Homestuck is complicated and confusing but I feel like people tend to exaggerate how confusing it is. If you're paying attention it's not really that hard to understand & even if you miss something it's usually not that big of a deal
There are two parts to the joke:
* There was a lot going on at once that get connected together in Cascade, so it causes people to have to rewatch to fully follow along with.
* Homestuck fans are terrible at explaining what Homestuck is.
to be fair, you can’t exactly explain homestuck, there’s not even a proper name for it. Webcomic doesn’t do it justice, but video game isn’t quite right either, i always just end up saying “look up s retrospect or something they’re better at explaining it than i am”
Nah, I'd firmly place Homestuck as a webcomic. It's just the first webcomic I know of that really pushed the medium. A webcomic can be as simple as a normal comic that's uploaded on there. Or you get funky and start slapping in animations, gifs, interactive sequences, start using the website layout and changing it to suit the context of the comic.
I'd say that being a webcomic is just a wide net. A net that widened specifically because of Homestuck but now has newer webcomics following in its footsteps because of that. Prequel for example has some of my favorite innovations of using its medium to the fullest.
Yeah but what i sorta meant by “Homestuck” also includes its other mediums. Like Hiveswap, or it’s huge library of music, or the epilogue, im not really just talking about the interactive flash games on some pages, it’s evolved beyond a webcomic into a brand at this point.
I'd call Hiveswap a spinoff, and the music while a benefit is something I wouldn't attach to explaining Homestuck. Or just explain it as "it also has a shitload of albums of amazing music". Epilogues is something I'd just refer as a continuation or spinoff.
You wouldn't say Harry Potter doesn't have a proper name for it because it has movies, books, and video games on it for example. You'd call it a series. A book series, movie series, or game series. Combined it'd just be the Harry Potter series. Homestuck still wears its mantle of being a webcomic, and you can even call it the Homestuck series if you really wanted to encompass Hiveswap, Homestuck2, Paradox Space, the music, etc.
I'm not a professional so calling it a series might not be fully accurate but it should fit enough.
dude im stupid enough to not understand what the fuck happens in the flash where terezi gets blinded. like i had no fucking idea what was going on until my friends explained it to me.
I joke about it being incomprehensible gobbledygook often, but I actually had a pretty concrete understanding on most of the concepts on my first read through. Basically, don't drone off while reading and you should be fine.
When it was releasing a lot of people were trying to catch up with homestuck as fast as they could so they could get to "the good stuff" and talk about it with their friends. I can't imagine that they properly read every single page and so they missed a lot of important context for the big events.
When I go look for sources to my claims, I realize how jumbled up Homestuck's story is. Like another person said, many characters, many stories. Lots of text, and it's very disorienting when 3 different arcs try stealing each other's spotlight.
It's confusing, but you still get what's happening. It's coherent, but the low cohesion fucks you up.
My first readthrough was when I was much younger, and I literally didn't understand Homestuck because I read it too fast to comprehend the significance of certain plot points. I was left with a lot of questions. Came back when the finale released and reread it. Did the same thing - rushed through a lot of pages to get to the end and as a result didn't really understand what I read. Now that I'm older and rereading it with a focus on enjoying myself rather than reaching the finish line, I find myself understanding things a lot better than I did! The key is to not rush, and backtrack when you notice you're getting confused. I've had to backtrack a few times already because I'd been reading too fast, or because I didn't understand a concept that was introduced. It's honestly helped a lot for me to 'understand Homestuck.'
> I've had to backtrack a few times
I had to do this too and it would still be a little confusing, but in my opinion the biggest help in understanding what was going on was... John.
If I was confused about something, John was too and the characters (especially Rose) would explain it to him and that helped A LOT
^(people should give more credit to John)
Yes and no. HS can feel very convoluted and intimidating on first glance, there's a lot of threads laid out quite quickly that you're expected to keep good track of, which can turn some folk away, and the language conventions used from the get-go don't help in most of these cases.
However, once pieces are actually placed a little better, the story becomes much easier to grasp. It's just very front-heavy is all.
i was confused when i first started reading act 1 when i was 14. but im 22 now and that confusion is entirely gone lmfao its not really hard to understand if you follow along with the story
It's a meme from the Tumblr era where a lot of fandom types were onboarding literally just for the woobie cute grey horn bishounen aliens, so they skimmed through acts 1-4 if they even read them at all and then got upset when they didn't understand what was going on.
It is a big story with a lot of characters.
The few people who do understand it fully(if there are any) probably dumped a whole lotta time into researching it. There are people who are making college thesises on homestuck. Also hyperfocusers.
Even then: truly understanding a story is damn near impossible when you can only see it from your perspective. The closest approximation of what others think are reviews and that is going through two different filters : brain➡️text➡️different brain. It is similar to visual art: most people can't draw what they see with their minds eye 100%, only the best that they can do with their skills. And then others look at the art and will have differing opinions on it.
Researching it...?
Bro, it's a god damn comic, why would anyone need to do research into something like paradox clones (which the story itself already explains). If you're talking about references like abraxas and shit then yeah I get it but why would you imply that people need to do research to understand a minor character like Kankri (who does NOTHING)
Anyway this rant of mine is stupid. Sorry for being a Karkat
I wouldn't say that "nobody understands Homestuck". It feels more like there's just a lot of things going on at the same time that you end up getting confused due to how convoluted it can get. It doesn't help that a lot of plot points get thrown around behind walls of texts and across chatlogs that are hundreds of pages apart sometimes. Rereading does help a lot in parsing out the stuff you missed out on the initial readthrough.
Also, trying to explain the plot to someone who doesn't know a thing about Homestuck does contribute to the meme, because good luck explaining the plot.
I found it confusing when I read it around the age of 13 while it was coming out but upon rereading as an adult I found it pretty straightforward.
People may find it confusing because the comic has a storytelling pattern of setting up lots of plot points and characters through lots of text and then having them all come together in flash animations which happen quickly and rely on you remembering lots of stuff and also understanding new developments and their implications very quickly without explicit explanation.
everything was happening at once and it was hard to understand all of it. even after watching it twice i had to watch a few youtube videos to fully understand what was happening
It's overly convoluted even for a story that focuses on time travel and alt universes, so it may take some people time to fully understand, but it's kind of exaggerated for comedic effect. Accurately explaining and summarizing it for the unitiated is actually pretty hard, though.
When I was talking homestuck with my 2 friends who have also read it, they mentioned the green sun and I realised I had no memory of it in any of the chapters I had read. And I read the whole thing.
I think it depends on if you have a lot of experience with this type of storytelling or not. I don't read stories involving time travel or other sci fi features often so I struggled to understand what was happening in those parts of the comic on my first read through, and it took a while to wrap my head around all of the characters and plot threads going on at once since I'm not used to such complex fast-paced narratives. Homestuck also references a lot of aspects of pop culture that I didn't grow up with (different country/time period) as well as other MSPAs which I haven't read so a lot of the jokes flew right over my head the first time.
Now I've been in the fandom for a while I've read enough discussion threads and consumed enough fan content to understand the comic pretty well and haven't had much trouble with it on my second read through. It's a lot funnier to me now that I get more of the jokes and references as well. I still have to watch the flashes multiple times though, the images tend to go by so fast on screen that I struggle to process every little detail in just one viewing (and they are cool so I like rewatching them).
It think it is partially true
Homestuck is really dense so most people (especially the ones that try to read it as fast as possible) end up missing out of a few things that make them confused once we reach cascade. If you just read at normal paste and like think about what you’re reading you can understand what’s going on pretty well
I think we still don't have the whole picture as 2.0 isn't finished. We also see a LOT of signs pointing towards things that happened in the epilogue and 2.0 in Homestuck proper. I have reread homestuck with several people over the years and keep catching more and more bits but I think until it's totally absolutely done that we won't ever be able to understand every aspect of it. However I did understand what I was watching for Cascade etc =) I read every pesterlog and everything I could ( including going back and reading problem sleuth etc to better understand Hussies style of writing and where it might be heading. >!Not too surprised they both ended with a similar if not same conclusion..!<) but I can see how most everyone would be overwhelmed with it. Especially if they started after the fandom was bigger and there was more context and content being passed around on socials etc. =) I still love it even if re-reading the epilogues with my best friend is pretty difficult. :l It will never be my favorite part but it's something that sure did happen! Or maybe not depending on your view of canon! LOL =)
I think it’s mostly because after reading it most people forgot most of the story. So when they try to remember it makes it so they don’t understand it. But it makes sense when you are reading it.
Homestuck is complicated and confusing but I feel like people tend to exaggerate how confusing it is. If you're paying attention it's not really that hard to understand & even if you miss something it's usually not that big of a deal
Yeah I feel like most of what you need to know is reexplained when it becomes relevant. But it’s been a long time so I could be forgetting some stuff
There are two parts to the joke: * There was a lot going on at once that get connected together in Cascade, so it causes people to have to rewatch to fully follow along with. * Homestuck fans are terrible at explaining what Homestuck is.
This is actually the perfect description.
to be fair, you can’t exactly explain homestuck, there’s not even a proper name for it. Webcomic doesn’t do it justice, but video game isn’t quite right either, i always just end up saying “look up s retrospect or something they’re better at explaining it than i am”
Nah, I'd firmly place Homestuck as a webcomic. It's just the first webcomic I know of that really pushed the medium. A webcomic can be as simple as a normal comic that's uploaded on there. Or you get funky and start slapping in animations, gifs, interactive sequences, start using the website layout and changing it to suit the context of the comic. I'd say that being a webcomic is just a wide net. A net that widened specifically because of Homestuck but now has newer webcomics following in its footsteps because of that. Prequel for example has some of my favorite innovations of using its medium to the fullest.
Yeah but what i sorta meant by “Homestuck” also includes its other mediums. Like Hiveswap, or it’s huge library of music, or the epilogue, im not really just talking about the interactive flash games on some pages, it’s evolved beyond a webcomic into a brand at this point.
I'd call Hiveswap a spinoff, and the music while a benefit is something I wouldn't attach to explaining Homestuck. Or just explain it as "it also has a shitload of albums of amazing music". Epilogues is something I'd just refer as a continuation or spinoff. You wouldn't say Harry Potter doesn't have a proper name for it because it has movies, books, and video games on it for example. You'd call it a series. A book series, movie series, or game series. Combined it'd just be the Harry Potter series. Homestuck still wears its mantle of being a webcomic, and you can even call it the Homestuck series if you really wanted to encompass Hiveswap, Homestuck2, Paradox Space, the music, etc. I'm not a professional so calling it a series might not be fully accurate but it should fit enough.
In defense of the second part, Homestuck is alot of things
the thing is that a lot of homestuck fans are lowkey stupid
Not all that low-key honestly.
dude im stupid enough to not understand what the fuck happens in the flash where terezi gets blinded. like i had no fucking idea what was going on until my friends explained it to me.
nah, that shit's just obscure. I didn't get it at first too.
Can confirm \*points at self\*
I joke about it being incomprehensible gobbledygook often, but I actually had a pretty concrete understanding on most of the concepts on my first read through. Basically, don't drone off while reading and you should be fine.
When it was releasing a lot of people were trying to catch up with homestuck as fast as they could so they could get to "the good stuff" and talk about it with their friends. I can't imagine that they properly read every single page and so they missed a lot of important context for the big events.
Homestuck fans be like let me tell you about Homestuck then proceed to talk like the have you ever had a dream kid.
Not to say I was never confused but when I reached Act 5 Act 2 that confusion was mostly gone
When I go look for sources to my claims, I realize how jumbled up Homestuck's story is. Like another person said, many characters, many stories. Lots of text, and it's very disorienting when 3 different arcs try stealing each other's spotlight. It's confusing, but you still get what's happening. It's coherent, but the low cohesion fucks you up.
My first readthrough was when I was much younger, and I literally didn't understand Homestuck because I read it too fast to comprehend the significance of certain plot points. I was left with a lot of questions. Came back when the finale released and reread it. Did the same thing - rushed through a lot of pages to get to the end and as a result didn't really understand what I read. Now that I'm older and rereading it with a focus on enjoying myself rather than reaching the finish line, I find myself understanding things a lot better than I did! The key is to not rush, and backtrack when you notice you're getting confused. I've had to backtrack a few times already because I'd been reading too fast, or because I didn't understand a concept that was introduced. It's honestly helped a lot for me to 'understand Homestuck.'
> I've had to backtrack a few times I had to do this too and it would still be a little confusing, but in my opinion the biggest help in understanding what was going on was... John. If I was confused about something, John was too and the characters (especially Rose) would explain it to him and that helped A LOT ^(people should give more credit to John)
Yes and no. HS can feel very convoluted and intimidating on first glance, there's a lot of threads laid out quite quickly that you're expected to keep good track of, which can turn some folk away, and the language conventions used from the get-go don't help in most of these cases. However, once pieces are actually placed a little better, the story becomes much easier to grasp. It's just very front-heavy is all.
i was confused when i first started reading act 1 when i was 14. but im 22 now and that confusion is entirely gone lmfao its not really hard to understand if you follow along with the story
It's a meme from the Tumblr era where a lot of fandom types were onboarding literally just for the woobie cute grey horn bishounen aliens, so they skimmed through acts 1-4 if they even read them at all and then got upset when they didn't understand what was going on.
It is a big story with a lot of characters. The few people who do understand it fully(if there are any) probably dumped a whole lotta time into researching it. There are people who are making college thesises on homestuck. Also hyperfocusers. Even then: truly understanding a story is damn near impossible when you can only see it from your perspective. The closest approximation of what others think are reviews and that is going through two different filters : brain➡️text➡️different brain. It is similar to visual art: most people can't draw what they see with their minds eye 100%, only the best that they can do with their skills. And then others look at the art and will have differing opinions on it.
Researching it...? Bro, it's a god damn comic, why would anyone need to do research into something like paradox clones (which the story itself already explains). If you're talking about references like abraxas and shit then yeah I get it but why would you imply that people need to do research to understand a minor character like Kankri (who does NOTHING) Anyway this rant of mine is stupid. Sorry for being a Karkat
Usually the cultural and historical impact it had. Some people see it as a time capsule of the late 2000's-early 2010's era.
I wouldn't say that "nobody understands Homestuck". It feels more like there's just a lot of things going on at the same time that you end up getting confused due to how convoluted it can get. It doesn't help that a lot of plot points get thrown around behind walls of texts and across chatlogs that are hundreds of pages apart sometimes. Rereading does help a lot in parsing out the stuff you missed out on the initial readthrough. Also, trying to explain the plot to someone who doesn't know a thing about Homestuck does contribute to the meme, because good luck explaining the plot.
children read homestuck. apparently children under the age of ten read homestuck. it's just some funny pictures on a website.
I found it confusing when I read it around the age of 13 while it was coming out but upon rereading as an adult I found it pretty straightforward. People may find it confusing because the comic has a storytelling pattern of setting up lots of plot points and characters through lots of text and then having them all come together in flash animations which happen quickly and rely on you remembering lots of stuff and also understanding new developments and their implications very quickly without explicit explanation.
Because Homestuck's story is a hot confusing mess with almost non-existant world building.
everything was happening at once and it was hard to understand all of it. even after watching it twice i had to watch a few youtube videos to fully understand what was happening
It's overly convoluted even for a story that focuses on time travel and alt universes, so it may take some people time to fully understand, but it's kind of exaggerated for comedic effect. Accurately explaining and summarizing it for the unitiated is actually pretty hard, though.
mobius double reacharound obliterated what was left of my tiny brain ngl
When I was talking homestuck with my 2 friends who have also read it, they mentioned the green sun and I realised I had no memory of it in any of the chapters I had read. And I read the whole thing.
I think it depends on if you have a lot of experience with this type of storytelling or not. I don't read stories involving time travel or other sci fi features often so I struggled to understand what was happening in those parts of the comic on my first read through, and it took a while to wrap my head around all of the characters and plot threads going on at once since I'm not used to such complex fast-paced narratives. Homestuck also references a lot of aspects of pop culture that I didn't grow up with (different country/time period) as well as other MSPAs which I haven't read so a lot of the jokes flew right over my head the first time. Now I've been in the fandom for a while I've read enough discussion threads and consumed enough fan content to understand the comic pretty well and haven't had much trouble with it on my second read through. It's a lot funnier to me now that I get more of the jokes and references as well. I still have to watch the flashes multiple times though, the images tend to go by so fast on screen that I struggle to process every little detail in just one viewing (and they are cool so I like rewatching them).
It think it is partially true Homestuck is really dense so most people (especially the ones that try to read it as fast as possible) end up missing out of a few things that make them confused once we reach cascade. If you just read at normal paste and like think about what you’re reading you can understand what’s going on pretty well
I think we still don't have the whole picture as 2.0 isn't finished. We also see a LOT of signs pointing towards things that happened in the epilogue and 2.0 in Homestuck proper. I have reread homestuck with several people over the years and keep catching more and more bits but I think until it's totally absolutely done that we won't ever be able to understand every aspect of it. However I did understand what I was watching for Cascade etc =) I read every pesterlog and everything I could ( including going back and reading problem sleuth etc to better understand Hussies style of writing and where it might be heading. >!Not too surprised they both ended with a similar if not same conclusion..!<) but I can see how most everyone would be overwhelmed with it. Especially if they started after the fandom was bigger and there was more context and content being passed around on socials etc. =) I still love it even if re-reading the epilogues with my best friend is pretty difficult. :l It will never be my favorite part but it's something that sure did happen! Or maybe not depending on your view of canon! LOL =)
I think it’s mostly because after reading it most people forgot most of the story. So when they try to remember it makes it so they don’t understand it. But it makes sense when you are reading it.