2021-09-06 7:04:15 ¶ ●

as long as I’m here getting meta about the history of Homestuck meta, I think it also deserves to be talked about that the comic’s sheer chronological length has bred a very particular kind of confirmation bias into the discourse surrounding it. when it’s been four thousand pages since something was relevant, it’s very easy to just forget the details, and when it’s been years since you started forming a hypothesis, it’s understandably difficult to just let that hypothesis go when new information comes to light years down the line. I can understand, for example, why someone who spent years expecting something totally new to come out of the Lord Noir plotline might find it hard - physically difficult, given the sheer page count that sometimes needs to be sifted through - to look back on the whole comic in retrospect and accept that yeah, actually, that was just supposed to show us another potential manifestation of Lord English.

this happens a lot in regards to Alternia’s worldbuilding, the quadrants being a good example, because for a period of time for whatever reason (I think the reason is called “shipping”) it was considered a favourable interpretation for moirallegience to be a healthy, symmetrical relationship between two people who love each other very much. so it could be quite disruptive to look back at the text and reanalyse it and find that, actually, this moirallegience thing is just another cog in Alternia’s big mincemeating machine. the fact that Alternia isn’t really the gender-liberal matriarchal paradise a lot of people made it up to be in their minds also kind of slots into this same vein.

and again this plays heavily into a lot of what people don’t Get about the Ultimate Self, and I can speak confidently on this one because I was caught up in the same trap as everyone else when Davepeta suddenly began insisting that every version of someone in every timeline was really just the same person. when you spend so many years thinking of “Bro” as a totally different character from Dirk, “the Condesce” as a totally different person from Meenah, it can feel very much like a copout to suddenly be told you’re wrong, and to see Andrew referring to “Grandpa” and “Mom” as Jake and Roxy so casually in the commentary of the books. and that is very much how we felt when the retcon happened and this weaksauce glue paste was used to paper over what we saw as gaps. but it’s important at times like those to look back at what has come before and realign your understanding based on these new ideas, because as it turns out, waking yourself up to the kind of Platonic ideas central to the Ultimate Self opens so much more of Homestuck up to you! I swear when I call myself a revisionist reader it’s not just to make myself seem clever. in a work that’s this fucking big, it is essential to be revisionist.