After I read the Epilogues and Beyond Canon I had this nagging theory in the back of my mind that maybe the real reason for why everything sort of just goes "haywire" in the Candy timeline is not due to them losing canon relevancy, but because they essentially skipped Sburbs actual end game, and just went to the big prize without actually triggering the event that is supposed to give them this prize.
Sburb is a video game, I feel like the writers lowkey just forgot this aspect of the story in favor of focusing more on the Meta powers that John gains that puts him above everyone else around him. But Sburb being a video game means that it too has rules that it has to follow, and there have definitely been times especially in early Homestuck when Sburb functions like a normal game. Like, when Dave makes the Grist torrent to essentially hack and get himself infinite Grist, the fact that there's multiple walkthroughs that Rose was scouring through to try and see what to do next, John trying to solve his own quest on his world at first before becoming inundated with Troll nonsense (lol)...
The game was set up for them to be played in a very specific way with very specific rules, and breaking any rules results in a doomed session. So, if that's the case then why wouldn't not fighting the big bad guy at the end also not "break" the game in a way lol?
John believed his new whole narrative meta powers put him above the rules of Sburb, but Sburb isn't the narrative; it's just a part of it. It's a piece of the story, but it was never the story itself. So, because John just makes everyone skip the big battle what ends up happening is two things:
Vriska is still fighting Lord English with all of the ghost army behind her.
The rest of the players have entered the final door before Lord English even dies.
These are two contradictory actions that would make any game freak out coding-wise, because they're triggering two different scenarios. One of those scenarios could potentially make all sorts of other endings happen as well, but because John and the others opened that door way before any of those scenarios could really load, the game doesn't ever "crash". The session ends because they technically reached the end in a way, so it can't become "doomed" if the characters have already won the big shiny prize. My guess is Skaia assumed all players would at least always defeat their big bad before winning the prize, and that they just never predicted a group like this winning the game in this way.
But the other scenario is still happening, so the game just continues on as if they never won it at all. It can't doom their session, but it still has to load all of those "possible" scenarios anyway...Which is why I think Candy is so freaky and weird, and also might explain why Dirk even became his Ult!Self, to begin with. A common glitch in games when you do stuff like this is that you continue to gain EXP and level up even after you've "won" the game. I think they're ALL still gaining EXP, they've all been climbing the echeladder for like 7 years, and just never knew or realized it, until Rose started getting those "mysterious" headaches and started getting way more advanced Seer powers just out of nowhere.
When you think about it, there's no real explanation for why Rose just suddenly becomes stronger as a seer to the point of seeing the two different realities. At this point in the game, nobody has even used their powers outside of mundane things like flight and teleportation (and even then, not even lol) But she just randomly gets stronger for some reason? It would make sense as well for her to be the second (because Dirk was the first) kid to level up in this weird way because she was also kind of the strongest after Jade, who lost her connection to the Green Sun during the epilogues.
The only explanation I can think of for how she became stronger like that is if she's just been gaining more levels and just wasn't aware of it, like how no one else is aware of it either. But instead of treating the defeat of Lord English like killing a boss they forgot about, she treats it like an important narrative decision, and thus everyone else just stops remembering that they're even really playing a game at all lol.
This is long but yeah, this is my theory :3
idk why it crossed the stuff out I didn't mean for it to do that but tl:dr
They skipped the boss battle and triggered two load-bearing cutscenes, so the game is still ongoing and they are still leveling up but they don't know this yet at all and that is why Rose randomly starts to ascend to her Ult!Self without ever actually using her powers. Sburb has passive EXP gain I assume.
The massive black hole is a result of the Green Sun blowing to smithereens and the canon relevancy isn't that big of an issue or a problem for them, the passive EXP gain and the weird glitch of the game from them triggering two game ending cutscenes at the same time is the "real" issue lol (it's like if one person skipped Asgore's fight in Undertale while another tried to still fight him. You'd trigger two cutscenes in the game that would make it just inexplicably crap itself. Sburb isn't a game that EVER "crashes" as in there's no way for them to just stop playing or turn it off, so it just keeps going forever until the players all die or they win.)
I absolutely love where you are going with this.
The Real Homestuck?
That's the friends we made along the way!
mIrAcLeS ):0)
Wish you could @ people already but thanks person above me :3 Also I want them to go back to treating Homestuck like a game, I miss when they got all goofy with the fact they were playing a highly advanced alien god creation simulator game.
I think this would be the perfect and most silly twist too. That at the end of the day, it really is still just a game. And even the gods have to play by the games rules.
I also just think it'd make for some really great angst potential for those who thought they had finally escaped the game, only to find they've always been playing it and have just been neglecting it for years. Dirk wants to make a whole new session because he thinks that will shoot everyone out of canon irrelevancy, but what if the game just glitches again because he's there? so many great opportunities IMO.
I absolutely love this theory. I've always thought about the Ult!selves and wondered why such a major and integral plot point still has little to no explanation for its existence. But, your theory provides a really good and interesting explanation that makes a lot of sense!
i'm fujoshing out
Also in Meat when Dave and Karkat have the conversation about how only one of them is really immortal...it got me thinking about this whole "Sburb has Passive EXP gain and they're all still gaining levels" theory. I think Karkat won't Godtier but that he will probably still experience reaching a skill point cap like in a video game. When you have so many skill points that you could potentially spend but you can't because it's impossible for you to actually advance in that direction, its not improbable that the game would stop you from accessing other parts of it before you used those points up. And Death is a game mechanic in Sburb quite literally. SO, with THAT in mind...They might be unable to actually die for real if the game is glitched in this manner and won't let them advance. (Also a large part of the Epilogues and Beyond Canon's themes is stagnation.)
My theory within a theory is that Karkat and possibly Kanaya are both immortal because of this passive EXP gain and they will only stop being immortal until the game fixes itself and the glitch finally stops (which can happen in games) OR...you know, they just godtier in the new session and finally break that skill point ceiling. But even that has disastrous consequences lol. For instance, have you ever killed a bunch of mobs all at once in Minecraft? You get a shit ton of EXP that way sure, but did you know you can gain more levels than the game can count and it'll fuck the game up and make it crash?
If Sburb can't crash because they have to win, I fear Godtiering either of them would be really bad in this scenario because then the game would have to find some other way to get rid of the anomaly fucking everything up. What I'm saying is, they could Godtier and then immediately blow up or some shit from how much EXP rushes to them. Like the worlds worst power up T_T
okay, ill preface this by saying that i do really like this concept, and 100% agree that i miss sburb being treated As A Video Game, theres so much goofy AND cool stuff to be done with it!
but isnt kind of a core part of lord english that hes already not supposed to exist in sburb? like, the Final Boss is meant to be the black king, and lord english existing is a result of a wholeeee lot of other things going on narratively (that could still cause sburb to glitch out, tbh, i doubt that caliborn ever finished his session "properly," if a single player session is even possible to win at all)
and! as i say that, i feel like the fact that the trolls kinda hijacked the humans victory (from the perspective of the game itself) could cause some fun glitches too?
play corru.observer
^ Yeah I see what you mean. This theory more or less predicates on the idea that Sburb is a game that has some kind of timeline generation code (like world generation in Minecraft, but for different routes/endings) I imagine the game can handle certain things like new players coming into the session, timeplayers changing important parts of the sessions past, and even a wholesale reset (the scratch). So, I don't necessarily think the trolls being there or Lord English being there is what "broke" the game, especially since before that part, everything was still going according to plan (Sburb was still functioning normally, we can even see them all still use Sburb mechanics in the final battle against Lord English)
I think what "broke" it is the fact that they went offscript in a way that Sburb couldn't handle (Not killing what Sburb had already deemed their final boss, and opening the door at the same time) These two things can't happen at the same time for a Sburb session because one actions "ends the game" and the other keeps it going. And let me tell you, Sburb doesn't even break when players destroy whole parts of it. Like, nothing truly went wrong with the game when Rose destroys her own gate, there's no weird glitch or upset with the games core mechanics after she does this the game goes on, which just says to me that even if a player decides to not play the game in a traditional sense, it is able to generate a timeline that can account for that.
(Like in Undertale when Asgore destroys the Mercy button and you can't spare him, the fight continues and there is still a path to get a happy ending despite there being no mercy button.)
The only time where Sburb starts acting weird is when Rose starts to ascend after 7 years of doing nothing. This is the only time Sburb has ever even been brought to my attention anyways, and the fact that the thing Rose keeps seeing is Lord English and other visions related to that final battle makes me think she was literally seeing what were supposed to be "cutscenes" of these Alternate routes. Basically, the timelines the game generated had finally been rendered, it couldn't show the players this, but as a Seer Rose is able to see all sorts of "cutscenes" regardless of whether or not she's there. Hence her having headaches, migraines, and just general sickness because she hasn't leveled up properly at all. This is all just a theory though that's just kind of weak and a bit more to have fun with the game mechanics of sburb lol
The actual reason is probably way less involved and probably just has to do with the Black hole T_T