Homestuck

[liv]

Homestuck is this... work of fiction, which is sort of like a webcomic, only it's also sort of like inventing an entirely new medium for telling stories. rysmiel, who calls this new artform a hypercomic, persuaded me I should read it. I was dubious, partly because I am not a very visual person and I don't always get on well with comics.

And partly because it starts off kind of bad. That is, the earliest part of it has really low quality art, and a lot of very puerile humour, and has a lot of slow and repetitive sections. But even so, it does a lot of things well, notably some really amazing characterization of young teenagers just starting to figure out how the world works, and their relationships with their parent figures and eachother. And through the puerile, repetitive humour, you can see glimpses of building a really complex and interesting setting with a many-layered story.

It is very long, but it just keeps getting better and better. More complexity and more really brilliant storytelling and more figuring out this new way of telling a story such that it's not just an online comic, it's something that could only exist on the internet. Not only because it incorporates long-form text, and music, and animations, and hyperlinks, and bits of playable games as well as the more traditional images + speech bubbles, though it does all those things really interestingly to make an integrated whole. But also because of the way it interacts with and responds to its own fandom, to the extent that it's kind of weaving metatextual stuff into the story itself. Meanwhile the art just keeps on getting better and better, still visually recognizable compared to the early bits, but scaling up from kind of dire to so visually amazing that I just want to sit and look at the pretty, it's as much a work of art as a comic. Like XKCD, it conveys amazing amounts of emotion with very minimal facial detail. Likewise the humour, the puerile and scatological humour never really goes away, but it gets sort of telescoped and self-referential, to the point where it's quite often genuinely funny or else consciously absurdist.

It's doing some very cool and original things with scale, it manages to be about four kids playing a computer game and at the same time about a multiverse-spanning mythos, without the personal, intimate stuff ever seeming pointless or the mythic background lacking in detail. It reminds me somewhat of Rabelais, and quite a lot of Olaf Stapledon's somewhat obscure but really innovative Starmaker, which is one of the ancestors of modern SF. There is a downside to this, though, which is that you start to get invested in the characters and the story pans out and reveals that it's really about the gods of the universe in which their entire planet is just a small speck within the cosmos. And it keeps doing that.

For me, there was almost no window between, meh, this is a bit boringly simplistic (though it has its good moments) to, woah, this is way too complex for me to follow, I'm missing most of the allusions and can't remember all the character connections or keep track of all the different levels of world-building. So I probably wouldn't have continued with it were it not for the fact that I've had rysmiel shepherding me through it. We've been reading it a bit in video chat lately, with the comic open in one window and Google Hangouts in another, which is not a way it would be sensible to try to read a conventional text-based book, but seems to work quite well for this hypercomic. rysmiel has been really patient at explaining the bits I don't get and reminding me of how stuff fits together and how the characters work (it's as bad as a nineteenth century Russian novel for having a huge cast, all of whom are important and all of whom have multiple names, but it's also as good as a nineteenth century Russian novel for psychological realism and every single character being distinct and having distinct interactions with each of the other characters). They've also been really, really careful at protecting me from any possible spoilers; basically I don't Google anything Homestuck related, I ask rysmiel, and they tell me strictly only things that I could reasonably know if I'd noticed and remembered all the detail of everything so far, so I've come to every single episode completely naive.

Is possible to enjoy HS without such a dedicated guide? I honestly don't know. I am not savvy enough to offer to be such a guide to anyone else, I don't think. There are some reveals that are probably better unspoiled, but if you don't mind very general spoilers on the level of knowing that a particular person who appears in a given scene is going to turn out to be an important character later on, you could probably get by with looking at the vast array of fanmade commentary and summaries and resources if you get confused.

If you don't want to plough through the beginning bits where Hussie hasn't quite found his feet yet, though is already showing glimpses of brilliance, I think it might possibly work to start at this point, which is towards the end of Act 2 and is about where I started getting excited about the story. It's a place where the comic jumps out to a new level, so it will make somewhat less sense if you haven't seen the preceding material, but it's introducing a whole bunch of new stuff even to readers who have been there from the beginning, so I think it may make some amount of sense. What you have to know is that the conceit of the comic is that it's set inside a kind of text adventure where the readers (initially for real, but very quickly only as a kind of literary device) tell the characters in-story how to act. The Wayward Vagabond is a character there has been glimpses of in earlier episodes, but here is properly introduced for the first time; equally if you do get into it and decide to go back to the beginning, most of the story up to here is about the people seen in the Vagabond's screen in this section.

Equally, if you don't care about spoilers at all, this is a YouTube video of animation I just watched the other day, and which completely wowed me, it is absolutely gorgeous even if you can't follow the story it's telling without having read the whole comic up to this point. Depending how your mind works and how you feel about spoilers, you might find it doesn't actually reveal anything, because if you don't know who the characters are you won't glean any information that affects the earlier parts of the plot.

You are probably aware that Homestuck fandom kind of has a reputation. I think that's partly because at least initially the story was about young teenagers, so it tended to attract a lot of that age-group as fans. And adults on the internet really hate young people's internet culture, so there's a lot of negativity towards the fandom. I haven't engaged with HS fandom much, because of rysmiel solicitously protecting me from spoilers. But I really love the canon, even though lots of it is over my head and some of it is really annoying.

In other news, I have only a couple of slots left for Daily December posting. Anyone want to suggest anything to complete the month?

Comments

[ceb]

I have read the first 3ish acts and loved it. However it was getting so complex that I decided to stop until it's finished and I can read it in one lump as I find small updates usually make it harder for me to follow a story.

I gather it may now have finished so maybe I'll make that my Christmas entertainment :-)

[liv]

Yeah, it is incredibly complex, I'm glad it's not just me being unfamiliar with web comics in general. I am not sure whether it's actually finished finished, (I've just got to the end of 5-1) but certainly if you've read Act 3 you have all of 4 and 5-1 and 5-2 to go through in a lump. From what I can tell Act 6, which is in several huge sections so it's really more like another six acts, not another single act, is still being updated at least through January.

[rysmiel]

It's not actually finished.

Overall, I'd say Acts 1 through 4 are a movement of story with a solid climax, Act 5 in total is a second movement on similar scale that's slightly longer overall, and Act 6 looks to be a third movement that is slightly longer again and will finish the whole thing bar brief epilogue, and is mostly done.

[ceb]

Perhaps I will make up to act 6 my Christmas entertainment :-)

[rysmiel]

If you do, I'd be intrigued to see your reactions. (Also, if you do, I recommend stopping after the interludey bit just after end of Act 5 rather than after the end of Act 5 itself. It is short and significant.)

[(Anonymous)]

Noted, thanks for the guidance.

[ceb]

Sorry, that was me :-)

[ewx]

I was planning on waiting until it finished, too.

[liv]

Sounds sensible, and it does look like it's going to be actually finished moderately soon. Right now I'm reading slower than Hussey's writing, so I'm not too bothered, I think.

[ceb]

Forgot to say, I came to HS after reading Problem Sleuth, which has the same problems HS does only much moreso. Gloriously silly though :-)

[rysmiel]

It is fun in a silly sort of way, definitely, but very much a dry run for Homestuck.

Hussie has occasionally muttered about Homestuck itself being a dry run for the project that comes next. The thought of what might fit that description is something close to terrifying to me.

[ceb]

A model universe, maybe?

[rysmiel]

Homestuck is this... work of fiction, which is sort of like a webcomic, only it's also sort of like inventing an entirely new medium for telling stories.

I've seen several articles referring to it as "the Ulysses of the Internet", and I can kind of see that as a quick glib description, but I think "the Tristram Shandy of the Internet" is better for getting hold of how gloriously experimental it is and how very much of a new space it's exploring. Then again, most other things in that general direction tend to peter out (like crotalus_atrox's 5ideways) because they are just an insane amount of work; Hussie's been working much more than a full-time job almost continuously for over five years on Homestuck.

[livejournal.com profile] rysmiel, who calls this new artform a hypercomic

Not my term originally; I think it comes from Scott McCloud. (Most of the smart places using that term are also into the kind of critical analysis that assumes you have read all the way up to date with the text, hence me not recommending them to you.)

persuaded me I should read it. I was dubious, partly because I am not a very visual person and I don't always get on well with comics.

*smile* thank you for having faith in me here.

It's doing some very cool and original things with scale, it manages to be about four kids playing a computer game and at the same time about a multiverse-spanning mythos, without the personal, intimate stuff ever seeming pointless or the mythic background lacking in detail. It reminds me somewhat of Rabelais, and quite a lot of Olaf Stapledon's somewhat obscure but really innovative Starmaker, which is one of the ancestors of modern SF. There is a downside to this, though, which is that you start to get invested in the characters and the story pans out and reveals that it's really about the gods of the universe in which their entire planet is just a small speck within the cosmos. And it keeps doing that.

Oh, I do like the Star Maker comparison. I don't think it's really monotonally expanding the same way the scale in Star Maker does, though (if you disregard the epilogue of Star Maker), which is part of why I suggested stopping where we did the other night rather than a couple of pages earlier at the act boundary. I am fascinated by the way it uses the increasing scale to deepen and enrich the character-level stuff, and also one of the things the video-game-like element of powering up via new equipment and new powers and the occasional bit of clever lateral thinking and [pile of other stuff we've not got to yet concerning which I am waving my hands enthusiastically] does is to keep the characters relevant and capable of direct impact even on the expanded scale.

I can see why, given the complexity of what he was building, Hussie made the decisions he did in terms of laying firm foundations - the first half of Act 1 to solidly establish the basic grammar of this particular hypercomic story, how he would use animation and music and chatlogs and little playable bits, and the second half to establish a lot of basic Sburb mechanics - but the granularity there is almost too fine for its own good, there really is a lot of faffing about there.

For me, there was almost no window between, meh, this is a bit boringly simplistic (though it has its good moments) to, woah, this is way too complex for me to follow, I'm missing most of the allusions and can't remember all the character connections or keep track of all the different levels of world-building.

I am fairly convinced Hussie is writing with the expectation that most people who stick with it will read much of it more than once, just because of how cleverly many earlier bits are illuminated by later information. The ways all the character connections and world-building fit together systemically certainly makes it easier for my mind to keep them all straight; the systems are complex and take a while to become clear but they are solidly consistent.

They've also been really, really careful at protecting me from any possible spoilers; basically I don't Google anything Homestuck related, I ask [livejournal.com profile] rysmiel, and they tell me strictly only things that I could reasonably know if I'd noticed and remembered all the detail of everything so far, so I've come to every single episode completely naive.

I am strongly anti-spoilers at many levels anyway, and I do think Homestuck does some particularly impressive pacing things if one can manage to come to it without spoilers; that said, there are some scales of spoilers it's becoming harder and harder to avoid, and I am aware that I can't reasonably expect most people to take as much of it on trust as you were willing to at my urging, so some more concrete details on why its worth persevering with are not likely the end of the world for people less spoiler-twitchy than me.

Is possible to enjoy HS without such a dedicated guide? I honestly don't know. I am not savvy enough to offer to be such a guide to anyone else, I don't think.

A fair few people seem to have, and I certainly did. I suspect it's easier for people who parse visual narrative more naturally than you do.

I think it might possibly work to start at this point, which is towards the end of Act 2 and is about where I started getting excited about the story. It's a place where the comic jumps out to a new level, so it will make somewhat less sense if you haven't seen the preceding material, but it's introducing a whole bunch of new stuff even to readers who have been there from the beginning, so I think it may make some amount of sense.

I'd be really interested to see reactions from anyone who did this.

You are probably aware that Homestuck fandom kind of has a reputation. I think that's partly because at least initially the story was about young teenagers, so it tended to attract a lot of that age-group as fans.

I think part of it, too, is that Hussie was, at least at the time Homestuck started, very much in a groove of writing for a fairly small audience of about his age (not sure exactly what that is, but I think late thirties now) and relying on being able to make references at levels they would get (both on the scale of assuming things like the text-adventure game format would be familiar, and on the scale of writing sequences where characters' understanding of what's going on is clearly incomplete or incorrect in important ways) and one side-effect of the huge explosion of young-teen fans is a non-trivial subset who get very emotionally attached to reading some facets of the story at face value, or to their own take on earlier elements even when later elements significantly recomplicate or subvert those elements or make it clearer there was more to them. I think a non-trivial part of the attraction to the younger teen audience is also that much of the underlying structure of the story lends itself well to "here are a small finite number of different ways to be which people can categorise themselves within and strongly identify with (and here's the pretty imagery and cool t-shirt for each category)".

[rysmiel]

...and there's also the tendency of some segments of the fandom to be very evangelical indeed about how awesome it is,

Not that I don't recommend it myself, but I hope to be less obnoxious about doing so than some of the failure modes of that scale of evangelism.

[liv]

And I hope I'm likewise not being obnoxious in my enthusiasm here. I've tried to talk about the really amazing good points as well as the reasons why it might not be for everybody.

[liv]

but I think "the Tristram Shandy of the Internet" is better for getting hold of how gloriously experimental it is
I really really do need to read Tristram Shandy, don't I? But yes, HS is doing something really innovative as well as really silly.

Hussie's been working much more than a full-time job almost continuously for over five years on Homestuck
I didn't realize he'd been working on it full-time, I'd thought that he was doing the three times a week updates first by means of drawing really fast, hence the bad art quality in the earlier episodes, and later by getting some amount of help with the execution. It really is quite monumental, isn't it?

Not my term originally; I think it comes from Scott McCloud.
Ah, thank you for giving credit, there.

the kind of critical analysis that assumes you have read all the way up to date with the text
I'm actually quite looking forward to getting into the smart, critical bits of fandom once I read the whole thing. Especially if you don't mind continuing to point me in the right direction.

Oh, I do like the Star Maker comparison.
I should have checked how the title is spelled before mentioning it. But yes, I'm reminded very much of Stapledon nearly inventing a big chunk of SF de novo, in order to make profound points about both theology and human politics. I think HS is more impressive and more novel, mind you.

I don't think it's really monotonally expanding the same way the scale in Star Maker does ... I am fascinated by the way it uses the increasing scale to deepen and enrich the character-level stuff
Yeah, the expanding scale is probably what most reminded me of Star Maker, but HS is certainly not doing only that. And I agree, it's really interesting that we don't just zoom out and leave the previous level to fade into the distance, the expanding scale continues to develop the characters and the worldbuilding at more intimate levels. But sometimes the moment of changing the scale feels a bit vertiginous, and, like, I read through of all of Act 5-1 not really knowing we were getting the kids back in 5-2, I can easily imagine giving up at that point because that's a lot of looking like we've lost the storyline and characters I'd invested in.

I can see why, given the complexity of what he was building, Hussie made the decisions he did in terms of laying firm foundations
Oh yeah, I can see what he's doing, it's just not wholly successful at drawing the reader in to the story, precisely because it is fine-grained and faffy.

Hussie is writing with the expectation that most people who stick with it will read much of it more than once, just because of how cleverly many earlier bits are illuminated by later information
Possibly, if only because it's too complex to really get all the nuances and detail and allusions on a first reading. Also because it's a hypercomic, you don't necessarily have to read it linearly, it's very much in the idiom of Tim Berners-Lee's WWW which is, well, a web, not a progression. But I think sometimes with complex novels, which is the medium I'm most familiar with, something later illuminates stuff from earlier and that in itself is a pleasure for the reader, it's not necessarily a cue to go back and reread the earlier stuff. Rothfuss, for example, has quite a lot of, 'so that's what was going on with such-and-such' moments. And Womack, though I think he's going to be an exception to my habit of not rereading.

The ways all the character connections and world-building fit together systemically certainly makes it easier for my mind to keep them all straight
For me, those connections and systems are cool things when you point them out to me (or occasionally I notice them, but rarely, I don't have anything like the intuition for structure and patterns you do), but they're in no way mnemonics.

[rysmiel]

I really really do need to read Tristram Shandy, don't I?

I think it's probably more worth having read than actually fun to read, myself. That said, my copy is old and cheap and basically all the pages are falling out, and if ever there was a novel where picking them up and putting them back maybe not in the right order was minimally inappropriate it's that one.

"Hussie's been working much more than a full-time job almost continuously for over five years on Homestuck"
I didn't realize he'd been working on it full-time, I'd thought that he was doing the three times a week updates first by means of drawing really fast, hence the bad art quality in the earlier episodes, and later by getting some amount of help with the execution. It really is quite monumental, isn't it?

It is. The three-times-a-week update schedule is only since the year-long pause, and is posting pre-drawn stuff from that pause (until the end of January; not yet announced what he'll be doing then). Before that he was posting a lot more than that; iirc the comment that if he were updating M-W-F it would have taken him thirteen extra years to release it all comes from fairly late on in the first four years. The improvement in art style is partly collaborators for the big animations but Hussie's pre-mspaintadventures work shows that he could already draw really well, the improvement through Homestuck is largely him learning to draw really well ridiculously fast.

"the kind of critical analysis that assumes you have read all the way up to date with the text"
I'm actually quite looking forward to getting into the smart, critical bits of fandom once I read the whole thing. Especially if you don't mind continuing to point me in the right direction.

Not at all, though a lot of the smartest stuff right now is trying to puzzle out deep plot stuff that will presumably all be moot by that point.

"Oh, I do like the Star Maker comparison."
I should have checked how the title is spelled before mentioning it.

And it's only when you said that that I noticed you have spelled Hussie's surname inaccurately some places in here.

But yes, I'm reminded very much of Stapledon nearly inventing a big chunk of SF de novo, in order to make profound points about both theology and human politics. I think HS is more impressive and more novel, mind you.

That really is a good comparison.

But sometimes the moment of changing the scale feels a bit vertiginous, and, like, I read through of all of Act 5-1 not really knowing we were getting the kids back in 5-2,

Ah. Sorry; I didn't realise that was unclear. I'd have thought the example of the interlude between acts 3 and 4 would create an expectation of getting the kids back, as well as there being a lot of kid plot left to go.

"Hussie is writing with the expectation that most people who stick with it will read much of it more than once, just because of how cleverly many earlier bits are illuminated by later information"
Possibly, if only because it's too complex to really get all the nuances and detail and allusions on a first reading. Also because it's a hypercomic, you don't necessarily have to read it linearly, it's very much in the idiom of Tim Berners-Lee's WWW which is, well, a web, not a progression.

*nod* it certainly works that way.

But I think sometimes with complex novels, which is the medium I'm most familiar with, something later illuminates stuff from earlier and that in itself is a pleasure for the reader, it's not necessarily a cue to go back and reread the earlier stuff. Rothfuss, for example, has quite a lot of, 'so that's what was going on with such-and-such' moments.

heh. I do think of Rothfuss as very much writing for rereaders, though not to the exclusion of one-pass readers.

And Womack, though I think he's going to be an exception to my habit of not rereading.

I am really looking forward to what you think of those books as a complete set, when you get around to reading all of them.

For me, those connections and systems are cool things when you point them out to me (or occasionally I notice them, but rarely, I don't have anything like the intuition for structure and patterns you do), but they're in no way mnemonics.

Fair enough; gosh how minds work is interesting.

thank you for having faith in me here

[liv]

Also, thank you for persisting, it did take quite a few tries for it to really take, for me, though I think you partly expected that. It has been so much fun reading it together in video and when you were here, yay.

I am strongly anti-spoilers at many levels anyway
That's fair. I do try to avoid confronting people with spoilers for major plot-twists in anything, but I'm fairly relaxed about talking about things like general shapes of stories, and sometimes I do want to have discussions actually about plot-twists in public on the internet, though in that case I do consider it my responsibility to mark clearly that that's what's going on.

there are some scales of spoilers it's becoming harder and harder to avoid
I am very impressed that you managed to protect me from the big reveal which is such a characteristic of Homestuck. Just being on the internet and at Worldcon could have spoiled me for that, and you kept on warning me about things like not looking at related videos on YouTube and carefully not pointing out cosplayers, and that was really quite an accomplishment to keep me actually surprised by that surprise.

some more concrete details on why its worth persevering with are not likely the end of the world for people less spoiler-twitchy than me
Yes, that's what I've tried to do with this post, explain what's great about it without revealing any details that would be more fun to find out by reading it. But I think, for example, telling a friend, oh, this thousand pages of apparently random digression is in fact relevant to the story you thought you were reading, and the earlier characters are coming back, would not necessarily be a worse spoiler than having them give up because the story is now about something else entirely than what they came for.

I suspect it's easier for people who parse visual narrative more naturally than you do
Yes, very likely *smile* It's a combination of the complexity and the way that so much of the information is visual that makes it hard going for me. Totally worth it, but I am glad I had you encouraging me that it would be worth it, cos I might not have been willing to cram all that information into my brain if I was expecting merely shaggy dog story puns.

*hug* Thank you so much for bringing this into my life and helping me to get the most out of it.

Re: thank you for having faith in me here

[rysmiel]

I do try to avoid confronting people with spoilers for major plot-twists in anything, but I'm fairly relaxed about talking about things like general shapes of stories, and sometimes I do want to have discussions actually about plot-twists in public on the internet, though in that case I do consider it my responsibility to mark clearly that that's what's going on.

Agreed, and likewise, and the more I think about this the harder I find it to come up with any useful clear generalisations on how I feel about spoilers; it depends an awful lot on how much of what I am reading a specific thing for is plot, which varies widely and non-obviously.

I am very impressed that you managed to protect me from the big reveal which is such a characteristic of Homestuck. Just being on the internet and at Worldcon could have spoiled me for that, and you kept on warning me about things like not looking at related videos on YouTube and carefully not pointing out cosplayers, and that was really quite an accomplishment to keep me actually surprised by that surprise.

I wasn't at all sure that would work, tbh, but am very pleased that it did.

But I think, for example, telling a friend, oh, this thousand pages of apparently random digression is in fact relevant to the story you thought you were reading, and the earlier characters are coming back, would not necessarily be a worse spoiler than having them give up because the story is now about something else entirely than what they came for.

That certainly makes sense, yes.

*hug* Thank you so much for bringing this into my life and helping me to get the most out of it.

You are most welcome; doing so is a joy to me.

[liv]

Hussie was, at least at the time Homestuck started, very much in a groove of writing for a fairly small audience of about his age (not sure exactly what that is, but I think late thirties now) and relying on being able to make references at levels they would get
Yeah, obviously I don't hold Hussie responsible for the worst excesses of his fandom. There's very little in the text to make it specifically appealing to obnoxious people, and besides he of course didn't know how popular it was going to be. Also, I really like the way he both responds to and pokes fun at the part of fandom that is obsessively about the slash and shipping.

both on the scale of assuming things like the text-adventure game format would be familiar
I had forgotten there were people too young to remember text adventures. Though some of the film references are obscure to me even though I'm about the right age, just cos I know nothing at all about films.

and on the scale of writing sequences where characters' understanding of what's going on is clearly incomplete or incorrect in important ways
That feels like quite a profound observation, I think you're probably right that adults are more likely to have come across and be comfortable with unreliable narrators than teenagers.

subset who get very emotionally attached to reading some facets of the story at face value, or to their own take on earlier elements even when later elements significantly recomplicate or subvert those elements
I can see that that's annoying, but I don't think it's deserving of the level of vitriol that seems to be directed at HS fans. I think with any big fandom there are going to be people who read on a very superficial level or project their own stuff onto the canon, and people who go in for in depth analysis, especially when the text is so subtle anyway. But I'd rather not get in the way when those groups form factions and start wars.

much of the underlying structure of the story lends itself well to "here are a small finite number of different ways to be which people can categorise themselves within and strongly identify with
Yes, see also the popularity of Harry Potter houses as identity categories. (There's also overlap with the thing you pointed out to me in email, with a vocal bit of fandom really strongly identifying with obviously evil characters.)

[rysmiel]

I had forgotten there were people too young to remember text adventures.

There are plenty of people in the fandom young enough that they clearly primarily think of this format element as "how Homestuck does it" and view text adventures in that light, which is odd to me.

Though some of the film references are obscure to me even though I'm about the right age, just cos I know nothing at all about films.

Most of them are, I am sure intentionally, pretty mediocre films if not actively terrible (I have seen probably about 75% of the films referenced) so I am generally not much minded to recommend them.

That feels like quite a profound observation, I think you're probably right that adults are more likely to have come across and be comfortable with unreliable narrators than teenagers.

That's probably inevitable with any piece of fiction, really, it's just unfortunate that the audience balance has exacerbated it strongly in this case.

I can see that that's annoying, but I don't think it's deserving of the level of vitriol that seems to be directed at HS fans.

*nod* I think you definitely have a point about some adult-centred chunks of internet culture really not liking younger-centred chunks of internet culture; also, Homestuck fandom's big enough that even the relatively small fraction of any fandom that's unavoidably utterly obnoxious includes a fair amount of egregious awfulness in this case

[(Anonymous)]

It has been a joy to read both of you on this thread. Thanks for that.

[daharyn]

This was me at work. Sorry bout that.

[elisem]

This makes me want to go back and reread up to the point I lost track, and then keep going.

Glad you are enjoying!

[liv]

It is very much rewarding of effort, but it is a lot of effort.

[elf]

I have not read your post (skimmed it lightly only) because I liveblog Homestuck and am avoiding spoilers. I'm at elfstuck at tumblr. I have a dedicated pair of screeners for asks, who make sure I don't see spoilers (or too many spoilers; I started out knowing a few things, like "trolls exist"), and whom I can pester about any issues I want help with.

I'm in the Intermission. I'm having fun with it. Having helpers means they can tell me how the liveblog-tracking community (apparently there is one of those) is reacting to my ponderings. It also means someone can go back and tag my posts in ways that apparently are amusing to people who know more about it than I do.

[liv]

Ooh, icon love! And I'm glad you commented, I remember you saying you were reading HS, and I was interested in what you'd think, but I wasn't sure if you were still around on DW enough to have seen this post.

I have tried to be non-spoilery in this post, talking about the structure rather than the details of the plot. I didn't even mention the T-word, because I managed (thanks to rysmiel) to get to the crucial fulcrum in the story without knowing they exist. Still, I think you're probably right not to read my post carefully; it sounds like you're experiencing the work in a really effective way, and I wouldn't at all want to disrupt that.

I'm glad that you also have helpful friends who can similarly screen you from spoilers. The Intermission is indeed fun, though I agree with you that some of the timey-wimey stuff is a bit frustrating.

[rysmiel]

And it keeps doing that.

That was a missed chance for an "it keeps happening" reference, there.