Yeah, I think it's a fair point.

There's a lot of problems regarding this with The Homestuck Epilogues indeed - people endlessly participate in Epilogues discourses without reading the Epilogues.

I think one of the roots of the issue is the human brain is an amazing tool to instinctively connect dots and simulate things, so if we're reading enough about a story, we assume we do know the work, that our knowledge of it is equivalent to our knowledge of its main plot points. And that's a fair assumption to make! But we need to remind ourselves it is NOT the reality of the work.

Gonna quote a post I made in the AVPG forum:

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Oasis Nadrama - 25 November 2024

You should really get back to watching movies instead of pseudo-watching them through social capillarity.

I mean, I get it - I never watched the Star Wars postlogy yet I "watched" every minute of it because some properties are just this omnipresent and inescapable in the current social and cultural landscape. And I definitely don't feel the need to discover it now. (Hell, if anything, I feel even LESS interested in them now than I was before learning everything about them.)
But I fight against the illusion I truly know these works, because I DON'T. I didn't watch them. An audiovisual piece is more than a succession of story ideas.

But you could have liked Alien: Romulus. Or even loved it. Or hated it. Or found it boring. You never know. You never truly know how you'll relate to a given work. The other day I tried an old survival horror I heard much about, I was sure I was going to get bored to death, and it just CAUGHT ME, I fell in love with the game, and it was just a nice surprise and a good experience despite all of the game's weaknesses.
You never know how works of art will speak to your soul.

Pre-discovery communication is a bane on the audience's heart, it conditions and poisons all of our expectations.

And it is intellectually dishonest to become convinced you truly know the work and produce the most relevant commentary on it without watching it.
I mean, sure, some of your participation to the discussion will be relevant. But you don't know how the movie is articulated, how ideas relate to dialogue and to composition and to the duration of the shots and to the soundtrack, etc etc. Every work of art is a precise chemistry, it doesn't start and end with a story structure or even a screenplay.

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