Oh hey I’m back with more post-liveblog commentary! I’m answering questions sent to my askbox.

Your thoughts about narrative glitching out of the comic bounds lately and narrative structure as a whole?

At this point the fourth wall is beyond repair, so saying that I think it will be broken further is an act in futility. I think it either is because of John being “unstuck in existence” or an indication of another external force acting on the characters like the exiles or Hussie’s avatar. John’s affecting the entire storyline, including potentially changing the past in ways that stable loops can’t account for. He’s breaking outside the boundaries of not only the story, showing up in places he doesn’t belong and that his character has no business being. It makes sense then that this would lead to the actual images going places they don’t belong, that is, outside the space set aside for the panels. (This would be much easier if I knew the proper website terms.) My prediction is that we’ll see the pictures and possibly the text continue to break out of the site’s boundaries in bigger ways. Ultimately John could end up reaching out to the reader. Since Homestuck has a lot of parallels with Earthbound (whose final boss was defeated by praying to the player, among other things) and with the Neverending Story (which involved another reader saving the Childlike Empress and the world), and since it began with reader input, it only makes sense, right? Although since Homestuck has so many fans it probably won’t be literal reader involvement. Either Hussie could pick whatever response he wanted because everything will be offered, or it’d be something corny like a poll.

On the other hand, to go with my nagging suspicion that Lord English will not be the Final Boss, I think we might get another meta layer added, much the way that the exiles were hinted at, then added as an extra to the story, then integrated into it completely. (And Hussie’s Avatar, and even the trolls.) Someone who will see the story from the outside, in this case in a bigger picture. I’m kind of hoping for an adult Cherub who would have a territory containing…Actually I’m not sure that would be feasible, but it would be cool, right?