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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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