I found myself compelled to add a new smiley

[Ari Rahikkala]

[Andreas the Wise]

?

[Ari Rahikkala]

Owing to the latest update of Homestuck. It's... worth reading. The smiley code is :mspa.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

I stopped reading mspa, it just got too complicated and moved too fast while I was in a non-sane state-of-mind.

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

I'm just left confused.

[Icebreaker]

SITYAOWH

[Harvey Steffke]

I kinda gave up on Homestuck once it became apparent that the rest of the comic was going to be a troll arc. They're okay characters, but I really liked the thing that was going on before they became important, and I'm left a bit frustrated that they totally stole the show.

[Demon of Fides]

Speaking of new smilies, can we pay to get some coded?

I'd like tl;dr (without colons) to be turned into



Scaled down, of course...

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

Jigga what?

[Harvey Steffke]

1.21 jigga whats?

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

... that was bad....

[Demon of Fides]

Gettit? Teal Deer? Tl;dr?

[Harvey Steffke]

... that was bad....

Was it? I was proud of that one.

[Kaiser Ometeotl I]

As your should be... thus my saying it was bad... which made it a good one... to be proud of.

[Ari Rahikkala]

I kinda gave up on Homestuck once it became apparent that the rest of the comic was going to be a troll arc. They're okay characters, but I really liked the thing that was going on before they became important, and I'm left a bit frustrated that they totally stole the show.

Yeah, that *is* sort of how MSPA works, you know. You think it's got a good thing going, and then something even more awesome comes along and just kills it

[Harvey Steffke]

As usual, I have difficulty gauging your sincerity.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

As usual, I have difficulty gauging your sincerity.

Yeah, I've just stopped trying. In my mind, Ari sounds like one of those automated phone systems.

[Ari Rahikkala]

As usual, I have difficulty gauging your sincerity.

Sorry about that. It's a habit I picked up from #adom, using the :( emoticon to indicate deadpan humour. I pretty much take it as an axiom that while Andrew Hussie isn't perfect, he knows what he is doing. Above all, he knows that webcomic fans tend to averse to change. Even if that change is for the better and those same fans would love the new stuff if it wasn't for that weird primal "I found this webcomic like this, now it must always be like this!" response.

If he'd just drawn what the fans wanted, Homestuck would still consist of the kids putzing around their houses messing with their sylladexen, and of an endlessly repeating a growing set of increasingly dumb running gags. I don't think I'd ascribe any single change to just wanting to watch the fans squirm trying to come up with objective reasons why the new stuff is terrible... but I wouldn't be surprised if there were an undercurrent of "let's move this paralyzed insect a few inches again and laugh at the poor stereotype that always responds the same way" anyway

[Harvey Steffke]

Okay. I can understand that. But it seems that the alternative of going with the flow is kind of the plot twist of the day. There's a definite undercurrent in the writing where it feels like he is making fun of the fans for believing or hoping for certain things. "Why would that happen? That would be incredibly stupid" kind of lines. It's all tongue-in-cheek, sure, but it's ringing truer and truer. I have a hard time believing he doesn't intentionally make the story look like it's going one way only to reverse it, with the previous misdirection being part of the suspense. And sure, all story-based media does these types of things to keep the plot from being too formulaic, but Homestuck seems to throw another one at me every time I check the site.

There is probably a very fine line between keeping things fresh and overloading readers with just too much odd new stuff, and Homestuck walked the line preeeettttyyy well for about a year or so which is what made it so great, but it feels like a lot of the recent plot twists have been kind of unbelievable nonsense. And not in the good "OH SNAP" way, but in the "I just can't muster the enthusiasm to keep up with this plot anymore if he's going to be that sort of jerk" sort of way.

"The trolls created the universe, OUR universe, the one with Earth in it" was the snapping point for me. Until that point, I had given the story major props for actually taking place on modern-day Earth with actual locations. I google earth'd Rose and John's houses when he posted the GPS coordinates of them - that was cool. But I feel like my faith in the reality was abused by the troll creation story nonsense. Kind of like he was saying "hey, since you accept that everything else about my version of Earth is accurate, you have to accept this too." For me, that moved it out of an interesting take on reality right back into the realm of any given fantasy planet setting, and that was a darn shame.

Edit: on the flipside, he treats cats nicely, so there's that too.

[Dolphin]

"The trolls created the universe, OUR universe, the one with Earth in it" was the snapping point for me. Until that point, I had given the story major props for actually taking place on modern-day Earth with actual locations. I google earth'd Rose and John's houses when he posted the GPS coordinates of them - that was cool. But I feel like my faith in the reality was abused by the troll creation story nonsense. Kind of like he was saying "hey, since you accept that everything else about my version of Earth is accurate, you have to accept this too." For me, that moved it out of an interesting take on reality right back into the realm of any given fantasy planet setting, and that was a darn shame.

I SEE IT MORE LIKE ITS A CHEKHOV'S GUN FOR SOME LATER TIME PARADOX TWIST FOR THE TROLL WORLD. OR THAT THE TROLLS ARE JUST REALLY EGOTISTICAL AND ALIEN.

THEY ARE TROLLS AFTER ALL.

OR IT COULD BE THAT PLOT ARC IS GETTING REALLY EXHAUSTED AND TONS OF NONSENSE IS JUST BEING MASHED TOGETHER IN SOME KIND OF RECAP.