I don't know why this is on here but the sheer novelty of it being here made me want to review it.

WHAT IS HOMESTUCK?

Homestuck is a webcomic. It is functionally designed very differently than most webcomics before it, to the point where it spawned a subgenre of webcomic structure. It also features some amount of interactivity beyond simply pressing the "next page" button. It is also much more text-heavy than art-heavy. I've seen people compare it to visual novels, and I suppose you could consider it that for the sake of it being on this website.

Homestuck follows the story of a number of teenagers who play a mysterious game that reshapes the world and brings forth the apocalypse, with the intended end goal of creating a new universe from it. Things become very complicated on textual and narrative levels as this game becomes doomed to fail.

A rather famous part of the story is the introduction of "the trolls", 12 other teenagers who are part of a dystopian alien race that preceded the universe that Earth is a part of. This is because once the story begins to focus on them, Homestuck morphs from a webcomic aimed at programmers in their 30s to a YA story focused on drama, comedy, and romance. This would create massive waves and ripples throughout the online world as it managed to massively spike in popularity but left points in contention between various parts of the online communities focused on Homestuck, the online communities that were uninterested in Homestuck but would encounter discussion of it nonetheless, and the primary author and artist of the webcomic, who despite everything was still very much the sort of edgy 00s computer nerd that the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the early 2010s was beginning to exist without.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time online. Getting to use the computer was aspirational, and eventually I finally got a computer of my own. In the comments section of a zelda fansite, I saw somebody link a webcomic called VG Cats. This isn't about that webcomic and that is a much briefer discussion that can be saved for another day.

What IS important however is that through there I discovered a comic called MS Paint Adventures, and their main story Problem Sleuth. I really liked Problem Sleuth. I found the structure that could be considered a parody of graphic text adventures very interesting and extremely funny. I read a good portion of it and then forgot about it for a while.

Fast forward to 2010. I am in sophmore year of high school and very fond of one particular website: TV Tropes. This is a little bit more about that website than the webcomic, but only to a certain degree. The big thing about the site was that it was a bunch of nerds from ages 13-35 trying to define media solely through media tropes. This had a number of downsides but in a nation with a failing public education system, it provided a greater deal of things to work with beyond whatever the Department of Education limited public school faculty to teaching such as "math presented in a dull and confusing way" and "a propagandized summary of pre-1960s America repeated again and again over 12 years".

TV Tropes also had a user forum, and in that forum I got to interact with and RP with a number of other nerds from ages 13-35. Through these nerds, I had learned that not only had Problem Sleuth ended, but the creator had moved on to starting a newer and more ambitious project: Homestuck.

For the next 2 years (give or take a few months) I was deeply immersed in the webcomic, and used the TV Tropes forums as a primary outlet for discussion of the comic. This had it's ups and downs. I was not the most politically intelligent teenager and did not have the best influences both on and offline.

At a certain point in the comic, what appeared to have been the penultimate portion of the story was revealed to have in fact been the midpoint. This, combined with a lot of other soured opinions I had read at the time, caused me to completely burn out on trying to continue keeping up with the project, and I more or less never touched it for roughly a decade, letting the comic's negative reputation wash over me.

In 2021, the Ranged Touch podcast network started a podcast called Homestuck Made This World. It was a dedicated effort to reread, analyze, and historically re-contextualize the webcomic Homestuck. This was a herculean effort, and was only able to be accomplished because the two hosts were trained academics who had managed to become successful enough as podcasters that they were able to put in needed amount of time and effort. Their discussions were deeply interesting and gave a significant amount more thought to what Homestuck was than most of the online world would ever dare to entertain. This motivated me to read along with the podcast, and so I did from the very beginning to the very end. Because of this, I highly recommend anyone interested in reading the comic to use the show as a companion piece so that one may both gain a better appreciation for what they read and so they may use the milestones of reading up to the end of the next episode as a healthy way to pace oneself when attempting to read such a daunting text.

SO WHAT DID I THINK OF HOMESTUCK?

Honestly? I think I liked it a lot. Despite burning out midway as a teenager, there was a lot to it that kept me interested before that point. As an adult, having the podcast as a companion and the wound-healing nature of time gave me a much better appreciation for what I was reading. It certainly has it's ups and downs, however.

Probably the single biggest criticism I can give of the work is that the main writer and artist, who is white, is racist towards black people in a very particular way where they are broadly favorable towards and interested in black culture, but have limited their understanding of blackness to the pop culture of their past and present. Aside from that, the rather antagonistic relationship they had with their readerbase was poorly-considered and deeply unhealthy for everyone involved and leads to a lot of additions that overall hinder the work. The beast of what Homestuck is also leads to a lot of confusing and extraneous details that are a little more trouble than they are worth narratively.

The single biggest praise I can give is how deeply fascinating, weird, and experimental it is from beginning to end. It serves as a rather bizarre melting pot of many different aspects of the late 20th and early 21st century online world, from an unconventional design to toying with narrative concepts across many genres to rather odd fixations with cultural detritus. Nothing like it existed before, and given the very particular circumstances of what it was and the world it was a part of, it is very likely nothing quite like it will exist again. I cannot recommend it enough, if for no other reason than a greater understanding of the online world around you.

For the ideal experience, I recommend downloading the unofficial fan archive (For much of what it was simply does not exist online in the same capacity through official channels) as well as using the podcast Homestuck Made This World as a companion piece (for reasons mention earlier).