Homestuck fandom cosplay meetup at London MCM Comic Con, circa May 2013. (Source: BlackholeWI)
The MSPA Fandom collectively describes the readers and fans of MS Paint Adventures, Homestuck, spin-off projects such as Hiveswap, and other works of Andrew Hussie, What Pumpkin Studios, and their creative collaborators. This wiki was written by and for members of this group; as such, if you are reading this, then it is likely that you may be a part of it.
Due to the interactive nature of Hussie's works, especially MS Paint Adventures itself, the comic has been significantly shaped through interactions with the fandom. This continued to be the case even after the closure of the command box, wherein readers could actively submit story prompts for the currently active adventure. Since the days of Problem Sleuth, readers have been embodied in the comic
through the stand-in character of the MSPA Reader. Via fourth-wall breaking, many characters in the comic have come to address the readers directly, such as Doc Scratch and Andrew Hussie's own self-insert. Other pieces of content have been shaped by or in reaction to the active fan community; a major example being the Openbound walkarounds, which were in large part a reflective parody of aspects of Homestuck's Tumblr fandom.
As Homestuck grew into a larger multimedia project, requiring collaborators, some fan content creators were invited to contribute content to the canon itself. This first started with the Homestuck music team, and later expanded to an art team for larger animations such as Cascade, Collide, and finally Act 7, which was entirely animated by a fan animator. When What Pumpkin Studios was formed, many prominent fan creators were invited to become members of this new official creative team for the franchise.
While there is of course fandom for all parts of the MSPA franchise, Homestuck's fanbase is the most visible and prominent. As such, the term "Homestuck fandom" is encountered more frequently than "MSPA fandom". Individual fans are commonly called "Homestucks".
Popular fandom activities include creating fan art, authoring fan fiction, producing fan music, cosplaying, roleplaying, comic discussion, and theorycrafting. Some notable fanworks and fan-derived content is discussed on this wiki within the fandom namepace.
Brief History[]
The roots of the MSPA Fandom lie in the Gangbunch Fora; a general interest community forum for Andrew Hussie's webcomic Team Special Olympics, and frequented by Hussie and his associates. This forum had itself originated from a community on the Something Awful forums. The Gangbunch Fora were where Hussie first created Jailbreak as a community forum game; as such, the forums were also the first MSPA suggestion box. As the popularity of MSPA grew to eclipse the previous purpose of the website, the Gangbunch Fora eventually converted into the MSPA Forums, which became the home of one of the first MSPA fan communities. The forums continued to house the suggestion box until it was closed due to infeasibility as Homestuck's popularity grew, and the MSPA Forums continued to be a fan community hub until their sudden disappearence in 2016, shortly before the comic's end. Although interaction from Hussie himself had effectively ceased by 2013, What Pumpkin employees continued to operate them as the official community forums until this closure, whereup much of the remaining forum community shifted to the Omegaupdate fan forum.
As Homestuck's popularity became increasingly mainstream, major fan communities grew on several other sites. Tumblr, the Homestuck reddit, and the Homestuck General thread on 4chan became major community hubs. Fan fiction became frequently published on FanFiction.Net and Ao3, whereas artwork was commonly shared on DeviantArt. Moreover, several Homestuck specific websites emerged for discussion of the comic, and for particular purposes such as roleplaying or collating information. Such sites include this wiki, roleplaying sites (such as MSPARP (now MxRP), Trollplay (now defunct), and later Cherubplay) social media style websites such as Gigapause (also now defunct), and the MSPA Booru for art hosting. MSPA Fan Adventures also emerged as a hosting platform for MSPA-style webcomics written by fans, a genre that had already emerged on the MSPA Forums. Some MSPA Fan Adventures went on to become popular webcomics in their own right.
A real-world version of Homestuck's Pesterchum application was produced by Homestuck fans, and also served as a venue for Homestuck discussion and roleplay.