#i think homestuck epilogues its just a challenge for how far you can read without feel sad or depressed

[goldengrecha]

Thing i made after reading Candy Epilogue. Striders made me cry again. I dont know why i draw Dirk in those clothes but okay i guess

[tomatograter]

i saw on twitter you reread the epilogues! would it be okay to ask how you feel about them now on a reread? have any of your opinions changed, for better or worse? i've really loved the art and analysis that's come out of your tumblr/twitter ever since they dropped, so i'm excited to know what you think. i couldn't get a great read on your feelings based on your tweets so that is why i am asking directly, hope that's okay!

Not much changed. That wasn't the first time I attempted to re-read the HS Epilogues, I've gone through bits and pieces of them a handful of times in the years since the original release and it's an effort I make to remind myself of events that happened because I tend to... forget. I don't mind reading books, I like those! In the hellscape that was 2020, according to my StoryGraph stats (great new site, by the way, stop using the Amazon-clawed Goodreads and transfer your account to a black led effort to diversify the current literary environment) I managed to read about 22 new books. Not too shabby for a total dumbass. The problem isn't that it was text-only, they just sort of mush together as a nondescript mass in my brain given enough time. 

The first time I finished the epilogues, I said they felt like a purposefully unfinished text, but one at odds with itself (though in much more undercooked words, as I had just spent the last 2 days busy reading it) and it's an impression that has deepened since.

I do not mean anything like "Meat contradicts Candy" with this, that'd be foolish; the dissonance is the fucking point. I know how dubiously canon alternate universes work and I *enjoy* them, otherwise I wouldn't have wasted years in the circus ring that is accompanying Big 2 Comics in the hopes they'd do anything genuinely cool with that concept. Instead, I find there is a general problem in terms of internal cohesion. The Epilogues want to be a lot of things at once, be it a continuation, an expulsion, a deliberate attempt at public scorn, a somewhat genuine play in heartfelt analysis, a reinvention of what came before, or a loaded gun pointed straight at one's own foot. And in the process, they end up undermining the impact of their own strongest moments. 

I don't like the Epilogues. Their lukewarm indecisiveness makes for a poor reading experience that needs far more asides, warnings and 'before you read it-'s than the book is worth. It is a text with a particularly distasteful, juvenile fixation in the show and repeated humiliation of sexual abuse victims, and manages to be more regressive about its female characters and what roles they're allowed to play than Homestuck, the 2009 Comic, ever was. And that was disappointing. It's as if the coming of adulthood must sort them into one of two categories: "wanted, desirable" woman or "unwanted, undesirable" woman. It also interacts with trans women in a really shitty way. It is a text married to traditional white-centric politics that makes an attempt to challenge them from that same perspective but falls flat on its face by pulling big moves like "making the alien-Hitler analogue character fight for a rebellion meant to represent racial liberation" and other unsavory choices. But I don't need to like the Epilogues to acknowledge them as both a text that exists and works within a shared universe. 

They're pretty fertile ground for dissection and analysis. I think it's interesting how they accentuate some of the worst facets of the HS "canon"/"lore" by being incredibly blatant about their connection to stuff like the Skaianet archives, how they play with Fanservice and Fan Expectation by dedicating so much time to solving or sinking ‘The Davekat Equation’, and how they elaborate on complex facets of old characters. It's a text that acknowledges the existence of fanfiction and popular fanworks on a direct quotable basis (like "Can't sleep without holding onto a motherfucker" of 4Chords fame) as well as Fan Movements that preceded it (the also Gamzee-based "Free the clown!" Rush from 2016) it's intrinsically interactive, and that's not something you can say about a lot of media. The olive branch beckons.

I don't recommend the Epilogues. To me, the Epilogues portray glimpses of two potential, but not absolute, futures soaked in limiting metadoomer pessimism, best appreciated as "what-if" tales taking on the questions of serialization, post-myth, the self-cannibalistic nature of franchises, the abstractness of Canon, the absurdity of fanon, and why fascists like milk. The Epilogues are also not going to magically disappear or un-exist from our collective recollection anytime soon, or… ever. These statements coexist. 

I think complex feelings towards media are best put to use in the making of your own art, which is unsurprising, given the fact I'm an artist and a fag, & I've personally enjoyed creating things that interact and rebuke aspects of that text. I've also been graced with the existence of wonderful art from others doing the same, may that be in the form of illustrations, written epics, analyses, comics, videos, songs, the collective transgendering of the series' main character, and all sorts of harder-to-categorize community creations. You can make the best of it. That's my favorite part of the whole ordeal, and one I don't regret one bit. 

I hope this is an appropriately satisfying answer on this subject, and if it isn't, well, here's the thing; you can write a better one.

[dukeofriven]

Homestuck means more to me than I feel like I can truly put in into words - to this day I maintain without irony that the original work is one of the most important texts of its era, and I point any aspiring writer to it as a master-class in character voice and plot-adjacent story progression. But with that in mind on this, 413, it should be said that my feelings towards Homestuck the past few years have been somewhat ambivalent. The primary trend in Homestuck as a franchise has been one of inheritance, with Andrew Hussie stepping back and fans of the work stepping up as his heirs. And the result has been an extremely mixed bag. It produced some genuinely delightful video games (I have yet to play Act 2 of Hiveswap but I hear its pretty great), but a lot rougher treatment towards the continuation of the original story. I’m one of the weirdos who actually liked the Epilogues. I didn’t enjoy them, exactly - they’re far too unpleasant to be enjoyable in any epicurean sense - but I found them challenging, complex, meaty (no pun intended), and really interesting. What they did didn’t always work, but they were so supremely ambitious that you couldn’t help admire them. The problem was the Epilogues proved what didn’t work in Homestuck: it felt a little like a purge or a blood letting, taking the story to the darkest of all places to prove that it could be done and then letting all those impurities go. That it was followed up with genuine delights like Pesterquest seemed to bear this out: we have explored the boundaries of tone and discovered just how far Homestuck can go, and where it probably shouldn’t trend all that often. At the time I pontificated about what I called the ‘Pumpkin’ timeline. In a story that always rejected binaries, it was clear to me that the future of Homestuck lay neither in Meat or Candy, but instead in the third option, one that rejected the nihilism and tragedy of both, one in which John found a way - as he had before - to tell fate to go fuck itself and do the impossible, the way Earth-C was originally impossible. This seemed so obvious that I always felt a little surprised I had to explain it - MEat and Candy were narrative aberrations when you took Homestuck as a whole, and the future would be, like Peterquest, finding that third option. But it turns out I was wrong. The future of Homestuck would, apparently, be doubling down on Meat and Candy, dystopic, hyper-emotive settings that were simply not built to cary long-term storytelling because by the end of the the Epilogues they were finished as narrative places - they’d served their purpose. And so i remained baffled that the future of Homestuck, Homestuck 2, remains mired within them. I dip in and out of Homestuck 2 repeatedly, and it’s... a thing that exists. It’s not bad. It’s not very good either. It just reads like someone treding water, as it muddles around spaces whose narrative point was already exhausted two years ago. It suffers dramatically from not really having a point - and this is the odd thing because much of OG Homestuck could equally be accused of being meandering and not getting anywhere. I think the problem is the writing - Andrew Hussie is a master at writing conversations that don’t go anywhere and don’t achieve anything but which nevertheless stick with you because of how well-crafted they were. So many conversations in Homestuck are just groups of people shit-talking one another: they don’t further the ‘story’ in the sense of plot progression, but they leave you wanting more because of how much you enjoy spending time with these charming idiots. Homestuck 2 struggles to find its way to that space because so many of the characters are just... lousy adults now, old assholes with shitty lives and worse temperments. I think everything was summed up in the very first panels - endless monologues by Dirk Strider. It was the worst possible way to start a new project: my reaction as visceral. By the end of the Epilogues it had become abundantly clear that Dirk Strider was an enormous piece of shit who did nothing but gaslight everyone around him, audience included, and - and this was the important part - was therefore not worth listening to. This was proven in Pesterquest, where we got to hang with old Dirk, rediscovered what a lovely character he could be, and were able to tell his Epilogue counterpart to go fuck himself, the pompous tool. And yet H2 chose to open with page after page of this exhausting tool monologuing about how he was still the most arrogant, pompous asshole in fiction, and in the year of our lord... 2020, was it, I think we’d reached a point as a society in which we’d realized we shouldn’t give those people attention any longer. And yet H2 keeps dragging us back to the blowhards and the depressed jerks. Sorry, this kind of turned into a rant about Homestuck 2 which was not my intention, but I can’t express my disappointment any clearer: Homestuck as a franchise is weirdly bifurcated between video games that seems to understand and completely nail the tone of the series but are concerned with narrative side-lines, and a ‘main story’ that thinks Dirk Strider’s ontological onanism is riveting reading material. Anyway, on this 413, I just wanted to say that I wish Andrew Hussie was still writing his own damn comic. 

[ardenttheories]

squarequeen replied to your post: “Thank you for voicing your thoughts on the HS^2! I feel all the things...”:

Criticism is fair, but 1) I think characterizing the team as a cult is more reactionary than productive and 2) I’m reluctant to pass judgement until we see how this plays out further. Homestuck has a long history of subverting expectations, and I’d like to give the writers a chance to do so

It is highly reactive, but it is also a fair comment to make. They are an exclusive membership seeking to explicitly hurt and belittle the fandom as much as humanely possible while gaslighting them into believing it is their fault. 

I no longer have ANY hopes for Homestuck^2 knowing that it is run by people who think so lowly of the fandom that genuine fandom criticism and upset over the shoddy way triggers have been handled was struck back with a complete fucking removal of content warnings entirely for an absolutely useless “overall warning” on the FAQ page.

Let me repeat that. 

The Homestuck^2 writers saw that they were handling triggering content so piss poorly that people were complaining more and more, and their response was to remove all content warnings entirely for a general blanket warning in a completely separate page on the website.

People who genuinely want to read the comic but might be triggered by its content no longer have explicit warning of what’s coming up. They have to crapshoot it and hope for the fucking best. Or, as the website itself says - they have to get friends to read the fucking thing for them to tell them if its safe. 

This, of course, completely ignores the natural human phenomenon of congregrating around people who share similar traits with you. As in, in a singular friend group, there are likely to be shared triggers. Which makes this attempt to put the onus on the fans to protect themselves fucking impossible. (It also disregards people who don’t have friends that’re into Homestuck, but like, lets ignore that shall we?)

It, mind you, is not up to the fandom to read and relate the triggers in your content. You, as the author, have a responsibility to admit what could be triggering to your audience. If you force your readers to “read and find out”, you are putting them through an explicit form of torture that could quite literally lead to panic attacks, dissociative episodes, and breakdowns that could have easily been avoided. 

At what point, as an author, do you genuinely look at your fandom with such disgust that you decide

And then, of course, the icing on the goddamn cake, is this:

No, actually, it really fucking doesn’t. You can tell a challenging and organic story while keeping triggering content in mind. You can write an interesting and developed world without having to rely on the shock-horror of unfettered triggering material. At no point as a writer should you ever have to decide that triggering your fanbase is better than changing how a scene is composed and written. Because, frankly? If you find it so fucking hard to write triggering content in a careful and delicate way, you are not a good writer. It isn’t hard. You can still get the reality of it through while also treating it well (you know - the same way Homestuck did?). 

Audience responsibility is crucial, yes, but that’s why you provide fucking triggers per chapter so that your audience can more directly decide if what they’re about to read will be harmful for them. However, it is also crucial that as a writer, you aren’t writing triggering content so fucking badly that you are triggering your fanbase month by month over material they could have otherwise handled. 

This is how they have attempted to explain it. This reads like every other big company’s “we have a diverse team of people working on this project, so any racist/homophobic/abelist content involved has complete validity and cannot be argued against in the slightest” memo. If you prioritise artistic intent over the actual health of your readers, knowing that you struck a chord with your fanbase because of your realistic but delicate handling of triggering topics in the main comic, then... you’re honestly just a dick. 

And this post? This is merely one comment of many that I have made on this blog over the past few months. The ask originally commented on? That’s only one ask of several that I’ve received on the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2 detailing why it hurts to much, why it feels like a betrayal, and what exactly has changed from the original comic. This has been worsening for months. While I understand that Homestuck is about subversion, this is not subversion. After a point you have isolated so many of your readers that when you finally flip it turnways, nobody’s going to want to fucking read it. 

These people are explicitly making Homestuck^2 as painful and hard to read as they possibly can. They have seen people complain that they are handling sensitive topics badly and have now reacted in such a way that it is “our” fault for having spoken out. That we, having the audacity to say it was bad and needed to change, are to blame for their reaction. 

Maybe calling them a cult was reactionary. But it wasn’t a far fucking cry from the truth when you combine everything together. 

[bladekindeyewear]

Boots Reads Homestuck Epilogue(s) Part 11 - Candy Page 12

==>

Alright, looks like Jake and Jane had an active night and now Jake’s going to distance himself again.

Yeah you’re pretty afraid of closing this distance with Jane.  You REALLY don’t want it, do you?

JANE: Lighten up Jake! The election’s off! The economy is stable! Dirk is probably never going to talk to us ever again! And we just... we finally fucked. Hoo hoo hoo!

Okay seeing that “Hoo hoo hoo!” at the end of the sentence makes it really fucking uncomfortable somehow.

Something catches the corner of his eye, and he swivels his head around to see the Trickster Lollipop on his bedside table.

JANE I THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T GOING TO BE SUCH A SCUMBAG THIS TIME AROUND WHAT DID YOU FUCKING DO????

far more sets of underwear than the number of people accounted for in the room.

Yeah that sounds about like what might happen with the lollipop thrown in.

Okay at least it was Jake’s idea??? that makes it... ALMOST... better... but not really..??

Oh God, and Jake just does the pushover thing and rolls with it only because he thinks he SHOULD, not because he wants to.  Fuck.

==>

Mhmm.  There’s always a thick sense that “what would Bro tell me to do” was thick in everything Dave did hanging over him like a shadow.  Interesting that here it manifests as that Meta voice he was using in Meat or whatever.

Is Dirk even going to be there, or has he fled entirely?

Gamzee, what the fuck are you doing.  Forceful character arc intervention?  Is that what you did with Roxy somehow?

...is Gamzee toying with the narrative now that Dirk has fled or something??

...okay there’s some author worship going on or some such?

Dave how do you even know who Pagliacci is.

Okay there’s the Rose bot, and an ominous note.  Suicide note? Self-Decapitation note, again?  Hm.

==>

Epilogue Three

Okay, that’s some startlingly abrupt pathmaking toward suicide.  I was warned that there was a vivid description of the leadup to suicide in Candy somewhere, so I’ll try to talk only lightly about it as I read.

Your legs feel impressively powerful as you begin to climb the staircase

Nice Meat callback at least.

A flip of the cosmic coin has rendered your entire life completely inessential. What could you accomplish in a dead-end existence like this? There are no stakes. No meaningful challenges. No structures or themes—only residual chemical reactions in a dying brain, a physical system’s obligate compulsion to exhaust its own lingering momentum. A cockroach with its head cut off, waiting to die of thirst.

Wow, yeah, you REALLY can’t stand living in a world where you don’t hold some sort of Light-y relevance, can you?  So much so that you were willing to steal Light away from the story entirely just to have more to carry with you in the flipside.  Is this supposed to sort of embody the comeuppance you didn’t get in the other half, the way you’re offing yourself here?  Weird.

Your friends might derive some sense of fulfillment from satisfying the elementary obligations of self-preservation and self-propagation, but there’s nothing here for you. It doesn’t matter anymore.

HOW ABOUT LIVING HAPPY LIVES AND NOT GETTING STUCK IN COMAS YOU ASSHOLE

Seriously, that whole Meat part, the... the four things I really couldn’t stand being left with were Jane’s fate, Jade’s situation, ROSE’s unenviable situation, and Dirk being allowed to escape without consequence.  Three of my favorite characters left on doomed paths or basically IN COMAS, constantly having their agency quashed by others or forced away from anything that could have corrected their disastrous path (Jane’s) by Dirk’s meddling.  A line being drawn in the sand that clearly stated CANON ENDS HERE, before any of them could wake up or stop FUCKING SUFFERING.  Jesus Christ.  I just wanted some loose ends tied up by this epilogue, I didn’t need the characters’ POSSIBLE HAPPINESS to be left unresolved with a likely “NO” as the answer??!???  THEY DIDN’T COME ALL THIS WAY AND SACRIFICE AND WIN FOR JUST THAT!  DIRK STOLE THE FUCKING ULTIMATE REWARD FROM THEM OUT OF NOWHERE!

*breathes*

FUCK.  So, yeah, on to seeing Dirk either die or get stopped by Dave somehow because he still needs him or whatever.

Ew, self-decapitation indeed.  You narcissistic fuck.

When you think so little of yourself as a moral character, any act of self-termination will result in a death that is Just.

Huh.  So that influences the way the clock judges you, hm?

==>

A damn funeral, huh.

He looks at Roxy, who is staring at the floor, rather beside herself in grief.

Oh thank goodness, a glimpse at her line to Gamz had me thinking she was in weird happy-stuck Candy mode still, that would have fucked this scene a bunch.

...IS Dave really more eloquent than you, though?

Dave’s long speech--

Oh my gosh I just realized during this speech how UTTERLY FUCKED of Andrew people must have thought this Dirk suicide section was if they chose Candy FIRST.  Jesus dick.

End of speech.  Jane, stop being so remarkably fucking composed.  Unless Dirk’s plans and machinations really hurt you as much as you let on when you expressed seemingly-mock excitement that you’d “never hear from him again”.

Fuck you Gamzee.

ROXY: BRAVO!!! DAMN I FEEL LIKE IF I NEVER HEARD ANOTHER WORD THIS GUY EVER SAID THATD BE FINE BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL JUST SO *PERFECT*

Thanks for coming to your senses Roxy, better late than never I guess.

Dave dips down so that their noses are bumping. Karkat’s eyes are so wide it’s amazing they don’t pop out. For a moment, it looks like they’re going to...

John sneezes.

Oh COME ON, John.  :(

JOHN: i have no idea why i did that. now i have this whole memory in my head that i could have definitely lived without.

Me after reading the Meat epilogue.

Huh, offering to undo the death.  That IS potentially a little bit insensitive, as obvious and necessary a question it is to ask, even if the answer is no.

DAVE: dirk was a complicated guy DAVE: dude obviously had reasons for doing what he did DAVE: if you go back and just rewrite his decision DAVE: thats like denying him his personal autonomy

Exactly.

A courtesy that Dirk, funny enough, wouldn’t have given anyone else.  The fucking prick.

--Yep, they’re too far outside of canon for his retcon powers to work anymore.  Rose told him on the last day he could.

Roxy what the hell are you doing.

ROXY: we should get hitched

No, you should ANSWER WHY YOU LEFT CALLIOPE HANGING and THEN decide LIKE ADULTS to do whatever you all feel like doing.  This isn’t legitimate if you’re HIDING most of the situation in Voidy shadow!  If you really DO want this, then do it properly and HONESTLY!!!!

JOHN: you... JOHN: LOVE me?? ROXY: yea john i love you ROXY: wanna marry u and spend the rest of my life with u and pop out a bunch of cute lil buck toothed babies with you JOHN: oh, uh. haha, wow. roxy that’s um. JOHN: that’s a LOT.

Yeah, this isn’t how it should go.  WOULD go.  Something’s seriously wrong with Roxy right now and I hope John figures out how to bring them to the forefront so they can come to an honest decision.

Just a few weeks ago, Roxy was happy with Calliope, and now she wants to have his babies? John feels like he’s missing something important here, like he went for a bathroom break during the part of the movie where the plot twist happens.

Exactly.  And you haven’t even had time to process how you feel about HER again.  If something’s off, make it NOT off before you say yes.

Roxy practically attacks John’s mouth, she’s so excited. John shuts his eyes and kisses her back, still giddy and laughing against her lips. She kisses him until they’re both breathless, then pulls back so that she can gaze at him with glittering eyes.

ROXY: omg ROXY: were gonna be SO freakin happy!

Yyyyeah, THAT was ominous.  Someone’s definitely fucking with this situation behind the scenes.  ...Maybe Roxy’s been hitting the Lollipop too when the camera’s away from her?

==>

Dammit, we skipped to the wedding without resolving ANY of their fucking issues first.  This is bad.

--oh my god we skipped to months PAST the wedding too.

JOHN: jane and jake are kinda, um, together now. TEREZI: OH GOD JOHN: and she basically ordered jake to catch the bouquet “or else.” JOHN: i was seriously afraid for him. and then he didn’t even catch it!

Jane.  Jane, come the fuck on.

Can’t we get ONE TIMELINE where Jane doesn’t end up terrible????  D:

JOHN: yeah. they’re all dating. JOHN: or rather... jade is dating them both. JOHN: dave and karkat haven’t... exactly figured things out yet. JOHN: and as much as i love jade, i don’t actually think she’s helped matters by putting herself in the middle of it. TEREZI: HMM >:[ TEREZI: SOM3HOW TH4T DO3SNT S33M R1GHT JOHN: i know.

Jade, you can’t force these things!!!

Can’t we get ONE TIMELINE where Jade doesn’t end up unhappy???? D:

JOHN: now i have to pretend to laugh and think it’s funny when she makes jokes about being the next to “tie the knot.” TEREZI: WOW D1D SH3 R34LLY GO FOR TH4T DOUBL3 3NT3NDR3 JOHN: what? TEREZI: WH4T JOHN: what do you mean? TEREZI: N3V3R M1ND

Jegus Christ.  Terezi, WHY did you have to go there.  I’ve seen enough nsfw RP to know exactly the fuckery you’re alluding to with Jade, NO.

JOHN: things’ll probably work out with those three anyway. things always work out between old friends. JOHN: we’ve all known each other for too long for anything to cause a permanent rift.

Fucking allusions to the Meat section...  D:

...okay, babies time.  There are babies.  Or at least one Roxy pregnancy and that earlier Vriskgrub.

TEREZI: 1T JUST S33MS... K1ND4 F4ST

YES, YES IT DOES.

TEREZI: 1 4LR34DY H34RD 4BOUT HOW J4N3 1S D4T1NG BOTH J4K3 *4ND* G4MZ33 4ND UNFORTUN4T3LY 1 DO B3L13V3 1T

What the FUCK is going on.  Who’s manipulating everyone.  Gamzee maybe??

TEREZI: H4H4H4 1 HOP3 YOU H4V3NT S33N TH3 P1CTUR3 D4V3 TOOK JOHN: dave has a picture?! JOHN: wait, never mind. i don’t want to know, and i definitely don’t want to see it.

Yeah that’s a cursed image if I ever heard of one

JOHN: so, what did you think, talking to dave and karkat? JOHN: did they seem... happy? TEREZI: NOP3 JOHN: oh my god, i KNOW, right? JOHN: the whole thing is such a mess, it’s hard to be in the same room with them these days. JOHN: i don’t even know the full story because dave won’t talk to me about it anymore, and jade seems to think that everything’s going just fine.

Dammit Jade, you forced your way in too early!!!  D:

And why can’t Andrew at least PRETEND to give us a slight, fishing-line-thin possibility that Jade might POSSIBLY have any sort of chance at an endgame workable romance with ANY OF HER GOSH DARN FRIENDS AT ALL???????

>:(

I just want Jade to be happy okay jegus

TEREZI: 4 TRU3 K1SM3S1S 1S JUST 4S MUCH YOUR L1F3 P4RTN3R 4S YOUR M4T3SPR1T 1S

Interesting quadrant talk

TEREZI: TH3 PO1NT OF 4 K1SM3S1S 1S NOT JUST TO M4K3 YOU 4NNOY3D OR 3V3N 4NGRY TEREZI: TH3Y SHOULD PUSH YOU TO B3TT3R YOURS3LF TEREZI: TH3Y SHOULD SH1N3 4 L1GHT ON TH1NGS 4BOUT YOURS3LF YOU WOULD OTH3RW1S3 1GNOR3 OR D3NY

EXACTLY.  I’ve been saying that about good black relationships for years.  And Jade’s plowing in and fucking things up without really making things ANY better AT ALL for anyone but herself, and only temporarily and in her own head at that.  :(

TEREZI: 1F 1 W3R3 3V3R TO DO BL4CKROM 4G41N, 1T WOULD H4V3 TO B3 LOW K3Y

Yeah, really pushing at what happens in Meat and stuff.

I love Terezi’s text-emote faces.

==>

Page 17... Someone told me to watch out for “Candy 18″ without any elaboration or context, so maybe I’ll split the post after this page so I can get to that one fresh? Hm!

My stomach is down to a low anxious simmer, so that’s good compared to before.  Maybe reading this whole Candy thing isn’t going to be so bad.  I can’t believe I’m not even halfway through.

He’s not sure why he feels the need to hide the fact that he’s talking to her.

Dammit, John.

It should be a beautiful image, but something about it roils John’s gut.

???

Is he catching on to some weird manipulation going on behind the scenes with his own metatextual awareness or?

Yep, Harry Anderson, heh.

He was. What’s bugging him about it is that Roxy didn’t seem to have any suggestions of her own.

YEAH THAT’S A HUGE GODDAMN RED FLAG RIGHT THERE.  WHAT IS HAPPENING TO EVERYONE.

...Oh, huh.  Now John’s having a bit of panic about how everyone suddenly feels like things are completely resolved with Lord English when they aren’t.  And how Rose seems almost HYPNOTIZED into not worrying about it, along with many of the rest of them.

The three gals in the room exchange a series of concerned glances. Do they truly think he’s crazy? Are they hiding something from him? John can feel himself trembling. It’s not possible that he’s remembering this wrong, is it? It can’t be. If he presses his eyes shut, he can still see the lines of the black hole cracking space apart around him. It seemed like such a big deal at the time, and then suddenly it felt like nothing at all. Why?

Are they, though?  Do they know they’re in a split timeline of sorts, or...?

You’re the ones not doing okay, he nearly shouts, but then realizes it’s just going to make him sound crazier than he already looks.

Yeah this is all cracking at the seams.

ROXY: oh of course that makes sense

ROXY YOU’RE NOT THIS BRAINLESS WAKE THE FUCK UP

Hm, looks like John’s not as comfortable on the placid planet as he is with someone giving him SOME sort of broader purpose.  A lot like Dirk, but LESS FUCKED.

JOHN: i’ve got a beautiful wife who loves me, but it’s not enough. i can’t even talk to her about what we’re going to name our stupid kid without it turning into some weird thing where she just goes along with whatever i want. JOHN: even when all i want is for her to want something different than what i want!!!

It’s like Steven stuck in Rose’s Room with that Connie clone, SU-ways.

Alright, clicking the next button and starting page 18 in the next post.

[momestuck]

Epilogues: Meat ch 18-27 [Epilogue 4]

So that happened.

In this chapter: a struggle over narration itself.

Dirk Strider has assumed control of the narration. Not unprecedented - Homestuck loves to put its narration in-voice for various characters - but in this case he’s making out that it was him all along, which has like, consequences I guess?

chapter 18

Dirk is narrating, and John actually notices sometimes - when Dirk uses words like ‘functional necessity’. But because Dirk has control over his internal monologue, the plot presses on.

It seems that just about the entire Furthest Ring has gone into the black hole, except for John maybe? Dirk narrates that John starts to blame himself for all this, and thereby decides not to go back to Earth C. He then directs John to find his dad’s wallet, floating in the void.

Despite what Dirk has said, he certainly has a different narrative voice to the preceding narration.

It’s notable that John seems to have some independence from Dirk’s narration. He can directly respond in dialogue to Dirk’s declarations, including to challenge them. Dirk’s power as narrator seems to be limited, not equivalent to the full powers of the ‘author’.

chapter 19

Dirk continues to narrate Jade giving an economic presentation to Roxy and Callie, on the subject of how Jane wants to basically recreate capitalist hierarchy, but on the new world, and that’s a pretty dreadful idea. She actually says the words “capitalist hierarchy”, and declares “none of that stuff works”... Homestuck’s politics seem to have changed, at least somewhat. (Perhaps due to Cephied’s influence..?)

Roxy is reluctant to get involved in politics, and concerned for Jane... and Dirk says something which I think will be important.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Roxy’s the only one left I haven’t been able to crack. Her mind remains a total enigma to me, just like it always has. If I had to guess, it’s her Void powers that make her invisible, even to increasingly omniscient parties such as myself. For all intents and purposes, it’s like her thoughts don’t exist. She’s the same person, as far as I can tell. She still wears her heart on her sleeve. But the bottom line remains: Roxy Lalonde is still utterly fucking inscrutable.

Anyway, then something else significant happens... Callie says they’re nonbinary.

CALLIOPE: yoU are absolUtely not an asshole!

CALLIOPE: i didn’t mind being called a girl. i still don’t really mind, it’s jUst not exactly... accUrate.

CALLIOPE: bUt i did take comfort in “being a girl” for a very long time. this is something i’ve only recently decided.

Roxy likewise says they’re enby too... this causes Dirk to have a bit of a meltdown.

I never would have guessed. Not that I’ve spent much time contemplating issues related to gender. I’m pretty secure in my expression of masculinity, and...

You know what? Fuck this. I don’t owe anyone an explanation of any sort on this topic. I’m confident with who I am, what I am, my gender, as well as my understanding of the concept. You want my honest opinion? It’s fucking fantastic. Good for them. Both of them, I mean, but also, both of them in a singular fashion, since each one can now individually be referred to by the conventionally plural word “them.” I’m ecstatic for this personal development they’ve embraced, for the people they are, the lack of gender they identify with, and the pronouns they prefer. I’ve got no problem with it whatsoever, and frankly, it’s fucking insulting anyone would ever imagine otherwise.

So yeah, I’m gonna allow it.

‘secure in his expression of masculinity’ was not the impression I had of Dirk personally, but I guess we’re going with this characterisation here.

For the rest of this chapter, Dirk keeps misgendering Roxy and Callie in narration - seemingly not deliberately, he swears and corrects himself shortly after.

There’s another interesting conversation where Calliope talks about how ideas of gender were, ‘circuitously’, transmitted to Calliope/Caliborn from watching Earth, and how these shaped Alternia (ok this one’s a little confusing because they didn’t make Alternia? though of course Doc Scratch did affect Alternia). So the system of gendered social relations is literally a “copy without an original” - Baudrillard was more right than he knew!

Anyway Dirk interrupts this discussion to narrate that Jade has a sudden vision of the black hole, and passes out...

chapter 20

Jade ‘wakes up’ in the furthest ring - was there a Dream Jade out here? i thought all the dream selves died but I don’t really remember anymore. Over here, she’s injured - she’s got a big piece of ‘the absence of a future’ skewering her.

Dirk narrates how she’s drawn towards the black hole - ‘the dead cherub is making her move’. At one point, his orange narration is interrupted by red text - the word ‘come’.

Of course, we now know that this dead Jade will fall into the Candy universe, where it will be inhabited by alt-Calliope. I am rather confused about how this came about though. Who’s this almost-dead Jade floating in the Furthest Ring? Why did Jade’s consciousness get shunted into her body?

chapter 21

Dave and Karkat are witnessing the first brood from the Mother Grub. Dave figures it’s kind of gross... and Karkat agrees after ribbing Dave a bit for being insensitive.

Anyway they’re here to try and win over Rose and Kanaya to the election campaign, only, they’re being predictably very Dave and Karkat about it, which is fun. Dirk’s narration is almost taking a backseat here... though occasionally stepping in to point to a trait of characterisation as why he’s going to win.

It’s nice to have Kanaya give some proper dialogue! She talks a bit about troll reproduction, the latent potential for fascism in both Jane and... Feferi. Which, fair.

Anyway Kanaya is rightly pissed about Jane’s plans for troll eugenics.

Dirk occasionally editorialises. Morality, he declares, is a cultural construct (complicatedly true so far as it goes) - it’s “pure ego” for them to think their morality will guide them to the “most effective” laws (that’s also a cultural construct you fucking idiot!)

Dave, continuing in his capacity to make everything as maximally awkward as possible, starts speculating about ectobiological ‘Rosemary babies’ (Kanaya has apparently not considered the term ‘Rosemary’ before, and declares that she hates it).

Kanaya gets concerned and calls Rose - and Dirk reminds us that she’s unconscious on his floor, and answers for her, but explains nothing. Because “John’s doing something important to the plot again” - and Dirk has to be there to narrate, I guess.

chapter 22

Keen to complete his full assumption of the role of ‘anime villain’, Dirk’s narration starts talking about breaking down the boundaries between people to become gods - to become ‘one god’.

Anyway, in this chapter, John bumps into Meenah’s ghost. She steals the Ring of Life that he previously took from Aranea while performing his current spate of retcons, and jumps into a ‘server’. (What did the servers do again? I don’t remember... ok apparently they’re just there in the Furthest Ring, as places people can store such things as wizard fiction and ~ATH programs on them...)

anyway it seems that Meenah can go through the door in the server somehow. presumably ending up in the Candy universe? idk. The wiki didn’t say a lot about what these servers do.

chapter 23

Not much narration, just dialogue. Kanaya arguing with Dirk, specifically. She’s not impressed by Dirk’s excuses (Dirk briefly interrupts to declare that she doesn’t really ‘understand’ Rose, even though she loves her) and sets out to retrieve Rose. Dirk keeps this a secret from Rose...

chapter 24

Minimum editorialising from Dirk this time. John floats around endlessly, and runs into... Terezi! Sure am glad to have her back :D

chapter 25

Dirk and Rose have an argument about... intimacy, identity, and other such philosophical things. Kirkegaard is name-dropped, and it comes out that Dirk (like me lol) gets most of his knowledge from Wikipedia, because obviously he grew up in a post-apocalyptic world...

ROSE: Who exactly were the academic cognoscenti of your era to determine which sources were deemed respectable?

DIRK: That would be me, obviously.

ROSE: Ok.

DIRK: I suppose you’re going to tell me you haven’t read enough Wikipedia articles on loads of scholarly shit to fancy yourself an elite academic by 25th century standards as well?

ROSE: No, I guess I have.

ROSE: I’d be one of the top intellectuals by that measure.

ROSE: A measure set by, I guess, literally one solitary self-absorbed teen boy for the express purpose of making himself feel clever.

DIRK: Absolutely correct.

They agree to have an ‘amateur philosophical debate’, which comes around to whether ‘free will’ exists. Oh boy. Dirk gets Rose to try to stand up, but then doesn’t ‘narratively allow’ it.

Dirk lectures her on the origin of her condition: the disappearance of boundaries in the ‘ultimate self’ amounts to an ‘unbundling’ of experiences (subjectivity, I guess) and the physical processes connecting to it. Dirk, supposedly, is strong enough to withstand this - so he offers to support Rose as she opens her ‘other eyes’, seeing what Dirk sees - presumably the ‘entire story’ that they’re in?

In this state, Rose is also able to see across into the Candy story. She describes both branches as a kind of ‘gross conceptual clumping’, comparing it to congealed sugar in a drink.

Dirk invites her to ascend - that she won’t be ‘her’ anymore, but ‘better’. This is described as an intimate process of perfect knowledge of the other person... and leads Dirk to start speaking possessively of Rose, his daughter in every respect, including ‘soul’.

Oh no Rose... this isn’t ideal :/

it’s funny, I have written before about such a ‘coming together’ of people, of ‘ascension’ in a similar sense, in my story ‘hacker’. but that wasn’t about assuming an ‘ultimate’, godlike form - the gestalt was a different person with different concerns, but not a ‘perfect’ person. here it’s a much more negative thing - a way for Dirk to take control over the ‘ultimate’ Rose.

chapter 26

Dirk’s narration seems to be perceptible, at least in some sense of inner monologue, to Jade. He’s trying to persuade her not to descend into the Black Hole (which, we now know to mean, the Candy universe) through his ‘metatexual’ messaging.

But he’s not succeeding. Alt-Calliope once again interrupts the narration at one point - and Dirk previously did not seem to recognise that it’s her doing it, but now he does.

In Dirk’s eyes, what he’s trying to prevent is a suicide. We know that going into the black hole is not suicide, but going to the Candy universe.

Notably when Dirk has the narration outright declare that something happens, that does not mean it takes effect in the way he describes. He is literally an unreliable narrator.

chapter 27

At this point, alt-Calliope and Dirk are outright fighting to contradict each other in the narration. (i’m gonna keep using ‘she’ pronouns for alt-Calliope, since to my understanding she’s a different person than Calliope)

alt-Calliope’s descriptions are adorably alien - referring to the ‘layers of flesh over her skull’ that maker her ‘expressive’, for example.

Apparently it’s not Jade occupying Jade’s body back on Earth C - the Meat!Earth C that is - but alt-Calliope. Alt-Calliope starts lecturing Dirk in the narration of the corrosive effect of his ‘megalomaniacal’ intentions. Somehow, she pretty much entirely shunts Dirk out of the narrator role. Dirk’s text - complaining rather than narrating - shrinks, and ultimately disappears.

There’s a fucking amazing moment when alt-Calliope gets Dirk going on a whole rant about katanas and how she’s supposedly metaphorically using them wrong.

But ultimately, what she’s going to do is just... ignore him. Or rather, talk about him like he isn’t in the room; use his metaphors, but do not allow him the dignity of response.

experiences such as the sensation of presiding over a vast, empty ocean. his ocean, which terminates with his horizon. it is a barrier, not real, but psychological, symbolic. no matter how much power he achieves as a man, he knows there are horizons he perceived as a boy which he may never cross. and yet i have crossed mine, with the express purpose of perpetually and eternally reminding him of his limits, and of enforcing them. limits, which like his vast, empty ocean, serve to remind him that he is phenomenologically, if not literally, alone. that he has experienced loneliness intimately and absolutely, just like i have. but unlike me, he is terrified by it. and i, unlike him, understand all too well that the children left alone are those who most despair at being ignored.

Epilogue 4, in summary

Damn. I can see why they call this the ‘meat’ route.

So.

Dirk has found some way to assert control of the narrative voice. In this capacity, he’s run roughshod over the various events trying to mechanically arrange them to achieve... some kind of end. But his carelessness in attending to the specific characterisations, instead of relating everything back to himself, somehow left him vulnerable to be excluded from the narration by alt-Calliope.

Whatever Dirk’s plan is, it seems to require... Jane and him to assume rulership of Earth C, and... what else? Well he wanted Jade to go into the Furthest Ring, but not to enter the black hole (because ultimately that allowed alt-Calliope to enter the narrative). He wanted John to do various ‘plot relevant’ things, like... presumably hand over the ring to Meenah, acquire the wallet, and meet Terezi.

Where’s all this going? Fuck knows lol!

We can try and talk about all the issues of identity, ‘free will’ and so forth towards the end, and the interesting attempt to connect that to gendered subjectivity, once we’ve taken in the story as a whole.

[massivelymysticalarcade]

THE CHOICE presented by the epilog and what it means.

THE CHOICE present at the end of the prologue was between meat and candy. Before the actual options were presented I though the two choices would be between finding out about the plot holes and learn more about the story before they left, and to learn about who they become, their personalities, relationships and accomplishments. Filling holes in canon vs fleshing out the epilogue presented through the snapchats.

These contridict the way the choices were presented to John. The candy should symbolize going back because candy is a filler, a dessert meant to be eaten after to make the meal more complete. While the meat is an entirely new meal that should be able to stand on its own.

What I though we would get is a "behind the scenes" vs a "where are they now."

Reading the descriptions of John eating the meat and the candy was disturbing and a little uncomfortable. I was disgusted by the meat and I just skipped over the candy one. And I think that describes my thought on the 2 choices.

I chose the meat version to read first because I love lore and so I thought I would be able to follow and see how these wonderful characters over came their challenges to grow and connect. This is a very important point for later.

I switched about halfway through because of a line Dirk had and so I read candy because I was curious how that went. I didn't get very far before I stopped reading and came to tumblr to look at other fans reactions because I didn't like the candy or the meat stories at all. The only part I found enjoyable was the dialog where Dave was ranting about Obama and the economy. But that was the only part I enjoyed.

It feels like not many of them grew. It feels like they stagnated and all their worst qualities surfaced because they weren't actively fighting them or suppressing them, how they were actively being better people.

And that's the point. The small portion of candy I read felt like an ooc fluff fic where everyone is happy. I felt like I had to skip over wide stretches of dialog and descriptions because they had no meaning in them. And some characters knew that Calliope, Dirk and Roxy. You can see in how they acted. And how Gamzee acted as well. Calliope stated how everything was flying by so fast and apparently it has. The first few chapters happened in a few days? Weeks? We aren't show much development, just some key scenes. Where in homestuck we had so much dialog and tangents that built up each characters voice and personality, their friendships and relationships, now, we only have plot. Everything has been crafted for a purpose. Gamzees speech was so long I just skipped over it. It was boring to read and amassed to much the same. It also felt forced. It was bad writing. Remember this too.

While reading through meat I felt uncomfortable. It felt like Dirk was writing an old angst or hurt/comfort fic without the comfort on fanfiction. No one was happy and the characters felt narratively trapped. We could see halfway through that Dirk took over the narrative and at times if felt like the time doc scratch was narrating in act 5. There were distinct passages where I had to remind myself who's voice was narrating. It didn't feel like the Dirk we met in homestuck. The only genuine reaction i saw from him was when he found out Roxy identified as nonbinary. Two lines, wait, what. Everything else eventually felt like he was summarizing something he already saw.

Which is what was happening. The two endings were written in this style specifically. From the graphic descriptions to how Dirk could control Rose but, from what I e read, could not control John. He mentioned that John was doing something important so the narrative focus had to switch to him but he could control what Rose couldn't do through narrative writing. He could influence John, but from what I've read, he couldn't tell him what to do.

This brings me to the final point. Both stories felt wrong. It's been 7 years and we are suppose to believe John never left his house? Same with Dave and Karkat? That they all just, stopped living in the world. The one they created and time traveled to go to. It feels like we just picked up where we left off. And that is exactly what happened.

Narratively, there has been no time. They stepped out of canon and all we know from Earth C was act 7 and the snaps. Which only showed us what happened. That whole explanation from Rose in the prolog of the epilog was really cool and it explained why homestuck ended the way it did. They went out of canon which had "real world" effects on the story.

We changed the story all the time as readers, in the beginning there was the prompts, then involvement with the comic, trickster mode, the two fan trolls, Hussie even added himself to the story. We have been changing the story so when they left canon, we were no longer able to know or change what happens, we can only watch. And this reflects in the story.

The epilog is an extension of that. When John went back in meat, he changed canon but it never felt real, the candy line also felt fake. The meat earth c felt the realest story wise but that changed when Dirk took over.

This brings me back to the 2 points from before remember those? That this is bad writing and how I wanted to see the characters.

This was done on purpose. In the overall meta of homestuck, they are not "characters" Rose's whole quest for her planet was to help her grow as a person but she never did it. She had a whole explanation on how it was ment for her character development but she is not a character. They aren't characters, they are outside canon so the option where John doesn't go back would never have been good for homestuck's overall meta. We should never have been able to see into earth c, to get any story from it because they aren't characters anymore. The only "reason" we could see was because of 413 and John's retcon powers.

The stories were almost exclusively told from a not-canon perspective. The epilog starts on earth c and in meat goes back to canine, but through the lens of earth c and what is relevant to the world. Then Dirk takes over and it is exclusively told from earth c perspective because what was being told wasn't canon. It never happened in homestuck and therefore we only go to John where he is doing something relevant to the epilog story line.

The more we read, the more they become characters, without agency, without substance and the more I read, the harder it was to read and like them because that was the point. We were given the choice to change canon to know what happened, or to find out what is going on after ten years but there was a third option. DONT READ

WHY WOULD YOU ONLY EAT RAW MEATFOR LUNCH? WHY WOULD YOU EAT ONLY CANDY FOR LUNCH?

They were bad options because that's not how the story of homestuck was told. The writing was bad because that's not how homestuck is meant to happen. I don't know or care if they wrote it this way on purpose. That they did it at all was doomed. It is a doomed result but it had to happen. Otherwise we would have been left with questions, we would have kept asking for closure. Our need for a complete ending clashed with homestucks meta. The story part of homestuck is done. We needed this to see that.

THE CHOICE was never between the foods, it was between choosing to eat the food in the first place or be content with what we have, to make our own snacks. Because we dont need a meal, we dont need dessert. Homestuck is complete on it's own and it took the epilog to see that.

I will not continue reading the epilogue. I found no joy in reading it and in fact felt a little sick. Fiction and my own thoughts are much kinder to the cast of homestuck where they can be characters. And be able to grow together instead or stagnate apart like they did here.

Thank you for reading this, I know it was long so:

TL:DR

The epilog shows us that we have 2 choices, but not the two presented by the story because the story is not canon. THE CHOICE is to read, or dont read. Dont be obliged to read the epilog because it is told from a non canon point of view so non of it affects the canon of homestuck.