What about homestuck turns away the most people?

the slur replacement mod for the UHC does this iirc, haven't seen it in action but if slurs are a dealbreaker for somebody then I understand why they'd use it. i think the length is the main thing that turns people off (8000 pages is a LOT for a webcomic). there's also other issues like the pretty titanic racism in Condy's design (& her speech patterns/theming/etc), and the comic itself isn't really dyslexia or colourblind friendly (although UHC does have mods for that too, iirc). im a certified vriska defender so i may be biased but i think the fact that she dies at the end and her girlfriend spends [an unknowable amount of time] lost in space hopelessly searching for her is a pretty big repercussion. i don't think adding more consequences for vriska would make more people read it

My first attempt at reading, I bounced off early in Act 2 beccause I was struggling to read the walls of coloured text in the Pesterlogs, and I happened to notice there were (at the time) 4500 pages left to go with multiple pages appearing daily. I didn't succeed in my archive crawl until several years later when I suddenly had a LOT of time on my hands.

the beginning is quite a slow burner, for example with many simple actions, like picking up a cake, taking several pages longer than you'd think. this, along with all the problems john encounters with the sylladex, are humorous to most fans, but to new people it can be confusing at best and downright frustrating at worst, possibly leading to exhaustion and giving up on the comic. over time this will only get worse as the average attention span decreases. I can speak to this myself; it took me putting in the initial commitment of installing the UHC to get me to read more than 30 or so pages.

the comic is also quite inaccessible, with the official website constantly having problems and the best way to read it being downloading dozens of gigabytes of files and a special executable to your computer (keep in mind most young people use phones rather than computers these days!). then again, homestuck is best enjoyed if you're a nerd who lets out an excited girlish scream at the thought of things like user interfaces, data structures, and programming language syntax.

I also want to bring up the CD rack on page 31, I thought that at this point the story had taken a non-linear turn and that every green CD (which turned out to be previous MSPAs) were required reading, which was frankly quite off-putting and overwhelming.

I don't think the use of the r-word is too consequential. it may put some off, yes, but I feel like most new readers would simply overlook it, considering this monolith of a webcomic started in 2009, when use of the word was more normalized.

regarding the troll session, I don't think you should be adding to it. maybe even removing some parts could be in order? redoing the entire intro sequence ("your name is blah, your interests are blah, here's more long winded actions sometimes leading to frustration" for each character) three(!) times throughout the entire comic (beta, sgrub, alpha) can easily feel like too much. this is actually one of the gripes I had with the recent HS:BC updates, throughout pages ~800-819 I was thinking "enough of the tired old gags, can't we just get to the new stuff already?"

on my first read, I also had trouble making it through the first intermission. i can't really tell you why, maybe I just felt like it was a confusing waste of time that had nothing to do with the story (but that couldn't have been more wrong, could it)

similar to the above reason, i had high expectations for the webcomic cause of people talking about the trolls, time travel shenanigans, complex plot, etc that i thought it would be apparent from early on until i started reading the comic only to realize the start is painfully slow and looking back at it i can appreciate its humor but at the time i just wanted to get to the "good" parts ive heard so much about from the internet that i dropped it at like page 50-100 like twice and only got past it cause the fandom pulled me in and because uh covid

One day you'll grow up and realize that Vriska is cool.

Anyways, Homestuck's length is the primary offender. The larger and more complex a story gets, the more it has to appeal to a prospective reader in order to bring them in. Look at this from the opposite angle: short-form video content is widely popular because if you watch one or four mediocre shorts, that's like a minute wasted at most. Homestuck was written over the course of eight years and would take like a week of treating it as a full-time job to speed-read through.

After that, it's the subversion. Homestuck loves to throw people for a loop. Be it switching to another character just before something big is about to happen or setting up for an expected outcome only for it to blow up in everybody's face. "What is Homestuck about" is a difficult question because the characters will be certain that Homestuck is about x for months before finding out that x was never going to be the primary focus.

Most of the people I've spoken to about reading Homestuck always are somewhat interested but only because they want to learn more about the trolls and want to know when they get to read about them. It can be a little confusing when most of the fandom is just Trollsona's and rarely is there content for Human characters. So they go in and see John instead of Karkat and are like "wtf where are the freaky lil gray dudes at :/ I wanted to read about them..." and you gotta break the news that they don't show up for like another 1k pages.

I was one of those people lol before I read Homestuck the only character I had ever seen was Karkat, and I thought he was the main character. I didn't know about John or the Beta kids, and thought I had clicked onto a whole different comic entirely.

Also the pacing is kind of bad, IMO the first three acts are spent with the kids just making random shit with the alchemiter and stuff, and there's a lot of fluff dialogue in between all of that explaining silly jokes about each silly item that they make. The only item that comes in handy later is Rose's wizard wands and the Jetpack and Dave's turntables (which he stops using when he godtiers lol) other than that, its just random silly items that a kid would have fun making in a game like that.

This would be fine if there wasn't like way more interesting things happening during the first 3 acts, like you want to know more about who's 'trolling' the kids, and about Rose's eldritch horror thing, and what happens when they reach the gates etc. But so much of that is kind of pushed to the side for a while because these are 13 year olds making silly items with the silly item maker machine.

IMO it's really just that it's long and you have to actually want to just read it to Read it. It's not about later parts that turn people off, they don't actually get to those parts. People hearing about it later want to get to some part they heard about that seemed cool but then they get to page 1 and its long and a slow start. Slow in the sense that nothing crazy 'exciting' is happening, because the beginning is incredibly funny, and has a lot of interesting details and systems that they set up. Homestuck is not a casual read, and it's neither formatted nor structured like a traditional story. You have to go in wanting something truly different and be patient as it builds. It's like reading/playing Umineko.

It's always valid for people to have a hard line at certain bigotries to not read something, but they so often read as an excuse. Like you would be hard pressed to find any real stories (that aren't like. Bluey) that are completely "unproblematic." Frankly, at equal or worse levels. Everyone's throwing stones from glass houses. The truth is, they're just not interested in reading Homestuck (which is duh valid), and they feel like they have to justify it with "objective" reasons.

Also "repercussions for vriska being vriska"... She was beaten to death on screen. she gets more "repercussions" than the actual pedophile(s).

"repurcusions for Vriska" she gets targetted by predators on 3 seperate occasions, was beaten to death on screen, got killed by Terezi after Gamzee framed her for more murders and didn't get revived because of slick using the juju breaker on the clock, gets isolated from all of her friends and treated like the only awful one in her friend group.

Anyway, my biggest issues getting into homestuck was not understanding the format, like I couldn't comprehend why it was being presented like a point and click adventure game but also wasn't at all.

Think I've said this elsewhere, but I always just read the slurs as kids being kids. You know, dialogue written in character? If this story was set during my teenage years, the dialogue would have been wall-to-wall homophobic insults from kids who weren't too clear on what being gay actually is.

(One of my favourite SF writers once pointed out that he has straight up dropped an N-bomb in a novel before now and nobody batted an eye. "Hint: there is a thing we writers like to call 'dialogue'.")

Ableism and Racism. Which like. Fair.

Also the plot being quite meandering at the start. These are things that perhaps the Pilot has a chance to address? We shall see...

Ableism, racism, length, and act 1 being slow.

yeah it’s. kinda just act 1 and act 2 in the first place by far- Homestuck is sold and pitched to kids looking for a fun YA fantasy sci-fi adventure and Homestuck really doesn’t become one of those in earnest until Act 4.

I will say to those ends the problematic content and controversy hurts matters a lot because it just lowers people’s baseline willingness to engage: why spend two months getting into a webcomic that tries everything in its power to throw you off when it’s got a dead cringe fandom some crazy creator drama and slurs and racism up the wazoo?

even if people don’t consume the Bad Parts, when they go in knowing it (and the widely held drop in quality of act 6) are on the way they’ll be less likely to even want to get that far, they’ll drop it when it gets boring and that’s that

what made homestuck difficult to get into for me personally was the pesterlogs, i tried to read it when i was like 13 and was put off by the walls of text because i was expecting a more traditional comic-like webcomic i guess? i just wasnt expecting so many words and i was like ehhh i dont have time for this

and then just in general i think the slowness of the first acts and kinda terrible reputation of the fandom and racism + ableism are the biggest reasons people dont get into or drop the comic

Some people hate anything that is challenging, lengthy, or different. And even for people who have higher standards, knowing whether something you're reading is 'worth the effort' of understanding its concepts can be its own battle. Homestuck doesn't do much to establish itself in the eyes of a neophyte reader as being Relevant and Interesting for a good long while.

It's the age of distraction and media saturation. So we just have to tell the new Homestuck fans to enjoy the ride and trust that it'll all make sense and be worth it for an attentive reader.

above all else it's the length

sure there's some very controversial bits and definitely some liberal use of the r word, but the biggest thing that turns people away is the length

Personally any I had a hard time with the character switching initially, I remember hating Dave at the beginning and being completely put off by the midnight crew intermission and I remember being very annoyed that I have to watch the trolls doomed session when so much interesting stuff was happening in the future.

Looking back I don't get my past reasoning but I guess I'm a different person now. When I tried to show friends the comic strangely they bounced off when it became a flash game for a few pages.

i think the most common complaint ive seen over the years is that its confusing. the length is scary, but its possible to go into homestuck with no idea how long it is. ive seen tons of people say they just got confused and gave up because of some combination of the unique format, weird and verbose dialogue, slow pace, or the midnight crew intermission specifically.

It's the start. The biggest turn-off is the start. I don't condone skipping to act 5, but I fundamentally sympathize with the people who did that because to incoming readers the game doesn't get interesting until it resolves the tension between "quest on a forum" and "actual narrative." The early acts absolutely have plenty of reread value, but to first-time readers the Problem Sleuthiness is going to be a turn-off and if they don't stick around at least until Davesprite's introduction then we've fundamentally lost them.

This is honestly a big part of why I'm invested in the idea of the adaptation happening. If it's good, great; if it's bad, at least I have a cheat code I can use to get people invested, I can tell people "watch up to episode X and then open the game and start reading from page Y."