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cest_whatThis is an edited version of a post I made over at my fic LJ. I decided that if I was going to try out the Dreamwidth thing for real, I may as well start as I mean to continue. By which I mean talking about Homestuck until I run out of breath, and then maybe continuing with terrible pictures. (Not really a joke: this fandom makes me wish I could draw so badly.)
NOTES: This is going to inevitably contain some spoilers. In Homestuck canon basically everything is a spoiler, every single fact functions as a reveal, including characters' names and appearances. Seriously, for the first 200 pages/panels we only know one character's name, and everybody else is only a chat handle on his screen. This is something the author did deliberately, to recall the way that internet friendships work, where you usually don't learn someone's name or what they look like until you've been friends with them for a while.
THE PREMISE: Homestuck is an epic multimedia webcomic.
Most of the art, including the animated flash files, is very simple and stylised
with occasional more complex and beautiful artwork.
I'm not going to put much art in this post, because finding out what the characters look like really is this effectively suspenseful thing, I wouldn't want to take it away. (And this is a persuasion post, not a primer.)
It's currently in its sixth act, of seven. The acts have been getting progressively longer, though: Act 1 is a bare fraction of the length of Act 5. It's set up like a narrative-based interactive game, with a player typing in commands. (It's not a game, you don't actually get to choose the commands and there's only one narrative path, although there are occasional true interactive elements, most of which make me trip over and flail about like a beached starfish, because I'm not a gamer and gaming things utterly fail to be intuitive to me. That said, for most of the first first three acts, all of the direct character commands really were reader submitted. The author would pick one from the pile of submissions each time and run with it. This leads to a lot of ridiculousness, but also some of the best jokes.)
The game structure means that nearly all of the narrative is second person addressing you as the character(s), or you as the player, or you as the reader, or are positioned as FROM you as the reader TO the characters, as commands that they are unaware of but do respond to, but don't always obey. (SO INTERESTING TO ME. BRING ON THE POV META, GUYS.) The direct dialogue between the characters mostly takes place in chatlogs.
Basically, the characters are playing a computer game called SBURB that has the capacity to alter reality. (Their reality already runs on somewhat different rules to ours, in a geeky coding meta way.) As they keep playing, it turns out that the game is tied to the end of the world, which they may be destined to prevent, or maybe not.
It is the geekiest, most meta-tastic thing ever, utterly ridiculous and hilarious and self-conscious, EXCEPT ALSO it will break your heart and make you keysmash in overwhelmed emotion and pain and the kind of delight that fuels solar systems. It is also utterly, utterly epic, like, apocalyptic and life-and-death stakes and alien First Contact and betrayal and love and hate and adolescent crushes and time loops and alternate universes and characters with the kinds of issues that should BREAK THEM IN HALF and also amazing, brilliant shifting relationships with each other.
It has the hugest cast of fully-realised fucked-up appealing vulnerable knife-sharp hilarious characters. Depending on how you calculate, there are currently about thirty characters who could be reasonably called main characters, every one of whom I fucking adore. Even the ones I don't rationally like very much regularly make my heart stop with love (Eridan and the angel slaying, what the actual fuck, why does that make me love you so much?)
For the first three acts, the only major characters are four thirteen-year-old kids, two boys and two girls. From Act 3 onwards you find that for most of their lives they have been irregularly hassled by 12 internet trolls, who turn out to actually be alien troll kids (also thirteen years old). They gradually become more important characters as the story goes on, although you don't learn their names or what most of them look like until Act 5. (Also there are the Exiles, who are the most amazing, but it's complicated and I'm not going to go into them here.) (Although I would love to do an epic spoilery-as-fuck primer that actually dealt with all the characters, if I thought anybody would want to read it.)
This makes getting into the fic (and art and vidding and and and) side of the fandom slightly challenging, because nearly all the fic features the troll kids. Also, the first Act, even though it's absolutely charming and it delighted me lots, doesn't give you much sense at all of the heartclenching amazingness and wholesale character adoration of later Acts.
(Caveat to this: I know a lot of people are told to plow through the first couple of acts, because it gets better? It does get better, exponentially so, and I definitely did need a period to get used to what the fuck Homestuck was even trying to do, it was such a different kind of story telling to what I was used to ... but that said, if you're not charmed by John fucking around with his sylladex and Rose accidentally wreaking havoc on his house and the general ridiculous meta of Act 1, probably it's not going to suit your sense of humour later on either.)
So, as mentioned the first characters you get to know are the four kids.
JOHN EGBERT: John is the world's biggest sweetheart and an absolutely terrible prankster. He would do anything for his friends, as long as they were ... right in front of him. Because when people are off his radar he is kind of an enormous jerk about forgetting that they exist, even if the last he heard they were in terrifying peril. Actually sometimes he's a jerk when they're right in front of him too. In the name of humour! He's the only one of the four kids (almost the only one of any of the characters) with a loving and stable home life, and it shows.
ROSE LALONDE: Rose is engaged in a years-long passive-aggressive war of demonstrative affection with her MOM, involving childhood drawings welded to the fridge in ornate frames, fake-out suicide attempts, inebriation and surprise ponies. She's obsessed with Lovecraftian horrorterror tentacled creatures and psychoanalysis, and has recently learned to knit; she immediately knitted a cosy for her laptop. She's basically incredibly wordy, smart as a whip, and wears bookish psychoanalytically-tinged snark like slightly cracked armour over the softer parts of her psyche.
DAVE STRIDER. Dave is so painfully ironic and cool he cuts himself. Actually Dave on first meeting is kind of an ENORMOUS DOUCHE, and I have this idea I may not have liked him that much at first? But I don't remember very clearly, through the confusing mess of how much I love him now. He talks in a constant patter of pop culture metaphors stretched to tortured hellscholar screaming point and he has a particular kind of chivalry mixed up with his insecurities, both of them related to his combatative upbringing by his idolised older BRO. Familial relationships in Homestuck: SERIOUSLY COMPLICATED.
JADE HARLEY. Jade was the most difficult for me to get a hold on. She fits herself with the kind of bright silly happy armor that doesn't look like armor at all, or feel like it either, but which shields her so well she can tell herself she can do most anything. Which is good because, more than any of the other kids, she frequently has to. She lives with her GRANDAD and her dog, both of which facts are deeply misleading, on a tropical island. She may be psychic.
HERE IS A PATHETICALLY INCOMPLETE LIST OF SOME OF MY OTHER FAVOURITE CHARACTERS:
KARKAT VANTAS who has epic hate-offs with his past and future selves in timey-wimey chatlogs, is eternally enraged, loves with a painful sweetness, suffers agonies in his attempts to be a good leader, and is generally so wide open and vulnerable through his furious wall of abusive sarcasm and capslocks that it physically aches to look at him. The word 'favourite' has almost no meaning to me in this fandom, but Karkat has a place in my heart carved out with ditches and spikes and a perimeter manned with assault rifles.
TEREZI PYROPE who sees the universe by licking bits of it, faces the world with an enormous shark-toothed grin and a hipster sense of humour, is obsessed with punitive justice, and types in leetspeak, using 4, 1 and 3: TH3 NUM3R4LS OF TH3 BL1ND PROPH3TS. (413 has continuous significance throughout the comic, due to April 13 being the day it began.)
VRISKA SERKET who is a jerk and a sociopath, and peppers her text with 8s. (All the characters have typing quirks and text colours that they never deviate from, unless something catastrophic happens to them, at which point their quirk frequently changes to something different.) She's also enthusiastic and generous, loves red sneakers, and badly wants to be loved, but not enough to stop maiming people.
KANAYA MARYAM whose default state is to be incredibly literal, especially when she's off-kilter, and whose interactions with people are a mixture of vulnerability, intelligent snark and delicate ruthlessness. She loves supernatural romance novels and she carries a chainsaw. I love her so much it hurts.
GOD THAT IS NOT EVEN HALF OF MY FAVOURITES UGH I LOVE THEM ALL SO MUCH.
SOME OTHER THINGS THAT HOMESTUCK HAS ARE: Canon f/f and m/m ships, magic, SF, timey-wimey stuff, ghosts, robots, EVEN MORE TIMEY-WIMEY STUFF, so much internet meta it will flood your gills up, and the most amazing internal mythology of the different kinds of romance that exist in troll culture, it's this whole glorious complicated thing that leads to the most amazing fic about unconventional emotional dynamics and makes me so happy. You have no idea. Also, this fandom is the most multi-shippy place I have ever been did I mention that it is brilliant.
Anyway, so like I mentioned, almost all fic in this fandom features the trolls, and most of it is super-spoilery for various bits of plot, or just makes no sense out of context. But here are some recs for stories that I think can stand alone if you want to dip your toes in the fandom before you try the webcomic, or if you just get impatient for the trolls to turn up in canon.
(Also note: Because of the format of the canon, at least half of all Homestuck fic is written in second person. Don't be put off by this! In other fandoms people write second person when they want to be literary and daring and poetic, so it kind of suggests hard work to a reader, but in Homestuck it's all the hilarious and hot and heartbreaking and every other kind of fic, and it's so normalised you don't even notice it.)
The Only Recipe For Lasagna You'll Ever Need (John/Karkat, by urbanAnchorite)
2,300 words, G (but basically for nearly all these fics you need to up the rating to PG-13 for language, especially if they have Karkat or Dave in them.)
A recipe for lasagne, as cooked by one boy human (enthusiastic) and one boy troll (who cannot believe he's doing this). This is so great. Hilarious and voice-perfect and heart-clenching. Especially given the conceit is a recipe. (Note that the recipe becomes less literal as the fic continues, it is an actual story.)
Promstuck: A Homestuck Fan Adventure (With Prom) (John/Karkat, Terezi/Dave, Rose/Kanaya, by Cephied Variable, schelby & urbanAnchorite)
Length unknown, but at least a novella, PG-13.
"Your name is KARKAT VANTAS and your LIFE IS OVER. AGAIN." This is exactly what it says on the tin. It's ridiculous and overly self-indulgent, but also hilarious. (Art-based fic mimicking the webcomic format, hosted on Tumblr.)
(Cheese) Dust in the Wind (John/Karkat, by anxiousAnarchist)
1,200 words, PG
Karkat and John grocery shopping, and what a terrible idea that is. There's no plot and no real conflict, but this is stupidly adorable in the very particular way John/Karkat established relationship can be.
John Egbert and the Goblet of Sick Fires by Hammie & Harry Hazard
This is a slightly weird rec, because I'm actually reccing the prologue, rather than the whole fic (which is currently a WIP anyway). The fic proper is obviously a Goblet of Fire AU centring on John, and it's charming but the pacing is a bit shot and I got bored. But the prologue is pretty much a standalone first year story about four of the troll kids, and it is impossibly darling, seriously, just go and like. Glance at the pictures. And see if you can fail to be moved by their tiny little faces peering through the dark of the Forbidden Forest.
if food be the music of love (Terezi/Dave, by urbanAnchorite)
4,300 words, G.
In which Terezi isn't coping, and Dave isn't equipped, so he deploys junk food. Seriously, this fic so great: the visceral quality, the weird sexiness, the heartclenching post-apocalyptic hipster doucheyness of Terezi and Dave, it's all over awesome.
A Gentleman and a Lady (Terezi/Dave, by DoctorV)
1,100 words, PG-13
Dave, Terezi, and ironic crossdressing that isn't as ironic as all that. Kind of carelessly hot and really charming. I am charmed.
While we're here (might as well) (Terezi/Dave, by artillie & Lindensphinx, art by Odificus)
3,300 words, NC-17
Dave wakes up in a pile of scalemates and the wrong body. Bodyswap xeno porn full of sharp edges, kind of ridiculously fun. Gave me Terezi grin.
The Devil's Own (Rose/Kanaya, by Ember_Keelty)
2,300 words, PG-13
A gothic horror AU, in which Rose is the daughter of a scientist who dabbles in the dark and profane, and Kanaya is a pale and fascinating stranger washed up on their doorstep. Oooh, yes. This has a few clumsy turns of phrase, but the atmosphere is perfect, and the dynamic between Rose and Kanaya is shivery and excellent.
Skeins (Vriska/Kanaya, Rose/Kanaya, by feralphoenix)
2000 words, PG
High school AU. Rose advertises for membership in a knitting club; Vriska understands her purpose instantly. Oh my god, this has the most amazing Kanaya & Vriska dynamic, and the best bubbly non-angsty Vriska voice. The Rose & Kanaya is also great, though less developed.
Rita, Bob, and Mary Sue (Rose/Dave/Terezi, by paraTactician)
5,400 words, PG-13
Rose keeps her current WIP at the bottom of a dizzying array of subfolders; today there are 10 words in it that weren't written by her. Yessssssss this is so good. All their contributions to the story are hilarious but also full of character stuff that kept making me stop and reread and go "damn".
Froth And Frogs (Jade/Kanaya, by urbanAnchorite)
1,100 words, G.
Jade and Kanaya, frog-catching in the snow, basically being the most appealing of anybody. This is funny and off-kilter and darling and I love it. (Canon note: ... I don't even know, uh: frogs are relevant to Plot, and everybody is a Hero of A Particular Aspect, it's part of the game structure. For Jade and Kanaya it's Space.) (G)
If Vision Is The Only Validation (Jade/Karkat, by roachpatrol)
3,900 words, NC-17.
In which Jade uses her Hero of Space goggles to see Karkat, and things go from there. This is such an adorable fic (xenophiliac voyeuristic PWP and all), and such a great Jade voice.
Drop It Like It's Hot (Dave/Karkat, by roachpatrol)
900 words, R.
In which the instant any of the human kids gets out a mop bucket to clean, the trolls are there like it's a spectator sport. This is both hilarious and stupidly hot. The way this author writes Karkat is breathcatching. (Canon note: buckets have sexual connotations in troll culture. It's a ... thing.)
insect clockwork (Dave & Bro, by SORD)
1,100 words, PG
Bro and Dave and heatwaves and the years between. Ughh, this will do your heart good. Bro you are so fucked up, but I do believe it was always about love with you.
NOTES: This is going to inevitably contain some spoilers. In Homestuck canon basically everything is a spoiler, every single fact functions as a reveal, including characters' names and appearances. Seriously, for the first 200 pages/panels we only know one character's name, and everybody else is only a chat handle on his screen. This is something the author did deliberately, to recall the way that internet friendships work, where you usually don't learn someone's name or what they look like until you've been friends with them for a while.
THE PREMISE: Homestuck is an epic multimedia webcomic.
Most of the art, including the animated flash files, is very simple and stylised
with occasional more complex and beautiful artwork.
I'm not going to put much art in this post, because finding out what the characters look like really is this effectively suspenseful thing, I wouldn't want to take it away. (And this is a persuasion post, not a primer.)
It's currently in its sixth act, of seven. The acts have been getting progressively longer, though: Act 1 is a bare fraction of the length of Act 5. It's set up like a narrative-based interactive game, with a player typing in commands. (It's not a game, you don't actually get to choose the commands and there's only one narrative path, although there are occasional true interactive elements, most of which make me trip over and flail about like a beached starfish, because I'm not a gamer and gaming things utterly fail to be intuitive to me. That said, for most of the first first three acts, all of the direct character commands really were reader submitted. The author would pick one from the pile of submissions each time and run with it. This leads to a lot of ridiculousness, but also some of the best jokes.)
The game structure means that nearly all of the narrative is second person addressing you as the character(s), or you as the player, or you as the reader, or are positioned as FROM you as the reader TO the characters, as commands that they are unaware of but do respond to, but don't always obey. (SO INTERESTING TO ME. BRING ON THE POV META, GUYS.) The direct dialogue between the characters mostly takes place in chatlogs.
TT: How did you know I wrote a story about wizards, anyway?
TG: john told me
TG: he was all snoopin around your room while you were asleep and i was like no man dont
TG: so not cool
TG: then he was like haha dude check it out this book is full of wizard slash
TG: and i was like i dont even want to know this is such a crazy violation of privacy
TT: This story sounds suspicious.
TG: do you want me to chew him out about it i will because that was so outrageous i dont know where he got off being like that
- Rose & Dave
Basically, the characters are playing a computer game called SBURB that has the capacity to alter reality. (Their reality already runs on somewhat different rules to ours, in a geeky coding meta way.) As they keep playing, it turns out that the game is tied to the end of the world, which they may be destined to prevent, or maybe not.
It is the geekiest, most meta-tastic thing ever, utterly ridiculous and hilarious and self-conscious, EXCEPT ALSO it will break your heart and make you keysmash in overwhelmed emotion and pain and the kind of delight that fuels solar systems. It is also utterly, utterly epic, like, apocalyptic and life-and-death stakes and alien First Contact and betrayal and love and hate and adolescent crushes and time loops and alternate universes and characters with the kinds of issues that should BREAK THEM IN HALF and also amazing, brilliant shifting relationships with each other.
It has the hugest cast of fully-realised fucked-up appealing vulnerable knife-sharp hilarious characters. Depending on how you calculate, there are currently about thirty characters who could be reasonably called main characters, every one of whom I fucking adore. Even the ones I don't rationally like very much regularly make my heart stop with love (Eridan and the angel slaying, what the actual fuck, why does that make me love you so much?)
For the first three acts, the only major characters are four thirteen-year-old kids, two boys and two girls. From Act 3 onwards you find that for most of their lives they have been irregularly hassled by 12 internet trolls, who turn out to actually be alien troll kids (also thirteen years old). They gradually become more important characters as the story goes on, although you don't learn their names or what most of them look like until Act 5. (Also there are the Exiles, who are the most amazing, but it's complicated and I'm not going to go into them here.) (Although I would love to do an epic spoilery-as-fuck primer that actually dealt with all the characters, if I thought anybody would want to read it.)
This makes getting into the fic (and art and vidding and and and) side of the fandom slightly challenging, because nearly all the fic features the troll kids. Also, the first Act, even though it's absolutely charming and it delighted me lots, doesn't give you much sense at all of the heartclenching amazingness and wholesale character adoration of later Acts.
(Caveat to this: I know a lot of people are told to plow through the first couple of acts, because it gets better? It does get better, exponentially so, and I definitely did need a period to get used to what the fuck Homestuck was even trying to do, it was such a different kind of story telling to what I was used to ... but that said, if you're not charmed by John fucking around with his sylladex and Rose accidentally wreaking havoc on his house and the general ridiculous meta of Act 1, probably it's not going to suit your sense of humour later on either.)
So, as mentioned the first characters you get to know are the four kids.
JOHN EGBERT: John is the world's biggest sweetheart and an absolutely terrible prankster. He would do anything for his friends, as long as they were ... right in front of him. Because when people are off his radar he is kind of an enormous jerk about forgetting that they exist, even if the last he heard they were in terrifying peril. Actually sometimes he's a jerk when they're right in front of him too. In the name of humour! He's the only one of the four kids (almost the only one of any of the characters) with a loving and stable home life, and it shows.
ROSE LALONDE: Rose is engaged in a years-long passive-aggressive war of demonstrative affection with her MOM, involving childhood drawings welded to the fridge in ornate frames, fake-out suicide attempts, inebriation and surprise ponies. She's obsessed with Lovecraftian horrorterror tentacled creatures and psychoanalysis, and has recently learned to knit; she immediately knitted a cosy for her laptop. She's basically incredibly wordy, smart as a whip, and wears bookish psychoanalytically-tinged snark like slightly cracked armour over the softer parts of her psyche.
TT: I will do by best to occupy myself as benignly and unmagically as possible until you show up.
EB: yes.
EB: please write some happy stories in your journal, about lively horses, and conspicuously not about wizards, or sadness.
TT: ... "Happy?"
TT: What is this strange, unsad emotion of which you speak?
EB: yes, this is good.
EB: you see rose, these are jokes.
EB: this are what they look like, do not be alarmed.
TT: Jokes?
TT: Are those the things people say when they want unusual noises to come out of the pliable crescent-shaped holes sometimes found in people's faces?
EB: laughs, rose. laaaughs.
EB: also, those crescenty looking holes where laughs come out of?
EB: those are smiles!
EB: observe... :D
TT: I need to make a note of this.
TT: Excuse me while I open this tome bound in the tanned, writhing flesh of a tortured hellscholar. The screaming will subside shortly.
EB: ok, i will wait patiently.
- Rose & John
DAVE STRIDER. Dave is so painfully ironic and cool he cuts himself. Actually Dave on first meeting is kind of an ENORMOUS DOUCHE, and I have this idea I may not have liked him that much at first? But I don't remember very clearly, through the confusing mess of how much I love him now. He talks in a constant patter of pop culture metaphors stretched to tortured hellscholar screaming point and he has a particular kind of chivalry mixed up with his insecurities, both of them related to his combatative upbringing by his idolised older BRO. Familial relationships in Homestuck: SERIOUSLY COMPLICATED.
JADE HARLEY. Jade was the most difficult for me to get a hold on. She fits herself with the kind of bright silly happy armor that doesn't look like armor at all, or feel like it either, but which shields her so well she can tell herself she can do most anything. Which is good because, more than any of the other kids, she frequently has to. She lives with her GRANDAD and her dog, both of which facts are deeply misleading, on a tropical island. She may be psychic.
EB: wait, how did you know my dad's car fell down here?
GG: johhhhn will you stop trying to trap me!!!
GG: you TOLD me the car fell remember?
GG: jeeeez
EB: jeeeeeeeeeeez!
GG: JEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ!!!!!
EB: ok fine well color me suspicious anyway.
EB: miss knowitall mcpsychicpants.
GG: john im not any more psychic than you though
EB: ok sure i am convinced.
EB: you have convinced me.
EB: (PSYCHIC PSYCHIC PSYCHIC)
EB: also i told you the package was in the car but i never mentioned that the game was there too.
EB: so kind of totally busted i guess.
- Jade & John
HERE IS A PATHETICALLY INCOMPLETE LIST OF SOME OF MY OTHER FAVOURITE CHARACTERS:
KARKAT VANTAS who has epic hate-offs with his past and future selves in timey-wimey chatlogs, is eternally enraged, loves with a painful sweetness, suffers agonies in his attempts to be a good leader, and is generally so wide open and vulnerable through his furious wall of abusive sarcasm and capslocks that it physically aches to look at him. The word 'favourite' has almost no meaning to me in this fandom, but Karkat has a place in my heart carved out with ditches and spikes and a perimeter manned with assault rifles.
PCG: JUST REMEMBER THIS IS MY PERSONAL PODIUM, A STUMP IF YOU WILL, FOR SOLE USE BY ME AS LEADER FOR IMPORTANT LEADERSHIP BUSINESS.
PCG: GOT IT?????????
FUTURE carcinoGeneticist [FCG] 612 HOURS FROM NOW responded to memo.
FCG: GROAN.
FCG: THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING.
FCG: WHAT WAS I EVEN THINKING.
PCG: STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PCG banned FCG from responding to memo.
- Karkat & Karkat
TEREZI PYROPE who sees the universe by licking bits of it, faces the world with an enormous shark-toothed grin and a hipster sense of humour, is obsessed with punitive justice, and types in leetspeak, using 4, 1 and 3: TH3 NUM3R4LS OF TH3 BL1ND PROPH3TS. (413 has continuous significance throughout the comic, due to April 13 being the day it began.)
VRISKA SERKET who is a jerk and a sociopath, and peppers her text with 8s. (All the characters have typing quirks and text colours that they never deviate from, unless something catastrophic happens to them, at which point their quirk frequently changes to something different.) She's also enthusiastic and generous, loves red sneakers, and badly wants to be loved, but not enough to stop maiming people.
GC: 1T'S H4RD TO B3L13V3 YOU W1TH 4LL TH3 LY1NG YOUV3 DON3
GC: YOUR BLU3B3RRY BUBBL3GUM WORDS ST1LL SM3LL PR3TTY GOOD BUT YOUR D3C31T ST1NKS! >8O
AG: ::::(
AG: I'll prove it to you. I'm giving Aradia a present that will make her feel all 8etter finally.
AG: Then I'll 8e in the clear. Phew! Totally redeemed. You'll see. I mean smell.
- Terezi & Vriska
KANAYA MARYAM whose default state is to be incredibly literal, especially when she's off-kilter, and whose interactions with people are a mixture of vulnerability, intelligent snark and delicate ruthlessness. She loves supernatural romance novels and she carries a chainsaw. I love her so much it hurts.
TT: Have we spoken before?
GA: Yes
GA: In The Future
TT: You and your friends never cease to invent ways to strengthen the credibility of your assertions.
GA: Oh My It Is Your Human Sarcasm Again
GA: I Enjoy Listening To It And I Wish Doing So Could Serve As My Primary Form Of Recreation
GA: There See I Just Did It Too
GA: Saying The Opposite Thing To Emphasize My Contempt
GA: But Suddenly I Feel More Primitive And Hate Myself A Little More
GA: It Was Like This Funny Miracle That Just Happened In My Heart
- Rose & Kanaya (ship of my heaaaaaaaaart)
GOD THAT IS NOT EVEN HALF OF MY FAVOURITES UGH I LOVE THEM ALL SO MUCH.
SOME OTHER THINGS THAT HOMESTUCK HAS ARE: Canon f/f and m/m ships, magic, SF, timey-wimey stuff, ghosts, robots, EVEN MORE TIMEY-WIMEY STUFF, so much internet meta it will flood your gills up, and the most amazing internal mythology of the different kinds of romance that exist in troll culture, it's this whole glorious complicated thing that leads to the most amazing fic about unconventional emotional dynamics and makes me so happy. You have no idea. Also, this fandom is the most multi-shippy place I have ever been did I mention that it is brilliant.
Anyway, so like I mentioned, almost all fic in this fandom features the trolls, and most of it is super-spoilery for various bits of plot, or just makes no sense out of context. But here are some recs for stories that I think can stand alone if you want to dip your toes in the fandom before you try the webcomic, or if you just get impatient for the trolls to turn up in canon.
(Also note: Because of the format of the canon, at least half of all Homestuck fic is written in second person. Don't be put off by this! In other fandoms people write second person when they want to be literary and daring and poetic, so it kind of suggests hard work to a reader, but in Homestuck it's all the hilarious and hot and heartbreaking and every other kind of fic, and it's so normalised you don't even notice it.)
The Only Recipe For Lasagna You'll Ever Need (John/Karkat, by urbanAnchorite)
2,300 words, G (but basically for nearly all these fics you need to up the rating to PG-13 for language, especially if they have Karkat or Dave in them.)
A recipe for lasagne, as cooked by one boy human (enthusiastic) and one boy troll (who cannot believe he's doing this). This is so great. Hilarious and voice-perfect and heart-clenching. Especially given the conceit is a recipe. (Note that the recipe becomes less literal as the fic continues, it is an actual story.)
Promstuck: A Homestuck Fan Adventure (With Prom) (John/Karkat, Terezi/Dave, Rose/Kanaya, by Cephied Variable, schelby & urbanAnchorite)
Length unknown, but at least a novella, PG-13.
"Your name is KARKAT VANTAS and your LIFE IS OVER. AGAIN." This is exactly what it says on the tin. It's ridiculous and overly self-indulgent, but also hilarious. (Art-based fic mimicking the webcomic format, hosted on Tumblr.)
(Cheese) Dust in the Wind (John/Karkat, by anxiousAnarchist)
1,200 words, PG
Karkat and John grocery shopping, and what a terrible idea that is. There's no plot and no real conflict, but this is stupidly adorable in the very particular way John/Karkat established relationship can be.
John Egbert and the Goblet of Sick Fires by Hammie & Harry Hazard
This is a slightly weird rec, because I'm actually reccing the prologue, rather than the whole fic (which is currently a WIP anyway). The fic proper is obviously a Goblet of Fire AU centring on John, and it's charming but the pacing is a bit shot and I got bored. But the prologue is pretty much a standalone first year story about four of the troll kids, and it is impossibly darling, seriously, just go and like. Glance at the pictures. And see if you can fail to be moved by their tiny little faces peering through the dark of the Forbidden Forest.
if food be the music of love (Terezi/Dave, by urbanAnchorite)
4,300 words, G.
In which Terezi isn't coping, and Dave isn't equipped, so he deploys junk food. Seriously, this fic so great: the visceral quality, the weird sexiness, the heartclenching post-apocalyptic hipster doucheyness of Terezi and Dave, it's all over awesome.
A Gentleman and a Lady (Terezi/Dave, by DoctorV)
1,100 words, PG-13
Dave, Terezi, and ironic crossdressing that isn't as ironic as all that. Kind of carelessly hot and really charming. I am charmed.
While we're here (might as well) (Terezi/Dave, by artillie & Lindensphinx, art by Odificus)
3,300 words, NC-17
Dave wakes up in a pile of scalemates and the wrong body. Bodyswap xeno porn full of sharp edges, kind of ridiculously fun. Gave me Terezi grin.
The Devil's Own (Rose/Kanaya, by Ember_Keelty)
2,300 words, PG-13
A gothic horror AU, in which Rose is the daughter of a scientist who dabbles in the dark and profane, and Kanaya is a pale and fascinating stranger washed up on their doorstep. Oooh, yes. This has a few clumsy turns of phrase, but the atmosphere is perfect, and the dynamic between Rose and Kanaya is shivery and excellent.
Skeins (Vriska/Kanaya, Rose/Kanaya, by feralphoenix)
2000 words, PG
High school AU. Rose advertises for membership in a knitting club; Vriska understands her purpose instantly. Oh my god, this has the most amazing Kanaya & Vriska dynamic, and the best bubbly non-angsty Vriska voice. The Rose & Kanaya is also great, though less developed.
Rita, Bob, and Mary Sue (Rose/Dave/Terezi, by paraTactician)
5,400 words, PG-13
Rose keeps her current WIP at the bottom of a dizzying array of subfolders; today there are 10 words in it that weren't written by her. Yessssssss this is so good. All their contributions to the story are hilarious but also full of character stuff that kept making me stop and reread and go "damn".
Froth And Frogs (Jade/Kanaya, by urbanAnchorite)
1,100 words, G.
Jade and Kanaya, frog-catching in the snow, basically being the most appealing of anybody. This is funny and off-kilter and darling and I love it. (Canon note: ... I don't even know, uh: frogs are relevant to Plot, and everybody is a Hero of A Particular Aspect, it's part of the game structure. For Jade and Kanaya it's Space.) (G)
If Vision Is The Only Validation (Jade/Karkat, by roachpatrol)
3,900 words, NC-17.
In which Jade uses her Hero of Space goggles to see Karkat, and things go from there. This is such an adorable fic (xenophiliac voyeuristic PWP and all), and such a great Jade voice.
Drop It Like It's Hot (Dave/Karkat, by roachpatrol)
900 words, R.
In which the instant any of the human kids gets out a mop bucket to clean, the trolls are there like it's a spectator sport. This is both hilarious and stupidly hot. The way this author writes Karkat is breathcatching. (Canon note: buckets have sexual connotations in troll culture. It's a ... thing.)
insect clockwork (Dave & Bro, by SORD)
1,100 words, PG
Bro and Dave and heatwaves and the years between. Ughh, this will do your heart good. Bro you are so fucked up, but I do believe it was always about love with you.
