homestuck
and the internet of early 2010s tumblr
When LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live” came on the radio, it hit me like a subliminal activation phrase, pulling forth from my unconscious what had been a deeply repressed past: early 2010s Tumblr, and with it, Homestuck.
Nobody watching the ending of Nicolas Cage’s Con Air, over which a re-recorded “How Do I Live” plays, could have predicted that this scene would resurface over a decade later in what would become one of the most important yet bizarre moments of internet culture and media.
Homestuck’s genre-defying mix of Microsoft Paint and Photoshop illustration with Flash animation, along with its terrifyingly intense fandom that would swarm conventions covered in gray body paint, represented the peak of the 2000s and early 2010s internet: a period of earnest weirdness when the internet was still figuring itself out, well before the great vibe shift of the later 2010s. There was nothing like Homestuck, and there may never be anything like it ever again.
Compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses in its breadth and ambition (I’ve also heard “One Piece for the gays”), Homestuck will be remembered as the first great canonical work of internet hypertext fiction.1
What was Homestuck? Explaining Homestuck is an impossible endeavor. I could start off explaining the premise of Homestuck: Four terminally online kids are sucked into a video game that brings about the end of the world and must create a new one alongside their alien troll counterparts. But it only gets so much deeper and weirder from there.2
YouTuber and Tumblr anthropologist Sarah Z’s “A Brief History of Homestuck” runs over 2 hours and 12 minutes, a feature film’s worth of a video essay dissertation that even drew legal threats from Homestuck’s creator for alleged defamation, only for him to back down after admitting that neither he nor anybody on his team ever actually watched the entire video.3
Homestuck, despite its significance to the culture, is not easily archived. For one, the demise of Adobe Flash precipitated an extinction event of an entire geological epoch of internet media, Homestuck’s animations and walkthrough role-playing mini-game elements included.4 More importantly, Homestuck was not just a text, let alone just a webcomic. Homestuck was an event. You just had to be there.
The experience of Homestuck was inseparable from its fandom in a way even other media properties with rabid fandoms could not compare to. One could read every Harry Potter book and watch every movie without camping out for premieres or reading cursed fanfiction about emo Draco Malfoy and Voldemort Gerard Way. Plenty of Doctor Who fans enjoyed the show without getting sucked into the SuperWhoLock nexus of Tumblr. On the other hand, the Homestuck phenomenon was uniquely co-created by its fandom, from the early content that drew from fan suggestions to the delirious anticipation that formed around every update (upd8) to the webcomic that inevitably crashed servers brought down entire websites. One could not be into Homestuck and be offline.
Homestuck was inseparable from what it meant to be a teenager on Tumblr in 2013. Owing to this generational specificity and Tumblr’s idiosyncrasies as a platform, Homestuck could not have been the webcomic it was if it were written any time other than between 2009 and 2016.
Like Vine or the original YikYak, Tumblr belonged to younger millennials, sandwiched in between the older millennials of Myspace and the borderline zoomers of Snapchat and eventually TikTok. Those of us who were on Tumblr, we grew up together. We collectively witnessed everything from the end of the original Harry Potter film franchise to the passing of the torch from Eleven to Twelve, or even the annual “is it just me or does Christmas not feel very special anymore” post that would always get tens of thousands of reblogs. Homestuck began during the throes of our middle school years, peaked when we were in high school, and ended shortly after we packed up for college and left our Tumblr blogs behind.
Tumblr’s unique digital affordances shaped the contours of online fandom, enabling the Homestuck phenomenon to become as intense as it did. Unlike any of its social media peers, Tumblr was (until very recently) “the last bastion of the chronological feed.” In absence of a For You-style algorithm, reblogs were the only way for a post to go viral. Users only saw what they wanted to see and what those they followed thought was worth sharing. I first fell down the Homestuck rabbit hole because of how much I enjoyed all the different art styles of Homestuck fanart that a friend kept reblogging.
Alongside the chronological feed, Tumblr’s approach to tags is the one social media feature I miss the most from other platforms. Tags lowered the barrier of entry to sharing fanart or commentary, making it easier for anybody to participate in a fandom. As a small account with barely a hundred followers, I could upload my highly-compressed yet aesthetic gifsets of the TARDIS spinning in space and receive hundreds of likes and reblogs from those following the #doctorwho tag. This wouldn’t have been nearly as easy nor egalitarian on Twitter, where you need to already be embedded in a scene, following and followed by the right accounts.5
Hand in hand, the chronological feed and tagging system guarded against context collapse, gave small-time fan creators an audience, and kept users’ feeds swimming uninterrupted with all the fanart and inscrutable in-jokes they wanted to see. Behind the Tumblr dashboard, countless teenagers found community in the shared backdrop of fandom, through which they discovered a penchant for drawing and cosplay or started questioning aspects of their identity after seeing something of themselves reflected in the silly grey-faced, black-lipped canonically “8isexual” horned alien trolls.6
Beyond Tumblr, Homestuck harkened back to an internet where people visited websites, not just platforms. I remember the thrill of typing in double-u double-u double-u dot mspaintadventures dot com into the browser just to check if there were any fresh upd8s. The accompanying MS Paint Adventures forums, a relic of the era of threaded discussions on vBulletin and phpBB forums, hosted lively discussions that couldn’t fit in an atomized tweet or ephemeral Discord channel, from sheet music arrangements of Homestuck soundtrack music to serialized fan-made spinoff adventures.7
That internet doesn’t exist anymore. Today’s Tumblr looks like a desperate clone of Twitter. Like Tumblr and Twitter alike, the rights to Homestuck would go on to be acquired and enshittified beyond recognition. Bandcamp, home to the vaunted Homestuck soundtrack music that launched Undertale creator Toby Fox’s career, terminated half of its workforce in a union-busting mass layoff last month after being sold off once again. Like digital sandcastles, internet mainstays fall into the sea eventually. This blog, I’ve migrated it over the years out from Tumblr to Wordpress to reading.supply and now to Substack dot com, a place more amenable to longer-form discourse that I hope will have staying power for the years to come.8
As of this past April, Homestuck has been over for as long as it ran. But allow me some wistful nostalgia for what it was like to be an angsty high school sophomore ten years ago, sneaking glances at the latest upd8 during class trips to the computer lab (do the kids nowadays even have computer labs anymore?), reblogging some of the most gorgeous fanart drawn for a niche webcomic incomprehensible to those on the outside, or welling up over Rosemary—Rose Lalonde and Kanaya Maryam, my all-time one true ship—becoming canon. Like I said, you just had to be there.
letters of recommendation
The definitive oral history of ‘Soul Glo’, the most iconic fictional ad in cinematic history
17776, a speculative fiction narrative published in 2017 by SB Nation about sentient space probes watching humanity play football, has since been compared to Homestuck. Alternatively: if a Thomas Pynchon novel were a Reddit thread.
Insane Clown Posse. Faygo. Guy Fieri. Dante Basco. Betty Crocker. Holographic ghost clone of Obama. Eridan’s character arc as an allegory for the Obama administration. TYP1NG QU1RKS. The four quadrant system of troll romance. An intricate, overly complex alchemy card system devised for just a few panels. The echeladder leveling system. An entire fan spinoff called Ke$hastuck. We didn’t start the Homestuck.
Rather than watch a two hour video, I highly recommend the LOVEWEB introduction to Homestuck. It recreates what it felt like to read the webcomic by immersing you in the Homestuck aesthetic rather than just trying to explain Homestuck.
Thanks to fan preservation efforts, new and returning Homestuck readers can still enjoy a meticulous recreation of the original webcomic via The Unofficial Homestuck Collection.
Whereas Twitter’s hashtags quickly became passé, Tumblr tags remained in use as common posting etiquette, suffixed to the bottom of each post as less obtrusive metadata. As a result, I bet the social graphs for Twitter communities look more centralized around popular accounts that fill in for the aggregating role of tags. Compared with Instagram tags, Tumblr tags felt cozier, as if there were a sense of community ownership over them.
It’s remarkable that Homestuck never sparked a Satanic panic. It was simply too online and incomprehensible for would-be pearl clutchers.
mspaintadventures.com now redirects to homestuck.com following Homestuck’s acquisition. This domain change resulted in a lot of broken links in the webcomic, many of which remain unfixed. Similarly, and quite sadly, the MSPA forums were lost to time after being corrupted in a server migration.
Disclosure: I am a very small equity shareholder in Substack.
Saw this through the reboot discord n enjoyed reading this! I loved early 2010s tumblr - was kinda hard for me to get my posts seen though but preFYP reblogging culture was so good!!