brendan mcleod

I thought John Gaius was from New Zealand, not Australia

thank you for this post honestly because i was starting to get irritated at how many people were mocking the "none houses" joke in specific. "it's lame tonal whiplash" yeah man it was lame tonal whiplash in-universe too or did you miss that

I guess I don’t have anything against it in principle but as someone who thinks jokes should be funny and good, I’ve never seen this done in a way where it wasn’t unfunny and bad. That’s not the end of the world but usually it’s unfunny and bad in a particularly memorable way that leaves a bad taste in my mouth which makes me enjoy the good parts of the book less.

I think that unless it’s a very tricky book that has a good reason for stepping completely outside of itself like this (if it’s to say “the narwhal bacons at midnight” it probably doesn’t), this particular type of bad joke signals to me that the author doesn’t care very much about the story they’re telling and I probably don’t need to either. I haven’t read these and I’m sure this passage isn’t representative of the series as a whole but man this was rough to read. I would definitely lose some interest if I was partway through a book and saw this. It gives me the ick as the kids say, and as I would not say in a far-future science fiction novel

Realizing how old John was put his & Gideon's meme-ing in a whole new light. I loved it.

And I love the memes that don't even work that way; they remind me that someone is telling a story and I like that.

The reason I can't take TLT seriously is entirely because the author was a very prolific Homestuck fanfiction writer, and not only is her writing style essentially the same (hence the prevalence of pop culture and goofy internet humor), she reused a lot of elements from her fanfics for TLT. Having read a lot of her fanfic back in 2010-2013 (when Homestuck was big), I can see how HS has thoroughly saturated every page of her original fiction and the parallels are too distracting for me to enjoy. I get hung up on going "Oh, this is based on that".

The main characters are literally just her versions of Dave and Karkat with a new coat of paint, and I can't stop thinking about how the skull facepaint is because of Gamzee.

And that's not to say the writing or humor is bad! Her prose is really enjoyable to read, but I've been soured on Homestuck and anything derivative of it over the last decade, and TLT is just... too quintessentially Homestuckian for me in 2024.