Homestuck

Fandom
Name:	Homestuck
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Andrew Hussie
Date(s):	April 2009-ongoing
Medium:	Webcomic
Country of Origin:	U.S.
External Links:	http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6
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Homestuck is a webcomic by Andrew Hussie. It is the fourth MS Paint Adventure, and by far the biggest one yet, with approximately 7,100 pages as of July 2012. It started on the tenth of April, 2009, with Homestuck Beta.

Canon Overview

In the beginning of Homestuck, four children (John, Rose, Dave, and Jade) play a reality-altering video game that brings about the end of their world. The adventure is characterised by time travel, mystery, and a complex fictional universe. It expands to include a very large cast, including the four kids, their guardians, exiles, agents, denizens of the game world, and twelve figurative and literal trolls from another universe whose character designs are based on Zodiac symbols (Aradia, Tavros, Sollux, Karkat, Nepeta, Kanaya, Terezi, Vriska, Equius, Gamzee, Eridan, Feferi.)

History

Homestuck's fandom originated on the MSPA Forums, which originally housed the suggestion boxes from which Hussie would take suggestions for the next action in his story. As Hussie began incorporating musical flashes into the story, it also housed the "secret" music forum, and members of the music team were selected from friends and fans who had posted their music to the forums.

Homestuck also has a long-running thread on the Penny Arcade forum, as well as several on both 4chan and plus4chan. Content was mostly created on the forums and reposted nonymously over on the chans. Most of the fanworks were fanart or fan music, though there was a very small fanfiction thread and a growing number of voice actors.

In the early months of 2010, Homestuck began to grow in popularity. On April 13th, 2010, Andrew Hussie posted the end of act 4 comic, "[S] Descend", which was an ambitious four-minute thirteen-second flash movie. It was the second of the flashes to use art elements from the new art team, staffed again by friends of Hussie's and notable artists from the forum. The unusual nature of the flash drew in a very high traffic of viewers. Act 5 Part 1, or "Hivebent," which begun on June 12, 2010, drew in still more new readers, since it could be feasibly enjoyed without catching up on the thousands of pages that preceded it.

On October 25, 2011 Andrew Hussie updated Homestuck with an almost 14 minutes long flash movie, "[S] Cascade", after a hiatus of more than a month. So many fans tried to watch it at the same time that the website hosting the video, Newgrounds, was temporarily down.

The forum's rules strictly forbid any pornography, and in the case of the child characters, anything pairing them with an adult (even in a worksafe fashion) is an infractable offense. In response, someone created MSPAchan, which allowed adult art and fic. Soon afterwards (?), zombiesauros created Homesmut in July of 2010, as a home for the kink meme and as a hub for people looking for adult fic and art. As these memes could not even be mentioned by forum rules, Sockpuppy also created Captchalogue, the worksafe request meme. While the worksafe meme has little traffic, the kink meme is hugely popular, currently gaining about 300 comments a day.

Current Fandom

Homestuck is now a very large fandom, with a sizeable presence on deviantArt, Livejournal, Tumblr, the Archive of Our Own, Facebook, and elsewhere. Due to its diffusion, its size, its overlap with English-speaking anime/manga fandoms, its 4chan origins and its Tumblr continuance, Homestuck fandom does not have a very strong credit culture. It is common to see art reblogged or reposted many more times without credit than with it, and icons, banners, and mix artwork are frequently unattributed. As a side-effect, Homestuck has few BNFs though the members of the art team and music team, particularly Radiation, Bowman, Lexxy, and SkepticArcher, may be exceptions. Some prominent voice actors, such as Octopimp and Von Fawn, are also well-known.

Many fanworks try to imitate the format of the comic, either by copying the colors and writing quirks of the main characters or by drawing their own comics. Many of these comics start on the forum and use audience suggestions (see MSPA Forum Adventures.)

Homestuck is also a popular cosplay fandom, especially the trolls. The T-shirts the trolls wear can be bought at the MS Paint Adventures online store, which makes the costumes easy to make in comparison with many other characters. (add pictures?)

Many fanvids in Homestuck fandom use fanart, often animated. Music is also a popular form of fanac and also frequently incorporated into vids.

Homestuck has a large fanmusic community, due to its large soundtrack and the fact that in the past the Homestuck music team was populated by fans of the comic who had made previous fanmusic. Several of the original members of the Homestuck music team were from OCRemix, and a certain amount of wank followed the early music team as a result. However, it has long since died down, and the main remaining vestige of the OCRemix influence today is the various fanmusicians' use of the term "remix" to denote works that use only the melody of the original, without sampling (usually this is called a cover). The official coloUrs and mayhem albums are made entirely of fanmusic submissions.

Several fans have created their own troll avatars for RP, complete with art and typing quirks. There is a Fan Troll Generator, the Trollslum Wiki for fantrolls, and several forum posts and tumblrs about fantrolls.

Fans who first discover fandom through Homestuck often chose pseudonyms based on the chat handles in canon, following the format adjectiveNoun.

Since the flash videos have become longer and more complicated, fans have started to record and share reaction videos.

Homestuck has a reputation for being a difficult fandom to "get into", for several reasons. The story starts quite slow and it takes a while for the plot to emerge, which disappoints many people who followed other fans' recommendations. By now the comic is very long and the plot is often convoluted and difficult to understand, which makes it very hard to catch up. Joining the fandom is also complicated because it is spread over several different platforms and websites. Furthermore, other fans who do not know Homestuck are sometimes annoyed by the frequency and over-enthusiasm of some Homestuck fans (for example many people on fandomsecrets in spring/summer 2011).

Because it is so complicated, Homestuck has many "passive" fans, who read the comic and enjoy some parts of it, but rarely try to puzzle out what exactly happened. Other readers, especially on the MSPA forums, enjoy trying to figure out all the details and figure out the clues about what might happen. The crazy plot twists in the comic lead to even crazier and often quite complicated theories being developed, some of them actually turn out to be true.

Popular pairings and tropes

Almost every imaginable ship exists somewhere in Homestuck fandom. Some pairings are especially popular, for example Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, John Egbert/Karkat Vantas, and Dave Strider/Terezi Pyrope. Stories deal with the interspecies romance in various ways, but (in not-porn fic) mostly ignore the cultural and physical differences.

Homestuck fandom has a lot of AU stories. Many stories feature both the kids and the trolls, either in a completely different setting or in a canon AU, even though in canon some of them finally meet only at the end of Act 5. It is not uncommon for elaborate AUs to have an accompanying Tumblr blog for answering questions, additional worldbuilding, reblogging of fanart, and announcements.

Several fanworks explore AUs in which the trolls and/or the kids have either a different blood status (troll society is hierarchic and sorted by blood color, see Hemospectrum) and/or a different title/element (when entering the game, every player is assigned a mythological role corresponding with certain powers and responsibilities). Examples for this trope, often called "bloodswap", are Red Dead Virgo by adamantApoplectic and Violetesence (link) by lucidSeraph.

There are also several stories in which the human kids become trolls or vice versa, (often called speciesswap), for example [[>Connect]] (link) by biichan, inverts, renachan, and roachpatrol.

Another AU trope is post-Sburb/post-Scratch fic that explores how the characters cope with the end of the game and going back to having normal lives.

There are several stories with a title that ends in -stuck (Hemostuck, Adultstuck, HeartStuck, Hoofstuck ...)

A fanon theory states that Dave is transgender.

Perhaps the best known element of Homestuck outside of the fandom is "Troll Romance". The trolls have their own specific, complicated romance system, divided into four "quadrants". (Canon explanation) Some fans have used this system for fusions with other fandoms. Other fans use this romance system to try and explain relationships between characters in other fandoms or even in RL (I think there´s a Tumblr somewhere?) ^{[citation needed]}

Flash videos sometimes inspire a variety of episode tags. Anticipated events (like the Scratch at the end of Act 5) also often lead to much speculating and fic.

Communities

• MSPAChan, the dedicated chan for Homestuck art and fiction.
• Captchalogue, the worksafe Homestuck request meme.
• Homesmut, the Homestuck kink meme.

Notable Fan Activities

• The Baby Is You: a parody musical made by Radiation & friends, consisting of 11 parts now available for download here (or on Youtube.) Radiation wondered whether the "no pregnant kids" rule on the Art forum extended to songs and created an album that centers around Dave giving birth to John. It was posted on the forum on 14.10.2010, met with shocked disbelief, and deleted a short time later. The mods later declared that "Posting anything from this album is unacceptable.". More reactions, koalababies?

• Music albums (esp christmas album)

(+ sheet music transcripts)

• art team calendar, March page, March Madness (move below?)

• Hivebent: The Radio Play: The voice acting community had become enormous by the summer of 2010, largely due to the popularity of the Hivebent characters. On July 30th, a Hivebent: The Radio Play thread was added to the forums as a centralized location for discussions going on in the voice acting thread. The radio play was a full cast production of Hivebent, and features both adaptations of the comic text and original sections written to fill out gaps in the story. It was originally directed by Von Fawn, who also voices Vriska, and was then being produced and directed by arianadream (who voices Kanaya) and Zigkirby (who voices Karkat). In April 2011, the first episode was released and met with enthusiasm, but in May 2011 it was announced that the project was shutting down.

• Zingled: Zingled is a website (like Omegle) which allows users to chat anonymously with another random user of the site. In early 2011, Homestuck fans discovered the website, and used it to roleplay anonymously as the characters from the comic. It is now almost entirely taken over by Homestuck RPers. Notable logs are posted as fic in themselves or used as inspiration for new work.

• MSPA Wiki - some more information?

• Pesterchum Radio: Pesterchum Radio is a podcast about MSPA made by several fans. Its first season ran from February to October 2011 and had 26 episodes.

• Pesterchum: There were various attempts by fans to create "Pesterchum", the chat program the kids use in the webcomic. (history, different versions etc.) The most recent version is Pesterchum 3.14. (usage?)

• Eat Mesa: In March 2011, inspired by an episode of the Pesterchum Radio, fans started to create and collect Homestuck-inspired recipes on the forum. An Eat Mesa Tumblr was created, and in December 2011 a .pdf version of all the recipes collected so far, the The Eat Mesa - An MSPA Fan Cookbook was made available.

• Finished Projects - so many of them! TBA

• Homestrife 4⅓ - "fan-community made multiplayer fighting game project based on Homestuck", currently being developed

• Nepetaquest 2011 - fan-made RPG, currently being developed

• Rex Duodecim Angelus - fanmade flash to an existing music track, currently being developed

• Terezi Pyrope: Ace Attorney, Homestuck-version of Ace Attorney, currently being developed

Wank and Conflicts

Like all large fandoms, Homestuck has its share of controversy.

Probably the first issue in Homestuck fandom was the closure of the suggestion boxes. Though Hussie had hinted many times that he was phasing out direct audience contribution, the suggestion boxes only closed for good in March of 2010. In the ensuing months, threads were posted regularly to the MSPA Forum complaining about the lack of interactivity and the fact that the story was now going downhill. ^{[citation needed]}

In April of 2010, Bill Bolin made a post to the MSPA Forum announcing that he was quitting the music team, giving a several-page-long explanation of his reasons, and culminating in a picture of himself flipping off the camera. Even with the explanation, Bolin's reasons were almost totally opaque without access to the discussions that had preceded his departure in the private music team forum. The confusion over Bolin's exit caused a number of forumgoers to create new threads asking for any clear explanation, which were quickly spammed by those who thought the whole thing was hilarious. Bolin's middle finger enjoyed a brief spate of popularity as a meme before the mods made it clear that stirring up wank over his exit would not be considered acceptable. When his songs were removed from the flash pages in which they were featured at his request, further conflict arose. Fans complained about the replacement songs so often that in November of 2010 the explanation was the second question in the Simple Questions, Simple Answers thread FAQ.

From 15.1.2010 until 2.9.2010 Hussie posted "The Intermission", a chapter that was, at that time, not directly connected with the rest of the storyline. It included many new characters and time travel shenanigans, making it difficult to follow. Many fans who started to read Homestuck later admit (or, in many cases, don't admit) to skipping the Intermission, which is completely accepted in some parts of the fandom (most places on LJ), but led to mockery and dismissal in other parts. When "Hivebent", act 5, became very popular, several new readers started reading directly at the beginning of act 5. When the focus shifted back to the kids there were heated arguments about which group, the kids or the trolls, were more interesting.^{[citation needed]}

Hussie is clearly aware of his fans, but it is unclear to which extent and whether he is influenced by them. Especially after surprising updates, some fans regularly accuse him of "trolling" the fans and of deliberately introducing content to mess with them. While he has occasionally admitted to including details made popular by fandom (for example the way he drew Karkat's ancestor, a reference to Pantskat), Hussie says that all major plot points were planned far in advance.^{[citation needed]}

In May 2011, Andrew Hussie made a post (now deleted, anyone have screencaps?) on Formspring asking his fans not to sell fanart or any other fanproducts without his explicit permission. Some fans were understanding, while many others could not understand his stance and were very annoyed. (See also Selling Fanart for this issue in fandom in general.)

In January 2012 the discussion about whether the four original kids are white or racially ambiguous was fueled by two posts by Andrew Hussie and resulted in a lot of discussion and some wank.

Potential points of discussion (mostly gathered from f!s, so YMMV):

• Hussie and fan tension
• disabled characters?
• fanfic and shipping young characters ("pedophiles!")
• fan trolls?
• transgendered Dave (could be both under wank and popular tropes)
• John is not a homosexual (canon statement) vs. slash fandom
• Kanaya as lesbian character vs. no homosexuals in troll society
• Vriska's death (and Vriska, and some other trolls, in general)

and from Tumblr:

• Eridan as woobie
• is posting porn okay?
• bad art mockery
• ubiquitousness of the fandom
• and of course "irredeemable fucking bitch whore"
• Gamzee: mentally ill?