to summarise the other day’s insane rambling, distilled into a coherent thesis: it seems to be that the cue ball is in essence a black hole viewed from the other side. while Act 7’s black hole is the grave Calliope digs to condemn Lord English in, the cue balls are the seeds from which he is forced to be born again in a neverending cycle, punishing him by forcing him to live out the horror of narrative he put John and friends through.

this follows conventional wisdom that Homestuck’s black holes are the equal opposites of white holes; while a black hole is a portal back into the cycle of death and rebirth that is Homestuck, a white house is your door out of it - it just happens that English, being cursed to only be born when Scratch dies, only ever gets to see the back of these white doors.

to look at it another way, just as a black hole is a dark pocket from which no information can escape, the cue ball is an endless fount of information - sometimes to the point of detriment.

possibly this also offers an alternate explanation for my similarly old view that what goes in through a black hole - a Gamzee, a crowbar, a set of magic pool balls - must come out through Caliborn’s immortality clock (just as Slick uses it as a gateway to the Furthest Ring, and Meenah uses the gateway in reverse to enter the black hole universe). because of course, the active component of that clock is itself a cue ball.