Act 7 Analysis

Here’s my analysis of how Act 7 went wrong.

I don’t think Act 7 is a bad ending. I think it’s straight up not an ending and wasn’t originally intended as such. First of all, you have to understand how Hussie put Homestuck together.

If you trawl his old Forumspring archives enough, you’ll find out that Hussie would lay groundwork that could ambiguously lead towards certain plot points he had in mind, without necessarily committing to them. For example, the eight player session on Mom’s terminal.

This was a nod towards the idea of a combined kid/guardian session, but that’s all it was. If he decided not to go that route, it would be easy to explain it away as some random session from Earth like FedoraFreak had. Jade’s final frog is an example that resolved the opposite way. Finding out who sendificated it to her could have been a vital plot point, but since Hussie decided not to use it, it’s simply a semi-intentional red herring that was probably prepared by some carapacian, just like the exile stations were.

So, given that strategy for writing, how could Hussie have decided on an ending so far in advance? Comparing the timeline in the newspost to the Homestuck archives, work on Act 7 started at about the same time Jane entered the medium and ended around the time John was experiencing his dimension hoping powers for the first time, though by that time animation would have been mostly done and very hard to significantly change. Thus, Hussie had to create an animation that only contained things he was dead sure about or was willing to commit to completely. The eight humans and meteor crew trolls surviving barely constrained him at all, and the fact that they would create a new universe and enter it is a no brainer. The big plot points Hussie was chaining himself to were a revived Calliope and Vriska, a god tier Calliope destroying the Green Sun, and Lord English being defeated by the Homestuck juju. This partially accounts for why the animation is so ambiguous.



Is Dirk and Jake playing soccer an indication that they’re dating again? That they’ve reconciled and decided to be friends? Or even that they never broke up at all? We can’t tell, and I think this is intentional. Hussie himself probably hadn’t decided yet, so he left himself room for the story to work it out. The animation doesn’t tell us because Hussie was going to (and did) tell us before the animation hit. Same thing with the picnic. Both have had feelings for her, so did Jade wind up picking Dave or Karkat? Haha, turns out it was actually Dave and Karkat who are the couple there, but the picture itself doesn’t communicate this.

I think the huge holes in the plot left by Act 7 share a similar origin. The flash doesn’t explain what Calliope is doing or why, or how the juju kills Lord English, because when he was storyboarding the animation, he was planing to explain those things in the comic beforehand. This wasn’t intended to wrap up the plot, it was supposed to be an ending cutscene, eye candy to get us feeling emotional about things finally coming to a close. It wasn’t supposed to tell us the details of how the story ended, although it was forced to take up (and fail at) that role. It was just a final look back at what we already knew.

That’s why Act 7 leaves so much hanging up in the air, like whether Vriska, Aradia, and Sollux survived, whether (and how) Lord English was defeated, and whether or not all of reality and unreality was totally destroyed by Calliope’s black hole. Honestly, it’s absurd to think that Andrew “Words” Hussie would intentionally create an ending that explained too little. This is a man who created a multiple page long news post because people misunderstood some of the minutia of how God Tier resurrection works.

There are several obvious dangling plot threads that essentially prove Hussie was originally intending more content before the end, even as recently as he was commissioning art for the last part of updates. (Recall that Collide “came right down to the wire” according to him.) The sprites aren’t in the final animation, even though it would have been trivial to have killed them all off in Collide or to have added a few more pages of them fading away as the game was won. There’s also been the sudden focus the idea of alternate selves being one, starting with John talking about his “canonical life” and Rose worrying about Jasprose polluting her “brand” and culminating with Terezi: Remember and Davepeta’s exposition to Jade. It was probably intended as lead up to some big event to tie up the billions of dream bubble ghosts and underscore that the retconned timeline was just as important to the story despite having not been part of the alpha timeline. (Another of Homestuck’s constant video game metaphors. All the branches of a game’s story are important, even the ones that aren’t canon.) These aren’t the work of someone trying to create a deliberately ambiguous ending, but of someone desperately emailing the parts of his essay he has finished to his professor on 11:59 PM the day it’s due.

So why did Hussie choose to drop it now, before its time? I don’t have any inside information or mind reading capabilities, so I can only speculate. It’s very nice animation that took a year to produce. He could have just been tired of sitting on it for so long, or maybe the animator(s) really needed to be able to add it to their portfolios in order to get jobs. Maybe he was desperate to keep people from forgetting about Homestuck, which is pretty reasonable since the IP is his main source of income. (See also the “take a Homestuck selfie and post it on your social media” thing.) Regardless, I think it was a huge misstep. I would have preferred a news post fessing up that he couldn’t finish Homestuck and just laying out all the plot points we’d skipped but would need to understand Act 7 properly.

It’s really a pity, because Act 7 really is beautiful, and not just in its animation. The whole structure is very Homestuckian. We get to see Lord English and the players’ final fates, him being defeated and them living happy lives on their new planet. Then it moves back in time to when they are just winning their games, showing us the cause after the effect.

But we didn’t get to sit back and enjoy the wonderful parallelism of the heroes about to begin the lives they’ve chosen as their Ultimate Reward, just as Caliborn is damning himself with the Ultimate Reward he chose. We can’t because we never get to see that downfall. His scene ends with the Furthest Ring’s destruction rushing forward until it almost meets the door forming on the juju, ambiguous imagery that could mean anything. So the animation doesn’t end on the triumphant note it would have if we knew how Lord English was defeated. Instead it ends with anxiousness, because we all think the other shoe is about to drop. After Act 7 ended, I was ready to see how all the action in the flash was wrapped up in the walkaround that I was sure was coming on the next page. I wasn’t feeling the satisfaction of a tale well told, with everyone finally getting what they deserve juxtaposed with scenes of why they deserve it. In the context it was released in, Act 7 was reduced from the stunning final note to the story that it could have been to a confusing mess.

So where does that leave Homestuck? At the time, I thought that it was literally Hussie’s way of throwing up his hands and admitting that he couldn’t finish the comic. After mentioning the “epilogue”, it’s right back where it has been for years: another pause before the next batch of content, the whole comic shambling along past its natural end, restlessly lurching away from its rightful grave. I’m sure the epilogue (or the epilogue’s epilogue) will tie up everything, or at least enough things, to be satisfying and let us make sense of what was going on in Act 7. Hell, I’ll probably rewatch Act 7 and love it now that I suddenly understand everything, but I really wish it could have happened in time to see Act 7 the way past-Hussie from 4 years ago intended it.