Help on reading Homestuck?

Homestuck is boring and can drag along until act 5, where the trolls first make their appearance.

Well, Homestuck isn't for everyone! It's long and confusing and a major time drain, and I'd say that if you reach [S} WV?: Rise up and you still feel bored out of your skull then you have full permission to give up on it. There's a lot of people who loudly hate Homestuck and I think it's just one of those love-it-or-hate-it type things. Especially the humor - I think Homestuck is consistently hilarious, but some people just aren't into it, and that's okay.

That said, if you're NOT bored out of your skull, and you're just kind of confused on where it's trying to go, I can help with that. Act 1 of Homestuck is a little misleading because with all the stupid little RPG-mechanics jokes being thrown around it can look a lot like it's going to just be stupid RPG-mechanics jokes all the way through, and then you get to where the comic is right now and it's ACTUALLY about like, two different universes and four different species and several large and many small loops of time travel and creation mythology and Betty Crocker and predestination vs. fighting fate and growing into your place in life, and once you reach that end of the story you look back on Act 1 and you think, how did we get so far. What I'm trying to say is that Homestuck is kind of like one of those cartoon snowballs rolling down a mountain that slowly becomes bigger and bigger until it's this huge sentient avalanche destroying your life, basically.

Now, do you mind spoilers when you're reading things? If you do, I highly suggest you DON'T read the thing I'm about to link you, it covers a whole bunch of things from every part of the story thus far. But if you don't, I think it's a good way to illustrate exactly how much is going on beneath the surface that you don't know about yet. This is a post attempting to solve one of the biggest mysteries in Homestuck, the Ultimate Riddle:

http://bladekindeyewear.tumblr.com/post/3279187083...

A lot of things in that post might not make sense to you yet, but I think it's worth skimming, so that you have a bit of a sense of how to read the things that happen in the story. Once you catch up to Homestuck yourself you too will be able to make outlandish theories about where the story's going to go next, and most of the time they will be wrong because the true answer will be some sort of brick joke the author pulled from 4000 pages ago that he thought was funny but somehow also makes a lot of sense. For reference, the author once wrote a story thousands of pages long where the big bad boss ended up being defeated by a Snoop Dogg bust that disappeared months earlier. That's basically how a lot of the plot twists work in Homestuck.

Of course, you can also just read the story for the trolls and their various wacky character interactions - they show up in text before Act 5, but you'll have to wait until Act 5 until you can see them in person. But honestly if you're reading a webcomic with literally hundreds of individual characters and about as many individual subplots and the one thing you're focusing on is a bunch of pubescent aliens who are bad at things, I'm not really sure what you're doing. They're good characters, though, don't get me wrong. Andrew Hussie is really good at taking characters that you'd think would be really obnoxious or boring - juggalos, angry forum commenters, rabid shippers, power gamers, self-absorbed racist villain-worshippers, a flying dog whose main skill is stabbing people - and making them really endearing anyway.

Uh, TL;DR: wait for WV?: Rise Up. See how it goes. Good luck.