Unpopular Opinions Thread

[calamityCons]

Honestly I'd probably feel the same way if I could understand any of it. All of the time fuckery from following people's past and future trails and all of that messed with my head. If it had been a tiny bit simpler I probably would have really liked it, especially with how it ties into the story later, but alas, my brain is not equipped for stuff like that.

That is totally fair my dude. Many of the more abstract and heady reality-bending concepts that Homestuck had featured were part of what I loved about it. Homestuck was and probably still is the best narrative out there that features Time Travel because it is the most consistent and logical with how it would affect and interact with the rest of the world, such as the characters and the setting. I found that really engaging and fun because I couldn't poke holes into the narrative because of how tightly it managed to stick together.

At least until the Retcon happened and basically tossed all of its time travel logic out of the window because the story had written itself into a corner (Doylist) || Terezi folded under the pressure of killing someone she loved for the greater good.

[thorondraco]

what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.

That is true. Honestly my own issue would be if the development makes no sense. Or really retcons something. Like if it turns out John wielded a sword the entire time despite literally, literally every weapon he has being a hammer.

What is important is less if it splits opinions, cause it always will, and more how it affects the story itself and if it can be explained and made sense. Though with Homestuck you cna get away with a loot of shenanigans to begin with.

[BrobyDDark]

what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.

I don't think those are the same as Roxy transitioning. First off, Jane becoming a villain happens over the course of decades and we see her steady decline towards actually becoming a villain. So, it happened naturally.

On the other hand, we meet with Roxy in Meat and they're just likely "I'm non-binary. Here's an info-dump." If we had gotten so much more on it, her thoughts regarding it, why she began thinking about it, and her gradual progression towards excepting that part of herself, I think it would be so much more well-received.

Barring that, to add this representation, it would have been equally as well-received, in my opinion, as that suggsstion I just gave, to introduce a new character. Like, maybe new Tavros is trans, or John's kid. They were already gonna do that anyways, right?

My unpopular opinion unrelated to the current transphobia discussion because I REALLY want to change the subject:

I find the Exiles and Intermission characters infinitely more engaging and interesting than it seems the majority of people do. I also really appreciated the way the Exiles called back to Problem Sleuth levels of chicanery and goofiness, it is a nice and lighthearted aspect to the comic even when the characters are the Midnight Crew + Felt and slaughtering each other all the time.

The Midnight Crew can (and should have) carry a comic on their own.

[thorondraco]

what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.

I don't think those are the same as Roxy transitioning. First off, Jane becoming a villain happens over the course of decades and we see her steady decline towards actually becoming a villain. So, it happened naturally.

On the other hand, we meet with Roxy in Meat and they're just likely "I'm non-binary. Here's an info-dump." If we had gotten so much more on it, her thoughts regarding it, why she began thinking about it, and her gradual progression towards excepting that part of herself, I think it would be so much more well-received.

Barring that, to add this representation, it would have been equally as well-received, in my opinion, as that suggsstion I just gave, to introduce a new character. Like, maybe new Tavros is trans, or John's kid. They were already gonna do that anyways, right?

My unpopular opinion unrelated to the current transphobia discussion because I REALLY want to change the subject:

I find the Exiles and Intermission characters infinitely more engaging and interesting than it seems the majority of people do. I also really appreciated the way the Exiles called back to Problem Sleuth levels of chicanery and goofiness, it is a nice and lighthearted aspect to the comic even when the characters are the Midnight Crew + Felt and slaughtering each other all the time.

The Midnight Crew can (and should have) carry a comic on their own.

I think the issue is multitasking a bit with Roxie. I think the trait works but they are also making her a near literal blindspot for Dirk. The reveal takes us off guard and is sudden because it took Dirk off guard and he couldn't foreshadow it for a couple of chapters. So knowing her line of thought is impossible so long as Dirk holds the reigns, and we don't know if Alt Calliope really knows what is going on in her head either.

so they wanted to use Roxie as both a means of working through gender dysphoria and nonbinary elements, but also wanted her to be a tool and weapon against dirk because he can't narrate him. Both work, both can work together, but in terms of the reveal of it, yea Dirk was meant to be totally taken off guard as a narrator and is not able to knowing how he herself is reacting to suddenly revealing it.

Also yes i used both male and female terms there cause i have a headcanon that Roxie continues to shift his/her identity throughout the story. Though far as we know they just stick as a boy, but i feel like it will be explored much more or even go to a rather emotionally extreme place. Like she ends up battling her own voidy nature cause nothing he does makes Roxie feel whole.

Then again we have like 2 Roxie's in play right now so maybe i should jsut use them depending on the roxie?
I think Homestuck just got a lot more confusing.

[Darth_Energon]

I'm not sure if this is unpopular but I hate Homestuck twitter.

[egg]

I'm not sure if this is unpopular but I hate Homestuck twitter.

Feels a lot like Discord twitter but not quite as nice.

[ThePungeonMaster]

I'm not sure if this is unpopular but I hate Homestuck twitter.

It's really only unpopular among people who mostly use Homestuck twitter. I think most people on Reddit or anywhere else think basically anywhere is better than twitter. Granted, I don't think the twitter fans think so.

[melonLord]

what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.

I personally don't see how that's absurd at all. The whole point is a good chunk of fans are not interested in characters being retooled to be multi-purpose in the current narratives and there's nothing wrong with new characters being introduced. I know it's what I'm hoping for from the HS^2 new session.

I'm not even sure what you even mean by "re-tooled to be multi-purpose" in this sense? Every single character (with the exception of some of the flatter extras like the Alpha trolls) has multiple thematic threads making up their character and goes through multiple changes, developments, and retroactive character reveals throughout the course of the narrative. Thinking that a particular development is out-of-character is one thing I suppose but worry over characters becoming too "multi-purpose" just seems...as JakeMorph said, absurd, and on the verge of actively detrimental to the story.

In fact, just to keep up the pretense that we're still following this thread's main premise; Unpopular Opinion (apparently): Introducing new characters for every new topic or "purpose" the authors want to explore would in fact be bad writing and detrimental to the potential of the existing characters.

Introducing a character for the explicit purpose of "exploring/having a topic/representation" within an existing narrative is just tokenism (or something close to it), and it's almost always recipe for a bland character that will be quickly discarded in favor of the "real" characters. In real life (to use one example) Trans People (TM) do not exist, people who are trans exist; people are not neat categorized embodiments of one issue or another, and introducing a character to essentially become one will come off as flat, because people have histories and any issue will have to be explored in conjunction with that history.

Which I think brings us around to my other point, which is that the purpose of writing Roxy or June as trans is not to "have a character that is trans", it is to explore ideas of gender and transition in relation to those specific characters' specific histories and life experiences, and introduce new depth and facets of their lives to dive into. The cast of homestuck would not be nearly as fascinating as it is if this had not been done multiple times throughout both the Epilogues and the comic proper, and suggesting that new facets and "issues" be spun off into separate characters runs directly counter to this.

Like, take the exploration of Dave's terrible home situation and domestic abuse at the hands of Bro we got at near end of Act 6. The point of that wasn't to just have a thing about domestic abuse, it was to look at how that interlocks with what else we know about Dave, his relationship to the idea of "heroism", masculinity, his relationships and view of the world, etc. Introducing a new character to be Mr. Domestic Abuse Guy instead would have accomplished...what? Dave would lose a fascinating bit of character depth and we'd have a dull-as-shit throwaway character (which homestuck absolutely fucking does not need more of). And there are of course countless other sometimes drastic character developments and explorations throughout the comic: Rose's alcoholism, Jane's descent into fascism, Vriska's repeated attempts to turn over a new leaf, Aranea's heel-turn, John's (failed, heavily repressed) processing of his dad's death and own relationship to masculinity, etc. I fail to see how a character becoming trans is any different, and maybe I'm misunderstanding what people are asking here, but I can't take seriously the idea that any of those things should have been spun off into separate characters.

And I am totally open to new characters, and I hope we see more of the Epilogue kids and heck maybe some totally new people in HS^2! But they should of course be characters and not mere vehicles to explore a topic of interest.

[MorganMustDie]

This is gonna be my last comment on transcourse for the whole thing because it's really kinda grinding my gears and I wish we could all just settle already

what an absurd proposition. every single development made upon a character is going to split some people's opinions. some people didn't like that dirk or jane were made into villains. that doesn't mean the authors should have just "taken the safe route" and made two completely new characters to fill those roles. there's absolutely no reason characters being trans should be any different.

In all fairness, I have seen plenty of people say that the writers "should have taken the safe route" with altering Jane and Dirk's characters, and I think the difference is pretty simple. As was said earlier, in fiction there's usually an expectation that things don't Just Happen, because that would be bad storytelling. There should be sufficient buildup to a significant character change, so that readers can look back, say "ah I guess that makes sense," and continue to enjoy the story being told. I personally think it was done well in the epilogues (an opinion as unpopular as they come, so we're still on topic ) as I feel all the major character changes are justified by what we see in the characters in Homestuck itself:
Dirk has always been a bit of a controlling puppet master who thinks about the big picture, and Jane was the heiress-to-be of a global conglomerate and seemed to have no idea why that would be a bad thing. The epilogues focused more on these specific aspects of characters, and to me at least, the changes in characters to reflect these aspects felt justified. I'm also very pro-trans Roxy, I disagree that she was """the most feminine""" of the characters, and I think out of everyone she'd absolutely be the most open to experimenting with identity and self-expression, gender or otherwise. That change also made sense to me.

On the topic of June, and as much as I support her as a fanon interpretation (and encourage people to make art, fanfic, whathaveyou, because it's fun), I feel like the foundation has not been lain for a serious character change like that. It would be something of a disservice to trans readers for the lead trans character to just be shoehorned in like an afterthought, and I know for a fact that there are a lot of trans readers who feel this way already. If the writers can pull it off in a way that's satisfying? Great! That'd be awesome, and I'd love to read it! I've seen some stuff floating around here about introducing alternate retcon-timeline Egberts as a way to include a potential June, which is a great example to me of what would be a decent, exciting way to go about it. But I think that's a chance that a lot of readers really don't want to take. The idea of "we're going to take a major risk with the protagonist that has a small chance of paying off, and is likely to leave a majority of the readership feeling unsatisfied, trans or not," doesn't sound particularly appealing.

I for one hope that any Homestuck Trans Canon in future be focused toward the pioneers of Weird Homestuck Gender Shit: specifically, Roxy and Callie. I thought they had an interesting dynamic in Meat (limited though it was) and would love to see some continuation of it. Alternatives include: March Eridan, the ORIGINAL homestuck trans canon.

[MorganMustDie]

Also I know this one is super unpopular but I met so many kind, welcoming, wonderful people through the Homestuck Discord community, many of whom I am very close friends with to this day, and it breaks my heart that it gets such a bad wrap.

They even listen to the weird music I send them it's super heartwarming <3 <3 <3

shoutout to xeno, he's cool

[egg]

Also I know this one is super unpopular but I met so many kind, welcoming, wonderful people through the Homestuck Discord community, many of whom I am very close friends with to this day, and it breaks my heart that it gets such a bad wrap.

They even listen to the weird music I send them it's super heartwarming <3 <3 <3

shoutout to xeno, he's cool

I'd join the Discord, it just has an ungodly high amount of people and it sets off my anxiety.

[MorganMustDie]

I'd join the Discord, it just has an ungodly high amount of people and it sets off my anxiety.

There are a lot of smaller, less official homestuck discords you could try out! Ones that are a little less massive

[aspiringWatcher]

I'm not sure if this is unpopular but I hate Homestuck twitter.

It's really only unpopular among people who mostly use Homestuck twitter. I think most people on Reddit or anywhere else think basically anywhere is better than twitter. Granted, I don't think the twitter fans think so.

Even HStwit hates HStwit.

[xeno]

shoutout to xeno, he's cool

[galileanTactician]

I think Roxy is the most boring character in Homestuck next to Calliope. She just comes across as "Rose but chill" and not even her drinking habits are exclusive to her as they are also stolen by Rose in act 6.

[calamityCons]

I think Roxy is the most boring character in Homestuck next to Calliope. She just comes across as "Rose but chill" and not even her drinking habits are exclusive to her as they are also stolen by Rose in act 6.

STRONG agree here. Roxy is not exempt from my general dislike of the Alpha Kids both as a whole and as individual characters. Every single one of them is shit.

[BrobyDDark]

Unpopular opinion: Dirk's suicide was really funny to me, because when reading it, all I could think about is that one VRchat video where Kermit jumps off a building. It has the same hasty, "gotta get outta here" feeling to it that just made it...humorous, in a way. And how out of nowhere it was. Everything fine and dandy then Dirk comes up and is like "i gotta die"

Especially after reading Meat where Dirk acts like this infallible god the whole time and then in Candy he just...yeets himself.

This probably sounds terrible, and I don't condone suicide, but.... Just watch the video and see if you can connect the two:

[Bahinchut]

Unpopular opinion: Dirk's suicide was really funny to me, because when reading it, all I could think about is that one VRchat video where Kermit jumps off a building. It has the same hasty, "gotta get outta here" feeling to it that just made it...humorous, in a way. And how out of nowhere it was. Everything fine and dandy then Dirk comes up and is like "i gotta die"

Especially after reading Meat where Dirk acts like this infallible god the whole time and then in Candy he just...yeets himself.

This probably sounds terrible, and I don't condone suicide, but.... Just watch the video and see if you can connect the two:

What, suicide isnt funny anymore? THANKS MILLENIALS

[tajazzled]

heres an unpopular opinion: wp should have hired me

[chromaticThespian]

HS^2 isn't nearly as bad as a significant part of the fandom says it is. Same goes for PQ.

Vriska's PQ route was fine. Something something death of the author. Not saying I agreed with the implications of it, but the actual writing was fine. Same goes for just about any other PQ route that gets a lot of flak.

The only badly drawn PQ sprites so far are Nepeta (her profile shots look off-model to a frankly ridiculous degree and her frontals look like they're gazing into my soul) and, to a certain extent, Dave (midget proportions). Everyone else was good. Vriska looked dopey, but not bad. Karkat looked fucking awesome and anyone saying otherwise is wrong.

June Egbert is not canon and would be such a wild swerve for John that nothing short of actual in-comic evidence will ever convince me otherwise. MTF Vriska doesn't have me hooked just yet but I'm not averse to the idea.

Squaredsprites were dope. Ultimate Self was dope.