Homestuck is very good if you stop at the credits.
But!
That’s pretty much exactly it. It’s on Homestuck.com, everyone is basically supposed to be made aware of it’s content, and it’s not explicitly marked as non-canon. And when the creators talk about it, it’s canon when they get compliments, and it’s not when they get critique. The retroactive twists on the characters are done to the fandom, and can’t be undone.
Gee golly I have no idea what you could possibly be talking about.
As someone who has gotten a lot of flack for daring to not like the Epilogues, it’s good to know there are other people who see through the Fake Deep Fake Woke edgelord crap.
She fuses with a god dog, going Dogtier. In Homestuck, it’s framed as an ascension into a more ideal form for her, that she’s wanted for a long time. And I like the non-epilogue version as an embrace of body modification and furries. Then the Epilogue goes and fucks it up by not letting her be trans and/or intersex.
For what it’s worth, I’ve fully reread the article and I still think it’s very good on most levels. It’s a very good explanation of why Homestuck is a phenomenon.
I just think that it’s giving Hussie all of the praise and none of the blame. I feel like knowing the SkaiaNet antisemitism thing is important, as well as acknowledging the places where the Epilogues failed. Fixating on the breast milk thing is funny, but there is real criticism to be had.
I liked the meat epilogue quite a bit (still haven’t gotten around to candy). I think it does really neat stuff around canonicity and the ways in which 3rd person omniscient only pretends to neutrality. And the whole “kids with godlike power and no accountability will go bad, so someone decides to be the new villain” is also kinda fun I think. Not all the writing was great, but the dialogue had the same old homestuck flavor that I craved and I’m looking forward to what comes next.
The caveat to all this is that I first read homestuck in college, and from the beginning I’ve been most interested in it from a textual standpoint. I have favorite characters, but it was never fully about the characters for me/I never identified with them the way other fans seem to have. Like, as a bi guy I was happy when homestuck started having queer relationships but I never looked to it for representation.
Boy those content warnings could have been done a lot better though, considering I didn’t even see them before I started reading.
I haven’t read Homestuck, but after a lengthy discussion with my friend this morning, it seems like this is ripe for some good articles about authorial responsibility, especially regarding queer characters and especially especially given the meta level of the narrative.
