• @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      58 months ago

      A “quest thread” comic that got wildly out of hand. Basically, a shitpost demigod named Andrew Hussie drew panels and wrote text like the first worthwhile reply was the input to an adventure game. Kinda like Twitch Plays Monkey Island, but with some kids dealing with internet trolls and the apocalypse.

      It became popular because Hussie would crank out half a dozen updates per day, including instant-message conversations between characters, each of whom was a different kind of teenage goober. Tumblr especially liked the weird plot shit, ridiculously abundant bisexual representation, and metatextual character archetypes that “kids these days” might not even recognize because the web has changed so much.

      It stopped being popular because the occasional “pauses” in updates culminated in an entire goddamn year sitting on a cliffhanger. That ended horrifically, and it was fucking incredible. The comic after that was weirder and bolder than ever, and just obliquely describing anything that happened would register seven point oh on anyone’s what-the-fuck-o-meter, but it did not stick the landing. The ending is just… okay. Which is not a great place to be, eight years and ten thousand pages later.

      Two years later the author dropped two novels on the same day. Mutually incompatible epilogues universally regarded as needlessly hostile, and outright described as “offroads from the fandom.” They’re plainly intended to lampoon bad fanfiction (of which there was quite a fucking lot) but they’re worse than what they satirize and not in clever ways.

      This comic, Homestuck^2, is a “post-canon” continuation, and there is every reason you’ve never heard of it. It began with the laziest whoops-nevermind revival of a finished plot. It’s written and illustrated by revered Tumblr fan artists, but somehow the writing is deeply questionable on every level. It instantly squandered all interest and goodwill by announcing it would only update monthly, and only on Patreon, and then didn’t even manage that. Aaand around this time all the creators were getting chased off Twitter, because Twitter is a harassment engine, by design. Hussie seemed genuinely surprised that other people do not thrive under a constant barrage of combative nonsense.

      But you should read Problem Sleuth, because it’s just as stupid and far more satisfying.