warm up with jailbreak and bard quest, or go straight to the goodies with problem sleuth. this is the greatest webcomic/rpg ever!
Bumping this thread from the depths of Zombieville. Didn’t get much (any) traction the first time, but I wonder if anyone else is reading these.
I’ve been reading through them the past few weeks. I thought jailbreak was hilarious and problem sleuth was so convolutedly crazy as to be brilliant. I also like how the creator of this comic becomes stronger and more proficient with his photoshop and Flash skills.
But I’ve been bored senseless with Homestuck. Nothing happens! And not the nothing happens like in Problem Sleuth’s story where every action leads to about six different opposite reactions. Nothing happens in that every single person has spent a year’s worth of story wandering around their own house. The only means of interaction between the characters seems to be them typing to each other. It’s the ultimate in telling, not showing. Page after page after page of computers being set up to load up more computers which blah blah blah… I can’t even say that this is a deliberate riff on the ridiculousness of computer games because at this point it seems he’s just playing it straight.
He’s even gotten away from the mostly viewer recommendations on where the story goes which means this stagnation is almost entirely his creation.
I dunno. I’m about 11 months into this latest one. Anyone else reading these? What do you all think?
Homestuck does take a long time to get going. The problem is that the story he’s planned is so ridiculously convoluted and complicated that he can’t risk reader input diverging it too much. My favorite bits of Homestuck are the little one-off jokes that were clearly reader submitted and don’t advance the plot or anything. The art is good but I feel like I’m missing out on much of the plot because I’m not taking careful notes on everything that happens (especially for all these troll characters and their screennames, I don’t know how anyone can keep them all straight). I do like the general story telling style so I’ll keep following it to the end, even if I’ll never completely understand what happened.
I feel I’ve stuck with it a long time. I’ve just finished the first year’s worth of material and I’m starting to get lost. Really lost. Even after the recap and everything.
I think one of the fundemental problems is that those pesterlogs are so long. First, I think it takes what could be a humerous joke and stretches it to molecule length thinness. Second, it’s telling, not showing. Third, as an offshoot of the second, every time there’s a chat there must necessarily be a break in the action. It means the characters must stop whatever they’re doing and just type. The story goes nowhere.
Fourth, those troll logs are really difficult to read. I get it, I get it. That’s part of the joke. But if I have a headache reading it and decide to skip it, I lose the story. Because the story apparently isn’t any ACTION. It’s people typing to each other.
And all this besides a time travel story so convuluted you get the feeling even the author can’t keep it all straight. Look at the Intermission, for example. Do you honestly believe he knew what was happening? Ultimately I think he just gave up and pressed the reset button to get back to the main story.
I dunno. It’s just that after the hilariousness of Problem Sleuth I’m finding this to be bafflingly boring.