#they’re recognisable Kind Of Guys from that sort of era and location. along with niche micro community websites

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

i genuinely do think that looking at the characters in homestuck through the lens of them being autistic is pretty important to do even if it obviously wasn’t intentional (except for nepeta at least) bc like. every character in homestuck takes some inspiration from early internet users. and a lot of early online spaces were absolutely disproportionately autistic. obviously not all, there were mainstream spaces, but it was a much less centralised place and had tons of mini communities made up of people intensely passionate about one thing which is a community structure that’s extremely welcoming to autistic people (comparatively- there was still constant ableism but that was true Everywhere in the mid to late 00s). and like all of the characters are based more on the types of people you’d find in those micro communities than on myspace. the Actual People who those archetypes were based on were disproportionately autistic and that absolutely carries over into how they’re written in homestuck, even though it’s unintentional. it isn’t helpful in every scenario and character obviously but like, i do think the fact that they’re based on online archetypes of what we’d call now terminally online micro community users and that a lot of those irl people were autistic bc in the early days of the internet being terminally online was actually extremely difficult instead of being the default- this was changing a bit around the time homestuck began, but the archetypes the kids and trolls are based on almost all date back to before then (the main exception being Some of the beforus trolls)- is something that can be useful to think about. it’s not an intentional thing, but it’s kind of an inevitable thing when you’re basing characters on 2005 power user stereotypes on gaming forums.