#i wanted to make it so all the kids contributed to johns cake haha

[cerulean-tea]

happy 413!! to the webcomic that changed my life 5 years ago ⭐️

[momestuck]

Epilogues

Oh boy, we’re back.

So if anyone’s not heard The News this 13/4/2019, Homestuck’s gone and done its epilogue(s) at last.

I am now several hours behind the hype curve, so no doubt the kind of person who reads this blog has already read the upd8 and developed an Opinion. Nevertheless, the duty falls upon me to liveread this.

So, it starts with an AO3 joke. Obvious comments out of the way:

“oh hey it’s well known fanfic author Cepheid_Variable” (which answers my question of whether Hussie’s still the only author: no)

“damn that’s a hefty content warning”

“this is a nice way to repeat the theme that ‘canon’ is less important than the personal and collective understandings developed by each reader, by presenting the ‘canon’ ending as just another fanfic”

of course, not every interpretation is created equal in terms of its social reception. Homestuck has already touched on discourses of ‘good fandom’ vs ‘bad fandom’ with the Calliope/Caliborn dichotomy; no doubt, with Hussie inviting a fanfiction writer on board, he took care to make a choice of a generally respected author

It continues the joke by being straight up prose. Physics terms are thrown about like a series of slightly dubious similes. The prose gets purpler and purpler until...

Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare. You snap out of bed, soaked in sweat, your heart hammering like a fire alarm. It is just as you feared. You’ve been dreaming in anime again. And you have no idea what it could mean.

Haha, got you again, suckers. Cake: had, and eaten. (Also, act 7 was literally anime so... yeah, sure thing.)

[ @drc4ble tells me there’s another level to this troll, in that Cephied_Variable is quoting a part of her own fic in this intro.]

You’ve always been confused about what, exactly, they contribute to the global economy. But it’s pretty cute how much they love playing at being suburban businessmen.

“cw: capitalism” indeed

So, in the idyllic world we saw in the credits upd8, all is not so well for the beta kids. John is 23, which means it is now, in canon as well as out, 10 years since the comic began.

Rose starts dropping some exposition, drawing on her Seer of Light abilities; of note is the ‘breakdown of boundaries’ between the different incarnations of the kids she describes:

ROSE: It’s not about gaining additional power, so much as the gradual dissolving of the boundaries between your own awareness and that of your many doomed selves who perished in other timelines.

ROSE: It’s a slow and apparently rather uncomfortable accretion of knowledge. Perhaps I’m the only one to notice any change, since my aspect explicitly relates to knowledge.

Jade has apparently detected that godtier!Calliope destroyed the Green Sun, ‘from this frame of reference’.

In much more important news than the end of the universe(s), we get confirmation of Jadedavekat OT3, or something like it:

she’s been gallivanting around with Dave and Karkat under whatever perplexing social arrangement they have settled on.

Another interesting turn of phrase:

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

‘Canon’ is certainly a choice of words, given this is being presented as a fanfic. This is spelled out, which I’m going to quote at length:

ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all.

ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

ROSE: Those are the three pillars of canon.

JOHN: what?

Rose shoots you an irritated look. You know what that look means. It’s reserved for the sort of bozo who just said “what” once too often.

ROSE: Any event said to take place inside canon will have nonzero values of relevance and essentiality, while maintaining an absolute foundation in truth, by definition.

ROSE: Whereas events outside canon have diminished values of relevance and essentiality. Or, for the most part, can be considered neither relevant nor essential at all.

ROSE: But such events can’t be said to be untrue either. Instead, it’s better to regard their truth value as highly conditional.

ROSE: Are you still following?

In short: what happens in the ‘C’ universe, stays in the ‘C’ universe; it is not ‘essential’, either in the carefully-constructed-timeline sense, or, I think it’s implied, in the development of plot and theme in the story. This is one perspective on how John, Rose etc. choose to return to ‘canon’, but we are implicitly invited to come up with our own.

More precisely, everything after ‘today’ is declared non-canon, which is to say we have completely free rein; everything before ‘today’ is outside of canon, meaning we have explicit invitation to decide what happens ‘off screen’, but I presume we need to accept such things as, e.g. Rose and Kanaya getting married and the rest of the credits upd8.

But because they’re about to enter the 無 state of non-canon, they must tie up the comic’s major loose end, and deal with Lord English - since their ‘escape’ depends on that being canon.

It’s exactly as dumb-clever-convoluted as I want Homestuck to be, at this stage.

Further caveats on this whole ‘canon authentication’ gig: by reaching the ‘victory state’, Rose and all the other main characters have relinquished their ability to play a major role in canon, so John - who retains his retcon powers - has to go it alone. Or not quite alone - he has to pick up different versions of the MCs, from different points in the timeline.

So this is going to be a total fanservice fest huh. But then, I mean who would come back three years later to read a Homestuck epilogue but the kind of nerd who cares very very much about minute details of canon?

Anyway, that aside, back to shipping discourse. Roxy and Callie’s relationship is underlined, while being explicitly vague about the details of that ‘weird, ambiguous’ relationship. The narration has John dwelling on unrequited feelings for Roxy. Also there’s a mention of the ring of life, which is a plot detail I had totally forgotten about. Three years, huh.

Going to highlight this quote:

Suddenly, Calliope bolts upright.

CALLIOPE: of coUrse! what was i thinking.

CALLIOPE: this decision is far too important to be made on an empty stomach.

Callie is exactly right to check if her friend has eaten when he’s suffering an anxiety attack :) :)

Unfortunately she then makes him make another decision... which might imply Homestuck is going to return to a reader-prompted format, or at least a poll, which they’re testing out here. I don’t know. Anyway, the ride never ends, etc. etc.