The Homestuck fandom has a bit of Nazi Joke problem.

What a doozy of a first topic, huh?

My content warning for this is: I talk about Nazis, Hitler, and the Holocaust and how we as a fandom accidentally make light of it.

Don’t worry about the fancy things like smart-quotes in this, I haven’t used AI or anything, I just wrote this in a word processor to ensure I get the spelling correct (which I’ll probably mess up anyway).

Anyway, just to bring up what made me think of it (NOT to continue any discussion about Gio or the article any further), there was a thing I noticed in the discussions about Gio’s blog post was his (now deleted) heading when he said “the Gio-ish question”. (Godwin’s law was in full effect here.)

Now, it’s a fucked up joke. He shouldn’t have made it, especially not in this situation. I hope everyone agrees with that. Even he does, so he removed it.

Anyway enough about Gio, he isn’t really relevant anyway to this topic, and I’d like to politely request people just don’t talk about him in the replies as I just wanted to give context as to why I am even thinking about this.

Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking shitty nazi-adjacent jokes is some problem unique to a ‘bad part of the fandom’. Have you ever said “Vriska did nothing wrong”? Do you know what the origin of that was? It was not originally Vriska, the original phrase was talking about Hitler.

To be honest, there also is stuff in Homestuck itself. Now, the only mention by text in the original Homestuck is calling The Condesce “sea hitler” (and “fish hitler” when Jake mistook Meenah for her). Plus there is a track calling her that (“pumpkin party in sea hitler's apocalypse”). Of course this is a relatively minor thing, because in-universe, such a comparison would be apt. However, I felt like I needed to mention it because it is there.

What is more more egregious is, well, so have you heard of the Skaianet files?

Did you know Hitler is a character in them? Like, related to the backstory of everything? Including a thing which basically is a dumb joke about how the Holocaust is actually Einstein’s fault for being a fraudulent scientist? Like, there’s a bit more detail to that, but overall it’s pretty shitty and completely fucking inaccurate. (I did study a bit of history including the rise of the Nazis, and it was disturbing, but sadly informative.)

Whilst the Skaianet files aren’t really well known, they are a thing that was written by Hussie. Now I’m not trying to say that Hussie is evil for making a shitty joke. I’m just pointing out that such shitty jokes are part of Homestuck-adjacent things, and may affect the people who read them.

As an aside: There is the accidental, but still unfortunate fact that “bait” in Vriska’s quirk can become “88”. Which sadly happens to also be a Nazi dog whistle (which as a further aside is somewhat related to how Bletchley Park was able to figure out how to crack encrypted Nazi communications). I wanna be VERY CLEAR that I believe this is ACCIDENTAL, but I know people who are uncomfortable when they try to say “bait” in that quirk.

All in all, my point is that as a community, we need to be aware of this and, idk, Be Better then we were in the past? Learn from our past mistakes, and realise that some things we enjoy have some unfortunate connections.

Thanks for reading. Let’s hope I didn’t get anything wrong that makes me wish for an edit button…