acamaeda:

bladekindeyewear:

evertwisting-plot:

bladekindeyewear:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

optimisticduelist:

After over a month of work, this is finally ready. 

This is in many ways my final statement on Homestuck as a whole, and though I don’t go over absolutely everything related to the ending here, I am pretty confident it’ll make at least some people reconsider how upset they are with the ending. 

I’d like to thank @olive-the-olive and @finalvortex for beta reading for me, as well as @joyceanfartboner, @kajy, and @fragilesoftmachines earlier on. You were all rad! 

I’d also like to thank (and tag) a number of writers who made writing this possible. @bladekindeyewear, @stormingtheivory, @wakraya, @purplepurpleunicornsparkle, as well as  @mikerugnetta who’s video about Violence proved to be instrumental, and finally Tex Talks, who doesn’t have a tumblr but is still one of the most fascinating voices in Homestuck analysis today, and you should really be following his work. 

I’ll let the piece speak for itself. My deepest wish is that it will help people unhappy with the ending feel better, but if you find my arguments unsatisfying on some level, please let me know. I’d love to engage with discussion about this pretty much 24/7. 

Rebloggin this once for the night crowd 

reboop 

Reblogging this again because remember how I said tex talks doesn’t have a tumblr? turns out he does @tex-talks-too-much

Honestly i dont even care if you read my stuff if you arent following tex’s analysis on homestuck you’re hurting your ultimate self severely

Click the link. Click the link click the link click the link click the link click the link.

CLICK THE LINK.

The above, linked little dissertation on Homestuck’s ending is now required reading for anyone who subscribes to this blog. (The author is crediting me because some of what I’ve expressed in theory/meta posts, not because I knew anything about what they were writing. I hadn’t heard of this post/article until Wakraya linked it to me. Oh, Wakraya also reblogged it with their commentary if you want more discussion about it.)

I mentioned that I was finally starting to let myself get angry about the ending, in part because we couldn’t know what he intended and those doubts carry a toxicity, and in part because he was so silent about the nature of the ending and intent to leave us with that and little else for a long time to come. However – much like unstuck and unbound, or as an even better extension of it – this explanation helps soothe all of that significantly.

Especially because it not only explains why the character arcs might feel cut a little early, but why Andrew has chosen to remain quiet about things and postpone any epilogue for quite some time.

Andrew always seemed to be insisting that this was the ending he envisioned for Homestuck from the beginning, that he’d conceived of this for the longest time, that he was so excited to bring his self-described Creation Myth to a culmination this way in some sort of “Rapture”. Much of our frustration is rooted in a combination of (1) doubting this is really the sort of ending he truly believed in, thinking that he perhaps gave up and convinced himself that he wasn’t giving up, or knew and just paid us lip service, and (2) not being able to understand what the ending means – and by extension, that Andrew could believe in an ending like this. Everything Andrew has said, especially about how long he’s been preparing this ending, has been POINTING at it being something VERY long-planned and intentional. I just couldn’t help but doubt that, and doubt that he might have had any sort of point with this ending that was worth cutting things off so seemingly unresolved.

But if this is really the answer to the puzzle he’s given us, then he has to wait until the post-end has gelled and coagulated into COUNTLESS headcanons and fanfics before he can give us an Epilogue – (which is why he didn’t even initially MENTION there was going to be an epilogue, only editing that into the news post later; and perhaps he regrets having mentioned that, too!) – and he has to be very careful and deliberate about the form that epilogue takes in order to preserve the goals he’s trying to accomplish with this story. A story in which he, the author, is killed, and fights with & gives an enormous thumbs down to the only other people trying to make this a narrative about themselves.

I still haven’t decided how much comfort this article brings me about Homestuck’s ending… I don’t know if I can really be happy with it yet. But at the very least, it’s a lot of comfort. Better than unstuck and unbound, bringing those ideas together into a much fuller explanation that I can buy into with more of my heart than what I had before.

And I still especially believe that Andrew has a responsibility to make the reasoning behind this ending a little clearer to many of us. I can finally understand why he chose not to – which is something I never DREAMED I’d say about the way he handled this ending!!! – but I still disagree and think he needs to explain this clearer. Those of us who don’t understand, who followed the story and fandom this closely for so long… many of us have felt this ending and Andrew’s silence thereof to be some sort of poisonous betrayal that taints our ability to even think about the story in retrospect! It really, really hurts! And even if it’s better for the artistic integrity of this work for him to stay quiet longer, I don’t believe it should be milked at the PRICE of so much toxic fan-felt despair.

Just a bit of explanation and reassurance. That’s all it would take, and I hope Andrew reconsiders withholding it so long. Even if I reluctantly (reluctantly) understand the point of him staying mum on what it all really means for up to a year.

Ok, for anyone reading this, this is not necessarily a direct response to either of the two posters above. I just feel that I need to discuss my feelings on this beyond the tags where I normally do. Of course, I am open to response from either or any of my followers if they decide to do so. 

I will first start off by introducing the fact that I have always understood why the ending is why it is. The topmost linked article certainly does make it much clearer and thus I accept it way more, but that does not mean that I am anyway happy with it. My problem with it is fourfold and I will try to be as clear as possible in my ramblings.

The first problem is that this type of conclusion is not what I look for when I am reading a story. Most of the time when I delve into a work of fiction, what I am there for is to see the development of a plot or characters to their completion; the ending is what I want. To me, it ending the way I want to or not is not what’s important so long as there is an ending. Very rarely do I read a story to find a character or story that I would want to take with me beyond itself as a whole. I probably didn’t put that well, but basically I usually finish a work when it’s completed and never address it again. There’s not usually anything I want to add to the endings after they are closed, even if they endings are bad. If they are bad, I will either be content with the fact that it was bad and never address it again or rewrite how I think it should have ended in my own head and be done with it. One might say that I should just write my own ending to Homestuck and accept it, but his leads me to my second problem with the ending.

The second problem is that, ironically, given the nature of the ending and intention, we weren’t given a choice, and what I mean by this is we weren’t given the choice to accept an ending or not. Earlier I mentioned how I would either be content with an ending given to me or rewrite it, but in either scenario I would still be satisfied because there was a conclusion. Here, Homestuck is taking away that first option and forcing me to write my own ending if I want to reach any sort of conclusion with Homestuck. I can’t move on until I have written my own ending; which for Homestuck would be tremendously difficult for me because I am a perfectionist and thus I would want to make sure that the ending I create would satisfy every answer which would take more time than I have. So, basically, I am stuck with Homestuck feeling perpetually unconcluded and I can’t move on with my life.

Now, the OP does make a good point about one thing; if there was a definite ending given, the fans would deem works that rewrite the ending as less “real” and by giving the story an ending it would lean readers to write around that ending. And while, to me the opinions of others on my ending never matter because I was not one to share it, it does matter to others. So what Hussie did with the ending was supposed to be a way to get around this, but I will explain why this ending particularly was not the best choice.

The third problem is that the Schrodinger’s ending is not the “every ending is canon” ending but is a naught ending. It’s going to be hard to explain this, but I’m going to try. With Schrodinger’s cat, it both was and was not alive for as long as nothing observed the cat. This ending is in the same unobserved position; it is seemingly everything that could possibly be, but the catch is that it simultaneously is not. While I could sit here and write a wonderful ending to the piece myself with all the endgame ships and happenstances that I wanted and be comforted with the knowledge that everything I do is a possibility, I will simultaneously always be confronted with the fact that it is also not that and it could equally be everything else. If I was given a definitive ending, I would at least be assured that my rewrite is not the possibility but is me actively rebelling against the author, but here I am stuck in an unsatisfying Schrodinger limbo between is and is not with no conclusion in sight. 

An “every ending is canon” ending could have been shown in a better way; like maybe in the ending possibility shown every character could have been swapping around for each other, like having instead of Dave and Jade having a picnic with Karkat, two different characters could be thrown in. Then Karkat and the other character could be switched with two more. By doing this several times in different ways, the scene could convey multiple contradicting realities happening simultaneously. It still would have been a conclusionless ending, but it better suggests that the conclusions are more infinite than what we’ve got. And this goes into my final problem with this ending.

The final problem is that there seems to actually be an intended ending, we’re just not given it. We were given the ending taped up in a box with the words “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL EPILOGUE” written on it and we were forced to speculate on its contents. We were shown an ending; the Mayor built can town, Calliope is hanging out with Roxy and John, and a bunch of people are hanging out with each other at the end. While Hussie showed these scenes to show them as possibilities, he unfortunately did not realize that, with his place as the author, these would be considered an ending. These coherent scenes showing a singular possibility end up showing an unfinished and unfulfilled “authorially canon” ending. 

If we were never shown those snippets I would have been slightly more satisfied because it wouldn’t feel like I was missing something. To explain I will reference the short story The Lady or the Tiger. In that story, a man chose between two doors, one having the woman he loved who he would marry if he chose that door, and the other door had a hungry man-eating tiger. The story ended with him choosing a door but the contents behind it being undisclosed. This is not a problem for me because the selection of the doors is completely and unbiasedly up to the reader. However, if the writer had shown what life could have been like with the wife, but only some of it, and then end when he opens a door it would feel unsatisfying because, by showing that earlier scene, it shows that the author seems to intend for that ending, but they don’t go through with it fully making the story feel incomplete; making the reader feel like the author is withholding the ending. If Hussie had not shown those snippets and instead showed nothing, or better yet, showed multiple clips that seemed to contradict one another, that showed many possibilities instead of one, it would have presented the ending as a choice for the reader to make and not as a choice the reader has to make because the true ending is being purposefully withheld.

So yeah, these are my problems with the ending. There are likely more, like how I wish we had more general questions answered that did not directly have to do with the ending to make it easier to form our own, like more definitive info on aspects or quests or the mechanics of the gameplay world or whatever, but this covers a lot of my main problems and I’m happy that I wrote this. Maybe someone who read this will understand and feel a little better too.

This is… yeah, pretty much all of the reblog’s points about why this is still unsatisfying are completely solid. Good way to sum up why this explanation didn’t totally alleviate my concerns.

If Andrew is going to end the story like this and deny everyone the plot fulfillment they were expecting, he has a responsibility to do it right, as far as I’m concerned. And no, don’t whip that Doc Scratch quote out on me, Andrew:

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.

…God damnit. See, this is why he NEEDS to explain to us what exactly he’s done. Even if this is true, it sounds like a slap in the face to many of us.

There are some other, simpler issues with the ending, too, if it was intended to be this way. There was the ominous note at the end of Collide, but nothing happened later that deserved the ominousness. We don’t definitively see that Lord English is defeated, and we’re left off before we actually see John touch the doorknob. Especially the last one, that one scene would have had narrative and emotional weight to it. After so many failures, they would have finally grasped what they couldn’t before.

A potential reason for the ambiguity is similar to what the big post up there discusses, “all endings are canon”. Hussie’s intentions might have been for fans to make endings that affect events beyond the new universe because of this.

Apotheosis and Creation Myth