Putting out feelers to the community at large!
I NEED YOUR HOMESTUCK MEMORIES AND STORIES! GOOD AND BAD!
Why?
Because, I'm currently working on a Homestuck retrospective panel for the large convention local to me (over 10,000 attendees) and the latter half of the panel is discussion and story times for bringing up Fandom memories (the good, the bad and the extremely ugly)
Please tell me some of the best (and worst) experiences you've had being a homestuck fan. The cringy the better! (If it makes you all feel better, I will be telling the story of the first time I went to that con at 13 in Terezi cosplay with full ACRYLIC PAINT ON MY BODY)
Heehoo!
jade & vriska made me realize i was transfem back in '23
everything u do is a balloon :)
when i was age 17, i went to a wilderness therapy program in the desert of utah. the only book i requested be sent out to me in the three months i was out there was a physical copy of the epilogues. still smells like campfire to this day!
- life is no fun if not for whimsy
when i was 13 i...
- went to a 413 homestuck meetup at a park and a gamzee cosplayer attempted to push me in a river and excused it by saying he was just trying to be in character
- was constantly painting my nails yellow for troll cosplays (do trolls even have canonly yellow nails? or was that just a hugely popular fanon thing for cosplayers? i dont even know) and it got to the point where my nails got literally stained yellow. like. my nails were just always yellow tinted for a loooong long time and it looked gross lol.
- was posted to a "cosplay cringe" instagram account for doing a casual rose cosplay in public. like, it was considered super cringe that i had the gall to show up somewhere in a noncanon outfit
- wore horns out in public Everywhere and All The Time. i had the plush welovefine aradia horns and id just wear them casually to restaurants, parks, family gatherings, grocery shopping, etc. one time a group of older teenage boys tried to steal them right off my head in the middle of a costco
- witnessed my irl middle school friend group get in a near fistfight over dave strider kin drama. one was mad at the other for buying out the last dave shirt at our local hot topic and it literally ended friendships
i definitely have a lot more stories but these were the first ones that came to mind lol. wild times dude
im an #oldhead and was there during its prime 2013-2014
and one of the (not truly worst, but pretty cringy) experiences was at a convention.
i (an aranea cosplayer) was just chillen, walking around by myself and looking for the homestucks, and a gamzee cosplayer suddenly showed up and walked along side me, with a tavros and I think a sollux. he started chatting me up, being over familiar. I got along with him until he hugged me randomly between conversation. which is a big fuck no. i didn't really know how to react so i was like "oh... oh okay!"
He kept following me around with a group of other people he was with. I learned they were all in their early-mid 20s and I was only 14. I didn't think it was wrong at the time because age differences were kinda a nonissue in fandom spaces back then. there were NO boundaries lol. But when they invited me back to their hotel for food, I knew I just had to get the fuck out of there lol. I made friends with a very kind davesprite and godtier dave within my age group who saw the awkwardness and helped slowly inch me out of there. The touchy shit was not a surprise to me. this was before con rules about touching were really enforced? homestucks were pretty huggy and *glompy* back then, even when they just first meet. It's all fun and fine until... you're being touched by a gamzee.
Later I made friends with a godtier vriska cosplayer, she was sorta very vriska-esque in the sense that she was a social butterfly but very demanding of peoples attention, and a little rude. So I'm mingling, chatting with her and other people. One minute I look away and the next minute, she's furiously making out with a random tavros cosplayer causing a crowd of more cosplayers to form around them. i guess to replicate that one panel, you know the one. it was very awkward. and also disgusting? the paint was smearing....
much later, it was time for photo shoots. many of us were strangers but we liked to pose with each other. I ended up posing with a random Jake,(cuz aranea/jake whatever) it was brief and he was nice(AND THIS TIME HE ACTUALLY ASKED PERMISSION TO PUT HIS ARM AROUND MY WAIST) afterwards I went back to watch the rest of the shoot and ANOTHER fucking gamzee B LINED to me to put his arm around me asking what I was doing. he smelled very bad. I went home after that because I think I'd had enough.
during that time, people were very in and out of role play within the con. there was this kankri who was acting like kankri, cringy but most people tolerated it cuz they were also children. and eridans were acting the way you'd expect. Its like how kids liked to larp warrior cats or some shit. except it was for a relatively niche web comic (though i'd argue its even more niche now) a lot of us were just excited teenagers who just wanted to feel immersed in their fave media. I was very shy so I rarely spoke, but I did ultimately have a fantastic time there. also towards the end my horns broke. and also towards the end me and a dave did the harlem shake.
source: nolonger100daysoftavvyfanart
