The Land of Fields and Fog

ARE THERE INFINITELY MANY WHAT

Hey people, sort of a late post but I thought i’d share it here for the heck of it.

so, i see a lot of people are unhappy with jane in the epilogue. which makes sense, cause she is just like, a major bitch. and im not really gonna go in her relationship with jake dirk and roxy, cause like, thats out of my wheelhouse.

whats not out of my wheelhouse though, is her being a fascist. Ive seen some people be surprised that jane is a fascist and a xenophobe, and the main question i have for those people is: why? Jane was constantly influenced by the condensce during her entire life, with subliminal messaging and propoganda being sent to her, the idea that that wouldnt have a lasting effect on jane is absolutly bonkers. 

the condensce, who by all account was fascist and xenophobic, obviously would also make her heir that. not to mention the fact that despite the fact the propoganda of the condensce got through to jane, she still hates trolls for the shit the condensce did to earth. thats obviously not a good thing and misguided, as the epilogue makes very clear, but it would make sense that she then turns all those believes shes probably acquired from over the years towards trolls.

that all being said, even though i think its perfectly in character, i dont like it very much and feel that jane couldve had a much more interesting and fullfilling arc had she confronted, with the help of dirk, dave and karkat (probably going like “karkat tells dave he cant stand her being a xenophobe, dave convicing dirk to talk to jane about it, and dirk and jane having a feelings jam over what the condensce did and jane starting the path of unlearning all the bullshit shes been fed). that would be a lot more interesting and honestly, just plain fun to read, cause seeing jane explicitly turn into a fascist isnt very fun, albeit accurate.

I’ve finally finished both halves now.  For the record, I read Candy first.

Also for the record, like many others, this epilogue stomped on all my feelings and ran them over with a steamroller before chucking their tattered remains into a burning pit filled with starving robotic badgers.  I have a separate word doc that is just the phrase “FUCK YOU DIRK” cut and pasted 1,377,459 times in coruscating rainbow shades.  @bladekindeyewear, whom I’ve followed for yonks, has some fantastic live blogs of both routes where he also varies the number of U’s in each separate utterance of FUCK YOU DIRK just to keep things interesting.  (See also his notes in the last post about his interpretation of the Meat postscript re: insulating fandom works from future canon threats.)

(Seriously, my condolences to anyone who loves Dirk ca. end of ACT 6 because now there are so many theories about What Went Wrong as regards Ultimate Selves and maybe we just want the Striders to get over their issues together.)

And the thing is I doubt I would have been nearly so invested in the outcome if both routes had not been impeccably executed.  I was drawn into the world immediately, not just textually but metatextually in classic Homestuck sense – my attention was often sent going up and down the levels of meaning but never jarred out of the fictional dream.  Dirk in Meat, and Gamzee in Candy, each compelled me to take multiple showers through the course of my reading, because EW.  And to yell at the screen almost continually for about the middle third of each route.  And most of the loose ends that I wanted to see tied up, were.  Hats off to @cephiedvariable and the other writers for being awesome.  I dunno.  Maybe I just like having my feelings stomped on and my brain put in a blender on “frappe”?

It’s an extremely painful read. If you care about the characters (and why would you still be here, if you don’t?) you will be hurt by this

It’s funny

It’s clever

It’s weird

Whatever you were expecting, this will surprise you in pleasant and unpleasant ways

To put this another way: this is as homestuck as it could possibly get and exactly the kind of epilogue, you would expect from a work like Homestuck

Now for the spoiler stuff

Now that I’ve finished Candy, I think it’s time to lay down my thoughts for sure. 

Candy and Meat together make Dirk’s suicide weird. From what I can tell, he’s been in control of the narrative a long time before the events of the Prologue. This isn’t something that he’s done just as we’re reading them happen; he’s been planning the events of Meat probably since the first time he pulled a blackout on everyone (which Jane mentions in Candy while she and Jake are getting drunk). He’s been aware of the narrative, its importance, and what he has to do, for a while. He’s been laying out plans and pulling the strings for three years. 

And then, suddenly, none of that matters. One decision made by John - by the sounds of it - cuts him out of the narrative entirely. He loses control, and he realises, quickly, that this isn’t a universe that will go well for him - worse, I think, is that he realises it’s a universe Calliope has complete control over, and he’s quick to get the fuck out before she shows up.“This world has been set on a path you cannot tread.” It’s like he’s regrouping, in a way; kill off the loose end, become part of the whole that is Dirk in Meat. 

It’s this series of paragraphs that presents itself as the most interesting, so I’ll post it all here and then comment beneath it: 

“A slip of the cosmic coin has rendered your entire life completely inessential. What could you accomplish in a dead-end existence like this? There are no stakes. No meaningful challenges. No structures or themes - only residual chemical reactions in a dying brain…”

“Your friends might derive some sense of fulfillment from satisfying the elementary obligations of self-preservation and self-propogation, but there’s nothing here for you. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Your choice is not between that of life and death. It is between an ignominious dissolution at the hands of entropy, and one final act of relevance that can bequeath your meager energies to the cosmic well from whence they came.”

“It is the very last moment of narratively consequential action that will happen in this whole, barren world.”

To Dirk, without any ability to hold Relevance or Truth or Essentiality, everything becomes meaningless. There’s nothing to stimulate him, and he holds no desire to stay in a world that isn’t Canonical. He doesn’t see the Candy route as being worthwhile because it holds no actual worth, no baring of the Plot. Despite the fact that everyone can - and does - live out the rest of their lives, that life isn’t Real enough to Dirk to even bother trying to go on with it. If there’s no Challenge, nothing to try and work towards, then it just doesn’t matter. 

This leads to the idea that his choice is between entropy and one last act of relevance. In his suicide, Dirk destroys the last piece of narrative importance in the Candy Epilogue. He is the narrative importance in Meat after all; with him gone, there is no narrative entity to keep it going (which isn’t entirely true, but I’ll be going on about that in another anon). This, there, explains it best: “The corrosion has already begun. You can feel the gears slowing, all the intricate, unseen mechanisms coming unhinged from their mooring and drifting apart.” Everything that Dirk has been doing to keep them relevant falls apart the moment John fails to become part of that relevance, and instead allows them to become a state separate from canon that Alternate!Calliope can use. The power struggle shifts, and everything falls apart. There’s no point in Dirk staying in a timeline where he’s lost all his power, relevance, and ability to influence the narrative. If it’s not canon, he can’t control it. 

You can tell, too, that this is the importance of the action. As Dirk jumps, he considers death to work in two parts, the first being “the destruction of the meat”. While he’s referring to his body, he’s also referring to the fact that the Meat Epilogue is him. He’s the author of it, he’s the one who resides over every action and every plot point, he’s the one who ensures, without fail, that everyone within the Meat timeline remains as canon as possible. Not only is he destroying the last piece of Canonicity within Candy, but he’s destroying the very aspect that makes the Meat Epilogue what it is; himself. This, to a degree, is why we have two Epilogues. Meat is Dirk’s; Candy is Alternate Calliope’s. (Again, more on that in another anon). 

It’s this paragraph that makes it even more interesting:

“Yours is a singularity of narcissism - an endlessly recursive existence so dense that it has no choice but to sprawl out much further than the boundaries of its person in any given universe or timeline. Once cut off from that, you become unbearably dispensable.”

Dirk’s powers as a Prince of Heart were always going to end up with him becoming aware of the narrative. Being so deeply connected to all the other versions of himself, with the very concept of Self as a whole, and being someone who actively destroys it, Dirk had almost no choice but to reach a point of complete awareness. It’s why he’s the only one who doesn’t die when they’re admitted access to the Ultimate Self, I think; because he is the Ultimate Self, and he’s always been aware of his other Selves, and connected to them.

Now that Candy!Dirk is cut off from the Ultimate Self - from being the Ultimate Self, the way that he was always lining himself up to be - he’s just another inefficient and unnecessary splinter. Someone who’s very aware of the stakes at hand, but no longer has control over them. I think that’s objectively the worst sort of position this Dirk could be in - the one thing he’s terrified of most. 

I’m wondering if Dirk isn’t actually his Ultimate Self. 

In Candy, Dave becomes his Ultimate Self through Obama’s intervention and immediately dies. His body is physically incapable of handling that much information at once, and he has to ascend by going into a robot using Obama’s Hope powers. In Meat, Rose is steadily dying because of the merging of her selves; the only way Dirk can replicate what Obama does to Dave is by preserving her body and transmitting her mind into a robot. 

For as much as a Prince of Heart is definitely a Heart player, and decidedly all about Splinters, it seems odd that he’s completely capable of handling the overload of information that kills Dave and Rose - someone who is just as versed with alternate Selves as Dirk is, and someone whose Aspect is deeply intertwined with Canon and all that it entails, and who also fused with an original self (that being Dream!Rose in the initial Doomed Timeline). 

Princes of Heart destroy the self. Part of the reason Dirk even has Splinters in his initial timeline - Brobot, his Dreamself, Brain Ghost!Dirk, Hal - is because it is an exact destruction of his own Soul and self identity. This is what it means to be a Prince of Heart; a Destroyer of the Soul. Smashing himself up into pieces and using them to assist him in the timeline is definitely a very valid thing, and something he’s capable of doing… 

But these Splinters are actively distant and different from him. Once Brobot is completed, he stays on Jake’s island and attempts to work on Jake in the way Dirk wishes Jake to grow. They never meet afterwards (from what I can recall). Dirk is incapable of controlling both himself and his Dreamself sufficiently until later into SBURB (this is why he ends up taking such long showers; he can’t be Wake Dirk and Dream Dirk at the same time, at least from what I recall). Hal literally diverges enough from his original core as a Splinter of Dirk to be defined as a wholly separate person, and though he and Dirk are capable of communication and togetherness, Hal is the Splinter Dirk is least able to control. 

There’s something to be said of the irony in the idea that a Prince of Heart, notorious for splitting himself up, could ever be the first to reach the Ultimate Self - the literal fusion of all those separate entities. The ones Dirk had a tenuous relationship with and understand of, and considered to be suffocating. The ones Dirk actively fought to not be associated with because he couldn’t even handle the idea that Hal was part of his identity, and represented part of himself. 

 Why would this be the player that reaches the Ultimate Self without cause or harm? Why would Dirk just accept all of this, the things he hates and rebels against, after reaching a point in Act 7 where he’s started to accept the things he is capable of as things he desperately doesn’t want to do? 

This much I’m still sceptical on, and believe as semi relevant. That’s the part of the post that I actually do take seriously; I’m not convinced Meat!Dirk is the Ultimate Self he posits himself as. Now for the more fun part. 

To try and explain away this little thought, here’s a fanciful, half-serious, half-hopeful idea that mostly comes as a direct divergence from the “canon” of the Epilogues.

Lets say Dirk really was starting to become his Ultimate Self. He starts to see things, to remember things, to go through the sort of experiences that kills Dave immediately in a soft, steady drip. Something that drips intermittently upon his mind, his soul, and gets more unbearable the longer it goes on. 

When he first locks himself away, he analyses all the data and focuses immediately on all the negative selves. The ones that have always plagued him. The ones that represent everything he’s terrified of, everything he hates about himself, everything he desperately didn’t want to become. His self-hatred gets the better of him. In one moment of isolated weakness, he comes to the conclusion that this is all Paradox Space ever had in mind for him, and he dives straight in. 

But in doing so, he completely ignores the positive selves. The parts of him that represent his self worth, his determination, his sometimes-selfless attitude, his deep seated ability to love his friends and genuinely desire the best for them. He overlooks every self that could be seen as a representative of his positive attributes, and he refuses to accept them. He’s the Prince of Heart; destroying the Self isn’t exactly new to him, and destroying his Ultimate Self by only acknowledging half of his Selves is well within his powers and authority. 

He slips back into old habits. He becomes aware of the narrative. He uses it to validate every thought he’s ever had. But he’s still only affected by half of who he is; he’s not suffering the full brunt of his Ultimate Self, and the drips have been so steady that he’s not aware it’s meant to be a torrential downpour. He’s dammed up everything that isn’t what he thinks he should be, what he thinks he’s worthy of being, and his Classpect is allowing it. 

So, instead of the Ultimate Self, what we have is the Bad Self. A Dirk that’s only the sum of his failures and lack of restraint. A Dirk that suffers from the paradoxical combination of egotism and a complete lack of self worth. A Dirk who thinks he’s the only one capable of taking the reigns, but can only see himself as the villain. A Dirk who, because of his Classpect and his continued ability to destroy the Self, is completely incapable of becoming his Ultimate Self.  

In the grand scheme of things, the Prince of Heart is not the person I’d put my money on to accept what it means to be a unified, total experience without suffering. What I could imagine, however, is a Prince of Heart coming to the assumption that he understands his deepest Self, and actively harming his True Self in the process. 

TL;DR at the bottom.

homestuck epilogue is for the most part good because it’s not straight misery and it’s not straight fairytale happiness, it’s more realistic than anything this godforsaken webcomic has ever thrown at us

the characters are adults now and they have adult problems, INCLUDING ones that probably manifested from the bullshit of all they experienced in-game?? They Were Children, Janet. so much of this reads “result of trauma” it’s not even funny

like is it perfect, god-sent, untouchable literature? no!! but will you people stop calling it absolute trash because it wasn’t what you wanted?? because yeah, maybe your fave is an asshole? maybe even a bad person?

god forbid i broach the subject of any of the strilondes

things change, people change, people grow, and sometimes they grow into something you wouldn’t expect and that’s just life!! the epilogue isn’t perfect by any means but it’s an accurate representation of how LIFE is