Homestuck

The logo of Sburb, and de-facto logo of Homestuck.

Homestuck is a webcomic written by one Andrew Hussie. It is but one of the comics featured on his website, MS Paint Adventures, which is often abbreviated into MSPA. It is famous for being even more WORDS WORDS WORDS than Ctrl+Alt+Delete, having a shit-ton of characters and one of the most annoying wonderful prominent fanbases in existence. For this reason it is often referred to on /tg/ as Homeskub.

Spoilers ahoy, yo.

What is Homestuck?

Homestuck began on April 13th 2009, one month after the creator's previous story, Problem Sleuth, had ended. It started out in the same vein as its predecessors; a Quest-style comic run soley by user input. The first three stories, Jailbreak, Bardquest (unfinished), and Problem Sleuth channeled old-school point-and-click adventure games based of a man trying to escape prison, a bard in his quest to slay a dragon, and a hard-boiled private investigator trying to leave his office respectively. Andrew Hussie went in a different direction with his newest work.

Homestuck started with a kid called John Egbert who was trying to talk his friends into playing a hot new game called Sburb with him. This soon escalated into surviving meteors, cloning themselves, fighting all sorts of monsters, dealing with aliens of various degrees of friendliness/bloodthirst and an immortal Time Lord demon mobster pimp wanting to DESTROY EVERYTHING. Notable is that it is more than a regular comic strip; it sometimes includes simple animations, complex Flash animations, entire flash games, and a soundtrack that covers over a dozen albums. You can also buy the printed version of the comic from the website. So you do not only read Homestuck, you watch it, play it, listen to it and buy it.

So Why's This so Popular?

This is a meme called "Lemmy Telya". It is a picture of a disgruntled security guard at a convention looking at disdain at a group of cosplayers. In any other fandom this would have passed over quietly. Not in Homestuck. They named him Lemmy Telya, a bastardised version of "Let me tell ya/you". There was art of him. There was a cosplay of him. There was art of said cosplay. There was Rule 63 art of him. All black people pointing/looking at Homestuck cosplays were dubbed as "Lemmy Telya", including a lunch lady and a man who looks like the black Techno Viking. The reaction of said security guard to all this is as of yet unknown, but someone will try to get it. Poor man.

For a number of reasons.

Length

First off, Homestuck is fucking HUGE, and therefore has huge guts. Said guts include having a page count that hit 5000 on June 1st this year (only two webcomics at that time shared having passed that count, and they started in fucking 1995 and 1997). MSPA as a whole hit the 7000 page count on June 21st this year. This is an average of 5 panels per day, every day. Wrap your heads around that one.

It should be noted that what counts as a "page" for MSPA can vastly differ. It can be a simple image with a caption (or none at all), or as complex as a 20-minute flash game or a 13-minute flash movie that brought down MSPA, Megaupload and Newgrounds when it was released.

So to honestly judge its length would be by word count. That, my friends, is where it goes balls-through-the-wall insane. Around August 30th 2012 (that is 3 years, 4 months and 17 days since the start of the comic) this webcomic is, including all transcribed words in the flashes, walk-around games and static images, are you ready for it?

Approximately 800,000 words long.

That is not a typo. That is really an eight followed by five zeroes. Homestuck has a bigger word count than freaking Ulysses times three, or bigger than one Ulysses combined with certain translations of War and motherfucking Peace. Shit's long yo.

Storytelling

Andrew Hussie has an above-average thesaurus and is rather adept at playing with words, creating new ones and giving new meanings to others. He also frequently reuses earlier parts of his story including jokes, chat logs that are to be read a second time now that you know who the character on the other side is, objects that suddenly turn out to be EXTREMELY important some few thousand pages later. For example, this is an 100% accurate quote from last year regarding the then-new developments:

"So a seemingly insignificant item from the beginning of the story is suddenly and literally RAGE'd into existence by a bloodthirsty purple alien juggalo, and the very same item connects randomly and equally insignificant-looking events to explain the cause of pretty much every bad thing in the story. And it was all Betty Crocker's doing, because she tweeted an ICP video to a time traveling hipster wannabe on a site called Delirious Biznasty. In the past. Also, she's an alien too. For those keeping score at home, this made things less confusing.

I would like to repeat that this is 100% accurate.

The good mister Hussie is also fond of adding easter eggs regarding, mentioning, referring to and wholesale copying, his earlier stories. The most jarring one is an event in Act 6 Act 3 that nearly page-by-page copies an earlier of his stories. Some of them like a story called And It Don't Stop (which is about rapping robots) is homaged with a bit more restraint.

He often repeats his own jokes as well with slight twists to them, such as variations of "It keeps hapening bro" (sic) which has been turned into a pair of banners for 4chan. Others include "Succumb to unfathomable x", "Huge bitch bluh bluh", various uses of the word douchebag, fuckass, bulge and nook, and many, MANY more.

While on the subject of story telling, there is the absolute clusterfuck of how the story exists in relation to the others. Bardquest and Jailbreak have been shown to exist within Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth and these games are all video games in Homestuck. MSPA itself exists within Homestuck too, except there it is a story about a group of mobsters called the Midnight Crew, who had appeared in the extra material for Problem Sleuth. After Act 3 there was an intermission starring these guys and show that in their universe MSPA exists as well, being about a story very similar to that of Homestuck called Hivebent. It then turns out that that story actually happened, the Midnight Crew had met the characters in Hivebent and helped them in their version of Sburb. It THEN turns out that the events of Hivebent created the universe in which Homestuck takes place.

This means that the Midnight Crew is fictional in the Homestuck universe, the Hivebent universe both is and is not fictional in the Midnight Crew setting and the events of the Homestuck MSPA took place in the universe that was indirectly created by the Midnight Crew. It's the biggest brainfuck since that episode of Doctor Who that revealed that, while Doctor Who and Eastenders (A British series and not relevant to the point at hand) are fictional series in each other's universes they also exist in the same universe. It's like meeting Vulkan who tells you that his people have been telling stories about you and yours for decades. And this is not even counting the "Alpha" universe.

Also this would mean that there are three iterations of Andrew Hussie running around; one in our universe, one in the Homestuck universe and one in the Hivebent universe. Welp.

The Story Itself

The story roughly resembles Avatar: The Last Airbender in that there are four kids with different personalities and backgrounds (yes I know Katara and Sokka are siblings and are not that different in that regard, go eat a dick) have supernatural powers and have to deal with problems far, FAR bigger than any 13 year old should handle. Or any adult. Or anyone who's not the Emperor. The scope set on only a few characters and their struggles, group dynamic and their problems with budding relationships. This, combined with the HUGE cast (there is a joke where the original 151 characters are said to the poster's favorites, this is within the realm of possiblity for the story.), adds huge potentials for shipping. It should also be noted that the guy who voiced Zuko in The Last Airbender (Dante Basco) also played Rufio in the Robin Williams movie Hook, with Rufio appearing a few times in Homestuck as a fictional/real character that gets killed and has his corpse kissed by Andrew Hussie. Because Homestuck is skull-fuckingly weird like that. Then the real Dante Basco began reading Homestuck. He got a nice warm welcome along with a Saw-esque greeting of "HELLO DANTE" printed in the site's menu bar and the fans loved him for reading it. When he got to the corpse-makeout point he was rather freaked out by it but kept reading anyway, calling himself "a Homestuck". Real trooper that one.

While most fandoms have some shippers, Homestuck goes beyond by introducing four different kinds of love: regular human love, "hatelove" (not to be confused with being tsundere), platonic love involving being the better half of someone without there being romance involved and being a relationship councilor for another pair of people. Especially the first two are popular within the shipping community, with hetero, homo, interspecies (often combinations) are very common, partially because the race of aliens involved later in the story has no concept of homo/heterosexuality as they reproduce asexually (don't ask, nobody knows how it actually works since the author never divulged on the subject, all we know is that it involves donating "genetic material" out of which a large insect creature can breed young aliens) and as such do not require a partner of the opposite gender to reproduce.

The Fandom

Homestuck has a very large, active, vocal and creative fandom with a penchant of getting shit done. They write music, make games (though not very fast), debate characters, events, objects and individual pages to no end, combine it with other games, series, movies and such, and draw umpteen FUCKTONS of fanart. As always, some of it is genuinly good while other suck bleeding horse cock. Unfortunately, this also means that the ever-present percentage of fuckwad those guys is a pretty large number of people. This results in that it looks like all of the fandom are retarded cuntmuffins who kick it into maximum oversperg every time someone disagrees with them. This is not true; as in all fandoms that is the infamous vocal minority.

Internal arguments are common as well: people hating people for not liking what they like (and vice versa), and shipping wars are rife. Because of the above-mentioned place that romance has in Homestuck everyone is shipped with everyone, to the point where people pair off vaults with pogo rides. It does not really help that Mark Twain (the writer) and Betty Crocker (the baking mascot) are an in-story canon pairing.

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Gallery

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  Post this on a Homestuck forum. The shitstorm will be legendary.

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  The average Homestuck reader.

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  Andrew Hussie, Creator of Homestuck, doing the dance of his people.

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  No, seriously, what is with this comic?

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  The comic makes a joke about grimdark for a while.

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  Yes, it has gotten this bad.

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  Problem Sleuth gave us this glorious porcelain edifice of a bust, known as the Bowen Stilson Dogg.

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  Andrew Hussie knows of /tg/. And he finds great pleasure in our gifts.

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  Problem Sleuth never got as complicated as Homestuck.

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  Sister of Battle initiate Kanaya Mayram shows you how rage is done.

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  It

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  really

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  is.