What is Karkat’s actual wriggling day? A pointless calculation.
So, with today being 6/12, I’ve seen a lot of posts congratulating Karkat for his wriggling day. But his wriggling day isn’t actually the twelfth of June– it’s the twelfth bilunar perigee of the sixth dark season’s equinox. He wouldn’t calculate his age in years– this is the guy who thought a human year was two weeks long. So, with one wriggling day every sweep, when should we be actually celebrating?
At first, I thought this would be simple– start on April 13, 2009, and then just add the length of a sweep (791.3581 days) to calculate wriggling days afterwards. But then I remembered that the trolls’ session lasted a few weeks, and so in order to calculate Karkat’s wriggling day relative to the human calendar he syncs up with when he meets Dave and Rose, we must first determine the exact length of the trolls’ session.
We know there are 618 hours and 12 minutes between Karkat first getting access to Trollian memos and Cascade. To account for the time between Karkat’s intro panel and then, and anything else I may have missed, I’m going to round up and say that the time between Karkat’s wriggling day and April 15, 2009, is an even 26 days, putting the date at the equivalent of March 20th, 2009.
From here, we can calculate the dates of Karkat’s wriggling days, and his age during important events in the rest of Homestuck.
May 20, 2011: Karkat is 7 sweeps old during the events of Act 7.
July 19, 2013
September 19, 2015: Karkat is 9 sweeps old by the end of the Credits.
November 18, 2017: Karkat is 10 sweeps old during the Meat epilogue and the start of Candy.
January 18, 2020: This is his actual next wriggling day! I’m going to set a reminder for that date and repost this then, unless my calculations are wrong.
I don’t want to bother going through the whole timeline for Candy so you can extrapolate from this if you want to figure out when exactly Karkat leads the troll rebellion or something. I calculated these dates by multiplying 791.3581 by n, rounding down, and adding that number of days to March 20th, 2009.
By extrapolation, this makes Karkat’s actual (equivalent) landing date March 20th, 1996, making him older than John and Jane and younger than the rest of the human kids. He’s also a Pisces.
Happy wriggling day, Karkat… in another several months.
His next wriggling day is within a day of March 20, 2022. From the humans' perspective, this date happened during the three-year timeskip between the Epilogues and Homestuck^2, meaning in the current story Karkat is now eleven sweeps.
The Homestuck Epilogues vs. Steven Universe: The Movie
There's no such thing as happily ever after... I'll always have more work to do.
I've been thinking about the Epilogues basically nonstop for the last several months, so obviously they were on my mind when I watched the Steven Universe movie that just came out. And despite their vast and obvious tonal differences, these two epilogues have an extremely similar theme-- the impossibility of a happy ending.
But I'd go further than that. In his recent commentary about the Epilogues, Hussie says the following about what happens when you continue a story after its supposed end:
Because, as certain characters go to some length to elaborate on, you can't tell new stories without reestablishing significant dramatic stakes: new problems to overcome, new injustices to correct, new questions to answer. There can be no sense of emotional gratification later without first experiencing certain periods of emotional recession. And by peeking into the imagined realm of "happily ever after" to satisfy our curiosity, we discover that our attention isn't so harmless, because the complexities and sorrows of adult life can't be ignored. Nor can the challenges of creating a civilization from scratch, when several teenagers are handed god-status. It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined. Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. So they spring into action, and begin repositioning all the stage props for a new implied narrative.
Basically what this means is that when you see what happens after the curtain closes, you inherently incur more suffering upon your beloved characters. This theme is far more directly stated than it was in the Epilogues in the Steven Universe movie, which has a whole musical number at the beginning about "happily ever afters" that you just know cannot possibly end well, as well as the quote at the end that I put at the top of this post.
But the two works go in opposite directions in addressing this theme. The Homestuck Epilogues becomes a "cursed tome", a deep meditation on adulthood and the changes and struggles therein. And in doing this, its primary goal is to defy the readers' expectations and really put them through the wringer. Each additional chapter read is pushed by an overwhelming sense of "HOLY SHIT WHAT FUCKED UP THING IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO THESE PEOPLE NEXT." But the reader can stop at any moment. You're bringing it upon these poor kids adults. You asshole.
Steven Universe doesn't do this. But instead of coming up with new ways for its characters to suffer, it has them retread everything they'd learned before-- using a literal plot device to reset the central Crystal Gems' character development, requiring them to repeat some of their most important moments of development for the audience once over again. Even Steven, who doesn't lose his memories, points out that he's going through the same process he always has: a Gem angry at something Pink Diamond did tries to kill Steven, and he has to fight her, talk her through her feelings, do some singing and crying, and find a peaceful way to resolve the situation. Spinel is nothing new to him-- he has to go through all of this over and over again for the audience's entertainment.
For the record, I liked the Steven Universe movie. It had great music, character interaction, animation, and probably the most compelling and likeable one-off villain the show has ever done in Spinel. Even the "the Crystal Gems have to repeat their old experiences" moments were pretty well done, in my opinion. But that doesn't change the fact that much of the movie's non-Spinel plot revolves around having the Gems repeat the past.
Homestuck's epilogues are a line (or two lines, I guess) moving forward into the future, and more suffering. Steven Universe's "epilogue" (it feels like one, even with a new season basically confirmed) is a circle, repeating the same suffering over again. It's up to the audience to determine which is better, both for themselves and for the characters.
What is Karkat’s actual wriggling day? A pointless calculation.
So, with today being 6/12, I've seen a lot of posts congratulating Karkat for his wriggling day. But his wriggling day isn't actually the twelfth of June-- it's the twelfth bilunar perigee of the sixth dark season's equinox. He wouldn't calculate his age in years-- this is the guy who thought a human year was two weeks long. So, with one wriggling day every sweep, when should we be actually celebrating?
At first, I thought this would be simple-- start on April 13, 2009, and then just add the length of a sweep (791.3581 days) to calculate wriggling days afterwards. But then I remembered that the trolls' session lasted a few weeks, and so in order to calculate Karkat's wriggling day relative to the human calendar he syncs up with when he meets Dave and Rose, we must first determine the exact length of the trolls' session.
We know there are 618 hours and 12 minutes between Karkat first getting access to Trollian memos and Cascade. To account for the time between Karkat's intro panel and then, and anything else I may have missed, I'm going to round up and say that the time between Karkat's wriggling day and April 15, 2009, is an even 26 days, putting the date at the equivalent of March 20th, 2009.
From here, we can calculate the dates of Karkat's wriggling days, and his age during important events in the rest of Homestuck.
May 20, 2011: Karkat is 7 sweeps old during the events of Act 7.
July 19, 2013
September 19, 2015: Karkat is 9 sweeps old by the end of the Credits.
November 18, 2017: Karkat is 10 sweeps old during the Meat epilogue and the start of Candy.
January 18, 2020: This is his actual next wriggling day! I'm going to set a reminder for that date and repost this then, unless my calculations are wrong.
I don't want to bother going through the whole timeline for Candy so you can extrapolate from this if you want to figure out when exactly Karkat leads the troll rebellion or something. I calculated these dates by multiplying 791.3581 by n, rounding down, and adding that number of days to March 20th, 2009.
By extrapolation, this makes Karkat's actual (equivalent) landing date March 20th, 1996, making him older than John and Jane and younger than the rest of the human kids. He's also a Pisces.
Happy wriggling day, Karkat... in another several months.
What I think about the Homestuck Epilogues, and what I learned from them.
“It's a tough, emotionally draining read. But it's cathartic, in all the worst ways possible.
He tends to get carried away with his projects.”
Four nights ago, I finished the Homestuck Epilogues. I sat there in my computer chair for an hour, typing my brains out to several people at once, trying to get anything even REMOTELY resembling a handle on the situation. Homestuck, the webcomic, caused me to become drenched in sweat as I failed to exit a weekend that felt like a fever dream of pretentious narration, questionable characterization decisions, and... some really great and substantive moments. All I wanted was to be a useless piece of shit all day and read all these epilogues. Well, I did get that, and a lot more.
Homestuck.
The word keeps ramming itself through my brain ever since the epilogues came out two days ago, which already seems like a lifetime ago somehow. What was I even doing the day before that-- Homework that I'd been neglecting? Watching some anime? In any case, just about the only thing I knew for sure would happen is that I'd write some long, rambling, extremely pretentious essay. Actually, a ton of my predictions came true, but just not in the... fuck. I better get to the part where I actually review the god damn epilogue.
The Homestuck Epilogues are a masterfully written descent into insanity. And by descent, I really do mean that-- this isn't insanity the way Homestuck was. The epilogues depict the complete unraveling of the characters, their world(s), and the narrative itself, into a big clusterfuck pile that never even THINKS about stopping from getting taller, in a way that might as well be considered a cognitohazard by the SCP Foundation. I felt physically sick, at times, reading this. I broke out into sweat. When I woke up Sunday morning, having read all of Candy and a third of Meat, I legitimately felt like I had a hangover. A Homestuck hangover! Unbelievable. And from what I've heard, I am *far* from the only person who had this kind of reaction. This, truly, is a testament to the skill of the writing team here. I don't agree with every decision they made, but god DAMN did they accomplish what they (hopefully) set out to. And if this reaction was all an accident, they performed the literary equivalent of five-year-olds fucking around with a piece of chalk and some candles and accidentally summoning Satan.
I started out with Candy, because of V saying it was her preferred order and the first page of Meat being broken when the update first launched. I wanted to do that order anyway on some level, but I was worried that I'd run into spoilers for Meat so it would be better to get that out of the way first. In retrospect, I'm glad I read it the way I did-- I feel like there's more stuff in Candy that's explained in Meat than the other way around, and I was fortunate enough to not run into any spoilers for Meat. But Candy had more things in it TO spoil, honestly. I'll talk about Meat later on.
Candy was, as advertised, character focused, and it involved most of them acting in painful, self-destructive ways. And a lot of them felt OFF to me, and I don't know how to feel about it. Like, John points out how Roxy is a lot less skeptical and rebellious than she used to be (and this applies IMMEDIATELY to the beginning of Candy, and doesn't happen to nearly the same extent in Meat.) This is explicitly acknowledged in the story, and it feeds into John's thoughts about everyone except him and Terezi being "fake", so it's clearly intentional. And yet, Roxy calls out John for ever thinking about it that way in their final conversation. I noticed this "off"-ness for a lot of the characters-- Jade, Jane, even Dave to an extent. And it really feels like it was intentionally to psych out the reader? Like, "ha ha, you THOUGHT people were acting weird, but they really just grew up?" If it's that, they grew up in some strange directions that I'll get to later.
As for other Candy-specific stuff, I still don't get what the fuck was going on with Gamzee! Was there, like, a point to that? It never touched on him getting to post-apocalyptic Earth-C with Caliborn-- is that just the Gamzee that fell in the black hole, then? Why did Calliope need to get John to bring Gamzee back? Why did he have such a prominent role? Why did she and Roxy fall under his spell so hard? I don't get it. There's so many things about the epilogues I don't get, and I can't tell whether it's because it's so fucking dense that I couldn't possibly absorb all of it, or it's a legitimate problem on the epilogue's part. I feel like there's a black hole in the center of my mind every time I try to even COMPREHEND the Epilogues as a single, consistent thing. I've never doubted my ability to actually review something like this before.
Candy just went to INSANE territory with the time-skips, and the rebellions, and the fankids which simultaneously got too much screentime and deserved more development (*especially* Tavros). And the (Vriska) gag nearly had me falling out of my chair, when John renamed her. But yeah. For something so big, I feel like I should have something more to say about Candy specifically. Maybe I'm not as talkative as I could be about it because I read it first, and a lot of what I have to say applies to my general thoughts? Whatever, let's move on to Meat.
Meat, at first, felt like it was basically just a checklist of things John needed to do to technically, officially wrap up the plot of Homestuck. Go and collect versions of the kids. Check. Have them fight Caliborn (who got next to no screen time, but considering Dirk, I can't really blame anyone). Check. Get in the Juju... You get what I'm saying. All of that passed by slowly, methodically, without much weight beyond John's internal dialogue, up until the Lord English fight. This to me felt like it was Hussie saying, "You want RESOLUTION, you ungrateful motherfuckers who can't even appreciate a good anime? YOU WANT IT?" and trying to shove it into our stomachs as fast as possible. He really didn't want it to matter. Which... I get, since we already knew what was going to happen up until the actual Lord English fight. But the Game Over characters, besides arguably Dave, didn't get much attention at all character-wise. They might as well have been puppets with which to carry out John's (or Ultimate Dirk's I guess) bidding. Hussie probably didn't want to make the post-retcon versions redundant, retreat existing (and partially unseen) character development, or dangle even more meat (ha!) among the people who prefer the pre-retcon characters. But honestly, the epilogue actually does a lot to reduce the burn from jumping to a different set of characters with different experiences, which I'll elaborate on later.
The battle against Lord English was good. And my only complaint is that it wasn't ACTUALLY RENDERED AS SOME PANELS IN THE COMIC, GOD DAMN IT. Seriously, if John and Terezi's arc in the Meat epilogue had been done as a traditional MSPA comic added on after the credits, it wouldn't have been that bad of an epilogue, all things considered. The battle was a great read, and it did a good job selling what it would actually take to kill Lord English-- including Dave actually using the god damn Welsh sword. Good for him. Davepeta felt a little unnecessary (really, the vore joke right THERE?) but I thought they'd have a much bigger role, and since I'm not much of a fan of theirs I'm kind of glad they just showed up for that little bit of the epilogue. And John's scenes, just drifting through the end of the canon universe, are easily the best in the epilogue. He gets a genuinely coherent arc that shows off all his strengths as a person and as a character, and his scenes with Terezi are THE BEST in a way I never thought they'd get. Including the one where they fuck. I mean, damn. The only bullshit I can think of about John is how Lord English's tooth having some kind of magic cherub poison in it seems contrived. I mean, if Caliborn had something like that, he wouldn't have been able to shut up about it, and he would've used it earlier out of spite instead of death rainbow-ing everything in sight. But I guess it takes something pulled out of the authors' collective asses to finally, truly kill John Egbert, himself the beneficiary of a literal plot hole.
Oh yeah, and there's all that Dirk/Alt-Calliope stuff. Yeah. I'm going to have to make a stunning confession to you all right now-- I, METY, have never finished Detective Pony. I started it and got maybe like a quarter of the way through before dropping it. I can say that's because it's pretty difficult to read on a phone and I always have other stuff to do when I'm on my PC, but that's just an excuse. I have to finish it. But regardless, I think what just rammed through my brain either gets close to or out-Detective Ponys Detective Pony. Holy SHIT was that a lot of Dirk. And in his Dirk-y way, his plans are *just* complex enough for their complexity to distract you from how much of a fucking bastard he can be, or in the case of the Meat epilogue, *is*. I never really cared that much about Dirk and stayed away from the people who argue about him all the time (my poison of choice is Vriskourse, thank you very much), but I'm sure the people who defended him are in a crisis of purpose about now. (Or not. They were always pretty weird.) And as for Alt-Calliope... I don't really get where they were going with her? Wasn't her whole point that she wasn't ever going to be relevant, or even talk to literally anyone, ever again? What does she even want? And why is she getting so involved (by her standards) with mortal affairs? She had some good moments, particularly shutting down Dirk, but she's nowhere near as compelling as he is. I guess she does make a good foil, though-- a true solemn presence in response to Dirk's Homestuck-y bullshit.
Hell, maybe that's why Dirk never touched the Candy epilogue? He wants something truer to the "Homestuck" experience-- he's a villainous version of Hussie, even more so than Caliborn was. And that's what Meat is, kind of, at least at first. Definitely in the case of his narration and all the metaness involved with it, which is a lot more blatant than it is in Candy. He's like me, and a lot of the people on the subreddit and discord, really. Wanting to keep Homestuck to our vision of what Homestuck is, or was at its best. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, but might not be great either.
Okay. So now, finally, onto my general thoughts about some things I said I would mention later. Mostly about the directions they took various characters and ships. This is in general order from whether I dislike the direction they took to whether I like it.
The Bad:
**Jane.** I don't think I've ever met anyone who said Jane was their favorite character, but her character seems unnecessarily fucked over in both sides of the Epilogue. I get what they were going for with her descent into authoritarianism, and understand why she has it in her to be a dictator. But they make her out to be a complete xenophobic, abusive rapist without even showing how she turned into all of that! Like, yeah, she'd be an insidious dictator, but I think she'd still be one who's not awful to the people she considers friends. I think the authors wanted someone they could use as a villain to make statements about current politics with, and they picked Jane because she has the best backstory for it and was never one of the most popular or developed characters. And that's why I'm not particularly mad about this-- I never liked her all that much. But mostly it was out of finding her boring. How on Earth (C) do you get from her Act 6 self to... what she becomes? She was treated with the same lack of sympathy reserved for characters like Gamzee who have already demonstrated themselves to be awful. John even points out that his Nanna (both of whom are conspicuously unmentioned) was never anything even remotely like Epilogue Jane in his timeline. Where did it all come from?
Jade. Okay. I get why she became a character dominated by her sexual exploits. Dog hormones plus spending the vast majority of her life basically alone is a powerful combination. But is that *really* all there is to write about her!? When she's not making Dave and/or Karkat incredibly uncomfortable, she's returned to her classic Homestuck position of being a plot device, this time spending most of Meat being a vessel for Alt-Calliope. I was hoping the Epilogue would give some much-needed attention to her, always the most maligned of the Beta Kids, but as usual the narrative fucked her over and spat her out. I really think she was written this way in order to sink DaveJade and Jadekat by virtue of making those ships less appealing in comparison to Davekat, and I kind of hate that it worked on me because Best Girl Jade Harley deserves better, god dammit. I understand what she became as an adult, and I don't have the problems with her development I do with Jane, but she deserved BETTER THAN WHAT SHE GOT! Literally every Jade ship also falls into the Losers pile here, of course, especially ones involving Dave and Karkat.
Roxy. They mostly subsume themself into John's story in the Candy arc until their final conversation, which serves the purpose of John's whole narrative of learning that the world doesn't revolve around him (anymore). But, as I mentioned before, they still act out of character throughout Candy in refusing to be assertive in any way or express any remotely contradictory feelings to John. This is addressed in their final conversation in Candy, in which she calls out John for being self-centered and says his thoughts are just because he's comparing a bunch of grown adults who've changed a lot to their teenage selves. But, as I discussed, we're supposed to know where John is coming from. It's intentionally written to make us doubt the characters' authenticity, almost as if the narrative itself is gaslighting us. And the Roxy we've seen in the comic definitely was not so much of a sycophant as to never question anything at all. Where are the skepticism and opinions that they show in Act 6? Ultimately, in Candy, their role is just to fuck with John and the audience, at the expense of getting actual attention and development as a character, with the exception of that last conversation. Meat is a little better, since there they aren't so intensely out-of-character, but there they take a very low-key role in the story that mostly just revolves around their experimentation with gender identity. And don't get me wrong-- that was some interesting stuff, and it was presented in a way I've never seen the subject handled in any work of media. But they didn't have anything to do besides that. I also liked that their relationship with Callie was treated as highly ambiguous, and not described as a romantic relationship by the human idea of the term. Part of me thinks Roxy should've swapped roles, in effect, with Dave-- Dave could stay in the background except to make some Dave-isms and talk about LGBT issues, and Roxy could do all of that on top of something interesting. Maybe their relationship with Jane could've been explored! Just a waste of potential, to me.
The sprites: I mean, I was never a huge fan of them, especially the ones created at the very end just to shoehorn in some more bullshit. So I'm actually kind of glad they're absent-- but none of them besides Davepeta even got mentioned! This is a pretty egregious omission, especially since the Credits show that the sprites all made it over to Earth C. Jasprose, as annoying as she gets, would have been absolutely worth at least bringing up with all the crap Rose went through. And John brings up his Nanna, but not the fact that there should be two of them on that planet, right now! Just a really weird absence that doesn't change the plot much but still feels wrong.
The Neutral/Could Go Either Way:
Gamzee. Why did he have to come back? Not only am I complaining about him coming back, but I'm pretty sure the literal version of that question wasn't answered. What made Calliope get John to bring him back? Was it for the sole purpose of being a red herring? I really don't get it. That being said, he makes the Neutral section because he actually did add a lot to the incredibly unsettling vibe that Candy had, and the point he's used to make about redemption arcs is a good one that immediately made clear that Candy won't be about that. And, of course, his death scene is great, but it makes one wonder if he only got to fight Vriska because he's one of the few characters capable of making her look good.
Dirk. I've already talked about him.
Dave. Look, Dave is great and he always has been. But he is the last character to deserve the amount of attention he got in the Epilogues. He got, by far, the most complete and conclusive arc in Homestuck proper, and I was hoping that some characters who late Homestuck kind of screwed over would get more development. But, nope. Nothing but the best for the author's (most sympathetic) self-insert, I guess. That being said, even if he didn't deserve it, most of his content was great. I liked him better in Meat since he mostly just stuck with Karkat and was relatively unimportant, but Candy still told a great story of his love, loss, and identity crisis that turned out to not be as completely wrapped up as we thought. Still, though-- his newfound obsessions with Obama and the economy got old incredibly quickly, and become far more repetitive than anything he said in the comic, which is all particularly disappointing coming from a character known for his creativity. Sure, the Obama scene was hilarious and poignant, but was the payoff really worth having him bringing that up constantly? I'm fine with Woke Dave, and him legitimately getting super into politics could have been an interesting direction for him. Using him as a vehicle for endlessly repetitive comments is just a disappointment for what could have been and for what we already had.
Karkat. I don't have all that much to say about him, honestly. I'm happy that he finally got to fulfill his destiny as a leader, but he was still pretty much treated as a joke throughout the entire epilogue, even in the scenes after he's leading the rebellion. It's like the narrative won't let us directly observe a moment of triumph for him. It would've been nice if he was the more prominent character out of his relationship with Dave, though, because he deserved the development a lot more. Also, he gets credit for the best one-liner in the Epilogues: "What the fuck is a calisthenic? Is that the name of your fan cherub?"
Terezi. I can't believe they legitimately let her get over Vriska, but I'll talk more about their relationship later. Overall, I feel really conflicted about what they did with her (besides shipping decisions). The story of her running away from all the supposed perfectness of Earth-C made her a great partner for John, but that's it--- everything she does until she crashes back into the Meat Earth-C revolves around John. Of course, considering I read Candy ==> Meat, I read Terezi's experiences with John in chronological order from her perspective, so who knows what I'd think of it if I read Meat first. Don't get me wrong, her relationship with John was incredible on just about every level, but why did she pick *him* as basically the only person she ever talked to in the first place? Yeah, her lack of closeness with any of the Meteor people other than Vriska is a consequence of the Retcon (another reason to hate the Retcon even after the Epilogues), but I still don't understand why she couldn't talk to anyone else. Maybe it was her latent crush on John, or lingering feelings about the Retcon from accessing her Game Over self's memories? Either way, though, even if she never really got to talk to anyone besides John and I never got why Dirk coaxed her onto his spaceship, she did a far better job as a satellite character of John's than Roxy was (and considering how blatantly her own issues are dealt with, she's considerably less of a satellite).
The Good:
Davekat. Yeah. I can't believe I'm saying this, but after being against it or at least reluctantly accepting of it since Vriskagram, I now wholeheartedly support Davekat. And a lot of people who hung around the subreddit back when Davekat first happened that were far more emphatically against it than I seem to agree, from what I've seen. Making it so Dave and Karkat never officially established their relationship in canon was an excellent move that softens the abruptness of their relationship from the viewers' perspective and actually gives us the catharsis of watching them get together. Ever since I stopped being a complete anti-Davekat belligerent I thought that Hussie could get me to ship Davekat if he actually put effort into selling it and showed us how they'd work in a relationship, and I never thought I'd be this happy to be right about it. Dave and Karkat's best moments in the Epilogues come from when they act as the Greek chorus to the insanity surrounding them, and complement each other immensely as two low-key guys who, deep down, really just want to be useless pieces of shit all day as the world devolves into insanity around them. The confession scene was, after reading the tragedy of Candy first, one hundred percent earned, and an excellent moment of catharsis mixed with pure fluff. The only conclusion I can possibly come to is that they're perfect for each other. There. I said it. My only problems with it are how even though I'm on board with Davekat it still felt like Jade was fucked over for the express purpose of making shipping her with Dave and/or Karkat less appealing, and that it makes the all the talk about Dave and Karkat dating in A6A6I5 retroactively untrue. But overall, I'm very happy with how this ship got treated.
Vrisrezi. Yeah, Vrisrezi got DEMOLISHED by the Epilogues, which absolutely shocked me. I was *certain* that Vriska would get her happy ending and make out with Terezi and all that. I believed thoroughly that this would happen because Vriska is Vriska, and she always gets what she wants no matter how awful it would be for everyone around her or how much the narrative has to bend over to make it happen. I also know that Vrisrezi is overwhelmingly popular with the Homestuck Twitter community that regularly interacts with official Homestuck people, so I thought it was basically a lock. Turns out I didn't have enough faith in Hussie. Yes, Vrisrezi fans are the losers here, but I'm certainly not! Vriska and Terezi never so much as SPOKE to each other, and the Meat ending especially demolished all possibility of it happening. Terezi even called Vriska a bitch! As someone who always thought post-Retcon Vrisrezi was at least borderline abusive, I am pleasantly surprised by this outcome.
(Vriska). This is, by far, the most surprising thing to me on this lit. But I actually liked how (Vriska) was handled in the epilogues. A lot! As I said, I firmly expected (Vriska) to get whatever she wants, but she finally the fate she deserves: being completely irrelevant and irredeemable. She literally drops in out of nowhere, and is faced with a new world that is completely apathetic to her shenanigans. Her epilogue arc is short, to-the-point, and doesn't interfere with any arcs besides Earth C Vriska's, with whom she has a good conversation (on top of Gamzee's dead body, no less). I don't think she ever talks to anyone besides those two and John. Between this, and maintaining her absolute irredeemability within the context of the story, I think this is probably the best way Vriska could've possibly been handled in the epilogue, even if I still believe she never should've come back to life in the first place.
John. Yeah, he's the main beneficiary of "main character privilege", but god damn does the epilogue really pull off TWO great character arcs for him. I talked about both of them earlier, but let no one say John is ever a bland character. I preferred his role in Meat, as it mainly focused on the implications and aftermath of beating Sburb, but his Candy arc tells an excellent story of isolation and how many loved ones John is willing to alienate in order to stand up for what he thinks is right. All this is helped by how his characterization is, by far, the least altered of any character who gets a large amount of screen time in the epilogues, making his part of the story feel more like a direct continuation of his role in Homestuck than something new for him to do. In fact, it's almost weird how little he changes in Candy as the timeskips really start to pile up. But I'm okay with that. John's role in the Epilogues, I believe, is to provide an anchor, something the reader knows that, whatever happens, will always be there for them. And he does just that-- remaining the person we always thought he was. (Until he dies, I guess. But it was about time death finally caught up to that guy.)
JohnRezi. I was always kind of apprehensive at this ship. I didn't like the idea that kismesissitude wasn't all that different from the human understanding of romance instead of the unknowable alien emotion it was originally presented as, and even though they had some fun interactions, black JohnRezi felt so forced to me during late Homestuck. I still don't get why the normally noncombative John kept calling Terezi, and Terezi alone, all those names even though she wasn't doing anything particularly annoying at the time, and their conversations in earlier acts were never anything like that. But I wasn't expecting the ship to get much focus at all in the epilogues, with my certainty that Terezi would end up with Vriska, so I never really put much thought into it. Plus, unlike Davekat, it never interfered with anything I actually shipped. But, in yet ANOTHER case of my shipping expectations being completely demolished, JohnRezi ended up being possibly the best character decision to happen in the Epilogue. Their relationship has so much chemistry and genuine affection for each other, and their general disassociation with the world around them makes them them excellent partners-- they're the only ones who truly haven't been able to move on from the game. Reading Candy, I just felt *refreshed* every single time I read one of their conversations, as they represented a break from the complete insanity happening in the rest of the story. And in Meat, I finally got on board with them as a couple, even if I still don't think I've fully accepted that John Egbert of all people got laid-- as one of his *dying acts*. But I am now completely on board with JohnRezi, even if I choose to interpret it as more red than black. This was probably intentional on the Epilogues' part, as JohnRoxy wasn't portrayed very well, but I think it might be my new favorite John ship. I now associate Do You Remem8er Me with those two, as I had it playing in the background during the chapter where Terezi formally gets over Vriska and they confess their feelings to one another. I am 100% ready for JohnRezi content. Bring it on. My only question is, remember that time she literally killed him as a prank? Maybe not the best baggage for the couple to have. But I'm okay with it. This was an overwhelming success by the Epilogues that resulted in a swift change in a shipping opinion for me, and I couldn't be happier about it.
And obviously there's far more I could talk about, but I spent four days writing this and at this point I just want to be fucking done already before the experience of reading these reviews becomes similar to that of reading the Epilogues themselves. I bet hardly anyone actually made it this far, anyway. (Hi, Nerdorama!) Either way, it's kind of amazing that much of what I enjoyed about the Epilogues was how they handled some of the things I was the most pessimistic about.
Before I conclude, I'd like to give my thoughts on something I've seen a lot of debate about-- the conclusion, or questionable amount thereof. Candy didn't really get an ending, which fits its themes, but the controversy comes with the Meat ending, in which Dirk and company fly up away in a spaceship like a fucking piece of garbage, and the rest of the cast follows suit. I've seen people mad about it for not actually resolving the plot, and leaving off on yet another cliffhanger. But when I read it, I didn't interpret it like that at all. Despite all the meta fuckery we see in the Epilogues, this is actually a pretty typical "And The Adventure Continues…" type ending seen in media countless times, with the heroes riding off into the sunset for parts unknown. It's not comparable to Act 7, and doesn't particularly require a continuation, because it doesn't have anything to do at all with what was actually established in Homestuck. Act 7 and the Credits didn't work by themselves as an ending for Homestuck because there were all kinds of character loose ends and plot threads that never got tied up. "How the hell did the main villain get defeated" is a perfectly reasonable legitimate question to be mad about. However, I've come to realize that this is a matter of perspective-- The Homestuck Epilogues work well as a conclusion to Homestuck, but not themselves, and it was really only the former that I particularly cared about. I guess I just didn't register anything original to the Epilogue as something that "matters" in the broader context of Homestuck, or I couldn't bring myself to care about what happens afterwards.
And that brings me, after five thousand god damn words, to the second half of the title. I couldn't bring myself to care about not every plot thread from the Epilogues getting wrapped up because an overwhelming feeling I got while reading them was that I should distance myself from Homestuck altogether. The Epilogues were such a brutal, emotionally draining experience to push myself through that by the end I just wanted the suffering to be over to the point that I considered whether it was at all a good thing for me to allow myself to get to that point in the first place. I mean, seriously-- can anything that causes me to wake up with what I described as a "Homestuck hangover" on the second day of my readthrough really be healthy for me? Of course, the fact that this monstrosity exists, and the fact that I got a fanfic idea from reading the epilogue shows that that's clearly not going to happen, but still. I just read a piece of literature that was so well-written and evoked its desired feelings so much that it convinced me that I should care less about it. And *that* is why, no matter what I think about the epilogue, it is transparently obvious that it was a masterwork on a technical level.
Someone, I forget who, told Candy John that things aren't conclusive unless you want them to be. And so I said the Epilogues had a satisfactory, conclusive ending pretty much entirely because I wanted that to happen. That is the product of two straight days of a descent into madness, which lead into four straight days of writing down a small fraction of the thoughts and feelings they produced. Because, ultimately, I think the Homestuck Epilogues are unreviewable, at least by me. My brain is too small, my chakras too un-blitzed to even begin to comprehend it as a single entity-- that's why this "review" is really just a bunch of mini-reviews of smaller parts of the Epilogues. That's why when I finished reading it, I felt like bashing my head against the wall until an epiphany came, and when inevitably nothing came I'd feel disappointed despite knowing it was never going to happen.
So… That is what I think of the Epilogues, and the like one or two things I learned from them. I cannot thank you enough for reading this whole thing, if anyone actually did.
See you next time I have way too many thoughts about something!
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