Why I Like the Epilogue Prologue
by @dialmformara
Homestuck is back! Sort of. On the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the comic, the first three pages of a Homestuck Epilogue were posted on homestuck.com. But it didn’t look like Homestuck—in fact, it wasn’t a comic at all. It was written as if it were a fanwork on Archive of Our Own.
A lot of people, including me at first, were put off by the new formatting, the pretentious narration, the long and self-contradictory list of content warnings. “It’s just fanfiction,” they said, “not real Homestuck.” But as @ohthewhomanity pointed out, this new framing device makes more sense than you might think.
Way back at the end of “real Homestuck,” there was a lot of talk in the fandom about dreambubbles and the nature of canon. Readers speculated that, when our heroes opened the door on their victory platform, they were leaving the story of Homestuck altogether and trapping Lord English inside. We even posted an essay about how Andrew Hussie used dreambubbles to validate fanfiction: if you the reader could dream it, there was a micro-universe within the story where it was true.
Well, it turns out Hussie and his team were listening. The prologue to the Homestuck Epilogue is presented as an AO3 fanwork because it takes place outside canon.
John has spent the last several years in the fugue state we saw him in during the credits: mourning his father and his world, enjoying being at peace, and not doing much of anything else. At the start of the Epilogue Prologue (a name that calls back to the acute case of nested acts Homestuck had developed by the end), Rose presents John with a call to action: tie up the loose ends of the Homestuck comic before they unravel and everything he and his friends have done ceases to be relevant.
At the end of the first update, John has not yet fully answered that call, with Calliope and Roxy reminding him that, now that he’s escaped canon, it’s his choice whether to go back. But once he does (and we know he will, because there’s no story otherwise), here’s what he’ll need to do:
He’ll assemble a team of doomed Alpha and Beta kids from those dreambubbles we mentioned earlier. Rose has given him instructions on how to do that.
He’ll take them to Caliborn’s session to defeat him before he becomes Lord English, fulfilling the vision that Caliborn retold in his Masterpiece and tying up the one loose end that’s been bothering the entire fandom: how did the Kids get trapped in the house juju, and what did they do when Vriska let them out?
I was skeptical starting out, but now I can’t wait. Maybe, when John gets back into canon, we’ll even get more comic panels.
PS from ohthewhomanity: “I particularly like the list of tags at the beginning. I’ve been sitting here giggling about how ‘canon compliant’ and ‘canon divergent’ are right there next to each other. I expect no less from a Homestuck epilogue!”
