This is for all of you stuck at home...

Recently I've been sucked into a webcomic. I'm not sure why it would be called a webcomic, really, it's more of an action/adventure drama. Let's just call it a webtionventurama.
Anyways, after finishing Problem Sleuth on Andrew Hussie's site MS Paint Adventures, I started the only other comic he hasn't abandoned: Homestuck.
It starts off with the reader meeting four normal kids thrown into a game that's part MMORPG and part certain death. They build their way to portals in the sky a la The Sims, fight monstrous enemies akin to those in over-the-top JRPGs, make dubious allies, and repeatedly break the space-time continuum.
Then, the real story begins after John dicks around with his sylladex for an entire act. A second cast of characters is introduced, then a third, and the entire plot becomes so insanely complicated that there is a wiki site just for this webtionventurama and Hussie's other works. It's got me hooked something terrible even though the story is starting to devolve from "Hey, that was a really cool twist!" to "Hussie, you are just being a raging douche." And really, after perusing his Formspring accounts (yep, he currently has two with over 1200 questions, plus a Twitter account) and reading his increasing amounts of self-insertions, I have to agree. Andrew Hussie actually is a raging douche. A raging douche with a good story. Now if he could write it without stopping every few updates to stick his middle fingers to the whiniest of his fans and lord his ego/author-god-powers over everyone, I would wholeheartedly agree that this story is absolutely amazing.

Now what?

Well, to be honest, I do believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I've been putting together a Homestuck trolls cosplay group. I plan to have my Karkat costume done for Anime Detour '11, and I'm helping my friends with their Eridan, Equius, and Sollux costumes. To be fair, I'm just helping Sollux with his horns and arm-coverings, and he's doing a lot of the screen-printing for the shirts. It's gonna be pretty fun.

So what's the problem?

Hussie doesn't draw his trolls with unnecessary features. Like ears. Or fingernails. Or noses, sometimes. So a lot of the fan drawings of them show the trolls with pointy ears and yellow fingernails (to match their candycorn horns.) Do I follow the fans here and shell out a couple more bucks for latex ear tips? Or do I try to hide my ears and just match my nails to my skin? Does it even matter?
This is what cosplay does to me.

I finished my nubby horns the other day, and they look really cool. I'm not sure how I'm going to do Eridan's massive horns without them becoming piles of horn-shrapnel, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

But, back to the things you care about...

As far as the plot goes, something I really like about Hussie's work is that really obscure things will tie into each other, things you don't even notice until someone points them out. His characters have so much depth to them, even the villains, and sometimes the character you least expect to do something will do exactly that. I don't truly dislike any character at this point in the plot, even if I do like some more than others. And lastly, it's always interesting, no matter what's happening (past the first act, which is kind of a slow introduction to things like technical game mechanics.)
On the other hand, Hussie seems to be making decisions as to what happens next based on what will make his fans as angry as possible, as a way to show that he can do anything he wants and his readers are powerless to stop him. Maybe the actual plot was created before any comments made by his rabid fans, but his self-insertions have been somewhat offensive as of late. If he were nicer person to the fans that pay for his merchandise and pass around word of his webtionventuramas, he would be the full package.

I guess that's what happens when you're a raging douche with a good story to tell.