The Homestuck Epilogues

Dubiously Canon

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The Homestuck Epilogues logo

The Homestuck Epilogues is a prose story by Andrew Hussie, Cephied_Variable, and ctset (with additional contributions from Lalo Hunt, Aysha U. Farah, and V), continuing the storyline of the Homestuck webcomic. The first three chapters of the story debuted on homestuck.com on April 13, 2019, and all remaining pages were uploaded on April 20, 2019. On the website, The Homestuck Epilogues is listed as a separate story from Homestuck and has its own log and description: "Tales of dubious authenticity."

The Epilogues' narrative picks up on post-canonical plot threads first introduced on the Homestuck Snapchat, and the webcomic Homestuck: Beyond Canon continues this narrative in a style more similar to that of the original Homestuck.

Synopsis

The story's title page is designed to resemble an entry on the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own, with a list of tags describing the characters and themes that will be featured. There is a prologue, meat path, candy path, and two different postscripts.

Prologue

Main article: The Homestuck Epilogues: Prologue

• Following an ominous dream of a black hole consuming paradox space, John Egbert, several years after the conclusion of Homestuck, is informed by Rose Lalonde that he must make a choice as to whether he will travel back into the story canon in order to defeat Lord English once and for all.

Meat

• Treated by Rose, John and Calliope as the "canon" path where John chooses to fight Lord English.
• John goes back to canon and steals a ring of life from Aranea Serket right after she is revived, then gather the kids to fight Caliborn as it happened in the masterpiece.
• Vriska is wounded by falling shards of reality and falls into the black hole before seeing the juju in action.
• The juju unloads the beta kids, which fight Lord English along with the ghost army. English gets struck by the Caledfwlch and is thrown into the black hole along with Davepeta. John gets badly wounded from the fight, but sees himself as the only survivor.
• Drifting in the abyss, John finds his Dad's wallet and later, Meenah. She steals John's ring of life and is brought to the Candy timeline.
• John and Terezi discover each other in the furthest ring. Together, they set off into the abyss to search for more survivors. John discovers his Dad's car in steady orbit around the black hole, and they use it as a transportation vessel to scour the void. Eventually, Terezi dislodges Lord English's tooth from John's abdomen, and the two have sex in the back of the car. Terezi gives up looking for Vriska and John brings them back to Earth C, but he doesn't make much further and dies from "cherub poison", a condition Jane could not heal.
• Meanwhile Dirk, in the "Candy" path of the Epilogue, committed suicide and in doing so unlocked what has been referred to as powers of "Ultimate Self" that allowed him to take over the story-telling of Homestuck itself, turning the very words of the narrator in the "Meat" path orange while Alternate Calliope battles him for control of the story-telling narrative with her respective red text.
• Karkat is convinced to run for Earth C's presidency against Jane but loses by a landslide due to Dirk's manipulations on the events.
• Roxy and Calliope transition, Calliope using they/them pronouns, while Roxy used they/them at first, but soon used he/him pronouns.
• Jade is possessed by Alternate Calliope and gains control of the narrative in this path. Dirk shoots a tranquilizer at Jade's body before she can interfere further. After waking up, Jade warns the others Dirk has to be stopped, but he already fled from Earth.
• Dave kisses Karkat under Dirk's attemped influence, "canonizing" their relationship.
• Ends with Alternate Calliope, while wielding Jade's body, consuming Lord English's entire body in a bloody act of vore. Aradia, Calliope, and Dave who has by this point turned into Davebot, proceed to leave this universe for a higher plane of existence. This ending while technically indicated by the URL to be in the "Meat" path, is actually the ending to the "Candy" path.

Candy

• Treated by Rose, John and Calliope as the "non-canon" path where John chooses not to fight Lord English.
• Calliope asks John to use his retcon powers for the last time to save Gamzee before he was thrown into Future post-scratch Earth.
• Aware of the non-canonicity of this path, Dirk asks Jane to give up her presidency campaign and commits suicide. His death unlocks what has been referred to as powers of "Ultimate Self" that allowed him to take over the story-telling of Homestuck itself in the "Meat" path of the Epilogue.
• Power beyond God Tier, known as Ultimate Self, is revealed to exist in the Homestuck universe.
• At Dirk's funeral, John realizes his retcon powers no longer work.
• John and Roxy marry and have a kid. Rose and Kanaya raise a clone of Vriska while Jane, Jake, and Gamzee are in a relationship as well as Jade, Karkat and Dave. Jane and Jake have a child and name him Tavros.
• An alternate timeline Jade crashes into Earth and later reveals to be possessed by Alternate Calliope. At her funeral, Aradia and Sollux arrive on Earth.
• Three years later, many troll ghosts who fell into the black hole arrive into Earth C, creating political instability. Karkat, who broke from his previous relationship, is leading a troll resistance against Jane's shadow antics. A revived Meenah later joins him.
• John and Roxy break up, but the two reconcile years later.
• When a failed assassination against Earth's president kills Jane's Dad, she declares war against the trolls and kicks Gamzee out of her spaceship. Jake later leaves Jane and takes their kid.
• The Vriska that failed to kill English finally arrives on Earth. She briefly enters a black romance with Gamzee but regrets it immediately, quickly murdering Gamzee to stop him from discussing it.
• Dave meets Obama at the Oval Office's ruins. Obama is revealed to be a Hope player who has been watching everything unfold from afar, and shows Dave a robot body to unlock his Ultimate Self's abilities.
• Ends with Rose transcending her body and becoming Rosebot who then travels with Dirk and Terezi (with John's captchalogued body) on a spaceship to a new liveable planet to start a new session of Sburb. This ending while technically indicated by url to be in the "Candy" path, is actually the ending to the "Meat" path.

Contents and chapters

Meat and Candy are both divided under "contents" into eight epilogues spanning a number of chapters each.

Meat Candy Epilogue One 1-8 1-3 Epilogue Two 9-13 4-13 Epilogue Three 14-17 14-15 Epilogue Four 18-27 16-21 Epilogue Five 28-32 22-26 Epilogue Six 33-37 27-28 Epilogue Seven 38-42 29-38 Epilogue Eight 43 39-40 Postscript

Prologue Meat Candy Meat, Epilogue One Candy, Epilogue One Meat, Epilogue Two Candy, Epilogue Two Meat, Epilogue Three Candy, Epilogue Three Meat, Epilogue Four Candy, Epilogue Four Meat, Epilogue Five Candy, Epilogue Five Meat, Epilogue Six Candy, Epilogue Six Meat, Epilogue Seven Candy, Epilogue Seven Meat, Epilogue Eight Candy, Epilogue Eight Meat, Postscript Candy, Postscript

Notes

• Andrew Hussie first announced plans for a Homestuck epilogue on April 13, 2016, when he edited his news post about the release of Act 7 to mention that he had ideas for the project, but it would take "a while" to produce. Little information about the epilogue project was made public during the three years between its announcement and release, with the most significant update - on September 14, 2017 - stating that the epilogue would exist "outside the confines of the web story," and Viz Media would be involved in its release.
• The process of "dissipation" described by Rose may be related to the cause of Alternate Calliope's timeline being doomed, as both Alt Calliope's lack of contact with the Alpha Kids and the unloaded status of The Treasure mean that Earth C never could have been created. Rose's descriptions of "unraveling" and "conditional existence" reflect the fact that although these timelines shouldn't be possible, they are still given a chance at existence with which to close the time loops necessary for their creation. However, it is implied that Rose's distinction of "outside canon" makes the distinctions of Alpha and Doomed timelines less relevant, perhaps discrediting this connection.
• The Homestuck Epilogues have a combined word count of 190,398, adding roughly 23% more words to Homestuck's total count within a single day. For comparison, Homestuck: Act 5 Act 2 is 179,693 words, released over the course of 400 days.
• The canonicity of the Epilogue's two paths, "Meat" and "Candy," are heavily implied by the story to be a grey area. The Meat path is treated by the story as the canonical continuation of Homestuck's main story, while the Candy path is treated as the non-canonical path. Simultaneously, events in the Candy path directly lead to outcomes in the Meat path, such as Dirk's death in the Candy path resulting in his rebirth in the Meat path. Additionally, the last page of the Meat path is the story ending of the Candy path, while the last page of the Candy path is the story ending of the Meat path.
• Various text colors were changed in the Epilogues, presumably for readability:
  • Caliborn's was changed from #2ed73a to #009c68, but was later reverted.
  • Jane's was changed from #00d5f2 to #0097d7.
  • Calliope's was changed from #929292 to #a1a3a6.
  • Davepetasprite^2's was changed from Jade's color to Nepeta's color.
  • Eridan's was changed from #6a006a to #7e0048.
  • Karkat's was changed from #626262 to #7c7e81.
• This is the only adventure on MSPA to not feature proper art, aside from the path icons, although whether the Epilogues can be considered an official "MS Paint Adventure" is dubious, as they follow a completely different format.

Trivia

• On this page Caliborn mentions that he prefers meat and candy over pumpkins, potentially foreshadowing the names of the two paths.