Boots reads Homestuck Epilogue part… one..??

Alright, let’s do this. As I’ve said, the page after this one is all I’ve seen, I’m diving in unspoiled. Also I gather from some of the non-spoilery chatter I’ve heard from my friends – one of which warned me this sort of thing was coming a couple weeks ago, and I believed them (but didn’t want to) – that this first epilogue-upd8 may not be the only epilogue-upd8, which isn’t surprising either given how Andrew works.

Alright, let’s go. Hope my stomach can take it!

So, Page 1, the mock-AO3 page that’s the only thing I’ve seen before posting this. The content warning is EXCELLENT, and gives me hope that this will be the usual Hussie-caliber and more humorous than heartwrenching. :)

It also makes some serious sense that there would be multiple epilogues; from the sound of the summary, this one might focus more on John and then leave ample opportunity to discuss the others.

Let’s click page 2 – oh, or contents: “Prologue”, this being a chapter list for this is another way to do it. Clicking Prologue…….

Okay wow, this is novel format for the moment. Good chance it won’t stay that way.

These first two paragraphs are well-written and ominous, sure – describing stuff we pretty much already knew was happening, in different words – but even though the writing isn’t really pretentious, there’s still a good chance Andrew *views* it as pretentious enough to find cutting away to art-style instead hilarious. Onto the third paragraph…

Music and Calliopes the other Calliope is conducting, yeah… Oh, there’s a garbage disposal reference. In regards to a black hole. Like the one I kind of pointed to during Dave’s intro sequence in the Third Scratch theory and stuff in all those big theories. The ones I was, er, wrong about… ahem. Moving on.

“Your name is John Egbert, and you have just had a terrible, deeply pretentious nightmare.”



Pfffffffff :D

I love you Andrew Hussie. Reading on…

YES I see chat colors. Chat colors!!! I need chat colors. Reading reading reading let me get down to them let me

Absolutely nothing of note has ever happened here in the entire history of the planet, which you would know, because you created it.

Baahahahahah. :D

Okay yes I’m at the phone-sterlog.

Uh oh.

I am reading elevated levels of angst compared to usual pesterlogs in this log. Which is to say, virtually any at all, really. THAT doesn’t bode well for the outcome/overall tone of this epilogue. :X –Not to say it isn’t *appropriate*, given they still haven’t fixed/resewn Paradox Space together, but… yeah, *future feels* are popping up on the radar, that’s what I’m worried about. I loved the tone of the snapchats and the feeling that everything was going to be fine, especially given how the ending “not being what I expected” shook me a fair bit, but to look forward to when that may end… D:

Yeah, Rose having some serious visions about some unfinished business they need to get around to instead of just fucking around and living their lives makes sense. :X –or at least some timeline version of them. I’m imagining they’re living varied, excellent lives in a whole TON of timelines of promise that commit our imaginings of their potential futures to virtual canon, really, with the main thread that ties off Caliborn’s stage play almost irrelevant in comparison… that was kind of the whole point of the Ending of homestuck earlier, of that final anime flash, the fact that the victory and planet and *lives* they won meant a whole lot more than whatever Lord English’s irrelevant machinations were.

So… returning to the tail end of that main thread and seeing how *serious* it might be……. yeah. Kinda mildly panic-inducing. :XXX

You move the phone away from your ear and assume an expression you haven’t practiced in years. It is the look of a man who actually has something to do.

Okay that was good.

Ah, he’s twenty-three now!

Let’s click the next link. ==>

Fuck let’s not recount Rose’s substance abuse.

Oh, cool. Er, “cool”. Rose is getting some of Rosejaspersprite^2′s awareness of all her alternate-timeline doomed selves and their lives. No wonder she’s worried about the substance abuse she technically mostly *avoided* in this timeline.

Light explicitly relating to knowledge, good. That’s a nice aspect tidbit to have reiterated.

ROSE: There’s a different scale I’ve come to understand. Another dichotomy that’s less… emotional, I guess?

ROSE: Consider, instead of the word “good,” using the word “essential.”

ROSE: And what exists at the opposite polarity from essential is…

ROSE: Something that is best not to contemplate.

ooh. oooooh. holy shit.

okay NO, BOOTS/BKEW. DON’T GET FUCKING EXCITED.

DON’T get excited.

It only SOUNDS like she’s learned to recontextualize the whole adventure in the rich context of the classpect system, that’s just your wild fanfic-y theoryimagination talking. Shoosh. (Even though she IS very, very, *very* clearly referencing the Light/Void dichotomy with the above quote.) Just… tamp down your hopes, Boots. Leave it at MILD hope. Like cool porridge.

Reading on.

Alright, yeah, this universe exists beyond the timespan of the Green Sun’s influence. Unsurprising, since it was heavily implied. And she doesn’t have access to her expanded Green Sun powerset while *in* such a universe, which was also heavily implied by alt!Calliope or her denizen or I forget the exact conversation where it said she’d have to make the final journey without Green Sun powers or whatever. That’s cool. (Though having it spelled out more explicitly than usual does make it more awkward to have her use her powers for humorous purposes on MXRP in the future.)

OOOH DAVE KARKAT AND JADE ARE IN A PERPLEXING SOCIAL ARRANGEMENT YESSSSS :D

Best news. Okay reading on.

ROSE: You will need to travel back into canon and defeat Lord English.

Yeah I guess.

Again, the way the ending sort of put it was that….. our heroes did have to defeat Lord English eventually? Or set right some prior stuff like doing the stage play? But that part of the point of this whole story – the Ultimate Reward – was that it didn’t really matter, because they had earned nigh-infinite branching timelines of promise in a brand new universe where they could go YEARS AND YEARS living their lives in many of the ways they wished, richly enjoying themselves and starting civilizations that would last billions of years, loving and living and experiencing, only “needing” to go finally check off these other responsibilities in a single timeline of promise at the end of an extended period of vacation they chose with no particular urgency. Branching years-and-years of essentially heaven as long as they EVENTUALLY fulfilled that particular endpoint, and they knew it. More or less.

Rose phrases it pretty explicitly, though. John’s powers are the only thing that can warp people through canon like that without restriction, so he was always to be involved, but… *he* needs to defeat him? Does that mean alone?

JOHN: yeah, i had a feeling that was going to come up again someday.

ROSE: I’m sure we all did. That is, even those of us without visions.

JOHN: i was doing my best not to think about it. i guess we can’t put it off any longer then?

ROSE: Now is the time. We are rapidly approaching a point of no return. If the decision isn’t made soon, it will be too late. The issue will no longer matter.

JOHN: when exactly is the point of no return?

ROSE: Today.

JOHN: wow.

JOHN: ok then.

Ouch.

That’s slightly more abrupt than the picture of branching bliss I just painted.

JOHN: fine?

ROSE: Of course everything is fine here.

ROSE: We’re outside of canon now.

JOHN: yeah, i know. what does that actually MEAN though?

JOHN: are you saying this isn’t really happening?

ROSE: Of course it’s happening.

ROSE: Just because certain events take place outside of canon, it doesn’t mean those events are non-canon.

JOHN: oh.

ROSE: In other words, there is an important distinction between events which can be considered to occur inside canon, outside canon, and those which are not canon at all.

ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.

Well okay then. I was wondering why she used the word “canon”. They literally DID escape the narrative literally as *well* as figuratively with that Juju, then, Neverending Story style.

Also, Light being highly tied to canon and Rose having spent so much time outside of it… yeah, I can understand the headaches more, too.

Alright, reading on, it seems Andrew is using Rose to more explicitly explain how he intends all the non-canon stuff he’s presented to us to “matter”, for those who didn’t quite get or fully believe the implied explanation from context towards the end of the story.

Heh, so the idea is that the urgency comes from “it’s been too fucking long since the story ended, and this epilogue needs to come out when an epilogue would still matter to anyone”. That’s kind of brilliant.



ROSE: As long as we live outside canon, everything that happens will technically be “real,” but only conditionally.

ROSE: There are certain crucial events inside canon which must happen in order to continue to prop up the legitimacy of events here on Earth C.

ROSE: And you specifically, John, have a responsibility to make sure those events take place.

Closing threads closing threads CLOSING THREADS :D !!!!!!

FUCK is this epilogue going to be mostly devoted to TYING UP LOOSE ENDS and clarifying stuff??? :D Like the HUNDREDS OF LOOSE ENDS that were left unanswered because the ending tried to paint it all as sidelined/irrelevant regardless of the fact that they hadn’t been answered/fulfilled, which had previously pretty much traumatized me around Homestuck’s end because I was (1) so used to Andrew expertly tying up almost every loose end eventually and (2) was a theorycrafter with explicit investment in the idea that Classes, Aspects, and most of these loose ends actually DID matter??? :D

Sign me the fuck up!!! :DDDD

…I know it’s doubtfully going to be anything close to all I hoped for, but still. Answers, contextualization, and John tying up loose threads. Like that final frog warped in front of Jade as a child. That’s good, that’s VERY good. I’m excited instead of nauseous. :D

–and yeah, reading on, Rose makes more explicit what I said earlier that the justification Andrew’s painting for this is “we have to wrap up all these loose ends before everyone forgets about Homestuck.” That is hilarious.

Okay, so the juju is a big plothole. Heheh. We’ve heard it called that earlier.

…Oh. Oh huh.

Rose is pretty much explicitly talking about the stage play consisting of a bunch of non-canon ALTERNATE VERSIONS of themselves that mean the original versions of them living happily in the new universe won’t actually die. Holy shit. I mean we theorized that for a TIME with some of them but THOSE loose ends (like Roxy still having her mask on) were closed up toward the end… So instead, having it put THIS way (preserving our ideas of them living full lives post-victory), and not only that but having John DO all this stuff RIGHT NOW to fix things retroactively with some really well-written contextual clarification we’re bound to get to help with the closure… god DAMN. This is really good. This is going to make a LOT of people feel a whole lot better about Homestuck. Like me. :D

…Pff, some other girl is getting punched by John in the face again. :D Don’t worry, Rose isn’t saying that this is the Vriska punch at the beginning of the whole Retcon arc and that this epilogue somehow happened in the middle. (I hope.)

…Yeah Rose implies heavily that John is gonna die his heroic death if he does this? Or it’s meant to make us THINK she’s implying that. Yeah. And she feels pretty fucking horrible about what she’s asking John to go through regardless, so. (Yeah, everyone looked pretty genuinely dead but a few at the end of the stage play, but it was pretty uncertain.) Either way, she’s acting like John isn’t going to “come back”, even if he lives through this.

Stupid feels.

Clicking the next link. ==>

Hiiii roxy and callie!!! :D

Yes how polite of them.

“Ultimate self”? Yeah, a sort of synthesizing of all the offshoots of her Heart and Mind, pulling it all together and realizing the full person she is and sum of her whole experience across all timelines, pasts and futures. Yeesh. Pretty uncomfortable for someone who ain’t a hypersprite.

…Roxy and Rose aren’t as close? Is it because of the substance abuse, because of the Light/Void dichotomy literally-or-metaphorically distancing them (with how disparaging Rose just was about anything that isn’t relevant), or something else?

Ah, Kanaya hogged her until she got “sick”, that explains some of it too.

A bell tower? (DOOONNNNGGG)

Fffff interpersonal relationship mildangst. Fuck

You and all your friends have dispositions affected by your classes and aspects. You think you know what that means in your case. But what about her? You can only speculate. Void is a place where things sink and disappear. Where they linger forever, but cease to exist. You aren’t actually sure if your feelings for Roxy ever really faded, or if they just grew numb with time and distance. Is it the same for her?

Holy fucking shit. What a big middle finger to everyone who told me aspects didn’t matter to their personalities. :D

…Though, I think he has it kind of backwards, since he still doesn’t totally understand all this business. It’s easy for those in canon, introduced to this subject, to think that the classes and aspects affect their dispositions, to an extent where the reality (at least I contend) is that it was their natural dispositions in the first place that the classes and aspects were actually describing. The power that was latent in their very personalities and tendencies to action all along.

Reading… Ah, yeah, a choice. Was pretty sure this terminology would be important earlier. It depends on what SORT of choice this is though… see, so far, Rose hasn’t given John a lot of really EXPLICIT motivation to go through with this, other than some mumbo-jumbo that would supposedly be “bad”. And it doesn’t even address the black hole in his nightmares. And here, we have Roxy and others explicitly encouraging him with regard to the fact that he can choose NOT to do this if he wants to.

The main question it brings up (to the future of this epilogue, how it’s going to be considered afterward, etc) is if this is the sort of Choice that John would always say yes to – in which case it’s more canon than anything else – or if he will end up being on the fence enough for a Terezi-style Mind-split. Because this would be the PERFECT out to have him “die” in canon. See, if he’s on the fence ENOUGH about going, then he creates two timelines that even both potentially have promise within the confines of this universe (since universes hold more than one timeline of promise, according to one of the Calliopes I think)– One where he lives here, happily ever after with everyone, and another where he completes his Heroic death in canon to fix everything. It would let Andrew kill John in this epilogue while still letting him live out eternity with everyone else outside “canon”.

He’d get to have his John-death and keep him too! Seems plausible enough.

Anyway. Reading… it looks like they know more about this decision that Rose has told them, including the consequences Rose might have been dreading. And likely know that IF John might die doing this, that it won’t be in a way that he regrets.

Oh wow, that whole Meat or Candy sequence is GREAT. Silly to the core, and yet perfectly emphasizing the debate that… well, I mean, think about what Andrew’s been telling us all along.

He keeps TRYING to tell us that non-canon stuff is fine. Trying to use that huge ending sequence of Homestuck to try and tell us that the fact that everyone is FREE from this story and its confines, free for everyone to imagine COUNTLESS ways things played out afterward for ALL these lovable characters in carefree futures, is almost MORE important than any of these stupid loose ends. But some of us were really cut by that ending, the insistence that the actual final battle “didn’t matter” and that this escaped-from-canon existence was the true victory. But if Andrew just upped and drew a bunch of bonus pages to start explaining more story, THAT would cheapen the escape-from-canon ending he wanted even as it satisfied those of us who wanted ends tied up, who wanted questions answered. He had to find a very careful, very well done way to give us BOTH. To write out the real “ending” of “canon” for those of us who needed it, without compromising the ESCAPE from the very necessity of it that was the essential point he WANTED to make with Homestuck’s story from the very beginning. To carefully keep the endless branches of post-victory possibility and play intact while still, separately and with explicit hedging and qualifications, give us the potential results of one last canon thread to tie up the lingering questions that he so dearly wants us to recognize still “don’t matter” as much in the vast scheme of things.

And he’s doing it. And it’s WORKING.

Holy SHIT.

I am excited for Homestuck. I am excited for Homestuck for the first time in years, and my nausea is gone.

I’m not going to start theorizing again; that’s over. But I’m definitely going to keep reading as the new Epilogue chapters come out, and do so with a spring in my step.

To Be Continued. :D