Homestuck Act 5 Act 2 Review

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you experience a piece of art that resonates so deeply with you you have to wonder how much bigger of an impact it would have had on you if you had experienced it while you were a teen. Act 5 act 2 of Homestuck has definitely cemented Homestuck as one such piece of art for me.

I have enjoyed reading Homestuck from the beginning. I know some people don’t really care that much for Act 1 because “it’s too slow” but I personally enjoyed it from the get go. With the exception of the intermission and act 5 act 1, every act ended up being better and better than the one before, and even the two acts mentioned here were really good, A5A1 only ended up not feeling better than A4 because Act 4 was that good and A5A1 was so different that it’s not very comparable.
Act 5 Act 2 is miles above the rest, it’s not even a contest. The initial plan was for act 5 to be the big act™, the one where everything escalates and comes together, with act 6 being supposed to, and I quote (from the formspring), “considerably shorter, with act 7 supposed to “be minuscule”. Now as we all know that famously did not happen, however A5A2 still ends up feeling like the ultimate conclusion of all that came before it, not only in terms of the story, but also in terms of the structure of the comic itself. From its inception Homestuck was intended as an experiment to create something different from the previous works and the webcomic landscape overall, initially meant to only be produced in Flash but the plan was quickly dropped due to the workload being way too demanding; nevertheless, act 1 already switched it up by having a few flashes with music, and every subsequent act escalated how much more novelty could be brought into the story.

Act 5 adds a lot to the formula. Playable flash pages were already a thing before, but apart from the first Act 4 page they were nothing more than just a simple joke or two. Alterniabound is the obvious example for how much bigger in scope the games have gotten: it’s a RPG type game that, as Hussie put in one of the Formspring answers, emulates the experience of getting to a new village in a RPG. You can walk around, talk to people, switch to a different character to get more dialogue, find treasure chests… On top of being really fun and unique for a webcomic, it also allows for the story to be told differently than usual; it doesn’t sound like it’s that much of a difference but having dialogue between characters being multiple speeches bubble with sprites like in a video game gives a totally different experience than it just being multiple long chat logs.

There’s not many of those games but they all feel unique, one of them straight up feeling like a segment you could get in Undertale, or the last one of the act opening with an animation followed up by a gameplay section that feels like the last stretch of a dungeon before facing the final boss of a RPG. Act 5 Act 2 is the high point of the comic when it comes to the technical side of it, but it’s not the best part of the comic solely thanks to its constant innovation. The story is also reaching new heights, and as I mentioned earlier, the fact it was meant to be the final big act is really felt throughout the entire duration of the arc.

Homestuck is excellent at balancing the focus and development of its characters, and accomplishes the same with its world and story. There are a large number characters involved in the story (there are 4 kids and 12 trolls and that’s only the start!!), and to make matters even more complex there’s frequently time travel shenanigans involved, so switching the focus between different groups and/or times has to happen a lot. Story wise, Act 4 concluded with many crazy developments which I won’t spoil here, and then Act 5 Act 1 decided to leave all those events behind to focus on the trolls. Up to that point, only some of them had appeared in the story, so A5A1 was there both to let the stakes go down a bit, and to properly introduce and flesh out all the trolls (all of them)

Act 5 then opens up with a Flash using a song literally called Homestuck, which is a perfect way to remind you that the story is about to enter its (planned) final arc…. And then it immediately hits you with some of its funniest conversations back to back.

Homestuck has always been a very comedy focused comic, and it excels at being hilarious. Throughout the comic, (almost) every line of dialogue is via pesterlogs. Those conversations are awesome to read, because they convey extremely well how online conventicingersations go, to the point that some bits of dialogue are pretty much 1:1 conversations Hussie had with some friends at some point or another. This feeling of authenticity really goes a long way into making the dialogue readable: some of the logs are long, and the majority of the characters are using typing quirks, and yet it never feels like a pain to read, there’s almost always a few good jokes around the corner. On top of that, Homestuck uses its length to its benefit, by having callbacks scattered all around the place: there’s a lot of visual jokes or events being repeated multiple times, or expressions being used and reused by multiple characters. Honestly, the expressions combined with the typing quirks very easily latch onto your brain, it’s just really fun to US3 4LL TH3 QU1RKS. 4LL OF TH3M. >:]

The different characters and their relationships is one of, if not the biggest, reason why Homestuck is so popular. It only takes a few conversations for you to get a good reading at their personalities, and the biggest cast members are all very endearing! From John’s cheerfulness to Karkat’s constant anger, it’s pretty much guaranteed anyone reading Homestuck will find at least one or two characters that makes them go “he’s literally me fr”. Personally my main guy will always be none other than Dave “cool kid” Strider himself, but A5A2 really put Karkat and Terezi as close seconds for me. Karkat’s constant anger and self loathing are somehow always leading to some hilarious shenanigans, the vast majority of the funniest moments from this act involve him being there, sometimes multiple times even. And Terezi just owns.

Even the more minor characters are exuding enough personality for people to latch onto them. It’s no wonder there’s so much fanfiction about the comic, since not only does it fit the whole meta aspect of the comic, it’s also easy to imagine how x or y character would react in any scenario, which conveys how well defined everyone’s character is.

There’s plenty of times where characters are just fooling around but more often than not, it’s used as a way to slow down the pace of the story only to accelerate it right afterwards. There’s an impressive number of narrative threads to be explored, and whenever one of them has taken focus for too long, it cuts to something else. This is very classic for a serialized story, and it’s an aspect of it that was handled skillfully, the experience as a serialized reader is obviously very different but I think there’s never been a moment where a section focused on x or y event could have been improved by being longer before switching to something else. There’s actually so many moving parts during the whole act that it probably would have been overwhelming if the story didn’t halt every now and then!

Across the previous acts, a lot of questions were being asked by the comic, and each act brought in some answers and even more questions, as the story progressed. The rules, goals and mechanics of Sburb have been explained enough to both the characters and the readers for them to no longer be a mystery, so now the big questions were all about the story itself, and where events would go. What was the mistake the kids were about to do and fuck over the troll’s session with? Why was their own session supposedly doomed? What could possibly have happened after the explosive Act 4 finale?

All those questions were answered, and every time the answer felt so obvious to a point it feels like you could have figured it out by yourself. The way Hussie sets up plot points is a lot like how One Piece does it, by introducing a ton of concepts here and there and coming back to them later on. It gives the worldbuilding a really organic feeling, as concepts that get introduced later in the story feel like they’ve been there all along since in a way, they kind of were. In the case of Homestuck, this storytelling technique is even used for more than just the story/worldbuilding, since a lot of jokes also follow the same format of just reusing a previously established sentence/drawing!
Even outside of just resolving the different ongoing mysteries, the events depicted in A5A2 are enough to make it the best act for me. The story has always been building up to more and more extreme events, and this act is no stranger to that: there’s so much action, so many plot twists, it genuinely has the same vibes as some big arc you’d find in a shonen manga, reading this act definitely got me in the same mood as the first time I went through the Impel Down - Marineford arcs in One Piece or the Yorknew City arc, and once I was deep enough in I knew it’d become one of my favorite works ever.

And on top of that, the act manages to introduce new narrative devices that I’ve never seen before. Since the beginning of the story, we’ve seen characters talking to each other in the future only to come back to the conversation later on with more context, which is already a really neat concept. But as the comic progresses, this scenario keeps being expanded upon: what if only one of the characters was in the future? What if both characters were in a different dimension? What if they had conversations that actually never took place, but at the same time gained some knowledge from those non-existent conversations? What if two characters’ relationship developed in reverse chronology? Time travel, parallel dimensions, dream worlds, Homestuck introduces a lot of concepts that can be hard to wrap your head around, but it still makes it relatively easy to understand their impact, and always keeps them interesting!

My personal favorite section has to go to the entire final stretch of the act. Homestuck has always been an extremely meta story, the literal premise of MSPA is meta, by letting virtually anyone contribute to how the story is gonna play, even if it’s an element Homestuck decided to ditch halfway during Act 4. I was afraid that the story would lose some of its charm by “only” being Hussie’s story, but I was proven wrong all throughout Act 5, and the entire ending section of it is the epitome of that: the meta elements are not only cranked up to 11, the entire comic somehow reinvents itself in ways only a piece of art like Homestuck could reinvent itself. Without getting into spoiler territory, the structure of the comic itself gets impacted, to a point where the story is told even outside of the comic itself: the website itself becomes part of the narrative, in a way that’s even more impressive than the playable pages.

This ~300 pages long section is full to the brim with creative ideas you couldn’t see in any other story, only a story told the way Homestuck is being told could introduce most of those concepts. Sure, some of those ideas have been done before (for example, there are some parts of the comic, earlier and during this section, where the narration is a story that parallels the current events, which is very similar to the in-universe comic found in Watchmen), but even those ideas are always kept fresh by adding an unique twist to them. Homestuck has always loved to switch POVs, or even to switch around its timeline, and this arc is the perfect encapsulation of how well the comic transforms all those concepts.

And then, the act ends with probably the coolest flash animation of the entire comic. That animation was so massive, and so expected (the whole comic went on its first of many long hiatus before it, for a total of 48 days), and its release broke the internet: not only was the MSPA site down, Newgrounds, which was used to host a mirror of the flash, also crashed, and the flash also caused other sites like Megaupload or even twitter to be temporarily down for several days due to the unprecedented spike in traffic. Goku VS Jiren breaking Crunchyroll doesn’t seem that impressive when you put it in perspective.

Hype for it aside, the Flash is excellent, being by far the longest to date and it gives the whole act an explosive conclusion. The act ends on a really high note, and in a way I personally love: the events depicted could either be an open-ended ending to the whole story, or just leading into the beginning of something bigger than what had been happening so far.

The flash is also a unique case where the music for it was specially arranged around the timing of the flash, and not the other way around! For every previous flash, Hussie just took a song someone made before and decided to create a flash around it, forcing the timing of the flash events to follow the rhythm of the flash. Music is a very important element in Homestuck, and it’s one of the aspects where it shines the most, because it reinforces the community aspect of the project. There is a lot of music that was created for Homestuck, with some songs making it into the comic and some “just” being released in albums.

A lot of unused songs end up being referenced in other songs, like the song linked above which is referenced in a dozen of other tracks! A lot of songs end up creating leitmotivs, either for characters or more generally for events, and those end up all over the place, for example this track is more or less Jack Noir’s theme. If you’re familiar with Toby Fox’s work on Undertale and Deltarune it shouldn’t be a surprise, as he’s the artist who has the most contribution on the Homestuck soundtrack. I’d even argue that his Homestuck output is better than his UTDR work, due to how diverse it is. Eventually the music of Homestuck grew to a point where different artists were putting out solo albums for it, and there are even some concept albums! Again the above track is a perfect example for it, as the album it’s from is tied to a fake in universe jazz band. Plus, Homestuck also features the best version of Megalovania if you ask me. Tensei’s guitar in this version sounds so fucking cool.

Homestuck is a one of a kind experience, something that couldn’t be created today and it’s unlikely we’re ever going to see anything like it ever again. Even if the interactive aspect of MSPA disappeared from it, a big chunk of the charm of the early acts comes from it. Nowadays, something like Homestuck would either be completely ignored or flooded by AI suggestions. But even that aside, Homestuck explores so many concepts it’s hard to not see elements of it in other stories and not think about it. In a way it’s like how The Simpsons “predicted” a lot of real world events, due to the sheer number of episodes it has. But no matter where you look, whether it’s a coincidence or not, there’s always a huge chance you’ll run into something that makes you think of Homestuck. It may be the way one of your friend types, a theme in a story, or even a cool narrative device: once you’ve experienced enough of it, HS becomes one of those experiences that’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. I still have over half the comic to read, and that’s even without counting the different epilogues and whatnot. All this remaining material could be some absolute dogshit that has nothing to do with the story I love and I wouldn’t care. The quality of everything up to it has been so good nothing can convince me that Homestuck isn’t worth a read, and one of the greatest experiences I’ve gone through.

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Homestuck Act 5 Act 2 Review