There is a gallon of milk. you bring it along as you decide to start a trip with your friends. During the trip your car breaks and you and your friends are forced to reach the destination in other ways. The trip becomes significantly longer, your friends start to show tiredness and problems. Some of your friends start dating and then break up. Others do mistakes to each other that can hardly be forgiven and they’ll never speak again. Others start thinking about their problems. Others come out as transgender and/or queer. others reflect on their action. At one point, you all arrive at your destination, your lives forever changed. You open your backpack only to find the milk that traveled with you this whole time, you offer it to your friends before you all separate. You pour the milk. As you and your friends drink it, you come to a realisation. The milk is expired.

Homestuck is like the trip, because it united people and characters and changed them forever. Homestuck is like the milk, because it expired very quickly, and very badly.

Due to its significance, its rich art variety and characters and internet context, I recommend it to anyone to read it at least once.

When I found this I was looking for ms paint comics and seeing what types of art people were making with it. The original mspaintadventures website was one of the first results. As a text adventure fan, I really enjoyed the inspirations homestuck took from older computer games and other similar content. It just hit with me, ya know? I was pretty young when I found this, and it all seemed so different and creative.

After i finished the first act tho, i started to really get confused with the additions of so many characters, and had to drop it. I think I tried to keep up with the series through reading people fan works and youtube videos, but I never ended up understanding the full adventure. I still really cherish the time I spent with the story, and I still do think of Homestuck on April 13th.

==> Minor spoilers ahead

"You can finally say with absolute conviction that it's all been worth it. It has all paid off. All roads no matter how treacherous brought you to this glory. Every obscure plot thread, every batshit twist, ..., every bit of dubious narrative legerdemain, ALL of it you now realize was designed with excruciating precision to achieve this singular, magnificent result." - Homestuck, page 7928

I can safely say without a doubt that this is my favorite piece of media ever. The well written story, the nonlinear storytelling, the characters, the soundtrack, the weird plot shit [sic], the time traveling shenanigans; all of this combined have created one of the greatest stories ever told. There are many moments that will leave you speechless. There is no such experience as seeing [s] Cascade, or [s] Caliborn: Enter the first time. This shit is peak fiction.

Homestuck is very debatable, from people saying how Act 1 is boring and painful to go through, the second half being worse than the first, and finally how the ending is rushed.
Act 1 really sets the tone of the story and is important in understanding how the game works and lays the foundation for later. Considering it is only about 250 pages in an 8000-page long comic, I'm not complaining.
The second half is not worse than the first, it's just different. It was made as a sequel to the first, and that is a very important distinction. The tone and direction the story takes are way different in the second half. My only complaints are the kinda slow start of Act 6, especially after the explosive ending of Act 5, and Act 6 Intermission 3 felt kinda boring after a while. Other than that, there were many great moments in Act 6. And really, you can't complain after seeing something like [s] Caliborn: Enter; I spent about a week just watching it and have not dared to move to the next page.
The rushed ending I kinda agree with. Act 7 could have benefitted from being like 6 minutes longer or something, but it has served its purpose and it was one of the best animations I've ever seen.
I wanted to write a longer review, but you can't really talk about Homestuck without spoiling a bunch of things and I'd hate to spoil this masterpiece to anyone.

So, if you're reading this, please give Homestuck a read. It will be worth your time.
I most likely will start rereading this a couple of months from now, so, there is that.

tl;dr
it's a comic and it's a game and it's awesome.
end of story.

April 13th, 2023, I begin rereading Homestuck, to honor it's 14th birthday, and to add to some of the nostalgia I've been reliving over the past few months.
May 16th, 2023. I had made it just past "[S] GAME OVER." the previous day, and I was fucking ready to go. I would spend the next several hours (albeit with a bit of a break midway through) reading over 1,200 pages, finishing up the webcomic just over a month after I started.

After Homestuck ended in 2016, I spent the next several years sort of forgetting about it, only looking back on it through unfortunate events that made it's way outside of the fandom and into my vision. This would eventually lead me to believe that I hated Homestuck, for some strange influence. I would hear these terrible stories, watch the similar reactions of others, the disgust from all of them, and I wanted to make sure I was nowhere near it. Any sight of the story or characters I came across over the years made me believe it was all a bunch of "terrible memories" or something that I would never look back on, pushing away something I had loved so much, I didn't want to be associated with any of it.

But this year was different. I gave up on that heavy belligerence toward the series, and I gave it another try, despite my assumed hatred, and by God I loved it just as much as younger me did.

Homestuck provides such a high fantasy world, dragons, aliens, supernatural death powers, so much miraculous bullshit, and pulls it off magically, with a cast of characters that I find amazingly enjoyable to read and voice. I started the first 2 acts through the website, before learning of the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an archive made to preserve some of the other features and side pages that the original mspaintadventures website held, as well as keep some of the fucking awesome Flash Player tricks that the old webcomic had that just can't be replicated through the site's YouTube redirects. So many chilling moments, seeing the animations interact both within and out of the panel that was supposed to be surrounding them.
That's the first thing I love Homestuck for, it's innovative use of the Adobe Flash Player. So much of the story loses its magic without it, including interactive pages, the aforementioned sort of "boundary breaking" animations for the real big moments, even a few flash games allowing the reader to take control of certain characters. I believe this is one of the things that makes Homestuck so special, in a format that you wouldn't really expect so much from.
Accompanying all of the [S] pages signifying each flash animation is some amazing music as well. Cascade, Carne Vale, all of the tracks in [S] Collide, and obviously the works of the big name, Toby Fox, every song, somehow with so many different genres present, fits in with every situation they're used in, and can really add so much more to the feeling of the page.

But out of everything I love Homestuck for, I think my favorite is just the sentimental value I hold towards it. About 8 or 9 years ago, I had moved to a new place, new school, didn't know anybody. I would soon start talking to somebody, I wanna say maybe a year later, and they would introduce me to Homestuck. That was, I believe, one of the first interactions I had with one of my now best friends of nearly a decade. I don't want to associate this comic with such bad memories anymore, I want to associate it with the things, and especially the people, that I love now. Homestuck brought me into a group that I was proud to be a part of for so long, I enjoyed being there for the long waits between pages, getting so excited with every new batch dropped, and being there on the day of the end, seeing it all culminate in its highest quality of animation yet, and one of the coolest and most satisfying motherfucking endings I have still ever seen to this day. I enjoyed watching it grow while it was still ongoing, the fan content created by other talented people so passionate about the story.
I still enjoy the company that Homestuck has allowed me to be around for so many years, and I feel things would be so unbelievably different had I never once found out about it all that time ago. I fucking love this series, and while I regret being so spiteful towards it for so long, I'm also somewhat glad that allowed me to re-experience it all for what felt like the first time again, 7 long years after I had abandoned it.

...but damn I do kinda wish my zodiac troll got a bit more screen time, preferably outside of that weird little fusion near the end.

this shit is so good on some aspects, SO GOOD it's actually bad. It's like reverse nanar

im scared about this existing out there

i hate knowing what homestuck is, i hate to know how bad it is
i hate to know how good it is