Candy epilogue 2 - electric boogaloo: everything is meaningless and I feel fine

[yurana]

 

 

I apologize for all the Homestuck posts but the epilogue is really good and I can’t stop thinking/talking about it. (as usual, beware of SPOLERS!)

 

 

This is basically a continuation and clarification of my last post. In that I took the position seriously that everything in the Candy universe is meaningless because it has not relation to canon. That is the position Dirk and Calliope (and John) take. What I think I didn’t make clear enough is that I think they are wrong about that.

To Dirk and Calliope, things that don’t matter to canon do not matter, period. But of course these things do matter. They matter to the people involved in them. Whether someone leaves an abusive relationship does matter, the rise of fascism matters, how people raise their children matters. In the reality of Candy Earth C, Jake’s and Tavros’s suffering is not any less real because it doesn’t matter to canon. They still exist as people who go through some horrible things and to them that most certainly matters. This is something that Dirk and Calliope can’t understand. They are so merged with canon that they have become the physical embodiment of the narrator, of course they cannot conceive of something mattering outside of canon. If you wanted to be mean, you could say they can’t conceive of anything mattering, that is outside of themselves. How is that for narcissism? Not being able to entertain the thought that things are relevant that have nothing to do with you, that things are meaningful because they are meaningful to someone else?

In a world that has no outside meaning provided for us, meaning is what we make of it. That also means that my meaningful life can look very different from yours. I think that is part of what John struggles with. His meaning was fighting Lord English and he struggles with finding something else to replace that. He also can’t see that the people around him do exactly that. He can’t see Roxy struggling to become more self-assured or finding out new things about her gender expression, he can’t see Rose’s happiness in starting a family. All he can see is that it is ‘wrong’ because it’s not serving the higher purpose of canon. To someone who is already struggling with depression loosing the one thing that gave his life purpose must be horrible. But on the other hand, there are plenty of worthy things on Candy Earth C that could give John’s life meaning, if he would allow them to. He could be a good father to his kid, he could join Karkat, Kanaya and Rose in their fight against an unjust regime, he could be there for Jake (instead of starting some kidnapping scheme that is more about himself playing the hero again, than helping others). All these things matter, but only if you let them matter.

So, fuck higher purpose, fuck canon. Make your own meaning!