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mme_hardySo, last fall S. was superduper excited about the end of the Gigapause, which was a one-year gap during which Andrew Hussie wasn't updating the webcomic Homestuck. She was so excited that I finally had to look at the damn thing. It was a week before the end of the Gigapause, and I had a lot of time on my hands.
I inhaled the whole damn thing in a week, pretty much every minute I was awake. That's all 7000-ish (at the time) pages, many of them actually Flash movies or games.
Cut for Homestuck. You have been warned.
My trusty guide was my daughter, who used to be a passionate Homestuck fan but is on a gigapause herself. She succored me through the fearfully dull first chapter. She soothed my anguish over having to recognize not only characters' names but their screen names and the fscking initials of their screen names. (She also, shamefully, had to point out to me that Pesterlog text color was a cue as to who was talking.) She taught me how to read video games so that I could actually complete the Flash games. It turns out that reading video games is a skill like reading art or reading music; there are cues an experienced gamer absorbs without thinking, like which objects on the screen are probably interactive and which are just decoration.
And then the fscking trolls became full-fledged characters, and I walked in screaming that I could barely cope with four sets of names, nicknames, colors, and text quirks, and now there were sixteen of them MY LIFE WAS HARD. Little did I know. Note: I still have to carefully check the horns and symbols when characters aren't fully drawn. "Okay, teal, straight horns, Terezi" and so on. But I manage it. And I can't remember the Beforus trolls' names at all and I do not care.
And then the Gigapause ended, and GAME OVER ripped my heart out and tore it into tiny pieces and blew its nose on the pieces. And then Terezi came through with a righteous DOOF and told John to F1X TH1S. And now I'm grumblingly waiting for the current pause to be over.
And omg Homestuck. Homestuck that I am constantly rereading and picking up details that I missed the first time. Homestuck that I read even though every damn page is a migraine trigger, and for many of them I have to scroll so that the art is off the top of the page. Homestuck that I watch CASCADE over and over again even though it is the migraine trigger from hell.
(dissolves into an incoherent pile of squee and feels and worldbuilding and disaster and despair.) (contemplates sewing a scalemate.) (wants Rose's black-Squiddle-shirt-pink-sash-long-skirt GRIMDARK TRANCE OF THE WOEGOTHICS outfit)
Please talk to me about Homestuck. Please.
For the record: Kanaya and Terezi, best trolls; the Alpha Kids, best people; I ship Dave/Jade and Kanaya/Rose like burning. And the Beforus trolls, except Meenah, are awful and should be retconned out of existence. And I have a theory that Feferi's going to be somehow resurrected because she's necessary to the endgame -- somebody has to be in place to succeed the Condesce (as the ruler of Alternia, not as Scratch's plaything). And Kanaya's righteous chainsawing and DOOFing of Gamzee and Eridan was a glory to behold. And [subsides into incoherent gibbering]
Note: I also have intellectual things to say about plot and recursion and clever retcons and Web-native interactive narrative. Today is not an intellectual day.
I inhaled the whole damn thing in a week, pretty much every minute I was awake. That's all 7000-ish (at the time) pages, many of them actually Flash movies or games.
Cut for Homestuck. You have been warned.
My trusty guide was my daughter, who used to be a passionate Homestuck fan but is on a gigapause herself. She succored me through the fearfully dull first chapter. She soothed my anguish over having to recognize not only characters' names but their screen names and the fscking initials of their screen names. (She also, shamefully, had to point out to me that Pesterlog text color was a cue as to who was talking.) She taught me how to read video games so that I could actually complete the Flash games. It turns out that reading video games is a skill like reading art or reading music; there are cues an experienced gamer absorbs without thinking, like which objects on the screen are probably interactive and which are just decoration.
And then the fscking trolls became full-fledged characters, and I walked in screaming that I could barely cope with four sets of names, nicknames, colors, and text quirks, and now there were sixteen of them MY LIFE WAS HARD. Little did I know. Note: I still have to carefully check the horns and symbols when characters aren't fully drawn. "Okay, teal, straight horns, Terezi" and so on. But I manage it. And I can't remember the Beforus trolls' names at all and I do not care.
And then the Gigapause ended, and GAME OVER ripped my heart out and tore it into tiny pieces and blew its nose on the pieces. And then Terezi came through with a righteous DOOF and told John to F1X TH1S. And now I'm grumblingly waiting for the current pause to be over.
And omg Homestuck. Homestuck that I am constantly rereading and picking up details that I missed the first time. Homestuck that I read even though every damn page is a migraine trigger, and for many of them I have to scroll so that the art is off the top of the page. Homestuck that I watch CASCADE over and over again even though it is the migraine trigger from hell.
(dissolves into an incoherent pile of squee and feels and worldbuilding and disaster and despair.) (contemplates sewing a scalemate.) (wants Rose's black-Squiddle-shirt-pink-sash-long-skirt GRIMDARK TRANCE OF THE WOEGOTHICS outfit)
Please talk to me about Homestuck. Please.
For the record: Kanaya and Terezi, best trolls; the Alpha Kids, best people; I ship Dave/Jade and Kanaya/Rose like burning. And the Beforus trolls, except Meenah, are awful and should be retconned out of existence. And I have a theory that Feferi's going to be somehow resurrected because she's necessary to the endgame -- somebody has to be in place to succeed the Condesce (as the ruler of Alternia, not as Scratch's plaything). And Kanaya's righteous chainsawing and DOOFing of Gamzee and Eridan was a glory to behold. And [subsides into incoherent gibbering]
Note: I also have intellectual things to say about plot and recursion and clever retcons and Web-native interactive narrative. Today is not an intellectual day.
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no subject
Date: 2015-02-02 06:39 pm (UTC)I read most of what there was during the Gigapause, but I got bored and wandered off somewhere in Act VI during a long spell of teen drama-- I think I'm still stuck somewhere in the middle of John forgetting Rose's birthday.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-02 06:45 pm (UTC)IMHO yes, pick it back up. Fight your way through the Beta kids' romantic shenanigans, deal with the eye-burning horror of Trickster mode, then seriously cool stuff happens.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-02 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 07:17 am (UTC)Mind you, I <3 teen drama. I mean, fictional teen drama is pretty much what has gotten me through a lot of challenging life situations in the last few years.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 08:10 pm (UTC)Welcome to Homestuck fandom! It took me a whole damn summer to finish reading it, but I did. And then the summer after that I wrote two thousand words in teal pseudoleet because to do otherwise would be OOC. Homestuck is dangerous like that.
Have you read the semi-demi-quasi-canon-authorized-spinoff, Paradox Space?
no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 08:12 pm (UTC)Link to your fic?
I dip into Paradox Space frequently; I'm not caught up on the current episode.
I like a lot of the art better than Hussie's artMan, Hussie has SERIOUSLY delved into reflexive and self-modifying fiction in the last couple of months. How hard did the events of GAME OVER hit you? I went mad because I had nobody to discuss it with.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-03 08:43 pm (UTC)I would recommend all of it, though, it really all ties together and my teammates were really good writers and artists. (See also: entries for the previous (http://hswc2014-r1.dreamwidth.org/13052.html) rounds (http://hswc2014-r2.dreamwidth.org/4608.html).)
It was created for the collaborative round of last year's Homestuck Shipping World Cup (http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/), which we actually won! There's a huge amount of fic/art/games/recipes/crafts created every year for the HSWC, and in the bonus rounds people often manage to make the most bizarre ships/prompts work.
I agree with you about the art. The art was one of the things that kept me from actually reading Homestuck for so long. I was just like "but life is too short to read webcomics with bad art." But then I kept seeing really cool fanart, so I just went with it and eventually stayed for the overextended metaphors and callbacks.
And ahahahahah GAME OVER was.... I may have changed my IRC username to cruellyslainbyandrewhussie or something. I was sure it wouldn't be permanent, but it was still very upsetting, and really the only bright spot was Gamzee getting cut in half -- only that kind of thing never sticks with him, so... yeah.
I remember seeing someone's desperate mostly-not-serious theory that the dead trolls would all make it to their quest beds and reach God Tier, only Karkat's quest bed was somehow under all the lava and he would just fortuitously end up on it, which still makes me laugh.