What stuck you on Homestuck?

[PetPeeve]

[Apologies if there's a topic like this already - I dug back through two months of threads and didn't see anything that fit. If I missed it, mods feel free to merge or close]

So, RationalAbsurdity wrote a very thought-provoking article in the in/famous little complaints topic. While writing my reponse, I got to wondering...

On the surface, homestuck is not even slightly user-friendly. It's womdingously huge, nearly incomprehensible if you don't read EVERY PAGE, it starts slowly, and there's so much to read I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of readers never get past the first act if they start from the beginning. How in hell did you get hooked on it? It makes no sense, but IT KEEPS HAPPENING.

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I tripped over MSPA in late 2009, after reading an insanely wonderful reader-driven story called You wake up in Razor Hill <-- READ THIS (by the way, I quit wow shortly after that).

The author mentioned Problem Sleuth as an inspiration. At the time, I'd never heard of it, or even this storytelling style (had you asked me before Razor Hill, I would have said "fricking impossible"). Over the next few weeks I read Problem Sleuth, and loved it. Just as I finished, The felt intermission started, and while I followed that to the end, my opinion at the time was that the story was "just a little too up its own ass" (nearly literally as it turned out...), and I left the site and forgot all about it for a few months.

I happened to revist MSPA months later while link cleaning, and this wonderfulness was happening, followed closely by Rose's alchemy binge. I just HAD to know what the story could possibly be that made all that make sense, and have been a fan ever since.

What's your story?

[karkatarot]

every time i got so bored of homestuck when i first started reading it, i just thought about how totally awesome all the flashes are so i kept reading

[Daniel990]

I was stuck to it since its first page.
It was always awesome.
AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEE.

[Quirk]

I was stuck from the scene where Rose expand's John's room, and then we see it from the outside.

Everything after that pales in comparison to the tears shed and aching gut from the outright hilarity of those two pages.

[PetPeeve]

Please - I'm asking for origin stories here, not just "I loves it forever"s. If you can recreate the thought process that you followed to get hooked on the story, please write about it! I'd rather that's all that's in here if possible.

EDIT: Ok, never mind about not posting about "liked it from the beginning", that's a legitimate data point. We have several of those already, so maybe it's not as unlikely as I thought it might be.

[Zhangku]

A friend of mine told me to look at it for its beauty. I said sure, why not. I will admit I arrived during the time just before the end of act 5. However, in a 16 hour period I got all the way through it, and it was glorious. The story telling had the right kind of humor and the tension was perfect in the majority of the situations I saw. Its just a really, really good story. I don't personally understand the rage at the trolls, but nonetheless, it was interesting for me, all of it was. I'll keep on reading this til it ends.

[Crispiness]

I really did like Act 1. That kept me reading well enough.

[Daniel990]

Please - I'm asking for origin stories here, not just "I loves it forever"s. If you can recreate the thought process that you followed to get hooked on the story, please write about it! I'd rather that's all that's in here if possible.

EDIT: Ok, never mind about not posting about "liked it from the beginning", that's a legitimate data point. We have several of those already, so maybe it's not as unlikely as I thought it might be.

Well, yes, I liked it from the beginning.
At first I thought it was really funny, and then it became confusing (which is classified as a good thing for me) and then it became awesome.

[MythicalWashrag]

Yeah, honestly the shenanigans in act one made me laugh. I'd already read through JB, BQ and PS so I was like, okay, yes, more of this silliness. I'm definitely going to stay hooked on this.
I was hopelessly hooked after such things like John's strife with Dad (I liked the use of "A" for every action), the haunting piano refrain, and "Data Structures for Assholes."
Then Rose started fucking up his bathroom and I caught up on everything in a day.

[Daysi]

I tried reading Homestuck a while back but gave up (it seemed pretty dumb), but then I kept hearing about it and I couldn't figure out how such a story could possibly become so interesting, so I looked it up on TvTropes. Didn't read through much (being completely trope overdosed as it is), but I noticed the each troll was associated with a zodiac sign so I went and read through all of Karkat's tropes (since I'm a Cancer). It only took a few minutes for me to decide that he was amazing and that I'd have to read the entire story, so I did.
It wasn't until I found out the trolls made the kids' universe that I became completely hooked, though.

[Rational Absurdity]

I followed from the beginning, so it was relatively easy for me to not need to buckle down and read it through. However, I slowly lost interest in the comic as time went on. By the time Act 3 was coming to a close, It simply felt that it was taking too long for the plot to get anywhere. So I decided to forget about it, or at least until there were updates I could catch up on without needing to constantly wait. I forgot about it for a longer period of time than I anticipated (Six months), and when I finally came back to it I saw a whole mess of new and strange things. I started where I left off and began reading again. To be honest, I was feeling that same sense of boredom that made me lose interest the first time. I was half-considering skipping through or just quitting when I got to This.
That flash glued me to my seat. It was EXACTLY what Homestuck needed, and the moment Jack picked up the ring you knew shit was about to take a turn for the worse. It was a twist in the story you didn't see coming, and meant that the plot isn't going to be as simple as you imagined. And when Descend struck I up and lost my shit.


I couldn't put Homestuck down after that, and read through to the latest update which was probably the BEST point for me to stop, and that was the beginning of Horrorstuck, or when Eridan just lost his shit and killed the trolls. So that probably also had a hand in making sure I didn't bury the MSPA website in my history this time around.
I mean it, too. For the first time in my life, I made basecamp on the MSPA website for the next week doing nothing but hammering the F5 button. I hadn't felt this excited for a story since I was a kid, and I loved every moment of it. I've mellowed out since then, but I'm still making my daily rounds on the website and eating up every goodie that gets posted.

[Trek]

[S]WV: Ascend. I was reading it serially form the beginning after the intenseness of Problem Sleuth but the entire scope of the story hit me when that flash came out. It showed how everything was related, no matter how different the story arcs were. The idea of SBurb helped keep me interested until that point, but after that I became an avid reader.

[IDSeeker]

I saw a great youtube video with the trolls (great mostly because of the music, but the strange character design got me too, to some extent); red half of the first act out of curiosity; got bored and dropped; then, after some months, I saw again the same great youtube video that made me read the comic in the first place; done some (luckily) spoiler-less research on who the trolls were; began to read again from when I first dropped (didn't care if I had forgotten almost everything before that); got to the flash with the meteor that falls on John; and finally became addicted to the awesomeness that came after that. Now I'm at the second playthrough just to catch up with the old jokes that I couldn't get either because at the time I didn't read PS or because I was too in a hurry to focus on the silly little things (that now are funny and makes a lot more sense XD)

[WalkingTornado]

I started reading homestuck because of all the fanart on dev, but i gave up halfway through the first act.
Then i saw this comic about a person who said that it gets better and more confusing later so i restarted. But what really stuck me was bec, simply bec fetching bullets for jade. Then when Vriska (patron) appeared.......... i became totally stuck )

[The Fifth Point]

I began reading Homestuck when I was in sixth grade. It was about a year into the story, and I stumbled upon a link to [S]: Descend. I started out thinking, "Alright. This is pretty cool. Must be a music video or something." but I wasn't all that interested. I was just about to bail when SS came in, and nothing fascinates me--especially 12-year-old me--more than a massacre. The babies and Bec interested me, along with SS and Bro's duel, but the second the Sqiddles showed up, I was hooked. "This is badass and weird and random all at the same time." I went to the MSPA homepage and began reading, and I've reread it at least five times.

[fweezel]

It's all KimikoMuffin's fault.

It wasn't even "bluh act 1" that stopped me from reading it when I first heard of it, more that I didn't want to commit to a new webcomic at the time and then forgot about it for a while. I was later reminded of it because of Heir Conditioning being talked about by Touhou fans, and decided that I should probably read it if I wanted to have any clue what was going on in the flash that had it.

Once I got to "there's a meteor headed straight for John's house", I was hooked.

[WillSpark]

A friend of mine kept poking me literally for months each chance he got. He steered me towards one webcomic (Questionable Content) that I enjoyed well enough, and he was and has always been a very good and trustworthy friend with sound judgements and advice, so I trusted him.

I tried Reading Homestuck three times, with the third time being the charm. The first time, I lost interest after a handful of pages. The "make the adventure" format with one image per page really didn't jive with me and I quit. The second time I pushed further, into the pesterlogs, and reading the inanity kind of killed me, so I stopped again. The third time, though, I made an inner pact to try to see it through, and made it to the page where John plays Showtime. It was at that point - a flash page with music - that I thought "Oh...this could get really interesting" so I kept going. By the time we got to the install page with Sburban Jungle, I was fully and completely hooked, and to this day it's one of my favorite songs in the Homestuck canon. Finished the whole thing over a weekend on winter break, January of last year.

[GiltCipher]

I saw a troll cosplay picture on the Escapist and found this video on Youtube within about a week of each other, so decided to look into it. I then proceeded to read everything up to Hussie breaking the 5th Wall (which was the current update at the time) in 6 days. WV: Ascend was the page that made me marathon through it.

[Soleron]

Listened to Saviour of the Waking World (no context at all) and liked it. Read a few wikis about what MSPA was but decided it wasn't for me.

Woke up one day 6 months later thinking "Right I'm going to read all of MSPA this weekend". It happened, 3 days of constant reading and forcing myself to read the (terrible) second half of PS with the promise that HS was good.

Got to [S] WV Ascend and couldn't then stop.

[wait]

The first hints of timefuckery and creation myth.

WV: Ascend is where shit got real.

[Kuraimano]

I think I already posted this story in a similar thread but whatever:

Not that I believe in destiny or that sort of silly things, but my life is literally filled with weird coincidences, all the time, seriously. Weird and improbable ones, at times impossible, at other times merely the results of my life being limited to a certain amount of interests that happen to crossover with each other, but I can distinguish these last one "apparent" ones from REAL coincidences after a whole life of weird shit. So, at an unspecified point of time I read the whole Problem Sleuth, at the time I did it wasn't even over yet, but it finished before I could even get to the point where there were no updates anymore so I basically read it entirely with no pauses. It was great. Why? Why do you even ask dummy, you are on MSPA too, the reasons are obvious! Also I swear I don't remember how I got to know PS, nor who introduced me to it if there was anyone who did!

That said, I also stumbled across the first pages of Homestuck. At something like the 6th page of John messing around in his room I was like "[dumb]This is stupid, this is not like problem sleuth![/homotool]" and never bothered reading it further.

Then, February 2011: I am a HUGE fan of dark ambient music (I mean, not particulary in february, it never stopped being a thing that was true or anything), and I was browsing on YouTube for some of it, mostly going from a related video to another, eventually ending up in a definitely weird and hipsterish part of the tube. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason there's some strange related video that catches my attention.

It was called [S] Make her pay.

"Man, wuts dis."
"k the music is nice... what's goin on anyway?!"
"...hey, that character totally looked like it was from Problem Sleuth, maybe this guy got inspired from that?"

I didn't do further research about this thing, and then, almost exactly one month later, my coolkid friend is talking to me and he's like "Yo dude, remember Problem Sleuth?" (oh, so maybe that's who introduced it to me!) "Yeah, well now he's making another comic, and people started following it as if it was a serious manga. That's so fucking stupid.".

Without even realizing that it was the thing I stumbled across on YouTube one month earlier, nor the one I started reading after Problem Sleuth (yes, my memory is THAT bad) I checked it out excpecting some cheezy attempt at a serious story, but instead here I am, talking about my favorite webcomic on its official forum. It was very difficult at the beginning, in fact I would lie if I said I didn't skip any dialogue (hah! I totally knew what I was doing!) nor that at some points of Act 1 and 2 I was reading out of inertia and nothing else to do/being too lazy to actually type in another URL since clicking ==> is way more convenient!

So... what got me hooked to this thing? Preposterous and unhealthy amounts of free time, BEING LIKE TOTALLY NOT MAINSTREAM, coincidences, being a fan of a previous work, and the fact that it has brilliant writing of course.

On an unrelated note, I could also name reasons for which I have been trying to NOT be hooked on it anymore, but I wouldn't like to start a flame or anything. Let's just say that there have been 2 or 3 times in the story where I found that Andrew's decisions on the plot were... well, not "bad" nor "badly written" or that sort of thing, but rather "intellectually dishonest", so usually even when I still like something, I would rather not give that thing my money (or in this case, my clicks/visits/approval/etc.) when it does things I don't approve. Eventually I dropped this idea, since Homestuck is unpredictable I might still hope that the wrongs I have seen in the comic will be eventually subverted (but probably not, and even if they were, the damage is done), and also because I give plenty of clicks and visits to TERRIBLE things only to laugh at them, so why negate mine to something that despite its flaws is still the best webcomic I've ever read (well, maybe the second best, Nedroid is pretty good you know).

Oh, and addiction, there's also that yeah.

[Tren]

I'm... Going to be completely honest with you.
I read 'try again' on the second page and kept going back to the previous page, because I thought it was an actual game of some kind.
Then I saw some flashes and found out you needed to just click the blue links at the bottom of the page.
I started reading it, got kinda bored with act one, and fell in love again around Act 3.

[nostalgebraist]

I heard it recommended here and there, but read a few things about it and it sounded kind of dumb. Then at some point a good friend said he was reading and enjoying it, and one night when I couldn't sleep I thought "oh, what the hell, I'll give this a try."

I enjoyed it pretty much all the way through. The jokes at the beginning weren't all that great, but when I got to first flash with John playing the piano I though "okay, this seems like it might be interesting" -- it suggested a focus on aesthetics, presentation and mood rather than just broad comedy. I found myself really liking the sense of humor, the characters and dialogue, and the premise (I really like the "computer game that affects reality" idea).

It helped a lot that my expectations were so low (having heard there were characters called "trolls" I just expected it to be a bunch of internet jokes), which made the whole thing a long string of "hey, it turns out I actually like this!" experiences. The fact that it's deliberately reminiscent of convoluted console RPG stories (with the "Insert Disk 2" thing, etc.) also helped, since I really loved video game storylines when I was a kid, and Homestuck felt like a hilarious parody of them that was also self-aware and well-written enough to rekindle the love that I had felt for them when I was younger. When I got to [S] JOHN. RISE UP, all I could think was "man, I haven't enjoyed a stereotypical video game cutscene this much since I was 14."

[Ace of Dark-Hearts]

The thing that hooked me on Homestuck, eh? There where actually many things that kept me around that kept building on top of each other.

I went into Homestuck thinking that it would actually be a game like on addicting games and got confused because this, "Beta Release of Sburb," was nowhere to be found. I gave up in a fit of ADD, and decided to check around the site. I originally thought the main page was a sort of messaging board so I was like, "Oh, someone posted a comic about this Sburb Game everyone's talking about at the top of the page." So I clicked it. And that is what began my adventure into Homestuck.

I kept reading it out of obligation at first, saying to myself "god when will this dumb comic get anywhere?" I didn't find any of the jokes funny, and the walls of pesterlog text where intimidating, but I kept reading because I just had to know what the hell this nerd John and his friends where up to. I got to all the stuff about the alchemitter and Rose's introduction and was impressed by the usage of the game mechanics, being a fan of video games in general. Then I got to the part with Nannasprite and when it was said that the earth was doomed, and the rant about skaia and junk. I suddenly didn't understand anything except for the fact that shit just got real. I think by the end of Rose's intro is what hooked me. Her and her passive aggressive campaigns of one-up-man-ship was hilarious. I quit for a while when Dave was introduced because I was sick and tired of this bull shit. After that I was fascinated by the creativity of the alternate dimension aspects, with the heroes, the kingdoms, skaia, and the different lands. By the time I got to the trolls I was sick of all these characters, but once I gave then a chance I absolutely adored their quirky personalities, along with their sci-fi elements. John's Ascension was probably the most epic and memorable moment for me, and by that time I was pretty much stuck on Homestuck.

[Moon Redeemer]

Do you know how awesome the idea of a Sim style game that influences real life is? I was hooked from the start of Sburb.