#teamcandy

What Homestuck needed... and what it got, in the Epilogues, was real, adult suffering.

Okay, I’m not sure it “needed” it in the sense that no good epilogue could be without it. But I’m really glad that it had lots. I went in on team meat, but now that I’ve read them both, I’m much more into the candy side of things.

“Winning” is so abstract. The kaleidoscopic, psychedelic journey of childhood and adolescence is a fuckin mess, and nobody really gets out of it without a few plot holes and stretch marks and sore spots. But it doesn’t end with “then it’s all good forever man.” That’s not what successfully growing up looks like.

Successfully growing up looks like stabilizing as a person, getting your feet under you, and, in many ways, suffering hard. Not that that’s all it is by a longshot. There’s tons of joy in the epilogues, especially Candy. But when you grow up, you begin to appreciate the mysteries of adult pain. Of your life narrative chafing you.

Like, I didn’t really need to see Dave happily married with his longtime boyfriend Karkat. I needed to see Dave “happy married” to his wife Jade, simultaneously enjoying genuine happiness and a deep, painful shard of what-if embedded in his body. Not that I knew I needed it, but it feels like life. It feels like a thing that can happen when you grow up.

Dissolving marriages based on enthusiastic but uneven foundations. Children towing the precious line of destiny between nature and nurture. Just adult people doing the basic emotional homeostasis of being okay and functional through the ups and downs of Actual Life, nursing their deep pain like it’s the glue holding them together, because fuck it, being grown up, in some sense it is.

They get to be people. Ridiculous, fallible people who fuck each other up.