Chapter Text

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

I've actually had people argue with me before about Homestuck being postmodern, so let me just... get this out of the way. Here's Hussie from the book commentary.

And because Homestuck is a neverending metaserpent always eating its own postmodern tail, here we have a printing of such a story, with even more "author notes" providing additional layers of quippy blithering.

I'm not going to get too into the weeds with defining terms you can look up on Wikipedia, since we have a LOT of ground to cover. However, I need us all to be on the same page here, so I'm going to start by defining some terminology.

Postmodernism is a literary genre that's defined primarily by its self-awareness. In other words, it's meta as hell. Postmodern stories are aware that they are fictional stories, that stories have tropes, that other stories exist, that the author exists, that the audience exists, and that the audience is also aware of all these things. It's defined by irony, intertextuality, metanarrative, unreliable narration, and non-linear storytelling (don't worry, we'll define these terms, too). What I'm saying is that Homestuck didn't exactly invent the wheel.

Something important to note about postmodernism is that its highly ironic, referential nature gives it a reputation - not entirely unearned - for being pretentious and cynical, so concerned with gazing into its own navel and commenting on the concepts of literature themselves that it fails to say anything meaningful, constructive, true, or beautiful. This idea is going to come up again later, so put a pin in it. 

You can consider the dynamic between modernism, the pessimistic movement that came before postmodernism, which often lamented the death of culture and the erosion of traditional morals and sincerity, and postmodernism, to be something like this:

For further reading on the topic, there's an excellent essay here regarding how Homestuck's usage of quotes from The Waste Land by TS Eliot and Nabokov's Pale Fire make it a direct answer to modernist pessimism.

Irony is, when speaking about postmodernism, "saying something to mean the opposite thing". For example, acting like a bad movie is really awesome in order to drive home how bad it is. It has a lot of overlap with sarcasm and parody, though irony is not always one of the two. It's a general sense of eye-rolling self-awareness that goes hand-in-hand with postmodernism's "it's all been done before" attitude. 

The crazy thing about irony, and the difficult part to grasp, is that it stacks. You can be ironic about being ironic about being ironic. The problem is, at some point, you lose the plot and stop knowing if anything is true or genuine or significant. This is called "irony poisoning", and is also something postmodernism is often (correctly) criticized for.

Homestuck deliberately plays with irony. It uses its obfuscatory nature to hide its sincerity, its meaning, its truths. Homestuck is like a mine field, where the mines are penis jokes, and also Jigsaw is there taunting you, but it's cool because we all think it's funny that Jigsaw is there. He is going to cut off your legs though. 

Intertextuality is a big one. It refers to a work not only being aware of other works, but reliant upon them to establish its own themes. It covers things like references, parodies, and pastiche (the fancy literary term for references). For example, a lot of Homestuck's story is reliant upon the bunny from Con Air. We'll get into this more later, but Homestuck legitimately has a required reading list in order to fully understand it. I'll do my best to make this essay legible even if you haven't read them, summarizing where I must, but nothing's a true substitute for reading them yourself.

That's the wolf from The NeverEnding Story. It's my greatest fear. I'm trapped in this attic like the kid from The NeverEnding Story was. That kid was reading a long fantasy story in that attic as a framing device for the "real story," where a bunch of crazy stuff happened, and a sad horse drowned in a swamp at some point. Also, as the kid kept reading, the lines between the fiction and reality started blurring, so it was a similar kind of metaclusterfuck as Homestuck. (Well, not really, but whatever.) Except the guy in the attic in this case isn't reading the story that's coming to life and consuming his reality, he's writing it, while throwing a big tantrum, and screaming at a wolf-head trophy. So that's why The Neverending Story is a pretty apt "mascot movie" for the author-insert layer of Homestuck, which also does an incredible job of making the reader suspect that its story quite possibly will never end. The NeverEnding Story themes have a way of surfacing any time I show up in Homestuck.

Metanarrative is the idea that a story can be like an onion and have layers. A traditional story might operate only on two levels: the actions of the characters, and maybe some greater theme or moral. For example, Cinderella is a story about a poor abused girl eventually marrying a prince, and it can also be described as a story about how goodness and kindness and small feet will be rewarded. Postmodernism takes this idea and stretches it as far as it can go; David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest has footnotes, with entire stories taking place entirely in the footnotes. Homestuck has its own webcomic within a webcomic (SBaHJ represent).

But metanarrative also refers to the idea that all of these small-scope stories add up to some greater whole, beyond a basic or simple theme. As such, to properly understand Homestuck, one must keep in mind these greater, metanarrative ideas, and allow those to guide their interpretations of smaller events. One must think in terms of symbols and layers.

Unreliable narration refers to a character within the story being intentionally manipulative, unconsciously biased, and/or genuinely unaware of something in order to trick the audience. Now, the line between an unreliable narrator and a character just being incorrect is a blurry one, but this is the major difference: when a character is just incorrect, the way the audience is meant to feel about the story's objective reality is never in question: it's either clearly telegraphed to the audience that the character is wrong about reality for the purposes of dramatic irony, or else that the character appears to be correct and the audience is meant to believe them (and then we'll both be shocked later when they turn out to be wrong). Meanwhile, an unreliable narrator OBFUSCATES how we're meant to feel about the story's reality, and understanding that reality can only occur if the audience rejects the narrator's version of events, which the story itself usually doesn't do. Hence, this meme:

That's what that's referring to. If you believe an unreliable narrator and take them at face value, you will simply be wrong about the story's reality. You'll note that EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN HOMESTUCK is an unreliable narrator. If you are not, at all times, interrogating Homestuck in a dark basement room with a baseball bat, you are literally going to have entirely the wrong idea about its objective reality, and this is why the fandom can't even agree on basic shit like whether or not Gamzee was evil all along. 

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at Homestuck's ending, which - apropos Homestuck's circular nature - is also its beginning.

THE ENDING IS SHITTY ON PURPOSE

Here's a question for you: who is the author of Homestuck?

It's a trick question, of course. Andrew Hussie is the obvious answer, and in our reality, this is true; however, is this still true of the diegetic reality of Homestuck? 

No. Andrew Hussie, who is also a character in Homestuck, initially appears to be the author:

I CONJURE THIS INTREPID FANTASYSCAPE WITH TEARS BLED FROM THE WISDOM-WEARY EYES OF FIFTY THOUSAND IMAGINARY MAGICIANS. I PULL HEAVY DRAGS FROM THE BRUMES OF INSPIRATION WITH ENCHANTED BELLOWS MARAUDED FROM A GUILD OF CHURLISH MYTHICAL DWARVES.

He wrestles with Doc Scratch for control over the story when Doc briefly takes over, calling Doc's meddling in Alternian history "troll fanfiction":

Before he's shot and killed by Lord English:

And Caliborn takes over the story:

ALLOWING [ME] TO OFFICIALLY AND PERMANENTLY ASSUME CONTROL OF. A PROPERTY OF [MY] EXPERIENTIAL CONTINUUM WHICH I HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE IS CALLED. "THE NARRATIVE".

And, because Lord English is ALREADY HERE, he turns out to be responsible for everything that ever happens:

uu: I THINK PART OF MY PERSONAL QUEST. IS TO BECOME AT EASE WITH THE FORCES OF INEVITABILITY.
uu: INEVITABILITY THAT ALL THINGS SHOULD AND WILL FALL IN MY FAVOR. THAT ALL CAUSALITY ANSWERS TO ME. AND THAT ALL OUTCOMES NOT ONLY SERVE ME. BUT CONSIST OF MY BEING.
uu: SO I FEEL THAT. THE MORE I GROW IN POWER.
uu: THE MORE STUFF IT SHOULD TURN OUT I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR.
uu: UP TO AND INCLUDING. EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENS.

Meaning that character!Hussie was, in fact, an unwitting pawn of Lord English the entire time, disposed of when he outlived his usefulness. This is, in fact, corroborated by Hussie in the book commentary:

AH, the character, as the cartoon avatar for The Creator, has a sort of arc, I guess you could call it. [...] More to the point, he is set upon a long-term trajectory from being the supreme goofball-savant in absolute command of his craft to gradually becoming a victim of his creation, as much at the mercy of the forces it unleashes as he was the original architect of their unleashing.

Which means that the author of Homestuck is, and has always been, Lord English.

In a while (next book) Doc Scratch himself is going to take over narration of the story. He's a villainous alt-author figure. This moment where I'm sort of pretending to be him, typing in his white text while also getting more whimsical and appearing to take my duties as an author less seriously, is just another leg in AH's long journey where he transitions from "the author as a limited, goofy, fallible human being" to "the author as a nefarious, destructive, non-human entity, which thrives in his absence, if not outright trying to kill/replace him, and itself has several different forms." Stuff like this generally tends to read as more stupid monkey business, but the individual segments start making a lot more sense when you start reading them as installments of "the increasingly derelict, maniacal author is gradually phasing himself out of control over the story, and/or is BEING phased out of control over the story by dark forces beyond his control."

And just to get this out of the way, Lord English is a symbol for oppressors: fascism, the patriarchy, abusers, and predators. I feel like this one is obvious enough that I don't need to back it up, but here's a quote explicitly describing how some of the souls in his cocktail were chosen for their toxically masculine traits:

I think when the time comes to show the douchebag cocktail stuck inside Cal, there's a brief temptation to regard it as an odd, semi-random melange of characters. But there are several layers of logic to the guys who all combine to form his personality. Much of the logic orbits around these negative traits associated with men, or more specifically, the "toxically masculine" aspects often linked to certain male personalities.

So, every time I say LE did this or that, mentally replace "LE" with "fascism, the patriarchy, abusers, and predators". Let's practice: LE usurped the story from "the author". LE was in control of the narrative all along. LE set up the characters to fail in order to perpetuate his own existence. LE made the ending shitty on purpose. Got it? Awesome. Let's get used to thinking in terms of symbols and layers, it'll help make things make sense.

But what does it mean that LE has seized control of the narrative? What is "the narrative," in Homestuck's cosmology?

Well, first of all, I want to make something very clear: "the narrative" is NOT a superpower in and of itself. There is no mystical force called "narrative" that bestows characters reality-altering abilities. "The narrative" just IS reality - more specifically, "the narrative" represents the idea that reality is like a story.

What is a memory, if not a story we tell ourselves about the past? What is a goal or dream or prophecy, if not a story we tell ourselves about the future? What is our identity, if not a story we tell ourselves about ourselves? 

We fundamentally experience reality as if it is a story - a string of meaningfully connected events, heroes and villains, rising and falling action - and so when a character claims to have control over the narrative, or serves as a narrator, all that this means is that the character who does so has some heightened awareness of reality, and therefore, more ability to directly act upon it. You could say - and this is a word that is going to keep coming up - that they possess some greater degree of enlightenment. Here's Hussie outright corroborating this connection between the awareness the story's villains have of "the narrative" (reality), and their effectiveness as villains:

As I've said before, the more powerful and villainous a character is, the higher up the metaladder they reside. Jack is higher than most characters due to his utilization of a Fourth Wall and appearance in narrative proximity to the author himself (my orange fingers typing his name). Doc is much higher than that. The first true alt-author of the story, but not the last.

So, with that in mind, what is the ending that LE, our author, writes for us? Simply put: it's one where everyone loses.

The way time works in Homestuck is that, in order for reality to continue existing, every time loop must close. If a choice is made that would result in a time loop failing to close, then the timeline becomes doomed and withers away into oblivion. The exact sequence of events that causes loops to close is governed by karma/Mind, which we will get to later.

Note that all other abilities are fundamentally subject to the laws of Space and Time. For example, though John's retcon powers allow him to flee doom indefinitely, and bestow a similar unmooring to anyone he wishes, he isn't actually able to unmoor reality itself: the post-retcon timeline he creates (under the guidance of a Mind player) not only satisfies all extant time loops up to that point, but is, in fact, in itself a requirement to satisfy other time loops, such as the creation of LE in the first place. Ergo: while John can escape doom for as long as he wants, the reality he lands in must still fundamentally satisfy the laws of Time, or else it will become a doomed reality and wither away.

AG: Think of it like circulatory system, where the veins and capillaries that do not help the overall flow of 8lood through the system are likely to wither and die. Those are doomed offshoots.

One of the largest time loops in the series, spanning from the far past of Alternia to the far future of Earth C, is the life and times of LE, Doc Scratch, and Lil Cal. One of the last chronological points in the story is the stop-motion battle Caliborn describes, where the eight humans challenge him to a battle, and eventually four rowdy souls get sucked into Lil Cal, who is banished into the void. This becomes LE, whose influence via Doc Scratch reaches to one of the earliest chronological points in time, the far past of Alternia.

This is the true form of LE's "narrative control", and what Doc Scratch means when he defines the alpha timeline as being the one that boasts exclusive rights both to his birth and to his death: via the time loops needed for reality to remain stable, LE has fundamentally bound reality to his own existence. There is only one viable reality: the one where John takes Caliborn up on his taunt in the end credits.

From there, we can easily trace the trajectory of the rest of the cast:

• The Black Hole is detonated by God Tier!Calliope, thus rendering navigation through the Furthest Ring impossible, as all previously successful attempts to do so were done via either the light of the Green Sun or the cracked bubbles, both of which are now caught in the Black Hole's event horizon.
• Dirk, Jane, Jake, and Roxy are trapped on Earth C in the far future, in Caliborn's session, with no way out.   
• John, Rose, Dave, and Jade, who are deployed from the House Juju, along with all other immortal characters, like Vriska and Aradia, are now trapped at the Black Hole with no way out.   
• "But wait, John's retcon powers" - it's implied that when past!John inherited (as an Heir does) retcon powers from future!John, this removed those powers from future!John, as the two never came to view the ability as more than just "something they inherited" (more on this when we get into Gnosticism). Therefore, they are no longer available.
• (It's lowkey confirmed that they're definitely trapped at the Black Hole, given that Terezi has spent literal years scouring the Furthest Ring looking for Vriska to no avail.)
• All characters left behind on Earth C, with the exception of Calliope, are mortal and die of old age, if not sooner.   
• Calliope must be parted from the Ring of Life at some point (leading to her immediate death), as Caliborn has the Ring of Void in his final boss fight, and each ring can only exist when the other one disappears.
• Earth C is completely lifeless and abandoned by the time Caliborn and Calliope are born, implying that the new humans and trolls were eventually wiped out, too. This also implies that GCATavrosprite and Jasprosesprite^2 perish at some point, as well.

Now, of course, there is grey, undefined space within this ending, but it is overall intentionally bleak, hopeless, and shadowed by a feeling of inevitability. Remember what LE symbolizes? Well, this ending represents his triumph: a Total Party Kill, rocks fall everyone dies ending, where reality is fundamentally preserved, but everyone - including LE himself - is ultimately destroyed. Ultimate annihilation, the logical endpoint of the forces LE represents in real life.

In fact, I wouldn’t make such a sweeping claim without backing it up. This circular ending is, in fact, an echo from one of Homestuck’s intertextual foundations: The Neverending Story. The Neverending Story is, itself, a nested story-within-a-story - a boy named Bastian reads a book called The Neverending Story, and is eventually directly drawn into it.

But there’s a really interesting passage within it, before he’s drawn in: in order to tempt him into doing so, a character within the book, the Childlike Empress, goes to see the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, a figure who is, despite being a character within the book, the one who writes and records it. And there, she demands that he tell the story of The Neverending Story.

The Old Man wrote and said: "If the Neverending Story contains itself, then the world will end with this book."

And the Childlike Empress answered: "But if the hero comes to us, new life can be born. Now the decision is up to him."

"You are ruthless indeed," the Old Man said and wrote. "We shall enter the Circle of Eternal Return, from which there is no escape.”

And so he begins, causing a permanent, recursive loop.

Once again she started on her way to find the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, once again she climbed the ladder of letters and entered the egg, once again the conversation between her and the Old Man was related word for word, and once again the Old Man of Wandering Mountain began to write and tell the Neverending Story.

At that point the story began all over again -- unchanged and unchangeable -- and ended once again with the meeting between the Childlike Empress and the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who began once again to write and tell the Neverending Story…

But, yes, I understand that for most people reading this essay, intertextuality alone isn’t going to hold much water. As such, I’ll list rapidfire a few more diegetic pieces of evidence that the canon ending is worryingly sinister, cast in the shadow of conspiracy.

First, the canon ending of Homestuck - right before Act 7 and the end credits - is literally Act 6 Act 6 Act 6 - 666, the number of the devil, to which Doc Scratch/LE are regularly compared. (Yes, you SHOULD start substituting "the devil" for LE/Doc Scratch when they come up, in addition to everything else. We are thinking in symbols and layers!)

[Doc Scratch]'s a fairly conventional devil figure in this way, as well as a nefarious alt-author, with the power to stand in for me, or subvert the narrative. These are his top-level qualities as a character and narrative device, which are explored much more intensively late in Act 5 during his story-hijack move. But there's an awful lot more to say about him than this. You'll see.

Second, the Condesce fight in [S] Collide feels weird, doesn't it? This character is supposedly completely immortal so long as LE has use for her, and LE being in the bubbles means he's not 1:1 aligned with time within the session, so him being defeated there wouldn't necessarily correlate with that being the moment his magic supply cuts out. It's enough to make one suspect that perhaps the Condy's death was a result of her outliving her usefulness...

Third, DaveKat becoming canon is actually a grim omen of ill portent (sorry DaveKat fans). First of all, Caliborn and Hal are two of LE's primary constituents. Caliborn is the OG DaveKat shipper, and Hal is shown as having a penchant for canonizing yaoi ships for shitty men, as he’s the one who got Dirk and Jake together. I'm just saying. (I feel like this take, more than any other, is going to lose me readers. Please keep reading, it all gets so much weirder, I promise.)

Finally, characters in Act 666 are CONSTANTLY alluding to the fact that they never addressed their emotional issues, like Terezi's monologue here:

GC: 1 N3V3R F3LT WHOL3
GC: 1 ST1LL DON'T
GC: 4ND YOU M4D3 1T SO 1 D1DN'T H4V3 TO F4C3 TH4T F33L1NG
GC: FOR 4 WH1L3 4T L34ST
GC: 4ND NOW TH4T 1 TH1NK 1 KNOW TH1S 4BOUT MYS3LF
GC: 1 TH1NK 1 G3T 1T
GC: TH3 F33L1NG W1LL PROB4BLY N3V3R GO 4W4Y
GC: ONLY COV3R3D UP 4T MOST, M4YB3
GC: W3 COULD W1N TH1S F1GHTGC: CR34T3 4NOTH3R UN1V3RS3
GC: SUCC33D 1N 3V3RY W4Y POSS1BL3
GC: 4ND 1'LL ST1LL F33L 1NCOMPL3T3
GC: V1CTORY WON'T F1X M3
GC: M4YB3 NOTH1NG C4N
GC: M4YB3 TH3R3'S TOO L1TTL3 SUBST4NC3 1NS1D3 M3 TO 3V3N B3 F1X3D

Or never completed their character arcs, like Karkat admitting he has no idea what Blood is:

KANAYA: You Really Dont Have Even The Slightest Sense Of What You Stand For
KANAYA: Some Concept That Speaks To You In Some Way
KANAYA: Or Represents Ideals Important To You
KARKAT: I DUNNO
KARKAT: UHH
KARKAT: BLOOD?
KANAYA: Blood
KARKAT: NO, NOT BLOOD.
KARKAT: I MEAN, NOT REALLY. MAYBE.
KARKAT: HONESTLY I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS OR WHY I SAID IT.

That they're still acting shitty and cruel toward each other, like Dirk refusing to acknowledge Hal's personhood:

DIRK: Via my shades.
DIRK: Which he incidentally used to be.
DIRK: Like, as a computer, which he lived inside as my Auto-Responder.

And even Hussie breaks his "Vriska is my waifu" characterization to comment on how the Vriska/(Vriska) meltdown paints a portrait of a unhealed person:

Vriska has a few really, really epic meltdowns throughout Homestuck, right up to the end. The meltdown to end them all of course happens between Vriska x (Vriska). These incidents always expose a deeply sad and broken person.

And also, though this is in the end credits, John literally develops depression?

And, oh yeah, here's Hussie in the book commentary alluding to the fact that we never see Lord English's defeat, because whether or not that's shown to you is up to HIS discretion, not Hussie's:

LE arguably is me, but detached from the literal AH persona by several layers of symbolism and exaggerated, shithead, in-story avatar composites, to create the ultimate anti-narrative, anti-reader, anti-Homestuck monstrosity. Implacable and invincible. So invincible that, even in a state of imminent defeat, his death can't be shown, because...why would he "give" that to you?

The story is blaring at you, in big bold text, that this ending is not a good one, that something has gone awry, that something is deeply wrong. The triumphant veneer is a trick - one of LE's misdirections, a shitty twist - to make YOU, THE AUDIENCE, accept the swill that LE is feeding you. 

But wait! LE's creation is inevitable anyway. Even if the characters did become aware at the end of how badly screwed over they were, it wouldn't change the fact that there's only one viable outcome. Why doesn't LE dispense with the pretenses, and go ahead and start taunting the audience? We know he has constituent parts that LOVE to brag (Caliborn, Gamzee, and Hal all indulge in this). Why bother with making the end of the story SEEM like a triumphant victory for the forces of good?

Peter Pan is why.

CLAP YOUR HANDS IF YOU BELIEVE

Here we get into our first major instance of intertextuality. Now, Homestuck draws on Peter Pan for a multitude of its themes and ideas - for example, the kids' planets are basically 1:1 conceptually lifted from the Neverlands - so I'm only going to enumerate them as they become relevant.

(I skipped one earlier, so I'll quickly go over it now: the narrator in the Peter Pan books is practically a character himself, opining very blatantly about the other characters in the story, and at one point flipping a coin to determine what vignette to tell the reader. This subjectivity clearly inspired Homestuck's own use of not only unreliable narrator, but also of the author-as-character, which Homestuck takes to an extreme. Moving on.)

Right now, what's important is this:

Peter Pan was a stage play before it was a book, and there's a part near the ending where Tinkerbell has saved Peter by drinking poison in his place. As she lays dying, she tells him that she can be saved if children express their belief in fairies. There are no children nearby, and so Peter instead turns to the audience.

(He rises and throws out his arms he knows not to whom, perhaps to the boys and girls of whom he is not one.) Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands! 

Remember, reality is like a story, and thus "the narrative" can be considered synonymous with the comic's objective reality. Two characters thus far have possessed overwhelming influence over that reality, which stems from their profound knowledge of it - Hussie being the author who initiated the narrative in the first place, and Caliborn gleaning his understanding from the terminal he unlocks that allows him to see anything, anywhere, anytime, superceding even Void obfuscation. 

However, there's a third character in possession of such narrative-spanning insight:

YOU THERE. MSPA READER.

The reason LE has to make the ending seem triumphant and victorious is because he needs to trick YOU. His ending can only stand unchallenged if nobody challenges it. He needs YOU to accept the ending as true and real in order for it to be so.

You see, a second work is referenced in Homestuck to the same extent as Peter Pan, if not moreso: the 1991 movie Hook, which can be described as a Peter Pan canon extension genfic, complete with original-character-do-not-steal Rufio. Both Peter Pan and Hook are formally heralded into the story by Tavros, signifying their equal import.

Hook's inclusion and elevation to the same status as the original Peter Pan raises a very important question: at what point does a derivative work become as "real" as the real thing?

The answer: when the audience believes it to be.

This is why, though Homestuck primarily references such works as Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz in their book forms, the comic contains references to their adaptations - Jade still wears ruby slippers, despite them being silver in the book. Homestuck is making an explicit stand that derivative works can rise to equal standing, equal "real"ness, to the originals, if the audience buys into them as being "real".

In fact, this idea that believing in something "fake" hard enough can make it "real" is literally the stated power of Hope, and why it's framed in-universe as being the most powerful aspect.

[T]he power of belief is the key to everything. Believing in things reduces their fakeness attribute. It's the force that shapes your reality, used to snatch personal meaning from the jaws of a cynical and nihilistic environment. Could this be why Hope is framed as the most fundamentally powerful aspect?

The shitty ending of Homestuck, the one where LE triumphs and everyone else loses, is "real". Any deviation from this ending, apropos the laws of reality, must necessarily be "fake". But fake things can become real things if you believe in them, and MSPA Reader (you!) is in a position of mastery over reality, same as Hussie and LE. 

And so LE must prevent you from realizing this at ANY cost. He must make you give up on Hope and cosign the characters to their fates by accepting the "real" ending as-is. The ending is shitty, and it will stay that way so long as you never challenge it and its author.

And again, we are thinking in terms of symbols and layers. Remember what LE stands for? Oppressors and abusers. This is commentary on real life. This is commentary on how those forces, in real life, shape our society and convince us that there's no other way to exist than the way it's been laid out for us. This is commentary on how they can only rule unchallenged if nobody steps up to challenge them.

When the Childlike Empress and the Old Man of Wandering Mountain initiate their Circle of Eternal Return, it’s with the explicit caveat that the one thing that can break the cycle is a human entering into the story from beyond the fourth wall to breathe new life into it. So, too, can the characters in Homestuck only break free of Lord English’s control with our interference.

I know this is a radical idea to start the essay out with. Traditional stories, at most, treat the fourth wall as something to wink-wink, nudge-nudge about. Almost never do they engage the audience as a part of the story itself.

But Homestuck is not a traditional story. It's postmodern. And postmodern stories are built on meta, on awareness of the outside, and they utilize things like intertextuality. Let's take a look at another passage from The Neverending Story.

"You ask me what you will be [in the real world]. But what are you here? What are you creatures of Fantastica? Dreams, poetic inventions, characters in a neverending story. Do you think you're real? Well yes, here in your world you are. But when you've been through the Nothing [to get there], you won't be real anymore."

[...]

"[H]umans hate Fantastica and everything that comes from here. They want to destroy it. And they don't realize that by trying to destroy it they multiply the lies that keep flooding the human world. For these lies are nothing other than creatures of Fantastica who have ceased to be themselves and survive only as living corpses, poisoning the souls of men with their fetid smell."

[...]

"In fact, that's the heart of the matter. Don't you see? If humans believe Fantastica doesn't exist, they won't get the idea of visiting your country. And as long as they don't know you creatures of Fantastica as you really are, the Manipulators do what they like with them."

"What can they do?"

"Whatever they please. When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts."

[...]

[Bastian] now realized that not only was Fantastica sick, but the human world as well.

The two were connected. He had always felt this, though he could not have explained why it was so. He had never been willing to believe that life had to be as gray and dull as people claimed. He heard them saying: "Life is like that," but he couldn't agree. He never stopped believing in mysteries and miracles. 

And now he knew that someone would have to go to Fantastica to make both worlds well again.

Listen: I, too, am an unreliable narrator. I, too, am someone who is telling you a story. I, too, am trying to convince you of a certain belief, of a certain way of thinking, of a certain kind of "truth".

But I think I make a compelling argument. 

HOMESTUCK = REAL LIFE IN MICROCOSM

The "Homestuck = Life" model of interpretation is often clarifying. The story itself is indistinguishable from the alienating, hostile realm the kids are attempting to grow up in. It fully embodies the conditions of adversity, along with all its backdrops and stage props, including the various prescribed challenges and regimented metrics of growth such as quests to fulfill and gods to conquer. So when Karkat is impatient with and aggravated by these storytelling patterns—the various linguistic tics, beats, and refrains we now recognize as idiomatic to Homestuck—he's actually being impatient with life itself, as defined in this metatextual way. Resisting and subverting the various traditions and orthodoxies that Homestuck has established as integral to its own telling is the same as resisting and subverting the organic flow of one's own journey through life and personal growth.

SBURB is a metaphor for adolescence, the embarkation from childhood to adulthood. Think back to how each of the beta kids' entry artifacts signify both coming-of-age and loss of innocence (or better yet, here's Hussie explicitly saying so):

Each one is symbolic in some sense of a departure. And each has things in common with some of the others.

[...] 

The symbolism of killing her dangerous dog to enter (i.e. a step toward growing up) borrows notes from the Old Yeller story, but in this case, it's a dog that can't die (though nevertheless would assume a death-like state through prototyping). 

The safe, known world of childhood is irreparably destroyed, and there's no way back. They must navigate a world trapped in a war betwixt light and dark, creation and destruction, grapple with politics and cooperation, and ultimately design and birth a new universe.

The children of today become tomorrow's voters, politicians, revolutionaries, law enforcement. There's a reason SBURB requires at least two players to make a viable session: society is a group effort. We literally cannot do it alone. We have to care about each other.

Remember what LE stands for? Lest we forget, John and Karkat's weapons are a hammer and sickle. Politics are baked right into the very foundation of Homestuck. This is how you have to think of the comic: not as some simple tale about some goofy friends going on a fun adventure, although that is one layer of its metatextual cake (and, in fact, a very important layer, though we'll get to it later) - Homestuck is a grand statement about life and society. What it takes to build a good society, and what it means to live a good life. Nothing about it is extraneous, nothing about it is simple and straightforward. Every character is significant; nothing can be discarded.

And this is Homestuck's most interesting trick of all: all the ingredients for a true happy ending are present within the canon itself. Homestuck is a jigsaw plot sans the final picture. Classpects, soul mates, and final character arc resolutions are all entirely solvable mysteries. As we continue on, I'm going to show you the conclusions I reached. Even if you disagree, I hope you're able to see things a bit differently. This is, I believe, the way Homestuck was meant to be read, the way Hussie - the real life guy - wrote it. Symbols and layers. Often, the idea of something takes precedence over its material reality.

What we gather from [Rose creating actual magical wands by alchemizing a shitty wizard statue) is that wizards, even shitty statues of wizards, are inherently magical, and their inherent magical properties can be harvested through the process of alchemy. This is yet another reflection of the fact that in this particular fictional realm, and especially where alchemy is concerned, the fundamental ideas the objects represent are more important than the objects themselves. But magic is fake, you say? Wizards aren't real? And cheap fake wizards statues and figurines ESPECIALLY aren't real? It doesn't matter. They carry the IDEA that they are magical, and so, producing conceptual concoctions where the idea is in play will yield real magical results.

There's one last piece of terminology I want to define before we wrap up part one of this giga-essay. 

AFTLIGHTING

Aftlighting is a term I made up to describe an idea Hussie calls "narrative marginalization and abuse". It's an equal and opposite concept to foreshadowing, hence its name. A piece of foreshadowing can be defined as something within the narrative that seems innocuous at first glance, but becomes significant in the story later. Or, as Caliborn puts it:

THE FORESHADOWING OF HIM, IS PRE-IMPORTANT FOR LATER.

Therefore, it follows that a piece of aftlighting can be defined as something within the narrative that seems significant at first glance, but becomes narratively marginalized and shunted into irrelevancy.

It's a term I had to develop to describe all these little hints and clues littered throughout Homestuck that point to its "fake" happy ending, all these little threads of potential that are ultimately left unresolved by the canon story. For example, Hope itself, and the incredible power imbued in it, is aftlit. Ultimately, it never ends up really mattering in the story, and our only surviving Hope player ends the narrative as an emotional wreck who meekly accepts being nicknamed "Joke". 

And yet, it's vital to any "fake" happy ending, to the point where the invocation of Hope, this power to make fake things real, is a prerequisite. Thus: aftlighting. We are looking back and shining a light on these things that SHOULD matter.

As these essays continue, and especially as we begin talking about Hal, the Homestuck Meta Final Boss, the concept of aftlighting (and aftlit details) will come up again and again, so I want to define it early. 

And so we conclude the first essay in this series, which provides us with the framework and mode of thought that will support and inform the rest of our reading moving forward. Hope to see you in the next one, where we cover everyone's favorite topic: classpecting!

... Is how this section of the essay originally ended, but then the classpecting section got so big that it's going to need to be split up into parts. 

So, hope to see you in the next one, where we cover PART ONE of everyone's favorite topic: classpecting!