Talk:Episode 52: Semiotics, Bridges, and Off-Ramps/@comment-24.20.175.35-20190825194802/@comment-67.193.125.125-20190827044739

1) The fact that people have discussed something doesn't mean it is without worth to discuss it again. Cultural and individual stances change over time, now more than ever thanks to the exponential cultural shift we owe to communications technology. The Epilogues pick apart what it means to be an Epilogue, and Hussie himself states that epilogues have worth: he's just following the idea through to its conclusion, "What does it mean to be a narrative afterthought? Why do we add epilogues to finished works, and why are we obsessed with the final positions of characters, if these weren't important enough to fit in the final chapter?". The Epilogues echo the work they're following: in this case, they're pointing out that these characters don't get to have easy happily ever afters, because the stakes are rigged. Despite this, they can choose to leave the narrative, abandon relevancy, and genuinely be happy. Rose, Kanaya, John, and Roxy, all find happiness in the Candy timeline, despite its canonical irrelevance. Meenah has found a place on a world that was never even her own via the Ghostrain: Alternate Calliope has established an earthly Heaven within Homestuck, and that's a beautiful thing. The Candy Timeline did eventually give everyone the "dead trolls get resurrected, paradise world (once a despot is defeated), people have kids" ending people were begging for, but without being overly saccharine. It delivered in a distinctly Homestuck way.

2) You talk about Vriska fucking a clown, cuck jokes, etc, as if they detract from the rest of the content of the work, and then go on to praise the comic for its handling of challenging themes. The comic was rife with ridiculous diatribes like the Tavros rap sequences, Terezi going on a Faygo bender with Gamzee and ending up in her underwear, miscellaneous jokes about troll reproduction/anatomy, apple juice = pee gags, and all sorts of other bits and pieces that weren't heavy. Hussie discusses how the Epilogues were meant to continue the challenge that Homestuck offers to its readers, and you deliberately isolated the bits and pieces that were clearly meant as silly distractions from the meat of the content. If you can recognize that Homestuck has complicated discussions about serious topics despite being a comic that also includes the line "John: Squawk like an imbecile and shit on your desk.", then the Epilogues' inclusion of Jade Having A Dog Dick should not be an automatic disqualification from handling challenging content. It doesn't sound like you're upset by the existence of silliness within the work, as that wasn't a problem with the comic. It sounds like you don't like The Epilogues, and are searching for reasons to justify that belief even when those reasons come in direct conflict with your love for the original piece of media.

3) Haha horse.

But no, seriously, I think this is being taken too literally. "Dubious Authenticity", imo, refers to the narrators of the Epilogues and whether or not they can really be trusted. Hussie said that the Epilogues are about stories and their narrators, so the Epilogues are "non-canon" insofar as they are being told from subjective viewpoints that are not conveying the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Aradia and Alt-Calliope's discussion about how this retroactively casts the rest of the story's authenticity into doubt, once a narrator has been revealed, casts Homestuck's truth into doubt. If Hussie, Doc Scratch, and Caliborn, were all dictating the narrative at various points, can we say it was unbiased? Clearly not, the narration mocks characters at various points, just as Calliope and Dirk disparage or reward various characters within their own narrations. Of course Hussie was involved in writing it, but positioning it superficially as "non-canon", or "fanfiction", serves to tie it in with the overarching themes of authenticity and a platonic concept of the narrative.

4) Andrew Hussie and Toby Fox are friends, Toby contributed to the music within Homestuck, Hiveswap, and the Friendsims. I doubt the guy's too hard up about the borrowing of themes. Creators are invariably going to influence one another, and Homestuck was already dealing with this concept from much earlier on, by way of Caliborn. Caliborn consumed the narrative of Homestuck through the TV Terminal Thing he had on B2 Earth, and was consistently irritated by it. He demanded that it conform to his will as a consumer, and ultimately damaged the narrative. This theme is not unique to the Epilogues, Undertale, or Homestuck itself. I don't really know where to begin on the "do something original for once in your life" bit, because you mostly seem intent upon being mad. If you read the entire comic, and were invested enough to read the Epilogues, you probably enjoyed them. Hussie wrote the comic.

5) Well, of course it was. Every piece of a work contributes to the overall whole. Generally, that means contribution to the narrative, but Homestuck ties its metatextuality to its narrative so inextricably by its later stages, that we can say that everything is contributing to "the meta". This doesn't have to be a bad thing, and positive character development doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with evolving the meta. Rose and Kanaya can be happy in Candy, and contribute to the overall meta: that happily ever afters don't come easy, often aren't what we're expecting, and sometimes require us to let go of certain drives in exchange for other ones. In this case, canonicity/relevance for the sake of romance, family, and happiness. Homestuck tackled the importance of relevance via Aranea and Vriska, and the Epilogues continue that theme. It was never "always just about metanarrative!", but the metanarrative has long been tied in. Lower-echelon concerns like the arcs of individual characters can be important and satisfying, and contribute to a greater whole.

6) What can I say except: Homestuck has always been pretentious. "The note desolation plays" is deliciously overwrought, and was drawing on narrative concepts that Hussie only himself came up with later, like Vriska. It's a wordy, overly verbose, comic that took 817,612 words to tell its story, and even then had to include hours of animations, games, and other mixed media. It played with hyperanimation in ways that haven't been explored very thoroughly yet, especially in its later acts (A6A6A1 - the Gold Pilot flash uses certain visual techniques like frame-breaking in unique ways, by playing with the overall boundaries of the webpage in a way that traditional media can't emulate). Homestuck has always been pretentious, and I think that's part of the charm.