A few thoughts on The Homestuck Epilogues
So I’ve seen a few folks talk about the Epilogues and many are a pissed off about the direction some of the characters were taken in, and while I think that’s fair, I think it’s worth pointing out that Homestuck always was one of those stories that was more about ‘stories’ rather than the characters themselves.
Sure I’d be pissed off too if my favourite character had been warped into a fascist, especially in a story with such finality. It’s not like Carol Danvers being weirdly authoritarian in Civil War 2, where here character has a chance to get back on the rails in a future story, for example.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s almost impossible to judge Homestuck by any kind of objective metric, since it’s really the only of it’s kind, we have no other multi-media webcomic/animation/interactive saga’s told via IM to compare it to. So really, when it comes to reviewing Homestuck, we can only describe how it made us feel.
Which has led to a lot of people talking about how the Epilogues were not a satisfying ending, and therefore a failure. Which is a fair assessment, but I think people are failing to understand that the Epilogues are not satisfying endings by design.
I hate to bring The Last Jedi divisiveness into this, but it’s a similar criticism regarding Luke’s story arc. If you were dissapointed that this was what became of the Jedi Master, that was intentional.
The Homestuck Epilogues are not comfy where-are-they-now fluff pieces. Anyone could crank something like that out, and wouldn’t really do a one of it’s kind weird project like Homestuck justice.
I suspect, that was the entire point. How do you put a cap on a story that spans thousands of pages, hundreds of characters, eons of distance and a multitude of alternate timelines that break the narrative wall itself?
(Spoilers from here on out)
The Homestuck Epilogues, then, are about Andrew Hussies struggle with bringing the series to an end, and the tug between giving the fans what they want and concluding the story in a way that stays true to what it was trying to do. Hussie knew that ending the story on his own terms wouldn’t please everybody. Heck it probably wouldn’t please most people, but Homestuck wasn’t a story by half, and you have to go big, or go home.
Do you want your happy endings? Do you want the characters living in domestic bliss, raising children? Years rolling by as we see them get older and a new generation take their place? Do you want that sweet, but otherwise inconsequential taste that’s nothing but empty gratification?
Or do you want an ending true to the stories themes. Do you want the narrative broken on the wheel. Do you want see that all actions have consequences? Do you understand that, as Drive-By Truckers said: “The secret behind a happy ending is knowing when to roll the credits?” Do you want to dig into all that meat, no matter how tough it might be.
So then, Hussie gives us that choice.
Pick candy, and you’re wishing on a monkey’s paw. You get your domestic bliss. You get your families and generations. You get characters growing into their own and becoming leaders. But it’s not what you thought it would be. They fall in and out of love. Characters age and they get harder with age. Crueller. In the end, that sweet fan-service candy sours when taken to it’s logical conclusion.
But you choose the the meat instead, and that’s barely much better. Much loved character ships are broken apart, the protagonist dies unsure if what he gave his life for made any real difference at all. The story breaks the forth wall for it’s final and ultimate time, revealing that a black comedy based heavily on internet culture could not, and should not, have a happy ending.
And then the two timelines clash, and the story pulls away moments before the final battle is about to begin, in almost a scaled up version of Cobb’s spinning top from the end of Inception.
Homestuck is a story about stories. If it were to give us Frodo Baggins sailing off to the Gray Havens at the end of Lord of the Rings, or Mark Grayson overseeing one thousand years of peace at the end of Invincible then it would have felt false.
Instead Hussie leaving us with a painful, bittersweet and at times maddening non-ending feels about the only way you really could stay true to a story that started with a character being incorrectly named Zoomsmell Pooplord by it’s own readers.
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