#because if everyone is a singular conciousness - ego death is the death of the idea that you are fundamentally seperate from everything

[cat-marshmallow]

z

[dahniwitchoflight]

Candy 12-14

Even Jake’s having his proverbial love triangle troubles

It’s clear he genuinely cares for both Jane and Dirk, but if he’s being honest with himself, the one he romantically loves would be Dirk, the one he would prefer to be with, who he’d choose if they were equal options, would be Dirk

But he’s also right that it’s not like Jane’s a bad choice either, sure it’s not his preference if he’s being honest, but he’s also not about to look the gift horse in the mouth if it falls right into his lap

13 is where we start start to see the unraveling happen I suppose though

Again, everyone is acting so drugged up in Candy

Jane and Jake getting literally inebriated and Dave acting like he’s going through Dirk withdrawal

Then Gamzee being the weird ugly poster child of both drugs and candy, honestly it really did make sense to shove him into this timeline in a weird and uncomfortable ham fisted way, it gets that “are you fucking high right now” feeling across really well

Gamzee really being the cloud cuckoolander here though

hold on let me un-gamzee-ify it just reading his text quirk makes me feel like im on drugs

Gamzee: you don’t got any need to go and concern yourself with his mortal flesh body out here in this candycane whirlpool beyond the infinite black wink of the wicked singularity, my ninja.

Gamzee: a sack of meat and bones in one life or the next is only a means to the final totality that will damn and raise us all in brilliant apotheosis.

Gamzee seems clearly meta aware of the situation he’s in which is interesting, This is indeed a candy swirled timeline hidden inside an infinite black hole singularity

the second line seems to be describing the meat timeline in a way though too

a sack of meat sounds worthless, but it is apparently only a means to a truer end, it has to happen for something else to happen

Essential, but irrelevant, again

funnily enough he’s also seems to be referencing gnostic concepts, not that i’m surprised really at this point

one sack of meat, or, one body in one life or the next

so reincarnation

is only a means to an end that both damns and raises a person into apotheosis, or their “zenith” their highest point

which, i mean, yeah, you live life again and again, differently each time, becoming closer to ascension, and ultimate consumation of every version of you is the basic tenet of the reincarnation gnosticisms

Also, a lot of text was put into describing Gamzee haphazardly crashing into things and setting off rube goldberg machines, which I guess sort of describes his escapades through Homestuck lol

“cinder block, crusty puppet, and Japanese sword in a tornado’s radius off balance and avalanching them catastrophically onto the hapless clown’s torso. “

So the Sword is Dirk (or AR) the crusty puppet is Caliborn (because Lil Cal) which I guess leaves the cinder block as Equius? He’s built like a brick shithouse? eh only problem sleuth stuff comes up so 2/3 ain’t bad

Speaking of Equius, oh look, A feminine half finished robot in Dirk’s basement

the uncomfortable Equius vibes ping once again though I don’t think this is robo-Aradia, but likely something meant to serve a similar purpose and almost DEFINITELY Rose related if reading meat wasn’t already obvious and if the skull for an inner head thing wasn’t immediately referring to the headaches Rose was known to have

though it’s also uncomfortably a symbol of her Doom

---14---

“A flip of the cosmic coin has rendered your entire life completely inessential.”

yup what did I just say, Meat is representing the essential bits of the story, candy is decidedly, not

hm, Dirk’s going to kill himself for the supposed greater good of his own making again

not unsurprising, but a guy like him always like to make an escape rather than give up, is he thinking death will unlock this part of his conciousness and send the memories back to the ultimate self? probably

“and one final act of relevance that can bequeath your meager energies to the cosmic well from whence they came.”

yup!

Though as much as he keeps saying none of this matters he did leave an explanatory note specifically for his friends to find, so there’s still something in him that cares

Don’t like how the bigger blacker text is basically instructing this version of Dirk to kill himself though, that again implies there’s part of Dirk that are subservient to other parts, so again it’s a question of if his ultimate self got tainted through the connecting pieces of Arquisprite > Lord English > Doc Scratch, then who’s actually pulling the strings in Dirk’s Ultimate Self and directing the behaviour of “Dirk” in general

Is it Dirk Strider? Or Doc Scratch? and does that even matter anymore since it’s all DS all the same anyway?

“In a certain sense, you’ve never felt so free.

> Kill yourself.”

That’s hilariously also a JailBreak reference, I think, but definitely played for the morbs instead of as a joke lol

https://www.homestuck.com/jailbreak/109

Literally this MC kills himself when his friend dies and he’s now alone in a vast cosmic emptiness and the text is:

“Yes! Finally! Free at last!

Though the victory is bitersweet. Your friend has died of blood loss.

This is no victory. The feeling is vast emptiness. You are no longer bound by bars or concrete, but you feel more incarcerated than ever. You come to the heartwrenching conclusion that the only true prison... is loneliness.

There is only one thing left to do.

> Continue”

and it just resets him back to the first panel but this time he makes choices differently

ironic that Dirk does literal the exact same thing but comes to exactly zero of the same conclusions

“Just as your epiphany occured at sunset, your death must occur at sunrise to complete the ouroboros of symbological harmonic resonance that is your personal arc. It is the very last moment of narratively consequential action that will happen in this whole, barren world.”

I wonder what about this death makes it so narratively significant? just because it passes along the knowledge of what not to do back to the Ultimate Self so he can avoid it? Probably nothing more than that

“but there really are no words that can adequately express the sound someone makes when they die. It’s a phenomenon that happens on two levels. First, there is the literal termination of organic processes, which is to say, the destruction of the meat. Then follows the dissolution of the ego. And you have quite the ego to dissolve, one that has flown so high above the forest that not only can it no longer see the trees, it cannot even conceive of the trees as material substance with objective meaning.”

funny it mentions a forest which is also where that happened in JailBreak

Basically describes how death in general works in Homestuck, the body dies but can leave a ghost/ego behind, but eventually that dissolves as well

Again though, making a compariosn between the Meat and the Body/Flesh and the Candy and the Spirit or Ghost

or another pun between Candy and Drugs if you take Spirit to mean alcoholic spirits

Candy seems ironically and symbolically the place where Breath Meets Void, no wonder John and Roxy hook up here lol

Does that make Meat then the place where Blood and Light meet? I have before put significance into the crossover of those symbolisms in Homestuck before, but couldn’t really conceptulize it as a solid symbolic thing and the Meat and epilogues in general did a really good job of conjoining them into the idea of the story what with the Narrative having importance but also Veins and the idea of Karkat as being reliable narrator etc etc

Meat’s as good a symbol as any for that I suppose

“ When you think so little of yourself as a moral character, any act of self-termination will result in a death that is Just. “

so this line seems to imply that Dirk’s death was permanent and Just here because he thought so little of his own moral character aka deep down he knew he was terrible person, amount of remorse felt over that not applicable, and because of that perception of his, the clock tick tocked over on to Just

Again reinforcing that the Clock is less of an ultimate moral judgment from down on high and much more like an influenceable moral compass, given form by the person affecting it at the moment

I actually kinda like the new spin on that it gives Vriska’s original just death, since that slow ticking of the clock was not just a decision, but a battle of wills between herself and Terezi, it could have easily gone either way depending on how each saw Vriska

neat!