DAVESPRITE-COSPLAYER: I like your cosplay. Though, your horns are sort of in the wrong place.
Karkat goes to a Convention
(KGTAC) is a satirical MS Paint Adventures (MSPA) Fancomic that dissects Homestuck and its fandom, created by MS Paint Fan Adventures user Cole "SwiftKickintheBalls" Zaslove.
It follows the journey of one of the many central characters of Homestuck, Karkat Vantas, after he wakes up to the "Real World" at CONSTUCK, a massive, city-sized, 3-day-long convention dedicated to the MSPA fandom and the many fanworks that spawned from it.
Its first page was posted on September 10th, 2018 on the MS Paint Fan Adventures Website, and new pages are still being uploaded to this day.
Tropes featured in Karkat goes to a Convention:
- Adaptational Jerkass: Dave Strider has become a cold Übermensch after outliving centuries of sentient beings and even his own friends, and only bothers helping Karkat, Jack and Stacey because it amused him.
- Affectionate Parody: While often being silly or satirical, the comic is one big love letter to MSPFA and the communities it has created.
- all lowercase letters: Multiple cosplayers and Dave Strider have their speech typed with all lower case letters.
- All Stories Are Real Somewhere: To some degree, Homestuck is real somewhere in this comic's multiverse.
- And I Must Scream: Played for dark laughs with Karkatron, who was alchemized with Karkat's brain and computer. He has sentience but no voice to speak with. The ending shows he's still conscious and half-broken, unable to do anything about his situation.You are a cold computing abomination. You wish you could scream, yell, cry, pry into the brains of whoever made you and smash them to bits. But you cannot.
All you can do is this. Please... Please, someone help!!!!!! - And Now for Someone Completely Different: Act 2 of KGTAC takes the focus away from the con and instead focuses on a group of four kids playing a game... who are the characters in Nan's own fanventure.
- April Fools' Day: A couple days before the holiday itself, the comic's title and image were changed to "Constuck", an amateurish retelling of the first few pages of the comic made by a collaborative team... which barely makes it past 8 pages before one of the collaborators apologizes in the comic for accidentally inciting some drama in the team's Discord server before all of the members forgive him for his mistakes in a long, drawn-out scene. And then a boy named Fred and an older, God-Tiered Nan comment on the collaborative nature of the comic, apparently intending to make a fanventure of their own...
- Caps Lock: The titular character's speech is typed using caps lock.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Central Theme of the comic is how ideas inspire others. The Homestuck characters are at the con because the people at the con thought hard enough about the characters for them to physically manifest in reality.
- Cosplay: The story is set in a convention, so there are tons of people dressed up as characters.
- Foreshadowing:
- In "Ascend", the clouds in the sky turn into a pair of pointed glasses, foreshadowing Redglare's appearance.
- Hints towards Act 2 are dropped very early on, mainly at the Crank cosplayer's booth and the various Home-Skillet cosplayers.
- GIS Syndrome: The "Karkat: Greet friends!" animation has blurred photos of Homestuck cosplayers in the background.
- Immortality Begins at Twenty: Sburb players who became immortal through God-Tiering age until they're 19.
- It Amused Me: Dave Strider only helped train Jack, Stacey, and Karkat because he thought it'd be interesting.
- Loving Bully: Vannessa turns out to be this for Nan. Deconstructed, as Nan shuts her down by saying her crush doesn't excuse the fact that she made Nan's life miserable for years.
- Mundane Solution: How do the main characters get rid of The Tumor? Jack captchalogues it and rips up the card.
- One-Steve Limit: Defied with Jack (the human) and Jack (Noir).
- Reality Bleed: Slowly throughout the course of the comic, characters from Homestuck start to show up in the real world. It eventually escalates from people to objects to whole chunks of land.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Nan verbally tears into Vannessa after she confesses her crush on her, calling her out on not only making her life miserable for years but for worrying about her love life instead of focusing on the fact that Homestuck is bleeding into reality.
- Sequel Hook: The end of Day 4 flash shows us Stacey and Jack coming across Dave's SBURB disks, which didn't turn to stone in the aftermath of the convention. Not only that, but Andrew Hussie is still lurking in the convention... and Lil Cal is with him.
- Sexy Whatever Outfit: SEXY!JADE-COSPLAYER and SEXY!ROSE-COSPLAYER are straightforward instances of this trope; sexy adult versions of rather normal child characters. There are a few other unnamed background cosplayers that also fit in this trope.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: Once Jack and Stacey finish their training arcs, they gain new shirts and hairstyles to symbolize how they've come into their own now. And also because they aren't bothering to cosplay anymore.
- Take That!:
- Dave thinks Earth C being racially segregated into four kingdoms is incredibly stupid.
DAVE: can you imagine the amount of racism that would happen how stupid would we have to be to think up that- Andrew Hussie is described as having a pitifully low imagination stat.
- Taken for Granite: Once Karkat activates the Juju, almost all of the Homestuck characters and objects that were brought into the convention via the Reality Bleed are turned to stone. The key word being almost.
- Took a Level in Badass: Nan goes from a Burger Fool to the leader of a group of survivors fighting against the underlings.
- Übermensch: Dave Strider loses his human views on morality after living for billions of years and outliving entire worlds of sentient beings and many of his fellow Sburb players. He feels that it's better to risk letting people die just in case interfering would keep them from learning a lesson. He also views most peoples' importance as part of a greater whole instead of as all individuals. He only even bothered saving Karkat, Jack, and Stacey because he thought spending the summer training with them might be fun.
- Your Costume Needs Work: There are multiple instances throughout the story in which real Homestuck characters are mistaken as cosplayers and critiqued for inconsistencies between their appearances and the comics. This actually becomes a pretty important part of the plot later on as it's revealed that Homestuck got details about the story wrong.
