Started this video thinking "finally I'll be able to understand what the hell Homestuck is" and instead I learn I'll NEVER be able to understand what the hell Homestuck is -R
My brother was OBSESSED with homestuck in his early teens, but he never let me read it because he thought it wasn’t appropriate for a little kid. I sneakily opened it up on the family computer anyways, read one page, and found it completely incomprehensible to my tiny mind. That night two tornadoes hit my town and destroyed part of my house. I like to think that somehow, some way, homestuck was responsible.
trying to understand homestuck when you've never been a part of it is probably what older generations feel like trying to understand memes and internet culture
I tried to explain one character to a friend and ended up giving a ramshackle, nonlinear summary of the entire comic. In response, I was sent that Always Sunny gif of the guy with the conspiracy board. And that's fair, I *felt* insane trying to explain ectobiology.
as someone who still sporadically consumes homestuck content, I have definitely seen her drawn saying that on multiple occasions, as well as fanart and cosplay tiktok of jane saying it
@@cheekybananaboy3361 Vriska's typing quirks in Homestuck were... 1) repeat vowels 8 times ("oh maaaaaaaan" 2) Replace B with "8" 3) Replace anything that sounds like eight with "8" The vid doesn't really mention it, but every troll had a typing quirk and Vriska had arguably one of the easiest ones (most of the main trolls had easily readable quirks). It's weird that the quirks carried on when they would actually talk in-person but... eh whatever.
there are 2 types of people in the world; people that think a 2 hour video cant be described as brief and people that are familiar enough with Homestuck to know 2 hours is as brief as we're going to get
Yeah I think it took me reading a couple of hours almost every day for about a month, to get through the entire thing. And I'm a fast reader. AND that's not even touching on the fandom shit, just the comic itself.
when she mentioned on twitter that the video was 2 hours and 12 minutes and once i knew for sure it'd be about homestuck my first reaction was "oh that's not nearly long enough"
The most Homestuck thing that ever happened in my life was my partner who cosplayed Dave Strider cheating on me with another Dave Strider. Like... COME ON
I just assumed they were the current trendy anime fandom at the time. And that most of the people in troll cosplay were just the same old cosplayers who hopped onto whatever was the new bandwagon and didn't particularly like the IP itself. My friend referred to this group as the Narutards.
I joined the fandom during the Omega pause, so basically as it was ending, so I was so happy to finally have answers that no one would give me till now.
@@artsy2502 Guidestuck? It's a fancomic for Homestuck that imagines a SBURB session with humanized versions of Becquerel, Lil Cal, the Harlequin doll, and Jaspers. It along with Heinoustuck were hosted on MS Paint Fan Adventures (shortened to MSPFA) and were two really big ones on the site at the height of the time. Now, Guidestuck has a sort of successor a la Homestuck^2 (called Guidestuck^2), and I *think* Heinoustuck has one too? Both run by fans of the two comics wanting to continue where they were left off since both of them went inactive for a long time.
I remember coming across Homestuck hate in my early days on the internet, but not understanding what any of it was about. This video answered an almost decade old question I'd forgotten I'd asked.
Minor correction: Megalovania wasn't created for Homestuck, Toby Fox first made the song to serve as the final boss music for an Earthbound ROM hack he made as a teenager
I love how Sarah makes a Tumblr fandom sound like an ancient, puzzling and terrifying civilization, that has left us many artifacts and its dreadful reputation
"If I had a nickel for every time Tumblr fans speculated that a bad ending wasn't the real ending, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice" - Sarah, probably
I'm a con vendor. I've never had a HS fan be outright rude--most were very nice--but as a group, they are by far the most inconsiderate. Damaging merch or people's clothing with their paint. Putting wet items in vendor tables. Leaving hairy gray messes in bathrooms. Taking up walkways. They'd station themselves in front of tables to talk, preventing anyone else from looking at merch. If asked to move, they'd sometimes try to migrate BEHIND VENDOR TABLES. None of it was malicious, just... Clueless. Sweet people for sure, most of them, but so many needed to pay attention to others.
Ah that sounds like they’re more victims of group mentality than anything, slowly erasing away the perceived personal responsibility the individuals would usually give themselves. It would make sense that homestuck fans would get that reputation since there were so many of them, much easier to fall into a group mentality.
@@thishonestgrifter That's the main impact of Homestuck to me, tbh. It fills me with a poignant feeling that's almost impossible to describe. But it's beautiful.
I read homestuck and it threw me off too. I guess because I was trying to remember when Act 2 had been split into sub acts and then realized she meant act 2 of her video was on act 5 of the comic and I was like "well thats pretty homestuck"
@@uilsoum875 y'know at first I was surprised to see a Technoblade quote here, but then I was like wait... I'm on the Weird Internet History Lady Channel. What am I saying.
Sarah has talked about Sherlock, Supernatural, Homestuck... All we need is one on Doctor Who and one on Hetalia, and I get a Bingo on my Tumblr Bingo Card
@@xxcallmeniaxx3272 I have never seen Hetalia in any form other than fan content and I remember wanting to see it so it feels like it isn't a real thing hahaha
this hits different knowing that andrew hussie begrudgingly watched this video after weeks of putting it off despite someone they're associated with literally threatening legal action over it
@@FCHenchy Idk, my english is not that good to watch this shot without a headache ;3; Just explain itt. Did hussie do something bad or other people involved in homestuck not him?
@@paweave9562 My English is not that good either but I’ll try to explain. They (Andrew uses all pronouns) and the studio behind Hiveswap sent legal threats to Sarah because of her video, “asking” her to delete it and apologize for spreading misinformation. Turns out, there isn’t misinformation, at least they never said what information is wrong, they just swear to god that the bad things about the development of Hiveswap (people not being credited, being fired without warning and the general delay of the game) are fake because the source of these informations are “bad people”. Sarah spent weeks talking to Andrew trying to understand what those false informations are, but they never answered, they just kept running back and forth about how some people that used to work with them are bad and how these people convinced their co-workers that Andrew and the whole development were messy and bad. Also, they accidentally confirmed a lot of the bad things that happened during the development of the game, like not crediting a person just because they believed that this person was talking bad things about the company after being fired without warning. A “funny thing” about this whole situation is that Andrew took weeks to watch this video that they claimed that has misinformation, they were talking to Sarah FOR WEEKS about THE VIDEO without having watched THE VIDEO
i already felt like homestuck was a "you had to have been there" kind of thing, knowing that its literally impossible to even read the damn thing the same way ever again is just so in line with homestucks branding
I wasn’t even that into Homestuck (I was... ten to twelve? I was a Homestuck fan, not a Homestuck Fan with a capital F, if that makes sense) and I remember my extremely stoic, VERY into Homestuck friend called me crying about the Game Over update (where everyone died) and... man, you really DID have to be there.
@@planetsliveinsidethemoon1600 I was in, like my 20’s when the game over flash happened and had the same interaction with a friend that was REALLY into it. I had know idea what was happening but tried my best to, like comfort her about it. I eventually did read Homestuck a little later on and she got the same call from me basically. 😂
It's not really LITERALLY impossible, thankfully the unoffical MSPA reader is super good and has everything archived, able to play HS as-is. The games and Flashes and everything - it's great. It's definitely missing the whole "reading along with the fandom" thing though, sadly.
*Hmm, sounds like Red Vs Blue, where ya had to be there. (Spoiler) I was there when season 13 finished and church died. So that broke me and nothing as ever the same. It's upsetting that they fired Joel VA FOR CABOOSE.*
When I was around 12 in 2012, nearly a decade before I realised I was sex repulsed, I made a tumblr account and almost immediately saw a gif of pottery that turned into porn. That single post horrified me so much that I never went on tumblr again, and i think that one pottery porn gif saved me from this because Homestuck is 100% the sort of thing I would have been into as a young teen. So I want to thank that person who terrified 12 year old me with porn for saving me from the objectively darkest timeline I could have gone down
@@emilybarclay8831 There was a porn ban in 2018 which largely contributed to why twitter became the new Tumblr in terms of the stereotypical user. Everyone left Tumblr for Twitter!
hearing Sarah Z discuss Homestuck in excrutiating depth for two hours makes me feel seen, not in a comforting way, but like im butt naked and embarassed.
so glad I'm not the only one experiencing. I have been laughing for 2 hours as a means of coping with the absurd pain every word in this video fills me with
". . . don't take this as 100% fact unless there's a source there. I don't want to get sued for reporting on this, so I'm not going to make any definitive statements about what happened here . . ." That aged like fine milk.
@@_thesunflowerfairy_ Yeah, check out Sarah's subsequent videos, there's two of them I think, about Sarah receiving threats of legal action from the fine people at Homestuck
the fact that you received personal correspondence from hussie free of charge after this video in the context of the kickstarter tiers is unbelievably funny
Man, that was the culture huh? Being the awkward kid alone at a convention sucks until you find the dark corner of the con center where the Homestuck kids your age are, then you're treated like family until you leave. I hope that kindness and openness never dies and finds itself in another fandom prone to awkward kids :,)
this is the equivalent of falling asleep and suddenly waking up in 3045 in the middle of a war in a battlefield and no one absolutely speaks a language you understand
Funny story. During middle school at the height of homestuck my friends and I went to a local-ish con. I use a wheelchair from a disability so I was immediately like “I’ll cosplay Tavros!” So I did. During the whole fucking con I had people coming up to me first of all complementing my cosplay but more importantly asking where I got the wheelchair to use for the cosplay! Legit they would always say “Your cosplay is so accurate where did you find a wheelchair to go with it?!” I would always respond deadpan “I’m actually disabled.” My friends still say that to me all the time. So now they say “Where’d you’d find the wheelchair?!”
That’s actually hilarious lmao. You could’ve told people you were so committed to the cosplay you gave yourself a disability to really *feel* the character
This story went better than I was expecting, I was afraid someone was gonna come at you for faking a disability for a cosplay, so I'm relieved even if they thought it was just a prop, it was received well. I've seen some horror stories of people standing up briefly from their wheelchair or moving their legs and being attacked for “faking it”. Some people don’t realise not everyone in a wheelchair is fully paralysed from the waist down.
This is one of my comfort videos, I’ve watched at least fifty times. And every single time, Sarah saying “Dante Basco, who played Zuko from the Zutara ship” fucking annihilates me.
If you take a shot every time Sarah says 'suffice it to say', you will time travel to 2012 and wake up in a bath that is a mix of sharpies and 70% alcohol.
In all my years on Tumblr, I avoided learning anything about Homestuck beyond the name itself. I didn't even know what type of media it was. I wore that fact like a badge of honor.... Until today. Today, I will watch this 2 hour long video and learn about Homestuck because Sarah Z cannot be denied.
Lmao this is me to a T, I've seen some pictures and cosplays that were forced upon my eyes in my years of tumblr but I refused learn the distinction between homestuck and that sans game, but alas, today is the day I learn lol
Obviously the Undertale fandom also drew Homestuck people. It’s basically the immediate successor, as was said. Now though there hasn’t been a project with the same spark for quite some time as the internet moves to be more corporation-centered.
having been a person who stayed home a lot since i was a child, growing up reading homestuck i thought faygo was a fake soda that the webseries made up for years up until the summer before i went to high school in 2015 and when i tell you i lost my shit when i went to family dollar and saw shelves full of faygo im not even joking. i felt so dumb when i talked to my friend about how they made faygo from homestuck real and looked like the biggest fucking idiot.
Bro I was in the exact same place as you when I was younger, when I found out Faygo was real, I fucking lost it, I had actually thought that they made the drink specifically from Homestuck
The weird thing about Vriska for me is my first girlfriend when I was 13 was a massive Vriska roleplayer and used her text quirk all the time, at a time when I knew zero about Homestuck. So when I finally got around to reading it years later Vriska just reminded me of that relationship and made me nostalgic. My second girlfriend was also really into cosplaying Jade too so basically when reading the comic I have pretty strong romantic associations with two Homestuck characters. This is what it was like being a teen in the 2010s.
As someone who worked upper management at an anime convention for a decade or so, I still resent Homestuck for all the times the hotels tried to hold us responsible for all the shit these kids destroyed with their body paint
@@zoelio999 We explicitly tell patrons to bring their own towels or ask the hotel for colored towels and make sure they seal their makeup but like you said, they were kids so they don't bother reading things like that
The thing about Homestuck cosplay is that it was ludicrously easy. Throw a printed symbol on a colored T-shirt and a couple props and you’ve got a costume. This made cosplaying accessible for kids who would normally never even have tried to cosplay. The trouble came with the trolls, because the costumes were still otherwise easy but the grey skin was difficult.
I worked for WeLoveFine which had the Homestuck merch license. Met Andrew, met his stalker, got lore checked too many times to count, and got paid to read Homestuck and come up with merch/find talented fan artists. Great to see this kind of video about something that was such a HUGE part of my career being a professional geek.
If I was able to create good art back then I'd definitely work hard to get the attention of someone like you. Homestuck was such a core building block to who I am, I just wasn't old enough to properly engage with the fandom and experienced art community then. Finally at a point where I can feel confident about my abilities and it seems possible to me now to reach artists like Xamag and Ikumaru, top tier Homestuck fan artists that shaped the way I draw. Anyway, thank you for your service, it's so cool seeing echoes of my childhood still going around wondering about Homestuck.
My 14 year old brother got into Homestuck during quarantine and I (23) had such horrible flashbacks when he told me that I literally said, out loud, “dude I’m so happy for you but please never use that word in front of me again”
When Sarah was like "you've heard of this before" about the trolls I was like 'no I haven't' and then she said "you've seen this before" and I was still like 'no I haven't' then she was like "you've definitely seen this before" and finally I was like well I guess if Sarah says so, I must have seen it before.
My only interaction with Homestuck was talking with some people covered in grey hanging out at the mall, very odd thing to run into. Glad I now have context for that like a decade later
our generation is all gonna have to have two versions of “the talk” with our preteens; 1 is the already existing one and the 2nd is that *tv shows, graphic novels, web series, and literally whatever form of media do not have a fake purposefully bad ending with the real good ending that will come shortly after*
Between homestuck, sherlock, and game of thrones I wouldn't be surprised if someone who has gone through this actually does end up doing something like that when one of them eventually gets creative control of a popular media property
oh god, how could I shake my head at the Sherlock kids from Sarah's last video when *I completely forgot about Mass effect 3, Indoctrination theory and how utterly into it I was*
imagine taking a tour of a billionaire's home, and finding a framed, courteous thank-you note from Hussie and the tour guide uncomfortably refusing to answer any questions about it
I remember being 13 and listening to my older friends try to explain to me what homestuck was and all they said to me was “it’s too hard to understand. Just don’t ask about the bucket” and I never asked about it because I was genuinely afraid of what “the bucket” meant. Edit: I now know what the bucket is.
"I don't watch movies, they're too long for me to emotionally invest myself into them." *Sarah Z, Jenny Nicholson, or Folding Ideas making hours-long content about media & early 2010s fandom shit* > Me: Invest emotionally.
It saddens me to come back to this video and always see your comment about being unable to emotionally invest in anything that takes more than two hours unless it is a video essay. I sincerely hope you've gone to therapy in recent years because it really is sad to see you're unable to become emotionally invested in other people solely because it doesn't happen instantaneously. I was like that for a long time, and I still somewhat am. It's a lonely existence like that. I don't want anyone else to suffer through it.
The description of Yiffy elicited an involuntary bodily response. I cringe yet feel a primal, subconscious horror that makes my spine crawl. As if I were looking into the eyes of Cthulhu Himself… and He dabbed.
True story, homestuck cosplayers got our local con permanently banned from the major con hotel in the area. They broke several elevator buttons because they were kicking them to avoid rubbing off the paint on their hands, got into the hot tub in costume and clogged up the pump with body paint and wig hair, and used "being in character" as an excuse to harass hotel guests both generally and sexually. When the con finally found a new venue they literally banned all homestuck anything because of it.
I was the Jade cosplayer of the group, and while we all sealed our paint, I was the designated button toucher since my hands were unpainted. I'm making a cosplay for another colorful character soon and for body paint I'm probably not even gonna do my hands except for nail polish just so I can still touch stuff
between editing my high school friend's erotic homestuck fanfiction and being sent hateful messages by other homestuck fans while I was in a psych ward, it's very hard to describe the precise emotion homestuck evokes for me, but i can say that it's left me with a feeling of absolute dread when i hear the song "fergalicious"
I am absolutely fascinated by your story. Like... I'd ask more, but I don't wanna trigger you or waste 2 hours of your time trying to explain to someone who has only watched this video.
@@AlriikRidesAgain I am happy to provide more details, but to explain the Fergalicious part, this is required viewing first ruclips.net/video/IWcb2pdgZTc/видео.html
I had no idea Homestuck was still HAPPENING. I thought it was a thing that swept the world like at least a decade ago and we were all just living the aftermath
I wouldn't say "favorite," but my strongest memory of the Homestuck fandom is of using a custom instant messenger program themed after the one the characters use. I ended up connecting with a person who I was certain was my then-girlfriend and having a couple hours of vaguely flirtatious conversations before finding out the next day that she hadn't been online that whole night. So, that's a thing I get to remember forever.
@@cyberpunk-2O77That's the one. Though creepy encounters aside, I gotta hand it to whoever made it, there are much less complicated acts of fandom devotion than writing a whole instant messaging program. What a weird time that was.
Watching her drink Faygo and thinking it was funny at first then seeing her getting more and more uncomfortable until I just wanted to her to stop is also a very good analogy to how I feel about homestuck.
I've never even heard of the drink before and I felt awful for her. It looks like someone dissolved artificial cherries and red lipstick in carbonated diluted acid. And then dropped a dumptruck of sugar into it and mixed it all together without removing the truck.
There are 3 different colors of Faygo cream soda. Blackish brown (regular cola color), red, and blue. Blue is the best, fight me. To be fair though they all do taste like the soul of america. But hey I dont mind the occasional cigarette or taco bell, I don't know if everyone enjoys consuming trash sometimes. Anyway, I'm really high but I think the fact that Faygo cost 99 cents should say everything I can't convey within the confines of the English language.
This entire video reminded me that I had my first kiss during a Homestuck Spin the Bottle game at a convention when I was 16 and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.
Oh god. I am immediately having flashbacks to being in a Homestuck spin the bottle game at a convention and I can't tell what's weirder: That the internet is so small I may have stumbled across someone else who was there, OR that Homestuck spin the bottle games at conventions were just THAT common.
@@MurderOfAKiller there have been other good ones for board games too. The only good games I can think of that started as kickstarters are Blasphemous, Darkest Dungeon, and Iron Harvest. I'm sure there are others but not a ton. But yeah also knew exactly what was going to happen once she said Kickstarter.
It's weird because usually the things that start as kickstarters have that part forgotten about as the work itself becomes what people care about (FTL: Faster Than Light is my favorite example) while the bad ones that produce nothing or let you down are always doomed to be forever linked to the cursed title of 'crowd funded' (Elite Dangerous.....)
The Vriska quarantine stuff reminds me of my days on Amino. When I was in the Tangled: The Series fandom, everyone was obsessed with Varian, to the point that the amino had to make a rule called “no Varian weekends” or whatever. There was a featuring thing where basically the people in charge could pick posts to go at the top of everyone’s feed, and on weekends they would refuse to pick anything that was about Varian.
I live in knowledge that one day when a fanbase I am currently in dies, Sarah will make a video essay about it and I will finally see how ridiculous I am
i never read homestuck, but my birthday is april 13th, and i have strong memories of being incredibly upset in middle school because my friends cared more about celebrating homestuck than my birthday
After watching the videos on Dashcon, Miss Officer and Mr Truffles, and All or Nothing, the biggest surprise in this video is that a Kickstarter campaign actually delivered anything at all
That hit me like a rock. Whenever I criticize undertale there's always someone who will "correct" me by saying there's this multiple timeline theory that resolves that plot point or that even serious RPGs have memes etc. etc. It dawned on me why people gave undertale so much praise even though the game was purely just a meme with "game file modifications" to defeat the final boss which all equates to pressing F12 and changing the text on a tweet to say something offensive. All the items and money the character obtained becomes irrelevant when you find temi the game is clearly makes itself a joke by adding in an infinite money glitch on purpose and to me, a person who as a hobby designs games and tests them as a job, these were problems that generally made games bad. I have been occasionally fighting with diehard who absolutely and spectacularly fail at explaining to me why these issues were non-issues because the game simply was inspired by something as crazy and outlandish as homestuck was. I just guess I was the joke for the people who were watching who understood it before me and laughed at how obvious it was.
@@Baumworld Yes that is an appeal however, that won't necessarily make a game good or bad. For example, the first Fallout game has really memorable characters except back then the UI was considered bad and by today's standards, absolutely horrible and game breaking. I would recommend at least trying it because if you can look past it you will enjoy it but those who can't, won't. For some people back then Fallout was considered horrible because of that reason it really depended on who you ask.
Ooooh that explains it. Something about Undertale I never understood was its initial backer support or developed its obsessive fandom started from seemingly nowhere. More mainstream game media tends to depict Toby Fox as some random guy who came up with a unique game idea and it exploded into a phenomenon due to luck and "determination". His work on Homestuck usually relgated to a small tidbit. And I think this has largely to do with our general cultural obsession to perpetuate the myth of the self made success story coming from nothing with no help mixed with those outlets' lack of knowledge of what HS is (tbf I've watched a few videos and still barely do myself). But it makes so much more sense that he was not only a decently significant part of an established media property, but literally had a close personal relationship with the owner of it. And that there was this ravenous fanbase with already years of built up experience and desire to create fan work and alternate universes just chomping at the bit for anything even related to HS. Not to undermine Toby or Undertale, I absolutely adore the game, it's one of my favorites. But it just explains a lot to me that he had way more to work with than just luck and a good idea. He had a proven style to work from, community support, and probably even a push from Hussie or WhatPumpkin in general. And even more interesting it being essentially an alternate universe version of HS with more broad mainstream appeal and a successful Kickstarter with little to no drama; except it happened adjacent to HS in real life.
Huh! Its true. Most Articles i could find write about his ROM Hacks with only Kotaku having made these connections ('The Undertale Drama' and 'what homestuck was')
I said the exact same thing about it on the Undertale video SEW put out a a couple months ago. It's like seeing all the buildings and roads of an old civilization lying in disrepair, and I compared it to someone who only found out about it after the end
yeah, i fell off before hiveswap, just out of boredom i think, and i had no idea it was in this state. i'm legit sad to learn it's like this on 4/13 : ( i think the franchise just needs to release its game, end, and go away for a bit.
God detachment is the best word to describe how I feel about the state of hs as a whole rn. Though I only recently read it a few months ago, it's so sad looking through places like youtube to see posts that were uploaded 8-10 years ago. To see this monster of a fandom just having the time of their lives and then looking at it now seeing a shadow of it's former self. Especially with how it ended, me just sitting there disappointed to learn that that's where it was over, an unfilling ending to something so seemingly great. Anyways sorry didn't intent to write an essay lol this just got me thinking
Watching this just made me deeply grateful that my method of choice for consuming Homestuck was to visit the site once a year and binge the whole archive every time, and to never interact with the fandom, nor bother with any release schedules or previews. I barely noticed the gigapause, was completely oblivious to the controversies and debates among the fandom, and I backed Hiveswap on Kickstarter at one of the lower tiers without ever once regretting it. For the record, I was a bit disappointed by Collide, but I liked the ending.
@@tuesdaysellers1545 Right? Like i was there i read the previous comic of the creator (the detective one) and within months it had an cultish following that was a bit scary...
I think that's the objectively best way to interact with any media nowadays... Fuck media as a community activity, fuck that shit, I just wanna catch up with this thing I've been hearing about in peace and decide for myself if I like it or not or if I should continue. Happened to me back in 2016 when I decided to start reading MHA, I NEVER touched the fanbase, I just binged like 5 chapters everyday until I began following it weekly and then I stopped when it got boring and that's it. The only bad experience I had with that thing was discovering I wasn't enjoying the series all that much.
One of my favorite Homestuck fandom memories was when someone on Tumblr who didn't know anything about it was looking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches but kept getting pictures of "peanut butter and jelly demons fucking each other" in the tag instead because pb&j was the ship name for Gamzee and Tavros.
I have only ever heard Homestuck referenced as an example of a dumpster fire fandom, and have no idea what Homestuck itself actually is. I am at full attention and ready to take notes, Professor Z.
The Homestuck fandom is virtually saintlike compared to What Pumpkin and Andrew Hussie, the creators. The only reason it gets a bad rep is that Homestuck fans basically took over conventions for a few years, but that died out pretty fast.
I got into homestuck cause my older sister told me to ‘avoid the grey cosplayers’ when I went to a local anime con in 2012, cause ‘they’re aggressive’ and my friends and I created a punch buggy game where we’d punch each other every time we saw a homestuck. Then after the con I immediately went and read it LOL the cosplayers were so good and I was curious haha
So, as a massive Florence and the Machine and Regina Spektor fan back in the day, who never got into Homestuck, I suddenly understand why every comment on "Girl With One Eye" or "Blue Lips" was about Homestuck and/or was completely incomprehensible to me. Thank you for solving an almost decade-long mystery that I'd managed to completely forget about!
"well shit that's a hell of a mystery no one thought was a mystery and didn't even really need solving but damn if it didn't just get solved so nice work"
Reminds me of when I went scrolling through the comments on 'Never Let Me Go' and was like, "Who the hell are Damon and Elena?" Turns out that song was used on The Vampire Diaries.
I think it’s very important for videos like this and Jenny Nicholson’s Bronycon video to exist so that future people’s will know what the fandom experience was like for dead fandoms.
So I was a Pegasister/Brony in the mid-2010s (got bored with it and left around 2017, maybe). It hurts so much to see it referred to as a "dead" fandom. Ouch.
i dressed as Jade at a convention...a Karkat cosplayer went up to me all excited...calling me classic Karkat curse words...i played along...i called her a “fuckass”...she cried...the memories hurt...
one time when i took a photo of a feferi cosplayer at a local convention i noticed literally a week after the fact that the eridan cosplayer in the background was flipping the camera off and i feel like our stories have some kind of kinship
me, who never read homestuck and never knew anyone who was into homestuck, sitting in 2021 watching a 2 hour long deep dive about homestuck: interesting
Same, I heard about homestuck just because I wanted to know the source of some memes and fanarts, but since I'm French no one in middle school or high school was into it, and I finished high school in 2013 and never heard about it later irl, since I'm one of the few people in my social group that understand english...(and that skill is completely useless at work, I work in a nursing home) So I'm interested in this kind of videos, from a completely distant point of view, I never read it and just know it existed because of memes x)
i had 2 friends into homestuck and they would talk to me about it all the time but never told me where i could read it when i asked and when i googled it i never knew what to click on 🙃 so thats why im here, i want to know more about this thing my friends wouldn't clue me in on besides shoving fandom jokes down my throat, telling me i would get it unless i read the context, asking where to find said context and them saying "no 💚"
As someone whos in some way known of homestuck for a while but never engaged in the fandom/ read a single page of it, the fact that a Toblerone has the power to change 10 years of story is something that I find impressive just as I find it mind boggling
@@sjahvsnavsb3365 it didn't that much since the person who did end up finding the Toblerone only asked for the protagonist to be made trans. But Hussy literally said anything could be requested, someone could have requested the entire plot changing and it would have
homestuck was incredibly odd for me, since i read it on my own in late 2017 - early 2018 with ZERO involvement or knowledge of the fandom at all: essentially just raw unfiltered homestuck with no outside influences. i didn't know any discourse or any drama, just a cool webcomic that i read and then finished. and so when i tried to look at the state of the fandom once i was done reading i was.......... incredibly put off. it was like going to a hotel, having a nice time, then looking out the window and realizing all the other guests have been setting beach towels on fire and fighting each other for the last week without you noticing
Yeah. There's a lot of things that basically require you to ignore their fandoms in order to be enjoyable. I have read Homestuck I think in 2015 until the hiatus break. Never engaged with the community and I don't regret it. Also I think that the Problem Sleuth is better, at least I enjoyed it more personally.
Same. I read it around 2016, I think, because a friend was into it and I finished it without looking at the fandom to avoid being spoiled only to look at the fandom afterwards and just going... :0 !!!?!?!!
Wait, so you’re telling me “the ending was bad so actually there must be another ending somewhere and this ending is a fake” is a REPEATING CONSPIRACY in fandom, generally? 🤯
To be fair, Homestuck was a story that literally canonically retconned past events before, as in characters fucking around in 4th wall-breaking ways to mess shit up (though it's been so long since I've dug anything Homestuck related out of my brain that I don't know if I have any examples off the top of my head.)
It's not a big stretch to go from "wow, I can't believe the ending was so bad" to "wait, I literally can't believe the ending was so bad!" to "what if this isn't the actual ending?" It's not just in fandom, it's a classic symptom of people who have massively overinvested in a specific outcome, and whose desperation to be satisfied is strong enough that it is easier to fight reality than to accept their disappointment. It's the dollar-auction scenario, scaled up until what you're bidding is your very sense of self-worth and you're allowed to lie to yourself about the worth of the dollar. This happens in real-world apocalypse cults; following a failed prediction of the apocalypse many members will drop out, but those who remain long enough for a new prediction will paradoxically be MORE staunch in their beliefs of the predicted apocalypse for having endured one failed prediction.
Especially in stories with themes of mystery or messing with time/space it seems. Like to compare 2 other genres but in cartoon form, Gravity Falls pulled an awful finale I think it would receive the same conspiracy, but My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic wouldn't. I think LOST got the same treatment?
I was on tumblr for an entire decade and never had any kind of grasp on what homestuck was. So glad, as a 26 year old adult, I will finally know what a Karkarat is.
Exactly. I remember going to a park in London with a friend and seeing a bunch of people dressed up as trolls. My friend, 22, leaned over slowly and gestured like he was hosting a nature show: "Look . . .an Eridan." But the splendor of the Eridan was lost on me.
I was on tumblr for a decade, I read 3000+ pages of Homestuck and I also had no grasp on what it was. (Granted, it might be because I am a non native english speaker so reading it was a miserable, confusing experience :( )
One thing that really stood out to people near the beginning of Homestuck- It started out as a story of four friends who met online, who had never met in person. It was an affirmation that those kinds of relationships could be as real, deep, and meaningful as any other, which really stuck with people who had those kind of relationships in their lives.
Full stop. That's what pulled me in to begin with. Not any of the trolls or big worldbuilding stuff. Just an affirmation on the types of relationships only this current generation of people first experienced
I first got into homestuck because my life-long best friend, who lives an ocean across from me, kept recommending it to me. "It's like us!" he would say, then proceed to sent me the most fascinating out of context panels. This is most definitely the reason why I got so emotionally invested in HS at the time, it was like reading myself and my bff having good times. Hold on, I think something's in my eye.
Definitely! I don't think I've ever encountered a piece of media since that has represented online friendships as well as Homestuck did. I think this is part of what made Homestuck very personal to cringe shut-in teenagers such as myself. I remember watching the flash where the Act 6 kids finally meet up IRL and fantasizing about what I would say to my Internet friends when I finally did the same.
I am halfway through the video and this development hell is so fun to me. Like, dude, you can't blame the team of developers for doing nothing and placing it all on them, because, you know, you can't just give them some money, say goodbye and then come back after a year asking where your game is. This is YOUR game, your responsibility, you can't just hand out money to some people without actually working with them and checking on them, even if the team is fucking around it's your job as a client to check on them and tell them not to fuck around. Your job to schedule and to harass them into working, because it is you in the first place who needs this game to be done. Like, if they weren't making any progress, how couldn't you notice for months? If you had bad expirience, maybe stop giving them money? I am working in the game industry and this is SO common for a client to fuck around and not to give you any information and then blame it on the team, this is so frustrating. Even if Odd Gentlemen screwed him over (which I honestly doubt) I can't see why it isn't Hussy's own stupidity, lack of involvement and carelessness, 'cos come on, it's your responsibility to get shit done. Especially considering how poorly Hussy treated the previous stage of development where he made no updates whatsoever for months, I'm siding with Odd Gentlemen on this one. I never new what homestuck is but this shit made me MAD so I'm ranting about it in the comment section of two year old video, look what you've made me do, Hussie!
The craziest thing I’ve learned is I thought the trolls were the main characters and I’ve never been so fucked up over a piece of information in my life and I was ON tumblr when this was happening
I feel like “good person but bad character” could be used for mary sues, as they could be the perfect person with no flaws. Good person, but not a good character. Not a great way to describe Vriska.
I love the idea that it just did that lol Like it sounds like something a dystopian government would say when a popular revolutionary figure suddenly died lol "No we did not shoot him in the head with a sniper rifle from a near by roof top. His head just did that. We are not accepting any further questions on this matter!" lol
Honestly I'm still just mad that the one cosplay I got the most following for (10k+ on tumblr) was Dave fucking Strider. Literally just a t-shirt, some red cons, aviators, and an ok sense of humor. It started because I was making cosplay gifs in my room during a thunder storm and this clap of thunder scared the SH!T out of me and I had been recording a gif that turned into a gif of me attempting to put my aviator shades on and being scared shitless by nature. I posted it because it was just amusing?? Then it blew up and lead to an ask blog, con panels, massive friend circles, etc. I'm now over 30, have worsening mental health, and never leave my apartment. I kind of try to forget and pretend my homestuck days never happened, but I can't ignore the flashbacks I got every 2 minutes while watching this video.
Dude, you probably made tons of people smile with that gif. Hell, I've probably seen it. Just know that you matter and have the potential to rule everyone around you. I'm just 22 and feel nostalgic about the Homestuck days in 2016, I went down a mental health spiral right after it ended and for a lot of years after that before I finally learned to be social and not scared of intimidated by other people / my literal self and the problems I thought I'd bring with me to new relationships. You can improve in seconds if you want to, never too late to break out of a bad cycle.
Followup here: ruclips.net/video/gsM9bQvpt_c/видео.html
omg im early :o
This is wild
GIRL YES I JUST FINISHED IT I'M STILL REELING
Just finished, came back for a rewatch to bump that view number up even higher! Let's gooooo
OH BABYYYY sarahhh these people omg. youre my fave haha big love
Started this video thinking "finally I'll be able to understand what the hell Homestuck is" and instead I learn I'll NEVER be able to understand what the hell Homestuck is -R
Mood, Red.
i guess that explains why its never been mentioned in any trope talks
OH MY GOD RED, NICE SEEN YOU HERE💙💙
mood
I'm still just trying to figure out what Faygo is.
My brother was OBSESSED with homestuck in his early teens, but he never let me read it because he thought it wasn’t appropriate for a little kid. I sneakily opened it up on the family computer anyways, read one page, and found it completely incomprehensible to my tiny mind. That night two tornadoes hit my town and destroyed part of my house. I like to think that somehow, some way, homestuck was responsible.
John Egbert was trying to save you
one of the top five best stories i’ve seen written in a youtube comment
This is one of the best comments I've ever read.
I'm not sure where I thought this comment was going, but it sure wasn't there.
IT WAS JOHN
HE DID THE WINDY THING
• I didn’t know what homestuck is about
• I watch a 2 hour video about homestuck
• I don’t know what homestuck is about
• I didn't know what homestuck is about
• I read a 7 year comic
• I still don't know what homestuck is about
^This, pretty much this.
Well, I'm glad it's dead because aesthetically it was an exploded baby diaper to the eyes.
Same
@@nukiradio I stopped on act 5 cuz i didnt like it at the start and now that I watched this, i might resume reading it
trying to understand homestuck when you've never been a part of it is probably what older generations feel like trying to understand memes and internet culture
Legit, I've been watching fanmade homestuck content out of context and the original media looks so complicated
@@Someone-rl8ii At this point, maybe reading the near million words web-comic/flash animation, might be not so bad.
It's terrifying
I tried to explain one character to a friend and ended up giving a ramshackle, nonlinear summary of the entire comic. In response, I was sent that Always Sunny gif of the guy with the conspiracy board. And that's fair, I *felt* insane trying to explain ectobiology.
Read your bible! (KJV, preferably) ♥
shoutout to the audible employee who sat through a feature length movie with of homestuck lore just to make sure its safe for sponsorship, godspeed.
They're probably an asshole anyway they work for Amazon.
There are worse jobs to have. I wouldn't mind being able to do something like this for a living.
I mean, here we are listening to it for free like suckers, when we could be getting paid
They did more than what Andrew Hussy was capable of 🫡
hello truck
if homestuck had come out more recently i swear there would be a page of vriska saying "gaslight, g8keep, girl8oss"
as someone who still sporadically consumes homestuck content, I have definitely seen her drawn saying that on multiple occasions, as well as fanart and cosplay tiktok of jane saying it
i understand the first 8 but the second one wtf. girleightoss
@@cheekybananaboy3361 8 looks like a capital b, so was part of Vriska's typing quirk
@@cheekybananaboy3361 boss
@@cheekybananaboy3361 Vriska's typing quirks in Homestuck were...
1) repeat vowels 8 times ("oh maaaaaaaan"
2) Replace B with "8"
3) Replace anything that sounds like eight with "8"
The vid doesn't really mention it, but every troll had a typing quirk and Vriska had arguably one of the easiest ones (most of the main trolls had easily readable quirks). It's weird that the quirks carried on when they would actually talk in-person but... eh whatever.
there are 2 types of people in the world; people that think a 2 hour video cant be described as brief and people that are familiar enough with Homestuck to know 2 hours is as brief as we're going to get
I've read homestuck and only now realize how far behind i am in reading because 2 hours still doesn't seem brief
Yeah I think it took me reading a couple of hours almost every day for about a month, to get through the entire thing. And I'm a fast reader. AND that's not even touching on the fandom shit, just the comic itself.
@@MissPoplarLeaf same and I can't stop reading, only stopped to eat or sleep then read homestuck, repeat.
3rd category: People who think 2 hours is _too_ brief for Homestuck.
when she mentioned on twitter that the video was 2 hours and 12 minutes and once i knew for sure it'd be about homestuck my first reaction was "oh that's not nearly long enough"
The most Homestuck thing that ever happened in my life was my partner who cosplayed Dave Strider cheating on me with another Dave Strider. Like... COME ON
Canon
the selfcest of it all...
You should've been a third Dave strider
That is such a Dave Strider thing to do.
stop my ex gf cosplayed dave strider and cheated on me twice 😭
As someone who *was not* in the homestuck fandom, seeing a 2+ hour video titled "A brief history of homestuck" explains enough by itself
To make a long story short, ignore any surrounding info (especially where fans are concerned) and make your own opinions
as someone in the fandom, i agree.
@@katu8478 you are chill
I just assumed they were the current trendy anime fandom at the time. And that most of the people in troll cosplay were just the same old cosplayers who hopped onto whatever was the new bandwagon and didn't particularly like the IP itself. My friend referred to this group as the Narutards.
Heard about Homestuck today. So its just some webcomic?
People who don't know Homestuck: "A *_brief_* history? It's over 2 hours!"
People who know Homestuck: "A *_brief_* history? And it's only 2 hours?!"
Honestly, I was expecting her to delve into major fan stuff like Guidestuck and all that gjfjfjfkd
@@keevr.3902 and what's that now?
For me, as someone who knows like half of it: “a brief history? It’s two hours!!! Wait actually that makes sense” *click*
I joined the fandom during the Omega pause, so basically as it was ending, so I was so happy to finally have answers that no one would give me till now.
@@artsy2502 Guidestuck? It's a fancomic for Homestuck that imagines a SBURB session with humanized versions of Becquerel, Lil Cal, the Harlequin doll, and Jaspers. It along with Heinoustuck were hosted on MS Paint Fan Adventures (shortened to MSPFA) and were two really big ones on the site at the height of the time. Now, Guidestuck has a sort of successor a la Homestuck^2 (called Guidestuck^2), and I *think* Heinoustuck has one too? Both run by fans of the two comics wanting to continue where they were left off since both of them went inactive for a long time.
My hobbies include watching 2+ hour dissertations on fandoms I was never even in.
It's like watching a garbage fire on the other side of the street.
same!
I remember coming across Homestuck hate in my early days on the internet, but not understanding what any of it was about.
This video answered an almost decade old question I'd forgotten I'd asked.
Okay? Lol
Yes! Literally dont know anything about Homestuck except the name but Sarah Z is a treasure and i will watch the whole thing
Minor correction: Megalovania wasn't created for Homestuck, Toby Fox first made the song to serve as the final boss music for an Earthbound ROM hack he made as a teenager
I thought he made Megalo Strike Back for the ROM, then Megalovania spawned from *that*
@arcanaix5551 Ahhh gotcha. Thanks
Thankyoooou, its always bothered me so much that she says its from homestuck
And he only made it because he wanted to use Megalomania from Live a Live and couldn't figure out how to import it
I love how Sarah makes a Tumblr fandom sound like an ancient, puzzling and terrifying civilization, that has left us many artifacts and its dreadful reputation
It basically was in its prime
I mean... you’re not wrong lmao
She's the Ken Burns of the internet.
as someone who was on tumblr up until seven months after the nsfw ban,
*she’s right.*
That could literally backfire so badly if Tumblr becomes popular again
i love the use of the word brief for this 2 hour long video
considering the comic's length? it fits.
I mean, it is accurate
Also, your avvy is from Shark Tale and that is good
@@ersatzandartifice it is the former longest work of fiction in the English language
I was about to say!
NGL, thought this was only 40 minutes, then I saw your comment and realised that was the UPLOAD time
"If I had a nickel for every time Tumblr fans speculated that a bad ending wasn't the real ending, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice"
- Sarah, probably
Three nickels
Happened with Supernatural too
Attack on Titan fandom
@@katara2021 and The Promised Neverland too
Voltron too
Aight, we got 6 nickels now..... we're rich ✨
I'm a con vendor. I've never had a HS fan be outright rude--most were very nice--but as a group, they are by far the most inconsiderate. Damaging merch or people's clothing with their paint. Putting wet items in vendor tables. Leaving hairy gray messes in bathrooms. Taking up walkways. They'd station themselves in front of tables to talk, preventing anyone else from looking at merch. If asked to move, they'd sometimes try to migrate BEHIND VENDOR TABLES. None of it was malicious, just... Clueless. Sweet people for sure, most of them, but so many needed to pay attention to others.
Ah that sounds like they’re more victims of group mentality than anything, slowly erasing away the perceived personal responsibility the individuals would usually give themselves. It would make sense that homestuck fans would get that reputation since there were so many of them, much easier to fall into a group mentality.
Part of my job is cleaning bathrooms and homestuck cosplayers sound like pain.
Compac purple bathroom cleaner is very good at cleaning sharpie btw.
Someone who is a devoted fan of a webcomic that is longer than the KJV Bible is probably not someone who gets out all that much.
what’s the most considerate fandom?
My headache made me briefly interpret "con vendor" as "snake oil salesman".
i’m drunk and have no idea what homestuck is and “ACT 2: act 5” broke me
I took psychic damage from that.
It caused me to fell an emotion I am unable to describe.
@@thishonestgrifter That's the main impact of Homestuck to me, tbh. It fills me with a poignant feeling that's almost impossible to describe. But it's beautiful.
it's been years since i read homestuck and the very mention of the act title breaks me thanks
I read homestuck and it threw me off too. I guess because I was trying to remember when Act 2 had been split into sub acts and then realized she meant act 2 of her video was on act 5 of the comic and I was like "well thats pretty homestuck"
my exposure to homestuck was kind of like having a neighbor who played very loud music that I couldnt really make out but was very aware of
fuck this is so legit it hurts
That's really accurate too...
Huh. Yes, this is also my experience with Homestuck.
how did you put into words what i’ve been feeling for nine years
Q: "Sarah, when is the Homestuck video?"
Sarah: "I'm not making one."
Also Sarah:
proof she is making two, get ready for the Candy version of the video
@@dnd402 nothing like introducing bullshit half-canonicity to top off videos covering Homestuck!
"I was actually using a really advanced techinque called LYING"- Sarah
@@uilsoum875 y'know at first I was surprised to see a Technoblade quote here, but then I was like wait... I'm on the Weird Internet History Lady Channel. What am I saying.
@@MissPoplarLeaf i thought i was just too obsessed for reading the quote in a techno voice, but no, it is a techno quote, good
Sarah has talked about Sherlock, Supernatural, Homestuck...
All we need is one on Doctor Who and one on Hetalia, and I get a Bingo on my Tumblr Bingo Card
She just dropped a vid on the pro life episode of doctor who, does that count enough for your bingo?
Ahhh Hetalia don't remind me
@@xxcallmeniaxx3272 I have never seen Hetalia in any form other than fan content and I remember wanting to see it so it feels like it isn't a real thing hahaha
begging please not hetalia
Dear god i forgot about hetalia
this hits different knowing that andrew hussie begrudgingly watched this video after weeks of putting it off despite someone they're associated with literally threatening legal action over it
Buck wild.
wait what. Hussie did something wrong?
@@paweave9562 There's a follow up video now. I think there's a pinned comment for it.
@@FCHenchy Idk, my english is not that good to watch this shot without a headache ;3; Just explain itt. Did hussie do something bad or other people involved in homestuck not him?
@@paweave9562 My English is not that good either but I’ll try to explain. They (Andrew uses all pronouns) and the studio behind Hiveswap sent legal threats to Sarah because of her video, “asking” her to delete it and apologize for spreading misinformation. Turns out, there isn’t misinformation, at least they never said what information is wrong, they just swear to god that the bad things about the development of Hiveswap (people not being credited, being fired without warning and the general delay of the game) are fake because the source of these informations are “bad people”. Sarah spent weeks talking to Andrew trying to understand what those false informations are, but they never answered, they just kept running back and forth about how some people that used to work with them are bad and how these people convinced their co-workers that Andrew and the whole development were messy and bad. Also, they accidentally confirmed a lot of the bad things that happened during the development of the game, like not crediting a person just because they believed that this person was talking bad things about the company after being fired without warning. A “funny thing” about this whole situation is that Andrew took weeks to watch this video that they claimed that has misinformation, they were talking to Sarah FOR WEEKS about THE VIDEO without having watched THE VIDEO
Thank you for making this so that I didn't have to.
( ˊ̱˂˃ˋ̱ ) pog
first reply to rabbit man B)
you being a homestuck makes a lot more sense than i want to admit
You should still fucking do it!
Should do it anyway
i already felt like homestuck was a "you had to have been there" kind of thing, knowing that its literally impossible to even read the damn thing the same way ever again is just so in line with homestucks branding
I wasn’t even that into Homestuck (I was... ten to twelve? I was a Homestuck fan, not a Homestuck Fan with a capital F, if that makes sense) and I remember my extremely stoic, VERY into Homestuck friend called me crying about the Game Over update (where everyone died) and... man, you really DID have to be there.
@@planetsliveinsidethemoon1600 I was in, like my 20’s when the game over flash happened and had the same interaction with a friend that was REALLY into it. I had know idea what was happening but tried my best to, like comfort her about it. I eventually did read Homestuck a little later on and she got the same call from me basically. 😂
It's not really LITERALLY impossible, thankfully the unoffical MSPA reader is super good and has everything archived, able to play HS as-is. The games and Flashes and everything - it's great.
It's definitely missing the whole "reading along with the fandom" thing though, sadly.
Read the "Problem Sleuth" instead. It's not as long as Homestuck and it really delivers that fun surreal plot feel. Minus the trolls.
*Hmm, sounds like Red Vs Blue, where ya had to be there. (Spoiler) I was there when season 13 finished and church died. So that broke me and nothing as ever the same. It's upsetting that they fired Joel VA FOR CABOOSE.*
When I was around 12 in 2012, nearly a decade before I realised I was sex repulsed, I made a tumblr account and almost immediately saw a gif of pottery that turned into porn. That single post horrified me so much that I never went on tumblr again, and i think that one pottery porn gif saved me from this because Homestuck is 100% the sort of thing I would have been into as a young teen. So I want to thank that person who terrified 12 year old me with porn for saving me from the objectively darkest timeline I could have gone down
As an asexual who was terrified by stories of Tumblr growing up, I find this much too relatable
@@Loreboar0 it’s the same reason I stay off twitter, I’m just not interested in having to dodge pron like I’m Neo
@@emilybarclay8831 There was a porn ban in 2018 which largely contributed to why twitter became the new Tumblr in terms of the stereotypical user. Everyone left Tumblr for Twitter!
As someone who is aroace this is the most relatable thing I've read
I had one way older than you. But, I didn't have that problem too much. Maybe I knew where to go and not too. Idk? 😐 I don't use it anymore
hearing Sarah Z discuss Homestuck in excrutiating depth for two hours makes me feel seen, not in a comforting way, but like im butt naked and embarassed.
Im the 413th like and I wanted to say that
so glad I'm not the only one experiencing. I have been laughing for 2 hours as a means of coping with the absurd pain every word in this video fills me with
Well, your profile pic is Shinji, so I guess you are used to it, lol
funny hospital dude
hey, at least you’re not doused in vodka and sharpie
". . . don't take this as 100% fact unless there's a source there. I don't want to get sued for reporting on this, so I'm not going to make any definitive statements about what happened here . . ." That aged like fine milk.
Did it?
@@_thesunflowerfairy_ Yeah, check out Sarah's subsequent videos, there's two of them I think, about Sarah receiving threats of legal action from the fine people at Homestuck
@@evrfreez ah, thanks!
I believe Sarah has been on every single fandom ever to have existed
That’s what being on Tumblr in 2011-2014 felt like
You've heard of Superwholock, get ready for Superwholockstucktaleceler
waiting for the fnaf video
She wasn't in the Hetalia fandom (and as someone who was in it I envy her)
I doubt she was in the Thomas the Tank Engine fandom (yes, that’s a thing).
the fact that you received personal correspondence from hussie free of charge after this video in the context of the kickstarter tiers is unbelievably funny
I suppose legal threats are stronger than crowdfunding obligations.
Man, that was the culture huh? Being the awkward kid alone at a convention sucks until you find the dark corner of the con center where the Homestuck kids your age are, then you're treated like family until you leave. I hope that kindness and openness never dies and finds itself in another fandom prone to awkward kids :,)
boy do i have news for you about the dream smp once quarantine is over
@@grace-yp3sv honestly both fandoms are pretty similar
You always do such a fantastic job. Probably the only channel I could legit sit and watch for the length of a film. Haha
@@grace-yp3sv i am SO excited to turn up to insomnia in a red and white shirt and get Mobbed
@@grace-yp3sv came here to say this lmao
this is the equivalent of falling asleep and suddenly waking up in 3045 in the middle of a war in a battlefield and no one absolutely speaks a language you understand
Rip Van Winkle has entered the chat
"I am a foreigner in a foreign land."
-Shrek 1852
Starter, that sounds like a prompt to a VERY INTERESTING roguelike!
Or a VERY DIFFICULT one...
XD
Funny story. During middle school at the height of homestuck my friends and I went to a local-ish con. I use a wheelchair from a disability so I was immediately like “I’ll cosplay Tavros!” So I did. During the whole fucking con I had people coming up to me first of all complementing my cosplay but more importantly asking where I got the wheelchair to use for the cosplay! Legit they would always say “Your cosplay is so accurate where did you find a wheelchair to go with it?!” I would always respond deadpan “I’m actually disabled.” My friends still say that to me all the time. So now they say “Where’d you’d find the wheelchair?!”
That’s actually hilarious lmao. You could’ve told people you were so committed to the cosplay you gave yourself a disability to really *feel* the character
What i find funny is its not even that hard to find a wheelchair, like there are medical rental places for them
@@ipodhty you can also buy them used from private sellers
@Michael Anderson No I legit never will. IT WAS PHOTOGRAPHED FOR THE OFFICIAL CON WEBSITE.
This story went better than I was expecting, I was afraid someone was gonna come at you for faking a disability for a cosplay, so I'm relieved even if they thought it was just a prop, it was received well. I've seen some horror stories of people standing up briefly from their wheelchair or moving their legs and being attacked for “faking it”. Some people don’t realise not everyone in a wheelchair is fully paralysed from the waist down.
This is one of my comfort videos, I’ve watched at least fifty times. And every single time, Sarah saying “Dante Basco, who played Zuko from the Zutara ship” fucking annihilates me.
If you take a shot every time Sarah says 'suffice it to say', you will time travel to 2012 and wake up in a bath that is a mix of sharpies and 70% alcohol.
Everyone time I hear that story I start dying of laughter, you just made it like 10x better-
Lmfao
It do suffice tho
@@gazeboist4535 it do be sufficing
I went back to early 2012 once. Then I took an arrow in the knee.
toby fox working on homestuck before releasing undertale and therefore bringing homestuck fans to play undertale really explains A LOT actually
That man is a tactical mastermind. Now if only writing were his other strong suit.
@@Ephraim225 ouch
@@Ephraim225 wait why? Is he a bad writer?
@@lordbander8767 idk i thought undertale had a good story
@@juice3287 same
In all my years on Tumblr, I avoided learning anything about Homestuck beyond the name itself. I didn't even know what type of media it was. I wore that fact like a badge of honor.... Until today. Today, I will watch this 2 hour long video and learn about Homestuck because Sarah Z cannot be denied.
the fandom is a mess but it's actually worth reading
same
I got into it just last year, best decision of my life
Im in the same boat. Never would have imagined it destroyed its own reputation from a problematic af video game kickstarter
Lmao this is me to a T, I've seen some pictures and cosplays that were forced upon my eyes in my years of tumblr but I refused learn the distinction between homestuck and that sans game, but alas, today is the day I learn lol
"The two epilogues are 190 398 words long"
Just checked for comparison, the Fellowship of the Ring is 187 790 long
"A lot of former Homestuck fans moved into the Danganronpa fandom"
...from what I've seen of the Danganronpa fandom, I hate how much sense that makes.
Oh god youre right
The Steven Universe fandom as well.
I will never ever go anywhere near those fandoms.
Obviously the Undertale fandom also drew Homestuck people. It’s basically the immediate successor, as was said.
Now though there hasn’t been a project with the same spark for quite some time as the internet moves to be more corporation-centered.
oh god oh fuck I didn't know this was a common thing
I feel called out ಠ_ಠ
I used to be in the danganronpa fandom. I'm so glad I left before it became cursed and cringy af
I was bullied in middleschool for NOT being into homestuck. I live in the worst timeline
Now you get bullied for being into MLP, you indeed live in the worst timeline.
Edit: Never make jokes, people cannot stand it.
@@kernium damn is it 2012? We’re having brony discourse?
@@kernium and now you get bullied for your cringe ass RUclips channel
@@queeftamer4205 No, I was just making a joke. But apparently you can't take those well.
@A Catalan Liam Maybe, but we can all agree that that person's anger management is piss poor.
having been a person who stayed home a lot since i was a child, growing up reading homestuck i thought faygo was a fake soda that the webseries made up for years up until the summer before i went to high school in 2015 and when i tell you i lost my shit when i went to family dollar and saw shelves full of faygo im not even joking. i felt so dumb when i talked to my friend about how they made faygo from homestuck real and looked like the biggest fucking idiot.
Bro I was in the exact same place as you when I was younger, when I found out Faygo was real, I fucking lost it, I had actually thought that they made the drink specifically from Homestuck
clearly you are not from Detroit
I knew about Faygo because apparently Insane Clown Posse fans, aka "Juggalos" are really into it. Hence her reference at 40:57
@@eileengaleen2845 im from newark nj lol
@@elbruces what with the faygo and the facepaint there are some similarities between juggalos and homestucks lolol
The weird thing about Vriska for me is my first girlfriend when I was 13 was a massive Vriska roleplayer and used her text quirk all the time, at a time when I knew zero about Homestuck. So when I finally got around to reading it years later Vriska just reminded me of that relationship and made me nostalgic.
My second girlfriend was also really into cosplaying Jade too so basically when reading the comic I have pretty strong romantic associations with two Homestuck characters. This is what it was like being a teen in the 2010s.
the way she so boldly says “zuko from the zutara ship” makes me lose it
I'm dying that hit me in the face
100% my favorite part of the video!
i had to pause the video and come look for a comment talking about it bc holy shit fjkksjhfkdsj (is she wrong tho)
Timestamp?
What a move.
a video named "a brief history of homestuck" having a 2 hour timestamp is one of the most homestuck things i've ever seen
As someone who worked upper management at an anime convention for a decade or so, I still resent Homestuck for all the times the hotels tried to hold us responsible for all the shit these kids destroyed with their body paint
Lol
They were young and genuinely didn't know better. At the very least conventions now have detailed checklists so newbie cosplayers don't do that again
@@zoelio999 We explicitly tell patrons to bring their own towels or ask the hotel for colored towels and make sure they seal their makeup but like you said, they were kids so they don't bother reading things like that
The thing about Homestuck cosplay is that it was ludicrously easy. Throw a printed symbol on a colored T-shirt and a couple props and you’ve got a costume. This made cosplaying accessible for kids who would normally never even have tried to cosplay. The trouble came with the trolls, because the costumes were still otherwise easy but the grey skin was difficult.
you should resent the hotel managers
I worked for WeLoveFine which had the Homestuck merch license. Met Andrew, met his stalker, got lore checked too many times to count, and got paid to read Homestuck and come up with merch/find talented fan artists. Great to see this kind of video about something that was such a HUGE part of my career being a professional geek.
that’s so cool! not the constant lore checking 😂 but the rest is. and cool that you found this video, i hope those you shared it with liked it too
If I was able to create good art back then I'd definitely work hard to get the attention of someone like you. Homestuck was such a core building block to who I am, I just wasn't old enough to properly engage with the fandom and experienced art community then. Finally at a point where I can feel confident about my abilities and it seems possible to me now to reach artists like Xamag and Ikumaru, top tier Homestuck fan artists that shaped the way I draw. Anyway, thank you for your service, it's so cool seeing echoes of my childhood still going around wondering about Homestuck.
My 14 year old brother got into Homestuck during quarantine and I (23) had such horrible flashbacks when he told me that I literally said, out loud, “dude I’m so happy for you but please never use that word in front of me again”
fuck i also discovered it during the boredom of quarantine
"dril was doxxed by the credits of a homestuck game" was not something i expected to learn today
no one has talked enough abt the whiplash of dril's involvement in this video
We all kinda collectively decided it didn't happen because it's more fun that way
I am so curious as to how people knew. Was he credited as "dril" AND his real name?
@@didiercollard I have the same question
Do I know a single thing about homestuck? No
Am I willing to watch a two hour video dissecting it? Absolutely
Ah fellow cultured man
Or you just need something long and easy to digest because you afraid to be alone with your own thought
When Sarah was like "you've heard of this before" about the trolls I was like 'no I haven't' and then she said "you've seen this before" and I was still like 'no I haven't' then she was like "you've definitely seen this before" and finally I was like well I guess if Sarah says so, I must have seen it before.
Me too
My only interaction with Homestuck was talking with some people covered in grey hanging out at the mall, very odd thing to run into. Glad I now have context for that like a decade later
This comment is me
Holy shit, I made an entire focaccia bread listening to this.
Was it good?
@@Sing_A_Rebel_Songuh, duh, its focaccia!
I'm dropping this random useless info on you: focaccia is considered pizza and not bread in Italy
our generation is all gonna have to have two versions of “the talk” with our preteens; 1 is the already existing one and the 2nd is that *tv shows, graphic novels, web series, and literally whatever form of media do not have a fake purposefully bad ending with the real good ending that will come shortly after*
Between homestuck, sherlock, and game of thrones I wouldn't be surprised if someone who has gone through this actually does end up doing something like that when one of them eventually gets creative control of a popular media property
they even did it with attack on titan like a week and that didn’t even have a bad ending 😭😭i would think by now we would’ve learned our lesson
oh god, how could I shake my head at the Sherlock kids from Sarah's last video when *I completely forgot about Mass effect 3, Indoctrination theory and how utterly into it I was*
The only time the fake ending thing has been true is with JoJo
*cries in Metal Gear fan*
imagine taking a tour of a billionaire's home, and finding a framed, courteous thank-you note from Hussie and the tour guide uncomfortably refusing to answer any questions about it
Love this comment
So... Toby Foxes house?
@@The_Obsessed toby fox is nowhere near a billionaire, the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is incomprehensible
@@-aexc- I know? It was a joke?
@@The_Obsessed ah, sorry it was a misconception I feel like I would have made a couple of months ago so I didn't realise it was a joke
I remember being 13 and listening to my older friends try to explain to me what homestuck was and all they said to me was “it’s too hard to understand. Just don’t ask about the bucket” and I never asked about it because I was genuinely afraid of what “the bucket” meant.
Edit: I now know what the bucket is.
What is the bucket?
@@georgekerscher5355 don’t.
@@georgekerscher5355 it explains towards the beginning of the video
@@georgekerscher5355 homestuck trolls reproduce using buckets
theyre literally spum buckets. for spumming in
Nobody's talking about Big Joel's perfect impersonation of Andrew Hussie and that's a shame because it's perfect.
omg when/where
oh my b I'm like 20 min in lmaoo
"I don't watch movies, they're too long for me to emotionally invest myself into them."
*Sarah Z, Jenny Nicholson, or Folding Ideas making hours-long content about media & early 2010s fandom shit*
> Me: Invest emotionally.
never mind Jenny Nicholson watching every Land Before Time movie
This is me utterly. Its just more thoughtful and in many ways more engaging.
Add Lindsay and Knowing Better to this list
Theyre more personal versions of doccumentaries
It saddens me to come back to this video and always see your comment about being unable to emotionally invest in anything that takes more than two hours unless it is a video essay. I sincerely hope you've gone to therapy in recent years because it really is sad to see you're unable to become emotionally invested in other people solely because it doesn't happen instantaneously. I was like that for a long time, and I still somewhat am. It's a lonely existence like that. I don't want anyone else to suffer through it.
I can't believe you basically made a Ph.D. dissertation defence on the history, politics, economics, culture, and impact of some grey web creatures
The description of Yiffy elicited an involuntary bodily response. I cringe yet feel a primal, subconscious horror that makes my spine crawl.
As if I were looking into the eyes of Cthulhu Himself… and He dabbed.
My exact same reaction to it.
I read chihuahua 😂
True story, homestuck cosplayers got our local con permanently banned from the major con hotel in the area. They broke several elevator buttons because they were kicking them to avoid rubbing off the paint on their hands, got into the hot tub in costume and clogged up the pump with body paint and wig hair, and used "being in character" as an excuse to harass hotel guests both generally and sexually. When the con finally found a new venue they literally banned all homestuck anything because of it.
yikes
I have heard this story about a local con and another con, I'm really not surprised.
whoa, thank you for sharing! i really wonder what other horror stories local businesses had to deal with!
I was the Jade cosplayer of the group, and while we all sealed our paint, I was the designated button toucher since my hands were unpainted. I'm making a cosplay for another colorful character soon and for body paint I'm probably not even gonna do my hands except for nail polish just so I can still touch stuff
@@kaydwessie296I am three years late, but have you heard of armsocks? They're basically colored tights you can wear on your arms and hands.
between editing my high school friend's erotic homestuck fanfiction and being sent hateful messages by other homestuck fans while I was in a psych ward, it's very hard to describe the precise emotion homestuck evokes for me, but i can say that it's left me with a feeling of absolute dread when i hear the song "fergalicious"
...oh
I am absolutely fascinated by your story. Like... I'd ask more, but I don't wanna trigger you or waste 2 hours of your time trying to explain to someone who has only watched this video.
@@AlriikRidesAgain I am happy to provide more details, but to explain the Fergalicious part, this is required viewing first ruclips.net/video/IWcb2pdgZTc/видео.html
Karkalicious definition makes terezi loco
@@celestial5028 I did this to myself didn't I
I had no idea Homestuck was still HAPPENING. I thought it was a thing that swept the world like at least a decade ago and we were all just living the aftermath
ahahaha there are new gen homestucks, this generations pre teens and teens finding in and ever so slightly reviving the fandom
Well it did release in 2010 and in 2020 around the decade anniversary, it ended up getting 2 fairly large sequels
@@snapbeau5916 One day there will be a Homestuck renaissance. And that day shall be the first sign of the end times for all.
@@eoincampbell1584 The second sign is the Hetalians coming back
it keeps happening, or did you forget?
I wouldn't say "favorite," but my strongest memory of the Homestuck fandom is of using a custom instant messenger program themed after the one the characters use. I ended up connecting with a person who I was certain was my then-girlfriend and having a couple hours of vaguely flirtatious conversations before finding out the next day that she hadn't been online that whole night. So, that's a thing I get to remember forever.
wow that's fucking creepy
Pesterchum, you mean?
@@cyberpunk-2O77That's the one. Though creepy encounters aside, I gotta hand it to whoever made it, there are much less complicated acts of fandom devotion than writing a whole instant messaging program. What a weird time that was.
Id use MSParp
Watching her drink Faygo and thinking it was funny at first then seeing her getting more and more uncomfortable until I just wanted to her to stop is also a very good analogy to how I feel about homestuck.
I had the exact same experience, it’s a scarily accurate, unintentional analogy, and this is coming from someone who’s never read Homestuck
I've never even heard of the drink before and I felt awful for her. It looks like someone dissolved artificial cherries and red lipstick in carbonated diluted acid. And then dropped a dumptruck of sugar into it and mixed it all together without removing the truck.
@@randomname7918 it’s… not that good. Some Faygos are better than others, but the red pop is not that good at all.
I hate how she always holds the glass. Just put down the glass. Jesus
There are 3 different colors of Faygo cream soda. Blackish brown (regular cola color), red, and blue. Blue is the best, fight me. To be fair though they all do taste like the soul of america. But hey I dont mind the occasional cigarette or taco bell, I don't know if everyone enjoys consuming trash sometimes. Anyway, I'm really high but I think the fact that Faygo cost 99 cents should say everything I can't convey within the confines of the English language.
This entire video reminded me that I had my first kiss during a Homestuck Spin the Bottle game at a convention when I was 16 and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.
In the moment, how was it? (From an 18 year old who still hasn't had a first kiss and was never in this fandom).
I can’t tell if this is the greatest or the saddest thing I have ever read
What a romantic story to tell the grandkids
Hey, it's way better than having a boring story 🤷🏽♀️
Oh god. I am immediately having flashbacks to being in a Homestuck spin the bottle game at a convention and I can't tell what's weirder: That the internet is so small I may have stumbled across someone else who was there, OR that Homestuck spin the bottle games at conventions were just THAT common.
Sarah Z says "kickstarter" and, in a Pavlovian response, my entire body tenses up.
not all kickstarters are bad! and by that i mean the big dnd kickstsrters are the only good ones
@@MurderOfAKiller there have been other good ones for board games too.
The only good games I can think of that started as kickstarters are Blasphemous, Darkest Dungeon, and Iron Harvest. I'm sure there are others but not a ton.
But yeah also knew exactly what was going to happen once she said Kickstarter.
wasn't undertale a kickstarter project ?
@@Envy_May it was
It's weird because usually the things that start as kickstarters have that part forgotten about as the work itself becomes what people care about (FTL: Faster Than Light is my favorite example) while the bad ones that produce nothing or let you down are always doomed to be forever linked to the cursed title of 'crowd funded' (Elite Dangerous.....)
The Vriska quarantine stuff reminds me of my days on Amino. When I was in the Tangled: The Series fandom, everyone was obsessed with Varian, to the point that the amino had to make a rule called “no Varian weekends” or whatever. There was a featuring thing where basically the people in charge could pick posts to go at the top of everyone’s feed, and on weekends they would refuse to pick anything that was about Varian.
I'm about an hour and twenty minutes in and im still wondering... did they ever get unstuck?
hi DPadGamer
@danielmcael Hi
no
@@spaceoddities1652 yes
It’s a yes and a no it’s so confusing
Sarah, describing the finale of homestuck
Me, noticing we’re only halfway through: 👁👄👁
It's homestuck... I found it typical lol
I live in knowledge that one day when a fanbase I am currently in dies, Sarah will make a video essay about it and I will finally see how ridiculous I am
*sweats* *in* *Friday* *Night* *Funkin*
@@sweetnote. i was literally about to comment this,,,,
I've never been swept up into a trending fandom, ever
me in the dsmp fandom:
*sweats in dream smp*
i never read homestuck, but my birthday is april 13th, and i have strong memories of being incredibly upset in middle school because my friends cared more about celebrating homestuck than my birthday
that actually sucks
This does suck...but it's still kinda funny
Let’s switch birthdays because I share my birthday with both Jojo Siwa and Nikocado Avocado 🗿
After watching the videos on Dashcon, Miss Officer and Mr Truffles, and All or Nothing, the biggest surprise in this video is that a Kickstarter campaign actually delivered anything at all
Well, it's still not done after several years and a broken record but the bar is exceptionally low
Omori? I mean, it took like 6 years but the game did come out
Kickstarter hint: if it's over 200k it's not gonna happen.
OMOCAT: *I'm about to do something called a pro gamer move*
@@marreco6347 or you're the Shovel Knight devs and you run out of money early on, and work for no pay for two months just to ship the game
The fandom bleed over from Homestuck to Undertale makes so much sense to me now
It made so much sense has to why the Undertale fandom became a hellscape SO fast
That hit me like a rock. Whenever I criticize undertale there's always someone who will "correct" me by saying there's this multiple timeline theory that resolves that plot point or that even serious RPGs have memes etc. etc. It dawned on me why people gave undertale so much praise even though the game was purely just a meme with "game file modifications" to defeat the final boss which all equates to pressing F12 and changing the text on a tweet to say something offensive. All the items and money the character obtained becomes irrelevant when you find temi the game is clearly makes itself a joke by adding in an infinite money glitch on purpose and to me, a person who as a hobby designs games and tests them as a job, these were problems that generally made games bad. I have been occasionally fighting with diehard who absolutely and spectacularly fail at explaining to me why these issues were non-issues because the game simply was inspired by something as crazy and outlandish as homestuck was. I just guess I was the joke for the people who were watching who understood it before me and laughed at how obvious it was.
@@Dovenchiko
People are crazy.
@@Dovenchiko eh the appeal of undertale is more the dialogue and the character interactions than the more rpg like stuff
@@Baumworld Yes that is an appeal however, that won't necessarily make a game good or bad. For example, the first Fallout game has really memorable characters except back then the UI was considered bad and by today's standards, absolutely horrible and game breaking. I would recommend at least trying it because if you can look past it you will enjoy it but those who can't, won't. For some people back then Fallout was considered horrible because of that reason it really depended on who you ask.
it was on this day, covering the extent of homestuck history, that she herself became part of homestuck history
read this in Adam Curtis voice
This is weirdly poetic
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.
Ooooh that explains it. Something about Undertale I never understood was its initial backer support or developed its obsessive fandom started from seemingly nowhere.
More mainstream game media tends to depict Toby Fox as some random guy who came up with a unique game idea and it exploded into a phenomenon due to luck and "determination". His work on Homestuck usually relgated to a small tidbit.
And I think this has largely to do with our general cultural obsession to perpetuate the myth of the self made success story coming from nothing with no help mixed with those outlets' lack of knowledge of what HS is (tbf I've watched a few videos and still barely do myself).
But it makes so much more sense that he was not only a decently significant part of an established media property, but literally had a close personal relationship with the owner of it.
And that there was this ravenous fanbase with already years of built up experience and desire to create fan work and alternate universes just chomping at the bit for anything even related to HS.
Not to undermine Toby or Undertale, I absolutely adore the game, it's one of my favorites. But it just explains a lot to me that he had way more to work with than just luck and a good idea.
He had a proven style to work from, community support, and probably even a push from Hussie or WhatPumpkin in general.
And even more interesting it being essentially an alternate universe version of HS with more broad mainstream appeal and a successful Kickstarter with little to no drama; except it happened adjacent to HS in real life.
Huh! Its true. Most Articles i could find write about his ROM Hacks with only Kotaku having made these connections ('The Undertale Drama' and 'what homestuck was')
"Vriska is cruel to people because she wants them to get stronger"
I mean, I don't begrudge Hussie writing my dad into Homestuck.
.oh
I-
SLJGL D-do you need a hug??
git gud get stronger!
Haha..... Same....
Comparing Homestuck to a ghost town accurately conveys the mix of nostalgia, pain, and detachment I get when I think of Homestuck.
I said the exact same thing about it on the Undertale video SEW put out a a couple months ago. It's like seeing all the buildings and roads of an old civilization lying in disrepair, and I compared it to someone who only found out about it after the end
yeah, i fell off before hiveswap, just out of boredom i think, and i had no idea it was in this state. i'm legit sad to learn it's like this on 4/13 : ( i think the franchise just needs to release its game, end, and go away for a bit.
God detachment is the best word to describe how I feel about the state of hs as a whole rn. Though I only recently read it a few months ago, it's so sad looking through places like youtube to see posts that were uploaded 8-10 years ago. To see this monster of a fandom just having the time of their lives and then looking at it now seeing a shadow of it's former self. Especially with how it ended, me just sitting there disappointed to learn that that's where it was over, an unfilling ending to something so seemingly great. Anyways sorry didn't intent to write an essay lol this just got me thinking
Beautifully put. A part of me misses it and yet finds it beautiful in it's passing. I'll always have the memories.
@@krawlzdraws6645 Myeah! It's like you're an anthropologist in a ruin of a great city barely kindling.
I'm no longer a Homestuck fan, but without it, I would have never met my husband. So uh, thanks Hussie.
"and this is how I met your mother"
how do i kin a comment i met my girlfriend of now 4 years through a fucking homestuck rp
Lol same. He heard me talked about it with someone and found the courage to walk up and talk to me about it.
I also met my best friend and partner through modding a facebook homestuck page in 2013!
Lmao same. Me and my partner of 3 years now met through homestuck twitter. The first thing I gifted to him was a scalemate that I sewed up myself
Watching this just made me deeply grateful that my method of choice for consuming Homestuck was to visit the site once a year and binge the whole archive every time, and to never interact with the fandom, nor bother with any release schedules or previews.
I barely noticed the gigapause, was completely oblivious to the controversies and debates among the fandom, and I backed Hiveswap on Kickstarter at one of the lower tiers without ever once regretting it.
For the record, I was a bit disappointed by Collide, but I liked the ending.
Reading Homestuck years after it ended over one summer definitely felt like the right decision.
same. liked the comic but the fandom seemed rabid and unappealing to me
@@tuesdaysellers1545 Right? Like i was there i read the previous comic of the creator (the detective one) and within months it had an cultish following that was a bit scary...
I think that's the objectively best way to interact with any media nowadays...
Fuck media as a community activity, fuck that shit, I just wanna catch up with this thing I've been hearing about in peace and decide for myself if I like it or not or if I should continue.
Happened to me back in 2016 when I decided to start reading MHA, I NEVER touched the fanbase, I just binged like 5 chapters everyday until I began following it weekly and then I stopped when it got boring and that's it. The only bad experience I had with that thing was discovering I wasn't enjoying the series all that much.
One of my favorite Homestuck fandom memories was when someone on Tumblr who didn't know anything about it was looking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches but kept getting pictures of "peanut butter and jelly demons fucking each other" in the tag instead because pb&j was the ship name for Gamzee and Tavros.
This is fucking hilarious
The whiplash I just got reading that ship name oh geez
i can’t stop laughing at this comment skjdskdksks
sounds about right
I have only ever heard Homestuck referenced as an example of a dumpster fire fandom, and have no idea what Homestuck itself actually is. I am at full attention and ready to take notes, Professor Z.
There is a good Let's Read on RUclips!
i watched the whole thing and i'm still unsure if i even really understood anything about homestuck
LOL same tho... I knew about Trolls but only visually. People tried to get me into it and I couldn't even try based off the rabid fan energy
same lol!! whenever sarah posts 2 hour long videos i just got to watch them even though i was never in these fandoms
The Homestuck fandom is virtually saintlike compared to What Pumpkin and Andrew Hussie, the creators.
The only reason it gets a bad rep is that Homestuck fans basically took over conventions for a few years, but that died out pretty fast.
It's official: I'll watch this woman talk for two hours about *any* fandom, regardless of whether or not I know a single thing about it.
+
same
Right? I have never subscribed this fast before (Usually takes me a lot of binging)
I got into homestuck cause my older sister told me to ‘avoid the grey cosplayers’ when I went to a local anime con in 2012, cause ‘they’re aggressive’ and my friends and I created a punch buggy game where we’d punch each other every time we saw a homestuck. Then after the con I immediately went and read it LOL the cosplayers were so good and I was curious haha
So, as a massive Florence and the Machine and Regina Spektor fan back in the day, who never got into Homestuck, I suddenly understand why every comment on "Girl With One Eye" or "Blue Lips" was about Homestuck and/or was completely incomprehensible to me. Thank you for solving an almost decade-long mystery that I'd managed to completely forget about!
"well shit
that's a hell of a mystery no one thought was a mystery and didn't even really need solving
but damn if it didn't just get solved so nice work"
Reminds me of when I went scrolling through the comments on 'Never Let Me Go' and was like, "Who the hell are Damon and Elena?" Turns out that song was used on The Vampire Diaries.
i live very "i don't understand the question, and i won't respond to it" towards a lot of things i see
I think it’s very important for videos like this and Jenny Nicholson’s Bronycon video to exist so that future people’s will know what the fandom experience was like for dead fandoms.
Seconding this. As a former Brony the future must know about our cringe fandoms.
Very true. I was always super confused (and still am a bit) on why people liked it and how the fandom got to the extreme level it was
I loved that video as a former pegasister and it actually was the 1st time i learned about the fandoms origins
So I was a Pegasister/Brony in the mid-2010s (got bored with it and left around 2017, maybe). It hurts so much to see it referred to as a "dead" fandom. Ouch.
"It was kinda cringy, but what fun thing isn't?" Words to live by.
Calling Zuko "The guy from the Zutara Ship" it's an absolute power move
Oh no!
I don't wanna touch that one!
BSHAHAHAHA
It destroyed me
Thank goodness she didn’t mention that weird spin-off fanfic Avatar: The Last Airbender
Danny? The hell are u doing here?🤣🤣🤣
There was a time I only knew homestuck as "that one comic Toby Fox worked on a little". Now the more I learn about it the scarier it becomes.
i dressed as Jade at a convention...a Karkat cosplayer went up to me all excited...calling me classic Karkat curse words...i played along...i called her a “fuckass”...she cried...the memories hurt...
😂😂
Cringe
sounds like she was a noob
Yup, that’s Homestuck for ya
one time when i took a photo of a feferi cosplayer at a local convention i noticed literally a week after the fact that the eridan cosplayer in the background was flipping the camera off and i feel like our stories have some kind of kinship
"Speaking as a former teenager" is one of the most encapsulating phrases I've ever heard.
me, who never read homestuck and never knew anyone who was into homestuck, sitting in 2021 watching a 2 hour long deep dive about homestuck: interesting
Same, I heard about homestuck just because I wanted to know the source of some memes and fanarts, but since I'm French no one in middle school or high school was into it, and I finished high school in 2013 and never heard about it later irl, since I'm one of the few people in my social group that understand english...(and that skill is completely useless at work, I work in a nursing home)
So I'm interested in this kind of videos, from a completely distant point of view, I never read it and just know it existed because of memes x)
you should read homestuck :)
i had 2 friends into homestuck and they would talk to me about it all the time but never told me where i could read it when i asked and when i googled it i never knew what to click on 🙃
so thats why im here, i want to know more about this thing my friends wouldn't clue me in on besides shoving fandom jokes down my throat, telling me i would get it unless i read the context, asking where to find said context and them saying "no 💚"
@@imsodonewiththissh1t wow your friends sound annoying af
Literally me rn
As someone whos in some way known of homestuck for a while but never engaged in the fandom/ read a single page of it, the fact that a Toblerone has the power to change 10 years of story is something that I find impressive just as I find it mind boggling
LOL how did it?
@@sjahvsnavsb3365 it didn't that much since the person who did end up finding the Toblerone only asked for the protagonist to be made trans. But Hussy literally said anything could be requested, someone could have requested the entire plot changing and it would have
@@Cherryxarts ohh that must be where the june egbert headcanon came from
Just goes to show you how little Hussie gave a shit about homestuck at that point
"theater kid at 11pm at denny's energy" is quite possibly the realest thing I've ever heard on your channel. I simultaneously went "aww" and "oof".
i miss that energy frfr 😔
Based on my experience, that's accurate. Most obnoxious human beings alive.
@@tonycampbell1424 See also: Band kids at McDonald's after a football game
homestuck was incredibly odd for me, since i read it on my own in late 2017 - early 2018 with ZERO involvement or knowledge of the fandom at all: essentially just raw unfiltered homestuck with no outside influences. i didn't know any discourse or any drama, just a cool webcomic that i read and then finished. and so when i tried to look at the state of the fandom once i was done reading i was.......... incredibly put off. it was like going to a hotel, having a nice time, then looking out the window and realizing all the other guests have been setting beach towels on fire and fighting each other for the last week without you noticing
I had similar experience
Same experience for me down to the time
Same here. Being a recent Homestuck fan is a... Peculiar experience
Yeah. There's a lot of things that basically require you to ignore their fandoms in order to be enjoyable.
I have read Homestuck I think in 2015 until the hiatus break. Never engaged with the community and I don't regret it.
Also I think that the Problem Sleuth is better, at least I enjoyed it more personally.
Same. I read it around 2016, I think, because a friend was into it and I finished it without looking at the fandom to avoid being spoiled only to look at the fandom afterwards and just going... :0 !!!?!?!!
Wait, so you’re telling me “the ending was bad so actually there must be another ending somewhere and this ending is a fake” is a REPEATING CONSPIRACY in fandom, generally? 🤯
To be fair, Homestuck was a story that literally canonically retconned past events before, as in characters fucking around in 4th wall-breaking ways to mess shit up (though it's been so long since I've dug anything Homestuck related out of my brain that I don't know if I have any examples off the top of my head.)
It's not a big stretch to go from "wow, I can't believe the ending was so bad" to "wait, I literally can't believe the ending was so bad!" to "what if this isn't the actual ending?"
It's not just in fandom, it's a classic symptom of people who have massively overinvested in a specific outcome, and whose desperation to be satisfied is strong enough that it is easier to fight reality than to accept their disappointment. It's the dollar-auction scenario, scaled up until what you're bidding is your very sense of self-worth and you're allowed to lie to yourself about the worth of the dollar. This happens in real-world apocalypse cults; following a failed prediction of the apocalypse many members will drop out, but those who remain long enough for a new prediction will paradoxically be MORE staunch in their beliefs of the predicted apocalypse for having endured one failed prediction.
@@velevetyyflies Read enough of cultic sacred texts and it gets reasonably hard to tell the difference.
Especially in stories with themes of mystery or messing with time/space it seems. Like to compare 2 other genres but in cartoon form, Gravity Falls pulled an awful finale I think it would receive the same conspiracy, but My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic wouldn't. I think LOST got the same treatment?
Stage 3 in the five stages of grief: Bargaining.
Little did Sarah know, comparing Hussie to Musk was prophetic.
@@abel6298 used to be a lector. Try again. 🙄
Wait what happened-
@@abel6298Why KJV specifically? What’s wrong with NIV or ESV?
@@jamesrutley1009KJV is outdated, read NIV or ESV
@@christineherrmann205that’s fine, ignore that guy.
I was on tumblr for an entire decade and never had any kind of grasp on what homestuck was. So glad, as a 26 year old adult, I will finally know what a Karkarat is.
Exactly. I remember going to a park in London with a friend and seeing a bunch of people dressed up as trolls. My friend, 22, leaned over slowly and gestured like he was hosting a nature show: "Look . . .an Eridan." But the splendor of the Eridan was lost on me.
I was on tumblr for a decade, I read 3000+ pages of Homestuck and I also had no grasp on what it was. (Granted, it might be because I am a non native english speaker so reading it was a miserable, confusing experience :( )
Karkarat and Vegetito.
@@zanite8650 He also goes by Gooku
you mean Kakarott?
One thing that really stood out to people near the beginning of Homestuck-
It started out as a story of four friends who met online, who had never met in person. It was an affirmation that those kinds of relationships could be as real, deep, and meaningful as any other, which really stuck with people who had those kind of relationships in their lives.
Full stop. That's what pulled me in to begin with. Not any of the trolls or big worldbuilding stuff. Just an affirmation on the types of relationships only this current generation of people first experienced
Thanks for this very specific, personal attack.
I first got into homestuck because my life-long best friend, who lives an ocean across from me, kept recommending it to me. "It's like us!" he would say, then proceed to sent me the most fascinating out of context panels. This is most definitely the reason why I got so emotionally invested in HS at the time, it was like reading myself and my bff having good times. Hold on, I think something's in my eye.
Definitely! I don't think I've ever encountered a piece of media since that has represented online friendships as well as Homestuck did. I think this is part of what made Homestuck very personal to cringe shut-in teenagers such as myself.
I remember watching the flash where the Act 6 kids finally meet up IRL and fantasizing about what I would say to my Internet friends when I finally did the same.
Sarah Z: A Brief History of Homestuck
Also Sarah Z: *two hour long video*
she did say brief
I didn’t even notice until now
for homestuck, thats brief
I noticed that and thought, "That sounds right, for a brief Homestuck summary".
"Brief"
I am halfway through the video and this development hell is so fun to me. Like, dude, you can't blame the team of developers for doing nothing and placing it all on them, because, you know, you can't just give them some money, say goodbye and then come back after a year asking where your game is. This is YOUR game, your responsibility, you can't just hand out money to some people without actually working with them and checking on them, even if the team is fucking around it's your job as a client to check on them and tell them not to fuck around. Your job to schedule and to harass them into working, because it is you in the first place who needs this game to be done. Like, if they weren't making any progress, how couldn't you notice for months? If you had bad expirience, maybe stop giving them money? I am working in the game industry and this is SO common for a client to fuck around and not to give you any information and then blame it on the team, this is so frustrating. Even if Odd Gentlemen screwed him over (which I honestly doubt) I can't see why it isn't Hussy's own stupidity, lack of involvement and carelessness, 'cos come on, it's your responsibility to get shit done. Especially considering how poorly Hussy treated the previous stage of development where he made no updates whatsoever for months, I'm siding with Odd Gentlemen on this one. I never new what homestuck is but this shit made me MAD so I'm ranting about it in the comment section of two year old video, look what you've made me do, Hussie!
The way Hussy’s own self-ran studio basically imploded leans evidence that this is all due to Hussy’s own actions.
Justin McElroy saying out of nowhere "Vriska did nothing wrong" activated me like a sleeper agent. Sucker punched back a decade.
Were you out buying groceries after getting punched?
as taako too :(
@@slithra227 the best part is that, as far as I can tell from this video, taako would absolutely be the little shit to say that
today i found out that i follow one of the people who bought the jumbotron to make him say that
small world
What's crazy is that episode of MBMBAM is from 2018!
The craziest thing I’ve learned is I thought the trolls were the main characters and I’ve never been so fucked up over a piece of information in my life and I was ON tumblr when this was happening
I mean some of them arguably are the main characters. It's a large cast
All of the trolls are technically main characters alongside the humans but the most important ones end up being like Karkat and Vriska so ehhhh
There's like 4-5 trolls that reach main character status (Karkat, Vriska, Terezi, Kanaya), the rest die lmao.
"vriska is a good person and a bad character" sounds like "nobody killed jfk, his head just did that"
I would say that she’s a good character and a bad person
commented this before getting to that point in the video oops
I feel like “good person but bad character” could be used for mary sues, as they could be the perfect person with no flaws. Good person, but not a good character. Not a great way to describe Vriska.
@@snowflaker3608 Very true!
I love the idea that it just did that lol Like it sounds like something a dystopian government would say when a popular revolutionary figure suddenly died lol "No we did not shoot him in the head with a sniper rifle from a near by roof top. His head just did that. We are not accepting any further questions on this matter!" lol
Honestly I'm still just mad that the one cosplay I got the most following for (10k+ on tumblr) was Dave fucking Strider. Literally just a t-shirt, some red cons, aviators, and an ok sense of humor. It started because I was making cosplay gifs in my room during a thunder storm and this clap of thunder scared the SH!T out of me and I had been recording a gif that turned into a gif of me attempting to put my aviator shades on and being scared shitless by nature. I posted it because it was just amusing?? Then it blew up and lead to an ask blog, con panels, massive friend circles, etc. I'm now over 30, have worsening mental health, and never leave my apartment. I kind of try to forget and pretend my homestuck days never happened, but I can't ignore the flashbacks I got every 2 minutes while watching this video.
Dude, you probably made tons of people smile with that gif. Hell, I've probably seen it. Just know that you matter and have the potential to rule everyone around you. I'm just 22 and feel nostalgic about the Homestuck days in 2016, I went down a mental health spiral right after it ended and for a lot of years after that before I finally learned to be social and not scared of intimidated by other people / my literal self and the problems I thought I'd bring with me to new relationships. You can improve in seconds if you want to, never too late to break out of a bad cycle.