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I think this is brilliant.
What I would add is that your phrase "magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers. It is both the biological reality of puberty and the narrative logic of progressing from child to adult. "Young adult" media inherently concerns the realization of conflict in the world and the boy's need to become a man. (The Pokemon anime is fundamentally for children because the world is basically good and the conflict is all in good fun, with occasional exceptions. The games are closer to puberty media.)
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Is it really that high now?
I thought it had more to do with Homestuck's fascination with alternative sexualities. If I remember correctly by the end of the original story there were maybe two main characters left who were not at least ambiguously gay.
I think there’s a qualitative difference between media where an identity is fulfilled and media where an identity is radically changed in essence. If you’re a boy born in 1920, what media are you reading where identity is changed in essence rather than fulfilled in development? You’re reading about a cowardly adventurer becoming brave, a soldier rising through the ranks, something of that sort. Or if you’re a boy playing WoW or Oblivion, you start as a grunt whose identity is achieved through an expected transformation. In 2020, you’re more likely to read about someone transforming into an animal, some cosmic being, being possessed by a different spirit, something of that sort. But I don’t know, maybe comic books are a counter example. But I think this is just one of the co-factors involved. If we shamed transgenderism and deleted all of their online spaces, IMO there would be a lot fewer cases; the notion of identity transformation would still be in the mind but it would be expressed by (maybe) shifting careers a lot, changing your name, changing religion, becoming Chinese, whatever else. Yesterday’s Lawrence of Arabia is today’s Lilith of Transbabea, but the Bedouin is more aesthetic IMO.
Per a survey of 7279 individuals, 52.1% of Homestuck fandom participants are transgender. I didn’t consider the possibility that it was because of sexuality representation, thanks for that info. I haven’t read it. Though the rate still seems extremely extreme extra high esp as few of the characters are transgender.
Yeah, as a form of experiential avoidance / negative reinforcement. The vicarious escapism is extra reinforced given the default social stressors. The real trigger though IMO is the extreme validation and praise you find in LGBTc places, with so much color and art and tribalism and such; really just a night v day difference for an at-risk nerd.
Correlation, causation.
The people taking a Homestuck community survey in 2025 are clearly selected for a willingness to hold socially ostracized beliefs.
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Transgender characters? Not as far as I recall, at all. I did a search and it looks like a few were declared trans in the "epilogues" (which came out years later). Part of what happened with Homestuck is that evaporative cooling over time made the remaining fanbase much gayer and more trans than the original population. And it was always fairly gay.
At the risk of launching a Homestuck synopsis nobody asked for: Homestuck is inherently about the fracturing and rebuilding of the self. Especially as it related to teenagers in puberty. The plot of Homestuck incorporates time-travel, multiverses, video game mechanic "god forms," second lives, mind control, fused personalities, and alternate realities. The common denominator is that every major character ends up incarnated in multiple forms and interacts with different forms of their own selves. For a simple and example, take the character Dave Strider. Dave is a relatively normal laconic "cool" young boy who wears sunglasses, who gains the power to travel in time. As Homestuck progresses, it becomes apparent that due to the choices of some other characters, Dave lives in a doomed timeline, so he has to travel back in time and interrupt his past self. Once the timeline is restored, the original Dave allows his personality to be fused with a sort of primordial ethereal power and becomes known as Davesprite. Davesprite and Dave now exist at the same time. Davesprite is a kind of alter-self of Dave, doomed, saved, frustrated, wisened, still "cool". Davesprite and Dave are treated as different characters and at the same time as the same. Davesprite becomes a mirror held up to Dave.
Every character in Homestuck passes through multiple alterations like that just described, most of them more convoluted or involved.
Almost all the characters also pass through to a sort of final form called their "god self". This is a superpowered form brought about by the complicated rules of the video game world. It's basically implied that these god forms are their "true selves," although Homestuck continues to put a lot of caveats around that conception. But the idea, fundamentally, is that each character iterates through multiple versions of himself before passing into a final mature form.
Make of that what you will. I think it is not inherently a metaphor for being trans, but is easily interpreted as one, in the same way that The Matrix has been reimagined as being symbolically a trans story.
At the same time, Homestuck also features this alien species of gray humanoids "Trolls" that are a massive gateway to queer plots. Trolls actually had four different kinds of romance available to them -- one is standard love, one is a kind of hatesex rivalry anti-love, one is a kind of asexual friendship, and one is a basically polyamorous menage-a-trois. Trolls could have all of these different romantic relationships at the same time like wizards with four spell slots to fill. And there were no gender or sexual restrictions on any of these relationships. (It's not even clear in fact why they have two distinct genders, except to facilitate readers in picking their self-inserts.) This convoluted mechanic was the seed of a lot, a lot of queer fantasy and ideation. In fact I think a lot of the original tumblr discourse that created bespoke niche pride flags and polyamorous/asexual woke norms literally came from Homestuck fans. I don't mean this casually: for anyone who wasn't there at the time, Homestuck had a huge influence on the social justice circles that became modern queer leftlib politics.
All this to say, Homestuck had a lot of queer representation. Of the eight main human characters, two were in a (doomed) gay relationship (one was explicitly gay, one was explicitly bi), another two were explicitly made bi, one was implicitly gay, and just three were left as probably straight. The trolls add another gay element since they are basically all canonically bisexual. (There are 24 troll characters, most of them minor, maybe about eight of them major enough to matter.) Note that none of this was inherent in the premise of the story. If you read Homestuck naively you would probably not suspect anything gay was coming for the first ~500 pages. The author just kept adding more and more gay characters and elements. The fanbase got gayer and gayer. To the point that on the cusp of the final battle that ends Homestuck once and for all, Dave Strider, who had up to this point been assumed to be perfectly heterosexual, who was the subject of the most popular heterosexual fan ship, confesses homosexual thoughts in his diary and is probably actually bi. Chronologically this is like if Ron Weasley came out as bi one scene before Voldemort is killed.
I think the trans stuff comes later. Once Homestuck was "over" the author eventually extended the story with some dubious sequels half-written by himself half-written by elevated fans, deliberately blurring the lines between canon and fanfiction. I think by then most fans had trailed off. I certainly had.
Anyways I don't know that I have a particular point. I haven't thought about Homestuck in years. Anybody who was never familiar is probably underestimating how big a deal it was once upon a time. For a cohort of left-leaning downwardly-mobile and first-generation college-going white Comicon Americans Homestuck was really big. As big as anything. It's amazing to me how little of it is in the culture now.
Truly fascinating, I had no idea about any of this. Thanks for taking the time to write that up. I only learned about Homestuck when researching which online communities have the highest rate of transgender membership (it’s Homestuck by a considerable margin, then its fanfic and TTRPGs). This part was especially interesting:
Was it like the polar opposite incubation chamber as 4chan? 4chan incubated the far right in 2010-13, and Homestuck did something similar with the left? Was most of its community on tumblr / discord then?
Discord, man, Homestuck is older than Discord. I was in Homestuck communities on Skype. Wikipedia will tell you that Homestuck ran from 2009-2016 but the main part of Homestuck was essentially working toward its finale in 2012. What had been a webcomic with almost daily updates came to a crawl, occasional updates dribbled and drabbled out very infrequently, sometimes with months between them. The story was essentially finished in 2015, except for the grand finale, a half-hour long flash animation that was posted ~250 days after the last update. (One of the things that helped Homestuck get so big was its popular "Sound pages," which were flash multimedia exercises that were sometimes short animations, sometimes medium-length videos, sometimes entire point-and-click video games incorporated into the body of the webcomic itself.)
(I remember there was this little ingroup notification system where people would post "Update" or "Upd8" into a groupchat and everyone would stop what they were doing and go check the site. Somehow this got memed to the point that just texting "potato" was a valid way of letting people know that Homestuck had posted some new pages. This was a big deal, I remember when Homestuck posted the flash animation "[S] Cascade" (13 minutes long) the web traffic crashed Newgrounds.)
Anyways, there was no Discord. It didn't exist. Discord became the social media platform for organizing groups of fandoms and servers. You go on Discord now and there will be dedicated servers for Minecraft, or Genshin Impact, or your favorite anime, or your favorite streamer, any kind of fandom. But before that, there weren't really dedicated fandom walled gardens like there are now. The homestuck subreddit was a major community hub of course. But outside that anybody who wanted to participate on the fandom had to do it on the open internet, and that entailed a lot of tumblr, because that's what tumblr was for. Tumblr was well-suited for that pseud-anonymous half-real early social media vibe where you were still posting in public where anybody could read you but you weren't necessarily doing it under your real name. And tumblr gave you a lot more options and control over color and html and music and theme than twitter did, it was like Myspace. So everyone was operating their own microblog with their own aesthetic and everything felt much more personal and yet much more surreal. Tumblr was much more like a mask you put on than twitter ever was, where twitter might be serving everyone a different algorithm but fundamentally the same experience.
Anyone who was around in those days of tumblr will remember that Homestuck was huge. The Homestuck fandom was essentially as large as the fandom for major TV shows like Supernatural or Dr. Who or Sherlock. (Those people were often called Superwholock because of the propensity of those three fandoms to overlap.) If you went to comic conventions there was often a huge contingent of Homestuck fans, often approaching the largest group. The alien Troll race I described in my previous post was characterized by having gray skin and horns, so it was very common to see people wearing gray makeup and somewhat casual outfits. (The Troll race was also extensively themed around astrological signs, which was a big part of their appeal.) I remember hotels having to put out warnings to convention organizers because too many people were cleaning up in the hotel sinks and the gray makeup everyone used would clog the pipes. This was not a one-off thing, this was a big incipient subculture. Somehow it mostly escaped broader cultural notice. But anyone who hung out in what we would think of as anime circles today was extensively familiar with Homestuck back then. It was all the same thing.
And it was absolutely the same thing as the far-left tumblr fan culture where a lot of woke gender norms percolated. It was exactly like the left-wing 4chan. I'm not saying that Homestuck specifically created the trans pride flag. But Homestuck, Superwholock, pop music, pornography, anime, Breaking Bad, Pokemon, Atheism Plus, on tumblr they were all fundamentally flavors of the same thing. And that subculture produced a lot of what later became characterized as woke. At the time they were all "Social Justice Warriors" which now feels like an extremely dated term, but back then it was absolutely a term people used to describe themselves in earnest. There was a whole cringe language of faux-offensive swear terms and slurs, this is where you got people saying "twatwaffle" and "shitbird" with venom and half a laugh. And in the same way that "Social Justice Warriors" gladly appropriated that epithet coined by conservatives, there were a lot of conservatives who gladly took the name "shitlords". (That was really what the tumblrites called them.) And this culture produced an enormous amount of what today is basic woke 101. The prohibition against saying "retard" was from tumblr. New norms about polyamory and disabled rights activism came from tumblr. The pride flags literally came from tumblr, anything that isn't the original gay pride flag was literally made up by someone on tumblr, there were discussions where people would just fill out and codify flags for "asexual" and "mlm" and "polyamory" pride like kids collecting every last Pokemon. Pronouns came from tumblr. Pronouns! If you weren't there it's hard to understand, it's hard for me to even prove this anymore, but I was there and I remember.
There was this idea at the time that the internet was inculcating the far right, the internet was making people nazis, and this idea burst out after Trump's election in 2016 and lead to a huge wave of internet censorship and control. ("Fake News" is another topic entirely, but it's also related in this sense.) But I remember what I was seeing and arguing at the time that, no, obviously it's the opposite, the internet and the way people socialize on the internet was driving a huuuuuuge leftward radicalization. And yet it wasn't "radical," it just seemed to flow naturally from basic obvious rules about how to behave, or, if you prefer, "basic fucking human decency".
Trans stuff was a huge part of this too. Of the friends I used to discuss Homestuck with almost all of them eventually went trans. It was a kind of social contagion, I saw it in real time. There was one woman (very nice) (very fat) (pink-haired) who declared that she felt herself to be agender and wanted to be called "it". All of my friends dutifully changed over and would say things like, "Where's Crystal? I haven't seen it since this morning." It was weird watching this in real time. I remember eventually there were counter-reactionary communities like subreddit /r/TumblrInAction, but I felt all along that this was not going to stay contained on the internet. It was really surreal.
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