It’s fun to imagine a conversation with myself from high school. There are things that would surprise him, and some that wouldn’t faze him, but one thing I know would make him jump up and down in the air with excitement: I’ve been podcasting about Homestuck for the last four years.

It started as a Facebook message with a good friend during lockdown, before pulling in another as a blind reader. It wasn’t about gaining notoriety, it was about having an excuse to hang out. 

And as a goal, it seemed an achievable, low stakes challenge. What could be less serious than discussing a comic that ended in 2016?

Homestuck was a webcomic about four teenagers who play a video game which causes the end of the world. It’s mostly told in the style of text-based adventure games, and as a story on and about the internet, it used the full capacity of the internet to tell its story. Dialogue is presented as chatlogs, and along with images, it employs .gifs, flash animations, and even some games for readers to play. A lot of the novelty of the story is not just what is told, but how that’s communicated to readers. [For instance, one of the main villains types in white text, so you have to highlight all his dialogue to read it, which is very annoying, as you can tell from this sentence.] It’s also long. Like really long. It ran nearly the entire Obama presidency, and clocks in at over eight-thousand pages.¹

This combination of unique storytelling, internet culture, and character introductions that provided a template to build on led to a fandom known for being full of loud and obnoxious teenagers. Add in that things as innocuous as buckets, frogs, and the word “quadrents” all have additional meanings in the story, and it’s clear where the distaste for Homestuck came from for a lot of anime-con attendees in the 2010s. This was not helped by a large portion of the cast being alien internet trolls with grey skin, leading to cosplayers painting themselves grey and leaving trails of paint flakes all over convention halls. 

For four years, we attempted to detangle it all. I don’t remember who came up with the name Serious Buisness, after an in-comic social media app for dads to discuss important matters like whether wearing a rumpled hat is gentlemanly (it’s not). The show didn’t end where we started. Listening back to early episodes, I’m taking myself too seriously, and worrying too much that people won’t listen for more than an hour. Along the way, we made each other laugh, tried our hand at some other topics, and developed a cadence with each other. The result feels much more “us.” Last June, we put out what we expected would be the last episode, covering the end of the story. It was a little bittersweet, but mostly it was a relief to be done. No longer was every other week spent furiously editing to get an episode up. Finally, for the first time in a decade, I could stop thinking about Homestuck.

Then Homestuck updated again. Kind of. 

A pilot for an animated series retelling the story released in September, and I guess it’s fine. It takes a lot of stuff that serves to familiarize readers with the format and turns them into visual gags without any motivation behind them. One of my favorite characters doesn’t feel like the version of him I remember reading. The tonal dissonance of the original text, which captures the awkwardness of being a teen, is squished so the serious moments are undercut before they’ve even landed. 

As we made our way through the story as adults, I learned care and compassion for my high-school self. I realized that I had missed homophobia and just how excessive one character’s misogyny was. Now I see it more fully. On the graph of good (well made) to bad (poorly made) and good (I like it) to bad (I don’t), Homestuck lands in all four quadrants. It was one of the first stories that could only be told online. It’s incredibly inaccessible to people who need screen-readers or with flashing-induced epilepsy. Some of my favorite characters ever are in this story, but it constantly makes fun of the audience which is extremely grating. 

Homestuck is responsible for more of my personality than I’d care to admit. My love of Faygo started off semi-ironically due to the soft drink’s in-comic presence. The compassion I strive to hold for teenagers comes from revisiting this story I loved in my teenage-years as an adult. It fundamentally changed how I engage with media. But most importantly, Homestuck has given me a way to spend time with two people I dearly love. If I never think about it again, it will have given me that. What business could be more serious?

¹Page count is probably not the best measurement of Homestuck’s length, as some pages are just single panels, and others are flash games that take forty-five minutes to play. A better measurement would be that Homestuck is 817,929 words long. For a point of reference, the NIV is 727,969 words long by one count I found online. The point is Homestuck is an ordeal to get through.

Sam Tuit

Sam Tuit graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in film and media. He lives in Grand Rapids and works as an event coordinator. In his free time, he loves trying new things, cooking for others, and having nuanced conversations about the stories our society is telling.