oh god you're so right. this is a fucking nightmare. please boil me in oil now, for my transgressions against punctuation, amen and thank you God. let's see if i can finish my thought without fucking things up even worse somehow:

the most common problems people have with the dancestors (primarily "they suck!" or "they're so cool but why not more!") stem from the exact same problems people have historically had with the alpha kids, which is that they don't fully Get that these are just alternate timeline kid versions of characters we already knew from way earlier in the comic. okay, they GET that, but they don't get that an alternate timeline kid version of you is still You. it's not a fundamentally different person. obviously there's a degree of philosophising to be done about what makes a "person" and what constitutes a "different" one, but within Homestuck the point is made pretty clear that alternate timelines should be thought of as extensions of, not deviations from, the alpha. Dirk's personality is an elaboration on what we already knew about Dave's Bro. Jake is a more intimate look into the psyche of Jade's previously enigmatic grandfather. good GOD, is Roxy's arc a continuation of everything we'd come to learn about Rose's Mom...

the Beforans come into this phenomenon at a disadvantage, because we obviously knew a lot less about the Signless and the Disciple after Act 5 than we did after four Acts of John's Nanna. but this leads into what is a secondary but still loadbearing precept to understanding the Point of Openbound, which is that these characters exist to offer insight into the main characters of the story!! to understand why Latula exists at all, you naturally have to take a step back and figure out first why Redglare was ever introduced, and the answer to that, clearly, is to provide a cultural context for Terezi to exist within. to appreciate how the institution of legislaceration shapes Terezi as a person we must have some context for what the institution of legislaceration actually entails, and as such Latula (in all her shapes) must be understood as an extension of Terezi. Aranea is the most overt possible example of this, since Vriska is the troll who is most overtly shaped by her ancestor: in as much as Homestuck is a story about the way adults shape children's lives, exploring what Aranea was like as a teen is just as necessary to understanding Vriska's childhood as Dirk is to Dave's. once you can recognise that it's no coincidence Aranea is the most influential dancestor, you should be able to start figuring out why none of the other dancestors are "coincidences" either.

drives me up the wall when I'm trying to talk about Homestuck's feminist themes re: the trolls (if you know me you know I am trying to talk about this literally every day of the week and year) and referring back to Porrim's statements about the purple-down patriarchy and the other guy hits me with a "well that's just how it worked on Beforus so it doesn't actually apply to Alternia". it's like, what do you think was the author's purpose in including Porrim as a character, or giving her that particular line of dialogue! what do you think was the intention behind including Beforus in the comic at all ?! it all exists for the purpose of elaborating on what has come before! that's how everything works - not just in Homestuck, but in storytelling in general. these are not literal events to be interpreted as the history of a real planet that exists somewhere out in the cosmos, they're a conversation between author and audience, and you got damn beeswax in your ears..........

(CONTINUING ON FROM THE ASTERISK IN MY FIRST POST THIS TIME):

*for a given value of "caring". I don't think Homestuck actually wants you to care about the dancestors all that much, and the fact that people THINK Homestuck wanted us to care about them is another part of the problem. but this requires the reader to understand that we also weren't supposed to "care" all that much about more than 50% of the Alternian trolls, which is a difficult sell to all the Nepeta Boosters and Eridan Stans of the world. I'm sorry.