Homestuck

Homestuck (also known as Hamsteak) 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.

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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 (wrapped up in a hastily manner), Bardquest (unfinished), and Problem Sleuth (actually finished) 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.

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 is to defeat the Black King of Derse and claim his scepter to stop The Reckoning, an event that destroys everything in a massive rain of meteors. The ultimate goal however is to create a new universe for you and your co-players to live in. Sburb is indended a multiplayer game: you require two players as a base minimal, the highest number of players in a single session is 48. This number needs to be even.

The game itself is described best as a LARP supplemented by vidja elements. You are the player and as you play you 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 sceen 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 Build Grist; 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 Phernalla 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 the Build Grist is stored, alongside many other types of Grist the players will discover. There are several basic shapes for the Grist: one shaped like twelve triangles slapped together to form a not-quite [die]], cubes and droplets.
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 and can extrude an endless amount of Cruxite Dowels (footlong cylinders in the color associated with the player, more on this later).
The Totem Lathe is designed to carve Cruxite Dowels into usable shapes, depending on the inserted Punched Card(s) (again, more on this later).
The Alchemiter can "read" carved Cruxite Dowels and create the object they represent. This can be upgraded with a number of shunts that allow players to insert items to give the Alchemiter properties associated with the inserted item.
The Punch Designix can turn Captchalogue Cards into Punched Cards to make objects usable for Alchemization (yes, I'm getting to that in a bit). 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 Punched Card is 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.

As hinted at above, players are able to create items with the various game objects. To do so they must carry out the following steps:

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

When you are ready to start playing you need to remove the lid from the Cruxtruder. A heavy blow or something big dropped on it will remove the lid, release a Kernelsprite and start a countdown anywhere in between 3 minutes to 4 hours. During this time you need to do two things: prototype your Kernelsprite and making and doing something with your Cruxite Artifact.

Prototyping you Kernelsprite is simple: you must throw something into it. This is a double-edged sword: the more useful item you throw into it the more useful your Sprite is during the game, but the kernel powers your enemies. So you might not want to throw in your Bloodthirster or your Nicol Bolas card, because that will ramp up the difficulty of the game quite a bit. Prototyping needs to be done twice: once before you enter the game and once after, or both before. Doing both prototypings after entering (or not at all) will render the game unwinnable.

Interacting with the Cruxite Artifact is more difficult. They all symbolise departure somehow, be it an apple (the loss of innocence like with original sin), a bottle (christening a ship), an egg (leaving a secluded place) or a dog (symbolises death and renewal in some cultures). Figuring this out needs to be done quickly.

If you fail to do this in time a meteor flattens your house and kills you. If you succeed however, you and your house will be teleported into The Medium. Immediately upon entering your Kernelsprite will lose its Kernel, which splits in half and goes to either side of the Incipisphere. That is where the game truly begins.

It is strongly advised players enter one by one so that Server players can help their Clients if needed.

The Incipisphere

You will find yourself in a strange new location called the Incipisphere, which will be the location where the game takes place. There are a few places of note here:

Every Incipisphere has one planet per player. This will be the primary location for their quests, though they can visit each other's planets. They share a naming convention that goes as follows: Land Of (one syllable word) And (one word). Meaning you get names like LOWAS, LOLAR, LOHAC and LOFAF. There is one known exception that overrides the third word in the name so it spelled LOLCAT. Together they float around in what is called The Medium. Fortunately the transition from Earth to these worlds kept electricity, the internet and possibly plumbing all working despite no longer being connected to anything. It should also be noted that while in the medium itself players are provided with oxygen and atmosphereic pressure while there being no logical source for these things. 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 planet has seven Gates positioned above the house of the player; each must be traveled through in order to reach the Battlefield and reach the end of the game.
Skaia rests at the center of the Incipisphere. It is one of the objectives of the players to reach Skaia and her battlefield near the end of the game. On this battlefield a perpetual war rages between the kingdoms of light and darkness, Prospit and Derse. More on these places later.
The Veil is a belt of asteroids that circles close to the border 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 patheon 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 prophethic 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 realise 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-euclidian 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.

Carapaces

The peoples referred to as the Carapaces (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 Carapaces, 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 Carapaces. Derse is known to employ Archagents, Carapaces of more intellect, cunning and skill. They are often sent on more dangerous or difficult missions for the kingdom.

Every player will have a Carapace assigned to him/her to serve as a guide; 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	Heart
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. Aside from serving as a "final exam" of sorts to test if the players are ready they also possesss immense hoards of Grist which is 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?

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 either War and Peace, Les Misérables or Atlas Shrugged. It is in fact of comparable length to Romance of the Three Kingdoms. 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.

So why do people hate it so much?

Again, a number of reasons. Most of them have 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: because of it being vocal (especially the muffcunts of the fandom) people think Homestuck to be something that makes you stupid.

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

Links

The big enchilada
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

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 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.

Homestuck

Contents

What is Homestuck?