Specifically with that particular “homestuck meta theory”, in addition to the obvious fact that it’s grasping at straws to find an explanation for bad writing:
The fact that someone could write “no, look, you guys, Hussie had a semblence of a coherent structure all along, and no, that’s not all, but it involved metafiction” and people will eat it up like “wow, you’re right, that IS brilliant, ending redeemed” just makes me wonder if some longtime fans were paying attention to the comic at all
Like, the thought process which that theory is positing, even if it had been coherently implemented, is one which could occur to more or less any competent author, and almost certainly has to many. The artifact represents power over the story itself, it lets the characters escape from their narrative constraints, in the end they win not by the rules according to the story but by breaking their way out of the story. Pretty straightforward.
But when I think back to end of act 5 and all the crazy metafictional stuff that was going on there, like with Doc Scratch and Hussie vying for control over the narration, fourth walls with their own defined in-universe mechanics orthogonal to a “fifth wall” which represents another level of meta, all this somehow happening in the same physical space but removed in time to both the main story and the seemingly unrelated Midnight Crew intermission which itself is an elaborate riff on one of Hussie’s earlier works, events happening simultaneously in the banner and the main panel, events unfolding out of time due to the laws of general relativity, somehow all of this tying into a whole array of other forces to cause the end of the universe…. this is the type of thing that’s actually brilliant, actually the mark of a genius, actually mind-boggling in that it’s impossible for me to comprehend in full the total logical chain of what’s going on at any one given moment let alone how someone comes up with it and writes it, actually unprecedented in perhaps all of fiction. And more importantly it works as written and doesn’t need some guy on tumblr to explain it to you a week later.
So when a Homestuck fan is presented with “consider this, the ending was not utterly lacking in thought, but in fact was a poorly executed version of My First Metafictional Twist”, and people respond in turn “wow you’re right, this ending was genius, I now see that it is on par with the rest of Homestuck”, it’s like… ok, clearly parts of what were happening earlier were not fully resonating with you.
I get that some people are more into the story for the character drama and whatnot and don’t necessarily have a boner for the eccentric stuff which borders on complexity for complexity’s sake. But the theory itself is arguing that it doesn’t matter if the characters were treated in an unsatisfying way, because it’s justified by a craaaaaazy metafictional system of thought, so
I’d forgotten just how much great meta stuff there was in Homestuck. Damn.
There are so many reasons I hate the whole “tee hee it’s METAFICTION now you HAVE to think it’s brilliant” posts circling around, but this post explains some of the reasons I hadn’t even really examined myself. It’s true, act 5.2 and act 6 are full of good metafiction qualities, well-executed metafiction methods, to an absurd degree, so handwaving off the ending as “lmao it’s just metafiction u plebes” is not only condescending as hell (and oh, is it ever) but also … a very shallow effortless way to excuse an ending that just wasn’t that good
I don’t know what happened with Hussie, if he was just ready to be Done or if he didn’t want to miss the important date or if he just fucking Threw It On The Ground wrt his storytelling, but “uh, duh, guys, it’s metafiction” is both giving him too much and not enough credit. Too much for a poorly executed ending that didn’t deliver on pretty much any of the promises made by the comic, and not enough for the actual good meta stuff he’s done in the past with the Scratch segment, the glitched act 6, and even – dare I say it – the retcon. (I know opinions on the retcon vary, but it was still a better handled metafictional concept than all this bullshit flying around about what the ending “really meant.”)