A science fiction writer I really respect once told me that “the purpose of prose is to take an hour to examine a moment” and I think about that a lot. I think that at its most basic level, the beauty of prose is to let yourself linger on shit you really couldn’t in any other medium. In reality, someone drops an egg, and it takes maybe half a second to hit the ground and crack. But with prose you can freeze that egg on its way down. You could really dig into what’s so very messed up about this egg getting smashed. Maybe it was the final egg. Maybe it was a lucky egg. Maybe you’re known as the motherfucker in the family who drops all the damn eggs all the time.

Whatever the case, prose allows us to really linger here with all this egg shit. We can find out what you were wearing while you dropped the egg, whether or not the light on the kitchen was on, etc, etc. Prose is for going inside situations, instead of looking at them head on.

Which is why I decided to do this in prose instead of visuals. I don’t think I need to describe “Terezi gets grabbed by a monster tree” but I really wanted you to know what she was feeling while it happened to her. It’s really what makes the Epilogues so visceral and uncomfortable, I think. Not only are we watching people make bad choices, we’re seeing the unkind thoughts they have when they make them.

Writing characters after time skips is always a challenge, even with characters I know incredibly well. Terezi has spent years onboard a space ship with Dirk and Rose, so writing the three of them interacting has been incredibly interesting, trying to get the balance between how I know they talk and how they might have changed or grown (or I guess…ingrown? Ungrown?) in that time. I think they’ve probably developed an interesting rapport. That’s why I made Terezi a little more direct with Dirk, less teasing and circular than she is with most of her conversations—at least the ones with boys.

We also figure out that Terezi more or less knows what’s going on, except she doesn’t exactly get how Dirk is doing it. To her it seems like mind control. Dirk says it’s not. But does the difference actually matter?

See you next time!