Sit down, dear reader, and let me tell you about Homestuck.

Does the phrase not make you want to flee in terror? Perhaps jump off a few bridges? Hit your head with a rock until you develop some form of incurable amnesia?

If you said no to any of those things, you clearly have had no prior experience on the matter.

Homestuck is the terror that’s been sweeping the nation. Homestuck is the menace that is corrupting our children. Homestuck, my friend, is an absolute monstrosity.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Go read some. Go to mspaintadventures.com and look me in the eye and tell me I am exaggerating.

“But I went there, and all I got was this weird video game comic thing!”

That’s it. That’s Homestuck.

It’s pretty ridiculous, but I love it anyways. How do you not love a webcomic that begins with the simple, mundane sentence “A young man stands in his bedroom” and eventually leads to that young man becoming a god and creating/destroying universes with his friends?

Sure, the first few hundred (there are thousands, by the way) pages are mind-numbingly boring, but I’m glad I pushed through them and finally went through the rest of the plot, because it’s honestly incredible. If you took any Homestuck panel out of context and just stared at it, you’d be at a loss for words.

But one of the things I admire the most about Homestuck is that the author manages to pull off second person point of view. Not every writer can write using “you” and “your” and still show how the character is feeling. Mad skills right there.

I’m not saying that Homestuck doesn’t have its flaws, of course. The story moves at the pace of an arthritic snail at times, with the story being almost exclusively filler until the trolls arrive, and it moves much too quickly when it’s wrapped up in a single flash sequence. Miss one flash sequence and you’re doomed. “Who’s Lord English? When did Dave reach god tier? What is god tier, anyways? Are they in an alternate dimension again? Am I in an alternate dimension? What if Homestuck is just a figment of my imagination? Why can’t I feel my hands?”

And on top of all that, there’s a massive character list to keep up with.

Firstly, there are the kids. There are eight. They exist in two alternate dimensions that they happened to create along with about 10000 other paradoxes, but other than that, they’re just your average human kids who happen to be friends over the internet. Also, they all play a game together that leads to them dying and then becoming gods, which indirectly leads to them meeting up outside the internet.
Have I mentioned that there are three alternative universes, and all the aliens from them are literally the same people reincarnated over and over? There are two alien races, trolls and cherubs, that connect with the kids via a chat client, although the cherubs don’t come in until much later in the story.
The main twelve trolls from what we’ll call Universe 1 that we start out with have ancestors and dancestors (“But ‘dancestor’ isn’t a word,” you say. Yeah, well, it is now. Live with it.), each of whom are basically these post-apocalyptic versions of themselves, and each set corresponds to a zodiac sign. Also, they live in Universe 2 and 3, respectively. Twenty-four of these trolls (or two sets of them) eventually meet up, because it turns out they keep living even after they’re dead and can cross into alternate universes with dream bubbles.
But they never can meet up with the last twelve of them, because they’re dead, as in permanent dead, except for this one chick, who is Betty Crocker (better known as the Batterwitch in this story) who was strong enough to survive the crazy apocalypse and lives on as Sea Hitler. In fact, she more or less caused the apocalypse. Everything is her fault. If you want to point an angry finger at anyone, it should be her.
Also, she acts like a ghetto stereotype.
It makes more sense if you don’t think about it.
Don’t even get me started on the cherubs. They’re two beings who apparently share a body and sort of have this yin-yang thing going on. I don’t get that either, but okay. Caliborn is the annoying one, and Calliope is really nice except she has this insecurity about her appearance. That’s about all you need to know.
Together, they die, co-create new universes, ascend to god tier, and mess with each other via timeline paradox shenanigans. But mostly they just die. Also, there’s a flash where Caliborn chews off his leg and morphs into this giant muscular green thing with cue balls for eyes and then kills everyone with this laser beam he fires from his mouth.
Yeah.
In my opinion, the best asset of Homestuck is its fanbase. The wonderful fans who assemble beautiful, intricate cosplays and create breathtaking fanfiction and fanart. The masses of teenagers in gray makeup who flood conventions, wearing shirts emblazoned with neon zodiac symbols and carrying plastic weaponry. The fans who made entire character designs based off a single easter egg hidden in the webcomic. The fans who raised over two million dollars to fund a video game project.
My conclusion? Homestuck is incredible. It’s changed so many lives, whether directly or not so directly. It’s had a vast impact on social networking, turning into one of the most prominent fandoms today, and connected so many people around the world. Me? I’m just glad it exists.