> Engage in useless learning.
You pick up a book and start learning all sorts of completely useless things. You are certain it will never be useful again.
- Ascended Fanon: Many character traits and hobbies come from fan theories and questions that Hussie has been made aware of.
- Tavros being in a wheelchair is from a popular fan theory before his reveal, and Eridan's interest in wizards comes from his similar appearance to Harry Potter.
- Davesprite's Fan Nickname of Seppucrow is used by Dave in an actual page of the comic.
- Bro's Cool Shades being Kamina shades. John calls them "dumb anime shades" as a nod to this, and Word of God says that it wasn't deliberate at first, but his forum-goers asked him about it and brought Kamina to his attention.
- WV and PM being an ex-soldier and a female respectively were both Fanon until Andrew made them canon.
- The Pre-Scratch Trolls having more than a footnote in the story came from fans dogging Hussie for information about them.
- Rufioh Nitram's name was a prevailing Fan Nickname before his introduction.
- Cronus Ampora's lightning scar comes from fans frequently comparing his dancestor (Eridan) to Harry Potter. He supposedly got that scar from an evil magician that cannot be named. And his Fan Nickname Coolscar shows up in his tags while he harasses Mituna.
- Porrim Maryam's protesting of the inequality in Sburb is much like what many fans have done.
- The Dolorosa being the slave girl who is assassinated by Dualscar having been sold into slavery likely came from fans speculating that Kanaya's ancestor was said slave.
- Mutie was her Fan Nickname before her name was made official.
- FedoraFreak's entire existence, and pretty much everything he says, is from fans.
- All Prospitians and Dersites eventually start to be referred to as Carapacians, a variant of the Fan Nickname for them, as a whole in Act 6.
- Snowman is female because of this according to word of Hussie.
Quarters and Matchsticks's heights were fanon, as was Quarters's use of a minigun. - Caliborn's original character in his mini arc is a poorly drawn version of a fan's drawing made before his full reveal.
- There were fan theories about a 13th "Ophiuchus" troll with the tag UU since Act 3 when the trolls were revealed. There were two characters with the tag UU and Ophiuchus-related symbolism, which was done to deliberately avoid validating any fan theory. Later, they're shown to not even be trolls at all, but the fanon still influenced the idea behind them.
- Lord English was not named as a reference to Lord British (he's named for a billiards term). Hussie liked the idea though, and decided to run with the similarities.
- For a single panel in [S] Collide, Karkat uses two sickles, something that has commonly been portrayed in fan art.
- Approval of God: In 2021, with the Homestuck website becoming more unstable, Hussie retweeted a tweet promoting Bamboshu's unofficial Homestuck collection as the best way to read the comic.
- Author's Saving Throw:
- Several fans were not happy with the creation of Tavrisprite, a horrifying mixture of two popular characters. Mere panels later, Tavrisprite explodes and Vriska and Tavros are apart again, albeit still dead.
- John/Vriska was perhaps the most Base Breaking ship in the fandom. In Act 6, both John and Vriska independently and completely discard the romance.
- Jane's Trickster Mode spawned some Flame War after declares that she feels "so CAUCASIAN!" after powering up (Andrew's way of making fun of people who consider determining the races of characters he considers raceless). Shortly after the incident, Andrew changed her message to "I feel so PEACHY!" and declared that her skin was peach-colored and not race-specific, as certain unsavory individuals were using the "caucasian" reveal as an excuse to harass fans of racial minority characters.
- Then, of course, there's the revelation that the Trickster shenanigans were a Juju-induced Mushroom Samba that utterly freaked Jane (and the other kids) out. Though it's something of an Ass Pull, the revelation can be seen as this.
- Caliborn shoving dust in the cartridge for Act 6 Act 6, aka, the final act that's not epilogue, and promising to ruin it had some fans up in arms about even more off-panel characterization such as the problems with the trip between sessions and the jump between the Alpha's entry and Jane's birthday, just to speed the story up. Fortunately John shows up and makes it little more than a framing device.
- All of the Felt, who were long one of the most popular Ensemble Dark Horse groups, end up coming back and getting some more attention in Act 6.
- The months-long Gigapause took place in part to address the complaints that were being made by the fandom about the narrative of the comic as of Act 6, in order to make for a strong conclusion.
- Following The Reveal that Vriska never died in the post-retcon timeline, a lot of people were angered, presuming that this would completely erase the Pre-Retcon Vriska, who had already died and lived in the dreambubbles, and subsequently cause Post-Retcon Vriska to forsake all of her Character Development she received before dying. Updates afterwards establish that while Post-Retcon Vriska may not have learned her lesson completely, Pre-Retcon Vriska still exists in the dreambubbles and has kept her development intact.
- After fans have been clamoring for Nepeta's return for years, Hussie finally brought her back as Jake's sprite in the post-retcon timeline. This was seemingly subverted when she was fused with Davesprite which pissed fans off, but than double-subverted shortly after when Davepeta met up with Arquiussrpite, leading to one of the funniest and most heartwarming updates in a long time.
- While Act 7 was agreed to be awesome on its own, there were many complaints that it still left a number of threads open. Not longer after its immediate release, Hussie announced he was working on an epilogue. Connected to the above, Hussie's release of the Homestuck credits (which are not the epilogue, but still expand upon the ending) won back a lot of fans lost thanks to Act 7 due to tying up quite a few loose ends. However, the actual episodes and sequel led to quite a Broken Base, but this was lessened by the fact that both of these are considered "dubious canon" and allow for easy Fanon Discontinuity.
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
- Tavros never said he had a meowbeast allergy; he did say he had a cat allergy, however.
- Karkat only says "fuckass" once, and that time he's not insulting someone, he's describing something he's trying not to be. John also uses the term once, and the other three uses all come from (surprisingly) Jade.
- Colbert Bump: Some people who can't easily get a hold of Faygo have started ordering it over the Internet to see what Gamzee's favorite drink tastes like.
- The various YouTube videos Homestuck links to (such as this one) often find their comment sections dominated by fans.
- The various YouTube videos Homestuck links to (such as this one
- Creator Backlash: At one point in his notes in the Act 4 book, Hussie stated that he'd written out a whole backstory for the Beta universe, detailing the Condesce's life as Betty Crocker and how things ended up where they were at the beginning of Act 1, then how it was really old and that nobody would want to read it anyway. At the beginning of 2019, the backstory was hidden as part of an ARG, and he immediately regretted it (as it contained some poor taste humor that drew comparisons to antisemitism), to the point that he broke radio silence and apologized for putting it up in the first place.◊
- Defictionalization:
- A lot of the finery and trinkets in the story are available for sale.
- Caliborn's DeviantArt account is real (here); it's not certain if he's actually on Vine or it was just simpler to host the gifs there, similar to using Newgrounds to host [S] Cascade. Vriska's Instagram account is also real (here).
- The in-universe fictional chat client, Pesterchum, was recreated by the fans. And yes, you can use it to chat online and it has the same features as the original.
- Forum regular Eyes5 made a real Cal doll and gave it to Andrew.
- Demand Overload: The comic has "brought down the house" on several occasions, particularly with its Flash updates:
- [S] Cascade, the finale of Act 5, is the definite record-holder so far for managing a triple-kill. In anticipation of the site crashing, it was also hosted on Newgrounds of all websites— and the traffic crashed NG about three minutes after! Someone proceeded to put the flash on Livestream so people could view it, but that site crashed as well! Tumblr crashed soon after with all the people posting it.
- The merchandise released in wake of [S] ACT 7 was in such high demand that the What Pumpkin store crashed hard. The fandom couldn't help but be amused that they managed to make one more site crash in the end.
- And even that wasn't the end of it, as the fandom managed to crash Google Drive streaming on the day of the Epilogues release in 2019.
- Development Gag: CD's poor memory is the only remnant of a dropped gimmick for the Midnight Crew where they had personality traits based off the phrase "forgive and forget". note
- Doing It for the Art: The people who paid for the appearance of the fantrolls Mierfa Durgas and Nektan Whelan were more interested in funding Hiveswap than having their characters show up onscreen.
- Fandom Nod: Many, as Hussie considers Homestuck a conversation between fandom and author.
- Fan Community Nicknames: Homestucks, as in "Nick is a Homestuck".
- Flip-Flop of God: Hussie has presented two contradictory views of Sburb: that A) one session occurs in any given universe (successfully anyways) and B) multiple sessions occur in any given universe and indeed multiple sessions can occur on the same planet at different points in time. There's evidence enough to support both sides, but given certain events like the Great Undoing, it seems the former explanation is more correct.
- God Never Said That: Skipper Plumbthroat doesn't have a pegleg, despite fans assuming he did.
- Half-Remembered Homage: The Horrorterrors bear an obvious resemblance to the monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos, but Andrew Hussie has said he was primarily riffing on the Mythos' popularity in geek culture. So he used Popcultural Osmosis as his only source on the topic and never read a word of H. P. Lovecraft.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes:
- After the site was purchased by VIZ Media, a lot of images ended up breaking and not getting fixed quickly, or in some cases at all. As Adobe ended support for Flash, several interactive pages also got rehosted as (surprisingly low-quality) YouTube videos. Several unofficial archives of the comic in its original form have cropped up in an attempt to resolve these issues.
- On October of 2019, several albums on the official Bandcampnote were suddenly removed without warning. While most of the solo albums are up on the Bandcamps of their composers, Squiddles! and The Wanderers have no replacement reuploads.
- Meaningful Release Date:
- The first seven pages went up on April 13, or 4/13 (2009). Since then, the comic has used 413 as an Arc Number all over the place. Given the way Hussie's been writing by the seat of his pants, and that he had originally tried to launch the story on April 10, it's safe to assume he built the arc number around the launch date rather than vice versa.
- Also, four anniversary animations have been released on 4/13 (in 2010, 2013, 2015, and 2016), along with one for the 413th day anniversary.
- 612 is introduced as an Arc Number in Act 5, which started on June 12th, 2010.
- The Finale of Act 5, "[S] Cascade", had one of these accidentally. It was originally meant to be released in September, but Schedule Slip delayed it so much that it wasn't finished until the middle of October, so Hussie agreed to hold it off for a few days to match the third Arc Number, 1025. It was released on October 25, 2011.
- 1025 is the sum of 413 and 612, so 1025 is also a combination of the two previous arc numbers.
- Three years later, [S] GAME OVER/ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3 was released.
- And Act 6 introduces a new arc number, 11 11 11 - Act 6 began on November 11th, 2011.
- In the Act 6 Act 4 flash, Jack Noir is seen marking off days in his jail cell as time passes for the Alpha session. At the end of the flash, twenty-one weeks and six days have passed (21 and 6, or 612 backwards). That many days after 11/11/11 is 4/12 of 2012, one day before the Beta kids will enter the Alpha session, and that many days before 11/11/11 is 6/12/11.
- There's a lot of regular updates that coincide with real-world holidays as well. The top of Jade's ball-shaped lab dropping onto the ground after a countdown was released on New Year's Day, and the page where Aranea discusses leprechauns was released a day before Saint Patrick's Day.
- The first seven pages went up on April 13, or 4/13 (2009). Since then, the comic has used 413 as an Arc Number all over the place. Given the way Hussie's been writing by the seat of his pants, and that he had originally tried to launch the story on April 10, it's safe to assume he built the arc number around the launch date rather than vice versa.
- The Merch: There's a lot of available merchandise from the comic, most notably everyone's clothing.
- Missing Episode: Two of the songs from the coloUrs and mayhem: Universe A album, "Indigo Archer" and "Temporal Shenanigans", were removed from Homestuck's Bandcamp as of December 2021. Both songs are written by Rachel Rose Mitchell, who sided with Sarah Z following her video about her stint with What Pumpkin's legal team. The entirety of the album Strife! by Joren "Tensei" de Bruin is also no longer available in Homestuck's Bandcamp, although it's still available on Tensei's own Bandcamp.
- Mutually Fictional: Homestuck takes this trope to its Mind-Screw extreme with the events of the main story and the Midnight Crew. In the world of the main characters of Homestuck the Midnight Crew are from the latest MS Paint Adventures series, and the reverse is true for the actual members of the Midnight Crew in their world. However, Word of God along with events at the end of the first Intermission claim that the the Midnight Crew exist within the same canon as Homestuck! In other words, it's not a Show Within a Show, it's a Show Within Itself!
- To elaborate on the "exist within the same canon", the world of the Midnight Crew is the same world as those of the Trolls, who also exist in (or at least communicate with) the kids in the Homestuck world, but are from an alternate universe.
- And, to take things even further, the art style and some of the universe mechanics for Midnight Crew suggest that it may also takes place in the same universe as the previous MS Paint Adventures comic, Problem Sleuth.
- Also, Problem Sleuth was apparently in the same universe as Jailbreak and Bard Quest, and John in Homestuck has video games of all three of these. There are probably even more tie-ins than that.
- Part of this is explained by the fact that Andrew Hussie exists in Homestuck beyond the fourth (and fifth) walls, which is apparently between the other universes. It's implied he's been sending Midnight Crew comics to the human universe, Homestuck comics to the Troll Universe, and a sequel for Problem Sleuth to the post-Scratch human universe.
- To elaborate on the "exist within the same canon", the world of the Midnight Crew is the same world as those of the Trolls, who also exist in (or at least communicate with) the kids in the Homestuck world, but are from an alternate universe.
- Promoted Fanboy: Much of the final animations, namely [S] Collide and [S] ACT 7, were actually done by long time fans. Extends to new in-house studio, What Pumpkin, and the Adventure Game, Hiveswap. A lot of the people are listed on this page.
- Dante Basco became this, becoming associated with Homestuck 2.0 after reading the comic.
- Referenced by...: Toby Fox, who previously composed music for the comic, stated during the Undertale sixth anniversary livestream that Alphys' design in both that game and Deltarune was inspired by John Egbert.
- Schedule Slip:
- Parodied with the placeholder for the (real) Act 4 finale:You go downstairs to check the mail for the END OF ACT. In spite of the fact that the red arm-swingy-dealy thing is flipped up, the mailbox is empty! You are going to have to conclude that the position of the red flippy-lever thing is an unreliable gauge for the presence of mail. You really don't know what the point of it is. The parcel you are waiting for is obviously going to be late. You will have to keep checking the mail over the next several days. Hopefully it will not arrive too late, or it may start to become a sore subject with you.
- That said, Homestuck was originally slated to end on its anniversary, then was pushed back to the following August, then to its second anniversary, then left unstated before a vague estimation of being done by 2013, and finally remaining on the verge of finality before concluding on its seventh anniversary.
- The original update planned for the anniversary came out almost two months later, but there were plenty of updates in between, so fans didn't mind too much.
- Inverted: Hussie announced that he was busy and might not be updating as often for a little while. In the next week, he posted eighty pages. Yes, eighty.
- The 12/16/2010 (the 612th Day Anniversary) update actually came out well into 12/17.
- The End of Act 5 update was actually pushed back enough that it landed on an important date, 10/25.
- The update intended for Valentine's Day, 2012 actually came out 2 days later.
- On 4/14/2013, Hussie announced what he termed a 'Megapause'. He would be postponing work on the webcomic for some time in order to work on the game instead.
- The final album of August 2012's solo album month came out two months after the last one, on Oct 23.
- Parodied with the placeholder for the (real) Act 4 finale:
- Series Hiatus:
- "The year 4 Megapause": On April 14th, 2013, Homestuck went on hiatus due to Hussie needing time to work on the aforementioned game. It returned on June 12th, 2013.
- The "Gigapause": On October 17th 2013, Homestuck went on hiatus due to Hussie deciding that it would be best if the remainder of the story was completed and released in one go.
- ... which didn't happen, as he ended up resuming the series on October 16th, 2014. There were a few months of updates until January, when he announced a hiatus for which he didn't have a definite name, but which the fandom nicknamed as "Masterpause", which would end on April 13th, 2015.
- 4/13/2015 through 7/27/15 had (mostly) daily updates, each having several pages/panels, with the occasional scheduled off-week thrown in. On 7/27/15 the "Omegapause" started, which lasted until 3/28/16 where a constant stream of updates would lead up to the final update on 4/13/16.
- ... which would in turn be followed by the longest hiatus of all, as the Credits animation on 10/24/16 was followed by two and a half years of complete silence, only broken with the debut of the Homestuck Epilogues on 4/13/19, three years after Act 7.
- Shrug of God: Exactly what ethnicity the human characters are, especially since it's been shown to be a touchy subject in the fandom in the past. One official calendar had two different artists portray Jade with different skin colors on different pages.
- Teasing Creator: Hussie would often deliberately take joke questions on his blogs, or answer plot-relevant questions with a joke.
- Trolling Creator: Andrew Hussie's jokes on the fans are legendary. Many of his self-inserts into the story are there solely to make fun of fans who were upset over certain plot developments. He also likes to throw Red Herrings into the plot liberally and then subvert the audience's expectations. He further has a habit of building up to a reveal or climax, and then abruptly cutting away to some other random part of the plot for a while, knowing that this annoys the readers to no end.
- Troubled Production: Hiveswap was originally planned to have been completed sometime in 2014, but it was pushed back and production shifted from The Odd Gentlemen to Hussie's own new studio What Pumpkin. Details are still largely unclear, but allegations from a What Pumpkin associate claimed that TOG had used a chunk of the money on a buggy demo, whereas other sources claim that TOG was essentially without any sort of direction for months as the design documents weren't even finished until 2015, and TOG went on to work on King's Quest for Activision. Between this and a number of claims from said WP associate, fans were led to believe that TOG stole money for King's Quest and did nothing, even though it would later come out that Hussie had them work on other Homestuck content such as assets used for the eventual finale.
- The game continued to suffer from troubled production with WP NYC, who were developing Act 1 being suddenly shuttered, and a good portion of their work tossed out, where after the game was reworked to be 2D instead. Even as of this writing, the final portion of the game hasn't been completed even though What Pumpkin has released other HS projects in the interim.
- What Could Have Been:
- Hussie had planned Heroes of Light: Strife, an epic animation for round two of the battle between Grimdark Rose and Bec Noir, as well as the battle between Vriska and Bec Noir but was cancelled, as explained here:Hussie: The planned animation would have been a major escalation in production value. The sophistication of the animations has increased over time, and part of the point of this for me is to keep pushing the envelope, but there are limits to how far you can go. It's good to keep pushing and find your limits and test them, but realistically you'll have to pull back at some point. Because that is what a limit is. A line between something you can do, and something that is literally impossible.I'm not saying the animation I had in mind was impossible, but it was approaching scary territory. I just made a judgment and decided it wasn't worth the energy, all things considered.
- So instead, the fight is shown in an abridged, narrated, slideshow-like format. While many fans did not like this and preferred epic flash animations, some admitted the "abridged slideshow" at least got the job done.
- Earlier, Dave's Inventory Management Puzzle was going to lead up to a hashrap battle between Dave and Bro. Hussie decided not to go through with it - and this is actually lampshaded by Dave after the actual Strife with Bro. Much later in Act 6, Hussie did manage to do a rap battle using the Inventory Management Puzzle, thanks to Dirk and Squarewave.
- After Problem Sleuth finished, Hussie thought about doing a Midnight Crew adventure before starting Homestuck. Though this never came to be, they did ultimately became important characters in the comic and got their own Intermission.
- Homestuck was originally going to be done entirely in Flash, as in the Beta version found here. This was abandoned as Flash was too much work.
- The four substances that the kids collect (oil, chalk, amber and uranium) were all originally going to play a role in their land quests: The ocean on LOLAR was going to be poisoned by all the excess chalk, which the islands were made out of, the gears on LOHAC were going to be gummed up by sticky amber sap, and LOFAF was going to be affected by fallout in a nuclear winter kind of way. Ultimately, this idea only came to fruition with John's planet, while the other three concepts were steamrolled to make way for the broadening plot.
- Hussie had planned Heroes of Light: Strife, an epic animation for round two of the battle between Grimdark Rose and Bec Noir, as well as the battle between Vriska and Bec Noir but was cancelled, as explained here:
- Word of Gay:
- Kanaya is confirmed by Word of God to be gay: although trolls do not have a concept of sexual orientation, maleness is a deal-breaking turnoff for her.
- As part of the extended "Toblerone Cave" fandom in-joke, Hussie confirmed the popular headcanon that John Egbert is a closeted trans woman. It's not at all clear how sincere this is.
- Word of God: Hussie used to use Formspring as a means of communicating with readers; he eventually ditched itnote in favor of his Tumblr account, though that, too, was eventually abandoned when he learned the hard way that you can misquote a post while reblogging it.note .
