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on trying to pimp Homestuck
Jun. 10th, 2011 05:12 pmAs threatened! And because I can't be the only one who's been noticing the growing number of fic on AO3 and wondering what was up with that (I got it confused with Homestar Runner for a good couple months there...) and then if/when you do look it up, you end up on MSPaint Adventures baffled (or possibly worse, the MSPA Wiki, which in my experience is terrifying to the uninitiated.)(And then I spent two hours on it last night when I ran out of new pages...)
The brief explanation: [mostly spoiler-free, provided you don't click the links; I mention a few future things but trust me, there's a lot going on and I'm not giving any of the surprises away.] Homestuck is the latest and longest-running story on MSPA (unrelated to previous adventures, none of which I've read.) It's nominally a webcomic, insofar as you have to call it something; it might be easier to think of it as a detailed walk-through to an illustrated text adventure game that doesn't actually exist. It's not particularly interactive (with the exception of a few fun little RPG-style flash mini-games); it's not a game but an unusual narrative device, with the story being told mostly through text-adventure style descriptions and commands, and chat logs.
( This got long, so I'm cutting to spare you. )
So, that's Homestuck. If you're still not sure, I'd suggest going to the beginning and starting to read. The opening is mostly nonsense; the story takes a bit to get going, and you can skim until you get to the first chat logs. I'd recommend going through to the end of Act 1 before you really decide how you feel - that's only a fraction of the full work, but it'll give you a decent impression. (Oh, and I'd try looking at it in different browsers, or else turning off fonts - for some reason the primary fixed-width text is bolded weird and hard for me to read in Firefox, but looks fine in Chrome.)
The brief explanation: [mostly spoiler-free, provided you don't click the links; I mention a few future things but trust me, there's a lot going on and I'm not giving any of the surprises away.] Homestuck is the latest and longest-running story on MSPA (unrelated to previous adventures, none of which I've read.) It's nominally a webcomic, insofar as you have to call it something; it might be easier to think of it as a detailed walk-through to an illustrated text adventure game that doesn't actually exist. It's not particularly interactive (with the exception of a few fun little RPG-style flash mini-games); it's not a game but an unusual narrative device, with the story being told mostly through text-adventure style descriptions and commands, and chat logs.
( This got long, so I'm cutting to spare you. )
So, that's Homestuck. If you're still not sure, I'd suggest going to the beginning and starting to read. The opening is mostly nonsense; the story takes a bit to get going, and you can skim until you get to the first chat logs. I'd recommend going through to the end of Act 1 before you really decide how you feel - that's only a fraction of the full work, but it'll give you a decent impression. (Oh, and I'd try looking at it in different browsers, or else turning off fonts - for some reason the primary fixed-width text is bolded weird and hard for me to read in Firefox, but looks fine in Chrome.)
