Yeah, pretty much everyone I've ever talked to before the epilogue dropped didn't want pointless fluff. They did want a happy end, but one that was worked for and earned. I'm gonna copy paste some shit from Drone Season chat: Whether or not the message was intentional, that's the message that was received by a lot of people. And if a huge chunk of your audience got a completely unintentional message, well. You should maybe think about looking into why that is.
It seems a little... Entitled, I guess, to feel slighted when a character you like draws the short end of the stick? The natural extension to that is "nothing bad should ever happen to anyone that isn't a very obviously stereotyped villain" which seems like a pretty untenable way to run a story, honestly.
i don't think that's a natural extension of people going 'i want to see a mentally ill or abused or traumatized character do better, get better, because i never see characters like that do anything but suffer and hurt people and die, and i thought that might happen and then the author yanked the rug out under me and i hit my head on everything being the same depressing nihilistic shit as always.'
Some are. Not all. (And please don't try to NUH UH me on this one; I'm An Old, I've met an awful lot of people in my life.) Bit of slippery slope fallacy, there! No, that's not a "natural extension" of being hurt when a favorite character turns out in a way one doesn't like, that's just straight up being childish. What is with all this reductive nonsense? It's not smart or clever, it's just snotty. Be better than this, you two.
(I mean, dirk's actually lot more affirmative once roxy switches to he/him rather than they/them, so even if that was a thing gay men always or often did - which it isn't - it isn't the case for him in particular in this instance)
What other conclusion is there to draw other than that they want nothing bad to happen to a character that someone could like? Also, I'd kindly ask you to drop the patronizing "be better than this" thing, thanks.
My upset with the epilogues is mostly due to the fact that I do not often get to see characters like me doing things in cool fantasy stories where they get to be the good guys and get to get better. While the story is also openly addressing how the fact that we are mentally ill due to trauma often ends up with us hurting other people. So I saw lots of characters that I related to and liked and I had lots of concepts that I related to and I liked and I had the hope that maybe, just maybe, we'd be allowed to get better for once. That we would be allowed a happy ending. This was not the case. This is hardly ever the fucking case. So I am back to having Kencyrath and...Kencyrath, honestly. Like the more I go back and think about the actuality of Homestuck never had exactly what I wanted and the only thing that fucking does is this one fucking book series. One book series out of hundreds of thousands of things I have seen has portrayed me as me and told me that I can get better even if it hurts a lot and I still get to have a magical sword and be a cool mythic hero who saves the world from a world devouring evil. Spoiler: Putting this under spoilers because suicidal ideation comes up The epilogues and the way they handle, say, Vriska or Dirk or the concept of redemption arcs and people getting better honestly made me feel like there was no point in life. At all. Like I might as well just get it over with now because I am ultimately going to just end up like that. This is why I made the post I did warning people to maybe look up spoilers of the epilogues before reading them. Not because I think they are evil or because the enjoyment people are getting out of them is bad. But because there are people like me out there who would react as strongly as I did to them and I really didn't want someone else to read the fucking things and genuinely want to kill themselves. Because I genuinely wanted to kill myself after reading them. And I'm allowed to be fucking upset with the god damned things and hate the fucking things because of that. That is my right. I do not need to bow to the idea that they're good and that I just don't get it. 'Just don't get it' is the coward's way out of people criticizing your story. Please stop patronizing people. It's rude and honestly just likely to piss people off more. So it'd probably just result in more of what you don't want to see.
Also agreeing on the whole it hurting in part because the characters feel like family thing. Though for me it is also part of...the characters feel like part of a personal meaning making mythology for me. They have actual magical, mythic significance to me. Granted that is also part of why I can just go 'Eh, the epilogues aren't part of my canon' and move on. Since I can basically just treat it like a myth I didn't particularly care for.
Wow ok. No. There's a big ass difference between overcoming hardship, having disagreements with others and learning about ramifications of troll biology, and becoming Trump 2.0. I agree with Lizardlicks that Hussie and the writing crew see the characters more as devices than characters, what with Jade getting possessed AGAIN, Karkat mirroring the Signless' uprising, Dirk and Calliope and the metanarrative, etc. Hometuck became a character driven story around act 4/5 and now it feels like a slide back to a plot driven story. Also, it's not like Trump is all that popular on this forum or elsewhere. I think it's reasonable for me to be upset that Jane seems remarkably unreedemable.
Jane's childhood inspirations were Ron Swanson and the condesce, this didn't feel completely out of left field for me. I don't think it's inevitable that she turns out this way but the danger was always there, especially with Dirk's influence. I do wonder what the nannasprites would have thought about all this, though. I really can't imagine they'd be pleased. Too bad they didn't seem to make it to earth c?
...i'm unclear on what you think ron swanson's influence had to do with it, given that one of his big character traits is that he thinks government inevitably leads to authoritarianism or waste and is, in fact, only in a government position so that he can try and slow it down as much as possible?
Dingdingding, we have a winner, or at least I do. The problem isn't conflict. The problem isn't that the characters continue to fight their inner demons and deal with universe-threatening villains. The problem is that it feels like some of the characters get fucking dumped in the garbage. Even the whole Dirk situation isn't entirely bad, and it's okay to see a major character become the new antagonist. Hell, Vriska is my favorite character, but she was one of the major antagonists of Act 5. But they kinda go overboard with it. The sheer amount of shit that I've heard happens in the epilogues (which I still haven't read) sounds depressing as hell. Ultimately, what I personally would want is for everyone to struggle, fight, have interpersonal conflicts due to all their respective problems, and then get better. They don't have to be perfect, but they can improve. Like Vriska, Roxy, and Dirk did before, for example.
An attitude often linked with a preference towards corporate deregulation and giving more power to people who have enough accumulated personal wealth to buy their own cops, roads and firemen. Is what I think the link is.
I mean, you're right. Some horrible, corrupted fusion of that and the condesce, weighted more heavily of the condesces side was what I was seeing
karkat being pissed off about his shitty polyamorous relationship and running off to go be a revolutionary is literally iconic and completely unproblematic on a meta and narrative level and you can’t change my mind. iconic. actually both of karkat’s routes are iconic. the literal heart of homestuck cannot be harmed i need karkat obama HOPE posters stat
point the first not to be "nuh-uh, you started it" but ... you fucking started it. neither karrinblue nor i want "uwu nothing bad ever happens to our faves ever" (and iirc we were the first to respond to this). you were the one who put those words in our mouths and have since refused to listen to us, seeing as you are still arguing against a strawman that neither of us put forth when we disagreed with you as aon said: point the second sure, fine, feeling that way could be entitled. it's not feeling slighted that a character i liked drew the short end of the stick - for the record, while i like dirk, i actually also like how he became the metanarrative villain. it's not what i wanted for him, but it wasn't actually surprising to me, and not something i found hurtful. jane? i actually genuinely dislike jane. her and jake both. the only alpha kids i like are dirk and roxy. i'm still significantly upset about what happened to them, because the issue i have with what happened to them has nothing to do with whether or not i like them. this might very well be the position of other people but it's not mine and i'm annoyed that you are dismissing my complaints with what happened as this, because quite frankly? calling it entitled, and calling it a day, is a lazy way of debating it, and your acting like it's the position that defines every person ever who's unhappy with the epilogues is rude and insulting. point the third no, i think the fuck not. this is a lazy and childish argument. you aren't engaging with anything that's been said. because that idea was refuted in very first fucking post responding to you. i don't know, try using some critical thinking skills. point the fourth my actual primary reason for being distressed by the epilogues? the rest of aon's post is also good, but this is the meat of it. an important part of getting better, when you've hurt people and you're hurting yourself, is being able to believe that you can get better. my very first read of the epilogues is that it's saying that abuse is an endless cycle, that we're trapped by our traumas to recreate them and inflict them on the future, that there is no breaking the cycle, there is no real healing, there is no such thing as "getting better." i am not alone in this read of it. i like other interpretations that i've seen - i can see, on subsequent read throughs, where the evidence for them is. it's not that i want "uwu nothing bad ever happens" or whatever. i want there to be a future. i want to see these characters get hurt, be hurt, hurt each other - and i want them to get better. i want to see a world where trying matters, where this is hope, where things can be fucked up and painful and awful, but that you can earn that fucking "happy ending." it doesn't even need to be overly saccharine fluff, that's not my style. i just want an ending where they heal, and where they don't inflict their own hurts on the future. that was it. it doesn't even have to be all of them, i like metanarrative villain dirk. i guess for me, it's very hogfather in nature. the speech death gives? about how none of our morals or beliefs about fairness or justice or whatever are real, but that by believing in them, we make them real. and that's what i wanted from homestuck - fantasy about how all those good things matter, that we can heal, so i can make that real. and i don't need homestuck to have done that, but homestuck is important to me, and the epilogues, on my first read through, felt like an intentional fuck you and deconstruction of that and that hurt. i don't like jane, for the same reasons i never liked feferi, and i loved how the parallels between jane and feferi were drawn, and i wasn't like "surprised," really, by the direction jane took. i was disappointed because i wanted her to be better, and i was hurt because it felt like the epilogues were saying that doing that, recreating the evils you yourself have lived through, is inevitable.
sorry what is this argument about? i’m dumb and can’t read, please explain to me how to read in more posts please
I agree with this. (I also wonder if the tiaratop had any lasting influences?) I feel like the characters in the epilogue aren't necessarily the way they'd inevitably turn out, but ways they could turn out in particular circumstances, which in Jane and Dirk's cases (for example) are failure states. I agree with this, also. Maybe not... more than they seem them as characters, but with how Homestuck is very much a story about stories, it feels like denying the personhood of certain characters to make them drive them plot is a big part of the story. Like, the point is that they're used by the story-as-a-character as plot devices. I love it from a meta standpoint, but I really don't love that it's come at the cost of characters that are dear to me. Which is why I've pilfered them to file off the serial numbers and give them a better home. *cough*
