“Are you a Homestuck”, no, I was like 25 when Homestuck debuted, so I don’t have the excuse of the comic’s fandom being a formative part of my identity. You’re talking to a guy who has an original printing of The Starlight Calliope on the bookshelf over his bed; I’m something worse.
“Then why do you sound like one” well, mostly because I was once a fourteen-year-old with unmonitored access to the Internet as it existed circa 1998, and that’s just what being a fourteen-year-old with unmonitored Internet access in 1998 was like. The comic is very effective at capturing the voice of an era!
Like, you need to understand that if you were in your early teens on the Internet of 1998, there were entire communities of people around your age with no adult supervision where everybody talked like Dave Strider, and you were almost certainly part of one of them.
Funnily enough, there’s actually a very slight generation gap there. I was born in ‘83, while Andrew Hussie was born in ’79, so Hussie would have been late-teens at the same time that I was early-teens, and that’s reflected in the argot of the two main “generations” of Homestuck characters – particularly with reference to the fact that first-generation leetspeak had already become somewhat unfashionable by the time my generation’s communities where establishing themselves.
Which is to say, the vernacular of the beta kids is largely based on how my generation of unsupervised teenagers on the Internet talked, but how Hussie’s generation of unsupervised teenagers on the Internet talked? That’s the trolls.
Not only were “troll quirks” a real thing people did back in the day, but it was popular enough that Homestuck wasn’t even the first big major webcomic to have characters talk that way
amhrancas 