Okay. Let me make my pitch.
I think you should read Homestuck.
If you are sitting there, an active fannish participant in 2017, then I know that feeling. Homestuck is huge and ubiquitous and sometimes its fandom is irritating. It’s deeply memetic and weird in a way that has a high barrier of entry, and you just are not interested in People Telling You About Homestuck.
I’m not gonna do that. I’m just gonna tell you, as someone who was in your shoes: you should read Homestuck.
A year ago today, the main story of Homestuck finally ended with the release of the Act 7 animation. Knowing literally nothing about it, but unable to avoid the explosion of reactions on my dash, I watched it.
I had no idea what the fuck was going on. But the music was stunning. So on a whim and with the knowledge I might fail out, I started Homestuck from the beginning.
The next two months, I got to experience why people cannot shut the fuck up about this goddamn ‘webcomic.’
There is literally nothing like it. Even people who look at the structure of Homestuck and draw out the major influences are missing that there is no other story like it. When I try to shorthand it, I call it “the homeric creation myth for the internet age.” And that still barely scratches the surface.
Homestuck is a funny story. The writing is some of the snappiest, most fast-paced wit I’ve ever seen. It’s loaded with visual jokes and running gags and the kind of back and forth repartee that the greatest comedy writers can only dream of, and everything in between.
Homestuck is a well-crafted story. It is long, and it is complicated, but it is never inscrutable, and all the jokes about how hard it is to understand Homestuck are simply untrue. It’s a story that takes you by the hand and teaches you a language of symbology and mechanics, and then uses that language to show you something so remarkable I can’t explain it to you because you have to know that language. And it’s all done perfectly organically and with careful pacing. By the time you read [S] Cascade, you feel like you were tricked into earning a PhD in this shit, and were rewarded for your time and attention.
Homestuck is a beautiful story. It’s visual style is at first glance simplistic, but is harnessed into pure art. It is filled to the brim with slick animations and with a soundtrack that goes hard as fucking hell and never stops.
Homestuck is a heartfelt story. It’s a story that has stakes that span entire universes and the fate of whole civilizations, but it never once forgets that it’s a story also about characters. And these characters are genuinely the most nuanced and carefully constructed and executed you have ever seen. There will be someone who hits you right in the heart. There will be someone who makes you grit your teeth in pure actual anger. There will be more than one who will make you proud by the end of their journey. And you will learn things about yourself through the cipher of these characters.
Homestuck is worth your time. I do not regret waiting so long to read it, because I genuinely feel like the archive read is a stronger story than the live update read. Now is absolutely the best time to read Homestuck, at your own pace, knowing there is a completed story ahead of you. You’ll learn something from the experience, either about the other media you consume, or about yourself, or about your own craft.
You’ll finally know understand what the fuck people are talking about, and get to feel that level of enthusiasm for yourself. And, my dudes, it is a very cool feeling.
So yeah. It’s 4/13, and I think now is the best time for you to read Homestuck.
Homestuck isn’t just “art” – it is the first work of an entirely new artistic and creative medium. That’s why it attracted artists like wild when the fandom first took off. There was – and is – the awestruck feeling that you were watching something entirely new be invented before your eyes.