The Homestuck fandom has a gatekeeping problem

As someone who has gatekept people in the past, I think there's a combination of people taking their own analysis too seriously and people just very much taking fandom too seriously (particularly I think the subreddit is a weird case just because the people there seem to be primarily people who haven't even liked homestuck since cascade and get upset at anyone who DOES like the comic or anything postcanon).

It might just be my ignorance, but i got into homestuck last year, so pretty late all things considered, but only like 1 of my friends knew about me reading it (which is the same friend who recommended it in the first place). My experience was pretty chill all around, i stayed off anything hs related online while reading to avoid spoilers, which i think made me take more time to take everything in about the comic and have a better understanding of what I would eventualy see in the fandom, and where all of the fandoms opinions come from

In short, MEDIA LITERACY IS PRETTY DOPE

But i get how sharing you love of the comic early on and asap is natural, i was torturing myself with not talking about it lol

in the end, just suck it up with the actions of newgens and for newgens themselves to hold back at least a little on their excitement, while still not feeling bad for sharing their interest in the first place

There's nothing to gatekeep. The fandom has no "sanctity" to profane, no "dignity" to ruin. It has always been a hideous, slow-motion catastrophe, lurching from controversy to controversy, shitstorm after shitstorm, shipping war after shipping war. So I don't care what the new generation does because the old generation was an absolute nightmare.

That's what I'm saying lmao. I doubt hazbin hotel fans can do anything as bad as 'giving a cosplayer a concussion because people thought it was funny to throw buckets at him'

but what if the hazbin hotel fans engage in tomfoolery and childlike behaviour??? what if they bring back jegus??? D:

The return of 'fuckass'

The Reddit for Homestuck is genuinely just a cesspool of people circlejerking each other over the same 3 topics, and getting mad at anyone who even so much as dares to have a different opinion than the consensus lol. You like the Epilogues and Beyond Canon? Sacrilegious. You think Act 6 was pretty okay and not as bad as everyone says? Burned at the stake immediately. You ship Grimdorks???? You must be tried at the Hussie Hague for your crimes obviously.

And for a long time, this was literally the only place you could talk about Homestuck that was centralized. Tumblr is too widespread, and if nobody follows you, they just don't see your posts unless you tag every Homestuck tag, or people are scrolling through it that day. And the Discord is owned by like one power-hungry dude who also owns the Reddit, so it's like his own lil echo chamber, unfortunately.

For a long while, I stopped even liking Homestuck because I just kept meeting other Homestucks who were fucking assholes who didn't know how to just have a civil conversation with someone else without making it into this huge argument or debate lol. I joined a discord server for Homestuck Fanfic writers and it's great in there I can actually state my opinions without a million people clawing to get to me through their screens.

And now I have the FRAF forums, which is also neat because now there are other people who ship "bad ships" or "rare pairs" like me who can just post fanart and move on. I don't actually ship Grimdorks or have anything to say about it, but the fact that Grimdorks shippers can't even post on like Reddit or TikTok or the fucking "official" discord without people judging or side-eyeing them is just why this community has felt so rancid for the past couple of years. I think if we just make the FRAF forums more popular and accessible to newer readers, we can finally offer a third space for discussion of the comic that's actually moderated by a team of people who also like the comic they're reading lol.

Also all the Hazbin fans have been really nice, it is once again just the mean ass Reddit and Discord that are bullying newer people away from even liking or enjoying the comic because they're all goddamn miserable. Sometimes I think that whole place should just be renamed "Anti-Homestuck" or something since I rarely see people even talking about how they like the comic. And because of the new Collab and stuff, there's an influx of new readers who don't have that weird hate in their heart for the comic lol so they're actually enjoying it without a loser in their ear telling them it all sucks and is bad and stopped being good after insert act here

I've always found it so stupid. cause like, wow, the Homestuck fandom will be filled with annoying fans? You might as well scream at me about how someone's dumping water into the ocean

i got into homestuck around 2015 or so after it ended and have the added bonus of not having anyone else know what it is, so ive never experienced the whole gatekeeping thing until i joined a discord where a bunch of my friends roleplay/discuss the webcomic a few years ago. when the pilot dropped i saw all of said friends absolutely LIVID because of vizviepop's name being associated with it and it felt so jarring talking shit about the hellaverse fans because im ALSO a helluva boss fan and a casual enjoyer of hazbin hotel (i liked the show but helluva boss just have a more engaging story imo compared to how rushed hazbin hotel felt when i watched it) like it was insane

fandoms aren't toxic because of what ships/headcanons you like, or what part of the story is your favorite, or because you're younger than the original wave of the fandom. fandoms are toxic because the people within them act in a way that makes it toxic. it's hypocritical to blame all the problems in a fandom on young fans/sequel likers/rarepair fans/etc. because the idea that these people are bad is part of what makes the fandom toxic in the first place.

people gatekeep like fuckin CRAZY HAHAH and then like. get upset when Wider Fandom culture Doesnt Like Homestucks. like. guys. we WANT people to watch the show and get interested. thats GOOD. because then people wont have outdated but still relevant ideas of how annoying homestuck fans are!!

I got into Homestuck from the Sarah Zedig discord server and p quickly ended up in the pgenpod discord and that sorta space that existed from like, 2019-2021. Honestly people were p chill there. I thought some folks were a bit inflammatory or annoying, but kept those opinions to myself and folks mostly got along. Drama among other communities tho... oh boy.

Long story short, yeah the Homestuck Reddit sucks. Act 6 sucks and is terrible, and queer fans often get bullied away, but we gotta keep a safe space for homophobic fans. Just like, rancid place. Given the Discord is the same community as the reddit, yeah it sucks. There was a ton of conflict between those two groups, and mostly it seemed between fans who only like pre-Act 6, and folks actually engaging in what was going on in the comic at the time.

Now with new fans coming in, yeah I hope folks come here instead of the reddit and discord lol. That or find their on communities among their own friendgroups, or different creators or what have you. It just sucks that, yeah a lot of the gatekeeping seems to come from those two big places where a lot of new fans will end up in and then be bullied. :V

I think it's also important to remember that FRAF isn't going to be immune to gatekeeping problems. I am hopeful we can stay a welcoming, accepting place! I'm not entirely sure how to articulate it, but I have seen a fair amount of negativity towards other fandom spaces on here. I get a little worried when I see that. At the end of the day, I just hope everyone can be chill towards Hellaverse fans who are just coming in. There IS overlap between audiences already, especially with the pilot but even before! I hope the fandom at large can get ready to welcome new people- new creators, new analysists, new cosplayers, new friends and people to have beef with into the fandom. I think it'll go okay, and we are at least somewhat on the way towards being welcoming to people.

taking people on discord and reddit seriously and not immediately discarding them as AI CIA operatives that are also 12 years old was the mistake i think people have made here.

Where I've encountered such obnoxious gatekeepers in other fandoms, I've taken to calling them the One True Fans. Some basic tenets of being a One True Fan:

Any fan not from the exact same demographic as you is a Fake Fan, and Fake Fans are the enemy.

Only the oldest material in the canon counts. The rest is Objectively Garbage for Stupid People.

The creators of the source material are evil sellouts, and Hate the Fans. The creators are also the enemy.

Any progressive messages in the older material don't exist They just don't. Any progressive messages in the newer material are "forced SJW crap."

whatever evil malignant malcontent wishes to associate with this fandom will ultimately be like a fart in the wind. we're a repugnant group. there are better things to gatekeep, like anime, or bodybuilding, or skateboarding.

Not to come across like I'm denying that gatekeeping is a real nuisance across all kinds of hobbies, but to be totally frank I don't think the things you're describing here are gatekeeping? If people are engaging in a hobby that involves a lot of care for the text, like theorycraft or analysis or like roleplay in your example, then I think they're within their rights to be annoyed when someone else isn't playing in the space with the same level of care. If they were rude, then they were rude, and that sucks and should change, but I feel that the term gatekeeping itself refers to a very distinct phenomenon that is different to what happened there.

This is hardly just limited to "newgens", either... if you asked me who the most annoying group of fans are, who always want to play in the big pool but never want to learn to swim, I would say it's the homestuck oldheads who think they know everything cus they read the comic 10 years ago but don't actually remember anything from that far back. If I could click my fingers one day and suddenly stop having to deal with these kinds of people when I'm trying to perform earnest literary analysis of a comic that I love, well, I think those two fingers on my one hand would at the very least touch...... does that make me a gatekeeper. i donno. call me Cerberus i guess 😔

I think some people can definitely go overboard, they always have and probably always will unfortunately. None of us can really know your own situations but there have always been readers both new and old that focus on the text of the story very literally and exactly where they are in it i.e. with no expectation of any kind of narrative pay off or arc or "we're doing a thing" the amount of people I've seen hate the epilogues while also going on a massive diatribe that very blatantly shows they genuinely do not understand the metatext at all is. disappointing and irksome. But the same thing happened a long time ago, I saw people doomsaying back when the scratch happened. I think a lot of it comes from how people talk about things. Some people talk about their headcanons like they're cold hard fact rather than y'know. A fun fan creation or exercise.

In a fandom about a work that is both so irreverent yet genuinely nuanced its hard. I don't expect everyone to understand or know everything but when I see comments like "skip to the trolls" and "johnrezi is a thing?" I do have to wonder if literally anyone else has actually read all of homestuck. I wish the "worst" thing i saw people posting was OOC fanfiction lol

not to sound like a bitch or anything, maybe this is me being a gatekeeper, but i do understand the frustration of someone who has yet to finish/read the comic (or epilogues, lets face it this is a huge fucking problem when it comes to the epilogues) chiming in on discussion while very, very clearly not understanding the text.

like i said in my last sentence (power to me) epilogues discussion is especially egregious in regards to people adamantly refusing to read the source material but wanting to participate in discussion as if their input is still relevant despite their obvious ignorance. i think in cases like this, some form of gatekeeping is acceptable. otherwise we invite random chud #23058239058 who read from someone who heard that another person said that their friend said that their brother in law read the epilogues and jade harley was a r*pist now. spending half of a conversation correcting misinformation that could be easily solved if they had just read the damn story to begin with is not an enjoyable way to talk about homestuck for anyone.

tldr i think gatekeeping more in depth discussion behind "you should actually read the comic/story" is not an inherently bad thing, especially in circles where the discussion breaches more into the meaning behind the text / what the characters motivations are.