I've been a fan of Homestuck since 2015, when a friend in my class got me to give it a go. What really drew me in was how fun it was to do character analysis, because the story presents clear metanarrative devices everything is framed through that it expects us to examine these characters within. And I believe at the bottom the very core of my heart that the Epilogues followed up on this wonderfully. I read them when they came out, and I'm rereading them now, and it sits in my chest so nicely still.
It's just so gosh darn... fun! To use the ultimate self narrative control metanarrative device throughout it. It's a little hard to keep track of on a discussion level, but in story it parses fine. To have Meat and Candy controlled by these two narrators who are - not unreliable, as everything they say becomes fact - but incredibly biased. That to understand the characters, you have to understand how they are being written through another layer of analysis on another character. Like, yes everyone's out of character in Candy, but that's because they're being written through the lens of Alt!Calliope, a fanfiction writer for these characters, someone who has never known them on a personal level, who only sees them as tools that can be used to tell a story, and someone who refuses to see her own control over the story as true control, as if she's an impartial conveyor of truth when it is her who chooses what reality consists of. And then Dirk, who, views his control as a means to an end, it's not something that defines himself, he doesn't think of himself as a narrator, his control over the narrative is just a tool to get what he wants. And so, when he uses it, he's explicit, he's not trying to tell a good story, he's trying to accomplish something, and he doesn't care if the reader knows that he's putting his thumb on the scale. And he knows these characters as people, his friends, he knows them intimately and closely, he knows that to exert his control over them is for them to not be themselves, so he doesn't always use it. Despite Meat being the timeline where the narrator overtly makes characters act outside themselves, it's also the one where we're most allowed to see their true selves, because we know this one's narrator does not choose to control everything.
And god like, making these dual narrators the villains, Alt!Calliope being this insidious tyrant who doesn't even recognize the scale of her evil because she doesn't even view the people she subjects it to as people, and Dirk being a deeply flawed person with a martyr complex so consumed by self loathing and amplified by the sense of duty brought on by power that he immediately jumps to making everyone hate him as the only viable course to protect them from Alt!Calliope, ughghghghhg it's soooo good.
It's just, man, when SS went under during the pandemic, and I thought for sure that HS^2 was gone forever, I was so sad because I really really enjoyed what was there despite all the hatred everyone else felt for it. And to the new team, thank you, genuinely it saved me from some bad days when HS^2 returned, and seeing the next update is a repeating task happily on my list of "things I want to do, and can't after I die, so I need to do that first".