Quick update on where I'm at. (TL;DR: Still haven't given up on Homestuck yet, but damn it's hard.)
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.