Written by Drew Linky, mirrored on Tumblr - 15th of January, 2018
The Gankro interview is complete, and now that I have his responses to my questions transcribed (under Appendix B, “Alexis “Gankro” Beingessner Interview”), it is time to actually write the entry. This is actually going to be quite the undertaking, as Gankro felt it appropriate to give me an incredible amount of information, with transcripts of his own conversations with Hussie and various assets associated with his projects in Homestuck. There is a lot of organization of information that must be done.
Further, the quality of this entry is going to require a lot of thought as well. After I shared some of the details I got with Makin, he said that he wanted me to write this as a full article of sorts and post it on the subreddit as an announcement since it has new information no one has really seen before. I’m a little apprehensive about this idea, but I’m eager to condense this information and get it out there. I kind of wonder how I’ll get my summary to be worthwhile over simply viewing his responses directly, but that can be figured out as I’m doing it. What follows this paragraph will be the article for Gankro’s interview as it will be published on the subreddit; it will not contain any new information from today. Anyone interested in more information or who wants to look at the assets may find them in the Tumblr version of the article linked above.
I’ve been conducting interviews for a few months now, trying to seek as much information as possible about various aspects of the Homestuck fandom. Alexis “Gankro” Beingessner is one such individual who deserves a fair amount of consideration due to his contributions to Homestuck. It is difficult to imagine anyone else who has contributed to the webcomic in quite the same way that Gankro has: while many artists and musicians have contributed their assuredly impressive works to the comic, Gankro was involved with a different aspect entirely, that of coding.
It feels as if the scope and importance of Gankro’s contributions have been massively understated, if not skipped over completely. In addition to some smaller pages that were simple and fun, he also made possible some of the most memorable or influential pages in the entire webcomic, such as the walkarounds. With as little attention as Gankro has received for his staggering work, I was inspired to seek him out and ask him for information.
Gankro himself seems like an interesting character, working on such projects as the video game Rust and then for Mozilla Firefox. With this in mind I was sure that he would be busy and an interview would be brief at best, but I sent him my request regardless. My suspicions worsened after my request was answered with possibly the most succinct email I have ever received: “Sure”. It felt certain that Gankro would prove to be a rather taciturn individual, with such people typically proving very difficult and unenjoyable to ask questions.
I’m happy to say that I was wrong: after positing my questions, Gankro provided an unbelievable wealth of information about himself and his position working on Homestuck, as well as other details that I am humbled he felt it was appropriate to share. His tone was distinctly amicable, and I got the impression of a person eager to share details from the past that were all but forgotten for years. Far from being an unpleasant experience, I think his responses may have been the most revealing and interesting of any I’ve gotten so far.
It is necessary to disclaim one or two things. First, all of the events or details described herein occurred years ago now. This is not a problem in cases where there is a record available, but a lot of the correspondences that will be mentioned here took place on the MSPA forums, which are now inaccessible. As such, it is important to take most of it with the allowance that the information may be slightly inaccurate. In Gankro’s words, “Consider everything I say to be suffixed with an ‘(I think?)’ :)”. With these things in mind, it would be pertinent to begin with how he became involved with Homestuck in the first place.
Gankro describes that he was a fan of Problem Sleuth while it was still on-going, and so the prospect of a new webcomic from Hussie was fairly exciting. In addition, he was an avid member of Newgrounds, through which he had already gained some considerable experience in Flash as a game developer. As such, when the Homestuck Beta was started on April 10th, 2009, Gankro was naturally excited: Homestuck Beta was an attempt to write the story entirely in Flash, an ambitious endeavor that was shortly abandoned due to its complexity and difficulty. While initially disappointed by this, Gankro continued reading the comic after it rereleased on the 13th of April in the mixed-media format that we are now familiar with.
On the 14th of April, he began participating on the MSPA forums and showcasing some small projects and games that he made in Flash, including an MS Paint clone. Hussie discovered Gankro’s works and even played around with them; after a while Hussie PM’d Gankro, and the two engaged in some correspondence with each other. In this manner Hussie extended an invitation to Gankro, asking if he would be “interested in working on some more complex interactive stuff for MSPA itself.” As we can see today, the answer was a resounding yes.
Thus began Gankro’s work. Initially correspondence took place through forum private messages between the two, but as time went by business was conducted in a variety of media: email, instant messages, and even a secret forum where other content producers like artists and musicians all collaborated. He describes the exact nature of his involvement in terms of collaborating with Hussie: the comic and its projects—even ones that defined major plot developments—were conceived and then thrown together in an extremely adhoc, chaotic manner. Working with him was nothing less than being in a creative firestorm, with projects being completed in an exceedingly short amount of time and often incorporating elements created on the fly.
A good example of all this is what Gankro labels Project 7 – Alterniabound. AlterniaBound in-comic features a distinct visual style for its character designs that is reminiscent of the video game Earthbound. Initially the Earthbound sprites were simply to be used as references for pixel-spriting the characters, but then they became templates. Someone created a dance animation referencing Secret of Mana as a goof, but then—simply because it existed and was available—Hussie asked that it be incorporated into the project. This workstyle proved to be the rule: “it was a lot of content firehoses and me racing to keep up with them,” Gankro comments.
I can't emphasize this scramble enough. Andrew was a ceaseless content machine, and I don't think I was ever "blocked" on him producing content. Which is ridiculous considering how much content is packed into our games. (like, hundreds of pages of dialogue). He literally traveled back in time to make a comic about our development process while I was rigging up the content:
Hussie’s direction on projects was no less of a flood: “Andrew would variously send me directories full of assets, Flash files with some stuff already rigged up, huge text dumps of dialogue/descriptions, or gif mockups of scenes I should rig up in Flash. I would just scramble to get it all done in a reasonable time-frame.” All of this serving as a manic pace of work that others could almost never keep up with, not out of lack of dedication but because the man in charge was a creative demon in his own right.
This sort of work began to take its toll on Gankro, at the time being a highschool student with a part-time job and then later working on these projects while in college. His tone becomes more despondent here, describing his lowest moments working on the comic. At one point, Hussie seemed willing to entirely abandon a project in order to start moving ahead in the story, and Gankro literally pleaded with him in tears to wait just one more day for the finished product. On another occasion Gankro, who typically doesn’t drink, was “so stressed out from working on one of our projects that I went to a party and drunk myself sick”.
These sorts of intense demands were no doubt taxing, insufferably so at times. For all of this though, Gankro doesn’t seem to blame Hussie for it:
I honestly pushed myself too hard here. I don't think Andrew really understood how hard this stuff was on me; I think he's a good enough guy that he would've given me more space if he realized what I was doing to myself. But he's just so productive and I burnt myself out really hard trying to keep up with someone who, ultimately, was my hero that I didn't want to disappoint.
It’s clear how much being able to work on these projects meant to Gankro, as well as getting to work with Hussie himself. Despite circumstances not abiding, he persevered to deliver some of the most memorable content the comic possesses.
It’s also easy to imagine at this point the complexity of the projects, and curious about how much creative input Gankro may have had with projects of this size, I asked him about the exact degree of control he had: “Andrew was a fairly experienced programmer (in fact, he did all the simpler interactive Flash games himself), he would often defer to me on technical and implementation details. So that's where I was often the most ‘creative’.” Gankro also utilized this position to include many easter eggs that would go on to become frequently referenced in-jokes in the community. The most important of these is arguably “Trickster Mode”, which would also go on to become a canon development in the story. With all of this having been said, it seems evident that without Gankro some of the comic’s defining moments would never have come to life at all.
Of course, going into something and then coming out the other side are two totally different things. One wonders what Gankro must have felt after all was said and done, examining his contributions post-implementation. The intense pace naturally restricted his ability to test or optimize things. Despite this, he seems content: “I think mostly I'm pretty happy with what I did because I know the context under which it was created. There was no time to do things right.” Naturally with the pace of development not everything could turn out perfectly, and he says that occasionally people tell him that parts of his games don’t work or are broken. He seems largely unaffected by this: “I feel bad for an instant, but [then] I remember what it was like back then and I just don't care.” He admits that there are some technical elements he regrets, especially in the wake of Flash becoming defunct recently, and he would certainly like to go back and fine-tune various elements of his creations. With his additional years of experience now on top of it all, it’s trivial for him to identify certain things that could have been done better.
Yet, for the reception of his work by the community at the time, those problems might as well have not existed. The games that Gankro managed to create working in conjunction with Hussie captured people thoroughly and completely, becoming signature parts of the story that are now effectively essential. Perhaps too essential, in Gankro’s opinion:
The only criticism of it that I consider particularly serious is that it comes along with inherent accessibility issues. In order to follow along with this epic story you had to be able to play these little adventure games which were stuffed with hundreds of pages of words, only some of which would be important. And these games don't run the best because there were tons of things I did that were awful for performance but made it possible to implement things quickly.
Indeed, there are a variety of issues associated with his works, the point about accessibility being most prominent. As time went by Hussie began including summaries of the story or collections of the dialogue for people to sift through, which undoubtedly mitigated the issue. As might be expected, the implementation of these projects became better over time.
Unfortunately, Gankro states that his interest in the comic and its community waned as time went by: “I really didn't like how the Homestuck fandom developed over the years, but I don't think that's as much a value judgement on the fandom as it is a mismatch of interests mixed with a lot of my own personal issues.” Homestuck ended up corresponding to Gankro’s worst years growing up, and he looks back with a profound amount of regret in the way that he acted or interacted with others at the time: “At times I genuinely perceived mundane expressions of joy as phony bullshit and got mad about it. This didn't mix well with a huge rush of other people coming to talk about things I don't care about.” With the growth of the comic’s fanbase there was a perceivable shift in the focus of the comic, which led to an increasing disharmony of his own interest in the comic.
As more people joined, there was a steadily increasing emphasis on the narrative and the relationships between characters. “… what I really loved about Problem Sleuth and early Homestuck was the world and mechanics and how Andrew made all this complete bullshit slot together like a giant rube-goldberg machine… The story and relationships? Those were always just a vehicle for the things I actually cared about.” As more and more time passed, Gankro grew increasingly unhappy with the direction the fanbase was going with their interests, and this change was soon mirrored in Homestuck itself.
Andrew’s creativity is founded a lot in his interactions with others.
… because MSPA is fundamentally a giant jam session lead by Andrew, this shift in the community's focus ultimately became reflected in Homestuck. It became more about the story and relationships… I perceived this as Andrew mocking the parts of the community that I didn't like, but as time went on it pretty clearly became some kind of Serious.
Gankro’s involvement in the community lessened, talking in only certain forums for a while before his activity finally diminished completely. He was so put off that he couldn’t bring himself to continue reading the comic after a while, and for years it remained a significant spot of unease for him.
Yet, his time spent working on the comic was not a waste, not for us and especially not for him. It has influenced his life considerably: “Working on Homestuck had a huge impact on me, and is probably the basis for my entire life trajectory.” This is apparent in two ways, the first and most obvious being that it deepend his experience with programming: “By the time I got to university I was way ahead of most of my peers because I had shipped like 7 games for a million people to enjoy, while the curriculum couldn't even assume you'd programmed before.” His path in college eventually led to him working on the video game Rust, and now he works for Mozilla integrating Rust into the browser Firefox, something he is happy to be doing.
The second way working on Homestuck influenced him was more personal: “There's a reasonable chance I would have dropped out of highschool overcome by depression with no one to turn to (even with Homestuck I got pretty close).” This is a sentiment I’ve heard a myriad of times, and sympathize with it personally. Yet, for Gankro, the importance of this is twofold: not only did it help him get through a time he regards with dread, but he played an instrumental part in helping others through their own despair as well.
Written by Drew Linky, mirrored with some edits on Tumblr - 23rd of July, 2018
Homestuck, operating as a multimedia webcomic, utilizes many different forms of media over the course of the story. Music is an enormous element of what makes the webcomic enjoyable, for many people even being one of the main attractions of the entire story. As I’ve written about previously, Homestuck even had its own Music Team dedicated to creating works that could be incorporated into the comic.
Alongside this, however, there is a burgeoning fan music community. Innumerable people who were either too late or otherwise unable to get onto the Music Team proper were undeterred, sharing their musical creations with one another on the forums. Their works were more often than not hosted on the website tindeck, and it was so heavily used for this purpose that the website eventually included “homestuck” as its own category. A quick glance shows that, at the time of writing at least, there are still people who upload their own Homestuck music projects there—quite the dedication.
There was one such person back on the forums named OJ who was involved in this process: for some time they were happy enough to share their music directly with others in lieu of getting on the Music Team, but after a while they conceived of the idea of compiling all of the fan music thus far into an album of their own. People would be allowed to nominate themselves and others, assuming the authors of the work in question could be contacted and were okay with being included. It was in this ad hoc manner that the Land of Fans and Music album was born.
I was given the opportunity to speak with two massively influential figures involved with the Land of Fans and Music group, or LOFAM, over the course of the last several years. Ndividedbyzero (more commonly known as Cait) and Lambda have both seen and done a lot to help LOFAM along in its several year history, and they were so helpful as to sit down with me and laboriously explain the project, and the various elements involved with its development.
This was accomplished in a conversational style, with myself, both of them, and eventually Makin all participating in a group chat on Discord. The transcript of this conversation may be found in the Related Materials in appendix C under “Land of Fans and Music (LOFAM) Discussion”. The conversation is not only interesting from the point of learning more about LOFAM, but is actually a fascinating representative example of a conversation on Discord for those less familiar with the medium.
Cait and Lambda themselves warrant some description. I’ve already written about them at length individually, but together they’re another story entirely. Throughout the entirety of our conversation, they would unabashedly begin talking about completely unrelated things ranging from the mundane to the spectacularly weird. In one breath they could go from describing the complicated interpersonal politics of musical development to the nature of blue raspberry flavoring and back again, not to mention the insertion of some rather shocking types of pornography at various points (this latter behavior being solely attributable to Lambda).
Predictably there were many interludes in our conversations that I felt were necessary to redact due to their explicit nature, but aside from a long stretch of uninteresting and unrelated details I’ve kept in all of the off-topic remarks, such as a rather amusing saga involving the ratio of flavors in a bag of Airheads Candy. The exchanges between Cait and Lambda themselves were actually fairly interesting to watch—they play off of each other well and together were extremely helpful in piecing together the history of LOFAM, especially the later parts that they were directly involved in. They weren’t actually involved in the organization of the first album, but they were no less informative on the subject.
This first album, also known as LOFAM1, was a different experience from its successors. OJ was the main person who organized it, alongside a prominent Homestuck musician from the team named Solatrus. It was organized openly, with participants posting their songs and album art directly in the forum thread dedicated to the project.
For some time, the main page dedicated to unofficial MSPA music was Homestuck Gaiden, "where a few album projects that weren't greenlighted by hussie went between 2010-2011" (Cait). Most albums there were made by the Music Team or people very close to the team, and then LOFAM1 was included there.
Released in July of 2011 with 53 tracks (giving it the second greatest amount of content in any Homestuck-related album at the time), LOFAM1 introduced a plethora of fanmusicians for the first time. It also became the technical standard in terms of organization and setup: “it set the precedent for basically every fanalbum to come” (Cait). It did suffer its problems but Lambda remarks that the quality of the music submissions overall were pretty good at this point, saying "there was WAAAAY worse [submissions] with the other lofams" that they ended up leaving out, with the other albums to be described later.
Unfortunately, Homestuck Gaiden ended up being shut down sometime after the release of LOFAM1. There is some speculation on why this may have happened, although none of it can be verified: one commonly suggested theory is that Hussie didn’t want fans to think that the albums were official and that he wanted more control over music production, among other reasons. This would make sense: "the music team ended up really really having to emphasize the whole UNOFFICIAL bit" (Cait), and if it proved not to be enough then they would have been asked to stop. Regardless of why, this development mixed up the fan music scene for a while.
Lambda describes that this is about the point where her involvement began. At the very beginning of 2012, there was a community stream celebrating the release of Bowman’s album Ithaca. Lambda began conversing with the people in the stream chat and then later outside of it. At some point she was thusly invited to a group jocularly referred to as the “Stupid ‘o Clock Chat”.
Hosted on Skype, Stupid ‘o Clock (SOC) contained innumerable people. In its greatest incarnation—of which there were many due to Skype’s tendency to crash or fail outright—it held approximately 80-90 people, which was almost certainly part of why it would crash periodically. Many of these people were important names in Homestuck music, but it also held some art people and a smattering of others.
Time passed in SOC, and in April or May of 2012 Lambda asked around if there were any plans to make a LOFAM2—people were still creating content, and OJ had neglected to step up after heading the first project. The vast majority of responses to her questioning indicated that there was interest in creating another album, but there was basically no desire to organize it. It was then that Lambda took it upon herself to do so.
Lambda recruited a person named Liza—who currently heads the official Bowman Discord fanserver—to help, and together they led the organization of LOFAM2. Lambda was fairly young at the time and inexperienced with coordinating such projects; between this and other influences, the album’s development was fraught with problems: "i think lofam2 ended with like / at least one person saying 'wow, never doing that again'" (Lambda), a sentiment echoed by Liza themselves.
Before LOFAM2’s release, a user named Shadolith—more commonly known as Marcy Nabors and who currently works making sound effects for Hiveswap—was working on a fanalbum called SBURB OST. With Homestuck Gaiden rendered unusable, a new place was needed to host music. Thus, in November of 2012, SBURB OST became the first album to be released on the unofficialmspafans Bandcamp page (graciously shortened into the acronym UMSPAF). At the end of the year LOFAM2 was also released. For unspecified reasons, perhaps general decay of interest, the Stupid ‘o Clock chat was abandoned by the end of 2012.
Due to the difficulties of making LOFAM2, making another album seemed unlikely at first. However, this quickly changed: "[making LOFAM3] was only unsure for like 3 or 4 months" (Lambda). Before long, LOFAM3 was being organized. Cait comments: “the head organizer for LOFAM 3 was VeritasUnae, who was a major contributor on Sburb OST, frequented the music thread on the MSPA Forums and worked on the UMSPAF website”. As with LOFAM2, songs were nominated by being posted in the relevant thread on the MSPA forums, or by sending an ask on Tumblr.
Cait had been friends with Lambda, Liza, and others, and herself was around for the creation of LOFAM2, but she claims she didn’t have enough skill to get onto that particular project. Despite this she was still heavily invested in LOFAM2 and was disappointed in the way it turned out: "i was an extremely active follower but not a major player, so i remember being real sad when i heard all the sentiment about drama on the lofam2 end" (Cait). When LOFAM3 started being developed, Lambda asked Cait to be a music judge, meaning she would get to determine which songs got on the album. She says she "was pretty surprised but definitely above all grateful for the opportunity".
Unfortunately, in late 2012 and especially 2013 the webcomic began to suffer in earnest from hiatuses: "homestuck died for 2 years" (Lambda). The decline in updates led to a subsequent decrease in fanworks, and fan music in particular languished considerably. There were very few albums released in the ensuing pauses of the story. Despite this, work on LOFAM3 continued for much of the year, with Cait estimating that there were nearly 100 contributors.
The overall process was smooth but festooned with numerous delays due to the sheer number of people involved. Finally LOFAM3 was released almost exactly one year after LOFAM2 on the 15th of December. Due to the lack of other albums in production at the time, it was a chronologically isolated event. There was a small stream to commemorate the affair, but this only heralded an intense quiet to follow after: for two and a half years, LOFAM3 was the last album to be released by the unofficial MSPA fan group.
As mentioned earlier, Homestuck’s numerous pauses led to a drastic decrease in fan music production. Most of the so-christened “old guard”, the original members of the fan team, had moved on even before LOFAM3 came out. This trend only worsened over time:
it's hard to get inspiration for fanmusic when the music team itself has resigned to fate / ... / homestuck being on break drastically correlates with breaks in fanmusic production / except after homestuck ended / for some reason" (Cait)
In this manner, the fan music scene for all of 2014 and part of 2015 was essentially dead.
At some point in 2014, however, a spreadsheet for LOFAM4 was created. It began relatively small, with a smattering of general concepts and "whatever we pieced together from the ashes" (Cait). At first, progress on developing LOFAM4 was extremely slow. There wasn’t a lot of material to work with and musical creativity was at an all-time low, so naturally LOFAM4 lay dormant for some time (although it was gradually building up steam, according to Cait).
Then in early 2015, a member named Josie began organizing a new fan album conceptualized as “the Beforus project”. Without going into too many details, “Beforus” refers to a portion of Homestuck that is oft-debated as being one of the worst facets of the entire story, so the subject of the album was already of major contention. To make matters worse, there appeared to be no quality control exercised throughout the album’s development, which lead to tracks that were extremely unpleasant to listen to, if not literally painful to the ear.
While many of the songs seem to have missed the mark ("i'm pretty sure like everyone on lofam4 was like ‘yeah, we'd... never let this touch a lofam’", said Lambda), Cait stresses that some of the songs were good or even great. Regardless of how one perceived the album’s overall quality, people who were fans of the subject material ate it up indiscriminately. It signified a new beginning for the fan music scene: scores of fresh artists and musicians were drawn in, and this lead to LOFAM4 being kickstarted into serious production: "in terms of lofam4, it absolutely helped us with contributions" (Cait). From there, the pace only seemed to quicken in leaps and bounds.
Following the release of the Beforus album, there was a significant upswing in activity: "the bottom line is that basically, starting in early-mid 2016, A Lot Of Shit Was Now Happening" (Cait). Not only was the fan music scene picking up, but this all happened to coincide with the release of Homestuck Volume 10 in June of 2016. "this was important specifically because we'd decided long ago that lofam4 shouldn't be released until homestuck volume 10 was" (Cait). Thus, with a significant personal barrier out of the way, speed picked up exponentially.
Some setbacks in the form of real life problems for many members of the team manifested: "this caused a few problems, namely that judging all the songs was a months-long task" (Cait). As soon as they caught up on their workload, more songs would be submitted that made the cycle repeat: "it was clear that some things had to change / luckily, things were changing whether we wanted them to or not" (Cait). This change would come in the form of the Cool and New Music Team (CANMT).
CANMT’s first album, cool and new voulem. 1, was released on the 2nd of July in 2016, serving as a second wind for the fan music scene. Ost, the founder and then-leader of CANMT, was later invited to be a judge for music submissions on LOFAM4 and were extremely active with the work, "which was exactly what we needed" (Cait). Makin was similarly invited to work on LOFAM4 about a month later (although he claims, perhaps appropriately, that he bullied Lambda into letting him on).
The first LOFAM Discord server was created on the 11th of November, 2016 as a replacement for the Skype chat that the group had been using. This switch happened at Makin’s urging, because Skype is generally regarded as an inferior program that people were very eager to drop. With an enormous group project like LOFAM, it was clear that more space was needed to facilitate their work just as organizers, let alone the countless content producers that would eventually be involved. Makin also suggested that switching to Discord would lead to an increase in popularity for LOFAM.
Unfortunately, at this point a rift grew between LOFAM and CANMT where some members of the latter group felt bitter about involving themselves with the former. CANMT had built itself a reputation as a music group with less of an emphasis on sheer quality and more on working with a theme, namely the Cool and New Web Comic (CANWC).
CANWC is a loose retelling of Homestuck in the style of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, which by nature connotes an outward shittiness that has carried itself forward in CANMT’s music. This is all completely appropriate: much of the early music in CANMT consists of bastardized versions of original Homestuck music and is predictably difficult to listen to, which is thematically appropriate. However, as time went by the music became less thoroughly dedicated to shittery and began actually improving. When their seventh album was released, it contained a significant number of songs that were considered of decent enough quality to be put on LOFAM4.
However, there were a select number of people who felt that working with LOFAM was inappropriate:
when canmt started to develop a distinct culture, there was definitely a subgroup who felt either that lofam was the establishment, or that the songs in 2/3 were too boring and canmt was better / so amongst people (i have no idea whether this was common opinion or a vocal minority) there was an idea that submitting to lofam4 would be to give away your True Loyalties (Cait)
This behavior ended up frustrating even the CANMT members who were working as judges for LOFAM, such as Ost.
Despite these naysayers, in 2017 LOFAM4 kept growing in intensity: “in january makin bullied me more and had me just make a team discord and post to the subreddit asking for submissions” (Lambda). He stresses just how important a part his consistent botherations played in saving LOFAM4’s development, claiming that “it'd still be in the works / or worse, bad” (Makin). Further elaboration:
on january 17, 2017, the second LOFAM discord was created, this time to facilitate contributors to the album instead of just the organization team. as makin had deduced, the floodgates opened fast and dozens of potential LOFAM 4 musicians + artists began joining, now under a much more conductive environment for sharing work, receiving feedback and communicating in general than the previous decentralized approach. many of these musicians, as it happened, were from CANMT, which eased the apparent problems between our two groups significantly (Cait)
In this way, the first half of the year saw the rate of development for LOFAM4 rise from quick to nothing short of a fever pitch.
Team restructurings happened: with such a dramatic increase in the number of people available for projects, the scale of projects they were willing to pursue increased substantially. LOFAM4 was of course being actively pursued and was wildly hyped up for release, but team members also began work on the Xenoplanetarium album. The music scene in general seemed to escalate in intensity, with another group known as FLSA creating a Problem Sleuth album known as Weird Puzzle Tunes.
FLSA itself is “perhaps best described as a short-lived music collective branching off mainly from the members of CANMT, but others such as myself also joined” (Cait). FLSA was the group that conceptualized Xenoplanetarium, but eventually they realized they were being subsumed into the larger group. In this way, “WPT could be said to be the first album released under the reinvigorated UMSPAF banner” (Cait). For the next several months, things ambled along at a fine pace with some unelaborated-on personal drama (never threatening projects), and a few amusing or exciting projects independent of LOFAM4.
Rather unexpectedly in June of 2017, a new album was uploaded to the bandcamp by Jamie Paige and Marcy Nabors. Entitled 『H☯MESTUCK VAP☯RWAVE 2016 RUH-RUH-RUH-ＲＥＭＩＸ』アンドレア・ヒューシー・グーグル翻訳 (seriously, go look at it yourself), it’s “mostly full of ironically shitty vaporwave remixes of Homestuck tracks by Jamie Paige and Marcy that was first uploaded to Soundcloud in 2016” (Cait). This was followed by another project called Ancestral; headed singularly by a person named Josefin at first, UMSPAF eventually stepped in to help master the album and upload all of the songs to bandcamp.
All of these things were happening quickly, and then suddenly in August a bombshell was dropped: act 1 of Hiveswap would be released on September 14th of 2017, only a month away. “This posed a problem…: LOFAM 4 was… probably going to be released in September, but if it were released after Hiveswap, there was a huge chance of the album getting buried in the hype surrounding the game.” (Cait) Thus, the team officially launched itself into overdrive to try and get the album completed before act 1 was released.
This proved very stressful at times, and it can't be understated that we were working hard; by the final 2 days, I had gotten in about 3 hours of sleep within 48 hours. But the deadline was met. On September 9, 2017, Land of Fans and Music 4, which ended up at a truly unprecedented 105 tracks spanning over 6 and a half hours in total length, was streamed on Twitch, then released… Seeing this many people react to the work that we had all compiled and worked on for years with hype and praise was a vindicating experience, to say the absolute least… A significant chapter in the Homestuck fanmusic community- and oddly enough, my personal life, as well- was over. (Cait)
Naturally, with this momentous occasion now passed, the group began to slow down in its efforts.
For a while there was some quiet, but eventually the aforementioned Xenoplanetarium album was published in December. “… the smallest in the discography by design”, it featured only 12 tracks, but was very well received in general. Another, less serious album called Gristmas Carols was put out by Christmas (even smaller at 9 tracks). As of this writing, Gristmas Carols is the last album the group has put out.
Aside from Xenoplanetarium and Gristmas Carols, the peaceful quiet post-LOFAM4 has lasted well into 2018. However, Cait assures me that UMSPAF is hard at work on its next project, labeled “Cosmic Caretakers”. She further describes that everyone is anxious to see it done, as it’s been “in the works for quite a while now”. Whenever it does happen to release, there will undoubtedly be a community stream and a large number of eager fans waiting for them.
Looking back over nearly a decade of community history is no easy feat, and something as richly storied as UMSPAF is something else entirely. The fanbase’s reception to their works and their fierce, unmitigated dedication is quite something to behold. A community thrives when its members are creatively engaged and passionate—more than almost any other group I can think of, UMSPAF is exemplary of these qualities. Cait made a remark about the upcoming album, but I feel that it also serves as an excellent summation of LOFAM’s history: “it's shaping up to be quite an experience.”
Written by Drew Linky, mirrored on Tumblr - 6th of February, 2018
Introduction
The Music Team is an undeniably important part of the fabric of Homestuck: many pivotal moments in the webcomic’s creation would have been markedly different without the presence of music, to the point that one could reasonably argue that it would not be the same webcomic at all. For this reason, I was convinced that it would be worthwhile to look into the various members of the Music Team and see what information I could find.
I mentioned in my previous article about Gankro that I’m writing a journal which aims to preserve information about the Homestuck fandom, and seek out knowledge in places that most might not be aware of. For this reason I elected not to write too deeply on the release history of the team as a whole or of its constituent members; it is a relatively trivial matter to go to the bandcamp page and learn which albums were released when, and who did what. With this in mind, the focus of my interviews was less on the content produced and more on the circumstances under which the Music Team created its content.
Every group formed online has a distinct history that, if it is not shared with other people, stands the extremely high risk of being lost forever. The Music Team might have been just such a group, and my primary goal with this article was to illustrate some of the nuances and historical developments that are associated with the Music Team over the course of the webcomic, and to see how people felt about their involvement with the group.
I will attempt to describe how each person I interviewed feels about their time as part of the Music Team, but it is most prudent to go through the raw history of the place so as to gain a better grasp of the circumstances that led to where they are today. With that, I’ll begin by forming a rough timeline of the Music Team from its creation all the way up to now.
Timeline
Beginnings
Shortly after Homestuck began back in 2009, Hussie sent out a general request on the forums and on his blog for musicians that wanted to contribute to Homestuck. There was little in the way of any sort of quality control: “Pretty much anyone who e-mailed Andrew was accepted.” (Alexander), and it’s estimated that the number of people involved at the beginning was somewhere around 50 people. To better facilitate content production, Hussie created a hidden part of the forums dedicated to members of the Music Team only: this is where they talked with each other and collaborated, posting works in progress and deciding how albums should be organized. This is where the vast majority of the work was done: “Basically every music team album except for Vol 10 was born there.” (RJ). In the beginning the Music Team forum was really active, since largely everyone who bothered to message Hussie was accepted.
At this point, the way it worked often involved Hussie giving out minor snippets about developments in the story, and based on these tidbits he would ask that the team create a piece to go along with it. This continued for a while, and in the meantime less devoted people gradually left the team: “Who stayed and who left was basically determined by who wanted to actually work and make music!” (Alexander), although people generally worked by themselves and there was little real collaboration on projects.
Highs and lows
In February of 2010, an album entitled Midnight Crew: Drawing Dead was released. This album seemed to serve as a sort of litmus test: “Most of the people who contributed to that album would stick around.” (Alexander). This trend continued with most major album releases, and by the time Homestuck Vol. 6 was released in 2011, it was more or less safe to say that all of the contributors to that album could be considered “core team members”, which consisted of only about ten people in total. Group identity was arguably at its highest point here and for some, especially Alexander Rosetti and Thomas Ferkol, this was one of the greatest times for the Music Team in general.
Sometime before this, an important incident in 2010 occurred with a now notorious ex-member of the team named Bill Bolin, also known as pleocoma. Bolin had at this point contributed several pieces of music to Homestuck. One day Hussie took music files that Bolin had posted publicly but claimed were unfinished and inserted them into the comic without notifying him.
Bolin’s general demeanor struck most as unpleasant, if not downright odious at times, such that after Hussie used his work without his express permission Bolin positively exploded at Hussie and members of the Music Team who spoke against him. In the interest of privacy and in a conscious effort to avoid reinvigorating old drama, I will not elaborate on this situation in greater detail. Suffice it to say that Bolin was removed from the team for his incendiary comments and had his contributions to the comic scrubbed.
While this incident was partially forgotten in light of the rest of the team’s activities, it cast a pall over the group in some ways. Many of the people I spoke to expressed that they felt that dealing with Bolin was far and away the lowest time of the team’s history, although others remember it less sharply. Bolin himself is now a complete non-entity on the internet, with no one who remembers him quite sure what happened to him.
Moving on from this, the Music Team picked up the pace and began making content at a remarkable pace: many members had solo album projects or were collaborating with others to create side albums. The team enjoyed a period of great creativity and followed a pretty heavy release schedule for a couple years:
Volume 5 going out of its way to include gobs and gobs of material definitely changed the project; the floodgates opened. I think people admired Andrew's astonishingly prolific pace from 2009 to 2012, and between 2010 and 2011 the music project had the same vibe: we released one or two albums monthly. (Bowman)
Vols. 1-4 were released separately throughout the first year of the comic's existence, but can now be found in one large album here, rereleased in 2011. The main volume releases, Vol. 5 to Vol. 9, were regularly interspersed from 2010 to 2012.
Growing instability
Regular releases followed for some time, but then in parts of 2011 and 2012 it became clear that there was a shift in how the Music Team was being run. Hussie’s own involvement was gradually diminishing, and Toby Fox was coming into greater prominence: “… Toby made great music, he made it fast, and he understood Homestuck well and how it should sound. I think it started because he was able to predict things that would happen in the comic and make music for them ahead of time.” (Alexander). To some, even if distressing, it seemed only natural that Toby was coming to the fore.
The way that the Music Team “worked” up to this point, in terms of contributing music directly to the webcomic, was that work was shared in the forum and then Hussie would select a piece that he wanted to animate around. However, this general method was interrupted when Hussie privately asked Toby to compose music for an upcoming flash animation, which turned into the song Umbral Ultimatum.
This shift in dynamics did not sit well with many members of the team: “This is unpleasant for a lot of us to think back on, but some of the team started ostracizing Toby somewhat.” (Alexander). This backlash itself contributed to Hussie pulling away, something that members remember bitterly: “Toby Fox being made the ‘leader’ probably was supposed to organize us more, but all that was was Hussie leaning on Toby to do/organize whatever random things he needed to get done.” (Erik). This cycle continued for a while, until finally Toby was fully acting as the liaison between Hussie and the rest of the team.
Contributions to the comic still worked in much the same way and at this point fan musicians like James Roach were invited to participate, but after Vol 9 there was one immediate degree of change: instead of personally selecting music from work posted in the forums, Hussie recruited Toby Fox in selecting finished pieces from albums for flash animations. Hussie had finally withdrawn from the team completely: “At this point any idea of a music team was basically irrelevant.” (Alexander). Additionally, there was a marked decrease in activity: “Around the start of Act 6 in the comic was when the activity started slowing down.” (Kali), although this did not stop those who remained from completing their own personal projects.
As mentioned previously, throughout the team’s history solo and side albums such as The Felt (2010) and Squiddles! (2010) albums were fairly popular projects for people to work on. Albums such as Medium (Clark Powell, 2011), Sburb (Tyler Dever, 2011) were independent projects that helped establish each musician in various ways, and many such albums cropped up over the years. The team would also get together and collaborate on side albums like The Wanderers (2011) occasionally. These projects were a way for everyone to associate and come closer, and to further their skills as composers more freely or creatively.
Decline
Around the time that Vol. 9 was released in 2012, there was another setback: Hussie decided to scrub most of the side projects that were in progress.
Andrew had to step in and basically shut it down or truncate it severely since he couldn't keep up with it. We couldn't release them at a reasonable rate and not all of them were run by him first. A lot of material got scrapped, people were tense and disillusioned from it. Couple members were kicked or left following that over a long period of time. (Thomas)
Following this, the update schedule for Homestuck itself also began to experience significant lags; with members of the team growing despondent or outright leaving and without much inspiration or even license to create new projects, the Music Team essentially ground to a halt. Following a couple of solo albums and the release of Cherubim (2013), there was no work done as the Music Team. For many, this was basically the end of group.
For a long time there was essentially no work being done, although there were a couple of revivals: “We had several years of not really doing much as Homestuck itself kinda petered out until it had that sudden rush back at the end.” (RJ). This sudden rush back came in the form of Vol. 10 (2016), which RJ Lake personally managed, and arguably served as the last hurrah for the Music Team.
Since Vol. 10’s release, there have been no major projects that the team is collaborating on. “A lot of us have banded together on our own little projects, but there's no one thing the team is gonna do next.” (Kali). Additionally, when the forums went down, so too did the Music Team’s section of the website; this led to a sizeable loss in content that people were working on or sharing with each other: “Really wish the forums would come back just so I could grab all that old stuff.” (Erik). Since then, while members still associate with each other and even consider one another friends, the Music Team as a whole has essentially been rendered inert.
Culture of the Music Team
With this understanding of the team’s history, one may begin to examine the more nuanced opinions that each member may have held concerning their position on the team and how they all interacted with each other. This task is more difficult to approach: each member of the team naturally has their own feelings on what transpired. From this, my initial idea that the Music Team would have its own readily identifiable culture has been proven largely incorrect.
Following this, the idea that I received most overwhelmingly over the course of the interviews was that the Music Team was not, in all actuality, a cohesive group. The very structure of the group and the method of producing music by and large didn’t provide the circumstances that might have led to a more tight-knit community; music was not produced in tandem with others most of the time, instead being mostly individual efforts that were stitched together at the end to make the larger volumes.
That’s not to say that everyone’s time spent in the Music Team was a waste, by any means. Most of the people I interviewed described that being on this team basically helped kickstart their careers, or otherwise helped further them greatly in their skills: Alexander Rosetti mentions that, “One of the best parts of being on the team was being inspired to get better and better when I heard other peoples' music.”; Erik Scheele mentions that he did more work for Homestuck alone than he did working for his degree in college, and that it was how he got into making digital music in the first place; RJ Lake’s entire career began as a result of working on Homestuck; Michael Bowman has led a very interesting career since working on the Music Team across a variety projects, a lot being music but then branching into other forms of entertainment; and Toby Fox of course went on to make Undertale, as well as making other music. For these people and undoubtedly more who were on the team, the course of their lives has been altered forever by the time they spent working with each other on Homestuck.
Even aside from the impact on them professionally, the marks they’ve all left on each other as people are important as well. RJ describes being friends with each other to this day: “All of us do talk casually. We’re just, y’know, friends.” (RJ), a point that Kali also makes. Conversely, there are some who look back on it with a more mixed attitude: “There were the fun bits, there was a lot of drama, and that's that.” (Erik). It is no stretch of the imagination to say that, along with the good, there was some bad accompanying it.
Toby Fox’s impact on the team being arguably the most profound, I wondered how people might feel about him now that all is said and done. Considering the negativity that surrounded him in the past, I was relieved to hear that most people have moved on or even reconciled with him: “… no one holds anything against Toby. We all respect him a great deal.” (Alexander). Across the other interviews, no one really spoke to the contrary.
Toby neglected to address this question for himself, but looking back generally he stated: “I think most people look back on [their time on the Music Team] with a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment”. While this may be true for some, for a majority of people it seems apparent that their time spent on the Music Team was valued. Their work has certainly inspired numerous fans to pursue their own music-making tendencies, like those in the Cool and New Music Team and UnofficialMSPAFans.
RJ Lake provided a comment that I feel is worth ending on: “I imagine most people on the team have pretty leaning-positive feelings about it in general looking back, on balance. I know I do.”
Written by Drew Linky, mirrored on Tumblr - March 14th, 2018.
Anyone who has more than a cursory familiarity with Homestuck is probably also aware that it has spawned innumerable fanworks in a truly stunning variety of mediums; the community’s works of art in a litany of styles are unending, and the music community is burgeoning to this day. It seems as if there is no end to the ways that people will take inspiration from the webcomic and craft their own way of celebrating it.
One of the more unique and interesting ways in which this has been done may be found in a community that is now called RPGStuck. For those that may be unfamiliar: RPG is an acronym for “role-playing game”, a genre of games where, as the name implies, players take on the role of fictional characters. This may be done in numerous ways, but one of the more classic forms of RPGs come in the form of tabletop games, such as Dungeons and Dragons.
Indeed, RPGStuck is based around just such an idea. They have taken core concepts of Homestuck and transmuted it such that it is viable as a tabletop game. I recently got in contact with members of the RPGStuck community who helped develop and guide the project over its lifetime: user 12yz12ab has even written an entire document dedicated to its history, which may be found here.
Those interested in the full and in-depth details will want to look at the related document; otherwise I’ve decided to describe their history in a way that is more accessible to people who may not be familiar with Homestuck or tabletop gaming in general, or are simply looking for a less involved read. As it is, the story of RPGStuck begins three years ago today, on the 14th of March in 2015.
Homestuck itself was in the midst of yet another pause, with the fandom in general waiting for the next batch of updates. People were growing restless, which was typical for pauses at that point. With more conventional means of entertaining themselves beginning to grow stale, one user named AnionCation made a post on the subreddit on the 9th of March, 2015 to see if anyone would be interested in a roleplaying game based around Homestuck.
The response was great, perhaps even greater than expected: 72 replies to the thread were made, and soon after people began discussing how this should be organized. As with any ambitious project there were responses geared towards the decidedly negative: doubts were cast as to the viability of this project, especially over the ability of people in charge to govern such an unwieldy project. Important to understand is that RPGs typically have an upper limit of players that can be sustained before it begins to suffer problems, and the number of people interested was more than any campaign can reasonably handle.
AnionCation continued unwaveringly, however, and she outlined a system in which the entire story, or “campaign”, would have different sections played by different groups of people, or “sessions”. This idea and the latter term are both in keeping with a storytelling convention in Homestuck itself and served as a rather clever way to handle the disproportionately large numbers of people that wanted to engage in the campaign.
Some days of discussion trying to tweak this overall system were had, and people attempted to fill in knowledge gaps in others who were at that point unfamiliar with the overall idea of roleplaying games: it was determined that the roleplay would be conducted on Reddit itself, through a play-by-post system. A helpful post that served as an introduction to roleplaying was created, and a friend of AnionCation named Andres-gamer “introduced a rudimentary system loosely based off of Dungeons and Dragons to use for the new roleplay”. The name of the community was conceptualized on the 12th, and then two days later on the 14th they officially began playing, which is by common consensus the true anniversary of RPGStuck.
The first day was actually referred to as “Day 0”: in roleplaying games it’s often necessary to start off campaigns by conceptualizing your character and establishing it in a world with the other characters that will be played. “Day 1” then was when the “game” in earnest began: the initial driving event—an apocalypse—and a larger in-game universe referred to as SABATH would serve as the forces that set things in motion for each session.
Naturally, the system did not work at first. “People were regularly forgotten about and dropped to be picked up again later.” Just starting the game had its difficulties, and even once players were more established it did not get any easier. This confusion led to some people permanently leaving the project, a mark of how rough and unpolished RPGStuck was in its infancy.
Yet, despite these difficulties most people involved persevered. A user known as ATTheorytime, or AT, came up with an idea for introducing more players as other, ancillary characters such as non-player characters (NPCs) in order to help smooth the process out some. While this particular idea was never incorporated, a similar one involving managers for the game manifested: there was apparently a shortage of people willing to be facilitators, or “dungeon masters” (DMs), and AT’s suggestion helped to mitigate this problem. With the influx of new DMs that had no experience running RPGStuck at that point, it was decided that it was time to begin another campaign in order to help address these organizational problems.
The first campaign in its entirety came to be referred to as C1. This naming convention stuck for all later campaigns, and thus RPGStuck embarked on C2, which was begun on Homestuck’s 6th anniversary on the 13th of April, 2015 and ran concurrently with C1. The new campaign also started off roughly but ultimately was proven worthwhile, being enormously helpful both to those new to playing it and to those managing it.
Managing these campaigns involved some small hierarchy: as previously mentioned, a dungeon master facilitated each individual session, and these DMs were collectively supervised by AnionCation and AT. At some point a Skype group was created so that DMs could discuss matters together, and then all of the players created their own chat.
While initially watched over, this group chat was eventually abandoned by mods and left to run itself, which proved ultimately to be a disaster, and a new chat was formed on Skype to hold everyone. In an amusing aside, a user named DouchemasterMcChest was banned from this new chat and returned in spite to the original, turning the forgotten Skype group into a “cesspool”. This became an in-joke in RPGStuck known as the “Bane Plane”. As might be expected, over time the Bane Plane was abandoned and now no longer exists.
As for C2, the system was still fraught with problems. The chat and other features made things run more smoothly for players in general, but the administration still encountered challenges like sudden DM departures, which threw an entire session off kilter and required an immediate replacement. At this point, a new person from C2 named Nanakishi, or Becks, brought up the idea of hosting community events. These events would manifest as both in-character and out-of-character parties or socials; as the names imply, in-character (IC) means the event was carried out while people were assuming the mantles of their characters, and out-of-character (OOC) means the events were held with people assuming their real identities.
At this point the community was still relatively small but everyone was close to each other, which is more or less typical of roleplaying groups. Outside of RPGStuck itself, community members often participated in other games such as Town of Salem or Board Game Online. This continue for a month or so, and then Becks came into contact with /r/Homestuck’s own moderator /u/aberrantArtificer—a player and DM in C1—and another user named Jumbuck, also known as Zion. Together, they began conceiving of ideas that would drastically expand the dimensions of the gameplay for RPGStuck.
The arbitrary and somewhat chaotic manner in which C1 and C2 were started is due in no small part to the absence of a lot of gameplay mechanics: having few rules allowed for sessions to be more free-form, but codifying mechanics would help smooth gameplay out and make it easier for players to know what to do in a given situation. To rectify this, and in keeping with tabletop gaming in general, the team started putting together some vital documents: a Player’s Handbook was assembled in order to make it easier for players and DMs alike to reference clearly established rules, which would in turn make gameplay more steady for all involved. Additional documents such as a database of enemies players could fight and a guide to DMing were also created.
With the increase in organization, it was decided to launch yet another campaign: in July of 2015, AT and user PissyDuck formally announced signups for C3. With C1 and C2 being so rough and still in progress, many viewed this as unfavorable. Even with this, established players and many new players alike decided to participate. In total, 76 characters—some being played by the same person—were created for this campaign.
C3 was larger than its predecessors and thus necessitated different handling. C1 and C2 were each based around a core plot that each individual session contributed to in some way, but C3 was the first campaign where sessions had completely independent plots, which allowed DMs to handle their sessions with more creative license than before. “One user was even inspired to create a session on a separate subreddit for a few of his friends in real life.” For a couple of months, the mood of the community seemed only to rise.
Throughout this process, the administrators were constantly involved with managing the community in both proactive and reactive ways. Anion, Becks, and AT were typically hands-on with how they dealt with players or even with community demands in general. At some point in September, a census was conducted on the RPGStuck subreddit, which showed that many people wanted more events outside of the game sessions themselves.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that RPGStuck had been using IRC throughout its history for various purposes. It was common for people to roleplay there in more casual or non-canon settings for fun, allowing people to continue playing as their character without being constrained by rules. Fights between characters were organized, and this activity led to a variety of creative ideas outside of the scope of RPGStuck itself.
Events for the rest of the year proceeded in much the same fashion. At some point in late October 2015, one of the groups still playing in C1 started pushing rapidly towards the endgame (although it would be another year still before the campaign was actually finished). A plethora of sideprojects were initiated, including a second version of the rules for the game known as “2e” being developed. Further details of these events and projects may be found in the previously linked document by 12yz12ab.
Before anyone knew it, the first anniversary of RPGStuck arrived. A small celebration was held, but then on April 24th of 2016 AnionCation stepped down from being the head of RPGStuck. Although she retained the honorary position of headmod of the subreddit, Becks was officially handed the reins. For a couple of months, things assumed a quiet calm.
On the 28th of June, things were shaken up drastically: C4 was officially announced alongside the induction of the completed 2e ruleset. For some time up to this point, the other campaigns had been stagnating, and the announcement was accompanied by the biggest burst of activity RPGStuck had ever seen.
C4 was run by Becks and aberrantArtificer: it was organized where players were sorted manually into groups with other people. Organizers also took into account the preferences of the players involved, so that people with similar interests were grouped together. After a month’s worth of preparation, on the 26th of July sessions for C4 were officially announced. Gameplay began in August with over 100 players, the largest campaign to date.
C1 was still around at this point—it had been decided that C4 would not commence until it was finished, but delays and other problems conspired such that C4 began even without the conclusion of C1. It was thus that 12yz12ab stepped in to try and coax C1 to its end, although it still took an impressive amount of time. The campaign dragged to its end over the course of four months, and finally on the 23rd of November 2016 the first campaign of RPGStuck was finally ended, complete with a finale written by 12yz12ab and aberrantArtificer.
For a few months, the other three campaigns proceeded as normal. Then some time into 2017, talk about beginning C5 was cropping up in the community. The discussion involved the possibility of letting C5 be run entirely by the community, but from the outset it seemed to be a misguided idea: “The chat was open access and was a vitriolic mess for much of the beginning, further hammering in the point that a completely community-driven campaign was out of the question.” C5 was tabled indefinitely, but the flurry of activity served as an indication to the administrators that expanding RPGStuck’s scope as a community was necessary.
So many people were involved at this point, and many of them so active, that people began to openly organize their own sessions. This process took off in earnest in the first half of 2017, and even aside from independent sessions a variety of projects were begun. One such example was by a user named Mathmatt878, called Whose Turn is it Anyways? as a parody on the improvisational comedy show Whose Line is it Anyway?, which served as a discussion post with a different prompt or topic from week to week. Projects like this one only served to attract more and more people as time went by, until it became clear to all involved that the community now had enough energy to keep itself going indefinitely.
The second anniversary of RPGStuck was met with even more community games and events for people to participate in, and the sense of togetherness deepened for all involved. Around this time, new sessions run independently shifted from being the exception to being the rule, and officially announced campaigns became gradually less prominent. The Player’s Handbook was fleshed out even more in preparation for a new version to be released, and still more side projects were completed: a user named TWRedditaccount created a program that allowed people to quickly and easily create spriteart for their characters, and a user named spinydoughnut33 released an RPGStuck album entitled The Lands of Chronostuck, a first for the community.
Amazingly, RPGStuck has only continued to grow in size, sometimes by leaps and bounds. The second anniversary to now involves so many distinct events that it feels impossible to list them all in a thorough fashion, including more talk about C5; due to people utilizing sessions of their own so often now it is surmised that C5 might never happen, although the possibility is still in the air. 12yz12ab comments: “we promised ourselves that it'll happen after one of two major events people are waiting for happen, but neither of those are going to happen anytime soon either”. A mysterious promise to be sure, but a tantalizing one.
Aside from this, there has also been a general shift from Skype to Discord for chatting with other people (which has an homage to the #bane_plane, now their dedicated shitposting channel). Their official Player’s Handbook had a number of expansions that massively deepened gameplay, all of which may be found in the Related Materials in appendix A under RPGStuck. Projects like Whose Turn is it Anyway? are still in production, alongside other more recent creations such as a series of podcasts. The administration even holds a census to better understand the people in the community.
At this point RPGStuck boasts an active subreddit with over 550 subscribers and its own Discord server. Those interested in hearing the rest of the last year’s events and learning more about RPGStuck would do well to read 12yz12ab’s document, or better still to go and talk with the community members themselves. They show absolutely no signs of slowing down anytime soon, and they stand as a shining e xample of the potential that the Homestuck fandom has to offer.
