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2011·The social era

Homestuck

An eight-thousand-page webcomic made of Flash animation and instant-message logs, and the fandom that ran the internet for five years.

You might remember it as MS Paint Adventures

A trend people joined in with

This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on mspaintadventures.com.

The story

What this was

Andrew Hussie's Homestuck ran from April 2009 to April 2016 on MS Paint Adventures. It begins with four teenagers installing a beta game that destroys the Earth and expands, across more than eight thousand pages and eight hundred thousand words, into Flash animations, playable browser games, original albums and hundreds of pages of chat logs formatted as chat logs.

It first appeared in 2011, during the social era.

It is the largest and most demanding native-internet narrative work of its era, and it could not exist in any other medium — the reader has to click through animations, read conversation transcripts and follow multiple simultaneous timelines. Its fandom was, for several years, the defining presence on Tumblr, and "Homestuck" was a recognised shorthand there for a kind of total, exhausting devotion.

The comic's Kickstarter for an adventure game raised over two million dollars in 2012, at the time one of the largest for any web project. Flash's discontinuation forced a rebuild of much of the work. An animated pilot was released in 2025, nine years after the comic ended.

You were there

More from 2011

The same internet

The social era

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Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on mspaintadventures.com.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
Andrew Hussie's Homestuck ran from April 2009 to April 2016 on MS Paint Adventures. It begins with four teenagers installing a beta game that destroys the Earth and expands, across more than eight thousand pages and eight hundred thousand words, into Flash animations, playable browser games, original albums and hundreds of pages of chat logs formatted as chat logs.
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