Is It Worth It to Read Homestuck Again

Andrew Hussie, the reluctant cult leader, on life subsequently Homestuck

On revolution, telling stories, and logging off

By Nov 11, 2021, 2:20pm EST

Graphic: James Bareham/Polygon

Artist and author Andrew Hussie is a reluctant father of cyberspace fandom. His comic, Homestuck, published under the website MS Paint Adventures, followed a grouping of teens who accidentally brought about the end of the world with a re-create of a video game. Hussie congenital a career past spinning dramatic and bumbling tales of the onslaughts of online life.

The interactive story of Homestuck strung out to epic proportions — it is over 8,000 pages long and ran from 2009 until 2016. At its peak, the comic entertained roughly 600,000 readers a twenty-four hours, and inspired i of the most robust cult followings of a generation — fans filled convention floors with cosplays of the characters and filled online forums and websites like Tumblr total of fan art. In 2012, around 24,000 backers pledged roughly $two 1000000 to help bring Hiveswap, a video game version of the Homestuck, to life.

Simply Hussie was ready for something new, and in his words, "anti-cult."

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Hussie's Psycholonials, a "visual novel" released in the spring of 2021, follows Zhen and Abby — two girls who must figure out what to do with a mess of a revolution and empire that they themselves prompted. In the kickoff affiliate of Psycholonials, Zhen, the novel's main character, shoots and kills a cop. As it goes in the story, she was drunk driving, and subsequently the cop gets physical with her, she grabs the gun from his holster and shoots. This event kickstarts her own story and accelerates the development of her own personal politics. Eventually, she goes on to write a widely read manifesto; taking the reins of a militant revolutionary group that wears goth clown makeup.

Throughout the class of Psycholonials, there are called-for constabulary stations, a revolution confronting the country, and a global pandemic — all mediated through the optics of a young woman who's trying to survive the fucked up world around her and while calling attending to its issues. The story feels like a retelling of the hell-twelvemonth that was 2020, just Hussie started drafting the story back when everyone was but starting to be stuck inside for the first time.

"I recollect having an unsettled feeling in the early days of the pandemic," Hussie told Polygon over electronic mail, "seeing that probably hundreds of thousands of people were most to die due to a willful mishandling of the crisis, and the population appeared very listless, as if information technology was about to sit dorsum and allow that happen without putting upward much of a fight."

Hussie decided that the "comatose feeling" America was giving him would make a good foil for a much more "outlandish, escapist sort of revolutionary scenario that examined what such a revolt might look like in this era."

He didn't complete a draft until but a mean solar day earlier the first Blackness Lives Matter protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"The protests began, law stations started called-for down, and information technology all felt pretty surreal, because I'd just spent a month writing about situations that looked a lot similar this. But mainly I was relieved to see the protests happen, because information technology answered a more fundamental question I had before starting on this story, which was wondering whether the country had any real fight in it."

And while the writer says he saw this nation-wide spark as a "very positive development," he wondered "if this was even a story that needed telling anymore."

In the cease, he decided it was. Hussie said he returned to the 140,000 word long draft, cut the story in half, and "tried to brand it feel similar something legitimately worth reading to anyone who crossed the full bridge of 2020'due south madness."

Image: Andrew Hussie

Pyscholonials isn't most Andrew Hussie and it isn't a Homestuck sequel. (As he puts information technology, "information technology's about the things it'south about.") The story presents a modern path to revolution in which the goad for the overthrow of an imperialist organisation is not the military strongmen of onetime, merely a young woman with social media savvy. The figure of revolution in the eyes of Hussie'south story is in fact, an influencer.

As Zhen'southward, who also goes past "Z", crusade grows, she continues to grapple with the responsibility that comes with inspiring such a snowballing movement. Toward the end of the story, Z and her best friend are forced to effigy out what to do with the empire that they've built that has become difficult to control — a reality that Hussie himself is familiar with as a de facto leader of a fandom.

Hussie suggests the personal allegorical elements in Psycholonials are "more like points of inspiration." This story is about Z after all, non himself. Still, he said that the text works as a thematic followup to his entire experience with building a fandom.

"In a personal sense, this story is an odd fusion of ii allegories. It loosely correlates with my past feel of presiding over a large fandom and watching it spin out of control, using much more fantastical elements like revolution and global conquest every bit the backdrop. It's as well an apologue for what I'thou doing presently with Psycholonials. Z decides to launch a new brand, and to rebrand her own prototype by making a clownsona, and so coil out new content to the public as a way of turning the folio on whatsoever she was upwards to before. This is basically what I did, and these 2 ideas mix together in the narrative."

Prior to releasing this story, Hussie struggled to pinpoint what his brand was as the creator of Homestuck. "But understanding that Psycholonials is chiefly an anti-cult narrative should aid signal to how I view the Homestuck miracle. I came to regard that fandom equally being pretty close to a cult. Not formally, and nowhere near equally dangerous as more conventional cults tin can be, simply shut enough to depict meaningful comparisons. And that's about how I've come up to regard all fandoms now."

Image: Andrew Hussie

It'south impossible to talk about Hussie's sentiments toward his following without discussing the following itself. The Homestuck post-obit was (and is in many ways still) very involved with the project. In some ways this was prompted — Hussie took fan input while writing the original story and incorporated it into the final product. In its heyday, the Homestuck fandom iterated and developed a lot of cultures that take come to characterize fandom today. At fourth dimension of publication, there are roughly 57,000 works of fanfiction dedicated to the series on Archive of Our Ain. Dorsum and so, fans popularized in-grapheme discussions where fans could roleplay characters through an online chat. Defended fans even created a browser extension that notified y'all the moment new Homestuck content went up.

Fans yet regularly obsess over questions and details of Hussie'south life and work. A quick search on Reddit reveals dozens of threads discussing questions like "What happened to andrew hussie?" and other posts tracking the creator's activity on social media platforms similar Tumblr. People dissect drama around his work and get amateur reporters on matters internal to his company. On a scarier notation, fans have fifty-fifty gone as far equally to notice Hussie's brother's social media accounts, co-ordinate to those who posted it.

"Anyone who presides over something popular is forced to play the role of an informal cult leader, which is what it felt like throughout near of Homestuck's run, and fifty-fifty well beyond." He said, "Some online personalities will revel in that role, and actually start behaving similar a true cult leader. But those with more than of an anti-cult stance, which describes myself, volition occupy the position reluctantly."

To him, a "reluctant cult leader" volition withdraw from the spotlight and rarely address their followers. However, even and then, Hussie thinks, a distance from the leader could possibly lead to an even more insatiable fandom.

Being a recluse can "suppress cultism in some ways (by not having someone at the top constantly throwing red meat to a hungry base, which inflames obsession and radicalism)," Hussie said, "but in other ways I recollect cryptid [sic] behavior tin intensify cultism. A cryptid leader leaves a major vacuum of content, direction, messaging, personal information, all the stuff a frenzied cultist craves. So what fills that vacuum is rampant speculation. Conspiracy theories, outright fabrications, connecting dots on whatever precious facts are known to paint whatever picture the theorizer wants to paint.

"The content vacuum created by a cryptid leader results in overwhelming conditions of parasociality, and the projections of personality, morality, and biographical data onto the blank-slate leader can get ludicrous, and frequently pretty spiteful. Then again, depending on the atmosphere of any given moment in fandom, in that location may exist at least as many simps projecting absurd deification fantasises on the leader."

Epitome: Andrew Hussie

What Hussie describes is a dynamic that we run across play out again and again online. In her commodity, "How Twitter can ruin a life" Emily VanDerWerff tells the story of an anonymous author turned enemy of the internet, and how just a pseudonym and a birth year gave people on Twitter enough fuel to groovy the author out of writing. And then there are all the people who tin't shroud themselves in secrecy. Streamers have to get increasingly savvy nearly the need to defend personal boundaries without provoking the ire of fans. On Twitter, creatives, journalists, and anyone with a modest post-obit agonize over what people recollect they know about them online, and trolls regularly captivate over personal data around topics like mental health. In this sense, fandom itself, with examples like Homestuck, was the precursor to the asymmetrical relationships that have come to characterize so much of online life.

"Information technology seems that whatever modest ways I was able to command that brand, back when I still was interested in doing then, has since become dramatically overwritten by the preposterous hallucinatory projections of a zealous fandom."

Hussie'southward apprehension of fandom — and the wild projections that come with presiding over i — seem appropriate given how public comments on his work ignite controversy within the fandom. In a video published in April 2021, Canadian YouTuber Sarah Z delved into the history of Homestuck and Hiveswap, with a focus on the turbulent development bike of Hiveswap. In a flurry of accusations, the video called out both the studio'southward fiscal decisions and Hussie's own creative work as information technology pertained to the release of the game. The video, predictably, provoked speculation over the true timeline and events surrounding the game's development. Hussie initially spoke to Polygon before the Sarah Z video, but agreed to follow upwardly conversations after its release. While he declined to exist quoted directly, he feels that the video missed of import contextualization that he had intended to provide to the YouTuber in a conversation.

Information technology'southward a prime example of how — even years after Homestuck and Hiveswap were completed — the distance Hussie keeps between himself and his fandom doesn't proceed his work from spiraling out into controversy. Following the incident, What Pumpkin, Hussie's former Homestuck production company (which he has since left), threatened to sue Sarah Z. In response, the YouTuber fabricated a video about their threat, which co-ordinate to the legal document shared past the Sarah Z cited "faux, speculative claims," propelling the matter even farther into the public theater. An otherwise slumbering fandom ignited as people filled Reddit forums with speculation.

Nonetheless, Hussie doesn't think every aspect of fandom is "completely horrible." Some forms — like writing fanfiction or creating fan art — are a positive, fun action. Just Hussie questions those practices every bit a grade of "fandom," and redefines what the discussion really means today.

"When I speak of fandom I'm referring to the activeness which is more indicative of obsession, hyperfixation, the need for a sense of belonging to a greater movement, and starting to let that feeling shape your identity. I'm non sure how much there is that's truly positive almost those things, but at that place is plenty which is negative. A fellow member of fandom may have a good attitude for a while, merely since their interest is predicated on obsession or very strongly held feelings, that positive attitude can plow on a dime, and information technology can have very fiddling to trigger farthermost negativity. It can be a turn in the story they don't like, the way a fictional character is treated, or the way other members of fandom they disagree with are behaving. And so it'due south not that I'grand saying fandom is all bad, instead I'd simply say that the appearance of anything positive about fandom should be treated with suspicion, and as if it could become destructive at any moment for any reason. The same can be said for any cultist."

Image: Andrew Hussie

Where does this leave a generation that grew up online, many of whom were devout Homestuck readers? Pyscholonials doesn't requite in to hopelessness. While it's about revolution, it's told in a refreshingly modern and relevant way. The language is deeply rooted in the now, and leans into the internet vernacular with words similar "simp," "eastward-girls," "respond guys," and "cringe." At one point, ane of the protagonists moves from beingness a fan, to dating a member of the popular K-pop grouping BTS (which also happens to be i of the biggest, well-nigh influential fandoms of the moment). Even because the medium of the text itself, information technology's a remarkably online object. You can purchase the interactive fiction on Steam. Information technology'due south digitally illustrated and lets yous click through like y'all would in a narrative game. Information technology'due south a gimmicky text that carries the history of Hussie's work and online life — for improve and for worse.

I asked Hussie if he thinks everyone should just log off. Possibly in a bid to avoid pulpiting to any fans, or even me the writer, he said he doesn't recall his story is telling each and every person to cut themselves off. "Information technology's not that I think people should, it'south that anybody already knows they should," he said.

"The [Online Poisoned] often even joke with self awareness nigh their bad net habits, simply [they] simply go along doing it," Hussie said. "That'due south how obsessive preoccupation works, and it's an accelerator of these forms of online cultism. No one needs me to tell anyone this, just stories can always serve as reminders."

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/features/22674181/andrew-hussie-interview-homestuck-psycholonials