Thread by @RubrumLancer

Okay Homestuck Twitter; as the current thread is super ridiculously long I'm going to split 2012 off into its own thread. Read down here to keep following me once you're done with the prior "history of the MSPA fandom" megathread.

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

I think it can't be overstated how much the fandom adored Jake English in particular. Basically the second he was revealed people latched onto him as literally the hottest thing in the story. He was the fandom's new husband and everyone loved him.

He was also someone who wouldn't be able to take a hint if there were airstrip lights guiding him to it. Not stupid so much as incredibly socially awkward due to his isolation from humanity. He also basically immediately overshadowed Jane in the fandom's eye

And I mean, his combination of classical roguish adventurer mannerisms, anime hair, vaudeville accent (not British, though early 20th century upper class American accents were closer to British ones than they are now) and neutronium grade density made him a heart throb.

(Credit to the above image goes to @ikimaruart. The image being chosen because let's be real the fandom at the time very much thought of Jake as their transatlantic accented adventurer himbo twink).

And whereas none of the beta kids ever had more than possibly flirtatious dialogue with each other, Act 6 immediately went out of its way to confirm that Jane was very much interested in Jake romantically.

And indeed, literally all of the Alpha Kids and damn near everyone he met at least had a passing attraction to English. Given how previously relationships and the drama they bring were mostly (with a few exceptions) not a heavily focused on part of Homestuck

The nightmarish love polyhedron spiralling around Jake English got a lot of people very interested straight away. Particularly once it was established that Dirk was also interested in Jake. There had been some love polyhedrons before

Like Eridan and Sollux both having eyes on Feferi; Vriska's complicated relations with Kanaya, Tavros, John, and Terezi; and some would also say the relations between Dave, Karkat, Terezi, and Jade. But those tended to not be core aspects of their characters.

Everyone pining for Jake and his fear of disappointing any of them and the difficulty of multiple characters to deal with their attraction to him though; was definitely a key leg of the stories of the characters involved in that.

We all like drama in our stories and one of the fastest way to add drama to love lives is the complication of multiple people going for the same person and having difficulty with admitting to it. Or cracking under stress and blowing our chances as Jane did rather dramatically.

Of course it also started like, a shit ton of flame wars. The great Alpha Kid War of the Pacific was the kind of naval combat free for all that you'd have to have lived through yourself to properly understand. In these great shipping wars things like the

revelation of Dirk being gay were like the battle of midway in intense ship to ship combat. With dive bombers of triumphant shippers dropping armour piercing munitions through the decks of the Imperial DirkRoxy Navy while Dirk's revelations of caring deeply for Roxy

was launched from a rhetorical Nakajima B5N in the form of a fandom torpedo to put the allegorical USS Yorktown representing the "Dirk doesn't care about Roxy" portion of the DirkJake fleet to the bottom of the ocean. Though of course the United States of DirkJake defeated the

Empire of DirkRoxy and I'm not going to make an atomic bombing joke for the sake of this metaphor because I have class.

(Note that Dirk is in fact gay. You don't have to be romantically attracted to someone to be willing to die for them.)

And speaking of Dirk and Roxy, they were initially kept somewhat mysterious with their names not being revealed for a bit. There was even a joke where Hussie only revealed the first two letters of their first names just to tease everyone.

Something of a callback to the very early days of Homestuck when the fandom were the ones who actually gave the kids their names. Well, more accurately the fandom suggested names and Hussie selected the ones he approved of.

There was even something of a rivalry between the people who correctly predicted that Dirk would be named Dirk and those who thought he'd be named Richard (or rather Dick). While for the sake of taking Dirk remotely seriously and not making a rather crass

implication by naming the first openly gay man in Homestuck "Dick" Dirk was definitely the better name, there were absolutely Dick defenders.

Most people correctly guessed Roxy's name since there's not a whole lot of other names commonly given to

AFAB babies in America with the first two letters "Ro" that are only four letters long with the only competition being Roan. Though before it was revealed that the second letter of her name was "o" you had some people predicting names like Rain, Rena, and the like.

The two of course were also very popular. Roxy perhaps the single most popular human AFAB character in the entire story; surpassing both Rose and Jade (notably Jade was actually kind of unpopular for most of act 5, straggling way behind the other three in terms of

fan attention until she became a inumimi by merging with her partially dog sprite. I myself recall Jade going from barely played on pesterchum RPers to suddenly being everyone's fave after cascade) and pushing Jane even farther down the fandom spotlight.

Of course with Roxy there was almost immediately discourse on whether it was okay to show a teenager having an alcohol addiction problem. I myself was of the opinion that; while some of the jokes were perhaps crass it was definitely shown to be a problem

and her struggle to overcome it was some of the best character growth in Homestuck period.

And what of Jane? I'll be perfectly honest, for most of the fandom Jane was mostly just there to be shipped with either Jake or Roxy with a small minority of DirkJane shippers mostly being ignored as they never drew attention to themselves.

And honestly the great Jake wars were a million times more vicious. Though given later revelations about Jane she's the character that would surprise me the least if it were revealed she were completely cishet.

Rerailing this thread though, Jane arguably got upstaged

as the main character among the Alphas by Roxy. As Roxy had the most pronounced and focused upon development and ultimately came to have greater influence on the movement of the narrative.

Roxy also was the only one of the Alphas who really considered Calliope a friend.

Though speaking of perhaps I should mention the Cherubs now yes? Shortly after we were introduced to Lord English, we found that the Alpha Kids were in communication with pesterchum users who had the initials UU.

The significance of this is kind of lost on people who came in from act 6 and afterwards, but back in the day a lot of people had a theory that there was a thirteenth troll. See the trolls are (somewhat) patterned off of the twelve western astrological signs

But there used to be thirteen until Ophiuscus; the Serpent; was dropped long before any modern country in Europe or western Asia existed. (There's thirteen again now after some international committee thing, I'm not big into astrology I don't keep track)

All of the characters' pesterchum handles (save for John's though it wasn't always that way) had initials derived from the sixteen possible two letter combinations of A C G T; the four letters used to mark the nucleotides that make up our genes.

However RNA doesn't have T (Thymine), instead having Uracil (U). So most theorised that the secret thirteenth troll would have the initials UU.

There were also mentions that there used to be a lime green blood colour among the trolls before it was basically exterminated.

So a new character who possibly fit all of the checkboxes was seen as validation of what was for quite a while; seen as a very farfetched theory by many.

"We already have so many characters"
"It'd break symmetry"
"We're approaching the end of Homestuck anyway" (hahaha)

What only a few people seen as crackpots in the fandom guessed though; is that UU wouldn't be a troll at all.

What I was probably the only person on pesterchum (or at least RRPT) to guess correctly was that they wouldn't be conventionally attractive either.

The grey hands we first saw of calliope were at first seen as validation of the "she's a troll!" viewpoint, but there were some hints that that probably wasn't the case. Both dark and light UU didn't quite act like most of the trolls we've seen, and whereas most of the

beta trolls kind of rubbed the whole alien thing in the humans' faces at every possible opportunity, neither UU made any direct statement confirming themselves as trolls.

So a lot of people were very, very surprised when it was revealed that Calliope was actually a skull monster in cosplay with a suspicious resemblance to Lord English.

I can recall at least one RPer I interacted with who was actually kind of upset that instead

Of a cute new troll UU was a macabre looking chartreuse visage of death. But they did stick to their original headcanon of a more conventionally pretty troll in the end. And to be fair, Calliope spends a lot of time wishing she were a cute troll rather than a skull goblin.

However Calliope would turn out to actually be one of the legitimately sweetest characters in the entire comic by a long shot. Like legitimately not a mean bone in her body even if some could be offput by her incredible enthusiasm.

As afterall; as Hussie himself stated; Calliope was meant to be the embodiment of the fandom at its best. Sweet, accepting, always dreaming of what they wish to be rather than accepting the prison of the present, enthusiastic, and very nerdy deep lore & analysis connossieurs.

What better way to do that than a character who literally cosplays as their fantroll and identifies with them deeply?

Her brother, whom it would be revealed was a separate personality sharing the same body who would take over when she was asleep, was very much not that.

Caliborn in a single phrase, is an awful, hateful little shit. And despite only appearing midway through the comic; easily snagged a respectable fourth place in Homestuck's swearing olympics.

(Credit to: polyglotplatypus.tumblr.com/post/142692816… for the chart)

(And yes, Jade cusses so infrequently she can't even be rated on this chart.)

Caliborn was both the worst side of the fandom and also the extremely online anti-fandom; particularly the "ew cringe" part of it that was made up in large part of grown ass men being very angry that teenage girls were enthusiastically liking a thing in their space.

Something as old as the internet itself and something that I'm rather sure is going to also be present when my own comic launches. Caliborn you see, isn't sending angry messages to the alpha kids because he wants to hateflirt with them, he just

wants to make them uncomfortable and let them know how much he thinks they suck. Yet despite hating them, he can't take his attention away from them so he ironically ends up just as obsessed with the alpha kids as his sister is even though its an obsession born out of

disgust rather than fascination. You know those people who say they hate a show but cannot stop talking about it or stop watching it because they don't want anyone to not know that they hate that show and everyone involved in it?

Caliborn is exactly that guy.

Because in a way, extremely online anti-fandom is just as obsessed with the work as extremely online fandom. That's the great duality between hate and love, the shared branch that is obsession.

Both were regarded pretty positively. Caliborn was an awful person with absolutely zero redeeming qualities save for his determination; but he was also very amusing. And ultimately being entertaining outweighs any personality faults for a character.

Calliope as mentioned before, was not only very sweet but also very knowledgeable. Together with Aranea (more on her later) she helped to fill in a lot of the missing gaps in our knowledge regarding SBURB. Particularly the classpects introduced with the alpha kids.

On classpect theorising; the thing about it is that while the aspects did cover the obvious thing implied by the name, they also covered a lot of less obvious elements most people wouldn't associate with them at first glance.

Given a bit of thought you'd definitely nod your head and go "oh yeah that makes sense" to most of them but Breath for example is way more than just airbending but also freedom in general among other things. Light kinda does light beams but

knowledge and fortune are actually its primary domains; light beams are way too basic to be the breadth of its domain. And of course for a time people thought Hope was kind of lame until it was revealed that Hope can cover things like believing so hard

reality itself bends to accomodate that belief. Because the cosmology of Homestuck is ultimately idealist in the sense that perception and belief can transform the material. And that abstract thematic or conceptual ties and properties matter as much or more than

more conventionally observable material ones. Your mind can make things real if you put enough into it.

Which certainly upended three or so years of the assertion that space and time were unambiguously the most powerful aspects since in a more materialist viewpoint

you really cannot defeat someone who can control space or time if they know what they're doing.

It did kind of partially work to alleviate concerns that Jade was now too powerful for the story since Jack already was unable and unwilling to cause her harm due to Becquerel's influence on him but was now a god tier first guardian.

Calliope and Aranea also emphasised that god tiering was actually a normal part of Skaia's game rather than an exceptional epic level system. The trolls were just kind of bad at going through SGRUB in the intended way and so missed out on the conventional path.

They also emphasised that god tiering is not the end of a player's journey in terms of growth as a person and in terms of powers. Drilling continent sized holes in planet with the wind is impressive and all, but that's not "deity for an entire universe" grade power.

And someone who is still only hours removed from being a mostly normal teenager definitely isn't ready to attain the mantle of responsibility for a literally infinite number of sapient beings. Further growth must be done and god tiering is more of a

milestone on the road to maturity than the destination. It's like going from middle school to high school. You're still not at the destination yet and the destination (finally being complete as a person) actually existing may be questionable.

This was definitely intriguing. Where once the classpects were mostly just about the cool powers, Calliope and Aranea's revelations (as well as Typhoeus' later remarks) would reveal that the powers and costume were just a small part of a classpect.

It's also in large part about who you are and how you'll take the path of becoming the ideal version of that as well as how you interact with others. Classpecting was more than a 144 (168 if you count the master classes) superpower grid but also something of a

personality and identity system. Which was very big news for the part of the fandom that loved to make OCs as well as the part that adored character analysis because now the classpects had taken on special character specific meaning that could be interpreted for revelations.

(It also makes me want Hussie to print like, a SBURB lore companion book to have all this information in a single repository) Which obviously was huge for all sides of fandom as what had once simply been seen as yet another nod to RPGs now had a lot of meaning to unpack

regarding how it influenced the story. And this time, we were definitely okay with the extremely long winded expository infodumps given to us by Calliope and Aranea because they gave new context to literally everything that happened before as well as to all the characters.

Whereas Caliborn's obsession with "worldbuilding" (a term Hussie actually kind of hates) was mostly poking fun at how nerds rivet count about things that ultimately don't matter in fleshing out the setting or providing hooks to more stories in the setting.

And do so in a long droning way that kills pacing while not actually benefitting the story or recontextualising any of its events or providing any new insights into any of the characters.

(If you know who the artist is, please tell me; I scanned through Bay12 but couldn't find a reference to the original artist)

I suppose I should segue in the dancestors at some point huh?

The Trolls were originally based on satires of certain types of internet Posters. Karkat was the all caps all the time super angry about everyuthing guy. Nepeta was the cutesy :3 subculture that kind of preceded the "uwu" culture of today. Gamzee was internet stoners.

Kanaya was the unnecessarily formal poster, Eridan the "god why won't people date me?" guy who's always been around but for some reason we didn't realise how shitty they were until 2014, Tavros the really underconfident guy in general and so on so forth.

The Dancestors were not just parodies of subcultures that got popular *after* Hivebent but also of the fandom's perceptions of the characters. Whereas the Alpha Kids were absolutely separate from their Beta counterparts save for a few common traits

The dancestors for the most part were much more rooted into the beta trolls. Cronus for example was one part greaser tropes and five parts dialing Eridan's dating woes up to eleven until that was basically his character. A fucking weirdo sex pest.

Horus distilled just about everything regarding Equius besides his fondness for machines and being really weird to eleven. Meulin's whole thing was matchmaking because we all remembered Nepeta's shipping wall.

And for the most part, the vast majority of the dancestors were side characters. Even more so than most of the trolls were. I'd say of them; Meenah and Aranea were the only ones who crossed over into the territory of "directly story important character"

Though certainly some of the dancestors such as Kurloz, Damara and Porrim do have some degree of influence over the story. The vast majority of them though have been dead for billions of years and don't really care to get involved further in Skaia's game of growth.

Indeed that's the thing with most of the Dancestors. They're not just physically dead. They're also in terms of development; dead. As is often said in Warhammer Fantasy, change is for the living. The dead are as they always have been.

Their whole thing was how after dying and being consigned to dream limbo they've largely just existed. Despite having hundreds of billions of years worth of free time and zero commitments or physical needs to worry about they haven't really done anything.

They didn't pick up new skills, they didn't make any particularly deep insights, they didn't even really change as people. They just exist; interacting within a fairly small social circle with the same people for dozens of times longer than the age of the universe.

However they were like, instantly popular with the roleplay community. Despite us never finding out their pesterchum handles the second they were revealed every pesterchum memo that accepted homestuck canon characters was immediately filled with them.

They were simple characters yes, but they were entertaining and had immediately identifiable personality traits. Not deep yes, but very distinctive. And that's honestly the most important thing in terms of a character getting traction with the fandom.

It's like the Bear Guy in the True Grit remake or Chris R from the Room. We don't really know anything about him, he doesn't have a large impact on the story but god damn is the screen time that he gets amazing.

If there's any strength Homestuck and all of its branches have, its characters that people can fall in love with. Even the most one off, one dimensional character with the briefest imaginable nearly always has some kind of charm that people can latch onto.

The Dancestors were perhaps the greatest proof of that within the era of Homestuck just being a webcomic. Most of them quite literally don't matter to the present of the plot beyond their historical role in the pre-scratch session that lead to the beta trolls.

Yet because they've got such distinctive personalities and mannerisms you can infer and read a lot more into those characters than you'd normally be able to from characters with relatively little screen time. Something immeasurably amplified by the massive openbound flashes

which could only be described as "characterization and lore porn" that let the fandom literally wander around the dream bubbles with just about any character they wanted to see them interact and talk with each other however briefly.

Admittedly I'm pretty bad at finding my way around most of Homestuck's walk around flash minigames so I kinda sorta skipped them and for a time I didn't actually realise they existed or that there was so much to them. To this date I've only read through them offsite.

Something I hope to alleviate when I do a live re-read of Homestuck some day.

Now, back in Act 5 there was a lot of hype for what would happen when the kids finally met up with the trolls. This ended up only half happening with Jade and John being separated from Dave and Rose; the latter of whom hung out with the trolls. They were separated for three years

In act 6 we instead got the twofold hype of what would happen when the Alphas met up with the Betas and the remaining trolls. Furthered by how unlike the Betas and the Trolls; the Alphas had extremely minimal interactions with the prior cast of characters.

So everyone had their own divergent ideas of how the dynamic would actually work out when they finally got to hook up with each other face to face. And I mean that in both a shippy and a friendly way. Though to my recollection Alpha/Beta ships didn't really get popular

until they actually encountered each other and there weren't really a lot of popular ones. I think Dave/Jane and John/Roxy were really the only ones that had a lot of currency among the fandom; especially after they were teased.

Of course you had to factor in how two of the alphas would be out of the question for any given beta kid in particular given their genetic relations. And Dirk wouldn't be compatible with Jade due to orientation reasons so that narrows things down a bit.

And by this point most of the fandom had accepted that Rose was sapphic, with the remaining John/Rose shippers mostly just quietly staying in their corner so that nixed Jake/Rose as well. Though speaking of relationship drama I should talk about the drama around Terezi.

See there was a long simmering rivalry between the people who were fond of Jade/Dave, Dave/Terezi, Jade/Karkat, and Karkat/Terezi. The first and fourth kind of united against the second and third. And you could even say that the stans for other ships involving the four

would come in as volunteer fighters against whichever of the four was getting too popular in a shifting web of temporary alliances of convenience. Like the thirty years war except over which teenagers should date each other. Karezi supporters in particular felt secure in the

canonocity of their pairing. Of course then the bombshells dropped that Jade had dated (then broken up with) Davesprite, and Dave was dating Terezi. Which immediately caused some heavy fighting on all sides in what I like to call

"The great KarEziDaJa Yugoslav shipping wars". Some frantically scrambled to see where any basis for Terezi picking Dave over Karkat could have come from (ignoring of course, that in human teenagers relationships tend not to last long and that Karkat and Terezi stated their

relationship to be "complicated" rather than out and out matespritdom whereas most other Trolls tend to wear their filled quadrants like medals. They definitely had a thing but it wasn't ironclad) and on the Jade side of things, people immediately wanting to know how the whole

thing with Davesprite went down and whether it had any bearings on her possibilities with Dave Prime. Of course, Davesprite is and always was his own person with his own experiences, point of view, and personality.

(Art by deviantart.com/saucemania/art… )

I mostly try to stay out of shipping wars and prefer to just quietly consume content for match ups I enjoy but it was pretty hard to not be caught up in the arguments for some of the loudest ship to ship combat the fandom had seen to this point in a period where the fandom was

already very argumentative over many other pairings. Though the fights did die down, I think I've danced around the nature of shipping in Homestuck in particular and how it affected wider shipping culture as a whole for more than long enough.

Shipping is pretty widespread among most fandoms, about as much so as Deathbattling. Who should kiss who and Who would win in a fight are Fandom's most basic, quintessential questions.

Homestuck danced as far away from the latter as much as it could, but it gave the former something new. An entirely new romance system based on the playing card suites.

The Heart is the flushed quadrant; Matespritship. Conventional love as we understand it. The Spade is the caliginous quadrant; Kismesistude which is probably one of the most often misunderstood quadrants. Its basically a sexually charged antagonistic relationship where

despite the feeling of enemyship, there's deepset attraction and mutual reliance pushed by the desire to surpass. These two are the quadrants relating to troll reproduction.

The Diamond is the Pale quadrant; Moirailegiance which can be summed up as "your better half".

The two keep each other from their worst excesses while emphasising one another's best qualities. Their relationship is about helping each other be better and more stable. In essence, ascribing love to the type of friend who keeps you from slipping into darkness.

Which was very important to me and many others on the ace/aro spectrum as it emphasised that there were relationships just as valid as traditional romance or sexual attraction without necessarily being classical platonic familial and friendship relations.

The Club is the Ashen quadrant; Auspisticism. This one is probably the most esoteric and in all honesty the one that feels the most "gridfill"ish. It's not only the sole quadrant to require at least three people, it's also more about intervening in relationships than it is

necessarily a relationship in and of itself. It's mostly a social mechanism meant for stopping people from entering unhealthy antagonostic relationships. Chuds might compare it to "cockblocking", others to simply watching out for people who might be bad for their friends.

But it's rather limited scope (applying mostly to caliginous relationships that wouldn't work) and its rather ephermeral nature made it the fandom's least favoured quadrant by far in terms of shipping. Still, it is nice to recognise warding friends from potentially bad

relationships as a healthy social function rather than bemoaning "cockblocking" like so many overly horny guys do.

Now how does this relate to wider shipping culture? There's the fairly obvious thing that people took quadrants and applied them to other fandoms to categorise their relationships even if they weren't made with the quadrants in mind.

Not just Homestucks who had interests in other fandoms but even some people who were at best only passingly familiar with Homestuck but saw their friends do it.

You could go "oh they definitely have a kismesistude going on" to particularly intense rivals who hate each other

but couldn't live without each other despite that.

But more than that it also helped to normalise the idea that there was more to relationships than the simple binary of romantic/sexual partners and friends.

That you could have a special, intimate relationship with someone that's goes beyond the standard bounds of friendship that ultimately still isn't of a sexual or conventionally romantic nature.

While certainly neither of the black quadrants would be healthy or ideal to have in real life (seriously please don't for real try to build a hate driven competetive rivalry with someone and definitely don't mix sexuality with that), moirailegiance

was latched onto by many as a sort of an ideal for a Filial form of love. And in comparisons to the four greek loves (Agape, Eros, Filia, and Storge) it helped a lot of younger people normalise the idea of there being other sorts of love beyond that for a conventional romantic

partner or for your usual friends and family. Indeed, quite a few I've spoken to have said that the idea of saying that you love instead of just liking your friends was something broached to them at least in part by Homestuck.

It also helped to expand the idea that you can ship a character with more than one person and with more than one type of relationship.

Conventional shipping is often what I call "compulsory monogamy" or "compmono" where we focus on a single, solitary pairing for two characters and don't pay much heed to any other relations they may have.

And that this relationship would ideally be a lifelong one like with swans. An eternal conventionally romantic and sexual relationship that would last until the end of time. From confession to marriage to grave.

But here's an important truth to understand.

Humans aren't Swans

We don't form singular lifelong pair bonds focused on to the exclusion of most other social relationships. As a rule we range from temporarily monogamous to outright polyamorous. For 13 year olds in particular, the idea of finding your perfect swanmate at that age

that will last you until you're both dead is frankly kind of ridiculous and sets up a deeply unrealistic expectation. Not to mention the focus on that one true soulmate instead of all your other also very important relationships is a twisted misunderstanding of our social systems

Something else Homestuck did that quite a lot of stuff popular with teens contemporary to it was also show that breakups happen and they needn't be the end of the world. Often that intense upswell of emotion that drives people together just fades entirely.

Sometimes not even enough of a bond is left to really be friends anymore. And that's alright. To be alive is to change constantly, staticness is for the dead and the nonexistent. So the idea that maybe a pairing isn't going to last forever (especially since

the bulk of the main character cast are ageless immortals) was more standardised and accepted. And of course, Hussie himself said that all possible pairings are possible in different universes with different circumstances; giving validity to shippers of any sort.

(Me on the other hand, I'll definitely judge you for strider and dersecest. I'm watching you motherfuckers.)

Of course did the fandom completely take this to heart in every single person? Obviously not. Jane got shafted in the fandom in no small part because she was seen as a rival to Dirk for Jake's affection. You can't really deny this.

The Homestuck fandom was also riven from birth to the present with shipping wars and people had a bad habit of searching ships they hated just to scream at the people minding their own business. Just as Homestuck had next level shipping, it also had next level ship wars.

Of course, shipping is the sibling of deathbattling as mentioned before and having a "wrong" conclusion or challenging someone's stance would be seen as a direct attack. Just as how voicing an analysis for "who would win in a fight" that certain people disagree with

can lead to flame wars; supporting a coupling certain people dislike would spark the same.

It's an unfortunate side of fandom that as we start to incorporate it into our identities, challenges to our conceptions are interpreted as assaults.

Now what would a discussion of 2012 in Homestuck fandom be without mentioning the Hiveswap kickstarter? I won't get too deep into the extremely troubled production of Hiveswap that serves as a lesson in the perils of indie game development, but the kickstarter itself

is probably what really brought Homestuck to decidedly more mainstream attention as several news sites from Kotaku (kotaku.com/actually-its-c…) to Dailydot (dailydot.com/culture/homest…) decided to pick up on the Kickstarter's immediate and very rapid success.

People had talked about a Homestuck video game since literally the beginning, but the news that one was coming out immediately dominated the fandom and drove it into a wild frenzy of speculation. One that Hussie and co probably should have tempered sooner than later

since from my reading it was clear that Hussie never had any intention of making a SBURB game as many people hoped for (and indeed regarded the idea as too ambitious for any indie game budget). And from what I've been able to gather had always intended to introduce

a new cast of characters who were somewhat connected but ultimately intended to be parallel to the comic's own cast due to his beliefs that the narrative of Homestuck should be contained within Homestuck itself. Think of it as an expanded universe game based around

the adventures of characters a degree of separation apart from the cast of the Star Wars movie. But he set his budget at a pretty modest amount, asking for 700,000 or so dollars. Which is on the somewhat higher end for adventure games these days, being a genre

almost exclusively dominated by small studios with tiny budgets with telltale being perhaps the sole exception; especially around the time. So of course the fandom surpassed it in a single day and would go onto pass it over three and a half times by the end of the campaign.

Which was a massive amount of money for an indie studio (Divinity original Sin only had 950,000 dollars)

And its quite a shame that the development ended up being so troubled in large part by Hussie's inexperience with the indie development world

as well as possible embezzlement by the first studio contracted out to make the game that forced Hussie to have to hire and build his own (an expensive endeavor).

But especially in 2012 land, almost two and a half million dollars was a record breaker among kickstarters.

(Particularly before Star Citizen became the world's foremost case study in sunken cost fallacies as exceedingly wealthy nerds keep handing Cloud Imperium games millions of dollars for the promise of playing an overpowered ship when the game releases lmao)

Especially for a fandom that was as a rule, mostly made out of people in school or university and thus didn't have fat stacks of cash to just throw around all willy nilly like some fandoms do.

The City of Titans kickstarter to try and build an MMO

to succeed the soon to be shut down City of Heroes which had a dedicated, pretty wealthy and impassioned fanbase only managed about 600,000 dollars in a similar timeframe. And that was from the fandom of one of the old pillars of the MMORPG genre.

Of course there was some discourse as some fans were upset that people were putting so much money to back the development of a game instead of giving it to charity or other causes and demanding Hussie instead pay out of pocket. (Let it be known now that while Hussie is

exceedingly well off by Webcomic writer standards, he's not "pay for an indie game with pocket change" well off and never has been and I strongly doubt anyone in this cash strapped industry ever will be.)

Others were angry that Hussie was diverting focus to game dev

instead of finishing a comic many people were expecting to be over within a year or two. And this was a fair point; Hussie and co themselves have admitted the development of Hiveswap ended up distracting them quite a bit from the comic and it might have been for the best to

focus on the comic first before the kickstarter but that's neither here nor there.

But for the vast majority of the fandom, it was the coolest announcement since the death of Osama bin Laden.

Perhaps the most interesting thing was that there were plenty of joke tiers. The highest one people went for was the 10,000 dollar tier where you'd be able to get your OC into Homestuck (no guarantees they'd survive introduction though). Which two people actually went for!

Meet Mierfa Durgas, made by SympathyPlan and Nektan Whelan by Jedediah Long. Hussie didn't think anyone would pony up that much money at once and so disabled the joke tiers after this so nobody would bankrupt themselves on his accord, but he did honour the rewards.

Of course you had to pay $100,000 to get the privilege of guaranteeing the survival of your OC which I'm sure at least one millionaire somewhere was thinking of doing before Hussie shut down the ultra high tiers.

Because you know some guy with a pathological need to brag about their bank account would have slammed a hundred grand pledge into the kickstarter and looked Hussie in the eyes with this OC they've been perfecting for years demanding that they get canonised.

The most bourgeois of ways to express your fandom. But alas we'll never see that possible future.

In this era when Twitter was mostly seen as a shitposting site rather than a serious fandom gathering spot, instagram was in the website equivalent of diapers and shitting them, the idea of Tumblr selling for just 3 million dollars was laughable,

and Facebook wasn't just a place for your grandparents to post cringe inducing minion memes about how vaccination will resurrect Joseph Stalin. Hussie still had his social media presence to speak to fans who wanted more direct access to him than could be gained from the Forums.

Initially he had an account on the now obscure site Formspring where he provided simple Q&A responses to fans who wanted to know a bit more about his thought process, some insight into the comic itself (note that death of the author was never written with serial works in mind

, a still being created work that can be edited at any time as opposed to a finished work is one where the author has far more control over its meaning. It's also worth noting that while it's a popular theory, it's not universally accepted and has its critics; particular in

Post-Colonial studies) or clarification on a number of lore questions. Formspring of course is a dinosaur from the 00s era of the internet and Hussie ended up setting up a tumblr later on to much fanfare as that's where a very considerable portion of the fandom was.

And of course, the subreddit at the time was very young, deviantart isn't really made for Q&A and why would you want to busy yourself with trawling through the cesspool of /co/ more than you absolutely have to?

This more direct exposure to the tumblr side of the fandom is probably what influenced the personalities of so many of the Dancestors, particularly Kankri and Porrim. Whether it was based on a certain type of tumblr poster or an exaggeration of fan characterizations of the trolls

it's undeniable that the place where he'd get more familiar with these sorts of figures would be through sifting through Homestuck tags on tumblr.

Of course I can't really talk about this period in the Homestuck fandom or even about Tumblr without acknowledging one of its most serious social justice controversies. See for years Hussie had maintained that the kids were aracial like the Simpsons or fantasy anime characters

In essence you could imagine them as whatever ethnicity you wanted or even just imagine them as weird colourless ghost people like how a lot of people ultimately default to thinking of the Simpsons as literally yellow. A noble enough sentiment even if I think it's a bit lazy

especially when there isn't much done to suggest the kids were anything but white. I personally would have gone the route of explicitly listing ethnicity but this thread isn't about me or my stance of "when it comes to diversity from a white cishet author I'm never going to

accept word of God as representation unless I see textual proof. No points for the easy way out I'm afraid."

But anyway, a number of statements like Kanaya thinking that Rose was as pale as a ghost or John basically saying that Dave was the epitome of the white guy rapper

were used to harass and often outright bully people who had non-white headcanons for the kids. So I'd be downplaying some serious issues in a fandom that was majority cishet white girls at the time if I said there was a peace until the incident I'm about to tell you about.

But there was at least, not yet a major uproar. It was mostly in the background because few felt the need to speak out besides in the usual ineffectual games of tumblr telephone buried under typical fandom discussion.

No what set if off was Jane entering trickster mode.

Where her skintone went from light mode twitter background white to something approaching what real fair skinned people would have and then saying that she felt very Caucasian.

That blew up in a way that Hussie didn't anticipate but probably should have given that he was already reading feminist literature and was familiar enough with social justice discourse to be able to make a character based around the stereotypes about puritanical white male allies

And another based more around women feminists and their actual concerns and tactics who ironically often get talked over by said white male allies trying to prove how woke they are by taking very dumb stances that don't hugely challenge their own privilege.

But he made the joke and the fandom promptly exploded like Electro went and pissed on some dynamite with his lightning dick. Immediately you had the same set of people redoubling their harassment of those with PoC headcanons who in turn battened down the hatches and

became rightfully angrily defensive and started to turn their ire towards Hussie himself. Which in turn prompted said people to defend Hussie in extremely unpleasant and embarassing ways that got to the point where Hussie disavowed them and edited the joke into saying

she felt very Peachy instead. He even left a message saying that people who go out of their way to defend him should never make him feel embarassed to have them on his side.

And let's be clear that it wasn't just an argument on tumblr. The forums also joined in on the arguing, as did most other sectors of the fandom though I really can't imagine that /hsg/ on 4chan had many people with non-white/ghost people headcanons anyway.

There were arguments in the fandom before but this was a genuine rift with serious bad blood in it in a very public internet space. And I'd say this marked a turning point in the fandom itself as it gave lie to the idea that the fandom was necessarily one big happy family.

Now Act 6 was a rather controversial act for a substantial number of reasons beyond the aforementioned discourse, even though the period between Cascade and the Gigapause was the literal peak of the fandom's size and popularity.

Some people raised that age old hideous rallying call of "they're making it gay!" as the story deconfirmed a lot of popular m/f ships but emphasised a number of same sex ships. (Nevermind that this act also introduced the possibility of Roxy and John as an item and

explicitly confirmed Jade's attraction to Dave. And also never at any point deconfirmed Sollux and Aradia maybe being a thing. Also there was MeuLoz and MItUla) though of course the "Gay Singularity" was still about three to two years off at this point.

Some felt that the story was now actively running away from action of any sort. Virtually all fight sequences are basically alluded to or briefly described rather than explicitly shown and the number of anti-climax fights rose even further than act 5.

Of course there's practical reasons as mentioned before. Fighting can be very demanding to animate and it proper fight sequences demand the full attention of the plot and should be key moments in character and story arcs.

This now famous fanmade animation set to Rex Duodecim Angelus depicting an imagination of the fight with the black king took a number of years and many contributors to make.

And Homestuck was moving towards a story more driven by internal rather than external issues. Ones better hashed out with conversations between friends than fights between enemies.

Some were mad that some seeming plot threads like Rose's expectation to "play the rain" were being left hanging. Though in that particular case, Rose's whole thing was that she thought the game's cookie cutter story arcs were bumpkis and

she wanted to handle things her way.

Others pointed out with some concern, the reduced pace of music album uploads which; fair point they weren't coming out as fast as they used to. But there was already a ton of unused music built up over the years.

Others felt that the increased emphasis on romantic shenanigans and deep lore was an unwelcome drag on the story. Putting a monkey wrench into Homestuck's self admitted pacing issues.

when what they really wanted was to see the plot threads raised in the SBURB session resolved and the confrontation with Lord English and Jack Noir. These people often feel that the Condescension's rise to prominence in Act 6 stole spotlight away from

the prior two established villains. And of course some felt that Lord English himself was taking attention away from Jack Noir whom they felt was and should remain the primary villain of the story.

Of course this does kind of miss the point. Jack Noir was dangerous but his hatred was born out of temporary irritations and his dersite obligation to oppose the completion of the game and the birth of new universes. He was a threat to the kids and directly orphaned three of them

but he wasn't really a Ridley type anathema to the ethoses of any of the Kids and Jade alone could disarm him by just being there. He was also falling behind in terms of raw power, and lacked the cleverness to really make the most out of the powers granted by

quadruple prototyping and having the abilities of a first guardian. Put it simply, as I mentioned before, Jack's not a mastermind and he doesn't hatch devious plots. While we get inside of his head a lot, he's ultimately an obstacle to overcome, not an antithesis to the hero.

Lord English on the other hand; while we did go into massive detail about his rise and path to power (such as the revelation of a fourth type of session; the dead session), what we learn of English is that ultimately he's the playground bully given the powers of God.

Lord English has no greater plan, purpose, or motivation beyond that he wants to ensure his own existence and he was to be able to break all the toys he wants without interruption. He's the epitome of the absolute worst path a SBURB player could take

where their selfishness becomes a black hole, a solpsistic singularity where they accept and allow nothing beyond their own desires and utterly reject the teambuilding nature of Skaia's game. But as is pointed out by Dave, when he isn't going on a rampage looking for

his sister's ghost he doesn't actually do much. And has not directly interacted with the players at all besides Doc Scratch's manipulations. Indeed, since he is the only reason any of the characters exist; they might as well thank him.

He is the underpinning force of evil in the cosmos, but the person with the most pressing need to stop him are Spades Slick and Calliope.

So what does the Condescension stand for then? In a way she's the embodiment of adults trying to hijack their children's future to relive their glory days.

You know the dad who pushes his son to the breaking point to get good at football because he misses

his time in the high school team? Or the mom who forces her daughter into mind numbing piano lessons because she wishes she became a master of music?

That's the Condescension. And she is in fact, very directly the personal issue of the Alpha Kids

and also the embodiment of all the problems the Beta trolls faced. The tyranny of a dead order constantly trying to reassert itself rather than accept the reality that it is a relic of a past already consigned to the dustbin.

A dead order that hopes to steal a prize intended for the next generation so that it can rebuild itself. Even though that prize was never meant for people who have already completed their life's journey. And certainly not those who
decided their purpose in life was power.

That's the Condescension

The adults who rather than try to support the endeavours of the youth, seek to divert it back to themselves to entrench their status.

The fandom for all that was still growing and growing very rapidly. 2012 through to early 2013 was the epitome of the fandom.

And this was back in a time where series analysis and lore videos on youtube weren't really a thing. Certainly not to the degree they are now.

This was the height of tumblr's dominance of fandom, where you'd go to tumblr for your theories, analysis, and fan art (fanfic was mostly on Ao3 though). And Homestuck was at the forefront of the golden age of tumblr.

In a way you could say that Homestuck was the embodiment of fandom tumblr. Yes, even more so than superwholock. Their rise and declines parallel each other from 2009-2013. (Although Homestuck seems like it's going to outlive tumblr lmao RIP)

And Homestuck was the quintessential tumblr fandom. Tumblr's demographics were the Homestuck fandom's.

Speaking of demographics, here's some surveys I managed to dig up from 2013 that while probably not meeting scientific standards of rigor and somewhat outdated, I'm willing to wager the transwoman demographic is a fair bit bigger. I'm surprised pansexuality is/was so dominant tho

homestucksurvey.tumblr.com (Source)

But it does kind of make sense since in my memories of the time, a solid majority of people I roleplayed were willing to match characters regardless of gender if they thought it was interesting/hot.

In this more recent poll done by @pgenpod here

https://twitter.com/pgenpod/status/1161713033514635264

albeit six years after the tumblr poll and with a different base, we do get different figures.

Of course with the disparate nature of modern fandom, you'd really need a professional agency to track down every portion of the fandom and get a complete census.

But in my experience most of the more active participants I've found in the fandom were women.

Men weren't an insignificant portion of the fandom by any means, but it definitely seemed like I usually saw at least two women for every man.

But Homestuck was the first seemingly majority woman and first substantially queer fandom I ever partook in as I've mentioned before. Although with the number of woman fans of stuff like Godzilla, Comics, and Metroid I've found in recent years I'm wondering how many

of the people I met in those fandoms online were either trans or were ciswomen who just didn't feel comfortable outing themselves as such in the "no girls on the internet" era. (One thing I'm glad died with the Bush era)

It also put me in contact with people mostly of my age as at the height of the fandom, people born in the mid to late 90s were the bedrock of the fandom. But we were also being joined by more people from the earliest portions of Gen Z and some older milennials from other

fandoms who were interested in what all the fuss was about.

It was also the first fandom for something too new to really have an established old guard I was a participant in. Sure you had the pre-Homestuck fans of Hussie and even some pre-MSPA fans of Hussie and the people who preferred the earlier acts

But take it from someone who's been through D&D edition and transformers generation wars. Homestuck's grognards never got anywhere near as bad and those did and they were never anywhere near as active as Edition partisans and Geewunners.

The continual influx of new fans also of course, brought in more new fans who were following other people who just discovered the new thing as newly born and expanding fandoms tend to do.

If your friend starts raving about how interesting they find a new comic that seems to speak your language as a child of the internet generations then you're likely to follow suit and check it out yourself.

And while there's the stereotype of people who skipped straight to hivebent, in my experience most people actually did go through the first four acts. The trolls never really threatened the kids' popularity among the fandom the way you'd expect from a massive chunk

of the fandom thinking the trolls were the real main characters. And the stupid bucket jokes were already increasingly in the past by 2012 and early 2013. While the sweet bro and hella jeff memes you'd need to have gone through the kids' stuff to know were evergreen.

This of course did mean that certain topics of discourse remained evergreen because new people always brought them back up again and refought the same old battles over and over again. Sure the prior generations of fans may have considered them resolved

but every person has their own perspective on things. So it's only natural to delve back into "old" discourse to bring up their own perspective. And I think in large part, the fandom was rather accepting of new people bringing up old discourse rather than shutting new voices

out of "settled" arguments as a long of fandoms from earlier ages often did.

And while Homestuck was kind of daunting to get into, previous fans were generally happy to have new people come in and tended to be among the most patient with newbies fans I've ever seen; nearly always willing to answer questions or discuss things with newbies.

It was also as mentioned before, a fandom that was pro-OC in a huge way. OC creators were a huge chunk of the fandom in this era, and everyone wanted to share their fantrolls and fankids and as we learned more about SBURB; their fan session ideas too.

The Homestuck roleplaying scene began to split with the introduction of MXRP (then MSPARP), CharatRP (dead with no successor), and later Cherubplay (succeeded by CHERP), all three of which were probably better designed for roleplaying than Pesterchum or Trollmegle.

(Neither of these screenshots are mine; being pulled off of Google Images; also apologies for the lack of a screenshot of conventional screenshot of CharatRP from the time period; though thanks to @MarcoNotPolo for having any screenshots at all)

MSPARP was intended for the IRC style of roleplay with quick responses and paragraph sized or smaller posts. It also facilitated chatroom roleplay with its group chat function for when you want a persistent roleplay between a large number of people.

Its roleplay matching system is based on what I call "filtered randomness", where you set some parameters (rating, paragraph or script style, what characters you're playing or want to see etc) and let the matchmaking system choose from a pool of searching RPers.

CharatRP was based primarily on a tag search system where you'd lay down some tags and let people scroll through them to find tags that they find appealing to match with you. It did have a random system, but it was never the focus the way it was for MSPARP.

Cherubplay was more the site for multi-paragraph play by post roleplay with "respond when you like" pacing similar to forum RP. While the functionality for group roleplay was added, it was always primarily a one on one RP site. It was based primarily on prompt selection.

All threee, even in their early forms also had a number of conveniences that made them considerably less unwieldy to use than Pesterchum which due to slavishly replicating the in-universe features of pesterchum was even by 2012-2013; a monstrously outdated dinosaur

of a client thanks to how quickly chat technology has moved. With text breaking all the time, no built in easy way to format text, often rather glitchy and unstable connectivity, and for group roleplay; a rather unintuitive way to program basic things like entrance messages.

And of course with trollmegle you had very little way to filter RP partners and omegle itself was pretty limited in what it could do.

As I mentioned before, the Homestuck fandom's love of roleplaying would lead to it revolutionising online roleplay. Especially in how acceptable it was. Before roleplay was generally seen as kind of niche and rather embarassing unless it was through

certain channels such as tabletop games. It was a habit for god modders, bad OCs, out of character canons, and horny ERP seekers. It was also a habit generally unacknowledged in fandoms outside of TTRPGs or MMORPG RP servers too.

But Homestuck literally had a character who loved to roleplay and wasn't really portrayed negatively for it. While Nepeta was indeed a grid filling joke character never intended to have a big role her hobbies were never shown to be a bad thing.

And of course the MSPA forums, as a lot of fandom forums did and still do; had roleplay boards to accomodate RPers. Though by 2012/3 they were long eclipsed by other segments of the HSRP community.

The fandom also made substantial usage of resources such as Wikia (which was somewhat less shitty then as it is now although indeed still a very shitty platform), pastebin, google docs, and the somewhat short lived Charahub to document roleplays and characters.

With very little exception, the fandom largely celebrated its roleplayers as a widely accepted part of the community just as it adored its fanartists, fanfic writers, and fan musicians. It was a hobby a very significant chunk of its

fandom partook in and whereas many other fandoms continually have "roleplayers are cringe" discourse (especially MMORPGs; though perhaps the most baffling are TTRPG players who vocally dislike roleplay) voicing that sort of opinion would

pretty quickly get you shunned from the fandom for being joyless assholes. So most learned to kindly shut the fuck up and let others have fun.

And this attitude is probably what fuelled the decision to create sites just for roleplay. And these of course would be

sites that through people's interests in other fandoms, also service roleplayers of all stripes. The roleplaying fandom, already booming in size since 2010, was now a juggernaut with a clearly marked presence on the internet.

No more would roleplaying be sectioned off to ancillary boards on fandom specific forums or obscure chatrooms and google chats and facebook groups. It would be loud and proud and have the technology to RP the way that it wanted to.

The process of finding partners would be made easier than ever, and the capacity to avoid people you weren't keen on getting to know better would be made easier than ever before through the anonymization of the fandom's self created RP sites.

Where all the persistent identifiers such as true user handles and DM access would be only revealable at your discretion and blocking or blacklisting someone you strongly didn't want to RP with would be made easier than ever. And with the more private

structure of these roleplaying sites, you were very unlikely to run into content from someone you don't want to see as opposed to forums or tumblr where even if you block or ignore someone you're still likely to indirectly experience their posts elsewhere.

Sure one could always make a new account, but you could say that about just about any medium for online roleplay.

Though of course the anonymity often did make it hard to refind partners in case of accidents (of course a lot of these "accidents" were purposeful)

but most regarded it as a worthy sacrifice for this sort of no strings attached RP. Especially when unlike many other RP forms; you didn't really need to get social group clout to be allowed into the cool kid's club.

Now to cover the golden age of another Homestuck fandom past time; Cosplay! Probably the most (in)famous aspect of the fandom.

Cosplay was both celebrated and a source of frequent discourse. More than just the usual race/body shape discourse

or the "cosplayer dressing as X asshole character acts like an asshole to be in character" discourse or the "venting your dislike of Y character on a cosplayer" or the "cosplaying a ship I don't like with your SO" discourse. There was that but the biggest cosplay discourse

by far was the body paint discourse. Since the majority of homestuck's characters are near-human aliens with non-human skin tones; a very significant portion of cosplayers would paint themselves grey to match. But the thing is most cheaply available and

easily removed body paint also smears and rubs off of everything really easily. People came to associate Homestuck cosplayers at conventions with grey paint being rubbed off on everything. On your hands, on your clothes, on the drink cups, on tables, on chairs, you name it.

The sharpie thing was now in the past (though it remains a warning against trying to take shortcuts in proper application of body paint), but the irritation at Homestuck cosplayers getting grey paint absolutely everywhere remained.

A lot of fans weren't as good about sealing their body paint as they should have been (here's a guide on it: quotev.com/story/6875770/… , please don't assume that the paint won't smear because it dries into a solid state. If not sealed it will make a mess.)

and it created a certain impression of Homestuck fans at conventions. The weirdos who made messes of everything and made the lives of Janitors hell and forced you to have to thoroughly clean out your own costumes after the fact. A huge portion of "homestuck fandom horror stories"

came from people's negative experiences with cosplayers.

Others instead felt that the fandom didn't really belong at anime conventions in particular. Just another front in the ever popular "what actually counts as anime and manga?" discourse wars.

People complain a ton about any fandom that they're not in that suddenly gets very popular and now conventions are full of people cosplaying it all the time of course. But the "Homestuck isn't anime!" discourse actually ended up spawning a meme that Hussie himself would

kinda reference some time after the ending. "Homestuck is my favourite anime" if you're unfamiliar with it.

Of course, if you're willing to get really pedantic you might argue that Homestuck isn't a comic book but an illustrated/graphic novel.

But that's another kettle of deeply stupid and nitpicky discourse for another time.

People have always and will continue to for the forseeable future; resented things that are popular that they aren't interested in. It's a kneejerk justification of your own interests

heavily encouraged by our consumerist society where you're conditioned to identify strongly with what you buy and consume and rally against the competition. If you don't like a thing and other people do (or vice versa), something must be wrong with them. Otherwise you'd need to

admit that your own consumption decisions may just be the result of your preferences rather than anything necessary.

So the resentment towards Homestuck cosplayers was always going to happen, the body paint discourse was just a rallying cry for it.

People have made nearly identical complaints to any popular fandom that they're not personally interested in's cosplayers. Especially if that fandom primarily skews young and doubly so if it also skews female and triply so if there's a lot of body paint usage.

(See how the complaints about steven universe cosplayers are by and large, identical to homestuck's as SU cosplayers also make heavy usage of body paint to simulate the large variety of inhuman skin tones)

But on much more positive notes

the cosplay side of the fandom was very broadly accepting of anything from a simple "wig, accessories, and a godhood" outfit to elaborate reconstructions of characters like Bec Noir and Lord English. And the fandom was also very approving of being silly and having fun

with other cosplayers in more or less any way you wished unless it was bothering or hurting someone else. It was rare to take yourself too seriously in the HS Cosplay subfandom and while some fandoms only had a small portion of people going for cosplay

cosplayers were one of the most prominent sides of the HS fandom as a whole. While I was personally not super invested into cosplay as opportunities for cons were substantially more limited where I lived at the time and I'm a very indoorsy person who's hard to drag out of the

house at the best of times, a very solid chunk of the people I kept in contact with in the fandom were deep into cosplay. Whether they were very young kids or people almost twice my age. Which I thought was cool, and I often wished I could fly out to those big cons

and join all those people in person but alas, plane tickets and hotels are expensive and my parents wouldn't have been keen on the idea of planning a vacation around conventions in countries they don't have family in at the time.

So that will have to go into my "what if?" folder like "what if I stuck with my initial interset in drawing and got an art tablet in the 00s and picked up tutorials?" and "what if 00s era social services didn't recommend english only at my household and

thus leave me stuck with only being able to converse in English while screwing me out of fluency in four other languages."

Still, it was definitely a community that I'd say the ups outweighed the downs of by far. And some fans even organised their own meet and greets.

Which is rad as fuck and more fandoms should do more of in the future. Especially outside of the usual big convention areas because not everyone lives in SoCal, London, or the Tristate area.

And to my memory, while there was some "couples cosplaying characters in a ship I dislike" discourse, the fandom was usually pretty understanding of it. Being pretty decent at acknowledging that A. What you ship doesn't necessarily match what you want to cosplay as

B. Expecting cosplaying couples to stop being affectionate just because they're in cosplay for the sake of being in character is a fucking dick move. C. Harassing people over their harmless ships makes your face very punchable.