“You don't know why you are wasting time on this website.”
– Narration¹⁾

Homestuck is a lengthy webcomic by Andrew Hussie that first started on April 13, 2009 and ended on October 25, 2016. While the work is attributed to Andrew Hussie, some of the assets were contributed by select fans which becomes a common practice by the end of the story.

In short, Homestuck is a chaotic coming-of-age story²⁾ that focuses on a creation myth video game³⁾ while toying with its readers. Some may genuinely appreciate it, while others resent it with scalding critique. Being a former serial reader,⁴⁾ it's just a hard sell nowadays.

The story follows four teenagers who play a computer game that triggers the Earth's destruction, so they're fated to play through and create a new universe. An alien society, who almost beat a variant of their game, comes into contact with them and eventually tries to help. To keep it simple, a number of mistakes occur, and both parties try to salvage their sessions through use of time shenanigans and a pivotal reset.

“But at the time I didn't expect to get as deep into [the trolls'] story as I eventually did.”
– Andrew Hussie⁶⁾

Homestuck was initially planned to be more 'compact' than Problem Sleuth,⁷⁾ with the early estimates being April 13, 2010,⁸⁾ then August 26, 2010,⁹⁾ then Hussie got caught up with Act 5 giving answers that it kinda snowballed out of his control, yet he still thought Act 6 would be shorter.¹⁰⁾¹¹⁾ Then in 2012, the crowdfunding campaign began, estimating Homestuck's end in 2013 and Hiveswap's release in 2014.¹²⁾

While the project was funded, Hussie forgot to write the game¹³⁾ and tasked The Odd Gentlemen with the Act 7 animation to buy time, then the two ended up parting ways in late 2014.^14)15)16) In the end, complete mismanagement delayed the end of Homestuck to April 13, 2016, and the adventure game was chopped into eight episodic installments with Act 1 of Hiveswap eventually releasing on September 14, 2017.

“I don't think anyone with a significant platform showed any interest in covering the Kickstarter events on the level of detail that you or Gio were diving into. It's also been my observation that the fandom as a whole never had interest in that level of detail.”¹⁷⁾
– Andrew Hussie¹⁸⁾¹⁹⁾

Out of nowhere, Viz Media acquired Homestuck on October 6, 2017,²⁰⁾ moving “mspaintadventures.com” to “homestuck.com” on April 2, 2018,²¹⁾ and The Homestuck Epilogues was unveiled on April 13, 2019.²²⁾ Unfortunately, this was all building up to Homestuck: Beyond Canon on October 25, 2019²³⁾ which also had a Patreon, then the project was placed under indefinite hold on February 11, 2021.²⁴⁾

This was followed up with an unusual situation where paranoid employees on the project had preemptively²⁵⁾ issued a legal threat over a YouTube video on Homestuck,²⁶⁾ which miraculously forced Hussie to disclose the internal history of Hiveswap,²⁷⁾ but fans weren't really pleased.²⁸⁾²⁹⁾ During this, Hussie claims that he left What Pumpkin in early 2020, while releasing Psycholonials's final installment on April 20, 2021.³⁰⁾

In 2023, a former Homestuck: Beyond Canon writer implied that their project was a non-serious cash grab, alleging that Hussie manipulated the writers and remaining fanbase to patch up debts and financial holes caused by the Viz Media acquisition.³¹⁾ Then on October 8, 2023, it was announced that Hussie approached musician James Roach, giving him permission to finish Homestuck: Beyond Canon.³²⁾

“i rarely say this explicitly, but the gigapause was really when people took a step back and said “wow, the homestuck fandom is kinda [awful]” and it just got worse from there”
– Nameless Rumia

It's believed that Homestuck initially had a small following coming from Problem Sleuth and a handful of them were computer science or programming nerds.³³⁾ However, there was a drastic change in April 2010 since fujoshi-type Hetalia fans would find refuge in Homestuck after a certain incident,³⁴⁾ then Act 5 started and introduced those symbol-wearing aliens while the newer fans tended to gush about shipping.

Homestuck notably peaked as Act 5 concluded in 2011, so a crowdfunding campaign was set up. This was a blunder as the story began to suffer, shifting its focus onto relationship drama, and it just dragged on as mismanagement led to numerous hiatuses. By this point in time, people had the opportunity to fully reflect on the webcomic and the former hype, allowing them to discover other media.

The final act wouldn't be published until 2016 and, when it did, the open ending saw harsh mixed reactions, forcing plans of an epilogue to come out. Stragglers would eventually see the text-heavy epilogue in 2019, which was followed up by a semi-canon sequel was so poorly executed that it had to be silently axed, though it has since resumed. Despite the dilution, fans do remain on Twitter, TikTok, Reddit,³⁵⁾ Tumblr, etc.

For a potentially fertile, successful session of Sburb, the session must have a hero of time, a hero of space, and pre-entry prototyping. If these aren't met or the session is rendered infertile, it results in a null session. These can be further categorized into a void session, a session that foregoes pre-entry prototyping,³⁶⁾ and a dead session, an extremely punishing single-player session.³⁷⁾³⁸⁾

After rolling for 2 out of 12 possible aspects,³⁹⁾ the main goal is to breed a perfect Genesis Frog, then claim the Ultimate Reward, but there's an implied time limit as the Kingdom of Light (Prospit) gets attacked by the Kingdom of Darkness (Derse) who are destined to win.⁴⁰⁾ In the event that the players are “softlocked” into a “doomed” null session, they must exploit the Scratch and optionally avoid its temporal blast.

The following chart is an overview of the Sburb and Sgrub sessions which canonically appear in Homestuck, though it may also be used to clarify what sessions “A1”, “A2”, “B1”, and “B2” refer to. Of course, it's worth noting that these five sessions are merely a sample size of the possible Sburb sessions, leaving the audience with some room to speculate on other theoretical Sburb sessions.

Alchemy is one of the most intriguing parts of Sburb, but it's easier to gloss over since it's not that important in the long run. Regardless, it makes for a fun creative exercise, so the following chart briefly explains the functions and known combinations. As a side note, the recipes would appear in the Alchemy Excursus,⁵¹⁾ but this would be insane for any fan project to replicate due to the vast array of combinations.

The hemospectrum refers to the vast array of troll blood colors, commonly sorted into the Alternian caste system, which also hint at their relative lifespan⁵³⁾ and psychic abilities.⁵⁴⁾ First off, below is an overview for their somewhat inconistent naming schemes. According to Kankri Vantas, he does say 'rust', 'lime', and 'blue' are considered to be slurs,⁵⁵⁾ but nobody takes this seriously.

Toggle hemospectrum chart.

Early in the comic, Kanaya and Eridan originally mistook Rose to be some sort of highblood,⁵⁶⁾ with the latter under the impression that she was a royalblood.⁵⁷⁾ Despite how the violet and fuchsia blood castes typically consist of sea dwellers, Kanaya curiously imagined Rose without fins, though Hussie would eventually defend this in the commentary by saying that Kanaya's imagination was essentially cutting corners.

• Homestuck tends to appeal to a young audience because of its character designs, cartoon violence, mature themes, and mildly edgy humor, but it never had a formal content rating during its run. Since their conclusion, it had a vague “Teen Plus” rating under VIZ Media,⁷⁹⁾ then the official Twitter account came out with a “Mature” rating as a way to retroactively cover their asses in 2020.⁸⁰⁾
  • The community always had teens and young adults, which the demographic surveys back up,⁸¹⁾⁸²⁾ and Hussie has acknowledged children,⁸³⁾ teenagers,^84)85)86) and kids⁸⁷⁾⁸⁸⁾ many times.
  • MS Paint Adventures used to rely on Project Wonderful and much of their ad space was bought by Slipshine, an adult comic paysite, thus the ponography mentions.^89)90)91)92)
  • It also shouldn't be overlooked that hormonal teenagers were rampant in the community, which led to many cases of minors entering adult spaces and adults being inappropriate with minors.
    • Some examples include “Nudestuck”,⁹³⁾ the invention of “sexcanon” (sexual headcanon),⁹⁴⁾ and the whole widespread dissemination of the infamous “tentabulge” headcanon.
  • Ultimately, Homestuck is about a bunch of middle-class online suburbanite brats, so it's not a huge surprise, and gaming webcomics at the time mostly appealed to said audience anyways.
• The original website, MS Paint Adventures, would extract data from a phpBB forum database, which used to be on Andrew Hussie's personal website.⁹⁵⁾ The forum went private in late 2014.⁹⁶⁾⁹⁷⁾
• From the very beginning, Homestuck was planned to be a combination EarthBound, The Sims, and the failed Spore,⁹⁸⁾ which gave Sburb its namesake and inspired its creation myth direction.⁹⁹⁾
• Early on, Homestuck references the Diet Coke prototype, Tab,¹⁰⁰⁾ a soft drink that would end up being discontinued in 2020, adding itself to the list of things that now date the webcomic.
• In “[S] WV: Lead your men to victory!”,¹⁰¹⁾ ignoring that the chessboard is set up wrong, the first 13 moves¹⁰²⁾ are ripped from the chess match between Bobby Fischer and René Letelier at the 14th Chess Olympiad in East Germany on October 24, 1960^103)104) that starts off with the King's Indian Defence. After four hours, we see the final 4 moves of a different match.
  • The theme of Black (P2) always winning, without exception,¹⁰⁵⁾ is sprinkled throughout the comic.
  • As such, this is also how the chess match between Calliope and Caliborn ends.¹⁰⁶⁾
• The original Midnight Crew had shadow-based magic in Problem Sleuth's fan-requested pages,¹⁰⁷⁾ yet we never actually see the version of the Midnight Crew in Homestuck use these abilities.^108)109)
  • If you ever wondered why Toby Fox sings “shadow magic priest” in the original “The Ballad of Jack Noir”,¹¹⁰⁾ before it was converted to chiptunes since that was the style back then, that's why.
• From August 2010 to July 2013, Hussie ran a Twitter account for a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff version of Barack Obama at @BarackObana. A number of sources corroborate this.^111)112)113)
  • During early reports on the Killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the account tweeted out “false alram guys it turns out it was just a tall hobo” and “i backed over the hobob in my car”.
  • For the r/IAmA event in 2012,¹¹⁴⁾ the account tweeted out “woah holy shit reddit blows want was i thinking with this numbnut stunt”, perhaps foreshadowing,¹¹⁵⁾ then closed out with “today i learned that literally everybony on the internet is an ignorant fucking disgrace.”
• As a small reminder, Dave is vaguely based on Hussie's online persona,^116)117)118) has knowledge of the stock market,¹¹⁹⁾ and noticeably shows his libertarian side while joking about communism.¹²⁰⁾
  • With this information, I want you to think, for just a second, all of those Homestuck ships with Dave. Now, why am I putting this thought into your head? I don't know, I thought it'd be funny.
• Hussie's mother has the surname of Holliday, which allowed him to joke about being a descendant of the gunslinger Doc Holliday, a name that would partially inspire Doc Scratch.¹²¹⁾
• In the comic's history, the race of the protagonists has been a recurring controversial subject.
  • Early on, Hussie stated that the protagonists were 'aracial' and definitely not black, responding to a loaded question that slyly brought attention to the racist buckteeth stereotype.¹²²⁾
  • The ensuing arguments would enrage Hussie into temporarily replacing “white” with “Íæûë€Å”,¹²³⁾ which is actually a seven-character string despite how it may look on your screen.¹²⁴⁾
  • Lastly, we had the “Caucasian” joke that was changed to “Peachy” in a day,¹²⁵⁾ which Hussie used to address some particularly toxic reactionary rhetoric that was in the community.¹²⁶⁾
• The trolls canonically have gray nipples, regardless of blood color,¹²⁷⁾ and we do know that the female trolls do not lactate¹²⁸⁾ as far as we know. Truly hard-hitting questions that need answering.
• Regarding the Beforus trolls, the initial silhouette sprites¹²⁹⁾ aren't the same sprites in “[S] Collide.”¹³⁰⁾ for some reason¹³¹⁾ which can be inferred from Damara's needles, Mituna and Latula's pants, etc.
• Vriska canonically renders “bait” as “88” four times.^{132)133)134)135)} This was back when the internet had memes like “u wot m8” or “gr8 b8 m8, i r8 8/8”, so it had to be answered.
• Caliborn's naming of “HOMOSUCK”¹³⁶⁾ is a reference to a derogatory name that often appeared in the Homestuck threads on 4chan before the 2015 ban, often rendered as “HOMOSUCK IS SHIT”.
• James Roach, upon resuming Homestuck: Beyond Canon, mentioned that Andrew Hussie's document on class and aspect is “very short” and kept “specifically vague” for personal interpretations.¹³⁷⁾ He would later delete this post, but I assume this was meant to redact promises of an official “class” test or a future Homestuck: Beyond Canon update revisiting these concepts.

“Why don't you just embrace all the boners they are giving you, and stop bothering me about it?”
– Andrew Hussie¹³⁸⁾

• MS Paint Adventures and Homestuck has been given shout-outs by other major webcomics:
  • VG Cats featured MS Paint Adventures on its front page¹³⁹⁾ around October 9, 2010,¹⁴⁰⁾ but it was after Problem Sleuth's conclusion. Regardless, the front page still has a shout-out.
  • Randall Monroe, the xkcd author, would add Homestuck to the list of comics that he enjoyed on February 18, 2015.¹⁴¹⁾ At the time, Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4 just ended.
• As the trolls were being named, Rocket Papaya from the Mana series was a recurring suggestion.
• In December 2010, the Homestuck art team had released a 2011 Homestuck Calendar.^142)143) This particular calendar became infamous for “March Eridan”, an illustration of a crossdressing Eridan that was illustrated by a now-transgender artist,¹⁴⁴⁾ that the community had a lot of fun poking at.
  • At the time, Act 5 Act 2 just started, so it was before Eridan received the wand¹⁴⁵⁾ and the ensuing deaths that occur right after. The outfit didn't become canon until two years later.¹⁴⁶⁾
  • To clarify, the humor in March Eridan was the idea of having a serious character wear an outfit that clearly did not fit, literally and fashion-wise, but carrying the confidence as if it actually did.
• During Act 5, people would shut down irrelevant character discussions with “DAOOTS”, short for “dead and out of the story” and rhymed with 'cahoots', but this fell out of use for obvious reasons.
• For a brief moment, Homestuck fans had to work with “RL”,¹⁴⁷⁾ then “Ro-Lal” and “Di-Stri”,¹⁴⁸⁾ before we found out that their names were Roxy and Dirk,^149)150) so there was a lot of guessing.
  • Roxy saw names like Ruby, Rita, Rosa, and Rona, while Dirk saw names like Dick and Dion.¹⁵¹⁾
  • It's funny to think about how, in retrospect, Dion was probably the second-worst possible choice, specifically once you consider where they took Dirk's character.
• In 2012, there was a March Madness webcomic tournament¹⁵²⁾ where MS Paint Adventures reached the final four,¹⁵³⁾ but lost to Gunnerkrigg Court,¹⁵⁴⁾ and people lost their minds that the prize money was donated to Child's Play, a charity that donates toy and games to children's hospitals.¹⁵⁵⁾
  • Subsequent tournaments showed Homestuck losing to Unsounded in 2013,¹⁵⁶⁾ didn't qualify in 2014, swiftly losing to Superbitch in 2015,^157)158) and losing to Blindsprings in 2016.¹⁵⁹⁾
• The comic does have progressive themes, but Hussie goes out his way to be overboard about it,¹⁶⁰⁾ eventually handing the franchise to women and marginalized individuals,¹⁶¹⁾ though they felt used as it became clear that Homestuck: Beyond Canon was made to patch financial holes.¹⁶²⁾
  • In 2019, Hussie hid a bunch of Toblerone boxes with canon-altering wishes,¹⁶³⁾ which include the transgender “June Egbert” headcanon^164)165) and some fantroll for Hiveswap.¹⁶⁶⁾
  • After this, Hussie and the Homestuck team at the time would be abrasive about politics: supporting Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in 2019¹⁶⁷⁾ and Bernie Sanders in 2020.^{168)169)170)171)}
  • In the Discord logs, Hussie laments communism, because of drama with “left wing personalities”, and proposes a “massive clown movement”¹⁷²⁾ which would inspire Psycholonials.
  • Lastly, we end up with Hussie at the 2020 FurCon Communist Party,¹⁷³⁾ where he posed a Mao Zedong book.^174)175) Notice how I said “posed” instead of “read” here.
• As a side note, Homestuck fans have complained about mischaracterization since, at least, Act 6.
  • There's an interesting theory that this happened as a result of the one-year Gigapause because fans would grow this idea of what a character was like in their head, but once it resumed, they were shocked that the character is nothing like the character that they had in their heads.
• With the Sarah Z conflict, Hussie claims that an employee had “brainwashed” or “poisoned” most of the former employees at What Pumpkin NYC when it closed.^176)177) This name has been leaked.¹⁷⁸⁾

• I caught up to Homestuck at “Karkat: Troll this worthless human.” on September 20, 2010,¹⁷⁹⁾ which I vividly remember as I spent the weekend on Problem Sleuth and Homestuck out of curiosity.
  • However, I do feel like I'm partially misremembering. It definitely felt like July or August instead.
  • As a result, I'm a bit biased towards the Bill Bolin and SolusLunes flashes, though I understand that the former had some particularly vile forum posts in a secret MSPA Forums subforum.
• On classpects, I used to consider myself a “Mage of Void”, but after taking many classpect tests and discussing with a classpecting friend: Well, I'm honestly just even more confused now.
  • For class: I'd still argue that I would fit into the Mage class, rather than the Seer class, as I feel like I would relate to the Mage's journey more. In addition, this personal wiki is pretty insane.
  • For aspect: I'm probably sticking to Void, but I've also considered Doom, Mind, or Time as well. Of course, take this with a grain of salt since I'm too fucking cooked to think about classpects.
• Homestuck shipping never really appealed to me, but I do have a soft spot for Katnep (Karkat/Nepeta). I apologize if this reveal upsets the fujoshi and those “eviscerate the straight” types.
• To be honest, I'm not a fan of Dave Strider. I understand the whole cooldude facade and journey that he never wanted to be a hero, but I'm just so tired of the dude's constant recontextualization.
• I would agree that the Cherubs were meant to represent the community's positives and negatives, but I suspect that some of the criticisms ended up being dismissed or overlooked by the audience.
  • For instance, the community's lopsided treatment of the female characters was addressed,¹⁸⁰⁾ yet most people dismissed this as another case of Caliborn being an evil misogynist,¹⁸¹⁾ rather than Caliborn exemplifying qualms that the author had about the community. In turn, Psycholonials would exclusively focus on its own female characters to serve as a more direct response.
• I was never really invested in the “teenagers are stupid” message either, so I kinda just slept on the whole bit where Vriska, Dirk, and Caliborn actively wants to become the center of attention.
  • Honestly, most of Homestuck was about the mysteries behind Sburb, then it deviates to paragraphs of bad teenage drama that it was easy to forget that the goal was to beat Sburb.
  • You could probably infer my feelings and thoughts on The Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck: Beyond Canon, given that post-canon decides to resume this bit with Dirk and Vriska.

• Pertaining to Homestuck
  • Bill Romanowski Painting (Painting of a Horse Attacking a Football Player)
  • Classpect Tests - A collection of classpect tests, results, and some classpecting resources.
  • Colours and Mayhem - The official fan collaboration album with many repurposed tracks.
  • The Homestuck Epilogues - A punishment for curious readers who want more from Homestuck, mostly considered a separate work and prequel to Homestuck: Beyond Canon.
  • Homestuck Translation Overview - Self-explanatory tracker. It's updated manually, whenever.
  • Nepeta Leijon - The best character. :33
• Outside of Homestuck
  • Danganronpa and OFF - Tales from Spring 2013, the Megapause.
  • Desiredriven - A short Homestuck and Touhou Project crossover fan game.
  • Psycholonials - The post-Homestuck visual novel that nobody read, which is now free.
  • Undertale and Deltarune - “Andrew? Andrew Hussie? Is that you?”

• The Unofficial Homestuck Collection (4GB) - The fan-made Homestuck preservation project, incidentially the best, least-broken way to read Homestuck and endorsed by Andrew Hussie.¹⁸²⁾
  • Third Party Mods - Self-explanatory list of third-party mods. Choose some or don't.
• MS Paint Adventures / Homestuck - The front page of MS Paint Adventures and Homestuck. It's somewhat broken, refer to the Homestuck.com Feedback Document for a list of known issues.
  • @andrewhussie on Twitter - The author. Obviously, he isn't very active under his real name.¹⁸³⁾
  • @homestuck and @homestuckteam on Twitter - Semi-official Homestuck accounts.
• Andrew Hussie MSPA Commentary - A public Google spreadsheet laying out the book commentary.
  • Homestuck Companion (Chrome, Firefox) - An extension that injects book commentary.
• The Acts and Pages of Homestuck - Rafe's guide to Homestuck, contains many helpful summaries.
• MS Paint Adventures Wiki on Fandom - The fan wiki for Homestuck and Hussie's other works.
• Homestuck POV Cam (Chrome, Firefox) - An extension for tracking a Homestuck character.
• Read MSPA - An interesting fan website that's filled with MSPA statistics, transcripts, and other stuff.
• Homestuck Flash Image & Audio Extracts - An old archive. Hasn't updated past A6A6A3.
• Homestuck on VNDB

> AH: I didn't read any of that.