‘Homestuck’: Recap, retrospective, redux

A young woman stands in her bedroom. Your name is KATELYN. You have a variety of INTERESTS. You have a passion for BEING CHRONICALLY ONLINE. You like to MAKE ANIME FANART. You have a fondness for CRINGEWORTHY MEDIA, and currently are using TWITTER.COM. As you scroll, you jolt in shock as an unexpected account pops up on your timeline. For the first time in almost three years, the official “Homestuck” X account has posted. The tweet simply reads: “update.” A supplementary tweet links to a site called “Homestuck 2.” Your jaw drops in shock. The most cursed webcomic you know has a new update. What will you do?

Luckily, I was prepared for something like this. At the start of last winter semester, I decided to revisit a foundational piece of history for middle school Tumblr nerds: “Homestuck.” If you are at all familiar with the text or its fandom, you may have read that name and sighed — this was also the response of most of my peers when I told them. Responses ranged from a disappointed “Oh my god” to daring lines of questioning, asking, “Why are you doing this to yourself?” While this is hilarious, I didn’t believe it to be a response specifically about the text — rather, I think the antics of “Homestuck’s” youthful, chaotic fandom in the 2010s have tainted it. My first thought when anyone mentions the webcomic is not of the text itself, but the kids who took a bath in Sharpies to cosplay the webcomic’s gray-skinned aliens. Even though it makes me cringe, I can’t help but feel a fondness for this incident. Have you ever loved something so much you were willing to bathe in Sharpies for it? Isn’t that at least a bit impressive?

What about this work could inspire such behavior? Put simply, “Homestuck” was a chronically online kid’s dream. The text, begun in 2009 by Andrew Hussie, was transformative in defining what a webcomic even was. Unlike panel-to-panel online works like “Lore Olympus” or “Penny Arcade,” “Homestuck” relied heavily on Flash animation and instant message logs between characters. The story follows four teenagers who accidentally trigger the destruction of Earth when they begin playing a computer game called Sburb. In an effort to create a new universe, they enter the weird world of Sburb, where they meet the aforementioned gray-skinned aliens (called “trolls” as a reference to internet trolls) and get into all sorts of interpersonal chaos. 

While the story initially intrigued me, what kept me around was the way these characters’ relationships were explored. Because we only experience their dialogue through chat logs, we can come to understand them as our online friends. Each character has a distinct tone with which they speak, specifically denoted by their typing styles. The trolls in particular have creative, quirky typing styles that can make it feel like their voice jumps off of the page: Kanaya Capitalizes Each Word when she types, making her feel like a lovably awkward grandpa. In stark contrast, the clown-obsessed troll Gamzee types in hApHaZaRd CaPiTaLiZeD aNd LoWeRcAsE lEtTeRs, frequently using profanities, making him palpably chaotic. Through their online presentations, we can understand them more intimately as characters — Gamzee’s chat log username is “terminallyCapricious,” further indicating his self-identification with chaos. Being able to imagine how Hussie has curated their online identities is a feature of “Homestuck” that I hold dear; they really do come off as annoying teenagers on the internet. Say what you will about its annoying fanbase, but this webcomic transformed how stories could be told online.

“Homestuck” technically concluded in 2016; I was about to graduate middle school. I wasn’t as invested in the comic as I had been a year prior (12 was a ripe age to be annoying online), but you’d better believe I tuned in for the comic’s concluding act. As opposed to the standard Flash-and-chat log format, “[S] ACT 7” was a nine-minute long animated short. Though I wasn’t particularly in tune with what was going on in the story by this point, the gorgeous animation brought me back to my unabashedly cringeworthy adoration and left me quite emotional. Though fan reception on Act 7 was mixed, it felt like a proper conclusion; I moved on from “Homestuck” pretty quickly after this. 

This young troll stands in her respiteblock. It just so happens that today (April 13, 2019, also known as the 10th anniversary of “Homestuck’s” debut), the first bilunar perigee of the first dark season’s equinox is the surprise release of the “Homestuck Epilogues”: the completely unexpected semi-canonical sequel to the original comic. What will the name of this young troll be?

It turns out that the young troll is you, a human COSPLAYING as TEREZI PYROPE. Your name is CECI LEDZMA: It looks like a typo but you’re just well-versed in VALID KID NAME CONVENTIONS. You wipe the GREY SNAZAROO FACE PAINT off your fingers so you can read the epilogue a little. Eight days later, right before running the FIRST SESSION of a LENGTHY D&D CAMPAIGN (that, unbeknownst to you, would remain a ONESHOT), you open the epilogues. Given the choice between MEAT and CANDY, you try to read the CANDY ROUTE. You get VERY UPSET. You then post THREE INSTAGRAM STORIES on your ART/COSPLAY/FANWORKS ACCOUNT complaining about how much the EPILOGUE upset you, but clarify you don’t want any DISCOURSE. None of the posts get any ENGAGEMENT.

The epilogues were a rough departure from form. Before the reader can choose to read the candy or meat route — the two tangentially connected versions of a continuation — they are greeted by a landing page parodying the visuals of fanworks hosted on Archive of Our Own. This is a visual reference to “Homestuck”’s central theme of metanarratives, its stories being “dubiously canon,” a phrase that has become the nomenclature to refer to post-“Homestuck” media. Unlike in the vast majority of “Homestuck,” chatlog boxes are done away with entirely, and instead only in-text dialogues have the traditional coloration and typing quirks. It is also no longer entirely in Courier New, instead introducing Times New Roman as the font for descriptive narrative text. Most noticeably, though, it is no longer a webcomic: The only two images are those used as icons for each route. They de-comic’d the most popular webcomic ever. 

I hated it. Absolutely loathed it. The candy route was a complete, albeit intended as satirical, perversion of the characters I had grown to love in the past three years. The main characters became overtly self-conceited, unfaithful partners, fascist xenophobe leaders and sexual assaulters in an unforeseeable blink of an eye. This is not to say subversions in media are bad, simply that this one was. The canon (if it can even be called that) explanation is that the candy route rapidly distanced itself from “canon” when the hero rejects the call to action, instead dooming it to petty interpersonal conflicts blown up to extreme, vile proportions — hence some of the previous character descriptors. Meat is a grittier, sadder but relatively down-to-Earth-C continuation of the story, with several additional character deaths along the way. The routes are not mutually exclusive, though, as characters jumping dimensions affect both storylines to solidify their quantum existence. 

I only know this after having read the recap available on “Homestuck 2: Beyond Canon’s” website. Back in 2019, I stopped reading these new entries after my friends saw how deeply unsettled I was by the candy route and gently weaned the phone out of my hand. Those were characters I had followed for years who, though flawed, I cherished and drew and dressed up as and, to some degree, understood. Suddenly they were worse than the worst I could imagine — how could I, as a dedicated fan, reconcile that? It’s not “out-of-character” if you can’t even connect the two depictions. It felt like being spat on the face just for wanting to know where their journeys would go, especially after the first round of epilogues did exactly that with happy-go-lucky Snapchat stories of rebuilding, weddings and friendships that joyously graced readers’ screens a few months after “Homestuck’s” conclusion. I swore off reading any further and pretty soon stopped posting about it too.

My relationship with “Homestuck” has always been pretty online. One of my main drives for getting involved with social media was to discuss the comic; I read through predictions threads, reposted memes (with no credit to the authors) and stayed up significantly past my bedtime in roleplay group chats, making some of my first online friends along the way. The mass amount of fan content available online helped foment my dedication. The first fanfics over 100,000 words I ever read were about “Homestuck” (my RP friends recommending a little site called AO3 helped this goal) and the many fan animations motivated me to ask for a drawing tablet for my birthday.  

Being a webcomic, it makes sense that “Homestuck” would have a significant online presence. It’s a weird fandom, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere — a niche relic of the early 2010s that’s somehow connected to major influences in pop culture. Did you know that Jacksepticeye played Hiveswap (“Homestuck’s” videogame spin-off) at his peak popularity? That a song featured in “Homestuck” can also be heard in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate? OK, that second one was kind of a gimme: Toby Fox, creator of Undertale and composer of “Megalovania,” was one of the music leads for “Homestuck,” which is not the niche secret I propose it is. However, I bet you didn’t know that a song Fox composed for Pokémon: Sword and Shield substantially quotes the 14-minute joke “Homestuck” fan opera he composed about an mpreg Dave birthing John, who is somehow also the same age and already alive. Yeah. Got you there.

This brings us back to “Homestuck 2,” updated for the first time in four years. Surprisingly, it seems the new writers may feel the same way as me. In a recent news post, “Homestuck 2” lead writer James Roach commented on the epilogues:

“The post-canon’s foundations are built upon a story that we didn’t always agree with, and had its share of questionable decisions,” he wrote. “We are so many steps removed from these choices that needed to be better than they were, that one might ask ‘Why bother at all?’ We agreed to take up this mantle because, like many of you, we are a team of passionate people who believe in where the story can go.”

Although our obsession with the series may have passed, we’re at least grateful to the new writers for this; their clear passion and drive to reinvent and repair the story can usher in a new era of happy “Homestuck” fans.

Daily Arts Writers Katelyn Sliwinski and Digital Culture Beat Editor Cecilia Ledezma can be reached at ksliwi@umich.edu and cledezma@umich.edu.