honestly I liked the loose ends better

[edenfalling]

I read the Homestuck epilogue(s) today and... that sure was a thing that happened.

I don't think any of it's impossible as an extrapolation from the main story, but neither thread strikes me as an especially plausible end-path for the characters, and while I do enjoy meta-narrative technobabble, I frankly prefer a less... uh... reductive and negative set of options, shall we say. Like, if your story is thematically about escape from the tyranny of narrative inevitability, why pick THOSE particular possibilities as the ones to narrow in on and explore?

Fortunately it's all fundamentally irrelevant, so whatever. I am officially ignoring the whole thing, just like I've already been ignoring the Snapchats and a bunch of the credits. :)

Comments

[sholio]

Oh wow, I didn't even know there was an epilogue! I don't know whether to read it or not. I'm morbidly curious, while suspecting that I probably would prefer the open-ended version.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, the first few pages went up last week (on 4/13, for obvious arc number reasons *wry*), but the main bulk of the thing just went up today. And it is... um. Something. That's for sure.

It's classically Homestuck in the sense of meta-narrative and long conversations and exploring the nature of growing up and interpersonal relationships. But it's missing the gleeful nonsense of the main story -- many of the absurdist elements are more uncomfortable than funny. And the overall perspective is pretty grim, a shutting-down of possibilities, whereas the comic proper ended by opening up an infinite future. :(

(Also while writing the epilogue in the superficial "form" of an AO3 fic is a fascinating structural choice, I feel the lack of illustrations hurts, particularly in regard to the tone issue.)

[mme_hardy]

Yeah, this. The Epilogue is harsh and brutal and then ... leaves things as unsettled as they were at the end of the Credits. It does confirm what many of us thought, that the Credits universe is explicitly badly constructed.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, like, even if you want to leave things open-ended, what's wrong with a positive tone? Why go to all this extra work just to switch the key to sour and depressing? *sigh*

[mme_hardy]

I was looking at it and going "Wow, Hussie, what happened in your life?" because it is so deliberately cruel and gloomy. I know, death of the author blah blah blah. But not only is Earth-C inherently terrible, nobody is happy in it except maybe Rose and Kanaya. They are all living terrible lives.

Also, this Jade stan is pissed the fuck off.

[edenfalling]

Characters on whose behalf I am upset: Jade (manipulated and shoved out of the narrative), Jane (all her worst qualities played up with none of the good ones, nasty sexual caricature, bigotry out of nowhere), Dirk (ditto on all his worst qualities with none of the good ones, also bigotry out of nowhere), non-predominated!Calliope (shoved out of the narrative), Kanaya (manipulated and shoved out of the narrative), Rose (manipulated by Dirk or only able to achieve happiness by getting a chunk of herself cut off/out by somebody else's choice), Dave (manipulated by Dirk, either directly or via the Obama AI), Karkat (oh god poor Karkat), John (seriously what does Dirk (and/or Hussie) have against him?), the various kids in the candy timeline (none of them deserved that clusterfuck), Gamzee (I had to skim every scene he appeared in because he was nothing but a gross, cardboard caricature instead of a person), and Jake (depersonalized, manipulated, and/or abused by, like, everyone). Also Sollux, a little, for getting unceremoniously left behind.

I don't care about predominated!Calliope, Aradia and Meenah were both fine for people who barely appeared, I am surprisingly okay with Terezi's characterization in both (shitty) timelines even though I want a better ending for her, and while Roxy got weird for a while in the middle of the candy timeline, I think she/he/they came out all right, comparatively speaking. But that's a pretty sad percentage rate of okay to WTF, and you'll note that I'm pretty ambivalent even about these notionally "good" outcomes.

Hussie has always made a point of kind of mocking his own audience/fandom, but this definitely felt nastier than before.

[mme_hardy]

"Hussie has always made a point of kind of mocking his own audience/fandom, but this definitely felt nastier than before."

Yeah. Nothing sweet or kind happens in CANDY. It's just people being terrible to each other. I have read candy, and this is not it. And everybody who reproduces (except R/K's adoption) is a terrible parent. John and Jane, who had the best Dads, are awful to their children.

I liked the Terezi/John relationship coming back. That was nice. The thing I particularly hate about Jade is that she's not just manipulated, she's actively cockblocking Dave/Karkat, the OTP. And wow, the slut-shaming, for both her and Jake. It's the way some slashers write female characters who get in the way of the sweet sweet M/M. (Not all slashers, obvs.) And Dirk ... like Dirk had more genuine growth than just about anybody in the comic not named Strider. And it's all thrown away. Love for friends? It is to laugh.

Given the ironing ending, Rose is very obviously not happy.

UGH. Some are expecting an Epilogue Epilogue given that the Epilogue had a Prologue. I'd be there to see the loose ends tied up, but I haven't had a good time.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, also also, the Eridan/Feferi forced kiss was GROSS.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, there was a LOT of sexual... uh... I don't know WHAT was going on, really, but it was like all sex was either nasty and full of slut-shaming, or... didn't really exist because it was just two idiots failing to kiss? Which is a lot like the purity culture thing that's been poisoning fandom more obviously in the past several years, come to think of it.

If this was an attempt to mirror that and show it as a terrible attitude, then I think it was a failed experiment since in practice it just makes the reading experience unpleasant and comes off as Hussie's own attitude. Particularly since it infests both timelines regardless of who's narrating.

(Like, Calliope's narration of John and Terezi's car tryst in the meat timeline is actually pretty sweet, but the candy timeline, which is notionally under her control, is even worse in terms of terrible attitudes toward and descriptions of sex and sex-adjacent stuff. *sigh*)

[edenfalling]

Oh, I meant Rose is happy in the candy timeline, but was only able to be so because John's choice not to go back cut her off from the bulk of her powers and the aspect of her personality related to struggles with responsibility and knowledge and stuff. She says so explicitly in the text. And that pisses me off. It's one thing to set struggles aside by one's own choice; it's another entirely to have that decided for you, and by somebody who doesn't even understand what the hell he's doing.

She gets her fate decided by outside forces (read: men) in the meat timeline too -- and again by somebody chopping off part of her life (here it's her relationship with Kanaya) -- but in that case she's clearly unhappy with the results.

[mme_hardy]

The epilogue is open-ended, too. But it's a much bleaker open end than the credits.

[mme_hardy]

Oh, Word of Hussie (as transmitted by V from Homestuck) is that the Snapchats are not, and never were, canon, they're just some [unspecified] writers messing around.

[edenfalling]

Ah! Well, it makes no practical difference to me since I was ignoring them anyway, but that makes me wonder both A) why they exist in the first place and B) why they weren't signaled more explicitly as derivative works like the endorsed fan comics from a few years back.

[mme_hardy]

And why they were abandoned mid-plot. Just weird.