There is a gallon of milk. you bring it along as you decide to start a trip with your friends. During the trip your car breaks and you and your friends are forced to reach the destination in other ways. The trip becomes significantly longer, your friends start to show tiredness and problems. Some of your friends start dating and then break up. Others do mistakes to each other that can hardly be forgiven and they’ll never speak again. Others start thinking about their problems. Others come out as transgender and/or queer. others reflect on their action. At one point, you all arrive at your destination, your lives forever changed. You open your backpack only to find the milk that traveled with you this whole time, you offer it to your friends before you all separate. You pour the milk. As you and your friends drink it, you come to a realisation. The milk is expired.

Homestuck is like the trip, because it united people and characters and changed them forever. Homestuck is like the milk, because it expired very quickly, and very badly.

Due to its significance, its rich art variety and characters and internet context, I recommend it to anyone to read it at least once.

Homestuck is honestly one of the most fascinatingly unique works of art out there, it’s a “webcomic”, but like you can pretty easily also consider it a Visual Novel which I think is really funny, and it is a TRIP, closing in on the final 300 or so pages, I felt like randomly checking out some of act 1, and it really hit my how it’s basically become a completely different thing between the beginning and the end.

I think the Homestuck’s main flaw is probably the pacing, you can go from like 50 pages that are just non-stop images, and like 5 pages that are just walls of text, it feels very uneven, and I kinda wish they used more music during the long Pesterlog pages to make them feel a tad more dynamic. Obviously the music is all around fantastic, but I do wish the comic would’ve used it more often then it does, by the time I got to the second half, I just put on the complete music playlist on the background while reading must of the pages, and while it didn’t always fit, it nevertheless helped out, considering the pacing is at its worst with act 6.

It’s kinda well known that act 6, which comprises Homestuck’s latter half, is generally regarded as “lesser” and best, and outright terrible at worst. I definitely don’t think it has the consistent highs of act 5, but honestly overall I didn’t “hate” my time going through it as much as most seem to, there were still a lot of moments I found myself enjoying, though I also don’t really think act 5 is quite as great as some make it out to be, which may be why my expectations were more tempered.

I think my favorite part of the experience is mainly the characters, as while it is a tad hit or miss, the character writing here is like, DECEPTIVELY really good a lot of the time, I feel like Homestuck uses its unique structure to deliver on a lot of character types you rarely ever see in fiction, like most of the main cast feels really unique. This may be a bit weird coming from me, but I think my favorite cast member here is honestly Karkat, on the surface he’s kinda just this really angry guy, but there’s a lot of layers to him regarding his self loathing, and it actually hit me a bit in a really weird way I wasn’t expecting.

I can definitely see why Homestuck was as big as it was, it’s kinda confusing a lot of the time yeah, but during those moments where you actually GET what’s going on, and it allows itself to lead into insanely cool, downright euphoric moments like Cascade and Collide, where everything comes together for this huge spectacular even, that’s when it really click, and I GET it man, this is a really damn cool.

But still, it’s locked being a lot of meandering and a lot of dumb moments that feel like padding, the humor was honestly a tad hit or miss for me not gonna lie, there were a good amount of really funny parts, but a lot of jokes also didn’t really do much for me, though humor is very subjective, so I can’t really all that much against it.

At the end of the day, Homestuck wasn’t really much of my cup of tea, but I still enjoyed it during some moments, and have a lot of respect for it. Really glad I went through it to be able to see just what it’s all about, but I’m also equally glad that it’s done, godspeed Homestuck, godspeed…

i have a newfound disdain for what it became after the trolls, for its author, and for its effects on me as a idiot tween, but i have to acknowledge that this middle step in the formative pipeline towards who i am is just as important as what began it:

youtube poop

(is there any reason they kept calling it act 6, i stopped reading this comic over a full decade ago)

==> Minor spoilers ahead

"You can finally say with absolute conviction that it's all been worth it. It has all paid off. All roads no matter how treacherous brought you to this glory. Every obscure plot thread, every batshit twist, ..., every bit of dubious narrative legerdemain, ALL of it you now realize was designed with excruciating precision to achieve this singular, magnificent result." - Homestuck, page 7928

I can safely say without a doubt that this is my favorite piece of media ever. The well written story, the nonlinear storytelling, the characters, the soundtrack, the weird plot shit [sic], the time traveling shenanigans; all of this combined have created one of the greatest stories ever told. There are many moments that will leave you speechless. There is no such experience as seeing [s] Cascade, or [s] Caliborn: Enter the first time. This shit is peak fiction.

Homestuck is very debatable, from people saying how Act 1 is boring and painful to go through, the second half being worse than the first, and finally how the ending is rushed.
Act 1 really sets the tone of the story and is important in understanding how the game works and lays the foundation for later. Considering it is only about 250 pages in an 8000-page long comic, I'm not complaining.
The second half is not worse than the first, it's just different. It was made as a sequel to the first, and that is a very important distinction. The tone and direction the story takes are way different in the second half. My only complaints are the kinda slow start of Act 6, especially after the explosive ending of Act 5, and Act 6 Intermission 3 felt kinda boring after a while. Other than that, there were many great moments in Act 6. And really, you can't complain after seeing something like [s] Caliborn: Enter; I spent about a week just watching it and have not dared to move to the next page.
The rushed ending I kinda agree with. Act 7 could have benefitted from being like 6 minutes longer or something, but it has served its purpose and it was one of the best animations I've ever seen.
I wanted to write a longer review, but you can't really talk about Homestuck without spoiling a bunch of things and I'd hate to spoil this masterpiece to anyone.

So, if you're reading this, please give Homestuck a read. It will be worth your time.
I most likely will start rereading this a couple of months from now, so, there is that.

tl;dr
it's a comic and it's a game and it's awesome.
end of story.

This is a reread.

At my first readthrough 6 years ago, i could not understand english, and the translation in my language stopped at act 6.

Now i'm bilingual. And i understood everything.
Every joke, every time travel bullshit all the shenanigans, why horses are so ironic.

I fought the homestuck. I like to think that for once, i beat it.

I don't know why this is on here but the sheer novelty of it being here made me want to review it.

WHAT IS HOMESTUCK?

Homestuck is a webcomic. It is functionally designed very differently than most webcomics before it, to the point where it spawned a subgenre of webcomic structure. It also features some amount of interactivity beyond simply pressing the "next page" button. It is also much more text-heavy than art-heavy. I've seen people compare it to visual novels, and I suppose you could consider it that for the sake of it being on this website.

Homestuck follows the story of a number of teenagers who play a mysterious game that reshapes the world and brings forth the apocalypse, with the intended end goal of creating a new universe from it. Things become very complicated on textual and narrative levels as this game becomes doomed to fail.

A rather famous part of the story is the introduction of "the trolls", 12 other teenagers who are part of a dystopian alien race that preceded the universe that Earth is a part of. This is because once the story begins to focus on them, Homestuck morphs from a webcomic aimed at programmers in their 30s to a YA story focused on drama, comedy, and romance. This would create massive waves and ripples throughout the online world as it managed to massively spike in popularity but left points in contention between various parts of the online communities focused on Homestuck, the online communities that were uninterested in Homestuck but would encounter discussion of it nonetheless, and the primary author and artist of the webcomic, who despite everything was still very much the sort of edgy 00s computer nerd that the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the early 2010s was beginning to exist without.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time online. Getting to use the computer was aspirational, and eventually I finally got a computer of my own. In the comments section of a zelda fansite, I saw somebody link a webcomic called VG Cats. This isn't about that webcomic and that is a much briefer discussion that can be saved for another day.

What IS important however is that through there I discovered a comic called MS Paint Adventures, and their main story Problem Sleuth. I really liked Problem Sleuth. I found the structure that could be considered a parody of graphic text adventures very interesting and extremely funny. I read a good portion of it and then forgot about it for a while.

Fast forward to 2010. I am in sophmore year of high school and very fond of one particular website: TV Tropes. This is a little bit more about that website than the webcomic, but only to a certain degree. The big thing about the site was that it was a bunch of nerds from ages 13-35 trying to define media solely through media tropes. This had a number of downsides but in a nation with a failing public education system, it provided a greater deal of things to work with beyond whatever the Department of Education limited public school faculty to teaching such as "math presented in a dull and confusing way" and "a propagandized summary of pre-1960s America repeated again and again over 12 years".

TV Tropes also had a user forum, and in that forum I got to interact with and RP with a number of other nerds from ages 13-35. Through these nerds, I had learned that not only had Problem Sleuth ended, but the creator had moved on to starting a newer and more ambitious project: Homestuck.

For the next 2 years (give or take a few months) I was deeply immersed in the webcomic, and used the TV Tropes forums as a primary outlet for discussion of the comic. This had it's ups and downs. I was not the most politically intelligent teenager and did not have the best influences both on and offline.

At a certain point in the comic, what appeared to have been the penultimate portion of the story was revealed to have in fact been the midpoint. This, combined with a lot of other soured opinions I had read at the time, caused me to completely burn out on trying to continue keeping up with the project, and I more or less never touched it for roughly a decade, letting the comic's negative reputation wash over me.

In 2021, the Ranged Touch podcast network started a podcast called Homestuck Made This World. It was a dedicated effort to reread, analyze, and historically re-contextualize the webcomic Homestuck. This was a herculean effort, and was only able to be accomplished because the two hosts were trained academics who had managed to become successful enough as podcasters that they were able to put in needed amount of time and effort. Their discussions were deeply interesting and gave a significant amount more thought to what Homestuck was than most of the online world would ever dare to entertain. This motivated me to read along with the podcast, and so I did from the very beginning to the very end. Because of this, I highly recommend anyone interested in reading the comic to use the show as a companion piece so that one may both gain a better appreciation for what they read and so they may use the milestones of reading up to the end of the next episode as a healthy way to pace oneself when attempting to read such a daunting text.

SO WHAT DID I THINK OF HOMESTUCK?

Honestly? I think I liked it a lot. Despite burning out midway as a teenager, there was a lot to it that kept me interested before that point. As an adult, having the podcast as a companion and the wound-healing nature of time gave me a much better appreciation for what I was reading. It certainly has it's ups and downs, however.

Probably the single biggest criticism I can give of the work is that the main writer and artist, who is white, is racist towards black people in a very particular way where they are broadly favorable towards and interested in black culture, but have limited their understanding of blackness to the pop culture of their past and present. Aside from that, the rather antagonistic relationship they had with their readerbase was poorly-considered and deeply unhealthy for everyone involved and leads to a lot of additions that overall hinder the work. The beast of what Homestuck is also leads to a lot of confusing and extraneous details that are a little more trouble than they are worth narratively.

The single biggest praise I can give is how deeply fascinating, weird, and experimental it is from beginning to end. It serves as a rather bizarre melting pot of many different aspects of the late 20th and early 21st century online world, from an unconventional design to toying with narrative concepts across many genres to rather odd fixations with cultural detritus. Nothing like it existed before, and given the very particular circumstances of what it was and the world it was a part of, it is very likely nothing quite like it will exist again. I cannot recommend it enough, if for no other reason than a greater understanding of the online world around you.

For the ideal experience, I recommend downloading the unofficial fan archive (For much of what it was simply does not exist online in the same capacity through official channels) as well as using the podcast Homestuck Made This World as a companion piece (for reasons mention earlier).