please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.
Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.
It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.
Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.
Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.
Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.
Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.
Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.
When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.
As I am still Homestuck garbage and probably will be till I die, I gotta echo a lot of Ash’s sentiments here. Homestuck has literally changed the bedrock of how FANDOM IS DONE. That’s crazy. The art/fic exchange models that Homestuck started are being echoed and used down the line, as well as large-scale fandom events like Promstucks. Now that most of the fandom has scattered, they’re still using HS meets to band together, through Draw-Party events at cons and local meetups. The thing I’ve noticed is, even the largest scale fandom hasn’t been able to match the physical tenacity of Homestuck. I’ve seen a handful of other local events try to pop up for other fandoms, but they don’t hold up. Next month we’re still having a 4/13 meetup.
What’s also cool is that the visual symbols have gone ahead of Homestuck, too. Years later, I still see people use the spade symbol to represent a hate pairing with characters that have NOTHING to do with Homestuck. (Most recently I see them floating over Kylux’s heads.) Whited out eyes to represent a dead character were used for everything from SNK to Dangan Ronpa and are still being used now. Even LANGUAGE has changed. There are tons of Homestuck phrases that have infiltrated our vernacular enough people who have no idea what Homestuck is can be heard saying things like “Being a kid is hard and no one understands” or “you’re the star, it’s you.” It brought back the second-person writing style. Before Homestuck, I had never seen second-person as an accepted writing style, but now I see it everywhere, in tons of mediums.
It had its dark sides, too, I won’t lie. The kind of fandom indignation that could literally brew WITHIN AN HOUR is partial to Homestuck. And I think a bit of the entitled nature of current fandoms comes from having a fairly accessible content creator (not entirely, but Hussie still kept tabs on fandom) who would respond openly to fandom’s demands, which can be sort of unhealthy, especially for content creators in the future.
I’ve participated in other fandoms, but still, nothing holds my heart like the Homestuck fandom. It’s like home, and even though a bunch of my kids have flown the nest, it’s nice to know that they took some of the good parts with them. C:
