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exoid-the-locomotive-monarch · 9 months ago

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Ok now for the epilogues. Spoilers if you didn’t read them.

Maybe I was too harsh calling it an undercooked steak in diahhrea, it is in fact, an acceptable, very rare cooked steak covered in vomit and diahhrea.

The epilogues actually has cool ideas and explores some very explorable and important aspects of Earth C. Hey, these teenage Gods who lost their universe and family and walked among the alternate universe corpses of themselves so they could inevitably create an ultimate evil are NOT fine and are indeed immature emotionally stunted and fucked up creatures!

Maybe separating the world into ethnic kingdoms causes unnecessary division and preserves the cultures and communities of the Sburban races and player races as much as it cultivates division and alienation from national and ethnic borders.

And also Lord English’s rise and fall are not complete, his masterpiece is yet to be done and his ultimate devise is yet to be unleashed, we gotta fix it, or don’t. This does exist beyond canon, so there’s no one true canon timeline that MUST be the events that really happened nor is this a continuation or ending of Homestuck, it ended at Act 7 silly!

So the comic preludes with John doing the ultimate hero sacrifice thing and goes on a picnic with Calliope and Roxy, his choices are Meat or Candy, substance, or style.

It then all goes to shit.

So as it turns out, you can completely unlearn your character arc and regress back into really shitty ideas and habits especially when you isolate yourself from human contact! Enter Dirk Strider.

Dirk Strider is God. He is the writer and the narrative, what he says in Orange text happened and will never not happen. He watches his biggest threat, John, retcon back into Canon as a Canonless entity, beats Lord English with a fatal wound, lets Terezi and John have steamy car sex so he may let his father be proud, and retroactively makes John die to bullshit narrative venom that never existed and kills his soul, he doesn’t even get a dream bubble afterlife, he’s the first real protagonist who dies forever.

Dirk of course narrative the narrative to his will, that’s cool that sets him up as a good villain, someone who will go as far as he can to change reality to get his way. However, he is not an ultimate amoral will. In Homestuck canon, apparently outside of Dirk’s control otherwise he could retcon it to not be that, narratives exist only when viewed from an audience, and the universe of Homestuck does not have the privilege to exist after all humans die and return to a slew of Carbon-12 atoms. If Homestuck’s story ends, it ceases to exist. The solution is we need to create Homestuck content forever to maintain their immortal existence as characters. That sounds cool, a cheat code to exist beyond the entropy of time, like Jesus Christ, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Don Quixote. Like these characters (and real ass religious prophet) they exist in our minds and we remember what they did, so in a way they remain in memory bottled as a captured moment of time that saves the dead from the void of memory to the maw of history. Dirk takes it a step further, they won’t be STUCK in their HOME NARRATIVE they’ll go on new adventures and never die.

Of course, there are two types of eternity. Eternal bliss and content, and eternal torment, and it seems the longer you live the more your life skews to these two fates, especially when you believe western ideas of death and the afterlife and not Samsara and the purpose of struggling from one life to the next with no permanent possessions but an eternal soul.

So what’s a man to do? Well for most of the epilogue instead of doing anything obvious he intrudes on a presidential election, he gotta distract the crew so he can ride solo. His biggest contribution is stealing Rose from her wife Kanaya Maryam and fucks off into space while he forces Jake English to declare his love for Dirk and shits his pants. He also does kewl narrative battle with God Calliope who is actually doing something instead of appearing last minute to obliterate Lord English and end the narrative control he has on Homestuck. Now she guards the universe, and she sucks at it. She mostly moves the narrative along, and forces the possession of a 16-year-old Jade Harley body and destroys the character development Meat Jade has. She mostly wants to get this timeline over with so she can move back to Candy’s timeline (oh boy) and act as a guard dog to the end of Homestuck.

Dirk wins and elects Jane (who is Trump because simething something Condesce’s tiaratop, even analytical fans struggle with Jane’s characterization, she’s more effect than cause) and he finally does what he needs to do, take Rose, tell Jake he doesn’t love him, fucks off and does the actual thing he needs to do in the sequel. Wow, underwhelming. It’s still a lot like Homestuck, characyers doe when Hussie and friends has nothing left to expand on them, a character takes a left turn to become a worse version of themselves, an in universe character takes over the narrative for their own goals and this one weird scene happens that you want to forget. Somehow Jake shitting his pants in the middle of a rally is more cringe and uncomfortable than Dave growing up for 13-years surrounded by felt sex puppets. At least the Bull Penis Cane had the dignity to not take itself seriously, Jake shitting his pants is integral to Jane becoming Führer of Earth C. It’s like a very rare steak, severely undercooked and has a high risk of tapeworms and vomiting on your plate, but steak is steak, it’s a good meal by design and even if you prefer medium rare it’s edible, uncomfortable to eat but edible. 6.5/10

The candy timeline is the seasoning, which is diahhrea and vomit. It came from food and you can still see chunks of good food in there, the problem is it is full of bile, shit, and inedible regurgitation of food that was there, in fact I think that came from the cake we ate before, what the hell?

90% of the AO3 tags the epilogues opens on apply to the Candy timeline. We see an even worse more outwardly evil Trumo Jane who goes full on Xenophobe and marries Jake just to raise an anchor baby while she romps with Gamzee. Jade, who has had no human contact for 16 years of her 23 year old life has gotten mega intrusive and horny. She will intrude on Dave and Karkat’s relationship, which still sucks so bad they needed Dirk to manipulate them into admitting they actually like each other (most popular mlm ship in Homestuck btw) and then Jade marries Dave and drifts away from Karkat, meaning this is the timeline’s second cuckold relationship. John and Karkat are the only cool characters as John gets major depression and regret that he didn’t save the timeline from Lord English and uses Terezi as therapy for his obsessive depression about doing the wrong thing. Karkat stands up to Jane and does a rebellion, it sucks until Meenah shows up and she gets to be the alpha troll with an actual character, and being way more competent than she was in her Sburb session. Lmao.

Jake sucks but then he divorces Jane and fills John with a hope that things can be better if you try and believe you can be the best person you are no matter what. This happens like 5 pages before the end of Candy. Roxy actually has a fun time marrying John, having a kid, and then divorcing his depressed ass, and while she has a hood speech (near the end as well) and leaving your hang ups to live the one life you got. Too bad she and her meat timeline counterpart both are apathetic to Jane’s current declaration of war on the trolls and their reproductive rights, which they avoid to mention how the mother grub lays hundreds of thousands of eggs per brood and never explores the biology and population growth of the troll race, racism is bad let’s put it that way, in a very very shitty analogy. Meat Roxy is also nonbinary and is transmasc nonbinary in the sequel. That’s cool, but why did a queer human refuse to oppose a reactionary until the last second I thought Homestuck was woke.

We also got new kids who do nothing, I don’t care about them, I just want to talk about all the weird cuckoldry, breastfeeding, toe licking (that an adult Gamzee does with a teenage Vriska!!!) diaper fetishism, a liiiiitle bit of pissing, complete character changes, and apathy to the new world these Gods birthed in the Candy timeline and how it offends me. It is both a middle finger and embrace to Homestuck’s weird moments. There was always that weird and off-putting moment where a character would randomly make a reference to something sexual or kinky. Smuppets are a huge part of Dirk’s character, Hussie does this dumb gag with a Horse Dildo and Horuss and bad censorship, and Doc Scratch preys on little girls to do his bidding. The epilogues does even more ridiculous fetishistic content that’s even more pronounced and intertwined to the character’s developments. We sure could have had Gamzee and Jane’s relationship be way less milky and passionate than it could have but Jake is still cucked. The epilogues did not have to ask what’s between Jade’s legs but they did anyway, it doesn’t even affect the plot, until the sequel. Anyway maybe they could have done something about body dysmorphia conflicting with the desire to keep and hold the memories of your guardian literally attached to you. (also they retconned Jade to have Bec’s tail because fuuuuuuuuuuuuck you) As far as I know Jade didn’t care about having a regular cis female body, and maybe she’d start caring a whole lot more when it radically changes. It would actually male me tolerate Jade having a dog penis, but no, it has to be offhandedly mentioned to answer the desires of porn artists.

She should’ve had a human penis instead.

So anyway there is something good in the Candy epilogues: it’s only the John parts, with Jake and Roxy helping out a lot in the end, and Karkat rebelling started out good until he gets shafted for Meenah and Dave meeting Obama. Oh yeah Obama was there, I wasn’t laughing at how absurd that was, I already had a bad taste in my mouth. I forgot to mention Rose and Kanaya and Vrissy with how boring their story was. They got to be happy, wow cool even the characters that finished their character arcs wrapped up in a proper epilogue got screwed over.

So was the epilogue formatted as an AO3 fanfiction outrageous, fetishistic, uncomfortable, and rodiculous? Yes. Is this postmodernist writing that challenges the concept if a proper epilogue and concluding character arcs? Yes. Does the epilogue explore how character live within and are controlled by the existence of narrative? More or less in the Meat epilogue, a little bit in Candy. Is it bad? Yes. It challenged conventional writing and it made something bad, not all postmodern works breaking the boundaries of conventional concrete elements of storytelling can be good, it’s challenging the status quo that counts. I’d only recommend the epilogues to people who can stomach shitty fanfiction.

The epilogues are the eternity that continues the narration for indefinite conflict, pain, and inevitable sorrow. This is hell and all our blorbos are stuck. Nothing can save them, not even a Toblerone. Poor June, destined to be canon in a canon that struggles to carry on, this is why I still headcanon John as a cis male.

I think since today’s the day, I should get off my chest what I think about Homestuck and the epilogues: the former is good and the latter is like an uncooked steak covered with diahhrea.

To elaborate, Homestuck is a cake that used too much baking soda and cooked in the oven for too short, its the same size as a cake but the outside is too airy and the inside is mushy and liquid batter, disgusting.

But there’s this middle part, between the layers that’s delicious as all hell, it uses grandma’s secret recipe and the chef was running a rush order, it’s a miracle he used the perfect ratio of egg to sugar to flour and milk, you can’t deny most chefs wish they could prepare a cake this good, and when one ingredient is off and it was underbaked, many critics would absolutely drop a solid 9 to a 5/10. It’s still good in my heart.

Now leaving the metaphors, I love this comic to an autistic degree. Its art direction and narration perfectly mix the feel of a strange adventure game published by some studio pushing the boundaries but had no budget so they end up reusing assets from stock images for most of its run, and for the second half abandoned jpgs for minimalist bean shaped heroes.

It has multiple flash animations, interactive walkarounds, and plenty of callbacks and reference to its own story beats and panels, it’s really good and even the secondary characters have a lot of dimension to them! The big issue was the pacing, and by god did Act 5 Act 2 cone out the miracle it did, balancing troll to human conversation perfectly, never abandoning the kids, and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the mess the trolls were about to make for themselves.

I even like act 6. Yeah I said it. Caliborn is funny, Calliope is eh, Roxy is the obvious character with the most going for her, Dirk has a good arc about his own struggles, but between him and the alpha kids, not so much. Jake had an arc for him to realize who he can be and his linits and how he should stand up for himself, and Jane was learning to trust her friends while being able to sleuth out manipulation or bad actors. Some of these words are in past tense because Hussie was now ping ponging to the boring 3 years where the kids are separated by dream bubbles and a long yard, almost never interacting with each other’s side of the 3 year journey (minus one DISTACTION by Rose and John hammering Bec’s head in with COOL NEW BREATH POWERS)

The pacing was a whole lot and openbound was a waste of time for 10 characters the fans could play with as dolls, but Act 6 Act 6 united both alpha and beta parties to actually do stuff.

But Hussie was also developing a (STILL UNFINISHED) adventure game(s) for his two new kidsonas that were going to give Alternia more breathing room and two new kidsonas an adventure to expand on the lore of Beta earth Roxy, Jake Harley, and a dead flighty broad.

After delaying when the comic should have ended by one and a half years, Hussie says “fuck it” and drops an awesome flash where everyone fucking dies. I was sad a little bit but remembered the comic had to end with the good guys winning so I just slogged another 500 pages watching a cool concept unfold: alter the timeline to unfuck the doomed timeline and fix the time paradox that would cause Lord English to not exist. Cool yeah?

The problem was after undoing 2000 pages of characterization Hussie needs to redo those 2000 pages and give characters worthwhile new arcs to solve, make everything both hunky dory on our way to the finish line but also start a new problem from railroading the characters into this new chance to win the game, and are clearly still coping or ignoring their other timeline’s struggles.

The best Hussie could do was 750 pages.

Build the new universe, kill the bad guys, save the troll race, finish Dave, Dirk, and Roxy’s character arc’s, we’ll finish the rest in a new timeline, the epilogues stuff. Drop in some vague shit at the last minute like “Ultimate Selves” “Aspect design and destiny” and some lip service to how these aren’t the same kids John knew, the look like them but they’re ever so different.

Then for like 6 months that was it, then the credits explained what happened to them and where they are now, and what’s unfinished.

Bonus updates we see a human cosplay space fish horns Hitler, a troll cosplay an immortal time demon hellbent on wrecking the corpse of every Universe he is aware of, and a carapacian cosplay a teleporting radiant dog demon that killed 3 parents. This was for Halloween.

Jane gets kidnapped by the goons you loved back when the comic only had 4 kids 3 adults a dog, some 4 chess friends, Jack, the midnight crew and the felt, and then she mind controls Jack and says she is going to get political.

Also the woobified side characters Wayward Vagabond and Oeregrine Me dicant are no longer “the deterrent of the original bad guy” and “silly marketable plush character who was once a veteran of the bloodiest massacre in Sburban history” they’re dead.

So what an ending huh, that was overwhelming, also unfinished. That epilogue should really tie in loose ends and end the narrative stakes of a work of fiction to a calm and satisfying pace like a traditional narrative does, boy oh boy can’t wait to expect that from the postmodern work of Homestuck hahahahahahahaha.

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