Was the ending to Homestuck really that bad? I didn’t really follow the comic so maybe I’m missing context, but I haven’t seen such a backlash to an ending since Mass Effect 3. I have to wonder if it’s justified?
Keep waiting.
It’s more Evangelion than Mass Effect 3. The actual animation was stunning, the music beautiful (I have it on my phone and listen to it regularly), but it doesn’t actually end. It just stops. Various bits of foreshadowing and character arcs are dropped in bizarre places. Calliope, for instance, had recurring self-esteem issues. The resolution to this is that another, better Calliope appears suddenly without explanation and takes care of everything somehow maybe.
Instead, as a handwave, everyone just kind of goes “meh” and kind of pieces out of being protagonists and lets Vriska (not even the Vriska who’s been having character development for all of Act 6, a retconned “reset” Vriska) use the Juju to do…..something they resolves the Lord English problem maybe.
And then dies? Or escapes? Is Vriska dead? Davepeta? Aradia? Not being dead was kind of Aradia’s “thing”. If they didn’t die, where are they now? I don’t want to list every unresolved question (how did Gamzee and Arquiusprite end up with Caliborn? Is there a post-retcon Caliborn/Calliope? Why was Caliborn making a circle of cracks around the green sun? What was Mituna’s sacrifice? Weren’’t a bunch of the ghosts in the ghost army copies of Kurloz and Damara, who were working for Lord English, and Meulin, who was mindslaved to Kurloz? That didn’t cause any issues at all? None of them were like “Oh shit, Vriska’s hanging out nearly for like ten minutes with the thing that can kill or god, better do something about that? For that matter, where was Gamzee during all of this? I’m also kind of curious about how Post-Retcon Vriska managed to control all those ghosts when it was Aranea doing the bulk of the work there, but that might actually have been explained and I forgot it)
On top of that, everyone went into Act 7 expecting The Big Twist. I for one was expecting an hour-long walkaround flash and blocked out some time for it.
Collide ends with Roxy killing the Condesce. (Who is, I guess, NOT immortal?) and then things get stacicky and the music gets all ominous to inform us that It’s Not Going To Be This Easy as the End of Act curtains get all fucked up in some kind of vaguely metaphorical way . And then Act 7 comes along, and…it is, actually, gonna be that easy.
So everyone was expecting Act 7 to be really long, contain One Big Twist, and then be really long and wrap everything up. This was not entirely unreasonable; there’d been hour-long flashes before, and Act 7 was in production for a really long time, and Collide was nearly 20 minutes of music video.
Instead, all that time and energy was spent making it look really pretty, and we learned literally nothing. It’s be like if, halfway through Return of the Jedi, the Rebels found a really nice planet and were like “Oh let’s just live here” and we saw Luke Skywalker’s heretofore unmentioned clone fighting Darth Vader and then it ended and we supposed to just kind of assume it all worked out and the last two shots were of the emperor getting more powerful and Luke smiling like an idiot. .
We’re coming up on 6/12 (413 and 612 are Important Numbers in Homestuck, though there’s never been an in-comic explanation for why, even though characters comment on it), so I’m kind of hoping that this is just a massive troll move and the “Epilogue” ends up being Act 8 (possibly featuring one of the characters associated with 8, like Aranea, who’s complained about stories not being well enough told and thus would be a nice lead-in. Oh, and who turned evil, got kicked back to the afterlife, and was never seen again).
I have a fear that a lot of the revolution is in Hiveswap.
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