After I read the Epilogues and Beyond Canon I had this nagging theory in the back of my mind that maybe the real reason for why everything sort of just goes "haywire" in the Candy timeline is not due to them losing canon relevancy, but because they essentially skipped Sburbs actual end game, and just went to the big prize without actually triggering the event that is supposed to give them this prize.
Sburb is a video game, I feel like the writers lowkey just forgot this aspect of the story in favor of focusing more on the Meta powers that John gains that puts him above everyone else around him. But Sburb being a video game means that it too has rules that it has to follow, and there have definitely been times especially in early Homestuck when Sburb functions like a normal game. Like, when Dave makes the Grist torrent to essentially hack and get himself infinite Grist, the fact that there's multiple walkthroughs that Rose was scouring through to try and see what to do next, John trying to solve his own quest on his world at first before becoming inundated with Troll nonsense (lol)...
The game was set up for them to be played in a very specific way with very specific rules, and breaking any rules results in a doomed session. So, if that's the case then why wouldn't not fighting the big bad guy at the end also not "break" the game in a way lol?
John believed his new whole narrative meta powers put him above the rules of Sburb, but Sburb isn't the narrative; it's just a part of it. It's a piece of the story, but it was never the story itself. So, because John just makes everyone skip the big battle what ends up happening is two things:
Vriska is still fighting Lord English with all of the ghost army behind her.
The rest of the players have entered the final door before Lord English even dies.
These are two contradictory actions that would make any game freak out coding-wise, because they're triggering two different scenarios. One of those scenarios could potentially make all sorts of other endings happen as well, but because John and the others opened that door way before any of those scenarios could really load, the game doesn't ever "crash". The session ends because they technically reached the end in a way, so it can't become "doomed" if the characters have already won the big shiny prize. My guess is Skaia assumed all players would at least always defeat their big bad before winning the prize, and that they just never predicted a group like this winning the game in this way.
But the other scenario is still happening, so the game just continues on as if they never won it at all. It can't doom their session, but it still has to load all of those "possible" scenarios anyway...Which is why I think Candy is so freaky and weird, and also might explain why Dirk even became his Ult!Self, to begin with. A common glitch in games when you do stuff like this is that you continue to gain EXP and level up even after you've "won" the game. I think they're ALL still gaining EXP, they've all been climbing the echeladder for like 7 years, and just never knew or realized it, until Rose started getting those "mysterious" headaches and started getting way more advanced Seer powers just out of nowhere.
When you think about it, there's no real explanation for why Rose just suddenly becomes stronger as a seer to the point of seeing the two different realities. At this point in the game, nobody has even used their powers outside of mundane things like flight and teleportation (and even then, not even lol) But she just randomly gets stronger for some reason? It would make sense as well for her to be the second (because Dirk was the first) kid to level up in this weird way because she was also kind of the strongest after Jade, who lost her connection to the Green Sun during the epilogues.
The only explanation I can think of for how she became stronger like that is if she's just been gaining more levels and just wasn't aware of it, like how no one else is aware of it either. But instead of treating the defeat of Lord English like killing a boss they forgot about, she treats it like an important narrative decision, and thus everyone else just stops remembering that they're even really playing a game at all lol.
This is long but yeah, this is my theory :3
