What Homestuck Is and How to Read It

Homestuck is a webcomic created by Andrew Hussie and styled like an old text-based adventure game; for its first year, readers could submit commands telling characters what to do. The typical page has a picture with a caption below it and the next command below that, linking to the next page. However, pictures often found themselves replaced with animations or full on minigames. All of this was accompanied by a beloved soundtrack composed by a dedicated team incluing Toby Fox of Undertale fame amongst many, many others.

Page 1 of Homestuck, featuring the character John Egbert standing in front of a door in his bedroom. The caption below reads '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?' Below it is a hyperlink to te next page with the line '> Enter name.'

The first page of Homestuck as an example

I began my Homestuck journey on a fateful day in August 2023. I thought it looked a wee bit cringe; before I knew it I was 5,000 pages in. Now I must dutifully spread this infection to you. Without further ado, here is the easiest way to read this lovely monstrosity.

Table of Contents

  1. Reading on Desktop
    1. Controversial Content
    2. Mods
  2. Reading on Mobile
  3. Reading Order
  4. See Also

Reading on Desktop

Since Homestuck made extensive use of Adobe Flash, its discontinuation in 2020 has left the official website severely kneecapped. Enter The Unofficial Homestuck Collection; a program made by Bambosh and GiovanH which lets one read this quirky comic, and its extensive supplementary material, in its original state completely offline.

To get started, you will need the application itself and the asset pack; both of which can be found at the link above. On startup, point it to where the asset pack is. You can put it wherever you want, but you may as well keep it in the same folder as the application. You'll also have a few choices to make:

With that done, there's one setting that deserves special mention:

Controversial Content

Mr Hussie's work is no stranger to racy content (sometimes in more ways than one) and some pages were later modified because of it. TUHC lets you turn on or off this content; they're off by default.

  1. Ten early Flash pages had to be re-scored because musician Bill Bolin left the team on bad terms.
  2. One of those re-scored pages features a song from another removed musician: SolusLunes. Enabling this will still overwrite a Bill Bolin page.
  3. One Homestuck panel included a joke related to a character's race, though not disparaging as far as I can tell.
  4. A Paradox Space page featuring a non-human's insides was considered too graphic, so was replaced with a written description.
  5. The text files hidden on skaianetsystems.com feature lesser known historic figure Adolf Hitler (in a negative light mind you). This one has the weakest reason to be hidden, as you actively have to seek it out.

For your first reading, I advise keeping everything on less (2). I say this because I think it's important to view any piece of art as closely to how the creator originally intended as possible, so that you may decide for yourself if what's presented is objectionable. Besides, none of it's that shocking anyway.

Mods

To my surprise, TUHC has a modding scene. Many add-ons improve the reading experience in various ways. Here are my favourites:

Reading on Mobile

For a mobile user, TUHC is unfortunately out of reach for now. This leaves two main options:

I fully admit I have more experience reading on desktop than mobile, so any other ideas are graciously appreciated.

Reading Order

If you just want to know what all the fuss is about, you can read the main comic from start to finish with no issue. However, there are many bits of side content included in TUHC. Reading these is not essential, but doing so gives you the right to feel smug for understanding the many inside jokes, inspirations and references present in Homestuck. New Reader Mode will unlock these as you go along.

Once you are finished with the comic proper, I'm afraid you're not done yet.

That's all there is. If you've any questions, please feel free to contact me. Happy reading!

See Also