I really want a set of derse pajamas not to cosplay or anything I just want to wear them like a huge fucking dork in the safety & comfort of my own damn home
After over a month of work, this is finally ready.
This is in many ways my final statement on Homestuck as a whole, and though I don’t go over absolutely everything related to the ending here, I am pretty confident it’ll make at least some people reconsider how upset they are with the ending.
I’d also like to thank (and tag) a number of writers who made writing this possible. @bladekindeyewear, @stormingtheivory, @wakraya, @purplepurpleunicornsparkle, as well as @mikerugnetta who’s video about Violence proved to be instrumental, and finally Tex Talks, who doesn’t have a tumblr but is still one of the most fascinating voices in Homestuck analysis today, and you should really be following his work.
I’ll let the piece speak for itself. My deepest wish is that it will help people unhappy with the ending feel better, but if you find my arguments unsatisfying on some level, please let me know. I’d love to engage with discussion about this pretty much 24/7.
Rebloggin this once for the night crowd
reboop
Reblogging this again because remember how I said tex talks doesn’t have a tumblr? turns out he does @tex-talks-too-much
Honestly i dont even care if you read my stuff if you arent following tex’s analysis on homestuck you’re hurting your ultimate self severely
The above, linked little dissertation on Homestuck’s ending is now required reading for anyone who subscribes to this blog. (The author is crediting me because some of what I’ve expressed in theory/meta posts, not because I knew anything about what they were writing. I hadn’t heard of this post/article until Wakraya linked it to me. Oh, Wakraya also reblogged it with their commentary if you want more discussion about it.)
I mentioned that I was finally starting to let myself get angry about the ending, in part because we couldn’t know what he intended and those doubts carry a toxicity, and in part because he was so silent about the nature of the ending and intent to leave us with that and little else for a long time to come. However – much like unstuck and unbound, or as an even better extension of it – this explanation helps soothe all of that significantly.
Especially because it not only explains why the character arcs might feel cut a little early, but why Andrew has chosen to remain quiet about things and postpone any epilogue for quite some time.
Andrew always seemed to be insisting that this was the ending he envisioned for Homestuck from the beginning, that he’d conceived of this for the longest time, that he was so excited to bring his self-described Creation Myth to a culmination this way in some sort of “Rapture”. Much of our frustration is rooted in a combination of (1) doubting this is really the sort of ending he truly believed in, thinking that he perhaps gave up and convinced himself that he wasn’t giving up, or knew and just paid us lip service, and (2) not being able to understand what the ending means – and by extension, that Andrew could believe in an ending like this. Everything Andrew has said, especially about how long he’s been preparing this ending, has been POINTING at it being something VERY long-planned and intentional. I just couldn’t help but doubt that, and doubt that he might have had any sort of point with this ending that was worth cutting things off so seemingly unresolved.
But if this is really the answer to the puzzle he’s given us, then he has to wait until the post-end has gelled and coagulated into COUNTLESS headcanons and fanfics before he can give us an Epilogue – (which is why he didn’t even initially MENTION there was going to be an epilogue, only editing that into the news post later; and perhaps he regrets having mentioned that, too!) – and he has to be very careful and deliberate about the form that epilogue takes in order to preserve the goals he’s trying to accomplish with this story. A story in which he, the author, is killed, and fights with & gives an enormous thumbs down to the only other people trying to make this a narrative about themselves.
I still haven’t decided how much comfort this article brings me about Homestuck’s ending… I don’t know if I can really be happy with it yet. But at the very least, it’s a lot of comfort. Better than unstuck and unbound, bringing those ideas together into a much fuller explanation that I can buy into with more of my heart than what I had before.
And I still especially believe that Andrew has a responsibility to make the reasoning behind this ending a little clearer to many of us. I can finally understand why he chose not to – which is something I never DREAMED I’d say about the way he handled this ending!!! – but I still disagree and think he needs to explain this clearer. Those of us who don’t understand, who followed the story and fandom this closely for so long… many of us have felt this ending and Andrew’s silence thereof to be some sort of poisonous betrayal that taints our ability to even think about the story in retrospect! It really, really hurts! And even if it’s better for the artistic integrity of this work for him to stay quiet longer, I don’t believe it should be milked at the PRICE of so much toxic fan-felt despair.
Just a bit of explanation and reassurance. That’s all it would take, and I hope Andrew reconsiders withholding it so long. Even if I reluctantly (reluctantly) understand the point of him staying mum on what it all really means for up to a year.
Dammit.
I’m two months behind deadline on my current novel and really need to get through a lot of writing today, but this is on my dash again and I don’t think I should put if off any longer.
So when my agent comes complaining, I’m blaming y’all!
Despite the fact that I’ve been credited as a source of inspiration on this post, which I suspect comes from my post Why The Characters Escaped The Comic is Not a Satisfying Ending for Homestuck, I’ve put off responding directly to it. Partially because it’s extremely well said. Partially because I respect optimisticDuelist so much that I’m cautious trying to wade into their words. And partially because I completely 100% fucking disagree with every word.
That is – not in theory. In theory, I like everything he has to say a whole damn lot. It’s extremely well put together, well researched, and well said. It’s the DNA of a truly amazing ending for Homestuck, the ending that I’d always dreamed of – the power of “narrative” being subsumed by the power of individual choice. But despite this explanation’s beautiful writing and complex researches, all backed up by classical literature and the very concept of creation myths, and despite the fact that it actually sources my big post where I comment on WHY the ending is crap – it avoids actually TALKING about why I hate the ending so much, except for one line saying “well I don’t buy it.”
These characters still have no agency in this proposed beautiful ending.
All the arguments about the ending being good seem to rely on one thing: that an ending where the characters choose to make their own lives is better than an ending where they play the roles set out for them. And the thing is? I agree. Wholeheartedly! As I said in my own post on the topic, the ending I always wanted was one where the characters found a way to escape the grip of the Alpha Timeline, and open-ended but hopeful final note where we don’t know what lives they might have beyond Paradox Space, but we know that whatever they do, whoever they become, they’re happy there. The insistence that those of us who hate the ending were looking for some traditional “fight the boss, end the game” narrative, that we just hate open endings, is just wrong. I LOVE open endings, and my perfect ending would have a lot in common with Act 7. And it wouldn’t have an epilogue set after the cards fall and the characters escape, because that would (and will) ruin the open end. I would have have a walkaround on the victory platform where all the characters can talk to all the characters, putting a cap on all the relationships and arcs that were currently open, while leaving enough loose ends so that we don’t know what comes next for them. I also wouldn’t have shown the flash forward. I would have wanted the ending MORE open, with ambiguity about what is beyond the grip of Paradox Space. Do the characters even survive slipping through the cracks they forced in this constrictive reality? Do they make a world there? Or does the act of escaping end their existence, because, as this article says, the Alpha Timeline is ultimately a story, and does a story still happen if there’s no one to hear it told?
But the simple fact is that the characters didn’t escape shit.
They didn’t subvert the narrative; they played TO the narrative. They didn’t throw off the chains of Lord English’s hold on the Timeline; the core cast never even MET Lord English. They didn’t escape Paradox Space into a new, fresh form of existence, brimming with possibility; they made yet another universe frog that we have no reason to believe isn’t subject to the very same rules and restrictions as the one they came from.
I’ll be the first to admit – maybe I’m just the wrong audience. Because this shit? Not really my bag. Even if someone manages to convince me that the ending of Homestuck is a beautiful meta narrative that doesn’t suffer from an author completely losing his passion after an especially rough year, I will always be angry, frustrated, and bitter about how it ended. Because yes, Homestuck has always had meta aspects, but I was never here for those. I’m a character writer, and what matters to me, what has ALWAYS mattered to me, is character. The thought that “character arcs are toxic” and that a character arc cannot happen to a character who is “real” kind of feels like a kick in the face. I make my living writing character arcs for characters who are as painfully human as I can write them. It’s my passion. It’s my entire life. Character arcs are the best thing in existence, how dare you tell me that they’re toxic and I’m contributing to some sort of culture of toxic storytelling by devoting my actual life to them??? (I am 100% sure @
optimisticduelist
didn’t even a little bit mean it that way, but it’s hard not to hear that.)
Characters and character arcs are what drew me to Homestuck. It’s what drew a LOT of people to Homestuck. The article talks about how Homestuck is both a character drama AND a metanarrative, but if this IS a brilliant meta ending, where’s the thing I was here for? If this is a good meta ending, fine. Where’s the good character drama ending, since Homestuck was both?
Let’s say someone who makes really good soup invites you over for soup and salad, and you’re not so into salad but you love soup, so you go. And then they serve the absolute best salad ever but the soup is soapy dishwater. Look, I don’t care how good that salad is. I came here for the fucking soup.
But I’m still not convinced that the salad was even that good.
The article ITSELF talks about the importance of choice and of agency. It attempts to refute my points by saying that what I’m claiming is that the characters need to understand EVERYTHING for their choice to matter. But what I’m actually saying is that they’re not making any sort of meaningful choice at all.
Where is the choice? The agency? John’s retcon can’t be the choice – John and Terezi rewrote the narrative of other people, giving them no choice as they manipulated and redirected the paths they’d taken. So making the frog is the choice? What sort of choice is that? To play the hand they were dealt? To continue the cycle? To stay in lockstep with the Paradox space that the article agrees with me is ultimately a squeezing fist around their lives? How can there simultaneously be no need for the characters to fully grasp their situation and then in the next line say that what matters is choice and agency?
There is the agency? Where is the choice?
Optimisticduelist states that “all the characters wanted was to be together and be happy.”
Hm.
Really?
Because I could have swore, Rose wanted to understand the world she’d been thrown into and to not let it control her fate. Which it ultimately does. Karkat wanted to feel like he was important, loved, and that he contributed something crucial. The ending was a big joke on everything he wanted. Jane wanted to be able to express her emotions in a healthy way where they wouldn’t either hurt others or hollow her out from the inside, and she never even got to apologize to Jake. And as for Jake himself, my favourite character? He doesn’t want to be “together” at all. His struggle is coming to terms with how much he likes to be by himself. The Jake I know would be having a panic attack to be surrounded by so many people the way he is in the flash forward ending. He never got even a semblance of resolution.
@
optimisticduelist
writes some really beautiful and moving stuff about the burden of stories and the power of choices. And maybe they’re right about all of it. But I remain unconvinced. And even if someone convinces me… where’s the comfort to those of us who care a lot less about the meta and a lot more about the narrative? Those of us who looked up to Andrew as a WRITER, not a philosopher, for years?
Ultimately, maybe it all just comes down to that. I never disliked the meta-narrative aspets of Homestuck, but it’s not what I sat down at this table to eat. I wanted the soup. I came for the building blocks that made up nearly every page and vastly outnumbered the time spent on the meta: the logs. The dialogue. And maybe that makes me some sort of philestine. Maybe caring more about Roxy’s crush on Dirk than some esoteric shit about the effects of creation myths in human history makes me some sort of dumbass who Just Doesn’t Get It. But I think that if a chef builds their restaurant on the promise of soup and salad, they can’t stop serving soup right at the end and expect the soup lovers to appreciate the salad. And if a writer uses dialogue to build emotional investment in the characters, their arcs, and story they inhabit, even the best utterly silent ending about the toxicity of character arcs is insulting.
In short?
Despite how well written, well researched, and well said this article is, I’m not convinced that the ending is a statement Apotheosis and Creation Myths, much less a good or well-expressed one.
But if it is?
That doesn’t make it better.
That makes it worse.
EDIT: I am INCREDIBLY embarrassed that I misgendered @
optimisticduelist
in this post, I’ve editted it and if you reblogged me, please delete and reblog this version.
Why I’m So Fucking Hung Up on the Masterpiece Being Written Off the Face of Homestuck
So here’s a little piece of the Homestuck ending that I feel most everyone has totally gotten over, and that I absolutely never will.
Caliborn’s Masterpiece.
Here’s a classic storytelling technique: showing the audience something that the cast don’t know. This can be something as simple as a scene revealing a character with a secret agenda, or showing an explosive with a ticking timer nearby.
Here’s another one: tricking the audience and revealing that their knowledge was wrong by widening the scope of context. The secret agenda was because a character was a TRIPLE agent, or the explosive was actually in a completely different place, and now a completely different character has been killed than the one the audience expected.
Caliborn’s masterpiece initially appears as one. I…. think…. it was ultimately meant to be the other? But it does it really terribly and here is why.
1. There’s no reveal.
The big moment when we find out that the Masterpiece was actually JUST A BUNCH OF PUPPETS or FROM A DOOMED TIMELINE or WAS ACTUALLY (JOHN) AND SOME POSSE OR GHOSTS or SOMEHOW AN ILLUSION or WAS THE MAIN CAST’S PLAN ALL ALONG never comes. Instead, we’re left to wonder, oh yeah. What…… happened with that?
2. It needs to happen.
It’s a crucial part of the narrative. Homestuck’s major theme of closed causal loops and beginnings and endings requires the origin of Lord English and of the House Juju to be explained. Which it was, and then, suddenly, with no explanation or even coy hints of what that explanation may be, it wasn’t. Or was it? Who knows.
3. My favourite character’s promised Big Moment was locked behind it.
Annnnd here’s where I get to what I really want to talk about.
The Masterpiece was rad for a lot of reasons. It recontextualized what we knew about the House Juju. It finally answered all the questions we had about lil Cal and what his deal was. It turned the reveal of Caliborn on its head – Caliborn WASN’T Lord English, just a part of him. It had Caliborn making vines with claymation.
Annnd it promised us a really baller ending for Jake English.
Look, I’m not too proud to admit that I’m biased here. Jake is my child. He is my son. He is my precious jungle baby. There isn’t even a contest for my favorite Homestuck character, and the Masterpiece got me REALLY, REALLY EXCITED. Jake gains control of his powers. Jake overcomes his Page weakness. Jake harnesses what he can do – to PROTECT HIS FRIENDS. To protect DIRK. The day would be lost without Jake, and at the critical moment, he leashes his shit, pulls it together, and saves everyone and gives HOPE where there was none. Holy. Fuckin. Shit.
Goddamn perfect.
When this happened, Jake was in a dark place. Right AFTER this happened, Jake went to an even DARKER place. He thought he was capable of absolutely nothing of value. Vriska insulted and abused him verbally. Jake believed her. She told him that all he could handle in a fight was the weakest target, Slick and the Felt, and she didn’t even give him any backup. He expressed doubt that anyone cared about him. He’d just been threatened with rape in Crockerteir Jane’s clutches. He rejects even ROXY’S love, thinking that she’s making it up.
He keeps specifically vocalizing that he’ll never be of value, that he’ll never get this big moment. But the audience is onto this. The audience knows that Jake is wrong and his darkest moment is is building up to something huge – to when Jake masters his powers and saves the day and saves everyone, especially Dirk. His and John’s log does a fun bit of foreshadowing for this, where John says that Jake is the sidekick character who shows up and saves the day while the hero character is overwhelmed. Dirk has already been visually equated with Batman.
With the Masterpiece gone, where does this leave Jake?
Uh, nowhere, really.
Remember how Vriska said that Jake was worthless? Called him “Joke” and “Jape” and said that he could take on the Felt and that’s it? Go watch Collide again. Jake COULDN’T EVEN DO THAT. Vriska set her standards as low as she could for him and Jake didn’t even get to measure UP to them, much less overcome them. Dad had to handle Cans, Karkat had to handle Clover, and the Striders had to handle Slick. Good job, Jake! You successfully defeated an enemy even weaker than Vriska, who vocally hates you, thought you could manage.
The Masterpiece being gone sucks for a lot of reasons, but for me? Oh man. This is the main one. Jake’s big moment, the culmination of all his shit, is locked behind it. I would have been fine with an ACTUAL bait and switch, here, but we didn’t even get that. Just a weird ellipse.
Jake is left with his shit hanging. Does the Masterpiece happen? When? Does it even mean what it appeared to mean for Jake when it does? Is it even OUR JAKE?
Who knows? Who cares. Andrew Hussie apparently doesn’t.
My boy deserved the ending he’d been promised. And if not that, he at least deserved the decency of having it plucked from his fingers.
I’m guessing you have your askbox disabled, because I can’t find a link to it on your blog, but anyways.
While it’s from a different angle, you have managed to capture in words what disappoints me about Homestuck’s ending in a way that I could not. I’d just like to say - Thank you for that, seriously. It’s something of a relief to be able to say, “Look, I’m not wording this properly, here’s how someone else put it,” when attempting to discuss with friends why I don’t like Act 7. That’s not to mention that it’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who’s still unsatisfied with the ending, of course.
So, uh, yeah. Kinda a weird post to make I guess, but yeah. Thanks.
Thanks so much for saying this. I really appreciate it.
I don’t mean to disparage the work other people have done analyzing Homestuck’s ending in a more positive light. A lot of them have had amazing and awesome things to say and I love all the discussion this ending brings out in people.
But I dislike the thought that negativity, dissatisfaction, and generally thinking the ending is hot wet garbage makes me a less intelligent reader than others, that I just “missed something” that others caught. No, I caught it. I just think it sucked and I fuckin’ hate it. If others can find meaning in the end and be satisfied with that, by all means!! You embrace that shit hard and don’t let it go.
Me? I will always be a character writer. I will always seek out well written, well told character stories. The fact that Homestuck sold itself to me on that premise and then bait and switched me for something I Did Not Want isn’t something I have any desire to admire. And when you spend at least half of your narrative real estate on exploring characters and their relationships, an ending without an exploration of characters and their relationships can never be a truly satisfactory or even a fair one. Homestuck could have had a meta ending that still honoured the work it had put into its characters, and it didn’t.
I’m old. I’m busy. And I’ve got a whole shelf of books I haven’t read, shows I haven’t watched, and games I haven‘t played. Homestuck is long as balls, and I would have skipped out on the whole thing if I had have known that it was more interested in making a statement ABOUT stories and character arcs than telling stories and character arcs. After spending 7 years serenading me with the very things it threw out at the last second.
Wow, I rambled again, I’m a salty fuck.
In any case, asks aren’t off on purpose! I’ll turn my askbox on and please, feel free to ask me anything, followers :)
Annnnnnd now I wasted two hours writing Homestuck meta instead of my actual goddamn manuscript that I get paid for and I have to spend my weekend working instead of what I was planning to do
which
tbh
was basically just laying around watching netflix in pyjamas
Where does the idea come from that the Masterpiece is "gone" and not just something that takes place in the future?
Ah god I could write so much about this and honestly I’m pretty burnt out on Homestuck meta right now and I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with the need to back up my opinions.
So I might tackle the handling of the Masterpiece at some point here, really, and really dig into it. For now, here’s the short version.
There are three potential readings of Homestuck’s ending:
1. The characters, having defeated all relevant bosses, beat the game by making a frog and entering a new universe.
2. The characters, somehow, have become Unstuck from the power of the narrative and they are escaping to a life where they have true free will.
3. The characters, about to achieve their Ultimate Reward and become gods of the new universe, abruptly cease to exist as Calliope’s black hole devours them, as well as all Paradox Space.
Those are the only three ways you can interpret what went down in the broad strokes. Here’s how the Masterpiece relates to each of them.
1. The characters have no reason to think that Lord English remains a threat. They knew that Vriska was going after him, and Vriska, ultimately, succeeds. In an ending where the characters have defeated all bosses and obtained their reward, what reason do they have to go after Lord English? Why go back and risk fucking up so much crucial timeline – remember that John’s powers REWRITE history and how careful he had to be with them! – to fight a boss that, as far as they know, has already been handled? Either they’re stupid, or Lord English has done something to require going after, which means… Vriska failed? He’s still loose? They learn something new? All of this is part of the main plot! So if this happened, the story has ended before the main plot has concluded. Bad storytelling.
2. The characters are free of the narrative. They have broken out of the confines of the story and are free to go and make their own lives. In this case, going back INTO the narrative – in fact, going back to the very ground zero day one origin story of the narrative – flies in the face of all logic. If their greatest fight with the narrative is yet to come, why end the story where it ended? It wasn’t finished yet, and omitting the most crucial element of the main characters interacting with the narrative as a whole right before it happens undoes all the catharsis of the characters being “free” at the end of Act 7. They’re not free. Their greatest challenge is yet to come. So… bad storytelling.
3. The characters are all dead and no longer exist so they can’t do the Masterpiece.
Ultimately the reason to assume the Masterpiece has somehow been retconned is because not having it as a part of the main narrative leaves the main narrative unfinished, which is bad storytelling. And either way, the fact that a core cast member’s big moment that he’s been leading up to all comic happens offscreen, after the ending, in a way that we have to infer from zero evidence when and where and how it happened, AFTER we’ve spent SO MUCH TIME on how fucking miserable he is, is bad storytelling.
Part 3: My Public Response on How People Should Feel Towards Act 7: You should feel however you feel! If you can't get past certain hurdles and my posts echo with you, embrace the salt! I've actually engaged more positively with Homestuck proper and its fandom since becoming the mouthpiece of the intellectual hater. If you see something in the end and Raf's article resonates with you, embrace the catharsis! Raf's writings are smart and insightful and well researched and well argued!
oh shit wait you meant for me to POST THESE ON PUBLIC !!!!!!!! IM REALLY BAD AT TUMBLR GUYS…………….
This is PROBABLY the most important point to be made as far as outside observers go, though, so I’m glad I caught it here. I completely agree. @purplepurpleunicornsparkle if you dont mind….taking screencaps…of the other two posts, we can compile them into an image as a single post I guess xD;
oh god, i’m sorry
Hah. The rest aren’t all that important so it doesn’t matter. The point I REALLY wanted to make was this one – that people shouldn’t try and feel anything about the ending that they aren’t inclined to feel.
All your feelings are valid. If you’re salty, be salty. If you’re satisfied, be satisfied. If you feel like you wasted 7 years of your life, scream about it. If you feel like you’ve just finished the best all you can eat buffet ever put before you, then celebrate.
I see so many people who are salty when they feel they should love the ending, or who love the ending but feel like they should be salty. Or even people who feel ambivalent when they feel they should be passionate. And like, stop. Whatever your gut feeling is? Just chill. Go with it. You feel what you feel, whatever that feel is. Neither feeling is wrong! What is wrong is twisting yourself into knots trying to make yourself think in a way you feel you should – or worse, in a way you feel pressured by EITHER side you should.
Just personally, I’ve found a lot of real catharsis in my salt. Started ficcing again after years, really getting to know people in the fandom, reblogging tons of art, meeting cool writers… my salt for the end has just made me more protective of everything pre-Collide, which will always be my very heart and soul. Negativity doesn’t mean hating Homestuck or throwing it aside. I love Homestuck more than ever because I feel the need to shelter it from itself >_>
Dirk and Rose have these really exacting standards and finely honed taste for what they’re attracted to and discuss their narrow definition of perfect hotness of their preferred gender together.
Meanwhile Dave and Roxy are like
holy shit…. a face… it’s so facelike…… its attached to a body……… and the person inside is so nice……… fucking 10/10 hottie
So having had a listen to the entirety of the near-final version of the ~thing that will be released~, here’s my thoughts:
- Length. I haven’t personally calculated it but I’m fairly confident that this album has the longest average song length of any of the main HS volumes so far, or close to it. As I teased before, this album will have the longest HS song I’ve ever made on it (which is coincidentally also a way of canonizing my favorite ship), but there are a number of songs by others that are *even* longer than that.
- Quality. Remember how earlier volumes would usually have 1 or 2 ‘epic’ songs (what you could call ‘animationbait’) like Rex Duodecim Angelus, Courser or Cascade? This album has several of them. There really is an unprecedented sense of effort on the part of the musicians, and many of the songs truly feel like they could have an entire animation built around them.
- Variety/Genre. It’s been a long time since volume 1 through 4. Though many of the earlier songs are no doubt iconic, they tended to gravitate towards chiptunes and had a general emphasis on synthesized sounds. And don’t worry, tracks like that are still there, but there’s so much more! We’re talking expertly orchestrated symphonies, live choirs, affectionately performed jazz pieces, hard rocking guitars and peppy electronic dance music.
- How far we’ve come.Despite said diversity in genres, the album feels remarkably coherent and consistent as a whole. We even have some musicians from the early days returning after an absence, so the album is a great capstone to HS music in its entirety and does a great job of representing how everyone involved has continually developed as an artist through all this time. The album definitely has a sense of nostalgia and finality about it, if only for the fact that some of us have really gone out of our way in terms of effort placed into the music as a kind of final goodbye, but at the same time doesn’t feel sappy or melancholic at all.
So speaking as objectively as I realistically can, I think this is one of the best HS albums ever, and I sincerely hope that everyone will enjoy it as much
when it’s released as I did listening to it just now.
oh man, ive been crazynuts over homestuck since winter 2014!! and the note we started the omegapause on fuckin churned thse fires right up - nonstop shitposting, nonstop fanart, ive got thousands of drawings on my computer from that time period.
i think one major issue from homestuck’s big pauses, as unavoidable as they are, is the time it leaves for hype theorycrafting.
is your "shafted miserable core character weve spent ages talking about their misery with" dirk? because mine's terezi. rip me after she didnt even show up to play football.
Mine is definitely Jake, holy shit, Jake is my child and I adore him. But that said, Dirk and Jake’s misery is so tightly linked and entwined. I actually can’t believe that after everything we went through in this comic with them talking just past one another, straight up LAMPSHADING IT at various points, always with this implication of a dangled carrot that some day the real Dirk and the real Jake would have a real conversation…
Nothing.
God
DMAN
(Also, Jane. Wow Jane got utterly screwed. After all that, she doesn’t even get to hug her own father? wow woowoww)
Haha so I finished reading Homestuck like a month ago and I’m playing Pokemon X/Y and I was like HOLY SHIT IMMA DO THIS SILLY THING IMMEDIATELY. I picked the pokemon I feel the characters would play while playing the game, trying to get their interests and personalities and general feel for aesthetics down. This made me appreciate a lot of pokemon I usually sort of hate like Probopass, thanks Jane for your goofy fucking taste in pokemons. Also it’s important everyone knows that Jake named his Snorlax Marguerite and his Quagsire Anastasia. Thank you.
Sprites are all my edits!
Yay I did a thing.
So I made this like two years ago when I JUST finished Homestuck and JUST started tumblr and I had, like, 2 followers. And now I have lots of followers so I’m going to reblog myself selfishly cause I worked really hard on this dumb shit.
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.
There was also a chapter 9 posted last night that I didn’t blog for, so if you’re still on Chapter 8, make sure you don’t miss it!
- jake finally fucking finally FINALLY talk to jade FUCK
- roxy dating john while *zooms out* dirk looks on w/eyes perpetually, suspiciously narrowed, like idk about this john guy he might be trouble while *zooms out AGAIN* dave never stops laughing/crying ever guys my family is fucking shithive bananas
- rose finally can corner dirk there is no escape. you might think you can elude me because there’s a whole planet here or whatever the fuck but think again FATHER, I am a SEER of LIGHT
reasons why I can’t yet write post-act-7 stuff:
- it doesn’t make sense it does not fucking make SENSE IT MAKES NO SENSE WHY ARE THEY HERE ARE THEY IN A FROG ARE THEY INSIDE THE FROG THEY WERE SUPPOSED TOE SCAPE THE NARRATIVE FAFHHHH
- who has powers what is a power are the trolls immortal now too? can they fly. we are all gods we went through the FUCKIN. DOOR.
- I’m just
- so
- FUCKING
- mad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! STILL. I’m still SO MAD
this is me_irl tbh which sucks because I have lots of Roxygen and Dirkjake ideas but Y R THEY IN A FROG
This is my slow reconciliation Dirk/Jake fic set post-act 7, wherein the kids have settled on Earth and are working out their various issues. From Jake’s POV, dealing with having dreams of his other self, as well as the fact that something is Up with Dirk Strider but Dirk won’t fucking tell him what. This chapter: Dave stages an inDirkvention with Jake’s help.
reblog if you 100% actually ship Jade/Davepeta because you fuckin love them together and not because you’re a DaveJade wanting to see a Dave get with a Jade, a Jade fan who wants her to have somebody, or a DaveKat wanting Jade squared away
those people are all fine and good and we love them
but reblog if u r a TRU JAVEPETA SHIPPER, WHO LOVES THEM WITH NO MITIGATING FACTORS
Karkat really didn’t expect Rose to actually READ the trashy romance novel he’d been using to explain quadrant vacillation. He also didn’t expect Rose to… really, really like it, or for them to start exchanging books and discussing them. Karkat-centric fic for Karkat day!
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.
UR DIRKJAKE ART IS MY EVERYTHING AAAAA<3333333 all of it is tbh ur one of my fave artists!!! ily!!! keep up the good work,, hope to see more from u, it makes my day!! c: ((((maybe someday we'll get those dirkjake smooches tho haha but the cuddles are great too!!! i love it!!!)))) ^u^
TEARS UP …. UR 2 NICE … IM SO GLAD U THINK SO !!!!! ;;;;;;;;; i sure will do my best to continue churning out the Content. heres a quick dirkjake for the road
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.
CW for this chapter in general! It gets heavy into Dave’s suicidal ideation – this is just darkest point, more or less. Was hard to write! DaveKatish things are happening!
I unironically fucking love that “well rose didn’t drool over jake” is proof that she’s gay. Like, it’s actual proof, because didn’t LITERALLY every single other human in Homestuck have at least one throwaway line about his hotness?? Jake is a walking gaydar.
Big thanks to everyone who participated and Shelby for giving us permission!
I love this because of how Cal makes Dirk sound ACTUALLY FUCKING OFFENDED AT THIS STUPID FAILURE OF A PUN I mean that’s Dirk in a nutshell, totally losing control of his ~super in control emotions~ because somebody incorrectly did humour
i love u all. dirkjake is great. u are great. keep on shipping them boys.
Write those fanfics. Draw them however you want. I wanna see the boys in fluffy moments, I wanna see the boys in angsty moments, I wanna see the boys doubting themselves and projecting their own issues onto each other and then I want to see what canon never gave us, the boys talking to each other honestly and sincerely about what they both did wrong and working through it. I want to see the boys relying on their friends to check them instead of isolating themselves, and relying on each other to speak up instead of stewing and assuming the worst about themselves. I want to see them recognize the mistakes they’ve made and choose to be better people, choose to let themselves make each other better.
Most of all I just want to see all the nuances and difficulties of conducting a relationship ostensibly between an extreme introvert and an extreme extrovert and I never want y’all to be shamed out of loving these boys with all their issues because some fucking people on tumblr can’t keep their shiphate out of our shiptags.
I feel most everyone knows what this fic is about by now, so here’s the short version: All I Know Are Sad Songs is a desperately-trying-to-be canon compliant Alpha Dave/Karkat fic set in Universe B2 wherein Dave Strider is deeply depressed and suicidal after Rebranding Day. Skaia, Paradox Space, and the Alpha Timeline bring a version of Karkat Vantas to this universe to give Dave a reason to fulfill his destiny. Please heed warnings, it starts off very dark.
IT’S FINALLY DONE!!! After a month and a half of toiling away we finally finished our submission for LOFAM4! This is the first piece I’ve ever written with poly, who happens to be one of my favorite producers of all time.
Davepetasprite^2 is one of the most layered and complex characters in Homestuck, and definitely one of the hardest to do justice. A lot of love went into creating this track, so as usual, please wear headphones for the best experience!
