Karkat is an alien lacking in human social constructs, so he probably doesn’t want to celebrate Valentines Day. Dave is a too cool for school and definitely thinks this is all lame, so he probably doesn’t want to celebrate Valentines Day. Luckily, Rose and Kanaya are here to straighten these idiots up.
honestly though let’s be real jake probably doesn’t even realize lube is a thing he’s just like well let’s have at it then the clothes are OFF and I am READY sayonara sweet virginity and dirk is just laying there like (ffs) (i cant believe this is about to happen and I have to stop him what a fucking parody of my life)
my mind: *Oh hey. Didn’t see you there. It’s your best friend. Terepy Pipes. BAck at it again. Recording live from,, Paradise, So, Uh, I don’t really remember when. Or how I got here. I was a little disraaacted. Here is a picture of me being distracted while a universe was Birthing in front of me. Anyway, I’ve seen better, so, a qwuickupdate, fr the fans. n th folowers. The deceased friends and family. Uhm. Still sad. I’m workin on it. Turns out, Can Land does NOT have Prozac. I’m still waiting for my girl, VASKA, to come back from the war… I’m hangin out with my friends: Stick, Tree?, and Dirt. Turns out my incapability to express genuine emotions aLIENAted everybody who was dear to meLETS TALK ROMANCE!!!!!!!!! So, I heard through the grapevine, and also by living with them for about three years, that,, CANYON, and, ROSS, stand next to each other. Under trees. karat an d eh,,,,,, Dont really stand next to each other. I havent seen them stand next to each other in a l- in EIGHTEEN MINUTESFFF HAAA anyway this concludes my lets play of SGRUB. All in all 7/10 game. All my friends died. 7/10 MAKE SURE TO LIKE COMMENT AND SUBSC*
The thing that makes Homestuck’s ending so shittastic is that it fails to bring closure to pretty much every level of the story. It doesn’t tie up all the loose plot threads. It doesn’t bring closure to most characters’ arc. It fails to complete the standard three act structure, because what would normally be the climax was entirely anticlimactic. It hardly even feels like Homestuck’s ending thanks to the complete change of visual style and pacing.
[…] Even if you manage to convince yourself that this is some great meta-narrative about escaping an oppressive story, and that this somehow makes up for everything else… it isn’t. It’s a story about a bunch of kids who got thrust into a narrative, got fucked over by it, then got spit out. The meta-narrative has even less of a climax than the actual narrative does, and makes even less of a statement.
Jake is excited to see Dirk, thinking of how he wanted to kiss him last night before bed, but didn’t. He’s also really frigging nervous to see him, thinking of how he wanted to kiss him last night before bed, but didn’t. He thinks he recognizes what he’s feeling from movies. ‘Thrill’ is the word, he thinks. Nerves and anticipation coming together.
This is my fic. I really wanted to write something exploring what it’s like to be an introvert and how a really perfect day can still exhaust you and how little things people do can drain you and how you can be fine and still want to be alone.
Also Jake is my favourite character in Homestuck and most Jake fic is Dirk-centric. Jake needs more love <3
(Also LandofMistsandSecrets is my fave ficcer and I’m happy she liked my thing. So many good Dirkjakers brought out by the ending!
The world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written. He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty life.
FFFFFFFFFFffghghhg this is so good everyone read it immediately
This my fic. I am super proud of it and it’s going to be my magnus opus I hope. I’m incredibly pleased with the writing and I’ve done a shit load of research and I owe to much to geniuses like @ao3sburbanite who have really brought the alpha Dave / reincarkat ship to vivid life for me. I hope people enjoy it and it echoes with them. At the same time it’s really triggery in a lot of ways so if you have suicidal ideation, age difference, or power imbalance triggers especially, you should probably stay away from this one. I don’t want anyone to be upset by it!!
I entered the We Love Fine shirt contest, please please go check out my design. Voting hasn’t started yet but if you guys could remember me when it does, I would be so grateful to win this competition. The little bit of added income would help me tons since I’m unemployed at the moment. You can find my design here
maybe my problem is that i was only really ever here for the characters
my problem is that i was mainly here for the game and the lore at first (and then started caring about a couple characters). but Act 6 was heavily character-driven, and SBURB remained a barely relevant backdrop in the second half of Act 6. so post-pause, all that sudden focus to game mechanics everybody had forgotten about felt jarring and artificial.
i think your problem (and everyone else’s problem) is that you were here for a big, complex, epic story called Homestuck
and that it ended like a small, nameless anime with a budget suddenly cut short and one episode left to wrap things up.
dirk strider: spent the first 16 years of his life living in the middle of the ocean with no human contact besides a chat client
dirk strider: raised himself with the only thing to go by being stories of a dead brother he never met
dirk strider: only companions were two robots and a puppet
HS fandom: he clearly has enough social ability and experience to maintain a relationship in a perfectly healthy fashion and if he doesn't he's a manipulative abuser
jake english: agrees to a relationship with dirk
jake english: tells jane a relationship with dirk is what he wants
both jake and dirk: did shitty things
both jake and dirk: blame themselves for the relationship ending
HS fandom: dirk OBVIOUSLY forced jake into the relationship and pressured him into continuing it and jake gave no consent whatsoever jake english is a sweet angel who has never done anything wrong ever and dirk is fucking satan
Me: I can't believe homestuck's ending left so much unresolved, I will be forever unsatisfied and write thousands upon thousands of words exhaustively detailing my many grievances
Also Me: What the fuck do you mean you ran out of alpha kids pins before you could ship them to me I'll have you know I need every single character's iconography plastered all over everything I own also WHERE is volume 10 JESUS CHRIST please take my money
The
world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is
because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or
just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows
is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst
thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written.
He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against
the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that
carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty
life.
Ayyy it’s Chapter 3 of my epic AlphaDave/Reincarkat / Dave&Rose fic, All I Know Are Sad Songs. None of the automated bots I can find posted this chapter, so I put it up myself :D
PLEASE HEED WARNINGS POSTED ON AO3, this fic goes to some dark places.
Little things about the ending of Homestuck that just piss you off but it’s hard to care too much about them compared to everything else in that piece of work but they still bother you a lot
WHY DON’T SOME OF THE GOD TIER TROLL GHOSTS IN THE ARMY HAVE FUCKING WINGS BUT OTHERS DO??????????
There is absolutely no fucking indication in canon that Roxy is even BISEXUAL, not to mention gay. She’s explicitly romantically or physically attracted to/interested in Dirk, Jake, Jane’s Dad, and John. Beta Roxy was explicitly romantically involved with John’s Dad. There are exactly two instances where Roxy acknowledges a female character’s appearance, and it’s in a very straight-girl bff way. There’s no evidence that Roxy ISN’T bi, of course, because she very well could be, we don’t know. Heterosexual attraction does not prove heterosexuality. Unless a character specifically states their sexuality in a context where there’s no reason to believe they’re lying, bisexuality is the negative that can’t be proven.
Look, the glory of fandom is that you can imagine whatever you want. If you like to close your eyes and dream of a world where Roxy is gay as shit, that’s cool. Go ahead and enjoy the fuck out of that, you do you man. That’s what fandom was made for.
But I’m getting really tired of gayRoxy EVANGELISM all over my dash. Other than John and arguably Jane, Roxy is probably the straightest character in Homestuck. And out of the five-ish firm-ish endgame ships in Homestuck, there is only one
(and a half if you count the Johnrezi thing) het ship.
Blah blah there’s no such thing as heterosexual erasure blah blah that is 100% true and I 100% stand by that and etc. But I mean. Come on guys it’s ONE het ship. How the fuck have I seen like six different untagged Roxygen shiphate/gayRoxy evangelism posts on my dash IN ONE DAY? How have I seen three different major Homestuck blogs demand a moratorium on Roxygen content because the ship is “problematic,” “triggering,” and “noncanon?” How have I seen so many different posts saying “well MAYBE the reason we don’t like Roxygen is because Roxy is so obviously a lesbian!”
In a cast of like 30 major characters, how can there be so much denial and rejection of the implied sexuality of one of like THREE straight character?
AGAIN, HEADCANON ALL YOU LIKE. SHIP WHAT YOU WANT. I even like RoxyCallie and JaneRoxy as ships in theory, cute art, nice dynamic. But this weird meta-level revisionism of Roxy’s canon actions is just WEIRD.
edit from a year and a half later: ooh boy wow this has not aged well now has it lord. suffice to say i don’t stand by much of this and i was objectively wrong about the canonocity of roxy’s sexuality and her relationship with callie but i still think people calling her a lesbian was weird :D
There is absolutely no fucking indication in canon that Roxy is even BISEXUAL, not to mention gay. She’s explicitly romantically or physically attracted to/interested in Dirk, Jake, Jane’s Dad, and John. Beta Roxy was explicitly romantically involved with John’s Dad. There are exactly two instances where Roxy acknowledges a female character’s appearance, and it’s in a very straight-girl bff way. There’s no evidence that Roxy ISN’T bi, of course, because she very well could be, we don’t know. Heterosexual attraction does not prove heterosexuality. Unless a character specifically states their sexuality in a context where there’s no reason to believe they’re lying, bisexuality is the negative that can’t be proven.
Look, the glory of fandom is that you can imagine whatever you want. If you like to close your eyes and dream of a world where Roxy is gay as shit, that’s cool. Go ahead and enjoy the fuck out of that, you do you man. That’s what fandom was made for.
But I’m getting really tired of gayRoxy EVANGELISM all over my dash. Other than John and arguably Jane, Roxy is probably the straightest character in Homestuck. And out of the five-ish firm-ish endgame ships in Homestuck, there is only one
(and a half if you count the Johnrezi thing) het ship.
Blah blah there’s no such thing as heterosexual erasure blah blah that is 100% true and I 100% stand by that and etc. But I mean. Come on guys it’s ONE het ship. How the fuck have I seen like six different untagged Roxygen shiphate/gayRoxy evangelism posts on my dash IN ONE DAY? How have I seen three different major Homestuck blogs demand a moratorium on Roxygen content because the ship is “problematic,” “triggering,” and “noncanon?” How have I seen so many different posts saying “well MAYBE the reason we don’t like Roxygen is because Roxy is so obviously a lesbian!”
In a cast of like 30 major characters, how can there be so much denial and rejection of the implied sexuality of one of like THREE straight character?
AGAIN, HEADCANON ALL YOU LIKE. SHIP WHAT YOU WANT. I even like RoxyCallie and JaneRoxy as ships in theory, cute art, nice dynamic. But this weird meta-level revisionism of Roxy’s canon actions is just WEIRD.
Just to clarify, this isn’t about Roxy shipping. As I said, I even like Roxy Callie and Roxy Jane. The beauty and wonder of fandom is the ability to ship whatever you want for whatever reason you like! Roxy has great chemistry with Callie and Jane!
This is about the pervasive discourse of Roxy as a “Gay Character,” which even goes so far as to assign negative connotations to the very notion of Roxy experiencing heterosexual attraction and waiting heterosexual relationships. Which, you know, she does. In canon.
I’m not gonna finish this davekat thing I’m working on before I leave for a con this weekend so instead I’m just gonna link All I Know Are Sad Songs again because it’s AMAZING and Chapter 4 went up yesterday.
It’s an Alpha Dave fic kinda like Love In The Time Of Juggalos (which is also amazing, everyone read it.) It starts just a few days after Rebranding Day, plus has interludes of Alpha Dave and Alpha Rose’s lives in the foster care system beforehand. I’m enjoying it so much. Dave and Rose have such an interesting relationship in it and of course there’s a bunch of DELIGHTFUL davekat stuff.
(Just mind the tags because the first chapter especially is a doozy in regards to potentially triggering content.)
when your absolute favourite ficcer keeps reccing your current big wip project <3
Yes, Chapter 4 of All I Know Are Sad Songs is up, follow the link if you wanna read, heed warnings, and I hope you all enjoy it!!
This fic is an exploration of the last stretch of Alpha Rose and Alpha Dave’s lives before their battle with the Condescension, told from the POV of recovering alcoholic Dave who is desperately fucking trying to keep himself together despite how futile that feels in light of the end of the world. But Dave’s got this FEELING you know that there’s someone out there, a soulmate, and then he accidentally runs into him ticketing his dumb ironic car.
@ao3sburbanite is amazing. She’s fuckin incredible!! You will laugh, you will cry, you will wish you hadn’t read it, you will be SO GLAD YOU DID. It’s light-hearted and funny, it’s dark and gritty and handles some really serious issues in a really compelling way. It’s cute and fluffy and sappy. It’s mercilessly cruel and doesn’t let anyone off the hook.
This fic is an absolute emotional ROLLER COASTER that completely changed the way I related to the post-Scratch versions of Dave and Rose. From long drawn out stupid metaphors about cars at high schools to Dave and Karkat clinging to each other at the end of all things, this shit takes you for SUCH a ride.
It’s got actual drama and stuff to do for Rosemary as a ship, it has ACTUALLY WELL WRITTEN BIPOLAR SOLLUX, holy shit as a bipolar person it was so nice to see accurate rep from a character who kind of… is the opposite… in his canon… it made me actually really care about its version of SolFef, the canon pairing from Homestuck proper I feel the absolute least amount of ANYTHING about. It’s incredibly well written and almost novel-like in how it has rising action and changing tone.
Have you clicked yet? GO CLICK. Read it. Love it. Live it. It deserves all.
Consider… Jake English in a dress because he is the one who actually has the most female role models. There is no one to rain on his parade and he is not afraid of being judged for his pretty daisy dress. The End.
I totally 100% love the idea of Jake being a totally 100% cis dude who is actually really comfortable crossdressing and embracing typically “feminine” activites, clothing, and interests, and even ascribes his own version of masculinity to them in a really healthy, gender subverting, selfloving way. Alpha Jade would have been so 100% accepting of absolutely anything he did and Jake lived alone with her and didn’t seem to encounter any actual social norms until he discovered movies and his internet friends relatively late in life. I love the thought of him wearing a shorter skirt and being all like MAN THIS FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT, AND LOOK HOW IT SHOWS OFF THE MANLY HAIR ON MY LEGS, I LOVE THIS.
It’s hard to describe my complex feelings of this but this picture fills me with joy and that’s what matters <3
The world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written. He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty life.
PLEASE HEED WARNINGS POSTED ON AO3, this fic goes to some dark places.
I freaking love my under-appreciated token het pairing, so here are some 100% positive roxygen things:
- John tries to pull pranks on Roxy all the time but she is simply too clever for him. After a lifetime of dealing with Jane, Roxy has this shit sorted. John pulls out all the stops and never manages to get her. She is his pranking white whale and he hunts her single-mindedly and she’s always one step ahead of his ass. Something about this is an aphrodisiac to him.
- Roxy def likes movies from the 80s and 90s, and John def likes console games. They’ve receptive to one another’s interests at first, because sure yeah Armageddon is a great movie/sure yeah I can totally play Smash Bros Melee! But they get drawn into the other’s passion and use it as a springboard to totally connect with the thing and so within a year, Roxy is riffing on John’s Con Air quotes and they’re getting their whole scenes together, and John and Roxy stay up until 2 AM finally 100%ing Super Mario World with John on the controller the whole time with no hints and they cheer so loud.
- John thinks that Roxy is for real the hottest girl he’s ever met and can’t believe that she’s interested in his doofy self. Roxy also believes that Roxy is the hottest girl he’s ever met, but legitimately finds his doofy self attractive af. Roxy likes interesting faces. Sure, John would never be Hollywood, but that’s 100% part of the appeal.
- Sometimes they have hard days where they get wrapped up thinking about GO. John wonders if he did the right thing, if there was a better way, if maybe he’d have learned to master his powers earlier, he could have saved everyone without rewriting. Roxy wonders if her friends miss their Roxy, whether they consider her a shoddy replacement, and once in a million years, she hates herself because she kind of feels that same way about them. John and Roxy are the only ones who understand what Roxy and John are going through. They’re the only ones who were there.
- Roxy finds out that John is the one who ectobiology’d them all into existence. Sees his pesterhandle. Realizes that holy shit there’s someone else in existence who is interested in ectobiology!! At first John is kind of bemused by her passion, but she gets him into it and they spend weeks holed up in the lab together trying to sequence the human genome to diversify their shoddy genetic variance in their group. John finds out that he’s a lot smarter than he ever thought he was. He also finds out that Roxy is a whole lot smarter than he’ll ever be.
I freaking love my under-appreciated token het pairing, so here are some 100% positive roxygen things:
- John tries to pull pranks on Roxy all the time but she is simply too clever for him. After a lifetime of dealing with Jane, Roxy has this shit sorted. John pulls out all the stops and never manages to get her. She is his pranking white whale and he hunts her single-mindedly and she’s always one step ahead of his ass. Something about this is an aphrodisiac to him.
- Roxy def likes movies from the 80s and 90s, and John def likes console games. They’ve receptive to one another’s interests at first, because sure yeah Armageddon is a great movie/sure yeah I can totally play Smash Bros Melee! But they get drawn into the other’s passion and use it as a springboard to totally connect with the thing and so within a year, Roxy is riffing on John’s Con Air quotes and they’re getting their whole scenes together, and John and Roxy stay up until 2 AM finally 100%ing Super Mario World with John on the controller the whole time with no hints and they cheer so loud.
- John thinks that Roxy is for real the hottest girl he’s ever met and can’t believe that she’s interested in his doofy self. Roxy also believes that Roxy is the hottest girl he’s ever met, but legitimately finds his doofy self attractive af. Roxy likes interesting faces. Sure, John would never be Hollywood, but that’s 100% part of the appeal.
- Sometimes they have hard days where they get wrapped up thinking about GO. John wonders if he did the right thing, if there was a better way, if maybe he’d have learned to master his powers earlier, he could have saved everyone without rewriting. Roxy wonders if her friends miss their Roxy, whether they consider her a shoddy replacement, and once in a million years, she hates herself because she kind of feels that same way about them. John and Roxy are the only ones who understand what Roxy and John are going through. They’re the only ones who were there.
- Roxy finds out that John is the one who ectobiology’d them all into existence. Sees his pesterhandle. Realizes that holy shit there’s someone else in existence who is interested in ectobiology!! At first John is kind of bemused by her passion, but she gets him into it and they spend weeks holed up in the lab together trying to sequence the human genome to diversify their shoddy genetic variance in their group. John finds out that he’s a lot smarter than he ever thought he was. He also finds out that Roxy is a whole lot smarter than he’ll ever be.
Consider Also:
- Dirk hovering in the background being hella protective of Roxy and asking Dave 200 questions per day about John and this cycling back around to Roxy who chastises Dirk for having no chill but is also kinda happy that it bothers him for multiple reasons, some of which are nice and some of which are not so nice to keep that slightly fucked up dynamic going
- John and Dave hanging out and Dave will just randomly drop shit about Karkat because he can’t help himself so John is like hey I have a relationship now too and drops stuff about Roxy and Dave is like dude that’s my mom S T O P and John delights in how flustered Dave gets about it and won’t shut the fuck up ever
- Same except Roxy to Jane and Jane is like lady that’s my son S T O P and Roxy cackles devilishly
- Roxy and Jade having dog person vs cat person wars and John like oh no I’m not getting involved in this because this is my girlfriend and my literal sister please don’t drag me into this *sweats*
holy fucking shit @hsdatingsim is making Kanaya AND DIRK pansexual after it has been explicitly stated by Andrew Fucking Hussie that Kanaya is a….
drumroll…
L E S B I A N
And Dirk is canonically a gay man who doesn’t like that word. Wow!
anyways they are now Officially Awful™ and their dating sim is Non-Canonical and disrespects 1) Lesbians 2) Gay men 3) Hussie
Please reblog this and don’t support their game lesbians and gay men and especially lesbian and gay HS fans Deserve Better
Please please please reblog this and spread this around
Oh yeah, some Proof
Dirk and Kanaya are explicitly-in-canon (in Dirk’s case) and word-of-God (in Kanaya’s case) gay and lesbian respectively. Erasure of explicit homosexuality is homophobic, period. Don’t support homophobic nonsense.
the homestuck subreddit actually turned one of the panels from the comic where john kills everyone for being gay into an official subreddit emote
hahahaha what a bunch of shitty fucking edgelords i cant believe it
Yeah man, I’m fucking outie. It sucks cause I’ve been on the sub for a long time and really have enjoyed a lot of aspects of it. I love tumblr, great community, but I get frustrated with the hoops you have to jump through to have an actual CONVERSATION, here. Maybe that’s why I stayed on reddit for so long.
John: ok, we all need codenames. i'll be eagle 1.
virska is "been there done that"
roxy is "currently doing that"
rose is "it happened once in a dream"
dave, "if i had to pick a bro"
and karkat is...
eagle 2.
Karkat: OH, THANK FUCK
The world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written. He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty life.
PLEASE HEED WARNINGS POSTED ON AO3, this fic goes to some dark places.
man honestly tho fuck people who explicitly tag their salty shiphate with the actual fucking shipname of whatever they’re hating on like really? lmao. you think we’re here for this shit?
homestuck is over and we’re all here trying to scrape up the last vestiges of aftermath content because we’re thirsty AF and/or can’t let go and meanwhile some asshole is over here trying to drum up dirk//jake abuse discourse in the year of our lord 2016 lmfao
The world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written. He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty life.
PLEASE HEED WARNINGS POSTED ON AO3, this fic goes to some dark places.
Oh man oh man if you think anything I’ve written before now was self indulgent nonsense just you wait, this is it, this is the most ridiculous self indulgent one yet. I’ve wanted to do something with the whole Dave’s gay panic vs Karkat’s quadrant confusion stuff for awhile and also something with both of these idiots being precious bottom boys so I just kind of said WHATEVER DO IT LIVE and by the way I started writing this at 11pm and now it’s like 9am and I had PLANS today someone please kill me.
It’s 1 AM, I’m trying to go to sleep. As usual, my thoughts drift to Homestuck, whether I want them to or not. Except this time I think to myself… “Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve had time to heal. It already hurts a whole lot less. Why not try to think about Homestuck intentionally, accept the ending, and start to finally process things?”
And so I think about it. And it seems alright! …For about three minutes.
Then my thoughts drift to the Denizens. To how we saw so little of them. To how one being implied to be a “witch” and “not a snake” was all we’ll ever know about her besides a shitty silhouette. To the paltry few mostly-offscreen Choices that were made. To how Andrew seemed so blithely underconfident that he could do justice to their faces that the closest thing we ever saw to a Denizen’s actual face was that SHITTY Demon Mobster Kingpin ripoff Yaldabaoth sketchface in Collide.
And then – THEN – I realize that not only did we never see Hephaestus, but his entire Choice, his entire epic repairing-one-thing SCHTICK, was absolutely and UTTERLY irrelevant to the plot in every single way. No payoff. He just fixed a shitty metaphor-sword. There’s no way to resolve that in the epilogue. It’s just permanently a thing that never mattered, forever.
And my blood just BOILS.
I understand the Unstuck and Unbound theory/theories. I understand that the POINT could have been that this really never meant anything all along, that these were all distractions. That Caliborn saying his veins swum with red herrings might have been a hint that all the overwrought foreshadowing in Homestuck would need to be completely sidestepped and unfulfilled if Lord English’s plans were ever to be glitched-out-of. If the kids were ever to be happy and free. I GET that.
But I can’t fully buy the Unstuck and Unbound theory, no matter how much I want to. I can’t buy 100% into it without serious confirmation. (Especially not with so many theories busted to hell by the end already.) And whichever parts of me DON’T buy into Unstuck and Unbound, whichever parts doubt the ONE POSSIBLE JUSTIFICATION for Andrew throwing the whole fucking plot out the window and jump-cutting to an easy happy ending… those parts can’t help but be angry. Really, really angry.
Angry that it seems like Andrew was having a bad year or two and just… decided to take a guillotine to his story and cut it short undone.
It’s as if you made a good friend, a really REALLY good wonderful friend, and you spent years together, and you knew they were eventually going to move out of the country, but you were going to make it as good a time as possible while he was there. And you do EVERYTHING together, and when the end finally comes you prepare to throw the biggest bash of all. But then he fucking SCREWS YOU. (Not that so many theories turned out wrong – that was always in the cards just from the nature of theorizing, part of the fun – but that there are NO FUCKING ANSWERS and everything is wrapped up by pure magic and nothing else, in a story that was so good about doing the exact opposite of that for its entire length.) He screws the SHIT out of you and all of your friends right before he leaves, vanishing with your money like a deflating Ponzi scheme, and has no intention to even write back to you about what he did (Epilogue) anytime soon. Is in no hurry to apologize, or even fucking justify himself. He just leaves behind a note saying “you figure it out”, and moves on to his next big thing (Hiveswap). And no matter how much you want to believe that he had the best intentions, no matter how much you believe he must have had a REASON, it’s impossible to believe with all your heart that that’s true. Not when he doesn’t even take the fucking time to say “I’m sorry”. (WHY did he have to say he’s not even in a hurry to do the epilogue? Why didn’t he even throw in an “I’m sorry, but” before he said it??!?) It’s impossible not to be angry. It’s impossible to try and forgive him on that unexplained, broken note. And it’s almost impossible to avoid the sense that all your good experiences with them in the past have been retroactively poisoned, the sense that you were utterly wrong about your friend having ever cared about you at all.
…It’s really hard. I don’t know how to stop being angry about this and still think about Homestuck, still help clean up the huge mess left behind by its wreckage. Every permanently-unanswered question that can’t possibly be addressed by the epilogue just… gets me so mad that I have to take my mind back off the comic. What do I do?
Any recommendations? I’m not giving up, I won’t let this ending do that to me. But I could definitely use some help. Any more advice on how to come to terms with this, how to be able to still stand Homestuck canon enough to finish analyzing it?
YES
yesss
Give into your hate.
I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the moment when you realize that Unstuck and Unbound SOUNDS pretty, but doesn’t actually mean dick when the characters didn’t choose that ending for themselves and also that it’s kind of hella reaching with what we know. And now that you’re here it’s like I can take a deep breath.
Hurray. The guy who devoted his whole life to analyzing Homestuck – even though I disagree with, like, ALL of your theories – admits that the ending was complete hot garbage.
But if I can tell MY story, here
I’ve always been so in love with Homestuck’s canon that I never had much use for fanworks. I was so confident that the comic itself was giving me everything that I wanted and I never doubted it until the last moment, which made me distanced from good fan shit. But since my rage at Act 7, I’ve started engaging creatively with the fandom and it’s been really great. Every day I read a new fic or write one myself, something heals. I still hate the ending and honestly? I don’t want to stop hating the ending. I don’t care how good someone makes their meta narrative theories sound – I devoted YEARS of my life to this comic for the dialogue and character arcs and even if the epilogue solifies everything as a beautiful flawless meta narrative, fuck you, Andrew, you don’t sell your product as a lore-heavy, mythos-dense character drama and then at the last minute switch that out for some statement about the toxicity of character arcs, eat dick. I like my anger. My anger hurts me less as time comes on, and I channel that anger into exploring all the things I loved about Homestuck, the characters and the lore.
Maybe you can also find some catharsis in fan-shit. It’s totally helped me.
The world is ending. Dave Strider can’t tell if the bender he’s on is because of that, or because of how bad stuff is fucked up with Rose, or just because his own bullshit has finally caught up to him. All he knows is that if the world DOES end today, maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Of course, he can’t throw in the towel. His fate is already written. He raises a resistance. He duels the false presidents. He stands against the Empress herself. So maybe that’s why Skaia allows a glitch that carries a consciousness across sessions that might save Dave’s shitty life.
PLEASE HEED WARNINGS POSTED ON AO3, this fic goes to some dark places.
I’ve been on a roll writing lately :D Making tons of progress, hurray.
