My Homestuck reading order was something I am dubbing the Obama route and I did it on complete accident.

Read 2 pages of meat, with page being the one where Dave mentions the possibility of "Obamas secret sburb session" then ended up stopping my reading of the epilogues for a few weeks to sit with the original ending a little bit more.

During this period of time I had decided to read the Skaianet files which dropped the lore bombshell that Obama was Grandpa Harleys grandson and thus had to get to post scratch earth via meteor or other shenanigans. So I was like "Hopy shit the secret Obama session might be real".

Then I went back and read the rest of Candy (Imo the better of the two epilogues) and the fucking shock on my face when the Barack Obama lore drops from Hussie's shitty real person fic ended up being true? My mind was blown.

Anyway reading candy first(ish) was a fucking experience and a half, when I came out of it all I could think was "I will never read something like this again". I didn't even know if I liked it!!! (I know I like it now though). The way everything is warped by Johns perception of reality and his depression while all his friends grow up and seemingly make such stupid desisions while he is convinced he is the only one left normal. Except he isn't. He is just as screwed up as the rest of them but still holding onto the past. The Jake dance scene is one of the most incredible things I ever read, a literal beacon of hope after so many depressing and numbing pages of everything going to shit, the fact it follows up Vriska finally killing Gamzee, finally killing the closest thing left in this universe to her groomer, is poetic.