The intent reflects how the text is laid out. The tone is absurdist, as are the events.

The point is that intent doesn't matter. The text - and the whole text - is what actually exists.

Bro was set up as a foil, not a villain.

Bro was an antagonist, since "Villain" is purely subjective, but he stood in between the protagonist (Dave) and his goal (Saving his friend, or, more concretely, the Beta).

There isn't actually any objective form of child abuse: that's just a moral judgment you can or can not pass on it.

This is like saying that murder is technically a subjective matter, since it requires you accept the legitimacy of a state to accept that it has occured.

Trying to interpret such an absurdist story as child abuse really strikes of being some moral agitator looking for child abuse.

I would say the opposite: That one reads as a moral agitator when one denies the plain text of a story because one thinks they should always be free from heavy themes in stories that use any degree of levity, and that one should feel safe assuming that.

Actual kids who read this, or Hussie's Problem Sleuth audience, mostly saw it as just humorous, with a little sprinkling of horror to keep the edge on.

I read this story first as a teenager, so I can say that my relationship to it was somewhat more complicated. I was definitely aware that the situation was troubling. It was, as you note, horror.

I don't see why recognizing later "Oh, yeah, someone put through that would have experienced what any reasonable, rational person who was acting in good faith would recognize that, were a real child put through this, it would be child abuse" is bad writing.

Do you think every single person out there at the time was checking their FDA approved child abuse reference manual in horror, as all the details added up? Or were they also just laughing at a not actual child character stuck in an annoying situation?

This is a bad faith argument and I will not address it. It neither relates to anything anyone here has said, it holds any counter-proof to an impossible standard ("Every single person"), accuses me of something ridiculous instead of what I have concretely done ("Checking their FDA approved child abuse reference"), and you seem absolutely intent to paint me as a moralist, which I'm not in this case? I'm just fucking making an argument about text. If you feel that your argument has troubling implications if you are wrong about the texts, that's ambiguity you have to deal with, it's not my job to deal with those bad feelings for you.I'm not saying it's wrong to have been taken in by the story in the early acts of Homestuck, which I have literally never said. In fact, I have literally already acknowledged that my first read was the same as yours, and it was only because I read this section several times before I finished the comic because I suck at finishing things I was completely unsurprised to learn that Dave was abused, because it's actually fairly cleverly written.

Or were they also just laughing at a not actual child character stuck in an annoying situation?

This, particularly, pisses me off. When have I ever even slightly fucking implied Dave was a real person? When have I confused the symbolic with the real? Statements on the symbolic still have implications on the real, certainly, but I'm not sure I've even more than passingly argued that Dave should be understood as real. Statements on the real, however, have substantial implications on the symbolic since the real structures our understanding of the symbolic - it would be meaningless without the real. As a result, statements about real children are the only comparative metrics we have for understanding Dave's behavior, since otherwise, fiction would be devoid of comprehensibility, as such concepts as death would not be possible to import and transform.

The point is they aren't actually realistic children. Hussie says he wrote them to be far more mature and capable than real children for the benefit of the story.

Ah, alright. Then the argument I need is "yes, that's how YA works, it doesn't mean that child abuse is impossible in YA."