CAMI: For creator merch sold on the FRAF storefront, the creator receives 70% of the profit to divide across their team as they wish, Homestuck Inc. receives 10% of the profit as the IP holder, and FRAF keeps the remaining 20% to pay our bills and team members.

VICTORIA: National treasure, Clubs, already started one. Hop on that. https://mspfa.com/?s=65022&p=1
KEVIN: It’s just so damn cute. 

CAMI: We would like to at some point open a suggestion box on the website, likely for limited windows of time.
DOC: Positive community discussion about a creator or their work has pointed our way for many of our creator choices, so in a way you already have been!

KEVIN: Allegedly.
DOC: Hor hor hor hor hor 

VICTORIA: I would love that. There's a lot of things I have my eyes on, but a lot of Homestuck works are currently siloed off to AO3, which has its own rules on monetization for its own safety. I'm currently working on some stuff for helping creators move off of AO3, but that's still in the works! Stay tuned.

CAMI: I’m not personally opposed to it at all, and nothing about our license would prevent a project like this from becoming a FRAF work.

KEVIN: We’re here to help fan creators make money from their work. Who are we to say no to a little pay-to-play?

VICTORIA: If you are making a game that is pay-to-play please for the love of god reach out. Games are tough to make, and you deserve to get paid for making games. God knows nobody else is getting paid to make games. The games industry is… not good.

CAMI: FRAF members typically nominate existing works for consideration, and the FRAF Team then reviews those works and comes to a decision on whether or not to include them in our next wave. If a work is not chosen for inclusion in the next wave, that does not mean it won’t be included in future waves and it is likely we will reconsider those works at a later date. We take care to include a wide diversity of works with unique vibes, themes, ideas, and audience sizes. Having a smaller audience does not render a fanwork ineligible for consideration, we actually like to have a mix of popular works alongside more niche works to try and help give said niche works a bit of an extra boost in attention.

CAMI: I don’t think we’ve ever considered it before but this does sound like fun.

KEVIN: Build it and we shall come.

KEVIN: This is actually one of the first things I ever pitched for FRAF, and it’s something I desperately want to pursue. ← (Teammate that understands merchandising and product development the least.)

CAMI: I’d love to personally, although something like this would require substantial financial investment beyond what we have the resources for at the moment, but never say never. 

DOC: Physical prints take some up front investments that extend beyond what we have to work with, but there are certainly ways to set it up if any of our creators propose it. 

KEVIN: Our Homestuck wunderkinds have enough insane ideas to choke a horse. It’d shock you the sort of shit we’re going to choke this horse with. Insane ideas usually take a while though. Watch this space.

DOC: When you put a bunch of very creative people in one little box and shake it a lot, all sorts of ideas bounce around. Which ones make it out to see the light of day is anyone’s guess, but I’m sure we can help it get there.

KEVIN: We are always up to some nonsense. If you see it coming, it’d be no fun.

VICTORIA: The next update is coming. I prommy. It's in the process of merging everything together. Soon. Soon! I am more or less solo-developing these forums, and while I've got friends and coworkers and peers I am the chosen hero here. It's just me! I think there is a real nobility in showing off things that lack polish. It's that Homestuck feeling of the ink not yet being dry when the pages hit the site.The forums not being the best they could be now is part of the growth, and forums are not an immediate payoff anyway. For fan works forums with inactive forums - this is something I expected, honestly. Fan works are considered successful if they capture one 20th of the light of Homestuck. Most fanventures have their own Discords, their own Twitters, and while forums are a nice benefit, they're secondary communities. I don't expect any fan creators to upheave their communities and move into the forums. The forums are best for methodical, considered, long-form discussion you don't need to join a Discord to see, and they're a slow burn in terms of community. It might not show yet, but my biggest inspirations for the forums are sites like old-school deviantArt, Cohost, may it rest in peace, and this old social media-like site called Canvas that moot made after he left 4chan. It was this very cute art board, where you could "remix" images people posted, and it was basically just a social drawing app, like if Strawpage was also Reddit. Those are all really inventive sites that put unique ideas out into the world, and changed how I think about social gathering sites. (Distinct from "social media".) But the time table for building that is years, and not weeks. The forums are the long game.

KEVIN: Small note! The aforementioned forum update is out, and more updates are steadily rolling out. Enjoy this glimpse into the recent past before those updates were out.

VICTORIA: I would love to release some API documenting and toolkits, but as far as open-sourcing goes, probably not. 

KEVIN: They ain’t got those.
VICTORIA: I fucking love Kiki Fukuoka. Don't fuck with me. 

DOC: FRAF is here for the support of homestuck fan creations, but we have interests in all kinds of fan content. I hope that we can continue to work with our FRAF creators on anything they create, and weave something from the community we’ve created around people’s hard work. 

VICTORIA: There are a lot of really great non-Homestuck hypertext comics (I will get this term off the ground or so help me.) and a lot of people wish to remain within the medium after they're done with their time making Homestuck fanworks, but at that point we ask whether that's really our jurisdiction. It's not our circus, and I think the answer is no, but who's to say some other circus wouldn't pop up and take in those clowns. Art collectives are great and mutual support is what it's all about.

VICTORIA: I try to encourage FRAF artists to share notes and materials whenever they can. The best thing for artists in my experience is communities of other artists who are all trying hard and doing good. As for whether we get exclusive stuff, I'm sure I could ask but we're all kind of doing our own things and that's its own kind of beauty. It's parallel play.

DOC: Creators tend to share what they’re working on with each other, including their talent when the time calls for it, but as for word from Above on Canon there isn’t anything exclusive. And if there was nobody would ever believe me.

KEVIN: I think we’ve only talked about classpecting twice-ish in the FRAF Chat? No one’s even asked for the notes?? They don’t seem to care much at all???

VICTORIA: We actually have plenty of finished works already - most Spicyyeti works, Kittyquest, Liminal Space stick out. Partnership remains in perpetuity.

DOC: While activity of a fan creation is something we look for when inviting new creators, FRAF is here to support projects in the community, even if they have finished works. Creators can stay a part of FRAF for as long as they are willing to be featured on the site. 

VICTORIA: The forums started development about a year ago (March 2025) and I worked on it semiregularly throughout the months until launch. In particular, we did a lot of what I'm going to call "opposition research" to see if we even needed to write our own forums to begin with. Web dev isn't the field it once was, and a lot of the heyday of forums is long-past. Forum scripts these days are either extremely monetized bloatware that is meant to be a hub for crypto trader and AI merchants to huddle around, or so old and riddled with bugs that it's like what they say about buying cars - you can get an expensive one that works fine or you can get a cheap one that doesn't, and you'll pay the same amount you would for the expensive one in maintenance and repairs. 

I personally learned a lot - there's a lot of stuff in the world of web dev that I've kept myself out of because I simply felt like I didn't need all that nonsense. I've been writing the same LAMP stack PHP I learned 15 years ago for my own stuff before this, and when it came time to make decisions on what to do, the big question of "can anyone contribute to these forums, code-ways" was the defining decision. So I bit the bullet and sat down and caught up with the world of web dev. Going from 2009-era jQuery and SQLite to React and Next.JS and Vercel and all these annoying things is like getting dunked in the deep end when you haven't gone swimming in a decade. 15 years actually. 

The biggest thing I learned is to actually feel the loss of websites. Websites are impossible to host at the amateur level now. There's great platforms like Neocities and Nekoweb out there, but those are still platforms. They're as likely to go down because of the capricious nature of web projects as anything else. The free hosting LAMP stacks never went away, I'm forever indebted to Nearlyfreespeech but like… that's different. It's just different. The ease of throwing up vBulletin or phpBB on a free-hosting server that was how I learned to make websites is now gone because every website needs to be the next Twitter, the next Discord, nothing can ever be what it is. We could have thrown up a Discourse forum or any number of Reddit clones but then it'd be… another vBulletin install, another phpBB install. Wouldn't be us.

KEVIN: I couldn’t follow any of that. This means she’s absolutely the right person for the job.

CAMI: I learned Typescript, and that I love Typescript, and that most importantly I hate Typescript.

DOC: I stared into the abyss and the abyss had hands. 

MILES: Please make this.

KEVIN: Our lawyers have reminded us that we only have a license to the Homestuck IP. If Dr. Mario Super Nintendo is reading this, please don’t sue us. 

MILES: I actually personally write and implement them literally the day the update they’re relevant to comes out so that not even FRAF gets spoilers.  I intend to continue doing this forever.  In fact every now and then old ones might even get updated, so keep your eyes peeled for that!  Probably not that often though.  I know I probably made a million people paranoid with this but I have to be honest.

KEVIN: He's really annoying about not spoiling us to be honest. He pisses me off daily if we’re being real.

KEVIN (JUST HANGING OUT): The cool thing about being unbound from canon is that you can just do anything you want? Forever? Internal consistency be damned. Enough from me, though. Without further ado, some FRAF Creators:

DOC (TABLESTUCK): This is a super fun challenge when working on Tablestuck, because it doubles down on the problem by making a rule book about a rule book. It’s a balance of offering players the tools to make a close-to-canon experience while also leaving space for them to make all the out of the box decisions that turns a vanilla session into a story. Some things we can offer options for, but other times we have to operate with the knowledge that people will just make things up, and making a system that can maintain balance in that system is a lot. But remembering that we are making a game that is fun, and we can do even more fun things by departing from canon in some spaces to introduce more depth and creativity, has allowed the team to make some of the most interesting additions throughout the editions. 

VICTORIA (BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE): I actually really like playing inside the lines of Homestuck. I went into my comic not really caring to be "canonical" because it was primarily me making what my friends and I envisioned Homestuck would be during that gap between the end of Homestuck and the Epilogues, but I outgrew that pretty quickly. These days a lot of my writing process can be described as "scraping around the edges to get it all". This has made me really annoying on the Homestuck server! I'm sorry to anyone who's had to hear me talk about [redacted] or [super redacted] when it's barely on topic. There's a sport to it, though. There's something kind of thrilling about giving myself challenges like "Can I make [redacted] an interesting character while respecting who she is in Homestuck?" or "Can I patch over this plot hole/continuity error only the most obsessed of nerds care about?", it's fun. It's really, really fun.

ELI (HOMESLICE): When it comes to writing a story such as Homeslice, there's a level of canonicity that we have to take into account while creating the story. The story encompasses the healing journies of Homestuck's beloved cast, after all— it has to feel realistic to the original material. Thankfully, Homestuck's rules are actually extremely flexible. Whether its because of a lack of canon information leading to filling in the blanks based off of intuition, or simply because Homestuck's characters are too human to be reduced to a stereotype or genre, even staying within the realm of Homestuck's "rules" lends to many-a opportunity for new and exciting adventures with "old, over-analyzed" characters.

ALIENOID (BEFRIENDUS): I knew from the very start that I didn't want to stay strictly beholden to all of Homestuck's lore. Sure, we're a dancestor prequel story and we conceivably have to fit into the existing narrative, but also there's, to put it gently, a lot I disagree with about how the dancestors were handled. Thus, the entirety of Befriendus has been operating under "it's a fanwork so we can just do whatever we want!" Nobody can arrest you for saying "Kankri might've been culled actually." The stakes are lower as a fanwork; there's no Star Wars Tribunal to rein you in and it rules.

LUPA (WAKE UP): honestly? i just didn't like working within the stylistic "limitations" of homestuck proper. it's not that the art in homestuck is bad, quite the opposite, but that i found trying to stick to the various "modes" as it were restrictive and unintuitive. i grew up drawing bad anime on deviantart, honing my skills in a very particular way - mostly in the lineart department (lineart is my favorite part of drawing...), so you can see why i'd find the traditional "lineless" style imitated by many fancomics frustrating. it just never clicked with me. i had created fan projects before - if you know you know - and they all petered out very quickly because of this percieved need to "draw like homestuck." 

this may sound unrelated to the question, but to me, the framing of "having to look like homestuck" mentally kept me in this place where i felt unfulfilled with my various projects, thus why they kept fizzing out so quickly. what was truly upsetting is that i had created these characters and cherished them dearly, but the roleplay scene i was active in at the time was fizzling out, and i desperately wished to create something with these characters and the worldbuilding i had done with them. but i was stuck at that impasse: do i draw in a way that is unintuitive to me, and end up dissatisfied? or do i say "fuck it" and draw how i always do? in the end, i chose my style, simply because the timesink of imitation did not feel all that exciting. 

once i removed that arbitrary expectation i had placed down, tweaking more and more about homestucks lore and worldbuilding didn't feel as daunting. i realised that i didn't have to make a story like homestuck. in fact, i could make a story that focused more on the aspects of homestuck that keep me coming back over and over after all these years. realising that has kind of freed me in a way. i just began to write the stories i like to read. 

tl;dr: i REALLY didnt like working in "spritemode"

MIDNIGHTMANAGER (LAIRHOLD): I think it does help to have the input of others in order to be more creative. if I made the entire comic by myself (which I can't, but lets say I could), I would not have explored nearly as much beyond my specific vision of Lairhold and what that would be (and the same goes for if my co-author did everything themselves instead of having additional input). Both me and my co-author have different visions for the comic at the end of the day, and are going to have different ideas of what we "should" explore, as well as we want to explore. And that's a good thing! Working together to this degree allows for us, to be more creative then we would independently. Simply having each other around is enough to help us with that, in a way. The reality is that your comic isn't going to end up being a finalized work by the time you come up with it on day 1, and part of a comic's devolpment is trying to firgue out ways to explore your ideas, and explore ways to communicate the themes you want to have there in your comic. This is especially true for somebody like me, who is relatively new to the experience. It massively helps to have people willing to give their own input, be it a co-author, suggestors, or even just friends willing to give their own thoughts, having people around you willing to even just talk about your comic while you are exploring it challenges your idea of what you can explore, and how you can explore your already existing ideas, to the point where it is likely drastically changed from how you thought of it on day 1.

GHOSTOPAL (DVFOS): 🐁 Sqeak squeak squeak squeak squeak. Squeak. (I've had a period where i really cared about doing this. I was more focused on Visual Art though so my big focus was copying how Homestuck's art "looked" (which is already quite broad, right?), but I also did try to replicate the story, how the characters spoke, etc.

Different material conditions in a media landscape warrant different demands. It might seem alien now, but several years ago Homestuck as a brand was virtually "silent" for ages. This, coincidentally, was the period where I became a Homestuck fan. The big thing that was "in" was copying and extending Homestuck to fill that hole in peoples hearts, to make something that "feels like the real thing!"

And yet, no matter how hard I tried, it always felt quite empty. This is because I was doing something fundamentally different from Homestuck. Homestuck was written & drawn with the intention of being a fun, and (I hope) good comic. I was writing and drawing with the intention of imitating Homestuck. What's the fun in that? I wasn't even saying anything, I was just playing charades. "This is what Homestuck WOULD look like if they kept making it!" is something I feel exists on the same wavelength as Game Boy Color Spiderman. (It can be funny sometimes though.)

After taking some time to improve my art outside Homestuck (and reading other things), I found my artistic voice (in both original/fanwork) improved a lot. I recommend doing this...

That being said, being conformant to Homestuck's "canon" isn't bad in of itself. There's plenty good Sburbventures that accurately copy Homestuck's implementation of the game because they're not just trying to imitate Homestuck, they're a love letter to its version of Sburb and the author wants to talk about that for a billion panels. That's fun! You have free will. 

At its core, I think creating fanworks is about taking the things you like from the source material, dissecting it, and adding in your own influences. Do you have a troubling life experience you want to put in story form? Did you read those visual novels everyone keeps vaguelly alluding to in association to Homestuck? Do you have an indescribable feeling? A weird hobby? A fetish? Add it! (Of course, do consider whether you would more enjoy making this a fanwork or original work. And yes, you are capable of making original works. I believe in you.)

That's generally how I do things. I often have a giant cloud of existing ideas/feelings/inspirations. I see something I like in Homestuck. I think, "What if [Thing in Homestuck] was elaborated on more, and combined with [original idea]?". I've been able to create a lot more cohesive fanworks that feel like --me-- this way. It's easier to have an endgame, a vision for where you want your story to go. I can make decisions because I want to make them, because I think it'd be the best way to reach the endgame. If you want Homestuck you can read Homestuck again. If you want the things I like about Homestuck then you can read what I make too.)

GATED (HOMESLICE): For a comic like Homeslice, not only do we have to uphold the canon of Homestuck, but also the established canon of Homeslice. The comic itself has transferred leadership a few times before I even joined the team. I used to feel very trapped by this—trying to adhere to the pages already released while trying to be sure every character involved has an interesting arc. Our central theme moving forward is: How do you live a normal life after spending your childhood in hell? How can anyone move on? When we came up with these themes and ideas for each character, only then did I feel some level of creative control and not like restrained by Homestuck proper or Homeslice itself. This process took a lot of meetings, but now I think the team and I are in a place where we are happy with the story (that’s you’ll hopefully see soon), and the level of control we’ve gained. I think Homestuck is uniquely situated to have these sorts of conversations and fan works , especially since we, as a fandom, have grown alongside these characters. If they can move forward, so can we 💖

TIMEKEEPER (PROJECT [S]OUNDPAGE): i dont know if this question wholly fits the... deal behind project soundpage, but i do have a few things to say because the goal of adaptation presents a unique challenge in this vein.

theres lots of little details in homestuck. too many to keep track of without some sort of massive doc or spreadsheet, things that we already have enough of in our production. so for us, the most important thing is that in the end we keep the spirit of homestuck in the project. we do what we can to be accurate, but we wont be able to do it all! some things are just too much for us, and some are literally impossible to portray in this medium. but we can still give the spirit of those things a chance to shine.

here's an example using an upcoming scene from act 1 episode 2:

in episode 2 of project soundpage john makes the fucking wild captcha-disaster-cake he does in act 1 (as seen on homestuck.com/002006). we didn't want to spend THAT much screentime on something relatively insignificant to this episode-- especially not when we were already fighting to fit everything we wanted into the episode. we had a very clear endpoint for the episode in mind, and we needed to get there within our 12 minute window. that whole sequence of him fucking with that cake would take ages to animate, be super complex, and eat away at our runtime. you'd NEVER get your episode! so... we did some slightly different but equally silly disaster-cake based sequence. and it works! we kept the absurd mess, the items stuck in the cake, and where he ends up the same. we just changed around some details surrounding how it all happens to keep it short and sweet but still funny. no pun intended.

the spirit of the goof and gag is still in there, we still see the disastrous aftermath, and we get the sequence without spending a whole month's budget on one scene. AND we get to sleep a little more. great success!