I've been reading Act 6 as it rereleases since I've never reread that half. As I think most people would agree it's the more difficult half of Homestuck, that pivots from the tight meticulous manipulation of an intricate number of moving parts over the course of one day to a more experimental, meandering and self-reflexive story; it's also the act where real life issues started to affect the comic's production as it went on. There's also less academic resources on it; the first big HS commentary project (you know that one) did not reach that far, and Hussie's official book commentary also did not reach it. I am absolutely not a hater of it but there's definitely stuff in it I hadn't grasped the point of back when it was being released live.
On the reread, so far it's great stuff, advancing all kinds of weird subconscious ideas of narrative through juxtaposition of disparate scenes, to the point that it demands a scene-by-scene commentary... but I don't really have anywhere to post that kind of thing that would garner any audience. Still, I was surprised at how coherent and tight a thematic narrative Act 6 Intermission 3 was, so I wanted to write a little bit about it.
I was a bit surprised to see a few quotes from Hussie in the recent discord q+a:
Even the Beforans in the story were never meant to be shown originally, but The People similarly forced the issue back then, but through a less orderly process.
I can't think of much I wanted to put into Homestuck but didn't, but can think of a bunch of things I didn't want to put in, but did, and a bunch of things I did want to put in, did put in, but shouldn't have.
The suggestion seems to be that certain parts of Homestuck, such as probably the Openbound games, are things that AH did not want to put in, yet was somehow forced to. Which is kind of striking because back then from the news posts and stuff it seemed like Andrew was doing exactly what they wanted to do, not making exactly what the fans thought they wanted. What does this mean? I think the questions this raises are built in to the metatext surrounding all of A6I3, and to a certain extent A6A3 as well.
At the end of A6I2, Andrew Hussie (character) is killed, and in A6A3 the Cherubs begin to take center stage more and more. The reader is no longer framed as "being" Jane etc., but as selecting each kid's perspective to be viewed from a computer by the cherubs; the outcomes of some of these perspectives are not shown directly but drawn by Caliborn. And in the end, it is Caliborn who has the EOA flash. A6A3 is also where the conceptualization of narrative content as "meat and candy" is first used, something which I think nobody picked up on until the Epilogues. And both times it is positioned as an alternative to pumpkins; Jack(!) and Caliborn both refuse to eat pumpkins because they prefer meat and candy only. So as soon as Andrew dies, the readers (Cherubs) begin warping the story around them, and motifs relating to their desires begin to show up in the comic.
A6I3 ramps this up to an extreme, with the entire sequence of Beforan games being a manifestation of fandom desire, with Andrew's own ghost being a constant presence. With the author's death constantly hanging over everything, we are forced to confront repeatedly that he cannot be writing the story - in fact, he seems to outright be unaware of the lore that is cropping up in his absence. He calls Cronus "Eridan", Meenah "Feferi", thinks that Damara is the same person as the post-scratch Damara he rescued. Andrew is here a stagnant ghost in the exact same way as all the charicaturic and stagnant dead teen trolls, who cannot truly move beyond his point of death even as the narrative continues on its own at the whims of the fandom. Meenah, in fact, compares him to a pumpkin, calling attention to the existant visual similarity with the orange skin and green shirt. So if a pumpkin narrative is a balanced "healthy" narrative, and candy and meat are extremes of fandom cravings, Andrew's death is the death of the ability for this to be a pumpkin narrative at all. This is not a narrative that consists of things Andrew Hussie wants - this is the pure whims of Cherubic desire. This is highlighted strikingly by the fact that the Ministrife, a complete overload of troll fandom 1-dimensional-character beats coallescing in an enormous pile, ends with Calliope's self-insert version of the scene (which is immediately modified again by Caliborn), which then transitions to Calliope's self-insert version of the John scene that ends the Intermission. The message is blatant: this is what Homestuck is now, because it is A Cherub Joint.
And many other scenes in the Intermission have text that alludes to these ideas being developed, creating a throughline via Act 6's favorite, juxtaposition. Tavros compares Vriska to Aranea here, but in doing so is clearly commenting on the very idea of showing all the Beforan trolls:
tHE ART OF SAYING OPTIMAL TALES BY MY UNDERSTANDING, iS TO CHARGE THROUGH ALL CONCEIVABLE DETAILS AND EXCESSIVE MINUTIA, uNTIL THEY ARE EXHAUSTED COMPLETELY, mUCH LIKE IT IS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, aND EXTRANEOUS INFORMATION IS TREATED LIKE THE RELIGIOUS WORDS YOU SAY OVER AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL BRAIN PEACE HAPPENS,
So when Andrew years later talks about their hand being forced, that's not a later-formed regret or anything (indeed they say elsewhere they wouldn't change a single thing) - the Intermission itself was already commenting on how inadvisable an idea it was, despite simultaneously fully committing to the bit.
This sense of "the author's resignation to forces beyond their control" is also echoed by Rose later in the Intermission.
Men have crefted many stories that are bullshit out of symbols risen from the abyss of coinsciousness withou necesharily knowing whath e fuck they were doing or saying, as they flounered around for some truth. Bust in spite of themseleves they would for howefer briefly cross through a ray of light regarless. Becuss of the sbymbols. Dave.. The symbols hol dall the power.
I think most people are already aware of this being a theme in Homestuck, of course - we first see it when we see Andrew with a Vriska mind-control bubble over his head, suggesting that maybe Vriska just mind-controlled AH into writing her do those things all along. That is then escalated to Doc Scratch taking over as narrator and then to LE killing AH once and for all. (And then made the most elegant of all by Psycholonials pretty strongly implying Homestuck was written irl by a clown god, but that's another topic.) (Also it's in Deltarune but that's even more off-topic.) But it specifically coming up here just makes it more obvious that this is when AH started fully leaning into that on purpose on every narrative level, and seeing what happens. (You could say the point when AH became fully conscious that this was a hypersigil, if you know what that means.)
Excited to see how this develops, because I truly do not remember how that whole Aranea thing goes or why.
