New to the fandom, Could you explain June? 💯 Love and support her. But homestuck 2 doesn't have her and I'm just confused?
June Egbert precedes the concept of homestuck^2! I’ve seen a lot of people be confused about this because they weren’t active on the fandom at the time the epilogues dropped, when reading her as a trans woman got a lot of discussion going and eventually lead to multiple confirmations.
So here’s an attempt at contextualization:
Throughout Homestuck, a few key ideas about Egbert’s identity and motivation to push forward with her hero’s journey are dropped like breadcrumbs. She’s meant to play the default straight-man protagonist. Her defining traits are ridiculously… generic, when compared to how all the other kids present themselves and stick to exaggerated bits. She’s a perfectly normal, regular suburban kid with normal, suburban issues.
She may not leave her room a whole lot. She may not have a lot of real life friends in the neighborhood. She holds a comical irritation for the concept of birthdays, even though her father is extremely supportive, and is delighted to see his son grow up nice and healthy. There’s no reason for her to be so irrationally upset at cakes and gifts, and that’s what makes the setup funny! June doesn’t even know why she’s annoyed with half of the things that annoy her, what the heck.
But under all that playing around there is a sense that her life is so normal, so blasé, so unexciting and limiting and hollow and fake that she’d give anything to not be herself, even if only for ten minutes. This goes way, way back. It’s why June needs SBURB to happen.
June lives as though her life hasn’t started yet. She’s stuck in the Tutorial stage. I would argue while most kids (and trolls) play SBURB to escape a shitty environment or the end of the world as they know it, June plays for a simpler reason: She needs to escape herself, and she needs to do it before it is too late.
Being thirteen means crossing the homeric abyss between being a child with no care for the world sporting a generic hand-me-down identity and becoming a Teen (capital T) who needs to figure out how to cope with atrocious bodily changes while building the adult they’re meant to be AND deciding what the fuck they want out of life, and how they’re going to work to get it, forever and ever.
When you’re trans, and you don’t yet know you’re trans (or that this is a thing you’re even ALLOWED to be) the above feels a lot like serving a life sentence for an intangible crime.
You know what you’re supposed to do. You’ve seen it on tv, you’ve heard it from your dad, you know what are the normal trials and tribulations. You know you'll grow a few pimples and stubble and you'll need to learn how to shave, obviously, because it's basically a tradition in your family, and no one is really happy to be a teen. You know at some point you'll find a nice girl and you'll grow a hat out of your skull and then you will have to pay taxes and maybe you will have a baby daughter? You'd like it to be a daughter for no particular reason. And when you get a daughter you're going to name her Casey and she's going to be adorable and this is something you've dedicated a lot of thought to. Maybe its because you thought Nic Cage looked really cool with those long flowing locks in con air, the movie who featured a trans woman as a minor character for a few minutes (and she gets quite a bit of compliments, regardless of how the movie has aged), and he had a really exciting life, but goddamn did he love his daughter. There is no purer love than the bond between a father and his daughter.
This absolutely has nothing to do with your father and you, or how you hold no excitement for becoming an adult man, or how your father's excitement for you becoming an adult man in your stead feels a little stifling.
June spends her time on SBURB mostly hassling karkat, and readily following the instructions of zany, dangerous, COOL girls that seem to know what they're doing. June lets Terezi lead her to certain death without blinking. June lets Vriska dress her up as soon as opportunity presents itself. June thinks its really funny to trick this troll Who Types Really Oddly into believing she's Rose, and also into believing that she's a very silly girl. You may even say Homestuck employs a few of jokes pertaining to how her name looks like EGG !
June has a ball playing this game until it starts to get shitty. She's never able to mend her relationship with her dad, as he's one of the first causalities. She has to spend a lot of time waiting around with jade on a ship until things get cool and exciting again, but she never stops growing during those three years. Its fine, though, because there's always more things to be done and more people to fight.
Until there aren't, and they make a new earth, and while everyone cheers and claps for the birth of a new planet June realizes all her excuses are over. Her friends begin to grow up. Rose gets married. Jade is living her best life. Dave has a not-boyfriend glued to his hip. Jane has a job. Jake is on TV for some reason. June doesn't want to leave home. June's birthday is around the corner again. Here come all the congratulations for becoming a strong lad for yet another year! Vriska is gone. Terezi is gone. SBURB is over. Wacky hijinks have been swapped for real-ass, boring-ass Regular life. We watch her unsuccessfully chase after the glory of days gone by when Rose presents her the possibility of going back into the game, when things were cool and mattered, or her flimsy decision to settle down with a nice girl she hasn’t really made an effort to know and become a father and be absolutely miserable for four decades as she asserts nothing is real, not anymore, and this is just how it is.
Depersonalization, depression and general apathy towards the world are all pronounced aspects of dysphoria that seem like unrelated incidents for someone who hasn't came out yet. June's trainwreck of a life post-game, specially her feeling of hollowness and chasing after anything that could fill it struck a chord with trans readers who left the epilogues to read HS again and discovered this has always sort of been here. June being a trans woman who doesn't have the proper vocabulary to express she is a trans woman makes a lot of earlier bits from the comic click into place, now in a broader context. We settled in the name "June" because it's what she imagines Vriska is calling her at some point, amid laughs, but even that was discussed for a lengthy period last year. What would she want to be called, what are possible tags for this, etc. But it was mostly for fun and games, because the prospect of the protagonist of a 10 year old beloved cult series being ACTUALLY confirmed as a trans woman just wasn't something that was done.
Until word got around to Andrew Hussie and he was reportedly so pleased with this interpretation of events he’d be making references to it, and some time later, a box of toblerones was left in a cave as a gift for fans to find. The first person to find a toblerone thought it would be funny to dedicate it to June, because now she was an ongoing reference that was fun to make. Instead of it ending there, Hussie logs on twitter for the first time in a long while to say 'Oh yeah, i'll make it happen' and that's when the whole thing exploded. I have a post detailing this made a year ago (with pictures!) so i won't keep you here.
In the year since, June has been vaguely alluded to in Pesterquest (in jade's end card, she's having her nails painted by rose.) Has been widely adopted by the community, those making their own fanventures and continuations, and the team behind Homestuck^2. In every way that matters, she's already thriving within the community that brought her to light a year ago. But her coming out in canon is something that will take time and a proper narrative arc to happen, one that is still being set up. We know it'll come eventually, the only question is “how”.
Not that the wind waits for anyone.
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