I really respect the HS2 team and there are elements of HS2 that I genuinely love, but overall I found the art direction really weak with a lot of cut corners and too much style matching to one artist's style. There were also some decisions I disagree with, like the direction they were taking Vriska in, and some stuff I thought was outright bad, like Chapter 8 just falling emotionally flat for me and Jade, Rose, and Kanya all feeling out of character in a storyline that really needed to do them all justice at least in the authenticity of how their voices are written, and I just didn't feel like that was there. The pace is also quite slow, and a lot of time spent talking about feelings without much plot progression. Even the "Meat" bits still feel like candy most of the time.

However, a lot of this I think is explained I think by a general lack of pre-production or time spent preparing, which I don't think is necessarily the teams fault. I think they just wanted to capitalize on the excitement from the Epilogues and maybe underestimated the scope of the project. Plus, the aforementioned harassment campaign that was ongoing for most of it and just kept getting worse. I can't imagine it was a good headspace to try and make the comic in, much less just, existing, which everyone was struggling with in 2020 when this all went down.

Again, I wanna emphasize that I really, really respect the team that worked on it, they didn't deserve the vitriol flung their way, and while I do think Beyond Canon is, in a lot of respects, a lot better than HS2, I still would have liked to see the original team's vision, and it's a shame we won't. I also do mostly really like HS2, it's just a case of, sometimes it's easy to be quite critical to something you like, but that has a lot of flaws. Especially in comparison to something else that you like in the same sphere with fewer flaws.