8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

Jake English is the most emotionally intelligent person in Homestuck and everyone who disagrees is wrong.

9. worst part of canon

jesus fuck that's a fucking question and a half, lemme think

10. worst part of fanon

ksdljflksdjfl i don't know how the answer can be anything but vriska, honestly. actually, no. no. i'm gonna say what the fandom did to tavros, basically throwing out his entire character to justify why its actually not that bad that vriska broke his back and then tried to make him apologize to her for being a "cripple" fuck off, leave tavros alone

already answered 11 so uuuuh

worst part of canon..................

........

Like. I logically understand why the Retcon and the accelerated ending of Homestuck happened. I do. I understand that Hussie just needed the story to be over at last, and as a writer, I respect that deeply and it was entirely their right to do it the way they did imo.

however

the actual execution of the Retcon has aged really badly for me.

The one and only part of it I can look at and say I liked was Terezi. I love how Terezi changes the universe by changing herself, and I think it's one of the most powerful and profound moments of the entire story, truly. The way she.... breaks herself and remakes herself into what she has to be to alter the course of reality is staggering.

But.... I have tremendous issues with the actual technical execution. The entirety of Vriskagram leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

(Which, some people might say "but it's the thing that made davekat canon" and my brother in karkat, davekat was already canon pre-retcon, that was the direction their relationship was going, it wasn't even subtle, i didn't need vriskagram for that)

That Vriska solved the Gamzee issue, fixed Rose's alcoholism, saved Terezi, got ahold of the music boxes to hop around and fix the prototyping, she fixes the Strider problem, and the way she supplants Karkat's entire point in the story honestly is so fucking aggravating. Vriska was a duplicitous turnways manipulator and she's flattened into a bandaid for the entire story. It sucks. It flattens everyone.

And on some level, thematically, it makes sense? She is the Thief of Light, and Light is Agency, so her greatest triumph is stealing the agency from everyone until the spotlight is hers alone and it washes her out. Its a triumph for the Alpha Timeline and its a tragedy for Vriska herself as she loses all of the progress she made as a person.

sighs

And also the fact that... Rose and Dirk never talk, no one defends Jake from Vriska's bullying, the way Jane and Jake's character arcs hard stop and never get resolved, the way the whole Roxy Died thing is just not dealt with-- so many balls get dropped because of the compressed ending, and on a technical level, I feel like the quality of HS post-retcon drops like a rock tossed into a canyon. And the glory of Dirk And Dave's conversation cannot singlehandedly fix that. Esp bc while its the perfect dismount of Dave's character arc, it's not the end of Dirk's. Out of the four alpha kids, only Roxy gets a full arc and it sucks.

DEEP BREATH

Sure. Though I don't know if I'd say I "disagree with canon" so much as I think the more someone tries to give us a straight up, clean answer on it, they're probably an unreliable source. My source is canon, but more holistically.

For me I think this started two places. First: I just..... don't really buy the idea of Pages being the Slow Burn class. I never bought it, honestly? As soon as I figured out how Jake English manages people and their expectations of him to get what he wants, it threw into question the whole concept of the class. Because Jake is the second most emotionally intelligent character in HS after Karkat, but he uses it for himself rather selfishly instead of for a greater cause. When Jake subtly or subconsciously tries to bend the story to his will, he's remarkably effective.

So, of course, I looked at Tavros. What does Tavros Nitram want? Well, he wants to have fun, to progress at his own pace, and to kind of do his own thing. I found it very interesting how the people around him sort of bent to what he wanted. No one stopped Tavros from dreaming on Prospit. He didn't do anything to get those mechanical legs, which he textually wanted, other folks took care of that for him. No one really stopped Tavros from playing the game (both FLARP and SGRUB) the way he wanted to. Aradia enables his allegedly bad class choice, Karkat orders Vriska to save his life, and when Vriska wants to force Tavros to play her way, Kanaya interferes. It's all very cohesive to me in a way that I genuinely do not know if the creator intended, but the pattern is absolutely there.

So, whoop, Pages Are A Slow Burn gets tossed into the garbage where it belongs.

The other one that really made me go "huh" is Calliope's Active/Passive thing. From the moment I read it the first time, I was like "i'm........ not sure that's a thing" and on every subsequent reread and relisten, I became even more certain she's just theorycrafting and its not borne out in the actual text. Which, frankly, fits into Calliope's whole thing of being a proxy for fans, particularly their speculation. She outright says to Dirk she gets carried away with her theorizing.

Like... for me its the Prince thing. I flat out don't think Princes are "The Most Active Class," at all, full stop. The idea is kind of silly to me. Eridan wasn't fucking Super Active, he just became extremely potent when he finally went off. And Dirk, similarly, is the king of Hurry Up And Wait. When shit pops off, he acts with incredible effectiveness, but the rest of the time he's zoning the fuck out, white lying about how cool he is, and fishing.

Same with Seers on the opposite end. Am I meant to take seriously the idea that Rose Lalonde and Terezi fucking Pyrope are the most passive class, nah. No sell. I literally and actually think I could make a better argument that Witches are more passive than Seers.

And then I just... don't agree with Calliope's verbiage of the classes. Dirk was not a destroyer of heart/soul, his most dramatic and effective moments in the story are harnessing his aspect, and in the conversation where Calliope tells Roxy her verbiage, even she says its a little esoteric and hard to grasp.

Calliope's trying to apply very firm wording and delineation to something that Terezi much earlier calls a "hyperflexible mythology." That reading of classpect frankly bears out a lot more, imo.

Which just led me to the conclusion that: all the stuff Calliope says, its her opinion. What I am interested in is action. What do these people do, what do they think of their aspect, how does it manifest.

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

the way Terezi makes Dave fucking uncomfortable

that actually legitimately fascinates me, the growing discomfort he has with Terezi, how he starts off not giving her time of day, then being lured in by shitty drawings and his need for attention, and then as he gets closer to Terezi, there morbidity she slings around starts to actually chafe against him really hard, and they're both not really kind to each other.

I think that Terezi and Dave's relationship is actually really complicated and not as easy as "they got red feelings" or "they're besties" like its not those things, its something else, there's an inherent understanding between them because the gravity of their lives keeps them orbiting each other but also their coping mechanisms make them bounce off each other just as much, and

the things Terezi is drawn to about Dave are the Cool Things, which Alternian context has taught her to lionize. And yes, she's also drawn to Dave's moments of honesty, when she can pry them out of him, but the fact she will pry them from him makes him uncomfortable--

IT'S INTENSELY COMPLICATED AND I LOVE IT basically. and i wish that got more attention.

It exists because Homestuck is a fiction, and the Bard is essentially the personification of handwave. There is, in my opinion, nothing to draw out of it. The Bard is plot contrivance. It is the curtains. It is the stagehand, not the actor.

You, in real life, are not a Bard because you have personhood. The Bard in Homestuck does not. Gamzee is reduced to less than nothing by the time he steps into the role, he exists just to make the plot work where otherwise it would not. Cronus is not a character, he's a caricature of the Worst Person the author could come up with in the story. Even among the frequently one- or two-dimensional-at-best Alpha Trolls, he's a joke. He has no purpose but to be contemptible.

OH THE RAPID MISUNDERSTANDING OF DIRK'S REMARK ABOUT NOT LIKING LABELS

this is not to say you can't headcanon dirk as whatever queer you want, that's fine, i don't fucking care

but the actual moment when Roxy calls Dirk gay and he gets defensive is not because he doesn't like being gay or he dislikes the label or that he's not canonically gay, it's him shying away from it because Roxy is in that moment being a total asshole and reopening an old wound and he wants to stop her from fixating on that while she's drunk and thus unkind

Dirk is gay, that scene is not about Dirk disliking the label, it's about Roxy being at her worst

I'll also add here, after reading through your posts, my aspect is Hope for sure. Which, funnily enough, is the aspect I originally thought I was after I read homestuck many years ago, before I started reading through other people's theories on classpects. I can't narrow down my class at all so far, but I'm sure something will stick out after I've spent more time thinking it over. Or if not, I'll just pick one and hope (no pun intended) that my personal journey ends up going in that direction

adlksjf thank you! Oh my god, I have reread/relistened to HS so many times that I have a stupid parlor trick I can do. When someone in my HS discord vaguely remembers a line or conversation, I can get them the link to it in under a minute because my brain just.... knows what lines are part of which logs and how to find the log extremely fast. It's TERRIBLE.

I'm glad my encyclopedic knowledge has been useful! And Classes can be hard, since they require a kind of... self-awareness enough to apply narrative tropes to your life. Keep percolating on it!