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Pants Donkey
Nov 13, 2011

I don’t see how it’s worse. The art is better, and it seems to be trying to take what was already done and steer into a decent direction.

It’s also only been like 4 or 5 updates, so it’s going to take time to right the ship. Might have been wise to just start from scratch (:v:) but I can see wanting to respect the work the prior team did and not just throw it away.

That said, the epilogues were always contentious and trying to build a long-form store story after literally doubling the cast always seemed like a poor decision.

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Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
I don't really see how what we have is really a different direction from what was happening before. "It is revealed that Rose and Jade did something mind-bogglingly foolish off-camera, and in spite of the fact that it wasn't really in character for either of them we're now going to examine its consequences in full and exacting detail" was always the premise of the Yiffy arc.

Nix Panicus
Feb 25, 2007

Pants Donkey posted:

but I can see wanting to respect the work the prior team did and not just throw it away.

I can't. A lot of the prior team's work was garbage and actively terrible, and theres no point in honoring trash just because someone worked really hard on that trash

If anything, the nature of Homestuck as a series should make it effortless to toss out bad prior work and rewrite the canon. Call it a failed timeline too dumb to continue existing and move along with better stories instead of trying to justify Yiffy's existence.

Although I have to say, thematically Yiffy does match up with Hussie trying to see just how much active loathing for his audience he could show before anyone called him on it and finding the answer was infinite

Fender Anarchist
May 20, 2009

Fender Anarchist

Man, I get having reservations, but a lot of y'all seem to hate the comic for being what it is, instead of being what you want it to be. Frankly I've seen a lot of that since the loving retcon, and some even going back to the start of act 6. Like, at some point the issue isn't "bad writing" or "author hostility", it's just you not liking where the story went. That's not the creative team's fault.

RandomReader
Nov 17, 2021

Fender Anarchist posted:

Man, I get having reservations, but a lot of y'all seem to hate the comic for being what it is, instead of being what you want it to be. Frankly I've seen a lot of that since the loving retcon, and some even going back to the start of act 6. Like, at some point the issue isn't "bad writing" or "author hostility", it's just you not liking where the story went. That's not the creative team's fault.
Anything I don't like is bad writing, and I don't care if it isn't legally speaking.

rko
Jul 12, 2017
New update, with more quite good art/visual gags and some interesting exposition.

Also, as an aside, Psycholonials is now free on all platforms. I can’t imagine anyone reading this thread hasn’t already checked it out, but I found it to be a bizarre and absorbing VN. Good music! My hot take is that I think it’s less about Homestuck than people make it out to be.

Fender Anarchist posted:

Like, at some point the issue isn't "bad writing" or "author hostility", it's just you not liking where the story went. That's not the creative team's fault.

I feel like some of the mistakes the new team have made are classic “bad writing” pitfalls—not moving the story forward quickly enough after the already slow first act, spending too much time on exposition and piece maneuvering, etc. They seem to be doing a bit of a mid-season reset, though, so it’s all pretty understandable.

My main substantive critique is that Homestuck, up through the HS2 hiatus, was always creatively ambitious to a fault. Pivoting to prose for the Epilogues and then the HS2 format (including a bunch of cool bonus page concepts) felt like big swings to me, all built on Homestuck’s original record of restlessly changing up the storytelling for every new section of the story.

So far, I haven’t seen that level of ambition from the new squad. I find it hard to believe they don’t have something interesting planned, though, and I also find what they’ve done charming enough to be happy to wait and see where they’re going with it all.

Death Bot
Mar 4, 2007

Binary killing machines, turning 1 into 0 since 0011000100111001 0011011100110110

rko posted:

I feel like some of the mistakes the new team have made are classic “bad writing” pitfalls—not moving the story forward quickly enough after the already slow first act, spending too much time on exposition and piece maneuvering, etc. They seem to be doing a bit of a mid-season reset, though, so it’s all pretty understandable.

My main substantive critique is that Homestuck, up through the HS2 hiatus, was always creatively ambitious to a fault. Pivoting to prose for the Epilogues and then the HS2 format (including a bunch of cool bonus page concepts) felt like big swings to me, all built on Homestuck’s original record of restlessly changing up the storytelling for every new section of the story.

So far, I haven’t seen that level of ambition from the new squad. I find it hard to believe they don’t have something interesting planned, though, and I also find what they’ve done charming enough to be happy to wait and see where they’re going with it all.

this is definitely how i felt about it all, getting to HS late felt like some mindblowing poo poo that i couldnt have expected, the epilogues were something i couldnt have expected from the comic and hit me just right, and HS2 was the overburdened setup to following the epilogues up that was still interesting as it had to try and stick the landing on Too Many concurrent plotlines. the side comics on the patreon contributed so much to this for me, they really did rule

HSBC having this weird kind of rolling start on an already wild premise is gonna be goofy, and it feels like they're trying to jumpstart that now.. but even the jumpstarting feels like it s gonna take half a year at this rate lol. i'm enjoying it among the couple handfuls of fics i keep up with, but it hasn't gotten to be this standout and i just know people have to be getting antsy right

Android Blues
Nov 22, 2008

rko posted:

I feel like some of the mistakes the new team have made are classic “bad writing” pitfalls—not moving the story forward quickly enough after the already slow first act, spending too much time on exposition and piece maneuvering, etc. They seem to be doing a bit of a mid-season reset, though, so it’s all pretty understandable.

I agree with this broadly, although I wouldn't even necessarily say "bad writing" - I'd say more "fan writing", people who aren't used to writing longform narratives built around a plot, but who are maybe really good at writing a character moment or an important scene in isolation. Moving the story and having things happen is a really hard skill to learn, and kind of a separate skill from writing good prose.

I like BC so far but it does feel like it's stuck in "the plot is ABOUT to happen" and doesn't know how to pull the trigger on things actually occurring. In this update, the characters can't even make a plan without Alt Callie showing up to tell them that something else is about to happen so they'd better not bother nudging the pacing forward one scintilla.

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Pants Donkey
Nov 13, 2011

It doesn’t help that they’re continuing from another team’s writing which itself built off another team’s writing. It’s very much a Frankenstein piece of media at this point, and they have get the Plot in Candy going, get it moving in Meat, and also tie the two together in the overarching plot of the whole thing.

Probably would have been better to start over, but this what they chose.

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