Thread by @RubrumLancer

Alright Homestuck Twitter here's some internet history regarding the MSPA fandom and its outsized influence on the Internet culture of the decade that's about to end.

We first, need to start with Jailbreak all the way back in the mid 00s. (1 out of a lot)

Before Jailbreak Hussie was just one in a sea of mostly forgotten Webcomic hopefuls who most wouldn't have figured would have amounted to much.

In these days, Megatokyo was still popular (I would like to apologise on behalf of all 00s kids for that)

Penny Arcade and CAD had dominated the webcomic scape with "gamer humor" (Loss was still years away at this point) and in terms of overarching webcomic epics; Order of the Stick was probably at the top of the pile; serving as critical role before critical role.

Enter Andrew Hussie who decided to do something different. Instead of trying to ape the format of traditional print (whether comic book style or comic strip like Sluggy free lance style) comics he'd make a single panel per page with a deceptively crude art style.

This was to make it easy to draw the panels quickly, because unlike most comics the readers would drive the action as Hussie picked from popular suggestions from the readership. Essentially an illustrated Choose Your Own Adventure driven by fandom.

This would greatly influence and help popularise the very young fiction format of the "Quest-fic", where the readership as a whole sought to drive the actions of some characters via voting or suggestions while the quest-master would describe the results of said actions.

However, Hussie was a child of the 80s and 90s and was old enough to remember obnoxiously frustrating adventure games (especially text based ones) where very often the game would essentially troll the player with moon logic puzzles, unwinnable states

easily unlocked by accident, and other ye olde video game fuck yous.

So the very first command in Jailbreak was to pry open the window. The second command would be to graft the pumpkin to the main character to give the protagonist arms.

Hussie would respond by erasing the pumpkin and denying it ever existed. "What Pumpkin?"

He then poked fun at the art style driven assumption that the protagonist was armless with "he already has arms, stupid!" when the readers demanded the Jailbreaker grow swole arms to rip through the jail like the hulk.

Hussie would accept the first suggestion on the thread for every panel which very quickly lead to people suggesting increasingly dumb and silly shit just to see Hussie visualise it. Which lead to Jailbreak very quickly going off the rails and having to go into Hiatus.

Still, it was a start. And it provided more of a fanbase for Bardquest, which was straight up a webcomicized variant of ye olde adventure games, down to the deliberately trollish sense of humor.

It was also formatted in a more traditional Choose your own adventure format with Hussie drawing out all the possible branches which very quickly lead to an exponentially growing dick joke hydra of a comic no Hercules could ever hope to tame.

It is the reason why the Bard's godhood in Homestuck has a giant codpiece though.

While Bardquest was the flagship comic of MSPA as a site when it launched in 2007 the constant exponential growth of the narrative made it unfeasible so Hussie put it on Hiatus and tried again.

Enter Problem Sleuth

Problem Sleuth would have a more coherent narrative built from Hussie being more selective with suggestions (what was interesting/funny rather than what came first) and ditched the branching paths of Bardquest.

It would also have a (bizarre and ridiculous) plot with (weird and quirky) characters and a (infinitely memeable) antagonist.

Essentially; it'd be an actual story rather than a series of random events.

As the 00s were the age of "gamer humor" comics, Problem Sleuth would also be rooted in Gamer Humor, primarily CRPGs and adventure games, a rather unplowed genre. Most gamer humor comics went for console retro (platformers etc), or triple A

video games and the order of the stick inspired tabletop RPG humor webcomic boom was winding down at this point as order of the stick itself had already transitioned towards an actual narrative ages ago and the D&D fandom was busy with the

3rd vs 4th edition wars.

All fertile ground for Hussie to quickly garner a large following, large enough to achieve that dream of all webcomic makers; the ability to go full time thanks to ad money clicks and donations.

At this point the MSPA fandom was about what you'd expect, mostly white, mostly male, mostly late teenagers and young adults with some older early milennials and late gen Xers thrown into the mix for variety. They probably followed Obama's campaign trail

and probably liked demotivational posters making fun of George W Bush (more likely for his propensity for meme worthy gaffes than you know; invading Iraq on false pretenses, fucking over New Orleans' Katrina recovery, repressing the LGBTIA+ community

opposing abortion and stem cell research, sitting back and letting islamaphobia build up, further breaking the backs of organised labor, militarising the police, deporting undocumented migrants, escalating the war on drugs, letting the capitalist class attain even more power

and a myriad of other reasons why Bush 2 was fucking horrific beyond him being a dopey moron.)

Their sense of humor was also rooted into the sensibilities of the time as meme humor was starting to creak into the mainstream with demotivational posters, lolcats,

Shoop da whoop, CDI and nintendo cartoon youtube poops, Numa Numa and all and sundry. They also were very much into subcultural gags.

Like weapon/object duality was rooted entirely in weird glitches making for funny if immersion breaking experiences.

The adventure game humor returned with the immensely overcomplicated rube goldbergian means of getting around very simple obstacles because the game world went out of its way to deny any simpler solution.

This wasn't bad by any means, it was hilarious actually

Level ups and stats; the core of so many CRPG experiences were of course also heavily featured. Pickle Inspector was weak and awkward but his imagination/magic was unrivalled. Ace Dick was a repulsive moron but incredibly strong. Problem Sleuth was hugely charismatic.

At least that's what his stats said. Hussie very quickly made a running gag out of his readership's fondness for violence as a solution to every problem by having the good detective never actually negotiate or show leadership do anything you'd associate with Charisma.

The only time he actually had to actually use its charisma/pluchritude for what you would expect in a tricky negotiation between the four nations; the Weasels, Clowns, Elves, and Pigs; he just went to GameFAQs (peak 00s there) and cheated.

And in true JRPG fashion, the final boss took up literally half the story's page count as Mobster Kingpin's demon form went through three forms and ridiculously chunky hitpoint counts. Which might be why Hussie was rather averse to fight scenes in Homestuck as

the Demonhead Mobster Kingpin fight went on for six months of increasingly over the top attacks.

Hussie also made a number of donation comics; of which the most important is probably Mayonaka's four donations that introduced the Midnight Crew, which set off a decently long non-canon plotline. (The reference to shadow magic came from their origins as tabletop characters)

Hussie would get Mayonaka to agree to let him use the Midnight Crew in his own works as while he didn't feel that they fit into PS' existing canonical narrative, he liked them enough to want to use them later.

This sort of fandom participation was very rare in webcomics at the time. Traditionally going little farther than simply taking in feedback that the author took a liking to, and it certainly spoke of a novel relationship between creator and consumer.

One made possible by the internet age that comics that tried harder to stick to what they saw in printed comics tended to miss out on.

Of course, all things must come to an end; and Problem Sleuth did something none of Hussie's prior comics had managed.

It came to the logical conclusion of its storyline with the death of the Mobster Kingpin and the trio now able to leave their fucking office building (why uncorrupt detectives shared a building with the mob is anyone's guess)

he even made a decently lengthy epilogue to wrap up all the loose ends for every character no matter how minor as he took a month long break in march of 2009 to prepare for his next comic.

This would be Homestuck, and at first he was going to do something really

really radical with it. Make it entirely in adobe flash to really get the most out of his burgeoning skill with animation and interest in incorporating music and interactive minigames into comics to create a true web comic; something powered wholly by what your browser

can achieve but dead trees can't.

And it would introduce us to ten year old John Egbert on the 10th of April, 2009.

Except no because flash is absolutely not ideal for being used like this and Hussie quickly walked back on the concept despite a great deal of fan interest in the now sprawling MSPA forums that served as the central hub of the MSPA fandom.

He canned it quickly and initially thought of basically making Problem Sleuth 2 with the Midnight Crew instead for a while before deciding to stick to his guns and try Homestuck again; just only partially and not fully in Flash.

Enter the now 13 year old John Egbert on his birthday of the 13th of April 2009. (What sort of timeline 10 year old babby Flash!John would lead is anyone's guess)

John and his friends would be kids of my generation. The interim kids between millenials and zoomers born in the mid 90s. His fans though as a rule skewed rather older than that and were predominantly heterosexual, male, white, and decently well off.

At this point the MSPA forums were absolutely hegemonic in the fandom. The fandom was mostly localised there with some outposts in 4chan (which was still a shitty place mind you, but this was before stormfront infiltrated /pol/), deviantart, and some other forums.

If you wanted to be a fan of Hussie's works, you went to the MSPA forums. That was that. Tumblr was still very young, twitter still had a 140 character limit, youtube videos were still using 5 star rating systems, and facebook had only just displaced myspace.

Forum culture was simultaneously harder and easier to break into if you were new than blogging culture. Harder because the more self contained nature of forums lended towards greater cliqueishness, easier because you could easily find where people were to get attention.

You had old personalities like Octopimp and Drillgorg who had by and large come from the Problem Sleuth days and Homestuck initially seemed to be going for a Problem Sleuth style 'weird gamer humor" type of story.

Just with the Sims (and later, God Games) instead of Film Noir being mixed in with CRPGs and Adventure games this time around.

Homestuck was also new ground for MSPA by being the very first MSPA comic to feature actual dialogue. For much of the early phase of the story that dialogue would take the form of IRC chat logs yes, but it was actual dialogue rather than

"you explain to him that X" which helped give a greater depth of insight into the characters. They cracked dumb jokes about stuff they liked, talked about their hobbies, vagued at each other about what they saw as their friends' issues, and all that.

Which was very appealing to a slowly growing secondary demographic; one that was younger, more diverse, and more female. Hussie's approach to writing female characters was refreshing in an era of smurfettes and shameless fanservice in webcomics.

Even if Rose and Jade literally only spoke to each other all of three times throughout the entire comic. And to be frank a lot of fans found the character designs to be very cute and charming (some in a distinctively more pedophilic/horny teenager way yikes)

Throughout acts 1-4 this side of the fandom based heavily on tumblr and deviantart would mostly simmer in the shadows of the MSPAforums proper, and on the dark side of things; the 4chan side of the fandom in /co/ also was building up.

At this point many people earnestly believed that Homestuck would be over on April 13th, 2010 (Hahahaha) and were expecting more of Problem Sleuth's tomfoolery. And there was a lot of tomfoolery, especially when Hussie was still taking suggestions.

But the fandom was growing too big and too fast for suggestion taking to be feasible anymore. The rapid growth of the fandom as the first flickers of 2010s fandom culture flocked to this cool new thing with music, animation, minigames, cool characters and designs

, mystery, and constant daily updates all made the suggestion box essentially useless because any possible action could be picked from the suggestion box. So part way through 2010 it was closed down.

This did very little to halt the fandom's growth as the scale

and stakes kept rising with animations like Jack: Ascend and of course, the legendary [S]: Descend that ended act 4 on a himalayan mountain range's worth of cliffs to hang off of shortly after introducing the trolls.

The Midnight Crew I mentioned above? Raising a number of questions as they were introduced as both the Archagents of the seeming antagonists of the Kingdom of Derse; and the Midnight Crew in a problem sleuth esque intermission crammed full of

mind bending spacetime fuckery that also introduced the idea of Lord English, who was initially conceived of as just being the antagonist of the Midnight Crew's leader; Professor Mayonaka wholly unconnected to Homestuck.

The how and why of what that happened did a lot to drive Homestuck theory culture as people were spitting out all kinds of weird and wacky theories left right and centre. And of course, back then a very big question was what the hell SBURB's purpose was

and why it sucked in kids into a gamespace to build their houses up towards a non-euclidean eldritch brainfuck chessboard in the sky.

https://twitter.com/RubrumLancer/status/1180985333099319296

Here you go.

Homestuck also had a new element to its fandom never really seen before in the MSPA fandom.

Shipping.

Homestuck bridged 00s and 10s fandom culture by mixing 00s hostility and flame wars to 10s fan content culture.

In this time of straight dudes and fujoshis the predominant ships were stuff like John/Rose, Jade/Dave, John/Dave (Jade/Rose was not really popular due to the lack of interaction) and unfortunately; Dave/Rose and John/Jade; and of course patron troll/kid ships.

While people tended to drop John/Jade like it was fucking napalm in their hands when it was revealed they were biological siblings, there was this rather unpleasant contingent of the fandom that stuck stubbornly to "Dersecest".

Every revelation for why it wouldn't work (they were siblings, the two were clearly more interested other characters, Rose was; if not a lesbian then on the sapphic side of bisexual or at the very least a bisexual in a clearly monogamous relation with Kanaya)

just made them double down into one of the more toxic and gross shipdoms rivalled only by the even worse Stridercest; especially Bro/Dave Strider which to this very day I maintain is the single worst ship with any popularity in all of Homestuck.

You also had the coming of the Fujoshis; the stereotypical "started at Hivebent" fans who came in from sections of the web like deviantart and certain sets of tumblr. They ypically stanned for four or so ships. JohnKat, JohnDave, Gamzee/Tavros, and Sollux/Eridan.

They collided with the previous mostly heterosexual and rather older PS era fans like a Panther tank's transmission collides with moderately steep inclines. Which is to say flame wars. While mostly kept somewhat civil in the forums by moderation; in more unmoderated spaces

there was a shit ton of yelling and screaming at each other.

It also produced some moments that actually influenced the comic itself like the time a particularly dedicated John/Rose shipper crafted a 15 page long doctoral fucking thesis by a user titled Lotus

(Sadly I believe this essay did not survive the end of the MSPAforums) Which impressed Hussie enough that he gave them a reference by placing a Lotus symbol on a book Rose was reading and decided to focus on John and Rose's relationship for a minor arc.

As the commentaries revealed he had little interest in canonising a ship that he saw as basically being the embodiment of the "standard" male and female lead romance, but he wasn't unimpressed by the effort put into it.

Shipping in Homestuck is a massive topic that I could easily go on about for ages, so I think I'll mostly refer to it as it comes up from here on out; so let's get a primer for another past time for Homestuck out of the way now.

D I S C O U R S E
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There were some smaller discourses in the fandom before Hivebent like "why won't the derse/stridercesters fucking stop?" and "bro is kind of creepy" and whether or not Terezi was a bad person but Hivebent is what detonated the proverbial hydrogen bomb to awaken the

equally allegorical Kaiju of discourse upon the metaphorical city of Tokyo and called forth the figurative Godzilla to do battle with it.

To continue my torturous tokusatsu analogy the King Ghidorah of act 5 discourse had the three heads of "Is Vriska evil?" "Is Eridan evil" and especially after murderstuck "is Gamzee evil?" Breathing out gravity beams of long internet arguments spread across the web.

Its wingbeats creating storms of stans and antis, its alpha call prompting other discourse titans to rise up, and the Godzilla of fandom ripping off one of its heads through the death of Eridan was met with it just regrowing the head and I am really making this about KOTM now.

With Gamzee and Eridan, while a lot of it was indeed driven by the "uwu badboy smol bean" fangirls its worth noting that plenty of older male fans were also willing to excuse the two, saying that Feferi brought it on herself for dumping Eridan or that gamzee's drug habit

absolved him. But probably the most severe discourse was the "Vriskourse". There was no section of the fandom safe from the vriskourse. Not Tumblr, not 4chan, not the MSPAforums, not Pesterchum, not Deviantart, Archive of Our Own, not other forums, not youtube comments.

The question of whether Vriska was a bad person analysed every panel she was seen, mentioned, or even had any impact on and the consensus swung back and forth constantly all throughout the time she was alive in act 5.

The key points for her being awful were Paralysing Tavros, Blinding Terezi, and forcing Sollux to kill Aradia even knowing that Sollux had an ambiguous but very close connection to her.

The key points for her redeeming factors were that she did have to feed her lusus nearly constantly lest the giant spider consume her, she showed some signs of regret, and when she actually liked someone (like John) she was genuinely sweet (if slightly creepy).

She also came off looking a lot better than Eridan who went on a homicidal nihilistic incel shooting spree and Gamzee who went full class division enforcement. Like for all she'd done (and much of it was terrible) she was at least trying to be better.

So in a way the Vriskourse was over whether she deserved to try at all; while the discourse over Eridan and Gamzee was more "they did nothing wrong uwu". But now let's talk about 2011.

2011 was the year I entered the fandom after deciding I may as well check out that Homestuck thing after having smashed through Problem Sleuth in October 2010. At this point the fandom was still in its growing and kind of unformed years.

Ao3 had started very recently and quickly became the Homestuck fandom's preferred fanfic repository instead of that bastion of 00s Internet culture; Fanfiction.net.

While there was a strong Homestuck deviantart community, the fanart community preferred

the space offered by Tumblr and its greater customizability, larger range of uploadable content, more welcoming attitudes towards expressions of sexuality and less work safe topics and superior tagging features (even if the search engine sucked conk and bepis.)

also tumblr didn't suffer from what I call the deviantart paradox where despite deviantart's prohibition of hardcore pornogrpahy it's also probably the horniest site in the world with a laundry list of esoteric fetishes.

And unlike Deviantart, Tumblr also offered a space for an often unspoken and unsung section of the fandom; musicians and VAs. Sure tumblr wasn't a good space compared to youtube and soundcloud, but it was *a* space.

On 4chan you also had the rise of /hsg/, the homestuck general threads. While the MSPAforums initially kind of leaned male and white and straight before evening out as newer fans came in; /hsg/ was aggressively so. And of course this being 4chan they made their own porn

seeing it as a contest with tumblr's more (but not exclusively) LGBT oriented smut (that the characters were minors concerned neither party's smut artists).

The fandom was now also an increasing force at conventions and meet ups, which was virtually

unheard of in the west for a webcomic. This did lead to the horror stories I'm sure you've heard of a million times of body paint accidents and people being very deeply silly, but Homestuck brought the idea of cosplay of (non video game) new media franchises to the spotlight.

And one plus for Homestuck cosplay is that the designs were simple and relatively easy for anyone to do competently while still being distinctive. Also girls didn't have to go half dressed if they wanted to join in either.

There were also other subsets of the fandom, like the then very recently started Homestuck subreddit, the Pesterchum IRC people (this was where I fitted into mostly), homestuck videos on youtube, and subcommunities on forums like Spacebattles.com, bay12forums and

Giant in the playground (the site of the aforementioned order of the stick comic) forums and elsewhere. Penny Arcade, NeoGAF, and more just to name a few. As mentioned before, I came in largely through the Pesterchum IRC set up by mindfang (the user not the character).

Leaked footage of the Act 5 discourse monster.

Pesterchum was created to be a Homestuck themed IRC that connected to special servers (which are still up I believe deviantart.com/homestuckhiveb… ) and while not intended to be solely a roleplaying hub at first, it quickly became one.

The pesterchum roleplaying community was always divided between the PM only and the Memo going community. The PM community usually only roleplayed with friends or by scrolling through the list of active users, or using the random encounter function (when it worked)

That was a segment of the userbase I neither partook in very often nor do I know a lot of people who mostly stuck around there though I understand most of them moved to (the now defunct) CharatRP, Cherubplay (also defunct now), and MSPA/MXRP when they started up.

But the memos, what we would call chat servers/rooms/groups were like microcosms of the wider fandom. Roleplaying memos to my knowledge at first started with truth or dare memos and other party game based stuff where people RPd a mixture of canons and OCs and crossovers

just passing the time playing the usual dumb party games. Indulging in the alluring fantasy of a game of spin the bottle where you can actually pick up a cute date instead of feeling awkward regret about playing it for the rest of your life.

And of course you often had multiple people playing the same character; which the fandom accepted thanks to Homestuck's embracing of multiversal fiction and multi-canonocity. Unfortunately there was definitely a sense of "wrong-fun". While I do feel that in a collaborative

story game like roleplaying, there should be a degree of effort put into maintaining immersion and some degree of cohesion (A Khornate Berzerker is an exceptionally poor choice of characters to RP as in when everyone else is playing HS kids and fire emblem characters)

a lot of it was straight up bullying and shaming people for straying too far from their ideas of canon. Whether it was shipping the wrong thing, having an AU deemed "cringeworthy", a character deemed too perfect, and more than a few times; a character appearance

headcanon someone didn't like (wrong race/wrong body type/wrong height/please fucking save me from the white vs blonde hair strilonde discourse/I don't want to play uwu seme megabottom twinkboy John stoooop) would get them banned.

Oh and of course heavily critical attitudes towards OCs that broke the stations of canon like pinkblooded fantrolls, half-troll/humans (this caused many arguments, especially if related to a canon character), a sibling/schoolfriend for the humans and the like.

What I'm saying is that there was fun to be had, but the memos nearly always got cliqueish and exclusionary to people not within those cliques as eventually an inner circle of "respected" roleplaying regulars would decide; consciously or not, the course of the roleplay.

The initial happening places to be were Truth or Dare and then R41NBOW_RUMPUS_P4RTY_TOWN which were both run by a guy named Adam. At first mostly playing with a fankid named Adam Crowley he later mostly mained Karkat. And while a pretty decent roleplayer an uncomfortable truth

emerged. Adam you see, was an asshole. Pretty quick to be irritated by people he saw as RPing in an OOC way, AUs he didn't quite like, OCs that weren't up to his standards, or interrupting his Decorum. He was also much harsher to regulars he knew to be men

while he was much more forgiving of girls. Adam liked female company and would often pick on the IRL boyfriends or husbands of girl RPers to try and drive them out, especially if he considered said girl a friend. And yet at its peak RRPT was far and away

the largest and most active memo on all of pesterchum, easily hitting 40-50 active users on peak hours simultaneously. Which is an awful lot of people to try all roleplaying at once on a rather primitive chat client.

But Adam was exactly the wrong kind of person to manage this kind of community which to be frank grew as large as it did because it was big to begin with from the ToRD community and because it shared a name with a canon memo.

People got kicked at the drop of a hat and were berated pretty frequently rather than given any particularly useful direction while most of the men and boys were negged off. Eventually people got the idea and started leaving save for a small clique of people who

stuck with him to the bitter end until he finally let the memo die in 2013-2014. According to one person who will remain anonymous, he remained active on Pesterchum until about summer of 2015, with her last known conversation with him being about Jurassic World.

Another chain of memos was the Strife Arena which was for fighting roleplays. At least that was the intention. It rather quickly became a hub for longer form and more dramatic roleplay in the "stands" instead as a lot of people wanted to be part of the community but

were not interested in action role play or had character concepts not suited for gladiatorial combat. Or at least, not violent action as there was of course; a lot of private ERP behind the scenes as you'd expect of any roleplay hub.

This memo was owned by someone who went by the name of Malley who was also kind of a douche. His fan-species "Anons" (conceived of as the trolls' predecessors) were in essence adrogynous pale hot aliens who of course were used for a lot of ERP.

And rather unfortunately for the owner of a memo built around combat RP he was never willing to take the L at any point. Obviously hugely unideal and an attitude very likely to cause bruised egos and hurt feelings when meshed with the competetive nature of

combat RP and played a substantial part in people getting kind of turned off on the idea of roleplaying out arena fights instead of casual or sexual roleplay. Malley's clique also grew to have a rather exclusionist view of Homestuck canon

with highly restrictive visions of what theories (and I must emphasise theories) were true, and keep in mind this was back in 2011 when a lot of info that we take for granted (like what the scratch actually was) had yet to be revealed.

Said clique also just like Malley; never liked to take the L. Especially if they didn't think your character deserved to win. And if they really didn't like you they tended to refuse to let your character even participate in said arena.

The Strife Arena collapsed considerably sooner than RRPT as it became increasingly clear that Malley was something of an ERP sex pest. However this group also didn't like Adam very much either so they would try forming their own memo several times.

One group would eventually form Vivandus (Now defunct) and another would coalesce into Pesterchum's longest reigning champion; Aperture Labs (which despite the name is mostly populated by non-fandom OCs and anime characters).

But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. One of the more interesting aspects of this early stage of pesterchum was how the memos were generally welcoming of literally every kind of character concept. Non-homestuck fandoms, OCs, non-homestuck OCs, canons, AUs, everything went.

Whereas later on these groups would tend to self segregate into "x fandom only", "canon only", "au only" or "oc only" chats to try and create a certain kind of atmosphere they never quite captured the kind of incredibly chaotic scenarios that could pop up in places like RRPT.

You wouldn't see Optimus Prime lecturing John Egbert and a Fantroll on when the appropriate time to resort to lethal force had arisen or have Samus Aran comfort Rose about her recently dead mother over some coffee in the later, more themed RP groups.

Also if you like my content I'm making my own webcomic with the aid of many friends great and small; which prompted my research into Homestuck as a fandom.

https://twitter.com/RubrumLancer/status/1083780185177022465

Of course as the joke goes, all roleplaying communities invariably grow to if not revolve around; then heavily pivot on erotic roleplay. I'm not going to name names or make accusations but obviously pesterchum was full of very horny people.

However, some parts of the Homestuck community felt that Pesterchum's commitment to replicating 00s era IRCs limited it as a roleplay platform. Many didn't like how if you wanted to find a good one on one partner you tended to have to go through memos or try your luck with a

nearly constantly broken random encounter mechanic or scroll through the userlist. Others didn't like the fact that your handle was public and thus people could find you at any point in time even if you'd really rather not be bothered at the moment.

And omegle was honestly even worse so fuck that. This lead to the creation of MSPARP (now MXRP) which would have a much more robust random encounter system that let you filter what you wanted to search for, actual usage of bbc code, and a far more permissive text limit.

At the other end of the scale were people who wanted to be able to sort through and find specific role play prompts and preferred longer form posts. This group went to the now defunct site called Cherubplay which would be based on prompts that roleplayers could choose to respond

to and strike up a conversation to hash out details before committing to the roleplay. Both sites notably purposefully do not let you see the other user's username unless they willingly give you those details, so as to avoid harassment and stalking as happens unfortunately often.

Both sites didn't take too long to grow beyond just the Homestuck fandom though. Much like how Jailbreak kickstarted the Quest-Fic, MXRP and Cherubplay would both be roleplaying platforms with no real rival or equivalent in their particular field.

Sure Roll20 is the predominant place for tabletop games, but if you want into one on one freeform roleplays, MXRP and Cherubplay are/were largely unprecedented in the degree of convenience they offer the user and they soon came to embrace their non-homestuck users.

But I'll cover more of roleplaying history later. For now we should also consider the growth of the fan-content community.

Homestuck was as mentioned earlier; one of the first large fandoms to largely reject Fanfiction.net in favour of AO3.

AO3 was started in response to FF.net's haphazard purges of adult (and particularly adult LGBTIAQ+) content which while never even remotely consistently enforced as even the most curosry glance at the M rated section can tell you; did influence its character.

It also responded to FF.net's consistent refusal to implement any manner of tagging or content warning system, which makes actually finding the types of fanfiction you want far easier; and it greatly simplified the process of author/reader interaction.

Finally, it's a lot less bare bones visually and it allows you to put more than just the most barebones of text on the site. These were all quite key to the Homestuck fandom's decision to adopt it and share fanfiction made on it while leaving the HS section of

FF.net to collect dust. Everything from AUs to smut to retellings to post-game stories and more was posted to AO3 and it was much easier to find things catered to your tastes even if many people felt that the kudos system discouraged detailed reviews.

The quest-fic in the Homestuck fandom's parlence would generally be called the Fanventure. Though technically, a homestuck quest-fic isn't necessarily a fan-venture. And because of Homestuck's highly visual nature, most such quests would be visual

and while like the majority of quests few would ever see their conclusions due to real life issues generally getting in the way at some point; some were truly ambitious even before we got stuff like Vast Error or Act Omega; like Guidestuck.

Of course, some fanventures decided to evoke the style and feel of Homestuck rather than explicitly root itself in its mechanics and universes. And a frequent critique of many fanventures was the feeling that they got stuck on the "stations of canon."

I.E aping a lot of Homestuck's canon events (a troll predecessor arc, aimless household shenanigans, everyone using crummy ass 00s era chat clients instead of something more like skype or discord, fetch modus antics etc) because they felt they needed to as Homestuck fanventures.

Some also felt that too many of the comics felt constrained by feeling the need to exactly mimic homestuck's artistic style instead of using their own flair which is a fair critique, even if I feel it kind of dismisses how shared artistic styles often contribute to fan identity.

Of course most attempts at SBURB fan-sessions in this era were constrained by somewhat limited knowledge of what SBURB actually did or was and had to do a lot of guesswork. The SBURB glitch guide; a rather popular non-narrative fanfic would inform a lot of fanon

but at this point everyone had their own ideas about how everything worked (theories about the horrorterrors and the Scratch in particular tend not to have aged super well) so it could sometimes feel like nobody was on the same page.

Oh and I'll just @VastError @ActOmega to not be rude since I am directly mentioning them.

discord.gg/2mRyPDp Also check out my discord.

Slight correction: The Glitch FAQ was formally codified in 2012 though it had predecessors on the forum.

The fanart community was traditionally split into tumblr and deviant art with smaller subsets on the subreddit, 4chan, and the MSPAforum but Homestuck fans soon established their own booru type image board called MSPA booru.

This served as a repository for just the Homestuck fandom and its fanart and while all the famous artists maintained their tumblr and/or deviantart pages; nearly all of them would find their way to MSPAbooru at some point.

Act 5 also saw a number of the more well known fanartists enter the fandom. Though Homestuck already had some popular and well known fanartists like Lexxy and SaffronScarf who were often invited to contribute, a lot of the best known art contributors got interested in homestuck

as a result of the act 5 boom. Most came in and found the character designs and the characters themselves highly appealing and began to start drawing them, and of course Hussie is nothing if not willing to reach out to big name fans to contribute.

Fan-art generally had a rather white view of the Homestuck cast. Also to be frank I don't think anybody in the fandom had a single brain cell when it came to bi or pansexuality. And RoseMary was probably the only really popular WLW ship.

Only to be expected, the fandom at this point was now comprised in largest part out of heterosexual anglophone girls with the next biggest group being straight guys (also from english speaking countries, though the Russian fandom existed in its own bubble as Russian

fandoms usually do due to the language barrier.) or at least, western european countries where English is heavily taught. The queer segment of the fanbase was mostly quiet, tolerated and accepted but not really super prominent as it became during act 6.

I mean, the story of the queer community throughout the 00s was us basically being quietly there in the background. Like in Fallout when you find the stealth suit and just crouch walk everywhere like straightness is illegal.

But there were still the occasional (flame war inducing) PoC headcanons and the incredibly rare once in a life time unicorn PoC fankid. And I mean incredibly rare. Fankids were already a small minority of OCs compared to fantrolls (I am one of the rare people who made

more fankids and cared mroe for them than fantrolls. I barely remember any of my fantrolls but my kids have a special place in my heart). Still, this was a very vanilla period of the fandom, in a lot of the memos I was in; I was the only non-white person in the room

and often the only non-straight AMAB. However, it wasn't all bad.

Back on fanart of course, in this golden age of fanart you of course had an incredibly wild array of styles. From those anime template bodies you often see on DA to semi-realism.

Everybody had their own ideas of what the characters look like (I continue; to the opposition of the entire rest of the fandom; to maintain that Jade is shorter and overall more petite than Rose. You all can fight me on this, but you will lose because I am strong.)

and of course we can't discount the influence of the various commissioners who sought to visualise their own images of what they thought of the cast (and it was these commissioners who introduced a number of artists to Homestuck), or trealise their own OCs.

At this point in time I didn't actually have a debit card so all I could do was window shop and imagine how nice it'd be to buy commissions. But there was quite a bit of discourse regarding commission pricing. Thankfully the art community as a whole very rarely engages in the

terrible "workers from poorer countries are driving down prices!" rhetoric when engaging in this discourse, so we at least avoided that kettle of racist fish from which no good can emerge beyond realising what a stupid argument it is.

Now the one area where the fandom has generally been fairly weak is in fan (video) games. Homestuck didn't have very many of them worth mentioning until pretty recently, though the Overseer project is worth mentioning.

To be entirely fair, non-video game fandoms rarely produce fan games anyway. This isn't something to hold against the fandom, and in time that trend did start changing. Though most of that is outside of the current scope. It's interesting to note that the video gamey

aspects of SBURB were emphasised the most at the period we knew the least about it. While as we actually learned more about SBURB it shifted more from "video game irl" to more a codified journey of discovery and actualisation.

Now, while video game projects were sparse at this time, there were quite a lot of attempts at making SBURB tabletop roleplaying games of varying degrees of quality. Many of them were hacks of existing TTRPGs, generally popular ones

As the 2011-2014 period was the nadir of Dungeons and Dragons due to Wizard of the Coast's many questionable decisions in the 4th edition era while Paizo's Pathfinder was increasingly ascendant until D&D wasn't even in the top three anymore

A good portion of these hacks were built around Pathfinder instead of what was seen as a dying game for nerds (D&D). It didn't help that D&D had lost a lot of its older fans due to the incredibly poorly conceived attempts at selling AD&D and 3rd edition fans on 4th.

Sturgeon's law being what it is, of course not all of these attempts were completed or even particularly memorable, though none were like; FATAL or HYBRID levels of completely broken and terrible. This was of course years before critical role popularised

the idea of sharing your TTRPG sessions with others like a show with visual aids (though this habit actually arose first in Japan with VNs based on sessions of Japan's favourite TTRPG: Call of Cthulhu) so what stories happened in the TTRPG side of the fandom are largely unknown

to me. If you have any stories from this era you want to share I'd be interested in hearing how SBURB TTRPGs went before we really knew what most of the classpects did.

And of course you also had the crossovers. Keeping in mind Homestuck's demographic it's not unsurprising that the fandom's crossovers typically went for other kid's media, anime, and games that held a great deal of sway among internet savvy young girls and coding geek boys

At the time, Superwholock was the other big thing on Tumblr with the pre-avengers MCU being a second tier fandom (at this time the biggest thing in blockbusters was Michael Bay's transformers trilogy), adventure time was starting to pick up steam, and on the coding geek

side of things My Little Pony was now starting to be popular as the great brony bloom occured. Axis Powers Hetalia had the rather famous fandom "war" before declaring "peace" with HS (though Hetalia was already starting its decline in popularity)

and unsurprisingly persona was a hot thing in the era with Persona 4's then relatively recent release. The usual suspects of Pokemon, Smash Bros, and Harry potter were also present. Though I don't personally recall a whole lot of mingling between the Percy Jackson and Homestuck

fandoms which is a shame since I think Percy jackson's sensibilities, tone, and themes mesh with Homestuck's better than Harry Potter's magic Blairism does. Also have you ever seen @camphalfblood and @andrewhussie in the same room?

👀

Though speaking of the loominarty I suppose it can't hurt to mention the memes. This was the twilight period of advice dog clones, demotivational posters, lolcats, and the other 00s memes, while four panel rage comics were starting to be seen as the height of comedy.

People also thought the term "derp" was inherently funny and continually said "John Egderp" because John was fairly forgetful (unfortunately memeing him into being an idiot despite figuring out how to use alchemy to combine objects on his own in minutes),

And of course, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff was, is, and will always be the absolute height of comedy. Which was of course Hussie's intention when he integrated SBaHJ into Homestuck to serve as a source of memes for the kids to use without actually using real world memes.

But probably the most reviled aspect of 2011-2012 era HS fandom meme humor was seeing buckets as inherently funny. Taking the joke of trolls finding them to be a highly sexual object due to their place in their reproduction cycles and driving it into the ground.

To the point that Hussie himself kind of decided to never really bring it up against shortly into Act 6 because everyone was sick to death of bucket jokes.

The build up to Act 5's ending animation: Cascade, was one of the most intense hype periods if not the most intense in the entirety of the fandom's history. Act 5 had thus far been longer than all the other acts combined in both page count and actual time spent on it.

Descend was already huge and Hussie's resources had expanded massively since Descend came out. Furthermore, there was the two month long megapause which was an unprecedented break from Homestuck at the time but fuelled endless, wild, and frenzied speculation.

We knew it was going to set up the Scratch, the thing is that we barely knew what the Scratch was besides that it was a hard reset for the SBURB session which we had only recently learned was a method to create universes.

People expected everything from turning the kids into trolls to turning them into horrorterrors to doing the first four acts over in a different way to genderswapping to revealing a third species. Only a handful of people predicted that we would see the bio-parents as kids.

Cascade was an unprecedentedly massive undertaking with four tracks composed for it. Cascade, Flare, Savior of the Dreaming Dead, and Black Hole Green Sun. Cascade was the only wholly original tune created for the flash while the other three were remixes of existing pieces

But up to this point every flash had by and large been animated with a singular piece of music as their basis. Having four for a single piece was unprecedented, and Cascade's thirteen minute runtime blew literally everything before it out of the water.

It certainly blew everyone's expectations out of the water as most people predicted a considerably shorter flash more around the scope of Descend. But of course, how could Cascade be anything else when it had so many plot threads to wrap up in a single go?

People had noticed that in the lead up to cascade, there was an awful lot of setting up and rather little resolution to things before the flash was released. Which definitely made people expect something big to tie off the loose ends, and with the last stretches of act 5

Being as thoroughly weird and unconventional even by Homestuck's standards (much of the story was told in the top banner images that you could easily miss if you were paying too much attention to the central panel and of course Doc Scratch took over as narrator)

as it was set up a certain expectation for something that would simultaneously feel enlightened but also very confused until we sat down and realised that we had all the pieces all along but just never put them together.

That was part of the appeal of Homestuck, how everything would click together almost perfectly once the balls were no longer being juggled in the air.

Cascade is rather (in)famous for bringing down multiple sites in a row due to the sudden surge of traffic from people trying to watch it. Something that sometimes had happened earlier before when there was a substantial pause before a flash update (such as

the flash update that saw John "die" at the hands of Jack Noir and pitted the unreasonably homicidal solar powered chess piece against a horrorterror influenced Rose lalonde.) But these were usually brief. Bear in mind at this point; October 25 (1025, 413 and 612 combined)

2011 the idea of uploading videos longer than 10 minutes was still new to youtube which had only increased its maximum allowed length in July of the prior year, and while Hussie wasn't the sort to issue DMCA notices, he wasn't really into the idea of uploading

his flash videos onto youtube at the time for a number of reasons. So uploading a youtube video to deal with the traffic didn't quite come to Hussie's mind; especially as there wasn't an official MSPA channel yet. Knowing MSPA's servers were not ready to handle this kind of

Traffic, they tried uploading onto Newgrounds off-peak hours and onto sections of the site made for high levels of traffic. Both the MSPA site and Newgrounds crashed anyway as neither a webcomic site or an aging dinosaur flash portal made for the days when "viral" meant

hundreds of thousands to low single digit millions of views spread out over a decent period of time could handle a fandom larger than the readership of any of Marvel or DC's A-list titles by orders of magnitude all at once.

So they tried Megaupload, a relic from a time before google docs, drop box, and its successor Mega.nz were the preferred means of sharing files. Megaupload also crashed several times before the traffic finally approached something resembling stability.

What the whole incident made very clear is that the 00's era internet was not at all ready for the kind of instantaneous mass reaction of 10's fandom. In the era of immediate responses by millions of fans to the notification of new content; the older internet designed for

smaller consumer bases checking on updates at their own pace simply wasn't going to cut it. It also was seen as pretty definitive proof that Newgrounds was well past its prime if it could no longer handle a single major fandom trying to watch one video on it.

I of course would be remiss if I didn't give you a fine example of the memes made of Newgrounds' inability to handle the surge.

It took less than five minutes for NG to shit itself and die under the weight of modern fandom.

Of course let's also remember that theories are a key component of the Homestuck fandom. And while Homestuck certainly didn't start the fan habit of wild mass speculation, it was definitely known for it; and while it was still ongoing people made whole social media

personalities built around trying to guess where things were going and if there might be clues regarding the path of the story hidden in the background. Every fandom does this to some degree; serial fiction fandoms especially since we all have our ideas of where a story is

or should go. But the often achronal nature of Homestuck's narrative as well as how we knew from at least act 4 that while time travel existed; time travel nearly universally had to satisfy the conditions of stable timeloops to prevent that timeline from unravelling entirely.

This also added another temporal direction for theorycrafting. Namely why things were the way they were because it was entirely possible that any given action in the past happened because of something that happened in the future that would influence the past through

time travel. What may have only happened because of something that has yet to happen?

it's the kind of question that only crops up in stories with time loops, and of course requires either substantial planning in advance or at least being able to give the appearance that

it was planned in advance. Of course, as with all fandom theorising, a lot and I mean a lot was pretty far from the mark because people looked at the wrong clues or drew off base conclusions from what they did see. Others from trying to justify what they wanted to happen

more than they were able to analyse and draft a hypothesis on what would happen. But you know, that's fine. A lot of the time foreshadowing only really clicks in after what was foreshadowed has come to pass.

Drillgorg on the MSPA forums (named for a gag character from Jailbreak and one of the MSPA old guard) rather famously predicted that Nepeta would be alright and that the second anniversary of Homestuck would have some huge flash.

He was wrong of course and so the short lived forum meme "Drillgorg lied, nepeta died!" was born which he of course; owned since he popularised it himself. Lotus of course, had that 15 page doctoral thesis on why John and Rose were definitely crushing on each other

and would be canonised which also turned out to be wrong.

There were a number of tumblr theory blogs of course, but probably the most famous (or infamous depending on what circles you were in) was bladekindeyewear who got their start in August of 2011

Though really BKEW came into their own in act 6 rather than 5. It's still worth noting that they (and @ikimaruart who got into the HS fan community in 2011 as well yet really took off during act 6) got their start in this time frame.

As discussed before the period leading up to Cascade was a period of incredibly active theorycrafting. Things were clearly leading up somewhere but nobody was sure just how it would all unfold once the pieces were fitted together.

Some people did connect Jade's mysterious penpal to perhaps being a character we'd meet in act 6, though I don't recall a lot of people who correctly guessed that they were an age swapped version of Jake's grandfather/biodad from the post-scratch timeline.

Most thought that perhaps she was her alternate future son or the like. Though it was clear that whoever they were probably had connections to Skaianet given their ability to access various SBURB related technology.

Some genuinely believed that the characters we had spent two and a half years getting to know up to that point were all going to be erased and replaced which in hindsight seems rather silly. Especially since Hussie rarely gets rid of characters for good without

reusing them later in some way or form.

For example: Mom Lalonde becoming Roxy Lalonde (though it's important to note that they're ultimately different people even if they're genetically identical.)

I suppose this means we should talk about what we take for granted in an era where Lord English's appearance and identity has been certain for years. But back in the day Lord English theorising was a big thing. People were for example, very sure it was Lord English who

forced the Trolls into hiding after they won SGRUB, or that he was behind the Scratch. Or that he was secretly manipulating the then current Big Bad; Jack Noir whom everyone was sure was being set up for a big badass final battle (forgetting that Hussie became rather

averse to prolonged action sequences after the experience of Problem Sleuth's DMK fight which took over half of the story. And also that ultimately; Jack at the core was a guy with a bad attitude given the power to act on his homicidal fantasies)

Lord English was this figure of mystery initially only brought up as an offscreen benefactor for the Felt Gang in the first intermission between Act 3 and 4. An opponent of Spades Slick and his midnight crew with questionable relevance to the Kids.

We knew very little about him beyond that he had time powers and could only be defeated through a convoluted series of spacial-temporal defect exploits (or just space-time glitches if you'd rather use less technical terms.) Which drew comparisons to another character naturally.

Lord British from Ultima, ruler of the kingdom of Britannia and supposed to be unkillable unless you exploited a glitch in the game. Hussie revealed of course that this was unintentional, and initially I believe Lord English wasn't stated to be unkillable without glitches

until after the comparison was made (someone can correct me if I'm wrong of course.) As Lord English was named for the pool term referring to when you give the ball a side spin. A difficult but potentially rewarding maneuvre.

The association of Pool with well dressed mobsters in the sort of faux-prohibition/depression era that Spades Slick and the Felt seemed to inhabit also made people think of English as a suave, sophisticated Capo.

Surely Doc Scratch's boss would be even suaver than him. I mean, just look at the guy! He's the faceless embodiment of an early 20th century criminal aristocrat who speaks with the sophistication of an old money professor and so cooly manipulates everyone with lies of omission.

So imagine everyone's surprise when Lord English was actually hiding in plain sight all along; within Doc Scratch's body (making his words of being a good host take on a much creepier meaning) and actually being this brutish skull hulk in tattered rags.

And while we were getting increasing hints throughout Act 5 that Lord English, not the Lovecraftian Horrorterrors (who never really mattered), nor the rampaging Jack Noir (who had no greater ambition beyond murder) was the true villain

All Lord English had to do to take the role of antagonist away from Jack Noir was just show up in the brief intermission between Acts 5 and 6. Blowing everyone's expectations for just what Lord English was in an instant in one rather gruesome transformation sequence.

Many of us were making bets on what the English track composed for the Felt album was going to be used for. I don't think most of us expected it'd be used for a skull faced green monster transforming out of Doc Scratch like the Hulk's R-rated gore fiend cousin.

Many people were unsure of how any villain could surpass someone like Noir in terms of menace; given that Noir could destroy planets wIth the flick of a finger, and with substantial effort; kill an entire universe and all of its possible divergent timelines while teleporting

around like the world's angriest portal portal player and seemingly having matchless physical strength and very few compunctions about killing everyone in sight. Then English just appeared and everyone realised that Jack was ultimately small fry in the grand scheme of things.

Act 6 began on the 11th of November 2011; notably the same day Skyrim released leading to the joke that for Hussie's next trick he was going to upstage the meme man himself Todd Howard.

Act 6 would introduce us to another set of characters from the post-scratch timeline. This time a new set of humans based on the biological parents of the four kids we got to know in act 1-5.

Starting with Jane Crocker; the kid version of John's grandma/biomom.

People were excited to say the least. The guardians and parents were characters we never got to see from the perspective of and very, very rarely saw communicate in an audience legible way. Mysterious and quite literally faceless.

Nana was something of an exception through Nanasprite, but the Kernelsprites were very definitely side characters who explicitly were not allowed to take narrative oxygen away from the main cast. Plus, Jane was a sixteen year old girl rather than a near centenarian old enough

to have seen both world wars and spent the majority of her life in the time of Jim Crow (makes you really think about her choice of settling down in 90+% white Maple Valley, Washington huh?)

Though maybe all that explains some things we learn about Jane in the epilogues.

I digress anyway, the Homestuck fandom loves to meet new characters and Jane was no exception. People wanted to know everything about her and her life and the details revealed about her

were interesting and unusual to say the least. Almost immediately we got the impression that she didn't exactly lead a normal life and Earth 2 wasn't quite normal. Betty Crocker wasn't just a brand for General Mills but a dystopian megacorp (though to be fair, General Mills

in real life is a dystopian megacorp. Just not run by aliens. We think.) One apparently contentious enough so that its heiress apparent was being targeted for assassination by mail order bomb like she was the second coming of Thatcher in Ireland.

What a lot of people seized on though is that she was in contact with the green text guy who had sent jade the cyber-rabbit that let Jack Noir assassinate the Queen. The second that was pieced together people went wild as they realised "oh shit he's Grandpa harley 2!"

Should I make another comment thread or keep on going with the long one?

Please also check out this thread covering 2012 and onwards.

https://twitter.com/RubrumLancer/status/1182802684119699457

Ah fuck rip my notifs.