Also genuinely your anylasis seems to point to homestuck being a profoundly, actively bigoted story? U keep indicating iys ironic but
1- Where is the irony? Like whats the point being made in contrast?
2- Would that even make it like. Not racist when (gestures at Gamzee) or not transphobic when (gesturing at all of post canon)
I guess I can start by saying that a major reason I initially gave Hussie benefit of the doubt when stumbling upon bigoted motifs, even before picking up on the Slurquest framework, and before Hussie's own coming-out via Psycholonials, was the fact that xe personally officiated a gay wedding between two of xer friends back in 2010's, not long after it got legalized. Extra textual knowledge is a cop-out, I know, but it didn't strike me as a tremendously homophobic thing to do. So whenever anti-gay sentiments were depicted within Homestuck, I was predisposed to doubt that the attitude issued from Hussie's personal convictions.
None of that speaks to any qualities of the text itself though, so let's move on.
1.One popular reading of the story that emerged in Act 6 is that the characters' goal is to escape the narrative, right? Lord English dominates the medium of everyone's existence -- the story -- and to escape him is to escape the story itself. This was, as best as I can tell, a theme long before "language" became personified as a formal villain. Myriad bigoted narratives are woven into what the reader is lead to experience as normal, and the reader is challenged to get out insofar as the hate is framed as conspiracy, the product of motivated paranoia. There's a joke in Skaianet Systems wherein racist birther conspiracies are #confirmed by having Obama originate from another universe (as opposed to another country). That suggests, to me, that when our black Mayor (as opposed to a black president) is tormented by dreams of attaining tyrannical power, we are observing racist projections of malevolence upon the Obama presidency that are implicitly framed as the product of a conspiratorial mindset.
So that's one mechanism of ironic detachment. In-story indications that you are dealing with conspiratorial thoughts, with political fears, and that you're obliged to evaluate the story with that qualifier in mind. Hiveswap does similar work with the Cold War: Jude refuses to touch TETRIS because of its commie germs; then we learn that the TETRARCH is some kind of bully who couches his domineering tendencies in talk of revolution. Bronya's "there is no hierarchy but do as I say" is a similar communism joke, and her name being the Russian word for "armor" links her to Stalin, hence her constant anxiety over purges. There are hints that Joey's strong feelings about animal death, ostensibly rooted in opposition to Grandpa's hunting, stem on a thematic level from the role the death of Laika played in anti-Communist messaging. Like with our demiurges Dirk and Allie in the Epilogues, who cause us to question the legitimacy of how their friends/characters are depicted, there's an overarching interest in developing readers who recognize that texts can be motivated.
And it's partly succeeded? Idk about you but I travel in circles that delight in using the story as a medium for reflecting on real world bigotry and for that reason applaud the author's creation of uniquely terrible assholes. Cultivating reader response is part of the work of determining your work's "meaning" I suppose... that's partly why it's so striking that Hussie's intervention on the "Caucasian" tricksters gag was necessitated by some fans using that joke as an occasion for racist harassment... anyway
2. I assume when you (gesture at all of post-canon) as transphobic you are mostly thinking about Jade's body -- the apparent canonization of a dogdick!Jade that had previous been limited to porn (because where else will you see a penis) upset a lot of people. The sense that her body had been reduced to an obscene joke was insulting.
This sort of hostility isn't really countered by satire in the same way as above -- the above focused on belittling the bigotry of outside parties. And while that is present with respect to Homestuck's depiction of homophobia and transphobia, in Jade's case it has more to do with the story's depiction of self-hatred, a certain devotion to the experience of dysphoria. I have a post talking about how a great deal of June subtext in Homestuck proper pertains to hatred of one's own body, how the body itself is apprehended as prison from which one must escape to become your true self. For John, Dad's car became a symbol of the body (and the masculine role in society) she wants to escape. Hence it is from the wreckage of Dad's car that John discusses with Vriska the possibility of escaping the violent lifestyle that SHE had been groomed to accept since birth, in the face of mounting self-hatred -- the desire to escape transfers to John, for whom Vriska was manifesting. We're treated to a shot of John gazing at skyward Vriska with a big red X over her groin, symbolizing the removal of the penis and thereby the attainment femininity.
I'm inclined to think the atmosphere of shock cultivated around Jade's body stems from the same self-revulsion that drove a great deal of dysphoric melancholy in og Homestuck for two main reasons. One reason is that transphobia has been melded into Jade's story since the outset -- e.g. her angry tirade about how fursuits don't make you a REAL animal is juxtaposed with Grandpa's intermingled collection of pelts, armor, and lady-portraits, which in sum frames femininity as a skin to be worn. But you read Slurquest, so you should be familiar with Jade's gay-bashing, largely directed at Grandpa ... until fusion with Bec causes Jade to redirect her contempt for "pansies" at herself, via Jadesprite. The story reframing Jade's transphobia as self-loathing can't help but flow into the Epilogues, and I'm led to think the shock we experience as readers is in part a taste of Jade's self-rejection, giving the experience of someone living while viewing herself as unnatural. Still far from positive, but to me at least it's a sympathetic position. The other reason is more or less a stupid pun, but obscene wordplay is the basis of my understanding of the story so whatever: the figure that embodied Vriska's aggressive tendencies (which are characterized as phallic via her conversation with John) was Doc Scratch, who was constantly whispering KILL in her ear. Doc Scratch rhymes with Dog's Crotch when you speak with an English accent, bring everything he represents to Vriska into dialogue with Jade's self-loathing.
One of Jade's biggest moments is defined by accepting Jadesprite, who she had rejected, as a part of herself as she ascends to godtier in Cascade. That this also makes her a "real" furry, when the fursuit had previously acted as a medium for subtly lashing out at "fake" women, is striking to me. Even if the Epilogues seem to represent a sort of regression in her emotional arc (a "gay reset button" as Dave puts it), I think the story gravitates toward self-acceptance despite its at times overwhelming devotion to the experience of self-hatred
That's all I have to say without stewing on everything for another week, I think. Kinda scattershot, but I hope it conveys a bit of the good I see here
