One more thought about the note Desolation plays: I really like that John briefly takes his disguise off for this page. I think it works really well as an encapsulation of what this page, Homestuck’s title page, represents.
Homestuck is a deeply silly series. It also goes to some genuinely heart-wrenching emotional places and isn’t afraid to intertwine its silliness with seriousness when it needs to. However, the first 81 pages of Homestuck are more or less exclusively silly. The plot hasn’t properly started yet. It’s just John dicking around in his room and trying to get his hands on a video game as the readers make suggestions for what he does. It’s jokes!
It’s just jokes, but the whole time, once you’re looking back having read further in, you know that there’s a story about the end of the world lurking in the wings and waiting to start at any moment. And this page serves as our first little glimpse of that.
The note Desolation plays page is serious enough that it can’t help but mock itself, purposely misattributing a quote as a callback joke and leaning hard into overly melodramatic prose. Its seriousness is itself a gag, but the page is also a very real first gesture toward story’s deeper themes and John’s sense of Absence.
John screws around for 81 pages and puts on silly costumes, and then for one page, the page that serves as our title sequence and a first gesture toward Homestuck as a larger story, he stops. He takes off the goofy disguise and looks, as his honest self, up at the desolate loneliness around him. For just a moment the story is allowed to be real and haunting and unsettled, and John becomes very small and human as the camera pulls away from him.
And then the very next page, John is instantly back in the beaglepuss and the narration is prompting him to take a shit in the mailbox, because we cannot possibly be serious or sincere for too long so early in the comic.
Leaning into anything too heavy at this point for more than an instant would give the whole game away, but for just a moment, in the hauntingly empty animation that serves as our title page, the silly disguise comes down and we get a hint of what’s coming for us.
