Hey guys, here’s a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for probably a few years now! What motivated me to write it was discussions with Homestuck fans about the trainwreck that is Homestuck: Beyond Canon. Everyone who’s not happy with the direction of Beyond Canon has a different reason why they don’t like it, and for me it’s that every single character is written incorrectly. The writing is so inaccurate to the original that it’s extremely difficult for me to read through any of it, it just pisses me off.

My second biggest problem is that Beyond Canon retcons and/or contradicts the epilogues again and again and again, and reverts so much of the characters’ development from the epilogues, but that’s outside the scope of this post. Point is, the authors of Beyond Canon have zero understanding what made Homestuck good. A cool thing about the epilogues is that they embraced having a format different from the original Homestuck: text only, lots of time skips, and a narration style very different from Hussie’s. Beyond Canon, on the other hand, tries too hard to replicate Homestuck, and fails at that miserably.

Okay, back on topic. In this post, I will be telling you guys the right way to write each Homestuck character, so that you can write fanfics that are actually good and accurate to the original comic. Not literally every character, but most of the important ones.

General tips

If you’re writing a Homestuck character for the first time, I strongly suggest you reread some of their chatlogs in Homestuck itself. I like to use readmspa.org to search for Homestuck conversations because it includes not just the pesterlogs, but also walkarounds and all the text contained in images. Also, when you’re writing fanfiction or anything at all, you should read it over and over again to iron out mistakes and make sure the whole thing flows smoothly. That’s what I always do when I write my blog posts. I obsessively reread them as I write them.

And as for narration, I find that in fanventures, it’s best if the narration imitates Hussie’s snarky adventure game style, whereas in text-only fanfics, it’s cooler if the narration uses the author’s own style. That way, the fic has the existing Homestuck characters written accurately to the original comic, but the style of narration will help make it feel like yours.