Pre-2014 Tumblr, some of the earliest and most vocal fans of the webcomic Homestuck, would have exploded in joy at this news. Over 15 years since its debut, fans are more divided.

On August 9, 2025, the internet let out a collective noise of confusion at the announcement of Vivziepop’s new studio Spindleroo adapting the Sisyphean behemoth. One commenter went so far as to congratulate the team on taking on “a 500 episode series”.

It is an ambitious way to start a new studio to be sure. Vivziepop’s long-standing career as an animator impresario can hardly be understated, coming to some notoriety with a 2012 animated music video to Ke$ha’s “Die Young”. She exploded in popularity with the twin successes of Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss in 2019, the former of which was picked up for a full series by A24 and released on Prime Video while the latter became a YouTube powerhouse. Seeing them take on Homestuck, however, some fans worried that something may be lost in adaptation or diluted by the Vivziepop art style, even if the teams involved seem to be working extremely close together. Toby Fox himself, formerly a major contributor to Homestuck and critically-acclaimed creator of the Undertale franchise, is voicing main character John Egbert. 

Once called The Ulysses of the Internet, Andrew Hussie’s long-running yarn about a boy and his friends playing an apocalyptic game was, at its height, unlike anything else online. Even calling it a webcomic is a little reductive, as its multi-media storytelling is unmatched in its variety and complexity. It includes, or included, volumes of still images, animated GIFs, short animated films, hours of music, walls of text, Adobe Flash games, separate semi-fan works of various degrees of canon, printed volumes and so much more. Styled like an isometric Sierra adventure game and initially written with the whims of a now-defunct forum guiding portions of the story, Homestuck was able to pull in a wide fanbase with its off-beat and thoroughly late-00’s energy. There is plenty to look forward to as the trailer shows many scenes dynamically re-imagined from the first two acts of the comic, but will it live up to expectations? I guess we will have to just click [S] ==> to find out.* 

Nearly a decade since the comic said “The End,” there have been a number of strange attempts by Andrew Hussie and associates to sequelize the comic or continue the brand. From the bizarre Meat or Candy epilogue to the fan-made but loosely canon Homestuck 2 and the critically acclaimed but perilously developed Hiveswap series of video games, efforts to keep Homestuck alive have been historically divisive but persisted nonetheless. Each one of these efforts were met with some kind of delay or backlash, causing historic rifts in a fandom for what was once such a fervently loved property. With the death of Flash in 2020, much of the original comic itself is now unreadable, causing atrophy to set in – a process that sped up with the takedown of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a fan-based effort to preserve the comic as originally published.

No firm date has been set for the release of “Homestuck the Animated Pilot,” but rest assured, as soon as it does, you can read more about it on The In-Crowd.

In the meantime, check out the full trailer below:

*Editor’s Note: [S]==> was the signal to readers of the comic that the next page had sound.