I'm reading it right now! But very slowly; I'm around page 3600 or so of what I hear are 8000 pages, and I've already gone back once to reread a large chunk of it -- I discovered a really good voiced version of it on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jMzJaztnFs&list=PLHO1rc05qiGtAidSBy_8jsEOlHXR6x4cd) and got a lot of pleasure out of listening to the conversations being voice-acted now that I understood more about what was going on. Plus I am reading a ton of Homestuck fanfic!
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise I have developed an entire array of tools/techniques for reading Homestuck! Along with the YouTube videos above I also use this great webpage (http://rafe.name/homestuck/) that has really good page-group summaries -- by which I mean if, say, pages 1-30 are all one set of actions, it groups those together and summarises it in a few sentences, with a set of links to each individual page on the right. When I was doing my reread I used that to skip over the really intense slogging in Acts 1 & 2, since rather than watching John interact with his environment for hundreds of pages trying to figure out how things work, I could just read some sentences about it and move on to the parts where people are talking to each other, which is what I'm actually interested in. (Eventually it did hit a pace where there was zero slogging for me, but it took a looooooong time.)
All that being said, I do love how twisty it is, and how the worldbuilding proceeds, and how there are many time-travel shenanigans and how non-linear the story is, and I don't mind the grim dark murdery bits (of which there are many) because for me it's all at a register of adolescent melodrama that means I *care* but I don't take it seriously as a reflection of life, if that makes any sense?
How far did you get when you tried it? I want to rec it to everyone, but the first 1000 pages of slog are understandably a very hard sell. But if you do decide to try it again I would love to hear!
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Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise I have developed an entire array of tools/techniques for reading Homestuck! Along with the YouTube videos above I also use this great webpage (http://rafe.name/homestuck/) that has really good page-group summaries -- by which I mean if, say, pages 1-30 are all one set of actions, it groups those together and summarises it in a few sentences, with a set of links to each individual page on the right. When I was doing my reread I used that to skip over the really intense slogging in Acts 1 & 2, since rather than watching John interact with his environment for hundreds of pages trying to figure out how things work, I could just read some sentences about it and move on to the parts where people are talking to each other, which is what I'm actually interested in. (Eventually it did hit a pace where there was zero slogging for me, but it took a looooooong time.)
All that being said, I do love how twisty it is, and how the worldbuilding proceeds, and how there are many time-travel shenanigans and how non-linear the story is, and I don't mind the grim dark murdery bits (of which there are many) because for me it's all at a register of adolescent melodrama that means I *care* but I don't take it seriously as a reflection of life, if that makes any sense?
How far did you get when you tried it? I want to rec it to everyone, but the first 1000 pages of slog are understandably a very hard sell. But if you do decide to try it again I would love to hear!