Can I be real?

I think canon isn’t really mediated by audience at all, not in the way we would prefer it to be. If anybody could make their own true essential and relevant contribution to Homestuck, they would have already.

The most loadbearing weight in a work’s “canonicity” is the material pedestal that the work is put on, the pedestal that determines the work’s ultimate reach.

People wanna be the CEO of Homestuck for a reason, and that reason plain and simple is that the things Andrew Hussie talks about and endorses set the standard for Homestuck discussion fandom wide. Even the most powerful ubiquitous fandomisms of the 2012 era, like Octopimp, wither and die with time, but meanwhile we still have to call Toby Fox’s magnum opus fucking Oppa Toby Style, and this is because Oppa Toby Style is the title of a track on the officially owned Homestuck Bandcamp page and “weh” does not appear in any Hussie endorsed Homestuck text.

Calling the Epilogues and HS2 dubiously canon is, to be completely honest, total and complete cope, because the simple fact that people feel so strongly about Jade’s dog penis to contest the validity that it even happened proves it *did* happen, that there is something to reject a basis to push back against in a way no happily ever after fanfiction for Jade could ever wield.

“Canon” is a fancy word for the parts of a work that can’t be meaningfully dismissed in relation to a work. I wouldn’t necessarily say every single “official” sequel to a work is Canon per say (after all, whens the last time you’ve heard somebody talk about Little Mermaid 2), but official channels simply by virtue of their size carry first pick on what is and is not “canon” to a work simply because they will always have the biggest megaphone to use.