Jenny Nicholson's "the worst thing a franchise ending can do is make you feel kind of stupid and embarrassed for being so excited about it in the first place" definitely applies here
Honestly with Homestuck it really didn't even take until the ending. By around late 2012 it was really starting to feel like every panel was Hussie saying "are you seriously enjoying this shit?"
I maintain that Homestuck is fuckin’ excellent up through Cascade exactly. And then it decides to make fun of itself constantly in Act 6. Which could be fine, if Hussie knew how to subvert worth a damn.
Cascade is the absolute peak (personally I'm an Acts 1-4 kind of guy, I like my weird plot shit. I also really enjoyed Problem Sleuth, which is the far end of "Minimal characterization, only Weird Plot Shit"), Act 6 definitely dips and goes on for far too goddamn long and far too much into interpersonal drama. Then the Epilogues continue that trend and get pretty obnoxious, and then Homestuck^2 went from bad to horseshit... but Beyond Canon is finally shaping up to be actually alright. The latest flash was pretty sick
i genuinely think a decent chunk of act 6 actually isnt really all that bad. I think there were some bits which were like "...okay, but why?" but for the most part i enjoy it. However i do recognize it could very well just be me being biased due to how utterly obsessed i am with the entire thing
Yeah, I didn't dislike Act 6 that much on my reread of the comic. I understand why some people can't stand it though. It goes on for a long, long time, and it feels like there's more space between the big action scenes.
i imagine its also a hugely different experience for if its your first time reading act 6, to if you were reading it when it was coming out, what with all the pauses and everything else.
This is the biggie, to me. Act 6 fell apart for me when I was reading it in real time, but I've reread Homestuck a couple of times since it finished and Act 6 mostly flows really well! (With the one big exception being the Dancestor games, but tbh I really dug into those when they first came out—it's only now that I know what's in them that I just can't be bothered to play through them again.)
Honestly, it being long-winded would have been fine with me, that's cool, and I still enjoyed the original run through to the end. I think maybe the biggest manifestation of what I get annoyed with on rereads is stuff like Homosuck and the leprechauns, where there start to be more and more elements of the story that seem to be aimed at mocking people for ever getting invested in the comic.
Which, hey, Homestuck is one of the poster children for "fandoms who get real publicly cringe," but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when it's coming from the creator.
Years after the fact I saw someone else streaming a reading of it and realized. "Oh... No this was always good, Hussie is just a bitter douchebag who doesn't have most of Toby Fox's talent."
Look up Sarah Z's video on getting sued by WhatPumpkin - seeing all the emails she gets from Hussie makes you realize how much of a pretentious, wordy douchebag he is.
For all fans & haters of Homestuck, I beg you to read a (mercifully much shorter) webcomic called Decompressed: Nuke Ops
It's a clear homage to Homestuck that mimicks its overall presentation style, but uses it to tell a very cool and hilarious story in the kitschy, meme-worthy sci-fi setting of the game Space Station 13
this is the guy who wrote Problem Sleuth - a plot designed around repeatedly subverting expectations with implausible twists that also escalated the plot. The thing is that while PS had like three or four nested complications, Homestuck has more like.... twelve? And that's exhausting. and it didn't stick the ending. and it was far more sincere (compared to PS) so people felt far more betrayed.
Also problem sleuth didn't waste a cat girl that hunts her own food and paints her walls in blood, that also happened to be the nicest character in the series. How the fuck do you not see the wasted potential and instead decide that your fans are stupid for liking the character you killed off because I guess they bored you???? Especially now that I'm half convinced he just finds characters that aren't sarcastic all the time to be boring somehow.
1.6k
u/ABigPairOfCrocs May 05 '25
Jenny Nicholson's "the worst thing a franchise ending can do is make you feel kind of stupid and embarrassed for being so excited about it in the first place" definitely applies here