the most part (and got better after... um... the herd was thinned quite a bit in Act 5, but to say much more than that is entering into serious spoiler territory).

If you can get past all the slow, random shit at the beginning, it really does get better, or at least I think so. That overly complicated inventory management crap, for instance, mostly falls by the wayside in favor of actual story later on (or when it does come back at all, it's mostly as self-parody). There will always be slow moments where it's just characters sitting around talking to each other through chatlogs and such, but never quite as slow or as dull as in the beginning. And there are a lot of things that might seem more than a bit like non sequiturs at first (e.g. the Midnight Crew stuff, or the trolls when it switches to them fully for a while in Act 5, or the "post-scratch" kids when they first show up in the first part of Act 6), but things integrate into a coherent whole, and the previous characters reappear eventually.

With most any other work, be it a book or a video game or whatever, I'd say that if you're not hooked within the first bit of it, then it's probably not for you, and that's usually a fair assessment in most cases. But Homestuck changes rather a lot as it goes on. Sort of like how, say, Star Trek TNG was kind of lackluster in the first season, but then "grew the beard (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrowingTheBeard)" from season 2 onward, except even more noticeably so. (Homestuck itself has an entry in the web comics (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GrowingTheBeard/WebComics) section of that trope, and for good reason.)

And here's a Reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/2zvbiu/new_reader_here_when_does_it_get_good/) with someone asking the same question of "when does it get good," and a bunch of different answers (ranging from "never" to "it was good from the start," but mostly the same sort of thing I said above).

And there's also this thing (https://www.youtube.com/user/CoLabHQ/playlists?sort=dd&view=50&shelf_id=1), for what it's worth, though I haven't watched/listened to any of that myself.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

"but it isn't until Act 4 that all four kids make it there"

Actually, I was wrong, since Jade doesn't even make it in until some point in Act 5, but anyway, yeah.