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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

As a longtime Homestuck fan, I approve of this review.

> So, do I recommend Homestuck? Should you drop everything and start reading it?

> You can’t. Homestuck is over, and I mean over, not just that it isn’t updating. “Homestuck,” the masterpiece, was the event, the community, the shifting pace of updates, the constant chatter between fandom and author. Homestuck is done. If you missed it, you missed it. It may still be worth reading the comic, but it won’t be Homestuck.

Yeah. You'll never watch Cascade on release day along with a million other people. I did, and it was insane.

(Though that problem is not unique to Homestuck. If you want to become a Beatles fan today, you're just as out of luck.)

IMO the best Homestuck-inspired works are Undertale (game), The Northern Caves (prose, finished) and Prequel (webcomic, ongoing). Check them out, you won't regret it.

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As a person who liked Homestuck and read it entirely on his own time and wasn't aware of any of the community stuff:

Saying things like this is narrow-minded as hell and i don't understand why you would even say something like that. All it seems to do is prop yourself up to be higher than someone who comes in later.

Will a person who didn't read it in realtime get a different experience? Sure. Does it mean it's pointless to do so? No. Why would it? In some aspects it may even be a better experience.

Trying to claim "you can't become a beatles fan anymore" is just nonsensical. It sounds like something an _ebooks twitter account would generate and less like a coherent human thought.

It feels like you wear the "be a fan" thing as a badge of honor, instead of just meaning "i like something".

Some folks best enjoy things in a group, and it sounds like this short story... thing... was completely designed to cater to those folks.

The post does come off as narrow minded, but I got the point after reading into it a bit more.

That's the thing really, it's not a short story at all. It's a web comic with over 10000 pages, a good amount of which are even flash and youtube animations and even flash games. It's totally worth delving in. :)

It's such a fascinating thing, how many people were part of that wave and yet collectively don't acknowledge it publicly any more.

It's one of the first times I've seen people en masse avoid mentioning a shared thing from the past, not unlike the stereotypical "playing with dolls" of being very young.

(Mandatory reference to people huddling around metaphorical campfires as various livestreaming services had people who had managed to load that 80MB monstrosity before it went down sharing it, and people sometimes streaming those streams as the per-stream viewer caps got hit, and various free filesharing sites went down as AH uploaded it there...)

I guess many fans of Homestuck today feel that it went downhill at some point. That's not unique, it happens with fandoms all the time.

Have you seen the latest update BTW? It goes a long way to rescuing the ending, I didn't know that was possible.

Not even recommending it, just acknowledging that you were ever acquainted with it.

A good number of the people I met in that community who still keep in contact with one another avoid the question when asked how they met, by someone who isn't from that set.

I suspect, indeed, that the reputation backlash as it hit critical mass is why people don't want to be associated with it any more.

(I've not; I ended up too busy to keep following it around when the largest of the pauses transpired, and haven't gone back to finish it or the added epilogue yet.)

e: drat, this comment makes less sense with your edit.

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