Homestuck

• 1. Introduction

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  Homestuck is an Internet fiction series by the American author and artist Andrew Hussie, and one of its Flash animations, Cascade, once crashed Newgrounds, Megaupload, and Twitter when it went online. So many people rushed to watch it that the servers could not cope. The series ran from the 13th of April 2009 to the 13th of April 2016. By the end it filled more than 8,000 pages and 800,000 words. How does a story told through single panels and chat logs grow to that size? What made readers follow it with such devotion? And what became of the world Hussie built after he declared the main story finished?

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• 2. Sburb and Its Players

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  On John Egbert's thirteenth birthday in 2009, a beta copy of a computer game called Sburb arrives at his door. The game lets him reshape the real world through a sandbox-style interface. His friends Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley join him. Meteor storms soon strike each of their homes. They survive only by finishing in-game tasks until they reach a place called the Medium. There they learn that installing Sburb somehow set off the destruction of Earth. Their only hope is to win the game and create a new universe.

  Danger comes from two directions. A ruthless villain named Jack Noir attacks the kids in the Medium. Meanwhile twelve Internet trolls, whose own Sburb session ended in failure, blame the kids for it. Karkat Vantas, Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope, and Vriska Serket each form a bond with one of the humans. The trolls turn out to be a real species of horned aliens. The story then turns aside to show how they came to play. The enigmatic Doc Scratch, who serves an even more mysterious master, manipulated them. They won their session, and that victory created the universe the kids live in. Jack Noir attacked before they could claim their prize, so they hid on a meteor and began to troll the kids through a chat program.

  The alliance between the two groups is shaky. Vriska sabotages key events, and the kids accidentally turn Jack Noir into a seemingly invincible monster. Tensions among the trolls boil over into killing. Almost half of them, Vriska included, die before Karkat restores order. Doc Scratch then tells the kids about a game mechanism called the Scratch. It lets the humans reset their session and escape Jack. It also summons Lord English, Doc Scratch's master, who seeks dominion over all of reality.

  The reset gives the story a second generation. Versions of the kids become guardians to new players, who are versions of their own ancestors. Jane Crocker, John's late grandmother, is now fifteen and leads Roxy Lalonde, Dirk Strider, and Jake English. They are Rose's mother, Dave's brother, and Jade's grandfather. Her Imperious Condescension, known as the Condesce, is the former troll empress and now serves Lord English. She dominates the new Earth. Online, the new kids talk with a pair of cherub siblings, Calliope and Caliborn. Calliope becomes a fast friend. Caliborn resents their closeness, and in the cherubs' own game he has his sister assassinated so that he can win alone.

  The finale begins when kids and trolls finally unite in the new session. John Egbert develops powers that let him retcon earlier events within the narrative. Only John, Roxy, Dirk, and the troll Terezi survive the fighting. Guided by Terezi, John retcons key moments, most notably Vriska's death, to open a clear path to victory. The kids and trolls then defeat their enemies in a giant battle and create the new universe. The comic ends with Lord English fighting an army led by Vriska. Caliborn becomes Lord English after gaining unconditional immortality as a reward for beating Sburb alone. The surviving heroes stand ready to enter their new universe. Telling a plot this tangled required tools that few comics ever use.

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• 3. Not Quite a Webcomic

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  The links at the bottom of each Homestuck page read like commands typed into an interactive fiction game. That choice hints at how unusual the work is. It is normally called a webcomic, and many of its pages are single panels. But it also mixes in animated GIFs, instant message logs, and the occasional browser game.

  Hussie's earlier works had used only GIF images for animation. Homestuck brought in complex Flash animations and Flash games, and many of them involved contributions from fan artists. Kevin Veale, an academic at Massey University, argued that these varied methods let the series steer its readers' experience. In his view, that steering is how it told a layered, nonlinear story.

  The game inside the story has recognizable cousins. Sburb has been compared to The Sims, Spore, and EarthBound. Hussie's earlier webcomic Problem Sleuth shares the series' fondness for time travel, mystery, a sprawling fictional universe, and frequent references to pop culture and previous adventures. The big change came in setting. Bard Quest and Problem Sleuth, two other MS Paint Adventures, were set in historical worlds. Homestuck turned to contemporary society, with online gaming and Internet culture at its center.

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• 4. Fans at the Controls

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  The Homestuck Beta went up on the 10th of April 2009, only three days after Problem Sleuth. It lasted just a few days before the main series began. At first, fans shaped the story by deciding what the characters would do. Hussie later abandoned that format. In his words, the method had become "too unwieldy and made it difficult... to tell a coherent story." He took control of the plot and the characters' actions, but he still said he "visited fan blogs and forums" for small touches to add.

  The schedule was never smooth. Updates stopped several times in named pauses. The most infamous was the gigapause, when Hussie spent a full year working only on Hiveswap.

  The last chapter, a nine-minute animated short titled "S ACT 7", ended the run. Hussie said an epilogue would arrive at some point in the future. In late 2016 the comic updated again with a credit sequence and more panels, delivered as a Snapchat story. In 2018 Hussie partnered with Viz Media on physical editions. These hardcover books carried the original storyline and art along with new commentary.

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• 5. A Fandom in the Millions

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  At its height, Homestuck drew around a million unique visitors to its site every day. The fandom ran into the millions through much of the series' history. Lauren Rae Orsini asked Hussie in an interview whether he still felt in control, given that the comic already had more than 5,000 pages and 128 characters. He answered that Homestuck itself was "still under my control". But he said the movement around it "is not under my control, and never really was."

  Fans built their own tools too. MSPFA, short for MS Paint Fan Adventures, is a website where users create and read stories in the Homestuck format.

  The actor Dante Basco became a famous fan after friends told him that Rufio, the character he played in the 1991 film Hook, appears in the comic. His interest led to a friendship with Hussie. Hussie then created a new character, Rufioh, who carries Basco's typing quirks and personality. Basco also teamed with the Voice Over Nexus YouTube channel to voice the title character in Let's Read Homestuck.

  Toby Fox, later the creator of the video games Undertale and Deltarune, was a noted member of the official Music Contribution Team. The Internet historian Amanda Brennan credits much of Undertale's early success on Tumblr to his association with Homestuck.

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• 6. Merchandise and Kickstarter

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  What Pumpkin is Hussie's shop, company, and record label, and through it fans can buy T-shirts, hoodies, pins, books, and fan art prints. Fans were also recruited to make music for the series. Ten major soundtrack albums have been released so far, along with eighteen side albums. On the 13th of April 2014, the fifth anniversary of Homestuck, Hussie launched Paradox Space, an anthology spin-off webcomic.

  Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a webcomic that appears early inside Homestuck itself. The character Dave Strider draws it, and it is intentionally terrible. The publisher TopatoCo printed a collection and described it in its press release as "the worst comic strip ever". In 2017 TopatoCo announced a second book, co-written by dril and co-drawn by KC Green, funded through Kickstarter.

  The larger Kickstarter came in 2012. On the 4th of September, Hussie announced a campaign to fund a Homestuck video game. Kotaku noted that it raised "more than $275,000 in hours". More than 80% of the $700,000 goal was pledged on the first day, and the full amount arrived in fewer than 32 hours. Stretch goals added macOS and Linux support. Digital Trends writer Graeme McMillan observed that the campaign was nearing the record for a comics-related Kickstarter, then held by The Order of the Stick at $1,254,120. The total finally reached $2,485,506. That made it the fifth game on Kickstarter to bring in a full seven figures and, at the time, the third highest funded video game in the site's history. A PayPal fundraiser took donations from people who could not use Kickstarter's payment methods.

  The game studio The Odd Gentlemen was meant to build it, but production moved in-house to What Pumpkin. The art style changed from 3D to 2D at the same time. Development began in 2013, with a finished game expected in 2014. The first episode did not appear until 2017. Homestuck has also inspired two visual novels, Hiveswap Friendsim and Pesterquest.

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• 7. Sequels and a Pilot

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  The Homestuck Epilogues began on the 13th of April 2019, ten years to the day after the series launched. They are pure text with no images, styled like fanfiction on Archive of Our Own. Two parallel stories run through them. The Meat Timeline ties up loose threads from the original work. The Candy Timeline draws on elements usually associated with "fanon". The two eventually begin to interact. Hussie wrote them alongside several fan writers, and although they were free online, they also received a physical release.

  Homestuck: Beyond Canon launched on the 25th of October 2019 under the name Homestuck^2. A team of writers worked from an outline by Hussie, and Patreon funded the project. In March 2021 its about page said the work had been paused indefinitely and that the team was being commissioned to finish the story privately. A February 2021 Patreon post said the Patreon would stop charging patrons. Snake Solutions, the company commissioned to write and illustrate it, has reportedly shut down.

  On the 8th of October 2023 the comic updated for the first time in nearly three years. A new team now works under James Roach, the Hiveswap composer, with Hussie as Executive Producer. The Patreon relaunched on the 30th of October. The ^2 was dropped, and Roach explained that the original outline called it simply Homestuck: Beyond Canon, because it is not a sequel in the traditional sense. He also began calling the earlier chapters a "prologue".

  An animated adaptation was announced on the 9th of August 2025 by SpindleRoo, an Australian division of SpindleHorse, the company of Vivienne Medrano. Skye Henwood directs and writes. Toby Fox voices John Egbert, Cherami Leigh voices Rose Lalonde, and Colleen O'Shaughnessey voices Jade Harley. Adam McArthur plays Dave Strider, Brandon Winckler plays Karkat Vantas, and Chris O'Neill is the narrator. In a September 2025 interview, Medrano told Polygon that the pilot would run 11 minutes and cover most of the first chapter. Audience reaction would decide whether studios want a full series or whether it continues on her YouTube channel. She called Henwood "an enormous fan who knows the comic very intimately". The pilot was released on the 27th of September 2025 and had over 2.3 million views by March 2026.

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• 8. Verdicts and Comparisons

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  Ben Tolkin wrote after the series ended that nobody can truly start Homestuck now. In his words, "Homestuck is done. If you missed it, you missed it." He treated the community, the shifting pace of updates, and the constant chatter between fandom and author as part of the masterpiece. Rob Beschizza made a similar point, saying that reading it today would be "like buying a DVD of Woodstock." What mattered, he said, was being there.

  Others reached for literary comparisons. PBS Idea Channel compared Homestuck to James Joyce's Ulysses because of its length and complexity. Mordicai Knode of Tor Books argued that it should be judged separately as a webcomic and as a plot. He placed it beside hypertext fiction and its attempts at the physical page, such as Pale Fire and House of Leaves. His conclusion was that "Homestuck is the first great work of genuinely hypertext fiction. If that puts it in the same breath as Ulysses, then so be it."

  Lori Henderson of the School Library Journal described the look as mostly black and white, with splashes of color and minimal animation. She felt that suited the webcomic. The goofy-looking characters, often drawn without arms, only "adds to the charm". Bryan Lee O'Malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim, called it a "massive undertaking of deftly-handled long-term serialized storytelling" that is "well-written and thoughtful". Orsini offered a more skeptical note, suggesting that the effort readers put into finishing Homestuck is an example of effort justification.

  NPR placed Homestuck among its top 100 reader favorite comics and graphic novels in 2017. That ranking came a year after the final chapter, so the series was still collecting honors after its story had ended.

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