you are reading homestuck wrong
(and it’s not your fault, you don’t deserve to be attacked, and the way you’re reading it is still explicitly supported in canon): an essay by me
“the epilogue ruined homestuck because jane and dirk are villains"
"it ruined homestuck because its too dark and sexual"
"everyones too ooc because theyre so sexually immoral"
"its bad writing because no-one gets a happy ending"
"its bad writing because the characters are treated badly"
people are making the mistake of treating homestuck like a narrative about the characters and plot still, when i dont know how much more obvious it can be made that homestuck is and always has been a deconstruction of how art interacts with the audience/fandom.
at the beginning of homestuck, it was driven entirely by reader commands. readers would send in a command to a character, and hussie would illustrate the results of that action. hussie himself did not plan the majority of early plot arcs in the story–they were created organically through creator-fandom interaction.
homestuck has always blurred the line between fanwork and canon, at larger and larger scales as the work itself grew larger and larger. growing from simply taking reader commands to shape the story, to having fans themselves drawing art assets for the comic and even writing parts of the story themselves, acknowledging fandom in-jokes and the story shaping itself around our discourse, our headcanons, our ship wars–the story itself has always followed the fandom, and the body of homestuck as a whole is less a story about the characters and more an exploration of how, in reality, the audience creates art, not the creator.
the characters are interacting with the world and each other in these ways directly because of how fandom and fanon has treated them over the years. this entire story is a culmination of the way the fandom has been interacting with homestuck for years.
we have a literal pages-long prologue where the narrative, via rose, holds our little baby hands and explains how this is an exploration of how canon as we commonly think of it no longer exists and that the epilogues will be a deconstruction of canon vs. fanon that puts them on equal levels. i feel like the importance of this prologue (and the importance of having the epilogues be presented in ao3 format, and of having them explicitly be written by people other than hussie, and presented separately from the main canon on the website) has gone over a lot of people’s heads.
in one of the original book notes, i believe from act 2, hussie literally said something to the effect of "homestuck is nothing but a machine churning out new worldbuilding concepts and tools at an ever increasing pace,” which i think is really indicative of how he sees his work: as a set of tools for other people to use. he created a set of rules, a world, characters, themes, archetypes. but that’s where he’s always seen his job as ending. he’s described his work on homestuck as that of a “dungeon master” out of D&D; he provides the playground, we go fucking apeshit with it.
if you’ve been reading the main homestuck canon with the expectation all along that it needs to provide a story for you to follow, that it needs to provide closure for you, that it exists to make you feel comfortable and satisfied, you’ve been reading it wrong. because homestuck was never about the characters, it was never about the arcs, it was never about the plot. homestuck was something created for us to use. homestuck does not exist as an objective body of canon; homestuck is nothing but the relationship between the audience and the art. homestuck only exists in how we, as an audience, consume and therefore create it.
here, we’re literally being told to go find our own answers. to go make our own realities, to answer our own questions, and thats so fucking empowering and Cool as a message! to put the ownership of your media in its own fans hands is so fucking powerful as a statement, to acknowledge that your work only exists as a concept for other people to create with… holy shit man.
and in the end, people who are mad about the epilogue and are creating their own endings, saying they’re doing it better than “canon,” people who refuse to accept the epilogues as canon, are doing exactly what the epilogues were meant to inspire. you may not understand the wider metatextual implications, you may not understand all of the cerebral bullshit that the nerds who wrote homestuck are spouting, but you are creating homestuck. you are writing canon.
because in the end, what we’re left with, is this:
you are just as much a part of creating homestuck canon as the creators of homestuck are. every time you engage with the concept of homestuck with genuine emotion, with genuine effort, you’re creating a little more of what homestuck truly is.
the effort and care you put into your work is what makes it canon, and that’s beautiful.
theartofmadeline
romaincrisis
stormborns
dededos
snowghoul
vaporwave
