Brought to you by the letter "A"

So, if you're keeping yourself abreast of the events happening in this fandom, you probably know that the Unofficial Homestuck Collection, an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to experience Homestuck it was meant to be experienced, is currently being struck down. This coincidentally more-or-less lines up, temporally, with the opening of Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory, a new hub for the fandom and a way for certain select fancreators to officially license their work, seemingly a semi-inheritance from Homestuck Independent Creative Union as a way for fans to take the reins of the beast.

This pressures me to ask the question:

What does it mean to give power to the fans?

I wouldn't say that creators and fans are necessarily in inevitable opposition. Fans only exist because of creators making something for them to obsess over, and their adoration for the creator's work pushes them to create fanwork - fanart, fanfiction, fanmusic, cosplays, all for the cultural enrichment of everyone involved. But there are certain legal hurdles to be demarcated: everyone knows that Nintendo sends ninjas after clamps down on everyone who uses its IP in a way they dislike, and Anne Rice has been an outspoken critic of fanfiction of her work: therefore, some modes of fancreation exist in opposition to the original creator's wishes.

It is impossible to please everyone, and one shouldn't have to cater to their audience.

But the difference is that while the fans which dislike the original can just move elsewhere, the original creator has a legal cudgel of IP to prevent or otherwise impede the creation of things they dislike. Legally speaking, fanfiction is illegal: fair use, as a concept, is a defence mode that argues that your violation of IP wasn't bad or damaging enough to be worth persecution. (This is why OTW bans financial activity on Ao3 - your work being non-profit helps their lawyers to assure the court that you're not competing with the original creator and therefore the IP violation shouldn't financially impede the IP owner.) But some people do want to make money off their fanwork. I don't think it's bad by itself, unless a fandom regresses to a money pump, not like I know of such cases.

Homestuck has a very rich fanculture - lyricstucks and character panels, sprawling fanfics and countless swaths of fanart, several splendid fanalbums of music, tons of fanadventures. A lot of people who worked on Homestuck (as artists who drew stills or musicians who made music), or even made fanwork, in some way are now renowned creatives. Undertale is the work of someone who made music for Homestuck. Homestuck also has a history of letting fans make money off itself. Welovefine/Forfansbyfans have always allowed fancreators to submit their work to be sold as merch or part of it!

So what if we took things a step further? What if we allowed the fans to have control of the comic itself?

What if we allowed some fans to touch the steering wheel?

The obvious problem arises when you think for half a second about it. Would you, personally, allow a random /hsg/ anon to write anything but the Caliborn sections? Sure, if that anon is someone like xamag, but an average person isn't them.

If you want to give the power to the fans, you need to vet the fans who are given the power.

Next, what does it mean to give power to the fans? Do you just tell everyone "hey, you can do whatever" and slap a public domain or a permissive enough CC license on your work to let everyone to make their own work/continuation? You can do that, or you can invite some hand-picked fans to do the official continuation, because each project has an upper limit of people beyond which it's impossible to not spoil the soup.

Hence, this becomes the matter of handpicking some specific people to let them steer the ship instead of you. But do the fans control the situation, or do you let them do that until they start doing the things you dislike? What is the difference?

Hussie has never taken their hands off the steering wheel. Sure, the team is independent, but anything they do can be vetoed by Hussie because he owns the IP and can therefore decide whether they are allowed to do that or not. They're little more than employees.

Now, what could be done? I don't know. Perhaps releasing Homestuck into the commons would serve the goal of letting the fans actually control the situation, although there's an obvious danger of the Big Mouse or its equivalents taking the comic and stripping it of everything we love from it.

Now, I do need to point out that Gio spent quite a while doing things that upset Hussie (and some of his past employees) personally, and this can be construed as retaliation. But Bambosh quite literally did nothing to harm them! The continued existence of UHC benefited everyone, and the only rationales Hussie had for taking it down were petty revenge and a desire to control as much as possible, and IMO it's up to you to decide what's worse.

I do have to bring up that FRAF is, effectively, the next wave of HICU. I do not think that it's like, bad, that people are getting official endorsement, but if Hussie's favour ends up being more fickle than everyone would prefer, they could be more uniquely in danger than people otherwise unaccounted for.

So, when will the fans actually stand equal to the creator as the HICU/FRAF effective mission statement proclaims?

Picture an average magical girl.

Why do our six take Kyubey's contract?

Madoka apparently wished for the cat to be saved in first timeline, and wanted all the despair to stop in the last timeline.

Sayaka wanted Kyosuke's arm to be mended.

Kyoko saw her father's despair, and wanted to remedy that.

Mami was dying.

Homura had to witness Madoka die.

Nagisa's mother was dying next to her.

The shared theme here is that of helplessness - the puella makes the deal because she can't do anything about her situation unless she takes the offered lifeline, so she does.

The magical girl spends a while fighting witches, and eventually dies or gets transformed into witch.

Madoka doesn't get witched save for these situations where she runs out of hope after killing Walpurgisnacht dead. This will be relevant later.

Sayaka has her moments because she couldn't deal with this all anymore, really, and the strain was getting to her and she contracted chronic hero syndrome and doesn't get that she deserves rewards and rest for her work.

Kyoko effectively commits suicide trying to pull Sayaka out of Witch Mode and deciding to give her company instead, instead of accepting the loss and absconding to live another day. In a spare timeline she also gets killed by Mami. AFAIK she also had her moment after her dad's death but Mami pulled her out.

Mami got nommed thanks to being not focused enough, and loses her shit in a spare timeline but gets offed before presumably getting witched.

Homura doesn't get witched on-screen, but she doesn't let herself lose hope, as we all know.

Nagisa understands that she was cheated and pretty much falls to witch state on the spot.

The shared theme here is that of despair - sure, the contract gave you powers, but it doesn't help! You can't deal with it either way! Your hope is as meaningless as it goes!

Finally we have the Witch going around, making people commit suicide or wreaking havoc, until she is destroyed.

I want to say that the final theme is hatred. More specifically, cycles of trauma.

A Witch is born of a puella that gets burned out of hope and plunges into despair.

I think that Witches do the shit they do as a form of retaliation against the hurt that was inflicted on them. They drive people to suicide not because they want to, but because they feel the need to share their anguish; they hate the world because once everything else is gone, hate is all that remains. What has the world done for them, but hurt them and pressure them into being child soldiers? What has it done for them, other than give them powers and then demonstrate their futility? What has it done for them, only to show how much it hates them?

So they hate in return.

And Walpurgisnacht is the ultimate witch.

She embodies helplessness, the helplessness that all puellae feel before they accept the contract; She embodies despair, despair of the fall that makes it impossible for anyone to win a fight against her with power intact, because you can't fight fate; She embodies hatred, so strong that she wreaks havoc even beyond her mark and destroy the world directly, the hatred of a Witch spurned by the world.

And here's the Madokami telling the Walpurgisnacht that she doesn't need to hate anyone anymore.

That here she is, to save those who are helpless, to show them the way out. That here she is, to save those who are despairing, to deliver them from the world safe and sound. That here she is, to save those whose hatred consumes them, to let them not feel hate anymore.

She offers a way out of the cycle of hurt (and as we know, Walpurgisnacht spins in circles), she lets them move on. And so she lets the fundamental amalgamation of the suffering that is being a meguka to stop.

I'd even say that such a way out was the only way to actually defeat Walpurgisnacht: let's look at Madoka's witch form.

Witch of salvation. Her nature is mercy. She absorbs any life on the planet into her newly created heaven--her barrier. The only way to defeat this witch is to make the world free of misfortune. If there's no grief in this world, she will believe this world is already a heaven.

The only way to defeat this witch is to make the world free of misfortune. If there's no grief in this world, she will believe this world is already a heaven.

If we assume that KG is the bottom half of the hourglass to WN's upper half, we may say that the only way for the helplessness and despair and hatred to be left behind is for them to be supplanted by salvation and mercy.

Maintaining the cycle only brings more pain.