Pick Your Poison
(A companion post to John English: Candy Corn Vampire and Night President)
Poison is not a word that gets grown around a lot in Homestuck. The most consistently it gets used in quick succession is when referring to allergies and peanuts. Another few times are in reference to Dirk’s influence of his peers and Jade’s skewed perception of hers; both of which are certainly interesting, but not quite the same as the two kinds of metaphysical poison that finally come into play in the Epilogues.
One poison is created by Lord English, and the other by his sister, the Dead Cherub. If we ignore the fact that the more technically correct term for injected animal poison is ‘venom,’ this is fitting, because they are both snake monsters after all.
The symptoms of the Dead Cherub’s poison appear to include blackening of the eyes. This connects her poison to another ink-black product in Homestuck decribed as ‘poison’ - the Black Liquid Sorrow Gushers. This isn’t a completely random connection, either, because the term ‘Black Liquid Sorrow’ refers to a substance that comes from a very relevant character; Problem Sleuth’s Death.
The loss of his beloved weapon has caused Death to shed another tear of black liquid sorrow - from his eye, no less.
The Dead Cherub is the spitting image of Death; a skull-like face in a simple black hood, and now being followed around by a character who was once described as the “H4NDM41D TO TH3 M4ST3R OF D34TH“.
So if the Dead Cherub uses a black poison, what kind of poison does Lord English use?
If what a lot of people say about these black and white snakes being central to Homestuck is true, then it would only be fitting that Lord English’s poison is a white one. And as it happens, there is a special white substance that is referred to as poison both in Homestuck proper and in the Epilogue.
The weapon—the unusual material it’s made out of—is poison to English.
These two lines refer specifically to Dave’s Welsh sword, Caledfwlch, but the second one specifically mentions the strange material it’s made out of. We know what this strange material is; it’s the same stuff the magic cueball is made out of, which Andrew’s author avatar also acknowledges as English’s kryptonite when threatening to use the White Magnum, which shoots tiny cueball bullets.
But neither of those lines refer to it as poison used by English; just poison that can affect him. Why would he use the same poison that is his weakness?
Well, it is worth remembering that each of those snakes in the spiral sucker juju is its own ouroboros; the codes for the individual green and red suckers are “UrobUros" for Calliope’s and “uROBuROS” for Caliborn’s. Each is a snake eating its own tail, before they are joined to make the two snakes in the spiral sucker; before the two poisons are pitted against each other.
And this is consistent with how English himself uses white cueball-themed weapons. Doc Scratch, the personification of the cueball, is first English’s servant, and wields the White Magnum himself, before it is then turned on him by Spades Slick in [S] Cascade. The white house juju works in the exact same way, and this cyclical nature is mentioned directly in the text:
So is it possible that the white snake is coming around to bite its own tail once again, and put the power of the white poison back into Lord English’s hands?
As one final note; there is one topic in Homestuck that sees the word ‘poison’ come up over and over again, more times than any other topic. It’s used to refer to sopor slime, to sugary drinks, to catnip, and finally in the Epilogue to tobacco. That’s three substances which are used in Homestuck as metaphors for drugs, and then one substance that is an actual drug. And what else is compared to a drug in the Epilogue?