Welp. Tomorrow's the big day. Is the fandom ready for it? Are we ready for it? I hope not. I want to be as unprepared as possible for whatever great thing comes next.
Since I have some time, and the forum community has destroyed any fear of self-expression I might have at one point had through simply existing in the disgusting hate-fueled circlejerky manner it has, I'm going to talk a small bit about my history with Homestuck.
I found out about Homestuck through KnowYourMeme. Funny how after a couple years away enjoying Homestuck I naturally found myself coming back here once I did all I could in the fandom. There was a lot, to say the least. There's a site called Whirled.com, still exists, great place (even if it's real lacking in users these days ever since they got rid of the ability to buy and sell music clips) but it was a fantastic place to be 3 years ago ESPECIALLY for Homestuck fans. Anyway, I found out about Homestuck through KnowYourMeme around the beginning of my Sophomore year in 2012, and being the culture-lover I was and still am, I naturally needed to figure out what it was. So I read the whole thing beginning to end back when the comic was around 4k pages long instead of the current roughly 8ishk pages long.
The comic was God-damn boring in act 1 and I only read it through sheer determination to overcome it. By act 3 I was actually enjoying myself and the trolls were interesting. I fantasized about romance with Nepeta, though Feferi was the shallowest fuck on the planet, and felt like Andrew Hussie and the fandom tried way to hard to justify the unjustifiable actions of an asshole troll named Vriska. I get people are to a degree a product of their environments, but there's a point at which responsibility should be given to the person creating the problems instead of 100% of the time gonig "oh, she just had a bad childhood." It's really annoying and feels like a horseshit argument to enjoy an abhorrent being because they have a charming style of living.
I got into the site Whirled in middle school but rarely visited it during that time, until I revisited it around late 2012. I loved finding a community filled with entertaining games and variety of people and music and videos you could put into your own personal rooms themed for just about any fandom or meme you could want and it was easy to make stuff considering how many people were doing it. Whirled was a really great place and I feel WAY too much of the internet is going to never know about how great that place was. From 2012-2014 that place was a Homestuck fan's dream (though I bet even most hardcore fans don't know about it) and it had lots of Homestuck music, fully animated avatars, videos, the works. I was proud and still am to say I bought an avatar of every troll and human (except the ancestors and adults) though even those I had a good few of.
Met a lot of horrible people on Whirled. Guilt-tripping bastards, many acting suicidal and even nonjokingly lying. But there were as many good as there were bad people there, and I was willing to suffer through the bad ones to find the good ones. I found the first woman I ever dated online (or ever for that matter) and her name was Madi. Madi was a selfish, bipolar, verbally abusive asshole toward me. She is the reason I am no longer a push-over so I never get used by someone like her again. Anyway she was a big fan of Homestuck, as were most of my close friends and enemies on Whirled. She even thought there'd be a third session on 9/11 in 2013, that's not a joke. The thought was it'd go in order of 4/13/9, 11/11/11, then 9/11/13. Anyway that never happened but I found that personally amusing in hindsight that she thought Hussie would start a third session on the day of a terrorist attack.
Also met a close old friend on there named Cammy. Whenever I roleplayed in Whirled there was always a small group of bastards that'd act like assholes on there and she'd actively defend me. It was nice, and for a long time I considered her a sister of sorts. In the end though, our friendship dwindled in passion as she grew away from Homestuck and became disinterested in what I liked to talk about. She was a very good friend and without Homestuck I'd have never grown close with her or most users on Whirled I met.
So during those years on Whirled.com I also loved to use a site called msparp.com. MSParp is a roleplay chat client that's very high quality and a must-use for real hardcore Homestuck fans. You cen select any character you want to (even the real obscure ones), their quirks already are in there but you can also custom add/remove quirks and even rp OCs in whatever colors you deemed fit. It was wonderful, and I met many once close friends on there including a couple main friends named Fran and Miranda. Fran was always a naturally very passive person and eventually stopped talking to me entirely when I displayed romantic feelings toward her. As for Miranda she's so passive she after a while didn't contact me enough so naturally that made it difficult to sustain a friendship where I'm doing all the talking. But even though I wish things would've gone better, I can honestly say those old close friends of mine I would not have met without using MSParp.
MSParp I considered a tool and still do of sifting through people, where I'd choose specific characters I want to roleplay with and naturally people with personalities matching those specific characters would roleplay them, and so I was able to find exactly the people I wanted to. Maybe in the end it's my own fault my friends were so passive. It seemed the only truly nice characters with true depth in Homestuck were generally the more passive ones. MSParp got me a nice series of friends and group chats even if most of them quieted down to silence toward me with time.
So that's what I did during the time between 2012 and 2015 when I was mostly inactive on KnowYourMeme. Since everyone loves to stereotype the Homestuck fandom as being trash like the other fandoms, allow me to give my own two cents on the matter seeing as I am probably in one of the best positions to judge the fandom a bit more wholey due to the well-rounded experiences I've had irl and online with Homestuck fans for years. They're quirky bastards that like quirky bastards and they're a lot more interesting than average people. What you'd call, extreme personalities with greater diversity and intensity than a typical person you'd meet. I would not say the fandom is bad, but I'd say you will find significantly more good and significantly more bad people in the Homestuck fandom than you would with your typical group of people whom are going to be more neutral ethically and be more hesitant to take a stand with their views and personality, like Homestuck fans often dare to do.