#and dirk being his dirk self internalizing it as dave just not giving a shit bout him

[cringefail-clown]

What was Dirks relationship with his Bro like? Would it warrant a canon-esque Strider rooftop conversation?

they had a great relationship that turned kinda sour due to dave not being around much, which made dirk v upset at him bc the kid was lonely af in the apartment. when it comes to the rooftop kind of talk there are two other characters that'll get it wonk wonk

[zan0tix]

Any general thoughts on/relating to the Brobot?

Have my half awake scrawlings...

I really love the brobot!!!! People really misconstrue it and also leave it out in a lot of dirkjake talk? Its a big player in not only how dirk expresses his affection/desire towards jake but also in their multi year spanning unspoken game of gay chicken 😭😭(all of dirks splinters are but Not about them rn)

It was sent yknow under the pretense that jake loves wrestling and wished so bad to have somebody he could wrestle with. But at the same time it protects jake from the horrors of hellmurder island (seen before they strife), pushing jake into the Damsel in distress role he wasnt expecting to play even before all the shit in the game, with Dirk being his hero.

Jake says he keeps it on a high difficulty because apparently in the Novice mode he says their interactions become "too tender" and doesnt want to elaborate, Friendly reminder! His convo with jane on the SAME DAY dirk pulled off that big romantic overture and the kiss happens and him and dirk begin "dating".. is the same day he asked jane if it didnt make him weird for wanting to date dirk. And he also says hed joke around with dirk about how theyd soo make a great couple if dirk were a girl haha.

I imagine the brobot and well. Getting physical like that with a robot that supposedly looks like dirk probably gave jake his internal gay awakening at 13 but he just never wanted to actually confront it and instead just wanted to brush past everything 😭😭 (See: every single time sexuality or romance comes up in relation to jake he is literally always thinking about dirk somehow and he never directly talks about his attraction to men or how that reflects/contradicts on his self image of the Movie Star Hero guy)

and jake doesnt actually hate the thing either, he tells jane he thinks it genuinely did improve his fighting capabilities (Which we see it did in collide! he beat basically the whole felt with guns and fisticuffs alone, no hope powers.) Which serves as a pretty evident parallel to dave who also is good at fighting, even if he doesnt want to be. (see dirk + dave convo)

This one comes from hussies authors notes in the aradiabot and equius scene (which equius imagery being invoked with dirk. something i could totally rant about another time haha) but yeah. Jake was being selfish asshat in that log forcing jane into a corner and wringing what he wanted to hear out of her, and also not giving a shit about the brobot (Which served as his protector and only other semblance of human connection since he was 13 and was a BIRTHDAY GIFT FROM DIRK) KILLING ITSELF? But hes so preoccupied talking about dirk. THE REAL DIRK. And immediately after jake loses the dirk splinter that protected him, HE (AND DIRK) CREATE A NEW ONE FOR HIMSELF USING THEIR COMBINED POWERS/?

Hussie is lying.. somebody Does care about dirks feelings. a whole lot to the point they activate their powers unwittingly Because of it. and its jake. but jake just cant admit that himself. (He cannot admit his real feelings until given permission to, dirk would have to concede the game of gay chicken first using his words and not just actions)

ANYWAY. hussie is so right its so easy to get sidetracked times one million talking about this comic. BUT AHH!! BROBOT. his existence.. tragic.. Jakes really smart in knowing that all of dirks splinters enlighten aspects of himself he doesnt oft share, and the brobot served as another dirk action on the pile of dirk actions he engineers to signify his deep immense care for jake, where he lets these grand gestures and implications sit out in the open without ever actually saying what they mean and where his feelings lay.

EVEN IF ITS SUPER OBVIOUS. The d man cant use his big boy words to actually describe his feelings despite how much a yaps! so jake doesnt know if hes even allowed to say anything about his own. Fellas: Is it gay if you labour for supposedly an extended period of time to create a custom robot in your own image to ship in pieces to your best bro guy crush who is HUNDREDS OF YEARS IN THE PAST because you cant be there yourself?

I think this hal message says enough about how bad dirk wished he could visit jake 💀💀

[millionyen]

different anon but ur tags abt homestuck r so good, i agree completely... im also asian and i cant handle how white the fandom is these days so i just stay out of it for the most part

LOL hiii like there's nothing wrong w being a white fan it's just....the fan space is so not conducive to diversity. and nobody gives cunt anymore like what happened to the baddies?? it's just all so one-note in terms of experiences !!

[ottiliere]

do you have any more stuff on dirks kf thread? i love that idea

referencing some of the stuff in this post, specifically dirk's.... art. how it's mainly shock value content...highly graphic, self-hating, misanthropic, nihilistic, 90s and early 2000s edgy humor art taken a disconcerting turn for the sexual. and, okay. this content would not be enough to warrant a kf thread on its own. what's been established is that his physical assault of hollywood director dave strider is what put him on the map and by extension in the crosshairs of the types of people who...use kf. people would start digging into his internet history, tracing his digital footprint, you know. his deadjournal, the boorus he uses, they'd identity an art style and essentially go to town tracking down everything he's ever made and posted, even if it was posted anonymously (4chan).

and, like. the things he draws... I don't know how to describe this but to him this isn't really vent art, and he's not, like, a shadman. (most of*) what he draws isn't drawn with the intent of it being hot, or appealing. it's... again, shock value. I think he thinks you'd have to be really stupid to think anything he draws is funny (the actual joke he's making is that he's stupid enough to waste his own time and energy doing all this shit, and the ACTUAL joke beyond that is that he knows it's stupid and is doing it as a joke and is so elevated beyond both criticism of the work itself and of the creation of the work on a sincere AND ironic level. you cant touch him because engaging seriously at all with anything he makes makes you a dribbling drooling IDIOT), but I dont think he cares about people getting off to his weird shock value porn.... though at some point he would have? earlier in life. like i do think he would've had a kind of puritanical phase where he realizes how wrong the way he was raised was, but I also feel like he quashed this relatively quickly on realizing that it just made his everyday life that much more humiliating. his creation of shock value porn SPECIFICALLY the porn part. is not to get off to it or to be sexy or to help anyone else get off. it is all part of the joke. if you get off on it you're stupid and missing the point but no more so than if you are out here laughing at his non-jokes. I don't think he'd LET himself be sex repulsed, basically. he'd feel that way for a little while but he is so surrounded by it that letting himself be disgusted by it feels weak. he isn't a kid he's not some girl or whatever. it's sex it's no big deal to him because why would it be. no seriously like tell me why why would he even be thinking twice about something like this. elaborate on it.

Like. I just really lean into the idea of him delibrately quashing a natural aversion to sex that comes from a history of being violently assaulted...to me that ties into him fueling his own internalized bizarreness refusing to get help or admit weakness etc. it's similar to the involuntary agere** and the bedwetting; if he could only look his own humanity and weakness in the face and come to terms with it he could heal but he will NOT let himself do this, no self-reflection no criticism just straight ahead into oblivion forever it does NOT get any better than this it isn't even that bad now it was never that bad then and you're projecting OBVIOUS STYLE if you think he's ever even struggled with jackshit.

but anyway.

the people hobbling together everything he's ever made, into one big thread... with the masses completely misinterpreting his intentions, the message, the motivation he had behind these pieces... he would be so mad. like he's not even mad about the insults, he does not give a shit about that, it's how little people are understanding that is what's truly offensive to him. like none of you get it you're all just laughing at the barest most obvious layer of absurdity out there. you're not even thinking not even for a second you're all so stupid compared to me and you'll live and die and you'll never fucking know it I'm going to blow my brains out on camera in front of you I'm going to kill you you are so fucking stupid how do you even justify your own existence etc etc etc.

*I can see him being, like, a legit puppet fetish artist. like these pieces are about the same quality of any of his other works but there's a much more sincere quality to them than any of his other art that depicts more grotesque topics. if people genuinely made fun of this stuff I think it's one of the things that would genuinely make him grind his teeth into dust. they don't fucking GET IT.

I'm envisioning the prominent features of this thread consist of, like, compiled scs of his deadjournal account...which if you don't know is like livejournal but they do not filter anything you write or anything like that. it’s got a smaller audience, no one reports you and no one monitors it. so i imagine he uses this as an outlet for utter bullshit fabrications of his life, like blatantly untrue ironic traumaventing with some stake in his emotional state at the time (e.g., extremely exaggerated stories of him being kidnapped and trafficked and tortured and shit, really long ramblings/lies that are adjacent to how he goes down stupid one-sided conversational rabbitholes) mixed in with EXTREMELY occasional genuine breakdown vents. kf members would tear all of them apart, but especially the latter kind once they figure out what they're looking for. like every once in a while someone does manage to hit a legitimate pressure point I think, like some weird analogy he makes a couple times. someone makes a random guess and happens to describe something that like actually happened to him and hes like stunned for a second over it.

in general i feel like this would just be so monumentally terrible to him. like hes aware of the extent to which people do not "get" him but. his little brain would boil at this he'd be so mad i think he would break things in his home. need to draw him sitting at his desk about to physically explode.

**I forgot to post meta about this in response to an ask I got. we've talked about it for cumulative hours and written fic of it and it is like. the cause of timeline branchiations. I cannot get into it now. it will be so long.

[burningthemidnightcityoil]

ON CLASSES

Classpects run on Irony, Puns, Wordplay, and each class has a secondary verb, in addition to the one they share with their pair.

Witch - Which. “Choose / Choice”. A Witch chooses power. Witches are the Powerhouse of the Session(cell). They are akin to Thieves, for a Witch takes power. But the difference here is that a Witch doesn’t need to take it from other people, a Witch takes back their own power from whatever Guardian (or “familiar”) has it. Its not like an Heir, where the Heir can just wait for it to come; a Witch has to grab it or be forced into its service.

Heir - Air/Err. “Inherit”. An Heir inherits power. While Heirs are akin to the Page, where they both inspire others to help them; the difference here is that Heirs will inspire others to Guide them (Literally inspire others to act as Seers), while Pages inspire others to Serve them (Inspire others to act as Knights). Heirs don’t like being Served (In fact, Heirs Homestuck-Historically have conflicts with Guardians because of their Service), and Pages don’t like being Guided. (Most Pages tend to talk smack about those trying to Guide them)

Mage - Magician. “Perform”. Mage’s are showy, in addition to being knowitalls. How you are Seen is Important. There are three Mages, two known and one HC’d, that give this. Sollux, inspite of his problems, is a Show Off and tries to play it off Smoothly. His performance is more important than his powers (Or Spells, if we’re dedicated). Meulin also tends to be Showy. Both by showing off her favorite couples, and by her Disciple self showing off her rommance on literal cave walls. HC’d Mage, Diamonds Droog / Draconian Dignitary, is all about the Show and the Class, and not about Flash Powers or Transformations.

Seer - To See. “Envision”. Seers See Seas. What you see is important. Unlike their counterpart, the Mage, A Seer’s visions are more important than their Spells. (This is inspite of the fact that both Mages and Seers are equally capable of both Visions and Spells, as well as Performance. It seems what what indicates if you’re a Mage or a Seer is if what’s important is How you are Seen, or What you See; A Mage wants to be Seen, a Seer wants to See).

Thief - To Steal / To Steel / Steel yourselves. “Enforce”. If Knights are the Law, Thieves are the Enforcers; because they literally reinforce themselves by taking what they want. Let’s take this a step further, and include all definitions of Enforce Thieves Strengthen, Intensify, Force, Drive and Urge whatever they set their sights on, to be what they want it. (After all, they Steal, or Take By Force / Violence)

Rogue - To Go Rogue / Haywire. “To Cross”. Rogues are pretty good about making connections, and making connections work; be it between people, or their Aspect. (Roxy between her Friends and her Windows; Nepeta with her Romances)

Knight - Night. “To Bare / Bear”. Bear hands? This may seem outlandish, but the origin of the word Night is “Bare” or “To be Bare of Sunlight”. And Knights tend to put on a kind of Mask, or Shield, or rather, Helm / Helmet as they feel their weaknesses (or what they think are their weaknesses) feel bare to the world (Dave and his Sunglasses; Karkat and his Temper; Latula and her Gamer Attitude).

Page - Chapter. “To Assemble” YOU BOY, EQUIP ARMS. This one took a bit, but what’s a Page without a Chapter? Be it a Chapter in a Book of Pages, or a Council to of all those they have called on to serve them. A Page is a Knightly figure that has a Round Table, akin to a Rogue’s Merrymen. A Page inspires others to play Knight to them, or to serve them. To call to Arms, or call to Action. So basically, if Robin Hood is a Rogue’s Mythic figure, King Arthur is a Page’s mythic figure. So literally, all those a Page calls on personally, makes them apart of their Round Table of Knights. (Wait, does this mean that HS^2 Jane is Morgan Le F--)

Maid - Made. “To Make” Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice. Maids are the Makers. They don’t so much as Maintain, though they do that too, as they create. Consider. Aradia is a prime example. She dies, so she makes Time for herself as a very powerful Poltergeist. She becomes a Robot, and makes Time for Herself by her many many Robot Time Copies, or as Time is Numeral, making Numbers. She becomes a Godtier, and suddenly, Time in the Dream Bubbles align perfectly with the Present. Notice how when we are first introduced to the Dream Bubbles, Time was a real nonlinear pain. But when Aradia took the Reins on this Time Management Stuff, and suddenly the Dream Bubbles were Linear and aligned with our Story. She did want to see the end, after all (And the more living Time Gods entered the Bubbles, the more Linear things became) For Porrim, its about Making Space for others in both her various views and her uh... Various Views. For the Dolorosa, this included making Space for herself, and for her son. She possibly even helped direct him closer to the idea of Freedom (And he did see visions of another space in time...)

Sylph - Sylvan / Wood Threshold. “To Matter” Okay, this one is like the Knight’s, if not more complicated (and likely gonna require more development in the future, cos this took waaay too much digging for my liking). Thing is, Sylph is a difficult thing to name from name alone unless you look into the word itself. Because its derived from Sylvan “Of the woods”. But we break that down into two things. Silva, the Woods, and Hyle, Matter. Hyle / Hule is already the Greek word for Matter or Wood in any case. And our word for Matter is already derived from Mater, the Latin word for Mother. (The original English word was displaced by Latin; Andwork was once our word for Matter). Unfortunately, I can’t quite make the connections here yet, so I’m not sure if “To Matter” is the proper verb. I can, however, describe some loose connections that at least tell me I’m on the right track: ... Sylphs are defined by their Environment; Such as Kanaya’s relations regarding Trolls (A motherly figure), Aranea defined herself by Information and giving Information (which ain’t healthy), Mindfang defined herself a Thief because the Troll Empire was lead by a Thief And HC’d Sylph of Mind, Snowman was, quite literally, the Universe (And its Multiverse, which is a Mind thing). So a Sylph defines herself by her “Woods”, or like a Nymph / Dryad, by her “Tree / Wood / Matter”. And when you kill the Tree / Wood, you kill the Sylph, and vice versa (Destroy the Matriorb, and Kanaya dies; Kill Snowman and you kill the Unvierse; Mindfang was murdered, and her Enlightenment about the Doc died with her).

Prince - Principle / Foremost. “To Postulate” Its the Principle of the matter. For Princes, Principle and Code are key, and they will follow these as a fundamental truth (and be damned to anything else). This is likely what it was meant when they were called a Destroyer Class, because they do tend to destroy all avenues when it doesn’t fit their Principle. A Group of Princes could be called an Argument. For Eridan, both the system he resided in, and his own internal narrative (his Hopes), were his fundamental truths. And in the end, it fucked everything up. For Kurloz, his Belief System and his chosen Lord were his Fundamental Truth (And Rage is about Truths; so this guy didn’t just have a fortified castle, he had an entire armored country) For Dirk, the Character someone presented was the Truth of the matter, and the Character he presented. He believed that all versions of him were Him, and that was his biggest flaw, because they weren’t. AR was no more Dirk Strider than Bro was. ... And unfortunately, one version of him took this very literally (HS^2).

Bard - Barred / Bar. “To Prevent” Bards are quite the Wild Card, because how the hell do you manage destroying stuff for other people’s benefit and it actually ensured that it is a benefit? But from our few examples, Bards do act as great barriers. They keep things on the path because if you didn’t have that barrier, you wouldn’t progress, or you’d go too far too quickly, or things could go out of hand. For Gamzee, he tends to invoke the idea of the Barrier Maiden (He does roleplay a fairy / maid). He can’t die cos he’s a Cosmic Keystone to things happening like they’re suppose to. Paradox Space, literally, cannot let him die because it needs him to complete the Alpha Loop [By extension, no Doomed Timeline ever has a Dead Gamzee, he’s just that important, the stupid fuck] / [consider the theory that he also absorbs his alternative selves to keep his keystone status; like how Rose absorbed her alternative dream self] (Though when you take him from his story / destiny / fate, he’s just another mortal shitty clown). Gamzee prevented Rage, for Homestuck to continue as its intended narrative. For Cronus, his little Hope Quest was a direct line to Lord English (being the evil wvizard in his little Harry Potter fantasy). But this blew up royally, because as it turns out, it isn’t up to the Beforus Trolls to do shit. So just as Gamzee’s crisis of Fate put things back on the Path to LE and prevented catastrophe, Cronus’s crisis caused catastrophe. He prevented Hope for the Beforus Trolls, because it wasn’t their Story. And now for my HC’d Bard of Doom, Clubs Deuce. He does exactly what it says, he Prevents Doom. Inspite of what it appears, he’s highly competent because that prevents things from going to hell. For CD, he prevented Doom, for his Crew, and the sessions he’s involved in. And any time CD tends to disappear from the picture, is when things go to hell fast (For the Crew, Cans showed up; for the Beta Session, he was a mere herald for the doom that was already coming and his death cinched it)

[oldstriderbot9000]

HS^2/Epilogues accidentally did Ult Dirk kind of right.

This is gonna be a long one. 

So I figure I will make this, whether it gets shared around or not. I need to get it out of my system and on Tumblr. 

Lets look at what an Ultimate self is, in essence.

An Ultimate self is not the combination of every possible version of a person. So humanstuck Dirks aren’t going to be part of the Ultimate Dirk we are seeing in the comic. 

An Ultimate self is the combination of every possible version of a person in a certain universe. Ultimate Dirk is both a special case due to how Homestuck had 4 universes linked together, but also because of how his aspect includes all splinters of himself. For normal Ultimate selves I will use Rose and Dave rather than Dirk.

You have a start point, the origin point of the alpha timeline you could say, and every moment there are new branches of timelines and possibilities. From there, you have successful timelines and doomed timeline. An ultimate self will combine all of these. All version of Dave will include all timelines from that base universe. Rose as well, all versions from that base universe.

Perhaps there are timelines that diverge from the alpha with, say, a less abusive Bro, or a non alcoholic Mom Lalonde. It will also include timelines that maybe Rose was alcoholic before the game began, or even one’s where Dave may have had an even worse childhood. They all are diverging timelines from the same base. So Davebot and Rosebot both have all of those possible timelines in their heads and memories. 

Luckily due to their non organic makeup, it is easier for them to sort through all of it, without the biological aspect of emotions to get in the way. If they did have biological bodies, I have no doubt the process would leave them split and having very intense internal struggles. I know Dave’s who diverged from canon because they went apeshit and killed Bro. Davebot has those timelines in his head supposedly.

It is a internal war of all kinds of morals and stand points. Most Dave’s are pretty straightforward, but there are too many possibilities. 

The same can be said of Rose.

However, if we look at Dirk, he is a special case. 

I am not going to diagnose Dirk any mental ilnesses. But I will pull from both people I know and my own research/experience. 

Ultimate Dirk is the combination of not only all of his possible timelines from the base alpha timeline, but also all of his Splinters. One such splinter affects one of his main Splinters, and leads to severe issues. 

I am talking about Lil Cal. Yes, he counts as a splinter. ARquiusprite, Caliborn, and a portion of Gamzee were all put into the Lil Cal puppet. And considering how Caliborn has experience eating the soul/dominating the soul of others who inhabit the same body, I have no doubt he did as such in Lil Cal. But it was a mix then. And Lil Cal went on to affect Bro, manipulating his mind and making him even more fucked up. Instilling extremely Toxic Masculinity, Misogynistic behavior, etc into Bro over the years. Caliborn’s influence is big here, considering his own misogyny and toxic masculinity ideology. 

Therefore, all Bro’s that were affected by Lil Cal are included in Ult Dirk, but so are all those Lil Cals. 

So now we have an idea as to why he may behave so… well. Shitily. It isn’t an excuse, but a possible explanation. His behavior is vile. So now we look at Dirk in canon that we have seen. 

Dirk was so lonely he created a copy of his own mind, and it just spat his deepest fears in his face. I think Hal actually had a hand in Dirk’s self loathing, what with “being the same person.” Dirk already hates himself, and he hates his splinters as well. But he doesn’t hate himself for “internalized homophobia”. Nope. He is very accepting of who he is, and accepts it. The only thing is, he knows who he is and accepts it, and he hates who he is. Or rather who he sees himself as. 

So you put someone who hates himself, and combine him with all of his worse selves who also have a core of self loathing, and you get someone who truly loathes himself, and has an internal battle, with biology adding onto it, against himself. Because for all the bad versions, there are just as many good ones. But part of Dirk is self loathing. It’s almost at the core of who he is. Not to say he can’t heal and grow, I know he can. 

But we know Dirk wants the best for his friends, his idea of how to give that to them is somewhat flawed already when he is a kid, and he trie to move past it as an adult, but a lot of who he is is the puppet master. 

I believe the Homestuck^2 and Epilogue writers didn’t fully grasp this, in fact I think they accidentally portrayed him somewhat correct. Ultimate Dirk is an idiot who makes himself the bad guy to ensure his friends have a chance to be happy. Yes, he treated Jake and the others horribly. No doubt. That’s where they were wrong with him. See, it should be about a 50/50 balance of “bad” and “good”. He would still have left Jake, but perhaps a bit softer, with the idea of protecting everyone from who he is now. Because Dirk is fucking stupid and like that™. 

But yes, he is a piece of fucking shit in the epilogues and HS^2, so they fucked up there. But they kind of accidentally showed him properly. Ultimate selves are also really fucking messy. 

Pretty sure Hussie also just wanted another way to go further than God Tier too. So. Meh.

If you read all of this, thanks. I know it’s somewhat scattered, but I have a lot of thoughts on it as a whole. Not to mention that as someone who struggles with a God Complex, and with friends who suffer from Bipolar, BPD, and others who identify really strongly with Dirk and Ult Dirk, he just both frustrates me because I know he isn’t quite right, and also validates how I feel. But I have the brain to not go apeshit like him.

[autumnblogs]

Day 74: The Ultimate Weapon and the Ultimate Self

https://homestuck.com/story/7786

The Dramatic Irony is so thick you could cut it with a fucking knife. Her Heroism, and need to be the one who defeats the most powerful enemy there is is pretty much exactly the same here as it was when she was going to go off and fight Jack - her perception of herself as having grown is almost nakedly false.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/7788

There’s something poetic about the fact that the final emotional confrontation in the comic is between Vriska and Vriska. The center of attention, Homestuck’s Model Hero - for (Vriska)’s arc to be complete, she has to be confronted not just with someone like Aranea - she has to understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of her own wrath to be able to really empathize completely with the people that she’s hurt.

And for Vriska, renouncing this version of her - a version of her who could conceivably happy - so viciously tearing into her - means renouncing the possibility of actually living for the people she loves, instead of going off to die for them.

Someone has to go defeat Lord English, I suppose; that’s his curse. Couldn’t have happened to be a nicer person.

https://homestuck.com/story/7795

Meenah is too restless a person to spend her life in peace and satisfaction, and I think it’s something she’s aware of. She’s just not that kind of person. I think it gives us a lot of insight in the Condesce to view her as the kind of person who has spent enough time with herself to make that recognition and internalize it completely to the point that it probably doesn’t bother her any more.

She’s the kind of person who wants to get shit done, and fuck shit up, and as much as she might have all kinds of sentimental feelings for people like Jane and the Psionic, at the end of the day, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to stop being who she is right now. She isn’t prepared to do what it takes to change, and she never was.

What Meenah and Vriska have largely always had in common is that they are committed to a vision of themselves, living up to a kind of Heroic possible version of themselves - not Heroic necessarily in a moral sense, again - and they’re not willing to compromise that for anyone else.

https://homestuck.com/story/7810

deep, seconds-long inhale

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

https://homestuck.com/story/7836

This really helps to solidify that, for however much she has been pointed at the right enemies, Vriska is as cruel and evil as she’s ever been, at least in temperament if not necessarily in terms of principle.

https://homestuck.com/story/7857

While I enjoy this whole sequence in theory, in practice, I’ve always felt like Tavros is still very much the butt of this whole joke; particularly because of how rapidly he just ends up handing off the huge ghost army he built to Vriska and Meenah.

I do think that for what it’s worth, it’s probably the actual follow-up on the bit of foreshadowing with Casey and their dead army.

https://homestuck.com/story/7870

They deserve each other.

https://homestuck.com/story/7895

Jasprose - Rose Lalonde, really - manages to finally put on the table this sense of alienation that has plagued her throughout the entire story - sums up the paranoia and pessimism, slowly replaced as they are by a desire to have someone to hold.

Rose is estranged.

https://homestuck.com/story/7898

The absolute pile of ways that Lord English can be defeated by the end of Homestuck really makes me feel like a lot of them are ultimately rendered silly and moot - y’know like, there’s just so much excess, any of them alone, or even a handful of them probably could have done the trick - but why all of them?

It makes many of the sacrifices feel unnecessary; and I have a secret impression that ultimately, just by his very nature, English could have been destroyed without assistance - the Dead Cherub seems perfectly capable of doing him in on her own.

https://homestuck.com/story/7917

I think one of Dirk’s biggest problems in general is that he always feels compelled to push the envelope to the actual fucking limit; he’s not willing to start small and work upward. It would do him a lot of good to just have some minor easy projects, a way to accumulate experience, and with time, maybe wisdom.

Taking care of a little flock of pigeons would be good for him.

https://homestuck.com/story/7922

Becoming comfortable with your own body and your own needs is one of the most basic things you can understand about yourself, but for Dave - as with a lot of us - that understanding is another casualty of his general estrangement not only from other people, but from himself.

https://homestuck.com/story/7923

For these two cool dudes, the past is in the past as surely as it can be. Whatever ill vibes were between the two of them because of their past selves are gone now - they’re new people, and they can move forward and create something new as a result.

That’s forgiveness for you.

https://homestuck.com/story/7941

Poor Terezi. She’s so...

Afraid. So afraid of everyone. She can’t bear to be loved.

https://homestuck.com/story/7947

Not even really by herself.

https://homestuck.com/story/7959

Each and every one of these losers - losers of Paradox Space, those who didn’t make it to the end because of unlucky happenstance - they all count. They all matter. Each and every one of them contributes to the whole picture of who they are as a person.

And gracefully, it’s never too late for them to reconcile with each other - and to reconcile with themselves.

As long as you exist, it is not too late for reconciliation. But that’s no excuse to put it off to the end of all time.

If you’ll allow me a moment to moralize, if there’s someone you’re estranged from, who you want to be able to be around again, maybe don’t wait. If there’s a chance to make things right with them, it’s usually worth it.

https://homestuck.com/story/7975

Good old Spades Slick, lived as he died - futilely making a stand against someone invincible.

https://homestuck.com/story/8006

Davepetasprite gives us as close as possible to a full statement of the theme that Homestuck explores through all of its alternate self shenanigans.

https://homestuck.com/story/8032

This is a little parallel I missed before, between Aradia and Jade.

Now that she’s had a little pep talk from Davepetasprite, Jade’s conquest over sleep is parallel to Aradia’s conquest over death, and I think they both form a nice metaphor for surviving depression.

https://homestuck.com/story/8112

After action patch-up.

Everyone gets a chance to see the ones they love most at last, no more stakes.

https://homestuck.com/story/8126

The Prospitian Monarch can beat her swords to ploughshares at last.

https://homestuck.com/story/8127

As the kids enter their new universe, their entrance is as one with the defeat of Lord English.

As Vriska destroys Lord English, her destruction is as one with his destruction.

The end of Paradox Space is as one with a new beginning for all sentient beings.

And the end of Homestuck is as one with the beginning of a life for these kids where they are not confined by the solidified line of the narrative, and numerous possibilities are open to them.

Let’s hope they pick good ones.

I’ll see you tomorrow for some final words, and some previews of my next projects.

For now, Cam signing off, alive, and not alone.

[me-and-my-gaster]

I don't know jack shit about homestuck but here you go! 3, 27 and 74! (I hope the questions apply to you) Oh and also 40 because I like when you ramble about ships even if I don't know those ships! ^3^

The 100 Homestuck Asks!

3 - How many times have you read HS?

It’s hard to count, I guess? I started reading it once and had to stop after the Cascade (about halfway). Then I re-read the first half to ‘get it’ when I read about the Alpha Kid’s session and finished the whole thing. Then I often worked with a YT queue of ‘Let’s Read Homestuck’ playing in the background. And I also often jump in and read a page or a hundred when my friend who is currently reading the whole thing for the first time reminds me of something awesome. So... Personally, fully, with my own two eyes with no breaks (that was a mighty binge, I tell you)? Once. Overall... hard to tell.

27 - Favorite carapacian?

I’d say The Mayor, because everybody loves the Mayor and the Mayor deserves all the love. I do also have a weakness for the Windswept Questant (White Queen) because her design is very pretty.

74 -  Earth C headcanons?

Everybody lived happily ever after, the end. Also, this was only the first planet they inhabited, later on, they traveled further to explore their new Universe. Good shit, good adventures, good fun.

40 - BROTP?

Ho boy. You like me ranting about ships and you picked one of the topics I can rant about A LOT.

Dave & Rose - they behave like siblings, squabble, talk shit, whine about each other, but despite that, both are ready to maul a bitch for the other AND die to keep the other one alive. 11/10.

Dirk & Roxy - they gave each other a hard time but boy if I don’t love how deep their pride and respect goes when it comes to one another. Especially since they grew up in similar circumstances and GET each other in ways that nobody else could. Good sibs again. Kick ass, chew gum, and have unhealthy coping mechanisms together.

Meowrails - at first I thought Equius was too overbearing towards Nepeta and that he was trying to keep her on ‘a leash’. But then I reminded myself that he kept her safe from the goddamn revenge spiral Vriska started and if Nepeta really wanted to do something, she would. I like the difference in height and personality between them. Nepeta being a very small, active, extroverted, and open one is a good balance for Equius’ big body and proper, stiff, and formal behavior. There are also those little things you notice like Nepeta having a blue tail, which meant Equius used his skills to help her with the Lioness life. Like how they’re usually shown together. Like how Equius trying to protect her while simultaneously knowing he’s too weak to keep her safe by his side, so he sends her away. Like how Nepeta was following him anyway and was ready to maul a mad clown because her moirail was hurt. All of it. I just really like them and I’m glad most of the fic writers always keep them together. 

Dave & Dirk - jesus wept, that one long-ass talk between them at the very end of the story hit me so hard. Both of them talking about Bro, about Alpha Dave about how they grew up and what are their expectations of each other. This was one of the best convos in the whole thing for me. I wish I could see more of them, cause there’s so much good shit that can happen. Every fic with Dave and Dirk being good brothers in any older/younger configuration is A+ content for me.

John & Karkat - I know JohnKat is a very fun and nice ship and I don’t blame anybody for preferring those two as a romantic couple but... there’s something for me with them being close friends (or moirails, please gods, yes). They really had a very good relationship in the story, one that had a lot of buildup and growth. One of my favorite convos comes from their interactions. (hi karkat!) They are both leaders of their respective groups, self-proclaimed or not and they did work together (with a lot of help from Jade, that is) to figure out how to save everybody’s asses. They also seem to balance each other out, or at least John is a good balance for Karkat’s unending anger rants. Karkat is also a lot smarter than John and isn’t afraid to point out the other’s dumbassery, so there’s that. What also appeals to me in the idea of them being moirails is how it could be a lovely way to work through John “I Am Not A Homosexual” Egbert’s internalized masculinity stereotypes.

Now, let’s delve deep into the BROTPs that didn’t have much material in the comic.

Sollux & Dave - I didn’t give this pair any thought until I’ve read a few good fics with them being in a pale quadrant, and let me tell you... this shit’s good. Those two are assholes on the outside and would probably be the duo that annoys the everloving shit out of everybody in the close vicinity just with their banter. And I just think they’re neat.

Davesprite & Hal - those two would have hit it off immediately, even if only for being the fifth wheel in their respective “kids set”. Both seem more bitter than their ‘alpha’ counterparts. Both also seem more mature, due to being a bit older/wiser but also a little bit more broken. Both also got mighty forgotten by everybody which, not gonna lie, hurts me a lot. I have a lot of feelings about Davesprite and how much he went through and I also have a lot of feelings about Hal, who’s both a human stuck in the shades and an AI at the same time. I just wish to see the two interact and be bros they really need. They should be happy, dammit!

Roxy & Eridan - the scarf and sniper rifle duo! Ok, I love both of them because they are my comfort characters for various reasons and their stories hit home very hard, so I am mighty biased. But... They both have issues that seem to be polar opposites for the most parts and I really dig the idea of them moirailing the shit out of each other. Roxy being a very open person who is first to make friends would have no issues with befriending Eridan “Water Asshole” Ampora any time of the day. And I think he needs somebody who would listen to him properly and attack him with too much love at any waking moment but also somebody he would have to be actually responsible for. Also, like I said, both are snipers who also use another extra specibi, so I think they would make a lovely power BROTP. 

Also, I do love the idea of Eridan painting Roxy’s nails because she never could get it right herself because she was either drunk or running with pumpkins and the polish looked shitty immediately after she applied it.

Ok, that’s about it when it comes to the BROTPs from the top of my head. Thank you for your ask!

[dragimal]

ok this is like. MAJORLY self-indulgent, self-psychoanalyzing rambling so I’m putting it under a readmore, but my thoughts have been spinning in circles over this for like. practically my whole teen/adult life. and I just need to put it down somewhere

idc if anyone wants to read this or respond or anything, again I’m just basically trying to vomit out my thoughts until something makes sense

so like. anxiety. I know I have it, that’s the ONE Problems Disorder I’m 100% certain I’ve got, to whatever degree it matters

but that’s kinda the thing-- to WHAT degree, and DOES that matter? at what point can I say it’s a legitimate part of me, and at what point is it something negligible and unobtrusive?

b/c here’s the other thing-- anxiety is, in fact, a strong aspect of my self-image. it’s something I associate strongly with as a character trait, and I tend to relate to ‘meek’ characters

I know part of it is a defense mechanism. I had to make myself small, being raised by my mom. she’s a whole other rant, but essentially she’s a very defensively prideful person, and any attempt to steer a conversation towards your own accomplishments/needs/interests is met with a blank look and a swift topic change back to herself. (and god forbid u bring up her faults, that would guarantee manipulative guilt-tripping at best, screaming and crying at worst)

but there’s also another convoluted level to this defense mechanism. I recognized at a young age, on some subconscious level, that pride was/is my mom’s greatest downfall. so I internalized that as, “pride (and even more broadly, confidence) is bad and and a danger to those around you” 

not to be Homestuck on main, but Dave’s first conversation with Dirk struck me on a level of personal experience that few other pieces of media have ever hit, particularly this bit

obviously the physical aspect of this abuse is beyond me, but the emotional manipulation, and Bro subsequently ruining a generally positive concept (the concept of heroism, in his case) hits incredibly close to home

my mom exuded confidence and always told me that confidence in myself over all else would save me, but she ultimately ruined confidence for me. I know there will always be this underlying thread of fear that if I’m not afraid-- that if I allow myself confidence-- that I will become like her. that I’ll hurt people with my pride

now this is all shit that I’ve known abt myself for a long time, and I know I’ve even mentioned some of this in passing before. but here’s what’s fucking me up nowadays: what happens when you cling to anxiety like this? what happens when you craft a disorder into your personality? where does subconscious reaction end and deliberate masking begin?

b/c here’s the other thing: I don’t truly hate myself. not rly-- not on the level I would say is dangerous or clinical. some of it may very well be real, but I definitely play it up. like play-acting at under-confidence

and it’s not like I don’t have pride either. I have tons of pride for various things I do or accomplish, namely academic studies, crafting/art, and just like working standards in general. when I can eloquently describe/argue my point, or accurately craft something to my inner image, I feel very real pride

but pride hurts. I feel pride, but equal to that is the shame I feel at feeling pride in the first place. it’s genuinely painful at times to accept a compliment without argument NOT because I necessarily disagree (tho there are definitely times where I DO actually disagree), but to accept a compliment is to admit I have pride in the thing being complimented, and THAT is unacceptable

and it’s not like my fear is unfounded either. I’ve hurt ppl w/ my pride before-- and this isn’t my anxiety making me self-critical, I KNOW this for a FACT. it simply comes with the territory of all that “gifted child” bullshit in school. yeah I was one of those. thankfully not a very outspoken student (the anxiety in my younger days was a lot more real and visceral), but I do still distinctly remember moments where my academic pride gave me an... inflated sense of presence over those that didn’t get the material, I guess u could say

I know there were times I made ppl feel small, due to my pride. hell, times I got overly, fearfully defensive of my knowledge or artistic skill to the point of talking over others and making them feel stupid. no one deserves to feel small, and it fucking tears me up to know that I did that to ppl. that I still knee-jerk react in that way sometimes, even now, and it still slips out

and isn’t that just proof that I can’t appropriately handle pride? that I’m not mature enough for confidence?

and it’s not even all about making myself small for others’ sake. half of it is this incredibly selfish knowledge that not living up to my own standards will fucking kill me if I let it

I feel like every ‘gifted kid’ experiences a chain events that starts at, “wow I’m so smart, I’m great at every subject!” and ends at, “christ I’m fucking garbage at literally everything.” we’re taught that success is in being able to do something well the first time (or at least quickly and with little effort), so if we’re not immediately good at something, we shut down b/c we were never taught that success is actually in the effort at the task

this has been talked to death by others so I don’t want to bother w/ it too long, but the critical thing to note is that there’s there’s this eventual sense of defeat in everything you do, when ur brought up w/ this mindset

I used to be somewhat competitive in certain things when I was younger-- the rare sports I played when I was RLY young, academics obviously, etc. or at least, competitive with my own personal standards, if not necessarily against other ppl. but every failure and mistake made me so upset that the angst was like. genuinely dangerous to my health

I used to play golf on a team in middle school, and every time I whiffed it I would get SO angry at myself that my dad literally told me that that level of upset would kill me someday and that I rly needed to stop

so I took that to heart and just. stopped caring

every time I whiffed it after that point, I was just like, “ah, well, what can ya do ¯|_(ツ)_/¯ ” this attitude definitely lowered my blood pressure, but it also rly killed my motivation to like... improve. b/c the thought of even trying to improve brought up all these feelings abt trying to meet my own standards of success, and how much it would hurt to fail

when u don’t set any standards u gotta meet, then when u fail u don’t rly fail, y’know? “well I didn’t even try, so it’s actually fine”

obviously I couldn’t give less of a shit abt golf anymore, but sometimes I wonder if my cold-turkey drop in confidence played a part in killing the interest itself? I know that sports and physical activity were never rly my thing in the first place, but did I perhaps give up so hard that I convinced myself that I didn’t even like those things in the first place?

I know it happened w/ academics at least: start to struggle with math? now I hate math. chemistry? that sucks too. etc etc

I kinda side-tracked here w/ all the talk of ‘gifted kid’ stuff, my point is that I have a vested interest in humbling myself-- to actively craft the persona of a meek, humble person

and I’ve been wondering if that, in and of itself, is manipulative. like, is it manipulative to let others think I rly lack THAT much in self-confidence? that I rly hate myself that much?

it certainly feels that way when I knee-jerk reject a compliment abt something I do, in fact, feel pride in-- when the shame at that pride is too much. but my friends don’t know it’s that reactive shame-- they think it’s that I rly don’t have confidence in that thing

but god, how do I even explain this fucking tangled, convoluted bullshit over my reaction to compliments? that I have to be small or I’ll hurt someone? that I do feel pride, and that’s the problem? what does that even MEAN to someone outside my own head??

and that’s not even to get into whether that manipulation is like, actually some subconscious tactic to get MORE compliments! am I fishing? when I make a post like this, am I actually just fishing for more compliments? is that what I’m doing??

I feel like I’m running in circles here, nipping at my own goddamned heels abt pride and shame and what is real and acting and does it even matter if nobody gets hurt?

do people get hurt? ppl get hurt when I allow myself pride, it’s happened before. but now I’m realizing that my self-hate may hurt ppl too-- my self-deprecation often goes too far, and it hurts the ppl who care abt me

how do I explain that self-deprecation is safe? a shield to hold back my pride? hell, it’s more accurate to say it’s a safe way to EXPRESS my pride in a way that ppl don’t detect. I acknowledge my faults, and if I frame it in a socially-acceptably comedic way, I get the pride of making someone laugh! it’s SAFE pride!

but is it? but is it, when it hurts ppl to hear me self-hate?

is there any way to feel pride safely?

I’ve never thought of myself as an actor, or as someone who can lie well (or at all). but can I lie, when I also believe the lie? is it a lie that I have anxiety? that I hate myself? that I have no confidence?

how much of me is real? how much does that hurt others? how do I carve out the parts of me that hurt others how do I make myself smaller in ways that are genuine and lasting and don’t hurt people??

I want to be small. I like being small. but am I small? or am I playing at being small?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

(cashing in on that safe comedic validation babeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy)

[katreal-fic]

Day 4 — for #fictober 10/04/19

Prompt: “I know you didn’t ask for this.”

Fandom: Homestuck

Warnings: Cursing, 2nd Person POV, Thoughts of Self Harm, fatalism, Descriptions of Temporary Death, Internalized Self Hatred

This is not a happy one. Sorry.

Characters: Dirk Strider & Dirk Strider (spoiler he doesn’t like himself much)

First | Previous | Next

x-x-x

You feel like you’re losin’ your mind.

Dirk > Pass the Time

The days drag by, a whirl of frantic activity where nothing absolutely happens. You throw yourself into work, but none of that work is actually worth shit. It’s all literal garbage. You’re lost in a haze that paints the walls a brilliantly familiar shade of green even if in your head you know it’s mostly neutral tones, metal and concrete. Your eyes slide off the product you’re supposed to be improving for Crockercorp as a favor, searching for--you don’t know. You feel like you should just be able to look and see and understand what it is you should be doing. What you should be working towards.

You know what you should be working towards. The what-ever-the-fuck contraption that rests dismantled on your work-bench. A favor for Jane. There’s a bug. A bug her engineers can’t squash. And even if you’ve turned into the world’s highest profile shut-in over these last couple years you still want-need to help your friends. To be useful, because that shit gives you purpose. Or it should. You just aren’t feelin’ it right now. Scraps of metal and half-gutted projects litter the surfaces of your workshop, but fuck it none of this matters. 

Right now you see nothing because it’s laughable. This is what you’ve resorted to spending your time on? Tinkering with toys? Any purpose you could grab at doesn’t matter. Irrelevent.  The one thing you were created for; it’s finished. Done. 

You aren’t even upset about it. It’s a fact, not a question. After preparing all your lives for something, only to have that final climactic moment pass, letting you and everything you love slide into irrelevance... 

What is left for you now?

Fuck, you want to take your wrench to your own skull and dig those slimey invasive questions out. The only reason you don’t is because you know such a death would be neither just, nor heroic (even if you think ridding the world of your horseshit might be a heroic cause of its own sometimes) so you’d just revive fit as a fiddle and bloody as hell, and you can’t be bothered to clean that shit up, especially when that blood and gore has a chance to splatter into the innermost workings of delicate electronics and fuck everything up. Even if your mood decided to take a swing for the depressive, and maybe nothing matters right now, the logical part of your brain that feels unnervingly like reading your autoresponder’s red text is calling you an idiot for letting chemical responses rule your organic flesh-lump of a brain. You’d think, as a god, having transcended biology considering you can’t fuckin’ die, you wouldn’t have to deal with this shit anymore.

It’ll pass. It always does. You throw the wrench onto the table when you find yourself looking at it for too long and make like a tree. Obviously you are not in the headspace to work today. 

You fold yourself into the crawlspace above the living room instead, your heart contracting painfully in your chest, as you look around the comparatively empty space even after all these years of living here. Your shit. All the shit bro’d left you. Shit that’d survived 400 years of sea-air and 6 months of game-time and the literal birth of the universe. Lost on the other side of that gate. You hadn’t even thought to go back for it. Hadn’t even occurred to you that you’d miss it. 

All you had was your shades, and whatever data you’d had uploaded onto them locally. Roxy might be able to hack into what remained of sburb’s network. Maybe. If you asked. Maybe she could retrieve your data, if nothing else. All the interviews, and notes. Personal shit. Things neither you, nor AR had considered important to back-up in his active New-World-Order archive.

Personal shit hadn’t been important when your destiny was to create a new world. 

You thought you’d want to move away from the past. To start anew. Yet as echos of lives you-yet-not-you never lived bear down at you, you find yourself grasping at straws to keep the core of yourself intact.

You yearn for a needle. Thread. Soft fabric under your fingers. In another life, the one activity that had allowed you to zen the fuck out and block out the fitful sound of a baby crying because it was too hot out and there was shit all you could do about it. In another life, it’d calmed you, muting the distant chatter of FASTER BETTER STRONGER ALWAYS STRONGER and the constant chorus of laughter.

Maybe you should try it. Stitch the fuck out of your heart. Close up the widening rips and tears allowing your own thoughts to seep through. 

You never asked for this.

You know you didn’t ask for this.

Your whole shtick was digging deep into yourself and cutting away the bits you don’t like, only to find it didn’t fucking matter because all of you is garbage and you can never change.

You’d just wanted the time to be better.

Maybe you’d wasted that in trying not to get worse.

You want to talk to Roxy. 

You want to talk to Jane.

You even want to talk to Jake.

Most of all, you want to talk to Dave.

But how can you talk to Dave like this?

You’d taken one look at Davepeta and never could completely step out of the shadow of oil and raging green flames. It loomed in the back of your mind, waiting for the silence to allow the growl of dogs to creep forward again. The shadow of death hovering over you. And honestly? That wasn’t so bad. You don’t mind death. Dyin’ in battle ain’t so bad even if you wish you’d been able to be the one to skewer the bastard. Your last memory was of the kid flying away. Injured, but safe. Off to fulfill his destiny. You much prefer being anchored there  than in hot summer days and bruises and babies crying because you’re too wrapped up in your own horseshit to care. Callous. Cold. A decade and change of neglect you know screwed Dave up. He told you. A hug. On a roof. Under a krypton green sky looking over a ruined city waiting for the world to burn. At least that memory is yours.

...isn’t it?

You’re lost. One day you worry you won’t crawl your way back out. Or if you do, it won’t be you any longer.

First | Previous | Next

[bladekindeyewear]

Boots reads Homestuck Epilogue(s) Part 6 - Meat Page 16

==>  (Whoa, went a long while before splitting posts, there.  Dangerous, with how often I’ve lost stuff to Tumblr page reloads in the past.)

Oh, you’ve realized Zazzerpan’s relevance as foreshadowing for the trolls or whatever, Rose?

Oh my god, PLEASE don’t put Rose inside a fucking robot.  >:|

Oh SHIT wait.  That one wizard Roxy named her cat after who wanted all the knowledge in the world, got overloaded and then crushed by the giant textbook or whatever???  That’s disturbingly Rose-similar here.  D:

Rose, puns.  Please.

Hm, you think it applies to you all now instead of the trolls?  Huh.  Do you think some of you might become villains and get Just deaths?

..Huh, wait.  Numerological significance?  Are we actually learning what 413 means?  Or learning that it was meant to be bullshit all along instead?  I’m “Hmmm”ing loudly either way...

Ow, ouch.  So a Light player wasn’t designed to properly live outside of canon significance, or??

Ooh.  She’s not sure that if she opens herself up to all the knowledge of her other selves, that it’d be “her” anymore.  A pretty legitimate fear... and one Dirk is perfectly disposed to disabuse her of.  As a Heart player, he’d understand better than most that the entire combination of one’s various states over all timelines IS you, and the unique direction your will and uniqueness embodies across whatever it touches.  Or something.

...Wait, wait a minute.  Before I keep reading........ I didn’t actually CLICK the candy button yet.  What if Candy just redirects to AO3 or something.  Like, the candy bit is all of our fanfics.  Oh jeez.

Okay reading on before that possibility drives me insane.

DIRK: I’m not sure anyone should be allowed to have that much foresight. Especially a guy like me.

...Mhmm, especially since in part that’s how we got Doc Scratch, yeah.

Reading to the end of this page, and........

Yeah, what the FUCK just happened.

So... is this Dirk BEING a villain?  Doing some sort of weird almost cherubic Eye thing to kind of supplant Rose as he becomes a Scratch-like fanfic narrator or... Let me reread these last few paragraphs a couple times...

Is he really sort of “puppeteering” Rose?  Is this like the birth of a god-tier villain or just a temporary respite he’s giving her sort of underhandedly for an actual good cause to help her out of her situation??  Or is “death” or a death of the self the actual solution he had for her mess???  I mean... the metatextual awareness bit that he’s speaking through in the last sentence is clearly something like what comes of ascending completely and going beyond the story to be able to write it like Caliborn or Doc Scratch might or... y’know what, fuck it.  I’ll understand it in later pages.  I have to keep reading if this is going to make sense to me.

This next button better not lead straight back to the fucking selection screen again.

==>

Oh shit, a giant Dirk section.  Only fitting that he might have been writing most of this all along possibly.

Undercurrent of narrative significance.  Oh shit.  Is he going to go off about Light, about the story parts not mattering?  Or that the fact that this IS a story and... from what I accidentally skimmed in sentences below before reading further, how we’re trapping them in a story by reading it or something???  Hence the idea that their existences are being “blighted” by the subtext of narrative significance, and would be better FREE of it?

Huh.  Is this really going to work?  As, like... a body slam of people who were too caught up in the forest of narrative purpose to see into the trees of the point he wanted to make with the finale?  It’s practically Andrew talking to the audience from within the story about their frustrations, heh.

Yeah, this whole rant is pretty awesome so far.  I forgot to mention it a few paragraphs ago, but when you look at the story list, the Epilogues are listed as “stories of dubious authenticity”, so is this whole thing like... how DIRK might have written the ending out?  Just to emphasize further that this whole thing is kind of pointless compared to the infinite possibility that was the reward for their escape from the confines of such story-stuff?

Cool.  Sounds like we’re seeing the “good end” that Dirk would have written for this story if he were to write one that still answers plotlike questions, or something similar to it.  That and/or he’s also engineering things in-canon -- or as “canon” as the victory planet is -- to follow all this for the end result he has in mind, and it comes across as practically Doc Scratch-y in the way it ties in metatextual awareness and stuff.  Either way, it DOES feel like Andrew might successfully be making his point.

==>

Pff.  This is going to be a bit interesting.  And, of course, unstuck-in-canon John can hear the narrator speaking.

And now John has ANOTHER story to get annoyed at the narrator of, heh.

The tooth is poisoned? Really? Did you just make that up or?

Okay, why suddenly the wallet, fanfic writer? Is he going to find touching pictures or just captchalogue the black hole?

This is all starting to feel a whole lot less serious, and I can’t help but figure that’s the intent.

==>

Pff, back to the B plot.  Yay Jade!  --Please don’t be metatextually aware like John and let’s get more actual story.

Phew, seems to be the case

...Is Karkat going to remake this post-scarcity society to be more Communist? Is that where we’re going here?

Alright, Roxy’s gonna be all voidy and Neutral and not want an impact on the election, from the sound of it?

GAAAHHH Jade is in love with all her friends and afraid of being alone.  AAAH FEELS

--Oh huh, so because Jane’s been in the distance putting on the Perfect act she thinks she has to pull, she’s gone down in her friends’ opinions even if that isn’t really her???  That’s pretty reassuring as an alternative, actually.  Leave it to Roxy to see everything crystal goddamn clear as usual.

Ooh, pronoun mishap.

Holy SHIT Roxy’s gonna go along with it.  That’s nonbinary-awesome!  And Dirk’s just fucking flabbergasted, I love it.

Pff, Dirk’s screwing it up outside too

yep, everyone ectobiologically had kids with everyone, really.

Oh, ow.  Something about the whole black hole green sun thing is fucking with her.  That, or, like...  Huh, might the whole metatextual ascension thing mean that she actually BECOMES that other Jade floating about for a hot minute, the one in the A-side plot??

==>

Ow this excellent narrative is pretty painful.  Like, empathetically inducing pain through really good description of pain and angst.  Ow.

Oh shit, alt!Calliope has a plan.  Maybe she’s able to use this black hole to re-begin Paradox Space and close the loop once everything’s absorbed or something, and needs a Jade’s help for it?

==>

Phew, some relative silliness with some of the others.  That vivid description of a Jade’s suffering was starting to give my stomach a cramp.  Actually, ANY vivid description of Jade’s suffering gives my stomach a cramp.  Or any allusion to it, even, heck even without WORDS.  I saw a Jadey song redux show up on my Youtube dashboard a few nights ago and had to turn it off after less than thirty seconds because I was about to throw up listening to the tune and staring at the image from my stomach clenching SO HARD.  I am WAY too attached to Jade in particular to tolerate her suffering without serious emotional feedback on my part.

Okay, breathe.  Breathe deeply, and keep reading...

....PFF, yes, Karkat.  Finally acknowledge it’s disgusting.  Birth is disgusting from any species really.

Yaaaay Kanaya! :)

Pfffff, Dave does record scratches with his hands mid-conversation like a fucking dab.  He would.

KANAYA: I Am Impressed That You Managed To Be Seen In Front Of That Many People Without Spontaneously Bursting Into Flames

I’m laughing

We internalize and project the quality in very different ways, however, which is why I’m going to win.

Win?!????

Win WHAT, the election???  Is that your only grand plan or... I mean fuck, way to be Doc-Scratch-like ominous!  Reading on...

...Yeah, Feferi was definitely a proto-Fascist too.  :)

Oh, huh. “Power Corrupts In Small Steps”... is this whole President thing going to be a big-ass metaphor for gaining your God powers without abusing them?? And pointing out that Jane is hella abusing her status in a way that COULD become villainous if it goes too far?  Victory is supposed to give you the ability to create a universe, but you’re not necessarily supposed to lord over it with an iron fist...

KARKAT: WHEN I HEAR ABOUT HOW HUMAN GRUBS CHEW THEIR WAY OUT OF THE FEMALE MATESPRIT’S ABDOMINAL HOLE BEFORE CONSUMING THE WOMB MEMBRANE IT MAKES ME WANT TO VOMIT.

Pffffffff

KANAYA: He Is Beloved In The Troll Kingdom For His Perky Ass DAVE: seriously? KARKAT: I TOLD YOU IT’S NOT JUST ME! KANAYA: It Has Some Terrible Arcane Power KANAYA: I Have Never Seen Anything Like It

I am laughing out loud here

pff dave’s doubtlessly imagined this at least as much as the rest of us

YESSS make fun of ship names some more, especially the ship names I’m not a fan of even though I’m such a fan of the pairing :D

KANAYA: Im Going To Call My Wife And You Are Going To Stop Talking

Why do I love that sentence so much.  Is it just because it has the word wife in it.  Probably.

At the other side of the cavern, Dave and Karkat bicker about what their combo kids would look like, in the event that they decided to stop being such laughable wusses and began fornicating like two cartoon animals of different species who have given into their lust.

Pffff.  Yeah, Dirk would put it that way.

Pffffff.  Not as adept at handling all sides of the story at the same time as you were as part of Doc, eh?

==>

Reading reading reading... Oh, adorable, he tried to slip a fish pun into Meenah’s name but couldn’t think of one.

...Oh SHIT, is he going to give Meenah the ring of life she wanted??? :D

Oh pff, that works too.  :D

==>

Okay, time for maybe at least a SLIGHT explanation of whatever the FUCK Dirk might have or might not have done to Rose or something????

...Huh.  What exactly are you trying to “fix” about Kanaya and Rose’s relationship, Dirk?  Something that didn’t fix itself with just the two of them together?

I mean...... Rose’s substance abuse never fixed itself when it was just two of them together on the first-run meteor.  And she’s been taking pills and trying to stave off her destiny out of fear while her wife hasn’t really been digging into her insecurities... I mean maybe he has a point.

SHADOWS around her??????  D:

==>

Yeah yeah, John drifting.  I just remembered what one of those “server beacons” they were mentioning actually is, too, visually.  Knowing it had an escape route helped.

What are you even gonna do with the slippers, gift them to Terezi when she comes flying in?  (Also, right, just remembered he’s a Breath player so it’s only natural that he actually finds whatever there is to find “coincidentally” around here, like that wallet.)

Ooh, you REALLY were thinking about Terezi over the past years from the sound of it.  And here she is or whatever.  :)

1 C4N ST1LL TOUCH TYP3 1N H3R L33T SP34K W1THOUT 4NY 4SS1ST4NC3 3XC3PT C4PS LOCK ON 4FT3R 4LL TH3S3 Y34RS  >:]

==>

Okay okay okay wait.  Her shadow is talking??? Is this, like... Jungian shadow stuff? Inversion shadow stuff?  What the fuck is going on.  It better not be Inversion-related.

Let me read that again.

Her shadow has faded to light behind her, assuming the shape of a Rose-like apparition. I nod to her, and she continues. When she speaks, it’s almost as if it’s the apparition that’s doing the talking.

That’s weird and I don’t entirely know what it means. I’d better just keep fucking reading.

Fun philosophical banter.  I didn’t know what “Hegelian dialectics” were until I read some big rant on someone’s Fallout New Vegas playthrough earlier last month.

ROSE: I think free will is a thing, sure. DIRK: Are you sure about that? ROSE: ... DIRK: Haven’t we spent the entire day having a feelings jam on how none of us got here by accident?

Ah, here we’re going with some Ultimate Riddle-y stuff.

Or wait, are we adding a bit on to that concept now?  Because it now seems like a large PART of the Ultimate Riddle stuff I covered (FUCK dropbox for breaking all the images) that might be revealed in this part of the damn epilogue is the whole the-only-way-to-have-true-free-will-is-to-escape-the-narrative-imposed-on-us or something along with the rest of it.

Hm, that whole “become One God” bit that Dirk ranted about in the beginning of one of the John sections... is that his ambition here?  I didn’t comment on the rantparagraph earlier because the “one” part of it threw me as possibly just some philosophical stuff he was musing about, but it’s like... I mean Dirk is the narrator right now, and it sounds like he wants to *BE* the narrator.  Like, become the one truly in control of this whole story.  With his orange Andrew-colored text or whatever.  Is that what he meant by “win”, winning control of the entire narrative, turning everyone else in the story into mere extensions of himself that he was “writing” by virtue of being the only author?

And him getting thwarted in that task, showing that it’s better if there really is NO narrator and the characters can do whatever they imagine in infinite branches and our imaginations, is the victory that proves the point of the story.  Or something.  Hmm.

Also, huh.  Like... I mean that IS a natural extension of a Prince of Heart if he were to turn to villainy.  A grand ambition to destroy everyone’s individuality until they’re nothing but Himself.  Right?

DIRK: Your Ultimate Self, that which is revealed when the mind’s partitions are stripped away, and all potentiality of who you are and what you could have been flow together. DIRK: Those are the experiences and processes that are refusing to stay bundled, that’s what your body can’t endure. The unbundling itself is your mind coming apart. DIRK: Because you’re not as strong as me. Not yet. DIRK: But you can be. DIRK: I’m working on that.

Because she’ll “BE” you?  Because you’ll be everyone?  Hm.

DIRK: But for now, I’m focused on stabilizing you with my own expanding consciousness. DIRK: It’s enveloping you now, in a way you can’t see. Keeping your thoughts solid, your identity anchored to your physical form as it strains to hold itself together. DIRK: You can’t see it, what I’m talking about. But I can help you. DIRK: I can help you see what I see, if only for a little while. DIRK: All you have to do is open your eyes. DIRK: Maybe what you see will help you through this.

Okay so maybe this all ain’t TOTALLY fucking sinister.  Just partially.  Hmm.

I’m not going to describe what she sees. First of all, that would be spoiling it. Unless you already know, in which case, I guess what’s taking place here qualifies as something closer to dramatic irony. But if you really want to see it for yourself, stop what you’re doing, flip the whole thing over, and begin again. I’ll be right here when you get back, waiting. Trust me, no one’s going anywhere.

Hahahahah.  So the candy part IS written.  I mean I was pretty sure, but it’s nice to have it acknowledged here.  Pretty awesome.  I won’t stop here to read it, I’ll get to the candy part eventually as a nice dessert.

All she needs is a nudge in the right direction.

We’re family. We belong together. And after years of micromanaging the inconsistent and confused desires of total imbeciles, wouldn’t it be a relief to have someone by my side who understood me?

Stop being so incestuous.  Dirk, you’re just getting off on the CONCEPT of incest being part of the flavor of all this, aren’t you.  That’s why you kept pushing things this way, you want it to be as uncomfortable as possible.

...wait, yeah he’s just talking about being a metatextual ascended, isn’t he.

Her body should be dead now.

I’M SORRY WHAT THE FLYING FUCK.

And Rose has... what, ascended but somehow given in to Dirk’s puppeteering of existence, or?  Ugh.

Next post, I wanna keep reading already to get through all this bullshit.  Then once I’ve figured it all out, I can rest comfortably back with the Candy side which Rose practically just promised me is potentially TOO SUGARY which is really enticing as a prospect.

[thaumaturtles]

Epilogue Thoughts

So, I finished the epilogues at around 11 AM on 4/21 and spent the better part of today mulling over it internally. Overall, I think I liked ‘em. Don’t get me wrong, they were brutal and tragic and ripped my heart out, but this is my garbage and I’m allowed to enjoy it. I was planning on liveblogging the epilogues but constantly pausing to jot down my feelings detracted from the overall experience. This is probably gonna be pretty scattershot, since I have neither the ability nor the desire to order my thoughts properly. Now, without any further preamble, let’s get into it.

Jane

 A lot of people said they didn’t like the treatment of Jane in the epilogues, and, fair enough, she was pretty awful and Crocker stans have every right to be pissed. But to anyone saying it came out of left field or didn’t make sense, I’d have to disagree (for the most part). Jane was brainwashed by the Condesce for the first 16 years of her life, and we see the effects of this when she goes Crockertier. She’d almost certainly have baked-in presumptions about how trolls were “meant to be” (ie super violent) even before she was consciously aware that trolls as a race existed. Jane was also always really in denial about having been brainwashed by the Condesce and I can definitely see adult Jane flat-out refusing to do any self-analysis and just assume there are no remaining effects of the brainwashing and she’s “totally cured” now or whatever. Jane’s also not super progressive? Like the conversation where she discovers Dirk has a crush on Jake and that Jake might even reciprocate was pretty uncomfortable to experience, and she starts a business on Earth C even though there’s no real need for corporations in a world with infinite resources. This shows that she’s still stuck in the belief that capitalism is inherently good/necessary for no reason other than “it’s what i grew up with.” All in all I could totally see Jane as someone who’d grow up to become xenophobic and have this colonizer mentality of “I have to regulate the Other because they’re not capable of functioning without me”

As for the non-consensual/rapey stuff... I’m actually not gonna touch that shit with a six-foot pole. The narrative is very explicit in the fact that Jane is an abusive partner and what she’s doing Is Bad, but like if she’s your favourite character you probably aren’t going to be all gung ho about seeing her do all the things that she did, which were admittedly very upsetting to read. I completely understand if you couldn’t read past those parts because they were pretty rough.

The Epilogues do get pretty unpleasant to read though :/

The Epilogues are highly antagonistic towards Homestuck’s readers. This is a fact. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to interpretation, but it is at the very least not a new thing. Listen to Kate Mitchell of the Perfectly Generic Podcast and YouTuber OptimisticDuelist for more in-depth analysis than I could possibly provide on this, but one of Lord English’s greatest weapons is his ability to get people not to care about Homestuck, or even better, to revile it. That’s what the aspect of Rage represents: Plot Contrivance. As Karkat says,

THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF. FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID. THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.

This is repeated, by Hussie himself no less, later on during his smug self-insert, found here. After Hussie dies and loses control of the narrative, LE is free to try his hardest to get you, the reader, not to give a shit. Rose, in the Epilogue’s Prologue, says that if people stop caring about Homestuck, reality as they know it will break apart, which is exactly in line with LE’s plans. So the fact that the Epilogues are very hostile towards the reader is basically par for the course. That said, I can see how it kinda sounds like I’m being all “oh it’s SUPPOSED to be shitty you wouldn’t underSTAND,” but that’s. literally what’s happening. and there’s evidence for it in the text.

Of course, in the past, when the narrative would pull things like this it would be under the guise of, say, Homosuck, which is very obviously meant to be bad and is presented in a fun, satirical way. The Epilogues, on the other hand, are downright upsetting. They’re presented in a much grittier light, which can obfuscate to what degree it’s Actually A Joke, if it even is a joke in any capacity. The fact that they’re tragic, though, should not be seen as evidence that they’re bad.

Some stuff I Liked

Both routes had some really top-notch interactions in them. A lot of folks seem to be overlooking how genuinely good the writing was. I said the phrase, “they’ve still got it” ALOUD to myself once or twice because the dialogue really did have that good ole Homestuck Charm. The Dave/Karkat/Jade interactions early on in Candy (before everything went to shit) were pretty great, as was basically everything that came out of English’s mouth. I dunno who the Antiquities Consultant was, but they did an excellent job at mirroring Jake’s usual speech pattern. I find that a lot of people, when writing Jake, just kinda throw in as many random old-timey words as possible and as a result it feels kinda disjointed, but the writing team for the epilogues managed to make him feel very... would light be a good way to put it? Sort of airheaded I guess. Just very goofy idk

We got to see Rosemary and they were married and raised a kid and it was the best! Rose was really well-written, as was Kanaya; I really loved seeing those personalities balance each other out again. It was nice to see them be good parents in the Candy-verse. The Vriska they raised was such a fucking scamp too! It was nice to see a Vriska who had a positive home environment but still had that same spunk

Also, Dave. Just, all of Dave. He was really solidly written throughout the whole thing. I fucking love his interest in the economy holy shit. I got to hear Dave Strider say the phrase  “neoliberal austerity measures.” That’s the best. “Economically Aware Anti-capitalist Dave” is rivaled only by “Karkat (True Leftism)”. I’ve seen a few complaints that Dave’s interest in the economy was also OOC, but for one thing he’s an adult and can cultivate new interests if he likes, and for another Dave is a pretty clever kid, and very numerically-minded. (Is that a term? I mean he’s good at maths and such). Don’t forget, not only did he manage to accumulate all the wealth on LOCAH in the span of three days by taking over their stock markets, but he also used the hash map modus in his day to day life, showing that he was able to do calculations in his head as quick as breathing. As shown here, the hash map modus is pretty complex and requires you to come up with a word that has the same value as the thing you wanna use in order to use it. That’s not easy to do on a dime and yet he uses it in his rooftop battles with Bro. All of this is to say, he’d certainly learn to be very good at economics if he wasn’t already. It just suits him.

Oh and I also love that Dave still makes SBaHJ and Karkat has a bunch of sockpuppet accounts he uses to defend Dave’s honour. it’s very cute.

Karkat also had some lines in the epilogues damn. I hadn’t realized how starved I was of VantasRage until I read a few of his rants. Also we finally got to see Badass Rebel Leader Karkat and he’s just as great as we all knew he’d be

The davekat kiss in Meat was great too. It was very gratifying to see after all the narrative cockblocking that went down in Candy.

John realizing in the Candy universe that he isn’t responsible for everything and that they’re all still just people with their own autonomy was good. Much as I have problems with the Candy universe on a whole I liked this specifically.

Also, roxygen! I love roxy/callie as much as the next guy but John and Roxy were very cute near the end of the comic and I liked seeing them grow up and have a kid. John names his son after the guy from Night Court because he’s a massive dweeb. Love it.

We got some great Terezi writing as well. The johnrezi at the end of Meat was nicely written and made me feel a whole host of emotions despite me not even having shipped them that hard beforehand.

OH MY GOD THE OBAMA SHIT. I almost forgot to put this in because I was focused on other stuff but my word the whole Obama Situation was beautiful I loved every second of it. It was so over-the-top in the best way and it simultaneously carried airs of being So Serious And Important To The Narrative and being just the dumbest load of crap. I loved it so much

Also, I was very happy with Roxy and Callie coming out. Roxy talking about how he’d already come out as dating an alien with a green skull for a head and how it felt like maybe he was being “selfish” by also wanting to come out as trans was a great illustration of something that already-out LGB people often feel when realizing they don’t identify with their assigned gender. Additionally, Calliope coming to terms with the fact that they don’t have to identify as female just to further differentiate themselves from Caliborn was great. It really helped to show how far they’d come from just being Caliborn’s foil into being their own person. However, this leads into:

Some stuff I didn’t like

Speaking of Roxy and Callie’s transition, Dirk also came out. As a transphobe. Which was disappointing, to say the least. He made a point of misgendering Roxy as often as possible and was pretty dismissive towards NB people when he learned about Calliope’s identity. (You could make an argument that Dirk is being thoughtless by misgendering Roxy and not intentionally malicious, but I don’t see Dirk as the kind of guy who slips up very often. He’s very careful with language.) I always headcanoned Dirk as trans, as I’m sure most people did, so having him just up and become transphobic was kind of the worst. I intend to talk about Epilogue!Dirk a lot more in a later post but yeah. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’ve thought about the Dirk thing a little more and he does eventually start calling Roxy by the correct pronouns, albeit in kind of a “see see look at how openminded im being youre such a manly dudely stud bro” way. Dirk’s initial discomfort with Roxy and Callie’s identity more comes from his own egotistical belief that he should have already known about it than it does from genuine animosity. That aside, he does still say “She probably would have loved being a “they” when she was a teen,” which sorta rubs me the wrong way. I might just be being oversensitive though.

Also, in the Meat universe, Rose and Kanaya split up! I’m very upset about that. Ultimate Power be damned, I want happy, married lesbians! It sucks that we either have Rosemary OR Davekat but not both

On the topic of davekat, Jade really got done dirty by both Epilogues, huh? She was used as a narrative device in one and was an intrusive presence in the lives of Dave and Karkat in the other. TBH I was never a fan of davekatjade for a lot of reasons but I would have preferred they be in a happy poly relationship than what actually happened in Candy.

Actually, the only two polyamorous relationships in the Epilogues both turned out awfully. I doubt any of the writing staff had anything against poly people; I’m sure it was just a coincidence but either way it’s pretty unfortunate. I have a bit to say about this but this is running too long as is.

Gamzee

Fucking Gamzee.

Unanswered Questions

Will there be any further updates? I sure hope there will, because the ending was not very satisfying and creates more questions than it answers. I can sort of see where it might be going but they left way too much up in the air and it feels very much like it’s unfinished. V has referred to it as “the whole thing” on twitter, so it might be finished for good, but i really hope it isn’t

Why did Rose say the session they’re creating will be the most important session of SBURB ever played? Why couldn’t they play it on Earth C? Surely Earth C’s inhabitants would be more used to seeing alien life forms and would know the basics of SBURB, thus making it more likely for them to survive it. Why go to the trouble of seeding a whole new planet? I’m curious.

Can a character be said to be “Out Of Character” if the character’s own creator wrote those actions? What if they passed on the actual writing to someone else but still had to verify it themselves? What does OOC even mean? Does it mean “this doesn’t fit my headcanon” or “there is no evidence for this” or “the author wouldn’t write them like this”? If it’s the last one, can an author merely saying “this interpretation is correct” absolve ANY action from being deemed OOC? I like that I’m being made to think about this kind of thing now

To what degree is each universe truly “Canon”? I’m aware that Candy lost its canon-ness when John decided not to fight LE, but the two universes are intrinsically linked: we see characters from one universe travel to another and it’s implied that Terezi has spoken to both Johns. How canon is Meat, even? Are either of them even still bound by the need to be part of the Alpha Timeline anymore, since Lord English has been created? What does anything mean?

Final Musings

I understand completely if you don’t like the epilogues. Maybe you think they’re too dark. Maybe you just don’t agree with portrayals of the characters. Maybe you hate that they gave jade a fucking tail when she never had one in the main comic. There certainly were bits of it that I wasn’t a fan of, but there are also parts I really wanna go draw fanart of right now. I like the Epilogues, but if I write fanfic or make dumb joke posts about Earth C, I’m probably gonna ignore large swaths of it (such as, I’ll probably keep both John and Dirk alive, and make them kiss a lot)

There has been a great deal of vitriol directed specifically at Hussie about the epilogues despite the fact that other people worked on them. It’s difficult to take these criticisms in good faith when so many people are blaming solely Hussie. I’m aware that he had total control over actual plot elements and wrote a bit of dialogue, but the bulk of the actual text was written by V. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people’s attitudes towards the epilogues are very much like the general attitude towards Act 7 when it first came out. I’ll admit, I left the Homestuck fandom in like 2014 and didn’t return until mid-2017, but people’s Jimmies were definitely still Rustled even then. There was a general atmosphere of “I hate Hussie, and you should too! The ending was bad and no one asked for it!” but as time went on, and people started analyzing the ending and making meta posts about it, everyone sort of grew acclimated to the ending. Suddenly, the general consensus was that Homestuck was Good Again Finally and the ending was Amazing and The Fandom Loved It. I feel like maybe that sort of thing’s gonna happen again with the Epilogues. I really hope that, as it continues to update (if it does), everyone will sort of chill out about it

[momestuck]

Epilogues: Meat ch 28-32 [Epilogue 5]

So now we’re in different hands.

chapter 28

We return to John, this time with alt-Calliope narrating about his alarmingly blunt teeth. Also on further thought I have no more reason to use ‘she’ pronouns for alt-Calliope than proper Calliope (alt-Calliope does not even seem to use the name Calliope in narration, just things like ‘the dead cherub’), so I will use they pronouns, and will edit the previous post to reflect that.

alt-Calliope declares that they are not going to be ‘inserting thoughts into peoples’ heads’, though they will be ‘truthfully’ reporting those thoughts with more clarity than the subject of narration is necessarily prepared to acknowledge.

john would be mortified with human embarrassment if he could understand the clarity and precision with which i am willing to telegraph his thoughts. but his embarrassment is irrelevant to me. as always, the truth is paramount.

This mortifying description of how John thinks of Terezi includes a reference to “gap moe”, because of f u c k i n g course it does.

John worries if this makes him like a creepy weeb who collects body pillows, but in dialogue dismisses this as something that would only make sense to a human. Unfortunately, Tegiri exists to disprove that sentiment!

Despite alt-Calliope’s avowed dedication to ‘truth’, there is obviously more to this than not contradicting the ‘truth’ of events or thoughts... she is deciding how to present the ‘true’ information, what to state and what to leave implicit and what to brush over. a story also concerns what’s ‘relevant’ and ‘essential’, as Rose said so long ago.

chapter 29

Jane, it seems, has been using the trickster-mode lollipop during her campaign. This leads to an argument with the narration about whether or not it’s “problematic” - neither Jane nor alt-Calliope think so, though neither can be considered someone presented in a 100% positive light at this point...

(Jane mostly argues in the in-universe political campaign situation, when of course the argument about ‘trickster mode’ was the whole ‘caucasian’ shitshow)

Anyway, despite her prior statements, alt-Calliope is not above interfering in the narration if it’s for the sake of cherub artefacts.

jane rubs her eyes under her glasses and groans. trickster mode is also quite exhausting. what a strange quirk of human biology that excess euphoria must necessarily be followed by crippling despair. she carelessly tosses the lollipop on the floor, lurches toward her desk...

no.

she turns around promptly, her body jolted by the surprise of her sudden reversal. she bends over, cradles the lollipop reverentially, and situates it carefully in a place signifying respect: atop the mantle, after clearing space for it by shoving several brittle, worthless objects to the floor.

alt-Calliope narrates that she’s totally got Dirk’s number - “he probably thinks he’s a very clever boy, my brother did too” - as Dirk works on a long red rifle in between other tasks designed to distract.

Jane wonders about trying to blackmail Jake by revealing that he’s been having sex with trolls. Dirk challenges this as xenophobic. There’s an odd exchange...

JANE: What ISN’T xenophobic?

DIRK: Well, for one thing, what you just said there?

DIRK: Probably also xenophobic.

JANE: WHAT?

DIRK: Sorry, that’s just how it is.

DIRK: You either gotta roll with the woke shit, or decide to commit laborious, symbolic, melodramatic suicide in the process of utterly giving up.

This may be referring to his suicide in the other branch, I guess? idefk what this is trying to say ><

chapter 30

Karkat and Dave are attempting to win over Jake. This involves a lot of jokes about “neoliberal austerity measures”, super pacs, and so on... and the two of them playing off each other. Dave has been presenting “visionary”, “avant-garde” campaign ads based on SBAHJ.

alt-Calliope notes that Jake has now been freed from Dirk’s indirect narrative control, able to make his own decisions. In tiny text, Dirk grumbles about this. Without his control, he declares, Jake is a purely reactive ‘dead bug’; with it, Jake is like an ant controlled by Cordyceps towards a “greater purpose” (i.e., reproducing Cordyceps ¬¬)

Anyway, Karkat ultimately makes a speech: he doesn’t say he’ll be the best president, but that whichever one wins, it will set a precedent on the matter of troll reproductive rights that will last for a very long time. Jane is, necessarily, far more concerned with nice appearances than doing right:

KARKAT: NO MATTER HOW NICE SHE WAS WHEN YOU WERE KIDS, HER DEDICATION TO THE APPEARANCE OF THAT “NICENESS” HAS ALREADY LED HER DOWN A PATH OF CORRUPTION AND DUPLICITY.

KARKAT: BECAUSE WHEN YOU LIVE INSIDE A SKIN THAT’S A LIE, YOU’LL EITHER GROW TO FIT IT, OR COLLAPSE UNDER THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF YOUR OWN SHIT-SPEWING COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

KARKAT: TRUST ME, I FUCKING KNOW, BECAUSE I USED TO SPEW AN UNTOLD AMOUNT OF SHIT.

I think this is well put. I think it gets to the heart of a lot of things, that this story is talking about, apart from the free will/alternate possibilities stuff...

Anyway, that wins Jake over to their side.

chapter 31

Back to Terezi eating weird things in space. (Nice!)

Do god tiers need to eat? ...come to think of it, Terezi never actually went god tier.

Anyway, Terezi and John have a heart to heart. About the doomed timeline... and about Vriska. Terezi refers to the Remem8er flash, where she found a connection with the Terezi from the Game Over timeline.

TEREZI: TH4TS WHY 1M OUT H3R3

TEREZI: YOU S33...  

TEREZI: TH4T DOOM3D T3R3Z1 M1SS3D VR1SK4 *SO* MUCH, 1T W4S L1K3 4 HOL3 1N H3R H34RT

TEREZI: 1 R3M3MB3R TH3 W4Y SH3 F3LT, B3C4US3 ON3 T1M3, 4LL H3R M3MOR13S C4M3 FLOOD1NG B4CK

TEREZI: 1 3V3N GOT TO S33 WH4T H4PP3N3D WH3N SH3 D13D

TEREZI: SH3 4ND 4NOTH3R VR1SK4 GHOST F1N4LLY FOUND 34CH OTH3R

TEREZI: 1T M4D3 M3 SO H4PPY G3TT1NG TO F33L TH4T, 4S 1F 1T W4S ON3 OF MY OWN M3MOR13S

TEREZI: 1T JUST R31NFORC3D TH3 F33L1NG TH4T TH3R3 W4S SOM3TH1NG SP3C14L B3TW33N US

TEREZI: 4ND 1 JUST K3PT H4NG1NG ON TO TH4T B3L13F, R1GHT UP UNT1L...  

TEREZI: OH, 1 DONT KNOW

TEREZI: NOW???

TEREZI: 1V3 PR4CT1C4LLY D3VOT3D MY L1F3 TO C3RT41N M3MOR13S, TO TH3 1D34 TH4T TWO P3OPL3 C4N B3 M34NT TO B3 W1TH 34CH OTH3R ON SOM3 COSM1C L3V3L, 3V3N 1F TH3Y 4LW4YS S33M TO G3T 34CH OTH3R 1NTO TROUBL3

TEREZI: 4LL TH4T 1NV3STM3NT, 4LL TH4T S34RCH1NG...  

TEREZI: 4ND FOR *WH4T*?

TEREZI: OV3R 4 SW33P TOG3TH3R, 4ND SH3 JUST D1S4PP34RS 1NTO THE VO1D 4G41N?!

TEREZI: WH4T 4 HUG3 B1TCH

T_T

Anyway, this gets to the crux of the matter: Earth C may supposedly be paradise, but it doesn’t feel like it for either of them. To quote a certain book series, “perhaps some people just don’t have the knack of being happy”.

Anyway, Terezi can’t bear to part with John just yet - so she offers to take a look at his tooth wound. There’s a very funny moment where alt-Calliope narrates the blade drawing in a way so as to personally antagonise Dirk, who is pissed.

Terezi removes the poisonous tooth and then dresses John’s wound - I’ll be interested to hear from @drc4ble if her wound care is up to snuff. Then they have post-surgery makeouts.

Literally any even slightly intimate moment lol (or even a fight)... I miss feeling able to be that affectionate with people.

Although this is a het scene, it actually feels surprisingly... not het. idk. Not sure how to clarify that.

alt-Calliope, I guess, hasn’t lost her obsession with shipping and intimacy from when she was small. She claims she’s merely allowing John to perceive his “true” thoughts - and that’s why he’s being so bold. But that involves a decision, right, about which of his thoughts are “true”?

chapter 32

Apparently “proximity to a black hole”, a proxy for void, renders Roxy’s internal monologue perceptible to alt-Calliope, even though it wouldn’t normally be for those “on a higher textual plane”.

as for alt-Calliope, narrated as Jade:

looking beyond the wall she faces, and beyond everything past it, through the very fabric of narrative itself. they scan the ciliary veins of pacing, motivation, foreshadowing, irony—a continuum that has been upended by the prince’s interference. 

Dirk and alt-Calliope are back to arguing in the narration - about how diverse the crowds are, for example. Dirk dismisses alt-Calliope’s narration as “fake-woke”.

Anyway, despite Dirk’s needling in the narration, Roxy and Dave have a well-observed conversation about like, figuring out your gay/trans/nb/etc, coming out and so forth. Dave talks about like, various stages of more-or-less-ironic self-denial. Dirk gets increasingly irate at the discussion of gender and sexuality that doesn’t lead straightforwardly into like, clear-cut relationships.

Also he’s preparing to assassinate Jake. Unable to force his thoughts into narration, he just speaks out loud, and I guess alt-Calliope reports his words.

Dirk starts climbing the bell tower. Alt-Calliope tries various means to stop him: narrating that his feet feel heavy - he monologues that he has determination to get past this - dropping a bell on him - he monologues that he’s destroying the bell with his sword. Then they just dismiss him as boring...

Alt-Calliope resorts to warning Dave of the assassination attempt. This is turning into Death Note here... “ah, but what you didn’t realise is...” type shit stacking on top of each other. Dave stands in front of Jake, which would be a Heroic death, something Dirk isn’t willing to expose him to. But Dirk’s gun isn’t loaded with bullets, but with... tranq darts. But moreover, he was misleading us as to his intentions.

He wasn’t going to shoot Jake at all. He was going to shoot alt-Calliope/Jade... giving him back control over the narration!

That was interesting though. Cherubs are fuckin’ weird, I’ll totally concede. Still not sure what makes them tick. What they idealize, what they really want. It all comes across to me as a little cloying. Perfection to them is a sweetness beyond comprehension. Sugar so potent it’s poison to us. To our bodies, to our souls. Like the place she was operating from was a realm of self-construction. A bubble of pure, phantasmal confection.

Well, I for one have had enough of that goddamn toothache. I’m back in the protein saddle, motherfuckers. I’m clacking my tongs, and the charcoal is hot.

Now who’s hungry for meat?

Epilogue 5, in toto

So this is just a ludicrously meta version of Death Note now? ok, ok...

Dirk has essentially taken the role of Caliborn, in terms of representing one of two poles of what Homestuck is “about”. Where Caliborn was about tedious masculinity and over the top carnage, Dirk seems to want plots: plans unfolding, some kind of big elegant modernist [that may be incorrect] construction where everything is “in its proper place” according to an artistic vision.

alt-Calliope now seems to want to tell a story about the personal, about complex but ultimately happy relationships, and of course to let these characters fulfil ‘their own will’, somehow...

[floralmarsupial]

what do you think the biggest misconception about dave is?

HMM GOD THAT’S HARD cause you’ve got two different eras of Dave Strider Meta to consider (Dave Strider pre-Dirk Convo and post-Dirk Convo) but I think a major joint misconception between the two is that I don’t think people understand that passivity is one of the base traits Dave’s personality is built off of. Like even in current meta now people will make Dave physically aggressive and irrational when he first breaches his sexuality because 1. that’s the most straightforward way of depicting Toxic Masculinity without having to go into nuance and 2. not everyone’s on the same page yet that almost every character in Homestuck is an Unreliable Narrator with identity issues of PROJECTED vs TRUE selves (not to mention the third option IDEAL self). So people read Dave’s pesterlogs at face value, mistaking his projected self for true self. Aka the version of Dave Strider that has completely internalized Bros training and is his un-emotive, lower than dirt EQ, “get shit done”, mini ninja. Lodged in everyone’s heads, echoing through meta and fandom depictions ever so slightly, like a fucking ghost.And I could go on, breaking down all the little details and falsehoods with supporting evidence in the worlds most self indulgent useless essay, but in the end the major one I wanna talk about right now is fandom interpretation of Dave as “Active” participant when everything he does falls under “Passive.”

Dave starts out not even wanting to play the game. He only does so when faced with the life or death situation of his friends.

Dave falls for every trap Bro sets out for him (which is what Bro wants) and in the end can only progress in his mission after losing to Bro (which is what Bro wants).

Dave delegates duties and events to alternate selves, being able to weed out bad calls and misdirection without having to deal with the finality of being the Dave that chose that route. (then hiding the evidence of it later).

 The stable timelines Dave is able to make being hinted to being at least partially due to Terezi. (Terezi even prompting her own fucking interest in him GOD)

Dave falls asleep leaving Davesprite to deal with the horde.Dave can’t live up to the expectations of a Legendary Hero so he breaks  Caledfwlch in half. Dave can’t break the Unbreakable Katana (i.e. defeat Bro) so he gives up on it.

Dave is unable to take his own life and meet Godtier until the focus is framed off of himself and becomes a joint effort of self sacrifice (and if we’re being honest an act of support in Rose’s own wants and motivations), passively accepting doom without the prior knowledge of the dream slabs.

Davesprite breaks up with Jade, can only have an onscreen conversation with John WHEN THE DUDES ASLEEP and flies off into the cosmos as all passive acts of acceptance that he’s not the “true” Dave and is willingly giving up these relationships that are equally important to him as they are Alpha Dave TO Alpha Dave (the only clues in his difficulties in coming to terms with these issues and coming to these conclusions being mostly passive aggressiveness directed towards John *aka the manifestation of IDEAL self he can never become because he’s offshoot.)

Not to mention Alpha’s break up with Terezi, which he frames as something he was in control of but really there’s no way of us knowing the truth. The only impartial information on the subject we get being learning of Gamzee and Terezi’s relationship in Openbound, and Dave being commented as “seeming depressed” around the same time. 

LIKE THE LIST JUST GOES ON AND ON 

I think one of the only true acts of direct retaliation Dave has in the story is his refusal to follow Grimbark Jade’s commands and in turn refuse his “destiny” in both the Game and the Fate of the Universe, which is hilarious because he’s doing it by not wanting to fight and goddamn tragic because that moment is immediately lost to Game Over.

I just wish i saw more characterization that truly emphasized this ya’ know? Which would maybe lead to more interpretations that explored the nuance of Dave’s Toxic Masculinity that was focused inwardly with gradual introspection ending with the active choice to disregard PROJECTED and accept TRUE self. 

Like Dave’s capable of it for sure, I mean dude is tied with Karkat for most appearances whilst crying (and that’s not even counting the time in the idiot cauldron with the onions) he just needs to make the active choice to recognize those feelings honestly.

I have a lot more misconceptions I could list I think but I’ll probably make different posts about those later. Anyways hope y’all liked this goddamn essay, it’s 11 pm and I have to be at work in 6 hours, god bless.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

OFF-THE-CUFF HOMESTUCK THOUGHTS #5: ACT 6 HOMESTUCK AS NARRATIVE REBELLION, OR: ARCS ARE DEAD, LONG LIVE ARCS

DISCLAIMER       FRAMEWORK

[CHECK THE TAG FOR MORE THOUGHTS]

[Note: This one’s a doozy! Still kind of off-the-cuff, in that I tried not to stress out about getting everything perfect, but I did do some revision to make my ideas more clear. That’ll probably be the norm from here on out. Hope you’re in the mood for a long read and a wild ride!

…Seriously, this shit is like twenty pages in Word.]

In my previous posts, I’ve discussed a number of ideas present in Act 6 and Act 7 Homestuck that I think contribute powerfully to the ending of Homestuck, especially on a thematic level.

I’ve discussed Homestuck as a meditation on the nature of a self divided across the many timelines of a dispassionate cosmos, and argued that the Retcon, far from a drastic change in storytelling, is a continuation of that long-running theme. Is victory meaningless if one’s original self isn’t around to claim it, or can a coherent, archetypal identity can be understood as existing beyond all of one’s disparate selves? In the system of Skaia, Homestuck asks, how do we live?

I’ve also discussed Homestuck, especially Act 6 Homestuck, as a Gnostic work, the story of an escape from a cosmic tyrant, a Demiurge whose ultimate weakness is that he cannot see the limitations of the domain he’s been given. In the same post, I discussed how this realm of the Demiurge, Lord English’s domain, is constantly paralleled with the space embodied by Homestuck itself, and how the kid’s departure from the story evokes their escape from this tyrant’s space-time domain as it reaches the end set for it by Paradox Space. From the system of Lord English, Homestuck asks, how do we escape? And at the same time, in the system of narrative called Homestuck, how do we find meaning within its limitations, and how do we escape them?

These themes work together.  As we’ve seen, they echo and reinforce each other, provide parallels and points of contrast. In fact, I’d argue that each of these different themes are diverse manifestations of one larger theme, in the same way that individual selves in Homestuck can be thought of as manifestations of one larger Self. This overarching theme is present throughout Homestuck, but it reaches its culmination in Act 6 and 7, in a finale that drives it home in a different ways. To understand Homestuck is to understand this theme.

If someone were to ask me, “What is Homestuck about?” this would be my answer:

Homestuck is an exploration of the tension between abstract, impersonal systems and individual, personal experiences of those systems.

Abstract, impersonal systems are everywhere in Homestuck, systems that don’t always align with the desires, emotions, and goals of the main characters. The central question of Homestuck is how these characters will choose to understand the systems that govern their lives, and how they will carve out meaningful lives in relation to those systems. Gnosticism, metafiction, divided identities, and Sburb itself all play into this theme. As Homestuck’s characters decide how to live their lives within these many interconnected systems, they suggest possibilities for our own lives, for we readers also live in a world that also contains many systems and forces outside of our control. In their choices, we find opportunities and implications for how we should live.

You’ll notice I said there’s a tension, rather than an opposition, between individual experience and abstract systems. I think that gets closer to the truth of what Homestuck is trying to say. Characters in Homestuck sometimes reject its systems altogether, but just as often they exploit them or find identities for themselves within the constraints/opportunities of those systems. While Caliborn’s  Gnostic-style domain of control is presented in a negative light, as something worth opposing and escaping, other systems, like Sburb itself, are presented in a much more ambiguous light, challenging us to decide how we feel about those systems and the possibilities they present within their rules.

I’ve talked about several of these systems in my previous posts, but today I want to talk about one I haven’t yet dug into in detail. Narrative itself.

Narrative in Homestuck, the power a story holds over its characters, is another system which the characters of Homestuck are constantly fighting, exploiting, and embracing.

Because another word for those abstract systems in Homestuck is…

Arcs.

Some Dave-Related Groundwork

[Note: If you’ve read previous posts of mine, I’m going to repeat myself a bit here, but I’m going to revisit the subject here because I want to make sure it’s understood.]

When we talk about Narrative as a system in Homestuck, we have to be really, really careful what we’re talking about.

Perhaps no sentence in Homestuck has been more unfortunately misunderstood as Dave’s statement to Rose near the end of Act 6:

DAVE: rose we dont have fuckin "arcs" we are just human beings

This has been interpreted in some quarters as Andrew Hussie throwing up his hands and saying, “I don’t care about character development or giving my characters meaningful growth, because arcs, like magic, are fake anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what I do.”

This would be incredibly annoying and misguided if it were actually what he was saying, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Andrew Hussie is deeply invested in character development, and it shows.

As I’ve said before, if Hussie rejected the idea of character development altogether, if he didn’t believe stories that contained character growth were important, he wouldn’t have given Dave himself one of the most cathartic character arcs in Homestuck! Even among those disappointed with other aspects of the ending, it’s pretty widely agreed that Dave’s growth out of his internalized homophobia, his connection with Dirk, and the chance this affords him to process his feelings about his abusive brother make a story that’s pretty damn powerful and triumphant.

The simple truth is that Hussie handled some character arcs well and not others, like many an author with a large, diverse cast to juggle. While he arguably dropped some balls and made some mistakes while attempting to take on his enormous humdinger of an ending, these failures did not come from any lack of passion or commitment to his characters, but from an inability to handle everything at once.

Dave’s statement, and the discussion that follows it, should not be read as a writer dodging responsibility for completing his work. Dave is talking about something very different, a subject he has a lot of experience with, and which his own development as a character has a hell of a lot to do with.

Dave is talking about the tension between his friends’ individual lives and the narrative frameworks, the overpowering Archetypes, that they, and Sburb, and Lord English, try to construct their lives around.

Dave’s arc, in fact, is about learning to question Arcs.

Arcs are Dead, Long Live Arcs, or Critiquing Clichés With Characterization

Let me explain this statement in a little more detail. By Dave’s arc (lowercase) I mean the series of events and choices that led to his growth as a person. By his Arc (UPPERCASE), I mean a story structure that tries to enforce a narrative on Dave from the outside, rather than exploring who he is as as a person and what path makes sense for him to take.

Think of an Arc with a capital A as something like a cliché. A cliché is a predetermined story structure that is tedious because we’ve seen it a million times before. The hero hooks up with the only girl with a speaking part over the course of his journey for no reason other than that’s what we expect from a movie. That’s tedious, and we all know it’s (heteronormative) bullshit. It isn’t true to life. It likely doesn’t represent what’s natural or personally fulfilling for the characters. It’s something imposed by the writer, the studio, and/or the need to please a certain audience. It’s a narrative structure, overwriting and suppressing a more organic process of growth.

A narrative structure is a set of changes from point A to point B: the hero starts humble, gets more badass, meets girl, achieves badass goals, wins girl. Or something like that. The structure is the shape of a certain kind of story. Meaning, encoded in a certain, archetypal trajectory.

Ideally, we would like to tell and read stories that say something true about our lives, rather than just regurgitate narrative structures that have little to do with our own life experiences. What makes this tricky is that stories rely on structures. Stories are not real life; they’re only representations of life. (Once again we’re getting into the tension between the Map and the Territory that Homestuck showcases so well.) We need structures of some kind to have stories. To tell any story at all is to fix it in a specific, limited set of representations, narrative structures, arcs that create meaning.

Hence the paradox, the ambiguity inherent in the word “arc:” conveying a person’s growth over time requires that you fix it in an arc, even when you’re drawing from how that person would naturally evolve and change. At the same time, though, certain narrative structures are overused; they overdetermine the story you’re trying to tell. They become a certain set of expectations, rather than tools for conveying a character’s development as a person. They become Arcs instead of arcs.

Do you see the difference? Good narrative structures (what I referred to as arcs) depict character growth in a way that feels organic, spontaneous, and real. Cliché narrative structures (what we’re calling Arcs) overpower organic character growth and force it to fit a preexisting, forced model based on a set of expectations.

Dave’s arc is his growth from repressed coolkid with internalized homophobia to a gentle, mature adult whose relationship with Karkat is one of the most positive forces in his life. He’s rightly proud of that growth.

Dave’s Arc was the set of expectations that were placed on him by his society, by the narratives inherent in Sburb, by Lord English, and ultimately by many readers and certain narrative structures within Homestuck itself. Expectations that he might be a powerful, unflappable warrior hero figure destined to slay villains like Lord English. Dave rightly rejects these expectations placed upon him, which had little to do with who he was as a person or what he needed. His arc revolves around him rejecting the Arcs that were harming him.

In Homestuck, Hussie contrasts his protagonists’ organic, individual growth with the harmful power of the narrative structures that try to control them. This is another manifestation of the recurring theme of Homestuck: human lives are spontaneous and personal, and don’t always fit into the structures that try to shape them. True maturity is being able to grow beyond these structures.

Read Dave’s statement this way:

“Rose, our lives aren’t stories. They’re just lives. We decide what they mean. Outgrowing the need for my life to fit those structures has been freeing for me, and I think it’ll be freeing for you, too.”

Now, what Dave’s saying here works on two levels. From an in-world perspective, he’s exactly right. In reality, human beings don’t have inherent structure to their lives. And that’s exactly the tension that exists between the protagonists of Homestuck and forces like Sburb, Homestuck, and Lord English.

But, at the same time, we can also recognize that Dave’s a fictional character and Hussie is, in fact, crafting a narrative arc with Dave’s statement. Dave’s growth as a person (his arc) is about learning to free himself from the overpowering, harmful narratives (Arcs) that surround him.

Hussie is using arcs to defeat Arcs.

Arcs as Archetypes

With me so far? Okay. So, I’ve been distinguishing between arcs and Arcs because I think we want to be clear about the point Hussie’s trying to make, especially in this conversation. Now that we understand that, though, let’s acknowledge again that we’re talking about two different versions of the same thing.

Art is a way of representing life. It can represent life well and with an understanding of the nuances and ambiguities of real human beings. Or it can represent life poorly, forcing characters to conform to predetermined expectations, and robbing us of our chance to learn from other people’s experiences. But it’s a sliding scale. No representation will ever be perfect, and no representation is completely without some grain of realism. Every story structure falls somewhere along the line between the most human arc and the most aggressive Arc.

But one of the greatest things about stories is the way they critique each other. So an author like Hussie can use his own, more naturalistic story structures to critique the harmful, false story structures of others. That’s exactly what Homestuck is doing, and the escape the characters experience is every bit as much an escape from harmful clichés as it is from a cosmic tyrant named Lord English.

A given narrative structure is not necessarily positive or negative. Nor are all the narratives in Homestuck seen negatively. (Again, it’s tension, not opposition.) Before, we talked about the danger of clichés. But now we’re saying they’re not always harmful. What’s a better word, one that takes in both the positive and the negative?

I really like TVTropes’ word trope, which they use, I think, to address this very problem. Trope is like the value-neutral version of a cliché. While clichés have been repeated so often that they become harmful and restraining, tropes are simply things that exist in narratives, structures that authors use to achieve various goals. It’s up to us to decide if they’ve been used poorly or well.  Homestuck is built on tropes, and uses some of them to challenge others.

A trope can be a certain kind of story. The hero went and slew a monster. The gods created the world. A young man overcame his psychological demons. These are narrative tropes we know well. We might also call them myths, or stories.

Another word we might use? Archetype. Literally a “leading type,” an archetype is similar to what we’ve talked about as the Ur-Self, or the Forms that come up in discussions of Platonism. It’s the original thing which can be seen behind various manifestations.

Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is an idea. And one of the fascinating things about Homestuck is that ideas are the basic building blocks of reality. In Homestuck, the power an idea can wield is immense.

Idea, archetype, trope, arc—they’re all words for what Homestuck is built on. The stories we bring to it, and the stories it presents to us. Above all, acts of resisting and embracing stories are at the heart of Homestuck and what it’s about.

What I want to delve into in this essay is: what are the narratives that Homestuck contains, and what are the narratives it critiques? What are the new narratives it suggests as more organic, more naturalistic alternatives? What does Homestuck suggest is the way to live?

Let’s find out.

Sburb vs Homestuck

On a narrative level, there’s a tension between Sburb and Homestuck.  Sburb is a game and a system heavily constructed around certain narratives, archetypes, and ideas. Homestuck is a fictional work that is heavily constructed around many of the same ideas, but also calls some of these structures into question. This is deliberate as all hell.

Meanwhile, superimposed over the narratives of Sburb, another set of narratives lurks: the rules of reality set by the cosmic tyrant Lord English, who enforces certain narratives, rewarding some and punishing others, and literally rewriting the story in the most juvenile fashion. Homestuck takes on his narratives, too. And, at the same time, it takes on many narratives that we know from our lives, and calls them into question even when they’re built into the structure of the universe.

Let’s take a look at how all this works.

The Narratives of Sburb

Start with Sburb. It’s not surprising that Sburb takes the form of a game. Games are, in a sense, nothing but structure. They’re made of mechanics, and mechanics frequently have narratives encoded into them. The possibilities of a given game system, the choices one is able to make within it, produce narratives and produce meanings. Sburb resembles many different games, including chess, fantasy RPGs, and billiards (to say nothing of the playing card motifs elsewhere in Homestuck).  This is because it has many different goals and thus creates many different narratives around those goals. In many ways Sburb can be read as critique and examination of all of these types of games (especially fantasy RPGs). But certain narratives encoded into Sburb seem to be extremely important, and over and over we see them come to the forefront.

Let’s call them Creation Myth, Coming of Age, and Heroic Epic.

The Creation Myth

Hussie has been very up front about Homestuck being a kind of creation myth.  In a 2011 Formspring Q&A, Hussie wrote:

Question: So now you've revealed that the trolls' Sburb session CREATED OUR GODDAMN UNIVERSE. How long have you been waiting to spring that on us?

Hussie: Since before Homestuck started.

HS was always going to be a story about an extremely elaborate creation myth. As elaborate as I could conceive…This was always what Homestuck was about. This revelation was carefully guarded, although there are plenty of clues. It has taken 4.5 acts to understand the "what" (as well as some of the "how" along the way.) The rest of the story will be about exploring the rest of the "how", as well as determining whether the players succeed.

 A Creation Myth tells the story of how the world was made. It usually tells the story of powerful gods, who represent certain aspects of the universe, causing different aspects of it come into being, often through fighting, procreating with each other, carving up the bodies of other, older beings, and all sorts of other memorable ways. By the end of it, the most dangerous gods have been defeated or made peaceful, and the world is paved for the arrival of human beings. The message is clear: these beings help us understand the world, and should be respected, as they still have power over it today.

This is Sburb’s central narrative. Only for Sburb, the gods are the players of a video game, and power over creation—described in terms of a new universe that is also the body of a giant frog—is offered as a reward for successfully completing the game. So, too, is their godhood (and god hood) a reward. It is not intrinsic to them, as with traditional creation myths, but must be earned over the course of the game.

But they earn it. Not only do they take on more elemental personas with magical power, and even become immortal within a strict set of rules, they also become mythologically important in the newly created universe. For the trolls, this takes the form of them becoming the twelve zodiac signs and constellations of Earth’s mythology. Later on, for the kids and trolls, this takes the form of them becoming venerated hero-ancestors who create the new civilization and guide it into a prosperous future. (Who knows, maybe they have constellations as well? Please, somebody put this in a fanfic.) To say nothing of the way Calliope venerates their journey as holy, almost mythological writ.

Hussie also wrote:

The goal is to create a universe all at once after overcoming an extensive series of challenges, and as is implied, the universe fleshes itself out with galaxies and systems and planets and lifeforms, ready and waiting for entry by the victorious players. The ultimate reward is for the players to enter the universe they created and do as they see fit. They are essentially the gods of that universe, and that is what the trolls are to our universe.

This ties in nicely with Sburb’s other strong narratives.

The Coming of Age and the Apotheosis

Sburb fuses the Creation Myth with the Coming of Age Story, or Bildungsroman (fancy German word for Coming of Age Story.) Sburb is designed to be played by adolescents, children on the cusp of adulthood, and it draws parallels between their journey into adulthood and their journey into the game. Indeed, Sburb seems to view maturity as what qualifies one for inheriting the mantle of a god. You can’t be a god without growing up, it suggests.

And isn’t it interesting that the goal of Sburb is to help a universe reproduce? A biological, evolutionary narrative, the non-narrative of the species blindly shaped by its attempts to reproduce, is introduced to the players right at the point in their lives when they’re also navigating their growing sexual and romantic maturity. The mysteries of adulthood are sublimated into the mysteries of giant cosmic space frogs. (See my Gnostic post for more about Sburb as biology.)

This process can often be cruel, as noted in how Sburb frequently kills off the guardians of its players, and usually their entire homeworld as well. It represents adulthood as a process of loss and grief and needing to move on. Not entirely untrue, but painful, too. It’s a brutal approach to maturity, one that echoes its inhuman, survival-of-the-fittest origins. The last generation must pass away for the next generation to take its place.

One of the most fascinating things about Sburb’s approach to maturity is the way that it tailors it to each individual player. Sburb tells them how they will mature, and who they will mature into. This is done through the system of classes and aspects (classpects) which are assigned, RPG-like, to each player. On the one hand, these are clearly elemental powers, like breath, light, space, and time. On the other hand, these are also descriptors of psychological realities for each player. Space connects with solitude and patience, breath connects with freedom, light with knowledge and agency. And the class side of the equation, the heroic titles of heir, seer, witch, and so on, are even more personal, describing a relationship to those elements and those powers. These are both the god-like roles the heroes will take on and the person they will be. (Or, in prophetic ways, they describe their failure to grow into maturity—see Eridan for an example.)

Thing is, though, they don’t start as these people. Because in Sburb it takes time to grow into being a god, right? As Kanaya says, Sburb frequently gives its players roles to challenge them.  So what a Sburb title is…is a narrative. Player A started off as young and brash…but grew into maturity as the wise, reflective Seer of Time. She grew as a person because of her journey in Sburb, and became someone who could be a Seer and a God.

But it goes even further. As Tex Talks discusses in his excellent analysis video here, the elements are literally elemental; that is, the aspects make up the deepest-level structure of the universe. As Calliope tells us, reality is built out of the same aspects that describe the players.  So when the players are maturing, part of what they’re maturing into is people who are closely tied to the structure of the universe. They’re becoming gods.

The combined narrative of Creation Gods + Coming of Age we might call Apotheosis. A fancy word for the story of becoming a god.

And as Tex reminds us, drawing heavily on Rose in her apples speech, for Sburb, the basic building blocks of the universe are ideas. Ideas in the Platonic sense; free-floating ideas that manifest in diverse forms but contain a central underlying truth. Tex argues, convincingly, I think, that these are also narrative ideas within the context of Homestuck. Light represents knowledge for both the reader and the player, and it represents importance on a metafictional level. Time and Space are constructs built into any narrative, Breath and Blood have ties to pacing, and Rage represents utter contrivance and bullshit.

It’s narratives all the way down.

So the story of each player’s growth into maturity, and the story of the group of players’ growth into the kind of people who can be gods of a new universe, is rich with narrative meaning on many levels. Each class, aspect, and pairing is a story, and given that Sburb can perceive all space and time, that means the story these descriptors tell is guaranteed to be tailored perfectly to each person’s process of growth or failure to grow.

Whew. Let’s see how Apotheosis, this fusion of the narrative of maturity and the narrative of creation, connects to the third major narrative of Sburb: the Heroic Epic.

The Heroic Epic

The Heroic Epic is a kind of story we’re all familiar with, I think.  A Heroic Epic generally pits one or more figures of great might, skill, or intelligence against overwhelming enemy forces. Despite the odds, the hero or heroes are able to triumph, a testament to their inherent excellence as people. This is a story framework as old as mythology itself. A given hero often has one or more traits that a society considered desirable or noble--military skill, tactical cleverness, and so on—and to the degree a hero fails, it is because they fall short of these goals.  Often a hero is a special, other kind of person, chosen from birth for greatness or descended from the gods.

An epic frequently takes the form of a long and complex poem or narrative, interweaving many different heroic figures and their struggles against opposing forces. Examples include the Trojan War, the Mahabharata, and the Journey to the West.  Victory and defeat, usually in war, are among an epic’s major themes, and despite the complexity of its many interwoven figures, despite death and failure along the way, we generally expect some of the figures the story depicts as noble will succeed in their aims, even if they have to pay a heavy cost.

Sburb structures itself as an epic, and so does Homestuck.

What’s interesting about Sburb’s approach to the Heroic Epic is that it could have come straight out of many fantasy video games. Sburb structures itself as a military conflict between forces who share the players’ goals and forces who oppose them. It depicts the players as the noble figures who have the power to win victory for the forces of good. It even calls them, explicitly, its Heroes. As in Skyrim or a fantasy RPG, without the intervention of the player character, good cannot prevail and the world is doomed. It’s a fantasy that exalts the one who participates in it: you’re the one who carries value; you’re the one who everyone is counting on. You are the hero. It’s you.

This joins nicely with the theme of Apotheosis. The player character in Sburb is able to achieve victory, grow into maturity, and become an immortal god capable of bringing a new world into being. These are all echoes of the same theme: achieving value. Value in Sburb’s terms, according to its structures.

Like many video games, Sburb places value on achievement, strength and victory. While personal growth will be different for every player, the Heroic Epic carries the same theme for everyone: greatness is achieved through victory. By helping the forces of light achieve their goal and defeat the forces of darkness, you become a Hero. By leveling up and growing stronger, you become more worthy.

Beat the enemies, beat the game, by being the best. It’s a theme familiar to us from many a video game. And it’s a theme the video game Sburb places at the heart of its heroic narrative.

These are the narratives, the Arcs, Sburb is built around. They’re not necessarily good or bad, but they have their limitations. They’re tropes, archetypes, that can only say so much. Homestuck is a depiction of these narratives, but also a critique of them.

The central science-fictional/fantastical concept of Homestuck is Sburb. To that extent, Homestuck and Sburb share the same narratives.  Homestuck, as Hussie discusses above, is an attempt to tell a very strange creation myth. Homestuck is also a story about kids growing up, and how they deal with the problems in their lives. And Homestuck is very deliberate and self-conscious about its status as a large, complex work where many heroic figures war against opposing forces, not just the forces of Derse, but also Lord English and his many agents. An epic. Homestuck is all of the same things Sburb is.

But it also critiques these things. Homestuck isn’t just Sburb, but a story about Sburb. Like any science fiction work about a particular concept, it has the chance to show both the exciting things and the limitations of a world where that concept is true. Homestuck offers a sharp critique of the narratives of Sburb by showing its limitations and showing how its players struggle against those limitations.

If you’re inclined to anthropomorphize Sburb, you might say Homestuck calls Sburb’s major narratives out as being cruel and callous. But, given that Sburb is fairly abstract, a structure more than it is an entity, perhaps it’s better to say that Homestuck tries to show how a system like Sburb imposes limits on its participants, and what the results of those limits are. We’ve seen this before with Sburb’s approach to the self. Now we can examine how Sburb also places limits through its narratives.

Interwoven with this critique of Sburb’s narratives is a critique of two closely related elements of Homestuck: what we might call the world of Inherited Narratives, and the narrative of Lord English.

Inherited Narratives, or: Everything is Caliborn’s Fault Forever

What do I mean by Inherited Narratives? Remember how I talked about Arcs (in the negative sense) as being like clichés? When we read a story, we don’t read it alone. We bring an entire world to it, the world of all the other stories we’ve ever read. We compare any story’s narratives to the narratives we’ve encountered before. This shapes our expectations, what we want to happen, and this shapes how a story is told. This is where clichés come from: they’re echoes of stories we’ve seen before, from the mind of the writer and the reader. But if a cliché narrative is just passed on without close examination, it creates an unsatisfying experience for the reader, one that doesn’t really say anything meaningful about its characters.

We exist in a world of cliché narratives in everyday life, too. We pick up a myriad of messages about what it means to be a good person, what it means to grow up, what a hero looks like, what gender norms look like. If you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with how these narratives are embedded in our society and our ways of thinking, picked up from the media we consume but also from everything and everyone around us.

Homestuck’s characters inherit these narratives, too, from their dying word. Much of the psychological growth they go through is found in challenging these expectations, these clichés pressed upon them by society, that no longer make sense for them to inhabit.

These Inherited Narratives even shape our expectations of what a creation myth, growing up, or heroic victory look like, and you’d better believe that when Homestuck’s critiquing Sburb, it’s critiquing them, too.

In our lives, we can blame history, culture, and society for the narratives we inherit.

But in Homestuck, we can also blame Sburb, and we can also blame Lord English.

Let’s get Gnostic again for a second. In case you thought I’d run out of things to say about Gnosticism, nope! There’s more here, courtesy of some great discussion from the legendary revolutionaryduelist and their commenters.

As revolutionaryduelist discusses here, in Gnosticism, the realm we inherit from the Demiurge, the Material World, is viewed in opposition to the World of Ideas. The false god gives us the world of flesh and death and suffering. But we can escape it by connecting through our own wisdom to the world of Truth and Goodness and Ideas. We escape to the world of the Platonic Forms, become more than our limited selves, become something more archetypal, more meaningful, more absolute.

The thing Homestuck does, and does so well, is that it parallels the Material World, the realm the kids inherit, with Inherited Narrative. As the Gnostics believed we inherit the limitations of the material, and can escape into a higher realm that is unlimited and good, Homestuck posits that we inherit the limitations of restrictive Narrative, too, and can escape into narratives that are more meaningful, nuanced, and free. Material Arcs. Transcendent arcs.

Lord English’s Demiurgic tyranny thus works on two levels. He creates Homestuck’s material reality, that is, its stuff, its substance, by devising time loops that perpetuate his own self-indulgent existence. Objects like Cal and the harlequin dolls dance to his whims.

But at the same time, he also creates Paradox Space’s narrative reality, its inherited ideas. The scratched trolls are born into an Alternia rewritten by LE’S agents into a world of bloodshed, competition, and cruelty, where Doc Scratch guides evolution and the Handmaid slaughters the unwanted, perpetuating fear.  Earth, meanwhile, inherits LE’s toxic ideas about masculinity and power (ideas we’re all familiar with from our own Inherited Narratives), and a dystopic future. In a bizarre twist, arguably these narratives form another enormous self-perpetuating loop, with Caliborn being influenced by the most toxic elements of Earth and Alternian culture, and then as LE orchestrating scenarios that bring Earth and Alternia into being. That’s the second level on which LE the Demiurge creates a harmful, limited reality.

But remember what Tex taught us? In Homestuck, reality is made of ideas. Paradox Space is literally composed of Platonic forms, narrative and conceptual elements. So these two levels of LE’s influence are really one and the same. He has created our players’ limited world, and their quest is to escape it for a better one.

So, Inherited Narrative, the Material Realm, and Cliché are all the same concept in Homestuck. It’s easy to see how this is a critique of Caliborn and all he represents.

But I think it’s also, implicitly, a critique of Sburb, or at least an examination of some of its limitations.

Because many of Caliborn’s harmful narratives echo structures from Sburb.

Caliborn: Sburb’s Demon

What does Caliborn value? He values his toxic notion of masculinity, but more specifically he values strength, self-glorification, and being the best. Especially when it comes to games.

Caliborn’s ideal narrative, and the one Sburb lets him achieve, is the story of someone who was inherently the best achieving victory over his enemies, overcoming absurdly difficult trials, and becoming recognized for his superiority by becoming a god, a god powerful enough to shape world after world in his own image.

As we’ve seen, this is illusory. What LE is able to influence is actually, like the Demiurge, quite limited. But from Caliborn’s perspective, this is his story.

In it we can recognize many aspects of Sburb’s narratives. Deification comes from the creation myth and from Sburb’s notions of growing stronger and better. Most of all, though, Caliborn draws on the Heroic Epic. He sees himself as being at the center of a great story, in which he proved his inherent worthiness via his victory over the great forces set in his way. Constant conquest is his way of approaching the world. He is a warrior hero, slaying the weak and worthless left and right; he is an artist, triumphing over the haters. He is as arrogant and militaristic as a warrior-king like Agamemnon, but without any of his redeeming qualities. Caliborn takes narratives encoded in Sburb and exaggerates them to a profoundly unhealthy level. He is an echo of what’s harmful about them. He is Sburb’s shadow, its demon, summoned up by what its Yaldabaoth principle encourages, as limited as the Heroic Epic itself can be.

But there is a theme from Sburb that Caliborn’s missing, and that’s the narrative of Growth in its notion of the Coming of Age.

Caliborn rejects his coming of age, or to put it another way, sees it simply as an act of self-glorification. He places deification over inner conflict, victory over meaning. He’s encouraged, in part, by the narrative structure of Sburb’s Heroic Epic, but he also pushes it to new levels, creating his own kind of game. He rejects the normal maturation process for his species, and because of this, as Hussie says, will remain an enormous stunted tool forever, lacking his maturity and his wings.

Caliborn adores one of the most limited parts of Sburb: the aspect of it that’s a Game. He wants to keep playing the game forever, to keep achieving victory at the expense of all meaning. He is the ultimate powergamer, and the game enables him to live out a false maturity, a false coming of age where he never has to be challenged, never has to grow. This is the horror of Caliborn’s love of games: that games are meaningless without our own growth within them. Caliborn misses life for the game, maturity for mere strength, and meaning for cliché. Personal arcs for Arcs. Thus does he perpetuate a horrible Paradox Space and a horrible, cliché set of ideologies, and pass it onto others.

Echoes of his mistake are everywhere in Homestuck, harming and shaping its characters. We could talk about them for pages and pages, but let’s look at just a few examples.

Dave Strider vs the World

Again, let’s talk about Dave. Dave inherited a very toxic narrative, the narrative of the Hero. I use this word to describe the Heroic Epic in part because it carries such emotional weight for Dave within Homestuck. A Hero, in Dave’s mind, is someone masculine, unflappable, perfect, and cool. A warrior whose life is all about fighting and victory. He gets this idea straight from his Bro, who personified ideas of masculine perfection, irony, and constant conquest. Bro is a warrior-hero, untroubled by complexity, and his attempts to force Dave to live up to this warrior-hero ideal through terrifying ironic mind games and daily fighting are explicitly called out as abuse.

As Dave says:

DAVE: it was "training" you know DAVE: but you know what it really was it was some vicious shit that was bad and sucked and i hated it DAVE: it didnt make me stronger DAVE: it did the opposite DAVE: it made me never want to fight DAVE: it made me never want to see blood or be near danger or hear metal sounds DAVE: it made me hate the idea of being a hero cause he was a hero and he ruined the idea of heroism

The narrative of the Hero, like the idea of being cool, was harmful for Dave, and to grow as a person he needed to escape from that narrative and find who he was beyond that story. When he said “I’m not a hero,” what he needed was not to learn to see himself as one, but to recognize that not being a hero was a good thing if that was the definition of heroism. In the end, he’s able to make that escape, and that’s a profound triumph over a harmful narrative.

Bro’s horrible influence was his own, but it was also Lord English’s. The two figures are linked: LE influences Bro through his soul embedded in Cal, but a splinter of Bro (AR/Hal, one of the more negatively-depicted versions of Dirk) is also in that soul, shaping Lord English.

And, at the same time, there’s a distant echo of Sburb here. A video game all about fighting enemies and becoming a victorious warrior figure perpetuates the ideas of value-through-victory that were so harmful to Dave. Bro’s actions within the Game were often to push victory forward on Sburb’s terms. He saw his abusive “training” as a way to help Dave win the Game. So, too, did Doc Scratch see his alteration of Alternian society into something competitive and violent as a way to help the trolls win Sgrub. It doesn’t make either of them less horrible and evil, nor their actions less abusive.

This isn’t to say that Sburb is inherently evil, but that it prioritizes certain things, including the militaristic, fighting-based heroism of a Heroic Epic, and the players of the Game suffer for it. In a way, it’s a critique of games in general: what does it mean for victory to be found in slaying enemies and gaining strength? (It’s probably not a coincidence that we find this theme in Undertale as well.) In a world where those game narratives shapes people’s lives and worlds, there are some deeply troubling consequences, especially after LE gets involved.

Accordingly, Dave struggles more than any other character with what he even wants to do within the confines of Sburb, what he should strive for.  In the end, he ends up rejecting Sburb’s idea of heroism in a big way. He chooses to fight for the people he cares about, not for glory, self-exaltation, or conquest. At the same time, he rejects a world of harmful clichés that he inherited from the same sources. Dave chooses to define himself by his own goals, not by his failure to live up to the inherited narratives of heterosexuality, irony, and unshakable coolness. He learns to celebrate his bisexuality, sincerity, and vulnerability instead.

In the end, Dave’s able to leave Bro, Caliborn, and Sburb’s ideas behind him and make his own choices about what his life means. It’s not surprising, then, that he understands the harmful power of overbearing Arcs better than anyone, and what it means to escape them.

Rose Lalonde, Disgruntled Narratophile

Rose’s reluctance to leave Arcs behind makes an interesting counterpoint to Dave, because it comes from an entirely different place. Rose doesn’t define herself by Caliborn’s narrative, but she does define herself very strongly by narratives she’s picked up elsewhere. Initially we see her as a psychoanalyst, trying to make sense of her friends’ minds by fitting them into Freudian and other models of repression. Yet at the same time, we also see her missing the reality of her own repressions because of the narrative she tries to fit them into. Rose misses the reality of her mother’s alcoholism because she turns it into a tale of irony and mutual antagonism between mother and daughter. She writes a story around it and makes herself believe it. Is this in part because the truth is too painful to admit? Almost certainly. It makes sense to us that Rose is introduced to us as a writer, because her way of dealing with the world is to reach out to narrative tropes and make sense of it that way.

Later on, we see her in the context of Sburb, and there she begins to think of her experience with the game as a kind of epic. Her GameFAQ is laced with grandiose purple prose and self-aggrandizing attempts at pathos, even as she mocks herself for it in an ironic-but-not-really-ironic way. She uses it as a chance to depict herself as a protagonist, a hero about to conquer a mysterious world.

Later, of course, as she becomes more disenchanted with Sburb, she turns the narrative around: she becomes an antihero opposing a corrupt world, ready to break the Game for its injustices. But it’s still an act of roleplaying, one that she eventually becomes disenchanted with. And as Dave later observes, it’s probably a narrative Sburb itself wanted her to fall into for its own reasons, giving her a reason to advance the time loops the destruction of Lord English required. After she breaks free of grimdarkness, though, she focuses on a narrative of self-sacrifice, wanting to find fulfilment in martyrdom that lets her companions escape their dire circumstances. Dave’s insistence on coming along with her complicates that narrative, as does her survival and transformation into the God Tier Seer of Light in the fires of the Green Sun.

After Cascade, Rose wrestles with the broken pieces of narrative all around her, not knowing how to put them into a framework. We’ll talk about that more in a bit, but perhaps we can see now why Rose has such a hard time believing Dave’s experience with Arcs—she writes everything that happens to her into her own personal story.

Though Doc Scratch is being his usual asshole self when he tells Rose this:

The plans you were making were based on assumptions and fabrications of your imagination. You were writing more stories, much like those about your false magical men.

…I think he’s actually got some pretty good insight into Rose here. He knows that she constructs stories around her life in the same way that she constructs stories about Zazzerpan and the Learned.  In Rose we see someone who’s constantly casting about for narratives that describe her circumstances. The narratives she finds aren’t so much Caliborn’s but Sburb’s—the story of a protagonist of an epic, destined for heroism and achievement.

But once again Hussie is stressing the difference between narrative Arcs, especially Sburb’s, and the random chaos of human experiences. Rose wants everything that happens to make sense narratively, for every event to be Chekov’s Gun, but sometimes shit just happens. Jasprose’s existence in the narrative, I think, is primarily to highlight this tension. Sometimes your dumb cat brings back your alt-universe dead self and fuses with her for no particular reason and it doesn’t really mean anything. That’s life, you know? It be like that sometimes.

It’s not surprising to me that one of the other narrative things Rose is uneasy about in the end of Homestuck is Calliope’s return from the dead. Rose wants to see her as a messiah figure, central to the culmination of an epic (her word) but the fact is, as I said in my Gnostic post, Calliope exists on her own terms, not as part of any narrative structure. This is hard for Rose to wrestle with, but it’s the entire point. Calliope, and by extension all the characters in Homestuck, don’t need to be narratively significant to be worth protecting. They need only to live.

(Okay, I can’t resist making another point, silly as it is: Even Rose’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Jade will debunk the concept of endgame ships has some truth in it. Homestuck approaches endgame ships somewhat differently from other narratives, showing a lot of different possibilities for each character’s relationships over the course of the story and leaving it somewhat ambiguous and open to reader interpretation where they finally ended up. This is especially true of Jade, whose close bond with Dave and Karkat is left to be interpreted by the reader. Homestuck acknowledges that relationships don’t always fit into simplistic narratives, and that how a relationship turns out has a lot to do with a person’s maturity, needs, and growth.  Rose and Kanaya, interestingly, are among the exceptions, being very clearly defined, but even still, Rose is surprised, I think, at the ways in which her problems endanger the relationship and the fact that it needs communication and upkeep beyond the usual romance trope of “they got together and all problems were solved forever.” So as much as Rose was joking, she’s also 100% right. Okay, I’m done. )

So that’s Rose: someone who attaches very strongly to Sburb’s narratives about importance, heroism, and growth, missing some of the ways in which her own life doesn’t fit those models. In the end, though, I think she ends up in a good place. She begins taking Dave’s remark to heart, as evidenced by how she begins approaching reality’s departures from her narratives with humor and levity rather than angst. And her connection with Roxy, which allows her to see past the story she constructed around her mother and perceive the real facts about their relationship, brings her out of her illusions and into a more mature perspective on her life. I think, by the end of Homestuck, she’s headed in the right direction, and she has a strong, mature bond with her kickass alien wife to help get her there.

Cascade vs Character, or God Tiers Don’t Cure Your Blues

With Rose we touched on how Sburb’s narratives aren’t always what the characters really need. This is something that also comes out in Sburb’s approach to maturity: the god tier. The god tier mechanic suggests that maturity comes from developing into a very specific kind of person. A Seer of Light, a Knight of Time, and so on. Most importantly, it shows this as happening in one cathartic moment, usually involving self-sacrifice, in which the Hero dramatically transforms into their mythological role. Bam—maturity unlocked. It’s growth-as-cutscene, identity as leveling up.

In Cascade, we see God Tiering happen in parallel with moments of catharsis for the characters. Dave and Rose find themselves alive on the other side of self-sacrifice, and Rose is empowered by her aspect to see things clearly, rather than be caught up in her illusions. Meanwhile Jadesprite, caught up in Jade’s self-loathing, is instead transformed into Jade’s greatest strength and glorious furry self-affirmation when Jade goes god tier. These moments are immensely satisfying, and one well might think that they represented the end of each characters’ story.

But Homestuck deliberately calls this catharsis into question. After Cascade, we’re shown that these flashy moments of ascension didn’t solve the characters’ problems. Becoming god tier didn’t keep Rose from having an ambiguous, painful relationship with her mother’s legacy. The strong narrative it suggested for her didn’t keep her from losing direction and becoming unsure of what was important. Similarly, Dave’s ascension to being a Knight of Time didn’t help him reckon with his brother’s abuse; if anything it heightened it because of his ambiguous relationship with heroism and battle. In the Game Over timeline, we see him having a nervous breakdown because of all the ways in which he hasn’t dealt with this! Only a real connection with Dirk, the right person to help him work through the problem, could set him free. And Jade’s reabsorption of Jadesprite didn’t fully allow her to integrate the sadness she represented into her psyche; it remained repressed, as comes out later when she’s under the GrimBark influence of the Condesce.

What stands out to me about the god tiers is that they represent powerful narratives within the context of Sburb—all three received powerful abilities that would help them win the Game of Sburb. But taken out of that context, on the three-year meteor and battleship journeys, the God Tier roles didn’t help them in the least. They needed actual growth, not the narrative structures that Sburb provided for them. This, I think, is the whole reason for the three-year gap: to show how Sburb gave our protagonists Narrative growth without giving them actual, individual growth that they could rely on.

And John? Well, John’s god tiering is taken to represent maturity, and as Homestuck’s everyman, his death and resurrection is a cathartic moment for everyone in their deepening relationship with the Game. But when he finally leaves the context of Sburb for good, we see him lost and aimless, holding onto the past, unable to follow his friends into a more meaningful maturity. He helps achieve a happy ending for everyone else, but he doesn’t know what to do without living in that story. (One hopes that in the Epilogue, he’ll find a way.)

I’m Feeling Just Peachy About Hegemonic Narratives

While we’re making contentious points about Homestuck’s relationship with narratives, let’s talk Tricksters. Yes, we’re doing this man. We’re making this happen. While some confusing signposting and the deliberately off-putting nature of the Trickster arc led to it not being well-received at the time, looking back I think it reads much better (and is much less tedious) archivally, and actually continues the theme of individuals versus narrative tropes rather well. I’m drawing on the aforementioned essay by revolutionaryduelist, which is frankly the definitive work on the topic of Tricksters, so go read their work, not mine, for a real examination of the subject. Cannot recommend it highly enough!

But to summarize how Tricksters fit into what I’ve been discussing here: with the Trickster arc and the candy juju, we return to Inherited Narratives and the toxic narratives perpetuated by Caliborn. The Trickster Arc is a depiction of whiteness, heteronormativity, and hegemonic power as horror, because all these things clash with who the characters are as people. And once again it represents big, seemingly cathartic moments as emotionally bankrupt because they lack the substance of actual growth. The Trickster sequence is off-putting not by accident but by design; it’s extremely uncomfortable to sit through because it is extremely uncomfortable for the characters and not what they really need.

The Juju is explicitly compared to the star in Mario; it’s a game mechanic that allows you to skip difficulty and blaze ahead to the end of the level. Of course, since this is Sburb, it’s paralleled with skipping ahead in one’s maturity as a person. The God Tiers offer catharsis irrespective of real growth; for Tricksters this is turned up to one zillion. It’s not surprising that this “gift” comes from Caliborn, who dearly loves achievement and leveling at the expense of growth, and from Calliope, who’s been led to dismiss the importance of her individual existence and whose hero-worship of the protagonists can sometimes be alien and othering.

Needless to say, the use of a power-up to achieve maturity goes horrifyingly wrong.

Caliborn’s link to Inherited Narratives of aggressive, overpowering masculinity is also here connected to other hegemonic narratives of heterosexuality and whiteness as power. While I wouldn’t call Homestuck’s approach to race perfect, ultimately I think the Trickster arc is written around showing Homestuck’s more usual goal of racial ambiguity for the kids as the ideal, while the departure from that ideal, ie; Trickster versions of the kids being represented as white people, is depicted as negative and horrifying.

This is demonstrated in Jake’s horrified reaction to Trickster Jane. While sober, he doesn’t see her peachiness as a good thing. He reacts with the same terror, and in fact the same panels, with which Nepeta reacted to the nightmare of Sober Gamzeee. Whiteness is being played here as horror, especially in that it’s supposed to be a way to achieve power and advancement. That whiteness would be seen as a tool for success and catharsis represents Inherited Narratives from our world to the highest degree, and we are indeed supposed to be horrified by it, as we are by all things Caliborn. While there was a lot of confusion around this at the time, and in ways it was written confusingly, looking closely, I think ultimately invoking the terror of hegemonic whiteness what Hussie was going for here.  Again, see revolutionaryduelist, who puts it better than I could.

Tricksters also evoke inherited narratives of Heteronormativity. Marriage and reproduction are their obsession, and they’re particularly concerned with fixing Jane and Jake’s problems through having a zillion babies. Trickster Roxy, meanwhile, ignores Dirk’s sexuality out of a misguided belief that she is entitled to a romantic relationship with him. Tricksters ignore the difficulty of working out one’s relationship problems by believing makeouts and absurd marriages will solve everything. The Tricksters also decide to head straight to self-sacrificing themselves into being god tiers. And why wouldn’t they? They’re high on the very notion of progress, and that kind of flashy, cathartic progress is exactly what they crave.

Ultimately, we can read the Trickster arc as a much more direct representation of what figures like Caliborn have been doing all along: enforcing seemingly cathartic narratives that are harmful to the protagonists in lieu of actual growth.

The good news for the Alpha kids is that when they wake up hung over from this narrative-induced bender, they’re forced to confront how abysmally it failed. They realize that this wasn’t the growth they needed, and they begin the painful work of actually communicating with one another and working through the problems which the Juju couldn’t solve. It’s a rejection of Caliborn and his ideals, and it’s a sign that they’re headed in the right direction.

This brings us, at last, to the finale, the ultimate repudiation of Caliborn and what he stands for.

Two Endings: Glory vs. Escape

One of the things that most caught people off guard, including me, about the ending of Homestuck was that the main kids, our central protagonists, never directly confronted Lord English.

I remember thinking, as I’m sure a lot of people did at the time, that there would be one more plot twist, that the seeming fight with the Condesce and three Jacks who were connected to Lord English’s power would give way to a fight with English himself, that somehow the kids—especially Dave— would have to confront him and take him down.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Homestuck played things much more straightforwardly. Those who’d said they were going to confront English—Vriska especially— held a showdown with English in the Furthest Ring, while the vast majority of our protagonists, the kids we cared especially about, simply confronted the lingering problems in their session, the echoes of his influence over Paradox Space, and achieved victory not over English, but their Game.

I was certainly surprised by this. Do I think it was a bad choice?

Hell no.

I think it’s an incredible fucking choice, and it’s a big reason I love the ending.

Look. The central narrative of the Heroic Epic, the idea of becoming important through victory over powerful foes, is called into question throughout Homestuck. It’s often a necessity to engage with because the Game asks those kinds of victories of its players, but Homestuck shows that it isn’t the same thing as real growth. Caliborn is the ultimate manifestation of the problems with this idea, someone who’s latched onto the achievement games offer, the sense of power and importance, while rejecting the opportunities to mature Sburb also presents. Caliborn wanted a multiverse in which everything revolved around him, and for a time, he got it.

But for the kids we care about, life doesn’t revolve around Caliborn. It revolves around their own goals, their own lives, their own reasons for being. They have Caliborn and Sburb’s systems to wrestle with, but they can choose how they want to engage with those systems. They can, if they wish, depart from the values of these narratives and be set free.

For John and his friends, the experience of Homestuck isn’t about having the biggest showdown with the biggest bad guy. It’s makings sure your friends are safe and getting to the end of the Game so that you can be free. It’s about finding a way, in a multiverse made out of these narratives and these systems, to live. Their story is not truly a Heroic Epic, that is, an Epic of Battle, of Victory, but an Epic of Escape.

But that isn’t true for everyone. While John and friends are bringing the story of an Escape to a culmination, a completely different story is going on at the same time over in the Furthest Ring. It’s a much more traditional story. The story of a great Warrior, confronting a great Enemy. It’s a traditional Heroic Epic, a Sburban Epic. And who is its protagonist? The one person who most wanted to be. Vriska.

There’s so, so much more one could say about Vriska, and I hope to say it all at a l8r d8. Suffice it to say for now that Vriska—especially this version of Vriska—is caught up in the very same narrative Caliborn is. The narrative of Becoming Important through Achieving Victory. Vriska rejects the growth the people around her have achieved, and berates her ghost self for growing away from this framework that’s so important to her. Like Caliborn, she can’t let herself grow, because to grow would be to lose her central role in the Narrative of Heroism.

It’s a narrative she inherited from her culture, from Sburb, and from Caliborn himself. Because technically, she’s right that what she’s doing is necessary. Lord English called someone like her into existence. It was always necessary that someone confront him, someone with the same devotion to Game Skill and Conquest that Caliborn has. Another powergamer, ready to (Heroically) take the bad guy down. Indeed, as a product of the aggressive, game-winning troll culture Doc Scratch brought into being, she is a reflection of English, his Girl Gamer double, his light mirror. She wins, in a way. She trounces Hussie. She gets exactly what she wanted. She gets to be the most important person to the cosmos. She gets to end his reign of terror, just as he got to have one in the first place.

But just like Caliborn, she’s caught in that story like a trap, and she can’t see it. She throws herself into the same black hole that devours Caliborn’s domain. Indeed, she chooses to sacrifice her relationship with Terezi, and the chance at a happy life it provides, for going out in a blaze of glory. She loses so much by this narrative, and yet she chooses it. This is in sharp contrast with her ghost self who instead chooses—of all the absurd things—happiness. And like Alt-Calliope, by committing to her narrative, she ensures (ironically) a loss of her own agency, ensures that she will be a tool used by Skaia and Paradox Space to end the story of Caliborn, to close a loop that was always meant to end. Just as Calliope and Alt-Calliope stand on two sides of that thematic divide, Vriska and (Vriska) also represent the choice between identity within an overpowering narrative and the more terrifying, but more meaningful possibility of personal growth.

(And isn’t it interesting that while Vriska thinks she’s the most important person to this story, she couldn’t have done it without Meenah, and Tavros, and Davepeta, and Aradia and an army of ghosts, all of whom work together to achieve that moment of victory? Her individualistic idea of her story is shown to be false by the very mechanism of her satisfaction.)

Simultaneously in Paradox Space these two stories take place. In the Furthest Ring, the story of Glory. In the final Sburb session, the story of Escape.

In contrast to Vriska’s story, the final chapter for our thirteen protagonists is about living despite the narrative structures around them, not throwing themselves into a predetermined role.  We already talked about this with Calliope, but I think it’s the nature of the victory for all of them.

In ending their Game, John and friends are working within the confines of one system while rejecting another entirely—and yet they find a way of escaping both. They do not choose to live by Caliborn’s values. They don’t go to the Furthest Ring seeking glory but merely seek an ending, seek peace. The peace that Vriska and Caliborn rejected.

Sburb itself offers them that peace, and mediates their victory. Its narratives are a structure that they must turn to their advantage, rather than reject entirely. Because Sburb—or, to put it another way, the rules of the Game, the rules of Paradox Space—has been running the show this whole time. The retcon Juju was Skaia’s creation, and the kids’ use of it to retcon a better ending for themselves was part of its plan to close the loop of Lord English and bring him to an end. This is clear from the way the Denizens approve and sign off on their victory, as they approve of all victories in their Game. The kids’ happiness is incidental, a footnote in the grand essay that is Paradox Space, and not necessary to this larger narrative.

But it matters because it matters to John, and Rose, and Dave, and Jade, to Calliope and everyone in that final victorious group. Their freedom comes not from a grand narrative but from themselves, from the ways in which they’ve grown and the things they want to achieve. They fight the final enemies LE throws at them—a Queen, a King, some Carapacians locked in stalemate—just as they’d fight the final bosses of Sburb, not because they’re seeking glory, but because they want their Game of Sburb to come to an end.

John talks about the importance of his friends in his final conversation, and how glad he was to be able to save them. Roxy talks about everything that was taken from them by the Condesce and LE’s agents—the promise of a better life, a future for humanity and trolls—and how by defeating them, she hopes to take back those possibilities.

But in the end, not much needs to be said, because implied beneath all the humor, beneath the painful memory of Game Over and John’s retcon journey, is that what everyone’s fighting for fighting to be free.  

And in the end, Sburb sets them free. For its own reasons, yes. But because they seek this freedom, also for theirs. They’re given a world to define and create for themselves. A world where they no longer play the Game. A place where the narratives they inherited, from LE, from Sburb, from the world, no longer matter. Where they can tell their own stories, the stories that come from their own growth and their own lives, rather than anyone else’s.

The End of All Storytelling

At the end of Homestuck, the camera begins to pull away. In their final moments in the story, we see the kids from a distance, wordless, opening the door to their freed but no longer clearly in the spotlight that once shone on them. We see them gathering together with loved ones, embracing those they thought they’d lost, reconciling after their past arguments. It’s not the end of a story, exactly. It’s an arrow, pointing in the direction of one. The signs that happiness is possible in that world of freedom. Even the depiction of the world they will build together is a suggestion, a projection forward through the door they will walk through. We can’t look on it directly, because it’s out of our scope. And in the Credits sequence we get glimpses into that world, but nothing direct. A series of suggestions, literal snapshots with us left to fill the space between.

The map begins to show only glimpses of the territory. Homestuck begins to pull away from Homestuck. We come to understand the kids are heading into a world in which all narratives cease.

Don’t misunderstand—this isn’t a rejection of the story of Homestuck. It’s an acknowledgement of its limitations. Homestuck sought to present a story of several kids who found themselves in a world of overbearing narratives, and how they responded and reacted to that—some by embracing those narratives, some by creating their own. They inherited narratives, but they made new ones that were more true to spontaneous experience, to their own lives. But Homestuck acknowledges that even the new narratives it creates can only say so much. No representation will ever perfectly be able to capture the spontaneous meaning of real lives. No map can ever perfectly show us the territory. So Homestuck chooses to point at the territory instead. To give us a sense of a future, of the lives that the kids, now freed, will be able to lead, without nailing down the details. In that wide-open space, we can imagine infinite possibility, and infinite freedom. Freedom for the characters, but also for the readers who love them.

In the end, it’s the same question all endings confront: how do you bring things to a close while acknowledging that life goes on, that nothing ever really ends? For Homestuck, the answer is to paint with broad strokes, to suggest that there will be a future, that each person we care about will shape it in their own way while leaving a wide space to explore what that means. For Homestuck, that means lifting away the restrictive structures of story for the wide-open possibilities of living.

Homestuck

So. Let me tell you about Homestuck. What does that word, that title, really mean?

If a home is the context we come from, the world we inherit, the realm we live in, then Homestuck describes our relationship with that origin. There are many origins in Homestuck, and thus there are many levels to that relationship. To be Homestuck is to be stuck in one’s context, to be stuck in one’s universe, one’s home planet. But also to be stuck in one’s narratives, in all the narratives one inherits from one’s guardians and from the world. To be stuck in a game, a set of rules. To be stuck in the corrupt realm of a Demiurge. To be stuck in the story one tells to oneself, to be stuck in a domain that promises glory but also prevents any other story from taking place.

The end of Homestuck is about escaping all of these things. How one achieves that escape, or fails to achieve it.

In the end, some do. Leaving Homestuck, they leave the context they inherited—through the door of a white house that represents their Game, the realm of their Demiurge, and their Story. Leaving it, they become unstuck from the Home they once knew.

They’re free.

Homestuck offers us the possibility of taking that journey with them, and finding our own understanding of that Escape. And it suggests to us the possibility of our own escape in a world that has its own structures, its own limitations, its own narratives, a world that, in its challenges, is really not too different from the world of the comic. It suggests that by questioning our inherited narratives, by writing our own stories, by living our own lives for our own reasons…

We, too, can be free.

That’s the meaning of Homestuck.

[Next time: confronting Homestuck’s reception, the limitations of my model, and the relationship between the fandom and Andrew Hussie. Coming…..at some vague point in the future.That sounds like a good release date. Yes, that’s right! Same day as Hiveswap. *rimshot*]

[dottenator]

@hussie

Respectfully....

WHAT THE FUCK

One little note before I begin my serious thoughts: Hussie how could you kill the Mayor? It absolutely pales in comparison to everyting else, but come on dude.

I'm gonna try to work out my frustrations in the order I read these, meat and then candy, so....

Meat

How dare you do this to Dirk.

That's the thing which keeps sticking to me, honestly. They won! The game is over, Dirk has friends who love him, why this?? Why is Dirk destined to go completely nuts and do such horrible and awful things, ciolating the mental autonomy of everyone he supposedly cares about? Jake and Jane's feelings in the earlier parts of the epilogue, before the meddling becomes so overt, are significantly more creepy and invasive once it becomes clear that Dirk is making them think like this. The way they break down with his influence removed is horrifying. Dirk is such a fantastic character and I'm supposed to accept that he never grows out of thinking he can control everyone? That I'm not allowed an epilogue in which he calms the fuck down and lets himself not be in charge? I don't care at this point of that's considered wish fulfillment, give him a HAPPY ENDING for once. Not this bullshit. I'm not even gonna call that ~~Ultimate Self~~ thing by the name of the character I love. He doesn't deserve this.

Rose and Kanaya were our one good thing, and then this?? Dirk fucks with Rose's autonomy and fragile mental state to trick her away from her wife forever? The Rosemary wedding was the best thing about the original snapchat epilogue. The two of them are perfect for each other, they were happy god damn it, and I don't like any brand of storytelling that decides to split up the immortal god lesbians for pointless egotistical drama. Kanaya's fury and grief when she's allowed control over her own thoughts again is the most terrifying thing, because it really shows just how far from their understood, canon selves they really were in this epilogue. (The use of the word canon is really touchy to me after All This, but atm it's the best way to describe "the characterization we all know and love from previously established sources")

Everyone died beating English. Sure, why not. All the ghosts, Vriska, the teen kids, John everyone. It makes me unbelievably sad to imagine any of them dying (maybe not the ghosts), but with all the rest of this steaming pile of bullshit characterization I'm almost numb to it. Terezi is refreshingly real, still herself and completely believable, but when she gets back to Earth C she just. Doesn't talk to anyone? Doesn't get in touch with John or Karkat, doesn't tell anyone at all that John is dead? Why??? I'm baffled here. There's no closure to anything about Terezi here, except her personal emotions on Vriska, and who knows how valid that catharsis is with the fucking mind control narrative device everywhere. Also, fuck Hussie for making me read anyone claiming that John isn't important, or relevant, or an incredible and unique character. Was the Candy postscript supposed to imply she ended up with Dirk and Rose?? Why??? What the fuck is even going on here?????

Dave and Karkat were usually a balm to the whole bullshit, but like everything else they too are tainted by the overwhelming lack of consent in this whole epilogue. Do I think Dave and Karkat are a cute couple who should be together? Yeah. Do I think it should happen like that? Fuck no!!! They're both clearly uncomfortable with the whole situation, it all feels like an incredible violation of privacy and consent, and then right at the end it implies that Karkat isn't comfortable with how it happened and is oushing Dave away because of it! Like, fuck!!! This isn't what anyone wanted to happen! Let them figure themselves out on their own terms, with no weird narrative devices pushing them into it. Who cares how long it takes, they're all immortal!!!!!

Roxy is a cornerstone honestly. The narrative can't touch him, and I love him for it. Good for him. I really don't have anything to say on Roxy in meat, he's just fine, due largely to his immunity to the narrative bullshit.

Jane.......... I'm not sure. The bits from her point of view (though it's really unclear how much is her and how much is the narrative's influence) paint her as having some kind of reason for her troll-related policies, but really? There's no excuse for them. What the FUCK, Jane. Why does her entire future have to be molded by the influence of Condy? Can't we have a future without uncomfortable Trump parallels and the assertation that a beloved character is an asshole who wants to quash the rights of an entire species? Please Hussie I'm so tired.

Jake just makes me sad tbh. Don't have a lot to say on him. The narrative has been abusing him since Act 6 started, and the new narrative doesn't let up. Give this boy a break, I'm begging you.

In conclusion on Meat:

The parts where the muse is in charge, or where the narrative steps back and allows the characters to be themselves, are amazing. Fuck everything else, and fuck Hussie for making me read it. I'm too mad to think straight.

Candy

How dare you do this, to any of them?

The first heartbreak of Candy is Roxy/Calliope. John/Roxy is a sweet enough ship, but at what cost? They were so happy together, amd even John repeatedly points out in his internal monologue that it doesn't feel right to break them up. His conversation with Dave about sexuality and love is incredible, and up to chapter 14 the Roxy and Callir issue seemed to be the only sticking point in a much happier version

Then Dirk dies, and really? Really??? Fuck you. Fuck you for making me read that Dirk Strider would choose to end his own life when he realizes that he can no longer <i>control the minds of his friends and family</i>. That's fucked up in a million different directions. Fuck you.

Every songle thing Gamzee does makes me feel physically unclean. Is this supposed ti be a parody of poorly written fix-it fanfiction? A deconstruction of redemption arcs as a concept? It wasn't needed! Homestuck has redemption arcs already, Vriska and (Vriska) in particular bandied the idea around and deconstructed it fairly well, all of John's retcon powers were a fix-it fic, was ANY OF THIS BULLSHIT necessary??? It's a disgrace to the person Gamzee was before he went insane, and to everyone forced to read through his awful, awful dialogue.

Roxy was difficult to read in this epilogue, coming straight out of meat where Roxy was confident in himself and hid place in the world, then on to this Roxy who felt subtly wrong right up until her final conversation with John when we get her point of view on everything that's happened. Still mad about the Straight Married Babies Ever After, but Roxy at least is still #real, and I can respect her and her choices. (Except the ones involving Gamzee and funerals. I acknowledge that being weird about funerals is a known Roxy trait, but come on. Really??)

John feels like the point of view character again in Candy. He's the only one who seems to notice that something isn't quite right, his conversations with Terezi are incredible when they aren't slapping me in the face with the not-so-subtle wrongness of this universe, and his reconciliations with Roxy and Jake at the end are beautiful. I love that he at least tried to help little Tavros, no matter how it turned out, because he's a good fucking person!

Jake is a mixed bag. Am I happy with how he's treated in the first three quarters of the epilogue? Oh FUCK no. An I happy that he finally gets to be free by the end and be his own fucking person for once in his life? Absolutely. Give the boy some agency, and some GOD DAMN PANTS.

Jade honestly doesn't..... Do much? Either plot-wose or for me emotionally. She isn't in the epilogue much except as an obstacle for Davekat, which is really rude to everyone involved. I barely remember a time when I shipped DaveJade, and I don't think I ever shipped JadeKat, but after Meat I'd really hoped that that triad could work itself out. They had the potential to really be happy. Then it didn't, and she's never going to know why her husband didn't come back from investigating that strange building, unless she followed and found his corpse, dead for no apparent reason and not capable of being revived. I'm not sure which is worse. At least one of those has some kind of closure.

Karkat I actually really like in Candy. He stands up for himself, apparently finds love with Meenah, founds a moderately successful rebellion. Good For Him.

Dave is a clusterfuck of emotions, as always. Am I happy about his relationship with Jade? Not really, it seems by the end like he forced himself into it, thinking it was the right thing to do more than actually wanting it. Am I happy he got to meet and talk to Obama? Absolutely, though there is then the whole can of worms which is the canon Condy backstory. Not even touching that. After the speculation in Meat I'm thrilled to find out Obama did in fact god tier and escape the destruction of the universe. Dave is gay, he loves/loved Karkat, he's off to be the ~~Ultimate~~ version of himself and save the multiverse in the Meat postscript. Good For Him. (Also I can't be the only one who thinks Obama meant he and Dirk Fucked. Did that really happen? Did I dream that up??)

Rose and Kanaya were good too. Am I thrilled they found and raised Vriska 2.0? No. Am I happy they got to grow older together, immortal lesbian gods who are deeply in love? 10 million percent yes. Rose thanking John for the happy times with her family moved me. It didn't make it all worth it, but it helped soothe the burn this epilogue left on my soul.

Aside: I'm glad all the dead trolls are here? They're not double dead, this universe is somehow inside the black hole I guess (?), the generic dead (and Meenah and (Vriska)) get to do other shit too. Meenah/Karkat is sweet, Vriska got to kill Gamzee once and for all, I'm okay with that sequence of events.

Aradia and Sollux showing up made my day, I'm not gonna lie. They're great and hilarious. Alt!Callie's explanation of how a narrator's motives can shape a story helped me come to terms with Meat, as well as being just a fantastic bit of meta discussion.

That really just leaves Jane........

I'm not happy. Sweet baker girl is a tyrannical and genocidal despot?? No thanks. Abusive, xenophobic, asshole Jane, basically new Condy with a twist, is not something I'n gonna accept. The only time I sympathized with her at all was when her father died, and that was more for his sake than anything else. (Side note: where the fuck was he in Meat??)

In conclusion on Candy:

I don't know how anything could be as bad as Meat, but this is. Somehow. The light parts were lighter, but everything had a fundamental wrongness to it, and I couldn't be satisfied with any of it. At least Callie said none of it is canon, and she only stuck around to kill English once and for all and fix the narrative of Meat.

In Conclusion

Hussie, come out and fight me you COWARD.