Hussie used to update Homestuck in small, steady increments—about three times a week. The price of such regular updates came as an infuriatingly slow storytelling pace, but one which allowed Hussie to lay out the details of the story’s world in baffling, then slowly recognizable detail. The first act of Homestuck is 247 pages long, and spends an inordinate time just naming its protagonists, yet still manages to end with a literal bang.

On October 17, 2013, Hussie broke that update schedule. It wasn’t the first time he’d done so, but the immensity of that particular announcement was unprecedented: According to him, he’d be wrapping up Act 6 and an all-new Act 7 all at once at a later, undetermined date. The absence was dubbed the “gigapause,” and fans whiled away their time speculating as to when Hussie would come back.

Homestuck itself wasn’t updated for a year, but Hussie was far from inactive. Much like A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, Hussie had plenty of side projects: Namco High, a since-discontinued dating sim game partnership with Namco Bandai; Paradox Space, which takes place in a segment of the Homestuck universe; the Homestuck “companion” webcomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. The biggest non-Homestuck-the-comic project to date is Hiveswap, the Kickstarter-funded Homestuck adventure game which, while part of the Homestuck universe as well, won’t follow the webcomic’s characters. (To note: The Kickstarter campaign goal was $700,000. Hussie raised over $2.4 million.)

The gigapause finally ended on October 15, 2014, and Hussie made his grand return with... a one-page update. Yet that was enough to crash the site (for some perspective, the monumental October 25, 2011 update “Cascade” had crashed the digital creator’s platform Newgrounds, a wholly separate, well-established site from MS Paint Adventures, in under two minutes), and soon Hussie revealed that he’d never intended to finish the series in one go at all.

The story was still unfinished; the updates would still be on their way. The gigapause was, in some ways, a red herring, but the response to its ending showed that, five years into the series’s surreal, madcap run, there was an audience still hanging on every word.

On January 19, 2015, Hussie began yet another hiatus, only there is an end already in sight: April 13.

It’s tempting to view his actions as deliberate attempts to toy with the expectations of his fans—first he giveth, then he taketh away, and he also backtracks on his statements. But the relationship he has with his fans is much more complicated than that: He interacts with them in such informal spaces and ways (imagine Kevin Feige tweeting a one-year hiatus on all Marvel productions) because fan ideas and creative collaborations have literally created Homestuck itself—many of the main characters were named by via fan suggestion, while fan work with Hussie to create graphics and music for the comic’s elaborate Flash animations. And then there are the characters of Homestuck. For all the razzle-dazzle of its plot machinations, Homestuck’s greatest strength is its creator’s gift for character-building within a weird and terrifying world. Hussie is able to get away with complex story-weaving and frustrating his fans' expectations because Homestuck’s readers are invested enough in its many unique and strangely relatable characters to follow them through time and space. In an interview with The Daily Dot in 2012, Hussie had this to say about Homestuck and its fans: “The comic itself is still under my control. I still make decisions about the story the same way I always did. But Homestuck as a ‘movement’ is not under my control, and never really was.”

Certainly, Homestuck’s particular digital reception has been remarkable, and its fan community has become ubiquitous both on online hubs like Tumblr and at comic conventions. But while plenty of webcomics and comics have devoted fan followings, Homestuck’s confusing nature might’ve relegated it to niche interest. Instead, it has become a phenomenon that could not exist anywhere but the endless expanse of digital spacetime, suspended by and within its audience’s wonder.

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