I meant to comment on something earlier, but put it off 'till now. A couple posts ago, @aliasisudonomo responded:
Y'know, at risk of being That Guy (although I truly mean it kindly) I suspect the reason you and others took the ending so badly is it seems to say the things you most need to hear, yet perhaps are most uncomfortable. You spent a whole lot of time assigning things boxes and frameworks and the ending seemed designed to tell us those boxes and frameworks were utter bullshit.
On the other hand, Hussie's the one with a website full of aspect shirts to buy, so there's that.
No no, you're not "That Guy" or anything; you're not wrong, in a sense.
Part of what I'd convinced myself, and constantly advocated, was that Andrew was trying to say that a system (classes/aspects) was quite meaningful in Homestuck, and understanding it would help us better appreciate some of what the comic was trying to communicate, especially the deeper stuff about how our will manifests in reality, all that Ultimate Riddle business. I thought it was really cool, and I thought Andrew was intentionally weaving it into his comic, and valued it at least somewhat similarly.
The way it ended made it look as if almost none of that -- hell, not even the final villain -- was ultimately important.
I don't believe "everything belongs in a box". But I did think there was some cool box meaning Andrew was putting in his stuff, and I made theories and drew a bunch of boxy charts, and then the comic's ending seemed to almost shit on boxes as a whole and left half the chart undrawn with a bunch of squiggles in penis shapes instead of neat resolutions.
Fitting? Maybe! You could even argue that he was subtly trying to hint at this the whole time.
But you can still imagine my disappointment. And how it feels to have an idea you put years of emotional investment in not just shot down -- not even disproven!! -- but just ignored and completely unaddressed like it wasn't even on the radar. When you were utterly convinced that they cared about it even half as much as you did.
It still really stings. :(
And to be clear, I'm not saying that what Andrew chose to do is "wrong" at all. This entire blog's history of classpect musings was me trying to appreciate what I thought he was intentionally doing, and give it all its due, expand upon it, etc! That's why I've never brought myself to endorse any sort of rewritten fan-alternative to the ending. I was in love with what I thought his work represented. It's not his responsibility that I misinterpreted it. I thought he'd want to give us all the answers, all the remaining pieces, in some cryptic form or another; it's completely within his rights to decide not to, and to not even intend to do so from the beginning.
The concept is a very human one. It is the product of your story writing again. You have written a story about the truth, making emotional demands of it, and in particular, of those in possession of it.
Your demands are based on a feeling of entitlement to the facts, which is very childish. You can never know all of the facts. Only I can.
And since it's impossible for me to reveal all facts to you, it is my discretion alone that decides which facts will be revealed in the finite time we have.
So in the end, in some ways, you're right. I was devoting my energy and emotional investment towards a story that probably wasn't the one he was actually writing, thinking I'd found this deep, amazing track in it that I could feel some measure of immensely satisfying rapport in following, when the track I was following -- and the devotion I thought the author was putting into said track, the track I thought I identified with -- might not have existed at all. (At least, not in a form that was even CLOSE to as important as I thought it was: Something that "had to be addressed before the end".)
The track wasn't inherently wrong, like, morally or anything. I just thought it was there and it maybe wasn't. Y'know?
Man I hope it stops hurting at some point.
