I definitely appreciate the context of viewing characters as "parts of a whole" that are able to be different based on their surroundings, but when it comes to Jane that feels like it becomes 10x harder to achieve. Her and Jake have a real, canon and living and breathing child together now and the process in which she got pregnant with that child is *very* harrowing.

I can't exactly see how the context of that story will ever be grappled with in a satisfying way, especially for Jane from Meat.

I want to be wrong so bad, because I *loved* that Homestuck presented alternative versions of characters and gave them "Second chances" so to speak, but I think one of the fundamental differences between how it handles this now and how it handled it then was that a character like Bro, while abusive towards Dave and definitely a version of Dirk, was never shown in any similar way to Dirk, he was a faceless guardian and had almost no dialogue to ascribe to him. Instead, Dirk is given to us as an introspection behind that faceless persona, not the other way around.

In Jane's case, we're given two versions of Jane that both have very equal parts of dialogue now and the only reason one hasn't done the horrendous things the other version did is because of what seems to be a retcon by some third party. (I assume so, at least. We're not entirely clear on what exactly happened.)

Candy Jane doesn't feel like a faceless woman who gets extrapolated on by Meat Jane; Candy Jane feels like a continuation of *the* Jane we grew to love in Homestuck; taken down a very dark path. I don't really understand why she was placed in that position for the story. I can only assume it was because of an external commentary around growing fascist complacency in America and the rest of the world, hence her emulation of Conservative groups; but this felt like an unfair hammer to swing in her direction when the story ended wholesale on her being given 2 Nanna's to help her prosper.

In this sense, I guess I'm sad that Jane's character was sacrificed in service of a meta narrative.

Does that make sense?