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That's honestly pretty interested because IMO, Act 5 is good, but not...amazingly so? I still do not understand why people absolutely obsess over Hivebent and the trolls. Not that that it isn't a fun ride or that the characters aren't good, no, because it is and they are. But the typical Homestuck fan obsession over them to the nigh-exclusion of everything else is honestly still a bit baffling to me.

Act 6 indulges in some slight obnoxiousness at times, but between the Beta kids, Caliborn and Calliope, the trolls and humans feeling meeting, I think it's a damn good act in and of itself.

Perhaps this is because of how I am reading Homestuck, that is, I'm plowing through it with the Unofficial Collection. There's no agonizing wait; any "annoying part" I just blow through in a few hours at best instead of being stuck for up to a week or two just waiting for it to finally end. I went through the entirety of Openbound in like two days.

Edited by Vadara on Mar 10th 2021 at 4:20:36 AM

Gilphon's right, though I'd dispute his specific characterization; not all of the plot threads which went unresolved were "smaller", in their framing during Act 5 and prior, and a couple were not only unresolved but outright contradicted, and one indisputably major plot thread from Act 6 goes basically unresolved. Still, a lot of people didn't much care about them if at all, so how much their being fumbled matters varies wildly, from "Ruins the whole comic's story retroactively" to "Doesn't matter at all" and those actually aren't exaggerations, I've seen both said in seriousness here. There are a number of people who like the ending, so if you still like things and their direction so far, I wouldn't worry too much.

Another point against the Epilogues is they kinda don't resolve any of the Act 5 and prior threads the ending dropped, so did little for anyone who cared about those (like me), and don't much function as epilogues so much as sequels; but they do address the big Act 6 thread I made reference to.

I stand by my assertion that anyone who thought The Ultimate Riddle and The Ultimate Answer, or each of the Kids' Quests for their Lands, or all their dealings with their Denizens and The Choices offered therein, were smaller plot threads were wrong to think that they were always framed as smaller or superseded, and just accidentally correct in not caring about them because Hussie also changed his mind about them being majorly important or even important at all. Also, is the rainbow frog sent back to Jade still unaccounted for, or did the Epilogues or HS^2 finally get to that?

As someone who also binged most of the comic until nearish the end of Act 6, Act 6 is largely pretty good, and Hivebent was largely pretty good. It's more that Act 5 Act 2 was amazing?

Edited by RaichuKFM on Mar 10th 2021 at 7:22:13 AM

As one of the people who gave a warning some time ago ("If you think Vriska is irredeemable, you're probably not going to like where the plot goes by the end."), there's still A6A6I5.

I personally love the ending of Homestuck.

I also ended up loving the Epilogues and what we have so far of HS^2, though I do think the latter was suffering from trying to juggle so many plot threads while trying to keep a somewhat consistent publishing schedule (HS^2 got to 407 pages before getting put on the backburner, which is equivalent to mid-Act 2 in HS; the various HS^2 plots feel to me like they're all in their own first Acts still)

Edited by Sixthhokage1 on Mar 10th 2021 at 6:29:15 AM

i really think calling homestuck's ending "irredeemably bad garbage" is underselling how awful it was and how it ruined everything is a bit excessive. it's just incredibly disappointing when you take into consideration everything leading up to the finale

though, if you take into consideration everything leading up to the finale it really should have been expected, in a way

I do think there’s a point that it wouldn’t have been as regarded a let down if there wasn’t such a wait for it

Really, it was the large hiatuses that got everyone hyped up for the end, and thus led to the inevitable disappointment. Binging the comic makes the ending come off better. Still, they should have done more plot resolution for the smaller threads in A6A6I5 rather than...that.

Edited by SatoshiBakura on Mar 10th 2021 at 7:47:55 AM

This topic always makes me look back to Problem Sleuth, a comic that had next to no plot to begin with, but also drew out its final boss battle for over half of its length so that every single little detail brought up previously in the comic could play some role in the conflict. And that worked great.

I think the main problem is hussie felt he had to go with the ending he had commishioned years before the end, and even if it didnt fit anymore in terms of plot and characters.

like himym

Act 5 Act 2 is legitimately amazing even now. Homestuck from Act 1 till Act 6 doesn't resolve every plot thread, but it tells a complete enough (and excellent) story if you take is as an And the Adventure Continues ending.

Still, I wonder just how this final fight will go. Homestuck doesn't have a WHOLE lot of fights in it, due to how it works—fights basically only happen in flashes, which have the limitations of no sfx, no narration, effectively no dialogue, being intensive to create, and mostly being synced to music. This is about the only real big criticism I have of the comic, because I love Shounen manga to be frank and love crazy intense fight scenes. HS totally could have them, but doesn't really. The characters all have pretty intense powers, the strife specibus system lets basically anything be a weapon, and everyone seems to have immense toughness. When god tiers do get to show off a bit, they're practically DBZ characters! Hell Jade can straight up instant transmission and throw massive Green-Sun-powered energy blasts. Each Aspect could definitely allow for more cerebral fights akin to early Naruto or Jojo too.

My fanfic is definitely gonna focus on battles a lot more.

Ah well, I'm literally like 400 pages from the end. Just gotta see for myself!

Edited by Vadara on Mar 11th 2021 at 11:57:48 AM

Well. I did it. It's over. I got to the final page of Homestuck.

I don't really have the ability to collect all my thoughts for now. It was a bit anticlimactic, but.

But.

I enjoyed my time. It felt worth it in the end. Finishing Homestuck was one of the mythical things I always wanted to do but felt I never could. But with the Unofficial Collection reading it became a breeze, and I am now done. I have no gone on to the epilogues or the sequel. I'm not sure I want to, frankly. I think I like how the comic ended just fine. Everyone "won". Earth C was created. Presumably Kanaya and a few of her friends went and made sure this universe's Alternia isn't such a caste-ridden blood-racist nightmare military dictatorship. Calliope got to be happy, and hopefully will protect Earth C.

Boy I sure hope no one on Earth C plays Sburb. That's the real ? lingering in the air. All the kids and trolls did was win Sburb once. Sburb is a fundamental part of Paradox Space and inexhaustibly continues to propagate, forcing kids around each new universe to play it, wherein the overwhelmingly majority will fail and die along with their planets and kin, and only a scant few will "win". Airquotes because "you get a new universe so you can MAYBE repopulate your species only for Paradox Space to make people play Sburb again and slaughter billions upon trillions upon quadrillions of people just to make another fucking universe where it all happens again and again and again" isn't much of a reward. This cycle of endless suffering is still there, ya know?

Damn, that's really messed up when you think about it. Personally, any sequel of Homestuck should have focused on efforts to unfuck this horrible feature of the comic's setting that dooms untold trillions of beings to suffer and die solely so the mulitverse can propagate for no justifiable reason.

Edited by Vadara on Mar 11th 2021 at 1:41:27 AM

Personally I believe like... Clear warning labels and only having SBURB arrive for species with more than one planet is the ideal solution. Like... The reason the trolls couldn't recover from SGRUB was less the meteors and more because G'loyb g'lyob happened to be on the planet where the game was played.

That might be a feature, not a bug

Well, yes, it's a feature of Paradox Space. This cycle of suffering means nothing to it—it exists for seemingly no other reason than it already does. There is no sentient or sapient force causing this propagation—it inexhaustibly occurs the same way gravity or the other three fundamental forces occur in our own universe.

Which is pretty messed up! Paradox Space shackles players to play its game to birth new universes without any personal reward for them—all they get is a rollercoaster of pain and loss and in the end another universe is formed which will undergo the same bullshit again. This cycle never ends.

I mean. There's certainly potential reward for the players. They get lots of cool magic powers and the potential to live good lives in the new universe.

And. Y'know, SBURB is the reproductive organ of universes. Life cycles naturally includes death. That's not good or evil, it's just how things work.

Thirteen billion years is a pretty good run

I think that might be exactly why the ending feels unsatisfying. All of that effort, all of the pain and toil over the course of the whole series, primarily amounted to winning their SBURB session. It felt like the scope of the comic's story was larger than that.

The problem is, that while ending SBURB will stop the apocalypses of individual planets, it means that there's eventually a cosmic deadline for existence itself. The problem is it's deployed to highly populated planets that are neither prepared nor equipped to deal with the resulting fallout. In an ideal world SBURB distribution would be in the hands of actual sentient beings who can minimize damage to life on inhabited planets.

There are sentient forces behind SBURB's propagation, actually. It's Skaia and the Horrorterrors. It's referred to as a bargain, one between those two entities, a compromise between growth and stagnation. To the extent that it is a compromise between disastrous unbounded growth and eventual end of everything, it's good. But as a compromise between those things, compared to other possible compromises, it's terrible.

Homestuck should have ended with the Kids and Trolls deciding SBURB and Paradox Space was needlessly and unacceptably cruel and somehow escaping it, going outside of it and finding or creating a new reality that could be better; or it should have ended with them facing and accepting the cruelty of SBURB and Paradox Space as a harsh but natural reality and fully accepting their role in that reality, metaphorically and literally growing up.

In the ending we got they very uncritically went along and beat the game without either rejecting or accepting the underlying philosophical ideas at all, and that's part of why the ending rings so hollow, I think.

There's also the thing that we haven't seen a Sburb session that isn't under the influence of Lord English.

Yeah, that.

Honestly this discussion has been enlightening. I was around when it actually ended, but I could never quite place why the ending felt so hollow. Thanks to Vadara's posts it has finally clicked, and it is weirdly cathartic to finally be able to point at something and say "That's the problem with the ending of Homestuck."

Homestuck had always been you can't fight fate. even when there was an actual game changer in the retcon john just followed orders for what to do. it was very things happened because they have to happen because they did happen so they will happen. rose was the only one who tried to fuck up sburb on a deeper level and she gave that up to become slightly more goth. no one else every really rebelled or wanted to rebel against sburb and just accepted it.

But Homestuck also made it clear they aren't controlled by fate. Things didn't happen because they had to happen; things happened because people did them. And yes those choices were in a big tangled mess where the causality is basically everything has already happened, but they were still free choices.

It's not that people do things because they have to do them. Homestuck, at least up through Act 5, has a lot of evidence to show this. If you look at Terezi trying to explain how things work to Dave, or see how Karkat tells John everything is predetermined and pointless and how he is framed to be wrong, or even just how the only people who ever do something because they "have" to do it did it because they convinced themselves of that (Aradia mostly, Dave on a few occasions); but that's backwards, it's consistently shown to end poorly for them and when they get to better mental states they don't think that way anymore.

People in Homestuck do things they "have" to do because they choose to, and because they would choose to, those things have to happen that way.

Karkat says The Ultimate Answer to The Ultimate Riddle was that nothing they did mattered and everything was predetermined and thus out of their control. Karkat is also from a Session where nobody actually tried to figure that out, except maybe Tavros, and were too busy munchkinning their way through. So he's got the wrong idea of what The Ultimate Answer was. I think it makes sense that he has it backwards. And this is what's so frustrating about Act 6 entirely forgetting The Ultimate Riddle was even a thing. It's a beautiful system of free will existing in a system that is preposterously deterministic, where everything has already always happened.

And it's just... Forgotten about? And the final moral of the comic is instead Davepeta telling Jade that she's a part of some greater entity, and it's okay if she suffered or however many other versions of her died, because this "Greater Jade", who isn't an individual who even exists, is benefited from it. Or something like that.

It has the greatest compatibilist moral I have ever seen, already entirely set up, thematically relevant even to Act 6 with how everyone is questioning their roles in everything, and it's just ignored. It's not used, it's not dismissed. The story doesn't even have the courtesy of saying its old moral core was wrong. If the point was that everybody always just did what they had to, it was all pointless, the comic sure doesn't show it! If the point was that these were restraining systems that should be rebelled against, it didn't show it. But if the point was that these were things that should be accepted, it doesn't show that either.

If the Kids "accepted" the game and Paradox Space as a whole, they accepted it as circumstances they were stuck in, as things to work around. And they worked around them. They never understood them on a deeper level, neither to accept or reject them. And it's not like they stopped considering their circumstances on a deeper level; Dave was questioning if he was just acting like how he thought he should, they had that whole conversations about how real people don't have character arcs. But they don't reject SBURB or Paradox Space. They beat the game, make a new world subject to all the same problems. And that's it.

But they didn't accept it either. They didn't play the game right. Rose never played the rain, nobody but John or Jade or maybe Dave did their Quests, more than half of them didn't talk to their Denizens much less face their Choices or do their Tasks, Echidna was apparently the only Denizen who needed to release a Grist hoard, nobody remembered The Ultimate Riddle existed, they didn't even send the fucking frog back to Jade so that their Genesis Frog existing even makes sense. They bludgeoned their way through SBURB the way the trolls did SGRUB, only with marginally less violence and considerably more convolution. The trolls, who were terrible munchkins, an example of how not to play, and who were denied The Ultimate Reward because of it.

It just doesn't work. The Kids don't reject SBURB, and they don't accept it, the trolls don't help make up for their old mistakes, they all just half-ass their way through it, kill Condy because Hussie forgot she was conditionally mortal, kill Spades Slick because he was just really mad at Terezi this whole time apparently, beat Lord English with a deus ex machina that wouldn't have been a deus ex machina if it had just actually been explained at all, let the entire afterlife be destroyed (you know, the bad thing the villain they were stopping was doing in the first place), and aimlessly perpetuate the cycle of Paradox Space without consciously going "This is the right thing to do". They just do it, because they want to? Because they're supposed to? Because they need to live somewhere? Did it even get said?

And it's not like they had to do it that way. John already escaped from Paradox Space! Right here! Oh, er, here, if you don't want the test index version. They could have taken their Genesis Frog seeded Skaia and thus the universe they made into that space, into a new reality, in a pretty clean way! I can forgive this one, all it would take is John and Roxy not realizing it was an option, but... It's not like it wouldn't have been easy to write. (There'd need to be an explanation of where Calliope and Caliborn came from, and why it has the ruins of the Alpha Kids' Earth in it, if it's not the Universe they create, though.)

But taken as a whole, Homestuck collapses in on itself, it fails major plot threads in a comic that has always prior tied things together in surprising depth, it abandons its old themes in favor of not just new themes introduced in Act 6, but eleventh hour themes pulled out of nowhere, and it ignores major opportunities to either reaffirm its original themes or at least positively deny them in favor of something else. But it doesn't. It just falls apart.

The ending of Homestuck is terrible if you care about its thematics or its story. And you don't have to; if someone reading this enjoyed the ending, I'm genuinely glad. If you were in Homestuck primarily for the spectacle, or the characters, or the insane escalation, and the ending delivered on what you cared about, that's great.

But it's been a while, and I haven't forgotten, the people who liked the ending in terms of thematics or story were coming up with ideas like "The protagonists escaped the narrative" or "It's all about subverting expectations" or "It's bad on purpose as a thematic statement" that were basically bending over backwards to justify liking a development that they didn't think was good. People defending the comic never really doing anything with Quests that weren't John's or Jade's or The Ultimate Riddle always just said that those things hadn't mattered since Act 5 and I was wrong to think they should have, but the comic established them as mattering. Why is it not a flaw that this establishment is just forgotten about?

The ending doesn't just drop small plot threads, it drops major ones. It doesn't just not tie everything together, it has blatant plot holes. It is the most spectacular failure of an ending I have ever seen, not because it is the worst ending, it isn't in itself, but just... Not because it falls short of the ending the comic was building to, not because it goes in a different direction than the ending the comic was building to, but because it just doesn't even try to be that ending or an alternative answer to it. It just happens.

And you might point out I'm talking something ridiculous because of how old the ending is, how can it be something different than the ending I assert the comic was building up to, but [S] Act 7 could have been a capstone on that ending. All the failures were baked in by Act 6, because it dropped themes and plot threads that could have been resolved before Act 7. There could have been an actual Epilogue in the comic to address something Acts 6 or 7 didn't, like in Problem Sleuth.

It's just so thoroughly defunct, and that's such a shame.

Edited by RaichuKFM on Mar 11th 2021 at 2:40:18 PM

I'm not gonna lie, I forgot all about the quests and the ultimate riddle and all that hullaballoo like 95% of the time it wasn't actively on page.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but John is stated to get a power that lets him ignore causality, only for his actions to create Lord English. That tells me that English's existence is bound to fate, rather than individual choices. In turn, that tells me that characters who say that fate is predetermined are completely correct.