Not really. Personally, I find the very idea that he did tiresome, because people only ever seem to use it to downplay the canon dirkjake built into it.

As things stand, there’s just no real reason to think so from a writing perspective. Like yeah, ok, unreliable narrators are a thing in Homestuck. But that logic doesn’t really work to just discredit whatever point a character makes that happens to be contentious.

There has to be an in-character or in-universe reason for a character’s perspective to be discredited, or it’s just bad writing. And I don’t really agree Homestuck is written badly! You might know this about me by now.

So focusing in on Caliborn.

Caliborn is quite aware of the Alpha Timeline, and the role he plays in it. He’s also pretty much the only character who actually likes the Alpha Timeline, and revels in his coming existence as Lord English.

He’s explicitly okay with and willing to endure whatever negative consequences are necessary to get him to that point, and he thinks he and his actions across his timeline make him the hottest shit ever to grace paradox space.

There’s no real reason to think he’d knowingly lie about events in the Alpha Timeline–especially the events that result in the creation of Lord English–because Caliborn is on record as thinking all of that is RAD AS FUCK! Including Jake beating him up, since its what leads to Lord English having his very name.

This comes through in the Masterpiece. Caliborn is noticeably excited to share these events with the audience, and ultimately pleased with the result of the event–he’s using it as a form of self-aggrandizement.

So if someone tells me they think Caliborn is lying about the Masterpiece, my immediate question is how–and why? And most importantly, what is there in the story to contradict or replace the Masterpiece, if we can’t accept it as part of the story?

As of right now, there isn’t anything. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if the Epilogue happens to cover the Masterpiece or part of the Masterpiece, and follows the Beta kid’s release from the Juju and/or the Alpha kids being picked up by John after the end.

We were viewing the Masterpiece from Caliborn’s perspective, so there could definitely be more to see after his particular role in the story is finished. I just don’t think that means Caliborn was lying, per se.

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This is kinda unrelated but I’ve been thinking about it so here we go. This is basically the same as people dismissing Calliope’s exposition on the Classes–in that a critical source of exposition on a certain area of the comic, with no equivalent anywhere else in the text, goes disregarded because of some hazy claim of “unreliability.”

Remember how I said there has to be a textual reason for such a source to be disregarded on a particular point? Homestuck actually does do this with gendered classes, so it’s a good example of what I’m talking about.

Yeah, Calliope says classes are gendered–but Calliope is explicitly as susceptible to biological essentialism as anyone else in the cast, believing she’s incapable of red romance just as John believed he was incapable of black.

Think what you will of the message, but by the endgame Homestuck is loudly stating that both views are inaccurate. Calliope’s ignorance is contextualized in the text.

That she’d make certain assumptions about gender makes sense–especially if she’s working her understanding of the classes off the sample sizes in Homestuck itself–which she explicitly is, and which explicitly do have gender biases.

But that doesn’t inherently discredit every other statement she makes, especially since without the exposition she provides it becomes ridiculously harder to prove anything about Classes as a system. Almost as if the author included that text as a source of important exposition or something.