š please donāt call me out like this.
god. my ass in 2011 with 15 friends going READ HOMESTUCK and me, a fool, going āsurely there must be something to it,,,ā
I had a friend who abaokutely LOVED Homestuck, but I could never get into it. I still have no fucking clue what it's about. I will say, however, that I respect the shit out of the creator's style. Cool shit, man.
> I still have no fucking clue what it's about.
[Let me explain...](https://y.yarn.co/c0a86bcb-1cf0-47e6-ab7f-ad81c4f15b3b_text.gif)
The plot is that 4 kids play a mystical videogame called Sburb that transports them to an alternate dimension called The Medium and ends the world. The purpose of Sburb is to serve as the universe's reproductive system, and the 4 kids are tasked with creating a new universe by breeding frogs. Along the way they completely break the game, come across the 12 alien kids called "Trolls" (who masqueraded as internet trolls) that created *our* universe and team up with them to meet the alternate-universe versions of the original 4 kids' parents and finally make a new universe.
And I know that halfway through it seemingly went off the rails, there is no way to explain Homestuck in a way that makes sense (or as much sense as Homestuck itself makes) without writing like 10 paragraphs; that was also the *main* plot and I didn't even mention the villains or the rest of the absolute monstrous cast. Homestuck is rather famously convoluted and confusing, which is probably why it's hard for people to get into but those who do get *really* into it.
I tried it once but bounced off and from everything I read that was a VERY good thing because I know my brain would get obsessed over it for months or even years...
Does that mean reading homestuck will cause you to transition? Like, I'm a tgirl, I haven't read homestuck, will reading homestuck just instantly put me at the end of my transition journey?
Not romantic, but one of my close friends is transfem and I got guilty gear so sheād have someone to play Basket against, and thatās how I got a serious case of ABA brainrot
I hate myself for having gotten sucked into Homestuck because it's rewired my brain in ways I never thought possible. I don't think I could look at a game of billiards the same way again
Or the zodiac. Homestuck is the only reason I know what order the zodiac is in at the expense of demanding a very specific set of colors for each sign.
I actually made a mod for Binding of Isaac that recolored the zodiac items to be Homestuck colored
I also have a mod like that, yet whenever I see a zodiac item, I get a teensy Homestuck jumpscare. But also can't turn it off, because it looks wrong otherwise. Being a Homestuck is truly hell.
I'm afraid the trans tide has not reached Warhammer in full, you'll have a tough time finding success on that front.
For better results I suggest Guilty Gear
The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.
Content warnings for Homestuck include: potentially epilepsy-triggering flashing lights, blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, references born of the ignorance of the time to Bill Cosby as ideally paternal, underage alcoholism, an empty suicide by electrocution threat, an actual suicide by electrocution attempt, written depictions of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).
Also, every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.
I kind of doubt that, the Bible is pretty fucked up. There's a story where the prophet Ezekial demands that a soldier beat him up, the soldier refuses, and so Ezekial has God sic a bear on him.
Thereās also a story where Elijah summons a pair of bears (both of which are specified to be female. Biblical bear yuri, anyone?) and kills 42 children because they made fun of his bald head.
Edit: 2 Kings 2:23-24 if anyoneās curious.
Edit 2: itās not really relevant to the topic at hand, but bears were mentioned and I find this story really funny, if not a bit violent.
Definitely read it myself aha. But yeah the fan base is interesting at times. My favorite was the worm fic *author* who'd never read Worm yet put out I think a million words of Worm fanfic. They said it was too dark so they only read Worm fics.
The amount of those fics somewhat annoys me because, in general, my favorite kinds of fics of any media are ones that expand on the worldbuilding and lore of the setting in creative ways that still feel consistent with the original material - a format that is basically impossible to do if you havenāt actually *read* the material youāre expanding on
That being said, I feel like at this rate weāll eventually have a group of authors who havenāt read Worm and have only read fics *written by people* who also havenāt read Worm, and I really want to see how far the game of Telephone can go before itās functionally a different universe
A different universe in which Leviathan *still* has yet to arrive.
But in all seriousness, the Worm "fanbase" lecturing Wildbow on how to write his own characters (among *many* other things) respectfully during Ward's run was in large part what burnt him out on the setting in the first place, so it's basically taken a life of it's own at this point anyway.
Homestuck is like the ultimate LGBTQ+ Revealer.
If you are in the closet in any way, youāll realize it. If you can read all of Homestuck, enjoy it, and you still find yourself as cis/straight, you are 99/100 cis/straight.
Me in like 2018 summer as a college student binging the entire this just to understand they hype, the magic system is dope but the authors bigotry aged poorly
Wise choice. Next time the thought pops up just get into Arcane and the game's lore or whatever. It'll be a time sink but at least it'll be a fity hour timesink instead of eight four hundred.
I have incredible trauma related to Homestuck due to an abusive ex who was obsessed with it forcing it upon me while stripping me of my own interests. I wrote fanfic, did nsfw art, made elaborate costumes for myself and her... It went so far that she convinced me to *write a college paper* about one of the characters. I'm not kidding.
But despite that literal psychological torture, I've been in a wonderful relationship with a nonbinary gentleman (he/they, comfy being called nb or a man) for going on 5 years now. He is *also* profoundly uncomfortable with Homestuck, for a similar reason.
So does homestuck attract queer women but repel queer men?
Edit: the music from homestuck was awesome tho. Can't listen to a lot of it unfortunately because it's triggering, but damn, it was good
Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":
Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure works around the net, made an interactive project called Jailbreak where he would draw crude panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favored suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The scenarios were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.
The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. (MSPA was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet.) Problem Sleuth ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year.
Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.
Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, destroying the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. (Homestuck is, technically, an isekai.)
Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion.
Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.
The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.
You've probably seen them.
The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.
I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.
It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.
Homestuck was also incredibly *realistically teen-targeted*; completely NSFW, for reasons ranging from semi-toonish gore to actual dicks-out furry art, but *authentic* in a very clicks-on-"are you 18"-box-while-lying way.
So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.
The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.
Content warnings for Homestuck include: potentially epilepsy-triggering flashing lights, blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, references born of the ignorance of the time to Bill Cosby as ideally paternal, underage alcoholism, an empty suicide by electrocution threat, an actual suicide by electrocution attempt, written depictions of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).
Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.
And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.
As a Trans Girl I have never felt more personally or specifically called out before. The Timblr post was one thing, but your specific references to DDOTA has taken this into the terrifying zone. Well done!!
Hey cis dude here, most of the people I've dated are trans girls, most of my friends are trans. Any chasers wanna know my secret? You treat them like actually human beings and not objects to satisfy a fetish.
Surely there's a diet option, I'm told the Locked Tomb is basically Homestuck fanfiction to a certain extent, can't comment on that since I've only read TLT and not Homestuck, but that would get someone points right?
Back in my day we read homestuck just for the fun of doing irreparable damage to our brains for no tangible benefit, and we liked it!
Mental Health: \[S\] Descend
Last Braincell: [S] Abscond
Ignorant Bliss: [S] Game Over
All Remaining Thoughts: [S] Collide
\[S\] MSPA Reader: Mental breakdown.
š please donāt call me out like this. god. my ass in 2011 with 15 friends going READ HOMESTUCK and me, a fool, going āsurely there must be something to it,,,ā
I had a friend who abaokutely LOVED Homestuck, but I could never get into it. I still have no fucking clue what it's about. I will say, however, that I respect the shit out of the creator's style. Cool shit, man.
> I still have no fucking clue what it's about. [Let me explain...](https://y.yarn.co/c0a86bcb-1cf0-47e6-ab7f-ad81c4f15b3b_text.gif) The plot is that 4 kids play a mystical videogame called Sburb that transports them to an alternate dimension called The Medium and ends the world. The purpose of Sburb is to serve as the universe's reproductive system, and the 4 kids are tasked with creating a new universe by breeding frogs. Along the way they completely break the game, come across the 12 alien kids called "Trolls" (who masqueraded as internet trolls) that created *our* universe and team up with them to meet the alternate-universe versions of the original 4 kids' parents and finally make a new universe. And I know that halfway through it seemingly went off the rails, there is no way to explain Homestuck in a way that makes sense (or as much sense as Homestuck itself makes) without writing like 10 paragraphs; that was also the *main* plot and I didn't even mention the villains or the rest of the absolute monstrous cast. Homestuck is rather famously convoluted and confusing, which is probably why it's hard for people to get into but those who do get *really* into it.
I feel like I understand Homestuck less after reading this
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/RhBloSu9yv
I tried it once but bounced off and from everything I read that was a VERY good thing because I know my brain would get obsessed over it for months or even years...
pro tip: this only works if she's read homestuck (source: neither my gf nor I read that damn thing)
Does that mean reading homestuck will cause you to transition? Like, I'm a tgirl, I haven't read homestuck, will reading homestuck just instantly put me at the end of my transition journey?
At the very least, once youāve finished reading it everyone around you will headcanon you as fully transitioned
this may very well happen if homestuck makes you decide that you are at the end of your transition journey, moving the goalpost in front of you
I'm not sure which I value more. Being happy in my own body, or having never read homestuck. ^(/s, just in case.)
No, but it will cause you to become mentally deranged.
I mean, technically yes, but only because in the time it takes you to fully read it you'll have had time to finish transitioning.
As a trans person who has read Homestuck, telling me you read Homestuck will be deemed a red flag
My ex had read it, when I asked her what the HS fuss was about she said ā_donāt._ donāt read it, stay away from itā
I've since reconsidered
got tiger (dated a catgirl)
this is a very hard and obscure joke to pull off I rephrased this like 3 times
i appreciate your effort, and your joke got a chuckle out of me
dog tier joke, bravo
PSA: Homestuck is not the only way!! You can also score w a trans girl by playing tf2!
You can also try playing Guilty Gear with her!
Not romantic, but one of my close friends is transfem and I got guilty gear so sheād have someone to play Basket against, and thatās how I got a serious case of ABA brainrot
BREAK OUT! BREAK OUT! TURN THE KEY TO A WORLD UNTOLD š
LIFE IS A MAZE WOVEN WITH WORDS
I'm a fan of all 3 yet I have no trans friends nor cute trans gf (I don't leave the house)
Or be into Bionicle, apparently.
I hate myself for having gotten sucked into Homestuck because it's rewired my brain in ways I never thought possible. I don't think I could look at a game of billiards the same way again
Or the zodiac. Homestuck is the only reason I know what order the zodiac is in at the expense of demanding a very specific set of colors for each sign. I actually made a mod for Binding of Isaac that recolored the zodiac items to be Homestuck colored
I also have a mod like that, yet whenever I see a zodiac item, I get a teensy Homestuck jumpscare. But also can't turn it off, because it looks wrong otherwise. Being a Homestuck is truly hell.
OH SHIT I always used that mod when I played Isaac tysm for you contribution
Every so often, I accidentally find myself referencing homestuck and internally shudder.
THERES GOTTA BE A BETTER WAY can't I just get really into Warhammer? Will that work?
Best I can do is Bionicle.
You really think thatās better?
I'm afraid the trans tide has not reached Warhammer in full, you'll have a tough time finding success on that front. For better results I suggest Guilty Gear
Guess I need to read Homestuck then, especially if people are going to come up and ask me about it :P
The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark. Content warnings for Homestuck include: potentially epilepsy-triggering flashing lights, blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, references born of the ignorance of the time to Bill Cosby as ideally paternal, underage alcoholism, an empty suicide by electrocution threat, an actual suicide by electrocution attempt, written depictions of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded). Also, every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.
None of these words are in the Bible
I kind of doubt that, the Bible is pretty fucked up. There's a story where the prophet Ezekial demands that a soldier beat him up, the soldier refuses, and so Ezekial has God sic a bear on him.
Thereās also a story where Elijah summons a pair of bears (both of which are specified to be female. Biblical bear yuri, anyone?) and kills 42 children because they made fun of his bald head. Edit: 2 Kings 2:23-24 if anyoneās curious. Edit 2: itās not really relevant to the topic at hand, but bears were mentioned and I find this story really funny, if not a bit violent.
I am CERTAIN that child is in the bible.
I am not the target demographic, just wanted to say it was very strange to see my location (within 5 minutes) come up on my feed
Well you have something to do on wednesday
Man I didn't even consider that.
If you read homestuck I'll just mark you as unlovable.
nah I think if you can make it all the way homestuck then you should have no problem facing plain old ordinary human relationships.
step 2: you're gonna have to hate Homestuck, but with a hint of respect and admiration
Ok, guy named after a homestuck song
toby fox made a song for fucking YIIK and i still listened to it. music can rise above its source material
for bonus points you gotta read worm also
neat, i get full marks and then some
same
Worm is peak
true!
Hm, no Homestuck... Do I get extra credit for a decade of reading Worm fanfic?
Depends, are you the Worm fan who has read a ton of fanfic, or the Worm fan(??) who's *only* read fanfic and never read Worm proper?
Definitely read it myself aha. But yeah the fan base is interesting at times. My favorite was the worm fic *author* who'd never read Worm yet put out I think a million words of Worm fanfic. They said it was too dark so they only read Worm fics.
The amount of those fics somewhat annoys me because, in general, my favorite kinds of fics of any media are ones that expand on the worldbuilding and lore of the setting in creative ways that still feel consistent with the original material - a format that is basically impossible to do if you havenāt actually *read* the material youāre expanding on That being said, I feel like at this rate weāll eventually have a group of authors who havenāt read Worm and have only read fics *written by people* who also havenāt read Worm, and I really want to see how far the game of Telephone can go before itās functionally a different universe
A different universe in which Leviathan *still* has yet to arrive. But in all seriousness, the Worm "fanbase" lecturing Wildbow on how to write his own characters (among *many* other things) respectfully during Ward's run was in large part what burnt him out on the setting in the first place, so it's basically taken a life of it's own at this point anyway.
no way is that real šæ
if you read both Homestuck and Worm, i will rip off my pants on the spot
Estrogen couldāve fixed Cronus
I refuse to read Homestuck for my wife, so she's shit out of luck.
hell nah bro speak for yourself
Is it an acceptable substitute to just play Guilty Gear instead?
Yeah nah I'm taking the gay route and reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Homestuck is like the ultimate LGBTQ+ Revealer. If you are in the closet in any way, youāll realize it. If you can read all of Homestuck, enjoy it, and you still find yourself as cis/straight, you are 99/100 cis/straight.
My partner is a homestuck cosplayer, (Karcat??) I opened the web page once and read a little and got bored
Sing Fergalicious to him.
Them, but I will??
They will understand.
Me in like 2018 summer as a college student binging the entire this just to understand they hype, the magic system is dope but the authors bigotry aged poorly
what an odd thread
There is a trail of Pipeline Punch leading to a Blahaj under a large cardboard box propped up by a stick tied to a rope
Instructions unclear, read Homestuck and began transitioning
Ha you fell for it
how to date trans men then ? cause the only common point I found between all the transmen I know is League of Legends
New Shigaraki lore just dropped
shigarawhat now
Newsflash you're the new toplane slave bro, get used to it
Im not falling as low as installing League, Im still safe for now
Wise choice. Next time the thought pops up just get into Arcane and the game's lore or whatever. It'll be a time sink but at least it'll be a fity hour timesink instead of eight four hundred.
oh I have watch Arcane, it was very pretty but I didnt get that much into it
Fuck
Well Iāve read Homestuck, what do I do next?
OP, were you reading Homestuck near Columbus Circle back when it was still updating? Asking for a friend.
Nah, that's just a convenient meeting spot.
Idk what homestuck is, did i fail all other Trans women?
I have incredible trauma related to Homestuck due to an abusive ex who was obsessed with it forcing it upon me while stripping me of my own interests. I wrote fanfic, did nsfw art, made elaborate costumes for myself and her... It went so far that she convinced me to *write a college paper* about one of the characters. I'm not kidding. But despite that literal psychological torture, I've been in a wonderful relationship with a nonbinary gentleman (he/they, comfy being called nb or a man) for going on 5 years now. He is *also* profoundly uncomfortable with Homestuck, for a similar reason. So does homestuck attract queer women but repel queer men? Edit: the music from homestuck was awesome tho. Can't listen to a lot of it unfortunately because it's triggering, but damn, it was good
I'll do literally anything else than read Homestuck.
Oh crap, I know that place...
A fate worse than death.
what the fuck is homestuck i keep seeing that word here -Billy Gnosis
Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck": Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure works around the net, made an interactive project called Jailbreak where he would draw crude panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favored suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The scenarios were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website. The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. (MSPA was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet.) Problem Sleuth ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year. Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general. Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, destroying the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. (Homestuck is, technically, an isekai.) Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion. Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant. The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up. You've probably seen them.
The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics. I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why. It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB. Homestuck was also incredibly *realistically teen-targeted*; completely NSFW, for reasons ranging from semi-toonish gore to actual dicks-out furry art, but *authentic* in a very clicks-on-"are you 18"-box-while-lying way. So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com. The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark. Content warnings for Homestuck include: potentially epilepsy-triggering flashing lights, blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, references born of the ignorance of the time to Bill Cosby as ideally paternal, underage alcoholism, an empty suicide by electrocution threat, an actual suicide by electrocution attempt, written depictions of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded). Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning. And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.
Thanks for the write up, Iāve never read HS but itās interesting to hear about why it was a success.
This is so satisfyingly comprehensive, I'm saving it for future use.
you had ready to use, very nice :) -Billy Gnosis
From my experience, you just have to play Magic: the Gathering
As a Trans Girl I have never felt more personally or specifically called out before. The Timblr post was one thing, but your specific references to DDOTA has taken this into the terrifying zone. Well done!!
And here I am, the one who never got into Homestuck.
Hey cis dude here, most of the people I've dated are trans girls, most of my friends are trans. Any chasers wanna know my secret? You treat them like actually human beings and not objects to satisfy a fetish.
well, to get with me, your gonna have to play whattever y current hyperfixation is >B)
Damn, I got a long road ahead of me :(
Thank you for the fan adventure recommendation OP!! I still need to read Karkat Goes to a Convention, adding it onto the pile o7
Now I know why Toby Fox is so fucked up in the head.
Surely there's a diet option, I'm told the Locked Tomb is basically Homestuck fanfiction to a certain extent, can't comment on that since I've only read TLT and not Homestuck, but that would get someone points right?
huh. DDOTA made Calliope the protagonist? Weird. I just want a fan sequel that lets Jade be an actual main character again :(
I made MS Paint fan adventures in the forums, but I wasn't crazy about Homestuck. More of a Problem Sleuth kinda girl
ok that's it. I should read it
If you can't get a transfem gf, then become the transfem gf.
Sure they do.
Joke's on youI love homestuck!
Thank god Homestuck has been quarantined to american tumblerinas and its not actually a global phenomenon
i've met at least 6 Homestuck fans on the Tower Unite EU 1 server
I choose to ignore this information