Homestuck Animated Pilot Containment Thread

I think Homestuck would work better as an animated series. I'm not a big fan of Homestuck's "iconic web-comic charm"; Commands, wordy dialogues, intermissions, Act Acts, typing quirks, gameplay segments. "Multi-media project" be damned, these are flaws! They aren't inherent to the story being told!

...Not very relevant to the pilot, which looks great, I just wanted to talk about Homestuck's supposed "un-adaptability".

I strongly disagree that gameplay and typing quirks are flaws. typing quirks make the characters feel like they have unique voices! It's just that, like, we can also use voice actors to communicate that feeling. Or subtitles! I actually think the comic's creative formatting will lead to a more interesting animated show. From the 30 seconds I've seen, I'm really excited. Unpopular opinion, but I do think the wordy diologue is an issue. I think that some of the iconic dave rants (for example) would actually be funnier if they were more concise. I'm curious to see how hussie will change parts of the comic that came off in ways she didn't intend, or that aged poorly. For a minor example, according to hussie's commentary, she never pretended to portray Equius as a sexual predator (just a pest lmfao), but a lot of people viewed the heart robot incident that way, or they view the meowrails as abusive. I wonder if Hussie will change parts of that comic to stay more in line with how she views Equius. Will feferi change? Will Guy Feiri still be satan? I'm excited to find out.

I really hope this show completely deviates from the original story, I think there would be so much potential to do something completely new and exciting

I agree there's a lot of possibility to do something completely unique but the main thing I think is that it's NOT like scott pilgrim in that homestuck isn't as ubiquitous, the ideas being pitched for that I think are implying Homestuck is CURRENTLY in its heyday which it obviously isn't. I think this series is going to be fairly regular and get people interested in homestuck as a concept first.

Personally I'm really excited for this pilot. My boyfriend who has never been near homestuck wants to watch it with me and my wife, and hopefully he'll even want to read it.

- Livvy, she/her

lots of people are expressing skepticism on the prospect of a homestuck cartoon adaptation by questioning how they're going to convey all the weird, interactive or format-breaking aspects of the comic but the thing that's more pressing imo is how they're going to adapt the actual animated pages.

even without going deep into the story, all the most memorable early-comic animations like [S] WV: Ascend or [S] Enter are basically complex music videos where characters aren't even implied to be speaking and the action keeps cutting in quick succession between different locations and timeframes, sometimes partitioning the screen to show multiple different scenes at the same time, and that's just not something that animated series usually do!

it's a genuine concern i have, because the flash animations are one of the most iconic aspects of homestuck and doing them justice in a completely animated medium is counter-intuitively hard, to the point where i'd place the quality of their execution as one of the main criteria by which to judge the eventual animated series

I hope, on all levels, that their focus is on making a good viewing experience first and foremost. That's really all you need. I've never fucked with the idea of "for fans" and "for newcomers". If something is good enough to make a newcomer into a fan, it's going to be just fine for fans. If something is only good for fans, then all that means is that people with an established investment in something will be less discerning with new material so long as it delivers on the fanservice.

If you execute the show well, nothing else matters. Not accuracy, not casting according to headcanons, not fanservice.

I hope the television medium bends Homestuck's source material as hard as it needs to to produce something enjoyable. No copyrighted material? Sad. Pacing adjusted for the flashes? Too bad. No dancestors? Better luck next time. Dave can't say the meteor is the size of your mom's dick? Yep, that's gonna happen. Meenah not a child predator anymore?...I can live with that one, actually.

This is actually one area in which I do trust Hussie, because when asked about a Homestuck adaptation in the past, they explained just how sweeping some of the changes necessary would have been. For as much as people like to claim Huss "hates Homestuck", I think it really is just that they don't tie themselves so tightly to most parts of it that they can't let go (this is the part where you make a Vriska joke).

Now, do I think that means this will be good? Oh, I have no idea. I think the visuals are fine as previously specified, but Hussie knowing they'd have to make changes and Hussie making those changes successfully are two very different concepts, and there's no reason to assume that just because they know their story is a long-winded structural nightmare that they're going to do well at making it into a more concise show.

And yes, I'm with bluebootyraider, the dialogue is potentially a big problem. The trailer doesn't indicate much one way or another, but the dense, verbose language of the original just doesn't translate to spoken word, I've always thought it was crazy that people like dubs and let's-reads of the comic because they always sound so unnatural. Even iconic shit like the "hell of a mystery nobody new was a mystery" line is still too long for the punchline to land in speech. I have no idea whether Hussie is going to be privy to this, or how closely they're working with the director/other writer, or if she is privy to this.

I have just seen the combination of Homestuck, Undertale and Hellaverse fandoms referred to as "StuckUnderHell." Yes. These words are accepted.

Slight tangent, but the sped-up and "cartoonified" dialogue we're almost certain to get from Spindleroo is one reason I think Project Soundpage needn't worry too much about this happening when they're barely out of the gate. They can keep working on their faithful adaptation for us existing fans who want to hear those scenes acted in full. Spindleroo needs to make something that will capture the attention of fans of the current online indie animation boom, and to do that it NEEDS to have a similar pace to stuff like Hazbin or Murder Drones.

@Diana if the way the teaser shows the Strife page with Dad is any indication there won't be anything in the show that resembles the original flash animations and that's a good thing

I STRONGly agree with Devin here. they shouldn't worry too much about fidelity to the original material and just make a good cartoon. since I'm quite fond of the hellaverse shows, I trust they'll be able to pull it off

homestuck with murder drones pacing lmao

show was good but it jumped around a bit too quickly.

jokes aside i went from "oh god vivzie being attached to this looks so bad" to "fuck it bring on the chaos i dont care anymore i survived 10 years here none of this matters"

but at the same time, i kind of wish we could have gotten a midnight crew adaptation of some sort. not really something that needs to be strictly followed, could take the in-universe story approach or fill in after Inaugural Death ended with the real spades slick. it would have appeased homestuck fans and maybe it could have also appealed the folks who really didnt like how helluva strayed away from the merc/contract killers storyline for a while (did they ever go back to that? we dipped out after episode 5 or 6)

@magicksrampage I'm with you there, it shouldn't have the stillness/choppyness of the original comic. That has it's charm because of the medium that it's in. This should look how it does in the pilot trailer also because of the medium of animation.

It has to be fast paced with voice calls/phones because it has to tell a story in the fastest way possible (within 11 minutes with most of or all of the kids presumably entering the medium and showing their new lands at the very end) because the supposed recorded attention span of younger generations is supposedly the lowest it's ever been. Karkat and the trolls will probably be calling form various "unknown numbers" via the meteor providing infinite anonymous burner phones like how it provides infinite "shitty coffee" as seen when Dave meets Kanaya and Rose in that lab room. The kids will recognize it's the trolls by their voices with the troll reveal to the kids being in the full show at some point if the pilot gets enough views. Karkat will turn on the his video and be like okay fine I guess you can see what we look like since you've earned my trust. idk something like that maybe idk. Obviously WE the audience get the troll reveal by the end of the pilot though.

Karkat will probably be adamant about not showing the humans their faces as a tactic to combat against them initially so that makes a lot of sense? Idk we'll see how things shake out

I think you're overthinking things on the phones. The trolls can already circumvent blocks and bans, they can just hijack a phone call...if it even IS a phone call. If it's like a group voicechat, they'll just keep kicking Karkat and he'll keep coming back.

"Mobile phone group chat server apps with voicechannels weren't really a thing in 2009" we don't know if this version IS set in 2009

@mobiancruxtruder it's also been shown in both the games and iirc the comic that troll tech is more advanced than where human civilization is at, regardless of what they do with it, that's just canon troll lore. Also this isn't our Earth, it's the Paradox Space troll-made Earth; so, there's room to play around and suspend disbelief a little.

as someone who's friends with two members of the project s team, i do actually think the fact that this animation seems to be ditching the narration is actually something i think i do prefer over how project s does it, because the narration is a tool i think doesn't really work as well in an animated form nearly as well

anyway if they do the generic high school mean girl ciska everyone seems to do i will be disappointed. vriska needs to be voiced by a trans woman or she wont be vriska to me.

also @forgotpassword i don't think the conversations are meant to be phone calls in universe, they seem to just be stylized representations of the pesterlog chats, because showing a wordless text conversation would be boring. but in universe they do seem to still be text chats based on what we can see from the trailer.

@mobiancruxtruder I agree changes will need to be made though I think you're confusing changes that will need to be made versus changes that could be made? It's a cartoon under Vivziepop's label not a Cartoon Network original they can say fuck and curse and have child predators, and I think if anything part of the goal would be to maintain some of Homestuck's rougher edges while at the same time providing a much more "easy viewing" experience than Homestuck's format fuckery.

@stagelights I think one of the bigger adjustments of a Homestuck animated is the fact that the comic ends in a very genderqueer place and starts at a very cishet one and I'm not totally sure how much the story will try to "rush things along" in that regard. Vriska positions herself as a mean girl the plot frames her as a mean girl and the degree to which the story winds this back is one of the driving forces of the comic. If they can get a trans woman to do the snippy cartoon mean girl voice it would be kickass, but I do think they'll prioritize having the latter above all else in the final cut.

On my own side, uh. I think it'll be good thought maybe not an ideal adaptation. Tbh I think Spindlehorse/roo are just the wrong guys for the job. Homestuck isn't that weird of a work, when you strip back the novelty of its internet format the biggest challenge to adapting Homestuck is just it being a very text heavy work, with much of the plot and visual presentations angled towards having a lot of narration and dialogue. But... this also applies to visual novels and light novels, which get adapted into popular anime like, literally all the time forever.

There isn't much in a Homestuck adaptation that wouldn't also have been an issue for (oh god) Fate/Stay Night, Higurashi When They Cry, Steins;Gate, Clannad, Haruhi Suzumiya, Spice and Wolf, Violet Evergarden, Monogatari-

Fuck it let's talk about Monogatari. When I think about what an "ideal" Homestuck adaptation would look like, a real pie-in-the-sky burn up all my dragon balls suck off the genie until she cums type wish, I think about Monogatari. Minus, uh, all the stuff about Monogatari that is Not Good.

https://youtu.be/oE-lx0Eu54k?si=JWLqcfUqhwsMZ3oI

Take a look at this. This scene is just two girls in a room, talking about Some Bullshit. Primo Homestuck Stuff. But rather than shying away from the long conversation, Monogatari just plays the whole beat out, verbatim. For visual stimulation, you see these quick cuts to objects around the room, facial closeups, subtle moments of character acting, static text, family guy cutaway gags, all of which serve to highlight the dense goofy dialogue while keeping the reader engaged and a little disoriented.

You could basically direct just about any given Dave-Karkat or Dave-John or Dave-Terezi conversations in this way and get insane amounts of mileage out of it. But Spindlehorse/Spindleroo *aren't* those guys, Vivzie is a student in many ways of the John K vibe where writers are some sort of demonic force that should be warded off with hymns and spells and grossout closeups. And that's fine and all, for Hazbin the result are some truly amazing character designs that render their bits spectacularly. But for Homestuck? Vriska don't got four arms to emote with, Karkat only has the one shirt.

It feels like a "straightforward" approach to Homestuck would risk losing out in comparison to similar cartoons simply because, without the parts Homestuck was designed around Homestuck kinda winds up lacking in head-to-head comparisons with its immediate comparisons. That said, I trust Hussie (and I love Hone's stuff so goddamned much) so I'm willing to see her cook. I just hope the bet pays off.

And yes, I'm with bluebootyraider, the dialogue is potentially a big problem. The trailer doesn't indicate much one way or another, but the dense, verbose language of the original just doesn't translate to spoken word, I've always thought it was crazy that people like dubs and let's-reads of the comic because they always sound so unnatural.

*rips off shirt revealing "I <3 UNNATURAL DIALOGUE" tattooed to my chest*