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Man, I miss Homestuck.

I, Furudo Erika... have duct tape..!

It's a shame how much the internet consesnus seems to have turned against it, i still remember it really fondly.

I get my Homestuck kicks from the Locked Tomb series now. A fair bit of Homestuck fandom is present there.

Pretty much, yeah. I've been rereading it recently and the main thing that gets me is just how well it still reads, even now. Like, obviously not everything about it has aged elegantly (especially the excessive usage of slurs, shock-humor, and really weird racial implications across the entire breadth of the comic) but on a fundamental level it's still a tremendously clever and entertaining story. I always wish I had been involved in the fandom in its heyday - I only got into it in 2017, a year after it had ended, and I was too young, really, to actually understand any of it in 2011 or 2012 when it was really popular - but still, I can't help but feel like I've missed something really special.

Yeah - those were written by urbanAnchorite, right? Should probably check them out sometime.

I, Furudo Erika... have duct tape..!

Well did people actually turn on Homestuck, or merely on its late content (Act 6 and epilogues...) ?

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

For me, everything up until Cascade is fantastic. Most of Act 6 is good up till Game Over, ehich is kind of the point it got off the rails, though I really, really love the integration of John's pan-fictional arm — it's the sort of narrative technique that I don't think has ever been used outside of HS, and Hussie deserves props for that alone. Other than that, my interest in the story and characters decreased exponentially (reverse-parabolically?) with each successive update past that point, not helped by the hiatuses and absolutely not helped by non-Hussie writers, and by the end I watched Act 7 mostly out of obligation. The "post-canon" content... well, I treat it as such. Mostly I avoid revisiting HS to keep the good memories intact, including the community.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

The luster went off for me when the retcon power got put on the board

It was a massive complicating wrinkle when the comic was starting to head towards an ending and my primary reaction was oh I guess we’re doing this thing now

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

Nowadays I see people treat it as an embarrassing thing they were into in the past.

i definitely think a lot of people turned on Homestuck specifically because of the ending

which had the effect of making all the "cringe" from everything before it not worth it, in a sense

i'm sure if Homestuck had actually homestuck the landing, it would be looked upon MUCH more fondly. closer to a "the fandom was weird but the work was just THAT good yknow?" a la Undertale

"There's not a girl alive who wouldn't be happy being called cute." ~Tamamo-no-Mae

I think part of it is the "oh it was good until Act 6" or "oh it was good until Game Over onwards" bothers me too. YMMV obviously and I don't want to imply that anyone has a lesser understanding of stories for not liking the comic beyond a certain point, but Act 6 is my favorite part of the comic by like... a lot! And it definitely feels frustrating that saying this makes me feel like I'm instinctively on the defensive.

I, Furudo Erika... have duct tape..!

Frankly I still love most of Homestuck without shame and the same goes for the fan arts and fanventures I've seen, but since the MSPA forum collapse I have grown apathetic to actually looking for such content (even fanventures which I'm aware continued outside the MSPA forum — too much of a hassle to check two forums and create two new forum accounts)

The Ace Attorney chapter of Hiveswap made me stop caring about the rest of Act 2 (especially since there most likely won't be an Act 3), so pretty much all of Homestuck for me is on "like, but can't be arsed to check".

...Except for Nepeta Quest 2022 which I just discovered from an NQ 2011 page update, and am currently reading.

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I also, personally, didn't experience a drop in quality after Game Over. I was however really deep into the thought crafting side of the fandom, so act 7 wasn't an entire surprise to us.

i don't want to turn this into another circular argument about how good or bad homestuck was. we've been there and done that a hundred times.

fact is that most people found the ending to be extremely dissatisfying. regardless of how any individual person feels about it.

and because the majority of people disliked the ending, it's cultural presence went from "weird fandom, good story" to "cringe fandom, cringe story".

and the fact that the following works were controversial at best, along with non-stop drama, this feeling only got more solidified with time in the public consciousness.

Edited by EpicBleye on Nov 16th 2022 at 1:31:26 PM

"There's not a girl alive who wouldn't be happy being called cute." ~Tamamo-no-Mae

I think it was the giga mega and whatever else pauses to blame. Internet fandom is fickle and there's always a new thing to latch onto. All the extensive pauses let the casual audience drift away and yeah bad worth of mouth would do its part at the point where updates started happening again.

Forever liveblogging the Avengers

I think Homestuck's reputation for cringe came as far back as when people first started cosplaying as trolls. Way before Act 6.

It had and has always been cringe, but there's "cringe but I still love it despite and because of it" (hello, Kingdom Hearts) and, well, the other type. The ending was massively divisive, it took way too long to come out, and the colossal amounts of real-world drama around the ending and additional content, not to mention the quality of it, just completely soured a lot of people on it. The fandom more or less imploded over it and everyone who wasn't in it just saw it as a clusterfuck best not to get involved in, at best.

Dopants: He meant what he said and he said what he meant, a Ninety is faithful 100%.

Do it! I'm just starting on the first book myself, but it's a very fun read so far. Gideon in particular has a character voice that's delightfully in-between Dave and Karkat's. I mean, look at this.

Also, kismesisitude is absolutely a thing that exists in the setting.

Oh, yeah, I liked Act 6 just fine myself. The post-Scratch kids are fun (Roxy remains one of my favorite characters), and the meteor arc is one of the parts of the comic that I like best. That part introduced a lot of interesting worldbuilding, like the cherubs and basically everything about the dream bubbles, and it's also the first part where the kids and trolls interact directly for any length of time.

To me, the real downward spiral starts specifically with [S] Game Over. Retconning such a major chunk of the story was... a risky move, it could have been done successfully but in this case it wasn't.

And yeah, agreed that the comic's overdelayed and drama-riddled mess of an ending, plus the post-canon stuff, definitely played the major role in destroying its reputation.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Nov 16th 2022 at 2:05:19 PM

As someone who read through Homestuck after it had been completed, while the lack of the post-retcon development was blatantly obvious, Act Seven isn't nearly as disappointing without the long wait to build it up.

The Crystal Caverns A bird's gotta sing.

I didn't have much of an issue with the retcon - part of it, I think, is that I've never really viewed alternate selves as being, like, distinctly different people or whatever. I always took the point of view that "alternate selves" were just a narrative tool to provide us with more depth about a specific character in a clever and sort of backwards way, which is why it didn't bother me that Vriska "lost all her development" or whatever - the version of Vriska who still emotionally matured still existed, and got the happy ending, all things considered. But I understand why people who didn't take this view had an issue with the retcon, like, making development irrelevant. It just never registered as a problem to me.

Edited by atiredonnie on Nov 16th 2022 at 5:14:12 AM

I, Furudo Erika... have duct tape..!

I certainly have my critiques of Homestuck, but I'd say that once the credits dropped, I was more or less satisfied. I really only wanted to know what happened with the Masterpiece, which looking back, might have been better off not existing. The Epilogues...did have some interesting ideas, but I'd be lying if I said it was what I wanted. After that...well, I can't say I'm especially clamoring for it to come back.

All that being said, I don't regret my time with Homestuck, and I think people are too quick to label the whole thing as cringe. I just wish it had been able to better rein in its excesses.

Oh God! Natural light!

I don't regret my time with Homestuck either. It was a wild ride from start to finish.

I read somewhere that, since Act 7 was set in stone for a long time, that it's possible that there was meant to be material in between Act 6 and Act 7 that would have elaborated on the ending before the ending itself happened but was cut out when Hussie decided to set the end date in stone as well. I'm willing to bet that this "Intermission 3" as I'm calling would have focused on Masterpiece, elaborating why the kids are there and their place in the timeline, as well as their final battle with Lord English. I would like to see such hypothetical intermission there.

I was disappointed by the ending, but I figured that Problem Sleuth also had a somewhat rushed ending, and the epilogue to that had tied up all the remaining loose ends, and thought Homestuck would be the same. I was expecting the epilogue to be the 'actual ending', not a Sequel Hook. As much as I loved Homestuck, I just wanted it to be done, even before Pesterchum and everything was announced. Knowing where to stop is something that modern entertainment has forgotten, and it sucks that Homestuck had to be added to that pile. Even if Hussie gave up on it and passed the work on to others, the fact that they allowed it to become a franchise in the first place is, in my eyes, the cardinal sin.

But I don't regret my time with it, and I will probably carry its influence my whole life. Game Over was a drop in quality, but it was still worth reading. I'd even hold that it's worth reading all the way to the ending, I just wish there was a little more to wrap things up. A little more, being the key there.

Edited by Anura on Nov 16th 2022 at 1:11:45 PM

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

The ironic thing is back when the ending was new, at least here in this thread, saying you didn't like the ending put you instantly on the defensive; people outright told me I was wrong to want the things from the ending that I wanted. So, having had been on the other end of that, yeah it does suck. For what it's worth, I think we're pretty cool about not insisting various takes are The Correct Ones, here and now.

I do think Homestuck had a decline in quality by the end, but I don't think it really happened at [S] GAME OVER.? I think that was more just the point where it was clear the plot had gone awry. I actually loved the retcons, I thought they were very interesting; the whole arm thing was incredible, even though I had only started reading after they were added. But also, the layer of a new time travel system over the other time travel system was great. I had a field day trying (with too many words) to explain how the system could make causal sense, against arguments that it just didn't make sense. And then it... didn't make sense, in the end.

That's what burned Homestuck's ending for me the most, not the character beats getting a bit off or the pacing being rushed. It betrayed a lot of the stuff that the comic itself had set up; the Quests, the Ultimate Riddle and Ultimate Answer, the final frog that still had to come from somewhere, etc. I liked the vast majority of Act 6, but I wanted it to end with another Cascade and it... really didn't.

This didn't catch me by surprise, but having figured out ahead of time that things wouldn't go the way I wanted, didn't actually change what I wanted. Which wasn't really as strict as "another Cascade", but I wanted the loops to close, and they didn't. I wanted the SBURB game philosophy stuff to come back, and they didn't. The stuff I got really big into and had expected to come back in the final hour just didn't (except Quests and Denizens, which only barely did).

It makes it hard to go back and appreciate the comic, although I definitely do like most aspects of it and most of the length of it. I'm also still in the fandom, mostly by roleplaying, but also this place here.

I also owe Homestuck, like, a lot? Genuinely lifechanging piece of media, if only because of the time of my life in which I read it. But indirect responsibility for the friendgroup that I have besides, I think it's why I write as a hobby. And roleplay as a hobby for that matter. I still haven't thought of a good way to write a story involving two different kinds of time travel layed over each other the way I thought the ones in Homestuck were, though.

Mostly does better things now. Key word mostly. Writes things, but you'll never find them. Or you can ask.

I honestly think that people would have been fine enough to look beyond the ending and just shrug it off, leave Homestuck in the past without much negativity...if the What Pumpkin controversies didn't happen.

The ending isn't great but it's...well I've seen far worse. But the attempt at making MORE out of the brand and having the inmates run the asylum, so to speak, is what really did its reputation in.

I think the pauses alone weren't enough to cause fans to drift. The pauses plus the forums disappearing however, were every bit the killing blow you describe, since the fans no longer had a handy place to discuss the comic and run fan adventures.

Losing the forum and having backups turn out unsuitable I can forgive. Not recreating the forum (even from scratch) despite that was a fatal mistake.

---

As for the ending, I think it was mostly fine even with the Offscreen Moment of Awesome problem. The "epilogues" on the other end were pretty much End of Evangelion.

Edited by Medinoc on Nov 16th 2022 at 8:37:51 PM

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."