At this point, I kinda just hope the epilogue just steals straight up from the HP epilogue and it’s like John talking to his troll child or whatever going “John Sollux Aradia Nepeta Equius Eridan Feferi Egbert, you were named for the six trolls i completely forgot existed and really just don’t give a fuck about.”  The end.

Because at least then I can finally put this bullshit behind me.

spoiler without context

oh god…

OH GOD

OH GOD

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

WAIT, WHAAAT-

my own personal reaction, which is just a personal reaction and doesn’t invalidate anyone else’s, is something like “everything that’s fucked up here was already present in homestuck, but at a jokey and stylized remove that gave it a sort of plausible deniability, and ti feels both more cathartic and fairer to the characters to confront that stuff head-on, rather than leaving it to sit uneasily in the background”

yeah exactly. like… “well i guess we should just go for it and talk about how shit’s fucked up.” and for me that felt pretty good. 

okay just also: I totally respect that not everyone likes these kinds of stories or wants to engage with them. But I also do feel like this is a logical extension of the rest of homestuck. It does not, to me, feel like any sort of departure. It’s — taste is subjective but I think there’s a big difference between a shitty story and a story where a lot of shitty things happen.

And I don’t think that we were owed closure or even owed good things happening to characters because that is never something homestuck promised to deliver— in fact, it repeatedly has warned us time and again that bad things are going to keep happening. And I don’t think the fact that bad things happened to people is like, a fuck you or anything I think that’s just what homestuck is like, I really do.

I can’t even — wouldn’t want to — distill this down to “this is the exact point they were trying to make” because I think that it wasn’t about proving a point? It was about like, exploring interesting things about narrative and authority and control and how people can be complicated and how who is telling a story changes the story and about synthesis, the desire for a third option. It wasn’t trying to say people are bad for liking happy endings it’s just that’s not the story the writers wanted to tell. And they didn’t have to tell it. It’s not the sort of thing everyone likes! And I think to a certain extent it’s asking for an amount of critical engagement that not everyone wants to put into it… and you don’t have to! I just think that like, this is all… very homestuck. This is that real homestuck shit. Imperfect, messy, but also complex and complexly interested — really truly interested — in exploring some shit about Narratives.

I am so full of so very many thoughts and most of them are very… Uh. Narratological, or something like that. And I am so tired after that marathon reading session. I understand why people wouldn’t feel the same sort of weary but hard won bone deep Contentment after finishing out the epilogues that I do right now, but that’s where I’m at. A lot of that has to deal with how I look at stories and a lot of that has to do with what I enjoy in stories and a lot of that has to do with feeling really justified in some of my like capital T Thoughts about homestuck as a Work. But some of it does just have to do with … I dunno man. I like sad horror stories? That’s what I’m about