#and it's also about how the protagonists cant deal with trauma and can't learn how . and it's about a guy NOT learning his lesson

[july-19th-club]

the brilliance of mystery spot, in the canon of famous time loops, is that your ordinary time loop ending is like, the final thing that the characters need to solve or defeat in the story in order to move on. in mystery spot, the time loop ends halfway through the episode and then things stop being fun in any way and just get a thousand times worse . the time loop was a lesson, punishment, ironic/poetic situation, sure, but in its own repetitive way it was also protecting the characters, keeping them from having to face the consequences by always resetting them to a time before disaster strikes. breaking out of the loop only makes disaster more permanent, and then you find out that they're just in a longer version of the loop

[slightly-gay-pogohammer]

so i keep seeing homestuck mentioned. im gonna ask. what is homestuck??????? (like ik its a web series and was popular in uhhhh the 2010's but aside from the candy corn horns idk anything else. something about a hive swap? idk man help me out gio

Homestuck is a story of a kid and his friends and a game they play together :)

and oh man i can't believe i googled this pic in the year of the lord 2022 but. alas.

yes this is going under read more

OKAY FIRST OF ALL TECHNICALLY SPEAKING?

it's a webcomic except not really. the way it's written is heavily based on old text-based adventure games, with a few panels with art and everything else written underneath, either from the point of view of a narrator or with chatlogues/dialogues of the main characters the comic also has some animation (or "flashes"), some occasional minigames and RPG-like games and songs, some of which made by toby fox

and yes i'd argue that a lot of things in HS aged poorly or weren't well written from the very start but the songs are literally all bangers. like even if you don't follow homestuck i cant not recommend the songs a LOT of stuff was really a product of its time too. like there's a lot of lolrandom humor, occasional jokes that would likely not fly rn that while can be excused with "these are 13 years olds and also like all them is canonically dealing with internalized homophobia, undiagnosed mental health issues or both" some parts really aged like milk

the entire plot is divided in 7 acts, with sub-acts and intermissions between each one of them to "divide" the story in chapters. like the first one is all "outside" the game the, the second introduces more characters, act 5 is the best one, act 7 is only the final flash to conclude the entire story

...and yes okay the story is, again, about a kid and his friends and a game they play together. basically on the 13th of April 2009 best boy John becomes 13 years old and recieves a game to play with his pals. It's a game that literally alters reality and that, once an item in the game is activated, summons a meteor. just roll with it this is how this universe works. "oh the gang needs to save the world then?" nah lmao the world is literally doomed their goal is to reach worlds spawned from the game, become gods, defeat the final boss and create a new universe

of course however things dont go as planned :)

all of this is explained approximately 1% into the whole story by the way

other than this, the kids are also dealing with a bunch of trolls from another world (the candy corn zodiac dudes), a bunch of NPCs from the game, alternate timelines, the literal goddamn author and lots and lots of death. Like HS is kinda infamous for killing of characters left and right. It has it's own set of rules to keep most of them relevant, like introducing ghosts, "dream" selves, the alternate timelines (Dave especially is SUCH a fun time he gets time-related powers and he gets to see SO many version of him dying :) ) or the whole way death works once the characters become gods, in which they can die only if their death is "just" (so if they were fucked up and evil and their death was justified") or "heroic" (so if they sacrifice themselves to protect someone, basically)

and. yes again homestuck isn't a story to take lightly, reading it requires a LOT of critical thinking, but it honestly has some of the best written kid protagonists I've ever read? Like with some duds of course *cough*gamzee*cough*act6vriska*cough*calliope*cough*, but most of them are really well fleshed out, with lots of flaws and good qualities, funny as hell, and for most of them their traumas and problems are integral part of their character growth - and yes while you get kind of used to see them die over and over have some of them Actually Die is. genuinely shocking and hurts so much?

like again shoutout to Dave but also Karkat because they start off as the "cool kid" and "angry kid" tropes and yet they get so much growth, learning to understand their limits and rationalizing traumas from the past. like the very last scene we get with Dave before the final battle is one of the best written pieces of media I've ever read

..........................................you just need to kind of. First of all pull a death of the author since they're kind of a douchebag and also remember that this started in 2009, likely with no intentions of making it a story as big as it ended up being. I don't think I would recommend HS to someone who "wasn't there" not for gatekeeping but specifically because. It's a product of it's time, and I think that if you finish Act 1 (in which basically nothing important happens, if not putting down the bases of the general tone) and aren't into it you likely won't likei t even when it gets so much better since

yes it's a story with very serious topics that WILL take seriously it's characters, but it's also a story that not only would drop everything from a page to another because the author decided to commit character assassination for his fav but. also one of the plot points is that the main villain of the first half went on a murder spree because he didn't want to dress like a clown. one of the plot points is that insane clown posse and guy fieri became presidents. one of the plot points is that the author has a crush on dante basco and rufio from "hook" is mentioned so many goddamn times. a plot point has buckets being used for reproduction. this is a canon line.

so is this one

and also it's a shame that they didn't do anything else afterwards :) that there is no hiveswap even if the kickstarter literally broke a lot of records :) that there is no epilogue :) that there is no sequel :) friendsim can stay but it's on thin fucking ice

TL;DR: homestuck is the most webcomic ever and also the ending was fine you guys are just mean