What is Homestuck About?

Homestuck begins with the four main kids (called the “beta kids,” since they’re from the beta timeline, as opposed to the “alpha kids” from the alpha timeline) John Egbert, Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde, and Jade Harley playing a video game called Sburb.

Sburb is sort of like Jumanji in that once the kids start playing it, the game becomes their real life. Once you boot up Sburb, you have a certain amount of time to complete a series of tasks in order to escape to a space called the Medium (kind of like the next “level” of the game) before meteors rain down on your location and kill you.


When you play Sburb, it triggers the end of the world (this is a feature of the game). The ultimate goal of Sburb is to defeat the Black King and for each player to complete their personal quest.

Through this process, the players will breed the perfect “Genesis Frog” which matures into a new universe.
However, completing this process is incredibly complicated and not necessarily linear. If you complete this all successfully, you win! If not, you die. Additionally, Sburb is an open-world game, with a TON of unique features and lore, meaning there are a lot of different ways to achieve the same end goal, and not every player will follow the same path.

These are the rules of Sburb (a game which exists inside of Homestuck). However, the story of Homestuck follows our characters through their session of Sburb, which is not at all a linear or normal session. This is how Homestuck gets really confusing and hard to follow, because it is both inventing this new overly complicated game with its own rules/storyline and simultaneously breaking those rules and bending the storyline as it goes.

Act 5 properly introduces the 12 (beta) trolls, who are aliens from a planet called Alternia. Each troll represents a zodiac sign and is meant to be a literal internet troll persona.


The trolls have already beaten their own game of Sburb, and the universe they created was the universe that the beta kids live in. However, their Genesis Frog was bred incorrectly, leading to the beta kids’ universe being flawed and allowing for the existence of Jack Noir, who hijacks the session and prevents the beta kids from defeating the Black King.


Jack Noir is the main villain in Act 5 of Homestuck. If you don’t want spoilers, stop here.

Otherwise: click here

Because Jack Noir prevents the beta kids from winning their game (which means they would die), the beta kids AND the trolls have to restart their entire universe, and escape to the new one via a three-year journey. The new universe (the alpha timeline) includes the alpha kids: Jane Crocker, Dirk Strider, Roxy Lalonde, and Jake English.

Here, the trolls and the beta kids unite with the alpha kids, but now they have to defeat the new villains who have hijacked this universe: Lord English and The Condesce. Act 6 is this journey, complete with more insane time shenanigans, more (mostly irrelevant) trolls, two cherubs, an entire terribly drawn interlude called “Homosuck,” and more!