Ever since its initial release in 2009, Homestuck has been one of the most infamous webcomics of all time. Love it or hate it, the impact it’s had throughout the Internet is enormous. After seven long years in the running Homestuck is finally ending and with it an end to one of the strangest, craziest fan base and story that there ever will be.
The Story
Source: mspaintadventures
Homestuck’s story has been one of the hardest things to explain throughout the time it’s been around. The comic is presented in a nonlinear fashion that makes it difficult to wrap your head around. Despite how hard it is to explain, it’s a really intriguing story. It centers around four 13 year old kids, John Egbert, Jade Harley, Rose Lalonde, and Dave Strider. They all get an augmented reality game called Sburb which destroys the Earth. They all are sent to their own planets and learn that the goal of the game is to create a new universe. They are both helped and hindered by a group of 12 aliens, called trolls, who had played the game before them and were who created the human’s universe.
Early on in the game, the humans doomed their session of Sburb by creating an unbeatable enemy, Jack Noir, by prototyping Bec, the First Guardian of Earth, into their kernelsprites. This forces the kids to have to use a game method called the “Scratch” to create a new session that is able to be beaten. The surviving trolls and four pre-scratch kids have to spend three years traveling to the new session where four post-scratch kids Jane Crocker, Jake English, Roxy Lalonde, and Dirk Strider have taken up the game.
When the two sessions finally unite, the kids and trolls unite together along with some of the dead pre-scratch trolls who scratched their session to battle Lord English an enormously powerful enemy, the former empress of the trolls known as The Condesce, and Jack Noir.
The Characters
Source: mspaintadventures
Saying that Homestuck has a lot of characters is an understatement. Homestuck has over 160 characters. Of course, only a few of them are major players in the story. The main characters are the four pre-scratch kids, the four post-scratch kids and some of the 12 post-scratch trolls. The most important of the trolls are Karkat Vantas, Vriska Serket, Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope, Gamzee Makara, Aradia Megido and Sollux Castor. Only two of the pre-scratch trolls are important, Aranea Serket and Meenah Piexes. Some of the carapaces, Wayward Vagabond, Prospitian Monarch and all incarnations of Jack. The final two main players are the two cherubs.
Even with that massive amount of characters, Andrew Hussie still managed to make them all unique and interesting in their own ways. Even characters that die out pretty early on -- though it’s not like death stops a character from still being relevant in Homestuck -- still have their own personalities that really shine.
Because the comic lasted for such a long time, many readers were able to grow up along with the original four pre-scratch kids as they went from the ages of 13 to 16. Their growing up played such a large role in the story. As they play the game they’re forced to deal with the death of their guardians, the death of their friends and occasionally even the death of themselves, the character grow up quickly. The characters of Homestuck are one of the biggest reasons why it’s such a great comic.
The Fans
Source: mspaintadventures
By far one of the most important things in Homestuck from day one has been fan interaction. In its initial stages fans were able to add their own commands to advance the story like with Andrew Hussie’s previous comic, Problem Sleuth. Eventually that changed, however the vast majority of the characters were named by fans.Naming wasn’t the only thing fans have had their own input in. Many were able to contribute art and music to the comic.
Of course, not everything the fans did was beneficial. Back in 2011 all the way through 2013 the fandom was enormous. If you went to a convention there would be mobs of people with unsealed gray face paint staining hotel furniture, mobbing up for meetups, and spitting in buckets. It was a monster both in real life and online. It was, quite honestly, a mess. The mspaintadventures website was crashed quite frequently due to the influx of fans scrambling to read the newest “upd8,” they even crashed websites like Newgrounds and Megaupload when Hussie put the Cascade flash animation on it.
Yet even with all of the bad, being in the Homestuck fandom at its craziest was still a joy. I’m not sure that Homestuck would have been as much fun for me if it hadn’t been for the insanity of the fans. Everybody hated the crazy fans, the ones that spit into buckets or destroyed hotels with their makeup, but there was a sense of unity among that. The fans were everywhere, making fan-trolls or drawing art, fanfiction was commonplace. I’ve seen fandoms since then, but none seem to have the crazy energy that made the Homestuck fandom what it was. It was a crazy mess of teenagers and twenty-somethings, but there was a real sense of belonging in it that was just like nothing else.
The Most Important Animations
Cascade
Source: School Library Journal
Cascade was the flash that destroyed websites. When it was uploaded on October 25th, 2011 it crashed not only the mspaintadventures website, but also Newgrounds and Megaupload when it was uploaded onto them as well in an attempt to let fans even watch it.
Website crashing is not the only reason it is important though. It wrapped up Act 5 in the most spectacular way. Cascade really showed what makes Homestuck so special, with incredible fan contributions in art and music making it a visual masterpiece with emotional impact.
Game Over
Source: Reddit
Game Over is one of the most impactful flash animations that Homestuck has. It was one of the most unexpected moments to happen in the comic, things had been going poorly but nobody could have expected just how poorly things would go. Paired with the visually incredible flash was incredible music that really made the impact land.
Collide
Much like Cascade, Collide is an 18 minutes long monster of an animation. It wrapped up Act 6 in a way that rivals Cascade. It has all of the visual and musical punch that Game Over and Cascade had and multiplied it. The battles were awesome, there were genuinely funny moments, and small shout outs to fan jokes that were touching.
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