YES, I WANNA MAKE YOU CRY

I love The Iron Giant <3 

A redraw was requested, so a redraw was done. 😄 2006-2016. I realized these are 10 years apart, almost to the date! One decade, thousands of miles and mountains of work since I decided to pursue art… this is a neverending quest, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

i think anyone who’s every used the internet has seen this picture at least once

 #should have done the blonde anime girl in the red plaid

you mean

yes that one exactly

wake me up inside

That first image is an edit of HUGZzz by Irene Strychalski. She’s improved tremendously in the past nine years, and you can see her current work on her tumblr, reniedraws! She has done backgrounds for Archer and Unsupervised, backgrounds and character designs for Chozen, and pencils and inks for issue #1 of Deadpool Family. She’s currently making a webcomic called Shaman Child. Here’s some of her current art:

[girl with scarf] [deadpool] [wedding commission] [hair and water]

As for the anime girl in the plaid skirt, I braved the hellscape that is early ‘00s anime websites, exploring endless gif-covered Gaia pages and vampire-filled roleplay forums, traveling across seas of unsourced DeviantArt edits and low-res hentai, to discover that she is an original character by Hiro Suzuhira. She has done work for Shuffle!, Ef: A Tale of Melodies, Akikan!, Phantom Breaker, and We Without Wings, among many others, and she is also a prolific freelance illustrator. Here are some examples of her art:

[chronicle cover] [misa] [soul eater] [higurashi] [phantom breaker] [leo]

tumblr VH1 presents “Where are they now? Early 2000′s internet artists”

refreshing-kun

Meanwhile, in prehistoric Canada…..

No no, you don’t understand, moose really do get that big. Take it from a Canadian. I’ve seen that bullshit in person. Scary as all heck.

And that’s how people can die if they hit a moose. Seriously, one of our fears when driving in the country is having to deal with this scenario of a moose jumping out in front of the car.

moose are actual legit ice age megafauna; theyve been here since the ice age, they are old as fuck. they also are pretty terrifying and ive echoed this before but i went to wiki and “In terms of raw numbers, they attack more people than bears and wolves combined” and “ In the Americas, moose injure more people than any other wild mammal and, worldwide, only hippopotamuses injure more.”

like, fuck off with that

I was dog sitting a dog once who insisted she had to go out in the middle of the night it was an emergency, so I took her out. Suddenly she starts pointing and barking and I look up and can just make out the outline of a HUGE moose. I’ve been accidentally face to face with a black bear and that scared me less than being up close with a moose. I’m 5 foot so imagine staring up at an animal several feet taller than you that is debating charging the dog who’s leash you are holding. I was terrified as I grabbed the dog by her collar to get better control over her and backed up slowly til I was out of line of sight and bolted for the house at a dead run. Did you know most Canadian lake monster stories come from people seeing moose swimming? They are massive animals.

They are massive and they charge. I get so scared when tourists are all “oh yeah, we got out of the car to get a closer look and, ya’ll have some mighty impressive animals around here.” Yes, yes we do, and they have mighty tired guardian angels because moose can, and do, charge at people.

Someone my mom worked with died hitting a moose on the highway. Their eyes don’t reflect light. In the dark they are literally nothing but a big slightly darker shape in the night. Roughly every year in the town I grew up in, a cow (moose) and her calf will wander through downtown. Maybe once or twice. If she’s aggressive enough, the local Mounties will escort her through to keep idiots away.

I’ve definitely talked with people who thought moose were deer-sized or maybe horse-sized and I was like NO YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND MOOSE ARE TERRIFYING

Moose are terrifying, you guys.

I finally live on a province where moose and deer exist.

I do not drive at night in fear of meeting one. If you hit a moose going 90 on a highway, not only is your car trashed, you are probably trashed. I’ve seen cars that got wrecked and there seems to be a consensus that at least half the time, the giant fucking beastie just shakes itself off and continues gallumphing along the countryside.

If you fucking hit a moose with your car and their legs go through your windshield, congratulations, you are dead. Massive hooves kicking you to death? Yeah. 

Moose are fucking terrifying. Bull moose won’t fuck with you too much unless you fuck with them, but the time a bull moose casually swaggered his way past 7 year old me when I was sledding literally put me off winter sports for a solid month. 

Momma moose and their babies, though? I legitimately had to call in to work to be like “ey yo there is a moose in my driveway and I can’t get out” AND MY MANAGERS UNDERSTOOD.

Moose. MOOSE.

I have to admit I thought they were like a Canadian deer before this.

The commenter above who claims that moose’s eyes don’t reflect light is only partially correct; if you shine a flashlight in a moose’s eyes it will glow like a cat (and then you will probably get killed to death by an annoyed moose) but the reason they are so dangerous to cars at nights is that they are too tall for the headlights to reach. Think about that.

Moose confirmed for actual kaiju.

Wait so if Trump wins, can we get Justin Trudeau to invite him to Canada and then throw him to the moose?

The year after I graduated from college apparently a moose wandered into town and down the main street on Homecoming  (Homecoming! HOMECOMING! Drunken college students everywhere!) My friend @mrsknightleysdays was still at school and she told me about it. People were less scared then the time a bear rambled around campus freshman year, probably because everyone was too drunk to know any better.

(Our school was very rural, in the mountains. The main street was the only street, pretty much, for context)

Please, tell us more tales of the moose, for I am an american, and thought them deer-sized.

Yeah, moose is the most dangerous animal in Finland as well. When you have a country which is mostly nothing but forest, you bet your ass there’s quite a few of them.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen one. There was this one time I was hiking and gotten so far that I was waiting my friends on the meeting point, and because I was early, I decided to have a nap. Some time later I woke up this loud WHOOSH WHOOSH SPLASH sound. Sounded like someone had decided to do butterfly strokes in the pond near me. But no. There was a moose and her two calves six meters from me trotting along the swampy shoreline. And I was like WHOA and sat up. And they freaked out, so I freaked out. Luckily I was on area where moose are hunted so the moose’s first reaction was to run. ‘Cause the cows can get aggressive when they have a calf.

And there are “moose warning” signs everywhere. Moose fences are built around roads, so that the animals can’t get on them on certain points. Except moose migrate. So if the fence is inconvenient for them, they might just jump over it. So now there are also tunnels and bridges built for the animals.

Wait wait so they are bigger than elk????

Yup.

But they’re SO DELICIOUS.

AHHH HELL NOO

probably one of the scariest things ive ever experienced was when i was a passenger and my bf was driving his truck down the highway. we live far north in the middle of nowhere so our highway just cuts through endless forest for four hours basically. he was probably driving at 110 or 120, and we didn’t see them until they had run onto the highway in front of us- a huge moose and her calf

the mother crossed quicker, and they were so close we couldn’t stop and we drove IN BETWEEN THEM, and she was RUNNING ALONGSIDE THE TRUCK on the driver side, and the calf was RUNNING ALONG ON THE PASSENGER SIDE!! like im looking out the window at this fucking moose and so sure we’re going to die. they couldn’t have kept it up for more than a few seconds but it felt like they were running with the truck forever

FINALLY they break off from us and casually continue their jaunt across the road. and me and bf pulled over and commenced staring out the window silently in horror, then he drove the rest of the way white knuckled, both hands on the wheel at all times lmao… like im pretty sure the only reason we didn’t hit them was because we were in a large truck and they wanted to stay out of our way. they probably would have just trampled a car. anyway there you go. moose are huge and scary as fuck

The only time I have ever been scared of a wild animal.

I was in Denali National Park with my husband and we were hiking near the lodge. I mean, practically in the back yard of the lodge.

We rounded a corner and there was a moose calf standing in the trail.

Just. A. Calf.

I actually put my hands up as I backed away, going “Where’s mommy…oh crap…where’s mommy.”

A moment later, mommy stepped out of the trees very much closer than I wanted to be to a wild herbivore that size. We backed around the corner as she herded her calf away in the opposite direction.

One thing which science fiction writers seldom realize: The most dangerous animals in any ecosystem aren’t the apex predators, they’re the big herbivores.

You can negotiate with a bear or a wolf. They’ll think before killing you.

A large herbivore female who thinks her baby is in danger won’t stop to think. She’ll just kill you.

Eraserhead be like

“don’t talk to me or my 20 children ever again”

she lifts and i love her

I want you all to know these files are titled “raise da Rupph” on my computer

These started out as just sketch doodles but Ruby’s hair wasn’t reading well with just lines, so I played around with grayscale shading and then it got a little out of control

No

no other person on this planet was made for you, they were made for themselves. love is all about choices. no one is going to be perfect for you, and i think we need to stop raising everyone on the belief that someone out there, just one other person in the whole world, was “made for you” because it isn’t true. no one is made for you, besides you. other people belong to themselves. if you want to make it work with someone, it’s about hard work, understanding, compassion, communication, and choice

and there isn’t just “one other person” out there waiting for you. you can love multiple people over your lifetime. you can love multiple people at once. you can have more than one soulmate, or none. you can be your own soulmate. 

my point is…you aren’t missing your “other half.” you are a whole person by yourself, and if you love someone, you need to understand that they are a whole person too, not your “other half.” 

pokemon trainer saitama would probably like, catch a mew right off the bat and doesnt even realize its a ultra rare legendary.

“dude wtf is that pokemon”

“oh. his name is cheese, he gives me free eggs its pretty awesome”

mew: *uses softboiled*

“free breakfast yeah”

“Do you even know what that is?”

“…a friendly flying cat?”*shrugs*

*frustrated noises* “okay does it even do anything else”

“it lights up sometimes”

*mew uses flash*

“dude”

*mew transforms into giant dragon*

“oh it does that sometimes”

“dude”

@asking-ask hun look

“ I kinda like that it’s blue.”

“Holy shit, Saitama, that’s a SHINY Mew.”

“…. What? No, Cheese is blue– get it? hahahaha”

“Oh my god.”

“dude it sparkles”

“yeah i brush him everyday his fur is perfect”

“bruh”

it was to cute i had to draw it

Its so cute and perfect omg

“I FOUND A MEW!!” @chongoblog “…its not that special, really.”

I find it strangely appropriate that Saitama would catch a shiny legendary only to teach it Flash, Transform, and Softboiled

please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.

Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.

It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.

Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.

Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.

Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.

Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.

Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.

When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.

OHH MAN PROMSTUCK, the final event clocked nearly 500 attendees and cost roughly $12,000 when the whole thing was wrapped. That’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this sort of discussion though. 

Homestuck was a phenomenon because with frequent updates and no defined update schedule, the hype train never stopped. Frequently fandoms will go through phases of an explosion of content and then a resting period, which can easily be tracked by when new content appears. With things like TV shows, video games, or even most webcomics, having a schedule means you could tell when everyone was going to be freaking out, and the subsequent planning around that meant the hype train could be quantified. The problem with Homestuck was those curves couldn’t be tracked, especially because there was NEVER any warning what KIND of content we were getting. One day could be an update dropped at 5 AM EST that was two kids pelting each other with fruit. 4 hours later we could get a flash that killed 17 people. Then it could be THREE DAYS before another update where haha it was retconned that was a dream none of those people are dead. It was fucking anarchy. Sure there was a WAY to define the plot but knowing what was going on or what was coming at any given moment was fucking impossible, and the break between these updates is what spawned “update culture”.

The thing with update culture is that most content creators are aware of, and plan content updates around, the idea of what the fans will be feeling and thinking once that content is done being distributed. For TV shows, episodes are released with beginnings, middles, and ends- a narrative arc that allows people to start thinking about media the way the creator wants them to, leading them along with little trails of plot and puzzles to solve. But Homestuck’s updates weren’t planned like that, because they came in chunks of whenever it was done, a carry-over from the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Because of this, people were theorizing about thing that’d be fixed in the literal next page, but because we didn’t have that information, the weirdest shit started being produced. It also didn’t help that Homestuck has some fucking weird shit happen in it! And sometimes fan theories wouldn’t resurface until literal YEARS down the line (Tricksters, anyone??) and people would be screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. There was no predictability, and therefore ANYTHING WAS VALID. And it created an incredibly interesting, though HORRIBLY chaotic space, that by god, was so much fun. Homestuck was a large-scale production media produced like a fanfiction author and because of the size of the audience lead to PANDEMONIUM on a scale that can’t be easily replicated.

Like it’s not really appropriate to say “oh x is the new Homestuck” because the very nature of Homestuck’s creation and population ensures there will never BE another phenom like it. The landscape of fandom, due to Homestuck, has changed, because update culture can’t exist without the perfect storm of described attributes that this comic had- that now no one else can replicate because Homestuck caused people to move away from that style of storytelling BECAUSE of the hectic fandom! It all feeds into itself. (Sort of like the story of this comic, honestly.) The Homestuck fandom experience will likely never happen again because of the way Homestuck shaped the fan scene. And that’s cool to know about!

Also I feel I should clarify on some of the above points. To begin, they’re all fucking true. - The sharpie dyeing story is unfortunately real. It’s original source is 4chan, the OP posted it on their personal tumblr blog (which for some reason still routes to my page if you google it). It can be found here. - The horse dildo was also real. It was sent as a joke because of a series of horse dick jokes mentioned in the comic; for those not in the know about Homestuck, there’s a character who talks a lot about horses and their rippling muscles. Hussie included it as a find-able item in a later walk-around minigame flash. - Two people did in fact donate $10,000 to the Homestuck kickstarter to have their fantrolls be canon and then murdered. While I don’t personally know the story of the female fantroll, the one in the top hat (Nektan Whelan) was actually made by an American Army veteran who read Homestuck while deployed in Iraq. He credited it was part of what helped him stay positive during active deployment. I can’t find the link to this conversation because it was on formspring like 4 years ago but if anyone has the link, let me know, I’d be curious to have it archived. - The Homestuck flash in question that killed Newgrounds was Cascade. Hussie recorded that at that time he received over 1.2 million unique pageviews trying to access it at once, world-wide. It also crashed the main Homestuck site and forums, then megaupload, and (for a VERY short time), Twitter and Livestream, because people started streaming it and tweeting the links. Someone made a comic about how that experience felt and as someone who was there screaming at Newgrounds to let me in, I can promise it’s accurate. - The update notifier was a godsend, and people would design specific macros, sounds, and images for their notifiers. It became a mini-culture in itself how you heard about the update. For a long time, I used to make tumblr posts about it. Update culture, and how fast you got to the update, was so real.

Anyway, hi, I’ve been in the Homestuck fandom for more than 5 years now, talk to me about it. It’s been a hell of a ride.

Even if you’re not into Homestuck the fandoms cultural significance is fascinating