Oh yay a place to tell my favorite oldhead fandom story lol

So the year Dante Basco read Homestuck was also the year I attended my first convention, and also the first year I had like a short, "masculine" haircut as someone who believed themself to be a girl at the time. (I was 15, we weren't there yet.)

It also happened that Dante Basco was guesting at the convention I was attending! Which was exciting for me and my other lil Homestuck friends. So my friend and I went to the signing dressed as Tavros and Dave, respectively, and it was con Sunday so I had already picked up a little bit of the con crud and my voice was a little scratchy.

So first off he was very nice and spent a lot of time picking my friend's brain about horn construction because he was thinking about getting a Rufioh look together, but when I got up there and gave my "Hey, what's up, nice to meet you," he said, "Haha, whoa, you really do sound like Dave!" Having never been told I sounded like Not A Girl before, I was inexplicably delighted in a way that I couldn't really account for in the moment. But in hindsight I think it was the realization that like, "Oh shit, so you're telling me I have options??"

Anyway that's how Dante Basco cracked my fucking egg via Homestuck. Of course it was a goddamn Dave cosplay. This is the most quintessentially 2012 Homestuck fandom thing that ever happened to me, aside from the Terezi cosplayer who surprise-glomped me with unsealed gray paint later that day, which was also pretty on-brand for the time.