Honestly, the biggest thing with Homestuck is that the early Act's sense of humor is very... Specific. It's 2000's internet lolrandom humor with programming jokes strewn in. Now, if you were essentially raised among the sporks, pirates and nitroglycerin sponge catapults of the late 00's / early 10's internet, value it greatly and have nostalgia for it like me, the early Acts are like being critical hit of nostalgia. They make me feel like that one food critic in Ratatouille every time I read them. Now, if you have no attachment to that era of the internet, or just developed into / always had a different sense of humor... Yeah, I can see how you'd struggle to get past the first few Acts. Unfortunately I never developed past that terminally online 15 year old when it comes to my sense of humor.
I think the only reason I actually finished homestuck was because I read it early as it updated instead of all at once 😅 I wonder how I'd feel if i read it again now as an adult
Dude I genuinely would’ve killed to be in the fandom at that time as the age I am today, since when i most did.. I wasn’t born… like yeah when I was born it was still going but slowly slowing down ://
lowest form of horror might be the dumbest thing i have heard this month. if the animatronics we're never shown and the game relied on your imagination it wouldnt turn into scott cawthons goddamn magnum opus it would be boring as fuck. when you have a game reliant on replaying over and over again that doesnt work thats why slenderman did the same thing. Its like claiming stand up comedy is the lowest form of comedy because its easier than situational comedy. Regurgitating other peoples opinions about the creative process is a surefire way to ensure you never create anything that stands out.
@@WilliamWarner-zk7hk well i think once you cast doubt on whether something is really happening suspension of disbelief falls apart. I reference The Shining as a positive example of horror and exactly what’s behind the occurrences in that movie is open for discussion. However as the audience we understand that axe into body = dead. idk much about slender man but i think it’s implied he kills you in some awful way and i’m fine with the fact that that’s not explicitly explained. but again i don’t know how that’s different than fnaf. main point is that fnaf 4 has multiple competing explanations for what it is, with multiple competing stakes. getting jumpscared could literally just represent having a bad dream, or dying horribly, or something else we don’t know. really i think it’s clear that it can’t represent anything. so it’s horror mostly comes from the knowledge that a loud noise will be played in your already high volume headphones. i was at party once where we played a game with this shock potato. this was like a normal game of hot potato but the thing we played with would zap the loser and it hurt. now i was scared of being shocked, but that doesnt make it a horror game. i was just worried about being subjected to a negative physical stimulus. in that regard fnaf 4 isn’t standup comedy, it’s tickling someone and calling yourself a comedian.
I started reading Homestuck when I was 20 back in 2010, when the story was in the middle of act 5 being published. I thought the jokes and references in act 1 were hilarious, but I never considered how specific these references are to people closer to the age group of millennials, which might just go over the heads of new younger audiences because Homestuck is vintage internet media now. It is interesting seeing younger people still giving Homestuck a chance and hearing their opinions on it. Also, Problem Sleuth is the true GOAT imo.
the frustration with the sylladex and being "a convoluted puzzle including breaking all your shit" due to incompetence is part of the data structures joke itself. i understand the several plays on it causing problems ending up stale if not enjoyed at all, but i personally think they have plenty of variety and charm even when the joke is completely lost, like other odd systems did in problem sleuth.
i started reading homestuck around 2013, and as an impressionable middle schooler i didn't get the vast majority of the references, nor even understand what the hell was going on in much of the story. i was just happy to be along for the ride and feel "in" with the cool older kids on tumblr. i think that social contagion was a big factor that's mostly gone now. on that subject i think there's a really interesting difference in the general depth of hs fandom engagement over the years, because back then you were just having fun with the current big thing online, but now you comparatively have to really TRY to get into it and i feel like that has led to some very high quality modern fanworks, theories, and analyses. (not to discredit the early fandom thinkers, we stand on the shoulders of giants and all that. also probably a lot of these are the same kids who are now older with fully developed brains) anyway great job on the vid
Unlike what others think, you CANNOT POSSIBLY try to read homestuck just like that, you first need to: 1-know what MSPA is/was 2-Read Jailbreak Adventure 3-Read Problem Sleuth 4-get The Unnoficial Homestuck Collection 5-DONT READ IT YET!, go watch some poorly homestuck review/resume that says pretty much nothing but still tells you the important stuff of Act 1 atleast 7-ok now you can start reading 8-if you feel like skipping those pesterchumlogs or whatever go ahead, you can go watch a narrated video about that part, but be warned, you cannot keep doing this past ACT 3 or 4 or else you wont understand shit. -9 ok start reading sweef bro and hella jeff por whatever that shit is called parallel to homestuck, you may know it from Henry Stickmin Congrats!!!(?) You got into Homestuck (Warning: if you got into homestuck because of the trolls this may be 200% more tedious.)
i REALLY love acts 1-4. they're very fun. the experimental feel of the early acts doesn't really carry over post act 5, snd while it's still good after that, i feel like the comic's identity shifted. it became a lot more relationship focused, and while that's still very enjoyable, i liked that stuff sprinkled in with bullshit game mechanics and dozens of pages dedicated to essentially fucking around.
I started reading homestuck a few weeks ago and now I'm on page 7000... I would say it is absurd, to a degree which destroys the reader's suspension of disbelief, but at a certain point it comes full circle in absurdity that it become immersive again! characters have legitimate reasons to do the odd things they do, strange quirks of the weird semi-game world they live in have actual narrative pay off, which makes it quite satisfying to read!
After ruin i watched the new matpat theory to see what was next. He went on to talk about the tunnels and their similarity to the tunnels in the books. Are we not gonna address that the mimic is free/dead? Cassie? Freddy? It doesn't help that Steel Wool wants to go back in time in the next games.
id actually argue the entire comic derails into a jumble of convoluted text post act 3. andrew hussie is LUCKY he can write funny characters though because now im attached to his characters forever. the kids banter was always my favorite part of homestuck honestly, i wish that energy was captured with the alpha kids because theyre all such interesting characters
i’ve read homestuck 2 and a half times. this was my experience with it: -i read up to act 4 and then dropped it -came back to it a few months later and read the whole thing. it made a bit more sense reading the first few acts again. -the 2nd full read, the lore and all the storylines all came together. and i was taking notes this time 💀. i also gained an appreciation for the exiles’ storyline :] my biggest takeaway is: homestuck is whatever you make of it. it’s a goofy story if you don’t look too hard into it, but the more times you read it, the more you begin to understand wtf is going on (and thus gain even more appreciation for it). i enjoyed it during my second reread just as much as i did during my first (one and a half??) rereads of it, but for a different reason. but yeah i completely understand that it isn’t for everyone :,) i’m also a relatively new fan (i read it in early 2023), so i never got to experience the fandom at its peak. despite that, i’m still glad that homestuck exists because. homestuck.
Need more art like homestuck where you don't know what the hell is going on until everything starts clicking together and this mass of incoherency becomes a much neater but still messy spider web of details that is more of chaotic sheet web than a tidy orb web. More chaos stories :]
3:03 alright, at this point, I do take issue to the idea that a kid would be reacting to being able to do something cool with confusion instead of wanting to play with it. That's some Everyone is a Post Iron Man 2 Marvel Movie Character logic there. We don't need the characters being like "Woah are you seeing what I'm seeing?" They're kids, getting their hands on new "toys" and fumbling with them, while stuff gets heated out of their control, and they need to figure out how to survive as others going through the same process are killed around the world.
"Why would you put video game mechanics in the real world instead of just the video game?" They're not being sucked into a video game. The "game" SBurb is just an interface for them to enact the reproduction of the universe, and all the weird quirks of the worlds internal logic feed into this system of universe proliferation. Not everything needs to be explained at first, and really I do think a major reason Homestuck did lose plenty of people's interest isn't things that are flaws in it, so much in that Homestuck overextended past it's computer nerd target demographic, leading to much of the early humor being impenetrable to a general audience that eventually found it.
Someone told me this shit was peak and I read several hundred pages of the characters repeatedly picking up and dropping items due to their really specific "Card Carrying" ability or whatever and then I read an in-universe shitpost comic.
yes wheals.github.io/formspring/formspring.html#:~:text=mechanics%20in%20HS.-,same,-with%20the%20brief wheals.github.io/formspring/formspring.html#:~:text=HS%20is%20getting,that%20machine%20do%3F wheals.github.io/formspring/formspring.html#:~:text=Since%20before%20Homestuck%20started. wheals.github.io/blogspot/blogspot.html#interrogative-remarks-followed-by:~:text=homestuck%20hit%20you%3F-,At%20some%20point,-during%20the%20last hope those work
I stopped caring in act one, yes I've occasionally come across people who liked it and wondered if I did and when I said where I stopped they didn't seem surprised and just changed topics People want something obtuse and hard to follow and then seem disappointed when others don't want to follow
This doesn't need a 10 minute video, it's the exact same thing every single time. Someone shows you a beautiful flash of kids going on a magic adventure across time and space with incredible music then you go and read it and it's 14 hours of kids sitting in their rooms spouting 2004 comedy at each other
my friend made me play pesterquest with them and then i read homestuck afterwards. gave me a really unique sense of suspense because i knew a few secrets about the characters but absolutely NOTHING about the plot other than that it involved "some sort of time paradox or something" and "multiple universes? i guess?"
Ī think an argument could be made that homestuck got so popular in part because its so confusing. It walks a really fine line between understanable and nonsensical, where everything *can* be explained, and so when you're rewarded for remembering something or figuring something out, or even when it makes a reference to something you understand. People liked that. Act 1 is a bad introduction only in the sense that it's not indicative of the later portions of the story, however it feels like possibly the most important act, as it's a baseline, its how it started and its actually really easy to understand, because you can tell it's just shanangains. and so when you get to the narrative portions, once philosophy and stakes and disperate threads come together to become bigger and better not only is there the reward of understanding, but also it feels like the story has grown along with your understanding. The art gets better, the conversations become more intelligent and the characters grow, actually grow, and thats I think in part because so many of the characters start off so blank slatey. Tl;DR homestuck grows with the reader, in complexity, in art, in writing and in character. and thats why people like it so much
@@huntedexp8142 You could argue a lot of modern stuff gets popular because you need to interact with people to understand it. part of minecraft’s success could be due to how you need to look up crafting recipes and so the forums are going to grow as a result. my video on my fnaf also talks about this pattern. Hussie has compared HS to loss and how complexity actually aided discussion and popularity of both.
The furthest I ever got was act 5. Yeah. That was years ago, and I never continued it. However, I do want to read Homestuck. The reason why I gave up on it so many times is because there was SO MUCH to read, and I would get easily distracted and want to do other things. I don’t doubt it’s really interesting so I’m gonna get into it!
You summarized pretty much all my thoughts on Homestuck. My feelings towards it are ambivalent and bittersweet. It both was and wasn't worth reading it, but looking back now, as the lonely and weird child that i was, i feel like it was inevitable. I was basically part of the target audience for it. Still, i'm thankful for it entertaining me in my pre-teen and teen years. Its kinda like that song by Queen, "Radio Gaga", but instead of it being a valuable medium of communication, its a stupid webcomic that taught me nothing.
This is a really well presented video. I absolutely wanted to like the narrative of fnaf for a long time, but you make a really good point. When youve decoded the story as much as is possible you dont really get anything poignant and it certainly doesnt feel worth it
The timeline with the White background at the beginning is so bad that I've lost any urge to watch this video, I won't even like it dislike the video I'm just not dealing with staying on this video with a timeline that horrible with notes even worse.
13:53 Steel Wool mentions Freddy Krueger in this interview as a villain with some depth; not born a monster, but created. But if you've seen A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy is a child-murderer from the start. Not the best example in my opinion.
As a fan of A Nightmare on Elm Street, I can fully confirm he was born a monster. I mean, he was born from a nun being gang-banged by asylum patients when she was accidentally locked in overnight, and the school kids bullied Freddy by calling him "the son of a hundred maniacs"; he was basically doomed to be a monster and psychopath from the get-go. If anything, a monster created would be like Jason Vorhees: he was born innocent but with a physical deformity that led to him being picked on by kids and eventually drowned at Camp Crystal Lake, then he came back vengeful.
