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The Homestuck fandom, a folklore group centered around consumption of Andrew Hussie’s 8,000+ page webcomic Homestuck , spin-off games, and the in-progress sequel Homestuck^2 , has spanned the breadth of the internet for the past eleven years. The Homestuck “universe”, an expansive multimedia experience, has spawned an unfathomable amount of creative works by its fans. What makes this fandom unique, however, is its most important piece of tradition: the interplay between creator and fan. From the suggestion box and the character naming forums in the early days, to the explicit referencing of fanworks and the ascension of fans to Hussie’s art, music, and writing teams of more recent years, Hussie has cultivated a social bond between Homestuck and its fans. This special intimacy between creator and consumer has allowed the fandom to take part in shaping the Homestuck universe’s development. By charting the course of a particularly ambitious fanwork, one can clearly see the significance of this social performance within the folklore group as it establishes a bonding of the fanwork and fancreator to the Homestuck universe. From its conception as a 1998 novel by renowned children's author Jeanne Betancourt, Detective Pony ( D.P. ) would enter the Homestuck universe as a joke, become a fanfiction, an audiobook, canonized by Homestuck^2 , and a YouTube series.
As previously mentioned, the tradition of performative culture that is the social interplay between author and fan creator is as old as Homestuck itself, which started on April 13, 2009. This first performance was the implementation of the suggestion box. Homestuck ’s format, like Hussie’s earlier comics, is loosely modeled after the “text based adventure” game, in which the link to the next page is worded like a command prompt one would type to make a game character perform an action. To further simulate the “TBA” experience, the suggestion box was born. Readers could submit a suggested command, and Hussie would pick one for Homestuck ’s next page, out of whimsy or to advance the story in his preconceived direction [footnote 1]. While this would later be phased out of Homestuck as its length and fanbase engorged, Hussie continued to emphasize reader input. His fanforum would serve as a place to gather name suggestions for characters, and when he began to “ascend” fans to collaborate on art or music, he found and communicated with them through the forum. Several of his characters are modeled after fan archetypes, and several pieces of fanart or fanfiction would make their way into the story. Fan involvement only grew stronger after Homestuck ended, with fans ascending to a writers team for collaboration on several video games, a 200,000+ word Epilogue , and the in-progress sequel Homestuck^2 . While working on Homestuck^2, these writers have not only utilized the suggestion box to have fans direct character Dirk Strider’s actions and choose a new character’s name, but they have also canonized Detective Pony.
Detective Pony, originally a children's novel, follows the adventures of Anna Harley and two of her friends as the “Pony Pals” help a stray kitten, fight a fire at an animal shelter, and find the kitten when it goes missing. Within the context of Homestuck , it follows an interesting evolutionary trajectory as a palimpsest- a written work that has been drawn or written over, altering the text but leaving traces. The Homestuck character who enacts the palimpsest is Dirk Strider, a teen who enjoys horses, irony, and philosophy. He lovingly defaces the novel in his iconic orange: writing, drawing, and pasting typed amendments over the pages as a gift for best friend Jane Crocker’s 14th birthday. Jane adores detective stories and “frightening fauna”, both of which are incorporated into the palimpsest of D.P. Though Dirk edited the entire book, the Homestuck reader is only privy to the cover and a few pages. These are Figures 1-4 below.
These four pages, posted on January 11th, 2012, are the first and last the reader sees of D.P. in Homestuck , but only the beginning of its journey through the fandom and Homestuck universe. As seen in Figure 2, Dirk amended the tone of the chapter titles with his scribblings, and according to Jane’s inner monologue in the Figure 4 caption, Dirk revised entire chapters to turn the lighthearted adventure into a deeply emotional story. If this was a regular community, these four pages might have faded into obscurity, just another little joke among the thousands of pages. Hussie himself likely thought of this as nothing more than a way to introduce the audience to the dynamics of Dirk and Jane’s friendship. However, the folk who participate in the Homestuck fandom are as obsessive as they are creative, and incredibly devoted to using those passions to cultivate masterpieces in a way that is nothing short of worshipful.
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Figure 1 (below): “You've read this a million times already. It's one of your favorite gifts.” [footnote 2]
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Figure 2 ("contents") & 3 ("a visitor").[footnote 3]
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Figure 4 (below): “Later, about halfway through the book, rather than see the gag through to the bitter end, Strider began pasting over entire pages of original text with his own completely rewritten version of the story, while keeping all the chapter titles. His revision is a tough, emotionally draining read. But it's cathartic, in all the worst ways possible. He tends to get carried away with his projects.”
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Detective Pony’s journey continued in the hands of Archive of Our Own (AO3) user Sonnetstuck. They purchased and began scanning pages of the novel in spring of 2012, using photoshop to edit them. Their adaptation had little to go on aside from what is seen in the Figures and captions above, but they continued as a labor of love. The result is a mixture of humor, violence, introspection, and philosophy, charting the Pony Pals’ adventure through their hometown of Wiggins, the Greek underworld of Hades, and through the book itself on a meta-textual level. Sonnetstuck’s version is, as promised, cathartic in the worst way possible. The three girls, each representing one of Dirk’s friends, have to contend with the impact of a domineering and manipulative false author-figure altering their lives, erasing their innocence, and reshaping their identities, the sort of thing Dirk fears becoming in Homestuck canon. Without going into to much detail, the story spirals “out of Dirk’s control”, as the fictional author writes himself into the story, argues with his own written version of Jeanne Bettancourt over the right of authorship, and loses his power as author to Anna Harley’s weaponization of dyslexia and ability to draw on the knowledge contained within the various works Dirk had plagiarized, including Dirk himself, as he sees himself as a literary character. There are various interludes and tangents where Dirk as the narrator ponders different topics, including the evolution of memes. D.P. is about 100 pages long, and Sonnetstuck edited each and every one, the last 30 being entirely new text. They described it as “an adventure through the tangled and self-indulgent world of metafiction” and “an exploration of the darkness that dwells in the heart of man” footnote 5]. They posted the pages on their Tumblr blog as they worked through the creative process, and on October 14th, 2014, they posted the entire twelve chapters of edited pages, plus a thirteenth chapter featuring the story in text-only format for accessibility, on fanfiction website AO3. The wordcount of the text-only version numbered at over 40,800 words, and received over 110,300 “hits”, AO3’s method of counting unique views [footnote 6].
Sonnetstuck’s Detective Pony was well loved by the Homestuck fandom, generating delighted comments and even some fanart on Tumblr and other websites. One of these members of fandom, known as Naked Bee on various websites, was especially inspired. She teamed up with friend and fellow fan Duckface, and the two produced Detective Pony the Audiobook, posting it on AO3 and YouTube. The 12 videos, divided by chapter, make a grand total of 4 hours, 3 minutes, and 19 seconds of audio. Chapter 1 was posted on October 1st, 2016, the rest following over that week, concluding with chapters 10-12 on the 7th. Naked Bee used her voice for Jeanne Betancourt, reading the black text that remained unchanged from the original novel, while Duckface used his to play Dirk Strider, reading the sections edited by Andrew Hussie and Sonnetstuck as Dirk in orange. The Youtube playlist had 11,900+ views, while the AO3 posting received 4,500+ hits [footnote 7]. This was again well regarded by fans, with many comments and fanart praising Sonnetstuck’s prose, NakedBee’s editing, and her and Duckface’s voice acting. Once again people were talking about the project, as many regard Sonnetstuck’s writing as the most true interpretation of Dirk’s internal anguish and verbal cadence aside from Hussie himself. The delightful contrast between Naked Bee’s poised Jeanne voice and the low, smooth ramblings of slightly-unhinged Dirk as voiced by Duckface, along with Naked Bee’s musical accompaniments, made the audiobook a pleasant listen. This Audiobook was posted at a critical time, as Homestuck’s Act 7 had been posted on April 13th 2016, and the end credits page would be posted just a few weeks after the Audiobook, on October 25th, 2016. Many fans regarded this as the end of an era, as at that point, the games were merely rumors and the vague promise of an epilogue or a “Homestuck 2.0” did not seem quite real.
The next few years expanded the Homestuck universe with a point and click adventure game and its episodic spin off, but did not contain characters from Homestuck itself. Then, on April 13, 2019, those characters returned. The “prologue” of The Homestuck Epilogues was released, followed by the rest on April 20th. These followed the Homestuck characters a decade later and all grown up, with Dirk as a main antagonist, becoming an author figure and manipulating his friends into actions and romance without their knowledge, changing their lives in the same way Sonnetstuck wrote Dirk’s influence over the Detective Pony characters. With one of the friends having to grapple with what parts of their identity were products of Dirk’s manipulations, the similarities to the D.P. plotline provoked speculations of inspiration.
Rumors of Sonnetstuck’s influence circulated in the Homestuck community, and the nail in the coffin soon arrived. On October 25th, 2019, the first 23 pages of Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon were uploaded. Fans, delighted to see the suggestion box for the first time in years, became ecstatic over a conversation on page 21 between Dirk, now ascended author-villain, and the alien woman Terezi he had tricked into joining him. This conversation is shown in Figure 5 both in its original form and in an easier-to-read caption, mentioning the phrase “remember Longcat Jane?”, a reference not to the 4 pages of D.P. in Homestuck , but to a rant that Sonnetstuck penned in their version, pasted on pages 21 & 46 over the original illustrations.
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Figure 5 (below):
Terezi: “Even your silly book about horses is an easier read (than Rose’s book) and I had to get Rose To explain what half of it even met. Especially all those references to ancient Earth culture.
Dirk: “I guess some of the magic is lost if you're not adequately boned the fuck up on several thousand years of human philosophy and like, four dead languages, true.
Terezi: “No, I meant the memes. “Remember Longcat Jane?” Completely incomprehensible.” [footnote 8]
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Figures 6 (“remember Longcat...”) and 7 (“but we’ll...”): a very long and convoluted rant about cat memes and philosophy. [footnote 9]
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To summarize Figures 6 & 7, the dense text begins with the shift in cat memes from longcat to “i can haz”, and spirals into a deconstruction of memes in relation to the Plato dialogue Phaedrus , but the well written rant pales in importance compared to HS^2 referencing it, elevating Sonnetstuck’s work from fanfiction to canon, establishing their words as equal to Hussie’s. This was a significant achievement, one that fans and writing team alike displayed their approval of. Naked Bee and Duckface celebrated this with converting Audiobook into a “movie”, 4 hr 2 min and 49 sec spanning 12 videos featuring barbies, horse toys, and digital backgrounds, released weekly from January 11th to April 11th 2020 [footnote 10]. They even created a tribute to the longcat rant: a huge corkboard of cat memes and Wikipedia articles, as seen on Figure 8 below.
The intricate dance between author, fanfiction writer, voice actors, and writing team displays a circuitous route affectionately referred to as the “circle of stupidity” by fandom. Detective Pony is fundamentally a transformative work, as each individual leaves their mark upon it as they pass it around the circle. Its influence has not ended, with a new boom after the completion of the “movie” in fanart and fanfiction depicting both the D.P. characters and Jane’s reaction as she reads DP becoming a new trend. This performance of creators and fans serves to solidify the love the fans have for Homestuck ’s universe and the respect Hussie and his team feel for the passion and creativity of the fandom. Hussie has always placed a significant emphasis on this social bond, and the blurring of lines between his work and that of fans elevates creations like Detective Pony and creators like Sonnetstuck, Naked Bee, and Duckface to a special status that cements them in Homestuck ’s history. This honored status immortalizes those who take part in the performance, ritually merging these fans and transformative work into Homestuck canon.
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Figure 8: Photograph of the Longcat Rant Corkboard. Note the orange string, the antique artwork of cats, and copious Wikipedia articles mixed in with the memes, Longcat himself at the center. [footnote 11]
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WORKS CITED
Duckface and NakedBee. 2016. [Podfic] Detective Pony. Archive of Our Own. October 8. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8179244?view_full_work=true .
Hussie, Andrew. 2012. Homestuck . What Pumpkin Studios. January 11. https://www.homestuck.com .
Hussie, Andrew. 2014. “HEY! Welcome to MSPA!” MS Paint Adventures . What Pumpkin Studios. http://www.mspaintadventures.com/test_index.php?viewpage=new .
Hussie, Andrew, Aysha U. Farah, Kate Mitchell, Lalo Hunt, Pip Dillistone, and Taz optimisticDuelist. 2019. Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon . What Pumpkin & Snake Solutions. October 25. https://homestuck2.com/story/21 .
Naked Bee. 2019. Detective Pony (Audiobook). YouTube. August 29. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ8hhddV_CO3MPToD4TCoo4eKFqeQTk9l .
Naked Bee. 2020. Detective Pony (Movie). YouTube. April 7. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ8hhddV_CO10iMt7PGZ3LSa_qB_Z_ah5
Naked Bee. 2020. Longcat Corkboard . Photograph. Twitter Instant Messages . April 16.
Sonnetstuck. 2014. Detective Pony. Archive of Our Own. October 14. https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427119?view_full_work=true .
Sonnetstuck (detective-pony) 2014. “About.” Tumblr post, 2014. https://detective-pony.tumblr.com/about .