Okay i was not supposed to wank, but anyways last time, there is this way of watching spn where esp Deangirls are obsessed with hating John and also they feel like they are being not heard, like the narrative isn't being fair by being John apologetic and this makes them frustrated bcz they are woke and others are dumb and also child abuse supporters and they just aren't getting narrative satisfaction.

Also again sorry but i only wank as a reactionary wanker and i am just very reactionary about these positivity blogs trying to make fandom better that are just delusional, anyways i am probably an awful person to have in fandom due to my negative rancid aura so i do not claim to be making it better but in anycase my issue here is the weird positivity culture creation while scapegoating factions and imposing subjectivity and having no self-awareness about it.

Anyways ya...John, like i just don't care much and am very neutral about my feelings, keyword feelings, cuz its not about what takes you have, its about how much of an obsessed wanker you are, like i just don't feel the need to announce how he needs to die and go to hell esp when you know...he did...like that happened, and if i were to feel sad for Dean and Sam's childhood it will be momentarily, and if i am to be negative about someone like Dean or Sam or Cas (which really i am not about anything) ideally i should get its my problem, doesn't make these feelings nonexistent but ofcourse its better to take things lightly, you know like you should with John, but that's not what they do is it, its such a weird wanky take on crit.

If you want to be negative about him be negative but its not the savage flex you people think it is to say every deancrit and every samcrit is just johncrit. Like yes your childhood affects you deeply like not a hot take most people get it but again its this weird negativity crit thing like what does it even mean, what is the criteria of doing media right and why does it not apply to John and why can one not have takes and feelings about a character and must reroute them to 'ya its John's fault' bcz that's what you want, you want to see no negativity about Dean, you want to control feelings around it and you want it rerouted to John, bcz that's what you do and people can watch and consume things the way they want to, which if they don't want to obsess over how everything Dean and Sam do is cuz daddy issues and so they have no actual negative traits and if they don't have strong constant negative feelings for a character, then they can do that, they are not dumb and evil, its literally you who doesn't have the braincapacity to get that people can have range in how they view characters that isn't rerouting all their feelings to the dad or having severe negative feelings for the dad. Its fine. If you have an issue with this culture of Dean bashing, i get it, but you can't control it with haha dumb people don't know psychology cuz everything you do is your dad's fault and thus dean has no negative traits or actions you and have to have intense hatred and no sympathy for John and never have negative feelings for Dean.

Also its a family tragedy and John is included in it, by the show, i get not liking that s14 ep or whatever but also its not actually unrealistic to acknowledge what your dad did and then be apologetic about it, and it would make less sense for them to be confrontational about it when the love and pain and the knowledge of how rigged things were is there. So what are you even whining about? Declarations not being given when we know by flashbacks and by their actions? A personally satisfactory confrontation that would not make sense? You genuinely think Cas killing John infront of Dean is the genius fix it? The Cas that barely protects his son from Dean? Whining that John is in heaven and how Dean is not with Jack who he treated like that bcz writers and circumstances and John and so its so tragic?

Like again literally feel and like and be compelled the way you want, and i do think some people get too cruel with characters ahem but ya you are not making the point you think you are with have no negative takes and feelings for anyone besides John. Its also literally not that deep, people are hateful and negative about characters usually due to projection and personal feelings and this ranges, like i could have the exact same take as someone about a character but have different feelings or different intensity of feelings.

The point should literally be that your feelings are your own problem, if you feel slighted by something like John, people are going to get slighted by something like well Dean, and then i guess you can discourse away about how noone is the A word but also what if someone is then what? What if Sam is really abusive or Dean is really abusive bcz clearly John is abusive and deserves hate and crit? What if a show has an abusive lead so then can you hate him? Is it now hate is it now okay to hate is it now crit is it now doing media right? Also literally his dad gave him issues means nothing when you talk about someone and who they are and what they did, it can explain it sure, like that's just not how it works, how is it an own? What kind of nonsense is this?

Like what is the point of 'like what i like and hate what i hate'. Again i do think ideally people should not take things srsly at all, but ppl have feelings, that's the whole problem, and the point is to expect people to manage them well and that includes not acting like someone not feeling the way you do is an evil idiot.

HS2's themes are fuckin wack crap cuz like... idk it all starts with the epilogues, right? the thing that the epilogues are trying to say is that all conflict that the characters face within the narrative is there because the audience cast their gaze upon this story and demanded entertainment. something has to happen on the stage to keep us watching, thus, it is the audience's fault that the characters suffer. but that's bullshit for so many reasons. for one thing, it ignores the role of the author. audience demand doesn't force an author's hands to write... that's a decision that the author made. we could've lived with nothing at all.

and conflict comes in many flavors. some stories hardly have any conflict at all. the whole iyashikei genre exists, like, I think we're well past understanding that cynicism, tragedy, and destruction are not the only forces that can drive a narrative. "conflict" is not the only reason for a story to be told. once again, stories tell us as much about the author as their audience. the kind of story an author deems worthy of telling is just as relevant to consider as the kind of story an audience deems worthy of attention.

and even in conflict driven stories... it matters what the conflict is, who wins, how, and why. as a simple example, when the conflict is a battle between good and evil, good wins, it does so by way of the power of friendship, and the reason it is presented this way is to promote the idea that you should be kind and help others... that's a story with a purpose. obviously this is like, children's cartoon level simple, and a story can be written to say different or more complex things, but I should always be able to ask those questions and come up with an answer.

if, as an author, Hussie wanted to accuse his audience of being culpable in the suffering of his characters, he would at least have to present the reader with a meaningful choice. and at first glance, it would almost seem like he did. meat and candy, even by their naming convention, seem as though they are giving you the option to consume a light or dark tale. but even in the names, there is a seed of judgement. Hussie has described the concept of a narrative containing both "meat" and "candy" in terms of story content, wherein meat is anything heavy in terms of plot or drama, and candy is anything that provides levity as a counterbalance, such as jokes or feel good fluff. these categories are already identified as "substance" vs. "a lack of substance" which places value on the cynical, dark route as being more truthful... conflating cynicism with realism.

and already I can see making a case for the idea that neither route is legitimate, because no story should subsist on just one or the other... both need to be at play for the story to be balanced. and you could even argue that the lampooning of the epilogues' legitimacy was the point... that they were supposed to be outside of canon and regarded as illegitimate all along. but then not only does that negate the author's ability to let the audience choose the kind of story they're participating in, but the story itself doesn't play by its own rules.

does candy truly read like some fluffy pandering fanservice filler, the way one might expect it to? and is meat totally devoid of any levity, while focusing only on plot machinations and/or the characters' dramatic downward spiral? I would argue that, even though the consensus seems to be that both routes are equally dismal, neither even gets dark enough to live up to that end of the bargain either. the execution is messy... the concept doesn't hold up.

and what of the initial concept? that the audience's observation of a story forces the characters to enact a conflict for the sake of our entertainment? is that really what's going on here? from the initial pitch, you could already tell that the answer was no. nobody asked for this. and so we cast our apparently destructive audience gaze onto Homestuck 2.

but there, we find another curveball. the story is... almost becoming self aware? in that it casts a character in the role of the author, and also identifies him firmly as the villain. but see, this is still a blame shift. and maybe that would've been less obvious if Andrew Hussie had not introduced himself as a character inside of his own web comic throughout the original narrative. the true author is already here.

the villain of homestuck was never the audience, and it was never a fictional character. if we're really shattering the 4th wall... if we're really ceasing our suspension of disbelief, pulling back the curtain, and acknowledging that these characters are fabricated, manipulated entities with real people behind the wheel, then there is only one conclusion we can possibly come to. the author has control over the narrative... no one else. and the things the author chooses to say with the platform they've made for themselves? those things are on them. what are we to understand about the author, as his audience?

this is why people are looking past the story entirely and engaging with the creative team, for better or for worse. if you break your story enough, it won't work anymore. and when the audience finds it in shambles, completely unusable as a story... you know, the thing it was intended to be? they might actually look to the people who broke it and ask them why they did that. it was a nice story. it performed several functions that people actually enjoyed. was dismantling it like this really the most fulfilling thing they could've done with it?

and I'll tell you another thing. part of why people take it so personally is because, just like how Andrew Hussie, the homestuck character, was a stand-in for Andrew Hussie, the human being... many of the characters in homestuck were stand-ins for us. John Egbert was for people who had an obsessive nerdy interest in movies, Rose was for people who wrote fanfiction, Nepeta was for people who ship characters a lot, she and Terezi were for people who RP, and also... Dave was for people who were trying to act cooler than they felt, Jade was for people who were lonely, Kanaya was for people who wanted to help people and be accepted, Vriska was for people who were hard to love and felt judged for that.

who do these writers think they're messing with?

and I just want to make it clear that I'm not condoning any kind of harassment of them, or anything like that. ultimately, my point here is that we are not our effigies. and in the same way that an author can't blame shift onto a fictional character, a person cannot claim the direction of a fictional story as a reason to do real harm.

but homestuck was always unique in that it spoke very directly to its audience. when Hussie added real pieces of us to his fake people, he had a powerful vehicle for the messages that he wanted us to hear. lots of stories have characters that are written to be relatable, but you'd be hard pressed to find ones that feel quite so specific as the cast of homestuck. to our era. to our humor. to the values of people growing up in our online cultural circumstances.

if this specific author is going to choose to act like a villain, at least in the small-scale context of this comic, then what is that setting us up to be? maybe nothing so presumptuous as a hero... maybe just like, Dave of Guy, y'know? but Dave made normal a pretty heroic thing to be... I think it's up to us to just be normal and have normal fun, in spite of the shit show. regular old homestuck already said all the valuable stuff it was gonna. for my part, I'm just gonna take that and run off with it. ignoring HS2 doesn't make it go away, but paying attention to it doesn't make it good either... so I guess whatever.

that's the themes. the themes are just a big "so what" shrug. most complicated way to say "who cares" I've ever seen.

This is a really good analysis

Saw someone from obvs d*sticule say they like the 'prequel' cuz its very much found family, its so weird to me like this obsession with found family and it being the criteria for them and how their entire spn viewing is based on it, like??? Do media right i guess, watch terrible tv for found family crumbs, jeez.