The popular not-a-webcomic Homestuck is famous, in a nutshell, for being incomprehensibly complicated. Its fans obsessed over it for becoming continually more convoluted than it already was (but in fun ways). Its non-readers knew it mostly for being so bafflingly long and confusing that any attempt to explain what it was fell flat.
But Homestuck isn't hard to explain. It seemed hard to explain, because fans of things are rarely good at explaining their enthusiasms, in part because fans rarely fully understand why they're enthusiastic in the first place. Enthusiasm at its best was incoherent, and Homestuck inspired astonishing enthusiasm and incoherence.
There are really only four things you need to know about Homestuck, after which you'll know literally everything about Homestuck forever. YOU'RE WELCOME IN ADVANCE
But Homestuck isn't hard to explain. It seemed hard to explain, because fans of things are rarely good at explaining their enthusiasms, in part because fans rarely fully understand why they're enthusiastic in the first place. Enthusiasm at its best was incoherent, and Homestuck inspired astonishing enthusiasm and incoherence.
There are really only four things you need to know about Homestuck, after which you'll know literally everything about Homestuck forever. YOU'RE WELCOME IN ADVANCE
ONE: Homestuck is a slapstick farce.
First and foremost, Homestuck is a comedy—and a pretty silly, dumb comedy too. Sure, it's geeky and occasionally highbrow, but the majority of Homestuck involves characters more-or-less throwing pies in each other's faces. (At times, they literally throw pies in each other's faces. That happens more than once.)
The daunting length of the story means it presents itself as a fantasy epic. Technically that's true (but see below). In practice, it primarily works as a long series of funny bits.
And it's very funny! It's got a great sense of humor and it comes up with truly inspired gags. Eventually, its fans decided they liked Homestuck for other reasons, but the thing that actually kept them coming back was its consistent record of humorous japes.
The daunting length of the story means it presents itself as a fantasy epic. Technically that's true (but see below). In practice, it primarily works as a long series of funny bits.
And it's very funny! It's got a great sense of humor and it comes up with truly inspired gags. Eventually, its fans decided they liked Homestuck for other reasons, but the thing that actually kept them coming back was its consistent record of humorous japes.
TWO: Homestuck is a Complicated Plot Generator.
Fans of Homestuck will try to tell you what it's "about," because they wrongly think that you need to understand its story in order to understand its appeal. But Homestuck's plot is unimportant. What matters is that its plot was designed to get continually more elaborate, multifaceted, and "epic," well past the point where most fantasies settle down into a groove.
Homestuck never stops making its own lore more complicated. Most of its plot developments boil down to: "Wow, this universe is even more epic than we thought!" It's an ever-escalating Bigness. And it has a lot of fun making itself be big! A lot of its comedy comes from its own unnecessarily-intricate architecture. Its epic-ness isn't daunting when you read it: it's a kind of carnival showmanship. It's only when fans try to explain that epic-ness that it starts feeling utterly exhausting.
The plot, ironically, is pretty shallow. Author Andrew Hussie came up with all sorts of elaborate games to play with his characters' arcs, but by-and-large none of them result in noticeable character complexity. That's fine, because Homestuck is a comedy. Its characters are fun. A lore-heavy plot lets them stay fun, because it keeps the emphasis on spectacle, on giving you things to ooh and awe over, rather than bogging itself down with self-serious fantasy nonsense. Its plot is dumb and it knows it's dumb, and it's great.
Homestuck never stops making its own lore more complicated. Most of its plot developments boil down to: "Wow, this universe is even more epic than we thought!" It's an ever-escalating Bigness. And it has a lot of fun making itself be big! A lot of its comedy comes from its own unnecessarily-intricate architecture. Its epic-ness isn't daunting when you read it: it's a kind of carnival showmanship. It's only when fans try to explain that epic-ness that it starts feeling utterly exhausting.
The plot, ironically, is pretty shallow. Author Andrew Hussie came up with all sorts of elaborate games to play with his characters' arcs, but by-and-large none of them result in noticeable character complexity. That's fine, because Homestuck is a comedy. Its characters are fun. A lore-heavy plot lets them stay fun, because it keeps the emphasis on spectacle, on giving you things to ooh and awe over, rather than bogging itself down with self-serious fantasy nonsense. Its plot is dumb and it knows it's dumb, and it's great.
THREE: Characters are gay and they make out.
I don't mean this as a pejorative: Homestuck was Degrassi for people who wanted to see boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls. The majority of its cast is canonically bisexual, which meant that gay teens could angst hornily over one another for years and years and years.
Who doesn't love romantic foibles? Homestuck offered them, and it offered them to demographics of folks who hadn't been given nearly enough foibles. Nuff said. Let's move on.
Who doesn't love romantic foibles? Homestuck offered them, and it offered them to demographics of folks who hadn't been given nearly enough foibles. Nuff said. Let's move on.
FOUR: Homestuck played around with what digital publishing could be.
Most online mediums more-or-less emulate how offline mediums work. Blog posts and newsletters take the form of print columns and essays. YouTube videos are just films (and YouTube series are just like TV series). Webcomics are just comics. Sure, the ways that people use these mediums are different, but the actual form of the medium stays pretty much the same.
Homestuck, on the other hand, is published as a series of "pages"—and any given page can contain pretty much anything that Homestuck wants to include. A page can include an illustration or an animated GIF. It can include text (and it can include a lot of text, if it so chooses). It can include video sequences, and had (literally!) dozens of composers scoring its most climactic moments. It can even, for a page, turn into an interactive game: by the end of its run, Homestuck had accumulated three different rendering and gameplay engines for different kinds of game-based storytelling.
At times, the entire layout of the Homestuck web site changes, as the story delves into territories set in stranger worlds. Sometimes its storytelling gets non-linear, presenting you with multiple narrative threads and letting you read through them in whatever order you choose. And it constantly messes with expectations, presenting "comic frames" that abruptly break or change sizes. (At one point, someone wields a crowbar so forcefully that the frames and text all fall off the page, as if the site itself is getting bashed to bits.)
It's fun! What's more, these constant change-ups keep the reading experience from getting stale. The process of "reading" Homestuck sometimes means flipping through a hundred pages in quick succession, and sometimes means investing yourself in a game for an hour or two. It's long, but it's varied, as if Homestuck itself gets bored with what it is and looks for ways to keep itself amused. (Which is more-or-less how it was written.)
Homestuck, on the other hand, is published as a series of "pages"—and any given page can contain pretty much anything that Homestuck wants to include. A page can include an illustration or an animated GIF. It can include text (and it can include a lot of text, if it so chooses). It can include video sequences, and had (literally!) dozens of composers scoring its most climactic moments. It can even, for a page, turn into an interactive game: by the end of its run, Homestuck had accumulated three different rendering and gameplay engines for different kinds of game-based storytelling.
At times, the entire layout of the Homestuck web site changes, as the story delves into territories set in stranger worlds. Sometimes its storytelling gets non-linear, presenting you with multiple narrative threads and letting you read through them in whatever order you choose. And it constantly messes with expectations, presenting "comic frames" that abruptly break or change sizes. (At one point, someone wields a crowbar so forcefully that the frames and text all fall off the page, as if the site itself is getting bashed to bits.)
It's fun! What's more, these constant change-ups keep the reading experience from getting stale. The process of "reading" Homestuck sometimes means flipping through a hundred pages in quick succession, and sometimes means investing yourself in a game for an hour or two. It's long, but it's varied, as if Homestuck itself gets bored with what it is and looks for ways to keep itself amused. (Which is more-or-less how it was written.)
tl;dr:
More than anything, Homestuck is entertainment. It reminds me of the opening of Stephen Sondheim's's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: "We shall employ every device we know in our desire to divert you." And if Homestuck became shockingly popular, it was because it had a broader sense of just what devices it had to offer: elaborate plot-and-lore shenanigans, format fuckery, ridiculous pop-culture gags, esoteric programming humor...
Homestuck's length became somewhat misleading. People tend to think of it as a vast project—something that requires genuine dedication to get through. But it's longform in the way that, say, Peanuts was longform. Peanuts ran for fifty years because it was a silly, lightweight comic that was smartly-written enough not to run out of steam. "Reading all of Peanuts" does take time, but not because Peanuts is a difficult read. Similarly, Homestuck managed to be as long as it was because it kept finding new ways to have fun. Reading it isn't a challenge in part because Homestuck goes out of its way to keep your attention. Whatever its value as a story or as art, more than anything it's a sheer virtuosic act of showmanship.
"Let me tell you about Homestuck" became a meme because fans really couldn't wrap their heads around why they liked Homestuck so much. The only way they knew how was by trying to explain its elaborate, convoluted plot at length, which came off to passersby as some really nerdy shit. And it was nerdy, but not in the brainy way that Heidegger or Gödel, Escher, Bach is nerdy. It was more like that doofus who tries to tell you how funny a sitcom is by telling you about a joke that happened in it. That shit doesn't work! And it's besides the point, when the real takeaway is "it's fun in some clever, unusual, and really delightful ways."
But just to flex:
Homestuck's length became somewhat misleading. People tend to think of it as a vast project—something that requires genuine dedication to get through. But it's longform in the way that, say, Peanuts was longform. Peanuts ran for fifty years because it was a silly, lightweight comic that was smartly-written enough not to run out of steam. "Reading all of Peanuts" does take time, but not because Peanuts is a difficult read. Similarly, Homestuck managed to be as long as it was because it kept finding new ways to have fun. Reading it isn't a challenge in part because Homestuck goes out of its way to keep your attention. Whatever its value as a story or as art, more than anything it's a sheer virtuosic act of showmanship.
"Let me tell you about Homestuck" became a meme because fans really couldn't wrap their heads around why they liked Homestuck so much. The only way they knew how was by trying to explain its elaborate, convoluted plot at length, which came off to passersby as some really nerdy shit. And it was nerdy, but not in the brainy way that Heidegger or Gödel, Escher, Bach is nerdy. It was more like that doofus who tries to tell you how funny a sitcom is by telling you about a joke that happened in it. That shit doesn't work! And it's besides the point, when the real takeaway is "it's fun in some clever, unusual, and really delightful ways."
But just to flex:
Homestuck's plot is easy to understand too.
Everyone in the universe is part of one big, elaborate game. Kids play this game to try and save the world from bad guys.
There are other universes too, and they're all playing a version of the same game. So people from alternate universes are going through this game too, and the different games bleed over into one another, with players in one game leaking out into the other (and vice versa).
There are more interconnected games than its players think, and every time we learn about a new game that's being played, the plot gets thicker. (Plus it retroactively makes the games we have seen feel a lot more complicated than they seemed at first.)
When Homestuck first starts and we see a cute little guy start to play a computer game with his friends, we wonder: How exactly does this wind up being three times as long as The Lord of the Rings? The answer is simple: other people play the game too, and then they all become a part of each other's games. That's the whole plot, start-to-finish. Only it's really, really fun every time we learn about another version of the game, and meet the people who're playing it, because Homestuck comes up with a lot of fun excuses to shoehorn yet another cast of gamers into the mix.
"Why didn't anyone who read Homestuck know how to explain this to anyone, ever?" Well, because they wanted to explain every single gamer from every single version of the game, and they also thought it was super important to go over all the convoluted things that happened every time new gamers showed up, and also, most of them were like sixteen. Teenagers are dumb. That's also the plot of Homestuck, incidentally, you're welcome.
Man! Talk about an easy thing to talk about. That only took someone, what, fifteen goddamn years?
There are other universes too, and they're all playing a version of the same game. So people from alternate universes are going through this game too, and the different games bleed over into one another, with players in one game leaking out into the other (and vice versa).
There are more interconnected games than its players think, and every time we learn about a new game that's being played, the plot gets thicker. (Plus it retroactively makes the games we have seen feel a lot more complicated than they seemed at first.)
When Homestuck first starts and we see a cute little guy start to play a computer game with his friends, we wonder: How exactly does this wind up being three times as long as The Lord of the Rings? The answer is simple: other people play the game too, and then they all become a part of each other's games. That's the whole plot, start-to-finish. Only it's really, really fun every time we learn about another version of the game, and meet the people who're playing it, because Homestuck comes up with a lot of fun excuses to shoehorn yet another cast of gamers into the mix.
"Why didn't anyone who read Homestuck know how to explain this to anyone, ever?" Well, because they wanted to explain every single gamer from every single version of the game, and they also thought it was super important to go over all the convoluted things that happened every time new gamers showed up, and also, most of them were like sixteen. Teenagers are dumb. That's also the plot of Homestuck, incidentally, you're welcome.
Man! Talk about an easy thing to talk about. That only took someone, what, fifteen goddamn years?