this is my last (and also first) stand as a proprietor of a homestuck forum. i have gathered every scholar from every mountaintop for the singular purpose of fixing the biggest, most glaring flaw in our understanding of terminology and taxonomy and meaning and love.
we really, really need to iron out the whole "canon" terminology thing because it's gotten really bad. i get that it's pretty harmless to people that aren't Active Readers or what have you, but it's made conversations between active readers actively(!) worse.
homestuck is meta. homestuck, since act 6, has introduced the idea of "canon" and "canonicity" as in-universe concepts. homestuck has obviously toyed with this idea a lot since then, and even outright defined with canon means, but if i were to pop quiz you on that, we'd all immediately be sent to hell. so, instead i'll skip the gist inside the gist and just get on with describing the terms we've already been using.
hopefully we can either retool them to suck a little less ass, or just agree on what they actually mean. (this is just my summary of the way canon is discussed by the text and by the fans, and isn't inherently "correct.")
canon: the actual text of homestuck, basically. everything contained within the comic, which by definition of being IN the comic, is inherently "true." not all of it is necessarily relevant (you can get by without knowing jack about the ancestors or the dancestors) but it's all "true information."
post-canon: riffing off of a pre-existing fanfic term for "what happens after the show ends," it means... basically that. since the "text" is over, anything afterwards isn't inherently true, so instead its canonicity is based off of how relevant/essential it is. basically, a sequel only matters as much as it sheds light on/carries the torch of the original. if it does it well, it's "true."
for those of you that skipped the book, the entire conflict of the epilogues is dirk trying to make a canon timeline (meat, where they actually circle back to homestuck 1, finish some plot points, and therefore become "essential, relevant, and true."), while the other timeline spirals off completely into fanfic nonsense (everyone gets heterosexually married and has kids and gets divorced, in circles, forever).
dubiously canon: so, this is where the problems start. this is another fandom term, usually referring to spin-offs and such. "is hiveswap canon to homestuck?" "uh, i don't know, it never comes up in the comic, so... maybe?" that's basically the gist of what this term is supposed to mean. is it true? does it matter? we don't know!
the tl;dr is that i think this term gets thrown around wayyyy too loosely by the fanbase, for a variety of reasons. like, i wouldn't consider post-canon to be dubiously canon. i also wouldn't even consider hiveswap to be dubiously canon? but when you introduce things like friendsim and pesterquest that obviously toy with the idea of "hey, does this matter, or are we just doing whatever the fuck?" i think that's when the term needs to be busted out.
because, ultimately, hiveswap is written with the intention of being a very canon prequel to homestuck, in the same way that the epilogues are a sequel, but then friendsim is like. somehow not canon to any of these things, and is just kinda doing whatever. now that's dubious. i am doubting that. and then tack on pesterquest, which is very clearly playing around with the idea of being completely noncanon but interacting with and around canon (up to and including the ending, i guess!), so now the term "dubiously canon" has been used to refer to, like, four things with completely varying relationships with the text and each other. which, i'll hand to you, is very dubious, but we can do better.
so, i offer upon you a task. a choice, even. come up with better, more specific terminology for this shit. you get to stand on the cutting edge of fandom discourse for the next however-many years. you gain no reward for this. the world doesn't get better. but i, specifically, will get less annoyed. do it for me. do it for we.
