lime-bloods:

ohhhhh… by mistakenly understanding the “yellow yard” as a “YELLOW LAWN RING”, Karkat is in fact positioning the crossing of the yard as the irreversible crossing of an event horizon!

p. 2003 / p. 6676

a comparison which becomes all the more obvious with Jade’s comparison of the yard to “the yellow brick road”, manifested by the golden path toward the wizard’s house, contained within the inescapable horizon of a black hole. the spiral as a symbol for an inescapable pull!!

god, duh, and that’s why Jade and John experience three years within the span of three nanoseconds; it’s gravitational time dilation!!!

(the image of a house encapsulated by a black hole, as a symbol for reality, continues to be alive and well Beyond Canon, too!)

this aligns very neatly with my prior assessment on the matter - that the lawnrings separating suburban homes are emblematic of the borders separating different realities - and completes one of Homestuck’s classic chains of iterative escalation; just as each home is surrounded by a lawn ring and each session of Sburb is surrounded by the “Furthest Ring”, reality itself would naturally have an even Furthester Ring insulating it from what’s outside!

but I can’t help but think even further back to the synonymity between the “yellow lawn ring” and the comic’s other ‘yellow rings’. if the yellow brick road is a black hole’s event horizon, then seemingly we have to make the logical leap that the yellow Rings of Life and Void are also in their own ways the event horizons of a black hole. so, huh?

I think the conceptual line we need to draw here is between Homestuck’s “Ring of Life” and Problem Sleuth’s “Game of Life”. Homestuck inherits its 'reality existing within a black hole’ conceit from the Mobster Kingpin’s absorbing of the Game of Life into himself, and Death condemning MK to play board games forever seems straightforwardly analogous to Lord English’s punishment by way of eternity trapped in a black hole. so I suppose the Ring of Life / Ring of Void become Problem Sleuth’s Life / Death doors? after all, the Void ring can be used to banish things into the Furthest Ring, just as the Life ring lets you back out! but Void being the aspect of obscurity also adds a second layer to the functionality of the opposite ring: being brought back to Life also becomes being brought back into relevance. wearing the ring of Life means being within the boundaries of Life, and as such so long as you wear it you’re 'still in the game’ of Life.