Through Shadowed Eyes
is a Homestuck fanfiction, written by Paravellex between 2019 and 2022. Its author describes it as "an exploration of Roxy Lalonde’s character through the vehicle of the Candy Epilogues, focusing on her relationships with John, Calliope, Rose, Jane, Harry Anderson, and her own gender," all of which are brought into greater focus than in the original story.
It retells several scenes from the Epilogues from Roxy's perspective, but takes care to not tell the same story twice, and the bulk of the fic is composed of original scenes. It also continues past the end of its source material, and since its ending was thought up before Homestuck: Beyond Canon began publishing, it's not compliant with the latter.
The final arc features illustrations from artists across the fandom: Meraki, SarcasmProdigy, Sketchoodles, Griever, Ghostrally, Sollay, KC, and Baban.
Through Shadowed Eyes provides examples of:
- Ambiguous Situation:
- When Jane is killed, the word "Just" is displayed in Rose's text color. Was this another orchestration by Ultimate Rose, something to do with Candy Rose, or something else entirely? We'll never know.
- Is Rose correct about the god tier players losing their immortality in this branch of canonicity? It's ultimately up to the reader to decide.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: In chapter 29, Calliope finally gives one of these to Roxy. While Roxy clearly has feelings for her in return, the ways that they've hurt each other and the people that they've become mean that their chance for romance in this timeline is dead.
- Arc Words: On three occasions, variations of the words "You're here/At last" are used as a call and response between Jane and Roxy, each time when Roxy returns to Jane at a pivotal moment in her life.
- Awful Wedded Life: As in the Epilogues, the last few years of John and Roxy's marriage collapses into a miserable sham.
- Babies Make Everything Better: Discussed. Part of Roxy's motivation for having a child, even though she doesn't admit it to herself, is based in the idea that it's part of performing her gender correctly. He does make her happy, and she doesn't regret having him, but she still ends up further ensnared in a heterosexual trap of her own making. Later she wants a second child, but upon discovering proof of John's emotional infidelity, panics and abandons the idea to keep him happy. Even after divorcing John, she still fantasizes about having a second child someday. In a way, this trope is inverted in the end: only after getting her life together and repairing her relationships does Roxy decide to go through with having another kid.
- Cast Full of Gay: Naturally, since it's a Homestuck fic. Much of the story centers around queerness in a world created by queer people who nonetheless weren't able to deprogram themselves from their heteronormative upbringings.
- Central Theme: Several, including:
- Carrying over from the Epilogues, the importance of communication and community between friends, and the dire consequences when that community fails.
- The nature of gender as a performance, and how conventional heterosexual romance is rooted in validation of that performance.
- How liberatory meaning can be found in structures that are normally oppressive, but how attempts to find that liberation can feed right back into oppression.
- The uselessness of centrism, and the moral obligation to actively side against fascism and for revolution.
- The subjective nature of experience: how no two perspectives of a concept can be identical, and how none can be complete.
- Truth, relevance, and essentiality: how stories acquire meaning, and how lives become stories.
- Establishing Series Moment: The words "truth, relevance, and essentiality" were used throughout the Epilogues to discuss canonicity, but their meanings were left implicit. This story opens with Rose and Calliope defining them explicitly, signaling its intention to build on the Epilogues' themes in a more analytic way.
- Even Evil Can Be Loved: Roxy says as much to Rose about Jane, explaining why she feels bad about killing her best friend even after Jane went far off the deep end.
- Fix Fic: Defied, despite the premise heavily lending itself to the possibility. The author claimed in an interview that they deliberately avoided "fixing" the parts of the Epilogues that they disagreed with, preferring instead to build something of their own off of it.
- Historical Domain Character: Towards the end, Roxy walks into a room and is greeted by the digital ghost of Karl Marx. Joining him around the table are Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Kropotkin, Leon Trotsky, Karl Kautsky, Max Stirner, and (much to everyone's annoyance) Mao Zedong. A dozen other ghosts go unnamed, including ones whose appearances match those of Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Angela Davis. It's mentioned that Rose's mother somehow captchalogued images of all their brains so they could help Earth C develop a world order based in political theory instead of the whims of the Sburb players.
- Informed Ability: Harry Anderson is supposedly "Isaac Newton with buck teeth and a bandanna" when it comes to mathematics, but never gets a chance to prove it. Nor does he want to: the topic bores him, and he'd rather focus his energy on theater, which he's still good at but not as prodigiously so.
- Kill the Ones You Love:
Roxy kills Jane to stop a nuclear apocalypse, but feels awful about having to stab her best friend in the back, and her narration refers to the act as a murder. - Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Towards the end of the story, it's mentioned that there's an in-universe debate about this concept regarding an attack on the Cathedral of Saint Leijon. A rocket fired by one of Jane's supporters made the wall collapse on some sheltering refugees, but in what is referred to as Saint Leijon's Miracle, both the people inside and the cathedral's iconic stained glass window survived unscathed. People can't agree whether this was due to a fluke of physics or genuine divine intervention. Since this is all relayed right after Rose's monologue about the nature of her world as a story, the subtextual answer is that it's both: the physics worked out the way they did because the author and reader said that they did.
- Memory Gambit: The story opens with Rose asking Roxy to wipe her mind. It's heavily implied that this is part of a plan to counteract Dirk in the Meat timeline.
- No-Dialogue Episode: Chapter 20, in which Roxy finally leaves John, is told entirely through narration except for four spoken words near the end: "You're here" and "At last".
- Non-Heteronormative Society: As in Candy itself, the characters try to make this happen, but they end up inadvertently recreating the systems of oppression they were raised under. They have more success toward the end, after Jane's been overthrown and they have the brain ghost communists to advise them.
- Parental Love Song: In a touching scene shortly after Harry Anderson's birth, Roxy sings "How Can I Keep from Singing?" at his cribside.
- Tragedy: This is a Perspective Flip of the Epilogues, so we already know how things go: Roxy's friendships with all her loved ones collapse, she divorces John after years of misery, Jane grows into a dictator, and the world goes to hell in a handbasket. Even after the story moves past the Epilogues' end, there's a sense of inevitability to the narrative. John and Roxy come to the conclusion that while they always had free will, the nature of their characters meant they were always going to do the things they did.
- Tragic Mistake: Things were already strained before, but when Roxy declines Rose and Kanaya's plea to change Jane's mind about troll reproductive rights, it's a turning point that sends her friendships and the world slowly but surely to their dooms.
- Transparent Closet: Rose considers John to have one.Rose: ...and John will get "his" eggshell cracked if it's the last thing I do.
- Trans Tribulations: Although Roxy doesn't fully transition (in this timeline, at least), she thinks about her relationship with gender a lot, and a major theme throughout the story is how she tries and fails to live up to an ideal of womanhood before turning her back on the concept so she can live as herself.
- Visit by Divorced Dad: As in Candy, John comes to visit Roxy after years of silence and distance. And this time we don't get to see what happens: since that scene was already told from Roxy's perspective in the Epilogues themselves, the narration simply fades out and is replaced with a voice that redirects us to the relevant chapter. When the story picks back up, it's to show us the aftermath, which serves as the first explicit indicator that the ending won't be compliant with Homestuck: Beyond Canon.
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Harry Anderson accuses his parents of this in chapter 32, but he's a big goofball in his own right.
- You Killed My Father: An unusually nuanced variant. Jane abused Tavvy for their whole childhood, and Tavvy rightly abhors her for it... but she's still their mother, and so when she's finally killed, they can't bring themself to speak to her killer.
