Cloverfield Lane

cancerously:

catbountry:

pirateygentleman:

hanari502:

You want to hear how gross of an exaggeration it was? Because my post didn’t even do it justice.

It was March 2011 when the first semblances of Homestuck began to seep through the wood and metal of the convention circuit. The unsuspecting convention goers had absolutely no idea what they were in for as little groups of kids with grey makeup and orange candy corn horns started around the con halls. People were curious, hell I was curious, but that’s all it was. Morbid curiosity.

It was around the time [S] ==> Kanaya Return To The Core was released that people finally hitched on and started getting into it.

And dear god was it hell.

Homestuck completely invaded the convention circuit, bringing in crowds of people ages 11 to 31, and a majority of them were kids. There were meetups every month for every occasion at every place you could imagine. Homestucks started to completely take over convention halls to the point where the dealers room all but emptied out whenever a photoshoot started. Promstuck was established and became a cemented part of convention going. Gamzee’s flooded the con halls at one point after he went crazy and people tried to recreate sopor pies.

People were sitting in bathtubs trying to sharpie dye their skin grey. Karkat cosplayers were having actual literal buckets thrown at their heads. Nicki Minaj’s ‘Turn Me On’ was a national anthem that sparked a music video. Children screaming ‘Fuckass’ in the hallways as they got their unsealed paint all over the walls and floors. There was at least one hundred Dave cosplayers at every photoshoot, and Photoshoots looked like this:

You see that Squarewave in the middle of the group? That’s me controlling the crowd around me. You want another example? Here:

That Kanaya with the cape in the middle is also me. Not good enough for you? How about this:

This was convention Homestuck. This was true nightmare. If you saw a horde of Homestucks coming at you, you fucking ran. There were literally hundreds of Homestucks back in 2011.

A video of a group of cosplayers sitting in a restaraunt, passing around a bucket and spitting in it caused outrage for everyone.

And then there was the tumblr side of it.

AU’s popped up for every conceivable thing. Broadwaystuck, Circusstuck, Dormstuck, Sadstuck, Any fucking thing you could think of, you slapped -stuck onto the end of it and it immediately became a reality. There were countless ask blogs for every character imaginable and the Homestuck Hype was real.

When the Cascade flash aired it crashed Newgrounds for two days.

‘FIRST!’ cosplays were a thing, and if you managed to make one you were heralded as a god. The Alpha Kids came into existence and everyone raced to cosplay them and to see who could name them, who could be them first. Canon urls became sacred and if you had one you were god.

There was a literal fight for the jadeharley url

Updates were daily, multiple times daily. It was the start of Octopimp’s Eridan and Tavros voices, it was how he got popular. Broadwaystuck sweeped tumblr like a plague and the words ‘Let me tell you about Homestuck’ became a threat. It was around the time I formed The Rose Lalonde Homestuck Thesis. Everywhere you looked, there was Homestuck. Hussie’s girlfriend was sending cease and desist’s to fanartists, Whatpumpkin didn’t even have Tshirts on it’s website yet. People kept skipping the Intermission to get to the trolls. And then Cascade happened.

Then the fandom went on Hiatus. A Megapause, if you will.

And then things started calming down. Once 2013 started, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Homestuck was still there, sure, but it was muted. Controlled. Expectant. As if anything that could happen now wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what had already transpired. Now we are but a shadow of the chaos that once was.

2011 Homestuck is not a gross exaggeration my friend. I lived through it. I survived.

It was exactly as bad as it sounds.

is there really a better explanation than this. Its perfect and so spot on.

I was in the position of being an older fan who had been reading Homestuck since it launched, since I had been reading Problem Sleuth while that was still going on. The sudden mushrooming of the fandom felt like it came out of fucking nowhere, as MS Paint Adventures, and Problem Sleuth in particular, had previously felt like something that would only appeal to a subsection of nerds that enjoyed jokes about text adventures, point and clicks, programming, RPGs, Strategic RPGs and JRPGs, since later Problem Sleuth was pretty much built upon jokes about overly complicated and convoluted in-game systems. It was very nerdy, and I could not imagine having a wide appeal outside of a particular niche. Needless to say, I absolutely adored it and its sense of humor.

So when Homestuck started, it looked like it was going to be very similar, except with jokes about convoluted inventory and crafting systems. Already it kicked off with the rigamarole quest bullshit, but was going for an angle of having four characters with fleshed-out personalities. I was totally on board with that. The plot was getting ridiculous at an accelerated rate in comparison to Problem Sleuth’s more gradual approach, and I made the mistake of thinking that I didn’t have to pay too close attention to the intricacies of the plot, as I had assumed, like Problem Sleuth, the absurdly bloated nature of the in-comic lore would be part of the joke. After all, Godhead Pickle Inspector thought I should just relax and have fun, and not worry too much about it. And who was I to doubt the word of Godhead Pickle Inspector?

And then the comic shifted over to the trolls.

And then things went nuts.

I had assumed there weren’t a whole lot of other people who read Problem Sleuth, that it was a sizable audience, but obscure enough that you could make a reference to it and a few people would be like “I know what that’s from! You read that too? Awesome!” and that would be it. When the trolls went from being unseen antagonists to actual fucking grey aliens doing the introductions like the kids had, I found myself inundated with fanart. Instantly, there were fantrolls, pairings, fanfics, cosplays and more. Suddenly this comic I was reading that I thought wouldn’t appeal to anybody who wasn’t at least college aged had a bajillion fucking teenage fans, treating it like they had Harry Potter. The trolls were simple enough in design and interests that it would take little effort to design OCs. Fuck, I remember frigging Zeriara hopping on that Homestuck hype train, at which point I began to realize “oh shit, this got really huge, really fucking fast.”

Crazier still, as I kept with the comic, I was realizing that I was supposed to be paying attention to what was going on, as unlike Problem Sleuth, this comic was not just purely shenanigans. Characters were getting fucking killed off. People were attaining godhood. And just when you thought things couldn’t get more confusing… they did. And I was still perplexed as to how a bunch of goddamned 12 year olds could follow any of this. I still have never gotten completely used to the chatlogs as a format.

I saw them at conventions. I had to explain to people who hadn’t read it what it was. I went to some draw parties and found myself as one of the older people there, being in my mid-20′s. I never really participated in the fandom beyond that and some drawings of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, which was far less polarizing.

Seeing the Homestuck fandom turn into what it became was weird, man. I can’t think of a single goddamned webcomic that has ever spawned the crazy amount of devotion that Homestuck has. In some respects, I think it deserves the attention, as Andrew Hussie has toyed with what webcomics are as a medium by adding interactive flash games, cut-scenes with music and even altering the appearance of the site itself to service the plot, bursting through the forth wall like a meth-fueled Kool-Aid Man. On the other hand, it’s still really weird to me that a lot of fans were too young to even have played a text adventure game and might not have any idea of what it was paying homage to.

I really do not think there will ever be another fandom quite like Homestuck’s. And that’s probably for the best.

Okay, I feel the need to pop in here, only because I feel like there’s something that needs to be understood about the way Homestuck operated as a phenomena, and why it was, literally, a game-changer in the cosplay and convention worlds.

As a prereq, hi, my name is Alex, I ran the first ever Homestuck ask panel (I am sorry about that) and I ran Homestuck photoshoots at major conventions on the US east coast from 2011-2014. I’ve drawn crowds of over 700 people and managed to keep grey off the walls and other people. Homestuck has almost gotten me arrested. Twice. And it was, in everything it did, a complete and utter whirlwind. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Here’s me at NYCC, leading that photoshoot circa 2012.

And Otakon, earlier that same year.

So the thing about Homestuck is that it’s purely Western media. Most big fandoms up until this point on the anime convention scene were Japanese-based, and therefore took a few years to percolate into popularity over in the states. Either there was an issue with accessibility (waiting for translations, finding subs online) or for younger fans waiting for dubs to air on television. Video games were harder because for oft-cosplayed things like RPGs, they usually had to be played, which meant they had to be able to pay to access them. Homestuck was the perfect storm of a couple of these things:

1- It was free and easily accessible. No worries of phishing scams, viruses, or illegality. You could even easily read it on your phone.
2- The source material was written for a younger generation, the ones who grew up on computers, but at this point pretty much anyone who operated primarily online (which, cosplayers, as a subculture, do).
3- The base costumes were EASY. I once calculated the numbers out to prove a trend that there were more of certain characters cosplayed just on the availability of finding something other than the Beta Kid’s shirts. (The answer was Dave, John, Rose, and Jade, which for those people in the HS fandom during the years I mentioned, I think you’ll agree this was about the breakdown).
4- With such a massive cast of characters, there was something for everyone.

And the thing about Homestuck is that when it got big, it got big SO QUICKLY it was straining. Here’s an image of a Homestuck photoshoot I did at a major Florida con, Megacon, in March 2011. As a reminder, this con drew over 50,000 people. It is not small.

This was the entire group.

Fast forward three months later to a smaller show- Metrocon, which boasted about 7-8 thousand attendees.

And, for reference, the following Metrocon took 6 pictures just to capture the crowd as a whole. When Homestuck arrived on the scene, it exploded. And it was due, mostly in part to Gamzee and Eridan’s killing sprees in Act 5. The trolls really did cause the comic to blow up.

But here’s the thing: the revolutionary part of Homestuck was it’s inclusiveness. AUs ran so rampant that anyone could cosplay ANYTHING from their closet and they were accepted amongst the group. And it changed the way we view cosplay as a whole! There’s huge debates on “real cosplayers” and what “counts as cosplay” and it’s Homestuck who was a major driving force in that phenomena, and set the standard for new cosplayers just starting out! Hell, Homestuck got me to start sewing my own costumes. My first sewing project was Jade Harley’s original outfit, putting buttons on a skirt I got at Goodwill. My most recent project took me over 60 hours and was drafted, patterned, and sewn entirely by me.

The Homestuck fandom in 2011-2014 was so, so incredibly important in ways I can’t even describe. I had people get engaged at photoshoots I ran. People made lifelong friends. I had someone, once, who had heckled me for cosplaying Homestuck, purposefully find me a year later at the same show (while they were dressed as Karkat) and thank me for convincing them to read Homestuck, because the support and inclusiveness of the fandom stopped them from committing suicide.

Yes, Homestuck was crazy. But that phenomena shaped a lot of the way we see the cosplay and convention scene now. I know we tend to think of some of the more outlandish aspects as wholly negative, and if I could change one thing I’d go back and make sure everyone sealed their damn makeup. But all of it, exactly as it was, was so, so important. And we need to remember that it made an impact on literally millions of people’s lives.

So allow yourself a little happiness for the things about the Homestuck fandom that, quite literally, changed the world. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad. It was an experience.