please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.
Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.
It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.
Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.
Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.
Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.
Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.
Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.
When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.
OHH MAN PROMSTUCK, the final event clocked nearly 500 attendees and cost roughly $12,000 when the whole thing was wrapped. That’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this sort of discussion though.
Homestuck was a phenomenon because with frequent updates and no defined update schedule, the hype train never stopped. Frequently fandoms will go through phases of an explosion of content and then a resting period, which can easily be tracked by when new content appears. With things like TV shows, video games, or even most webcomics, having a schedule means you could tell when everyone was going to be freaking out, and the subsequent planning around that meant the hype train could be quantified. The problem with Homestuck was those curves couldn’t be tracked, especially because there was NEVER any warning what KIND of content we were getting. One day could be an update dropped at 5 AM EST that was two kids pelting each other with fruit. 4 hours later we could get a flash that killed 17 people. Then it could be THREE DAYS before another update where haha it was retconned that was a dream none of those people are dead. It was fucking anarchy. Sure there was a WAY to define the plot but knowing what was going on or what was coming at any given moment was fucking impossible, and the break between these updates is what spawned “update culture”.
The thing with update culture is that most content creators are aware of, and plan content updates around, the idea of what the fans will be feeling and thinking once that content is done being distributed. For TV shows, episodes are released with beginnings, middles, and ends- a narrative arc that allows people to start thinking about media the way the creator wants them to, leading them along with little trails of plot and puzzles to solve. But Homestuck’s updates weren’t planned like that, because they came in chunks of whenever it was done, a carry-over from the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Because of this, people were theorizing about thing that’d be fixed in the literal next page, but because we didn’t have that information, the weirdest shit started being produced. It also didn’t help that Homestuck has some fucking weird shit happen in it! And sometimes fan theories wouldn’t resurface until literal YEARS down the line (Tricksters, anyone??) and people would be screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. There was no predictability, and therefore ANYTHING WAS VALID. And it created an incredibly interesting, though HORRIBLY chaotic space, that by god, was so much fun. Homestuck was a large-scale production media produced like a fanfiction author and because of the size of the audience lead to PANDEMONIUM on a scale that can’t be easily replicated.
Like it’s not really appropriate to say “oh x is the new Homestuck” because the very nature of Homestuck’s creation and population ensures there will never BE another phenom like it. The landscape of fandom, due to Homestuck, has changed, because update culture can’t exist without the perfect storm of described attributes that this comic had- that now no one else can replicate because Homestuck caused people to move away from that style of storytelling BECAUSE of the hectic fandom! It all feeds into itself. (Sort of like the story of this comic, honestly.) The Homestuck fandom experience will likely never happen again because of the way Homestuck shaped the fan scene. And that’s cool to know about!
Also I feel I should clarify on some of the above points. To begin, they’re all fucking true. - The sharpie dyeing story is unfortunately real. It’s original source is 4chan, the OP posted it on their personal tumblr blog (which for some reason still routes to my page if you google it). It can be found here. - The horse dildo was also real. It was sent as a joke because of a series of horse dick jokes mentioned in the comic; for those not in the know about Homestuck, there’s a character who talks a lot about horses and their rippling muscles. Hussie included it as a find-able item in a later walk-around minigame flash. - Two people did in fact donate $10,000 to the Homestuck kickstarter to have their fantrolls be canon and then murdered. While I don’t personally know the story of the female fantroll, the one in the top hat (Nektan Whelan) was actually made by an American Army veteran who read Homestuck while deployed in Iraq. He credited it was part of what helped him stay positive during active deployment. I can’t find the link to this conversation because it was on formspring like 4 years ago but if anyone has the link, let me know, I’d be curious to have it archived. - The Homestuck flash in question that killed Newgrounds was Cascade. Hussie recorded that at that time he received over 1.2 million unique pageviews trying to access it at once, world-wide. It also crashed the main Homestuck site and forums, then megaupload, and (for a VERY short time), Twitter and Livestream, because people started streaming it and tweeting the links. Someone made a comic about how that experience felt and as someone who was there screaming at Newgrounds to let me in, I can promise it’s accurate. - The update notifier was a godsend, and people would design specific macros, sounds, and images for their notifiers. It became a mini-culture in itself how you heard about the update. For a long time, I used to make tumblr posts about it. Update culture, and how fast you got to the update, was so real.
Anyway, hi, I’ve been in the Homestuck fandom for more than 5 years now, talk to me about it. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Even if you’re not into Homestuck the fandoms cultural significance is fascinating
*And THIS is the post that made me finally read Homestuck.
