John English: Candy Corn Vampire and Night President
At the end of the Meat Epilogue, John is infected with some kind of poison that prevents him from regenerating. We aren’t provided with a Heroic or Just ruling on his demise, and his slow, painful fading away in Terezi’s arms seems uncharacteristic of a death afforded by the Immortality Clock. Most importantly, the Dead Cherub tells us that “[John’s] resuscitation remains a theoretical possibility for those still striving for it.” So it seems most likely that it is English’s poison that stops John from being revived instantaneously; possibly related to his breath that allows him to destroy ghosts.
This might seem like a strangely ambiguous end to the story of our protagonist since page 1 of Homestuck, but in truth, the Epilogue itself explains what this poison is; because in Candy, a version of Jade faces the exact same problem.
JANE: Well, something is blocking my Life powers.
JANE: It’s as if she has… a sort of poison in her. Not a literal poison, mind you.
JANE: It’s attacking her on… perhaps this sounds crazy, but…
And we soon find out what that poison turns out to be; it’s the Dead Cherub, about to use Jade’s body as a puppet host. So if Jade becomes infected with Calliope’s poison and becomes Calliope’s host; is John, her brother, slated to become Lord English’s host now that he’s infected with Lord English’s poison? Let’s look at some other parallels in their situations.
Before becoming the Dead Cherub’s host, Jade falls through a black hole that represents Calliope herself. Before John is poisoned, he falls into Lord English’s mouth. Note that Lord English himself is like a black hole. Before Jade falls into the Dead Cherub’s event horizon, she receives a slice of the broken fabric of reality through her chest. John receives a similar wound from Lord English’s tooth; but it isn’t just any one of Lord English’s teeth. It’s his gold tooth, cracked off at the base. Where does Caliborn get his first gold tooth?
It’s a piece of candy corn he knocks from the header of the MSPA website. Just like the piece of the Furthest Ring that gets Jade, Lord English’s golden tooth is a broken piece of the frame that the story takes place in.
Let’s take the candy corn angle a little further. A fantasy creature well known for its ability to pass on likeness through a bite is the vampire; and importantly, Caliborn’s use of a candy corn tooth is a direct reference to a vampire within the MSPA mythos, the Candy Corn Vampire.
Beyond comparisons between Kanaya and human mythology, vampires are mentioned sparingly in Homestuck, but come up twice in the Epilogues. Once in mention to John recoiling from light as if he is one (noteworthy), and then another time in a strange sequence of internal monologue Jane has.
The title ‘president’ here is obviously being used in the same sense as in US politics, but it also merely means ‘someone who presides’. This paragraph and a half invokes a very easy to read concept; two beings, one presiding over Day, the other presiding over Night. Light, and Darkness. And the latter is a vampire. It is possibly worth noting that the word ‘preside’ is mostly used in reference to the Green Sun, which later becomes a black hole, which is actually the Dead Cherub. And just like Lord English and the Dead Cherub, vampires and the sun are mortal enemies.
Jane rejecting outright the idea of a dual presidency is also an obvious reference to the dual juggalo presidency of Earth B2. This is important because Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are two of the characters in Homestuck who are implied to be the subjugglator religion’s Mirthful Messiahs. Andrew’s commentary in Homestuck book 4 has this to say about the Mirthful Messiahs:
[…] the Mirthful Messiahs can refer to different “mirthful” pairs of people, depending on at what point in the story the idea is discussed.
But what we do know for sure about the subjugglator religion is that it heavily concern a “paradise planet,” which Earth C is compared to again and again. So who do the Mirthful Messiahs refer to now that the story is at a point where the subjugglators’ paradise planet actually exists? The invocation of this question speaks volumes on its own.
Let’s take the vampire connection just a step further before it starts to wear thin. If John / Lord English is some kind of cosmic vampire, is there a similar but contrasting creature that Jade / the Dead Cherub can be compared to? Perhaps a werewolf. Werewolves receive very little attention in MSPA - even less than vampires; Problem Sleuth, from whence the Candy Corn Vampire originated, did not have any kind of werewolf monsters in it. But it is worth pointing out that by the time Kanaya was introduced to the story, Hussie had at least heard of Twilight, which can probably be credited with putting vampires and werewolves at odds with each other in modern western fiction. And werewolves do receive three mentions toward the very end of Homestuck, all in reference to Jade in her “grimbark” state, which puppet Jade is directly compared to.
To finish off this train of thought, take note of the use of the term ‘puppet’. The way the Dead Cherub controls characters in the Epilogues is compared to puppetry multiple times. This is hardly surprising, given the prevalence puppets and puppeteers maintain throughout Homestuck. But it’s notable because Lord English has used a puppet body as a host before; and one with similar canon-breaking power, symbolised by the same white orb that John’s own source of power sometimes manifests as.
Could John Egbert’s dead body potentially be the next host of Lord English, just as many of Homestuck’s earliest and most prevalent theorists once predicted would happen to his father Jake English?