I hate the whole "canon discussion" the series has taken

[PilotBlackSmith]

Alright. I won't bother you much about what you wrote since you said it was mostly an opinion piece to show why some people might have liked those terrible things,
However.

I don't have much an argument to make here. The fact that this moment completely betrays all conventional wisdom and is a massive "fuck you" to the audiences expectations. But Homestuck has been all about flouncing expectations since day one, for better and especially for worse.

You have stated that Homestuck has always been about subversion and that's a big no-no.
Since when the hell was Homestuck about this "subversion" shit? I fucking hate it and I hate it SO much. Acts 1-5 were always INCREASING my expectations, making them hope for something even bigger, and I GOT those "bigger things" with Descend, John: Rise Up(which was being taunted at us since the beginning, the whole part of the kids rising as heroes) and finally Cascade. Even fucking hivebound, which is the only thing that immediately reminds me as "subversive", still had the pacing of original homestuck and at the very least, the trolls were funny stupid imperialist bug aliens so their batshit insane relationship mechanics were somewhat interesting, but actual teen drama? where the FUCK did this shit come from? who the fuck looked at the crazy banter those 13 year old kids messaged between each others and said "yep, this is a deep character drama alright."? HOW? A lot of the times the kids are rarely talking about themselves and more about the plot or what they have to do. Relationship dynamics only came in when the trolls arrived and even then they were somewhat focused on the IMPENDING DOOM RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES to bother with relationship romance bullshit.

The great retcon wasnt funny, it wasnt interesting(SPECIALLY FOR LIVE READERS) and it only proved that Hussie wasnt writing the story as well as he was doing in the early acts, instead choosing to be VERY pretentious with the meta shit, and, to the surprise of no one, failing completely on it. If your "subversions" make your story worse, then you should stop writing them in.

Undertale is a "subversive" game too but it actually did it's subversions well because it was always subverting into something better and more interesting(or at the very least, funny), none of them felt like a rude "FUCK YOU" from the developer to me and because of that, the story itself wasn't compromised and UT was still able to masterfully deliver its message. Homestuck's post act 5 "subversions" feel like a broken mess of pretentiousness made by a teenager trying to be "deep" and write a surprising story, only to end up with a fucking uninteresting shitshow.

So yeah, no. Homestuck's

one more thing,

to the point where there was a 3 minute flash illustrating why every ounce of those time shenanigans was important.

from this 3 minute flash, only 40 seconds of it had Act 6+ content in it, most of the whole thing was shenanigans from acts prior
the only thing act 6 added was Caliborn closing the loop.

Who knows, maybe I should go back and read Homestuck all the way through and see if my opinion changes.

you should.

if I were to write the greatest story ever told, and right at the very end, give a massive "fuck you" to my readers and destroy the entire narrative, I woudn't be regarded as genius or a good writer, only a massive fucking dumbass.

I would like to leave, as a piece of opinion at the end, that this whole mindset that "Homestuck has always been about subversion" is a bad one and I should make an effort to show why its bad so the community understands why the direction WP is taking homestuck is a very bad idea. So far, Hussie and the team haven't shown anything interesting done with the whole concept besides the 20 minute window where Dirk allowed reader commands back in, so why should we trust them to keep going with this whole stuff instead of going back to a more traditional story?

[BrobyDDark]

if I were to write the greatest story ever told, and right at the very end, give a massive "fuck you" to my readers and destroy the entire narrative, I woudn't be regarded as genius or a good writer, only a massive fucking dumbass.

This is implying that Homestuck is better than the Muppet Babies comic Hussie did, and I don't like it.

So far, Hussie and the team haven't shown anything interesting done with the whole concept besides the 20 minute window where Dirk allowed reader commands back in, so why should we trust them to keep going with this whole stuff instead of going back to a more traditional story?

See, now, I was wondering if they actually did open up commands. Which makes Dirk's frustration at the "End Homestuck" command even more hilarious. I have to wonder how many of those they got.

Relationship dynamics only came in when the trolls arrived and even then they were somewhat focused on the IMPENDING DOOM RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES to bother with relationship romance bullshit.

To add onto this, when Karkat (I think it was Karkat?) basically told John that he would have to get with Rose to save their species, John's response was (if my memory serves me right) akin to "Huh, never thought about that. Weird."

It really showed how fuck-all romance actually played into the story, aside from the plot device that was Troll romance.

And then Act 6, which was basically a YA post-apoc novel, came along and 90210'd all over the place.

[PilotBlackSmith]

This is implying that Homestuck is better than the Muppet Babies comic Hussie did, and I don't like it.

it is a FACT that Andrew Hussie's magnum opus is Problem Sleuth.

that is not even up for debate.

[BrobyDDark]

This is implying that Homestuck is better than the Muppet Babies comic Hussie did, and I don't like it.

it is a FACT that Andrew Hussie's magnum opus is Problem Sleuth.

that is not even up for debate.

I need to re-read PS at some point. It's been too long.

[Joyfulldreams]

@pilotblacksmith I'd kinda like to hop in here and just...say I think you are just completely incorrect when it comes to insisting Homestuck was not about subverting expectations. It...it is VERY LITERALLY about that from moment one? Like, literally the very first panel. With the whole arms joke thing, and introducing the sylladex and playing around with what the readers expect from it via their commands, throwing people for a loop by building up expectations to be a certain thing and then *subverting* those expectations.

The entirety of what makes Acts 1-5 so amazing is the fact that the story is literally built upon the narrative, and occassionally hussie, straight up telling you that a thing is going to happen. You expect a thing to happen, because you are literally told that it will. A meteor will strike, a hat will be sent through the mail, a copy of a game will show up in a flower, a green box will end up in x place at x time, someones dreamself will wake up, the universe will end, a character will god tier, a room will explode, someone will die, etc etc etc etc--and then every single thing you are told will happen, happens, but your expectations are SUBVERTED because they almost always happen in a way that either flies in the face of assumptions we'd been lead to make previously (the trolls aren't literal aliens they're just being trolls, the green sun is created not destroyed but then it is destroyed later, we thought dave rose and jade wouldn't god tier but then they do and in quite an epic fashion) or happens in a way that is so bonkers it couldn't have been predicted at all (literally all of murderstuck, BRO CUTTING A METEOR IN HALF???, bec prototyping himself to rescue jade, etc etc).

So whether you think this is a good or bad thing aside, or whether it gets taken too far later on or not executed even near as well (which I'd agree with, both for act 6 and CERTAINLY the epilogues) Homestuck....LITERALLY has been all about the subversion of expectations. Down to subverting how one might expect a webcomic to work by functioning more like a text adventure game but then still not quite that because inputs are cherrypicked and then later entirely disregarded and--just. Yeah.

The thing is, the mere act of subversion is neither a story in of itself nor is it quality writing. It's simply a thing you can do. It's a thing you can do well, or not so well, or even do horribly.

Case in point: the characters of Tavros and Jake are meant to exist as 'subversions' of how many female characters are treated in other stories, i.e. being treated as nothing more than a vehicle for a male character's development, often via abuse (Tavros), or being constantly and often unrealistically sought after by a large number of other characters and being used as merely an object of desire rather than a person in their own right (Jake). Tavros and Jake are that, except the genders are flipped! Wow! Exciting!

In Tavros's case, this falls completely flat, because the way Tavros is portrayed--as being whiny and pathetic--does not actually subvert pretty much anything regarding gender dynamics, and just ends up REINFORCING tropes of portraying abuse of men by women as a joke, while ALSO doing a double-whammy and infantalizing a disabled character. Thus, this subversion fails to reveal or explore anything meaningful or valuable. This is subversion done SHITTY AND BAD. It's still a subversion. But it is done badly. (I'd say the epilogues are another example of subversion being done extremely shittily, but...this post is already long. I'll save it for later.)

Jake, on the other hand, has a little more going for him, because the subversion of Jake, who at first is introduced as some Hyper-Masculine Hero Type who is instead really the Object Of Desire is at times far more blatant to the point of being obvious parody, and at other times extremely subtle. Jake is not merely preyed upon by women and laughed at for it (...at first...), instead he is set up as having an obsession with hypermasculinity and action movies and with being an action-adventure hero type--something that is obviously extremely common in media and in real life--and those obsessions are immediately shown to be petty, meaningless fantasies. This introduces the idea that perhaps such ideas are also simply petty, meaningless fantasies in OTHER places they show up. This is an interesting idea that the reader is eased into quite subtly, and is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the interesting ideas Jake potentially brings into play. If it weren't for the fact that Jake's journey falls into similar pitfalls to Tavros, goes basically nowhere, and falls completely flat even though it starts out great, I'd call this a fairly good example of a subversion. Instead it's...overall pretty meh.

Although that kind of brings me to my last point, I guess, which is that I genuinely don't understand why people are so averse to the whole teenage drama thing. The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex. There's just so much more GOING ON there. I'd say this is partially due to the fact that they are literally older, and since Homestuck seemed to want to explore ideas related to the realities of kids growing up, more specifically on the internet, it kind of makes sense we'd go from relatively uncomplicated 13-year-olds and...age up a bit into the far more angst-ridden teens. Raise the stakes, as it were. Was it done as well as it could have been? Probably not. But I don't think it came out of nowhere, or that it was never a part of the original 'plan' as it were.

[egg]

I think people are less upset that Homestuck is about subversion, and more like the subversions towards the end became less 'oh this is an interesting way to look at it' and more so 'haha i pulled the rug from under your foot!!! haha it's a prank bro!!!!! it's all about the meta dude!!!!" which just... isn't cool.

[Flame_Warp]

I think people are less upset that Homestuck is about subversion, and more like the subversions towards the end became less 'oh this is an interesting way to look at it' and more so 'haha i pulled the rug from under your foot!!! haha it's a prank bro!!!!! it's all about the meta dude!!!!" which just... isn't cool.

Yeah, pretty much this. Homestuck has always been about subversion, but its subversions in the past have generally lead to the characters and stories becoming stronger. I can't say 'these characters have lost all their development/become monsters offscreen' strike me as either of those.

[egg]

I think people are less upset that Homestuck is about subversion, and more like the subversions towards the end became less 'oh this is an interesting way to look at it' and more so 'haha i pulled the rug from under your foot!!! haha it's a prank bro!!!!! it's all about the meta dude!!!!" which just... isn't cool.

Yeah, pretty much this. Homestuck has always been about subversion, but its subversions in the past have generally lead to the characters and stories becoming stronger. I can't say 'these characters have lost all their development/become monsters offscreen' strike me as either of those.

Hussie and/or his writing team should just play something straight for once. In a comic about subversion, not subverting something is the ultimate subversion and it won't make anybody want to drive to your house and say a lot of mean words towards you.

[BrobyDDark]

Although that kind of brings me to my last point, I guess, which is that I genuinely don't understand why people are so averse to the whole teenage drama thing. The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex. There's just so much more GOING ON there. I'd say this is partially due to the fact that they are literally older, and since Homestuck seemed to want to explore ideas related to the realities of kids growing up, more specifically on the internet, it kind of makes sense we'd go from relatively uncomplicated 13-year-olds and...age up a bit into the far more angst-ridden teens. Raise the stakes, as it were. Was it done as well as it could have been? Probably not. But I don't think it came out of nowhere, or that it was never a part of the original 'plan' as it were.

I mean, well, first off, to be a more interesting character, the parts of a character's personality that would be more interesting than another have to be shown well.

You can say Jane is more complex than John, but we saw years worth of exploring his psyche and his emotions beyond what he was supposed to be. If John is the Everyman, Boring Guy, of whom his character traits amass to two singular descriptors of 'Main Character' and 'Likes Movies', and Jane is the Spoiled Rich Kid, of hom her character traits read like the description to a Nickelodeon live action series, and then you leave it at that, then, sure. Jane is more complex and inreresting. However, we learned so much more about John beyond Everyman, and the more we learn about Jane the more it feels forced and opaque. There's much more to explore with John, but with Jane it feels like there's a wall keeping us from seeing her actual complexities.

The angsty teen drama is largely disliked because it permeated EVERYTHING, corrupting and changing everything we know in an instant. It wouldn't be nearly as disliked if it was shown gradually. However, it wasn't. At the start of act six we get three new characters craving Jake's toned rump and then skip to the Beta kids and the Trolls and learn: Rose is an alcoholic now for some reason, Jade and Davesprite have been having a terrible on-and-off relationship for the passed three years, culminating in Davesprite leaving for no reason, Terezi and Gamzee have been hate-kissing in the vents. It sets up an overall terrible mood for the rest of act 6. It reads more like a teen drama or a YA novel than it does the whacky adventure it started out as. It's like if Cerebus Syndrome had a fifteen year old younger sister named Jessica who found a command terminal and decided to play god and have these poor, unassuming heroes act out her high-school friendfiction.

[calamityCons]

When it comes to the teen drama, a simple reaspning for my dislike is taste. I just don’t find things like love triangles that enjoyable on its face. Love triangles to me rely far too heavily on lack of communication and just overall stupidity for me to want to spend time with these characters. Jane’s crush on Jake and his deciding to hook up with Dirk was played for drama and I just thought it was the most infuriating thing I read that day. However, another person who finds teen drama engaging and powerful might see that same scene and get really interested in the story.

As a live reader, Homestuck was to my taste because it was very much a shonen anime that didnt realize it was a shonen anime so it didnt fall into repetitive tropes or recycled story beats. The story was focused on the cool superpower fantasy plot stuff, and I was hella engaged in it because of the cool plot and the characters that I found really engaging on their own and with their interactions. John and Rose in particular have an incredibly sweet and hilarious friendship with their personalities bumping up against each other in hilarious ways. Dave and John are also best friends and it’s SHOWN to us through their dialogue together and the actions they take (dave’s birthday letter to John comes to mind).

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that my experience with homestuck was one of me eating some very delicious food that I loved, then I get surprised by the introduction of a new course in the meal that I take one bite of and I immediately gag. I just plain dont like teen drama.

[PilotBlackSmith]

alright I'll agree that the subversion thing was there from day one but even then, in earlier acts it was done so much better than it was later on to the point I didn't even notice my expectations were being subverted in the earlier acts. Not only that but I still believe the new writers aren't handling it as well.

However,

Although that kind of brings me to my last point, I guess, which is that I genuinely don't understand why people are so averse to the whole teenage drama thing. The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex. There's just so much more GOING ON there. I'd say this is partially due to the fact that they are literally older, and since Homestuck seemed to want to explore ideas related to the realities of kids growing up, more specifically on the internet, it kind of makes sense we'd go from relatively uncomplicated 13-year-olds and...age up a bit into the far more angst-ridden teens. Raise the stakes, as it were. Was it done as well as it could have been? Probably not. But I don't think it came out of nowhere, or that it was never a part of the original 'plan' as it were.

I'm still not keen on the teenage romance drama thing, I still think it was absolutely not a good idea for the story, and we would have been MUCH better without it. I think the reason is that the writing wasn't able to deliver something as interesting as I hoped out of it. It felt like Hussie was just trying to capitalize on the shipper craze but ended up making an uninteresting story that in the end nobody except a very small part of the fans enjoyed. Homestuck just didn't feel like the kind of story made for this sort of tone, just think about the entire goddamn fact that Jade had to stuff her own grandpa's body as a little child. It all felt very "flat" and boring SPECIALLY right after Cascade. The Beta Kids and the Trolls specially also had their fair share of drama but it never felt it was slowing down the pace of the story and it was handled in a much more tastefully.

But really I just can't take it seriously at all. Dirk was raised by himself as a baby in the middle of the ocean on a flooded earth ruled by an alien genocidal dictatorship and somehow became V E R Y fluent in English and learned to program AIs and neural networks by himself and now I have to deal with romance drama like it's a goddamn soap opera? yeah, that's a yikes.
As an archival reader, act 6 felt like a slog about something I didn't care about for characters that weren't fun while the characters I DID care about got shutted to the side.
And I really wish I didn't have to say this, but I think Hussie isn't the right kind of guy to write good romance, not that I enjoy romance anyways. But that's just my opinion.

[tajazzled]

i hate teen drama because when i read it im forced to relive the ages of 13-19 which is extremely traumatizing

[Deageon]

Although that kind of brings me to my last point, I guess, which is that I genuinely don't understand why people are so averse to the whole teenage drama thing. The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex.

hnghn oh my god. i'm really glad that you are understanding that this is just your opinion and that it isn't the be all end all of discussion, because uh. in my opinion you are completely wrong? there was plenty of stuff going on with the betas, with each of the four having their own little issues (john dealing with his relationship w/ father and his emotions, jade being lonely (and stuck on a island for the entirety of her life) and dealing with the litany of things that stem from that, etc etc etc. but those issues aren't the complete forefront, which would be sburb and their journeys. with the alphas, their issues were just spelled out pretty blatantly and over a larger amount of time with the major focus being on those issues.

[burnt2ashleys]

[...] It...it is VERY LITERALLY about that from moment one? Like, literally the very first panel. With the whole arms joke thing, and introducing the sylladex and playing around with what the readers expect from it via their commands, throwing people for a loop by building up expectations to be a certain thing and then *subverting* those expectations. [...]

...No? No, I'm gonna go with "no" on that one. The fake arms thing is Hussie being clever about the exact same suggestion he got on Problem Sleuth, not a subversion. That's a byproduct of the (now lost) dynamic between the (now different) readership and author. Homestuck used to allow for reader suggestions, as I'm sure you know.

[...] your expectations are SUBVERTED because they almost always happen in a way that either flies in the face of assumptions we'd been lead to make previously (the trolls aren't literal aliens they're just being trolls, the green sun is created not destroyed but then it is destroyed later, we thought dave rose and jade wouldn't god tier but then they do and in quite an epic fashion) or happens in a way that is so bonkers it couldn't have been predicted at all (literally all of murderstuck, BRO CUTTING A METEOR IN HALF???, bec prototyping himself to rescue jade, etc etc). [...]

wat
I mean, what? That's storytelling 101! You know why, at the end of Homestuck, things kinda fall flat? It's because Vriska tells you to your (you the reader's) face about each and every conflict that's going to happen (Terezi, Dave and Dirk! You go fight Spades Slick and Jack English!), she lays out the plan, and it works out exactly as she planned it. If I'm making a story about a heist and the plan succeeds, is that fun? Is there tension? I mean, I could obviously know that the heist is successful beforehand, but if the laid path is the one taken then there's nothing new added to the table! That's why we don't have SBURB rules laid out, dog! Because if Hussie laid out a successful session with the 4 kids, then the total tension would be so much lesser then the amount of tension that we actually got by introducing foreign agents (carapaces, Jack, the trolls, Doc), you feel me? If you lay out a plan in a story, you shouldn't let it come to fruition unless it's from the antagonists' side (contrivance should always be against the protagonists, never in favor), because then it's just boring, yo. Hell, even in the very comic we find evidence of this rule playing out with Rose and the Green Sun, with Doc telling Rose (and us) that she'll have an involvement with the Green Sun through an explosion, and yet we're tricked at the payoff by Rose being the creator of the Green Sun, not its destroyer.

[...]The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex. There's just so much more GOING ON there. [...]

As opposed to all the shit that ISN'T going on with the beta kids? John bottling his emotions? Rose's relationship with her mother? Dave's conflicted feelings about Bro and how much of a hero he is? Jade's loneliness? I mean, c'mon now. The beta kids are just as complex as the alphas, and some might argue that they're even more complex!

[Joyfulldreams]

Oh man I absolutely agree that almost all of the stuff with the pre-act 6 characters was done...horribly. Just. Really badly. And then the added insult of just erasing it all at the end with the retcon? It feels like you just got a whole lot of your time wasted, basically. With the added insult of not even properly explaining how things actually ended up different in the new timeline in literally any detail and expecting people not to care. Oooo did I care.

But when it comes to the alphas, specifically, uh. I'll have to completely disagree? Like. I spend an awful, awful lot of time analyzing and thinking about every single character in homestuck, and Jane...IS more complex of a character than John, just. Full stop? I adore John, he's one of my favorites, but like kind of the whole point of him is that his problems and personal challenges are a lot more...common? in nature, and a bit more straightforward. Which does not devalue them, but in fact goes to show that even common, straightforward problems are still meaningful and challenging problems to have. John loves his friends and he wants to be closer to them, he wants to be helpful and kind and he wants to have fun. He finds himself in situations where he's ignorant to a lot of important things, and it makes him feel helpless and frustrated. Even with all of the love he has to give, he often finds himself aimless and directionless. He experiences a great loss at a young age that he's never given a real opportunity to properly process. He bottles up and represses most of his feelings and deals with various outbursts of misdirected anger and frustration as a result. Etc!

Jane, though...man. Jane. Her complexities are not presented as clearly, because a lot of what goes on with the Alphas is very subtle and Jane is the one who gets the shaft the most out of all of them, but. Jane has been brainwashed from a very early age to have a particular set of values and has grown up with a potent societal influence to live up to a particular set of extremely specific expectations for her life, and who she's supposed to be. It is practically coded into her DNA to follow some sort of Rules of Respectability. In every aspect of her life there is some expectation for her behavior and presentation that she is meant to follow and anything that deviates from those rules and expectations just does not compute. She has to be the Modern Working Businesswoman who dresses sharp, and has good business sense and intellect (but no so much that she's intimidating), is attractive (but not too attractive), is assertive and strong-willed (but not bitchy or TOO MUCH oh no heavens no), is nurturing and giving of herself (but not too much), etc etc. She has to be straight and feminine and grow up to have a respectably handsome husband and a white picket fence and 2.5 children or whatever. She takes John's problems with repression and takes it up to a fucking hundred. She is constantly repressing not only her emotions but her innermost desires, and varies wildly between shoving everything she actually wants deep deep down to become the world's most unwilling doormat, and then finally giving in to that little voice in her head whispering "hey, you know you're better than this. you don't have to put up with this crap anymore. you don't have to hold back. don't you kinda just want to go apeshit?" and then she goes goddamn apeshit.

It's very clear that she actually doesn't even like Jake all that much because she barely even knows Jake. She likes the IDEA of Jake, as a hot, charming piece of ass who won't even remotely challenge her in any way whatsoever. He fits very neatly into the trajectory she thinks her life needs to take, but she actually kind of fucking hates him. She doesn't really bother to know any of her friends properly at all for a long time, not bothering to pay any attention to any part of them that doesn't fit into her fairly rigid expectations of the world. Roxy's drinking problem, Jake's manipulative nature, and Dirk's sexuality, just to name a few things. Where John is ignorant because he's a sheltered 13-year-old boy who otherwise does try his best to understand who his friends are as much as they'll let him, Jane just straight up plugs her ears and goes LALALALALALA.

Which is why, while I totally agree love triangles are stupid bullshit that are almost always extremely frustrating, the way Homestuck executes it is damn interesting because it's less a love triangle and more a love...quadrilateral? Some other bizarre shape? Nobody knows anything about themselves or each other and all these sad teens are just scrambling in the dark of their own subconscious to make some kind of meaningful connection with someone else, but without any real understanding of how to do it or what it would even mean if they managed it.

And then the epilogues kind of spit in your face and go "you wanted to see what might happen if they finally figured it out??? TOO BAD. Not only do they not, but NOBODY DOES!!! MWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!" or. whatever. something like that. I hate the epilogues. God do I hate them. So much.

EDIT: not replying to you, burnt2ashleys, your post cropped up while I was writing this one. :P

[calamityCons]

At least in the end we can bond over our shared opinion that the epilogues are garbage and spat in the face of anyone who had the gall to give a shit about these characters, eh? xD

[Joyfulldreams]

@burnt2ashleys

Um...your rebuttals don't really make all that much sense, because saying that something is storytelling 101 does not make it not subversion? Subversion of people's expectations...IS an important part of storytelling, as a rule, in a lot of situations. It is a broad sort of thing that applies in a lot of different ways. "Doing a thing a different way than the way you expect it to" is...is subversion. Stories can have this idea be more or less central to their plot or structure depending on what the author wants. A heist story or a detective story absolutely has to rely more on subversion than other genres might in order to keep things interesting. But other kinds of stories like...romcoms, or sitcoms, don't have to do that as much, or just have to do it in a different way--i.e. subverting expectations for comedy, rather than drama.

And Homestuck just happens to use this idea as a more central part of it's structure. It doesn't always execute it well, or consistently, but it's...a core part of how the story even works? So I'm not sure what your whole 'gotcha' thing is trying to say.

EDIT: Also, I never said the betas didn't have their own complexities. I adore the betas. But when it comes to the sheer interconnected depth and potential, the alphas just literally have more going on, especially between them. More complicating factors and interconnected issues that make their problems that much more...well, complex! Challenging! For the betas, their problems don't really rub up against each other too much and are far more individual. Which is great for seeing each character as their own person with their own story. But the alphas are so interconnected their problems cause and exacerbate and also sometimes solve? each other, it's a bonkers and beautiful tapestry that I love trying to parse exactly how it's weaved.

@calamityCons

oh yep definitely. like you think my posts have been long thus far??? just get me fucking started on all of the ways the epilogues fail to be good by literally any metric.

[Deageon]

But when it comes to the alphas, specifically, uh. I'll have to completely disagree? Like. I spend an awful, awful lot of time analyzing and thinking about every single character in homestuck, and Jane...IS more complex of a character than John, just. Full stop?

homie, this really sounds like "my interpretation is the most sound and epic one here" which i'm not saying you're going for but uh. it's not great. when did you start reading homestuck?

[thorondraco]

[...] It...it is VERY LITERALLY about that from moment one? Like, literally the very first panel. With the whole arms joke thing, and introducing the sylladex and playing around with what the readers expect from it via their commands, throwing people for a loop by building up expectations to be a certain thing and then *subverting* those expectations. [...]

...No? No, I'm gonna go with "no" on that one. The fake arms thing is Hussie being clever about the exact same suggestion he got on Problem Sleuth, not a subversion. That's a byproduct of the (now lost) dynamic between the (now different) readership and author. Homestuck used to allow for reader suggestions, as I'm sure you know.

[...] your expectations are SUBVERTED because they almost always happen in a way that either flies in the face of assumptions we'd been lead to make previously (the trolls aren't literal aliens they're just being trolls, the green sun is created not destroyed but then it is destroyed later, we thought dave rose and jade wouldn't god tier but then they do and in quite an epic fashion) or happens in a way that is so bonkers it couldn't have been predicted at all (literally all of murderstuck, BRO CUTTING A METEOR IN HALF???, bec prototyping himself to rescue jade, etc etc). [...]

wat
I mean, what? That's storytelling 101! You know why, at the end of Homestuck, things kinda fall flat? It's because Vriska tells you to your (you the reader's) face about each and every conflict that's going to happen (Terezi, Dave and Dirk! You go fight Spades Slick and Jack English!), she lays out the plan, and it works out exactly as she planned it. If I'm making a story about a heist and the plan succeeds, is that fun? Is there tension? I mean, I could obviously know that the heist is successful beforehand, but if the laid path is the one taken then there's nothing new added to the table! That's why we don't have SBURB rules laid out, dog! Because if Hussie laid out a successful session with the 4 kids, then the total tension would be so much lesser then the amount of tension that we actually got by introducing foreign agents (carapaces, Jack, the trolls, Doc), you feel me? If you lay out a plan in a story, you shouldn't let it come to fruition unless it's from the antagonists' side (contrivance should always be against the protagonists, never in favor), because then it's just boring, yo. Hell, even in the very comic we find evidence of this rule playing out with Rose and the Green Sun, with Doc telling Rose (and us) that she'll have an involvement with the Green Sun through an explosion, and yet we're tricked at the payoff by Rose being the creator of the Green Sun, not its destroyer.

[...]The alpha kids are, in my opinion, INFINITELY more interesting than the betas are as characters. Precisely because of all of that drama. These characters are far more multifaceted and deeply complex. There's just so much more GOING ON there. [...]

As opposed to all the shit that ISN'T going on with the beta kids? John bottling his emotions? Rose's relationship with her mother? Dave's conflicted feelings about Bro and how much of a hero he is? Jade's loneliness? I mean, c'mon now. The beta kids are just as complex as the alphas, and some might argue that they're even more complex!

With Hussie's insanity i always wonder when something is intentional or accidental. By all means one of the biggest issues of Collide is a mixture of a lack of catharsis, and a lack of subversion. Rather than something poetic such as Jane taking the empress's life, which might have helped subdue the more fascist aspects hidden inside of her, she was made to just run around as a healbot. Rather than Jake coming in and proving his true strength, he beats up a bunch of puppets that he struggled against despite being godtier. Kanaya and karkat were denied a part in bringing down the tyrant that made their world a literal hell.

So i am wondering if Hussie, having already decided to continue Homestuck in the future, deliberately chose to leave too many things hanging in the winds? With the implication that it was actually John', in universe at least, fault?

Basically John hijacked the timeloop and changed the prior outcome, whatever it may have been. A mixture of him not comprehending his own power, and maybe his lack of storytelling chops, lead to Vriska fixing everything and few if no one getting a chance to really shine in the final battle. Because what John wanted, was it to be done already.
He probably thought that he changed a few things and then paradox space would set the course. He had narrative influence though, if subconscious, so everything was shaped by the singular desire to beat the game and to defeat lord english.

Maybe it was Hussie being slightly lazy, but it is also possible he deliberately did it this way to hint at this nature.

[calamityCons]

@joyfuldreams Put us in a session together and we could create like, one of those enormously long scrolls of paper with JUST all our enranged and impassioned fury at how badly the epilogues were executed. And then weaponize it. And alchemize it to our specibi or something lol.

Also, @Deageon I don't think being an archival or a live reader is a good thing to ask. It's coming across as a bad faith attempt to discredit Joyful because you're leading with the expectation of "oh I am an archival reader", which is setting her up for some kind of gotcha from you. Don't be a dick.