And honestly to read a kind of intimate/sexual violence in Equius' action regarding the mechanical heart isn't a bad take either. What he does is concretely to try to implant romantic feelings in Aradia without her consent. It's a very "love potion" scene, it's a completely unacceptable and deshumanizing action. There's context to it, yeah. He's a kid, yeah. He comes from an incredibly ultraviolent and toxic culture, yeah. But the action itself is a form of intimate violence.

The interesting thing is that unlike most of traditional "love potion" stories, the narration here seems from the start VERY AWARE of the fact what Equius does is wrong. In addition to demonstrating it in the scene - Aradia makes no mistake, she correctly reads that as a direct attack on her agency, and reacts appropriately -, it's further conveyed later in some of the conversations, including one where she regrets kissing Equius after this moment. There's a critical eye on this one scene.

IMO Ranged Touch talks about the matter quite reasonably.

Andria:

but the baked-in focus on the serialized experience makes a lot of the actual comic analysis a lot weaker because homestuck is so tied together and in conversation with itself for its entire run that any analysis made partway through is really shaky

The reverse is true as well.

BOTH serialized and holistic readings of Homestuck are flawed, because the serialized approach fails to take into account the entire work and the holistic approach fails to take into account that the webcomic was written, illustrated and programmed over seven years, seven years during which the world evolved, Hussie evolved, the readership evolved.

Now, in defence of serialized analysis... It will always be an important angle to at least consider because unlike a lot of pop culture stories, Homestuck was during his early years produced and updated day after day, without a general written plan. It bloomed at the very rhythm it updated. As Hussie wrote in one of their Formspring, "What you get on the site is what I'm making, that's it" (paraphrasing from memory).

There's a kind of performance to it. They worked without a safety net. For years, they just kept advancing, with only a rough idea of where they were going. They kept finding new concepts and adding them to the story and worldbuilding, and rushed ahead without a lot of visibility.

If I'm not mistaken, Hussie kept working this way until the Gigapause started in Fall 2013.

It was part of the experiment, part of the performance.

So the serialized reading doesn't simply make one closer to the 2009-2016 update culture. It makes one closer to the craft itself, the rhythm at which Homestuck was developed.

The "ideal" Homestuck podcast would probably start with a serialized analysis and then dedicate many episodes to examine in-depth the work as a whole. A possible third angle would be to look at Homestuck character by character, theme by theme, subtext by subtext.