WHAT IS HOMESTUCK?

homestuck is a mutimedia webcomic made by Andrew Hussie in 2009 about 4 kids that play a video game that accidentally ends in the worlds destruction, and in order to remake the world they must play it and win. It's also the dumbest fucking thing on the internet and I love it so much.

homestuck is some kind of nightmare that just happens to its chosen

its also a webcomic that spiraled into one of the longest pieces of fiction in human history and effectively the first domino in a chain of popular media that gave us UTDR, which itself cascaded out into a wave of other inspired media, and will most likely still have remnants of itself in media even a hundread years down several chains of inspired media

homestuck is ALSO (in my opinion) one of the greatest things ever written both due to the quality of its narrative and also how its multimedia nature makes it inexorably tied to the internet as a media for storytelling, and a true encapsulation of what internet storytelling can be

its also sweet bro and hella jeff

homestuck is basically nothing, you know. maybe not when it's in decay, but homestuck in abstract terms represents nothingness. the logical extreme of homestuck would be nothing, which is what occurs when homestuck is at a rise.

i could actually describe homestuck to you, but does it even matter? it's one of those things that is really easy to understand when you read it but really hard to explain. it's a foundational text of the internet age. i think it is a modern classic and should be taught in schools.

goodness, i might be too late to this thread! it's been more than a week! you might've finished your essay already!

but just in case, i wanted to point out that homestuck was not just a work of fiction, it was also a community-building exercise, and that's what really gives it its position in internet history. hussie had at least a cursory understanding of the various tribes/archetypes of the ancient internet that existed in the early 2000's, and many character designs (the trolls in particular) were based on them. this took place during an era where social media was still new, having "internet friends" still made you an outcast, and internet culture wasn't taken very seriously. like people shared our memes and so on but we were generally regarded as losers by mainstream IRL culture.

so you have this assertive celebration of ancient internet culture, plus a staggering amount of content based directly on community input, discussion, and memes. a lot of the jokes are removed from their original context for the archival reader - if you want a good example of this, look up the Pantskat meme. along with this, hussie frequently reached out to community members to make various contributions - calliope's art was produced by a popular fanartist, as one example among many. there was a tremendous effort to make the readers feel like a part of the story!

if i wanted to summarize what homestuck is in just a few words, it would be "internet Woodstock" - a massive gathering of a specific subculture around an online stage.

you are stuck in a home

Homestuck is basically if The Odyssey had been written in the modern age on the internet ; )

Homestuck is many things all at once. It's one of the biggest individual works of web history. It's a queer coming of age story. It's a work of epic poetry. It's a massive fucking shitpost. It's several layers of irony cloaking a story that is much more sincere than most people give it credit for. It's a work of art.

@dionysia -

Strongly agree on "It's a work of art." We have a terrible tendency nowadays to see fiction as just "content" and "entertainment", rather than as "art". Like it's a length of Generic Extruded Entertainment Product squirted from a nozzle onto a conveyer belt in a factory somewhere. That goes for TV, movies, comics, games and even novels. If the GEEP doesn't meet our (individually differing) expectations exactly, it must be defective, so it's time to put the fear of Death into the stupid factory-serfs.

It is really, really hard to fit Homestuck into the Sausage Factory Model. The OG comic is whimisical and disturbing; deliberately confusing and frustrating; full of the author's personal obsessions and unfiltered thoughts; unsanitised and rough around both the edges and the middle. Art doesn't have to do what we expect. Art doesn't have to do what we want. You consume product, you engage with art. Same goes for all the later Homestuck works, even if they are more of a team effort.