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probablystupid · 21 days

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HELLO EVERYBODY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK-

Four kids, best friends who have known eachother online for years, decide to start a new and still in Beta multi-player game called SBURB. It all starts with our main character John, who gets his package on his birthday. Little did these four freshly 13 year olds know that this game would end the world as soon as they entered. Now the mission is to complete the game and win the prize: a new world for them to shape. Along the way they meet some other players from another world, aliens called Trolls. And there's a few deadly glitches to be bugged out....

The first act is a lot of character introduction and buildup, aswell as early art style as it was being worked on by only one dude for a while. Impatient people don't get past the beginning unfortunately, but its absolutely worth the read, even the beginning! Quality jokes

Homestuck, A History;

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favoured suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, the Starsky and Hutch movie and the cast thereof, 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. This sort of thing was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet. It ran for about 1650 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 colored panels as default, videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most importantly, actual conversations between characters, 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, a program that destroys 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 has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval. This is the sort of story where the Author appears as a character to explain things to the audience, another character ends up changing the color of the site to his own scheme and narrating in his own voice, and the Author bursts through a literal fourth wall into the world of the story, hunts him down, and beats him with a broom. This is the sort of story where one specific person has killed another three times across multiple iterations of both themselves and the universe, and three of the killee are alive at the end, despite all of them being versions that were killed by the killer, who himself has one alive at the end, and both of those people have four-letter names, the first two letters of which are the same.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, but their influence carried on; 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 Something Awful, 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 that had undergone a SBURB Session that they claimed had been influenced by the lead human characters. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, incectoid traits as opposed to hominid, and near-univeral bisexuality.

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.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work in both plot and presentation, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice above all, and which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet. 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, 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 forshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even making their own works as substitutions. Few speak of the epilogues. Fewer still speak of the sequel.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, clowns, dicks-out furry 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), mocking of otherkin, minor characters being racial stereotypes of Black (Meenah) and Japanese (Damara) people, minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon (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.

#homestuck #karkat vantas #explained #lefttumblrandsworetonevercomebackbutheyhereiamgoinginsanebecauseofthiswebcomicthanksandrew

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