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it’s shocking in retrospect how absolutely homestuck crashed into irrelevance. not just in the sense that it was bad (it was) but various factors partly or wholly zapped huge swathes of its content out of existence flash’s downfall hit the main comic, the tumblr purges probably wiped out a ton of fan content, Paradox Space’s old links are all redirects, the megathread is now chockablock with links to Tweets that no longer exist it had the whole internet under its sway for years and then dissolved into vapor
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Feb 8, 2022 22:55
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It is extremely like "what if Game of Thrones' ending happened to an indie work that then got devoured by a media publishing content". Also without a joke our old megathreads about the work are probably one of the most coherent historical logs and records of the comic's run and yeah it's full of dead links and other missing content.
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Feb 8, 2022 23:23
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For a real trip down memory lane, reread homestuck while going through the old homestuck threads at the same time, to see everyone's reactions as they happened! They were so hopeful, back then... (Use The Unofficial Homestuck Collection to get around flash issues or the old website not being maintained)
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Feb 8, 2022 23:58
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Nah, I think there's still some fan content that pops up here and there, and its influences live on, although I'm not really the person to keep track of Homestuck's descendants/heirs/progeny. I don't feel like it has erased its place so much as it was just always a project mainly coming out of one guy and it ended. I guess his later projects haven't achieved the same out-of-control popularity, but that's fine. I feel like there have been other webcomickers to not have the same kind of success in later endeavors. Or not the same kind of popularity? I feel like Gwenpoole isn't as popular as Dr. McNinja, but I bet Chris Hastings gets more reliable pay from Marvel than he did on his own website. So far as what I know about Game of Thrones managing to erase itself, what's impressive about that is that it was a whole franchise with lots of people working on it in the hold of a company with the interest in continuing the IP's popularity and selling merch, and all of that vanished. There were even plans for a spinoff that were canned. Barnes and Noble is desperate for merch to bulk out its shelves, but now they're stuck with just Star Wars and Harry Potter. I have no idea what's going on with the original book author not putting out sequels. I'm not even sure if anything that was inspired by the successes of Game of Thrones is even still around (altho I haven't really watched Game of Thrones so I couldn't really identify its influences. Disenchantment?) I know at the time, it felt like it was the start of some big shift. Or people said it was?
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Feb 9, 2022 00:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:Nah, I think there's still some fan content that pops up here and there, and its influences live on, although I'm not really the person to keep track of Homestuck's descendants/heirs/progeny.
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Feb 9, 2022 00:27
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In webcomics, maybe, but Undertale emerged out of Homestuck in an even more direct way to a much bigger impact. I love K6BD, but a song Toby Fox first developed for Homestuck got performed for the Pope. And I think a lot of what made Sans a big enough deal to end up in Super Smash Bros was that Toby had a lot of firsthand experience seeing what character traits the internet likes to latch on to.
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Feb 9, 2022 01:01
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Precambrian posted:In webcomics, maybe, but Undertale emerged out of Homestuck in an even more direct way to a much bigger impact. I love K6BD, but a song Toby Fox first developed for Homestuck got performed for the Pope. And I think a lot of what made Sans a big enough deal to end up in Super Smash Bros was that Toby had a lot of firsthand experience seeing what character traits the internet likes to latch on to. Was gonna say that I thought Undertale was Homestuck adjacent/related/influenced.
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Feb 9, 2022 01:13
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To be more precise, Megalovania was composed for an Earthbound romhack first. Though its inclusion in Homestuck is almost certainly what cemented it as Toby Fox's calling card. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIowwZThIXM
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Feb 9, 2022 01:21
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habeasdorkus posted:Was gonna say that I thought Undertale was Homestuck adjacent/related/influenced. toby fox worked on undertale literally in hussie's basement, as well as being a major contributor to homestuck's soundtrack
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Feb 9, 2022 01:30
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Watching Hussie's extended breakdown under the weight of the Homestuck fandom is also directly tied to why Toby Fox is so dedicated to completely separating his internet persona and the real person.
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Feb 9, 2022 02:22
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And now they threaten to sue people who dare speak critically of them or Homestuck or the garbage fires it was involved in.
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Feb 9, 2022 03:36
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Safari Disco Lion posted:And now they threaten to sue people who dare speak critically of them or Homestuck or the garbage fires it was involved in.
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Feb 9, 2022 04:31
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girl dick energy posted:Viz has mishandled the license in every possible way. In that they bought it in the first place? Not really sure what there actually is/was to be done with it.
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Feb 9, 2022 04:37
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Lunatic Sledge posted:challenge accepted People posted about it a lot on here and had avatars of it, so I started reading it. I don't even think the first wave of trolls were introduced yet when I started it. The more alternate reality characters it collected and more tangled time loops that built up, the less interest I had in it. I think I read a few pages after the Gigapause ended, which I believe was the last or 2nd to last big hiatus? But I'd lost all interest and realized I was just scrolling through giant text logs from one of 60 characters that had 5 individual voices and uniquely impenetrable writing styles. Homestuck basically reached a point where you either needed to embed yourself deeper and deeper into a group of fans hardcore enough to analyze everything and break it down into understandable parts, or you decide it's not worth the effort to decode and walk away, I think. the holy poopacy posted:In that they bought it in the first place? Not really sure what there actually is/was to be done with it. The website for the comic itself is kind of a mess now. There were definitely better alternatives they could have converted the interactive elements to after the death of Flash. I'm sure they had no interest in doing anything besides paper collections of the series. It's like how Neopets could in theory be in the hands of better custodians who preserve some important internet artifact, but there's no energy to do that so let's just make NFTs instead and let the site rot.
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Feb 9, 2022 06:16
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I tapped shortly after a Jigsaw troll appeared and started going on about puzzlemurder. No, I don't care if it was actually a cherub
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Feb 9, 2022 06:27
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I think seeing avatars and fanart and the like here pointed me in Homestuck's direction, or maybe that was an "aha, that is what the reference" moment but also finding out it was the same author as did Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff was a big part.
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Feb 10, 2022 00:30
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Count me as another person who came from Problem Sleuth. I loved all the wacky riffs on video game mechanics and nonsensical jokes, and spent a lot of time in high school refreshing computers in the school library for updates. Initially, I was really drawn into the mystery of Sburb and the post-apoctalypic characters, but the introduction of the trolls as full fledged characters just killed it for me - I hated the l33tsp34k gimmicks and didn't find them funny or interesting. So after I missed a day or two of updates, I just didn't have the motivation anymore to continue. Oh well, at least I still have the original version of Mutiny saved somewhere.
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Feb 10, 2022 01:25
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Mazerunner posted:I think seeing avatars and fanart and the like here pointed me in Homestuck's direction, or maybe that was an "aha, that is what the reference" moment Wait, I thought Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff was just a one-off joke in Homestuck -- it was an actual thing?
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Feb 10, 2022 01:35
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ToxicFrog posted:Wait, I thought Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff was just a one-off joke in Homestuck -- it was an actual thing? Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff spawned as Andrew Hussie mocking a dude's terrible "guys playing video games" webcomic on the Penny Arcade forums. It actually happened a month before Homestuck even started. He later incorporated it into Homestuck as a comic drawn by Dave and it appeared consistently throughout Homestuck's run, with new comics being added every so often as Dave made them in the story. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is easily Homestuck's most enduring legacy.
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Feb 10, 2022 01:49
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ToxicFrog posted:Wait, I thought Sweet Bro & Hella Jeff was just a one-off joke in Homestuck -- it was an actual thing? There was a whole physical book! The barcode scanned as a bag of Doritos.
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Feb 10, 2022 01:57
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I got into Homestuck because I really enjoyed the irreverent adventure game shenanigans coupled with sharply observed chatlogs, and hints of cosmic horror with "a game that destroys universes in order to propagate itself" (very similar to the antagonistic force of DIE now that I think about it. Also the interaction between the kids and the trolls was extremely funny at times. Like a lot of this kind of work, it ended up disappearing up its own convoluted backstory, dragged on too long, drastically killed the forward momentum of the story by introducing new characters, and generally ended in an unsatisfying way.
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Feb 10, 2022 11:13
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Begemot posted:If you're interested in lots and lots of context for how and why Homestuck became such a big deal, there's a really interesting podcast from the Ranged Touch guys called Homestuck Made This World. Including historical archive-diving of the thread on this very forum (since the official forums are gone forever). just wanna say homestuck made this world has been great so far. highly recommend it
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Feb 10, 2022 12:18
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There was a whole physical book! The barcode scanned as a bag of Doritos. 
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Feb 11, 2022 16:02
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Homestuck was very much a product of its time, and that time ended before its publication did. Over the course of its existence it managed to appeal to readers in many different ways, some of which were more viral than others. It brought many formal innovations to the medium of multimedia hyperfiction, and a lot of subsequent work by many authors drew inspiration from it in very creative and satisfying ways. Considering it in hindsight, it's a vexing chimera of a comic, difficult to revisit, but I have to admit I had fun with it at the time.
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Feb 14, 2022 08:45
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'Hyperfiction' really fits Homestuck well as a term, and for more than just 'hypertext fiction'.
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Feb 14, 2022 11:44
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I'm another person who got into MSPA through Problem Sleuth and then continued on to Homestuck because it was the next thing by the same guy. I was really into it for a while, and still contend that some parts of it are genuinely good, but the Gigapause near the end really killed a lot of my enthusiasm for it. I think one of the comic's main strengths was its insane update schedule, where you could refresh the page several times a day for new content, and that the long hiatus brought all the narrative momentum to a screeching halt. I saw the main comic through to the end out of a sense of obligation, because I'd already invested so much time into following these characters on their journey; but when the Epilogues were announced, I just felt no desire to pick the series back up. Its moment was over, the time had passed, and I was ready to move on to new things.SlothfulCobra posted:Nah, I think there's still some fan content that pops up here and there, and its influences live on, although I'm not really the person to keep track of Homestuck's descendants/heirs/progeny. Homestuck influence does still pop up occasionally in the most unexpected places. Most recently, I was extremely surprised to see some clear Homestuck influence in the afterlife mechanics of Harrow the Ninth (a Hugo-nominated sci-fi / fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space).
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Feb 15, 2022 03:47
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Chronosynclast posted:Homestuck influence does still pop up occasionally in the most unexpected places. Most recently, I was extremely surprised to see some clear Homestuck influence in the afterlife mechanics of Harrow the Ninth (a Hugo-nominated sci-fi / fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space). The author of those books was a big deal in Homestuck fanfic. She co-wrote Promstuck, among other things.
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Feb 15, 2022 04:05
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Oh yeah, original question-asker, if you're still looking to identify something mspa did that's still theoretically replicable: the upload schedule from PS and early HS. If you can create more of your comic at an unhealthy rate, then post it ridiculously frequently but unpredictably, that'll get people constantly expecting another update (whether they click a bookmark twenty times a day or are just surprised to not see it in their RSS reader) and talking about it (partly to be the first to let other readers know there's an update). Note, I don't recommend this. It's far from the only thing MSPA had going for it, almost certainly not healthy for you or your readers, and probably only even works as a multiplier when you already would have some amount of attention. Creating your comic at a sustainable pace, and then posting on a reliable schedule, is way more advisable on almost every front. (slow and irregular updates are the worst of both, but you probably already know that.). Ditocoaf fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Feb 15, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 05:41
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Ditocoaf posted:and probably only even works as a multiplier when you already would have some amount of attention. I can say from trying it that this is absolutely the case (I updated ten to twenty times a day, at one point). When Project Wonderful was around and I could use that to bring in more readers, readers were more likely to get invested with the insane schedule. It's no longer "I will bookmark this and check again next week," it's "I'll check again in an hour." It also helped that ComicFury's Recently Updated section wasn't limited to once per day, so I kept showing up on it all day long, day after day. Buuut the effectiveness of rapid-fire updates plummeted when that changed, and when Project Wonderful imploded. Can't get new readers invested if you don't have new readers. The good news is, the occasional random burst fire style updates do kind of soften the blow later when I go into a depressive spiral and quit updating for two months. The audience gets used to spinning the wheel, they know by now it's just a matter of time before I start vomiting out pages with no regard for human life again
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Feb 15, 2022 06:28
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A bit late to the discussion, but... I got into Homestuck somewhere after the four main kids had been introduced, and fell out when the Trolls started being 'playable' characters. I read the archives and loved Problem Sleuth. The main thing about it that grabbed me was that, between the allegedly-user-submitted prompts, the actual-user-submitted-prompts, the bizarre mechanics and the moving parts, each chapter felt like a Rube Goldberg machine was being designed by committee, and at some point an unintended consequence was going to start it moving. Dave's Inventory Queue launching items out at speed, sending them out the window introducing a new challenge, and then being used as projectile attacks during Strife. Rose's internet outage dropping a bathtub in front of a door. Pickle Inspector being too slow to fall properly. Then, those bits felt like they were becoming fewer, and further-between. They felt less like single perfect moments in a storm of chaos, and more like adventure game puzzles that had been setup in advance. You were going to USE Key On Lock because that was the only way things could go. The storytelling became more about chatlogs and less visual. More about throwing in more Shippable Characters than developing the ones they had. It felt easier to relate to Hysterical Dame with her zero words than any of the walls of text. It became more obvious that Actual User Submissions were being ignored, which took away from the organic nature, and meant something that dragged stuff down would still stick around. It felt like the puzzle Problem Sleuth solved by looking up a solution on GameFAQs, except we were forced to watch it happening the long way.
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Feb 15, 2022 18:11
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I'm not sure where exactly ut was but I stopped reading HS after seeing yet another thousand word text log, saying I'll read it later and then just not doing that
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Feb 15, 2022 20:46
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I agree a lot with Elfface with the added thing of drat did I hate how long we went away and pushed out the initial 4 kids. The trolls were exhausting, and not just because of the endless romance nonsense, but then after THAT we got MORE kids and they were all obnoxious and going through very similar overall plot beats and I just couldn't stand it anymore alongside all the other issues
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Feb 15, 2022 20:54
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World Famous W posted:I'm not sure where exactly ut was but I stopped reading HS after seeing yet another thousand word text log, saying I'll read it later and then just not doing that This but it was one of the flash game segments
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Feb 15, 2022 21:48
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It was the second set of kids that had me finally not even pretending I'd catch back up eventually. When you're adding more and more characters in symmetrical sets to keep the excel spreadsheets tidy, I no longer can care about any of them.
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Feb 16, 2022 00:09
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I was a reader of Problem Sleuth, but fell off at some point and when HS started I went back and finished PS to see how it all ended. Homestuck I stuck around long after I was bored of it, mostly due to momentum. It wasn't too surprising when the long hiatus hit is what got me to finally check out and any place I was engaged with other fans which might have at least kept me somewhat interested also moved on. I had long either skimmed or skipped a lot of the chatlogs and would read summaries for the flash walk-arounds. Elfface's comments on how the mechanics of things got less interesting was part of the decline for me as well. I think from the beginning Homestuck was marketed as being much more freeform with what suggestions (if any) were being chosen, so the interactivity part of it wasn't one of the appealing part of HS for me. I think moving away from that was probably the right choice anyway since some of the worst jokes in PS also had to do with the audience suggested actions. But I also admit that sort of thing was also probably a huge draw. Audiences love at least the illusion of interactivity.
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Feb 16, 2022 00:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:Homestuck basically reached a point where you either needed to embed yourself deeper and deeper into a group of fans hardcore enough to analyze everything and break it down into understandable parts, or you decide it's not worth the effort to decode and walk away, I think. Nah, I managed to keep track of pretty much everything on my own. The only time I ever checked in with the MSPA forums was to see if anyone had their own cool fan adventures going, so I probably dodged all of the fandom's worst aspects. Instead, the fact that most of my social circles had negative interest in my favorite comic is a cause of occasional frustration and self-doubt to this day. Ditocoaf posted:Oh yeah, original question-asker, if you're still looking to identify something mspa did that's still theoretically replicable: the upload schedule from PS and early HS. If you can create more of your comic at an unhealthy rate, then post it ridiculously frequently but unpredictably, that'll get people constantly expecting another update (whether they click a bookmark twenty times a day or are just surprised to not see it in their RSS reader) and talking about it (partly to be the first to let other readers know there's an update). Before I started reading Homestuck, I had a slew of webcomic bookmarks that I would check in on once a week. Afterward, Homestuck monopolized my attention so much that I never went back to any of them, even after I stopped reading Homestuck.
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Feb 16, 2022 01:17
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My own drop-off was when Nepeta was killed by Gamzee. She wasn't my favorite character or anything but it just... set kinda wrong, but it was also a culmination of a lot of little things leading up to that point as well.
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Feb 16, 2022 20:32
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Am I in the minority for never having read Homestuck? The entire thing completely passed me by, don't think I'd even heard of it before it was done.
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Feb 17, 2022 06:52
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nimby posted:Am I in the minority for never having read Homestuck? The entire thing completely passed me by, don't think I'd even heard of it before it was done. I was familiar with it, and I did at least read most of "Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff", but otherwise I never paid attention to "Homestuck"
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Feb 17, 2022 07:01
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For me I think it was just browsing this very forum that got me into Homestuck; I started noticing a lot of HS avs popping up after a while and I was wondering where all of them were coming from since they clearly shared the same art style. I still see a few pop up from time to time. No idea if its just goons who legit still like the series or, more likely, didn't feel like shelling out for a new avatar and have managed to keep under the radar enough that they don't get redtexted or caught up in an avatar drive. I think what finally pushed me over the edge though was seeing an ad for the MSPA wiki on some other wiki I was browsing. This was before Fandom/Wikia became a nauseating dumpster fire so seeing links on there were still worth glancing at from time to time. It had some metric along the lines of "readership growth of this wiki in the last month" and it was something absurd, like 1000% or so. It also had a screenshot of a character that was clearly the same one I kept seeing in the SA avatars so after that I finally went "okay, what the gently caress is this?"
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Feb 17, 2022 07:35
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