Act 1 - What in the World is a Homestuck!?
screenshot of the first panel in Homestuck
"A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, 2009, is this young man's birthday. Though it was thirteen years ago he was given life, it is only today he will be given a name! What will the name of this young man be?" - Homestuck Page 1 (Act 1)
Homestuck is a multimedia webcomic that started April 13, 2009 and ended April 13, 2016. It's infamous for its fandom and the irreparable effects it has had on the internet as a whole. Shaped by early internet culture, Homestuck went from a story about a boy and his friends playing a game to a story about the ramifications of being a creator and what happens when a story gets taken out of your hands.
The main story of the comic is told through single comic panels. This is occasionally supplemented by other material all contained within the main webpage of Homestuck itself (homestuck.com previously known as mspaintadventures.com). Homestuck was created by Andrew Hussie and it was the 4th webcomic they released (First four webcomics being; Jailbreak, Bard Quest, and Problem Sleuth). Having already garnered a fandom for their comics allowed Hussie to get incredibly creative and use some *unconventional* methods for story development (wink ;) we’ll get to that later).
While the main story of Homestuck may have ended, it continues to live on with games, spinoffs, and “dubiously-cannon” epilogues.
The ending of Homestuck is very heavy handed in its metaphor: the fandom, the creative output of fans of a media, have weight and affect the story they are apart of simply by interacting with it. As a nod to fanfiction writers, the Homestuck Epilogues start page mirrors how fan fiction on the website Archive of Our Own (AO3) appears.