What was the cause of homestuck's popularity? I know it started getting really big around the intro of the trolls. Was it the story? Or the innovative qualities, like the flash pages? Or did more people pile on when they saw how big the fandom was? I'm curious if this is documented anywhere.

As far as I know, it was a mixture of things, the Characters and Convoluted Story kept people coming, but one of the major things that drew people in was the update schedule and the style. The animation was frantic, things were just happening all the way, and things shifted from comedy to gorey horror with existential questions and extreme customization to make your OCs along the way, but the thing is, Hussie’s update schedule was absolutely crazy. Some days you’d get more than one update, others you’d have a pause of a day or two, others you could wake up in the middle of the night with a new animation that kickstarts an entirely new arc or concludes something, it was just hard to tell at that point in the story what was going to happen and everything was leading up to Cascade, little by little…

The issue is that, with the Alphas being introduced, and the update schedule faltering because of other projects and personal issues, people lost steam. Some things began to become too Meta for some people’s likes, other things became big glaring mysteries that would’ve been resolved if they just waited for the next update, except the next update happened months afterwards and at that point they’d forgotten the question. By the time everyone was reunited and leading up to Caliborn’s Yaoi Art Showcase, the Gigapause made people whose interest had dwindled towards other things, simply drop entirely, and many people who got back afterwards had forgotten critical bits of the story that made sense of sections afterwards. Combine this with Game Over dropping shortly after the resume of the Gigapause, and the whole Retcon Quest making people think a lot of the comic had suddenly become irrelevant (Spoilers: It really hadn’t, people are just overdramatic), the Fandom at large began turning against the direction Homestuck was taking, merely because… They had like, over a year to think about how they would have wanted the comic to end, and it didn’t end that way.

Come to think of it? Fandom’s biggest issue is simply setting themselves up for something because of a misconception and getting over-excited about said misconception, before it blows up on their face, and rather than admit they were wrong and taking the new content as it comments, belligerently tearing what’s new down in favor of their own ideas.