This is a film that exists deep in a rabbit hole, but it's well worth the journey, because despite the best efforts of its interminably and indeed antagonistically pretentious narrator, it does keep touch with authenticity.
So a bit of background. On pp. 4438-41 of "Homestuck," the webcomic, we see a copy of Jeanne Betancourt's children's book "Pony Pals: Detective Pony" that has been gifted by one character, Dirk Strider, to another, Jane. What makes this gift very special is that Dirk has vandalised it, by drawing in the margins, replacing words with pasted-over text by Dirk, and, later:
"pasting over entire pages of original text with his own completely rewritten version of the story, while keeping all the chapter titles. His revision is a tough, emotionally draining read. But it's cathartic, in all the worst ways possible.
"He tends to get carried away with his projects." (p. 4441)
But in "Homestuck," we only get a few pages of this: just enough to give you a sense of what sort of joke it is.
Enter the author sonnetstuck, who imagined on Archive of Our Own what the entire text would look like, and wrote it. It is, frankly, magnificent: silly, frustrating, pretentious, and one of my favourite works of literature. Some people say it's as good as "Homestuck" itself. (And at 40,000 words it's far more digestible.)
The present listing is a film version of that novella: the text is unchanged, but nakedbee's cinematography is invented from whole cloth. It adds another level to the conceit, and is very often inspired and hilarious, in countless little details as well as in the general, ridiculous conception of using Barbie and Ken dolls to do fanfic of fanfic of fictional fanfic.
But it's not because of this that "Detective Pony" is good. It is not, after all, sonnetstuck (or nakedbee) who are pretentious here, but Dirk, whose pretentiousness is a defence mechanism; sonnetstuck depicts Dirk's David Foster Wallace-esque journey of irony and self-flagellation because they love him, because the insufferably pretentious also, at the end of the day, deserve love as much as any of us do. In this sense, the real purpose of the novella is to demonstrate the reality of this love: for love, after all, is a promise to put in a certain sort (emotional, spiritual) of work for the sake of those whom we love. And for those of us who struggle against our pretentiousness (which is all of us, in great or small ways), "Detective Pony" is a balm.
It's definitely a strange and demanding watch, and if you're allergic to DFW and his ilk, you'll probably be allergic to this even if (as I think) it's better than a lot of that stuff. But if four hours of experimentalism is where you're at, you could hardly do better.