Homestuck post the second

I have spent the last four days solid suffering from a moderately bad cold while trying to resurrect my desktop from a miserable hell of corrupted hardware. No data lost, thank god – the hard drive at fault went through so many warning spasms before giving up the ghost that I had ample time to back everything up – but, without going into all the fine detail, so many complicating factors turned up during the task of removing the dodgy drive that I eventually gave up, formatted the surviving disk and am now reinstalling everything from scratch. (Were I more superstitiously inclined I might wonder about the odd coincidence of timing by which my computer and myself have been progressing back to health more or less simultaneously, and find myself reinstalling some more drivers to see if it makes me feel any better. But that would be crazy talk.)

The upside, such as it is, was that I spent a more or less guilt-free weekend reclining in bed with my laptop and a large box of tissues waiting for this to format or that to install on the desktop, and have consequently finished Homestuck and now have my life back again. With that milestone cleared I feel the need to say a little more about the experience in post-mortem – not a full review, because my reviews get wordy enough under normal circumstances and I don't even know where I'd start on something the scale of Homestuck. The long and short of it is: I loved it, and probably more than anything else I've fallen for since Cable & Deadpool. But I can see why the latest act has been so controversial among its fandom, and with that in mind, I think I'm rather glad I didn't discover Homestuck any sooner, since I suspect I would have dealt with all the suspense, heart-rending tragedy and pages and pages and pages of Vriska's bullshit a lot less well had I been reading those pages as they came out.

( Expanding on those last points a little. No spoilers, in case that matters. )