any particular examples? (you can paraphrase and avoid giving users)

One of the most frequently recurring ones I've bumped into is arguments about whether or not the particulars of Homestuck's cultural framing as a product of its time are essential to its narrative, and whether the pilot mis-steps in updating that framing to be more contemporary, in which seemingly nobody involved in the conversation is aware that Homestuck isn't Like That simply as a product of its time; i.e., that it was a deliberate period piece even when it was new.

I doubt any of the kids reading it back then where old enough to remember Johnny 5 is alive or Mac and Me. Fuck, I can barely remember it, aside from Steve Guttenberg being in one.

It ain't about the pop culture references; a lot of them are contemporary with the comic's publication, anyway. (e.g., the Barack Obama jokes, for one.) I'm talking more about the era of online culture the comic is consciously evoking.

While Homestuck's text ranges pretty widely, one of the central themes it keeps returning to is the experience of being a socially isolated teenager with unmonitored Internet access, as part of the first generation for whom that experience was possible – i.e., of being a bunch of unsupervised children trying to construct a society from first principles because there simply wasn't anyone to hand it down to them. The recurring Peter Pan shit may be a bit, but it's not only a bit, if you take my meaning.

Though the pop culture references are all over the map, in terms of its sense of time and place, the comic is pretty firmly situated in the mid to late 1990s; in fact, it's so precisely situated that you can map the beta kids and Alternian trolls to two distinct cohorts of that first generation of unsupervised children on the Internet, to an accuracy of plus or minus just a couple of years. A big part of why it can be hard to pin down exactly when the comic is meant to be taking place is because for all intents and purposes it's simultaneously 2009 and 1997.

#oh so you mean it feels like both: when it was written & when hussie(+peers) were last that age? 😉 (via @ramenheim)

Not quite, interestingly. The beta kids reflect my own cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet, but not Hussie's; Hussie was born in 1979, and thus was already pushing 20 in the late 1990s. The beta kids aren't written from the perspective of the ICQ Generation so much as they are from the perspective of an observer who just barely missed the boat on being part of that cohort themselves.

Of course, remember when I said that the different characters relate to the Internet in ways that are very precisely locatable in time?

Hussie's cohort of unsupervised children on the Internet is represented not by the beta kids, but by the (Alternian) trolls. The trolls are the IRC Generation to the beta kids' ICQ generation; this is reflected in everything from the palpable ghost of pre-World Wide Web BBS culture that informs their understanding of their analogue of the Internet, to the fact that they still think leetspeak is cool, while the beta kids find it quaint, and it's particularly apparent in the differences in how they use chat software compared to the beta kids.

(I have a suspicion that Karkat's faintly absurd penchant for indulging in curmudgeonly kids-these-days grumping toward the beta kids in spite of the fact that he's barely older than they are is one of the few places where Hussie allowed their own voice to really authentically come through, far moreso than any of the direct self-insert shit.)

#the way that Coding is a much bigger part of the troll's stuff stands out to me #and that karkat and sollux are specifically specialized in /malicious code/. (via @luesmainblog)

Yeah, you could write a whole analysis just based on how the Alternian trolls inhabit a milieu where some level of coding knowledge is part of the basic buy-in to be permitted to exist in online spaces at all, while the beta kids regard it as esoteric wizard shit, and how that directly reflects one of the least bridgeable generation gaps between mid 1990s versus late 1990s online youth culture.

millennial forrest gump

Hah! The analogy isn't unwarranted, but I think it's a little more tightly focused than that. Structurally it's actually pretty weird, because the trolls' whole deal is so central to understanding what's going on in spite of the fact that most of them are almost entirely peripheral to the actual plot, but it's like... okay, so we have this group of Internet-obsessed feral children who we've been forced to figure out how to be a society from first principles because there simply was no previous generation to pass the foundations of their youth culture down to them, and whose character arcs wholly revolve around how they navigate – or fail to navigate – the grief of having poured everything they have and everything they are into creating a world which they've subsequently learned they won't be allowed to actually live in?

To put it briefly, Homestuck isn't an allegory for the rise and fall of 1990s online youth culture in the same way that The Lord of the Rings isn't an allegory for the First World War.