the short answer to this question is: we don’t plan on it.

the long answer: maybe? there won’t be any flashes, but this doesn’t rule out the prospect of animation and/or music altogether.

to go into a little detail: shockwave/adobe flash is a deprecated technology that won’t be supported anywhere after 2020. in simple terms, we’re not interested in making something that will have such a limited shelf-life. this is also why the homestuck 1 website has youtube links rather than the original flash pages by default: in a little while you simply won’t be able to watch flash animations in your browser any more.

what does this mean for animated webcomics moving forward? well, there are a few possibilities. the big “new” thing is html5, which has been around for (checks wiki page) exactly 5 years as of tomorrow, and still has no reliable way to mesh music with animation in the same way homestuck did. there is also the option of simply animating for youtube and embedding the videos on the site. this isn’t ideal, since it depends on another platform, and in this case it’s a platform which empowers fascists while disenfranchising and demonetizing queer creators (but that’s a whole other kettle of fish). the point is, there are bound to be plenty of potential means through which homestuck² could be animated beyond the usual GIFs, but each has their own problems.

but that brings us to another, more important question: should there be flashes in homestuck²? when starting to lay the foundations for this thing, we decided that we wanted to run this ethically, paying artists and writers (i.e, ourselves) at least passably fairly for our work, without relying on simple goodwill and love of the comic to get things done. that’s all well and good as far as writing and drawing panels is concerned, but animating is a whole order of magnitude of scope beyond that, both in terms of sheer difficulty and the ratio of time needed to produce versus the total runtime. from the point of view of human labor, it’s a highly unfavorable equation. and that’s just the visuals—the music is a whole additional load of work on top of that, and another whole complicated story that i can’t really get into.

as of right now we are simply not in a position to be able to produce animation on the scale of homestuck 1 in a way that’s equitable for the people involved. however, we are artists, and part of our work is finding new and creative ways to communicate ideas. it’s a constant consideration. there are many other possibilities to explore other than animation after all. and if in future we’re in the position to produce something akin to homestuck’s flashes in an ethical way, we will consider those possibilities as well, but not before.