I don’t know what to call this - it has too much original content to be a theory, too much complexity to be a headcanon, and too little effort to be an actual story. But I think this would make a really slick storyline for an offshoot of Homestuck - an alternate ending that doesn’t invalidate the original.

This takes a lot from this theory, and also this one.

Here’s the setup: Caliborn is under the impression that Homestuck stopped updating after A6A6I3 (GAME OVER and its aftermath.) After he scolds Andrew Hussie for never uploading Caliborn’s further contributions to the narrative (which, in our universe, are the other non-intermission parts of act 6), he resolves to finish the story himself (by “HAVING OTHER PEOPLE DO ALL THE WORK.”)

Caliborn starts by downloading all of mspaintadventures.com, one page at a time.

The story then follows the second John, from a timeline where the first John (the one in our version of the story) appears from the future using his warpy powers. This second “(John)” goes to Typheus and gets the same powers, but he uses them differently, to go back and round up living god-tier versions of the other human kids to confront Caliborn, as in A6A6A5 (the “masterpiece”).

Of course, we know how this ends: Caliborn is defeated (only to later earlier become Lord English), while only the post-scratch kids are left. They can’t use John’s abilities to go earlier in the story, or Dave’s “regular” time travel to go earlier in the timeline.



However, they do have another way to use “regular” time travel - Jake has somehow become the leader of the Felt. He hits Sawbuck until they land at the correct point in time, before GAME OVER.



Regular time travel has rules, of course - you can’t change events that happen in the future, at least not without creating a doomed timeline in the process.

But there’s a loophole. Karkat, Terezi, Kanaya, and Gamzee all die in GAME OVER, which is a Flash animation. Caliborn lives in the far future, where the web browsers left over from the remains of civilization have stopped supporting Adobe Flash long ago.

Because this alternate narrative is hosted by Caliborn, and Caliborn skips the Flash animations when he downloads all of MSPA, the events of Flash animations are no longer a permanent part of the narrative, and can be changed.

Jane, Jake, Dirk, and Roxy can’t use time travel to rescue the beta kids (their appearances later in the timeline in the fight against Caliborn somehow seal their fate here), but they do use Sawbuck to go back to before GAME OVER, grab the four trolls and Jane’s dad, and then jump into the future.

At this point, it’s impossible to stop the Condesce, former ruler of both the trolls’ (Karkat et al) and the kids’ (Dirk, Roxy) universes - they don’t have enough people left to fight her. However, she needs the cooperation of the other trolls (i.e. their genetic material) in order to rebuild a troll empire. So Karkat makes a deal with her, on two conditions.

One is that she must allow the 4 post-scratch kids and 4 trolls to live in the new universe, unimpeded. The second condition is a mystery.



The new universe in this narrative, like the one in the original, exists outside of Lord English’s influence. However, due in part to the presence of Gamzee and the Condesce, this becomes the Earth on which Caliborn predominates, leading to the confrontation and eventually to Lord English’s creation.