re: alexis

Totally agree. I feel very strangely about the way that people are very insistent that anything that they don't like in a story is out of character, especially when it comes to Homestuck1 (? I guess?). Like how can it be out of character? The author wrote it! On purpose! The author created the character! Maybe it's more that you, as a fan, created a persona or a version of this character in your head and then got disappointed that it didn't turn out to be real.

Some of the best parts of Homestuck flat out would not exist if Hussie had been focused on doing what the fans wanted. Some of Hussie's earliest fans were people who came from Problem Sleuth and their other work, some of whom were almost certainly disappointed when the story turned out to be very different from their other work. That doesn't mean that everything past, say, act 2 is out of character, or that Hussie hated those early fans. And yet there are still people out there saying that everything past Game Over was an asspull and was written out of spite or just because Hussie wanted to be done with Homestuck.

The epilogues are certainly a bridge, or an offramp- Hussie makes that clear- but I don't think that it's malicious. I think it is a sincere meditation on what it means to be an epilogue, and in Candy especially it does a lot to interrogate the positioning of suburban picket fences as utopian happy ending. I find it genuinely moving, and the idea that it's a fuck-you to Homestuck fandom paints Homestuck fandom as a monolith with the same opinions, beliefs, and wants from the text.