#anyways take as opinion!! i still like hs2 art at least

[d1nnerd0g]

Hey it's that anon again. y'know that one from like a day ago. or a few days ago I don't have a good sense of time. it could be 2030 for all I know

I think my most major like, post-canon take is that I'd probably sorta hate it if I were treating it as a real completely serious canon continuation of Homestuck. Instead I read it more like fanfic than anything, just slightly more Creator Approved than most fics.

Not to say I lack standards of quality for fanfic, but I am more open to certain character alterations and interpretations (there are still more than a handful I don't like in post-canon) because I am more cool with seeing it as someone else's vision of a character rather than them being "utterly ruined" in canon or whatever.

I think it also helps that I read all of Homestuck a couple years after HS^2 paused so I wasn't in the active fandom during all of that (I almost was! I originally tried reading back in 2011 but I fell off of it within 500 pages because I had bad taste) so I didn't actually have my opinion particularly swayed by outside influences and was just more willing to give it a fair reading.

My next most major post-canon take is that, as an epilogues and HS^2 liker, the most recent upd8 is quite literally the best I've actually felt about the writing in ANY post-canon content. I think even if I DISLIKED HS^2, I'd still be interested in seeing where it goes from here, after that.

Hi! I waited til I read all of HS2 to reply so I actually know what I’m talking about. I get you on the benefits of backreading, reading this thing in one go I cannot imagine waiting month-long pauses in between scenes, boy can you really feel them in the text (in a way that wasn’t true in the original comic.)

I don’t find that either the AH-lessness or the divisiveness of the postcanon stuff changes the fact that this is the de facto continuation of the canon storyline - it is the reason any of us are reading it. Them framing the epilogues as an AO3 fic doesn’t make them any less on homestuck.com, rejecting this continuation is an active choice you have to make as a HS reader.

Anyway reading HS2 I was surprised both by how little plot occurred (except in Candy, ironically -- oh my GOD I cannot believe Meat decided to do 3 more years of The Yard/Meteorstuck) and how overall unobjectionable it was? This comic’s just been a lot of really nice art and decently written character banter, and that’s essentially it. Then both took a shocking nosedive in ch15/16, the worst writing I’ve seen in all of HS/postcanon, which was so egregious that I think… if the New Team honestly cares about this project shouldn’t they at the very least go back and revise some of that? At least fix the numerous typos?? Instead we get Terezi offering wry meta commentary that this time she’ll “do it right”, which already communicates a dismissive attitude I’m not impressed by. But hey all we've seen so far is two new conversations, everybody loves Sollux, let’s see if JR can fanfic his way into a compelling story.

…Seriously tho anon, thanks for sharing your thoughts and I absolutely just used your ask as an excuse to bitch some opinions out. It remains true there’s nothing in HS2 that I like that hasn’t already been done or done better in fanworks, except drawing Jane looking extremely bangin I guess, but I haven’t sought that out, as a fan, so it’s like the gift I didn’t even know I wanted, and didn't want

[rabble-dabble]

im assuming that youve seen hs2 update due to unfortunately circumstances

if the unfortunate circumstances is my own will, betrayal by my own mouse click, then yeah, it is.

But as much as i do shit on hs2, its because i'm intrigued. For the wrong reasons!! I despise the story direction, and the events in it. But reading hs2 is like reading the rise of its failure - in which, its not so bad that its good, but you just can't help yourself into seeing all the ways it'll crumble on itself! And sure, there's enough people who like it to have the idea of keeping it going. But, unless that's your intention with the content you create, you don't want that kind of attention (even if it turns more eye to your provided content). I'm betting that Homestuck itself had a little more than it's share of "haters" at its time. But now, it's a lot of the fans of Homestuck Prime who visibly (and audibly) despise what events happen in hs2, it's really not the type of support you want from an audience.

You can have a "love-to-hate" theme, for as arrogant Ultimate!Dirk pokes and jabs at the readers. But it's so much more than that - hs2 is bringing up powerfully issues without ever addressing them, or being really disgusting with it's treatment of it. The writing team has said that Hussie made some "non-negotiable" plot points, but honestly, there has to be a point where you can recognize that your audience is displeased with you for obvious reasons, or that as a creator you have made a mistake.

Ignoring hs2 is theoretically easy - but seeing it fall so far from Homestuck Prime is very intriguing. Inconsistancy and a jumble of problematic issues is entertaining not because it'a written by one guy, but by an entire team approved by one guy that manages to okay the updates without (somehow) finding any problems with them. Hs2 is dubiously canon to the Homestuck universe, but I don't think it'll ever have that "sequel on ao3" feel as if it were written by some 16 year old with an idea to do sadstuck with a twist of angst and drama. It feels professional.

Professionally bad.

And that is really, really interesting.