The Homestuck Resurgence: What, How, and… What Does This Mean?

August 15, 2025

So, Homestuck just got announced for an animated pilot. Not only that, it’s SpindleHorse picking it up. If that name means nothing to you, they’re the studio behind Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, so you know the internet is feeling many different (and intense) ways about it. Whether it’s a recession indicator, discourse magnet, or a wild, sharp turn for our current timeline, it sure is something.

After the announcement, three things happened instantly.

My FYP clocked me as an ex-Homestuck enjoyer in record time and now refuses to show me anything else. It’s full of flash animations, reuploads of fan comics, and unsettlingly accurate deep cuts that make me feel like I’m back in 2015 listening to “Karkalicious” on loop.
The old fandom has started clawing its way out of the sewers, reacting with joy, rage, some indifference, but a fierce protectiveness we were not expecting.
Every platform is suddenly full of new people asking, “so what’s Homestuck?” which is a question that cannot be answered without ruining the rest of their week.

So what even is Homestuck? Why is bringing it back such a strange move? And why are people already splitting into teams over it?

The “what”

Homestuck was a webcomic from the early 2010s about a group of friends who start a video game and accidentally cause an apocalypse. From there, it explodes into time travel, alternate timelines, complex lore, 20+ main characters, and more plot threads than a Vriska argument.

It wasn’t just told in static panels, though. There were endless chat logs, original music, animations, and little browser games. It really took advantage of the unique storytelling opportunity that a webcomic gave. It felt like a revolutionary approach to storytelling, and at the time, it felt really special and unique. It was part comic, part interactive story, part fever dream that absolutely gripped our little hearts and minds back in the day.

The fandom history

The original Homestuck fandom was… for lack of a better word, absolutely batshit. Con culture in the early 2010s still brings it up in hushed tones. It was messy in every possible way, both online and off. There were Tumblr threads that went on for hundreds of replies, discourse about being called an abuse-apologist for liking a particular character, extremely loud inside jokes about buckets, a stupidly complex and drama-heavy (but also super interesting) shipping system, and roleplay drama that could clear a room. It became the blueprint for “what to avoid in big fandoms,” a bit disappointingly.

Like any big fandom, there were people doing amazing creative work, but there was also a smaller group making the rest of us look unhinged. It was chaotic, sometimes exhausting, but it was ours. Going to a con meant seeing a wave of grey paint, bright hoods and candy coloured horns- you were never too far from sharing kinship with someone. And if nothing else, it’s the reason half of an entire generation of cosplayers learned the hard way that you must seal your goddamn body paint (and under no circumstances should you try and DYE YOUR skin grey using a sharpie bath… like what the hell).

Problem one: new fandom, new fans, old protectiveness

Here’s a new twist for the revival: even the comic itself is hard to find now. Andrew Hussie took the original Homestuck off its official site, and while there are fan mirrors and archives, they can be clunky or incomplete. New fans might hear about this wild, formative internet epic and then run straight into a locked door.

Add to that the SpindleHorse factor. The Hazbin/Helluva fandom is big, passionate, and extremely online — which is exactly how the original Homestuck fandom used to be. You’d think there’d be an instant kinship, but instead there’s a mix of apprehension and mild hostility. The old guard doesn’t want to share space with a crowd they see as “different,” while forgetting that ten years ago, we were the loud, messy fandom everyone else was warning people about. It’s a weird kind of alienation, both from the source material and from each other.

Current Homestuck fans, who still carry the reputation of being the most annoying fandom of the 2010s, are suddenly worried that a revival might bring that stigma roaring back. And, in a twist only the internet could produce, many of those same fans are now side-eyeing potential newcomers because of the Hazbin/Helluva connection. Which is pretty funny when you realise we’re all cut from the same cloth. Different fonts, same energy. Be nice to your cousins.

And then there are the fans that just want Homestuck to stay exactly where it was, deep in our memories. Homestuck is a very ‘of its time’ style of humour. While we can look back at it with equal parts fear and nostalgia, is it really a good idea to wake this sleeping giant and put ourselves through this all again?

The “you had to be there” effect

Even if you can get through the comic, that’s only half the experience. The Homestuck fandom spent years building a whole labyrinth of inside jokes, memes, and meta content. Fan musicians, full-on animations, parody comics, completely deranged AU concepts that spun out into their own fandoms (for everyone whose ear I talked off back in 2015 about RTStuck… I am so sorry).

You could understand the plot perfectly and still feel like you’re missing most of the conversation. It’s a permanent “you just had to be there” situation. And as anyone who’s tried to explain “Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff” or why Betty Crocker or Guy Fieri are essential to the plot to a non-fan will tell you, some things simply don’t translate.

The adaptation problem

The biggest hurdle is that Homestuck wasn’t designed to be consumed passively. It was thousands of pages released over the years, with long pauses in between. Some updates were nothing but scrolling chat logs.

It was slow, immersive, sometimes frustrating, and felt like something you well and truly earned. People argued about whether skipping to Act 5 was cheating. There’s a badge-of-honour mentality in having done the grind.

Turning that into a show means cutting and condensing something that was already strange to follow. And no matter how well it’s done, it’ll clash with the voices, designs, and interpretations fans have been building for over a decade.

Simply tuning in to a 20-minute animated episode, or getting a 12 ep adaptation and calling yourself a fan, just rubs people the wrong way. You weren’t forged in the fires of hell like the OG homestucks, but the hard part is that an animation will never hit just like the original.

Where I’m at with it

I was a die-hard back in the day. I wouldn’t call myself a Homestuck now, but the nostalgia still hits hard. The fandom was ridiculously creative. Cosplays, animations, fan comics, whole albums of music. Seeing that spark pop up again is honestly really nice.

I’m not part of the crew hoping it crashes and burns, and I’m not sneering at new fans. If anything, I welcome a new generation of Homestuck fans being able to experience it for the first time. For what it’s worth, it’s a crazy roller coaster of a story. But I’m also cautious. Will it be done justice? Will it crash and burn? Is the fandom going to ruin it for one reason or another? Are we about to get a wave of energy that reactivates all the sleeper agents and brings new blood into the fold? Or are we bound to repeat the same disasters we swore we’d grown out of?

Either way, the pilot is coming, the old guard is awake, and the discourse is already sharpening. We will be watching it unfold, fondly, with a touch of morbid curiosity at the potential train wreck that may unfold, but quietly queuing up “Suburban Jungle” just for the occasion.