Apotheosis and Creation Myth

bladekindeyewear:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

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 like to thank @olive-the-olive and @finalvortex for beta reading for me, as well as @joyceanfartboner, @kajy, and @fragilesoftmachines earlier on. You were all rad! 

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

Click the link. Click the link click the link click the link click the link click the link.

CLICK THE LINK.

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.