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Explain Homestuck
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!
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!
Comments
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. 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.
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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...
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!
Some may frown on spoiling them but I mean, who can watch -this- and not be somewhat intrigued.
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.
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.
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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.
The amount of material being produced this quickly by a single person is extremely impressive.
It's just that judging by his output I do not respect his skills as an artist or writer.
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.
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!