I have a few thoughts on this, one about the "cost", one about production, one about what you're actually purchasing with a patreon subscription, and one about the nature of Homestuck as an ensemble cast work https://twitter.com/mayrosemary_/status/1198379727435767809

the patreon thing is weird, and I get that. you're not like... actually paying for Homestuck updates, you're paying for bonus content. that's not really how things work traditionally, and it's a little hard to wrap one's head around, I understand that.

this sort of bleeds into the point about "cost". the cost here is free. I don't really have any sympathy for the people not chipping in at this point and still whining, because the objective cost of entry to them is nothing.

this sort of calls into question feeling let down by an upd8 though. after all, you're strictly not paying for it, right? you haven't actually seen the content you ARE paying for yet. personally, I'm excited to see it! I'm glad my money can make more content happen

which leads neatly into the points about cost and production.

say we take this $5 as a pricetag for the update (though it's not). that's about what you pay to buy a floppy comic, often 22 pages long. sometimes you pay 6 or 7 or 8$ even.

how does the content compare?

personally, I know what I'd rather be reading. idk feel free to look up my feelings on Alan Moore (he's right, basically) but I tend to find a lot of floppy comics to be thin stuff for a high price tag, and neither the art nor writing in like... Nazi Cap is as good as this upd8

and yet, while comics comparatively have a readership of "fuckin nobody", at least vs films and videogames, they do still have somewhere between 20 to 200 times the number of BUYERS as Homestuck.

this means that there's way, way less actual money to produce Homestuck

like... I don't know how to stress enough that we HAVE the numbers, on graphtreon, to see roughly where this project falls in terms of its probable income, and there is almost certainly NO WAY IN HELL anyone working on it is making close to a living wage.

that's just facts.

if you look at the history of patreon and kickstarter you will see a mass grave of people who convinced themselves if they just did more work, the money would materialize. that is not how it works. I had to learn that the hard way, and it almost ended me.

so... I just have kind of a hard time seeing this perspective. it seems really divorced from economic reality. as far as I know, no one works on Homestuck full time.

how could they possibly afford to?

if you want to see more, tell people to support independent queer art.

and lastly on that note, I kinda get the dirkjake antipathy, I mean god DAMN I would like Dirk to just shut up for once.

but.

Homestuck is fundamentally an ensemble cast story and I want to push back at this idea that every upd8 should focus on your fav?

like every minute we don't see June Egbert appear in all her trans glory I desiccate a little more into a mummy, BUT the purpose of this upd8 as I see it is to do a bunch of rhetorical work that goes WAAAY beyond just dirkjake content (though there is that too)

this upd8 gives us a window into Dirk's (or Jake's perception of Dirk's) belief about himself and all his friends: that because they are gods they cannot be happy. if you're someone like me interested in theme, now's the time when you should be sitting up and paying attention!

we also get struggles with addiction, a recurrance of the theme found throughout homestuck of a revelation followed by some sort of backslide (growth takes work!), a direct challenge to the narration's claims about Candy Earth being characterized by inaction and malaise...

see where I'm going with this?

the characters in an ensemble cast exist in their own right but they also serve to elaborate and modulate and introduce wider themes within a work. I'm not saying you gotta love Dirk... but I think there's a LOT here to think about and engage with!

I want to see us get to a point where we recognize art as a complex dialogue, and also frankly that most art right now is made under sweatshop conditions. we can do better.

I genuinely think there's a lot to love here and we should nurture it :) I hope this helped explain why