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

Homestuck is a lengthy webcomic by Andrew Hussie that began on April 13, 2009 and ended on October 25, 2016. While the work is attributed to Andrew Hussie, do note that 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. I wouldn't personally recommend it, but it does offers a unique experience for each individual reader.

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 the 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 by messing with timelines and performing a reset.

With this pivotal reset, the parties cross over into a universe where the four's genetic parents are teenagers that get stuck playing the game, then said parties arrive with the intent to finish the game in their session. Eventually, their mistakes would add up in a way that results in them facing the powerful antagonists that they incidentally created, but they fail and end up in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Luckily, the protagonist gains the power to "retcon" past events which is used to patch up their mistakes and prevent some deaths, fixing their entire team structure. This results in a more successful plan where most antagonists get beaten, the “invincible” villain is sent into a black hole off-screen, and everyone flees to a new universe in order to break the narrative, though it leaves us a controversial open ending.

> Summarize the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck: Beyond Canon.

“But at the time I didn't expect to get as deep into [the trolls'] story as I eventually did.”
– Andrew Hussie⁴⁾

Homestuck was initially planned to be more “compact” than Problem Sleuth⁵⁾ with an end date of August 26, 2010,⁶⁾ then Hussie decided that Act 5 should start giving answers and it snowballed into something larger than Problem Sleuth, yet he still believed that Act 6 would've been shorter.⁷⁾⁸⁾ Then in 2012, a crowdfunding campaign began, expecting Homestuck to end in 2013 and Hiveswap to release in 2014.⁹⁾

While the project was funded, Hussie forgot to write the game¹⁰⁾ and tasked The Odd Gentlemen with the Act 7 animation to buy time, then the two ended up parting ways in late 2014.^11)12)13) 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.”¹⁴⁾
– Andrew Hussie¹⁵⁾¹⁶⁾

Out of nowhere, Viz Media acquired Homestuck on October 6, 2017,¹⁷⁾ moving “mspaintadventures.com” to “homestuck.com” on April 2, 2018,¹⁸⁾ and The Homestuck Epilogues was unveiled on April 13, 2019.¹⁹⁾ Unfortunately, this was all building up to Homestuck: Beyond Canon on October 25, 2019²⁰⁾ which also had a Patreon, then the project was placed under indefinite hold on February 11, 2021.²¹⁾

This was followed up with an unusual situation where paranoid employees on the project had preemptively²²⁾ issued a legal threat over a YouTube video on Homestuck,²³⁾ which miraculously forced Hussie to disclose the internal history of Hiveswap,²⁴⁾ but fans weren't really pleased.²⁵⁾²⁶⁾ During this, Hussie claims that he left What Pumpkin in early 2020, while releasing Psycholonials's final installment on April 20, 2021.²⁷⁾

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.²⁸⁾ Then on October 8, 2023, it was announced that Hussie approached musician James Roach, giving him permission to finish Homestuck: Beyond Canon.²⁹⁾

“hussie indirectly complains about being viewed as a cult leader with psycholonials,³⁰⁾ but nearly everyone was on board to kill hussie by the end of homestuck or some time after”
– 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.³¹⁾ However, there was a drastic change in April 2010 since fujoshi-type Hetalia fans ended up finding refuge in Homestuck,³²⁾ then Act 5 began and introduced those symbol-wearing aliens while these 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 hype that once surrounded it, 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. Despite the dilution, fans remain active on Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and Tumblr.

• The original website, MS Paint Adventures, used a script that extracted data from a phpBB forum database on Andrew Hussie's personal website.³³⁾ This forum became private in late 2014.³⁴⁾³⁵⁾
• From the very beginning, Hussie had always planned Homestuck to be a combination of EarthBound, The Sims, and the failed Spore.³⁶⁾ By the end of Act 5 Act 1, he would elaborate that the story is about a creation myth video game, which is why Sburb was meant to be a play on Spore.³⁷⁾
• In short, the tasks of Sburb are to: prototype your sprite (at least once) before you enter the Medium, defeat the Black King, then breed the Genesis Frog to get the Ultimate Reward. However, sessions could easily be “softlocked” and rendered unwinnable, forcing these players to exploit the Scratch as a way to reroll their session's chances of success.
  • A null session is a common doomed session, a void session is a doomed session where no sprites were prototyped,³⁸⁾ and a dead session is an extremely punishing single-player session.³⁹⁾⁴⁰⁾
  • The Genesis Frog requires a time player and a space player, which may explain the high probability of null sessions⁴¹⁾ as players have to successfully roll 2/12 (16.6%) possible aspects.⁴²⁾⁴³⁾
    • Keeping this in mind: A1 pairs Porrim with Damara, A2 pairs Kanaya with Aradia, and B1 pairs Jade with Dave. B2 did not produce the required aspects, thus were doomed to fail.
    • The cherubs had a unique situation where Calliope and Caliborn cannot coexist since they have the same body, so they can't collaborate and were locked into a dead session.
• Alchemy is one of the most intriguing parts of Sburb, but it's easy to gloss over how it all works since it isn't important in the long run and meteors from The Reckoning distracts from the tutorial.
  • There are two main functions in combining the captchalogue cards:
    • && (AND) - You overlap two punched cards into the totem lathe and the alchemized item will have both items' functionalities. Some &&-combined items include: Pogohammer, Serious Business Goggles, Thorns of Oglogoth, SORD....., and Captcharoid Camera.
    • || (OR) - You double punch a card on top of another card, overwriting it, and the alchemized item will retain one functionality and take the other's form. Some ||-combined items include: Wrinklefucker, Wise Guy Slime Suit, Needlewands, and Velvet Squiddleknit Dress.
    • && (AND) + || (OR) - You combine the two functions somehow. Some examples include: Telescopic Sassacrusher, Remote Ghost Gauntlet, Snoop Dogg Snow Cone Machete, SHABJIFIER, Dead Shuffle Dress, and Three in the Morning Dress.
    • && (AND) + && (AND) - This theoretical recipe is only mentioned once for Jane Crocker's gifted copy of Pony Pals: Detective Pony with commentary from Dirk Strider.
  • It should be noted that the “Alchemy Excursus” would normally document such recipes,⁴⁴⁾ though I understand that this would be a tall order for Sburb fan projects like The Genesis Project.
• The chessboard in “[S] WV: Lead your men to victory!”⁴⁵⁾ is actually set up wrong.
  • His first 13 moves are: “1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 0-0 5.e5 Ne8 6.f4 d6 7.Be3 c5 8.dxc5 Nc6 9.cxd6 exd6 10.Ne4 Bf5 11.Ng3 Be6 12.Nf3 Qc7 13.Qb1 dxe5”.⁴⁶⁾
    • Some may recognize this opening as the King's Indian Defence (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6).
    • These moves were ripped from a chess match between Bobby Fischer and René Letelier at the 14th Chess Olympiad in East Germany on October 24, 1960.⁴⁷⁾⁴⁸⁾
  • The last 4 moves doesn't copy how black won in this match, however, but it's entirely possible that WV has played multiple chess matches within a four hour span.
  • Black (P2) always wins, including the Calliope v. Caliborn game.⁴⁹⁾ Nannasprite foreshadows this by saying “that the forces of light are always destined to lose” in Act 1.⁵⁰⁾
• From August 2010 to July 2013, Hussie ran a Twitter account for the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff version of Barack Obama at @BarackObana. A number of sources corroborate this.^51)52)53)
  • He would notably comment on the Killing of Osama bin Laden, saying “false alram guys it turns out it was just a tall hobo” and “i backed over the hobob in my car”.
  • In contrast, the Barack Obama in The Homestuck Epilogues would speak in a formal syntax.⁵⁴⁾
• In the main story, Jade Harley prototypes her sprite using her dream self's corpse⁵⁵⁾ and god tiering's reliance on the player's dream self causes her to become part-dog (“dog tier”) upon ascension.⁵⁶⁾
  • For some reason, The Homestuck Epilogues decide to expand on this and hints that Jade Harley grew a penis after “some things”,⁵⁷⁾ though it isn't explicitly stated whether her penis is canine or human.⁵⁸⁾ Afterwards, Jade gets to impregnate Rose in the Candy timeline of Homestuck: Beyond Canon and Rose secretly gives birth to Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde Harley.⁵⁹⁾
• The string “Íæûë€Å” actually consists of seven characters in total: I-acute, Æ, U-circumflex, line tabulation, E-diaeresis, Euro sign, and A-ring.⁶⁰⁾
• I shouldn't have to explain why the trolls and the cherubs were reflections of the community.
• To summarize the Sburb/Sgrub sessions, because the two-character acronyms gets confusing:
  • A1 - Null session. Bad team.⁶¹⁾ → Scratched session. Aranea initiates,⁶²⁾ players die to exist.⁶³⁾
  • A2 - Null session. B1 Jack kills the Genesis Frog.⁶⁴⁾ Players collaborate with B1.
  • B1 - Null session. Players incidentally create B1 Jack. → Scratched session. Players win in B2.⁶⁵⁾
  • B2 - Void session. Jane enters without prototyping, as God Cat prevents this action.⁶⁶⁾
  • DS - Dead session. Caliborn met Yaldabaoth for the Choice, picked Conquest over Sacrifice.⁶⁷⁾
• It's known that the trolls canonically have gray nipples, regardless of their blood color,⁶⁸⁾ and we know that female trolls do not lactate for some reason.⁶⁹⁾ There are no blood-colored nipples in canon.
• The original silhouette sprites for the A1 Trolls⁷⁰⁾ are very different from the sprites in the “[S] Collide.” animation.⁷¹⁾ For instance: Mituna and Latula have pants, Damara's needles were straight, etc.
• Vriska does canonically render “bait” as “88” four times.^72)73)74)75) People used to ponder about this, since memes like “u wot m8” and the “gr8 b8 m8” copypasta were common at the time.
• Caliborn's naming of “HOMOSUCK”⁷⁶⁾ was a reference to the derogatory name for Homestuck that came from 4chan's “Comics & Cartoons” (/co/) board, often phrased as “HOMOSUCK IS SHIT”.
• For anybody who happens to live in the post-Tab world: Tab was just a prototype of Diet Coke.
• Despite the characters being around 26 or 39 years old in Homestuck: Beyond Canon, they still retain their teenage sprites from Homestuck, though this can still change as the production resumes.
• There are time skips in The Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck: Beyond Canon, charted below:

> Chart out time skips in Homestuck, the Epilogues, and Beyond Canon.

“Why don't you just embrace all the boners they are giving you, and stop bothering me about it?”
– Andrew Hussie⁷⁷⁾

• Homestuck didn't have a content rating until 2020,⁷⁸⁾ so most people assumed it was for older teens and young adults⁷⁹⁾⁸⁰⁾ with several demographic surveys backing this sentiment.⁸¹⁾⁸²⁾
  • There are many unreported cases of adults being very inappropriate with minors online, especially at conventions, and the 2011 nude-sharing “Nudestuck” phenomenon highlighted this.⁸³⁾
  • I can't stress enough that teenage hormones were rampant. This was the community that invented the word “sexcanon” (sexual headcanon)⁸⁴⁾ and had the “tentabulge” headcanon.
• MS Paint Adventures and Homestuck has been given shout-outs by other major webcomics:
  • VG Cats featured MS Paint Adventures on its front page⁸⁵⁾ around October 9, 2010,⁸⁶⁾ though it was after Problem Sleuth's conclusion. Their front page still leaves a shout-out.
  • Randall Monroe, the author of xkcd, would add Homestuck to the list of comics he enjoyed on February 18, 2015.⁸⁷⁾ At the time, Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 4 just ended.
• Rocket Papaya, an infamous early troll name suggestion, was a reference to the Mana series.
• I caught up to the webcomic at “Karkat: Troll this worthless human.” on September 20, 2010,⁸⁸⁾ which I vividly remember as I spent the weekend reading Problem Sleuth and Homestuck out of curiosity.
  • As a result, I'm biased towards experiencing the webcomic with the Bill Bolin version of the flashes, and the lone SolusLunes version of “[S] Rose and Dave: Shut up and jam.”
• If you're interested in trying Faygo for the first time,⁸⁹⁾⁹⁰⁾ you could get the Faygo variety pack.
• Andrew Hussie has revealed that his mother's surname is Holliday, allowing him to joke about possibly being a descendant of the gunslinger Doc Holliday, partially inspiring Doc Scratch's name.⁹¹⁾
  • There is a certain image of Lily Holiday's Facebook page, showing an image of Andrew Hussie (36) at Michaela Cragg's graduation, the sister of Shelby Cragg (21), posted on May 16, 2016.
• “DAOOTS”, short for “dead and out of the story” and rhymed with “cahoots”, was an old term used to shut down “irrelevant character discussions” during Act 5. It fell out of use for obvious reasons.
• Nostalgic fans will reminisce on how “[S] Cascade” crashed Newgrounds and Megaupload, but omit that Homestuck was peaking and how this likely never happen again.
• In early 2012, ComicMix held a March Madness webcomics tournament⁹²⁾ where MS Paint Adventures reached the final four⁹³⁾ but opted to lose to Gunnerkrigg Court,⁹⁴⁾ and people lost their damn minds over the entire tournament that both finalists agreed to donate their winnings to Child's Play, a charity that donates toy and games to children's hospitals.⁹⁵⁾
  • Subsequent tournaments showed Homestuck losing to Unsounded in 2013,⁹⁶⁾ didn't qualify in 2014, immediately losing to Superbitch in 2015,⁹⁷⁾ and losing to Blindsprings in 2016.⁹⁸⁾
• Upon redacting the “Caucasian” joke, Hussie addressed toxic reactions,⁹⁹⁾ then began to exaggerate some controversial and political aspects¹⁰⁰⁾ which, in my opinion, were rather mild to begin with.
  • This would culminate in him gifting the franchise to marginalized individuals,¹⁰¹⁾ except Hussie isn't a good person and it turns out he was indeed using them to patch financial holes.¹⁰²⁾
• I am not a Dave Strider fan.^103)104) I get the “cooldude façade” up to venting to his brother,¹⁰⁵⁾ but I don't personally see him getting to know troll romance¹⁰⁶⁾ being a sign of anything deep.
  • That being said, Dave does have capitalist¹⁰⁷⁾ libertarian beliefs and jokes about communism.¹⁰⁸⁾
  • It should probably be revisited that the characters come across as middle-class online suburbanite brats, like, they skip over 5,000 years for society to be established on Earth C.¹⁰⁹⁾
• On August 25, 2019, Hussie hid Toblerone boxes with canon-altering wishes,¹¹⁰⁾ with notable ones being the transgender “June Egbert” headcanon^111)112) and a fantroll to cameo in Hiveswap.¹¹³⁾
• For a small recollection of Andrew Hussie's perceived political beliefs:
  • The official Homestuck team has endorsed the Labour Party in 2019¹¹⁴⁾ who ended up losing,¹¹⁵⁾ as well as Bernie Sanders in 2020^{116)117)118)119)} who dropped out for some neoliberal.
  • In the Discord logs, Hussie laments communism, specifically for drama with “left wing personalities”, and proposes a “massive clown movement”¹²⁰⁾ which would inspire Psycholonials.
  • Lastly, we end up with Hussie at the 2020 FurCon Communist Party¹²¹⁾ where he posed a Mao Zedong book.^122)123) Never mind his past live in Guam!
• In 2021, Hussie claimed that a problematic employee “brainwashed” or “poisoned” most of the former employees at What Pumpkin NYC when it closed.^124)125) The problematic employee's name did get leaked in early versions of Sarah Z's video,¹²⁶⁾ pointing to a Unity developer who presumably provided the core for the 3D version of Hiveswap, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
• The classpect tests I've taken usually categorize me as a Mage of Void player, though my friends who know more about classpects have considered Mind or Doom as alternative aspects.
• I was never huge on Homestuck shipping, but “KATNEP” (Karkat/Nepeta) is the best Homestuck ship. :)
• Why are the Homestuck.com flashes rendered as 360p videos?

• Pertaining to Homestuck
  • Bill Romanowski Painting (Painting of a Horse Attacking a Football Player)
  • Colours and Mayhem - The official fan collaboration album with many repurposed tracks.
  • Classpect - It's mostly a brief summary of the mythological roles.
  • Homestuck Translation Overview - A self-explanatory tracker, updated manually.
  • 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.¹²⁷⁾
  • Third Party Mods - Self-explanatory resources 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.¹²⁸⁾
  • @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.

> Hussie: Lack professionalism.