>>67254
>>67256

Its a tie.

>>67254
>>67256

Its a tie.

Tie between pacing and character development. Act 5 was all done in a day. The events that took place could've easily been made to have been as long as the Trolls session.

>>67275
I thought EVERYTHING up until Act 6 was done in a day. Act 1 took place in about twenty minutes. Act 2 in less than that.

>>67322
Didn't they use up the whole 24 hours' worth of defense portals during act 5? And remember that Dave and Jade were both introduced during daylight and didn't enter until after nightfall... So maybe as much as twelve hours of stuff was happening before the reckoning began

It doesn't matter if it took place during 12 or 24 or 36 hours. The point is that the trolls' session, which was a post-scratch game (with stronger players) and for the most part highly successful (until shit went down), took several weeks to complete. And while there's really no way to know how long an 'average' session lasts, it's been mentioned over and over again that the kids had insanely little time to find out how to save the day.

That doesn't excuse the pacing. Rose's development is probably the most obvious. She goes from a sweet but snarky girl who wants to play Sburb to revive her dead cat to an amoral black magician who will murder innocents without second thought if she believes it to be important to their survival. She leaves her beloved cat behind in favour of omniscient and/or omnipotent alien beings, believes herself to be clever enough to coax information and power from them without any backlash whatsoever. She then goes through a (mostly symbolic) corruption after her mother's death and sets after her murderer, watches her friend and/or love interest get killed and then dies herself. She then sets out on a suicide mission to save their asses, but ultimately realizes how badly she fucked up and is then granted god tier as proof of her character development change in personality. And all that happened in like a single day.

>>67330
To be fair you're assuming that Rose, in the beginning, wouldn't have done any of those things but she developed the traits as the story wore on. That's not necessarily true.

I also wouldn't call her amoral at all. She was told it was a game she needed to play, then told that it was a game she and her friends would not be able to win if they played by the rules, and so she cheated. From her perspective LOLAR was just a game abstraction to overcome in order to save everyone who was still alive from certain death and she really had no reason to think of it as anything else.

>>67330
I'm not even sure if Rose's ascension even coincided with any important character development. There war some change for sure, but it had more to do with getting new powers than dealing with any problems she might have.

>>67332
It was necessary for the creation of the green sun that she did not become the Seer of Light, since that would have allowed her to see how she was being used by Scratch and/or the Horrorterrors. Her land and her sources provided her with copious amounts of lore, information and clues, most of which were completely true, which she could have used to put the pieces together. Instead, the Horrorterrors merged her memories with those of a doomed dreamself which served to motivate her to abandon his quest, while Scratch toyed with her through half-truths, assumptions and lies through omission and perverted her aspect into that of Void.

In the end, she seems to understand her mistakes just seconds before ascending together with Dave, who had just underwent a similar development (he spent their session afraid of his own mortality and angsting about never being the hero, but ascended after saving Rose and going through with their suicide mission). While Dave's case is more clear, you could either choose to view Rose's ascension as a "reward" for doing what she was meant to do rather than what she was 'supposed' to, or you could choose to see the god tiers as a reward for character development or finding the role they are meant to have in the game.

>>67331
I agree with all of this. I took a lot of what happened to Rose in Act 5.2 as evidence that she HADN'T grown, actually. She'd always been presumptuous and arrogant, so it wasn't surprising that she thought she didn't need Jaspers anymore (and not just in the sense that she wasn't going to listen to what her in-Sburb adviser said she had to do; she thought she'd outgrown her childhood pet) or that she could outwit Scratch.

For another example, in the beginning of 5.2 a lot of people were anxious over Rose "going evil" because she was tearing up temples (and maybe killing turtles as a consequence of her actions? which I personally believe describing as "murdering innocents" to be a little misleading, but ni modo), but I thought it was a believable heightening of her violent actions in the beginning of the game/story, such as throwing bathtubs through walls and bludgeoning imps with heavy objects. Rose can be sweet, but it's not really one of her primary characteristics.

giant text walls.

far too many pesterlogs are spent having characters talk about what they're -going- to do, and then doing it. why not just cut the chatter and get right to the chase?

>>67338
Act 6 chatlogs with any of the new characters except Roxy have been the first time I've just kind of skimmed the chatlogs.

Some of the Dirk/AR logs go on for about three times far too long.

>>67341
I don't think that's an issue with the longness but just that we're not as invested in the characters and as a result their long dialogues (which aren't as long as some of them, say Karkat's memos) are more tedious to read.

Suffers from Bleach Syndrome. Too many characters, not enough development. Older characters who were interesting to us get shafted when their novelty runs out in order to put the new ones we're not as used to in the spotlight for their own 15 seconds of fame.

I generally agree with most everyone on the pacing. I can somewhat reasonably believe that acts 1-3 and some of 4 took place in a day, but not that monster that was act 5.

As for the pesterlogs I must disagree with some in this regard. I enjoy pesterlogs, even now. Though I do find walls of text very tedious. The troll logs were like this, and many subsequent ones were as well. This was ok with the trolls, as it was usually Karkat and he's always generally enjoyable to hear from. Not so much for others. I think that logs would honestly benefit from older methods of making the logs span different pages, while being shorter per page. This happened with Dirk and uu and I want more of that.

There are other things of concern, but I'll come back to that.

Homestuck has alot of flaws, the work itself would certainly include its pacing and character development amongst its most glaring flaws.

But outside of the work itself I'd have to say the fandom, which is downright cancerous, and I feel it has affected Hussie since he feeds off of them

>>67344
I feel like this needs to be examined. How did the fandom get this way anyhow? I remember running past Problem Sleuth threads back in the day and, while not really getting involved, they looked fun. Then Homestuck happened, and I didn't join until around Act 3 or 4 after seeing all the flashes on /f/.
I mean, I started out with a bunch of others in HSG and things seemed fine, but soon afterward, around Act 5, shit hit the fan and the whole world changed.

>>67345
In the early acts most of the readers were holdovers from the Problem Sleuth era. [S] Descend brought in the first huge wave of fans, as the people who were already reading FINALLY got all their friends to read after showing them how awesome this flash was, and their friends told their friends etc. I figure [S] Descend also managed to pull in a lot of /co/mrades who were on the fence about reading it too. Every other big flash since then has been the same; all the fans freak out about it, non-fans are confused and might watch it and then might start reading the comic to find out what the fuck is happening in it. ESPECIALLY that one flash that broke Newgrounds (I can't remember what it was anymore--[S] Make Her Pay?).

As for what brought in the BAD fans, the troll arc was ship bait incarnate. People who were fine to begin with now had ships to defend. Newcomers started reading BECAUSE they saw shipping fanart. The internet porn machine started churning out a lot of stuff suddenly so you got a lot of people who were pretty much in it just for pictures of characters doing the horizontal tango. And somewhere in that mess, a lot of chucklefucks from the Hetalia fandom jumped over to ours. And a lot of kids who were like 13-15 and entering their first real fandom experience.

I can't blame the porn and the shipping on Act 5 or the trolls or an influx of fans though. That was ALWAYS there. It was just repressed by really strict MSPA forum rules and general prudery. Who remembers the Eyes5 naughty mailing list? I do. For people who have forgotten or it was before their time, there was a fanartist who drew some weird violent stuff and sometimes drew naked characters, but there was no place for them, so if you wanted to see this stuff you had to sign up and she would email it to you when she finished a picture. And A LOT of people signed up, like virtually all of the named fans and a bunch of anons. They all wanted it EVEN BACK THEN but they just didn't want to admit it publicly.

I would even go to say that the early fandom was still rotten, but it was rotten in a completely different way than it is now. The early badness was only sustainable when the population was relatively low, so as the fandom kept growing it went through a metamorphosis.

>>67347
>ESPECIALLY that one flash that broke Newgrounds
[S] Cascade

It's not Problem Sleuth.

>>67347
That is an interesting history.

>>67345

>>67347
The porn and shippy fanart is what I don't get as fan bait, though. Why would you be emotionally invested and interested in characters when you don't even know who the hell they are in the first place?

>>67355
Why don't you go back to the 90's and ask the Weiss Cruz fandom that. Pretty sure that and other female 90's anime fandoms won the fucking award for "huge fandom that didn't actually read the canon." From what I remember, they largely just made up their own characterizations for the characters with disregard to actual canon.

>>67356
> Weiss Cruz fandom

Oh jesus I think I blocked out that memory

>>67353
Oh hey that post. Yeah that basically covers things. I still can't believe we only gained the less extreme of the Hetalia fandom. I shudder to think of the rest.

I wish hussie would act like a reasonable fucking webcomics artist and release on a goddamn schedule. Flashes require breaks and I'm cool with that but when he is just releasing panels i wish he would do it at a predictable rate. With a very small number of exceptions we have almost never known when the next update would be and i think that sucks.

I wish hussie would act like a reasonable fucking webcomics artist and release on a goddamn schedule. Flashes require breaks and I'm cool with that but when he is just releasing panels i wish he would do it at a predictable rate. With a very small number of exceptions we have almost never known when the next update would be and i think that sucks.

>>67387
aside from working on flashes (which he usually gives a warning about if they are going to be long downtimes) but he updates in chunks pretty much every day, and sometimes more than once. complain about the characters and the plot and the art style and the narrative and literally anything else and i think you would probably have a valid point, but the scheduling of all things? what the fuck? no.

>>67387
Coming from reading other Webcomics, Homestuck's torrent of updates is a breath of fresh air

Seriously it's nearly 5k pages in a 3 year timespan while 8-bit theater while still an awesome webcomic was about 1200 pages in 11 years

>>67390
I think Hussie overestimates his output, though. He counts a single image "page" (which is often an edit or composition of already existing art) as equivalent to a full page from another webcomic, while the latter tends to have more than one panel to his single panel. Roughly four or so of Hussie's pages would equal a single page from most other popular, mostly full-drawn webcomics.

>>67347
how was it shitty before?

>>67391
Do the pesterlogs and animations count for anything?

>>67391
That's still an unbelievably large amount. Right now, Homestuck has 5258 pages. If every four pages counted as a single "full page," that's 1314 full pages.

>>67392
The fandom used to be concentrated in the MSPA forums which sucked because it was obsessed with being Kid Friendly, and a lot of the posters were unfunny morons who thought they had good stuff to say when they absolutely did not. It's probably still like that but I figure the mods have probably relaxed their policies a bit. Back in the day though a dude got banned for bringing up weed in a thread, and you'd get warnings and bans if you posted risqué content in the romart thread (read: very mild stuff, especially in comparison to what you see nowadays). iirc a lot of goons came in with the intention of raiding it and then stayed, I guess because it may have reminded them a bit of home, just a whole lot less offensive than SA.

The +4 Homestuck threads used to be awesome though. I swear to god this isn't just nostalgia clouding my vision, we legitimately had great times there and I look back on them fondly. It's incredible how fast it deteriorated after we got /mspa/.

>>67391
but you have to take into account that most panels with pesterlogs have much more words than the average webcomic page.

>>67391
but you have to take into account that most panels with pesterlogs have much more words than the average webcomic page.

>>67391
but you have to take into account that most panels with pesterlogs have much more words than the average webcomic page.

what the fuck is with posting lately

>>67395
I see, thanks

>>67412
also, a majority of fans submitting comands were idiots who kept requesting "ride x like a mechanical bull" and "Rocket Papaya" for names

>>67413
nofunallowed.jpg

>>67415
it was funny the first time. but after you get like ten people who think they are being witty by entering the same useless command over and over and over again, not so much.

>>67413
>Rocket Papaya
I remember the name games.
Can't say I remember that one, but please god say it was for Tavros.

>>67420
I think it was for multiple, but I remember it best attached to Terezi. I think maybe when they failed naming Terezi Rocket Papaya they just submitted it for every subsequent troll until they got bored.

Sicchu Atchun was the best failed name though. Everybody thought Eridan was going to be a guido parody.

>>67421
I thought he was going to be a Snoop Dogg spoof. Because, like... the rings, and the concern for the environment... and the precedent for a Snoop-themed character... and stuff... it made sense at the time!

>>67421
Damn, thought I might have saved that pic of Sicchu Atchun. I did however save a little speculation thing from back in the day of CA & CC. Straight off of MSPAF I believe.

Also, I was thinking, something along the lines of the previous trolls' naming deal. I'll bring that up in the other thread though.

It's nice that people can point out many flaws within something thier board is dedicated to and they read, without getting into flaming arguments or attacking each other for pointing it out.

Though to be fair not as many people post here as in other places, and this isn't so much what you would call a board of 'diehard fans'.

>>67423
his name is snoop lion

>>67614

Give it time.

Personally I feel the meta aspect of MSPA is really tainted by Homestuck's runaway popularity and Huss can't really get over that, so in his attempts to appeal to the fanbase he screws up the fun, very basic story.

Dialogue is also an issue. THe characters are very fun but listening to them wax prolific over hundreds of pages while sitting at computers is a very, very poor pacing choice.

Oh, and the "quirks" are fucking stupid and a horribly conceived idea. I have no idea why Huss is still sticking with them even in the A1 trolls. That shit is flat-out idiotic and makes the comic painful to read.

The thing that pisses me off most is lack of proper foreshadowing. You have many plot threads that end up being red herrings and going nowhere, which is okay by itself, but then you have stuff like Rose and Dave going god tier which just seems like something Hussie pulled out of his ass. "Oh I guess there was another very specific way to go god tier that we never even alluded to before and will never come up again."

>>67870
>"Oh I guess there was another very specific way to go god tier that we never even alluded to before and will never come up again."
You mean the same way Aradia hit god tier in [S] Wake, like a thousand pages before Cascade? The way that Doc Scratch explicitly alluded to but Rose neglected to investigate?

It's not so much a lack of foreshadowing as just a shitload of information to sift through. There's tons of foreshadowing. Keeping all of it in your head is what's actually hard.