prokopetz:

@weaselsblaugh replied:

prokopetz:

(With reference to this post here.)

Okay, strap yourselves in, folks…

For those who don’t remember the Dark Times, at the height of its popularity, Homestuck
had spawned several fan-created AUs that were, themselves, popular
enough that people unconnected to their creators would write fanfic set
in them, cosplay as the AU versions of various characters, and so forth. It
got to the point that some of the most well-established AUs had
separate mini-fandoms made up of folks who’d never actually read Homestuck proper, and were in it just for that AU.

The most prominent example of the type is probably Marchingstuck,
a high school AU in which the Beta kids and Alternian trolls were all members of a school marching band. (The Alpha kids and Beforan trolls don’t feature
because the whole AU lived and died prior to their introduction.) Marchingstuck was so popular that it went recursive and spawned its own fandom project, a Tumblr-hosted fan-fan-comic called Promstuck that ran for six months in the latter half of 2011 and successfully concluded after over 250 pages.

(I was never into Marchingstuck myself, though I did casually follow 4chords for a while.)

Why does this description sound like some kind of post-modern Hitchhiker’s Guide kind of prose?

Trying to explain fringe fandom as a cultural phenomenon in a way that would be comprehensible to a reader who’s coming in with no prior context is just like that. Seriously, try to explain, say, Ke$hastuck in a manner that would make sense to the uninitiated without sounding like an alien anthropologist struggling to make sense of human society in the process.