Thread by @atomicthumbs

homestuck was pretty good, overall, but you had to be there

i had really liked problem sleuth, and discovered homestuck maybe three or four days into it, in april 2009, my junior year of high school.

it finished in april 2016, in my sophomore year of art school (community college null zone not included)

it was basically my primary fiction/media thing during that community college null zone. I checked the site every day, posted in the SA forum thread about it, and so on.

I don't think there's any experience exactly comparable to it. I haven't found anything.

homestuck is about 40% longer than War and Peace. Everyone knows it's long.

but that was spread out over most of a decade.

you can read a novel in a series of solid chunks, but it would be a completely different experience if you had time to think about it every few pages

time to think more about the characters and plot, ship them if you like that sort of thing, make fan art, fan fiction, fan music

there was enough time between plot points and during hiatuses in homestuck for the popular image of the fanbase to become *reviled*

you can archive-read Homestuck, but unless you are consuming it over the course of more than half a decade, you aren't getting the full Original Experience.

AND that was enhanced by the burble of activity in community spaces, many of which are just gone now (MSPA forums).

I haven't gone back and re-read it. I have way too much other things to do, and I worry some of the writing won't hold up to the maybe-idealized memories I have of it.

but I paused [S] Cascade to watch this and I am still feeling the echoes of what I felt when I first saw it

Until he ran out of steam and the story started to get bogged down, Andrew Hussie managed to keep a continuous escalation of character development, plot events, and things getting worse and even more serious for a frankly impressive number of years

every single time the update consisted of a single [S] page, one very big flash animation, that was a cue to not take a look at the site until I could make some time and sit down in a quiet place with a good pair of headphones.

because nearly every single one of them, for someone who had been reading the comic for years and made it part of their life, evoked emotions best described as "Oh Shit"

whether it was starting off by destroying the earth, closing plot loops, the antagonist becoming a superpowered demigod, entire universes being destroyed,

I can't even remember, so much shit happened in that comic

few people who were not properly indoctrinated the first time around will feel exactly the same sort of "oh FUCK" reaction to this, when the animation broke out of what had been the comic's framing dimensions for years

Flash is dying. Doesn't work on Firefox. Youtube breaks it.

so powerful my laptop's CPU couldn't handle encoding it

anyway, what i'm trying to say here is: homestuck is a piece of fiction semi-firmly anchored in the early to mid '10s. it's fiction but in its original, and IMO best form, it's fiction that takes years

also the music slaps

addendum: huh that's weird i don't remember this part