A Brief History of Homestuck

this video is brought to you by audible try audible free for 30 days at audible.com sarahz or text sarah zed to 500 500. a young woman sits alone in her room it just so happens that today the 13th of april is the day she has set aside to analyze one of her old fandoms though she has been reviewing and critiquing fandoms for years now it is only today that she shall be given a name what will the name of this young woman be so exactly 12 years ago on this day we saw the beginning of a silly serialized webcomic that would become a global phenomenon from massive cosplay groups to convention horror stories about sharpie baths to thousands of art pieces animatics fan fiction and more to millions of dollars raised for a game homestuck quickly turned from a simple microsoft paint project to a gigantic fandom with a population nearly equal to my entire country there aren't quite as many homestuck fans as there are canadians but i would easily believe a homestuck nation could conceivably exist the other sarah's ed even did a homestuck video before me so there's lots of fan involvement here at its height the fandom was a lot of things zealous expansive and perhaps most importantly deeply confusing and terrifying both to those involved in it and those watching from the sidelines with only a vague idea of what the hell was happening in it nowadays it's i mean it's hmm it's kind of still going and it's kind of not in a confusing way which is perfectly on brand for what homestuck is to be fair but in a lot of ways the community and the way it was engaged with is kind of a ghost town and i don't mean in the homestuck sprite way looking through the fandom now it very much gives me the same energy as visiting a town that used to be huge and bustling and now it's dried up leaving behind not nothing like it's still there but it's just a little empty and a little bitter and a little bit in denial it's so fascinating to me like how does this massive incredible slightly terrifying fandom turn into this well to answer that we need to look at homestuck the whole thing the entire 800 000 plus word thing and the entire decade plus history of the homestuck fandom so what was homestuck why did it appeal to literally millions of people why was the fandom so famously terrifying and what happened to turn it into what it is now let's find out as far as massive media projects go home stuck had pretty humble beginnings for the vast majority of its history it was created primarily by this one guy andrew hussey it began as a mixed media project that was a partially interactive web comic that incorporated stuff like flash animations music and gifs the sort of branding of it especially at the beginning is that it looks like you're playing a video game with video game dialogue options chat logs between friends and interactive elements to click at the very beginning there was also a forum where directions the plot went were determined by forum responses the forum wasn't started for homestuck it was called microsoft paint adventure or mspa for short and was actually initially created by andrew hussey in 2006 to host an interactive forum game called well ms paint adventure it later got renamed to jailbreak the drawings are pretty crude like very 2006 and it was a pretty weird story that incorporated forum suggestions and in some ways served as the blueprint for homestuck hussey made a few other little comic slash game creations on mspa over the couple of years leading up to homestuck none of the aforementioned stories got the same hype that homestuck did but they're still relevant and often intertwined with it they were often kind of fun surreal interactive stories often drawn in simple art styles with little nods referencing each other there were three of these before homestuck there's the aforementioned jailbreak there's bard quest which never got finished there's a story called problem sleuth that starts out as a noir detective story and later actually gets incorporated into homestuck and then finally there's homestuck much like its mspa predecessors homestuck initially utilizes a pretty simple art style and video game dialogue and again much like its predecessors it starts out as an interactive story that incorporates the forums into its narrative so like for example the first main character we get introduced to is named john and that name was picked by someone on the forums john was the first option proposed and a couple moments later someone commented suggesting the name clint newton for the main character hussy seeing jon first went with jon but the protagonist of homestuck was literally seconds away from being called clint newton same goes for the other protagonists we meet stuff like their names were determined largely by random people on the forums all these stories got a moderate amount of popularity online but homestuck was the first to really blow up so much that less than a year into its making hussy had to actually stop taking forum suggestions just because there were so many of them and the narrative was getting more and more complex and it just wasn't feasible or compatible with his vision for the story anymore so in many ways this was not only his most popular story to date but also his most well solo story so what is homestuck actually about that's a complicated question mostly just because the story is very convoluted and surreal and features lots of stuff like time travel and alternate worlds and timelines and so much happens in it and it's nearly a million words not to mention art and music and animation and stuff but fundamentally to sum up the meat of the story in an accessible way it's about a bunch of kids who accidentally ended the world and are trying to create a new one there's no way this video is going to manage to sum up every single detail of what happened in homestuck in a way that's accessible to everyone while still being interesting so forgive me for this being necessarily somewhat incomplete but okay so we open on john egbert almost clint newton a 13 year old kid hanging out in his room we get to know him and learn that he's a nice dorky kid who's friends with cynical nerd rose lalonde aspiring cool kid with some deeper issues to work out dave strider and heart of the group jade harley the kids accidentally end the world by playing the beta copy of a video game called spurb and they have to finish the game to make a new world the early parts of homestuck are interesting some people really love them and some people really hate them and some people are a mix of both i know a lot of people who have really tried to get into homestuck but the beginning of the story just drove them off for some reason or another it really just captures the feeling of around in a new video game just trying out a bunch of things and seeing what works combining different things together picking stuff up and putting it down again testing your limits all of that some of it also takes place in the dream world so you get all this surrealism and exploration as a result a lot of early homestuck is kind of just that it's a mix of programming humor and confusing world building and reading it you can really see why some people love it and why some people either just don't get it or just don't like it the story also contains a lot of interludes and references to side characters including characters from problem sleuth and it's often hard to see the plot connection right away it reminds me a lot of trying to read worm another insanely long web serial where there are lots of little interludes between chapters some of which got added after the fact sometimes it feels like they enhance the world and deepen our understanding of existing characters and sometimes you're like oh my god please this is already long enough i want to get to the plot now homestuck is told using the act structure and this is really what the story was like for its first four acts it's a lot of us getting to know our main characters seeing them explore these worlds without a ton happening to them and seeing these interludes that deepen our understanding of what the world of homestuck is like often featuring side characters and references to other mspa games the first four acts spanned about a year of real life time as homestuck slowly accumulated a bigger and bigger fandom i can't find exact numbers of how many people read homestuck during its first year but a simple google trend search shows it really rising in the second quarter of 2010 and will soon see it growing exponentially beyond that because after act 4 and after a recap interlude homestuck started its fifth act in mid-2010 and this is really where much like earth the story and the fandom blew the up [Music] so let's say you're someone who has never seen homestuck before never read it know nothing about its plot are only vaguely tangentially aware of it all of this so far might be completely meaningless to you entirely fresh new information now i want to show you a picture of these things chances are your mind lit up in some form of recognition you've seen these even if you think you haven't you absolutely have maybe you've seen fan art on your tumblr dash maybe you've seen someone cosplay them at a convention but you've seen them and you can't unsee it these are trolls and they're about to blow everything the up so it's worth mentioning that while the first four acts of homestuck focused almost entirely on our four beta kid protagonists starting in act three they were contacted by these mostly off-screen mysterious grey-skinned kids known as trolls they didn't play the most important role in the plot mainly seeming to exist just to troll the main characters but they certainly were there and there certainly was a lot of mystery around who they were and what they were up to and then act 5 started so after the explosive act 4 finale which involved this long elaborate flash animation the longest yet for the series the story decides to pick up not by exploring any of the massive plot threads it left off on but instead by taking us to another part of homestuck's world this is alternia where the entirety of homestuck act 5 act 1 called hive bend in universe will take place by the way i know that sentence was weird to parse act 5 act 1. that's seriously how they name this stuff in the later acts you literally get like act 6 act 4 act 1 so apologies for that in advance the story shifts to focus entirely on 12 brand new alien kids whose alien species is literally named trolls yes their name is a pun based on the fact that they're internet trolls who are playing their own game of sperm on the surface it seems more of the same just with a new cast but in reality this was a drastic turning point for where homestuck was going to go homestuck up until this point was still good but very different than what it would eventually be known for it was a lot looser its plots were more jumbled and all over the place it had characters and an ensemble sure but they weren't so much the focus of the story they were more like tools that could be used to get to the wackier and zanier and over the top story elements act 5 changed this homestuck was still fun and goofy yes but it found itself now focusing more on character relationships and interpersonal drama rather than the plot moving the characters it was now the characters moving the plot but focusing on a relatively simpler more self-contained story wasn't the real reason why this part of the series took off i mean homestuck's intermission focused on a seemingly unrelated story about a gang called the midnight crew and it worked so well that readers regularly have to ask whether or not they can skip the first intermission but act 5 had the secret ingredient to success with the trolls on first glance the popularity of the trolls can seem a bit strange what is it about these guys that made them stand out so much against the rest of homestuck or just in general but what it really comes down to is this the trolls are perfectly designed to be appealing and i mean that with no sense of irony they're all introduced with very simple and exaggerated personality traits which makes them easy to understand and latch onto this one is angry this one is shy this one has never done anything wrong if you didn't like one of these characters chances are you could find one that you thought was amusing or that you related to or just enjoyed seeing they also all have very striking character designs with simple but immediately iconic traits gray skin orange horns and black zodiac t-shirt there were a couple variations on that like cat girl or fish or juggalo but these were the consistent traits among all 12 of the act 5 trolls the simplicity and uniformity of these traits meant that it was easy for fans to replicate for their own fan creations and there were tons of fan creations if we've learned anything from kingdom hearts it's that introducing about a dozen cool characters with a lot of angst and inner drama is a surefire way to ignite a fandom so for troll cosplay all you needed were some horns an official t-shirt and either gray face paint or a bathtub and some sharpies and you were good to go but there was also the more interesting creation of the troll sona or fan troll because trolls had such extensive lore behind them and such uniform traits it was super appealing to just make your own troll with all the troll rules and styles and everything like that plus because the basic troll design was already so iconic and unified it was really hard to make a bad troll sona so long as you followed the basic guidelines you couldn't really make a bad looking oc i don't think i've ever seen a bad troll sona and this is a dare send me your troll sonar art and i will tell you that it's good troll sonas were so common that it felt like everyone in the fandom had one and maybe i'm biased because both me and my co-writer emily had our own troll sonas with designs and lore and everything there were sites where you would take a personality quiz and then it would name your fan troll and make all the stats based on your answers and i would go on to this designated website msparp that was like omegle but for role playing is your troll sona and everything and it was certainly a time act 5 act 1 of homestuck might have been slightly controversial with homestuck's originating fan base but it was hugely popular with bringing in a new crowd of people as these fan creations got spread around it would raise a lot of questions about what the a troll was and where were they from and this would cause a bit of a rift in the community from those who believed you should or could start reading homestuck at act 5 so that you could immediately get to the trolls and those who were more purists and insisted that you needed to read from the very beginning in order to appreciate the story and characters it was essentially the homestuck equivalent of doctor who fans yelling don't skip nine at you after about three months act five act one was over and homestuck moved into act five act two the story went from being solely focused on the trolls to being very much focused on the trolls but also everyone else is here too there was finally follow-up to the end of act four the original beta kids got to interact more with the trolls there were a lot of character deaths like a lot of character deaths and it was all very very dramatic generally speaking this feels like the era of homestuck that people most fondly look back on that's not to say that people consider this part of the series perfect but generally speaking when people think about homestuck they think a lot about the stuff in act 5 act 2 for better or for worse in a lot of respects it's the least divisive section of homestuck this all culminated in the end of act 5 act 2 animation known simply as s cascade it's a 12 minute animated epic featuring four different musical pieces in seven different parts and it's tying everything together and it's so grand and cool and badass and the soundtrack slaps and it's just great there was a lot of hype for this and it very much delivered and i'm not exaggerating the hype the release of cascade drew so many clicks that it shut down new grounds the site it was hosted on and then it crashed the mspa website and then they uploaded it to mega upload where it crashed that site too everybody wanted to see this thing cascade was a big point in the fandom and in a lot of respects represents homestuck at its most popular most relevant and most revered it serves as the end of homestuck's golden age and the end of act five from this point on homestuck is gonna get a lot more divisive and a lot more more so what was the homestuck fandom like at its height god it was a lot of things it was big it was bizarre it was sometimes terrifying it was a lot [Music] a couple weeks ago i asked people on twitter to tell me about their favorite memories of the homestuck fandom good or bad at that point it wasn't really for hashtag content so much as just getting a feel for things but there were so many interesting answers there not all of them can feature in this video because jesus christ it's already long enough but one of the main things people highlighted was the fan creativity and there really was a lot of it especially in the early days and not all of it was good because there was a large volume of it and a lot of it was made by kids but there were so many amazing impressive prints and a lot of animatics to songs too so lots of fandoms did this but homestuck was one of the really big ones to do it back in the day 2012 was really the height of it you'd have these animated hand-drawn videos set to different songs with cool fan art behind them and it's at the point where certain songs are just permanently associated with homestuck in the minds of millions of people because of these projects like you know how if a song was in shrek it's a shrek song forever a lot of songs are just homestuck songs forever now to a whole generation of people girl with one eye by florence in the machine is a homestuck song forever because of this animation with a million and a half views matchbox 20s let's see how far we've come as a homestuck song because of its several animatics blue lips by regina spector homestuck song some of these got up to six and a half million views and that's just the animatics of established songs possibly the most iconic one that people remember is actually a song parody of we didn't start the fire called you can't fight the homestuck which came out on july 1 2012 with four and a half million views despite coming out just short of a decade ago i have a strong feeling a large chunk of people watching this video can probably recite it from memory it was passed around tumblr a whole lot and if you look at the comments people are still coming back to it fairly often with this feeling of nostalgia one really big thing with this fandom was just this real sense of collectiveness just the hype and the idea that this fandom was one big family was huge at least at the start and don't worry i'm not gonna pretend that everything was actually peachy in this fandom speaking of peachy more on that in a second suffice it to say there was criticism and problems and discourse and fights and all that but there was also just this collective atmosphere of pride in being this weird giant fandom one thing was just the level of excitement people felt whenever the comic updated if you remember that homestuck cop story from a couple videos ago where someone made up a fake story about reading homestuck with a cop after it updated it was clearly cringy and fake but one thing it got right was that homestuck updating was a big deal the comic would update and people on tumblr and forums would immediately announce a new chapter everyone clicking to react to the new stuff at the same time the hype of new updates was collective and huge possibly my favorite memory of this was this blog called mspa profit it was this pretty small tumblr blog that without fail would announce a day or so earlier when the comic was going to update and how many pages the update was going to be they used to just cryptically post update is coming and they were always right which is weird as hell right because hussey didn't usually announce when updates were going to happen they just happened there were exceptions of course like for when the comic had gone on hiatus for a while and it coming back was a big deal but updates often kinda came out of nowhere but without fail this one blog would always know beforehand i remember there were all these theories about how they knew lots of posts speculated that the blog was somehow run by andrew hussey himself back in 2017 they actually revealed how they did it and it's some super interesting stuff basically they accidentally stumbled across this weird hidden backend forum that hussey used to use to post the comics they couldn't see what was in them but the number of posts on the forum was public and they very quickly realized the number of forum posts corresponded to the number of pages of homestuck so they just checked the hidden forum every few hours and counted the difference in posts each time they checked and that was how many new pages each update would be it's such a weird roundabout way to upload pages onto a comic and the fact that this seems to be how andrew hussey did it and that someone figured this out is just so quintessentially homestuck another big thing in the fandom was just how certain memes almost thrived in their weirdness and their inability to be understood to outsiders to the extent where if you weren't a homestuck fan and you saw half the they were posting about or laughing about it was probably utterly incomprehensible my favorite example of this is this post about how homestuck is a metaphor for the obama administration just everything about it is great especially vriska friska i think about this post so much i love it sometimes these jokes got old pretty quickly sometimes they stuck around for ages like one thing in the fandom was this joke about buckets basically homestuck trolls reproduce in a way that involves buckets so whenever a troll character sees a bucket they get really embarrassed because it's seen as a not safe for work thing in their culture like how condoms would be to us so there was this whole meme in the homestuck fandom about how if anyone saw a bucket they'd act like a homestuck troll and make a big thing out of it or the soft drink phago features a lot in the comic especially in its early years so homestuck fans drinking fago at conventions would be a big thing stuff like that speaking of homestuck fans at conventions one of the main reasons the homestuck fandom was infamous is how they were at cons and i mean the good and the bad so basically every convention from like 2011 to well when the plague struck and convention stopped existing was famous for having homestuck fans attend them in droves remember how i said that the trolls were so appealing partly because they were really easy to draw and cosplay yeah you'd see trolls wandering the convention grounds on mass at pretty much every con ever especially anime conventions some trolls were more popular than others characters like tavros or pfeffery usually didn't get that much love but if you were at a convention in 2012 you probably saw at least one of every character cosplaying at conventions was this massive unifying thing for so many fans especially awkward teenagers using homestuck for this huge sense of community lots of fans would go to conventions alone and very easily be able to identify who their people were because of some horns and grey face paint it was like a built-in friend group at a lot of conventions giant group pictures of homestuck cosplayers were super common you'd meet big groups of people and goof off and drink faygo and be loud and have you know theater kid at 11 pm at denny's energy and it was wild and fun and memorable and there were lots of great memories associated at least for the fans outside the fandom homestuck cosplayers didn't have the best reputation for a few reasons part of it is that if you're a theater kid hanging out with your theater friends at denny's after a show is a time-honored rite of passage if you're a denny's server or another patron though you probably hate the theater kids homestuck cosplayers quickly had a reputation of being loud pushy or just overall obnoxious at these cons the perception was that they were always trying to tell every person they met about homestuck that they didn't really have an appropriate set of boundaries that they were mostly 15 and annoying and so particularly older cosplayers perceived them as unlikable and immature and obviously that's not to say that every homestuck cosplayer was actually like this hashtag not all homestucks but rather because the fandom was so big and skewed pretty young a lot of people had a negative perception of them whether it be from personal bad experiences finding them annoying or just hearing about bad experiences from others lots of people both inside and outside the fandom have horror stories of obnoxious homestuck con kids being rude to them or being overly pushy or just ruining the experience for other people one time a bunch of them spat into a bucket at a restaurant just because it's on video no i will not make you watch footage of that some of this is also just the fact that there were so many of them especially at anime cons homestuck despite a lot of fandom memes is not actually an anime so classic anime fans often got really irritated with like 70 of the attendees being home stuck cosplayers it was seen as basically encroaching on their space and this isn't even mentioning the main problem people had with the homestuck cosplayers the face paint i remember the first and only time i did a homestuck cosplay which was of a character i will tell you about in a second who did nothing wrong i went to the local hobby shop and i bought a thing of gray face paint and the lady who worked at the store just stared at me with this recognition that i couldn't handle she just stared into my soul she didn't say anything but she knew perfect example of the mortifying ordeal of being known but okay homestuck trolls are gray if you're going to cosplay a homestuck troll unless you're doing like the human version you need gray paint which means cons were overrun with a lot of first-time cosplayers who were painting their entire bodies this is a problem because a lot of these people did not know how you were supposed to handle body paint basically you need to seal it with some kind of spray or powder or it will wear off on everything everything hotel employees had horror stories of entire hotel rooms covered in worn off grey body paint if homestuck fans were ever overly physically touchy they would get their paint on everything and everyone and most infamously there's the horrific con story from anime expo 2012 of the sharpie incident basically a homestuck cosplayer allegedly got into a bath at a hotel and in an attempt to dye herself grey with minimal effort bathed with vodka and sharpie dye she's in the bathtub for two hours while the people around her get increasingly suspicious and concerned finally they come into the room according to the story the bathtub is filled almost halfway with well what we later found out was 70 alcohol and sharpie die bottles and sharpies are just everywhere it's all over the walls on the tile on almost all the towels and on several articles of clothing and bags in the bathroom there are no pictures of this infamous incident and at this point it's more legend than fact but kennedy who read that line apparently knows someone who was there and i would trust kennedy with my life so i believe it even the mere fact that this became homestuck legend is very telling of how fans were perceived by a lot of non-homestuck people basically they were seen as the theater kids of fandom for good and for bad the height of homestuck's fandom also wasn't stranger to a lot of controversies beyond just controversies about the fans themselves the comic itself had quite a few of its own there are so many that mostly boil down to thinking that elements of the story were offensive and poorly handled and i don't have the time to list every single problem that the comic had suffice it to say it was a problematic fave but a few got really big one of these was the caucasian incident basically the kids in homestuck don't have canon ethnicities their faces are drawn in a cartoony style they're not colored in and so how to interpret these characters is up to fans there are some kind of popular fan interpretations of this like jade is very commonly drawn with dark skin dave is almost always drawn as white but nothing is technically canon but the thing with that is that there was a pretty vocal audience of people who would get really really mad if you suggested that some of these characters were anything other than white if you drew certain characters as black or just dark skinned in general a lot of people would get really really mad which made some fan atmospheres pretty hostile for artists of color like if fans would draw john is not white you'd have people get mad and link you to some early panel where baby john is described as pink or if they drew roses black people would get mad because she has blonde hair just like that that specifically was a really shitty atmosphere in a lot of ways and to be honest hussy could have done a better job if the intention was actually to depict them as a racial stuff like the lying describing the character as pink did definitely seem like the author was just thinking of them as white people when writing it but still this freedom allowed for fans to interpret these characters as people of color and a lot of folks were really shitty and racist to fans who did this so with that as the context there was this part of homestuck in act 6 where the characters were in something called trickster mode basically it's this weird state of the world where everything was colored brightly it all looked like something out of candyland and in particular there was a panel where a character who had previously been depicted as a racial was explicitly described as caucasian this line was apparently meant to poke fun at these fights and to poke fun at racist fans but who knows very quickly this caused controversy some people getting mad at hussy for it lots of people using it as proof to be like see i told you they were white now you can't draw them is not white anymore just lots of like that hussy ended up actually having to change the word caucasian in this page to the word peachy this was apparently in response to people using the panel to tell fans the character couldn't be imagined as a person of color anymore the whole thing was just a mess and it soured homestuck for a lot of fans there was also stuff like the character concrete existing where like his whole personality for a significant chunk of the comic seems to just be getting offended by everything and being a parody of social justice warriors some people liked it and found it hilarious some people really hated it or damara whose whole personality was just horny japanese schoolgirl for a bit again a lot of people did not like that and justifiably so lots of characters plot points and moments caused that kind of controversy where they were seen as offensive or tone deaf or were just fought over in general and oftentimes people had good reason to not like these plot elements these were just a few examples of things because the whole story is almost a million words and is very convoluted but suffice it to say there were a lot of these controversies some bigger than others but i think that if you had to ask me to pin down the most controversial thing among fans in universe the main thing would probably have to be vriska so okay there was a lot of discourse in the homestuck fandom over things like characters and shipping shipping was its own beast because there were sort of four types of main relationship in troll culture there's traditional romantic shipping like we'd think of it there's a form of relationship they have that i'll describe here over simplistically as being someone's best enemy like a sexy arch-rival situation there's a relationship that kind of means like platonic soul mates and then there's a relationship type which is basically asking someone to mediate the whole best enemies thing to make sure you two don't destroy each other these were called the four relationship quadrants and it was common to ship characters across the lines of these quadrants some teenage homestuck fans would even try to find real-life friends to fill all their quadrants the platonic soulmate situation was called being someone's moirail and i remember lots of posts of people calling their friends their moirails or stuff like half-baked attempts to find a sexy enemy arch-rival anyway there was lots of shipping and character drama pertaining to these trolls and at the center of a lot of that was a character named briska circuit i can confidently say she is the most divisive character in the homestuck fandom so basically vriska is especially at the start not a good person she's manipulative toward all her friends she's really mean towards several characters for what seems like cruelty for cruelty's sake and she kills a lot of her friends keep in mind that death in homestuck is very much not permanent because resurrection is a thing and multiple timelines are a thing and so a character can die and come back and be kind of okay with the fact that they died a lot of it is video game rules you know but still she does do quite a bit of murder i would say she's in academic terms kind of a huge and a lot of people don't like her specifically because her levels of um huge energy are sort of relatable to people like a lot of the characters in this comic are bad people lots of them are murderers multiple of them are responsible for certain characters being permanently injured and a lot of them are just not very good people but the specific way she treats certain people is seen as close to home for a lot of fans the way she acts towards some of the characters is seen as abusive in ways that feel a bit too real to people the way she treats her friends reminds them of actual bullying in real life stuff like that you've probably never experienced someone trying to murder all of the people you love or if you have i'm very sorry but it's very possible that you have experienced someone being shitty to you because you don't like them back or manipulating you to get what they want or trying to sabotage your own success at something so they can do better than you the ways in which briscoe was a huge were very real to some people so she naturally inspired a lot more emotion than some of the other characters not only that but hussy focused on briska in the narrative a lot a lot of time is devoted in the story to briska trying to become a better person and failing or learning about vriska's backstory and making her seem sympathetic or bringing her back from the dead not only that but a lot of people feel like given all the times she's depicted as sympathetic she isn't sufficiently punished for all the bad she's done so this is where my opinion differs from other people's in terms of redemption arcs i don't think characters need to be physically punished in some way to be redeemed i think redemption arcs are about making amends to the people hurt in as good a way as possible and making an active commitment to do better it's why i hate redemption arcs that start and end with a character doing one grand gesture and then dying i don't think good redemption arcs need to incorporate punishment but rather a commitment to do better but a lot of people did feel like she didn't earn what redemption she got whether it was because of a lack of punishment or a lack of commitment to do better basically a lot of people saw her as andrew hussey's very shitty very unlikable pet character who was being forced onto the audience despite being a terrible person on the other hand a lot of folks really really liked friska for one a lot of the shitty things she does are i wouldn't say excusable but it's at the very least explained beyond just that she's a shitty person who hurts people for no reason so a lot of fans can be like oh wow this is a tragic character i can sympathize with why she's like this she's a murderer because she was raised with an abusive parent figure who is a giant spider because homestuck and who forces her to do it she's cruel to people because due to her parental figure and background she sincerely believes she's making them stronger there are moments where she clearly shows a capacity to be tender and care about others and try to be better which makes it fascinating and devastating when she fails to do that and because she gets so much focus by the narrative she's very easy to grow attached to and also speaking as a former teenager i think she's just very easy for teenagers to relate to i honestly feel like a lot of teenagers sometimes just do cruel things and don't really know why they do it or they're at a stage where they realize they're selfish people and they want to become better but it's an uphill battle and it's messy and it's not linear and you feel like you're the main character of life and you're complicated and searching for an identity and all these intense feelings of being a teenager are in my opinion perfectly encapsulated in a character like vriska so there are naturally a lot of divides when it comes to her this both included shipping debates with her and the big thing whether we should like her or hate her there are people who hate everything she stands for and they think she's a bad character and a bad person there are people who think she's a bad person but a great character there are people who feel really attached to her and defend her and feel like she's a good character and a good person i haven't met anyone who thinks she's a good person and a bad character but i'm sure they exist quadrants and all i feel like this could be a political compass meme if it's not already someone get on that but you can see how very quickly these sides could come to hate each other one person complains that briska shows up too much someone who loves her comes in to argue that she's a great character and you're being unfair to her one fan says they think she's a good person someone else comes in with a laundry list of bad things she did someone else replies that those things were excusable and understandable someone else says they're not and because it's the internet these people fight forever and ever and ever it got to the point where the homestuck forums literally had to create something called a vriska quarantine thread which is my favorite thing ever literally they had to have dedicated threads for people to fight about briska or it would bleed over into the rest of the forums and by the way if you look into those riska quarantine threads there are lots of posts in them these things were not a joke it also spawned the meme vriska did nothing wrong which some people loved and some people hated my understanding is that most of these people do not actually sincerely believe that briska did nothing wrong but it's more like a glib ironic thing you say when you like riska but don't want to fight about it they were tired of people getting mad at them for liking a character who's a bad person some people also point out that a lot of male characters have done stuff that's pretty much on par with friska's actions and they tend to be humanized more and seen as a lot less divisive by the fandom so riska did nothing wrong quickly became a meme my favorite moment of that was when someone paid podcaster justin mcelroy to say it in an episode of my brother my brother and me great stuff riska did nothing wrong though of course you did have some number of people who did unironically believe riska did nothing wrong or that everything she did was okay and excusable and this phrase got them even more mad and there's more fighting and all of that people who hated her accused people who liked her of all kinds of terrible things and vice versa how much of it was true well the problem is that the fandom is so big that pretty much any critique of how the fandom acts is gonna be true for some subset of people yes there are people who unironically think friska did nothing wrong because there are literally millions of people in the fandom yes there are some people who hate her for the same they like male characters for because there are literally millions of people in the fandom etc etc there's always some hypocrisy to point out or a reason to hate the other side because there are just so many people that you can always find an example of whatever it is you're criticizing and you're usually right the sheer size of the homestuck fandom and the relatability of the brisket situation by which i mean both people who related to vriska and people who related to the characters risk a hurt made it really personal anyway my point is that briska did not do a single bad thing wrong ever in her life honestly the state of the homestuck fandom was basically a microcosm of fandom in general it was like every good part and every bad part of most fandoms but turned up to 11. the good parts were especially good the creativity was amazing and so was the feeling of being part of something so big and collective and special big enough to have this massive fan community but indie enough to feel intimate and the bad parts from character discourse to discrimination within the fandom to how some fans were perceived by outsiders felt exponentially so because of the sheer scale and nature of homestuck but despite being the peak of the fandom this was only the start because the world of homestuck was about to get a lot bigger and a lot messier 2.5 million dollars messier so in 2012 homestuck was at the height of its popularity it had a massive online presence was bringing lots of money in via merch and soundtrack sales and there was a plethora of fan content and coverage for the series homestuck was becoming less and less of just a niche online thing and more of a media empire and when something gets this big and this popular it's only natural to want to expand beyond the scope of what you had originally planned enter the homestuck kickstarter on september 4th 2012 hussey started a kickstarter for what was simply called the homestuck adventure game it would later like way way later get an actual name hiveswap the kickstarter states that with the end of homestuck on the horizon author's note homestuck would not be finished until four years after this hussey wanted to start turning his attention to making a video game version of the series and this makes sense in the grand scheme of things homestuck the comic was a parody of adventure games and so it's only natural for it to become a natural adventure game not much was said about the plot or storyline or anything like that beyond that it would be a self-contained story focusing on its own cast of characters unrelated to the plot and ensemble of homestuck while still taking place in its world they were asking for seven hundred thousand dollars with an estimated release date of two years later in 2014. so overall looking at this kickstarter page it seems pretty reasonable and well put together he's very upfront about how much money goes into making a video game states that any extra money obtained will be spent expanding the scope and support for the project and there were numerous enticing rewards and incentives that should excite people even if they weren't on board for a full adventure game there's not a lot in terms of say a proof of concept or character designs or anything like that but did you really need any of that stuff this was a homestuck that's all you needed to know all hussy really had to do to excite people was just include a montage trailer of homestuck's best moments set to dramatic music and say homestuck video game and people would eat it up and eat it up they did because the homestuck kickstarter quickly met its 700 000 goal like within less than two days it got 400 000 on its first day alone and then kept going and going and going and going until eventually by the end of its run it made 2.5 million dollars from nearly 25 000 people which is a ludicrous amount of money with this they were able to add mac and linux support multiple language options a physical release of the game an art book and even a digital copy of homestuck would be included with every physical release not to mention the reward tiers most of the tiers were pretty standard stuff the lowest tier was 15 which would get you the game a little bit more would get you the soundtrack higher tiers would get merch all that stuff but where it got really interesting was the much higher tiers five thousand dollars would get you all the earlier stuff plus a custom commission by hussey two people pledged that much ten thousand dollars on the other hand was the highest tier this is actually the maximum amount of money kickstarter will let an individual person donate to one project so this was especially wild ten thousand dollars would not only include all the previous rewards but also the opportunity for your fan troll to become a canon part of homestuck and two people actually went for it two people pledged ten thousand dollars to the video game in order for their fan troll to become an actual part of homestuck these fan trolls who are yes now a canon part of actual homestuck were this one named me irvadurgus and this one named nect and whelan here they are in homestuck i don't know if i like this or not i feel like i'm drinking clown tears in a way just the fact that people were willing to give 10 grand to andrew hussey in exchange for canon fan trolls is telling in and of itself of what homestuck's fan atmosphere was like but what's interesting is that technically other tiers also existed these weren't officially available on kickstarter since 10 grand was the limit but they were still listed elsewhere and they were mostly intended as a joke no one actually donated to them no one was really supposed to either but they were still technically options at 100k your character in hussey's words will survive for more than one page at a million they would become the most important character in homestuck i know no one was ever going to donate to this tier but to this day i still wish someone had i just want to see how that would have happened in the writing like how do you justify that hussy if you're watching this it's not too late you can go back and change things you've done it before please make my fan troll the most important part of homestuck 10 million dollars would get hussy to like one of your posts 100 million would get a reblog and just in case there were any eclectic billionaires out there one billion would get you a courteous thank you note i know these were joke tiers but like in all fairness this is absolutely something i could see elon musk doing point being the absolute dedication that people had to homestuck was really exemplified by the fact that people were willing to pay that much just to appear in a page of it even knowing their character was likely not going to survive for more than that page it didn't matter it was the chance to be in homestuck this was exciting everyone was so on board things were going great and then they weren't because as we all know getting the money from kickstarter is only half the struggle the other part is what to do once you actually have all that money so with millions of dollars in the bank and fan expectations on the rise it was time to get started on the homestuck adventure game and start it they did kind of sort of not really because the planned june 2014 release date just came and went with no new updates on what happened or what was going on there's a really great document compiled by a blogger named giovanni titled the hiveswap fiasco that has a lot of screenshots and in-depth logs from this time saved it's a really invaluable resource and if you'd like to read geo's account of everything that happened with the kickstarter i'll link it in the description it was a really helpful source for my research so full credit to giovanni for putting a lot of this together in one easily accessible place the most important takeaway from everything with hive swap is that it very quickly lost track of its original goal in terms of when the finished game was going to come out to the extent where for years lots of people were convinced it was never going to happen for one there was a surprising lack of transparency from the team about how the game was going and when it was going to come out the plan was for hussey to do weekly updates so that the backers would know what was going on with development even if it took a bit longer than usual because yeah on one hand the team got a lot more money than what their initial goal was and oftentimes that can mean certain products might take longer to put together especially because this was hussy's first actual full-fledged adventure game and sometimes things just take longer than you expect if you're new to something but the backers got almost nothing all they really got for about a year was updates about shipping out merch for the backer rewards which to be fair is a big undertaking there were tens of thousands of backers there's a lot to do but people got nothing about the development or an updated timeline or anything like that just merch it's worth mentioning here that from october 2013 to october 2014 the webcomic was also completely on hold this is something called the gigapause and it was a time of collective despair for the homestuck fandom i'll talk more about the pauses and update scheduling later but the most important thing here is that there was no new content for homestuck fans to really enjoy for an entire year which is a big deal to fans because they were used to regular serial updates almost three months into the gigapaws on december 31st 2013 the backers got their first like actual game update it was titled the first annual homestuck kickstarter update and although it was only visible to backers luckily for me people quickly shared the contents of the update around the internet thanks something awful it featured some character models and sketches information about the design work being nearly done and a lot of hussy telling you why they can't tell you more basically everything that had happened so far was either a massive spoiler or really boring paperwork the most important thing though was some more information about what the story of the game would look like notably spurb aka the game that exists in universe and jump-started the whole comic and ended the world would not be featured in the game the game wouldn't just be a recreation of spurb which makes sense because in the world of homestuck spurb isn't really an adventure game so much is just like a sandbox sim-like game where you can mess with things it also wouldn't be multiplayer wouldn't feature any voice acting would feature a new story with primarily new characters you didn't technically need to read homestuck to understand the game and finally most importantly it would feature trolls it also included the line i can only hope it was at least mildly frustrating for you to read because that probably means you want to play the game which amazing very consistent with everything we know about hussy so far love it and that was all people heard about it for almost 7 months the fact that this comic was also on well gigapaws made the lack of information coming out of the kickstarter even worse like imagine you're a devoted homestuck fan it's june 2014 when the game was originally slated to come out and you're almost completely in the dark about how development is going and if you're even gonna get an actual game in the first place that would be frustrating for fans of any media property but now also factor in the fact that you haven't had any homestuck content at all for 8 months now and no idea when the comic is supposed to resume suffice it to say a lot of fans were pretty annoyed don't get me wrong you had people saying to be patient that stuff like this takes time not to pressure the people working on it all that but the idea that hive swap was taking forever or would never actually be finished very quickly became a popular sentiment which is why finally at the very end of the month half a year after the first update people got their second helpfully titled first annual homestuck kickstarter update part two the update included some pretty neat concept art like this palace and these axolotls this picture of a new troll with a caption saying this was all they could tell backers about that character so far and most importantly it introduced the odd gentleman to us these are going to become some important players in the hive swap tale so okay the odd gentleman is a small pasadena based game studio founded in 2008 and part two of the update included telling fans that this was the studio that was going to officially be developing hiveswap according to the post they were chosen for a few reasons most importantly the scheduling just worked out for the whole thing and they liked the people who worked there and were confident about their ability to deliver a good game they also addressed some of the criticism about how the game was supposed to be out by now and they seem to have you know just picked a developer just because they were there and also had only shared a single game related update until then over the course of nearly two years in hussey's words 2014 was the year we were shooting for release note there was no target month given because i really didn't know what the time frame was down to that level of specificity i expected there would be bumps in the road because there always are for big projects like this when the kickstarter ended that is not really when development began in earnest that's when we began getting a lot of boring legal stuff in order which took a while probably around six months i'd say after that planning began for real so if we are behind schedule which may not even be technically true i guess it could be by that amount of time but i'm anticipating a major surge in development in the latter half of 2014 so we'll see where we are as we approach the end of the year thanks for the patience so okay a couple things firstly it's super weird to assert that they're not actually behind schedule because they never said when in 2014 the game was supposed to be out like they said june the kickstarter says june you can go back and check it still says that and like stuff is late all the time happens you can just say that weird the implication also seems to be that the game should probably be out within a little while they say development is going to start to ramp up soon and that they'll review their progress by the end of the year the update didn't necessarily satisfy everyone some people were just getting really frustrated with the whole thing as expected but the inclusion of some of the concept art like the axolotl and some kind of assurance that things were on track and would be out soon definitely helped to comfort a number of fans like okay the studio knows what it's doing no weird setbacks or curveballs so anyway three months later the fans get a weird curveball apparently the odd gentlemen were dropped as the official game studio developing hive swap just months after they announced that the odd gentleman were there instead they're now having it be run by what pumpkin so okay what pumpkin is kind of hard to explain because what exactly it is has sort of shifted over time but the easiest way to explain it is that what pumpkin is basically the in-house production company for homestuck run by andrew hussey it's taken on a lot of different functions over time what pumpkin was originally just the record label used for homestuck music then it was the online store where you could buy homestuck merch and now it's doing game development i guess it just kind of became a game dev studio as well as a record label and merch site so the odd gentleman were kicked off the project and what pumpkin very suddenly expanded now turning into two branches for the company there was what pumpkin florida which covered merch and the like and then what pumpkin studios new york which was apparently now a game dev studio there was a three-year non-disclosure agreement on the people who worked for the odd gentleman so for a long time no one knew exactly what happened there why they were kicked off the project and why all of a sudden there was this in-house production company handling the whole thing luckily the nda has since expired so there's some very interesting information out there about what exactly went down particularly interesting though is the rumor that the reason it all happened is kind of just that hussy didn't communicate the right information to the studio and didn't have them doing anything actually helpful in terms of game development so okay this information again comes from giovanni the person who created a really helpful timeline of the kickstarter stuff geo apparently spoke with several people who worked on the game before it went down and did some independent research to corroborate as much of it as possible including statements by hussey himself all of which are sourced in the article i'll link that one too some of these sources are anonymous so take everything i'm about to say here with a grain of salt i will say that a lot of the smaller claims are backed up but still you know don't take this as 100 fact unless there is a source there i also don't want to get sued for reporting on this so i'm not going to make any definitive statements about what happened here rather just that this is what geo and the people involved who geo allegedly spoke to have reported on it's also worth mentioning that there are kind of two sides of the story here both from blogs with the inside scoop on exactly what went down with hive swap there's the stuff geo reports on which frames the odd gentleman in a more or less positive light and hussy in a negative light and then there's this other post from one of andrew hussey's personal friends an artist who goes by i punch gay deer or just ipgd she shared a lot of behind behind-the-scenes stuff on homestuck before and is widely considered to be in the loop what both sides here agree on is that for the first couple years of hiveswap's development very little actual progress got made the stuff the odd gentleman made wasn't overly usable and a lot of time and money was spent and ultimately kind of wasted on these first couple years where these accounts differ however is exactly whose fault that is according to ipgd's side of the story the reason things went so slowly and poorly for the first couple years as that the odd gentleman didn't like do anything they were given money to work on hive swap a lot of it and they just kind of around and blew off the agreed upon schedule instead they mostly just made a shitty demo that wasn't really usable ipgd criticizes the odd gentleman for taking the money and then not really doing anything to work on the game instead prioritizing their own personal project to be clear the odd gentlemen were involved with making hive swap for quite a while before the actual patreon announcement introducing them so this two-year period would have been from 2012 where behind the scenes the team was getting ready to organize the kickstarter and get everything in motion and 2014. according to the geo article the problem started when hussey didn't provide the studio with any design documents including the specifics of what exactly was needed to make the game meaning the only thing the team could work on for hive swap during the first couple years of production were just general assets and nothing specific to the story according to this side they couldn't make much because they just weren't given any information about what they were actually supposed to be doing what's interesting is that the kickstarter notes for hive swap do seem to corroborate the second account that they weren't given the design document until way late into the game we know that because we actually saw a picture of the design document in the june 2014 update with text telling us that it was almost done here's the picture and here's the quote the game design documents comprise dozens of files and around a couple hundred thousand words in total last winter ryan north and i scribbled down all this stuff the basic outline of the game tons of funny ideas and puzzles and such then in the following months i and some other people ironed out all that into documents that programmers can actually understand and turn into a game so what does that mean for the status of development since all the documentation is just about done it's out of my hands at this point so basically it very much seems like hussy himself is saying that the design document only got finished around junish which does corroborate the idea that the developers weren't given the documents they needed for a really long time again there are two wildly contrasting perspectives here ipgd alleges that the odd gentleman actually took this money and pretty much ran with it using it to fund their own game instead according to this accusation they stole kickstarter money to work on a game called king's quest a game that they'd repeatedly implied they cared more about and would prefer to be working on again there's no proof of the accusation that they spent a couple hundred thousand dollars of hive swap money on their own game instead it's possible that this is true and everyone involved in the conversation will readily admit that the odd gentleman spent more time working on king's quest than they did on hive swap but again the point of contention is whether this is because they were screwing andrew hussey over or because andrew hussey didn't give them anything to work with for hive swap in the first place if hive swap was running out of money because the odd gentleman screwed over andrew hussey and embezzled it to make their own game it's a pretty open and shut case of a creator being exploited it points to a lack of business acumen on hussy's park but he's definitely not a bad person for getting screwed over but another side of the story paints the situation in a completely different light another claim again from an anonymous source who spoke to geo is that at some point during that time andrew had tog spent their budget the kickstarter funds on making 3d animatics and animations for the homestuck finale video act 7 instead of working on hive swap andrew justified this by saying the properties were related and the ax7 assets would be used in hive swap significant portions of the ax7 animation were in progress or finalized as early as 2013. the work all done in secret by the odd gentleman just like the ipgd allegations this is hard to corroborate i mean apparently geo spoke to several people who worked on the game who said that hussy was cagey about who did the act 7 work which doesn't 100 confirm that the odd gentleman did it but does raise suspicion but because this is also an anonymous source and it's not backed up by any specific thing hassi says you do have to kind of take their word for it it definitely seems like geo did their due diligence in reporting on this they even created this super helpful timeline picture but i think this is worth taking with a grain of salt if this is true it would essentially mean that money that was supposed to go to hive swap was actually used on trying to finish hussy's webcomic if this is true it points to backers being lied to this is a pretty serious accusation and again it's not one i feel comfortable simply regurgitating uncritically a lot of this comes from anonymous sources whose credibility i can't confirm again there are basically two word-of-mouth accusations here that support completely different theories one where the hive swap money was misappropriated by the odd gentleman for their personal game and one where the hive swap money was misappropriated by andrew hussey for his personal comic either way it's a show i will say that there are a few things here that very much suggest that the odd gentleman worked on at least some small part of homestuck without being credited for instance hussey talks here about when he finished the storyboard for those parts and if you look at the dates that's right before he started working with the odd gentleman so it's definitely possible that the odd gentleman did uncredited work on parts of homestuck using money that was supposed to be for hive swap i can't and won't say for sure whether it's true but i think the fact that this is an accusation that's been made and talked about is still important in terms of dissecting exactly what happened to get the odd gentleman kicked off the game my instinct in terms of who screwed over who here is that the truth lies somewhere in between these two accounts in the worst case scenario this paints hussy as someone who actively screwed those people over and in the best case scenario he himself is painted as someone who got screwed over and just isn't very good at managing a business in any case in terms of the less contentious stuff that isn't about embezzlement both sides here do agree on the fact that the odd gentleman didn't really do much work on the actual game over those two years the real point of contention is again just whose fault that was given the fact that we do know it took hussy almost those full two years to come up with the appropriate documents i'm inclined to mostly side with the odd gentleman here no matter what the cause for not much of use being produced over those two years the odd gentlemen were officially off the project and the creation of the new game studio with what pumpkin was theoretically going to refresh development for the project and get things as back on track as possible which is especially important because it was nearing the end of 2014 and if the stuff produced up until that point really was as nothing as it seemed they were going to have to get a lot done so did they well so the announcement that what pumpkin was becoming a game studio contains some more information as well including the very interesting revelation that there would be multiple games hive swap was going to be the first game and then there would be a sequel titled haunt switch not only that but the release of these games was going to be episodic so basically each game was going to be divided into about four parts that would be released over time as they finished so although episodic release is usually kind of risky because making the remaining parts tends to be contingent on part one doing well the idea was that homestuck fans would be used to this format and would therefore support the game the announcement also included again a whole bunch of concept art designed to get people excited like suffice it to say this whole thing was a really big update for a lot of reasons backers got a few more months of radio silence as the end of 2014 aka the projected release year of hive swap passed by at this point any hopes for the promised weekly updates were pretty much gone and fans were just hoping for whatever they could get the next update came in february 2015 and updates started to get a bit more frequent february got people a video of some 3d models and april got fans quite a bit emerald city comic con was on and what pumpkin had a booth there plus some gameplay previews and most importantly an actual teaser trailer on the 10th the teaser showed off some gameplay the 3d nature of the game some music and the projected release date mid 2015. the mid-2015 thing was repeated again the month after where developer jess haskins promised that hive swap would be out in the second quarter of that year okay sure looking at the youtube comments they're not super positive like don't get me wrong people were still mostly excited for the game but a lot of people just didn't think it looked very good especially not for a game that raised two and a half million dollars in years of waiting and promises of elaborate adventure stuff the frame rate was the biggest concern for people and you can see a lot of comments just being kind of underwhelmed at worst and overwhelmed at most people still wanted to see the game happen but it seems like the more information people got about it the less mystery and excitement and assurance that this was gonna be great there was spoiler alert this game would not come out for the next a while keep in mind we're still at 2015 in our timeline and so we're not gonna see the release of hive swap for a while don't worry we'll get there but suffice it to say right now the fan atmosphere leading up to hive swap was just a lot less earnest and excited there was also one more update at the end of 2015 with another weird curveball so i know this might be a crazy stretch of an interpretation but some of y'all might just possibly be getting the idea that what pumpkin is not a very well-managed company just maybe so uh december 2015 they put out a release over kickstarter explaining that the entire what pumpkin new york staff had been fired if you remember that's one of the subdivisions of what pumpkin that got made after they fired the odd gentleman it's the subdivision responsible for handling the game the statement doesn't really say much about why this happened here's what we get most of the people who worked on the game in new york unfortunately are no longer with us as the studio has been restructured to be more of a geographically distributed operation to help save costs we really appreciate everything they did for hive swap and the passion they put into the game i would like to sincerely thank them for all the great work they did for this face of the project running a studio in new york for a while was actually a lot of fun they were all wonderful people and i wish them the best cool okay apparently this was a shock to the people working on the game they were just kind of fired just like that it wasn't expected it wasn't really planned for they kind of just lost their jobs and apparently there was nothing in the way of severance pay provided or anything like that the assumption here is that they just ran out of money to pay those people according to daniel kelly a contractor who worked with what pumpkin and is now no longer under nda what pumpkin started quietly fundraising from outside sources a few months after this so the idea that they just didn't have enough money to keep the new york staff working there is probably what happened but in any case it was this weird sudden thing that now cut down on half the development staff according to some of the people who worked there there was also no real lead up to it the blog post from someone who used to work on hive swap and then got fired after the new york office closed has a lot of interesting insight as to the whole situation for instance this whole thing super abruptly happened in october and right before they were all repeatedly being told that things were going fine look at this we had issues with the owners of the company aka the webcomic creator and them being transparent with us we had known two months prior to the layoffs that there was a tightening of the budget as we had to let go of an animator and two writers slash data people a few others myself included had their hours cut the night before we all got laid off we had received an email from our investor recruiter that we had interest from angel investors and things were looking good hell we might even get pay raises talk about mixed signals the owners didn't talk to us they didn't tell us when we were in trouble and we trusted them so you know a well-run company also hive swap was no longer going to be in 3d the game is 2d now and all the 3d assets they made are just gonna go to waste years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars just gone like that that's not to say this was a bad decision in terms of the quality of the visuals the frame rate was pretty rough beforehand very dragon prince season one but suffice it to say it was increasingly clear that what pumpkin did not know what they were doing and the whole situation was a mess hopes that the game would come out well or soon or at all were really dwindling lucky for homestuck fans they did actually get some game content in the late half of 2015 based on a kickstarter from someone involved with homestuck that was charming and enjoyable it just wasn't hive swap so undertale is a game you have almost certainly heard of extensively it's a pixel rpg that utilizes a lot of old adventure game tropes it's made by this one guy named toby fox it got really really really popular this isn't news to most of you but what some people don't know is that there's a really deep connection between toby fox and homestuck like fox used to make music for homestuck pretty regularly he developed a lot of undertale in andrew hussey's basement the song megalovania the iconic boss battle song at the end of undertale's no mercy run was originally used in homestuck the undertale kickstarter promises one person the option of having your canon fan troll in the game though that's a whole other can of worms so if you're a homestuck fan it's kind of wild to see how undertale a project that's very very steeped in everything homestuck that came from the guy who composed a song about homestuck characters giving birth to each other and did a lot of this work at andrew hussey's house so quickly become a thing beyond the confines of homestuck a lot of homestuck fans quickly latched onto undertale in hiveswap's absence that also might be a part of why undertale also has such a reputation for its fans being very loud and very zealous it's a few things some of it is just that there were a lot of kids in the fandom some of it is just that there were a lot of undertale fans and therefore a lot of pretty loud and wild undertale fans and some of it is that a lot of these people were homestucks but part of the reason a lot of these fans started focusing less on hive swap less on homestuck and more on undertale is that between july 2015 and march 2016 homestuck was once again on pause this was called the omega pause so not only was there no new hive swap content but there was also again no new homestuck content suffice it to say we weren't going to find out more about hive swap for a little while because in march 2016 the omega pause ended and homestuck was back in business and pretty soon the comic was going to end so homestuck was on and off hiatus for a large proportion of the time that hive swap development was happening this was increasingly leading to a dwindling and frustrated fan base that's not to say that no one got excited for updates or cared about the story anymore lots of people did and lots of people made some pretty amazing fan works and got hyped about the game and updates and stuck with it the whole time i will say that the people who did stick around for all of this were pretty tenacious but homestuck's golden days were definitely over the resuming of homestuck after the 2015-2016 omega paws also coincided with the mspa forums finally being shut down if you tried to follow the link to the forums you'd get this notice that they were temporarily down for maintenance and they'd be back up soon and then they never came back up they were just down forever in the equivalent of what some fans would compare to your dad going out for a pack of cigarettes and never returning it was later confirmed that all the content on the forums was corrupted and that everything that was once on there is deleted accessible now only via web archive you'd think this would be a big moment for the fandom with the forums that were a part of homestuck from the very start being shut down but it just kind of wasn't largely because the forum's shuttering wasn't this big event they were just supposed to be back up and then never were while it didn't shatter the fandom i think it's representative of the same way a lot of mainstream interest in homestuck died not with a bang but with interest gradually petering out in the absence of new content again not true for everyone the people who were still left made a lot of great and impressive things and i don't want to dismiss their interests but if you ask a lot of people when they fell off homestuck it's usually a pretty common answer to say around late 2015-ish just because of a mix of outgrowing certain interests and there not being that much content to sustain oneself on anymore homestuck's sixth act spanned from 2013 to a month after the forums went down in 2016. so act 6 was what most people were consuming during the time of most of the pauses and the kickstarter stuff its reception was fine the fan consensus seems to be that a lot of parts of act 6 kind of blend together and aren't that memorable like there's what's functionally a three-year time skip in there that's generally just not liked by fans and is seen as boring and unnecessary but there's also some fun character moments poignant exploration of real world issues and some beautiful animated sequences it's not generally considered to be homestuck at its best but it's not generally considered to be homestuck at its worst either it's just kind of considered to be ok homestuck mostly the main controversy about act 6 is from what some people saw as a cool move and what some people saw as homestuck jumping the shark this was an event called the retcon which was pretty controversial basically after a whole bunch of goes down in act 6 a lot of characters are at their lowest points people have died it looks bad for everyone lots of personal struggles all that a couple of the characters work together to create a new timeline where stuff is better and basically they all shift to this timeline and a lot of people hated this for one they just thought it was hasty and not well written they were expecting the ark villains to be defeated in a cool way and then the stuff just didn't happen and a lot of people saw it as clunky and uninteresting like don't get me wrong the production on it was still great but many fans didn't like the writing homestuck was no stranger to weird timeline happening but usually when the timelines shift it has lasting consequences of some kind or people are impacted in some emotional way but a lot of folks felt like because all the stuff in act 6 got retconned the story and character development just didn't matter the act had stuff like some characters dealing with addiction for example that just got retconned and now it's fixed because timelines none of the years worth of content years worth of things they waited through multiple hiatuses for mattered to the story it was bad to these people not only because it discredited years of out of universe time and stories people were invested in but it also made it harder for people to get invested in future stuff if none of it matters if it can all just get retconned why care but some people did really like it they liked that the retcon timeline brought back characters they didn't want to see die that some characters came from the original timeline so people still learn things and the characterization still mattered and that it works thematically because of the video game like nature of the story and how it's a way of demonstrating recovery from rock bottom basically these fans contested the implication that the retcon didn't matter and really liked the positive changes that came from it also one of the reasons this was so controversial is that it brought vriska back from the dead so everything involving briska once again made this divisive as hell the stuff involving the retcon was kind of a microcosm of how fans perceived ax some people loved it some people hated it but overall reception was lukewarm compared to the golden days of act 5. i feel like i'm drinking drano i feel like this is my heather's moment act 6 ended with a flash animation called s collide on april 6 2016. there were all these big plans in universe regarding how this big fight was gonna go and this is where a lot of it went down for the end of act six people widely consider the animation and music for collide to be great there was some cool art some great moments and just generally a lot of neat stuff at the same time a lot of fans found it kind of underwhelming like you know how in heist movies if they give the audience a detailed plan in advance you kind of expect some element of it to go wrong in order to keep it interesting that didn't really happen here it was just them carrying out the exact plan that readers were expecting them to everything just went as expected no big surprises no curveballs no new challenges it definitely wasn't seen as the worst thing in the world like it was technically very well executed and a lot of fans liked it but at the same time everything fans were expecting to happen just kind of happened so there wasn't a ton of tension basically going into act 6 fans weren't pessimistic but they were really hoping for something to excite them so act 7 was the final act of homestuck as we know it it began and ended on april 13 2016 the seven year anniversary of homestuck act seven consisted of a nine minute animation that resolved the story of homestuck titled the rapture plans for this had apparently been in effect for years and it was time for the big epic conclusion fans who hadn't thought about homestuck in years tuned in just to see how it would end the fact that it managed to end on the anniversary was so perfect for people it was like nostalgic bookends on a fandom that symbolized so many people's middle school and high school years if you check the google trends page for homestuck it's declining and declining and then there's this big spike and yeah that's the end of homestuck the actual story end itself basically shows the characters accomplishing what they set out to do from the beginning they win they create their new world and they get to live happily on earth the actual quality of the animation is really pretty and really good and you can see how far the story had come since the days of crude flash animations we get to see the characters happy there's this part that says thanks for playing and for people who got off the homestuck wagon and came back to see it end there's something really nostalgic about the entire thing this is a piece of media that's existed for seven years and it's grown so much and it's big and complex and it finally gets this send off and it's exciting but is the finale actually like good well as with any fandom as big as homestuck it depends who you ask but the finale was definitely controversial especially among fans who had stuck with homestuck the whole time a lot of fans saw the finale after so much excitement and hype and responded with a resounding wait that's it this is largely because the way the story resolved is just kind of anti-climactic and rushed it couldn't have actually been rushed because apparently this was in the works for years and was planned for so long but it felt like it to people this is partly because a lot of stuff in it kind of seems glossed over like there are a lot of plot threads that never get resolved or they're resolved off screen without ever being explained or there are elements that don't make internal sense for something that took years to plan and create people just weren't expecting the very end of the comic to be one single nine minute animation that didn't address a lot of like what happened to certain characters or even how certain important plot stuff was done that kind of ending just didn't feel suited for the complex beast homestuck had become some people disliked it so much that they theorized that this wasn't actually the end of the homestuck comic and the fact that it was bad meant that there would actually be more and well i've done an entire video on this exact same thing happening in sherlock and it never ends well so suffice it to say that yes this was actually the last part of homestuck basically some people hated the finale and saw it as an unsatisfying end to the comic on the other hand some people really did sincerely love it for reasons beyond just nostalgia it was kind of a return to the themes at the very beginning of homestuck the kids started homestuck by playing a game and they ended homestuck by finally winning that game and sure not every single threat they faced was laid out in meticulous detail but did it really need to be this was a comic that emphasized fan creativity and fan imagination throughout its history so why is it a bad thing to let fans fill in some of these gaps themselves there's ambiguity in the ending where it's happy and these characters get some respite but there are still threats out there and it still leaves room for possible sequels and fan works and follow-up and a lot of people really liked that not to mention the animation and music sincerely were great for many fans it felt like a satisfying ending to homestuck or at least as satisfying and ending as something as big and complex as homestuck was ever going to produce in some ways the controversy about the finale in the fandom was probably kind of unavoidable like what's more homestuck than fighting over whether homestuck is good or not and in a lot of ways it kind of is a continuation of collide if you liked collide you'll probably like the finale if you disliked collide you'll probably dislike the finale still the finale was divisive even for homestuck standards with a lot of people coming out of it satisfied and just as many people coming out of it frustrated but either way whether you loved it or hated it homestuck was over andrew hussey set out to tell a story and after seven years of work and money and blood and sweat and tears and fandom it was over sort of not really there's more so after the ending of homestuck there was a lot of excitement and pressure to keep the series continuing in some way shape or form some of this was a given after all the kickstarter game still hadn't been delivered so at the very least there was going to be one homestuck project that was going to be released hassi had already announced that there would be epilogues released at some point so fans knew that even though homestuck was over it wasn't really over and that raised more questions what ways could what pumpkin keep the series continuing well this is where homestuck 2.0 came in on may 9th 2016 the official homestuck youtube page uploaded a video simply titled homestuck 2.0 the video features an employee from what pumpkin and dante bosco the voice actor of zuko from the zutara ship announcing the start of a new promotional plan for the series the idea was that homestuck 2.0 was not one specific thing but rather the name given to the overall movement to expand the reach of homestuck and the potential for what it could be this would involve things like the aforementioned video game but also live streams and community-made content that would be submitted and uploaded to the youtube channel additionally bosco made comments both in the video and in interviews that implied they were attempting to expand homestuck into some sort of hollywood production most likely a television series and then none of this happened like the game happened but none of the rest did no community content was ever uploaded to the youtube channel no news on any productions or side projects came out no further updates were made about the homestuck 2.0 initiative they didn't even end up doing any live streams or anything later that october the video would be quietly taken down from the homestuck youtube page and that was that no official word on what happened or why things fell through or what the plan was now it's very strange and very weird and i'm not sure why they put this video out if they weren't actually prepared to or in a stage where they would deliver literally nothing and they still didn't have the video game out around the same time that the homestuck 2.0 video was taken down a new trailer for act 1 for hive swap was released which showed off more gameplay and it switched to a 2d art style it had another announced release date this time for january 2017 but then come january 28th and there was an announcement that hive swap would be delayed for several weeks and by several weeks they mean that hive swap act one would finally come out nine months later on september 14th and it's good it's a good game totally cute enjoyable experience the characters are charming and the visuals are very appealing and the soundtrack which was partially done by toby fox is very well done it's only a few hours long but for ten dollars it's not a bad purchase at all plus now with act 1 release the wait for act 2 shouldn't be that long right like they said it would be out next spring that's promising anyway it was beginning to look like things were finally stabilizing for what pumpkin so it was time for another huge cluster to happen viz media bought homestuck if that sounded like it came out of nowhere then yeah now you know how it felt like to actually be there at the time so if you're not aware viz media is a publishing company known primarily for distributing manga in the states things like one piece naruto bleach jojo dragon ball wait what does the script say things like one piece naruto bleach jojo dragon ball all these fun series that i get to make sarah say so that she sounds like a weeb thanks emily thanks a lot for that they're the largest publisher of graphic novels in the united states accounting for 23 percent of the market basically they're a huge deal which made them buying homestuck feel even weirder on october 6 2017 viz media put out a press release stating that they had acquired the publishing rights to homestuck they would be publishing new printed versions of the books starting in 2018 with digital versions also available for purchase in case you wanted to buy a digital version of a printed version of a digital web comic they would also be the official publisher of hive swap from this point forward plus any other homestuck related projects they would also have control of the website retooling it from ms paint adventures to homestuck.com on the surface it seemed like not much would change i mean homestuck would be getting more print editions that's cool but it also had print editions before the first three acts had physical copies made by what pumpkin years ago my co-writer emily actually still has them and the book contents are basically identical to the viz counterparts and hive swap was still going to come out and everything yeah the website url changed but so what that's just a website url it kind of sucked to see ms paint adventures go away since it was such an iconic brand name but theoretically going to homestuck.com isn't too big a change except that this would actually be the start of breaking homestuck as a whole and literally breaking like the site was broken it still is in a lot of respects the comic contained a lot of things like hyperlinks to other parts of the mspa site which just stopped working once the domain name was changed to homestuck.com like take this part from the end of act 6 intermission 2 where it just doesn't let you continue at all it redirects to a different page and if you want to keep reading from here you have to put in the url for the next page yourself there are several pages with this problem and despite people telling them about it and chronicling all this stuff over the last few years they still haven't been fixed additionally part of viz's plan for the homestuck website was to get it to work on mobile this was a huge deal as for years you just couldn't really read homestuck from your phone or tablet like you could but it obviously wasn't designed to be read that way and was an overall frustrating experience so they started working on a mobile site which meant messing with a lot of the formatting and moving things over to html5 and they did an okay job for the most part but there's still some issues like there's these pages in act 6 act 6 where the fireflies are present throughout the scene and it's a cool effect but if you try to press on the next page button while any of the fireflies are hovering over it it simply won't let you yeah it's a minor thing but stuff like this adds up and makes it way more annoying to read but the biggest detriment to the website came with the death of flash in july of 2017 adobe announced that in three years they would be ending support for flash this meant that anything that used flash would just suddenly stop working and considering homestuck was so rooted in flash and i almost mean that literally the comic was originally made entirely in flash this spelled worrying signs for the preservation of the comic in the long run all these animations mini games interactive elements were at risk of being lost to time forever this jump-started attempts to future-proof homestuck to mixed results theoretically it's all there there's not stuff missing per se but it's definitely not great like sure some of the stuff got converted to html5 and still looks and feels no different than it was before this tiny little interactive game at the start of act one where jon strife's his dad is still there and working but a fair bit of things weren't given such treatment like the interactive walk around section with car cat in act 5 is just static images now which okay like works but ruins a lot of the original appeal of those moments and then there's the big flash animations like cascade and descend those were instead replaced with embedded youtube uploads which theoretically is fine these moments didn't have any interactions and are basically just long videos anyway but the problem is that these uploads are for some reason ridiculously low quality like some go as low as 360 pixels they look and sound absurdly worse than their original counterpart and it's not a youtube specific thing because fans have uploaded these videos onto youtube in much higher quality so for some reason the official release just didn't these may sound like small things but when they're all added together it really affects the comic it means that anyone trying to get into homestuck now will be going through a significantly worse reading experience than one would have had years ago there are still ways to read homestuck in its original form the most prominent being the unofficial homestuck collection a free downloadable program that uses a customized browser to run all of homestuck's assets offline and on your computer and it's really nice that this exists but the fact that the best way to read homestuck is to download a fan made preservation effort and not to just go to the officially licensedhomestuck.com website says something about the amount of care being put into the official site by viz oh and they still didn't have the video game out in spring of 2018 the period of time where they said that act 2 of hive swap would drop several high-profile members of the what pumpkin team announced that they were parting ways with the company this included several artists the composers james roach and toby fox and hiveswept's director shortly after on april 8th the what pumpkin tumbler announced that they were going through a restructuring period and that while hive swap development would continue they were switching their focus to short form video games that could be released more regularly this would lead to the creation of the friend sim series short dating sim-like things where each volume would focus on you meeting one of the trolls from hive swap and befriending them 18 volumes of friendsom were released at around a dollar a piece the first one coming out on april 13 2018 and the last one coming out december 2018. they're relatively short with each volume taking about 30 minutes to an hour to complete depending on how fast you are at visual novel stuff and generally are fun enough i guess the thing that gets me is the idea that they even had to do this in the first place like here we are they managed to release the first act of a game that they theoretically should have started making in 2012 that was supposed to be released in 2014 and now within less than a year the second act of the game got delayed and they're suddenly talking about needing smaller scale lightweight things between hiveswap releases but and not to diminish the work put in by the hiveswap team because act 1 was overall pretty good and clearly had a lot of effort put into it but it's also not a massive huge release i mean when you get down to it it's not really that the first active hive swap took me about two hours to beat and i was really trying to explore as much as i could and see any possible dialogue option or clickable thing i could point and click on it was fun and it was cute and i enjoyed it but it wasn't a complete game nor did it feel like it had the same level of content as say undertale which was fundraised made and released in half the amount of time as just the first act of hive swap the whole point of having an episodic structure in the first place both in hive swap and just in general is that you can release the game in spurts without making fans wait through the long developmental process but now you're telling me that you need episodic releases of small scale games in order to help fans wait through the episodic releases of small scale games and after all those earlier production issues after finally managing to get one part of the game out suddenly what pumpkin and hive swap were going through production retooling again there's also the question of credits basically when act 1 of hive swap came out a lot of the credits for the game were just completely missing no one who did work for hive swap anytime before they fired the nyc team is credited for the game at all even though like some of their work is almost certainly used in the game even with the shift from 3d to 2d so that's a thing and it sets a bad tone then when act 2 of hype swap came out fans were surprised to notice that there were just no credits on it for any of the team members they just weren't credited the team later announced that the people who worked on the game wouldn't be credited in order to avoid them being harassed which is just what i spoke to someone who knows a lot of official homestuck creators pretty well and the impression i get is that this was less out of maliciousness and more out of incompetence like they seemed to think they were genuinely doing the right thing and protecting their team from harassment they weren't doing it to be evil but it was still a really bad move and was quickly met with backlash from the fans they pretty quickly announced that they would add the credits later via a patch and so three days after the release of hive swap act 2 they released a patch adding in the credits side note but drill like the twitter user drill was one of the writers for hive swap and the release of the credits led to people learning his real name and identity nothing too spicy there he's just a dude but the drill homestuck connection was wild to a lot of people but this credit mess and the weird time frame and repeated development problems really go to show that hive swap and really what pumpkin as a whole seem to be incredibly mismanaged in the time it took to release act 2 not only were they able to release 18 volumes of friend sim but they were able to release 14 volumes of a sequel to friend sim called pester quest which was essentially the same thing but instead used characters that appeared in the actual homestuck comic we wouldn't get the first teaser trailer for act 2 until october 31 2019 and then the game itself wouldn't come out until november 16th 2020. this is over three years since act one was released and eight years since the kickstarter itself reminder that hive swap still has two more acts to go and apparently a sequel series of games there is a very real possibility that it'll take them over 10 years to finish delivering what they promised with that original kickstarter oh but speaking of things taking forever to come out remember those epilogues [Music] so in 2019 three years after homestuck's official ending and on the 10th anniversary of the series fans were surprised by the release of the long-awaited homestuck epilogues while these were originally planned to be released only as a book published by viz the decision was made to upload the first three chapters online on april 13th and upload the rest a week later after all this time and anticipation there was finally more official mainline homestuck content out there and the fandom took it so there are a few things that are worth knowing about the epilogues one unlike the rest of homestuck they are entirely a written work with no artwork to be found simply conventional narration text accompanied by the usual chat logs one would expect from homestuck the entire thing is formatted to resemble a fanfic to the point where the opening page of them replicates the layout of ao3 two this was the first mainline homestuck project where hussey wasn't the sole writer or even the primary writer while he gave an outline for the story a team of other writers were responsible for most of it three they're long in total the epilogues are 190 398 words long for comparison the original comic was around 800 000 words total four the epilogues are split down two different roots meat and candy both feature dramatically different events and tell wildly different stories both are just as canon as the other five they're depressing as hell and not what a lot of fans wanted okay so the central mission statement around the epilogue seems to be examining the concept of canon and the idea of what an ending to homestuck should even look like thus the epilogues have been described as dubiously canon they are an official homestuck release yes but whether or not they're actually the official continuation is well dubious this is further emphasized by the fact that they do focus on two different timelines meat and candy the fact that even the epilogues don't give you one definite explanation for which plotline is the real one that matters means that fans get to decide which version of homestuck's epilogue they prefer to be true meat candy or none this was also done to encourage fans to have their own fun with homestuck and its world the series has always been defined heavily by its community be it the existence of the original suggestion box literally changing aspects of the story or if it was the popularity of fan adventures and fan trolls and original universe stories it can be said that for a while the world and culture of homestuck has existed far beyond whatever hassi managed to come up with and put into the comic himself so by presenting a story with two very different possible routes and two very different open endings it could theoretically open the door for fans to explore these concepts in their own way and make their own version of what they imagined the homestuck story to look like and fans hated it quality of the epilogues aside let's really look at the meat of the problem here or the candy of the problem here you choose the fanbase who wanted the epilogues didn't want a springboard to create their own canon they didn't want something this existential and something this unconventional and out of it the people who wanted the epilogues wanted them because they wanted to see more elaboration on homestuck's ending and wanted to see the characters they loved get closure and finish up their arcs this isn't to say they all wanted a sweet simple candy ending they just wanted unending and the epilogues didn't provide that instead making the story more complicated depriving most of the cast of happy endings and turning some fan favorites straight up evil from the fan perspective they weren't given three exciting options to determine their own take on the story they were given three lackluster options that all provided no real closure and well that was it homestuck was over like over over the comic had its official ending and now it had its semi-official epilogue sure it left a sour taste in people's mouths and there was a lot of dissatisfaction like a lot of dissatisfaction but at least the saga of homestuck was closed and for the most part while later parts were divisive fan opinion still seemed to view homestuck as overall pretty good though you may be wondering if homestuck is so good why is there no homestuck too on october 25th 2019 fans were taken by surprise by the release of a new comic called homestuck 2. well ok technically called homestuck 2 beyond canon but let's be real it's called homestuck 2. [Music] it launched at the same time as a new website and an official homestuck patreon the homestuck twitter even announced it by simply saying surprise and just linking to the website though they've since deleted the post for some reason so okay this was unexpected people knew the epilogues were coming they had years to prepare for them and then a few months to be angry at them that's fine but a full-fledged sequel seemed to be out of the question and when this was announced there was a lot of excitement like artwork was back the series was illustrated again and the suggestion box was returning that hadn't been around in ages sure there was a fair bit of concern over whether or not homestuck should be put to rest but going back and looking at the announcement there was a definite excitement there for the project and for the series to continue let's try to break down exactly what homestuck 2 is according to the series now deleted faq page homestuck is by all accounts an official fanonization by this they mean that homestuck 2 was a webcomic made by former fans of homestuck specifically by a studio known as snake solutions studios llp which had been producing over 80 episodes of a weekly homestuck podcast however it was also conceived and produced by what pumpkin and andrew hussey thus giving it some form of officiality the plot was based on an outline provided to them by hussey and it would directly follow the epilogues and theoretically provide some closure to the plots for both the meat and candy timelines introduced in them it's worth noting that homestuck 2 wasn't funded by viz media despite the rest of homestuck and the epilogues and related projects being published by them instead homestuck 2 was to be funded entirely by the new homestuck patreon homestuck 2 would update once a month however if the patreon achieved over 2 000 patrons which let's be real should be an easy task for homestuck it's the homestuck there would be an extra update each month beyond that patrons would get access to exclusive bonus content and comics that would expand the world of homestuck 2 and explore more of its characters this was all very cool and exciting and there was a lot of hype and buzz and interest and then homestuck 2 was bad it's bad y'all i'm sorry but it's really bad i'm trying to be nice here but i really don't like it homestuck 2 is bad i don't want to kick a project while it's down and as you'll soon learn homestuck 2 is very very down but i have to be honest when i say that i have read all of homestuck 2 and just found it not very good like it's not even an issue of the plot of homestuck 2 or whatever because homestuck 2 doesn't really have a plot nothing has happened it's a comic that has run for 400 pages for over a year and barely any plot progression has taken place this is already a bad sign as the original homestuck was known for its fast moving and frantic and batshit plot and the fact that homestuck 2 hasn't really replicated that is a huge flaw and that's not to say that it's bad that homestuck 2 isn't exactly like the original homestuck it's ok for sequels to deviate from the tone of the original but this weird dissonance is especially an issue because of how they branded homestuck 2 as a return to form compared to the epilogues how the suggestion box and drawings and all that would be back and this discrepancy between what was advertised and what homestuck 2 actually was is even further reinforced by the fact that they abandoned the suggestion box almost immediately after implementing it like it existed for one singular update suffice it to say despite the branding that this was going to be closer to the style of actual homestuck than its epilogues just in terms of how the story was told it just wasn't that on a lot of levels in terms of the pacing the main meat of homestuck 2 is spent mostly on characters talking just talking talking about their feelings talking about what's going on talking about what they plan on doing lots and lots of talking and here's the thing i don't mind stories that consist largely of characters having conversations some of the greatest pieces of media are just people having conversations look at i don't know my dinner with andre or no exit talking isn't bad but the dialogue in homestuck 2 doesn't really serve to deepen our understanding of these characters or allow for interesting things to happen to them it's just seemingly there to fill space sometimes the talking consists of lame jokey ship bait exchanges that feel right at home in those incorrect quotes blogs on tumblr like look at this exchange and tell me it doesn't flat out look like it could be from a parody quote blog where they just take quotes from other shows and put homestuck characters names in them for the memes sometimes it's long-winded talks where the characters just say different variations of hey i'm feeling sad over and over again and sometimes it's melodramatic meta-commentary ramblings of someone like dirk who is theoretically the main villain of homestuck 2. if i had to compare the writing of homestuck 2 to anything it's season 4 of community here you have the continuation of a cult favorite series now overseen by a different staff of people people who hold the original work in such high regard and are so afraid of potentially deviating from it or upsetting the fan base that their direction seems to be to try to replicate the voice and style of the original writer to the point of it just feeling hollow and shallow and unappealing characters are flanderized to such basic caricatures of themselves just so that you know it's them and can feel like you're seeing them in their iconic fan preferred state plot lines get a lot shallower and more focused on providing cool fan service moments rather than actually making sense or continuing the arc of the story it's just flat very very flat and uninteresting the type of writing that makes you question if you ever even liked the series in the first place all this would be fine if homestuck 2 had any real form of plot progression or if at the very least its update schedule was faster while hussey admits that his work ethic on the early parts of homestuck was unhealthy and unsustainable and shouldn't be repeated and quite honestly yeah he's right the fact that homestuck 2 was coming out only once and then eventually twice a month just made these non-important sections feel like filler it made keeping up with homestuck 2 feel tedious also the art in homestuck 2 is well for the most part it's good fine gets the job done but it's also way more of a mixed bag than the original was like just for starters you have the fact that despite the characters theoretically being 30 years older most of the cast uses their exact same designs and sprites from the original homestuck which makes it very weird when they're placed next to their children that are supposed to be 15 years old and then there's moments that are just straight up bad like homestuck was always designed to look a bit shitty like well an ms paint illustration but it was never actually bad meanwhile there are moments in homestuck too that just look bad like look at this leg look at this table look at this table the more you look at it the worse it gets and related to that one of the strangest directoral choices in homestuck 2 was the decision to not have the elaborate animations or really any interactive elements at all places where you would typically see a huge animated set piece were instead portrayed via simple written narration very similar to the epilogues so far in homestuck 2 there's only been two s-labeled panels one is just the words tick-tock repeating over and over again and the other is a short little animation of a rocket taking off neither of them last longer than a few seconds and neither of them have music even though homestuck 2 has an official soundtrack that you can pay real world money to buy this is really bizarre because a big reason why homestuck blew up in the first place was because of those big elaborate flash scenes like don't get me wrong homestuck is more than just epic orchestrated animations but when you're trying to get someone into homestuck you're not showing them the long chat logs or moments where jon puts his fake arms into a cake you're showing them cascade or playing megalovania for them you're showing them all the cool hype that can be found and what's supposed to just be a simple webcomic and you can't really do that with homestuck too apparently the reason for this was just that they couldn't do animation with their budget and staff and schedule which okay fair enough that stuff is hard to do and takes a lot of time but once again while hussy's schedule and output was unhealthy and shouldn't be replicated it's very strange that an entire team of people now being paid via patreon and releasing only one to two updates every month were unable to replicate even somewhat similar results to a single person working mostly by himself and updating almost daily like i'm not saying they should have crunched or overworked themselves i'm just saying it's weird that increasing the budget and number of people working on homestuck seemingly made the production value go down and let's go back to that patreon because i think it's very important so the idea of homestead 2 beyond canon is that it continues the theme that the epilogue started of challenging the idea of what is or isn't canon this theme doesn't seem to really be explored throughout the work itself to be honest at least not yet like dirk alludes to it in some of his monologues but really the meat and candy sections of homestuck 2 operate just totally normally working concurrently very similar to how the original homestuck would play with differing timelines but from a creative standpoint the concept of canon was a big deal a lot was made about the fact that homestuck 2 wasn't technically considered an official continuation but rather beyond canon except this element doesn't quite work out for a variety of reasons for starters advertising the series as being overseen by hussein based on hussy's outline is automatically gonna give it a semi-official status that's unavoidable no matter what anyone says this is something even the original faq seems to acknowledge it would be like saying this star wars project isn't necessarily canon but george lucas wrote the plot and oversaw the project and lucasfilm is promoting it and funding it there's a lot of power and perception that comes from being tied to the original creators of the original work but beyond that we also have to look at the patreon on the surface this patreon seems to be specifically for homestuck too it's the only project listed in the description all the benefits and rewards tie solely into homestuck 2 related content all of the bonus content and stories uploaded to it take place in homestuck 2's universe and are produced by homestuck 2's team and yet the title of the patreon isn't homestuck too is it it's just homestuck and less than a month after the patreon started they released a public update that included this quote from hussey the point of the patreon wasn't only to fund hs squared there are dozens of people working on homestuck games and projects and almost all of them came from the fandom originally so they're spread across everything we're doing like hive swap friend sim pest request and now hs squared contributing art writing music and programming the patreon is a good way for fans who love what they're doing to contribute to their overall compensation outside of game sales alone the better the patreon does not only does everyone at the studio benefit but the more you'll see hs squared start to pick up the pace on its surface this is a fine statement yes it's cool for the money from the patreon to be used to fund homestuck things but this isn't a patreon for hive swap or friend sim or pester quest this is a patreon for homestuck too and so what this means is that even if you don't like homestuck 2 even if you don't think that homestuck 2 is canon even if you want to argue that it's just a fan project there's an incentive there to support the creation of homestuck 2. after all the better homestuck 2 does the better the patreon does and the better the patreon does the more likely things like hive swap which still hadn't released act 2 at this time by the way would get extra funds that could help it be completed depending on your view of what pumpkin and homestuck as a whole this could be seen as a very cynical move using something as eye-catching and attention-grabbing like something called homestuck 2 to generate extra funding and interest to the other projects that what pumpkin wanted to create i don't believe that's entirely true as it does seem like homestuck 2 was initially a passion project for those involved but it definitely doesn't look good homestead 2 managed to run for half a year without issue okay well when i say without issue i mean that there weren't any big over-the-top scandals there were issues in the sense that there was a growing sense of backlash toward the comic and dislike of its pace and storytelling and everything but i mean that wasn't anything new homestuck had always had a passionate fan base so them being disappointed or disapproving of the series or the plot wasn't anything unexpected or unique but over time the backlash to homestuck 2 seemed to be growing more and more culminating in the april 13th 2020 update which introduced readers to the existence of yiffi oh yiffy oh boy i don't even know how to begin okay it's explained that some time in the backstory of homestuck 2 the character of jade really wanted a child this couldn't be achieved through her dave and carcat for a variety of reasons and they weren't able to adopt because of racist laws that discouraged interspecies relationships between trolls and humans so jade instead decided to ask her friend rose to be a surrogate mother they decided to do this without telling rose's partner kanaya for 15 years which is yeah kanaya seems weirdly okay with this despite literally just now finding out that her partner has lied to her about having a child for over a decade and um the reason why jade and rose are able to conceive a child together is because jade has partially fused with a dog meaning she has canine dna and a canine yeah it's um an interesting choice but um that's how we ended up with the partially dog child known as yiffany long stalking lalonde harley or just yiffy for short that opinion on yiffi is divisive like probably not on the same levels as riska because homestuck 2 just isn't as popular as homestuck was but for a lot of fans yiffy just represented a lot of what was wrong with homestuck 2. here was this character whose existence makes two pre-established fan favorite characters look significantly worse whose role in the story so far was meaningless compared to the importance placed on her all she's done so far is get kidnapped refuse to eat food out of a dog bowl and then get shock collared whose design seems more like a nostalgia critic fursona and her name is yiffy and uh let's talk about the whole dog reproduction thing because it ties into something very important with late era homestuck in its fan base as the series has progressed into the epilogues and video games and sequel comics one of the most notable things about it is the increase in focus on gender so before we get into all of this i should clarify that i'm saying this all as a cisgender woman yes though as a cis woman reciting the words of my transgender woman co-writer who i gave a pay raise to because i made her write about transgender issues and yiffy for me send your hate mail and discourse to at great cheshire she's entirely the one to blame for this all right so there's been a significant increase in trans and gender non-conforming characters because of homestuck's large and widely beloved cast however most of these efforts come in the form of applying these attributes to previously established characters sometimes this can be blatant like the character of roxy who goes by different pronouns depending on which story root you go down in the epilogue other times it can be subtext such as the pester quest game leaving a lot of hints that riska is trans to the point where the fan base and the author of said pester quest route accept it as canon and then there's june egbert and the toblerone thing in late 2019 andrew hussey started something that i guess can best be described as an arg where he hid a bunch of signed toblerones around the world toblerones were chosen because of this viral image of hussey standing in front of a cave holding a toblerone with the caption cave after the first set of toblerones was found hussy hit even more and kind of jokingly declared that whoever found the toblerones would get to make a request that would affect homestuck cannon the first of these requests was to make june egbert the interpretation of protagonist john egbert as a trans woman canon june was one of the more popular fan interpretations at the time and so when hussey responded to it by saying it will be done it caught a lot of people off guard and raised some attention there hasn't been much official verification of june beyond this with the exception of an easter egg of rose painting john's nails in volume 4 of pester quest and some lines in homestuck 2 that could imply that the story is heading in the direction of jon doing some gender questioning still the fact that something like this is even a possibility that the original starting protagonist of homestuck could be revealed to be canonically a trans woman based on a toblerone fan request is super super fascinating as you can imagine the response to these sorts of developments has been mixed like even beyond the fact that homestuck's fanbase is simply unpleasable and any sort of change has the chance to rile them up this is something that comes up a lot when people talk about the later elements of homestuck and it's something that people have issues with to give a generous interpretation of fan concerns regarding this taking previously established and known characters and writing them as trans years after the fact can all feel very retconny for some people regardless of if it technically counts as a retcon or not like when a character who has existed for over 10 years has suddenly been declared trans because fans want it or because a new creative team has taken over does that suddenly equal good representation or storytelling especially if the story doesn't actually set to tackle or cover a lot of the struggles that come from discovering your gender or how it plays into your relationship with the world and those around you because well that was never something the story thought to focus on not that all stories featuring trans or gender non-conforming characters need to focus on gender or gender struggles but rather i guess it's the question of if learning whether or not vriska is trans actually affects the story of homestuck and makes for good representation i guess the thing is whether or not these retroactive confirmations regarding gender identity feel empowering and impactful to the story or do they serve as ticking boxes for representation and headcanons like when i find out that jade has canine amab genitalia i as a cis woman reciting the words of a trans woman who wrote this part don't feel empowered or represented i just feel like oh that's huh and i think that it ties into a lot of the issues that fans were starting to have with homestuck 2 as a whole while as previously established the community had always been important as more and more homestuck projects began to come out with more and more involvement from people other than hussey it started to feel like the students were running the school like to certain groups of people who were having issues with choices like that and the direction entirely homestuck was starting to feel less like an original series and more like an outlet for fan service you could argue against this by saying that controversial decisions like yiffi and her backstory were part of hussey's original outline for homestuck too and something he considered non-negotiable but for these people that's not necessarily a huge comfort because it goes just beyond who's literally coming up with what ideas and more of the general presentation of homestuck as a franchise what once was a fresh and innovative series was starting to feel more and more like an insiders only thing that cared solely about pandering to the base that already existed rather than trying to expand what homestuck could be and what it could do there are also fans who disagreed with the creative direction solely because they dislike trans people and didn't want to see characters they like be trans or see any trans people in homestuck and you know that transphobes and transphobia if your primary issue with homestuck 2 is simply that you don't like the existence of trans characters in it or a character being revealed to be trans makes you think less of them simply because they're trans then off and if you're so bothered by the existence of trans characters in your online web comic that you feel the need to harass the creators behind said webcomic especially trans creators then you can absolutely off too that is not okay there are a lot of issues with homestuck 2 and the way it handles representation but to act as if it's the existence of trans characters or even lgbt characters in general as the problem isn't going to get anywhere nor is it going to produce anything healthy it's fine to critique this stuff i certainly have in this video but if the root of your problem is just that a character is trans well you're missing the fundamentals of the issue and just sort of being a shitty person and especially if you feel the need to harass the creative team about it and of course people started harassing a creative team about it this part of the story is honestly pretty divisive and hostile and fresh we're talking drama that's less than a year old with a lot of conflicting viewpoints on the root cause of it who is in the right who was in the wrong where the actions of the creative team at fault were the actions of the fans at fault a bunch of back and forth and it's messy and it caused a lot of drama that left a lot of people personally affected and it's probably for the best to just not really cover the specifics of it deeply this video isn't about the personal lives of the creators but about the actual homestuck properties themselves and how people responded to them i want to focus on that so here's what you need to know on may 21st 2020 it was announced that homestuck 2 would be going on hiatus for the month of june and then at the end of june homestuck 2's creative director announced that she was leaving the project and no longer interacting with fans a few days after that it was announced that homestuck 2 wouldn't be back until august meaning homestuck 2 would be going on a two-month hiatus so things were basically like the original homestuck now it should also be noted that around this time other creatives and directors and artists on homestock 2 were beginning to leave the project as well leaving it in a very not good state during the summer hiatus emails between hussey and a moderator on the homestuck subreddit leaked which made fans view hussey in a negative light these leaks are what's more than likely responsible for the patreon losing over a hundred patrons in a single day which is very much not a normal thing to have happen and ended up kick-starting the trend of homestuck 2's patreon gradually losing patrons over time it only took a few months for homestuck's patreon to dip below 2 000 patrons meaning the update schedule ended up getting halved very shortly after coming back from its first hiatus the idea of a homestuck patreon having less than 2 000 patrons is buckwild to me like you may be asking well is 1800 patrons a lot and that really depends on the context for an independent youtuber yes for the sequel to one of the most popular web comics ever no like yeah 1800 patrons is not a number to scoff at that's still a lot of people that's nearly three times as many patrons as i have but just think about how a homestuck patreon would have performed in say 2012 back when the kickstarter managed to raise 2.5 million dollars it's a sign that there was a growing trend of at best dissatisfaction at worst this can also be seen in the way the series was interacted with on twitter twitter is a hell site meant to cater to everyone's worst sensibilities but even this was bizarre posts announcing next chapters of homestuck 2 would receive responses like trying to get them ratioed by posting the team fortress 2 engineer people critiquing them for not having hive swap act 2 released yet or people actually seeming to be disappointed that homestuck 2 updated at all not the content of the updates themselves just the fact that updates for it even existed a fan base that was once so excited for new updates that they would crash websites were suddenly mad at the idea of anything new being uploaded at all that's wow it got to the point where later posts from the homestuck account just wouldn't allow replies at all and that's understandable considering the massive amounts of hate and harassment the team was getting but still geez like the most recent update hasn't even been posted to twitter at all but you just really don't want to be engaged with on that platform homestuck 2 would keep on keeping on until december 25th 2020 december 25th being an important day in homestuck lore after this the team would announce that they were going on hiatus again and there would be no update for january what's weird is that this was an update that finally introduced an actual plot into things with the idea being that they'd have to fix the timelines by taking the chosen character into the giant black hole called the plot point and um this all sounds familiar but anyway yeah the team would be breaking for january with the promise that they'd be back in february and they were kind of not really on february 11th andrew hussey put out a written statement on the patreon that the patreon would be shut down and wouldn't allow any new patrons nor charge any old ones said statement was originally made public but for some reason days later was set so that only patrons could see it which is weird considering that you couldn't like become a patron anymore but whatever the meat of this update is that homestuck 2 would be going through a radical change instead of being funded by the patreon and updated gradually it would be paid for entirely through private commission and released all at once when it was done the reason for this as cited by hussey is the fan backlash and how it led to ongoing harassment and abuse given toward the original staff of the comic specifically the members of the staff who are transgender or people of color and well that's that a few weeks later snake solution studios llp the original team behind homestuck 2 shut down rumors regarding who is still involved in homestuck 2 and who have left are all abound there hasn't been any official word on when homestuck 2 will come back or any other future for the franchise just in general i will say this in my opinion the odds of homestuck 2 finishing are slim according to the original creative team they foresaw their vision of homestuck 2 running for years years and years and considering the pace of the story and how little happened just in one year of updates how it feels like the inciting incident was just now happening it doesn't seem like homestuck 2 is in a state that it can easily wrap up soon finishing up homestuck 2 is going to require a team of creatives working privately to create hundreds more if not thousands more pages and considering how this series was seemingly already bleeding creative talent plus the toxicity the project is now infamous for getting people on board and ready to work is going to be a challenge itself and keep in mind this is theoretically the same company and the same brand that has taken almost 10 years to release half a video game i don't necessarily associate what pumpkin and the homestuck creative team with timeliness anymore even if homestuck 2 does eventually get finished and does eventually come out it more than likely will be years from now and well considering how little enthusiasm and impact homestuck 2 is leaving on people after one year of updates i can't imagine there will be a lot of fans who excitedly pick up the rest of homestuck 2 in 5 years once it's all over so yeah for now this is how the story of homestuck 2 ends not with a bang but just a whimper a really really sad whimper i guess in some ways homestuck 2 is like this fago you know it started out kind of good and sweet and now i've been drinking it for five hours of filming and i don't like it anymore [Music] there are a lot of things that even a video as ridiculously long as this didn't get to touching on there's hussy turning into an e-boy on instagram and just some of his trolling antics in general there's the controversy surrounding andrew hussey's co-writer cohen on hive swap there's all the different fandoms ex-homestuck fans migrated to like danganronpa and steven universe in 1776 which is great by the way there's the official music albums and the music work for homestuck in general there's some of the most famous fan fictions and homestuck parodies and stuff like kesha stuck and suffice it to say it's pretty much impossible to cover every single thing that was big in the entire history of the fandom because there was just so much of everything but what i think is interesting here is just to look at the big picture at what homestuck and its fandom really were what they represented what made them so unique especially looking back on it all over a decade after it started there's something very strange about homestuck and i don't mean strange in the sense that like its plot involves the nick cage bunny from conair and barack obama's ghost and betty crocker no i mean strange in that it's just such a weird phenomenon like in a lot of ways something like this can never happen again right homestuck was this strange very personal independent project that utilized the internet not just as an outlet for content distribution but as a medium itself a vehicle that could be used to influence the presentation and expression and direction of the series it got this cult-like fan base who obsessed over it frantically re-reading it and immersing themselves in this hard-to-explain niche web comic and the nature of homestuck how it reflects a certain era of the internet age makes it something that can never truly be replicated even by itself andres amador is an artist living in san francisco and his art largely revolves around beautiful complex patterns drawn into sand on san francisco beaches if you look at his art it's incredible geometric patterns that are so precise that it's amazing that one guy in his human hand drew them complicated mesmerizing series of lines where you're like it's amazing that this existed in your head like this landscapes so much bigger than one person and every day just a few hours after he makes these gorgeous pieces of art the ocean washes them away and the beach just looks like a beach again he knows this when he makes them the people who love his art know it and in a way its temporary nature is kind of the point in amador's words the entire act becomes a meditation on being in the moment of celebrating and being at peace with life and death when i look at homestuck as a whole the way it started and the way it ended it really feels to me like a sand drawing on a beach flash is dead pages upon pages of the comic are completely broken now homestuck can never be experienced now the way it could be back in the day attempts have been made to save parts of it and someone who is reading the comic completely from scratch nowadays could probably still get an enjoyable experience out of it but homestuck at its height can just never exist in the same way that it used to ever again the other day i learned that yahoo answers was gonna get shut down it just wasn't profitable enough anymore all these questions and this massive resource of people that was sometimes helpful and sometimes hilarious and sometimes terrible is just gonna vanish people will archive as much as they can but then that's it things like flash and yahoo answers to me really represent the internet and it's wild west days for better or for worse and as frustrated as i am with the fact that if anything on the internet wants to exist now it has to be tied to profit generation somehow i think that this all really goes to show that everything we take for granted on here is a lot less stable than we might think it is we build these sand pictures and draw thousands upon thousands of lines and we have to remember to appreciate them while they're here because one day they just won't be anymore the period of homestuck's existence isn't ongoing it was massive and complex but it was fleeting i won't say homestuck was unambiguously good all the time it very much wasn't for a lot of reasons besides the elements of the story that were just hashtag problematic there were also a lot of cases of poor storytelling or weak characterization or just not amazing writing throughout not to mention the stuff we now know about how andrew hussey tends to run businesses makes me think less favorably on homestuck as a broader collective enterprise but at the same time homestuck was something really unique it was huge and creative and sometimes beautiful and complex and that's marked not only by the work itself but also the culture that sprung up around it again that culture wasn't always good i think i've made that pretty clear in my video but that culture was this huge collective thing that can just never happen again it's a place full of thousands upon thousands of art pieces and animatics and songs a place where people were so dedicated to homestuck they'd give tens of thousands of dollars to die in its comic the culture of homestuck was terrifying at times because it was big and chaotic but it was also this uniquely collective thing and now that homestuck is over and now that it can just never exist again the way it used to the same is true for its fan culture the wave has washed over the beach homestuck truly is over i think that's what makes the epilogues and homestuck 2 such a fascinating thing to me if homestuck was a big complex piece of art that's gotten washed away to sea homestuck 2 is like if someone tried to draw in the sand while there was still water on the shore it's trying to keep making art past the times where that artwork can sustain itself or even be relevant and at the end of the day it makes you frustrated that you even thought to make art in the sand in the first place at some point you have to just accept that the tide is too high and it's time to move on to something else lest you have the entire experience tainted with frustration and disappointment and terrible sandcastles it's a shame that this is how homestuck's story ends that this is what we have to close this out on because it would be nice to talk about homestuck as this great nostalgic thing of the past this work of internet legend from yesteryear but instead the conversation around homestuck is just this tired old franchise that seems to keep getting dragged into increasingly controversial spin-off projects by a creative team that seems to be in the best of words very very mismanaged but i think now even after all this drama the buyouts the dropped works the controversial story choices the everything there is still something there to admire about homestuck whether that's as a part of internet history or a piece of media that you still hold dear there's definitely something there still worth remembering and i'll raise my fago to that fans of homestuck really love this story with irreverent humor and absurd lore that starts with the world being destroyed and follows our every person protagonists into a delightful space adventure if you're looking for something similar that's accessible and timeless i'm always proud to recommend the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy it's iconic and it's managed to stick around as a staple of humorous sci-fi literature for decades for good reason if you're interested in listening to it you can easily do so with my sponsor audible audible is a great service where you can listen to thousands of titles including audiobooks from pretty much any genre you can imagine we've got space erotica we've got comedy we've got tragedy we've got space erotica we've got action we've got mystery we've got space erotica it's great not only that but audible's new plus catalog allows members access to thousands of select audio books podcasts sleep and fitness tracks and audible originals that you can't get anywhere else you can also do things with audible like change the narration speed which makes audible super fun whether you're trying to chill out and relax going for a run or much like how i consume audiobooks eating chips while staring at the ceiling and vividly imagining myself as a sci-fi protagonist however you like to listen to audiobooks podcasts and more audible is a really cool site for all of it if you're interested in exploring audible and checking out audiobooks like hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy you can get a free 30-day trial at audible.com sarah zedd or text sarah zed to 500-500 that's audible.com sarahzed or text sarah zed to 500-500 [Music] confusing but magical it might be a little strange but it's really incredible it's about four kids who play a game and nothing [Music] animation with music and it's really good you can buy albums of it and you should that doesn't cover half of it the first part's slow but please don't quit it picks up the pace after a while so please just give it a try it's about four kids who play a game and nothing will ever be the same there's time travel shenanigans crazy plots and aliens they're trying to save the universe but not if the bad guys get there first they're gonna need a lot [Music] on top of a big thank you to all my patrons i'd like to specially thank lindsey benkel for joining my 20 plus tier welcome

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 968,208

Rating: 4.9352026 out of 5

Keywords: sarah z, homestuck, video essay, video essayist, youtube, fandom, sarah z homestuck, homestuck fandom, 4/13, karkat, vriska, rose lalonde, johndave, davekat, kanaya, jade, hussie, andrew hussie, sarah z homestuck fandom, internet culture, fan culture, internet history, big joel, red bard, lindsay ellis, jenny nicholson, youtuber, undertale, toby fox, toby 'radiation' fox

Id: ohFyOjfcLWQ

Length: 132min 31sec (7951 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Stevoisiak]

The comparison of Homestuck to Kingdom Hearts is great.

[u/MJL-1]

This has caused things to hit the fan on Twitter.

[u/Aureo_experience]

Crazy to think that THIS is what finally got Aysha's mask to crack.

[u/sandypockets_]

"brief"