That scene from Fionna and Cake yesterday reminded me of Kamal a lot (plus Kamal can get a lil silly with it as a treat)

oc comic :)

not @ me drinking a sneaky little cider and feeling kinda funny afterwards and wondering why that could be (i'm allergic to apples) this is the end guys

homestuck has always been a character driven story, though. you can’t expect people to automatically be chill with characters suddenly representing a more thematic purpose when, up until that point, homestuck has largely been mostly a series of character studies. as if in order to have a characters story be thematic you can’t keep their characterization in tact. presenting critique of the epilogues as if it’s just people being upset their faves didn’t get happy endings or the right characters didn’t kiss is. super disingenuous. they’re just badly written man.

Hi! So, Homestuck is obviously character driven in many ways because it has a metric shit ton of characters (there's bound to be one or a set that appeal to everyone) and the characters are the heart of the story. For most people, engaging and interesting characters are why they read a story. And that's absolutely fine- but it doesn't mean every story is written that way, and every other manner of writing or reading story is incorrect or bad.

So you don't like the epilogues. That's absolutely fair! There's plenty of reasons to not like the epilogues-- such as how it was handled by staff, or elements that were offensive or improperly tagged. But I would like to say that's clearly not what I'm talking about. I'm talking specifically about a not HS-specific notion that character supersedes theme. (You know, like modernised myths that completely ruin the actual meaning of the original text because no attention was paid to theme or purpose)

Like I said, I'm posing a question in order for you to critically examine why. Is it that X, or is it that Y. And you know- it's perfectly fine for you to critically examine your feelings and still go "yeah no canon sucks, I could do it better." Because some people could do better- and sometimes canon sucks. For example, I personally have decided that HS2 canon DOES actually just suck for naming that poor child THAT.

But some people will critically examine why they hate something and think "Actually, Hussie doesn't hate Jake. Jake is a fictional character and I don't like what happened to him, but that doesn't mean that Hussie baited us into liking him and then deliberately gave him a shitty story because he hates Jake and he hates us too." (If anything, I would argue that narrative manipulation points to Hussie baiting people to DISLIKE Jake to bait and switch them, but that's another story.)

And I'm not sitting here saying "the epilogues are perfect and great and everyone who hates them is or thinks they're bad is wrong." I'm not self centered enough to believe that when over half the fandom had a mass exodus after the release and I probably would have joined them if my circumstances at the time were different. The epilogues are a desperately unpleasant read, one I very much struggle with every time I have to reread parts of them before writing something new. Like I said, most people read stories for characters or interesting plots, and it is desperately unpleasant for your favourite character to become a pseudo-philandering self-harming alcoholic who is sexually assaulted and domestically abused and is forced to defecate himself on stage. That's not what I would have written. But, I also don't view it as out of character.

BUT, I do think it's not the right take either to think that HS hasn't always been thematic, deconstruction of the nature of form, playing with narrative manipulation. HS breaks the fourth wall, uses intertextuality, epic narrative form, breaking the actual structure of the website, gameplay, animation etc etc etc. All of those things were so important in making HS what it was. My OG thesis pitch was on narrative manipulation in HS back in 2017-- literally not dissimilar at all to narrative text as God and how that manipulates a reader discussions in the epilogues. Academic journals have been written on how HS uses form to tell its own story. All of those things are as fundamental to HS in my opinion as the idea that it's a story about kids and growing up. The latter is the reason why we LOVE HS. But the former is the reason why it's so important as a seminal text. There's any amount of great stories about kids and growing up-- but they're not HS.

HS could have never had a continuation beyond opening the door unless Hussie wanted to deconstruct the form and the narrative itself, and the concept of endings. HS as a web comic structure in a liminal space ends when the door is open. Now, a very good argument can be made here for "ok then there shouldn't have been an epilogue." I actually don't disagree with that. I think one of the best things Hussie could have done would have been to allow a few more lilypad conversations and have HS finish dead the second the door opens. But it didn't-- and HS could have never had a happy, neat epilogue and have everyone agree on a vision.

On the subject about HS being a story about kids and growing up, HS also says real people don't have character arcs. It's a pretty clear reason as to why everything wasn't tied up neatly at the end of HS proper, and it's a pretty clear reason for most of the epilogues. Recovery isn't linear. Sometimes people grow up wrong. Real people don't have character arcs.

We think of story largely in character arcs so we think-- Dirk always wanted to be a good person, so his arc should be him becoming a good person. Not that Dirk tries so so so hard to be a good person, so hard and it still doesn't make him happy. It still doesn't get him where he wants to be. He's never ever going to be good enough to feel redeemed-- oh and btw, he's literally in a story that's ending, it's falling apart, and he's so so so scared to not exist. He's more scared of that than he is of being a bad person. Is that desperately unpleasant? Of course. Is it out of character? No. It's just not what anyone focusing on a solely character driven story would necessarily do. It requires deconstructing the narrative and then going, what would this guy do next now. Character and theme and narrative and form all have a symbiotic relationship. It's meat and candy.

HS isn't just character driven. But that's just what most of us (MYSELF INCLUDED) care about. And that's not wrong, that's not bad, that's not some terrible flaw in recognising one's self in the other. In fact it's the logical reading of a text you love. But you actually miss a huge chunk of what makes HS so special if you're only looking at the characters and their interactions and arcs. You miss a lot of what makes a lot of stories so interesting. It also makes it a lot harder to not become disillusioned when stories get difficult or disappointing or unpleasant. But I wouldn't still be here if I didn't think parts of recent HS were worth investigating and analysing.

(Also just for transparency: my original post wasn't actually about the epilogues, though considering my subsequent and previous post I entirely understand that it's been read that way. I saw art on my dash by a meta poster I remember from 2018 who got a lot of stick at the time for thematic analysis. Including from myself. And I was considering whether or not that was unfair. Because a character can thematically represent something that they are not, in actuality. Things can happen to a character that represent something else. Freudian analysis if you will. And if I wasn't caught up in being outraged that he'd said something sticky about one of my favourite characters, something that did not happen in the text, then maybe I would have been able to engage with it on a more in depth level. And I annoyingly missed the opportunity to investigate it in my HS thesis in 2019 because of my own hubris.)

Anyway I'm a realish person and I don't have a character arc but I do grow up in weird ways that would make younger me desperately uncomfortable. I think that's a theme in itself.

Attending my cousins 30th birthday party!

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If sherry joined leon in his drinking

danny's biological father is still alive. ditched the town he and stephanie made his home long ago once the rumours that he murdered his own family came to be too much and now lives a quiet, miserable existence southside of indiana, working sunrise to sundown and drinking away the nights. he'll start talking when he goes too heavy on the alcohol - how someone murdered her and took away his boy, how that damn lab is to blame, how they covered it up. his friends smile tight and stiff and pat his shoulder. easy on the whiskey rob, it won't do you no good.

until the early spring of '89, long after the state wide panic up in the midwest's quiets down and hawkins has begun to heal, a young man comes to his doorstep, crumpled old photo of steffie in his hands, and Robert Riggs meets his son again.

Been watching mainly Better Call Saul lately (ever since I binged my way through BrBa)

And he reminds me of Parsley a bit cuz... Lawyers!

Ugly

[All comics in order here]

el alcohol quita la vergüenza

My parents just came back from their trip to Austria and I got a beer glass from the second oldest brewery in Germany and a bottle of Berchtesgarden Hell!

And bags of crystals!!!

At least do the sky puppies right.