#altstuck

[friendlybatteringram]

Out-of-context quotes from my own Homestuck alt-ending comic. (Sorry about the picture quality)

[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.

[ck-dash-4]

Doodles from this month

[bastardgoblinwolf]

ok ok guys. altstuck. i only have some ideas but ya'll can help fill in the blanks

aradia does dark decora. i mean look at it

sollux is a cybergoth. so something like this but red and blue and yellow

karkat is grunge. but actually grunge not storebought poser shit. so i don't trust pinterest to give me an authentic image cause its an aesthetic site it'll all be designer

kanaya is a pastel goth as ive said in the past. kinda like this

vriska is scene. but like casual scene not super dressed up

eridan is gyaru. maybe the substyle with the more exaggerated makeup

feferi is hippie goth. probably more beach oriented than most hippie goths but still

that's all i have someone fill in 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[crappy-homestuck-confessions]

ok altstuck anon here im back with the trolls, a lot of these are jfashions but hey it's alt

aradia: cult party kei. if you don't know what that is its a jfashion with a focus on pastel, light sheer fabrics and chiffon, and peignoirs and other nightwear. it also has a religious imagery connection. it's pretty spooky and she would love it i think

tavros: cottage core but more like mori kei. which is a jfashion with the theme of looking like someone from the woods, so like earthy colours, jumpers, vests. very comfy and i think mr animal whisperer would totally be into it

sollux: two takes- either cyber goth or menhera. cyber goth is like super rave style, big stomping boots and colourful wires that look like ponytails. if sollux wasn't a bit of a shut in he'd be a rave guy for sure. or menhera, which is a style born of people on japanese mental health forums putting their vent art on clothes to share. sollux would go on troll menhera forums

karkat: emo again. he and dave are emo boyfriends

nepeta: 'scenecore' which i prefer to call hyperscene. which is like the whole. tiktok monster energy bunny hat kandi which i think is a cute style but different from scene-i call it hyperscene because while it has influence from scene, it's also rooted in very hyperpop-like music-- my favourite artists of the hyperscene type are zeija, tr15t4n and d3adgrl. but yeah nepetas all about it

this got long ok ill be back with the others

.

[buzzingroyalty]

altstuck terezi for day 4 of anime expo 2023 >:D

[atlantastuck]

is altstuck still like alive? I've noticed a bit of a drop off in blog activity in the recent years but I'm holding out hope for momocon

something something homestuck Renaissance

hoping to see people at momocon in a couple months !

Yea! we're still alive and kicking :o) Its kinda a one person team at the moment so I havent been makin a lot of blog posts As always, there will be photoshoots at Momocon Friday and Saturday.

[airshipcity]

uh so i finally caught up on altstuck again and i’m crying over [s] break because it’s so fucking good and everything we deserved and altstuck is officially and unrevokably accepted in my heart as the true alternate ending of homestuck 

[teenyskies]

[...] i mean, i wouldn’t have MINDED if i got to live a full life like you guys, but... at least i can die knowing it’s all worth it. i think that right there is a lot.

happy birthday to @friendlybatteringram !! here’s a drawing based off of his AMAZING homestuck alternate ending fic that i seriously ADORE.

[friendlybatteringram]

Good news, fans of the things I draw!!!

In honor of my recent return to work on the third JadeKat comic (Midnight Flush 3), I have created a Discord server for all things related to both Altstuck and the Midnight Flush series!! The link is right here:

https://discord.gg/MxtDS8tpg7

Join if you wanna discuss the current progress of the current comic or perhaps share thoughts on the already completed ones! And, of course, just hang out and have fun with others.

See you there! The more the merrier!

[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.

[atl-sparklestuck]

Posts that will be coming shortly 

[crappy-homestuck-confessions]

have i talked about altstuck here yet? no so here's some alternative or cool fashion styles i think hs characters would wear

june: scene, and she's the type of scene kid who wears invader zim and kandi and hair extensions and converse and the more flashy bits of it

rose: romantic goth definitely, maybe with some elements of vampire goth

dave: emo, but he won't say he's an emo cause that's 'cringe'. but he's emo

jade: trendercore, yk the gnc colourful outfits, making fun of kalvin garrah types who call people trenders. twenty nine pride pins on every inch of her body

ill be back with the trolls but i have school neow

.

[friendlybatteringram]

Boy am I still happy that I crafted an entire alternate ending to Homestuck that I can interpret as my own canon, that way I don't have to acknowledge all the crappy ass things that happened post-GAME OVER, including the Epilogues and HS^2.

[atl-sparklestuck]

Some pretty big news for all you roller fiends out there. 

SparkleStuck is now being held on March 14th and 15th 2015 

Same time same place - just a whole month earlier!

In addition, the ticket prices have been tweaked a little to reflect our new time constraint;

RIGHT NOW tickets are $25 

Starting on January 1st prepaying will cost $30

Prepaying will end on February 28th

Tickets at the door will be $35

PREPAY NOW!!

don't forget about the cool things you can get if you donate a little more to help us!

art by the-strider-squad @ tumblr

[terminallywerde]

Hey, I was referred here by allieelly. Trying to find the organizer(s) of the HS photoshoot on Saturday at D*con. Wanted to say thank you for organizing the shoot and having the patience to deal with the drama, but also wanted to get the full story regarding the 10th floor of the Marriott and the run-ins with Heroes of Cosplay. If what has been circulated around tumblr is true, this is utterly deplorable and the story needs to be told from the highest rooftops from the original source.

Okay basically what happened (warning this is my point of view and I might have missed some stuff up on the tenth floor) is when we were all waiting it was getting closer to 5ish and I noticed someone setting up in our spot. And if anyone could tell from my weird welcomeing/game starting, I get a litte paranoid/oddly organized I guess (probably cause i hae like 7 siblings and im used to things not going as planned) But I went over and asked him when his photoshoot was and he said now till ten. and I was like. “Um, I hae this spot reserved 6 - 7:30. And he was like well, as long as you’re out by 8 we’ll be fine” So I went and found jane and told her what was up and we figured we would moe any homestucks who wanted to come to the shipping shoot (this is befroe we knew about yaya because he let that slip when jane was double checking with him the times) So yea, we thought we had 2 hours to move everyone. We even had like a plan with line leaders and people meeting at the sky bridge to lead people. I even opted to miss the offical shoot to go claim our next spot since now we wouldn’t have a reservation.

So I left, got down to the hilton and I missed the action. All I know is I set down my stuff to wait only to get a text saying yaya was on her way up already. So i was like shiiiittttt. And I sent the girl who was going to meet the group to the bridge to meet the first group as I politely asked the people lounging in the area if it was okay that we had a shoot here and they were fine with moving. Which was great. About half the homestucks got down there and we get a phone call from jane (we being me and female Kankri) that they’ve shut down/taken over elevator use for the film crew to do t things. (which was douchey. douch douche douchey) So i told them to send them to the emergency stairs to go down one floor so they could take the elevator. And then we shifted and shuffled around till we all got there, eventually storming that outside spot and just claiming it as our own. and the shoot wasn;t perfect or as well organized as we had hoped and im sorry for that I really am.

The jake in the collar spent most of it complaining to the staff and dragon con and yesterday I faxed them my reservation email to show that spot was ours till 7:30. So now I just have to wait and see what they do.