Is Candy Canon?

When Act 7 seemed like the end-all of Homestuck, one symbol seemed to be set in stone: the colour black represented the story - what is canon - and the colour white represented what was outside the story, or outside of canon. Black is the colour of the space that acts as the backdrop to the Medium and the void of the Furthest Ring, while white is the colour of the extracanonical space that peeks out from underneath when the black space is blown away. 

The white house juju that gets John “un-stuck” from canon is a representation of this; a “white hole” to outside of canon. The similar white door that appears in Act 7 to usher the heroes into their new universe - a white frog, as opposed to the black frog created by Karkat and the other trolls - served to cement the same concept, acting as a gateway for the characters of the story to finally leave it.

So it only followed that if a “white hole” was one that led out of the story, a black hole was one that led back into the story; that by creating the black hole by the Green Sun, the Dead Cherub was intending to doom Lord English to forever be trapped within Homestuck itself.

The colour diagram - cyan, magenta, yellow - that the Dead Cherub draws to create the black hole was often pointed to as significant following Act 7′s release, and the three colours used support the argument that the black hole represented the story itself: they are the colours of Skaia, Prospit, and Derse, the three forces locked in eternal conflict that serve to keep the story of SBURB in motion.

The Homestuck Epilogues seem to throw a spanner in this very straightforward machine, though. The black hole the Dead Cherub created seemingly took Lord English and the rest of those who fell past its event horizon to exactly the same place the white door did: not only the supposedly extracanonical Earth C, but the Candy timeline, which seems to be regarded by many of its inhabitants as even less canon than its Meat twin.

So what does this mean? Is the running hypothesis for black/white symbolism just way off the mark? Or is the situation regarding what is and isn’t inside canon more complicated than the story’s residents seem to understand? I think a good argument can be made for the latter.

One prominent piece of evidence is the logo for the Epilogues themselves, which feature black/white duality heavily; one side of the story canon, the other outside of canon. But perhaps more importantly the logo uses a black-within-white/white-within-black motif akin to that of the yin-yang part of a taijitu, symbolising the ways that two aspects of a duality feed into each other: canon begets noncanon, noncanon begets canon; noncanon contains canon within it, canon contains noncanon.

Another comparable symbol from Homestuck is the intertwined ouroboroses that make up the sucker juju; a white and black snake biting each other’s tails, canon feeding into noncanon and vice versa. This is especially important because these two snakes are also symbolic of two poisons - one black, one white - that are essential to the narrative of the Epilogues.

The black poison appears in the Candy timeline infecting Jade, allowing the Dead Cherub some influence over a timeline she otherwise considers “inconsequential”. Meanwhile the white poison afflicts John in the Meat timeline - a part of the Epilogues which it should be mentioned largely takes place in the white space around the black hole, which is the most literal example of ‘outside canon’ that Homestuck has to offer. Despite all the posturing about Meat’s canonicity and Candy’s dubiosity, there is canon and noncanon contained within both.

It is also worth noting that the Dead Cherub considers the black hole to be “basically her,” and that the Postscript to Meat acts as a continuation of Candy, wherein the Dead Cherub - a Muse of Space, one who represents creation itself - literally eats Lord English, symbolically trapping him within herself. The swapping of the Postscripts reinforces the same concept presented by the yin and yang and the double ouroboros - that black and white flow in and out of each other in a cyclical manner - and Lord English’s becoming part of the Dead Cherub is proof that he is still very much part of the story. What that means, however, and what happens from now, is anybody’s guess.