Homestuck.

I usually wouldn't consider myself to be much of a critic, I have a tendency to mindlessly consume what most people in my circle would consider slop, I enjoyed Steven Universe and I thought that Detroit: Become Human was a good game, an opinion I still stand by to this day. I think the first time I actually critically consumed a piece of media and felt offended by it was A Minecraft Movie, a work of fiction so hilariously bad and so creatively bankrupt that it got my to completely reconsider the media that I consume and got me to start thinking more about if something I was watching or reading was actually worth my time. With that in mind, I expect that I am going to miss many of the worse points of this show, despite my attempts to pick it apart and point out every flaw that I could find. I apologize in advance.

A Homestuck TV Show? Huh???

I have been a fan of Homestuck for a very long time, I definitely would not call myself a classic fan, I'm not, I read a bit of it in middle school and only really got interested in it during the pandemic, so dismiss my thoughts if you wish, I will not be offended. For anybody else who is still reading after that short explanation, I'd like to bring up what I originally thought the pilot was going to be like to try to help me better get my point across: I thought the pilot would be terrible when I first heard about it, I very much expected that the writing was going to be excessively edgy and that it was going to completely butcher the characters. I did not think that Spindlehorse would be able to address the offensive parts of the story well and I did not expect them to be able to effectively translate the long, terribly paced comic into something people would be interested in watching.

If you've followed my rants on Bluesky I have been incredibly critical of official Homestuck content in the past, I am not a fan of Andrew Hussie or What Pumpkin, I do not agree with how Hussie chooses to treat his IP and the fandom associated with it, and I do not think that the fandom should be supporting or funding What Pumpkin given it's chronic mismanagement and it's aggression towards it's critics. If you are coming here expecting a completely unbiased or hugboxy review of the show, I would highly advise you check out the Official Homestuck Discord instead. Despite this, I am going to try my best to separate my criticism of the show from my criticism of Hussie, and I hope that I can get my point across without sounding too harsh on the show. I do think it was a good pilot, I just think it could be better.

The TV show is not the first attempt to "redo" Homestuck in a different medium. There are two "major" projects that I feel would be worth mentioning before I start talking about the actual show: Firstly, another show project called Project Soundpage. Project Soundpage is incredibly cool, I've been following it for a while, it's quite similar to the Homestuck TV show, though it's significantly more authentic to the original source material, which is both extremely positive and extremely crippling, given how poorly paced the original comic is. They actually released an animatic for their first episode a couple years ago, which you should check out if you haven't already.

The other project is not quite an animated adaptation, it's more of a dub like Lets Read Homestuck and VOFTs liveread, both are very good and I would highly suggest both of them if you aren't interested in reading through the entire website. L Voids dub of Homestuck heavily enhances the comic while still presenting as an actual comic dub. I cannot recommend it enough.

The Homestuck Animated Pilot

I do, alas, eventually have to get to writing about the actual pilot.

The intro to the show is great, the show quickly handles WV's involvement in the plot while still feeling authentic to the story. I do hope that the show keeps presenting scraps of WV's story this way rather than completely shifting into their story at random points. The major plot transitions like shifting into Hiveswap, the Midnight Crew intermission, or ACT 6 would be quite destructive to an animated version of the comic, I don't think that people who haven't read the comic would appreciate it, and I don't think it would be fun to watch as part of a show.

John's intro is a bit slow, I very much hope that it does not do a narrated introduction for every character, I like how they handled with Dave where he quickly rejected the joke name when he was introduced and it very quickly explained how a hashing algorithm works and how the hashmap modus works without uttering a single word. I hope that they take that approach with other characters as well. In order to stop myself from bringing this up every time it happens in the show, I'm going to quickly take a moment to state how much I love the way that they use the sylladex in the show. Rather than it being a silly gimmick that gets in the way of the story and slows down the show, they use it to enhance the way that John interacts with his environment and they very effectively use it to make the animation more fluid. I absolutely loved the way that John grabbed the Game Bro magazine from Dave while they were talking.

With regards to the character's personalities, Dave Strider definitely lost some of his charm, although I believe that that was at the very least partially necessary to make Homestuck work as a TV show. Dave talks a lot, and while that was a major part of his personality, it definitely had to be de-emphasized, it would have killed the show's pacing and it would have been unbearable to sit through. Jade was decent, although I feel that she was a bit annoying, I do appreciate the way that they tweaked her personality, it felt far more intentional than what they did with Rose, which I am going to be putting in it's on paragraph due to how incredibly terribly she was written. Jade feels far more dynamic in the pilot than she does during most of the comic, where she acts as a cheerleader and occasionally spits out some exposition, this is partially necessary due to her purpose in the story as a space player. She is kept at a distance from everybody else in the game and acts as a tool to push along the plot. I am very, very, very, glad that they did away with this in the show. Seeing her snap at John when he's ignoring her gave me a lot of hope for how they're going to handle her character.

Of course, if the show was all good and was the perfect Homestuck show I've always wanted, I wouldn't be writing this review. During the first four minutes, I was incredibly impressed, the voice acting is great, the way that the characters interact is great, the animation and the environment are beautiful. But then, I met Rose Lalonde. I have a lot to say about the way that she was written and I would not say that any of it is positive. Rose is completely butchered, I think that the only time that she felt like herself was when she was directly repeating her lines from the comic. Almost everything that made her cool in the comic is completely thrown away, her long winded manner of speaking is completely thrown away in favor of a flat, completely generic caricature of a Gen Z teenager. Not a single line that comes out of her mouth sounds like something she would say in the comic. I would provide examples of the offending dialogue, but my criticism applies to almost every single line in the pilot. Watch it yourself. She's shown quickly rushing through her interests like some overactive toddler and she cannot sit still or stay in once place under any circumstance. I am incredibly disappointed in the extreme mischaracterization of her, and I hope that her character is completely reworked prior to the release of the actual show.

I appreciated the fast transition from the dramatic strife scene between John and his father to Dadbert trying to dispel the smoke, I want to believe that this wasn't a shitty transition and that it was trying to imply that that was all in his head so that it contrasts with the combat between Dave and Bro, but I know that that's not what they were trying to do. The hole in the floor is still present in his room, all of that actually happened. I think that there's a lot of points in the pilot where the show could have done something cool, but is incapable of treating the viewer as an intelligent adult and therefore incapable of trying to set up some kind of complex narrative. This isn't a show you're supposed to think about, while I really really want to say "this can be something more", it's slop. It's mindless slop as part of a last ditch effort to revive a dying fandom. I wish Spindlehorse the best of luck in it's attempt to make the Homestuck TV series every fan has dreamed of at least once, but I really don't think it's going to achieve that, at least not in it's current state.

Before I finish writing this post, I want to very briefly touch on a topic that's been memed to death both inside and outside of the fandom: the swearing. Homestuck is an incredibly edgy comic, from it's extensive use of the word "retard" to Dave casually dropping racial slurs to the terrible FUTURE arachnidsGrip joke that the comic is STILL trying to push TO THIS DAY, Homestuck and Spindlehorse are a perfect match. I am not some pearl clutching FCC official, I'm not some hugboxy advertising company trying to sanitize the internet so I can advertise to children. I just find having to hear John inserting the word "fucking" into random sentences to be incredibly annoying. I counted them swearing 17 times in the 10 minute pilot, that's 1.7 times per minute. It's not cool, it's really annoying. While the characters are talking like teenagers, and it does make sense that they would curse a lot, I really wish they didn't, or at the very least did not put tons of emphasis onto it every time they do.

Closing Thoughts

I think that this show has a ton of potential, but I don't think that Spindlehorse is going to be able to bring out said potential. Homestuck is a great story, it has countless flaws, the quality of writing varies wildly, but it's something that I love very much. It is a massive shame that the standard for quality has been set so low. I very much hope that Spindlehorse is able to improve the show's writing by the time it's released, if any streaming service is even willing to pick the show up, but I worry that in the end, Homestuck: The Animated Series, is going to be nothing more than another forgotten show in the Amazon Prime TV library, and even if it wasn't, the Homestuck fandom needs to move on from official Homestuck content. Andrew Hussie has repeatedly shown that he does not care about Homestuck, and simply wants to use it to line his pockets and satiate his massive ego at the expense of the entire fandom. Given Hussie's constant mismanagement of Homestuck, I could not see myself giving Hussie or What Pumpkin my money under any possible circumstances.

~XWASHERE