When I wrote the Hiveswap article, I left a note asking for people to contact me if there were any facts I got wrong or major events I missed. A number of people took me up on that, which I am thankful for.
However, there was one big report I got that was too significant to just edit into the article. Because these allegations were new, and from a credible source, I thought they warranted their own article and research.
For the rest of the story about Hiveswap, see The Hiveswap Fiasco, to which this is a kind of sequel.
By the request of the source (because Andrew is known to be aggressively litigious), I have edited our conversation into a synthetic document. This is a summary of the claims from the source to preserve their anonymity and ensure clarity. I am not yet asserting anything, just stating what the source said; Iâll hold my personal comments until after the whole thing.
Here is that report:
The biggest reason thereâs an NDA in place about The Odd Gentlemenâs involvement is that Andrew wanted to cover up the fact that much of the blame is on Andrewâs failure to deliver a workable plan to the studio in the agreed-upon schedule.
While parts of the ipgd post are true, the post distorts what happened into a story designed to make Andrew look like he did no wrong. What actually happened is this:
One of the reasons Homestuck was so popular is how contemporary it was to internet culture.
You tell anyone that Homestuck is heavily influenced by internet culture and theyâll nod and agree and youâll both be very intelligent media critics.
But somehow, even from that same group, youâll see people who notice how the writing style of Homestuck changes over its nine year run and forget about contemporary culture entirely, which is a mistake.
Andrew Hussie has always spoken (or tried to speak) in an aggressively contemporary voice.
What he wrote in 2008 sounds like it was written for the internet in 2008, with all the charm and all the baggage.
Homestuck began in 2009. Remember internet culture from 2009?
âR*tardâ was still an acceptable insult back then (among the dominant cultural groups that made up internet forums, at least).
Going back as an archive reader in 202X, though, reading âthe r slurâ in casual conversation is jarring.
Why is that there? That shouldnât be there.
The comic that Andrew wrote immediately predating MSPA was called âTeam Special Olympicsâ, and thatâs a whole conversation, let me tell you.
In MSPA proper, Andrew was happy to make running jokes about racial diversity or gay pornography in an uncritical, unsatirical way.
This was the internet culture Andrewâs comics were deeply immersed in.
Rather than stay fixed in 2009, MSPA â and Homestuck in particular â continued to mirror contemporary (read: pop) culture as it went on, which caused natural shifts in the material.
What were previously wacky domestic antics played up for laughs became serious issues of domestic abuse, in retrospect.
As readers revisited the earlier material, they re-evaluated it through a more mature cultural lens.
Because of the serial nature of the comic, this worked out very naturally: as Andrew and the fandom grew, Andrew wrote in-characters realizing that abusive behaviour was concerning, just as actual abuse victims do.
It felt like a natural progression of the story and characterization, because it was natural; it was the same dynamic that really was playing out irl.
This effect had a noticeable impact on the tone of the comic.
13 year boys who insultingly called each other âgayâ as playful insults â or prefaced their interactions with âno homoâ clauses â would become very different characters in 2015.
Sexuality isnât a insult now, itâs a character arc.
Disabled characters, too, were originally played for laughs, but later got real character arcs about their disabilities as they related to their identities in a way that treated the issue (semi)seriously.
All this change â what Sarah Zedig calls its âmaturation away from its at times uncomfortable edginessâ â can sometimes rub old homestuck fans who liked everything about the atmosphere of the 2000s the wrong way.
It can feel like the second half of Homestuck is âsubvertingâ the story they knew and loved, because, well, itâs different.
In back corners of the internet youâll hear that Homestuck was somehow âtaken over by sjwsâ or even conspiracy theories that later parts of homestuck were ghostwritten by another author entirely.
On the other side of the room, youâll have people who read Homestuck, see how it develops well-written gay, trans, and non-binary1 main characters in its later half, and treat the full body of Homestuck as thoughtful queer fiction.
Neither of these is quite right. Both forget how long Homestuck was a serial work, and how much the contemporary culture it mirrored changed over its run.
Homestuck re-framed earlier events as its fans themselves re-contextualized them in a changing world.
Likewise, Homestuck engaged with queer topics only as and because they became a topic of conversation online. Andrewâs writing reflected the culture of the internet as it happened, and reading it as an archive work invokes all those difficulties with it.
When people describe Homestuck now, they might mention that the first part is âdatedâ, due to contemporary references, slurs, insensitivity, and the like. But that forgets that Homestuck intentionally, extremely, unavoidably a product of its time, and the internet culture that gives it its charm is the same thing that can leave a bad taste in peoplesâ mouths.
Replying to hmsnofun:
i want to say this stuff should be left as an apocryphal entry on a wiki, but at the same time i've long maintained that homestuck's maturation away from its at times uncomfortable edginess is part of what makes it such an essential work of fiction. so idk i guess
It's 2020 stop trying to make Hussie retroactively woke You're allowed to like things by people who weren't and aren't a beacon of progressive shit Pretending that it has zero problems or all the queer shit we have now was always intentional does more harm than good
I still guarantee you all with 98% confidence that representation in Homestuck is incidental at best, and Hussie by no means intended to have grandiose, intricate and well-written trans narratives at the start, and J//ne should not be treated as such.
This is, of course, only a short blurb about one facet of a multifaceted issue. It is not a comprehensive essay about any of the topics mentioned and should not be treated as such.
The real story of Hiveswap isnât about the game or the universe. Rather, the conversation âabout Hiveswapâ is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project â starting as a Kickstarter success story but then bouncing from scandal to scandal for years. The story of how Andrew Hussie burned through a $2.5 million dollar investment over eight years to produce almost nothing is fascinating, convoluted, and poorly understood even among Homestuck fans.
Right now, this meta-story mostly exists in the form of oral history. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of the key sources are ephemeral â and most of them have been deleted â but itâs also because it feels premature to write up a âpostmortemâ on a gameâs development before itâs even an eighth of the way finished.
Iâm documenting the story so far so that the Hiveswap Story isnât lost to time, and so thereâs a decent summary of events so far, and maybe even so new Hiveswap fans can catch up.
I dug through every page, announcement, interview, blog post, FAQ, and tweet I could find, and the culmination is this the most comprehensive â as far as I can tell â explanation of Hiveswap to date.