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.
“If a tree falls and no one hears the sound, did it fall at all? Homestuck’s answer is not only that it didn’t, but that without someone present to witness the forest at some point in its existence, the forest does not exist at all. Reality is pointless and redundant without someone to experience it, to the point that it’s impossible to differentiate whether or not it even EXISTS if an observer isn’t present.”
Yes, YEEEEEEES. This article comes as close as I’ve ever seen to hitting upon the way I relate to the monster of a webcomic that is Homestuck: an examination of a cultural moment in which reality seems more kaleidoscopic than ever, which posits connections between quantum physics and religion and mythology. All this, all thiiiiis, is how Homestuck helped me with my existential anxiety and dread and gave me a means by which to reconcile my unforgivingly rationalist world view with my spirituality, which I’d completely lost till then.
When I begin to fear the death of humanity, I think about this comic. These ideas motivate my creative work. They make me care about living.
A+++, please read this.
This is super old but seeing someone respond to the post that started this whole adventure for me is lile this is…moving. It reminds me why I started talking about Homestuck like this, and how much more I still want to do. Thank you.
PS: I’m laughing at past me’s immense hubris in claiming that post was a final statement on Homestuck. My my. How far we’ve come.
Flying through Storytelling 