On Sept. 27, the pilot for an animated show adaptation of the 2009 webcomic Homestuck, made by Andrew Hussie, was released to the SpindleHorse YouTube channel, directed by Hazbin Hotel creator Vivianne Medrano. As a long-time fan of the comic, I found myself watching it the day it was released. It does a pretty good job explaining the first act of the already hard-to-understand comic, with a small montage of what’s to come in the final minute or so of the full runtime of 11:33, featuring later characters such as the Trolls. It has been confirmed that, if the pilot is greenlit, the studio will make a proper first episode aside from the pilot, so there’s that to look forward to.
As for what’s in the bulk of the pilot, it follows a boy named John Egbert (voiced by none other than Toby Fox, creator of Undertale and another big fan of the comic) who receives a beta copy of the upcoming fictional video game Sburb for his 13th birthday. He talks about it with his online friends Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde, and Jade Harley, and eventually begins to play said game. In short, the game activates a world-ending sequence, and John must work with his server player, who can modify his home, in order to escape his doomed reality as meteors begin to rain down on his planet.
The webcomic in its entirety is about 8,000 pages long, so if the pilot were to become a full-fledged show there would be a lot of content to cover. For people with no experience of the comic, I’m sure the pilot was awfully confusing, and I don’t think that the pilot should be your first experience with the series, but the best way to understand it is to read it for yourself on homestuck.com, where it is currently being re-released after being shut down several years ago following the death of Flash.
