#ardenttheories

[ardenttheories]

The specific problem I have with trans Vriska isn't just that she does bad things, it's that those bad things include a drawn-out on-screen prior-planned sexual assault of a disabled fellow child (the sequence after "Vriska: Wake up" - Tavros was NOT HAPPY in that scene at all, as shown clearly by the fact that she had to MIND CONTROL HIM) which we're supposed to think is funny. "Sexual assailant" is quite possibly THE absolute most widespread and harmful stereotype of trans women. Not good!

I forgot about this scene! It’s the one where Vriska plays out Pupa Pan while degrading Tavros about his disability that she caused him the entire time, and upon kissing him and not having him kiss back - because he can’t tell if she’s callignious or flushed for him - she dumps him on the floor! Then, wonder of all wonders, she manipulates him into not just kissing her, but actually being FLUSHED for her! The only reason she gives up is the realisation that, yes, he is still disabled and can’t actually stand up. Again. Because she paralysed him. 

This is definitely one of the deeper problems with trying to put trans rep into characters who were never originally written as trans. No trans writer would write this scene about a transwomen in their goddamn life. Noone trying to represent a genuine and accurate portrayal of a trans woman would even THINK about writing a scene wherein she forces her abuse victim into a kiss - not just once, but twice. 

I honestly don’t think I could put it better than you did. Sexual violence is the most prominent and harmful stereotype of trans women. Nobody in their right mind would write this for a trans women unless they were actively trying to write into that stereotype. Or, as is the case here, unless that character was never written as trans to begin with and trying to retcon a trans identity on them now has deeply unfortunate implications.

When you read this piece, the comedic effect is meant to be at Tavros’ expense - that he’s a weak and weedy boy who can’t even kiss a girl he’s actively interested in when she’s trying to instigate - and not meant to be a slight against Vriska’s character. We’re meant to laugh because a female abuser is abusing her male abuse victim, and that makes Tavros pathetic. They’re not trying to shine a negative light on Vriska herself; you can tell this by how much they focus on her genuine disappointment that her plan fails. You’re meant to sympathise with her, somehow.

This is bad enough when Vriska is seen as a cis woman. When you put the trans identity on top of that, oh, boy does it become just ten times worse. Becuse not only does it focus on this deeply harmful stereotype, it also tries to make you think that stereotype is actively okay! That it’s funny! Again, no shit do people like Kate say Vriska can do no wrong as a trans woman; scenes like this only emphasise that fact. 

This admittedly is the difference between having a headcanon and genuinely making those things canon. 

When you headcanon someone as trans, you tend to put things into them that don’t actually happen in the comic, or you retcon out certain things because a trans person wouldn’t actually do them, or you slightly change others because a trans person would see them in a different light. Headcanon!Vriska still isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but transwomen aren’t going to perpetuate this scene in their headcanons when it’s so genuinely harmful to them. They’re going to create scenes for her instead; experiences they’ve been through to replace some of the worst shit she’s done. 

When you canonise that identity, however, you are explicitly taking them out of that headcanoned context. You have to see them in their canonical light. You have to accept literally everything that character has done, said, thought, achieved, whether it would come across as inherently transphobic or not. Headcanon!Vriska might never do what canon!Vriska did to Tavros, but canon!Vriska can never undo that. So she becomes a transmisogynistic stereotype instead of a genuinely cared for and built up piece of representation that the fandom loves.

This is why we need more trans representation that was always legitimately meant to be trans - and good trans representation at that. The issue I just described is always, always going to be a problem unless Hussie and co. start writing trans characters from day 1, and not just writing cis characters and slapping on an identity when the fandom attaches a headcanon to one long enough. They need to start being genuinely aware of how they’re writing their trans characters and if they’re falling into - or ever fell into - transphobic/transmisogynistic stereotypes.

Trans representation isn’t good enough if it perpetuates hatred and violence against trans people. 

Unfortunately on Vriska’s behalf, there’s nothing we can do about that scene. It’s canonical. It’s always going to be there, and it’s always going to be a transmisogynistic slight on her character. I think the best we can hope for is that future trans women aren’t written like this. 

Dear god do I hope future trans women aren’t written like this.  

[ardenttheories]

A genuine question I mean absolutely no harm with, please don't hate me: is it so wrong to have trans characters be bad people? I get wanting to have good rep (speaking as an enby) but not all trans men are UwU soft bois. Or is this more of a case of "they're the only rep we've got so them being bad people brings real trans people into a negative light as well"? Again, there's no malice or ill will behind my asking, I'm just still a baby when it comes to these things.

It’s okay! I’m more than happy to answer a question like this - I’m by no degree upset, mad, etc... at all. 

Having trans characters that are bad people isn’t inherently bad, no; wanting good rep is great, and it’s always nice to have a hero be trans, but it doesn’t necessarily mean having them be perfect. You still want them to be human - to fuck up, to make mistakes, to have feelings and emotions and motivations, even those that are questionable - and you still want them to be 3 dimensional enough to be interesting. So having them be bad people? That’s engaging! 

For instance, Vriska could be decent trans rep. Yeah, she does a lot of absolutely awful shit, and she is genuinely a terrible person; but her reasons behind it, the moments when she is genuinely nice, how she feels about people and about herself - they even her out and make her more believable as a person and more interesting as a character. Like, you can’t deny that Vriska is a victim on her society to some degree - but you also can’t deny that she thrives in that society as well. 

That’s not the inherent problem with her. She still has experience that transwomen associate with, and a lot of her past - especially in Pesterquest - can absolutely hit home with transwomen. Even her actions and maneurisms can make her amazing rep for transwomen, regardless of how good or bad she is as a person. 

The actual issue is how the writers treat her, and how they use her being trans to erase all her wrongs. To them - especially to Kate - Vriska being trans excludes her from taking any and all blame for the horrible things she’s done. She’s trans, so she can get away with paralysing one kid, blinding another, and outright killing a third. In this light, she represents every anti-transfem sentiment and stereotype I’ve ever seen. That is NOT the sort of representation we want. This isn’t what we want to be associated with; this supposition that abusive trans people don’t exist, simply because they’re trans and apparently free of blame.

It’s also a tiny bit suspect to me that, out of every character they could have canonised on the main cast first, they went with the one that people are abuse apologists the most for. 

On the other spectrum of things, it’s very much the latter point you gave; that we don’t want all of our trans rep to be negative, and so far, that’s... all we really have. It’s either that, or trans people so badly written that they just don’t come across as trans or could be read as absolute stereotypes (such as Roxy, who is just badly written transmasc, and Lanque, which I’ve gone over before having my own issues with). 

If they made Dirk trans on top of that, we’d have an actual, outright villain who’s gone back to toxic abusive behaviour as our transmasc rep. As much as I’d love Dirk to be transmasc, I don’t want him to be transmasc now. If the other trans rep we had was better then I’d likely be happier with it, but at the moment we’ve got no genuine, actual, acceptable representation that doesn’t make me internally cringe or infuriate me to some degree. 

Trans characters can be bad people, but if you only ever portray them as bad people - and rely on stereotypes or struggle to write them well when they’re not bad - then that’s when we get an issue. 

If you only ever canonise the bad people as trans, that’s also a huge issue. You’re indirectly saying that you could only ever see trans people as bad, abusive, and toxic. 

Characters in representation don’t specifically need to be good people, but you desperately want to avoid falling into stereotypes that could harm the groups you’re trying to represent . You desperately want to avoid putting characters into boxes of “interesting but horrid” and “boring but good”. 

[ardenttheories]

A random thought, but I think a lot of us are using the word “coded” wrong.

Typically, “coded” means that the character was intentionally written to read as a specific race/gender/culture/religion/sexuality, but was not allowed to be - or was not in a position to be - presented that way.

An example of this are the gems from Steven Universe. Garnet, for instance, is heavily black coded. She’s voiced by a black woman, has hair similar in style and shape, has similar body proportions, has similar speech patterns - you couldn’t look at Garnet and claim that she’s white, because she’s clearly coded to be black. The only reason she isn’t black is because she’s an alien with skin the same colour as her gem. 

It was an intentional effort on the writers’ part to make her black coded. They put thought and effort into presenting her in this specific way, to offer representation for black women - especially sapphic black women - even when the main character is nonhuman. To make it obvious that, yes, this character is meant to be you.

What isn’t coding, however, is when writers accidentally write a character one way when they completely intended to write them another.

The most recent thing I can think of for this is Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot. There’s so many hints towards her being trans - the scene where she’s getting all dolled up, a scene where what looks like a trans flag is on the wall, the general way she behaves especially about traditionally feminine things - that the fandom read into but weren’t actually there.

The writer/creator confirmed this. Jenny isn’t trans. That doesn’t mean that we can’t view her as trans, or that we can’t headcanon her as such, and the writer himself has encouraged that reading with pride that she could be something for the trans community - but she was never written or intended to be trans. It’s not the same as genuine representation. 

Being able to read into a character isn’t the same as them genuinely being coded that way. This is why, for instance, people can read John as both transmasc and transfem; he was only ever written as your typical cishet American kid, but some of his experiences and actions are reminiscent of what trans people experience. It’s just enough to read into, but not coded to a point of confirmation one way or another. 

This is also why it’s harder to read Roxy as transmasc. Roxy is inherently written as a cis woman. Hussie admittedly got better about his writing and it’s therefore easier to read her as a trans woman, but even she’s not coded enough that you can say with absolute certainty that the specific reading is what Hussie intended. It’s even less viable that Hussie actually wrote her from the start as transmasc. 

Homestuck-era characters are inherently cis. It’s an unfortunate fact that will never change. Hussie never introduced the concept of gender identity and revelations - such as he did with gender identities, which were a big fucking part of character progression throughout the story - because he never wrote the characters to require them. I deeply suspect that he waited till Homestuck was over to save the integrity of his characters as cis, and only now, in his non-canonical post-canon, are we seeing him begin to change his cis coding. 

Except he’s still using the same cis coded characters and randomly slapping on labels. However we read them isn’t how he wrote them, and they aren’t experiences he (or his team, for that matter) are all that good at capturing. This is going to be a big issue for him as HS2 goes on. Case in point, transmasc Roxy instead of transfem Roxy, and the already-neglected attempt to canonise nonbinary Calliope - alongside the inherent cisery of Ultimate Dirk when he’s predominantly read as transmasc. 

Or, it would be, if he even cared enough to remain on the HS2 writing team to begin with. 

Basically, what we need is more coded characters in Homestuck. We need characters that were always intentionally written as trans to be our trans representation. Our identities shouldn’t be afterthoughts or products of fandom vocality only. 

We have the chance to code the Omega Kids as something other than cis, and to write genuine trans identities with trans people on the writing team from the beginning. Of course we’ve had issues in the past (re: Lanque as transmasc rep and Vriska as transfem rep), but this is their chance to do it right.  

[ardenttheories]

i think to me one of the worst things about epilogues davekat is that in context it makes them both seem like horribly self-absorbed creeps. their lack of visiting their extremely depressed and isolated BEST FRIEND, john, is played as a joke at the start of candy, but like... that’s terrible? candy dave regrets not dating karkat more than his brother’s suicide (that he could have prevented and chose not to?) fucked UP

The Epilogues make light of every damn mental illness there is, and it’s deeply frustrating, especially when you consider how many of these kids are mentally ill or have trauma. 

Like, an interesting point of depressed John could have been the reasoning behind why people didn’t go to check in on him. 

Why would Dave, someone who was stifled for years and kept inside a very small apartment filled with traps and danger, not want to spend more time outside with his friends? Why would he, who only spent time with one person for 13 whole years, not want to experience life with other people? Why would Dave, who repressed his own trauma so much that he was more concerned about Jade seeing his dead body than he was with touching it, completely blank that the same thing is happening in someone else? Why would Dave, who understands the importance of being able to open up to someone about your struggles and have them validated, not immediately check in on someone who clearly struggles post-game?

Does he just want to spend some time for himself? Is he being selfish because he was never allowed to be before? Is he hesitant or even scared to face what he never acknowledged while in the game, and talking to John would make him have to face that? Is he unwilling to see his childhood hero at his worst? Or does he just genuinely think that John can’t be struggling, because John never struggles, and his own impression of John is blinding him?

Like, there’s so many things that could have made Dave’s lack of interest in John’s welbeing interesting - or having Dave go to visit John in and of itself would’ve been amazing to see. They’re fucking friends. If one of your friends doesn’t come out for a few months, you don’t just not check on them, or take their “I’m okay!” at face value. 

And I think a lot of this is what I mean when I say that they lose a lot of their individuality when they get together. Dave, for some reason... stops being Dave. He stops existing outside of Karkat. They become weirdly reclusive, existing only with each other, like none of the people around them really matter. They spend so much of their time trying to get people to leave in the Epilogues? It’s actually pretty bad, all things considered. That’s not what a healthy relationship looks like. It’s not even what a healthy friendship looks like. 

It’s also frustrating how little Dirk’s suicide is actually acknowledged in the characters who loved him most. Dirk dies, and that’s just sort of it. I get that it’s Candy, and that things are made irrelevant all the time, but Dave literally gets one speech to mourn Dirk and it pretty much never comes up again.

People don’t just get over loved ones. Even to this day, ten years after my granddad died, I can still remember one of his favourite poems and sometimes cry thinking about it. Four years after I lost a good friend of mine, I still break down over how unfair it is that they got taken from me. It’s not easy to just accept that someone is dead. It’s not easy even years later to be okay with it.

You definitely don’t just move right the fuck on after a funeral with little to no other thoughts on it. Like. Geeze. What a way to be insensitive to the people who’ve lost those to suicide and to suicidal people who saw how few people cared about Dirk when he was dead. But also, just how infuriatingly unrealistic that depiction is?

Do they really think that out of everything, Dave's biggest regret would be Karkat? Someone who’s still alive and who he can actively chase after and mend things with? That he’d think of Karkat over his own brother who he actively went to seek help from, who he felt actively lost without the guidance of? Like. You can regret things at equal capacities. If nothing else, they could’ve had Dave regret losing both Karkat and Dirk. Loss does that to you!! If you lose one person, losing another stacks on top! It doesn’t override it, especially if the second person is still alive! 

DaveKat shouldn’t overwrite everything else that Dave and Karkat live for or have going for them in life. DaveKat shouldn’t stop them from spending time with their friends, shouldn’t make them recluses, shouldn’t erase their own friendships for each other. It shouldn’t stop Dave from caring as much about Dirk as he clearly does. 

It’s frustrating and I completely agree with you. They just lose so much of who they are for this weird unity that they become, I assume because the writers can’t be arsed to write a good, healthy MLM relationship for once. 

(On a side note, and going back to John for a sec, because man does it frustrate me: Even Rose was shit at this. Rose, who only calls John when she actively needs him, despite being a Seer and likely Knowing that he’s struggling. Rose, who is struggling herself, and didn’t think to tell John that she’s sick, despite him being her friend. Rose, who is into psychology, and probably would have known that John was struggling to reach out. Did they just forget everything about her character, or?). 

[ardenttheories]

thank you so much for your davekat post 😭 I honestly have a lot of the same feelings about rosemary (pre-hs^2 bullshit). it feels like they just threw in the lgbt relationships and were like "!! everyone's okay and happy now! :D don't think too hard about it though ;)"

Honestly? I think that’s exactly it. You see it a lot in how Dave and Karkat are in the Epilogues, but they’re almost there, together, just for the benefit of other people? As if they no longer exist as individuals but as a unit - which isn’t inherently bad, of course, but you could swap Dave and Karkat around in dialogue and you’d have basically the same conversations.

They’re not their own people with their own thoughts and opinions. Even when you love someone, you often have something different to them. My boyfriend and I both love Buzzfeed Unsolved, but for different reasons (he loves learning how they did it and freaking himself out over the murder aspect, and I love trying to figure out how they got to the theories and what tools they used to try and catch the killer, if any). With Dave and Karkat, their writing comes down a lot to “well they like the same thing because they’re dating :)” with... no actual development on that. 

A lot of them being together also ruins their prior relationship in the dumbest way. Like, with the retcon? We lost so much of their personalities. Instead of Dave and Karkat being dicks to each other, Dave supplexing Karkat and them fighting over drawing dicks on a book, all we do is see them... sitting on a sofa. A lot. 

Which, again, isn’t inherently bad, but the first set of actions has more of their personality in them! You can still do that stuff when you’re in a relationship!! 

My boyfriend once accidentally made me cry because I freaked myself out over a video and it was so late at night that when he played the audio I Lost it. And you know what he did? He laughed! He couldn’t stop laughing even as he said, “oh, baby, I’m so sorry!” 

My boyfriend used to accidentally call me mom sometimes. You know what I did? I started yelling “excuse me??? Excuse me??? Do I LOOK that old to you???” through my laughter as he tried to embarrasedly shut me up. 

He calls my dad “daddy” because he thinks it’s funny. I tell his grandma that I love her more than him whenever she’s on the phone. We laugh at each other’s antics and we joke around a lot more because of it. Like, I can’t tell you the amount of times “oh, your dad’s on the phone? HEY DADDY! HEY!!! HEY DADDY I LOVE YOU!” has lead to the wildest conversations with my family, or how often “MEEMA!!! MEEMA I LOVE YOU MOST!!!!” has led to me and her poking fun at my boyfriend as he bemoans that everyone hates him. 

Like, you can love someone and still be dicks together. You can still love someone and muck about, have fun, make each other laugh. That’s actually an incredibly important part of being in love, I think - you have to enjoy their company and enjoy being yourself and having fun around them. You don’t just lose that when you’re in love. You don’t suddenly settle down, become demure, lose all of your individual personalities to be a unit that does... almost nothing together. 

And that’s what I see a lot in canon DaveKat. All of the scenes that made them unique, that made them feel like a real-life, three dimensional couple, is erased during their canonisation. They stand next to each other, yeah, and they talk, sure, but they don’t have a lot of the same antics as they used to - the things that make them who they were, especially together. 

We don’t always see them talk about the things that really matter, either, which you do with your partner. We don’t see them talk about anything that’s really bothering them at all - to the point that they break up in Candy, and just end up so fucking bland in Meat. Like. Yes, they kiss - that’s great! But aside from the “man they really want to kiss, huh?” tension that they have going on, they don’t actually feel like a couple. They don’t feel like people who have been in love for several years.

It’s, again, just really bad writing of a MLM couple. It’s like they didn’t know how to write them, so they just went the most bland and basic way they possibly could with it. Which is frustrating, because they wrote John and Terezi’s interactions perfectly fine in both Candy and Meat, with both of them still dicking around with each other and having fun, and having actual conversations together, so... why couldn’t they have done the same to Dave and Karkat?

You’re right, too. They did the same thing to RoseMary. How much of their initial interactions were based solely on them having fun together? Poking and prodding and showing care and affection as they slowly fell in love? It was beautiful to watch them over the duration of their conversations, as antagonisation became fun, as fun became care, as care became love. 

But then a lot of that silliness goes. They’re hit by the same demure flaw that Dave and Karkat are, but it’s objectively worse because Rose and Kanaya are canonically confirmed to be together for a significant amount of time prior to them actually seeing each other on the Meteor. So when they’re together and it sort of... fizzles on the romantic side? It’s so strange. 

I can honestly remember more of Rose’s exposition on random bullshit than I can on her feelings towards and conversations with or about Kanaya. Likewise with Kanaya about Rose. Which might just be a straight man underestimating how much gay people will talk about their partners, but I also think it’s the Heterosexual Writing that’s coming to the fore in a lot of places. Maybe Hussie did his best, but Hussie isn’t MLM or WLW, and it really shows. 

I personally prefer RoseMary a lot over DaveKat, because there’s genuinely more there to enjoy and to see your representation in, and it’s also one of the best early ‘10s LGBT+ relationships ever written - especially to be popularised on the scale it was. There’s a lot more that could have been done - in both ships - and I think seeing canonical representation done even better more recently (such as Rupphire) makes the hindsight on RoseMary a little bittersweet. 

[ardenttheories]

The issue with “Dubiously Canon”.

“Dubiously canon” was a term used by Hussie to describe both the Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck^2. To his mind, this meant something very simple; in the greater canon of Homestuck - that is, the story it tells and the actual events that happen in its timeline - whatever happens in this continuative media paradoxically is and is not relevant. 

It is a term that allowed Homestuck to continue without actually being “Homestuck”; to carry its name without supposedly tarnishing its branding. It was used to posit a very simple question, and one that is actually fairly interesting to ponder: what is canon? 

This, of course, comes from the background of Homestuck’s community. Homestuck has thousands of fanfiction pieces, thousands of AUs, thousands of posited artworks - everything which is non-canonical, because it did not happen in the core story of Homestuck. 

Hussie, with the suggestion of “dubiously canon”, offered his fandom the choice of pseudo-canonicity; Homestuck is over, and anything that comes after is just one in a series of potentials that might have eventually happened. A piece of fanfiction detailing the life of John as he struggles with depression and eventually finds solace in Dirk is as potentially canonical as a fanartist’s design of Rose wearing her Seer uniform and becoming an actual goddess. 

Nothing is true, everything is permitted, to copy from a rather famous game’s quoting. Homestuck has no actual “end”, so everything we create is as real and unreal as anything else. 

This, of course, is a perfectly valid and reasonable claim to make. Dubiously canonical content allows the fans to be validated and recognised in the context of Homestuck. It’s saying to us, quite simply, that we have been a huge part of the creation of Homestuck - and from here on out, we are as real as Hussie is as authors, as creators for Homestuck. 

What causes it to fail, however, is when Hussie himself then makes a continuation. 

Hussie is the author and creator of Homestuck. In the grand scheme of things, he is the word of god, the lore creator, the one who envisioned it. If Hussie recognises something, it automatically stands out above the rest. It is inherently more canonical because Hussie, as the creator of Homestuck, has looked at it and said, “hey, this is something that could probably happen in Homestuck”. 

As the author, his word is miles above our own. He wrote Homestuck. He made a series of decisions that created Homestuck; without him, it would doubtlessly be completely different from what it is now, if it even existed at all. If Hussie says, “this is Homestuck”, then it simply is - because that’s what being an author means. You create the lore of your world, and anything that you recognise as part of that world is immediately brought into the canon. 

So, of course, the publication of the Epilogues and of Homestuck^2 is a significant issue. This is canonically Homestuck; this is how Hussie has determined that Homestuck would naturally continue. It’s obvious enough with how he described the Epilogues as Homestuck’s “drop-off” point; you can see the Epilogues and turn back, stay with the original story of Homestuck and all of its fanon content, or you can progress into Homestuck^2 and the story Hussie - the author - wants to tell.

By putting his name on it, posting it on his own website, and adding his own thoughts and ideas to it, Hussie has completely negated the point he was trying to make with “dubiously canon” content. Canon is canon because the author decided what is and is not part of the original universe. Whether Hussie wants to recognise it or not, he has declared that the Epilogues and Homestuck^2 are the actual continuations of Homestuck. That this is how Homestuck ends, and carries on. 

Another part of this issue is that Hussie’s name makes it official. Even if this was truly dubiously canon - in a paradoxical place of being both canonical and noncanonical - Hussie’s name and the fact that it’s being written by authors chosen by Hussie, that Hussie is paying to write the content, slaps an incredibly blatant “official” sticker on Homestuck^2 and the Epilogues that can’t be ignored. Money is changing hands. Several voices have been picked out of the crowd and one story has been chosen among thousands to be the Hussie mandated continuation. These are the official people and the official words of Homestuck - and with official branding comes canonical privillages.

Nobody is going to look at a work of fiction on AO3 and say that it has the same weighting as Homestuck^2 does. Nobody is going to look at a fan-made AU and say that it is as canonical as Homestuck^2. 

People already see Homestuck^2 as canon. Not as something that is dubiously canon, but as canon complete. June should not be lauded as a canonical figure, and neither should transmasc Roxy, because in theory they have the exact same canonicity as transmasc John and transfem Roxy - but by being in Homestuck^2 specifically, by being acknowledged by Hussie, the fandom sees them as more canonical than other fandom headcanons. They’re not just headcanons anymore - they’re real. But, in all technicality, they shouldn’t be if Hussie’s ideology is true. 

None of the events of Homestuck^2 should be seen as any more viable than any written fiction by a fan - but even the authors of Homestuck^2 see their word as law, their choices as canon, and their headcanons as the most legitimate. It is impossible to dismiss the canonicity of Homestuck^2. 

It is not the same, does not hold the same weighting, as a piece of fanfiction that maybe went down a route that we didn’t like. It isn’t something that can be brushed off. This isn’t an unknown author making a work of fiction for a piece of media they like; it’s Hussie’s official team, Hussie’s official word, making the official continuation of Homestuck. 

“Dubiously canon” cannot work when the author continues his story. It is no longer “dubious”, it is outright canon. It no longer allows for the fandom to be validated, to be as genuine, as he intended for them to be. Through the sheer effort of writing Homestuck^2, Hussie has completely devalued the entire basis of its literary theory. 

There is, of course, yet another issue, and a fairly significant one at that: the profitisation of the Epilogues. 

The point of the Epilogues was that they were meant to replicate AO3′s fanfiction format. It was meant to show that they were as fanon as any other piece of fiction, and that they held no bolder position in the grand scheme of Homestuck than any fan’s work. 

No fan can profit from their work. No fan has the capacity to publish their fanfiction, to have it sold in stores, and set a price for it. Legally, they cannot get away with doing anything of the like - because they do not own the rights to Homestuck, and their publication could pose issue for Homestuck if casual readers mistake it for an actual piece in the canon. Donations are the best a fanfiction author can hope for, or perhaps Patreon subscribers. 

The point of fanfiction is that it is done for free. The enjoyment of something enough to create for it - and to create something that can never be achieved in the same way official content can - is what makes fandom and fan content what it is. You physically cannot profit from it because it is not your story to profit from; not your character set or your universe to claim. If profits can be found, it is through legal channels that VIZ and Hussie have explicitly allowed, such as commissions. Individual basis, rather than mass-production.

You can likely see where I’m going with this. 

The publication of the Epilogues completely ruins its fanfiction format. It is no longer a piece of fanfiction, styalised on the internet and mirroring what fanfiction authors do every day. It is no longer hosted in that category of fan work. It simply can’t be, because to be published, paid for, stocked on shelves - it has to be canonical, has to be written by the author, or at least endorsed by him. 

To have it published directly separates it from every piece of fanwork it was trying to celebrate. 

Their format was originally designed to emphasise the fact that it’s as non-canonical yet as relevant as other fan works post Earth-C - and is only one variant of the End-Credits continuation. Publication instead emphasises that the Epilogues are the official and canonical ending - because it’s the one that the unknowing public will accept, because it has Hussie’s name on it, and because it is no longer a replica of fanfiction but is instead on par with the other published Homestuck books. 

Yes: publication of the Epilogues puts it in the same place of canonicity as the canonical story of Homestuck, likewise published by VIZ. This is no longer a “drop-off” point; it is what bookstores genuinely cite to be the “long awaited ending to Homestuck”. The issue being, of course, that the Epilogues aren’t an ending; they’re a beginning - one that leads directly into Homestuck^2. Which, by proxy, provides canonicity to Homestuck^2. There is nothing dubious here. 

The problem being, of course, that as an author you cannot claim that your piece of media is meant to validate fan works by being in the style of a fan work, and then actively monetise and profit off of it. You cannot put it into bookstores with your name and your copyright and still claim that it is exactly the same as fanfiction. It just isn’t. It hosts a series of legalities that differentiates it completely from fandom.

The point of “dubious canonicity” is tarnished because of this. No fan author will ever be able to get that level of validation to be published above any other work. No fan author will be seen as that canonical to be praised as the “ending to Homestuck” by book stores. No fan author will receive a penny for the works they create on a similar scale. 

The Epilogues are Homestuck. By profiting off of it, they have explicitly stated that this is how Homestuck ends. They have made it clear that this is part of Homestuck’s canonical story.

The point they tried to make - both in regards to what canon is and how canon and noncanon works in Homestuck^2 - simply can’t exist with the way they have created it. “Dubiously canon” is a contradictory statement, one that doesn’t work for an official piece, and especially is lost when that piece is then profited from. Had it been left as a hand-off to fans, this would have been completely different - but the moment an author then continues to write, dubious canonicity hosts no meaning. 

[ardenttheories]

Yea I’ve seen copies of the epilogue too, nearly flipped my shit when I walked past it

(Image provided by @cyanizite - thank you!)

I also for the bloody life of me can’t find the person who said they’d seen it in Ireland - but thank you to them, too!

The fact that this is actually published and available in real stores still boggles my mind. In part because it just completely ruins the entire themeatic relevance of the Epilogues and the point they were trying to get across - which I’ve gone over before, but also because, like... 

Imagine being a general reader. Just your everyday person who has no idea what Homestuck is. If you’re like me, you’re usually drawn to covers first - and seeing ANY book that has an upside-down motif is usually deeply interesting. Two sides of the same story? How exciting!

Except then you go to flick through it and you very much need to know what Homestuck is. Which, if you want the full and genuine experience, you need to read online, which could take you several months if not a year depending on your reading speed and the time you have to sit down and read it. 

So, you read through all of Homestuck, you get to the end, read through the scattered remnants of the Credits... 

And realise you can just read the Epilogues online for free, anyway. So you went through all of the prepwork to read something that seemed genuinely exciting in theory (because there’s always a lot of fun getting to the end of one story and being told to turn the book upside-down to read the next), but then turns out that you can just. Click a link on a webpage. With a completely different format that has more meaning behind it than the physical book you might have considered buying. 

As standard business practice, it just seems a little odd. Yes, sometimes book series have continuations that you need to read past books to understand - such as the Olympians series in the Percy Jackson franchise, which you need to read the original Percy Jackson books to fully understand - but they often come with exposition to explain things that you might have missed from past books.

E.g. Warrior Cats? Each book has several moments where they literally just go “Fireheart felt deep guilt at Cinderpaw’s twisted leg. He remembered when she had gained the injury by the Thunderpath, when he had asked her to find Tigerclaw, the Thunderclan deputy. It had been a trap set up for Bluestar, their leader.” And this happens in every succeeding book once that event goes down. Even without having read the previous books, you know exactly what happened to the main characters. Not in explicit detail, of course, but enough to understand what’s happening in the book you’re reading.

The Epilogues don’t do this. They very much expect that you understand the universe, the story, that you’re coming into them as a fan. So the publication of the book will literally only mean something to fans, and will only ever be picked up by fans. It might make a few random people read Homestuck out of curiosity, sure, but the physical Epilogue book isn’t something that you can take home with you, hold onto till you’ve finished the original series, and then come back to.

Again, it’s free online. How pissed off would you be to realise you spent $34 on something that is and always will be free?

It’s just honestly the weirdest and most surreal business practice I’ve ever seen. Like, it’s clearly trying to milk fans of a little more cash, but why not just leave it online in this instance? The Homestuck books have the addition of being easier to read for people who can’t go through the formatting with ease or the flashing lights safely, and also have Hussie’s commentary to make buying them worthwhile and valuable for new fans. 

The Epilogue book... does not. And it’s so exclusatory to new fans, to potentially bringing people into the fandom like a good continuation should, that surely it’d made more sense to just have it be an online purchase exclusive to FFBF? It would also likely be fucking cheaper, too, because I can promise that a significant portion of that price is just the fact that it’s on shelves. 

[ardenttheories]

What actually irks me the most about this situation with Jade is that the aesop of "children dont solve everything" was already made, and somewhat succesfully at that. Roxy wanted a child to feel more like a woman and to make sure John loved her. Jane used Tavros to chain up Jake to a relationship in which he was miserable. They already did that song and dance, and it was BETTER by a mile. To see them butcher old characters tpo make a point that was already clear is baffling.

Honestly, the thing about it that pisses me off most is that... we know that having kids don’t make things better? Each of the kids suffers from some form of abuse. Rose is neglected by Mom; Dave is outright abused by Bro; Jade’s life is actively put in danger by Grandpa’s neglect. It’s already been shown to us that having a kid doesn’t improve anything, make you a better person, make you happier - anything. These kids, more than anyone, should know that being a guardian is a big responsibility. They should know that even with the best of intentions, you can still seriously harm/traumatise your child. They’ve already been through that. 

This isn’t a lesson that they should need to learn through having kids. It’s not something we, as the audience, needed telling either. And if this is meant to be the “nitty gritty reality” of adulthood, I’d like to know what cisheteronormative bullshit they were on when writing that, and why they thought we couldn’t have the kids just... be better than their parents?

But, if we have to accept that this is a thing that the writers did, for whatever purpose, you’re definitely right; Jane and Roxy make much more sense, with a much better point, than Jade did.

At least with Jane, it’s a clear manipulation tactic; something she’s doing because she knows it’ll stop Jake from leaving, keep him trapped even though he’s not happy. The “kids don’t make everything better” there is that her relationship with him only deteriorated because he was a prisoner. A prisoner with a responsibility he literally could not leave. But even then - why the hell would Jane do that? Nanna was an objectively lovely, grandmotherly woman. But for some reason, Jane is just... the worst piece of shit known to man, suddenly, willing to carry a child for 9 months and go through the pretty traumatic process of giving birth just to control Jake? Good way to make a villain, but bad way to turn a hero into one.

As for Roxy, I think she and John in that whole situation is just... sad. They’re definitely the better example of “kids don’t make everything better”, in that they both still love each other and Harry Anderson, and they do get better at raising him, but there is the firm idea that having a kid will inprove their love. And it just doesn’t. Especially considering that Roxy is a woman who never had her mom, and John is a man who lost a very loving father; both of them probably wanted a normal family to make up for what they lost/never had. It’s heartbreaking that it didn’t work out, and you feel so sorry for Harry Anderson getting mixed up in the middle of his parents’ struggles.

But Jade? What’s the everloving point of doing that to Jade? If you’ve already done it twice before - and those two times have questionably made even those characters look fucking awful and has come out of a place that just doesn’t seem right - why go through it again? What point’s being made that you haven’t already made? Especially when all Jade does to Yiffany is essentially neglect her, hand her off to a known child abuser, and then forget that she really exists.

Again, though - the fact remains that none of these points needed to be made. The writers just seemed to decide that the “nitty gritty reality” of adulthood included child abuse and making the same mistakes your parents did. Which is such an awful take to make? And why the hell would they think anyone wants to read the traumatised kids we saw go through trouble and strife and torment become actively terrible people? Or victims? Or deep-rooted unhappiness?

It’s a baffling choice to make if you want to retain the integrity of your characters and the enjoyment of your readers - but the writers have never cared about that to begin with.