Can I just say, it is a travesty how john Egbert is ignored and made fun of by the homestuck fandom. But its very nice to see a blog that actually cares about and likes john just as much as the other characters. Thanks for listening :)

Aww I don’t think he’s ignored or made fun of! At least not in any sincere way.

But prepare for an essay, cause hoo boy did this response take a turn into a deep metatextual analysis:

John’s a really interesting case of this blank-slate, everyman sort of character surrounded by a very deep, richly written supporting cast. Which is very much the point of him, I think. Notice that for pretty much every additional character (especially the betas over the course of their introductions in the first few acts), the lore, backstory, and complexity of homestuck increases. So John is meant as sort of the character-base-one. He’s exactly who you would expect to star in a comic like this. A nerdy goofball who we can’t help but love but whose place in the story isn’t much deeper than the lens through which we discover things.

Take Act 5 Act 2. While everyone is backstabbing, blowing stuff up, or trying to save the universe, John’s just following people’s instructions and discovering his powers. The story’s diverged, and we’re no longer seeing Homestuck through John’s eyes, we’re seeing it from pretty much everyone else’s except John’s. We do watch him become more and more powerful and grow as a person, but it feels disconnected from the rest of the plot.

This seems to continue through Act 6, but it starts to become obvious that Hussie is doing this for a reason. John keeps bumping into everything else that’s going on, but no matter what happens, he’s never the one to act. He hangs around watching movies on the meteor, he has a brief battle with Jack, he bumps into Vriska, but none of those are Big Plot Occurrences.

But then, he sticks his hand in the House Juju. Not only has he been metaphorically separated from the rest of the story, he’s now literally detached from Homestuck. The rules of the story – which had been acting tangentially, but not directly, to him pretty much since day one – now don’t apply to him at all. He’s become a fully separate entity from the other characters, popping in and out but never occupying the more conventional role of a story’s characters.

Then Game Over happens. Suddenly we discover the Rules of Homestuck everyone else had been following are fundamentally broken. And only a character on whom the plot directly acts and who acts directly on the plot could have been the center of that break. Or, since I’m getting verbose and excited about homestuck meta, should I say br8k. Vriska represents the antithesis to John in terms of connectedness to the Plot and Rules of Homestuck. Whereas John went with the flow, Vriska actively inserted herself into almost every major plot development. Whereas John stumbled upon his powers, Vriska actively cultivated hers. And, whereas John was detached from the events that lead to Game Over, Vriska was what caused it in the first place.

(As an aside, Aranea is a demonstration of what happens when a character who is not a central actor attempts to assert themselves into the narrative and redirect the course of events. She tried to rebel against her place in the story as a background, expositional side-character and do what only a character either heavily entrenched in the plot like Vriska or outside it entirely like John could have done.)

So, the big question becomes “what now?” How do we F1X TH1S? Terezi is in a unique place where, unlike John, she has played an active role in the plot. But unlike everyone else, she has the ability – be it her powers as a Seer of Mind, her involvement with the breakage itself, or just who she is as a person – to view the Plot from the same bird’s-eye-view as John would if he knew to look. And the fact that she is both fatally wounded in and one of the sole survivors of Game Over is a very physical embodiment of the liminal place she occupies between “canon” and “non-canon.” But, because she’s still an actor in the plot (acting upon and acted upon), she doesn’t have the power over the story to repair what happened. But John does, because he is an outside presence. A relatively literal Deus ex Machina. You can’t put out the fire from inside the house, so Terezi leans out the window and tells John – who’s standing out on the sidewalk watching but not affected by the flames – how to use the hose. How’s that for a metaphor. So John does just that. He breaks the laws of storytelling because those laws never applied to him in the first place.

This is a very long and rambly way of getting back to your question. Basically, John isn’t, and was never meant to be, like the other characters. Whereas they’re all wrapped up in their angst and decisions and romance, John’s just…John. And I think it was very smart of Hussie to write that character not with less development or depth, but with less…character weight(?). Or something.

Basically we don’t talk about John as much as the other characters because in fandom, we normally focus on that character weight. Their relationships, their quirks, their sad backstories, etc. John Egbert, by definition, has less of that. Not none of course, but less. So it’s easy to forget about him in the stuff fandom mostly focuses on because who he is as a character is very heavily dependent on the role he plays in the story. Outside of his role as the Unstuck, he’s just a lovable goofball of a friendleader. And we love him for that, but he can easily be lost when surrounded by much ~heavier~ characters like Terezi, Vriska, Dave, Rose, etc.

So let’s take a moment to appreciate John Egbert as a strange, disconnected, surrealist entity that breaks the conventional laws of storytelling. And also because he’s adorable.