Truth about epilogue hate and why its bullshit

from your perspective, what are the epilogues supposed to be? i don't remember it well at this point, but, when the epilogues released, i admittedly did not finish them because i wasn't enjoying. i disliked most of the character writing, especially jade's. it felt overly negative. i am curious to hear your thoughts

they are specifically meant to be out of character as they are doomed universes, candys universe is written poor on purpose as a parody of fanfics and because its so completely divergent from canon

Actually I do think the epilogues were a pretty poor misread on a lot of characters, and stomped on a lot of their character arcs. Even if it were meant to be something not officially tied to Homestuck it would probably still garner the same reactions, just to a lesser extent. The HSBC team came in and made a lot of it make sense and the decisions were rationalized to fit the characters, but before that? Not great.

@fffan2008 that is interesting, i could definitely see that from the parts i remember... i got that impression with candy, but i guess i didn't pick it up with meat as well hahaha. i am curious if the same would apply to hs^2 (i have not read more than some random pages). maybe i should reread with that idea in mind.

it kinda makes sense with there being like, a gazillionbajillion timelines, but i must say it is quite distracting that they feel so mischaracterized XD i am left with a sense of "there must have been a more cohesive way to write this". @cabalisticalchemist conveyed my thoughts in more sensically

Does it matter if they're mischaracterised and poorly written on purpose? It's still bad and I don't want to read bad things. Writing poorly and saying "Actually this was on purpose!" betrays an insecurity in your ability to actually write something good.

i actually agree w op here; i do think the epilogues are very intentionally bad but there are ways that it could've been executed better or more tactfully. i do think it requires a lot more analysis than homestuck proper to really be able to enjoy and i just don't think that's something we can really expect from the majority of the fandom...

i am curious to see how things will shift (and how they already have shifted) with beyond canon having a new team and being revived. but i think it's too early to tell.

youre so right op. everyone else on the entire internet is bad at having opinions unfortunately

i agree with daverose. the fact of the matter is, even if the poor writing is intentional, it’s still terrible. you can bake a feces cake on purpose, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it’s literally shitty.

Well, if someone else likes something, then I'm not going to argue them out of liking that thing, right? So its fine for everyone to like it.

I guess the Epilogues, more than Homestuck by far, feel like a narrative torture chamber of pure sadism. Even if we take it for granted that the characters are supposed to be OOC at the center of some great misanthropic, I don't find it illuminating, challenging, enjoyable or even really *relatable* to read their experiences. I have suffered a great deal and met with some crushing disappointments in my life, but I find it trouble to empathize with the lobotomized discount store effigies of the Homestuck characters that populate the epilogues. It just feels like watching someone pull wings off flies. Leave the dumb little flies alone, yo.

Well, if someone else likes something, then I'm not going to argue them out of liking that thing, right? So its fine for everyone to like it.

I guess the Epilogues, more than Homestuck by far, feel like a narrative torture chamber of pure sadism. Even if we take it for granted that the characters are supposed to be OOC at the center of some great misanthropic perma-nightmare, I don't find it illuminating, challenging, enjoyable or even really *relatable* to read their experiences. I have suffered a great deal and met with some crushing disappointments in my life, but I find it trouble to empathize with the lobotomized discount store effigies of the Homestuck characters that populate the epilogues. It just feels like watching someone pull wings off flies. Leave the dumb little flies alone, yo.

Sorry for the double post (and now triple post.) It seems like you can't delete your own posts yet.

@magicmirror ive seen deleted posts before i think? does the trash button not work :0?

regarding the actual topic of the thread though... even as someone who enjoys the epilogues quite a bit i do kind of loathe the idea that disliking them is only possible if you miss "the point?" i like the parts that are bad on purpose (sans jade -_-) bc my tastes do unfortunately align with "narrative torture chamber[s] of pure sadism" but not everyone finds that appealing? or needs to appreciate that? i hope this doesnt come across as too wishy-washy OTL but i think theres much to criticize abt the epilogues even when youre well aware of what its meant to be u_u
on a separate note i do believe that i benefit(?) greatly from being a newer hs fan irt the epilogues just because i went in fully aware of their existence and for YEARS heard about how hated they were. they were a lot easier to take in and analyze bc of this anticipation but i think its fully understandable for anyone who was There when they came out to feel bitter (shrug)

I have vastly less respect for The Homestuck Epilogues and what it has to say about the idea of canon than I would if Hussie had been willing to practice what he preached and put the canonicity of his own work into question in a material sense. The Meat/Candy dichotomy and according implications of canonicity rings hollow when the book is posted as a single work on the official website by the original author next to the original comic.

You're allowed to enjoy the Epilogues, but my personal distate for it is not Because I "do not understand it", I simply just don't find it to be a Fun or interesting read, because it Lacks the charm of the original source media that I enjoy. That's it. understanding it won't make it Any more enjoyable in my opinion :/

re: terminaltermagant

I think this issue is exactly what HS:BC might be trying to address. Not just from the fact that Hussie is no longer the one writing the comic (even if he gave the writers an outline) but also with how the whole fanontinuum is going to play into things. Just consider how Dirk, the villain, the bad guy, is the one trying to push things back into a canon, and what that might say about the narrative. I could go on and on about this but I think ultimately Dirk's defeat will come because of fanon overtaking canon in the story, and the final message to the readers will be to leave the original story behind and start writing their own stories once canon loses its meaning. Post canon less so the whole step outisde of canon and more so the rite of passage from the original author to the fans who'll keep Homestuck alive from now on. But that's all speculation, of course.

As for the main topic, I do think some people have yet to realize there's a difference between a story that's uncomfortable and one that's badly written on purpose, because those two things aren't the same but many people think they are, at least in the case of the Epilogues. Obviously there's some subjectivity to this and people are allowed to have opinions but I personally didn't have a problem with how most characters were handled in the Epilogues, not even in one timeline or the other. Maybe it's because I don't tend to become very attached to fictional characters but watching their ruin was an interesting reading experience that felt a bit realistic considering the strange and shitty lives the kids had led until that point. Seeing them grow into terrible people might feel sadistic but I still think it fits with the meta commentary on sequels and how there needs to be conflict for the story to go on or however it goes.

I think I went off track but my point is that the epilogues aren't "intentionally badly written", in fact I think they're very effective at being so strange and upsetting and that should be a positive quality. It feels on brand for Hussie and there's a message to be taken from the fact that the story took that direction. You can say you don't like it but calling it bad writing might be too much.

I'd like to throw my hat in the ring and say: I think its shortsighted to attribute the decisions the characters made that we don't like to "intentional bad writing". Yes, both Candy and Meat were parodies of different kinds of bad fanfic that fail to understand the appeal of the Whole of homestuck, but also... every decision everyone made was in character.

Jane becoming a fascist and date rapist? She was literally raised as a corporate heiress. One of the first inner thoughts of hers we see is her planning to privatize the postal service. She tries to keep Jake as a sex slave when she's Crockertier, one of the few impulses during that mode that WEREN'T solely programmed in by the Condesce. And we see in the ending(s) that she revives CrockerCorp on Earth C, a clear demonstration that she has not grown out of her old ways.

Jade becoming a sex pest and a deadbeat mother? Think about it. She grew up without any physical affection accept from a dog, a dog she now Also Is. She isn't socialized, she doesn't know boundaries, she never even got those years with June during the timeskip because June had to retcon her presence there out! She's taking advantage of her god clout to be a party slut because she's desperate to make up for lost time but has no idea how to do so in a way that's healthy for her and others.

Dirk killing himself and/or going off to make SBURB happen again? He could never sit still, he always had to be in control, and now he's unable to cope with being in a slowburn coffee shop AU. He has to be in control, to make everything revolve around him, or he gets scared. Its also worth remembering that, via UltSelf mechanics, he's also Literally Lord English, which also influences those decisions.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The epilogues aren't as simple as "they're bad on purpose and that's why we don't like what the characters are doing". The characters are doing exactly what terminally online nerds from the 00's who got contracted into being child soldiers by the universe's ovaries, and then are told they're gods, would do. They're all maladjusted freaks. THAT'S why they act up.

I found the Epilogues to have some really dry prose and the dialogue rarely grabbed me, and I do think the story of Homestuck is better in its native medium, for SURE, but to call the Epilogues "too mean" is losing the forest for the trees. The epilogues are a deconstruction of the happily ever after. They're taking the ending of Homestuck and saying "You didn't think that just because they won, they'd be happy forever, right? They're still the maladjusted bastards from before, and now even worse thanks to their inability to cope with what they went through and with their new position as gods. There is more story to tell. Let's set up for that."

My only gripes with the Epilogues is just the way that Jade was written. I understand that the Epilogues are supposed to be "bad on purpose" lol, but I still feel like the way they wrote Jade's story was inherently misogynistic and had a lot of Transmisogyny written into it that felt incredibly icky and unnecessary. I also felt as if there was a lot of weird disdain toward Jade that was Authorial, when that disdain seemed to come from nowhere.

Calling her derogatory words like "slut" or "whore" simply because she "sleeps around" or whatever seemed mean in a way Homestuck normally isn't mean. And other characters did the same thing, like Jake, but he is only narratively shamed for doing so, like once or twice. There is a stark difference in Jade being called "Older, slutty Jade" casually by Dirk's narration many times than him referring to Jake as a "Man-whore" once.

Jade having issues with boundaries is cool, and I even agree that she would have that as a problem, but I do not agree with the way the characters spoke about her, and I do not think it added much of anything other than make her "friends" seem like really awful friends for no reason lol.

As for the bit on transmisogyny, I do indeed think it is incredibly "yikes" to write a transfemme character as this "sex-crazed" person who has animal parts and is incredibly predatory towards other people. I think it's even more "yikes" when that is your only transfemme character in the whole story, and that's how you've chosen to portray her. There is a way to write female characters who suffer from hypersexuality, but this was not the way to do it, and I fear the writers spent more time on the "shaming" aspect of Jade's story rather than showing her dealing with and suffering from this kind of affliction. I am not transfemme, but I did suffer from hypersexuality at a young age for similar reasons to Jade, so to see them treat her that way just kind of rubbed me the wrong way personally.

I hope they do not do this with June Egbert because I will be incredibly disappointed. I want to see them write an actual trans character in a respectful manner that's not riddled with any kind of hidden bigotry.

Other than that though, I really liked the Epilogues and I found them to be pretty cool addition to the story because I liked the stark contrast between fun, campy Homestuck and the grim new reality they made for themselves after they 'won' the game. It's kind of like looking at a trainwreck and not being able to look away, you get to see all your beloved childhood characters turn into the worst people imaginable and have it all just make sense in the end because of the previous silly comic you just read.

And then when you read the Epilogues you kind of realize all the kids issues were there from the start and that actually this whole trainwreck was a long time coming.

Re:elegantSpinstress

They ARE bad friends. They always were. The entire comic everyone is unnecessarily bitchy to each other. Sure it was mostly ribbing but combine that with distance and calcification, that can absolutely turn into genuine hostility.

On the topic of the transmisogyny, though, I do think there's a point to be had there, but its also, like... very clearly stumbled into, I feel.

She isn't really transfem, for one. She was a cis girl who got a radioactive male dog's reproductive system stapled onto her when she was already almost halfway through puberty. She's less transfem, more... sci-fi late onset intersex. I think trying to boil her down into the mold of "transfem" shows problems mostly because it wasn't meant to fit into that slot, and also it limits the things we let Homestuck and its post-canon analyze. Everything about her makes sense and is interesting, I love it when stories like this look at the implications of a story and follow them to their logical conclusion, as the Epilogues did with all that. But it does admittedly read as transmisogynistic tropes when you read it through a lens it wasn't meant to, which, while yes You Weren't Meant To, its still... a deeply unfortunate situation I don't like. I'm with ya there.

Thankfully, I highly doubt June will in any way echo Jade on this. Their stories, personalities, flaws, and everything else are completely different. A June Egbert with the confidence that comes from transition will absolutely be a freak (/pos), but in a completely different and far less stereotypical way than a transfem candy!Jade reading.