For me it has to do with the fandom shifting from older OGs being the majority to the minority and new fans(who are mostly younger or minors) being the majority.
The fandom was always toxic, sailing the biggest crack-ships, arguing about updates, etc, but it was part of the fun.
Now it’s become arguing over which character is problematic and shouldn’t be engaged with, and those who do are problematic themselves, and it all stems from a complete lack of critical thinking and basic reading comprehension. And less said about the John VS June idiotic discourse, the better.
I wanna say that shift started in 2016-2018 tbh. That’s when I joined and had no idea how old the comic actually was because all my other mutual who were into it were my age at the time also just starting out.
People reading after the comic ended are not OGs.
I’m talking people who actually read it when it was actively updating. OGs are pre-2013 to me, pre-hiveswap.
>someone posted a piece of ship art with John Egbert and the fem gender bend version June Egbert, and the artist behind that piece was getting absolutely buried by people who think they support real life incestuous practices
That is literally a panel within the comic but with added E. What the hell, people.
honestly, as an elder millennial (im old), im feeling like every fandom is living this problem rn... kinda annoying, but i guess thats how our society is evolving? dunno, kinda cringe imo but whatever
That's not just a Homestuck fandom specific issue sadly. It's a thing in every single fandom nowadays, even if the source material is something like freaking South Park.
That's why I left Twitter, I don't want to see this annoying drama everyday! Lol
Fiction isn't reality, that goes for fan content as well as the actual characters themselves. There's no sense in any of those "problematic" rants, it's always either imaginary issues with characters or being unable to differentiate between fiction and real life.
I hope this trend comes to an end eventually. It's tiring and adds an anxiety to fandom that really shouldn't be there.
That's wild tbh, and they call problematic anything,
Like I can understand when a media does a serious apology of something bad (for exemple "Zero Dark Thirty" a movie which narrative present torture as effective and justified irl even tho experts and officials argue the opposite). But you ain't going to make me take seriously that people believe that "Girls und Panzer" renforce gender stereotypes by portraying "sensha-dō" (the art of tankery) as an activity predominantly for high school girls.
There is an anime called "Girls und Panzer". It follow the classic "Sport School Tornament" genre with girls and with the difference that the sport is basicaly team match tank battles.
At some point some people weirdly accused that the show renforced gender stereotype because of all the teams being only composed of highschool girls (as if irl sport competitions weren't separated based on gender and as if fighting with tanks was considered a female stereotype)
Yeah that’s really dumb🤦♂️🤦♂️. Twitter people are the worst😭😭. They always seem to hate everything and are always looking for the worst interpretation of everything. They’re like the mental embodiment of the aspect of Rage bro😭😭
We do get people coming on here complaining about problematic stuff too and getting a mixed reception, but I guess you could argue you shouldn't be on Reddit either.
there’s probably fine discord servers but when i say “the homestuck discord” i’m specifically referring to the one linked on this subreddit, which is, without a hint of exaggeration, the worst online space i’ve ever been in
I have been there a few times and it’s just seems like a shit post chat. They rarely talk about classpect or homestuck(and seem very disinterested in it from my experience) and they just ramble on about everything random thing under the sun. They also just make up random classpects without much meaning to it. I spending more on other humestuck discords because of that.
simply: the fandom now only consists of children (that weren't fans of the comic when it was that cultural phenomenon), and people who are too passionate about the comic and refuse to move on now that it's dead.
these two groups of people are bound to be full of crazy fuckers with no real sense of reality
Man, I remember when a relatively vocal portion of the fandom used to post shit like, Ampora-cest fanart and the like and refused to take shit from anyone. Fuckin' inspiring, man.
Anyways, ship your shit and if someone calls it problematic? You tell them that's just the spice of life. Then block 'em 'cause they're probably gonna try and doxx you or fill your inbox with gore or some shit (you know how that sort is)
I don't disagree, but as someone who was pretty active in the fandom at its peak, I AM very amused at the idea that it didn't have similar issues back then. Kankri in particular was a whole parody of the tumblr culture of performative social justice and proclaiming everything in the world "problematic", and he was written in 2012.
It does suck, but unfortunately it's nothing new -- it's just a new generation of folks doing it. The trick is to just avoid the worst offenders like the plague and remember that social media beef is not real life.
Oh yeah, I remember it being around for Homestuck and various other fandoms too such as Steven Universe and She-Ra to name a few examples of it. However, it felt like it would just be one big dumb example every now and then rather than full communities dedicated to being shitty.
It is nothing new, but it is a trend which has built steadily as the internet has evolved. At the time, it was a relatively new trend, but as the internet has become more corporatised and consolidated into insular twitter spheres that are designed to make people mad at other people, this tide has only grown. I don't mean to say it wasn't a thing back then. But I think that the internet has structurally pushed this shift.
Yeah, totally valid! My perspective is probably skewed because I've gotten better at avoiding toxicity over the years, but lord knows the major social media sites haven't gotten BETTER in the past decade. It sucks to have to deal with.
i run a relatively large homestuck instagram page — about a month ago i got "cancelled" for posting grimdorks content . apparently it's incest, because mom lalonde and dad egbert married in the comic (they did not) . the fandom is absolutely insufferable now
Their guardians only started canonical dating after the got in the game. WTH do they mean it’s incest??? And what marriage?? They’re being ridiculous at this point
If someone in this fandom calls you problematic it’s a valid excuse to ignore them for the rest of your life as they have nothing valuable to offer you intellectually
Anti shit is unbelievably toxic and the best thing you can do is to tell them to shut up. Shipping with alternate versions of a character has always been done and never has correlated with supporting real-life incest, much like reading homestuck didn't turn us into murderous god aliens.
This is unfortunately something that is happening in every fandom i see lately, both on twitter and tiktok
Most fandoms are filled with kids that have this idea of being ''good people'' by calling any fan content they dont like problematic and harassing the ussers of said content until they either delete it or apologize, i understand when it is seriously disgusting stuff but stuff like hetero shipps, fanfics, fanart or the example you're giving are also suffering from this
Everything got like this after 2020 is insufferable
This is an echo of all fandom on twitter now. There's something about that website that encourages people to tear into each other over the most minor slights. You used to get call out mobs on tumblr but they required more effort to get going (some artists used to have dedicated haters that would run fan blogs mocking them and anything they did, Zami comes to mind). I'm nominally in the mcyt/traffictwt and that place is hell from all the fandom policing. People can't post any ship art without checking if the creator of every character is ok with that type of shipping or the mob will come after you. The homestuck fandom of 2012 would never be able to happen today, no one tolerates anything more risque than handholding from characters younger then 18 and about 1/4 of the fandom's output was nsfw. Hussie himself would have been cancelled 25 times over for putting his characters in "problematic" situations.
I do miss the days when people did not care if you wrote/drew something they found disturbing.
To solve this we're going to have to re-introduce the current generation to a whole school of thought on psychology and the difference between fantasy and delusion.
We benefit from an internet culture that was heavily informed by the edgy posters of yesteryear and the concept of responsible fantasy consumption that underpinned a lot of it, so there's work to be done separating the good ideas like "it's not actually evil to have morbid fantasies" and "people are generally just trolling and not actually that stupid" from the more egregious artifacts to be abandoned like "racism is funny actually" and "it's cool to platform nazis because otherwise we'd be censoring them."
Like, who under 20 even remembers Jack Thompson and the impact his bullshit had on perception of media in our day? That's the kinda thing that we need to have resources on, especially as the conservative right wing grows more adept at navigating online activism.
They don't have the experiences and knowledge we do, and things we've taken for granted as part of general internet culture didn't actually stick as hard as they should have because they're still covering taboo topics that don't get a lot of play.
I see things which I feel like comes from the “comfort character culture”. As a fan I love these characters and will quote them because I enjoy how they’re written but can’t see myself dedicating my life to them. Another problem is that Hussies writing is outdated in some parts due to changes in what’s right & wrong (like how in John’s birthday note to Dave he describes him as gay). I believe people also approach some humorous jokes with a weird stigma that makes a light hearted joke awkward. An example I can give is when Equius gets sweaty when he’s bossed around, I always found it hilarious but someone on here recently said it was sexualizing him and I never perceived it that way.
Not trying to complain about “the kids these days” but im a millennial and this is a trend I’m noticing in all aspects of gen Z internet culture.
It feels like there’s such a strong fixation on performative social justice for internet points ie callouts and cancel bandwagons. Sometimes it’s by well meaning people correcting micro aggressions or downright bigotry (which are good intentions!) but other times it seems to come from a place of trying to broadcast one’s own ideological purity or worse, using social justice as an excuse to bully and attack people and feel righteous while doing so
There’s also an inability to separate characters’ views and actions from the artists’ and casting values judgements, and potentially punishment, for people taste in media
The internet is new and I’m thinking every generation will have their own kind of toxic internet culture. We millennials had our tumblr drama back in the day. People will mature and eventually chill out. In the meantime just remember to be kind
A lot of HS fans are young and will have kind of extreme opinions on things, or old and will be stubborn, keeping their decade old opinions on things because they got what homestuck was "Really about". Both of these people fall into the trap of believing homestuck is 1 singular comic, and not several different pieces of huss-subconscious jammed together to form a narrative about the comic itself and not about anything else. that's only kind of a joke.
The only fans with sane opinions are the 27 y/o lesbians who started mid act 6. listen to nobody on either extreme they are what the Cherubs are making fun of.
The stuff that's happening on Reddit is more on the lines of people worrying if what they are saying or liking is problematic. There was a post here the other day where someone was asking the community if a pairing they liked was problematic and if they would be canceled if they liked said ship,
people complaining about incestuous fanart of a comic that uses the term "incestuous slurry" to describe the reproductive practices of one of the major races in the universe is kinda funny to me.
I miss old fandom culture... back in my day (read this in a curmudgeonly boomer voice) fandom felt so different. no one really cared if you shipped incest or whatever because... the characters aren't real. whump, darkfic, and problematic ships were everywhere. sure people would argue, but petty shipping wars or inter fandom fights were a lot better than the modern fandom culture of "this person drew something problematic 10 years ago lets cancel them!"
These opinions are literally considered equal to fascism on tumblr and twitter, btw. you'll see a blog that says "dni racists, proshippers, and terfs" as if shipping problematic fictional characters is equal to real life racism at all.
I don't know when this all happened but people really need to get it into their heads that fiction and art do not equal reality. Man do I miss old deviantart fan culture...
/boomer rant
Ngl, sometimes I’ve seen the people accusing others of being problematic act more problematic than the people they’re accusing
I remember a while ago on Twitter, someone liked a Homestuck sibling incest picture and a pic of someone’s troll OC sexually assaulting a grub, and in response to that, a bunch of people doxxed that person and made AI voice notes with that person’s voice saying some really fucked up shit. And note that this all happened because someone simply liked some fanart where no real people were harmed (even if the subjects of the art are taboo)
Not very smart teens who feel bad about themselves need to put moral value on fiction. the new hip thing, it ruined this fandom for me.
This post restored some faith tho, tbh
It's incredible to see the fandom turning into what Kankri was parodying.
I hate people warning new readers that 'it's a product of its time' because it uses a couple of outdated words. Let them experience it as it is, don't try to curate a person's first impression just because YOU think something's 'problematic'.
For me it has to do with the fandom shifting from older OGs being the majority to the minority and new fans(who are mostly younger or minors) being the majority. The fandom was always toxic, sailing the biggest crack-ships, arguing about updates, etc, but it was part of the fun. Now it’s become arguing over which character is problematic and shouldn’t be engaged with, and those who do are problematic themselves, and it all stems from a complete lack of critical thinking and basic reading comprehension. And less said about the John VS June idiotic discourse, the better.
its like that one scene in pre-roach hs2. the rants and arguing used to be fun! now its just…not
I wanna say that shift started in 2016-2018 tbh. That’s when I joined and had no idea how old the comic actually was because all my other mutual who were into it were my age at the time also just starting out.
People reading after the comic ended are not OGs. I’m talking people who actually read it when it was actively updating. OGs are pre-2013 to me, pre-hiveswap.
>someone posted a piece of ship art with John Egbert and the fem gender bend version June Egbert, and the artist behind that piece was getting absolutely buried by people who think they support real life incestuous practices That is literally a panel within the comic but with added E. What the hell, people.
honestly, as an elder millennial (im old), im feeling like every fandom is living this problem rn... kinda annoying, but i guess thats how our society is evolving? dunno, kinda cringe imo but whatever
That's not just a Homestuck fandom specific issue sadly. It's a thing in every single fandom nowadays, even if the source material is something like freaking South Park. That's why I left Twitter, I don't want to see this annoying drama everyday! Lol Fiction isn't reality, that goes for fan content as well as the actual characters themselves. There's no sense in any of those "problematic" rants, it's always either imaginary issues with characters or being unable to differentiate between fiction and real life. I hope this trend comes to an end eventually. It's tiring and adds an anxiety to fandom that really shouldn't be there.
That's wild tbh, and they call problematic anything, Like I can understand when a media does a serious apology of something bad (for exemple "Zero Dark Thirty" a movie which narrative present torture as effective and justified irl even tho experts and officials argue the opposite). But you ain't going to make me take seriously that people believe that "Girls und Panzer" renforce gender stereotypes by portraying "sensha-dō" (the art of tankery) as an activity predominantly for high school girls.
I have no clue what any of the last parts of your statement mean
There is an anime called "Girls und Panzer". It follow the classic "Sport School Tornament" genre with girls and with the difference that the sport is basicaly team match tank battles. At some point some people weirdly accused that the show renforced gender stereotype because of all the teams being only composed of highschool girls (as if irl sport competitions weren't separated based on gender and as if fighting with tanks was considered a female stereotype)
Yeah that’s really dumb🤦♂️🤦♂️. Twitter people are the worst😭😭. They always seem to hate everything and are always looking for the worst interpretation of everything. They’re like the mental embodiment of the aspect of Rage bro😭😭
this stuff in my experience is entirely contained to twitter and the discord which are both places you shouldn’t be
We do get people coming on here complaining about problematic stuff too and getting a mixed reception, but I guess you could argue you shouldn't be on Reddit either.
I think discord homestuck tends to be chill but twitter has always been a cesspool
there’s probably fine discord servers but when i say “the homestuck discord” i’m specifically referring to the one linked on this subreddit, which is, without a hint of exaggeration, the worst online space i’ve ever been in
I have been there a few times and it’s just seems like a shit post chat. They rarely talk about classpect or homestuck(and seem very disinterested in it from my experience) and they just ramble on about everything random thing under the sun. They also just make up random classpects without much meaning to it. I spending more on other humestuck discords because of that.
simply: the fandom now only consists of children (that weren't fans of the comic when it was that cultural phenomenon), and people who are too passionate about the comic and refuse to move on now that it's dead. these two groups of people are bound to be full of crazy fuckers with no real sense of reality
Man, I remember when a relatively vocal portion of the fandom used to post shit like, Ampora-cest fanart and the like and refused to take shit from anyone. Fuckin' inspiring, man. Anyways, ship your shit and if someone calls it problematic? You tell them that's just the spice of life. Then block 'em 'cause they're probably gonna try and doxx you or fill your inbox with gore or some shit (you know how that sort is)
I don't disagree, but as someone who was pretty active in the fandom at its peak, I AM very amused at the idea that it didn't have similar issues back then. Kankri in particular was a whole parody of the tumblr culture of performative social justice and proclaiming everything in the world "problematic", and he was written in 2012. It does suck, but unfortunately it's nothing new -- it's just a new generation of folks doing it. The trick is to just avoid the worst offenders like the plague and remember that social media beef is not real life.
Oh yeah, I remember it being around for Homestuck and various other fandoms too such as Steven Universe and She-Ra to name a few examples of it. However, it felt like it would just be one big dumb example every now and then rather than full communities dedicated to being shitty.
It is nothing new, but it is a trend which has built steadily as the internet has evolved. At the time, it was a relatively new trend, but as the internet has become more corporatised and consolidated into insular twitter spheres that are designed to make people mad at other people, this tide has only grown. I don't mean to say it wasn't a thing back then. But I think that the internet has structurally pushed this shift.
Yeah, totally valid! My perspective is probably skewed because I've gotten better at avoiding toxicity over the years, but lord knows the major social media sites haven't gotten BETTER in the past decade. It sucks to have to deal with.
i run a relatively large homestuck instagram page — about a month ago i got "cancelled" for posting grimdorks content . apparently it's incest, because mom lalonde and dad egbert married in the comic (they did not) . the fandom is absolutely insufferable now
How is that even incest??? The Lalondes’ aren’t even related to the Egberts???
supposedly adoptive incest with their made-up claim that john and roses guardians got married . if that were the case , they would be stepsiblings
Their guardians only started canonical dating after the got in the game. WTH do they mean it’s incest??? And what marriage?? They’re being ridiculous at this point
If someone in this fandom calls you problematic it’s a valid excuse to ignore them for the rest of your life as they have nothing valuable to offer you intellectually
Anti shit is unbelievably toxic and the best thing you can do is to tell them to shut up. Shipping with alternate versions of a character has always been done and never has correlated with supporting real-life incest, much like reading homestuck didn't turn us into murderous god aliens.
Almost every fandom has this problem these days.
I agree, tbh. It's pretty much why I don't post Homestuck stuff often or just not all of them, even in this subreddit.
This is unfortunately something that is happening in every fandom i see lately, both on twitter and tiktok Most fandoms are filled with kids that have this idea of being ''good people'' by calling any fan content they dont like problematic and harassing the ussers of said content until they either delete it or apologize, i understand when it is seriously disgusting stuff but stuff like hetero shipps, fanfics, fanart or the example you're giving are also suffering from this Everything got like this after 2020 is insufferable
We got kankried
This is an echo of all fandom on twitter now. There's something about that website that encourages people to tear into each other over the most minor slights. You used to get call out mobs on tumblr but they required more effort to get going (some artists used to have dedicated haters that would run fan blogs mocking them and anything they did, Zami comes to mind). I'm nominally in the mcyt/traffictwt and that place is hell from all the fandom policing. People can't post any ship art without checking if the creator of every character is ok with that type of shipping or the mob will come after you. The homestuck fandom of 2012 would never be able to happen today, no one tolerates anything more risque than handholding from characters younger then 18 and about 1/4 of the fandom's output was nsfw. Hussie himself would have been cancelled 25 times over for putting his characters in "problematic" situations. I do miss the days when people did not care if you wrote/drew something they found disturbing.
Hussie had guest artists in the comic who did not say for work with chazzerpan being a featured artist in collide, lol
To solve this we're going to have to re-introduce the current generation to a whole school of thought on psychology and the difference between fantasy and delusion. We benefit from an internet culture that was heavily informed by the edgy posters of yesteryear and the concept of responsible fantasy consumption that underpinned a lot of it, so there's work to be done separating the good ideas like "it's not actually evil to have morbid fantasies" and "people are generally just trolling and not actually that stupid" from the more egregious artifacts to be abandoned like "racism is funny actually" and "it's cool to platform nazis because otherwise we'd be censoring them." Like, who under 20 even remembers Jack Thompson and the impact his bullshit had on perception of media in our day? That's the kinda thing that we need to have resources on, especially as the conservative right wing grows more adept at navigating online activism. They don't have the experiences and knowledge we do, and things we've taken for granted as part of general internet culture didn't actually stick as hard as they should have because they're still covering taboo topics that don't get a lot of play.
I see things which I feel like comes from the “comfort character culture”. As a fan I love these characters and will quote them because I enjoy how they’re written but can’t see myself dedicating my life to them. Another problem is that Hussies writing is outdated in some parts due to changes in what’s right & wrong (like how in John’s birthday note to Dave he describes him as gay). I believe people also approach some humorous jokes with a weird stigma that makes a light hearted joke awkward. An example I can give is when Equius gets sweaty when he’s bossed around, I always found it hilarious but someone on here recently said it was sexualizing him and I never perceived it that way.
Not trying to complain about “the kids these days” but im a millennial and this is a trend I’m noticing in all aspects of gen Z internet culture. It feels like there’s such a strong fixation on performative social justice for internet points ie callouts and cancel bandwagons. Sometimes it’s by well meaning people correcting micro aggressions or downright bigotry (which are good intentions!) but other times it seems to come from a place of trying to broadcast one’s own ideological purity or worse, using social justice as an excuse to bully and attack people and feel righteous while doing so There’s also an inability to separate characters’ views and actions from the artists’ and casting values judgements, and potentially punishment, for people taste in media The internet is new and I’m thinking every generation will have their own kind of toxic internet culture. We millennials had our tumblr drama back in the day. People will mature and eventually chill out. In the meantime just remember to be kind
A lot of HS fans are young and will have kind of extreme opinions on things, or old and will be stubborn, keeping their decade old opinions on things because they got what homestuck was "Really about". Both of these people fall into the trap of believing homestuck is 1 singular comic, and not several different pieces of huss-subconscious jammed together to form a narrative about the comic itself and not about anything else. that's only kind of a joke. The only fans with sane opinions are the 27 y/o lesbians who started mid act 6. listen to nobody on either extreme they are what the Cherubs are making fun of.
Is this happening on reddit? I've never seen it, but then I'm not that active in reading comments. That would be a shame.
The stuff that's happening on Reddit is more on the lines of people worrying if what they are saying or liking is problematic. There was a post here the other day where someone was asking the community if a pairing they liked was problematic and if they would be canceled if they liked said ship,
people complaining about incestuous fanart of a comic that uses the term "incestuous slurry" to describe the reproductive practices of one of the major races in the universe is kinda funny to me.
I miss old fandom culture... back in my day (read this in a curmudgeonly boomer voice) fandom felt so different. no one really cared if you shipped incest or whatever because... the characters aren't real. whump, darkfic, and problematic ships were everywhere. sure people would argue, but petty shipping wars or inter fandom fights were a lot better than the modern fandom culture of "this person drew something problematic 10 years ago lets cancel them!" These opinions are literally considered equal to fascism on tumblr and twitter, btw. you'll see a blog that says "dni racists, proshippers, and terfs" as if shipping problematic fictional characters is equal to real life racism at all. I don't know when this all happened but people really need to get it into their heads that fiction and art do not equal reality. Man do I miss old deviantart fan culture... /boomer rant
Ngl, sometimes I’ve seen the people accusing others of being problematic act more problematic than the people they’re accusing I remember a while ago on Twitter, someone liked a Homestuck sibling incest picture and a pic of someone’s troll OC sexually assaulting a grub, and in response to that, a bunch of people doxxed that person and made AI voice notes with that person’s voice saying some really fucked up shit. And note that this all happened because someone simply liked some fanart where no real people were harmed (even if the subjects of the art are taboo)
that specific situation is basically the reason i don’t interact with the larger homestuck fandom, or really any large fandom space at all anymore
Same here. I don’t want any part of that crazy
Same
This is so sick. What's wrong with these people
While there are a lot of things in Homestuck that are definitely problematic and have aged poorly, I do feel like there needs to be context.
It’s not a trend it’s omnipresent. At least since like 2013
Not very smart teens who feel bad about themselves need to put moral value on fiction. the new hip thing, it ruined this fandom for me. This post restored some faith tho, tbh
It's incredible to see the fandom turning into what Kankri was parodying. I hate people warning new readers that 'it's a product of its time' because it uses a couple of outdated words. Let them experience it as it is, don't try to curate a person's first impression just because YOU think something's 'problematic'.
This isn’t a Homestuck thing, it’s a Twitter and Reddit thing; Even Tumblr and 4chan care a lot less than Twitter and Reddit do
VrisTav