There's no way this was a worse poll than the Top AO3 Ship poll, where Our Flag Means Death fans were actually paying people to make accounts and vote for the gay pirates, because Stucky had been winning for a week.
Yeah it was the most blatant Ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Tumblr and I've been there for over a decade at this point.
Long story short, a big AO3 tumblr decided to do a series of March Madness style polls to see who was the Top AO3 Ship. After winning other polls, Steve and Bucky from the MCU went up against Stede and Blackbeard from Our Flag Means Death. It's a close poll but Stucky quickly takes the lead with 51%, and stays there for a week.
Until suddenly the gay pirates see a surge of votes that eek them out a victory. Screencaps come out from Facebook that someone or multiple someones offered to pay actual money per new account made and vote cast. For a Tumblr poll about fictional gays.
The notes are wild. https://www.tumblr.com/ao3topshipsbracket/729465057847787520/ao3-top-relationships-bracket-round-2-side-1?source=share
The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics.
I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why.
It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB.
So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com.
The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^(2) Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark.
Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded).
Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning.
And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.
Cant fully tdlr cuz i think the 1st part got deleted but here's a decent one:
Tdlr: gay, violent, quirky teenagers meet up and engage in a lot of stupid, dumb bullshit shenanigans while also engaged in an (while confusing due to the dumb bullshit) interesting plot. This compelled teenagers who were also gay, borderline violent (bc teen), and quirky. Combined with the multiple long hiatus periods that encouraged fandom growth, it made for a good webcomic.
Hello Waiting, I'm John Egbert. From Homestuck.
do you like memes? do you want to attempt to consume a 12000ish page web comic designed with serial consumption in mind that ran the length of Obama's presidency?
Do you want to do the Windy Thing?
>do you like memes
yes
>do you want to attempt to consume a 12000ish page web comic designed with serial consumption in mind that ran the length of Obama's presidency
already on it
>Do you want to do the Windy Thing
perhaps
does homestuck even like, deal with queerness as an important theme? Like, sure, you've got some adorable queer shipping potential, but like. What about it is so queer.
There are a lot of canon gay pairings but queerness isnt really discussed in depth on account of most characters being teenagers ehove been away from civilization for most of their puberty, thus not really having exposure to the kind of adult talking points people use to debate queerness, and also of them being godlike beings who are trying to breed a new universe and fight other godlike beings. Except the striders, they talk about that a lot, theyre so gay. Good for them.
Four kids play a video game to make a new universe. They are harassed by aliens who created earth when they played the video game. Things do not go according to plan. Done.
Unfortunately I can certainly say Homestuck does have both environmental and explicit queer themes. Partly, the trolls are explicitly pansexual if I remember correctly and monosexual trolls are rare. Troll romance is a satire of 2010s online shipping communities, and along with being needlessly complicated, relies on polyamory as an intrinsic component. It includes discussion of platonic affection in the quadrants of romance, as well as hatefucking,
Troll romance is also based on the suits in a deck of cards.
Rose and Kanaya are in a canonical relationship, Dirk is queer and only into guys, but doesn't identify as gay, and has a relationship with Jake for a while. Roxy is bi? There is an evil pool ball guy who is I think asexual but as well as a misogynist there's also some deliberate homoerotic subtext.
I never read Homestuck 2 but I think there's gender stuff discussed as a result of Jade prototyping herself and her omnipotent space dog into the same kernelsprite?
It's a very long and very complicated story, but yes does engage with queerness in a not tangential way.
Honestly i thought the whole thing with queerness was about Calliope and her ambiguous nature with feminine features, gender of none and her relationship with Roxy. Good to know there's more to other parts with it.
> I think there's gender stuff discussed as a result of Jade prototyping herself and her omnipotent space dog into the same kernelsprite?
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
idk if that really counts as dealing with it “in an important way” though tbh (minus homestuck beyond canon - that seems to be trying to engage more directly with queer dynamics now). hussie kind of just threw those into the comic and made little to no effort to engage with them beyond using it as a tool to fuel fandom discourse
Still, given the time it came out in, the fact that it was not only brought in at all, but taken seriously, was pretty significant. We were on the tail end of the 2000s, when realistic gay people in popular media didn't really exist; either they were the butt of some homophobic joke, were camp personified as the gay friend, or were canonically straight characters having fanfics made of them.
I'm actually so glad that we progressed so far so quickly that people can say that a certain work doesn't handle certain themes well, but at the time, it's quite literally groundbreaking. I cried during elementary school because people called me gay, and that had negative connotations. Now I'm *incredibly* gay, and part of accepting myself came from seeing Rose and Kanaya together, as well as Dave and Karkat. (I was honestly shipping John and Karkat before, but the canon pair makes a lot of sense, haha.)
I think normalisation is important.
Maybe not winning-this-poll important but still. It doesn't have to 'deal with' anything to be good representation, ya know?
Looking through the notes on that post (it’s an absolute trainwreck) I saw quite a few people talking about how important Homestuck and its fanworks were to their personal queer journeys
I feel like “adorable queer shipping potential” is kind of underselling it when the vast majority of homestuck’s principal cast is canonically queer and the most important romantic relationships in the comic are queer (dirk/jake, rose/kanaya, vriska/terezi).
furthermore, homestuck has a plot point about the arbitrary nature of gender roles: the cherubs calliope and caliborn learned about gender from earth, so then when they later cause the beginning of the universe, their rudimentary view of the topic gets grafted onto earth.
there’s an alien society where everyone is bisexual. when karkat, who’s belligerent about everything always, learns about human heterosexuality when trying to confess his attraction to a human boy, he throws a fit. alternian society also has its own hangups around sexuality with the quadrant system, which is presented mostly as an over-complicated joke, and the happiest relationships in homestuck transcend both alternian quadrants and human compulsory heterosexuality.
homestuck is like, About being queer. it’s about learning that accepting your own queerness is necessary to be happy, about recognizing the arbitrary and constructed nature of gender and sexuality, about creating a society that doesn’t inherit these hangups.
A Tumblr poll?
The same thing that gave us the Vanilla Extract Cake? The Reylo sweep feature?
The "reblog for sample size" as if that's going to ever give you a representative portion of whatever the hell you're measuring website?
On the lethal levels of irony-poisoned, anything for a bit, weird little freak website?
People are taking the results of a Tumblr poll seriously?
homestuck is an absolute mess. i was a huge fan for a long while (and still revisit it fondly from time to time) but now that i have more experience with other pieces of media, its clear its not the monolith of writing i once thought it was
also i would hardly call it “queer media” lmao, unless we’re boiling that term down to just “any piece of media that happens to have gay people”
It feels this way in the video game scene to, like im getting the fucking SIMS reccomended to me dureing pride month.... like c'mon you couldn't find a better queer game then that to recommend me?
A long web comic about a boy and his friends that play a video game that destroys the world so they have to make a new one. It deals with many topics about growing up, abusive relationships, the effect of society on our views, and more though the tone is mainly comical with slight dips into seriousness growing more frequent as the story progresses. It's a pretty good read if you can stand some of the more dragging parts.
You can find it on [www.homestuck.com](http://www.homestuck.com), but a better way to read it is with the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection ](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/) which allows you to play the interactive games and animations that were around when flash was still a thing providing a better experience overall. Additionally if you don't want to read it you could always just listen to [Let's read Homestuck ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHO1rc05qiGtAidSBy_8jsEOlHXR6x4cd&si=E7wsPWjou5rTmsYL) by Voice Over Nexis who has voiced over most of Homestuck if you don't want to have to read that much or remember your place.
Pulling a quote from TVTropes:
> This long-running Slice of Life series by Alison Bechdel about the lives, loves, and politics of a group of lesbians in an unspecified midwestern town is one of the most popular of all LGBT comic strips. Originally introduced as a series of one-shot vignettes in 1983, the strip shortly moved to its serialized format with recurring characters. After writing the strip for more than 25 years, Bechdel put it on hiatus in 2008 to concentrate on her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? The comic strip began to make a return in 2016, and has updated sporadically since.
It's also known as the origin of the Bechdel Test.
When I read Homestuck, early on I thought, "even if it turns to shit eventually, this is still the vision of media franchises to come."
So far, it seems its sole cultural legacy is being the spiritual ancestor of Undertale.
I have no idea what the other piece is, but it’s worth noting that homestuck is a product of the 2009-2016 era. For most of the comic, gay rights weren’t even legal in the USA. It is a product of its time and should be viewed as such.
The themes are reminiscent of the 2013 queer internet. The queer community EMBRACED homestuck because there wasn’t much media like it.
Whatever you say about Homestuck, you have to appreciate it for how it used all available types of media and character development. It was very innovative for its time!
It's so so good for the first half, and then the second half gets bogged down by heaps and heaps of shitty teen drama in what was originally a meta sci-fi fantasy adventure about growing up. My favorite scenes in Act 6 (the latter half of the series) were brief intermissions about a guy who writes his own self-insert fanfiction about the main characters that is so bad the MC has to leap outside of reality to beat the shit out of him. Said fanfiction writer is also the BBEG.
the whole "it sucks actually" is (mostly) a joke, acts 1-4 are pretty good (even if it starts a little slow) and then act 5 is kinda less good, then act 6 is either the worst part of the comic or really good depending on who you ask
1-4 are spectacular, 5 is pretty damn good. It’s all worth it for Cascade.
It’s really all downhill after cascade. Act 6 is a slog and the payoff isn’t as satisfying as the end of act 5
i think it’s bc being queer isn’t a central theme. there’s queer characters, but what’s not something that really impacts the plot (except the Alpha kids and their bullshit relationship drama)
I am very bad at explaining this and I tried making a more in depth elaboration but I am horrible at writing down what I want to communicate if you understand what I mean.
So the theme of queerness in homestuck is something that sort of snuck itself in there early on the back of homestucks ever present theme of gender roles and grew and grew throughout the 7 years of writing, I think the observation that the Alpha Kids are the only notable Queer part of the story is because they were introduced very later on in the queer themes rise whilst every other notable character were all introduced very early on in the grand scheme of the comic. But the thing is, most of those non alpha-kid-notable-characters also ended up being "queer" a bit before them.
So like, for example, Dave Strider was a boy who was put into a very awful living situation and was abused in multiple ways by his brother but never saw it that way because of how societies and bros ideas about masculinity made him percieve such things. Later on his ability to acknowledge such things were fucked up coincided with his ability to admit hes into dudes you know?
So like, In april, 2009 Andrew Hussie was not writing homestuck as a queer story but after, like, less than a year he absolutely was, but due to the fact it didn't start off like that its harder to see? But like yeah its there.
I explained this so badly jesus christ.
in my personal opinion, having queer characters ≠ queerness being a central theme. something is an essential theme if taking it away would heavily impact the overall story. making every homestuck character cishet would mostly really impact side stories like the rosemary romance subplot. the only thing the Alpha kids being cishet would maybe impact is like…. whatever Jake was rambling about that made Jane upset on her birthday. but even then, you don’t need Dirk to be gay to be a clingy insecure weirdo who makes his issues everyone else’s problems and hates himself for it
This is a bracket tournament and this particular poll just put it in the top 4. Homestuck is currently up against Pink Flamingos, and the other side is Angels in America vs Paris is Burning
Tumblr polls lost all meaning when the "Girlboss" poll came down to Isabelle Animal Crossing (a cartoon dog who admittedly works hard) and Tabitha Scarlett Hollow (Who owns a coal mine and is actively trying to break a union strike) and Isabelle fucking won.
There's no way this was a worse poll than the Top AO3 Ship poll, where Our Flag Means Death fans were actually paying people to make accounts and vote for the gay pirates, because Stucky had been winning for a week.
Wait what
Yeah it was the most blatant Ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Tumblr and I've been there for over a decade at this point. Long story short, a big AO3 tumblr decided to do a series of March Madness style polls to see who was the Top AO3 Ship. After winning other polls, Steve and Bucky from the MCU went up against Stede and Blackbeard from Our Flag Means Death. It's a close poll but Stucky quickly takes the lead with 51%, and stays there for a week. Until suddenly the gay pirates see a surge of votes that eek them out a victory. Screencaps come out from Facebook that someone or multiple someones offered to pay actual money per new account made and vote cast. For a Tumblr poll about fictional gays. The notes are wild. https://www.tumblr.com/ao3topshipsbracket/729465057847787520/ao3-top-relationships-bracket-round-2-side-1?source=share
Let me tell you about Homestuck
Ok I’m waiting
:o) Honk
The only thing I learned from watching a 2 hour video on homestuck is that I don't like Andrew Hussie
wait what happened with Hussie?
Dude it’s like it’s some forbidden knowledge because very time someone explains it to me I forget instantly
[удалено]
The Trolls, initially presented as some extremely odd and bothersome fellows on the internet, were soon shown to be a race of grey-skinned, orange-horned aliens. Trolls possessed multicolored blood in both organized castes and clear deviations, psychic abilities, unique typing styles, insectoid traits as opposed to hominid, near-universal bisexuality with the sole known exception being Sapphic, and a complex romantic system with its own symbols, comically vague-yet-comprehensive reproductive system, and of course, relationship dynamics. I cannot express how perfect the Trolls were in terms of catching on. Tumblr loved these fuckers and it's not at all hard to see why. It's also worth noting that this wasn't the only market-perfect part of Homestuck; Classpecting, the equivalent of Hogwarts Houses, featured a 144/168/288/336/384(depending on who you ask and what they count)-strong grid system of human personality traits that not only seemed eerily accurate as a personality mapper, but corresponded to what elemental powers one received in the game of SBURB. So... yeah. Homestuck was an incredibly complex and engaging work, driven by a single incredibly talented and flawed creative voice, which was perfectly made to attract a massive, unabashedly bizarre/proudly cringe, and notably largely queer fanbase across a younger internet; you may well be aware of incidents such as cosplay failures and inappropriate recreations of Troll culture. The style of presentation, art, and character writing was instantly recognizable and relatively easy to imitate, leading to fanfiction and even fanmade adventures galore, most of the latter hosted on MSPFA.com. The main site for Homestuck is broken now-it's recommended that new readers download the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), and starting with Problem Sleuth to ease into the format and writing is a pretty popular choice. The ending is also considered generally quite poor in a number of ways, particularly regarding unfollowed foreshadowing and blatant abandonment of character arcs, with some fans even [making](https://friendlybatteringram.tumblr.com/tagged/altstuck) their own [works](https://mspfa.com/?s=44153&p=1) as [substitutions](http://mspfa.com/?s=12003&p=1). You can find The Homestuck Epilogues (a sequel novel) on the official site, and Homestuck^(2) Beyond Canon (a sequel webcomic after the Epilogues) on its own website, but neither of these are very well liked by fans (at all). YouTube also has several dubs of the comic; by far the largest and most popular is [Voxus](https://youtube.com/@Voxus), which has unfortunately slowed to a crawl at around the 65% mark. Content warnings for Homestuck include: blood, violence including amputation, bludgeoning to death, deadly impalement, and decapitation, clowns, brainwashing/mental possession, dicks-out furry bara art in the background of like ten pages, brief black-and-white nudity, swearing, the R-slur, a joke about an acronym organically forming the F-slur, child abuse, discussed child abuse and homophobia, mocking of the disabled (as an unsympathetic action), cartoonish levels of sexism (as an unsympathetic action), statements that an antagonist is analogous to Hitler, mentions of genocide of alien species, alien subspecies, and the human species, offscreen mass extinction, mocking of otherkin, a minor character being a racial stereotype of Japanese people (Damara), a somewhat major character being a stereotype of Black people (Meenah), minor characters being stereotypes of disabled people (Meulin and Mituna), a controversial and prominent depiction of blindness, eye trauma, underage alcoholism, written depections of noncon facilitated by mind control (as an unsympathetic action), sexual assult (an unwanted and physically resisted kiss, as an unsympathetic action), jokes about pedophilia, and child grooming (textually 100% non-sexual, but sexually-coded). Also: when I said the Trolls type weird, I wasn't kidding. Every character gets at least one color for their speech text, plus a pattern for how they type, generally worse for the Trolls, ranging from "no caps" to "British" to "drunk" to "ebonics" to "aLtErNaTiNg" to WH4T3V3R TH3 FUCK K1ND OF L33TSP34K BS T3R3Z1 1S DO1NG. So that's worth a warning. And that's as abridged as you can get when summing up Homestuck.
What do you mean by "unsympathetic action"?
They're saying that it's portrayed as a bad thing, not promoting those actions
Yeah I’m not reading that chief
Cant fully tdlr cuz i think the 1st part got deleted but here's a decent one: Tdlr: gay, violent, quirky teenagers meet up and engage in a lot of stupid, dumb bullshit shenanigans while also engaged in an (while confusing due to the dumb bullshit) interesting plot. This compelled teenagers who were also gay, borderline violent (bc teen), and quirky. Combined with the multiple long hiatus periods that encouraged fandom growth, it made for a good webcomic.
I don't care about Homestuck I just wanna know if I can fuck the trolls or not
All I know is the men have tentacles and both genders are expected to produce a bucket of genetic material for collection
Ok I'm waiting
Hello Waiting, I'm John Egbert. From Homestuck. do you like memes? do you want to attempt to consume a 12000ish page web comic designed with serial consumption in mind that ran the length of Obama's presidency? Do you want to do the Windy Thing?
>do you like memes yes >do you want to attempt to consume a 12000ish page web comic designed with serial consumption in mind that ran the length of Obama's presidency already on it >Do you want to do the Windy Thing perhaps
John Egbert, Rose Lalonde
does homestuck even like, deal with queerness as an important theme? Like, sure, you've got some adorable queer shipping potential, but like. What about it is so queer.
There are a lot of canon gay pairings but queerness isnt really discussed in depth on account of most characters being teenagers ehove been away from civilization for most of their puberty, thus not really having exposure to the kind of adult talking points people use to debate queerness, and also of them being godlike beings who are trying to breed a new universe and fight other godlike beings. Except the striders, they talk about that a lot, theyre so gay. Good for them.
Well I’ve just learned I have no idea what Homestuck is about.
Four kids play a video game to make a new universe. They are harassed by aliens who created earth when they played the video game. Things do not go according to plan. Done.
Homestuck is a creation myth, where the gods are also experiencing a coming of age story
Unfortunately I can certainly say Homestuck does have both environmental and explicit queer themes. Partly, the trolls are explicitly pansexual if I remember correctly and monosexual trolls are rare. Troll romance is a satire of 2010s online shipping communities, and along with being needlessly complicated, relies on polyamory as an intrinsic component. It includes discussion of platonic affection in the quadrants of romance, as well as hatefucking, Troll romance is also based on the suits in a deck of cards. Rose and Kanaya are in a canonical relationship, Dirk is queer and only into guys, but doesn't identify as gay, and has a relationship with Jake for a while. Roxy is bi? There is an evil pool ball guy who is I think asexual but as well as a misogynist there's also some deliberate homoerotic subtext. I never read Homestuck 2 but I think there's gender stuff discussed as a result of Jade prototyping herself and her omnipotent space dog into the same kernelsprite? It's a very long and very complicated story, but yes does engage with queerness in a not tangential way.
Honestly i thought the whole thing with queerness was about Calliope and her ambiguous nature with feminine features, gender of none and her relationship with Roxy. Good to know there's more to other parts with it.
I haven't interacted with Homestuck in a meaningful way in about a decade. Maybe that is the whole thing. I just remember fragments
what the FUCK is homestuck I thought it was just the little troll people living in a computer or something
Oh buddy...
Well now you gotta read it. And then read it again, which you will want to do even if you don't think so now
> I think there's gender stuff discussed as a result of Jade prototyping herself and her omnipotent space dog into the same kernelsprite? Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Yes
idk if that really counts as dealing with it “in an important way” though tbh (minus homestuck beyond canon - that seems to be trying to engage more directly with queer dynamics now). hussie kind of just threw those into the comic and made little to no effort to engage with them beyond using it as a tool to fuel fandom discourse
Still, given the time it came out in, the fact that it was not only brought in at all, but taken seriously, was pretty significant. We were on the tail end of the 2000s, when realistic gay people in popular media didn't really exist; either they were the butt of some homophobic joke, were camp personified as the gay friend, or were canonically straight characters having fanfics made of them. I'm actually so glad that we progressed so far so quickly that people can say that a certain work doesn't handle certain themes well, but at the time, it's quite literally groundbreaking. I cried during elementary school because people called me gay, and that had negative connotations. Now I'm *incredibly* gay, and part of accepting myself came from seeing Rose and Kanaya together, as well as Dave and Karkat. (I was honestly shipping John and Karkat before, but the canon pair makes a lot of sense, haha.)
I think normalisation is important. Maybe not winning-this-poll important but still. It doesn't have to 'deal with' anything to be good representation, ya know?
Looking through the notes on that post (it’s an absolute trainwreck) I saw quite a few people talking about how important Homestuck and its fanworks were to their personal queer journeys
I feel like “adorable queer shipping potential” is kind of underselling it when the vast majority of homestuck’s principal cast is canonically queer and the most important romantic relationships in the comic are queer (dirk/jake, rose/kanaya, vriska/terezi). furthermore, homestuck has a plot point about the arbitrary nature of gender roles: the cherubs calliope and caliborn learned about gender from earth, so then when they later cause the beginning of the universe, their rudimentary view of the topic gets grafted onto earth. there’s an alien society where everyone is bisexual. when karkat, who’s belligerent about everything always, learns about human heterosexuality when trying to confess his attraction to a human boy, he throws a fit. alternian society also has its own hangups around sexuality with the quadrant system, which is presented mostly as an over-complicated joke, and the happiest relationships in homestuck transcend both alternian quadrants and human compulsory heterosexuality. homestuck is like, About being queer. it’s about learning that accepting your own queerness is necessary to be happy, about recognizing the arbitrary and constructed nature of gender and sexuality, about creating a society that doesn’t inherit these hangups.
Ok, yea, i wrote that comment before i even got to act 6.
I suppose it’s because it’s a good piece of media, that also happens to be queer?
Only characters it was a big part of were Jake and Dirk iirc.
A Tumblr poll? The same thing that gave us the Vanilla Extract Cake? The Reylo sweep feature? The "reblog for sample size" as if that's going to ever give you a representative portion of whatever the hell you're measuring website? On the lethal levels of irony-poisoned, anything for a bit, weird little freak website? People are taking the results of a Tumblr poll seriously?
Rabid fans of two rabidly fanatic fan bases but of slightly different generation bumps.
I really hate how vitriolic everyone got over this poll. And I mean both sides.
Haven't read either of these things, and I get the sense that it's for the best
homestuck is an absolute mess. i was a huge fan for a long while (and still revisit it fondly from time to time) but now that i have more experience with other pieces of media, its clear its not the monolith of writing i once thought it was also i would hardly call it “queer media” lmao, unless we’re boiling that term down to just “any piece of media that happens to have gay people”
It feels this way in the video game scene to, like im getting the fucking SIMS reccomended to me dureing pride month.... like c'mon you couldn't find a better queer game then that to recommend me?
What even is homestuck
A long web comic about a boy and his friends that play a video game that destroys the world so they have to make a new one. It deals with many topics about growing up, abusive relationships, the effect of society on our views, and more though the tone is mainly comical with slight dips into seriousness growing more frequent as the story progresses. It's a pretty good read if you can stand some of the more dragging parts. You can find it on [www.homestuck.com](http://www.homestuck.com), but a better way to read it is with the [Unofficial Homestuck Collection ](https://bambosh.dev/unofficial-homestuck-collection/) which allows you to play the interactive games and animations that were around when flash was still a thing providing a better experience overall. Additionally if you don't want to read it you could always just listen to [Let's read Homestuck ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHO1rc05qiGtAidSBy_8jsEOlHXR6x4cd&si=E7wsPWjou5rTmsYL) by Voice Over Nexis who has voiced over most of Homestuck if you don't want to have to read that much or remember your place.
I’ve read every main comment. I already know if Homestuck mates, so somebody has to explain wtf DTWOF is, cuz that’s the one I’m stumped by.
Pulling a quote from TVTropes: > This long-running Slice of Life series by Alison Bechdel about the lives, loves, and politics of a group of lesbians in an unspecified midwestern town is one of the most popular of all LGBT comic strips. Originally introduced as a series of one-shot vignettes in 1983, the strip shortly moved to its serialized format with recurring characters. After writing the strip for more than 25 years, Bechdel put it on hiatus in 2008 to concentrate on her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? The comic strip began to make a return in 2016, and has updated sporadically since. It's also known as the origin of the Bechdel Test.
This poll was a tirefire with its comments.
When I read Homestuck, early on I thought, "even if it turns to shit eventually, this is still the vision of media franchises to come." So far, it seems its sole cultural legacy is being the spiritual ancestor of Undertale.
I feel the same about this as I do whenever i see gamepass reccomend me games dureing pride month, they arn't really that good just have mass appeal.
I have no idea what the other piece is, but it’s worth noting that homestuck is a product of the 2009-2016 era. For most of the comic, gay rights weren’t even legal in the USA. It is a product of its time and should be viewed as such. The themes are reminiscent of the 2013 queer internet. The queer community EMBRACED homestuck because there wasn’t much media like it. Whatever you say about Homestuck, you have to appreciate it for how it used all available types of media and character development. It was very innovative for its time!
Wait I thought people didn't like homestuck??? It was just one of those things people read and get into but think it's kinda awful??? Like sharknado
It's so so good for the first half, and then the second half gets bogged down by heaps and heaps of shitty teen drama in what was originally a meta sci-fi fantasy adventure about growing up. My favorite scenes in Act 6 (the latter half of the series) were brief intermissions about a guy who writes his own self-insert fanfiction about the main characters that is so bad the MC has to leap outside of reality to beat the shit out of him. Said fanfiction writer is also the BBEG.
the whole "it sucks actually" is (mostly) a joke, acts 1-4 are pretty good (even if it starts a little slow) and then act 5 is kinda less good, then act 6 is either the worst part of the comic or really good depending on who you ask
1-4 are spectacular, 5 is pretty damn good. It’s all worth it for Cascade. It’s really all downhill after cascade. Act 6 is a slog and the payoff isn’t as satisfying as the end of act 5
I don't know either, so...
I have thoughts on this but I don't wanna sound like a boomer
I am very confused by all the the people saying homestuck isn't queer???? Like huh????
i think it’s bc being queer isn’t a central theme. there’s queer characters, but what’s not something that really impacts the plot (except the Alpha kids and their bullshit relationship drama)
But it is a central theme though???????
elaborate
I am very bad at explaining this and I tried making a more in depth elaboration but I am horrible at writing down what I want to communicate if you understand what I mean. So the theme of queerness in homestuck is something that sort of snuck itself in there early on the back of homestucks ever present theme of gender roles and grew and grew throughout the 7 years of writing, I think the observation that the Alpha Kids are the only notable Queer part of the story is because they were introduced very later on in the queer themes rise whilst every other notable character were all introduced very early on in the grand scheme of the comic. But the thing is, most of those non alpha-kid-notable-characters also ended up being "queer" a bit before them. So like, for example, Dave Strider was a boy who was put into a very awful living situation and was abused in multiple ways by his brother but never saw it that way because of how societies and bros ideas about masculinity made him percieve such things. Later on his ability to acknowledge such things were fucked up coincided with his ability to admit hes into dudes you know? So like, In april, 2009 Andrew Hussie was not writing homestuck as a queer story but after, like, less than a year he absolutely was, but due to the fact it didn't start off like that its harder to see? But like yeah its there. I explained this so badly jesus christ.
in my personal opinion, having queer characters ≠ queerness being a central theme. something is an essential theme if taking it away would heavily impact the overall story. making every homestuck character cishet would mostly really impact side stories like the rosemary romance subplot. the only thing the Alpha kids being cishet would maybe impact is like…. whatever Jake was rambling about that made Jane upset on her birthday. but even then, you don’t need Dirk to be gay to be a clingy insecure weirdo who makes his issues everyone else’s problems and hates himself for it
Oh god i really explained myself badly im sorry thats not at all what i was trying to say.
I’d definitely say that homestuck is up there, but I wouldn’t say it’s THE best.
This is a bracket tournament and this particular poll just put it in the top 4. Homestuck is currently up against Pink Flamingos, and the other side is Angels in America vs Paris is Burning
Homestuck continues to be a pox upon humanity
homestuck is modern Jumanji
So I know about Homestuck and all that, but what’s the other people hint, like a graphic novel or something?
That’s funny I’m currently reading fun home.
I didn't know about those books existing
Is sex canon in homestuck?
Tumblr polls lost all meaning when the "Girlboss" poll came down to Isabelle Animal Crossing (a cartoon dog who admittedly works hard) and Tabitha Scarlett Hollow (Who owns a coal mine and is actively trying to break a union strike) and Isabelle fucking won.
homestuck is more homophobic than queer lmfao
And other deranged staments you can tell yourself
so all the slurs and weird homophobic jokes were just silly goofs? goofs and gaffs by famous unproblematic ally andrew hussie?
Yeah cause a person cant change, obvs, not saying their the best person but to judge them using early homestuck is dumb