tagged for blacklist as #long post
tfw younger/newer homestuck fans were not around 5-7 years ago when we, the older fans, who were mostly TEENS back then, were still under the assumption that certain characters were just gag characters with no significant impact on the story, because homestuck, 5-7 years ago, held a very different tone to us than it does now, where us older fans, the ones who have shaped homestuck’s community for new fans now, watched these character grow up for 7 years without being able to read everything within a month.
because homestuck was constantly evolving and improving and changing, and the story was always diverging for months at a time, distracting us before bringing us back, leaving us to fan theory and conceptualize and get into heated debates about what a characters true motives were before it was revealed.
5-7 years ago, bro strider was considered a character with little to ZERO background story. things we heard by word of the beta kids were, at the time, random and funny. a guy who runs a puppet porn site? hilarious. raps with his kid brother? also cool. we genuinely thought that dave looked up to bro. we did not know any better, and thus we created Fanon Bro, who was essentially our creation, who we perceived bro as back when we had no information, who is nothing like the bro that we came to discover in comic as homestuck continued, and who eventually died out in the fandom when 3 years down the line it became apparent to us that he was abusive the more that the comic and dave revealed about him.
Eridan and Gamzee, villains who we thought were typical gag characters, turned out to be intentionally murderous assholes. “wweh” and “nyeh” was eridans fucking fandom anthem (popularized more by fanon VA’s back when those were a thing), because people assumed he was just a “nice guy” trope and did not expect him to attempt to kill several people. nor did they expect gamzee to fucking snap the way he did and kill equius and nepeta. people were SHOCKED, because, as stated previously, we had gone YEARS knowing these characters as one type, only to have their true selves shown to us in an instant and shatter our realities regarding them.
the same can be said about aranea, who appeared to be a much nicer serket when we first met her, but eventually turned out to also be a villain, and was erased entirely from the narrative for her interference.
like. i get that younger/newer fans are seeing the thousands of fanworks produced by fans about who they deem as Bad Characters, but yall gotta understand that most of that content was produced YEARS ago, before we were given the information. you have it incredibly easy. homestuck was nearly finished by the time you started reading it in its final stretch to the true ending.
you probably were not there to experience update culture at its peak, in homestucks hayday when everyones dashboard was filled with homestuck whether you were in the fandom or not. you probably werent there for the shipping olympics or the homestuck fansong album by kylee henke and others (you cant fight the homestuck!). you probably didnt experience andrew hussies twitter escapades with his friends before he cleared his account, or his formspring, or his tumblr, or when hussie gave us a fake image of calliope to spread around tumblr to “fake spoil” people who hadnt read the latest update yet, because there was a time when hussie was genuinely involved with us as a fandom before we got too big and hectic.
you probably were not there when the fandom was first gathering its resources to decide which type of molding clay was best to make troll horns, or whether to use snazaroo or ben-nye for troll skin cosplay. you probably werent there when the fandom analysis for characters came out during a time when we hardly knew anything about them, and it was not as simple as just “reading more into the comic” or checking the wikia page, because there was nothing to read, we had to wait days to weeks for more information.
im wondering how many of you even remember the old gigapause site, or if you were around for trollplay/trollmegle, or when homestuck fanartists used to struggle with finding the best settings for Livestream because we didnt have Picarto yet and Twitch wasnt well optimized if you werent gaming.
the people you see drawing for homestuck? who are a big part in its continuation??? used to be regular fans like us, and still are but just with bigger responsibilities.
so i gotta say. from the bottom of my heart. all of you younger and newer homestuck fans seeing old art or older fans liking a thing from the comic that you perceive as “problematic” or “confusing” and you just feel so angry and dont understand why people would Do Such A Thing because you think you Know It All and homestuck was so Cut And Dry???
chill the fuck out. let older fans be nostalgic about a time that was good for them. its more about how the fan feels about the time they remembered said material from rather than the event or character themselves, who you honestly have no right to police a person about for anyway.
we had gone YEARS knowing these characters as one type
Eridan: Do Something Awesome (Eridan’s intro)
Posted August 13th, 2010
[S] Kanaya: Return to the Core (The beginning of Eridan’s ramage)
Posted January 22, 2011
People in fact had only a little more than five months with Eridan and Gamzee (and the other throwaway trolls) before finding out their true natures or lack of importance to the story. Meenah was a major character in Homestuck for almost SEVEN TIMES more realtime, not to mention raw pagecount, than the throwaway beta trolls, and yet it’s harder to find Meenah fan content (or the other Alpha trolls, or sometimes the actual alphas KIDS) than, say, Feferi, who has the shortest pagecount AND realtime exposure of anyone who can possibly be argued as being part of the core cast.
(This isn’t even to get into Bro, who MANY people found very obviously abusive very early on. I, for one, was 100% sure he was responsible for Dave’s many issues after the Beatdown flash. Some people didn’t see it. But some DID, and Fanon Bro ignored those people who saw what had always been there and assumed they were reading too deep or imaging it. Which we weren’t.)
And yeah people can draw/meta/write what they want sure, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to get crabby when ‘full cast’ art includes Eridan while excluding Calliope, Meenah, or even the alpha kids. I want to engage with Homestuck as it IS, not this fever dream of Homestuck from 2010 that only existed for an eyeblink of the comic’s full lifespan.
edit: clarifying that I mean this in a “here is another perspective” way more than in a “fuck you” way. I know how it feels when nostalgia turns a brief moment of time into an era and I know how it feels when a story changes and things you thought you knew about characters you had become attached to change. But the other side of this isn’t being irrational. We have a leg to stand on.