Homestuck

Homestuck (also known as Hamsteak, or pejoratively as Homosuck) 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. It is also noted for being one of the few corners of nerd-dom that is female dominated. Well over two thirds of Homestuck readers are women and the primary residence for Homestuck fans, tumblr, is as overwhelmingly comprised of nerdy female virgins as 4chan is overwhelmingly nerdy male virgins, so love/lustbound fa/tg/uys often get into it in hopes of meeting the elusive female nerd.

Spoilers ahoy.

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

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 (left unfinished for ages, then wrapped up hastily partway through Homestuck), Bardquest (a multiple choice experiment that was abandoned very early and will likely never be finished), and Problem Sleuth (actually finished, and whose unexpected popularity directly precipitated Homestuck) 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 absurd office respectively. Andrew Hussie went in a different direction with his newest work, by making it about a group of early teenagers who chat and play video games online. Homestuck begins with goofy young hero John Egbert getting his hands on beta copies of a hot new game called Sburb for his birthday. What looks like a novel team-based version of the Sims takes a crazy turn when the game reveals powerful reality-warping properties, and matters soon begin to escalate as John and co find themselves surviving meteors, cloning themselves, fighting all sorts of monsters, dealing with aliens of various degrees of friendliness and/or bloodthirst and ultimately facing an immortal Time Lord demonic time-travelling crime boss seeking terrible and destructive ends. All the MS Paint Adventures are notable for being more than regular comic strips; Homestuck frequently includes simple animations, occasional Flash animations of escalating complexity, entire flash games, and a soundtrack that covers several dozen albums. You can also buy printed versions of the comic from the website in case you want a hands on experience, but that means missing out on the flash goodness. So not only do you read Homestuck, you watch it, play it, listen to it and (maybe) buy it.

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

Who are these douchebags?

Aka, the character primer. Homestuck has over the course of its three and a half years of existence amassed a spectaculary huge cast of characters. There are four kids who each have their own guardian/pet, Consort, Denizen, Exile, Archagent, Wise Black Man and more. This is discounting the Trolls and their associated characters, who increase this total by roughly four dozen, and many more beyond.

Kids

The four "main" characters of Homestuck are the Kids. They are the initial players of Sburb and have SHIT GO REAL on them.

Kids
Name Chat Name	Mythological Role	Weapon	Guardians	Description
John Egbert ectoBiologist (formerly ghostlyTrickster)	Heir of Breath	Hammerkind	Nanna/Dad	The closest thing the comic has to a main character, John is the guy we know the most about. He's a bit of a jerk but is good and genuine to his friends , loves cheesy movies (Nicolas Cage being his personal hero), has some serious derp moments but is smart, has solid intentions and is quite brave. He started off the weakest of the bunch of kids and has developed the slowest, but has steadily caught by present day and is seen one-shotting endgame critters in droves; seeing as his equals can travel through time on a whim or teleport your guts straight out of your body this really says something.
Rose Lalonde tentacleTherapist	Seer of Light	Needlekind	Mom/Jaspers	Rose is intelligent, sarcastic and thinks that everyone but she has issues of some kind. A big fan of the works of Lovecraft and Freud, she derives no small pleasure from psychoanalysing others and seeing what skeletons pop out. In spite of her outward snark she cares for her friends and alcoholic mother and will protect and help them any way she can. Went grimdark at one point, but it did not stick.
Dave Strider turntechGodhead	Knight of Time	1/2swordkind	Bro/Cal	The coolkid. Dave knows everything about being smooth, hip and ironic, or at least he thinks he does. Actually has an inferiority complex where he thinks he sucks compared to his impossibly badass bro (he doesn't). He is also the author of the tremendously shitty webcomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff which is so bad it curves back on the badness scale and becomes solidly awesome again. Other hobbies of his include mixing music, rap, photography and keeping up with internet pop culture (again, mostly ironically). He also mastered the ability to flash step; how his older brother taught him this is unknown.
Jade Harley gardenGnostic	Witch of Space	Riflekind	Grandpa/Becquerel	The resident "strange genki girl", Jade grew up alone on an island in the Pacific with only her grandfather, her devil-dog Becquerel and her internet friends to keep her company. She is quite skilled in the ways of nuclear science, is a crack shot and has bouts of narcolepsy. Not that she suffers because of this: she has a "dream bot" that allows her to fly around and interact with her home when she's asleep. Though quite friendly and energetic, she will drop the attitude fast when she feels threatened. She also enjoys gardening, playing the flute and bass (not at the same time) and watching tv shows with anthropomorphic animals, but she would not dream of wearing a fursuit. Ironically becomes part dog later on in the story via "shenanigans".

What is Sburb?

Sburb is the fictional game that got the plot rolling. It is a combination of The Sims, Spore and Minecraft, with a bit of Earthbound thrown in. The main "goal" of the game (much ignored and treat as the excuse plot that it is by the protagonists) is to defeat the Black King of Derse and claim his scepter to stop The Reckoning, an event that unleashes massive desturctio via a rain of meteors. The real goal underlining all this is, via cooperation with the White Kingdom of Prospit, a series of shaky political dealings with powerful god/demon entities called The Denizens (one is assigned to each player upon entering the game) and a extensive and convoluted sidequest about frog breeding, to create a whole new universe for you and your co-players to live in. Sburb is by nature a multiplayer game, with two players as a base minimal, and the highest known number of players in a single session being 48. This number needs to be even, lest there be dire consequences.

The game itself is described best as an intricate LARP supplemented by vidja elements. You are the player and as you play you personally level up, gain special powers, magic items and may even transcend humanity. But more on that later.

Getting Started

To start the game you need fellow players and one copy of the game's Client and Server disks for each. You install the Client disk while your a fellow player installs the Server disk, making you the "client player" to his/hers "server player". Each player installs their disks so that everyone is both a server for and client of another player.

This does not immediately change anything for the client, but the server will see the following screen focused on the player. This menu bar is where it all happens. This grants the player three cursor options and four menus:

The Select cursor allows the server to pick up and move objects. This expends Grist, the games abstract construction resource; the heavier/larger the object, the more it costs to pick something up.
The Revise cursor lets the server player build: walls, stairs, ladders, roofs and so on. As above: the bigger the construction the more Build Grist it costs. For example, a ladder costs more than a flight of stairs, which costs more than a small-sized floor.
The Deploy cursor interacts with the Phernalla Registry as listed below; it allows for game objects to be placed within the world.
The Phernalia Registry is the game's inventory. It can hold objects created by the game itself (more on that later) and objects created with them.
The Grist Cache is where Grist is stored, starting with basic Build Grist and expanding to include many others along the player's journey.
The Explore Atheneum is a store of some kind: players can spend Grist to gain access to new game objects and upgrades for the existing ones.
The Alchemy Excursus is where the crafting recipies discovered during the game are stored.

At the beginning of the game, the Phernalla Registry will have five items in it that are essential to the progress of the game:

The Cruxtruder needs to be activated in order to start the game, revealing a countdown until a meteor strikes the player's home, setting the player's first real deadline in the game. It can also extrude an endless amount of Cruxite Dowels (ootlong cylinders of mysterious sculptable material in the color associated with the player.
The Totem Lathe is designed to carve Cruxite Dowels into usable shapes, depending on the inserted Punched Card(s) ( more on this later).
The Alchemiter can "read" carved Cruxite Dowels and from the pattern create an object they represent. This is obviously a massively powerful and important ability, as the Alchemiter can literally *poof* any object into existance so long as the appropriately carve Cruxite Dowel is presented to it. The Alchmetier can be upgraded (and indeed the typical player upgrades it extensively over the course of the game).

An important thing to note before the rest of the Phernalia is the matter of the player's inventories. Each player has their own personalised video game inventory that seemingly exists outside the realms of Sburb and allows them to carry around vast quantities of potentially very large items, provided the player carries enough Captchalogue Cards (disposable sheets of magic rigid card that disappear into the modus when not in use). While useful, the Fetch Modii are based on a mixture of novelty game logic and data storage structures, and are a pain in the ass to retrieve items from at times. The difficulties presented by the various Modii are part of the challenges of the early comic, having a smaller but still notable presence later on.

The Punch Designix can turn Captchalogue Cards into Punched Cards, which can then be used to carve Cruxite Dowels and thus Alchemize more items. Players enter a code obtained from the back of a Capchalogue card and insert a Capchalogue card which is then punched. It is important to note that the code punched into the card does not need to match the code on the card, meaning you can punch empty cards and save the original object as punching a card locks the item in.
The Pre-Punched Card is a one-off item vital for starting the game successfully; it contains your Cruxite Artifact and is the first object a player must craft and interact with in order to enter the game.

The steps to crafting new items via the Alchemization process is as follows:

Obtain the objects you wish to combine to create an item.
Obtain a Cruxite Dowel from the Cruxtruder.
Read the code on the back of the Captchalogue card, enter it into the Punch Designix and punch a card. A code consists of eight digits with letters A-Z (with a difference between capital and lower case), numbers 0-9 and the ? and !, for a total of 64^8=281.474.976.710.656 (281 quadrillion) different combinations. You now have a punched card.
Take the card and the Dowel to the Totem Lathe. Insert the Dowel and the card in that order to get a Carved Totem.
Put the Totem on the pedestal of the Alchemiter. If you have enough Grist, the Alchemiter will substract an amount from your Grist Cache and create the item. Totems are infinitely reusable when they are made.

One of the first items a player should make is a Capchalogue Card. When you have a Carved Totem based on one (code 00000000), you can make Capchalogue Cards at the cost of 1 Grist of your choice. This is very useful when crafting a large batch of items in one go.

Entering the Medium

The first act to playing a game of Sburb is the removal of the lid from the Cruxtruder. A heavy blow or dropping something large on it will work (this is where the server player comes in handy), releasing a powerful source of energy called the Kernelsprite and "starting" a countdown anywhere between 3 minutes and 25 hours. Two things must be achieved in this time: prototyping the Kernelsprite; and creating and interacting with the Cruxite Artifact.

Prototyping a Kernelsprite is simple: toss or drop something, ANYTHING into it. The item is absorbed into the Kernelsprite and gives it a form, empowering it for the rest of the game. Later, the Kernelsprite will shed its core to become two Kernel halves and a lone Sprite. The Kernels fly off to the kingdoms of Prospit and Derse, where they will radiate great power that shape both the forces of good and evil in the story. The Sprite, meanwhile, hangs around the players as their own personal ghostly mentor and assistant, getting them into the early stages of the game and being a helping hand through to the end. Protoype whatever you like, but remember that whatever you pick will be a double-edged sword: the more useful item you throw into it the more powerful both your friends and enemies will be. It may not be in your best interests to throw in your Bloodthirster or your Nicol Bolas card, unless getting swamped by monstrous powerful enemies right out the gate and having a demonic monstrosity be your "helpful" guide sounds like fun to you. Prototyping must be done once, but may be done a second time, which can happen before or after the splitting of the Kernel (depending on whether you want it to affect your enemies and allies or just your sprite assistant). Failing to prototype pre-entry will cause something terrible to happen with the two kingdoms and renders the game unwinnable.

Interacting with the Cruxite Artifact is more difficult. The player will be prseented with an object symbolic of departure somehow, be it an apple to be bitten (the loss of innocence as with original sin), a bottle to be smashed(christening a ship), an egg to be hatched (leaving the nest) or a puppydog pinata to be smashed (leave the grim imagery to your own imagination there). Figuring out what needs to be done to satisfy the artifact needs to be done quickly, and failure to do this results in a meteor flattening the players house before the game even begins.

If all goes to plan, the player, their house and anyone else in it at the time is whisked away into the mystical realm called The Medium, a place of cosmic significance tailored to each player in the game and where the action takes place.

Because a player cannot access their own phernalia register among other things, a lone player can never enter medium by themselves, but must do so through the assistance of their Server player. Similarly, such is the nature of the demands of Serverhood that said player would best wait until after they've escorted their Client in that they make a move to enter themselves, at which point their Server steps up. Doing so in turn will gradually involve all the players introducing each other in turn to the game world, with the last entree being led in by the first to make it.

The Incipisphere

Players will find themselves within the heart of the Medium, a strange place called the Incipisphere, where the meat of gameplay occurs. Each Incipisphere is comprised by a number of planets, orbiting a larger body in the centre. In detail:

Every player in a session has one planets devoted towards them, referred to as their Land. This will be the primary location for their quests, though over the course of their journey they can visit each other's Lands. They all follow the naming convention of having a pair of words, the first of which is monosyllabic, which then tends to be abbreviated; John's Land is the Land of Wind and Shade for instance, typically abbreviated to LOWAS. (one known exception overrides this to have an extra word in the name so it spelled LOLCAT). A convenient property of the Medium in which the Lands float is that in their transition from Earth, the players' homes kept their electricity, the internet and possibly plumbing working of their lack of connection. The Medium itself also provides all its locations with air and oxygen apply and a comfortable atmospheric pressure and temperature without any discernible source. The exact workings of gravity while in the Medium is unknown, but there seems to be no inertia while floating around in there. Perhaps it is related to the Elemental Plane of Air, but there is little known about the nature of the Medium. Every of the player's Lands have seven Gates located high above the player's houses; each must be traveled through in order to reach the mighty Battlefield at the heart of the Incipisphere and achieve the goal of the game.
In the midst of the Incipisphere rest Skaia, a great and mystical blue body said to possess "limitless creative potential". The great fluffy clouds that forever cross its skies bear mystic (if often confusing) portents to those who would gaze upon them, while deep within Skaia lies the greatest planet of them all, the Battlefield, where long before the players arrived a might war rages. Finally, on the outskirts of Skaia swings the golden planet of Prospit, a glittering world of light that supplies one of those two aforementioned armies.
The Veil is a belt of asteroids that circles the far borders of the Incipisphere. They contain numerous labs, facilities and installations needed to continue the war between Prospit and Derse.

Beyond the Incipishere lies the Furthest Ring, a Realm without reason or logic, where time and space mean nothing and is inhabited by a pantheon of unspeakable horrors whose true forms would drive any mortal insane.

Prospit and Derse

Sooner or later you discover you have another body when you fall asleep: your "dream self". You will also discover that this person wakes up in a room that looks just like your bedroom (except in either yellow or purple) on the moon of either Prospit or Derse. These are the two kingdoms that fight the war on the battlefield.

While these dream selves share the same abilities that you have they have no access to your inventory: anything you do you will have to do with your own wit and skills, more espionage and intelligence work than outright warfare. To compensate for this you are given one ability in return: based on what planet you are on you get either prophetic images of the future when you peer into the clouds of Skaia, or you can converse with the members of the Noble Circle of Horrorterrors who reside in the Furthest Ring.

There is a difference to how Prospit and Derse treat the players: Prospit sees them as heroes and saviors in a war they are destined to lose, while Derse opposes them. It is difficult for Dersites to harm the players because of a set of rules in place that prevents them from attacking the players before the full-out war begins.

The Battlefield

At the center of Skaia is the Battlefield, a chess-like location where the final parts of the game takes place. Its shape depends on the number of prototypings that have taken place. Unprototyped it resembles a 3x chess boards with the only pieces on it are two kings locked in a never-ending game: one black and one white. If you have a basic grasp of chess you will realize this is an eternal stalemate. But as more and more prototypings take place, the battlefield changes. A single prototyping increases its size to a large chess board with multiple pieces on it, a second turns it into a massive cube, a third into a sphere and a fourth adds a series of non-euclidean tentacle-ridges around the sphere.

While being mainly a series of black and white checked hills and plains, there are some features including fertile ground for growing crops, bodies of water, forests and castles.

Residents of the Incipisphere

The players are not alone in the Incipisphere. A number of beings reside on the players' planets, Prospit, Derse and the Battlefield.

Carapacians

The peoples referred to as the Carapacians (because of their tough exoskeletons) are the inhabitants of Prospit and Derse. They are on average shorter than an adult human and a slight bit stockier. While not more difficult to directly kill than humans, they are less likely to succumb to wounds to non-critical locations and are less likely to bleed out. The lower-ranking Carapaces have dentures that consist solely of molars, while the higher-ranking Carapaces possess arrays of cutting teeth for eating meat.

The King and Queen are both Carapacians, as are their subjects (commonly referred to as pawns or agents, depending on their activeness in the war). Both kingdoms also employ living constructs that are upsized versions of Carapacians. Derse is known to employ Archagents, Carapacians of more intellect, cunning and skill. They are often sent on more dangerous or difficult missions for the kingdom.

Every player will have one of five Carapacians assigned to him/her to serve as a guide (though not one per player in the case of the trolls); these are called Exiles for they have been exiled from the Incipisphere to the players' home planet, to a time period several centuries after they lived there.

Consorts

On every of the player's planets lives a race of intelligent [herp]tiles called Consorts. They live in simple agricultural Iron Age-style communities and worship Billous Slick (more on him later). The consorts are not very smart; while capable of speech and able to follow simple instructions they appear to have limited capabilities of deduction and have difficulty understanding human technology. The Consorts are also non-violent; they have zero combat ability making them easy targets for the various Underlings.

Underlings

Creations of the Denizens of the various planets, these are the primary enemies within Sburb. They are found on the players' planets and will begin to attack their houses upon their entry into the game. While mainly the servants of the Denizens, they are on friendly terms with the forces of Derse and will cooperate to achieve mutual goals on the planets. They seem to possess an intellect on the level of the Consorts. All Underlings are enhanced by prototyping, so if you were to prototype a Myr card and a bird, the Underlings could have Myr-like noses, wings, slender arms and legs, beaks, tails, or any of the above combined. These attributes combine with all those gained from prototyping, so you can expect to see a large variation of Underlings during the game. There exist a number of Underlings, some of which include:

Imps are the most common enemy. Standing at roughly 1 meter tall they can pose challenges for new, unupgraded players unless they have considerable enhancements from prototyping.
Ogres are the second-most common enemy. They are roughly 4 meters tall and possess large tusks. While large and physically strong they should prove no challenge for a player of a reasonable level or with moderately powerful equipment.
Basilisks are lizard-like creatures approximately six meters long. They fortunately do not possess a dealy gaze like most of their namesakes do, but they can easily devour a low-level player.
Giclopses are large (6 meters) enemies with short legs and low-browed heads. They are very strong and can be more than a match for players early in the game, but can be overcome with wits, skill and proper equipment.
Liches are amongst the first mid-level enemies. Approximately as tall as an adult human, they have gaunt bipedal bodies and skull-like heads. They are said to be frighteningly powerful, but the few times they appeared the protagonists made quick work of them.

There are other, rarer kinds of Underlings including massive horned or multiple-armed giants, giant octopi, huge skull monsters called Acherons, tick-like things called Titachnids and the enormous faceless things called the Lich Queens.

Denizens

Breath	Light	Time	Space	Life	Hope	Void	Naturally Powerful players
Typheus	Cetus	Hephaestus	Echidna	Hemera	Abraxas	Nyx	Yaldabaoth

Quite possibly the toughest enemies in the game, the Denizens are the de facto rulers of the players' planets. They have massive serpentine bodies, are incredibly strong and possess amazing intellect. Another notable thing is that they are aware of their status as constructs in a game, but do not take action based on this. They serve as the penultimate final bosses for the players, to be defeated in a 1-on-1 fight between the planet's player and the denizen itself. However, players who do not engage them may discover there are alternate routes to victory that do not require actually fighting the Denizen, which may even result in the Denizen providing aid instead. Aside from serving as a "final exam" of sorts to test if the players are ready they also possess immense hoards of Grist which are needed for the endgame. Which Denizen a player has is determined by the player's Aspects, which is described on the right.

So Why's This so Popular?

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?

Over 1,000,000 words long.

That is not a typo. That is really a one followed by six zeroes. Homestuck has a bigger word count than freaking Ulysses times three, or bigger than one Ulysses combined with either War and Peace, Les Misérables or Atlas Shrugged. It is now 25% longer than Romance of the Three Kingdoms as of the end of Act 6 Intermission 5. In case you didn't get the point around your head by now, it is over twice as long as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series, and over five-fourths the length of the King James Bible (though it is just slightly shorter than the entire canon of Harry Potter). In fact, the only novel that is longer than Homestuck is In Search Of Lost Time (a staggering 1,200,000 words, which is a feat that Andrew Hussie could potentially surpass depending on how long Act 6 Act 6 and Act 7 are).

If nothing else, Homestuck is long - and it isn't even finished.

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, and various things 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."

We at 1d4Chan would like to repeat that this is 100% accurate, and that it all makes sense (or something resembling sense) in the context of the story. Seriously.

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 possibility 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 (and women dominated) 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.

So why do people hate it so much?

Again, a number of reasons. Most of them have nothing to do with why people hate it.

Because it is so extremely long and starts off slow, some people do not have the patience for the comic and call it boring or nothing happens until act 5. The people who skip acts 1 to 4 (and the ones that skip the first Intermission, or all the parts with the exiles) are especially loathed amongst the fandom.

Second is that the story can really swing between whimsical fun, grim darkness and relationship shenanigans. Some people want a story to be consistent in tone, while others don't mind it switching around.

A third reason is the fandom: Due to its tendency to be quite vocal (especially the muffcunts of the fandom) people think Homestuck to be something that makes you stupid, and they fear it as horribly cancerous.

Fourth, many people quit homestuck halfway through because they feel it hurt them like an abusive spouse after their favorite troll has been killed off or their ship got sunk. A good deal of the more vocal haters were avid readers turned rabid haters. It is worth noting that on the shipping front, things are rarely set in stone and at least some degree of polyamory seems to be the norm.

And still more people hate homestuck because they feel it doesn't deserve the popularity it receives. They claim it is both trashy and pretentious, too avant-garde and simplistic all at the same time and that it fails to tell a story, but apparently not poor enough to warrant a simple dismissal instead of a more favorable and vocal shouting down.

So you're putting down your 40k minis and taking a gander at the fandom

Given that you're here on this site, you're likely a 40k fan primarily, maybe a D&D one too. Given that you're reading this, you're probably interested in how all this applies to you. Fear not, for those of us who are in both fandoms can tell you what to expect. One thing to remember is that with Warhammer most fellow fans are probably college age and male, in Homestuck most of the people you'll meet will be high school age and female. Yes, that's right, you're going to have to deal with women.

So there's a lot of delicate shit that you need to get over when you as an aficionado of painted plastic miniatures who engage in bloody war expose yourself to aficionados of teenaged RPG characters in webcomic format who engage in shenanigans. Firstly, most Homestuckers don't care about "who would win in a fight" questions, instead being far more interested in who's making out with whom. For those who came from the largely shipping free 40k fanbases this will be a culture shock. Secondly, Homestuckers won't care about traditional /tg/ displays of superiority such as more dakka so leave your gun porn at home.

Thirdly, whereas 40kers (which you probably are given that it's the semi-official game of /tg/) mostly hang around forums like dakkadakka or our home of /tg/, homestuckers by and large dwell in the mysterious land of tumblr where they congregate around especially creative/notable fans into cliques that take time to engage in heavy ship to ship combat, creating ever more fan content, and discuss the hell out of any updates made.

Joining tumblr is not necessary, but will help you understand the fanbase. Be careful though, there is a lot of porn there, so much so that the rule 34 site itself probably only has half of it catalogued at best, and that's not even getting into the smutfics. And being that many of the creators are teenaged girls you expect lots of very literal faggotry. Browse through tumblr at your own risk.

Fourthly, a lot of what is considered funny to Warhammer or D&D fans will go right over the heads of most homestuckers and vice versa. Creed and Gazebo jokes won't be recognized and may in fact get you marked as an outsider. While most Homestuck fans are very accepting of getting your fandom and theirs mixed together, there are some pretty loud and obnoxious purists who will jump on you for trying to "taint" Homestuck with foreign elements.

On that note, Homestuckers are notable for their general love of crossovers, typically marked by (insertnameofpremisehere)stuck. If you're good with writing and/or art, you can win some of them over by creating your own crossover. This will help you bridge the gap between them and you and may in fact get some of them interested in what you like. There are a few of the asshole purists, but they're thankfully rare and if you attract a big enough ~~cult~~ following they usually prove to be pussies and leave you alone.

Fifthly, you know all that teenaged drama you once dealt with? A good bit of the story is about teenaged drama. 40k fans will look for action and badassery in fanworks, Homestuck fans will look for dramatics and characterization in fanworks. Don't think that just because you can write a ball bustingly awesome action sequence that you'll win them over. You're going to have to rely more on intercharacter interactions to lord over them.

Basically the difference can be summed up like this. The 40kers and D&D players of /tg/ are mostly neckbeardy guys who focus on the setting and are most impressed by masculine stuff like explosions and big badass battle scenes. The homestuckers all over the internet are mostly energetic girls who focus on the characters and are most impressed by feminine stuff like drama and relationships. Bridging this gap can be a bit hard, but if you pull it off you are not only awesome, you now have access to the largest collection of women who might just be interested in seeing your meticulously painted collection of Death Korps of Krieg troopers on earth.

Homestuck and Warhammer 40k

As said before, despite the two fandoms being ECKSBAWKS HUEG and fucking everywhere on the internet, there's surprisingly little overlap between the two as their lack of shared interests leads to little reason to interact and even when they do 40k and Homestuck rarely get mentioned. That being said, there is still plenty for a 40ker to do in homestuck. Most common are fanquests that adapt 40k characters or species into SBURB players or have a SBURB session being played by members of a 40k faction.

Ones meant more for the 40k crowd will largely keep closer to 40k canon, and thus are probably going to have adult main characters, fudge a few of the rules of SBURB, and feature stuff like Chaos and the C'tan as being way more in the forefront. Ones meant more for the Homestuck crowd will go the opposite way, and will thus have teenaged main characters, disregard select bits of 40k canon, and mainly put Homestuck related plot elements as the lynchpin.

Either works, but as that one mexican girl once put forth, why not both? Nothing's stopping you from making a fansession with a group of Eldar, Tau, Imperial, Chaos, or Ork teens that freely mixes aspects of both. Nothing's stopping you from having your fanfic's black king becoming a Daemon Prince or Necrons crashing the party or maybe Tyranids popping out of a wormhole. On the flipside of things nothing's stopping you from thinking up a way to make SBURB a part of 40k as a test for planets and/or place stuff like the Troll civilization in the 40k galaxy.

On another note, the colors of the first four main characters (commonly called the beta kids) match up to those of the Chaos gods. John is blue like Tzeentch, Rose is violet like Slaanesh, Dave is red like Khorne, and Jade is green like Nurgle. What you can make of this is entirely up to you, but their associated elements also match up to the chaos gods.

Lastly, Homestuck also has the term Grimdark, but it means something completely different to them. To them, Grimdark means you're being influenced by lovecraftian monster gods who are causing you to burn with black fire and speak and act uncontrollably. Another variation of the term that may confuse you is Grimdork, which refers to the pairing of John Egbert and Rose Lalonde, as Rose once went Grimdark and John is of course a gigantic dork, whose supporters point to the classic union of the awkward nerdy guy and the classy, elegant girl.

Games

So I'm making a tabletop game version of Sburb/Sgrub/Homestuck ...

About once a week there's a thread on /tg/ about someone new who's going to be a pioneer and make a Homestuck RPG. It's a weird case of /tg/ not getting shit done, probably because the idea is inherently flawed -- the game 'Sburb' as described is a Mongolian clusterfuck of The Sims, Minecraft, Chess, Zork, Final Fight, Street Fighter, Megami Tensen, Earthbound and Princess Maker... and maybe a couple others. Attempts usually get as far as player vs. mooks combat and end there because this is the someone's first attempt at game design, or because they give up in the face of trying to write a system for four-axis multiple simultaneous divergent timeline romances between alien/human/ghost/demigod/chesspiece/software-construct and another or maybe two aliens/humans/ghosts/demig*BLAM*.

There are ~~three~~ two published attempts that get referred to as those who've actually completed something playable:

Be aware that we're still learning about the rules of SBURB so updates to these RPGs are fairly frequent. Just whenever we think Hussie's finally told us everything about the game, he pulls a Billy Mays and shouts "but wait, there's more!"

Links

The big enchilada Be prepared to spend several days at least going through it.
A homestuck *booru image repository
the soundtrack albums free to listen streaming
MSPFA fan-adventures like fanfic but with illustrations; most are started and then abandoned when the author loses interest. Recommended stories that don't need familiarity with Homestuck are:
- A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe
- Superego
- Waterworks
Why nothing and no one is ever safe, ever. View at your own digression, you were warned.

Gallery

Post this on a Homestuck forum. The shitstorm will be legendary.
The average Homestuck reader.
Andrew Hussie, Creator of Homestuck, doing the dance of his people.
No, seriously, what is with this comic?
The comic makes a joke about grimdark for a while.
Yes, it has gotten this bad.
Problem Sleuth gave us this glorious, monolithic, porcelain edifice of a bust, known as the Bowen Stilson Dogg.
Andrew Hussie knows of /tg/. And he finds great pleasure in our gifts.
Problem Sleuth never got as complicated as Homestuck.
Sister of Battle initiate Kanaya Mayram shows you how rage is done.
It
really
is.