2019-05-11 16:10:44 ¶ ●

This passage from Andrew’s commentary in the Homestuck books has been brought up a lot regarding Dirk’s arc in the Epilogues:

> Villains in Homestuck tend to be meta-villains. That is, they exist much closer to the surface of the story’s meta-bubble, and often interact with the way it’s told. For instance, Jack Noir is the original owner of the 4th wall … As a universal bureaucratic game construct, he can keep tabs on everything going on in the session, including just outside the story.

> Though Jack Noir is a meta-villain, there are limits to this, possibly tied to his personality. It could be the scope of his ambition never includes messing with the story itself. His desire for power lies entirely within fictional parameters. Later, there are much more flagrant meta-villains … They live on the surface of the meta-bubble, and at times badly puncture it.

But I think perhaps the most intriguing part of this particular comment is that it’s immediately preceded by this pretty innocuous and pointless-seeming line:

> The orange fingers are my fingers. Why are they orange? Let’s not answer that question.

This small, almost throwaway sequence where Andrew directly interacts with Jack Noir as a character is basically crucial to the mechanics of Dirk’s role in the Epilogues, because every other time a character receives commands it’s from another character in the story, like WV and the other exiles. But here we see that yes, the author of the story does have the ability to influence the thoughts and actions of characters through commands in exactly the same way: just like Dirk does with the rest of the cast in Meat.