Oh no, I somehow fell back into Homestuck. I'd dropped out at the beginning of Act 6, when it suddenly introduced a new cast of characters and I went 'HOMESTUCK, YOU HAVE A THOUSAND CHARACTERS ALREADY, HOW AM I EXPECTED TO HAVE ANY ROOM TO CARE ABOUT THESE ONES?'

And then, a couple of years later, I revisited it in an idle moment, and... well, it turns out that I love Jane, Roxy, Dirk and Jake just as much as I loved John, Rose, Dave and Jade. That'll teach me to judge.

The friendships in Homestuck are so great! I had forgotten how wonderful they were. All the Homestuck hatred floating around on the Internet had sort of driven its excellent qualities out of my mind. I had not forgotten how fantastically incomprehensible the plot was, but the characters and their dynamics make up for it.

There's a part of me that wants to reread the entire thing from the beginning once I've caught up. There is another part of me that is pretty convinced that that would be a terrible idea. Homestuck is a million years long and incredibly confusing, and the start, if I recall correctly, is a bit on the slow side. But it's so much fun!

It'd also be quite nice to re-experience the early acts with my later knowledge. When I first started reading Homestuck, I didn't pay much attention to the trolling bits; I was much more interested in the conversations between the kids, and I hadn't yet realised that the trolls actually had significance in the story. I still love the John-Rose-Dave-Jade friendship, of course, but it would be nice to reread the early carcinoGeneticist logs in the awareness that Karkat is the best forever. He's just constantly ineffectually furious in a way I find utterly charming.

I think I hateship Karkat with basically everyone. But especially himself.


This is a particularly unfortunate time to get back into Homestuck, as it happens. I haven't formally participated in National Novel Writing Month since 2006, but I do try to write at least a little each day during the month of November. Naturally, I usually end up writing fanfiction for my fandom of the moment.

If my fandom of the moment is Homestuck, this is a problem, because Homestuck is completely impossible to write fanfiction for. Even setting the incomprehensible plot aside, there's the difficulty of getting into the heads of characters who are mostly aliens, and then there's the issue of how to write dialogue. In Homestuck, most of the conversation takes place through chat clients; when people have physical conversations, though, their speech is still rendered in the style in which they type. I can't imagine writing Homestuck fanfiction that isn't in chat-transcript style! IF KARKAT ISN'T SPEAKING IN GREY ALLCAPS, HE'S NOT KARKAT TO ME. Dont Even Get Me Started On Kanaya OR T3R3Z1. maybe writing the kids would be ok, but i think it would still feel weird not to use their font colors and capitalization styles! (Whoops, just realised I'd used the American 'colors' but the British 'capitalisation' there; I am already screwing up John's voice, and I haven't even started writing fanfiction yet.) And all of this would look ridiculous in a non-transcript format fic.

"ok, that sounds good!" John said.

IT JUST DOESN'T WORK.

In conclusion, Homestuck fanfiction cannot be written. It looks like there are over twenty thousand Homestuck works on AO3, but I'm fairly certain they're all blank documents.