Something I’m ashamed to have totally missed is the consistent treatment of post-scratch Earth as an afterlife realm. Not just in the obvious sense that when the Condesce appointed her Mirthful Executives it became the “paradise planet” inhabited by the “band of rowdy and capricious minstrels” foretold by the Highbloods, or that thousands of years later in Earth C it was being directly called a paradise planet; thousands of years later still, Caliborn calls the place his Dark Carnival, something Gamzee implies to also be connected to the paradise planet and its minstrels.

Just like the Mirthful Messiahs, the paradise planet and its Dark Carnival seem to shift identity “depending on at what point in the story the idea is discussed, on context, and on whichever particular interpretation happens to be most convenient at any given moment” (Homestuck: Book 4, p.49), but being based on that version of Earth seems to be a constant.

With Caliborn’s session and the paradise planet being accessed through black holes, I wonder if this might bring us closer to reconciling the depiction of black holes in Homestuck and their significance in Problem Sleuth, where mobsters worship their boss/a black hole as a Messianic figure (in a “Mobster/Gravitation-based cult”) and that black hole absorbs the afterlife itself… but that’s about as far as I think I can stretch this.