@chitonousCerate

the names are kept as they are, which, yes, does mean that the letter count gimmick is lost in some cases. and, yes, of course there are equivalents of the kids' names, but the story is already pretty america centric, so it wouldn't really make sense to adapt them. obviously with any story that has certain allusions to real life, there is a cultural context and an expectation of what the reader would already know, e.g. the movies john likes in the beginning of the story are meant to be recognized by the reader and the fact that john likes them is part of the implicit characterization based around the general reputation of said movies. but, if the reader doesn't come from a background that familiarized them to these movies and had a certain reputation associated with them, this implicit characterization is lost. to this extent the translation doesn't really try to "adapt" all the different pop culture allusions to be more readable to a non-american audience - and i think it shouldn't really be its burden to bare. a version of homestuck that isn't based in america and instead bases itself in the pop culture of a different country is certainly an interesting concept, but then it wouldn't really be homestuck anymore, it would be a different fan adventure. to this extent translations that try to adapt certain allusions are actually pretty disliked - for example harry potter (sorry to bring it up it's just a really good example) has two russian translations, one that tries to adapt the wordplay in the names of the characters, and one that doesn't, and the former is infamously hated. the general position on translations of proper names is that people's names shouldn't be translated, e.g. if you have a character named "mr brown" you wouldn't translate the word "brown", you'd just transcribe the name. this is somewhat of a debated topic, since with things like names of places, animals, and fantasy objects most people accept adaptation, to come back to the harry potter example: most people accept a translation of the name "griphook" since it's the name of an animal. and the reason harry potter is a good example for this is that a lot of the names include some sort of wordplay or meaning, the whole topic of translating them is pretty controversial. generally speaking there's no ruleset for how to translate proper nouns acceptably, you just gotta play it by ear and hope that the larger fanbase accepts your translation (even though there'll always be purists who insist you just have to keep the names as they are in the original). to go back to homestuck - the russian translation does translate the characters' handles, which makes sense as those are just made up of two real words. it doesn't try to do that with any of the names of the characters', though, and that also makes sense since having a kid in an american suburb who's deeply situated in american pop culture have a russian name would make very little sense. however this urge to adapt a story to a different cultural context does manifest in russian fandom spaces - there's a whole genre of fan works called "rusreal" where people take characters from non-russian settings and put them into a "typical" contemporary russian setting. danganronpa actually has such a big rusreal scene there are whole fangames and a pretty much separate fandom for the rusreal AU of it!