#Homestuck explained

[cannoliparty]

quadrants explained!

quadrants are a fun and (compared to homestuck's other elements) simpler element in the comic. personally, i find them intriguing but i dont really make any pairings with them unfortunately :( atleast theyre fun to explain!! so here we are ^_^

overview

the quadrants are the ways trolls experience romantic attraction to eachother, and what their relationships are based off of. these 4 quadrants are as follows:

matespriteship <3

moirallegiance <>

kismessitude <3<

auspiticism c3<

keep in mind ALL these quadrants are a form of dating, whether feelings are of love, hate, pacifism, etc.

(note: i looove the detail of these quadrants having little text symbols like earth's own romance (<3)!! its clever and makes troll romance seem even more realistic)

in a more literal sense, the quadrants obviously take a liking to the 4 suits in a deck of cards. this plays into the theme of "bar games", with the pool motif of the felt/lord english being another example.

quadrants can be sorted into 4 sections:

red romance: <3 and <>

black romance: <3< and c3<

concupiscent: <3 and <3<

conciliatory: <> and c3<

quadrants

matespriteship <3

this is (probably) the easiest to understand between the 4 - because matespriteship is the same to human romantic attraction. trolls will feel deep respect and adoration stemming from attributes of their matesprite, and this is a positive connection.

moirallegiance <>

moirallegience can be closely described as "platonic soulmates" - but keep in mind this is still regarded as a way of romance and dating!

moirails look out for eachother. they are the first person you confide in, as you are to your moirail. they help eachother in pacifying emotions, and keeping the other calm. theyre mostly necessary because of the violent practices in troll society, and moirails help tone down their partner's violent tendencies and general negative emotions.

an example is karkat & gamzee: at first gamzee carried out the duty of pacifying karkat's loud anger, but later the jobs flipped and karkat had to calm gamzee down from his own murder-spree.

all this pacifying is done through "shoosh-papping" which i feel is just homestuck's funny way of communicating how trolls calm eachother down as moirails: through physical comfort. overall, moirails know how to keep eachother in check aswell as always support and be there for eachother, whether its over their rage, their sadness over a quadrant, or their all-out violent thoughts.

kismessitude <3<

kismessitude is a form of romance that perfectly resembles the violent society trolls are in. it is best described as a rivalry, with a deep hatred for your kismesis. but regardless, this hatred and the quadrant in general is rooted in a deep admiration for the qualities and/or feats of the kismesis, and its just that that makes the quadrant a form of romance and not animalistic violence.

but thats why its normal for a kismessitude to be pretty violent. you hate eachother, after all. and with this deep hatred combined with alternia's normalized violence, something's bound to happen, and fights will break out indefinitely.

although, often kismessitude can be too violent for its own good. an example being when the rivalry and hatred for eachother is too strong and you can end up culling eachother is when a 3rd person (and the 4th quadrant!) must step in.

auspisticism c3<

this quadrant is only present in kismessitudes, but not all kismessitudes have/need an austpistice. the auspistice is the mediator of a kismessitude for when it gets too violent, and someone else needs to step in and calm both/either of the parties down. its to make sure the rivalry remains healthy & balanced, aswell as keeping the pair away from culling eachother, because otherwise then its not dating, and just plain hatred.

of course, auspiticism comes in different forms. the most prominent example is kanaya in a (albeit strange) kismessitude between vriska & tavros. kanaya would mediate and talk to vriska, keeping her away from getting too heated/over the top and straight-up culling tavros. this is an example of when an auspistice is needed for only one overly-violent party member of the kismessitude, but austpisticism can be especially taxing when both parties are overheated in hatred & violence.

categories

now that all quadrants have been established, we can go further in-depth with their categories.

red romance

matespriteship & moirallegiance are in this category! this is because of the non-violent elements in both of these quadrants, as one is positively romantic and the other is used to pacify negative thoughts.

black romance

this category contains kismessitude & auspisticism. this is due to the hateful nature in these romances, whether the parties are mutually hating or it's a 3rd party who must step in on the hate.

concupiscent

matespriteship & kismessitude are in this category. theyre here because they are the only 2 required for troll reproduction.

conciliatory

this category has moirallegiance & auspisticism. theyre here because theyre the other 2 that don't have any reproductive activities and are mostly used for pacifying/mediating. sometimes because of the lack of reproduction people dont view these quadrants as equally romantic as the concupiscent ones, but theyre still a form of dating and romantic bonds!

conclusion

overall, quadrants are fun! whether you come up with your own pairings that arent the basic matespriteship or not, i personally find them fun to analyze/look over nonetheless. feel free to comment quadrant-related things such as more in-depth discoveries or your own troll romance pairings in homestuck!! ^3^

[derseprinceoftbd]

In honor of the new Upd8, here's the updated version of my Personal Homestuck Explainer.

An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, and too long to fit in a single reddit comment. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

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 favored 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, 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 videos with sound, small WASD-controlled computer games on various pages, and most significantly, actual conversations between characters, semi-hidden behind clickable boxes at the bottom of some pages, 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, destroying 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 is, technically, an isekai.)

Homestuck has been described as "a story that's also a puzzle", and this lens has gained authorial approval; events are often told anachronistically, as a kitchen sink of high-concept ideas are explored by a man who sometimes wants to show off his semi-deconstructive version of a classic sci-fi/fantasy trope, sometimes wants to infuriate readers through anticlimaxes and misdirections, and sometimes wants to just go off on a tangent about a random movie from his childhood that somehow soon becomes integral to the plot in an absurdly esoteric fashion.

Eventually the suggestions from readers became so numerous and difficult that the suggestion boxes were closed near the end of the first year, leading to less meandering from Act 4 onwards, but the influence of the audience remained; 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. 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)-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, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. 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 foreshadowing 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). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^2 Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.

Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara 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), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted kiss, 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.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

[sadpurpleblood]

Alright. I was gonna make this more in-depth, but i really have no idea how to condense a work longer than the bible into a coherent post so. Time for

SPB tries to explain Homestuck somewhat briefly.

(somewhat spoiler warning)

so. homestuck is a web"comic" about 4 kids (also 12 kids. plus 4 other ones. also one really fucked up one.) playing a game. that game is called SBURB. in some instances its actually SGRUB. because yes. that game causes their world to end. but its alright! you can escape into the game world. there you can breed frogs until you have a very special frog thats gonna be a new universe for people to live in. when youve done that, you won the game! this has very little to do with the actual gameplay of that game.

One player can build things at the house of the other. but that player has to kill enemies first so they have enough recourses. you build upwards towards floating gates so you can enter the game world. In the game world, every player gets their own planet! theres a scary boss monter hiding in it. also, somewhere on it is a bed where when you die on it you become a god! What kind of god depends on your personality. Or maybe your personality depends on what kind of god you are? noone knows. also the planets each have sweet little reptiles or amphibians who just live there. theyre cool. later on you can visit the planets of the other players through further gates.

you can make basically everything you want to by combining things with alchemy! actually the alchemy is more like programming. and needlessly complicated. (also people have inventories that function like different types of data storage. but that has nothing to do with SBURB. thats just normal in the world of homestuck)

you also get a little ghostly companion as compensation for the whole rest of your planet dying! A glowing orb absorbs something and it becomes your guide. most of the time, the thing the orb absorbs is someone/something dead, so you get to revive someone basically (neat!). actually two things can be put in the guide. But what you put in there before you go into the game world also affects the enemies youll be facing.

Somewhat related to the game, there are special dream moons. when you go to sleep, theres a dream you there on one of those. One moon is yellow and for :D people and the other one purple and for B) people. Your dream you can die seperately from your awake you, but you need them both you for the magical god-bed to work! Luckily, theres also another place to die on the moons where you just need the dream bodies around. Also, on the moons live chess people. The yellow one has white and the purple has black ones.

The chess people also have a big chessboard battlefield planet in the middle of the game world. They fight a war there. What you put in your guide thingies also affects the board.

Sometimes, the previous players fucked up and made your universe frog have cancer. That makes the game unbeatable for you! Luckily, theres maybe a place on one of your planets where you can basically hard reset your universe. Yay! But that means youd normally die. So if you dont wanna die, you gotta find a way around that to get into that new universe.

Okay, that was the game kinda. Now onto stuff that actually matters!

Those are the four kids it starts with. its the one on the lefts birthday and the sburb beta comes out. so they all play sburb and cause their planet to be destroyed. but uh oh

the trolls who played sburb first fucked up making the human universe so now the previous four gotta reset it! So they do that.

Those are the new four kids that happen there. theyre actually the grandma/grandpa/mother/brother of the original four. actually theyre their mother/father/mother/father. because everyone is either a weird slime clone of themself or a mixture of two clone slimes.

the new four also talk with cherubs

these guys. the red one hires a dream assassin to kill the green one. that one plays sburb alone and thats not allowed so he suffers a totally different session which i will NOT get into but he gets green leprechaun muppet henchmeb because of it and also hes the big bad actually.

Yeah turns out due to time shenanigans he kinda has always been there and *sorta* has been pulling the strings since the beginning?

doesnt matter. they manage to defeat him after they bring a new green cherub from another timeline there.

and uhh thats the end of homestuck then.

🎉...

i left out basically everything that makes homestuck. fun. and enjoyable. But i will NOT get into the characters because everyone interacts with everyone and theyre really complex.

also, fun fact, the birthday "boy" from the beginning is actually a trans girl after someone found one of the authors toblerones. this shows up nowhere in canon material but according to hussie its canon now. its probably fine to picture that fella as whichever gender.

also everyone is hella queer and or neurodivergent. even the homophobic racist characters. especially those actually.

okay ill shut up fr now i might talk about the characters at some point but now definitely not.

(@possiblyatransgirl heres the quest attempt its shitty but homestuck is equally shitty)

[utopianparadoxist]

i have to say i never read the epilogues but i'm always looking forward to seeing good endings for these characters that mean a lot to me, so thank you ♡

you also mentioned going back to making youtube content, will it be a continuation of homestuck explained or something else?

It'll be a mix of more Homestuck explained content and hopefully more personal projects like the Heaven will be Mine video I've wanted to do forever.

The main difference is I won't be too involved in a lot of the Homestuck content. I'm interested in using the patreon/YouTube platform to uplift other theorists or analysts I value in the community, trying to make it something I just have some editorial helpful contribution to now and then but don't have to work on too actively myself.

This is mainly because I work full time and go to grad school and there's no possible human way I could really treat Homestuck as a job, even if it did pay enough, which it hells of does not. But it feels nice to imagine that it'll help my friends pay bills a bit better, get new ideas out there more accessibly, and all I need to do is a little networking and project management.

[buzzingroyalty]

On this day

A Savior was Born

[sorrelpaws]

lets all be fuchsia and not tell jane

[pastabaguette]

not even canon at all, because he would not post this, but i still wanted to draw it. it’s funny.

i’d also like to bring to attention that i changed all the profile pictures. a minor thing, but i think it’s cool.

[wordpress-blaze-133681193]

Brainy-Yak and Other Missed Signals

The summer I was six years old should have been filled with only fond memories of my father's promotion ceremony. I had dressed in what was then the height of 1970s style – a sweet little pink and maroon checkered dress that made me feel like a fashion icon. I remember the excitement building as we drove to the ceremony, and then, without warning, that familiar wave of nausea overtook me.

The car windows were immediately rolled down, but it was too late. My precious dress became the casualty of what everyone dismissed as "just carsickness." I was devastated – not just physically ill, but heartbroken that I had ruined such an important day (and my beloved outfit).

What none of us knew then was that this wasn't simply an unfortunate childhood affliction I would outgrow. It was actually the first signal flare of what would eventually be diagnosed as vestibular migraine – a neurological condition that would weave itself through the fabric of my life in ways none of us could have anticipated.

The Early Warning Signs

Looking back now, the evidence was everywhere. At age five, while hospitalized for surgical removal of a hip tumor, I became something of a curiosity to the nursing staff. Unlike every other child on the pediatric floor, I refused the kid-friendly meals they brought around. Hot dogs and sodas – staples of childhood cuisine – were my nemeses.

"She won't eat a hot dog?" a nurse asked my mother incredulously. "I've never seen a kid turn down a hot dog."

Fortunately, my mom was completely supportive of me not eating what she viewed as junk food, and requested adult meals instead. I tried to explain that eating hot dogs made my mouth feel funny in a bad way and the soda hurt my mouth, nose, and throat. These weren't the complaints of a difficult child – they were genuine physiological responses - impossible for a five year old to truly articulate, and unknown to doctors - that would later make perfect sense in the context of my diagnosis.

No one had any idea in 1977 that I was experiencing the early manifestations of a nervous system that processed certain stimuli differently – a hypersensitivity that is frequently reported among those who develop vestibular migraine later in life.

The Teenage Misdiagnosis

When puberty arrived, it brought with it two unexpected changes: my straight hair suddenly developed curls (a hormonal shift that bamboozled me and confounded my morning readiness routine), and I began experiencing what would eventually be recognized as classic migraines. The timing wasn't coincidental – hormonal fluctuations are well-documented triggers for migraine conditions.

What followed, however, was not immediate clarity but years of confusion and misdiagnosis. When I described my symptoms to doctors – the intense headaches accompanied by facial pain so severe that my temples, eyes, forehead, cheekbones, and jaw were tender to the touch – they repeatedly diagnosed me with sinus infections. The sensation that my eyes were bulging out of my head seemed to support this diagnosis, at least on the surface.

"It's a sinus infection," became a refrain I heard throughout my teenage years and well into young adulthood. Antibiotics were prescribed, offering no relief because they were treating the wrong condition entirely. This misdiagnosis is startlingly common – the similarity between migraine pain patterns and sinus symptoms leads many sufferers down a similar path of confusion and inappropriate treatment.

What neither I nor my doctors understood at the time was that these distinctive facial pain patterns were not caused by sinus inflammation at all. They were manifestations of trigeminovascular activation – the involvement of the trigeminal nerve in the migraine process. This same nerve pathway was responsible for the pain when consuming carbonated beverages or nitrate-containing foods like hot dogs. The trigeminal nerve, with its three major branches spreading across the face, was central to my migraine experience, creating pain patterns that mimicked sinus issues.

The traditional migraine symptoms were certainly there – excruciating head pain, sensitivity to light and sound, and the need to retreat to a dark, quiet room until the storm passed. But these symptoms were accompanied by this distinctive facial component that would confound proper diagnosis. I learned to manage as best I could, accepting these episodes as an unwelcome but expected part of my life.

I was eventually diagnosed with migraines in my late adolescence, but didn't receive effective care for another 15 years. My college routine consisted of my roommate (a wonderful person and good friend) waking me up every morning with a cup of coffee and acetaminophen. She's really the only reason I was able to get out of bed every day1, Eventually, I learned about food and environmental triggers, and started taking preventative measures, significantly improving my day to day life.

To this day, however, when I eat nitrates I still feel like I've been punched in the roof of the mouth, and drinking carbonated beverages is like drinking liquid razor blades. I only learned a couple of years ago that most people find carbonated beverages delightfully refreshing, and not painful at all. Likewise, they don't feel like the roof of their mouth is experiencing a tiny but violent earthquake when they eat corned beef. I truly thought consuming these things was just as excruciating for everyone, but for whatever bizarre reason, everyone but me enjoyed the pain.

What I also didn't realize until recently was that my body was gradually setting the stage for something more complex, a condition that would manifest when my hormones underwent their next major shift decades later. And I didn't understand that there was a direct neurological connection between my childhood sensitivities, these teenage "sinus infections," and what would eventually emerge as full-blown vestibular migraine.

The Perimenopausal Pivot

The arrival of perimenopause in my early fifties marked another hormonal watershed – and with it came symptoms that defied my previous understanding of migraines. There was still head and facial pain, but now there were new, frightening experiences: sudden dizziness that made the world seem to spin or tilt, a persistent feeling of the floor dropping away even while standing on solid ground, and pain that could be triggered by something as mundane as the sound of my spouse turning on the kitchen faucet.

I found myself clutching walls as I walked down hallways, canceling social engagements because I couldn't predict when the next wave would hit, and feeling increasingly isolated by symptoms that were difficult to describe to others. "I'm dizzy" barely scratched the surface.

It took multiple consultations, a process that spanned months, before my headache specialist finally was able to help me connect the dots between my childhood sensitivities, my traditional migraines, and these new vestibular symptoms. "Vestibular migraine," she explained, "often emerges or intensifies during hormonal transitions like perimenopause."

The diagnosis was simultaneously validating and enraging. Suddenly, the seemingly disconnected threads of my medical history formed a coherent pattern. My childhood motion sickness wasn't just a painful inconvenience – it was an early indication of how my brain processed movement. My strange food sensitivities weren't peculiar preferences – they were legitimate neurological responses to substances that act as migraine triggers.

Understanding Vestibular Migraine

Vestibular migraine represents a distinct subset of migraine disease that affects the vestibular system – the complex network responsible for our sense of balance and spatial orientation. Like classic migraines that can manifest a myriad of symptoms with no headache, vestibular migraines can manifest predominantly as episodes of vertigo, dizziness, imbalance, and spatial disorientation, sometimes with little or no headache at all.

What makes vestibular migraine particularly challenging is its protean nature. Symptoms can be different for everyone, and can overlap with several other conditions. It's a diagnosis of exclusion and symptomatology; there's no blood test for it.

For me, understanding that all these symptoms stemmed from a single condition was the first step toward regaining some control over my life. Learning that my childhood sensitivities were connected to my adult diagnosis helped make sense of experiences that had previously seemed random - or psychosomatic.

When you have lifelong experiences that no one else seems to understand, it's very easy to gaslight yourself into thinking none of it is real. I'm still working on that,

The Connection Between Childhood Symptoms and Adult Diagnosis

Research increasingly supports what my journey illustrates: many children who experience seemingly normal albeit extreme versions of childhood "quirks" are displaying early signs of migraine vulnerability.

Motion sickness, particularly, stands out as one of the strongest predictors of future migraine disorders. The severe carsickness that ruined the day of my father's ceremony (at least it did for me, I suspect my family was so used to my barfing they forgot it even happened immediately after clean up) was actually my migraine brain reacting to conflicting sensory inputs about motion and position – a vulnerability that would later manifest more dramatically in adulthood.

Living with Vestibular Migraine

Navigating life with vestibular migraine requires a multifaceted approach that addresses both the underlying neurological condition and its myriad triggers. For me, this has meant:

Medication protocols that target both prevention and acute episodes

Dietary modifications that eliminate known triggers

Stress management techniques, since emotional stress is a potent trigger

Sleep hygiene practices to ensure consistent, quality rest

Manual therapies such as massage, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy.

Careful attention to hormonal fluctuations and working with my doctor on potential hormonal treatments during perimenopause

Perhaps most importantly, it has meant accepting that my neurological makeup is not defective, just differently calibrated. The same sensitivity that makes me vulnerable to vestibular symptoms also makes me perceptive to subtle environmental changes and attuned to details others might miss.

I have the nose of a bloodhound, and can smell things no one else can. I know now those aren't the proverbial "smelling toast" stroke signals, but genuine abilities. Of course, depending on the smell, sometimes it's good, sometimes not so fun.

Finding Meaning in the Journey

Looking back at that little girl in the pink and maroon dress, I wish I could tell her that her experience wasn't just an upsetting incident but an important clue to understanding her body. I wish someone could have explained to the puzzled five-year-old in the hospital that her food sensitivities weren't strange but significant. Most of all, I wish my teenage self had known that the migraine journey was just beginning and would require compassion, time, and understanding rather than frustration.

Vestibular migraine, like many chronic conditions, doesn't just happen overnight. It reveals itself gradually, leaving breadcrumbs throughout a lifetime that only make sense when viewed in retrospect. Looking back, I can see how these conditions exist on a continuum, evolving and transforming as our bodies change.

For those experiencing similar symptoms, whether you're the parent of a carsick child or an adult suddenly grappling with unexplained dizziness, know that these experiences aren't random. They're meaningful data points that deserve attention and investigation. The connections between childhood sensitivities and adult neurological conditions are becoming increasingly clear to medical science, even if they're not yet common knowledge.

My rollercoaster ride with vestibular migraine is still full of twists and turns. Some days, it feels like the ground is practicing for a dramatic exit and I'm gravity's reluctant assistant, while on other days, I can prance through life, virtually symptom-free and ready to take on the world. After over 50 years of fine-tuning my migraine management skills, I'm a maestro, orchestrating what once felt like a collection of discordant notes into a weird symphony.

Source: Brainy-Yak and Other Missed Signals

[poxxum]

So I got obsessed w a certain song for a short period there....

[beescake]

back in the day we had pantskat

now we have sagg sollux

[offkilterkeys]

Guys if I compile all my Jake English panels edits I can make a crude montage of something roughly resembling an arc.

[cupid-tune]

Doodle of Lucius pre-incident, she was a whole lot worse

[cannoliparty]

mobius double reacharound.. explained!

got the idea to write this from a friends bulletin post on spacehey, asking what mobius double reacharound was, so ty for the inspiration!!

MDR

mobius double reacharound (MDR) is in summary, the stable time loop of the infinite creation of the trolls' and kids' sessions and universes, over and over. specifically, the term is more often used to describe the trolls' session.

when the trolls start out in sgrub, they believe the goal is to be split into 2 teams and compete for who will win/finish their session first. later, its discovered the 2 teams were 1, and they must learn to work together to not die, and create a new universe.

the term "mobius" is coined from a "mobius strip", which is a sheet that at first looks like its made up of 2 sides, but running a finger over it reveals its actually just one! basically, a physical version of what the trolls went through.

the MDR virus

the mobius double reacharound virus is also another really interesting & detailed topic i want to explain, and it really ties the whole mobius theme with the 2 universes together nicely!

sollux, an expert in the programming language ~ATH (used on both alternia & earth) coded the virus for fun.

universe 1 & universe 2 are both imported. the first universe starts a method executing the second universe's method, which both inexplicably overlap. then, the 2 universes die.

basically, the 2 universes are the trolls' and the kids'. the program connects these 2 universes and causes them to forever be cursed yet the most stable time loop, creating and destroying eachother endlessly.

thats all i have, let me know if i have anything wrong or u have anything 2 add!! also taking requests for explaining stuff in homestuck (unless its lil cal/juju lore....)!!! byee (^0^)/*

[derseprinceoftbd]

An explainer for Homestuck, typed up on a Google doc for Reddit, and now transplanted onto Tumblr, with the hope of crossposting it onto Reddit. Most explainers I've seen utterly fail to get the tone of the series across, thus not answering the main question I see: "what is Homestuck *and why is it like this*". Why does it evoke the reactions it does? Why are so many things considered a reference? Who is Vriska? (I can't actually explain that one in under 3000 words, it turns out.) But, here's a briefer briefer (heh) on the subject of "What the actual fuck is Homestuck":

#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.

And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.

[onlysushicat]

never forget 😙😙💕💕

[lembowe]

so webfishing...

[blue-atom]

Limbusstuck... Homebus Stumpany... is this anything