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Explain Homestuck

edited March 2012 in Manga/Comics
Part of the appeal of Homestuck is, that you can ask 10 people about the plot and what its about, and you will get 10 different answers.
I guess there are more Homestuck-Fans on this forum, even though Rym and Scott don´t know it... yet.
So:
Everyone, Explain Homestuck and why its awesome!
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Comments

  • edited March 2012
    Let me copy what I wrote in another thread.

    Homestuck is almost impossible to explain because it's told in such a unique fashion and handles it's narrative in a very weird way. The plot and the method in which it is told are basically one and the same, but lets see if I can hit the basics.

    Homestuck is the tale of a young boy and his friends, who set out to play a video game. This video game seems to lets you play The Sims with the other player's houses, but it turns out to be a mechanism used to end one universe and start another, keeping the constant death and rebirth cycle going; the kids enter a gameworld, defeat bosses, and set up not only their own existence retroactively, but plant the seed that becomes the next universe, into which they ascend as gods. Unfortunately, something goes wrong with their game; a minor NPC gains near-infinite power and starts fucking with stuff, so they are contacted throughout their game by the previous players, the trolls, in an attempt to figure out what went wrong. As of the most recent act, they've rebooted their game, and their entire universe, but it's going even more off the rails.

    Homestuck is sort of a perpetual experiment in all elements. The art, the layout, the presentation order are all attempts to push various envelops of the medium. It's a webcomic in the truest form of the word; it cannot be presented, fully, in any medium other than a browser.

    It's story is complex and nearly impenetrable. What we thought was an unrelated intermission turned out to be both canon and important, characters hold conversations across time and space (occasionally with themselves) and more than one character freely travels through time, setting up stable time loops. In fact, thus far the entire series has been a series of interlocking time loops. Homestuck is sort of like if Primer had been thirty five hours long and crossed over with Doctor Who, the Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter at various points. However, you don't feel much of that while you are reading it, because the story is presented such that you quickly grasp it's mechanisms; there was a very recent twist that a bunch of characters actually lived in the far future and were chatting back in time with others, and this was universally hailed as a clarification that simplified a great many things.

    Here's a good quote regarding that.

    "The unconventional style of storytelling present in Homestuck is somewhat reminiscent of an intense game of Jeopardy.
    Instead of most stories where a question is presented and an answer is searched for, in Homestuck, answers are freely revealed while the reader has no idea that it is an answer to anything or what sort of question it could be answering.
    It is backwards.
    When the question is finally revealed later in the story, the reader is reminded of the answer being presented to them way back when absolutely nothing made sense, and the entire plot begins to fall into place.
    The answers are often cryptic, subtle, or too obvious and ongoing for most to even consider them important.
    Everything seems to have some sort of meaning and each tiny detail seems to be some sort of important key to completely unlocking and understanding the big picture.
    ''After years of reading Homestuck, the fandom has finally gotten the hang of deciphering such an insane puzzle of a story.
    For example, if a banana was randomly placed in a panel, part of the fandom would speculate as to what the significance of the banana could possibly be, part of the fandom would attempt to prove that it is in fact not a banana, and part of the fandom would make a sexual joke."
    Many characters are experiments in reader perception; how far can Vriska go before we lose sympathy for her? Will people call Jade a Mary Sue? Is Eridan sympathetic or just pathetic? In that way, the trolls themselves are an experiment in character interaction. There are 12 trolls, and we get to see most of them talk to each other at least once. They have fairly simple personalities, but very complex interactions with one another. This is exasperated by their amusingly complex notion of romance, which is multifold and based on the suits on a deck of cards; they've got love as we know it (the heart), a sort of hate/rivalry romance (the spade), a life partner/bromance sort of thing (the diamond) and mediated hatred (the clubs). Furthermore, gender is no object to them. So you've got twelve fairly fleshed out characters, with four ways to ship each, and anything goes. You see why they are popular with the fandom.

    Seriously though, the only way to actually understand Homestuck is to read it. Yes, it's intimidatingly long and yes, it's complicated as all get out, but also tons of fun, with cleverly-written characters, an epic story, and a unique combination of light-hearted humour and dramatic adventure with a lot of imagination. If you are curious as to what it is, give it a shot and find out.
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • It's a pretty cool webcomic.
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  • /frcf/circlejerk
  • As much as I, and other fans could probably go on about everything awesome about Homestuck, I doubt it really makes a person's initial reading much better. Half the fun is watching the comic evolve from sylladex data structure shenanigans to the crazy convoluted-yet-self-consistent-trans-universe-cluster-fuck of a story.

    Personal advice? Read problem sleuth, his previous comic. It's much shorter but his narrative style is hilarious. If you enjoy that, you'll probably like HS.

    ...Of course it's a given that Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is his best work...
  • I'll just throw out there that I think Homestuck is incomprehensible ramblings of made-up nouns. Even summaries of the plot remind me at best of Time Cube. I am unable to appreciate or enjoy it, and I give up.
  • I thought you liked wacky things, Rym. Have you grown older?
  • I'm currently reading Homestuck and I think that I can quite easily describe my feelings towards it. It's lots of fucking idiotic and stupid concepts that somehow manage to work while viewed from moment to moment.
  • edited March 2012
    I'll just throw out there that I think Homestuck is incomprehensible ramblings of made-up nouns. Even summaries of the plot remind me at best of Time Cube. I am unable to appreciate or enjoy it, and I give up.
    Here, let me give you the simple version of Homestuck, without any made-up nouns. Not to force you to read it, just so you understand.

    SPOILER WARNING FOR PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ IT!

    There are four children who set out to play a new video game. In classic style, they are sucked into the game and discover it's purpose; to end their universe and a create a new one, into which they will ascend as gods. The game's universe consists of two warring kingdoms based on chess pieces, representing progress (good) and preservation (bad). The kids are supposed to do quests, level up, and defeat the bad guys in order to bring about the next cycle, the archetypical video game storyline.

    However, their game is glitched. One of the minor NPCs on the bad guy's side, Jack Noir, killed his queen, stole an artifact of great power, and is going on a rampage, ruining the game and preventing them from being able to win. This glitch is caused because the kid's universe wasn't set up right the previous time; the last set of players from the universe prior to ours (the trolls) screwed up, were locked out of their victory, and are now sitting in the broken remains of their game, trolling the kids in frustration. The troll's tiny little error added up, and runing their chances of success.

    The kids and the trolls eventually team up and make a deal with the "GM", so to speak, to hit the reset button on their game, rebooting the universe and escaping into it in order to try again with what they've learned. However, they were tricked, the GM was against them all along, and the reset universe is even worse off, with the game already in total disarray.

    That's Homestuck so far!
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • I think Homestuck is about some home schooled kids that have a prom in the garage and dance with their sisters?
  • Also the flashes. The flash animations are pretty bad-ass whether you know what's going on or not.

    Some may frown on spoiling them but I mean, who can watch -this- and not be somewhat intrigued.
  • I'll just throw out there that I think Homestuck is incomprehensible ramblings of made-up nouns. Even summaries of the plot remind me at best of Time Cube. I am unable to appreciate or enjoy it, and I give up.
    Here, let me give you the simple version of Homestuck, without any made-up nouns. Not to force you to read it, just so you understand.

    SPOILER WARNING FOR PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ IT!

    There are four children who set out to play a new video game. In classic style, they are sucked into the game and discover it's purpose; to end their universe and a create a new one, into which they will ascend as gods. The game's universe consists of two warring kingdoms based on chess pieces, representing progress (good) and preservation (bad). The kids are supposed to do quests, level up, and defeat the bad guys in order to bring about the next cycle, the archetypical video game storyline.

    However, their game is glitched. One of the minor NPCs on the bad guy's side, Jack Noir, killed his queen, stole an artifact of great power, and is going on a rampage, ruining the game and preventing them from being able to win. This glitch is caused because the kid's universe wasn't set up right the previous time; the last set of players from the universe prior to ours (the trolls) screwed up, were locked out of their victory, and are now sitting in the broken remains of their game, trolling the kids in frustration. The troll's tiny little error added up, and runing their chances of success.

    The kids and the trolls eventually team up and make a deal with the "GM", so to speak, to hit the reset button on their game, rebooting the universe and escaping into it in order to try again with what they've learned. However, they were tricked, the GM was against them all along, and the reset universe is even worse off, with the game already in total disarray.

    That's Homestuck so far!
    Except for the proper nouns. They're ridiculous in quantity, and I'm saying that as a fan of Tolkien and R. Scott Bakker!

    I'm not necessarily saying it's bad or you're bad for liking it. I just think it's less clever than many people make it out to be. It has a surprisingly vocal but small fanbase, but I fail to see the appeal. Everything good the vast majority of people have to say about it is external to the work itself.

    I read a good deal, and simply cannot enjoy it for what it is. It rings hollow, moreso than a Jabberwocky, for its rambling and incoherent litany of made-up gibberish words. It reeks of post-hoc continuity. A simple explanation of the plot sounds good in the same way that the simple explanation of the plot of many super-hero comics sounds good, or at least intriguing. But in the actual consumption, I find nothing to consume. Nothing to engage. Tell the story you posted above differently, and there's meat. But I lose the meat for the.. skcub fandychum dingosht? Is that a thing? What about COOKALIZER? Cruxtruder? Horutaxter? ADIOSTOREADOR pesters Rose and GRIMAUXILIATRIX!?!

    I read well more than a thousand pages and met not a single moment of revelation, interest, or meaningful (to me) content. I felt unaccomplished for the time spent, and no desire to continue but for the sheer force of will demanding that I understand what another person would see in this.
  • Because Homestuck seems so popular I have done extensive research on it and tried to read it multiple times. I have come to the conclusion that it is an incomprehensible mess of shit. The people who legitimately like it are short attention span tweaked out punk kids, or on drugs. Everyone else who claims to like it is just trolling. Yes, I'm aware there are trolls in Homestuck.

    For example, look at that flash animation that Grunkie7 just posted. He described it as bad ass and claimed that it would intrigue those who view it. What I saw was a bunch of random poorly drawn unrelated imagery of eggs, meteors, fire, destruction, cakes, devils, murder, and who knows what the fuck else. It is in absolutely no way intriguing or badass. The only things it reminds me of are Hyakugojyuuichi for its completely random nonsense, and Scientology for its volcano fire imagery.

    Whenever I see anything that is Homestuck, the only thing my brain can think is "What the Fuck?" No matter how much reading I do, not even one bit of it makes sense. Even after reading plot summaries and explanations, nothing in the actual webcomic actually matches up with any of those explanations in any way, shape, or form.

    Now, I am completely aware that this appears to be the first sign of me being old. Homestuck may be the first thing that my generation doesn't understand like how some people in my parent's generation looked down on rap, and people in their parent's generation looked down on rock. It's the old South Park episode where everything looks and sounds like shit.

    That being said, it is so far the ONLY majorly popular thing enjoyed by the younger generations of nerds that looks like shit to me. I also would like to point out that I have yet to find someone who is both a fan of Homestuck and also a fan of high brow things. The really good stuff in this world finds fans across generations and demographics and all walks of life. Homestuck seems to only have fans in one particular narrow demographic.

    I am willing to bet that as the fans of Homestuck grow older, it will be their He-Man. I liked He-Man, but when I look back at it now, OH BOY. When I was young, I watched the Adam West Batman, and thought it was for serious. Only later in life did I realize it was a joke. I am confident that when you come back to Homestuck as 30 year olds you will wonder WTF was wrong with you.

    I challenge you to find me any mature and intelligent older person who understands and enjoys Homestuck, and can eloquently explain why it is good. I do not believe such a person does, or ever will, exist.
  • Homestuck is pretty good - for a webcomic. Consider that most webcomics are really terrible. Homestuck is noteworthy primarily for the production values involved in making it, the interesting way it creates a video game-like world, and the sheer quantity of weird time shenanigans involved. I started reading it last week, and I've been sucked into wanting to know where the plot is going, but I'm still not sure if it's worth the effort.
  • Homestuck is pretty good - for a webcomic. Consider that most webcomics are really terrible. Homestuck is noteworthy primarily for the production values involved in making it, the interesting way it creates a video game-like world, and the sheer quantity of weird time shenanigans involved. I started reading it last week, and I've been sucked into wanting to know where the plot is going, but I'm still not sure if it's worth the effort.
    Ok, seriously. People keep saying that Homestuck has high production values.

    W T F

    I'm no artist, so I can't even draw as well as homestuck. However, I do view a great deal of art, and I can tell good from bad. I can tell high production value from low. Homestuck is some crappy MS Paint drawings. That flash animation that was just posted wasn't even a remote fraction as high production value as say, Homestar Runner. Even comics that don't try to have fancy art, such as xkcd, Order of the Stick, or 8-bit theater have higher production values than Homestuck.

    W T F

    I'm also partially convinced Homestuck is a huge conspiracy. A whole army of people teamed up to make a pile of shit then go around the Internet spreading it like it's awesome just to confuse and dumbfound the rest of the world that isn't in on the joke.
  • Well, you know how those punk kids like to go around "freaking the squares" with their rock 'n roll and their rollerskates and jukeboxes and stateful achievement-based FPSes. This fits right in.
  • It's more production values in the sense that it updates around five "pages" per day, and that includes those five-minute flash animations, the occasional flash game, and original music. Yes, individual Homestar Runner flashes have better animations. How frequently do those animations update?

    The amount of material being produced this quickly by a single person is extremely impressive.
  • Homestuck (much like it's predecessor Problem Sleuth) started as a parody of and joke about Adventure games and Adventure Game Logic. That's the origin of the Proper Noun Syndrome it has, and it just never out-grew it, at least as far as I can tell. I stopped reading around the timeskip and never looked back.
  • edited March 2012
    It's more production values in the sense that it updates around five "pages" per day, and that includes those five-minute flash animations, the occasional flash game, and original music. Yes, individual Homestar Runner flashes have better animations. How frequently do those animations update?

    The amount of material being produced this quickly by a single person is extremely impressive.
    Anyone can put out a high quantity of work if the quality is insanely low. If you want piece of shit podcasts we can do ten times as many. We won't edit it at all or spend time coming up with good topics. We'll just ramble a stream of consciousness for hours on end, and slap the files up online without a care in the world. If that will make us as popular as Homestuck, maybe we should try it.
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • Scott's down on Homestuck for reasons I am not down on it. I respect the creator and the effort quite a bit.
  • edited March 2012
    Yes, individual Homestar Runner flashes have better animations. How frequently do those animations update?
    Twice, since 2009, I think. Maybe three times, at most.

    Post edited by Churba on
  • Scott's down on Homestuck for reasons I am not down on it. I respect the creator and the effort quite a bit.
    I respect that he has somehow figured a way to get insanely popular and live off of a work. It takes some kind of genius to figure out what will be so insanely popular and create exactly that thing. I surely have not been able to do that. I also respect that he has put a great deal of effort into it and has sustained that effort over a long period of time. That takes a great deal of willpower.

    It's just that judging by his output I do not respect his skills as an artist or writer.
  • edited March 2012
    All the reasons Rym list for disliking it are the reasons I love it. Homestuck is very polarizing for that exact reason; it's unique style and vocabulary hooks pretty much your whole brain if it gets you, and turns you off entirely if it doesn't. That's why there aren't too many "casual" Homestuck fans. There are people who read it and fail to grasp the appeal, and people for whom it worms into their brains

    Homestuck's unique presentation is both it's biggest strength and greatest weakness. It can be hard or even just straight-up impossible to become invested in it because, for better or for worse, there is nothing like it. If there is a convention in sequential art, Hussie does the exact opposite just to troll his fans. It gives it a voice that is completely unlike anything else.

    Actually, Homestuck is powerful for the same reason Ponies is powerful. It's not that Homestuck or Ponies has exceptional storytelling, characters, or presentation. It's that it has good stuff in a medium we aren't used to receiving it in, which turns it from "work of fiction" to "insane fandom, holy shit", but with the caveat that some people won't be able to get past the unusual medium.

    For Ponies, it's the totally unironic bright, colourful idealistic world, a setting that is basically always a harbinger of stupid insipid drivel, instead having a strong core cast of characters and funny jokes. It's pretty much the only combination we have of those two things, so for people who get into it, it's not just good, it's amazing, and we love it even more because of it's bright and colourful nature. However, for some people it's lost under it's saccharine presentation.

    Homestuck has really good characters and weaves a very complicated set of relationships between them. Their character and relationship arcs are quite extensive, and the sheer number of character archetypes combined with their extensive interactions, added onto Homestuck's extensive length, means that it can (and does) delve deep into the motivations of a wide variety of very different folks and picks apart their brains. That's the meat. The proper nouns and plot bullshit are but the bready sandwich bits.

    It's a hell of a work to get invested in emotionally; there are moments I punched my hand in the air in triumph or stared at the screen in sheer disbelief, not from a twist of the plot but from an action or elation of the characters. When Horrorstuck happened, my brain pretty much shut down for about a hundred pages, and it's conclusion had me cheering out loud, much to bemused looks from my family.

    Thing is, you can't experience those things unless you get past Andrew Hussie's completely insane presentation style. If you can't get through it, then you'll never get the good stuff. If you can, then before long the quirky presentation becomes a part of the good stuff; you start to roll with the schizophrenic shifts between humour and drama, the silly words and the weird time shit. The overly complex troll relationships go from irritating to interesting. It's like learning a new language or some shit; what seems like random bullshit to a person who doesn't speak the lingo becomes a subtle pun or clever wordplay to somebody in the loop.

    Also, you may be underestimating the number of Homestuck fans. They did kinda blow up like four different sites to get at the end of Act 5 Act 2 when it was released :P

    EDIT : Scott, holy shit. It's one thing not to like a work, and another to assume you can only like it if you are stupid.
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • Now you made me check Homestar Runner again. It's like a sad bi-annual ritual.
  • My problem with the craziness of Homestuck is Problem Sleuth. I was completely able to follow Problem Sleuth. Everything made sense, followed logically, and never left me in the dust. Homestuck dropped me around the meteor timeskip part and I could just never find my way again. I should try to read Homestuck and PS again and try to figure out what the difference is.
  • You must seriously be talking about a different thing that is not Homestuck. Is there some secret site that has the real Homestuck? Give me a link to a thing that has drama and character depth. I have been unable to find one after very much searching. I haven't even found any part of the comic where I can even tell what is going on at all. It's like you are reading a book written by monkeys with typewriters and saying it's the greatest. All I see is random letters and hardly any actual words.
  • edited March 2012
    No Scott, you are just old.

    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • Homestuck is a comic about kids who play a video game that manipulates the fabric of reality. There are also alien internet trolls who turn out the be the best written characters.
  • edited March 2012
    My problem with the craziness of Homestuck is Problem Sleuth. I was completely able to follow Problem Sleuth. Everything made sense, followed logically, and never left me in the dust. Homestuck dropped me around the meteor timeskip part and I could just never find my way again. I should try to read Homestuck and PS again and try to figure out what the difference is.
    I've seen this mentioned too many times now. It dropped you on the meteor timeskip part.

    Can someone please explain to me not the overall plot of Homestuck. Just explain to me what is happening at the very beginning. There is a guy named John. He's in his room. His room functions like a point and click adventure game. He starts doing a bunch of random shit with random items for seemingly no reason whatsoever. It's his birthday. He looks at some movie posters. He looks out the window. He does something on his computer. He goes back to messing with items. Eventually puts on a disguise and goes downstairs.

    How did you even get past this? Is there some later page where things actually begin? I've looked at many many later pages. They make the same amount of sense. Is this the fake beginning to keep people with working brains from reading it? I don't even know anything at all about this character John other than that he's some punk kid who lives in a crazy world. You talk about character depth, there isn't even character introduction!
    Post edited by Apreche on
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