When reading Homestuck for the first time, what were your biggest misconceptions?

i went into my first reading knowing some basic info and the names of most important characters, but was mostly in the dark on their appearances. so i thought Lord English was going to be a very stereotypical british villain with a curly mustache wearing a tophat and monocle

i first read homestuck like ten years ago now so i can’t remember much. but because of all the d/ancestor fanart from back then i thought kankri was like. the main troll. like i thought he was the main character of hivebent. spent the entirety of act 5 just wondering “wait so where is kankri???” so close yet so far. a similar thing happened with dirk

I was given the most vague tidbits of info about pieces of the story before reading it, so some parts of the story i thought were way more important

I also spent a good amount of the time reading it being confused about timeline shenanigans before getting a grasp of it

Before reading Homestuck the only character I had ever actually seen anywhere was Karkat. I thought Karkat was the main character and was very confused when I started to read Act 1 and there was no small gray lil dude waiting for me.

I even thought I'd perhaps clicked onto the wrong comic T_T I asked around and was shocked to find that I'd never get to read about Karkat for another 4k pages.

It's also worth noting my first read through of Homestuck I had absolutely 0 clue what was happening. Like at all. I could tell you the plot points but like there was 0 comprehension. You know how in Act 1 John checks in on Problem Sleuth in the middle of the adventure and skips to the end of the update, he has no idea what's happened or why but he still likes the comic anyways? Yeah, that was me but with Homestuck lol.

This year, I finally read through it as an adult and I FINALLY understood the story and everything. It was kind of a really cool experience, like watching a movie you liked as a kid but couldn't remember the details of because you were young and falling in love with it all over again.

I have two big ones that stuck out to me, that I had trouble understanding.

- i found Homestuck through someone doing a live reading of homestuck on the activity section of Quotev. like in like 2015. roughly. I clicked a link they dropped. the first few panels I saw was John jetpacking to his dezien. I fell in love with the comic and wanted more! I was so confused when I hit the start over button because how is the beginning even connected to what I was reading earlier?

- at this point I knew about the dancestors through quotev roleplayers. i skipped a bunch of flashes because my phone couldn’t interact with them. I saw caliborn’s text. I assumed he was kankri. i assumed Calliope was like nepeta’s dancestor.

i used to think dirk was the beta strider and that there were only 4 trolls for some reason

not really a misconception, but when i first read homestuck, i considered future arch really boring

and now it’s just the best homestuck has to offer to me lmao

I don't remember but I think I did have a couple. All fanart I saw that got me into homestuck were of the 4 patron trolls, so I thought there were only 4. Also I thought they were demons, not aliens (bc of the horns and the fucked up/mean attitudes).

i saw feferis talksprite while i was still in act 3, and assumed that jade somehow turned into a troll over the course of the story

I didn't understand that Peregrin Mendicant had gained all the prototypings when she took the White Queen's ring, so for a long time I didn't understand why Bec Noir suddenly had a white clone who hated him.

My biggest misconception was honestly the fact I thought Vriska was a terrible person, I also second the lord english being a british guy with a monocle thing since he was one of the only things I knew about homestuck from his JokeVsBattleWiki page that I read like a year before reading homestuck and completely forgot what he looked like (other then the fact he induced epilepsy on people)

oh yeah also decided to repost a thing i said in another thread similar to this one here:

I thought Snowman was a secret former member of the Midnight Crew and that's why her and Slick had a rocky history or whatever. Didn't realize she was the former queen until a reread/rewatch tbh.

i found homestuck through a blue lips animatic and sincerely thought that nepeta and equisis was the main characters since they were the major focus of the video

didn't really have many misconceptions after reading but before I ever got into homestuck I thought karkat was a talking cat themed car who yelled and swore a lot who was in a relationship with his driver dave

Before I read homestuck I thought vriska was a really nice character because all my friends said i was exactly like her

i started reading homestuck bc i saw people being upset about the ending and i wanted to know what all the fuss was about. For the longest time i thought the story ended by opening a normal door in the leg of lord English (didn't know his design, just a Giant Leg) and all characters leaving the story forever, breaking the fourth wall oneshot style

Before I read Homestuck, I knew about it via a Know Your Meme video all the way back in 2012. It was described in a very nebulous way, and actual Homestuck content made up a minority of the video in favour of fanworks, so the contents and format of the comic were left up entirely to my imagination. I had read webcomics before, and nothing they showed looked like a webcomic, but they did showcase some of the early walkarounds. Because of this, I thought Homestuck was mainly a game, and most likely pay-walled, so I never bothered checking it out.

I don't remember having a lot of misconceptions about the trolls. My other main exposure to Homestuck at this time was an animatic called "The 12 Trolls of Christmas", which laid out all their personalities in a pretty straightforward way, albeit cartoonishly simplified obviously. It reminded me of like, Vocaloid, so I wasn't too confused that there were just these memetic characters who were constantly referenced in YouTube videos.

Although, going back to that Know Your Meme video, it did show a bit of Bec Noir and dog PM, and it showed Jack killing some of the trolls. So, along with some other foreknowledge I had, I assumed Jack and PM were like these otherwordly dudes who show up to enforce the rules and put the players in their place, kind of like the Gumball Guardians in Adventure Time when they put Finn on trial.

I didn't actually start reading the comic until a year later. I can't really remember what I expected or what misconceptions I had, except that I was very confused about the mechanics of sburb and the actual plot of the comic, seeing as I was 12 at the time. A lot of the time stuff, everything regarding Doc Scratch, etc. went completely over my head. I read the whole comic on my phone, so I had to search for soundpages on YouTube. That means anytime a soundpage had a nondescript hyperlink, I literally couldn't watch it. I only caught SOME of the walkarounds because I went to my granny's house occasionally, and she had a computer.

I do remember being pretty impatient about getting to the trolls, which is funny because nowadays I care for the trolls a lot less than other characters in the comic. I even skimmed through the intermission because I thought it was getting in the way of the main story. Jade was just introduced, the trolls were becoming more relevant, and things were just picking up with the exiles. Why am I reading this Spades Slick guy when Jack Noir is actually relevant to the plot???

Speaking of the trolls, given I literally knew every troll by name already, I had to then guess who each one was based on their trollhandle and typing style alone. I recognised Vriska, Sollux, Karkat and Terezi right away, but others were harder. Reaching Hivebent and learning their actual identities was very disorienting lol.

Oh, I don't know if this counts as a misconception but I was totally blindsided by Lord English as a villain. Like I said, I skimmed through the intermission and Doc Scratch's dialogue was hard for me to understand, so his name literally never came under my radar until basically the end of Act 5, and I was very confused. Also, the hotlinks totally didn't work on my shitty 2013 Windows phone or the dedicated MSPA reader app I chose to read Homestuck on for some reason, so that big scrapbook segment near the end of act 5? I also missed everything there, and there's a LOT of important information in that part.

i thought it was a bunch of yaoi boys (john, dave, karkat) trapped in a mansion with gamzee (gamzee) trying to kill them