Homestuck.

[rax]

 So, because my housemate Nicole has been begging me to for months, once the semester ended I finally gave Homestuck a try. I have strong and mixed feelings! That I will try to keep minimally spoilery but there's no way I can completely avoid it. At the very least probably most of it will mean nothing to you if you have no idea what's going on in

Comments

[eevee]

I read it. I read it all. I read it all the way to the end of act 5. And I don't know why.

Problem Sleuth was good. It got a little wacky at the end, and the bit in the middle with the plugs was boring as all hell, but it was a cute idea that reminded me of a type of game I enjoy and it told a zany but coherent story.

Homestuck is not the same thing. It makes some light nods here and there, but I cannot believe that any of what's going on is remotely related to audience participation. And I guess that would be okay, except that the medium itself is now an experiment in making me not want to read it: the white text on white, the increasingly novel and irritating flavors of chatspeak, the abbreviation of all sixteen major characters to every two-letter acronym possible with four letters (so now I have to remember that "green text guy" is the same as "GG" is the same as "guy who likes spiders" is the same as "karkat" and also that this person probably has some kind of personality; what the hell is this, a bad logic puzzle

[rax]

It is a bad logic puzzle and that part is _super frustrating_. I personally disagree that there aren't any predictable rules and I like the plot; that said "bad fanfiction of itself" is kind of true in places (how many layers is this frickin' thing going to have) and if I didn't get connected to the characters the way I did I would probably be tired as hell of it. I'm kind of astounded that you got that far if you didn't care. I'm simultaneously impressed and sorry.

I... avoid fandom, basically. I entirely avoid homestuck fandom. But I talk about what's happening plotwise, and what connections those things imply, with the people I know who read it and I find that rewarding.

I also hate Doctor Who, so our tastes on this might just be orthogonal. I may even have bad taste here. Scifi is decidedly not my genre. Terrifyingly, if you're right about the connection, that may make me understand Twilight fans who are like "Whatever, I find your old vampire stories boring and I like this one." I am not sure I wanted that understanding, ever

[eevee]

I tried to care, because I could imagine a hypothetical alternate telling of the same core story that was interesting, and I was hoping that Homestuck might become that. But it's just gotten worse and I finally can't bring myself to even look at Act 6. Maybe it'd help if I didn't think the trolls were by and large completely intolerable.

Admittedly I don't look for fandom; my sample here is "whatever noise made it my way". So there's less plot noise than troll noise, I guess.

Doctor Who is not exactly consistent with its 50 years of different writers, which is kinda why I used it for a metaphor. H2G2 could be a better contrast; the rules are completely arbitrary and everyone knows it and the books outright say so, but nobody cares because it's still clever and entertaining and is a story about people which is what scifi ought to be

[rax]

See I actually found it a story about people which is why I liked it! Some of the people are dipshits but some of them I really liked watching grow and change. However if that part didn't work for you then augh I bet it's terrible. :( A lot of it is decidedly either arbitrary or feels arbitrary enough that the difference doesn't matter. Sorry that you wasted your time!