queenshulamit-deactivated201602 asked: If I read Homestck, would ity be a good idea to quit at the end of act 5?

ghostdunk:

nostalgebraist:

I’m not sure I would recommend that per se?

For one thing, not everyone dislikes Act 6, and not everyone who dislikes it (or finds it not fully satisfying) dislikes it as much as I do.  The conversation surrounding Act 6 is a lot like the conversation surrounding Steven Moffat in Dr. Who fandom (from what I can tell from the outside): there’s so much negativity toward a particular part of the work (“Act 6” or “Dr. Who with Moffat as showrunner”) that at times it can seem like a sort of consensus, but it’s not like there aren’t people who like the widely disliked thing, or like there isn’t a real conversation to be had about its merits.  If I were to say “don’t read Act 6” it would be like saying “stop watching Dr. Who after Moffat starts running it” which might statistically be pretty good advice (since many dislike these things) but would deprive the advisee of a chance to judge the newer, different stuff on their own.

Also, Act 6 has some parts that even I like.  You should at least read until Roxy Lalonde appears because you need Roxy Lalonde in your life.  And it’s not like its badness is actively offensive or disturbing (well, mostly).  It’s mostly just kind of overly long and tiresome and disappointing.  At worst it’s a waste of some time.  (And even then, a waste of some time that will let you understand innumerable internet arguments / fanarts / etc.)

i emphatically disagree!

it’s even worse than saying “stop watching dr. who after moffat starts ruining it” because homestuck is a single story, dr who is a serial. theres lots of fiction that has disappointing endings, and id never advise someone to just read/watch half of those stories. sure, you can quit halfway through if you don’t like it, but either you like it or you don’t. if you really think someone is gonna be turned off by act 6, or you think it’s wasting their time, don’t tell them to read homestuck.

don’t plan to read half a story!

I disagree with this because I think the distinction between “single story” and “serial” is not always clear-cut, and Homestuck is a pretty clear case of something that’s in between the two.

There are cases when, say, some author will write a long series of books that aren’t going anywhere in particular (though there may be a running “through line” in the plot) – something very much a serial – and then they’ll cap it off with a book that gives a definitive ending, closes off characters arcs and loose ends, etc.  Does this suddenly retroactively make it a “single story” and thus something one has to read all the way through.  What if the standard advice was “stop reading after book 5, they start to suck” and then book 13 comes out and turns out to be a definitive ending – does “read books 1-5 and then stop” now become bad advice?  What changed to make it so?

Twin Peaks might be a good example here – it was something that clearly was supposed to be a complete story, but which got screwed up by struggles between writers and management (I think?  management suddenly told the writers they had to reveal who the murderer was and that screwed up the plot?) and ended up with a bunch of oddly bad, irrelevant episodes in the second season, all capped off with a final “good” episode that brings things back to the main story.  Does the existence of that last episode mean that one can’t say “stop Twin Peaks once the bad episodes start,” because the whole thing has to be treated as a cohesive whole, even when it clearly isn’t?

(The really extreme, clobber-you-over-the-head-with-unsubtlety example here is Cerebus, a complete story – planned from the beginning to be 300 issues telling the life of a single character all the way to his death, and executed as planned, in that sense! – which completely changed tone and content to the point that many people who love the earlier issues find the later ones unreadable, extremely offensive, or some combination of both.  Cerebus is complete, but it’s the furthest thing possible from cohesive.)

Homestuck seems clearly in the vein of these examples: although Hussie has had some sort of ending planned this whole time (or so he claims), the story has clearly evolved in ways he didn’t expect, and earlier parts were written under assumptions about the later parts that turned out to be false.  When he was writing Act 5 he told us that it was “the big one,” the one where all the plot threads came out in full, and that Act 6 would be a shorter, climactic cap-off to Act 5.  When he was writing the really early parts he thought Homestuck would be over in a year!  There are clearly elements of a serial there, and elements of the Twin Peaks / Cerebus sort of thing where earlier parts were written with assumptions about the later parts in mind that turned out to be false.

There is a level of difference, even in a story with an ending, at which you can say “this has clearly stopped being what it was once planned to be.”  (Or “what we once wanted it to be.”)  And that can make reading only part of the story a good idea, sometimes, I think.  Some people say “please please please read High Society and Church and State, and please please please don’t read the later volumes of Cerebus,” and I don’t think they’re wrong, even if, yes, the aardvark does die in Issue 300, just like Dave said he would.

turboshitnerd asked: re: Homestuck, I see your point but like, Hussie said back in Act 5 that the ending had been on his mind the whole time and hadn't significantly changed from his conception in the very beginning, and even now with A6 I feel like the ending he has in mind is probably still essentially the same. Plus, even though A6 is definitely different from A5, if you're reading it as a serial it's not "this comic ive been reading forever is suddenly hard to get through"... (cont)

if you’re just reading it from the archive, i feel like the reaction if you don’t like a lot of act 6 is just “well, it starts dragging a lot in act 6”. as long as the reader keeps moving i feel like some of the bad/weird/boring parts get minimized. like, with the trickster stuff, people often react really really negatively to it, but a serial reader had to wait like a month for the whole thing to finish whereas an archival reader gets through it in what… maybe an hour tops?

This is all true, and I guess I personally don’t have an archival reader’s perspective on A6.  OTOH I feel like I’ve heard archival readers talk about the same effect.  E.g. in response to my earlier post about this, an-animal-imagined-by-poe (who archive binged during the Gigapause) said:

This is pretty much exactly what happened to me - there are parts of act 6 I’ve enjoyed (and I’ll admit I actually like the ancestor stuff, with a heavy dose of headcanon), but mostly I just can’t stop.

A lot of what I’m talking about is serial reader embitterment but I don’t think it’s just that?  Also, anyone reading Homestuck right now will get the chance to be an embittered serial reader for a least a little while

queenshulamit-deactivated201602 asked: If I read Homestck, would ity be a good idea to quit at the end of act 5?

zombiedelphos:

ghostdunk:

nostalgebraist:

ghostdunk:

nostalgebraist:

I’m not sure I would recommend that per se?

For one thing, not everyone dislikes Act 6, and not everyone who dislikes it (or finds it not fully satisfying) dislikes it as much as I do.  The conversation surrounding Act 6 is a lot like the conversation surrounding Steven Moffat in Dr. Who fandom (from what I can tell from the outside): there’s so much negativity toward a particular part of the work (“Act 6” or “Dr. Who with Moffat as showrunner”) that at times it can seem like a sort of consensus, but it’s not like there aren’t people who like the widely disliked thing, or like there isn’t a real conversation to be had about its merits.  If I were to say “don’t read Act 6” it would be like saying “stop watching Dr. Who after Moffat starts running it” which might statistically be pretty good advice (since many dislike these things) but would deprive the advisee of a chance to judge the newer, different stuff on their own.

Also, Act 6 has some parts that even I like.  You should at least read until Roxy Lalonde appears because you need Roxy Lalonde in your life.  And it’s not like its badness is actively offensive or disturbing (well, mostly).  It’s mostly just kind of overly long and tiresome and disappointing.  At worst it’s a waste of some time.  (And even then, a waste of some time that will let you understand innumerable internet arguments / fanarts / etc.)

i emphatically disagree!

it’s even worse than saying “stop watching dr. who after moffat starts ruining it” because homestuck is a single story, dr who is a serial. theres lots of fiction that has disappointing endings, and id never advise someone to just read/watch half of those stories. sure, you can quit halfway through if you don’t like it, but either you like it or you don’t. if you really think someone is gonna be turned off by act 6, or you think it’s wasting their time, don’t tell them to read homestuck.

don’t plan to read half a story!

I disagree with this because I think the distinction between “single story” and “serial” is not always clear-cut, and Homestuck is a pretty clear case of something that’s in between the two.

There are cases when, say, some author will write a long series of books that aren’t going anywhere in particular (though there may be a running “through line” in the plot) — something very much a serial — and then they’ll cap it off with a book that gives a definitive ending, closes off characters arcs and loose ends, etc.  Does this suddenly retroactively make it a “single story” and thus something one has to read all the way through.  What if the standard advice was “stop reading after book 5, they start to suck” and then book 13 comes out and turns out to be a definitive ending — does “read books 1-5 and then stop” now become bad advice?  What changed to make it so?

Twin Peaks might be a good example here — it was something that clearly was supposed to be a complete story, but which got screwed up by struggles between writers and management (I think?  management suddenly told the writers they had to reveal who the murderer was and that screwed up the plot?) and ended up with a bunch of oddly bad, irrelevant episodes in the second season, all capped off with a final “good” episode that brings things back to the main story.  Does the existence of that last episode mean that one can’t say “stop Twin Peaks once the bad episodes start,” because the whole thing has to be treated as a cohesive whole, even when it clearly isn’t?

(The really extreme, clobber-you-over-the-head-with-unsubtlety example here is Cerebus, a complete story — planned from the beginning to be 300 issues telling the life of a single character all the way to his death, and executed as planned, in that sense! — which completely changed tone and content to the point that many people who love the earlier issues find the later ones unreadable, extremely offensive, or some combination of both.  Cerebus is complete, but it’s the furthest thing possible from cohesive.)

Homestuck seems clearly in the vein of these examples: although Hussie has had some sort of ending planned this whole time (or so he claims), the story has clearly evolved in ways he didn’t expect, and earlier parts were written under assumptions about the later parts that turned out to be false.  When he was writing Act 5 he told us that it was “the big one,” the one where all the plot threads came out in full, and that Act 6 would be a shorter, climactic cap-off to Act 5.  When he was writing the really early parts he thought Homestuck would be over in a year!  There are clearly elements of a serial there, and elements of the Twin Peaks / Cerebus sort of thing where earlier parts were written with assumptions about the later parts in mind that turned out to be false.

There is a level of difference, even in a story with an ending, at which you can say “this has clearly stopped being what it was once planned to be.”  (Or “what we once wanted it to be.”)  And that can make reading only part of the story a good idea, sometimes, I think.  Some people say “please please please read High Society and Church and State, and please please please don’t read the later volumes of Cerebus,“ and I don’t think they’re wrong, even if, yes, the aardvark does die in Issue 300, just like Dave said he would.

But there’s no closure at the end of Act 5. I don’t see how you can view Act 5 as any kind of ending? At the very least, I can see how you might can a case for reading through Act 5, then skipping to ??? where ??? is as of yet unknown.

The thing I think some people are missing is that act 6 isn’t “slow and pointless”. It mirrors the beginning of the comic AND it quickly begins connecting itself with acts 1-5. Should we skip the first three acts because they’re slow, and so many of the actions are pointless commands put in by readers?

No, that’s ridiculous. If you don’t like the story, don’t read it, but whether you enjoy it enough to stick through to the end or not, do not go around telling people to stop reading halfway through the story.

You’re answering a criticism of Act 6 that I don’t think anyone upthread actually made.  My reasons for disliking Act 6 don’t have anything to do with the beginning being too slow.  If you’re curious about what they are, see here (warning for others: spoilers).

I think my post above makes it clear why I think it’s OK to tell someone to stop partway through a story.  Would you also object to the people who tell people to read some, but not all, of Cerebus?

Anonymous asked: Hey, I've been wanting to read some more analysis on homestuck and its fall. Could you point me towards some other good writers of that?

I’m just going to link to a few tumblr friends who post about many things besides HS – I think they’ve all got their stuff pretty nicely tagged, so I think you can find the HS crit that way.

(When you say “its fall” I take it to mean you want people like me who think it really went downhill at some point in Act 6, so I’m choosing people who have that general orientation)

sir-argues-a-lot has written a lot of stuff about Homestuck over the years, including update reactions and a lot of character arc analysis.  He’s also “Conspicuous” over on MSPAF and has written similar stuff over there.  (Note: I myself posted on MSPAF for a while under the same username I have here and wrote a ton of Act 6 criticism over there, albeit of dubious quality)

blurds doesn’t write about Homestuck especially often, but it’s always great when he does.  He’s also notable in this context for having stayed on the boat for a lot longer than I did – I was frustrated with A6 from pretty early on, where he only really gave up on it (if that’s the right phrase) more recently.

mercurialmalcontent I’d recommend as a good all-around Homestuck commentator who (I think?) is disappointed with a lot of A6; I’m not sure if they’ve written specifically about A6 vs. earlier acts (the other two people mentioned definitely have), but reading their HS posts is a good idea in any event.

Anonymous asked: Is it worthwhile to read homestuck?

It sure was for me!