What is a "Homestuck"?

now that it's finished i'm finally reading this behemoth of a webcomic. prospit dreamer. sylph of hope? pinius. Epilogue: Meat (read Candy)

[kindykotik]

It's a (=^･ω･^=) filter

[dead-obsith]

My Aradiasprite over the years

[telltaletypist]

i've already said this on twitter but i still think it's funny that the hs post canon writing team decided to go with "one of the main characters becomes aware of their existence within a story and starts manipulating canon to suit their own vision of reality" as the central premise for its villain and of all the characters they could've picked they didn't go with the one for whom being an author is already a defining part of her character and whose super power is literally partial omniscience. no i guess it makes sense for it to be the pony loving weeb sure

[telltaletypist]

i feel like rose got reduced to the wholesome lesbian rep character after the rosemary kiss and people kinda forgot that she was mainly defined by vindictiveness and an obsession with control over her narrative up to that point. like if any of the kids were gonna become a supervillain it was gonna be her. add to that the author motif running through her story (not to mention her alpha timeline self literally wrote a bestselling series that was secretly a direct allegory for events in the comic) and it just baffles me that you wouldn't have her at the center of any meta story involving the canon of hs itself. like it's all sitting right there staring you in the face and you just didn't touch it?

[hamsters38]

im not a 100% happy w this one but its okay

[evegwood]

reel nice

[plchu-deactivated20220701]

most important thing to know about canon nepeta tbh

[valtsv]

i could escape the narrative actually. rip to the rest of you but i'm gonna get out of here.

[valtsv]

girl help i've become the audience, no longer confined by the narrative yet equally powerless to change it

[dyscomancer]

You know what? We all like to hee haw about Homestuck being bad and everything, but I legitimately was never as happy and enthralled with a work of fiction as I was when Homestuck was consistently updating

[dyscomancer]

I think we lost ourselves in the prevalence of cringe culture at the time and didn’t appreciate just what a marvel of modern storytelling Homestuck really was while everyone was busy laughing at the kids who painted themselves grey. 

If you think about the sheer enormity of it and the attention span of the average person, it is an honest to god miracle that Homestuck found any traction at all; but it did, because it told an interesting story about relatable characters in a completely alien setting and did so with unique, pioneering storytelling methods.

[dyscomancer]

I honestly think that Homestuck should be widely hailed and praised for being the first story to properly use chatspeak and the widely misunderstood nuance of how people communicate on the internet. This is very appropriate, because Homestuck is a work that cannot exist in its entirety anywhere else except for the internet. 

Anyone who has been on the web for more than a few years can tell you that there is a lot of subtext to text-only communication. We had to develop this subtext because it’s difficult to convey emotions without the use of audible speech. As silly as it sounds, the difference between “:3″ and “;3″ is huge and should be noted for anyone trying to understand how people on the internet ‘speak’ to each other.

Homestuck got that. The late 2000s/early 2010s were brimming with a bunch of corporate attempts at storytelling that tried to relate to kids with onslaughts of l33tspeak and dropping hundreds of instances of “omg” all over the place. Kids and teens aren’t stupid, they can very easily tell something is inauthentic. 

Homestuck wasn’t like that. It was entirely authentic. It was written by someone who had first hand experience with not only the surface level of the internet’s communication stylings; Hussie knew about the intricacy that could be found in such simple things as capitalization, italicizing, bolding, changing colors, emoticons, and line breaks. He used that to make each and every individual character feel real in their chat dialogue, which is ordinarily a medium that some perceive to be counteractive to emotional communication.

[dyscomancer]

I could go on for ages because I unironically adore this comic, but basically what I’m trying to say is that Homestuck’s greatest asset is a sense of authenticity that is very clearly perceivable by the target audience. Maybe that will fade over the years, but for someone who was 14 in 2009, it was perfect. It was one of the first times I felt that a story was written for me, a person who mostly grew up fucking around on the internet.

We can talk about the plot, simple even in its complexity. We can talk about the aesthetic appeal of the comic. We can talk about the cosplaying community, the music, the interactive panels, the plot twists, the drama, everything. All of this contributes to HS being an incredible piece of work, but it would not have been the same if the characters spoke in speech bubbles or audibly. 

Homestuck was a pioneer of how the internet could not only carry stories told in other mediums, but how it could be a unique storytelling medium of its very own. I think that’s amazing, and I think it should be appreciated.

[dyscomancer]

A fun update to this: a major (2.0) update to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection just released today. It includes a lot of quality of life changes, extra bonus content, and the real pick of the litter; modding support.

If the use of slurs in the older parts of the comic upset you, there is now a Homestuck Slur Replacement Project you can easily mod in. This is just one of the plugins they have available.

I strongly encourage those who have the collection to update, and those who are thinking of getting it to do so.

[merryscosplay]

i am very much alive and i intend to stay that way :)

(my Aradia cos from Friday of MEX 2021!)

[homestuck-scribbles]

A little Homestuck PSA

As 4/13 is right around the corner I just wanted to remind everyone about the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. As Viz and the death of Flash have been slowly killing the intended Homestuck experience there is still a way to see it how it was meant.

This offline program allows for all the flash to be seen and mini games to be played as intended and helps protect from spoilers. If you are going to start reading Homestuck or are planning to trick some unsuspecting friend into reading please consider using this program!

And - I love new livebloggers! Let me know who you love to watch make this journey.

https://bambosh.github.io/unofficial-homestuck-collection/

THE UNOFFICIAL HOMESTUCK COLLECTION

An offline browser built from the ground up to archive Homestuck and its related works.

[arp1033]

Also! Homestuck has some language that has not aged well (i.e. slurs and unkind terms, especially towards the begining) so someone also made an optional patch that removes that language and replaces it with stuff that still keeps it funny! Not everything gets replaced outside the main comic but I know they are working on it!

https://twitter.com/AltUniverseWash/status/1320759511242649601

[mr-elementle]

I think it's hella cool that this option exists for people that may not be comfortable with the very late 2000s internet language of homestuck, but this post opened my eyes to that fact that homestuck mods can exist, like we can mod homestuck now,

[homestuck-virgin]

Trollsona made with @disteal 's Homestuck Picrew

[h3lltown]

more homestuck art (more like a draw over)

this is my all time favorite panel and i think abt it almost every day

[r0ryss]

happy 4/13/21, everyone!! behold - some kids playing a video game :]

[p.s. click through, some of em are transparent]

[colerains]

Happy 413!!!

I don’t realy have anything new to show for it but here’s some Mom Lalonde fan art. <3

[kaenith]

I don't know what's going on in Homestuck canon these days, and I'm not really interested in finding out, but I was playing around with some pressed flowers and I remembered that 4/13 was coming up, so... here're some Knights.

[catter-bug]

It's legal to draw Homestuck once a year so of course I'm going to draw my mans

[mmmmalo]