EPILOGUES: MEAT OR CANDY?

the first time i read the epilogues i was kind of taken aback at how extreme they were (even after knowing ahead of time what i was getting into) and respected them a lot but had trouble fully appreciating them since they were just plain miserable to read sometimes and the cutoff endings made them feel unfinished. now i absolutely love them (including the abrupt endings)! if i had to rank the four parts of homestuck, with the epilogues as a fifth part, i'd put them right in the middle. it's hard to top act 5 and the second half of act 6, but they hold up amazingly as a sequel to/extension of homestuck and beautifully pay off some of the stuff homestuck teased near its end but wasn't fully able to get into.

i definitely like candy more than meat, both are great but candy's depiction of the friend group's complete collapse and the existential/dissociative themes that come from john's pov really hit home for me! i love the broad scope it gives over multiple decades of the timeline, events just building up and tumbling over each other, things never stopping happening. when you look at how it started and how it ends, it feels like it's spiraled utterly out of control, but also weirdly inevitable? it's great stuff.

i also used the meat -> candy -> meat format when i first read them, it was fun but i don't think i'd call it the best way to read them. last time i read each side all in one go, and next time i'm planning on switching off every part. curious how watching them evolve side by side will effect things!

i like both, but i like candy slightly more

i do love the metanarrative fuckery of meat, especially dirks reveal (it's so good i still get goosebumps from it), but it goes off into another adventure (almost) right after the last one ended, with no retrospection on what they lived through

meanwhile candy stops and ponders my favorite question: you won. now what? how all characters process what happened, how they try to live "normal" lives, how society treats them, how they use their abilities in day-to-day routine, and how disagreements turn into planet-scale conflicts

+ i have to agree with karkat:

I finished reading the epilogues last night, and I read the meat->candy->meat way, and I really, really struggled to get through Candy. Much like when reading the original comic, there were parts that frustrated me so much that I had to put it down and stop reading for the rest of the day. But when I finally got back to Meat, I read the rest of it in a single sitting. Throughout the original comic I often complained to the friends who got me into it (hi Lyric & Margot) that I wished there was more meat to the story generally, that I felt frustrated that the main plot kept happening off-screen and most of what we got were frivolous asides and bullshit, so to have the story so neatly divided into the Plot section and the Frivolous Asides And Bullshit section was both interesting and frustrating.

Like, ideally, in a good story, you have a nice balance between Meat and Candy. Homestuck never quite seems to find that balance, imo. To the point that it literally unbalances itself on purpose in the epilogues. While I am compelled by the story and intend to keep reading into HS2/BC, I consistently find myself frustrated with some of the authorial decisions being made.

With all that out of the way: I love Meat. It was the first part of the whole story I can genuinely say I enjoyed all the way through, from start to finish. Dirk Strider I hate you you sonofabitch I'm gonna kill you. You homophobic fucking bitch.

My Homestuck reading order was something I am dubbing the Obama route and I did it on complete accident.

Read 2 pages of meat, with page being the one where Dave mentions the possibility of "Obamas secret sburb session" then ended up stopping my reading of the epilogues for a few weeks to sit with the original ending a little bit more.

During this period of time I had decided to read the Skaianet files which dropped the lore bombshell that Obama was Grandpa Harleys grandson and thus had to get to post scratch earth via meteor or other shenanigans. So I was like "Hopy shit the secret Obama session might be real".

Then I went back and read the rest of Candy (Imo the better of the two epilogues) and the fucking shock on my face when the Barack Obama lore drops from Hussie's shitty real person fic ended up being true? My mind was blown.

Anyway reading candy first(ish) was a fucking experience and a half, when I came out of it all I could think was "I will never read something like this again". I didn't even know if I liked it!!! (I know I like it now though). The way everything is warped by Johns perception of reality and his depression while all his friends grow up and seemingly make such stupid desisions while he is convinced he is the only one left normal. Except he isn't. He is just as screwed up as the rest of them but still holding onto the past. The Jake dance scene is one of the most incredible things I ever read, a literal beacon of hope after so many depressing and numbing pages of everything going to shit, the fact it follows up Vriska finally killing Gamzee, finally killing the closest thing left in this universe to her groomer, is poetic.

IMO, the epilogues are arguably Homestuck At Its Best. That's probably a controversial opinion, but I truly believe it. Maybe I'm just partial to Hussie's style of prose, but it's all really beautifully written.

My first time reading the epilogues I did a weird machete order, where I'd alternate between the two every chapter. As in, Prologue-->Meat1-->Candy1-->Meat2-->Candy2, etc. My second time through I read them Prologue-->Meat|Stop when Dirk tells you to|-->Candy-->Back to Meat. They were both incredible experiences all around, but I think the second is the proper way to read them. Reading Candy is much improved by having read the first bit of Meat, and reading the second half of Meat is much improved by reading Candy.

It's not really fair to discuss them separately, given how intertwined the narratives are, but if I had to pick one over the other I'd probably go with Meat. It hurts my Serket-Simping-Soul to not pick the one with Vriska in it, but I just adore Dirk's whole style. His irreverence and nonchalance towards everything is just really great, and I adore the Narrative tug-of-war between him and AltCalliope. (It also doesn't hurt that he's hot asf, but that's a conversation for another thread) The scenes between Rose and Dirk are some of the best I've ever seen, the DaveKat scenes are great, the JohnRezi scenes are great, Meat is just great in general.

Also, if we're including HS:BC in these discussions then I think Meat clears even more. Again it hurts to say that because I love the dynamic between the Vriskas, and I really adore both timelines, but my Strider Simpage might outweigh even my Serket Simpage.

The Epilogues is definitely, unambiguously my favourite part of Homestuck. I remember finishing the original run of Homestuck being like, a little disappointed. They fight and kill (? off screen) the big baddie, they all win and live happily ever after and I kinda just... shrugged. Ok, cool.

Then I read the Epilogues and it was just... really, really good. Definitely uncomfortable but absolutely amongst if not the best written part of Homestuck. It sort of confronted my issues with the ending really cleanly and is one of my favourite books ever.

agree with cyto. i read the epilogues right when they came out, when i was about .... seventeen? and i honestly don't think i was mature enough to Get Them. not that you can't be seventeen and mature enough to get the epilogues, just that i personally wasn't. i haaated them.

i reread them a couple years ago and i was like hey wait. these actually.... aren't that bad? they're good even? maybe even peak? which i'm glad about. i'm glad that i was able to get to that point of being able to enjoy and love the epilogues for what they are. there are definitely still parts that i don't like (some of the handling of jane, especially in meat, is still stuff i don't like, and the way callie's gender is talked about still ticks me off) but overall, i really like them.

candy is my favorite, though. nuclear family suburbhorror YAY. i especially like the very subtle (maybe unintentional?) themes of youthlib in some scenes. i'm pretty sure i read them as candy->meat the first time, but the second time i read them as candy->meat->candy.