#another honorable mention: rose or gamzee from homestuck

[soysaucevictim]

Time for another one of those tag games, thanks to being tagged by @bibliomatsuri. So here's my response “to list 10 of my favorite characters from 10 different fandoms,“ so here I go:

Sanders Sides - Remus Sanders (I love all the dorks but this man has stuck me with THE most pervasive brain rot. As y'all could probably tell. Even though I relate most to Logan/Virgil/Janus... he's just that infectious of a brain goblin, pffft.)

The Umbrella Academy - Klaus Hargreeves. I love that he exudes a similar chaotic energy to Remus. (They're all pretty delightfully dysfunctional people though.)

Encanto - Bruno Madrigal. Another Remus Energy Pick. (Though I relate to Luisa more...)

Final Fantasy (FF6) - Kefka Palazzo. Idec if he's a blatant a Joker Expy. "Dancing Mad" is S-Tier Final Boss Music.

Danny Phantom - There was a hot minute where it was Freakshow (clowns, man)... but now I think it's a toss up between Dark Danny, Clockwork, and Danny. Probably Dark Danny, because TUE was terrifying and the BEST episode, imo. (Though I've kind of related to Jazz and Sam a decent amount.)

Marvel Comics - Spider-man. (It really is a split between Peter and Miles, for me tbh. Also love the Marvel Zombies run so much. And I know Danny was a bit of a Spidey Expy.)

Gravity Falls - Stan Pines or Bill Cipher. For wildly different reasons. :,D (Soos and others were great too.)

Soul Eater - Crona Makenshi. (But Dr. Stein is a runner-up, love mad scientists types.)

Breaking Bad - Skyler or Jesse, probably? (But there's a lot to pick from for interesting characters here. Walt gets to be DELIGHTFULLY punchable as things go along there.)

The Spoony Experiment - Dr. Insano. Mad. Scientist. (In full acknowledgement of how CA/TGWTG/TSE/etc. turned out, it was my first actual active fandom involvement.)

And I'm gonna tag (an arbitrary number of people) @milktea531 @r0sethrills @falconwhitaker @aliensnipe @chromorbid @electropath @moonlightsmasquerade

(Of course, the usual, preemptive apologies to anyone here who doesn't want to be tagged in these things. And even if you haven't been tagged, you can obv do this if you want to, ig.)

[stormsbourne]

the homestuck epilogue, summarized by me

edited after: I’m leaving this here for my own reference but there’s a decent amount of stuff I got wrong in these. I’ve tried to correct most of it. still please don’t bother with these if, for some reason, you’re still free of this dark knowledge in the post hell 2020 timeline

there’s doubtless parts of both sides (which are actually only one side, big spoilers there) that I’m going to forget so I apologize in advance for that but I read the entire thing very quickly and some parts are more memorable than others. this is also only slightly polished up from when I posted it on discord, which I did in a tremendous hurry. so pardon the grammar

please be wary that I literally CANNOT tag this with everything there are warnings for so if you’re not sure, check the actual epilogue tag list, because literally all of it is mentioned in some capacity.

letsa go

LET’S START WITH CANDY.

john decides not to go. immediately, things start going strangely well for literally everyone, who all get exactly what he thinks they want (or what SOMEONE thinks they want, more on that later. I think it's still john doing the influencing.) davejadekat hook up. john and roxy get married. etc. gamzee gets “redeemed” by which I mean john rescues him at calliope’s request and he goes around saying he’s good now. but as always there's trouble in paradise and the things that seem to be "good endings" end up being bad. jane becomes president of earth but this leads her to become a fascist dictator who may possibly be responsible for the future genocide of trollkind (this shit is full fascist racism shit. “troll camps” are a thing.). dave and karkat are in love with each other and jade getting in with them has actually just made it harder for them to be honest with one another. gamzee basically serves no purpose except to be annoying and gross. 

at some point literally all the trolls start getting resurrected because of timeline shenanigans where the black hole is spitting out their ghosts onto earth c (which is actually inside of the black hole in paradox space somehow. don’t think too hard about it). rose and kanaya adopt a grub they name vriska to honor her sacrifice and also because it looks like vriska. john and roxy have a kid named harry anderson. jane basically rapes jake (he's drunk and also the lollipop is invovled) and conveniently gets pregnant with a kid they later name tavros. AS TIME GOES ON, karkat breaks up from djk because he's sick of it and then goes on to lead a troll rebellion against jane. jane starts cucking jake with gamzee. roxy and john break up because john is depressed and also because john is way more interested in texting terezi than in his real-life spouse. dirk kills himself for reasons that have more to do witht the construct of the meat timeline than the candy one.

all of this is slightly out of order but I’m trying to be succinct so when things get crazy I can keep the relevant details close together.

QUICK MEAT DETOUR (MEATOUR).

john decides to go. he makes a quick stop to grab the ring of life from aranea, then scoops up the other game over kids, who head off to face caliborn. the masterpiece goes down as you would expect it to with the beta kids getting stuck in the juju. the betas are later released from the juju by vriska but it doesn't actually kill english (dave does with his sword, then gets decapitated), and john gets nailed hard in the chest by caliborn's gold tooth, which begins to poison and kill him. davepeta appears for like two seconds and then vanishes into the black hole. jade's corpse is the only one of the kids that isn't fucking vaporized but it gets sucked into the black hole. we'll come back to this later. john runs into meenah, who steals the life ring and peaces out into the black hole. then he runs into terezi in the remains of paradox space and the two of them fuck. 

IN THE MEANTIME, on earth, karkat mounts an opposition run to jane's presidency, at dave's urging. dave and karkat are explicitly not together but also explicitly dancing around how they both know they love each other; jade keeps trying to start a threesome and both of them are like "UHHHHHH." roxy and calliope are together. jake and dirk have a stupid wrestle rap tv show but it is iterated on over and over again that dirk thinks jake is a useless idiot who he can't treat well and who deserves nothing and whom he needs to babysit and control so cool I guess. dirk goes to talk to rose and it becomes clear both of them are experiencing the same thing with their expansion of consciousness giving them awareness of other timelines and vague control over them (”ascending”) AT WHICH POINT it becomes clear that dirk is actually the narrator+controller of the entire meat timeline. the narration turns orange and dirk’s character voice (or what the epilogue says his character voice is) begins to leak into how it’s written.

BACK TO CANDY FOR A SECOND.

jade's corpse from the meat timeline crashes down into the candy earth c through a ghost black hole portal. nobody knows what the sweet christ is happening, but roxy proposes having another funeral since the kids only see one another at funerals (the last one being dirk’s) and aren't very close. they have the funeral but in the middle of it, jade sits up and has been possessed by the spirit of red calliope, who claims she is protecting this version of the planet and is keeping watch out for a bad actor who could destroy everything.

kid vriska is horrible to kid tavros. john and terezi talk a lot and it's routinely implied that john cares more about her than about roxy, and that john is the only person she talks to. jake eventually walks out on jane with their kid but only after she’s treated him horrendously and continued to cuck him with gamzee. meenah also comes down through a hole in the sky, where she meets karkat and they hook up romantically. dave and jade get married but it’s implied to be a very troubled marriage. kid vriska begins banging harry anderson once they are teens. also once they are teens, ACTUAL (alive) vriska comes crashing down onto the planet from being sucked into the black hole. she and kid vriska have some conversations about terezi, but only after vriska hatefucks gamzee. vriska sends terezi a message. we don't see how this pays off, which makes me think that more is probably coming. 

dave, while trying to help karkat with the troll rebellion, comes upon actual literal barack obama, has a conversation about sexuality with him and how he’s not really into jade (here he calls himself “gay” while in the meat timeline he is very explicit about being bisexual). obama tells him that ascension to one’s ultimate self is impossible for the normal human body to withstand and helps him turn into a robot so he can handle the transformatiin and help save another timeline. 

btw a war has started between jane’s fascist empire and the trolls, led by karkat, who has an eyepatch. john, having patched some things up a bit with roxy, reconciles with his son. this is basically how candy ends.

OK. LET’S GET BACK TO THE MEAT.

now that dirk's control over the narrative is firmly established he actually starts exerting some level of control over people through his narrative voice. he uses this to start making people do things he wants.

anyway jade falls into a coma at some point and when she wakes up, the spirit of red calliope is using her to "transmit" and dirk and red calliope start literally fighting over who gets to write the story. red calliope wins at first, and dirk's narration is reduced down to small font where he passive aggressively swipes at calliope. alive calliope takes one look at possessed jade and runs away almost literally screaming. oh also I forgot calliope and roxy both go by "they" at this point in time and dirk+calliope spar a bit over that as dirk also keeps calling roxy "her." fun times. 

anyway while calliope is running the narrative jake agrees to endorse karkat's presidential run as dirk makes plans involving a rifle and the phrase "jake english, your ass is mine." during the rally where jake is about to endorse karkat, dirk fools calliope into thinking he's trying to shoot jake, but wheels around and hits jade instead with a tranquilizer through a window. this makes red calliope's influence go away and dirk resumes control of the narrative. 

using his regained control of the narrative, dirk presses his thumb down on jake to remind jake how much he loves dirk, how he’s IN LOVE with dirk, and how "to love dirk is to obey him" and jake, obligingly, endorses jane in front of the entire crowd gathered there to watch his speech about karkat. 

dave and karkat, drinking together after jane handily wins the election, hook up though dave basically has to shout dirk out of his head because he wants to do it on his own terms instead of the way dirk keeps writing it, and dirk WILL NOT LET HIM because dirk knows best. eventually dirk leaves him alone but only after dave basically forcibly chases him out (without knowing what he’s really doing, sort of like Aimless Renegade in the comic). john and terezi come back to earth, where john dies and terezi captchalogues his body. dirk (as narrative) and terezi (as herself) spar a bit until he makes an offer to her to come see him about her dead boyfriend. this is the last we see of her. 

dirk then convinces kanaya (using the narrative) that he and rose are in love and he's better for rose than she is and she needs to let them go if she really loves rose. kanaya obligingly does this. dirk leaves kanaya some medicine that will wake jade up and goes to talk to jake, where he sex blackmails jake into lending him a spaceship. jake thinks he's coming along on the trip but dirk assures him this is not the case. jake breaks down literally sobbing and begging to go, dirk kisses him and tells him he'll never let jake break his heart again, and dirk leaves with rose (in a coma which dirk will resolve by putting her into a robot like dave).

jade wakes up and, with memories of red calliope's goals, shouts that dirk has to be stopped, pointing out to various people (namely kanaya) how weird they’ve been acting because he’s been subtly influencing them using the narrative as lowkey mind control. they all make plans to go find dirk though none of them can figure out where the sweet fuck john is (terezi is awol). they ask jake who, sobbing, confirms that dirk took a spaceship, and then go plan to get one of their own and follow him using red calliope's instructions.

also this is impossible to get in anywhere else but roxy is going by “he” now and dirk has a whole paragraph about how suave and manly and cool and masculine he is

WOW THAT WAS HAIRY. THAT IT?

the actual ending of each consists of the following: candyverse davebot shows up on candy earth as red calliope opens a hole presumably back out to the furthest ring (after literally eating caliborn’s body). he and aradia (she was in candy for a while now but did pretty much nothing) are like cool let's go and vault into the hole. meanwhile, meatverse dirk and robot rose draw closer to a new unnamed planet as rose does dirk's laundry. they both know the planet is destined for a new sburb session in the future.

YIKES!

yeah yikes.

WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS?

if you’re like me you should ignore it and just keep doing what you want to do. have fun. the author is dead, long live the fanfic author.