Lord English: The Anti-Homestuck

Another highly coveted self-insert round serving a brief reprieve from all the Sadstuck. Which admittedly may have just been in the process of turning into Stupidstuck. So we might as well take a break and go full Stupidstuck, and watch me fool around in my recently green-painted mansion while wearing Lord English's huge coat. The "Who is Lord English" question has been picking up steam, which means it's time for me to waltz into the story and fuck with you a little on that subject. There are some clues that we're circling this topic that were hard to appreciate at the time. Gamzee is watching the ball drop during the critical moment, which circumstantially coincides with the rise of LE. We don't have all the info yet, but that was a subtle prompt to consider the question, which I'm doing here. Mainly by "reassuring" everybody that I'm not going to turn out to be LE himself and become the supreme villain that my fictional heroes all have to gang up on and defeat in the end. If that were literally true, then yes, I would be right in describing that here as "dumb." But then again, you can never totally trust me, can you? This is just some farcical misdirection-slash-admission in plain sight, which is a frequent tool of the story. LE arguably is me, but detached from the literal AH persona by several layers of symbolism and exaggerated, shithead, in-story avatar composites, to create the ultimate anti-narrative, anti-reader, anti-Homestuck monstrosity. Implacable and invincible. So invincible that, even in a state of imminent defeat, his death can't be shown, because...why would he "give" that to you? But getting into any of that would be skipping too far ahead to Act 7 meta. For now, this just reads as more self-insert buffoonery. It takes a very long time for all of this symbolism to become manifest. (Though for the record, when it finally does, I consider the conclusions about LE as a complex, wrathful, multi-faceted author avatar to be pretty evident. I don't think I'm spilling much Hot Dirt here.) At this stage, it's all hard to see, and the true identity of LE feels like an important piece of info we're waiting for, which means it can be trollishly teased in this manner. It also feels kind of glaring, on a reread, how baked in all this was from the start. I'm pretty sure this was the loosely intended nature of LE even when he was being alluded to in the Intermission. The way that true nature was eventually presented (for instance, the Arquiusprite constituent) is what was somewhat freestyled along the way. Naturally, when you joke about an outcome ("how stupid would that be?" ) it takes a little heat off the suspicion of that outcome. Probably even AH, the character here, doesn't have the slightest idea what LE's true nature is. He's not even really me. He's semi-me, an in-story projection of AH the buffoon, the megalomaniac "godhead" who goofs around, and on some level knows he's just a flailing clown at the mercy of the thing he's making, as much as its creator. He's sort of an innocent victim of this endeavor, almost as much as other characters are. He can't possibly "fill the coat" of LE in this form. Few can. Even someone with AH's proclivities, author-tier powers, and a nefarious agenda like Doc Scratch can't fill the coat. That's why I'm "swimming in this garish piece of shit." The coat is another loaded symbol. Something terrible needs to happen, and the monster needs to surface. Yes, he may be "already here," but it's just not time yet.
-Book 6 page 71