EPILOGUES: MEAT OR CANDY?

trick question. one cannot exist without the other and a piece of the other can be found in the one (hears a katana blade swooshing towards the back of my head) But in the spirit of cooperation, I pick Meat.

I really love the epilogues and hold that they're the best part of Homestuck full stop. I'm a big fan of both but Candy is kind of a miserable mess, which i love about it but!! The parts of the epilogues i go back to are usually Meat. I love the meta stuff happening there and I feel like there's a lot of plot to digest. However, I can't deny that Candy has some of the hardest hitting emotional moments in the whole series.

While I liked both, I definitely liked Candy more. I do not like happy endings, especially after the events of stories like Homestuck. SBURB is something that is going to stick with you through your entire life, and seeing that the impact it had on everybody didn't magically go away, especially with the beta kids felt like the perfect ending to the story to me.

for the epilogues specifically, i think candy is like. one of the most successful things andrew has written. first read makes you feel like you're dying. second read makes you feel like you're dying. the prose is genuinely really, really good. but for hsbc I'm definitely a meat guy.

candy is like quite literally made for me as i am now. ah yes the positioning of nuclear family heterosexuality as the ideal happy ever after is the horror!!!!

to be frank I don't know if I even remember the differences in events between the two. maybe in part because of my enlightened mind that absorbed them as part of one greater ultimate narrative but also in part cus I haven't read them since 2019 and I really need to reread

Its been a while but I remember when I first read them I was like "oh these are good but definitely not for everyone so I'll advise caution to anyone I think might not like them" before *everything* happened

as for which I liked more I think I have to give the edge to candy. Meat very much tried to be no nonsense plot, the reveal of dirk as narrator was interesting, and I enjoyed the junerezi scene followed by the cliffhanger that hs2 picked up on, but I feel like candy was really able to dig into the characters and pull out bits I hadn't really grappled with or considered up to that point. Had more for me personally to grapple with, also the setting being more turbulent than the one in meat had me more interested.

All in all though the epilogues as a whole I think were good and turned me on to some characters I hadn't quite been seeing the appeal of until then.

i go back and forth, and all i can definitively say is that candy is an easier read. meat isn't hard per se, but its so heavy and the later stuff with john and terezi, as well as kanaya's realization that she was duped was in my opinion really emotional. i actually just finished reading them for the first time and it felt stupid but alpha john dying made me pretty fucking sad after 11 years of reading all this bs. candy was lighter, as the name would imply, and had more internal plot movement, whereas lots of meat felt like oh god what is dirk going to do and eventually you realize oh this isn't going to even happen until HSBC. candy obviously doesn't end with a definitive conclusion but there are more arcs and self contained (appropriately) things going on that make it a bit easier to follow.

Candy tends to be my preference, but the entwined nature of things makes a lot of things hit harder. I've been talking about Roxy's gender crossroads since my first read, and that is a transition narrative that you don't really see: that there's not one single right way to be happy.

I enjoyed them both by virtue of getting more Homestuck (one of my special interests and comfort fandom) at a time when things were a bit uncertain for me; so, I can't really pick a fave. Both were good in their own ways. I just remember being like "where's the rest of it?" after finishing both. I read left to right so I started with meat then read candy iirc.

i genuinely like the epilogues, tho i can understand why a lot of people dont
its definitely a toneshift but several of the concepts introduced/elaborated on just tickle my brain in exactly the right way

i dont quite remember which one i started with, i think it was candy
i also cant really compare which one of them id like better bc they both feel so very different

i like candy for having more character interaction both bc more characters live and also bc they are all together
i like meat bc i do like the destitude and i did also really like the reveal of the narrative fuckery

bc it was so very noticable that something was off

candy of course is also off but in a different way, which of course is intended
i will say tho i am not mad about gamzee not being in meat

Candy stuck in my mind more. I liked having new characters from the next generation. A lot of people have trouble with how the Candy crew failed so hard at adult life, but frankly? Relateable. Meat had more fun SF stuff in it, but on the downside I got REALLY sick of the sound of Dirk's voice.

I read Meat first, and I stand by my belief that doing so is in some sense optimal; a lot of what makes Candy tick feels like payoff for threads established in Meat. (Obama Ex Machina in particular follows up a gag from Meat that I don't remember having any presence in Candy in otherwise, though I could be misremembering.)

As for my route preference, while denpa is cool and all, Meat's high-concept action is so completely and utterly My Shit that I ultimately end up vibing with it more than I do with base Homestuck. I would read an entire adventure hinging exclusively on the narration-battle mechanics. (inb4 "but Ruki, that already exists, that's just Umineko!") Candy is, of course, also cool and I am always a fan of extreme mental breakdowns, but my favorite single page of Homestuck in general is Meat 32.

I have slightly complicated feelings on the Epilogues because my preference of which is "better" depends on whether we're talking about the Epilogues themselves, the follow-through in HS^2, or the new management shit on BC. I'm of the opinion that the Candy Epilogues were really fucking boring and slow, but translated incredibly well into the webcomic format on the switch to HS^2, while the Meat Epilogues were amazing as written text but translated very poorly to the webcomic format. As of BC I think I still prefer Candy currently, but as a whole, I think Meat was the better Epilogue and I enjoyed reading it a million times more than I enjoyed reading the Candy Epilogues.

I do think both have their strengths and weaknesses, but I did find Meat more enjoyable to read. Some of the later stuff on the ship remined me a lot of meteorstuck which was one of my favorite parts of the original comic.

this is tough!!!! meat gets enormous credit for me for the absolutely insane reveal + implementation of characters as narrators (ESPECIALLY the aliope and dirk fight via jade LMAO), but candy is so hysterically bleak, and so artfully crafted to be miserable... and that final conversation between roxy and egbert is my favourite individual chapter by far.

ahh it's like choosing between my two kids!! my two evil ass cognitohazard kids...

i THINK right now i'd pick meat. there's just so many iconic Dirk Moments™ and it does such a fantastic job at demonstrating the importance + relevance of constantly asking the question 'who is telling this story?'. like that bit where dirk starts talking in his text colour + stops pretending to be the subjects he's describing, and egbert IMMEDIATELY becomes dazed and confused, feeling like his thoughts are no longer his own and don't make sense? gah, so good.

that being said, the storyline with the cycles of abuse + familial neglect being told in the candy timeline in hs:bc is currently my favourite of the ongoing ones. super compelling for me in every way. i would kill for yiffy.

does that make my answer 'both'? what a copout lol. in short, meat for just the epilogues, and candy for hs^2 :)

reviving this. i somewhat accidentally read the epilogues in what I like to call the "rose lalonde way." I started meat, and then switched over to reading all of candy at That Point With Rose, and then went back and finished all of meat. I don't think I could really separate the two as a result, as I read candy as part of meat. I also, like lyrichartwell, think the epilogues are just fucking incredible and probably the best part of homestuck, and I've felt that way since they first dropped.

candy kind of broke my brain a bit because I went into it with some pretty heavy preconceptions that got played with fantastically. I was fully on board the june train, what she was thinking just made Sense to me, and it actually took a few years for me to fully process and accept the counterargument. really fantastic stuff, so if I had to choose one I'd probably go with candy.

I read them the same meat->candy->meat way! never considered that this might have been what contributed to my difficulties separating them years later haha... I would still totally recommend others try it though

i also read the meat->candy->meat way, i wonder how common that is? i got into homestuck about a year or two after the epilogues released, so i google searched what the recommended reading order was and the first result was that method, so i just went with it because it sounded like a fun way of reading them. logically i guess it would make a lot more sense for someone going in blind to just read one all the way through and then move on to the other, but i wonder how many people reached that point in meat and actually stopped and deliberated if they should continue meat or switch over to candy?

candy is my favorite just because of all the characters and how they devolve over time are so interesting, and it ironically feels like it has more meat to it than Meat does.