The Homestuck Epilogues Appreciation thread (positive only)

I've never read them. I skipped acts 1-4, so I could get to the trolls, and then I finished act 5 act 1, and then stopped reading forever, because there were moments that weren't about the trolls.

i really appreciate how the epilogues expand on one of my favourite character, alternate calliope, a character that had very little screentime in the original comic. i'm also a cherub enjoyer and i love the new information that we get either directly or indirectly about the species from it.

I really liked the dichotomy of Meat and Candy along with the fight for the narrative

adore the epilogues!!! they're an absolutely amazing piece of art o(〃＾▽＾〃)o

super big shame not a lot of people have read them - and that most try to get others to never read them aswell :( makes me sad to see (┬┬﹏┬┬)

the epilogues felt like watching something i loved die

which is meant as positively as possible, I think it really delivered on what it wanted to do. both thematically and emotionally

re: Berry

I completely agree lol. The Epilogues are very effective at making you feel very weird about the direction things are taking, but in a way that's engagingly uncomfortable. I think my favorite scene is from Candy, when John tries to run away with Tavros during his birthday party and gets caught by everyone. It's such a good look into John's character in the Candy timeline, and it makes you feel really bad for Tavros.

I still don't know what to think about Gamzee, though. He sure was weird.

absolutely LOVE the meta aspects in meat. watching dirk & alt callie fight over narrative control was genuinely fun! on a similar note everything about epilogues dirk just makes me soooo miserable. in a good way. theres just so so much to explore about his character there and i really cant help going back and rereading both epilogues fairly frequently u_u the final paragraph of candy 14 haunts me. its just so good. i really do love candy even in its less palatable moments just because of how much there is, ironically, to chew on? its genuinely painful at times to read and the wrongness of really.. everything? within builds such an intense dread that i love so so much. honestly I don't think anything i say can get the point across as much as that karkat line from hsbc add1. they make me want to kill myself and i really do respect that

i LOVED the epilogues, i finished them in a mad frenzy the day they were released. one of the authors (v, i think? it's been a while) suggested reading candy first and it was So Worth It just for the experience to going from alt-calliope's monologue at the end of candy to the sudden change of the narration to dirk's text color in meat. i think i literally screamed.

(and also rose is my fav character so her having a prominent role in meat really made me happy :) )

I'm a newer fan, so when I finished Homestuck, I let the ideas marinate for about two weeks and then dove into the epilogues. As a longtime fic writer and general fan of the "homestuck self-aggrandizing metanarrative horseshit" situation, they were fantastic. My complaints are minimal, and plenty of scenes are standout. Besides, despite carrying bias against men, the Ultimate Self is such an interesting idea that I ended up really enjoying Dirk, and it recontextualized plenty of his scenes in Homestuck to be gripping to me as well (timaeus did, in fact, Testify).

June's character in Candy is especially compelling, doubly so when drawn against Meat. She's really externalized from Earth-C, and the mounting feeling of wrongness or needing to take action against a world that is so wholly a step to the left and wrong is just gripping. I love it.

re:Berry, you kind of nailed it on the head, in a way. I can immediately understand the issue some people have with the Epilogues, but reading them, I couldn't help but feel it was the best step forward for the story, and that anything placid or afraid to do rough things to the adults who weren't fully healed by/after Sburb would've been far, far worse.

I even like Yiffany Longstocking Lalonde-Harley. I know that's not technically an Epilogues thing, but the spirit of it is there.

I started out HATING the epilogues and started loving them after a few years when I reread them. Granted, I was like eighteen when I first read them, so.

I really love it. ESPECIALLY Candy. This complete deconstruction of suburbia white-picket-fence heterosexual-marriage-with-a-baby-on-the-way as the utopian ending validated so much of what I feel about growing up and about what's expected of you. And the idea of all of these characters backsliding meant a lot to me. Of course they're not better people. Of course in some cases they've actively gotten worse! That's part of what happens with trauma! And the metatextual elements of Meat, the tugging back and forth over the narrative, Dirk becoming a narrative to keep the story going because he's scared to not exist even if he won't say it. The imagery of Terezi with Egbert in a car at the end of the world, giving up on Vriska even as Vriska tries to reach her from across the time divide... it's really moving.

I will never understand how people say the characters are OOC in either Meat or Candy. They make perfect sense to me.