What is Homestuck?

[Jubal]

Homestuck: A Newbies' Guide

It's honestly hard to say what Homestuck is.

But here goes: Homestuck is a comic-type story told in mixed media (text, images, flash games, animations) which is initially about four teenagers who play a game that creates and destroys universes. And then about twelve trolls who play a different but linked session of the same game. And then about the genetically linked children/parents of the first four teenagers.

By page count it's one of the longest stories in the English language, running at over ten thousand pages (compare to the mere 1000 or so in all three parts of The Lord of the Rings, though still somewhere short of the 12000 or so in the full Wheel of Time series). It's also notable for having an obsessive fandom who are often looked upon with confusion (unsurprisingly, as fans of a work that draws from sources as diverse as 1980s adventure gaming, 1910s light music, the zodiac, and lucky charms cereal).

And this is the place to discuss it! (And its smaller cousins such as the excellent Problem Sleuth).

[Glaurung]

Thanks for posting this. I hadn't heard of Homestuck before.

This appears to be the starting point - is that right? I sense there may have been some inspiration here for parts of Exilian's very own Choose Your Own Adventure

[Jubal]

That is indeed the start. 

I should warn you that at times the plot is infuriatingly complex - time travel, multiverses, the lot. Also, the trolls all "speak" with some sort of typing quirk which can be an extremely major headache to read.

[Glaurung]

It's surreptitiously consumed quite a lot of my evening. I finally escaped at the end of Act 1. I'm not sure whether I can afford to process the remaining 6,500 or so pages at the moment, and I fear it needs to be taken in large doses in order to retain enough in memory for it to make sense.

I'm not sure about the trollish typing quirks - any idea how they compare with Bascule-speak in Iain M Banks' Fearsumm Endjinn?

[Gen_Glory]

All I know about homestuck is the cosplayers

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There are always so many of them, and a lot of them have a bad reputation

[Jubal]

Yeah - I think a lot of fans of HS like myself are often reticent about it as cosplay and shipping are the only dominant activities of a big subset of the fandom.

There's a lot of fun stuff in there though once you get past that. I suspect a lot of the fans don't really care much about the game-like style or mechanics of it and tend to just delve into sections of HS where it gets rather into soap opera with space aliens territory. (For that matter, I've seen many HS cosaplyers online admitting to never having read the whole thing...)