metatextual villainy in the epilogues
if you take the Epilogues seriously as a metatext existing outside of canonicity, and embrace all the implications and hints it gave about narration and authorship, then the essential tragedy of Epilogues Dirk isnât that he loses his better self amongst his splinters when trying to take hold of narrative control
itâs that he loses his better self to the authors of the Epilogues: Andrew Hussie, ctset, and cv
thatâs why Dirk as narrator is lacking in love for his friends, a defining character trait of his in Homestuck itself: Hussie doesnât love the alphas
thatâs why the one expression of care for others as people that he has left is exclusively for Dave: ctset is ipgd, stridercest author who basically already wrote this story before in the form of âFamily Never Endsâ
thatâs why Dirk, who honestly has never been a very good puppet master, is able to pull off all this manipulation successfully: because the authors can
Dirk has always been one of the more Hussie-like characters, always half author avatar, but in Homestuck, he grew and changed. he made steps to letting go. he was ready to stop trying to be a puppet master, which he acknowledges he sucks at, and just try to be a good brother and friend. he reconciled with his flaws, and he moved on.Â
but Hussie cannot.
Hussie says that proximity to the author is a marker of a villain Homestuck itself, but in the Epilogues, you have to flip that around: proximity to villainy is what defines a character as the author
because if you follow the metatextual premise to its logical conclusion, you canât stop with the narrator or the audience. you have to look at who actually wrote this.
itâs not Dirk Strider who canât let go. itâs not Dirk Strider who treats the reader with contempt, hates so many of its characters, yet canât stop telling this story. it isnât Dirk Strider who is scared to lose relevance. sure, he might have any these traits to greater or lesser degreesâthatâs a matter of interpretation, but debating that is missing the point of the story as a metatext. Dirk is not the person telling the story. Calliope isnât either. and neither is Caliborn or any other character.
itâs Andrew Hussie. hating Homestuck and its readers for wanting him to continue. terrified to stop telling it. terrified that if he does stop, he wonât matter anymore.
the author is scared to not exist. the author is scared to become irrelevant.
Calliope warns us not to let uncoloured text trick us into thinking weâre reading the writing of an unbiased, external speaker. But in that warning is its reverse: donât let coloured text trick you into thinking youâre reading what a character has to say.
in a metatextual narrative of this kind, the villain is the person who creates the situation. some might try to blame the readers for wanting to read, and some might try to blame narrators for narrating the story, but that is only ever slight of hand to hide the real villain of the tale.
it is the author. it is always the author. as a metatext, the Homestuck Epilogues are in their essence no more and no less than the authors, playing puppeteer and throwing their voices on multiple levels. because they just canât stop.Â
the villain is the person who makes the story. and we know all three of their names.