Oh, the creators of Hazbin Hotel have announced a Homestuck. Look, there will be a lot of Very Online nouns in this one, but we’ll attempt to guide you through it. animated pilot
If you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last 15 years, you’ve most likely encountered Homestuck—or come into contact with someone whose brain has been irreversibly changed by it.
Andrew Hussie’s multimedia webcomic was a genuine internet phenomenon when it broke Online Weirdo Containment back in the first half of the 2010s; whether by luck or design, Hussie’s blend of video game references, chatroom culture, half-serious lore dumps, and Insane Clown Posse jokes slammed into the primordial soup boiling in millennial Tumblr-cooked brains like a meteor, with the resulting explosion forming massively influential online subcultures, inspiring projects.
Although the comic formally “ended” in 2016, several Homestuck side projects—mostly created by fans, under Hussie’s curation—have seeped out over the years, and now a major one has emerged: A pilot for an official animated series was developed by SpindleHorse, the animation firm founded by Hazbin Hotel’s Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano.
History
Andrew Hussie, an American artist and writer, founded MS Paint Adventures in 2007 as a website to host his unique, wacky webcomics. Hussie created his distinctive style using the primitive MS Paint application and some choppy Flash animations—thick pixel lines, predominantly monochromatic hues, and characters with adorably simplistic, expressive expressions.
The gimmick with these comics was that they were written from the perspective of the reader. Users of the site would submit potential commands via forum posts or blog comments, which Hussie would then apply to the characters and write the story in that direction for a number of pages, repeating the cycle until Hussie decided the comic was finished. It was a cooperative choose-your-own adventure with a skilled improviser at the helm.
Homestuck was the fourth MSPA comic to start this manner. However, over a year into the novel (Act IV), Hussie informed readers that he would no longer accept command proposals, at least not explicitly. Any further development of this already-dense mixture of people and tedious lore (don’t worry, we’ll get to it) was now under his complete authority. As Homestuck’s reader base grew, Hussie was able to hire more artists, animators, and musicians to help with its implementation. [Undertale’s author, Toby Fox, worked on multiple albums for the comic, while Sans’s theme “Megalovania” originated in a Homestuck flash animation.]
In Homestuck, the tale maintains a text-based adventure vibe, with you—the reader—taking the lead in the action. However, the majority of the real plot is told through extended, back-and-forth conversations between the protagonists on a messaging app. Sometimes you’ll see a single comic panel at the top of the page, followed by a chat log that’s so long it makes your scrollbar sweat. It’s a risky idea to include so much reading, but Hussie’s keen wit and spot-on character voices typically make the scroll worthwhile.