MEAT EPILOGUE THOUGHTS

MEAT SPOILERS
not even really sure where to start with this. it's kind of odd to be digesting this as its own standalone piece of fiction, as it has been a good three years since homestuck ended and i have not made any attempt in the interim to reread it. i've kind of been parsing this as half "way to potentially wrap up the stuff of homestuck i remember/care about" and half "way to take the characters i enjoy and see what the hell happens to them next"
and meat absolutely delivered on the latter and not as much on the former. call me a sucker but i've always had a soft spot for john no matter how much the narrative tries to tell me he's meek and a totally average joe, so seeing him Actually Do Things and grapple with his adulthood contrasted against his younger friends and actually HAVE A FINAL FIGHT and deal with meaningful character death, reconcile with terezi, and then get unpersoned... that hit hard. i've been rooting for him for six years and i don't want to come to terms with the fact that his story is finally over, but in the grand scheme of things he did what he had to do i guess.
by contrast i definitely don't care as much about the alpha kids as i do the beta kids so it's !!! FUN !!! that they got so much importance in meat. jane is like... meh? i don't really care about what her or what they did with her. the whole election plotline and how dave/karkat got caught up in it was funny but jane in particular i couldn't really bring myself to care about. jake was kind of in a similar boat but i felt they did a little more interesting stuff with him than with jane. the two of them definitely felt ooc'd in a big way. though i liked roxy's whole subplot with coming to terms with his gender identity/expression but i'm going to assume not everyone will agree on that; i'm not as well-versed on the subject as i'm sure other people are so i won't pretend to be the end-all-be-all on it
holy fuck i hate dirk now. like i genuinely want to see him suffer for what he did to the rest of the cast in this. he got changed in a huge way but for him at the *least* i think this seems like a logical progression for him becoming in tune with his ultimate self, which logically includes lots of incredibly fucked up people and straight up antagonists of the story. i really enjoyed the metatextual and extra-authorial moments, how dirk took control of the narrative and added his own spin to events, influenced characters to behave in certain ways, grappled over control of the narrative with alt!calliope, and literally godmodded during the bell tower scene to wrest control of the story back so he could continue what he needed to do. that shit was written *masterfully* but godDAMN did it make me hate the absolute shit out of dirk. he's straight up reprehensible now. i will never be able to forgive him for what he did to rose and kanaya.
overall i think meat felt like... not homestuck. this definitely was not homestuck in the traditional sense. it was like elements of homestuck were taken and added onto this different, more large-scale and overarching story that i felt more attuned to now in the present than i did back when i was more into homestuck. it felt like the evolution of something that wasn't quite homestuck, but homestuck was able to fit into it in its own way somehow. might not have been a perfect fit the whole way through but there were parts of this i absolutely enjoyed and overall i liked it more than i thought i would. actual writing was genuinely fantastic, meta elements were compelling, characterization was pretty good for the most part but i'm not going to lie it did get ooc. it ended very abruptly but i'm taking that as tacit confirmation that there will be more homestuck-related content in the future because come on there's no way that's not happening. is that a good thing? i don't know. i think at the end of the day i'm curious to see where the story goes from here so i guess it is.
also i got a sick glee out of seeing postretcon!vriska die the way she did, i'm sorry