In the same vein as your idea of sopor slime as a control mechanism of Lord English, do you think Caliborn being a candy corn vampire might imply that the trolls' candy corn horns are also a means of influence, as though they were all pre-bitten and injected with English's poison? Or as though their horns were really something more like insect radio antennae, receiving psychic signals? It'd be funny if the very thing preventing Tavros from getting in the brainwashing tub was the size of his receptor...
I’ve always been interested by the fact that trolls’ candy corn horns kind of prefigure the tricksters all having their associated candies stuck on their heads, so the idea that they might be the signature of another kind of sugar monster does have an appeal…
certainly horns representing corruption is consistent with the fall from grace iconography that accompanies Lord English’s takeover of Alternia; the fact that Beforans are also hornéd could be considered a solid counterargument to this, but that’s not really stopped me before… what would have been fun for the “Alternians are vampiric Beforans” angle would be Beforans being diurnal, though ostensibly the two races should be biologically identical so using their physiology as evidence of corruption is always a little problematic. bears some thinking about
Considering the weird ways that time loops in homestuck, it’s not inconceivable that the influence is looping on itself. That is to say, kinda sorta, that Beforus/Alternia vampirized Caliborn (which, hey, raised by gamzee so, who got corrupted by Caliborn who got raised by gamzee who-)
Like the Beforans and Alternians basically lean heavy into the general vibes Caliborn rocks, for obvious reasons, but considering the whole incestuous slurry thing that keeps popping up, what with Idea’s influencing things in a whole chain that can loop back on itself in places (and then you end up with the repeating and similar but actually different thing with the ancestors)
oh absolutely there are examples of Caliborn’s influence on Alternia kind of “echoing backward” into Beforus; the example I always fall back on is the existence of Beforus’ clown religion, something that existed on Alternia as a direct result of Lord English, but there are other smaller similarities. Scratch’s modus operandi as a “scratch doctor” is also to leave the broad strokes of history basically the same while changing key details that fit his agenda, so when we say something “exists because of Scratch”, that’s almost always shorthand for “exists in this form because of Scratch”. in his own words, there is nothing new in paradox space.
these temporal echoes tend to operate in the sphere of Ideas, though, so the prospect that biology could be transmitted across the scratch is a little troubling… there are characters who can give ideas physical form, of course, but applying an idea to an entire species is a whole other ball game. it’s also harder to imagine horns as a sign of fall from grace if there was never a hornless grace to begin with… time in Homestuck is cyclical, as you say, but it’s never outright paradoxical. you can’t travel back in time and give horns to a species that had no horns in your timeline. Ideas are things that “always” exist.