#tlcstuck

It's a pretty common belief that large parts of Act 6 were relatively unplanned, with Hussie essentially having a beginning and end in mind and just sort of moving things about to fill time in between them. And this lead me to wonder; was one of Homestuck's first truly big theories possibly based on real, abandoned foreshadowing?

It's no secret that Jake had an immediate association with Lord English that a lot of people picked up on, speculating about them having some kind of connection. And some went so far as to float the idea, based on some of the language surrounding him, that Jake would specifically be possessed by English in some manner, a theory which eventually made its way into DDOTA, easily Homestuck's most well-known rewrite project to have reached Act 6.

So, do you think that this might have been part of the actual plan? That Hussie had some number of ideas he considered enough to leave potential retroactive hints for, but then abandoned after reconsideration, and that this was one?

We’ve been moving along swimmingly, but this is the first time I need to bring in the additional context of Homestuck, really and truly, into the picture. Because, at this point in Homestuck’s Journey, people are starting to get restless about the whole thing. Why? Because it has perpetuated the most awful, terrible thing you can perpetuate if you are a webcomic enjoyed by teens on the internet: IT IS HARMING THE PRECIOUS BLORPOS!

And that. Cannot Happen. This is a genre I like to call “Rewrite” and it basically is like. I want to Rewrite Act 6 (it is always Act 6, usually starting from the Retcon but sometimes it can happen before it), and I want to make everybody get a happy ending, HUSSIE BE DARNED. Now, the thing about this stuff is that it’s usually pure fluff. Sugar. It’s Candy, is what I’m saying. It’s intentions are, “I am going to write this thing right, and by right I mean I want all the characters happy and smiling and I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.” It’s…certainly A genre, and I get wanting to see characters happy instead of sad but…they are characters. They aren’t, you know, real. They have narrative choices that are deliberate, and those choices have consequences. Also, Homestuck doesn’t suck when it gets to Act 6, at least not for me. I can see why some people MIGHT like, not like the meta elements that Act 6 contains, but also Homestuck was doing that kind of thing BEFORE, it’s just not. You know. At that kind of scale. But I REALLY like that kind of thing, and therefore Act 6 has the most “bits” and moments and sequences that I like! Besides the rest of the comic.

The thing about this kind of story is, it only works if you A) do not like the original story, B) got attached to the original stories’ characters somehow despite not liking the original story, and C) want to read an alternative take on it, but not the full thing, just the part that you REALLY despise. Like. It’s a lot, and you kind of need to start off being a hater in your heart for Homestuck on the Homestuck Fansite? And it doesn’t make a complete story? But I guess I need to stop being a hater in my heart for this kind of thing and really judge the story on it’s own merits it’s just. Not starting off on the right foot, is all I’m saying.

and then you look at @thelifetimechannel and @clonerightsagenda and @geejaysmith and how they said "Alt-Calliope is the Conductor, the story is about rebelling against these cosmic forces, Rose was right, SBURB is obviously incredibly evil, the *story* is the enemy, characters should have good endings because it's Not That Subjective' and it's like I Don't Know Which One Of You Actually Understood The Themes Of Homestuck Less But By G-d What These Two Have Made Is *Better* Than What Hussie Ever Would Have.

Edit:

#Homestuck, A History;

Andrew Hussie, a person (now going by any pronouns) then known for various obscure things around the net, made an interactive reader-driven comic-type-thing called Jailbreak where he would draw panels demonstrating the events of the story as dictated by other posters in the thread, putting his favoured suggestions in the narration and responding in kind. The happenings and variables were influenced by his own strange brand of humor and set of fascinations, such as rap, the Starsky and Hutch movie and the cast thereof, horses, clowns, and H!rry P!tter as a cultural presence. He would eventually compile this, along with the unfinished followup, Bard Quest, on its own website.

The third installment of the so-called MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth, was a massive step up in production value, featuring impressive art and output speed as well as evolutions such as some pages being flashing gifs. This sort of thing was considered to be one of the best demonstrations of the potential of the internet. It ran for 1674 pages over the course of about a year.

Homestuck was the followup to that, running 8123 pages from April 13th 2009-2016 with numerous hiatuses in the latter half of that time. It featured such advancements as colored panels as default, videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most importantly, actual conversations between characters, allowing them to become three-dimensional and truly sympathetic. (Hussie, it would soon be revealed, was heavily skilled at writing compelling and unique character voices and dialogue writing in general.)

Homestuck was definitely the most complex MPSA, with a grand overarching plot being integrated into the results of the actions of the readers. The plot revolved around an in-universe game called SBURB with the power to influence reality, sort of a Jumanji with time-travel mechanics that would soon be revealed to be the centerpiece of reality itself, a program that destroys the home planets of its players to motivate them to enter the world of the game and fulfill an unknown grand purpose, complete with millions of fully sentient NPCs. 

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval. This is the sort of story where the Author appears as a character to explain things to the audience, another character ends up changing the color of the site to his own scheme and narrating in his own voice, and the Author bursts through a literal fourth wall into the world of the story, hunts him down, and beats him with a broom. This is the sort of story where one specific person has killed another three times across multiple iterations of both themselves and the universe, and three of the killee are alive at the end, despite all of them being versions that were killed by the killer, who himself has one alive at the end, and both of those people have four-letter names, the first two letters of which are the same.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, but their influence carried on; one easy example is a character only seen from the top half initially being theorized on the official forums as using a wheelchair, a fact which would not only become Canon, but highly relevant.

The early MSPAs curated an audience through programming humor and 80s-90s film references as filtered through the styles of Terry Pratchett, Mark Twain, and the Something Awful forums, but the audience for Homestuck, due to the nature of the characters, was markedly different, especially after the Trolls showed up.

You've probably seen them.

The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens that had undergone a SBURB Session that they claimed had been influenced by the lead human characters. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.

I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.

It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count, I've always thought 192)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.

So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work in both plot and presentation, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice above all, and which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.

The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed forshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). Few speak of the epilogues. Fewer still speak of the sequel.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, clowns, dicks-out furry art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), mocking of otherkin, minor characters being racial stereotypes of Black (Meenah) and Japanese (Damara) people, minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon (as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded). 

Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.