Homeschool Winner

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"Boy, I'd like to clean his clock..."

Homeschool Winner is a rejected character, appearing visually similar to Homestar Runner. Though never properly appearing with a significant, identifiable role in a toon, Homeschool Winner has been the most frequently referenced of the site's rejected characters — likely due to his resemblance to the site's title character.

Contents

Origin and Design

The name "Homeschool Winner" came about when a friend of the Brothers Chaps misremembered homestarrunner.com as "HomeschoolWinner.com". In keeping with the connection to Homestar Runner, his design is an intentional distortion of Homestar's — similar white skin, lack of arms, and general proportions; but with an overbite instead of an underbite, blue shirt and red-soled feet rather than a red shirt and blue-soled feet, and speech bubble rather than star on his shirt — in a manner somewhat similar to Homsar (though thinner than Homestar, compared to Homsar's squat proportions), another joke character inspired by an incorrect version of Homestar's name.

Contrasting with Homestar's status as a "terrific athlete", Homeschool is described as a "big nerd" — depicted in the Sketchbook holding a calculator or in Why Come Only One Girl? winning a "Quiz Bowl" trophy. While "everybody loves the Homestar Runner", people seem more antagonistic to Homeschool: Matt Chapman remarked that the character has "a creepy edge to him", while the narrator of Why Come Only One Girl angrily calls him a "weaselly know-it-all". In Quickstart Overview, it is implied that he may be Homestar's stepbrother.

Appearances

Despite inclusion in the unused Character Cards and a cameo in a Dancin' Bubs background, Homeschool Winner was never fully introduced to the site. In a 2003 interview, Matt Chapman described Homeschool as a "joke character", indicating that the Brothers Chaps were unlikely to continue developing the character.

Although Homeschool Winner sees relatively more frequent mention than other rejected characters, references to him typically have been tongue-in-cheek — the character becoming an inside joke, emblematic of abandoned, rarely-used, or otherwise niche elements of the body of work. In Sample of Style, Matt implies that Homeschool Winner had been killed off. A skull resembling Homeschool's head was seen deep underneath Strong Badia in buried. He appeared alongside several other rejected characters in A Decemberween Mackerel. In 2019, he appeared in Powered by The Cheat form in Quickstart Overview. Four days later, an animated GIF tweeted by @StrongBadActual marked the first time Homeschool Winner appeared in the site's modern animation style.

Arcade Guy

In Dangeresque Roomisode 2, the silhouette of the arcade game player in the window bears a striking resemblance to Homeschool Winner, and has a voice vaguely similar to Homestar's without the rhotacism. In addition, Dangeresque mentions the silhouette's behavior being "creepo", presumably referencing the aforementioned "creepy edge" to Homeschool's character. If this figure is indeed Homeschool, the game would be the first time he has been heard speaking.

Filmography

See Also

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