Sum up of Homestuck fandom after [S] Cascade.
(2011)Ā Homestuck as a general phenomenon was very active and developed at a very swift pace from the time it was published (2009) onwards, especially in 2012-2013, including and past the first years of the Homestuck Kickstarter Project, a.k.a Hiveswap.
Between 2009 and 2012, Homestuck as a webcomic was infamous for updating daily, constantly, multiple times a day, at all hours, for years. There was a remarkable cold calculated average that Homestuck updated 5.5 pages per day, dropping entire bundles of updates of character interaction and plot reveals frame by frame, posted as fast as Hussie could write it. Though it wasnāt immediately obvious, this pace was literally sleeplessly breakneck, Hussie allegedly didnāt do anything but live, breathe and dream Homestuck for at least four years straight. Iām serious when I say updates came at all hours. I would wake up 2am on a week night and idly check MSPA to see if there was a new update, sort of like a trained parrot. Then in five minutes Iād tab back over to the Homestuck tab and refresh, just in case.Ā
This lead to anĀ phenomenon appropriately dubbedĀ āupd8 culture,ā which became the basis of the sheer evangelical furor people still associate with the Homestuck fandom. Quick history: MSPA fans originated and migrated over from the Penny Arcade forums, Reddit, and 4chan to nestle permanently within the bowels of 2011 - 2013 tumblr, and were best described from a distance as āzealous.ā Even remembering it now almost feels remembering a distant riot. If you didnāt cosplay, write up a detailed theory post, or scribble up a crazy level of appropriately detailed fanart within 10 or so minutes any given upd8, you were buried under the force of post overload and were officially late to the party. Even after years of this, fans had some idea of just how dedicated it came off of, which spurred on fandom and made Homestuck into the most meme filled in-joke community you could possibly imagine.Ā
Whatās frustrating about describing Homestuck and Homestuck fandom is they both heavily affected each other and were both unique phenomenons within themselves, which makes actually trying to get across the atmosphere and of the early 2010s a really a wordy process. I could tell you Homestuck heyday updates regularly crashed tumblr servers, which became an actual funny fake rss way of seeing how much the plot progressed that day, or could have been because tumblr servers even in 2011-2013 were not very robustly programmed. I could tell you Homestuck dominated tumblr to the point it had a virulent hatedom of people who had never even read it and constantly saw it and never understood what was happening in it, and everyone else couldnāt stop themselves from chattering about it all the time.Ā One thing that has to be noted is all this continual bickering and movement and development and competitive content production was honestly fun as hell.Ā
Popular fan theories had multiple fanfictions written on them just to better explain what might happen, and reoccurring fanart traits and fanfictions were constantly being corrected, updated, and replaced by a deluge of new information and characters to pore over every single detail with a fandom magnifying glass. Canon and fanon both directly pulled from each other, especially in the small details. I donāt know how many hyper ambitious fandom projects, games, animations, multi media fanstories were abandoned for new starts JUST because the information they were working off became too outdated. There were always running projects of painstaking collaboration of organizers, voice actors, programmers, artists, writers, etc. I think some fanventures are still doing that to this day, and back in 2012 there was theĀ exciting happenstance of the Homestuck Shipping Olympics, which was overwhelmed with applications for the years it ran.
As even a casual reader, you just read the upd8 and threw everything you had out there for scrutiny until it was kind of clear what could be scoured from the newest upd8, for your own rigorously interpreted and analyzed theory and making posts about it. What constant updates to canon meant in conjunction with Hussieās oddly accurate tabs on fandom theory was you had to do whatever you were doing fast, or you would be outdated, wrong, inaccurate, or irrelevant at some undisclosed unspecific time, very soon. As the fandom grew bigger and younger Hussie seemed to shade more politic in his fandom communication, but it still always felt like an āopen channelā call and response between fandom and comic, at every second.
Another aspect feeding upd8 culture was in the actual writing and content of Homestuck.Ā One thing Homestuck didnāt lack for was constant barely solvable mystery. Part of my extreme willingness to take part in Homestuck fandom was that Homestuck was so crammed to the brim with open ended creative potential, just the cool ideas and plot mechanics and vivid characters presented with actually innovative framing that hadĀ really good ideas and existed literally nowhere else, and I say that as a huge sci-fi fan. Time travel in Homestuck was excellent. It was an ambitious story and I really do think it pulled it off.Ā
There were also factors of style, innovation and novelty that I think affected the diversity of fan output. Even small things like the definition of a āpage,ā or even a āwebcomicā became malleable within Homestuck. A page could range from single static scribble gif image to a 3 hr fully programmed rpg or 18 minute asset heavy style swapping animation, or most commonly, sprite art followed by several hundred words of dialogue and character interaction. Pages came by different artists, different styles, different mediums, different paces and focuses, but with a breadth-spanning understanding of the internet. Homestuck was once described as the fossilized excrement of someoneās personal creative experiments, and I canāt help but think thatās a good way of putting it. Innovation and excitement teemed off the page, and straight into a staggeringly wide variety of fanfiction and art, in style, content, theme, and pov.Ā
Lastly, Hussie had a tendency to canonize fan content and hire fanartists and fananimators if their output was solid enough with a gentle horse kiss of approval and a naturally internet-transparent hiring process and the assumption people understood internet courtesy, like a forum. This was a purposely fostered atmosphere in the spirit of experimental adventure, and was just fucking nuts. Fans never wrote the story, but they did heavily influence aspects of how it was told and where it went (by design, fans were pretty much involved in making the comic) and even get to actually flesh out the details, like the main characterās names, memes, romances, character, and scope. Everything from canon sprite art to Calibornās character to Calliopeās art skill to music and trickster arcs were all originally based on years of fan jokes and fanon. Homestuck was definitely Hussieās sole property and precious baby, but it was always kind of built on top of the assumption of freeform rap battle with the fandom. It added an extra layer of galvanizing egging on to fandom purpose.Ā I donāt know how else to explain everything that came of it. Fandom was like a roiling morass of bullshit activity, we were like a freaking breaking news bullpen, there was so much energy sparking off of all facets of fandom because it was just so fun. Fan output was borderline insane in 2010-2013.
Hussie said fandom grew exponentially at the introduction of the Trolls in Act 5 in mid 2010, but I can honestly say I think fandom reallyĀ started treating Homestuck like a hidden gem worth prosetelyzing right after the events of [S] Cascade at the end of 2011. Before then, Homestuck was tenuously good, and had a rep on tumblr for having weirdly ubiquitous fans and over- detailed fancontent, but [S] Cascade was the moment every single gamble asked of the reader in the story actually paid off. AĀ puzzle clicking into place. In fact, Homestuckās plot was generally constructed to climax at [S] Cascade, as was apparent from the big explosion of fan reaction after the fact.Ā
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