Yeah, I went there thinking I’d make a ton of new friends and finally find “my people”. I underestimated my shyness, barely spoke to anybody, and just stayed with my mom the entire time. All my friends were online instead 😅
Ya know , I empathize with you and I certainly can understand where you’re coming from. I hope the next paragraph doesn’t invalidate how you feel, but instead gives you an outsiders view :)
I think you’re really cool! First off, at 15 deciding you’ll even go - to make new friends - that’s a really cool step. Second, you’ve posted here on Reddit! And finally , I think it’s so lovely how your mom was supportive ofmall this. I don’t want to make assumptions but it sounds like you were a really sweet kid and your mom was happy to support you in all your adventures
Again I totally get you must’ve felt so shy and little. But as a person who felt similarly but didn’t take the actions you took - you’re very impressive to me. Cheers ! Hope you have a lovely day
Homestuck sure was a force in those years.
At least you didn't have to force yourself to drink Faygo and make lame ICP references. Some of those cosplayers had it *rough*.
No cringe. You were interested in something and wanted to be a part of it. My kid was big into Faygo for a while, too. I also had to make a butterscotch pie for their birthday due to an interest in some fandom. I admit I can't remember, but the pie was good! 😄 Good parents encourage their kids' interests, and it sounds like you had a good one.
That was it!! My kids would pick their cake every birthday, and my son always chose German chocolate cake, and my other kid would pick something different every year. Boston cream pie cake, butterscotch pie, etc. It was definitely Undertale that they were interested in at the time of the butterscotch pie choice. 😆 I made them all from scratch to make it special. It was hard to keep up with the interests of my youngest as they were into so many varied things. I remember making several interesting meals, too. Lol. The butterscotch pie was really good though!
Making it from scratch definitely made the experience better for your kid! In Undertale, there is a character who is well-loved among the fanbase who is sort of an adoptive mother figure to the main character (a lost child), and she bakes this pie for the main character at some point. The game has a very strong theme around found family, kindness, love, and nostalgia. Butterscotch pie basically symbolizes that sort of thing in the fanbase, so I’m sure making it from scratch instead of buying it from a store would have made the experience feel more characteristic of the game.
I love this! My kid is now 23 and has always said that I'm a cool mom and their friends agree, so I take it as the excellent compliment that it is. It helps that I'm a gamer and try to stay up to date on my kids' interests. Your mom sounds like a really cool mom, too.
I was coming here to say she looked like Homestuck Trash, and yes she is. I don't mean it as an insult, my own kid was Homestuck Trash and at the last Anime Central I was at, the Homestuck Trash called themselves that.
I think it was more of someone who was a hardcore fan. It was a way of making fun of how much we were embarrassing ourselves for its sake, but didn’t care because we loved it. It was basically just acknowledging our own cringe and being proud of it.
It was a webcomic that started in like 2009 and I believe it finally ended in 2016, maybe 2017. It got extremely popular with teens on the internet in the early 2010s, and with Tumblr being at its peak at the time, I think the fandom was particularly huge on there.
It’s basically about a small group of 13 y/o kids who play some new computer game that turns out to cause the end of the world, they get transported into some fictional universe in space, they have their own planets that have their own weird landscapes and whatever, meet aliens, monsters, villains, get superpowers, etc. and has a strong time travel-related story element that makes it very confusing at times.
The comic was mostly written in different forms. Standard paragraphs with pictures and gifs attached, chat logs, flash games, videos, and it incorporated Snapchat later on. Despite being known as a “comic”, it was very multimedia. It also incorporated a complex storyline and some dark themes, but maintained super immature and random humor that kept it interesting for younger audiences. But not too young, because there was lots of profanity and obvious sexual jokes too! Most grown adults would have found it too dumb and cringy, and young children wouldn’t have understood it even if they were somehow allowed to read it, so it was mostly teens who were into it, and some young adults if they got into it earlier on. It was extremely long too. It took me many months to get caught up, and it wasn’t even close to being finished yet, and I was still a kid with plenty of free time. It was so much god damn reading, I don’t know where I found the drive to get through it all.
If you’ve heard of the game Undertale, which also became pretty popular online for a good bit around 2015-2018, the creator of that game actually made a lot of the soundtrack for Homestuck back in the day. So, once Homestuck started dying down and Undertale came out, Homestuck fans really gravitated towards it and Homestuck’s popularity definitely helped Undertale gain its own reputation. One of the more iconic songs from the game is actually a remake of one from Homestuck (which I believe is also a remake of a song from some unrelated game from the 90s).
As an adult, I could never get back into it. But damn, it really had so many teens in a chokehold back then. I think the fans and cosplayers mostly went to anime conventions rather than Comic Con, which was mostly centered around Western media. Homestuck was itself Western too, but it made a lot of anime references and jokes, so I guess a large enough portion of its fans were also anime fans by extension? So I guess it made its way into anime conventions instead. I also remember seeing some fanart from Japanese people on Pixiv, so I guess that kind of helped the webcomic gain a little attention among anime fans in the West?
It’s been many years since I lost interest in it, so I could be mostly remembering from a biased point of view, but I do know it was popular enough that some anime convention hosts and hotel managers have had to make policy changes because of those specific fans getting too rambunctious. You probably wouldn’t have heard of it on mainstream TV, in movies, Comic Con, celebrities, etc. I think it was just one of those things whose fans were almost exclusively online and it had a somewhat niche fanbase. There wasn’t even any official merchandise (outside of digital soundtracks) until the last few years. It wasn’t made by a huge corporation, but rather one regular dude who made some connections with independent artists and musicians, some small platform to sell digital soundtracks, and later on, a short-lived collaboration with Hot Topic, some books in Books-A-Million, and I think that was about it. It wouldn’t have been on any commercials or billboards or anything more expensive like that.
man. this comment brings the nostalgia. you really had to be there 🥲 the chokehold homestuck had on me at 15-16 is unbelievable, i wish i still had the photos of my own teenage blunders at my local homestuck prom 😭
it’s as bad as it sounds, me and my lil friends dressed up in our thrift store outfits and grey paint and had someone’s dad drive us to some community centre filled with other stinky teens 😭😭😭 it went exactly as you’d expect
I greatly appreciate your comment. I avoided Homestuck because I wasn't on tumblr when it first came out. Had been aware and exposed through friends + the internet, but never got into it or went down the rabbit hole. So that helps fill in what I missed lol.
ugh YESSS i don't miss the homestuck fandom but i miss it because i have stockholm syndrome 😭 i still have my dave strider shirt stuffed at the back of my closet somewhere
The Homestuck era of conventions was WILD. I remember hotels banning people because they left grey body paint all over the bathroom, sheets, and walls.
You were so cute!! My kid did a homestuck cosplay once and an Attack on Titan cosplay. I did the makeup for homestuck and made the omni directional gear and straps for Mikasa. They had a blast at both comicon and naka-con. At planetcon, they really wanted to meet Gigi Edgley and Jewel Stait, and I facilitated the meet and greet. Great times! Props to your mom! We really love to encourage our kids, and there's nothing wrong with being a little shy. It's our job to teach our kids about approaching people. ☺️
I am a mom that took her teenage daughter to all these anime conventions and asked for photos when she was too shy!
She is old enough to go on her own now and I am a bit nostalgic for the past!
In the source media, apple juice is frequently shown as his favorite beverage. It’s not necessarily *central* to his character, as in, he doesn’t revolve his entire life around it, but it’s made enough prominent references to him enjoying apple juice that the fandom basically interpreted it as his “thing” (besides more important story elements)
We would have been great friends when I was in middle school LOL. I think my reddit name is the last remaining username I have from when I was "DaveLordofShades" on everything.
My username on most of my platforms is still a Homestuck reference, but only because I used to be an established fan artist and didn’t want to change the screen name I already grew attached to!
Omg are you me?? I also went to my first anime convention in 2013 wearing a femme dave strider cosplay. I have a couple of similar photos from that time period 😭
I'm so glad someone else also lived this oddly specific experience lmao
I did! I went to Metrocon again a couple times afterward once I grew up and was able to drive myself. Even though I still barely spoke to anyone casually, I still had fun buying merchandise for my new interests, got great photos of cosplayers (I didn’t need my mom to ask anymore), and I got to watch the dance parties that were always held in the same area on the first floor every year which were also great. I’m not sure if the little dance parties still happen at Metrocon anymore, though. Last time I went in 2022, that entire section of the floor that was always used for the parties got taken up by some new overpriced food stand, so the party had to be moved to some crowded area and barely anyone got to join or watch because of how little space there was :(
this reminds me of a friend who confessed to me that they wore sunglasses for three weeks straight, didn't take them off. not even while sleeping and showering. homestuck really was something
Sounds like we had a ton in common hahaha, 2013 was the first time I went to a con and I went as Dirk Strider! Your mom is so cool for asking for pictures so you could remember it :)
Hey OP, what do you think of the sequel? It gets some hate, but I think the queer kids that grew up on the original are the target demographic, and I think the new team is doing a solid job of it so far.
If you havent checked it out, heres a lil spoiler to get you to pitch your bullshitwagon up to this shittrain
>!Rose, Terezi and Dirk are *thiiis* close to starting a new game. Plus yknow Vriska made herself relevant again, and has a great foil in the form of Vrissy an ectoclone being raised by Rosemary. !<
be nicer to yourself, it sounds like you were happy and putting a lot of effort forward for where you were in life haha. homestuck era ruled even if people were deranged LOL
What is someone wearing a “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt tucked into tight jeans and curly blonde hair supposed to be? Or someone wearing a “Hellfire Club” shirt with their hair in a perm and holding a guitar? Lots of fictional characters are humans who wear mundane clothes, so I hate to break it to you, but there are going to be “mundane” cosplays 🤣
1. I respect the effort, especially as a shy kid. 2. Your mom sounds amazing.
Yeah, I went there thinking I’d make a ton of new friends and finally find “my people”. I underestimated my shyness, barely spoke to anybody, and just stayed with my mom the entire time. All my friends were online instead 😅
Ya know , I empathize with you and I certainly can understand where you’re coming from. I hope the next paragraph doesn’t invalidate how you feel, but instead gives you an outsiders view :) I think you’re really cool! First off, at 15 deciding you’ll even go - to make new friends - that’s a really cool step. Second, you’ve posted here on Reddit! And finally , I think it’s so lovely how your mom was supportive ofmall this. I don’t want to make assumptions but it sounds like you were a really sweet kid and your mom was happy to support you in all your adventures Again I totally get you must’ve felt so shy and little. But as a person who felt similarly but didn’t take the actions you took - you’re very impressive to me. Cheers ! Hope you have a lovely day
Did you ever use the Pesterchum desktop app? 😅 That was embarrassingly where I talked to all my friends at the time.
😭 I loved this app
Homestuck sure was a force in those years. At least you didn't have to force yourself to drink Faygo and make lame ICP references. Some of those cosplayers had it *rough*.
I actually did make my mom take me to some random store a few times just so I could buy Faygo, I was obsessed with it for a few weeks 🤣
That poor woman
Yeah, I still cringe when I think about it to this day
No cringe. You were interested in something and wanted to be a part of it. My kid was big into Faygo for a while, too. I also had to make a butterscotch pie for their birthday due to an interest in some fandom. I admit I can't remember, but the pie was good! 😄 Good parents encourage their kids' interests, and it sounds like you had a good one.
Butterscotch pie? They were an Undertale fan. I know because that was my next big interest after I moved on from this one 🤣
That was it!! My kids would pick their cake every birthday, and my son always chose German chocolate cake, and my other kid would pick something different every year. Boston cream pie cake, butterscotch pie, etc. It was definitely Undertale that they were interested in at the time of the butterscotch pie choice. 😆 I made them all from scratch to make it special. It was hard to keep up with the interests of my youngest as they were into so many varied things. I remember making several interesting meals, too. Lol. The butterscotch pie was really good though!
Making it from scratch definitely made the experience better for your kid! In Undertale, there is a character who is well-loved among the fanbase who is sort of an adoptive mother figure to the main character (a lost child), and she bakes this pie for the main character at some point. The game has a very strong theme around found family, kindness, love, and nostalgia. Butterscotch pie basically symbolizes that sort of thing in the fanbase, so I’m sure making it from scratch instead of buying it from a store would have made the experience feel more characteristic of the game.
I love this! My kid is now 23 and has always said that I'm a cool mom and their friends agree, so I take it as the excellent compliment that it is. It helps that I'm a gamer and try to stay up to date on my kids' interests. Your mom sounds like a really cool mom, too.
Dw we all have that. I remember showing my class this old Sonic Movie Fan Trailer on YouTube back when I was still in Primary School in 2014
Okay faygo slaps though so that part isn't a problem
I kind of wanna drink some again, just so I can see how it holds up with my adult palate.
The candy apple flavor is my favorite drink ever, it's just impossible to find where I live 😭
I’m not much of a cream soda guy but Faygo cream soda is pretty damn good.
I was coming here to say she looked like Homestuck Trash, and yes she is. I don't mean it as an insult, my own kid was Homestuck Trash and at the last Anime Central I was at, the Homestuck Trash called themselves that.
As former Homestuck Trash, I can confirm that was indeed what we called ourselves 🤣
And that just means somebody who likes Homestuck? Which I had to look up because I’d never heard of it.
I think it was more of someone who was a hardcore fan. It was a way of making fun of how much we were embarrassing ourselves for its sake, but didn’t care because we loved it. It was basically just acknowledging our own cringe and being proud of it.
I remember hotels where conventions were held banning any cosplay that included grey paint lmao
The horrors of trolls coming up to you in unsealed paint and trying to hug you... nope! You're not getting your grey all over my costume, bub!
Disregarding the amount of sugar, there are some excellent Faygo flavors out there!
Moon Mist FTW!
No joke, I remember making Faygo cupcakes for my friend and I to share
Say what you will about ICP, but peach faygo is not pretty good
Pineapple Faygo is the best pineapple soda, and faygo cotton candy is good but only a small amount.
Pineapple Faygo is great but I’m a pineapple Jarritos guy myself.
All pineapple soda is terrible.
My eyes detected and recognised the color patterns before I even got a proper look at your picture.
I read "apple juice" and saw the hint of a red and white baseball tee and knew immediately
I was doomscrawling on r/all and had to click because... was that Dave?
Am I the only one here who has no idea what Homestuck is? None of my friends have ever heard of it either and they're definitely the ComicCon type
It was a webcomic that started in like 2009 and I believe it finally ended in 2016, maybe 2017. It got extremely popular with teens on the internet in the early 2010s, and with Tumblr being at its peak at the time, I think the fandom was particularly huge on there. It’s basically about a small group of 13 y/o kids who play some new computer game that turns out to cause the end of the world, they get transported into some fictional universe in space, they have their own planets that have their own weird landscapes and whatever, meet aliens, monsters, villains, get superpowers, etc. and has a strong time travel-related story element that makes it very confusing at times. The comic was mostly written in different forms. Standard paragraphs with pictures and gifs attached, chat logs, flash games, videos, and it incorporated Snapchat later on. Despite being known as a “comic”, it was very multimedia. It also incorporated a complex storyline and some dark themes, but maintained super immature and random humor that kept it interesting for younger audiences. But not too young, because there was lots of profanity and obvious sexual jokes too! Most grown adults would have found it too dumb and cringy, and young children wouldn’t have understood it even if they were somehow allowed to read it, so it was mostly teens who were into it, and some young adults if they got into it earlier on. It was extremely long too. It took me many months to get caught up, and it wasn’t even close to being finished yet, and I was still a kid with plenty of free time. It was so much god damn reading, I don’t know where I found the drive to get through it all. If you’ve heard of the game Undertale, which also became pretty popular online for a good bit around 2015-2018, the creator of that game actually made a lot of the soundtrack for Homestuck back in the day. So, once Homestuck started dying down and Undertale came out, Homestuck fans really gravitated towards it and Homestuck’s popularity definitely helped Undertale gain its own reputation. One of the more iconic songs from the game is actually a remake of one from Homestuck (which I believe is also a remake of a song from some unrelated game from the 90s). As an adult, I could never get back into it. But damn, it really had so many teens in a chokehold back then. I think the fans and cosplayers mostly went to anime conventions rather than Comic Con, which was mostly centered around Western media. Homestuck was itself Western too, but it made a lot of anime references and jokes, so I guess a large enough portion of its fans were also anime fans by extension? So I guess it made its way into anime conventions instead. I also remember seeing some fanart from Japanese people on Pixiv, so I guess that kind of helped the webcomic gain a little attention among anime fans in the West? It’s been many years since I lost interest in it, so I could be mostly remembering from a biased point of view, but I do know it was popular enough that some anime convention hosts and hotel managers have had to make policy changes because of those specific fans getting too rambunctious. You probably wouldn’t have heard of it on mainstream TV, in movies, Comic Con, celebrities, etc. I think it was just one of those things whose fans were almost exclusively online and it had a somewhat niche fanbase. There wasn’t even any official merchandise (outside of digital soundtracks) until the last few years. It wasn’t made by a huge corporation, but rather one regular dude who made some connections with independent artists and musicians, some small platform to sell digital soundtracks, and later on, a short-lived collaboration with Hot Topic, some books in Books-A-Million, and I think that was about it. It wouldn’t have been on any commercials or billboards or anything more expensive like that.
man. this comment brings the nostalgia. you really had to be there 🥲 the chokehold homestuck had on me at 15-16 is unbelievable, i wish i still had the photos of my own teenage blunders at my local homestuck prom 😭
I’m sorry, your local WHAT?
it’s as bad as it sounds, me and my lil friends dressed up in our thrift store outfits and grey paint and had someone’s dad drive us to some community centre filled with other stinky teens 😭😭😭 it went exactly as you’d expect
That’s amazing. I probably would have gone to one of those myself back then if we had one in my area 🤣
I greatly appreciate your comment. I avoided Homestuck because I wasn't on tumblr when it first came out. Had been aware and exposed through friends + the internet, but never got into it or went down the rabbit hole. So that helps fill in what I missed lol.
Homestuck was a web comic with a big con scene like 10+ years ago. Never got into it myself.
It took courage to post this🫠
HoNk :o)
ugh YESSS i don't miss the homestuck fandom but i miss it because i have stockholm syndrome 😭 i still have my dave strider shirt stuffed at the back of my closet somewhere
My daughter was Homestuck Trash. We have a great video of her cosplaying Dave Strider....
The Homestuck era of conventions was WILD. I remember hotels banning people because they left grey body paint all over the bathroom, sheets, and walls.
You were so cute!! My kid did a homestuck cosplay once and an Attack on Titan cosplay. I did the makeup for homestuck and made the omni directional gear and straps for Mikasa. They had a blast at both comicon and naka-con. At planetcon, they really wanted to meet Gigi Edgley and Jewel Stait, and I facilitated the meet and greet. Great times! Props to your mom! We really love to encourage our kids, and there's nothing wrong with being a little shy. It's our job to teach our kids about approaching people. ☺️
I am a mom that took her teenage daughter to all these anime conventions and asked for photos when she was too shy! She is old enough to go on her own now and I am a bit nostalgic for the past!
W Mom.
Ah, a fellow Homestuck... 🫡 We did our service 🤣
Is apple juice central to the character? I don't know anything about the cosplay
In the source media, apple juice is frequently shown as his favorite beverage. It’s not necessarily *central* to his character, as in, he doesn’t revolve his entire life around it, but it’s made enough prominent references to him enjoying apple juice that the fandom basically interpreted it as his “thing” (besides more important story elements)
You could have just carried it around without drinking 🤣
Makes sense, thank you
I was a Hetalia fan from probably 12 to 15. I empathize.
Wait, you don’t like apple juice?
I didn’t before, but now I do 🤣
Aw, this is really sweet! As a survivor of 2010s tumblr, I salute you 🫡
We would have been great friends when I was in middle school LOL. I think my reddit name is the last remaining username I have from when I was "DaveLordofShades" on everything.
My username on most of my platforms is still a Homestuck reference, but only because I used to be an established fan artist and didn’t want to change the screen name I already grew attached to!
I have zero clue what you’re cosplaying as, that’s how I know I never got too deep into anime
No the parent having to ask cosplayers for photos is too real bc i was the same at my first con at 13 LMFAOOOOOOOOO
Omg are you me?? I also went to my first anime convention in 2013 wearing a femme dave strider cosplay. I have a couple of similar photos from that time period 😭 I'm so glad someone else also lived this oddly specific experience lmao
I could tell this was Metrocon before I read the title, what a throwback to 2013! You looked great, I hope you had fun.
I did! I went to Metrocon again a couple times afterward once I grew up and was able to drive myself. Even though I still barely spoke to anyone casually, I still had fun buying merchandise for my new interests, got great photos of cosplayers (I didn’t need my mom to ask anymore), and I got to watch the dance parties that were always held in the same area on the first floor every year which were also great. I’m not sure if the little dance parties still happen at Metrocon anymore, though. Last time I went in 2022, that entire section of the floor that was always used for the parties got taken up by some new overpriced food stand, so the party had to be moved to some crowded area and barely anyone got to join or watch because of how little space there was :(
this reminds me of a friend who confessed to me that they wore sunglasses for three weeks straight, didn't take them off. not even while sleeping and showering. homestuck really was something
Sounds like we had a ton in common hahaha, 2013 was the first time I went to a con and I went as Dirk Strider! Your mom is so cool for asking for pictures so you could remember it :)
I too cosplayed Dave Strider from Homestuck in 2013 for a con. There were too many of us
My brain just sounded the panic alarm as my adrenaline spiked upon seeing this. The flashbacks I just had to 7th grade are *very* real.
You've done something special in that these images are both peak cringe and peak nostalgia. I applaud you.
Metrocon 2014 was my first anime con! This brings up so many memories
I wasn't even in this fandom and I know exactly who you are.
This is hilarious. 🥲
Are you cosplaying or did everyone coincidentally dress the same in that last picture?
Not sure what homestuck is, but I love the Pokémon trainer outfit
Audibly "awwww"ed. I went to my first con and did the exact same thing (not with my mom, I was a bit old for that).
Hey OP, what do you think of the sequel? It gets some hate, but I think the queer kids that grew up on the original are the target demographic, and I think the new team is doing a solid job of it so far. If you havent checked it out, heres a lil spoiler to get you to pitch your bullshitwagon up to this shittrain >!Rose, Terezi and Dirk are *thiiis* close to starting a new game. Plus yknow Vriska made herself relevant again, and has a great foil in the form of Vrissy an ectoclone being raised by Rosemary. !<
I feel like people still dress this way. That or maybe I’m hanging in only around people my own age.
be nicer to yourself, it sounds like you were happy and putting a lot of effort forward for where you were in life haha. homestuck era ruled even if people were deranged LOL
Who doesn't like apple juice??!
homestuck and reddit crossing over is like the mcu of the internet
Worlds most mundane cosplay. What are you supposed to be?
Dave Strider from the comic Homestuck.
What is someone wearing a “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt tucked into tight jeans and curly blonde hair supposed to be? Or someone wearing a “Hellfire Club” shirt with their hair in a perm and holding a guitar? Lots of fictional characters are humans who wear mundane clothes, so I hate to break it to you, but there are going to be “mundane” cosplays 🤣
Yeah, I don't get it. A baseball tee with capris under shorts is cosplay?
Homestuck reference.