… and as such, here are some reflections.

I’ve said many times that once I finish my Homestuck blog post series—the same one that I started in 2015, paused for almost two years, and have worked on since then very on-and-off—finishes, I will never have to think about Homestuck again. Now, this is obviously an exaggeration, but I’m still starting to view the completion of my Homestuck post series as the end of an era for me. Why might that be, you may ask?

For one thing: Homestuck means a lot to me. I first read the comic in 2014, in the summer between my first and second years of high school; I was 15 years old then. I gradually got more invested and obsessed with Homestuck in the following years, participating in online discussions and fan projects aplenty. I had a steady stream of Homestuck interest going until late 2017 (months after my Homestuck posts initially fizzled out), and then it went on and off from there, with me moving to different interests—SiIvaGunner, SRB2, and MLP:FiM to name a few—but often coming back to Homestuck regardless, and finishing my Homestuck post series bit by bit. I resumed my Homestuck posts on a day in December 2018 where I was so bored that I wanted to resurrect that old project, and later Homestuck media since then (most of all the epilogues and new book commentary) has continued to fuel my motivation to continue those posts. Now, the fuel of new Homestuck media has fizzled out, but I think I have just enough remaining Homestuck energy to finish those posts!

And now, in July 2021, I am 22 years old, and my life is on the brink of going through lots of changes. I graduated college two months ago, and since then I’ve been applying to full-time jobs mostly related to computers and programming, since that’s what I studied in college. The applications have had frustratingly little success at first, but in the past few weeks I have gotten more interviews, and victory feels like it may be around the corner. I’m very anxious about all this job stuff, and especially worried that I may end up feeling hollow about not pursuing my true passion, which is music. But still, with big changes about to happen in my life—this will likely include moving out of my parents’ house and doing other such adult things—now’s a great time to send off my relationship with Homestuck.

I should note that music being my true passion isn’t some sort of new revelation. It’s been true since I first learned piano when I was six years old, and while my creative projects don’t exclusively involve music, it’s still by far what I have the most fun doing. It’s how my proudest creative projects came to be, it’s how I ended up participating in big online collaborative projects that I’m happy to have played a part in, and it’s how I met basically everyone who I would today call a friend. It’s even how I ended up meeting Internet acquaintances in person, which seemed like a faraway impossible dream until MAGFest 2019 happened, and I’ve met Internet acquaintances and become much better friends with them a few times since: a whole bunch in MAGFest 2020 (in January 2020 just to be clear), and two other times one-on-one. A big part of why Homestuck means so much to me is because of its music, especially its large swath of fan music which a lot of fans overlook in favor of those annoying memetic song parodies. Cool and New Music Team deserves special mention since I played quite a big part in the team’s albums and even got to contribute to their official final album. Unrelated to Homestuck, SiIvaGunner is worth mentioning too, since I’ve made many friends from being part of the channel and met a lot of them in person, and I got into the channel because of Cool and New Music Team.

With all this music talk, where does that leave the completion of my Homestuck blog post series? I estimate that I’ll get those posts done around September—if I’m lucky, it could be on September 18 or 20, the anniversary of the post series’ introduction post and proper first post respectively. But I’m not counting on making that date necessarily; finishing those posts is the important part. I know I always say that I want to never think about Homestuck again once my Homestuck post series is finished, but that’s really a humorous way to say I want my relationship with Homestuck to have the sendoff it deserves. I have only eight posts left: five going through pre-Omegapause A6A6I5, one going through post-Omegapause A6A6I5, one going through [S] Collide and the following pages, and one going through Act 7 and the credits. Some of those posts will no doubt be lengthy and tedious to write, but the feeling of properly finishing this project—one that I spent most of 2017 and 2018 thinking I’d never finish—will be well worth it.

I’m not exactly crying thinking about ending my Homestuck posts, but my eyes aren’t exactly dry either. But if I end up crying in real life upon concluding my Homestuck post series, that wouldn’t surprise me too much. After all, I DID cry in real life after watching the final episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, a show that I first got into from 2013 to 2014 and spent six years rudely neglecting.

(P.S. As for resuming my MLP posts… I’ll worry about that after finishing my Homestuck posts, OK? One thing at a time.)