Homestuck

I see fan-art for this everywhere. If you think the Pony stuff is getting old, imagine what it would be like if it started years ago and it was still popping up with this frequency. I know at least one person on Trillian who keeps telling me I should read it, that I MUST read it, because it's like, so awesome bro. I'm supposed to believe that it has this huge, involving mythology and history, an iconic cast of characters and this epic story arc or something. But that it's also hilarious. Something you make two wikis for.

I finally give it a shot. And what do I get?

Some Milhouse and a clown or something. For at least 50 pages, it's just this. Nothing happens. Not one fucking thing of even passing significance to anything, ever. For FIFTY FUCKING PAGES, IT'S LIKE THIS.

I seriously had to stop and consider if this was just a new version of "Rick Rolling". I felt like the victim of a prank that never actually stops. But no one is stepping up and claiming I'd been trolled, or that I'd "lost the game". Do people actually ENJOY this? Are these the same people who gave 'The Smurfs' a $35 million opening weekend? It's like if Asthon Kutcher never actually jumped out from the bushes and proclaimed you had been Punk'd. If he just sat there, and watched misery play out into infinity.

Homestuck actually makes me angry. I even gave it another shot today, skipping through the crap I'd already seen, and I felt my precious time on Earth being stolen from me. Try to imagine what something must be to be called a waste of time, by a guy who doesn't regret the half-hour he spent making a Wreck-Gar Plz icon.

I get nothing out of it. I don't get to derive joy from it and be a part of a group of like-minded individuals and share fanart and stuff. There's nothing I can even make fun of here. It's not even amusing in a juvenile way, like the previous comics by the same guy. Reading it is like being haunted by the ghosts of all of the minutes I could have spent masturbating.

Maybe it's just the fact that it was oversold to me. It's like being tasked with eating a 600-foot long placenta, but being assured that "about 200 feet in, it turns into Skittles". Maybe I've just been misinformed about its status as a dramatic story arc, and it's actually supposed to be some meta-black comedy something or other I'm too stupid to figure out. And maybe it does get better, and you can all cry hypocrisy and frottage each other and feel like you belong to something special that I just don't understand, man.

Fine.

But speaking as a man who has a lot of experience being bad at making webcomics, I feel I have the authority to say the following:

If you can't advance your story, develop your characters or even make your comic interesting in the first 50 pages, you're bad at storytelling. Fucking Dragonball Z didn't take this long to get to the point. And I'm supposed to plow through it, for what? So I can eventually join a fanbase even the guy recommending this comic to me thinks is toxic?

I'm sorry, but even I don't have that much Asperger's, and I've sat through most of 'Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood'.

EDIT: Whoops. Accidentally linked to a comic that isn't ass up there. Sorry about that, everyone.

END OF LINE

~A.H.