the non-webcomic homestuck

I think it will be fun. It's not and can't be a replacement for Homestuck in any way, but I think it's fun that it exists. And if it gets some new people interested in checking out the comic, then even better.

Like elegantSpinstress, I especially like the way they seem to be handling the fact that Homestuck is 90% chatlogs: just have have characters reach through the phone and interact as if they were there. I'm curious how or if they will handle things like John's phone being trapped under the sylladex while Rose tries to reach him. Maybe she'd be trapped in a captchalog card, trying in vain to get John's attention?

Also a lot of people seem to think its impossible or whatever for them to at least cover 1 or 2 acts lol, but most of those acts are just the kids making random shit they'll never really need. There's like a whole section in Act 2 of John just making random shit with the alchemiter and look that was funny in the comic to see him make a Bill Cosby laptop...but we don't actually need to see that animated because the whole thing would just be john standing around pressing buttons on a weird machine T_T

That and the amount of time John spends just literally goofing off and not really doing much lol.

I actually think all the alchemy stuff could translate really well into this style of animation. The early acts have a much more slapstick feel that animation could really take advantage of. It's the later acts, when Homestuck leans a little more serious, that I don't know will translate that well. But I haven't watched Hazbin Hotel or Helluva Boss, so maybe they do handle serious moments well enough as well.

how are they gonna animate the pesterlogs especially some of them are really fucking long like are they just gonna animate like 10 minutes of talking and the characters staring at a computeer screen

What‘s going to happen with Exiles? who are pretty much weaved into the narrative solely via Webcomic? maybe they’ll do episode titles or something?

im seeing so much doomposting on twitter its so nice to see people optimistic for this pilot like i am. it wont have everything the original does but i dont think it cant be a super fun experience to open up homestuck to new fans up to reading it. the homestuck fandom is already a lowkey garbage fire at least if this goes decently well it can be a relevent one. im excited for the new content and to see what they do with this. tho i will say im mad as hell the merch has helluva boss characters on it ive watched vivs shows and i do not care about them at all

@davespritejohn

I imagine pesterlogs will be done alongside other things, like alchemization sessions or exploring their lands. As these are straight dialogue, they can be voiced over things like that without killing the flow of the story.

i'm excited about the idea of a cartoon because as weird as it is i can see two different ways it could be executed well:

- the CANDY route is that they make a pretty conventional adaptation condensing the plot of the comic into something humanely animatable, which would lose out on a lot of what made homestuck so good but would have the upside of presenting us with a version of the story that has gone through conventional editing rather than accreting through years of updates hot off the presses

- the MEAT route is that they take cues from the scott pilgrim anime and blindside everyone by closing off the pilot episode with a twist that takes the story into an entirely different direction (also makes sense for a pilot that would like the existing fanbase to make enough noise about it to drum up excitement for a full series)

either way could be a good time and the pilot will probably make it clear which way they're going

As a Scott Pilgrim fan I would love if Homestuck Animated pulled the rug under us like how the Scott Pilgrim anime did. That would be such a fun thing to do :]

I totally agree about homestuck losing a lot of its flair in another medium. It seems like they're doing some cool stuff with the captchalogs which I'm stoked for!! I am nervous about putting the lengthy dialog into the show and how that might water down characters tho. I'm also wondering how they'll handle the amount of offensive language in the first act. I guess we'll just see what happens tho :/

The way I see it, the fact that original homestuck was so good at leaning into its storytelling medium of choice is, in itself, a sign that the upcoming animated version will also be good at using its storytelling medium of choice in fun and interesting ways. I think the skill of playing with the medium itself within a story is transferable between mediums. If Andrew Hussie has that skill, they'll be able to use it with animation just as much as they used it with webcomics.

The appearance of Karkat in the trailer for an otherwise mostly act 1 trailer and the appearance of new scenes and lines not in the original comic leads me to think that the show will be a complete retelling. I am torn between speculations of how they might reconstruct the story of Homestuck into the new medium with minimal loss and the possibility of it being an entirely new story. either way, it will be a very different product from original Homestuck.

How well the New Homestuck compares in quality to the old is something that can only be seen when the show is actually released, but I've chosen to be optimistic about it, especially as someone who is intrigued by any transformative take on Homestuck. ideally, both works will be elevated by their shared existence, which is the most one can ask from any adaptation.

TBH i think the only reason kk is in the trailer is as b8 since hes like, the guy from homestuck. i agree w/ everything else because youre really smart & i love the way u write words

Oh that is certainly a possibility.

At the very least, the one change I am most certain will occur is that the trolls will, one way or another, appear sooner in the story then they do in the original Homestuck, more likely shown trolling the kids then any "speed up and skip to act 5" type changes. But truly anything feels possible at this point.

Honestly, I'm not worried about how they adapt The Story as much as I'm worried how they've failed to adapt The Style. In fact, cut a bunch of the meandering in Act 1 & 2! It makes for very amusing reading, but just doesn't work in sub-30 min episodes. The Style, however... It doesn't have to be a 1:1 recreation of old Homestuck, of course, but I think a lot is lost from what we've seen in the pilot.

Take the screencap @elegantSpinstress posted on page 1, for example. The beaky Hazbin-style mouth coming off of the face at the corners, the shades warping with the expression. It just feels very flat.

Spindleroo putting their own spin on things is inevitable, but I wish they'd take some notes from Hussie's work. Their earlier work isn't just crude MSPaint-esque drawings, they have an incredible talent at expressing a lot with very little. Take this panel from Act 2, for example. Dave isn't much more than an oblong orb on a tube, with four bendy tubes as limbs... But in sticking to a few specific parameters (mouth stays within the confines of the head, shades are static objects) it imparts some three dimensionality to a very simple figure.

Hussie does a lot with what are essentially blobs with some funny shapes on them for hair, and I don't think any of it is incompatible with actual, frame-by-frame animation.

(while writing this with the gif playing, I noticed that the left-most orange puppet ass stays completely stationary the entire time. Not germane to my point it was just bugging me)

yeah...another reason to be worried about the new show, there are other reasons already but that one is a big one...

and zendaya is meechie.........

anyways i dont think it's totally incompatible, it'll just have to get creative in an entirely different way. personally i'm excited to have parts of homestuck that have aged poorly or just aren't very good writing be adapted and ammended into something new. a youtuber once said that homestuck is kind of like a first draft of a story that didn't get ammended - this is an opportunity to write a second draft, and maybe improve it.

I'm sure they'll change around some plot elements, but the same thing happens for literally any adapted media from format to format. How many overtly long pesterchum conversations will be skipped or shortened? How many 'iconic' moments will we miss in order to get to other iconic moments faster? How quickened will the pacing be? So on and so forth.

I think it's a really difficult thing to adapt but I also think it's perfectly possible. It's also worth saying a majority of the people in the current Homestuck fandom either haven't finished reading the comic, skipped over parts of the comic themselves, or like in my case, read and finished the comic a very, very long time ago and now suffer spotty memory.

It's impossible to guestimate what the final 'adapted' product will look like, and it's very uncertain if it'll make it out of the pilot phase depending on it's performance. But i'm still putting money down that making a 'good' adaptation of a webcomic like Homestuck is completely possible. One may even assume it could be an enjoyable product. But if you do into ANY adaptation expecting a 1:1 of the source material, especially if it was originally created in a much different format, you're unfortunately a fool's fool.

We will be trading a lot of arguably unnecessary dialog and 'pointless' filler content (worthwhile or otherwise) for the sole purpose of lots of moving pictures (animation) and voiced dialog, while bringing Homestuck to a *much* easier front to digest for new and existing fans. It's a tradeoff i'm okay with making.

Do I think it will be BETTER than the comic? No. The original webcomic will always be the 'correct' way to consume this piece of media, much like it's preferrable to the actual official homestuck 'graphic novels'.

But I think everyone getting their wizzies in a twist over the simple fact that the adaptation is going to exist, at least in pilot format, are a bit overzealous and silly for a number of reasons. There is no homestuck secret club- normies getting their hands on homestuck is something that has more or less *already happened,* especially with the influx of nufans in recent years. It's already been retaining it's power in fandom culture even in the slow years. So that's not really a criticism that's valid or worth making in the first place. That, and everyone crying about the association with a Vivziepop animation studio like that fucking matters.. I mean, I wasn't the biggest fan of Hazbin Hotel but Helluva Boss is a genuinely decent show and I don't think the Homestuck animated series is going to suffer any great sins by being animated by a studio that's already proven to be good at animating regardless if you liked the plot of the Vivziepop shows or not.

A majority of the lambasting and crybabying over the fact that the animated pilot will exist in some format feels really unnecessary, especially given the years and years of 'homestuck the anime' posts and fake homestuck animated screencaps i've seen since I started reading homestuck in middle school. It's actually happening now and the trailer looked fine, but we're all crying in advance, because.... what? You don't want Homestuck as an entity to exist while still pretending you're a big fan of it? What's the motive here?

I can't help but feel like a lot of the initial despair is just because people still want to hold on to the idea that Homestuck is this fun little niche internet fandom, which I think is because a lot of nufans weren't around for the quote unquote 'biggest' years of Homestuck popularity. Oh no! This archaic internet comic you like is getting revived in some way and you're getting even more content! Woe is you, I suppose! The fandom is more alive than it's ever been in modern times, and now I think it sucks because I don't feel as unique as I did before by attaching my personality to this previously completely unknown to me piece of internet media! I skipped the first 5 acts, kinned a character I didn't even read the backstory of, and now they're animating all those parts I skipped and i'm going to feel obliged to actually engage in what Homestuck is instead of only consuming it through memes I see on the internet and bastardized fandom interpretations of all these characters I don't really understand! I'm going insaaaaaane! I need to fish for a banger on Twitter by saying something bad about this pilot that isn't out yet immediately. That'll make me look cool.

Fucking whatever man. It'll be fine, at very least i'm expecting a solid 6.5/10 production and i'll be pleasantly surprised if it's better than that. The chances of it turning into a full animated series after the pilot aren't as low as some of these replies are assuming. It's going to be an adaptation of a comic a lot of people already like and non-homestuck normies are going to be treated to a fun and easy to digest silly show with interesting worldbuilding and fun characters. Regardless if it get's a full animated series or not we're going to see a new wave of nu-nu fans to compliment the nu-fans.

In the words of Aradia Medigo, “i think i mostly want to see what happens when this whole place breaks apart”