it's kind of disappointing how homestuck is/was considering The Ultimate Piece of Digital Multimedia Internet Fiction!!!!!
since like, writers in the 90s back in the day thought that The New Media Digital Internet Superhighway Landscape would completely fucking change fiction and make it weird forever. they made it sound like u could read a story on the internet and it would BLOW UP YOUR MIND and UPLOAD IT to the Cyberweb and you'd wet your panties with digital ecstasy
90s writers expounded shit like "cybertext" and considered non-linear fiction while something like homestuck is super linear. digital multimedia isn't super relevant to homestuck's story and is kind of gimmicky tbh. at it's core it's just text and images, and yeah they did publish homestuck as a book.
in the "cybertext" concept and many 90s concepts, the audience is usually expected to be an active participant, a "user" and not a "reader", while in something like homestuck or a more linear visual novel, there is not much interaction and the experience is passive like reading through a book or watching a movie
also don't take me as trying to attack homestuck pls lol
i don't think i can really explain all this weird 90s Future of Literature shit without my brain imploding but that's kind of how i feel comparing what people in the 90s thought digital literature would be like and what it is now. 'cause digital literature can be like that!
although it's not like fiction like that doesn't exist. many video games are basically what people thought Epic Cybertexts were gonna be like, although you get that more out of artsy, experimental indie stuff and not like triple a garbage where the plot is an excuse for Pew Pew Pew. video game-y type stuff leans more into the medium, stuff that uses social media as its medium (which is more passive), etc.