Unpopular Opinions Thread

[gutza1]

So, I thought I'd bring back an old thread from the former MSPA Forums. If you have any opinions on Homestuck that go against the opinion of the majority of the fandom, or at least its most visible members, share them here! There's just one rule:

Rule 1 (and only): Please don't argue with others about their opinions. This is supposed to be a "safe space" for people to share their unpopular opinions without being dogpiled on or starting an argument, not yet another debate thread.

[Generalrabogolfo]

Rosemary is a character development black hole that completely ruined both Kanaya and Rose.

[Dream Muttman]

Collide should've been scrapped for a flash in which Karkat repeatedly knocks himself out to keep retrying the Lord English boss until he wins and that should've been the Undertale reference in HS. Set to Iron Knight.

[gutza1]

Ninja'd

Alright, now that the OP is up, let me share some unpopular opinions of my own...

Obligatory Shipping/Characters:

I think OG/canon Roxy is far more unique and endearing than !trans/Epilogue Roxy, who's just a shitty Dave clone.

John/Dave is a much better gay ship for Dave than Davekat, and if Dave had to get with a guy, it should have been with his best friend, not the troll who is characterized by self-loathing that would have made the similarities between his character and Dave's repulsive to him.

When it comes to het ships for Dave, Daverezi and Daverose are much more interesting than Davejade.

Karkat is a better love interest for Jade than Dave.

Rose is bi and her attraction to John and Dave wasn't just her being ironic/obligatory heterosexuality.

Rosemary was interesting up until it became canon, whereupon all the potential sources of conflict (Kanaya rigidly adhering to the quadrants) that could lead to interesting character arcs for the two magically disappeared.

Johnvris is still a great ship and (Vriska) should have come back to life.

...Okay, now with all the obligatory shipping stuff out of the way, let's get to more substantive opinions...

Jack Noir got shafted by the story in all of his incarnations and he should have been the main villain of the Alpha session instead of the Condesce, with the kids and trolls' final battle being against him. Also, Spades Slick should have shown up in the fight against English.

Caliborn is a much more interesting "meta commentary" villain than Ultimate Dirk, and he's one of the only characters with a satisfying character arc. As a person who also has a mental disability (autism), I find his struggle to overcome his learning disability very relatable.

The Mayor went from being an actual character that drove the plot to just the team pet that does nothing but look cute, and that's bad. Also, AR is very underappreciated but I love him.

I think the official Aspect Wheel doesn't make sense and it should instead look like this:



Finally, I don't think Sburb and the Genesis Frog are just the result of natural reproduction/Darwinian evolution applied to universes, not when the lore of Paradox Space is so heavily based upon RL creation myths and religion. I do think Paradox Space and Sburb was created by some kind of powerful being, who's the "God" to Lord English's "devil," or the "Abraxas" to Lord English's "Yaldabaoth."

[Darth_Energon]

Kanaya has always been boring, she should've stayed dead because she became even more boring after.

[furrylatula]

the epilogues were good. everything in them was a logical development of each character’s personality given their individual circumstances. dirk’s transphobia was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from an authoritarian cis dude who was actively battling someone at the time and thus didn’t immediately mentally update his view of someone he’d known for years

it isn’t “jk rowlingesque” to retroactively apply queer/trans readings to your narrative if you actually go in and canonize those things in future works. no one wouldve been pissed about dumbledore if he had been canon gay in fantastic beasts, so why are people pissed over vriska?

cronus is canonically a serial pedophile and abuser and overall Way More Fucking Dangerous than his pathetic facade would suggest. hes the type of dude you NEVER leave someone alone with and yet his friends keep leaving people alone with him? man the dancestors are really shitty people aint they. thats not unpopular i just kind of never realized how shitty until now

boring m/f ships with zero chemistry dont suddenly get less boring just because one of them transitions so its gay

[burnt2ashleys]

The worst Homestuck ship is your favorite ship

[foreverFlummoxed]

I don't enjoy Bill Bolin's tracks that were in the comic and the tracks that replaced them are better

[JakeMorph]

this is one of those ones that I really didn't think would be unpopular but apparently is: murderstuck didn't happen "to troll the fans" or to "shrink a bloated cast". read anything about Andrew's thought processes and planned narrative during and around Act 5 and it is clear that characters like Feferi and Nepeta and Eridan were never going to be important to the story. they were there to pad out a cast of background creator figures that Andrew has said he wasn't always going to make important to the story in the first place, and a character appearing does not always mean that character is going to have an arc. sometimes background characters are just background characters.

[rookie1978]

Davekat is awful and has literally no chemistry. Rosemary is okay but had lots of missed opportunities. People shipping johndave relentlessly are annoying after John's blatant "I am not a homosexual".

Nepetas crush on karkat was never supposed to religiously inspire nepkat shippers and only existed to show how off kilter nepeta is for pursuing karkat despite karkat refusing her multiple times and called her autistic. She grew up in a cave and painted 'shipping walls' with the blood of trolls and beasts she killed. If anything she existed to make fun of the 'bloodthirsty' tumblr shippers and fans who hated on anyone not agreeing with their ships. The people who still ship nepkat for whatever reason completely disregard Nepeta's actual characterization and instead play into all the things about her that were supposed to be bad. People who ship nepkat because 'they want good things for nepeta' are utter buffoons because the ACTUAL best thing for nepeta is her getting over her puppy love and to stop being so obsessed with relationships.

Meowrails (ironically another nepeta ship) is also awful. Equius failed to protect Nepeta the moment she needed it most because of his subby choking kink. I love them both as characters but Equius literally let himself and by proxy Nepeta DIE because HE WAS A DEGENERATE. He died SMILING. His complete and utter lack of actual faith towards his moiral was supposed to be TRAGICALLY COMEDIC. Again, people who still cling onto meowrails completely missed the point of meowrails.

Making lanque trans so friendsim could get representation points, and then making him canonically an abusive shitty person, was hilarious but still an awful decision. The repeated warnings and the literal 'its starting to sound like a woman wrote this' line were completely obnoxious and I have no idea why they decided to keep ANY of that shit in, especially since he was one of the FINAL ROUTES.

A majority of homestucks fans are annoying and flanderize characters beyond belief.

The mayor being a useless little iddy biddy boy who did nuffin wrong and wouldnt hurt a fly is fucking stupid. He led his own revolution. That wasn't ever supposed to happen. His deconstruction of normal sburb mechanics were on the same level as Jack Noir betraying the queen- neither of these events happen in a normal Sburb session. The Wayward Vagabond is a fucking hero and the comic forgot all about his potential AND actions.

Aimless Renegade totally could've shot the fuck out of pre-bec Noir.

There was no reason to make Spades Slick a villain and he was morally a good guy until Collide decided he wasn't.

Trans roxy doesn't make sense and it didn't make sense. Trans vriska and john also came completely out of nowherw and none of these sudden labels fit the characters at all.

The epilogues were a poor attempt at 'look at how serious it is now we're all adults with real problems now ooooohga woooga'.

Vriska got too much screentime during the entire comic. Most of the trolls were more interesting then her. Vriskas only personality trait is literally BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH and the 5 seconds of character development she had where she actually learned how to calm the fuck down were entirely trashed for no reason. At least gamzee was an interesting villain.

Eridan never got the chance to be anything more than a joke and most people don't understand how tragic his story is. Then again, its not like the comic tries to let people know anyways. Incel eridan is funny, but is a comedic flanderization of his character and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Out of all the flanderization by the fans and act 6 Dave got the worst of it. He was turned from cool radical dude with a sword to depressed fucking loser emo boy whose also like, suuuper gay, haha, rememeber when roach wrote daves route and the literal 13 year old called himself a dick rider? Wooow, how hilarious and appropriate for his character. Dave was literally ruined.

Bro being abusive was a terrible, lazy writing choice made late in the comic to provide an easy tearjerker moment. Dave and Dirk reminiscing about how cool yet quirky their brothers were, hugging it out, deciding to just call eachother 'bro' and fist bumping would've been such a better scene that still could've had the twinge of nostalgic sadness the writer so desperately wanted.

Problem Sleuth is a million times better than Homestuck and it always will be because it never lost focus of what it was.

Caliborn is the best character.

[BrobyDDark]

Roxy transitioning and how preachy it was in the Epilogues was jarring, poorly handled, and, I feel, insulting to people who have dealt with Gender Dysphoria, though I can understand if someone who has Gender Dysphoria felt inspired or uplifted by reading about it.

The toblerones are utter shite and the only time they were used well was when someone made a wish to bring back the OG MSPAForums (which was beyond the dragon's power.)

The handling of Davekat could have been good but was fucking awful.

In general, the handling of LGBT characters in Homestuck has been awful.

I despise Trolls and wish their involvement in the story was significantly dampened

It is far passed the point to make these characters trans and discuss why that's important. The seeds of that should've been left early in the comic for the Beta and Alpha kids, and doing it now is just pandering to one audience by taking away characters that appealed to most everyone. Make. New. Characters. You were heading towards Dirk restarting a game of SBURB anyways. Why not wait? Why not focus on timelines where these characters were trans? Why not do a million other things?

Not like that matters because I believe leaving so much up to interpretation is lazy, hipster bullshit that's supposed to be "deep" but is as shallow as a slowly drying puddle.

Speaking of, a lot of Homestuck is full of that pretentious, wannabe deep philosophical stuff, and whenever it's talked about, it hurts the narrative.

Writing fifty billion words just to say simple shit doesn't make the comic look smart, it makes it look like it's trying too hard

Karkat is lame and not that good of a character

John's retcon powers are heavily underutilized and shouldn't cause rifts like Meat or Candy. The Huss either shoupd have never given them to him, or taken them away after the big retcon.

I can't take Dirk or Roxy seriously since their world was subjugated by a couple of mediocre clowns and Guy Fieri.

[Cyber-Fan]

rememeber when roach wrote daves route and the literal 13 year old called himself a dick rider? Wooow, how hilarious and appropriate for his character. Dave was literally ruined.

I know this isn't supposed to be a thread for arguments, but this is such a bizarre thing to deem inappropriate when Dave said shit like this:

TG: when the stars come into alignment and your flux capacitor lets you finally sate your meteoric greed for crotch-dachshund
TG: i wouldnt want to miss it and cause a paradox or something
TG: itd suck if the universe blew up on account of you missing your window of opportunity to help yourself to a pubescent boy's naked spam porpoise

TG: radially effevescing arms of more little boy peckers than you can imagine
TG: turning out insane corkscrew haymakers of a billion dancing vienna sausages strong
TG: this is how we do this
TG: this shits more real than kraft mayo

way back in act 3

[BrobyDDark]

rememeber when roach wrote daves route and the literal 13 year old called himself a dick rider? Wooow, how hilarious and appropriate for his character. Dave was literally ruined.

I know this isn't supposed to be a thread for arguments, but this is such a bizarre thing to deem inappropriate when Dave said shit like this:

TG: when the stars come into alignment and your flux capacitor lets you finally sate your meteoric greed for crotch-dachshund
TG: i wouldnt want to miss it and cause a paradox or something
TG: itd suck if the universe blew up on account of you missing your window of opportunity to help yourself to a pubescent boy's naked spam porpoise

TG: radially effevescing arms of more little boy peckers than you can imagine
TG: turning out insane corkscrew haymakers of a billion dancing vienna sausages strong
TG: this is how we do this
TG: this shits more real than kraft mayo

way back in act 3

To be fair

Extremely beautifully worded dick jokes doesn't exactly equal "yeah I ride dicks"

But it's all pointless because it's all irony anyways

[dualfallen]

The decision for Friendsim/Pesterquest to constantly make jokes about how "We're being paid to write this", "This character looks the exact same because we didn't want to make more sprites", "This route has been off track long enough and we need to end it eventually" constantly breaks the immersion and is extremely disappointing. I get Homestuck has meta jokes, but with something where you personally are supposed to be making friends, hearing about the financial situations or workloads really takes me out of it.

The fact that a lot of new song titles keep trying to be silly and wacky is just annoying and not particularly funny. Making a song a QR code, a huge paragraph, or an ASCII image just makes things frustrating for when you want to look it up and is quite unprofessional.

I can't reasonably believe that the characters I've known for ten years were actually trans this whole time and it just comes off as extremely forced and hurtful to the character. I can't see John being happy by being forced to transition by a magical toblerone. I get why it's being done, but why can't we have the lgbt representation in characters that haven't already been established.

The overabundance of gay ships compared to heterosexual ones is just embarrassing. In Homestuck, characters are a lot more free with their sexuality which sounds great on paper but this "freedom" simply means forcing them into a same-sex pairing (most of which end up as rather boring like Davekat and Rosemary). Friendsim has like one healthy heterosexual relationship (Azdaja and Konyll), with nearly every other straight ship being abusive. Meanwhile there are a massive amount of same-sex relationships that are described as being perfect. "Everyone is gay" is not diversity.

I highly dislike how Homestuck^2 is trying to create OBJECTIVE GOOD vs OBJECTIVE EVIL. Dirk and Jane in particular are painted as irredeemable evil even if people think they have a point (especially with Dirk talking about how Acts 1-5 were the best) and it just feels like the audience is expected to side with the "heroes". Vriska was a perfect character who you really weren't sure whether or not she was a hero or villain. I heavily dislike being told what to think.

Overall, just stop with the politics please. Don't worry, anyone who's reading at this point is fully accepting of LGBT matters. We don't need everyone being trans, and gay, and whatever else is in the LGBTQQIAAP+ to make a point.

[JakeMorph]

there sure are a lot of people in here who think their opinions about trans and gay characters are unpopular!

[gutza1]

there sure are a lot of people in here who think their opinions about trans and gay characters are unpopular!

I think it’s just that the official fandom locations like Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter have a massive and omnipresent circlejerk and some people are just tired of it but are afraid that the circlejerkers will dogpile them if they go against the circlejerk. Rest assured, if I see any actual bigotry in this thread, I will report the offender as soon as possible.

[egg]

A majority of homestucks fans are annoying and flanderize characters beyond belief.

This isn't unpopular as much as flat out the opinion that the vast majority of the Internet, and soon even people in real life like convention organizers, began to believe in.

As for my unpopular opinion, I honestly think that people in the Homestuck fandom are inherently desperate to have characters be like them or be innocent. I have yet to meet anyone in the Homestuck fandom who likes a character precisely because they are an horrible person, except for Caliborn fans, who are woke and have 500 IQ. The constant, ever present desire to justify characters and make them seem 'not as bad as they seem' is annoying, and especially annoying when the person advocating for that character starts putting pressure on other characters, leading to a sort of hypocrisy in which your favorite character isn't allowed to be a bad person, but all of the others are. I do defend some of the characters I like, but I also don't put down any others unless I feel like their mere existence is treated by the narrative as some sort of miracle. Also, all the blatant "my favorite character is who I would want them to be rather than what they are" bullshit needs to stop. I feel like I'm in anime fandoms all over again with people desperate to have their waifu not be shitty. There's value in characters that are dislikable, and it's okay to like them. It's okay to like them for being interesting villains and having complex issues that makes them have problems interacting with others.

[TC]

Unpopular opinion but my opinions are always right.

I'm not gonna tell you what they are though.

[sorbicCondition]

My only slightly unpopular opinion is that trying to find moral fault in any of the characters pre-epilogue that aren't Doc Scratch, Lord English, or any other adult character is stupid. They're kids, folks. Eridan isn't at fault for being a shitty boy. Equius isn't at fault for the things he believes. Vriska isn't at fault for the things she does. They're a bunch of kids being raised in a shitty environment.

My probably more unpopular opinion is that the exiles and carapacians in general are barely characters. They're basically just game constructs with some pizazz. PM and maybe Spades are the only ones with anything interesting going on, the rest are basically just used for gags or plot contrivances. That people latch onto them or get upset at their treatment is completely and utterly beyond me.

My most unpopular opinion is that every character is gay and trans.

[Khiara]

The fact that a lot of new song titles keep trying to be silly and wacky is just annoying and not particularly funny. Making a song a QR code, a huge paragraph, or an ASCII image just makes things frustrating for when you want to look it up and is quite unprofessional.

I can't reasonably believe that the characters I've known for ten years were actually trans this whole time and it just comes off as extremely forced and hurtful to the character. I can't see John being happy by being forced to transition by a magical toblerone. I get why it's being done, but why can't we have the lgbt representation in characters that haven't already been established.

The overabundance of gay ships compared to heterosexual ones is just embarrassing. In Homestuck, characters are a lot more free with their sexuality which sounds great on paper but this "freedom" simply means forcing them into a same-sex pairing (most of which end up as rather boring like Davekat and Rosemary). Friendsim has like one healthy heterosexual relationship (Azdaja and Konyll), with nearly every other straight ship being abusive. Meanwhile there are a massive amount of same-sex relationships that are described as being perfect. "Everyone is gay" is not diversity.

I highly dislike how Homestuck^2 is trying to create OBJECTIVE GOOD vs OBJECTIVE EVIL. Dirk and Jane in particular are painted as irredeemable evil even if people think they have a point (especially with Dirk talking about how Acts 1-5 were the best) and it just feels like the audience is expected to side with the "heroes". Vriska was a perfect character who you really weren't sure whether or not she was a hero or villain. I heavily dislike being told what to think.

Overall, just stop with the politics please. Don't worry, anyone who's reading at this point is fully accepting of LGBT matters. We don't need everyone being trans, and gay, and whatever else is in the LGBTQQIAAP+ to make a point.

I second these. And for my (probably) unpopular opinion about the fandom, I'd like to quote a single particular line.

"I heavily dislike being told what to think."

You can tell that I'm over-reacting or such, but this is what made me feel threatened and uneasy in a fandom. I feel endangered just for having a different thoughts (even headcanons) than the majority, while the majority can celebrate their "canons" whatever they want.

I can't say I disliked Vriska's sprite art on Pesterquest because they would accuse me for "disrespecting the art-style diversity"--while I'm just complaining for the anatomy (especially her face), not for the "lack of boobs for the 13 y.o." like they thought. (Hell, I don't even understand why they made her looks like Komaeda, rather than make more expressions that suits her character. What's the point of that again?)

I also can't say I don't believe that Vriska is MTF trans because they would accuse me for being transphobic or such. I have nothing against LGBTQ+ community--even I may be one of them. I don't even despise the trans Vriska concept, I'm okay with the racebent and trans headcanons (including fanworks)--I enjoyed June Egbert fanarts, too! But what I hate the most from the concept is the way they forced the others to believe it, the way they acted like it's the absolute fact and cannot be denied.

They told me to respect the diversity, while they could just bash the different opinions right away. Good Lord...

(I don't even want to go with the official writer's toxicity--you know who, since I'm afraid it's against the forum's rule.)

Not gonna lie, these are what made me almost went to refund Pesterquest.
Though, I could always take a break, stay away from the community for a while, and enjoy my own "canons" all by myself (I'm still working on several fanworks, anyway).

Last but not least,

>I was incredibly surprised when knowing Xamag made PQ sprites, too! Like, dude! Why not having them to make Vriska's sprite at the very first place instead???

>For me, Vriska is a cis-bi. I do not believe that she is trans, and I would not allow anyone else to force me to believe it.