Culture Phoenix

I apologize for my absence from this blog, honestly My senior year of high school has been keeping me busy but as the school year rolls to an end I will certainly have some more free time.

So what have I been up to lately you may ask? To be entirely honest... Homestuck.

I avoided this thing like the plaque for years, as is my usual reaction to something that explodes like wildfire over the internet, the added bonus of the infamous troll characters taking up a good 30% of all Anime Conventions recently did not help in my desire to read it at all.

However I have learned to not pass judgement until I have at least tried to understand why something is so popular ( It was the only reason I watched the first season of Big Bang Theory). I met someone who was a huge fan and she convinced me to read it with her, and read it we did.

I was actually fairly surprised. Despite the horribly long and boring start combined with humor so smug and meta you can practically hear the sad trombone noise coming from the webpage, I soldiered on until the End of Act 2 of the story. It kinda sucks that you have to read that long to get to anything really good, but if you have a way to entertain yourself during those first 2 acts you'll be fine. Once there the story picks up quite a bit, and is fairly entertaining.

Not GOOD per say, but entertaining. Despite a lot of problems dealing with it's tangential nature, silly humor, and about 20 different plots going on at one time ( at often ones that get dropped). Not to mention just plain skipping part of the story/ not explaining what in the blue devil is going on. If you take a minute to think about it you can probably fill in the blanks as much as you need to and move on. It makes me a but sad this story doesn't take itself a bit more seriously and a bit more focused, it could make some seriously good modern-day Sci-fi.

If I had to name my favorite part of Homestuck, it would be how it looks/sounds. I'm not too big a fan of the usual look of the comic. The Short and squat silly cartoon look is fine but nothing spectacular, though some of the backgrounds are really interesting to look at. But Where Homestuck shines is in it's Flashes.

Se every so often, usually for a huge plot event, the story goes from pictures/gifs to full on flash videos. The more detailed and brightly colored look of these are pretty good eye candy, in combination with music that is both good and fits the whole tone of the series. Yeah those are pretty great to watch.

At the end of the day it's a fun read/watch and it doesn't do any harm to anyone, it certainly isn't the worst thing to become big on the internet. In the end Homestuck really couldn't exist without the internet, and I find that fascinating.