Why did Homestuck get so popular?

Why did Homestuck get so popular?

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It's funny and interesting
Until it's not

PORN

UNDERAGED ALIEN PORN

Tons of potential for shipping.
The comic gets pretty colorful around the later half and vibrant colors attract autists.

I blame OP's mom.

Colourful and distinctive characters, in a comedic, fantastical world, combined with a bit of luck. That's the recipe for every weirdly obsessive fandom that came out of nowhere.

similar looking characters with modular design that allows people to easily make their own fan trolls, just like with Sonic characters.

>Building blocks for something good
>self-aware
>a few good jokes

People assumed the occasionally successful joke and awareness meant it would deliver on its potential. The OC friendly aliens pulled in a big following. Then it failed to deliver on anything.

Teenagers with ambiguous body types and broadly defined characteristics, meaning you can project traits on to them.

Is Vriska extremely conventionally attractive, a lanky nerd, or a completely typical teenage girl? Who's tall? Who's short?

Nobody knows, hence the variety in smut.

Hussie was getting a pretty good amount of buzz toward the end of PS, which gave him a bedrock of fans to keep HS going through the rough early arc(s).

The more human characters with colorful, but uncomplicated, aesthetics allowed younger fans to latch onto characters to identify with (and later obsess over).

The trolls allowed shipping to explode, which was helped immensely by the very streamlined design choice of having just about every character wear a plain black shirt with just a zodiac symbol on it.

Shit load of baiting.

The 90s/early aughts property nostalgia attracted median-to-older aged millenials, while the fantastical world building and relationships attracted younger millenials to older Gen Zers

When it came out, there was really no other webcomic with quite the same level of workmanship put into it. Hussie updated like a crazy person in the early days, and the animations, flash games, and 4th wall breaking updates were something that hadn't ever really been done before.

tl;dr a lot of gumption on Hussie's part, being in the right place at the right time, and appealing to shippers like fuck.

People were able to have a chance to have their inputted command as part of the webcomic. Not to mention the premise was a homage to text based adventure games, and 90's nostalgia; so the RPG aspect really adds to the malleability of the comic, along with people just generally enjoying dicking around. Pair that with .gifs and animations being incorporated into the webcomic, along with always feeling like there's something to discover; and you've got a recipe for a popular webcomic. Not to mention that animated webcomics, or breaking the fourth wall in them wasn't really a thing back then; so it was a pretty cool thing to see.

I could always pick the low hanging fruit and just say "Shipping" too, but while that's one of the big reasons; it's definitely not the only one. People like quirky characters that they can project traits onto; and over half the cast is exactly that. Why do you think people like Undertale so much for other than the story and worldbuilding? Same thing with M/L/P.

Was Vriska ever popular with the fandom, or was she mostly Hussie's thing?

>colorful
Yeah all that grey sure is great user

It gave us this horsne child.

Not really, unless you mean disliking her being popular; because it was. Most of the people hated her, and enjoyed it when she finally died; and thought she finally got what she deserved. A lot of people also disliked her because it was kind of apparent that she was his favorite. Other people wished she had a 'redemption' instead of dying; and probably ended up regretting it post retcon, since she didn't learn shit.

Which is why a lot of people hate the retcon, since Hussie basically wrote himself into a corner and ended up having to bring back his waifuu that nobody liked to go and solve all the problems in Homestuck without any explanation on why she knows all this shit all of the sudden.

First she was "popular" in the sense that there were endless shit storms arguing about the morality of her actions that would subsume all other discussion, and would go on forever. Here, it would invariably start a few hours after every update (or as soon as the update dropped if she was in it) and go on for like five hours. All the fucking time.Then she started to be redeemed in a lot of people's eye's and she was pretty well liked for awhile, which eventually faded in the absence of her death.

When she came back it was pretty immediately shit, so she never got a huge amount of traction after that.

Big hatedom, small number of people recognizing that she could have been done well and hoping it would pay off.

Hussie fumbled her hard. If her ultimate punishment was no longer mattering to the story, she and the rest of the trolls would have been wrapped up in a nice thematic bow.

It was actually really good during it's prime.

Autism

This desu senpai

You are describing John's neighborhood, and very little else.

>Heavy community involvement in the early days; MSPA was like a secret club of sorts
>Also in the early days, lots of references to shit like internet messengers, adventure games, interactive fiction, which appealed to nostalgic nerds
>A particular brand of meta humor that's pretty much unique to 2010 Hussie
>Author had delivered a satisfying and intense ending previously, and kept bragging about how this would be just like that but bigger and better
>Creative use of the medium (so far I don't think any non-fanadventure webcomic out there has done shit like walkarounds)
>The sheer amount of callbacks, red herrings, incomplete systems like aspects, and very subtle foreshadowing feeding the crazy theorists
>Abstract art style that let your imagination fill in the blanks and was also pretty unique (sprites, stolen Google images shit, etc.)
>After Act 5: vague but extensive worldbuilding fueling the creation of fanfic
>This, combined with extremely codified yet open-ended character themes, led to a fantroll and fankid craze (see also: SU gems, JoJo stands, etc.)
>Finally, appealing to shippers by making a massive show of the characters' romance angst, teenage drama, and sexuality in general

But most important of all
>Most important of all, LITERALLY INSANE UPDATE RATE thanks to Hussie's work ethic and/or NEET life, keeping everybody in a constant state of zeal
I think that was the biggest one.

...

Depends what you mean by "popular". A lot of people had a very strong opinion about whether she was a villain or an anti-hero. A lot didn't care and wished we could stop the morality wank and get back to other characters already.

Either way I don't know anyone who read Homestuck to the end and was satisfied by her character arc.
>Even Vriska fans?
ESPECIALLY Vriska fans. Although of course there's always a couple muh-waifu/husbando-did-nothing-wrong crazies in every fanbase, but I have thankfully never met those.

But yeah in the end I think she was just a thing for Hussie to masturbate to (intellectually, with all the subversion shit, and also probably the regular way).

>He left "big change" in
Most characters barely got past "Experimenting".

Not every character follows the typical arc, and a good writer won't be afraid to show regression or incomplete arcs. It's a chart of the farthest any of the characters will go, ideally with the protagonist reaching the final step (outside of tragedies, series with decoy protags and villain protags), not what every character with an arc entails.

user is saying that under Hussie, the farthest you get is backpedaling to reluctance, not that the average character even had an arc.

Okay, let's settle this once and for all.

Which character ruined Homestuck?

Hussie.

None of them, and all of them.
If anyone did anything we would have a story, making the comic more tolerable.

Instead all of the characters did nothing for almost the entire series.

>Implying you can blame a singular fictional character for bad writing.

If any of the characters overwhelmed the whole comic instead of bits and pieces you might have had a point. As it is, the orange man is to blame.

Hussie.

>None of them, and all of them.
But some characters are more guilty than others

You bet we didnt need those stupid B-side trolls or whatever the fuck they were called

Is Kankri doing nothing TRULY any more responsible than Jade doing nothing?

I'd say no.

Which wiggler should John smash?

Probably the teens and young adults posting it around on social media and everyone who saw it having a "okay what is this thing" reaction going and reading it.

>smash

i see what you did there ;)

...

Katnep is dum8.

Cool music.
youtube.com/watch?v=oc5WL2NKbf8