There is a lot – or at least a fair amount – of meta concerning Candace Flynn out there. But it’s mostly concerned with her various motivations for her attempts to bust her brothers. Which is, of course, all well and good, but is not where this is going. Well, mostly – as according to this, my most favorite of headcanons, there might be yet another subconscious reason for why she does what she does. Without farther ado, here’s the long and short of what I’ve dubbed the Math Theory, because I’m incredibly great at naming things like that.

(Source: Rollercoaster, 2:05)

It’s generally pretty well-known and accepted that at least part of Candace’s motivations for busting is jealousy of her brothers. Some of it’s jealousy that she could never get away with the things they manage to do so easily thanks to the Mysterious Force, but there’s also jealousy that while their big ideas are lauded and praised and quite often accomplished, hers are… mostly ignored. She can’t do what they do, and to be so shown up like that only feeds into her insecure nature. Phineas and Ferb, for their part, never try to encourage this attitude, indeed often the opposite, but their sister is an insecure person in general, and will thus often find something to be insecure about. At the same time, she does have a point. While no child of the Flynn-Fletcher family can be called completely normal, when it comes to the… hierarchy, as it were, there’s no doubt that Candace is the most normal, is there? Is it any wonder the people coming for massive theme parks ignore the girl who really can’t match her brothers’ abilities? No particularly, no, and yet Candace – understandably – gets frustrated over it. It can’t be easy to live in such a large shadow. She herself remarks as such at least once, too.

(Source: Gi-Ants, 00:25)

To be entirely fair, a balaclava bear is… a strange idea. Unique, but not on the scale of a rollercoaster or a movie theater or something that would attract the recognition of people in the backyard the way Phineas and Ferb’s creations do. Really, since Candace can’t do those sorts of things, she’s going to have to face this uphill struggle, one to content herself to live in the shadows, and not let it rile up her insecurities the way…

(Source: The Best Lazy Day Ever, 6:58)

What, what’s this now? Oh, that’s right: the episode wherein Candace’s desire to bust her brothers grew too powerful because they weren’t doing anything that day, and so she had no outlet for her urges. She then got that same urge that incidentally also seems to power my fanfic writing – “If you want to see something done, then just do it yourself” in a gambit to get her brothers to take over for her so she could then, finally, have someone to bust.

The TV commercial promised the ‘Amazing Man-Eating Dinosaur-Themed Totally Sick Waterslide of Doom’ was so simple to put together that a ‘five-year can could build it’. (4:27) Of course, when are TV commercials accurate anyway? Considering that Candace used a cement mixer, a crane, and a jackhammer to build the thing (6:47) – and those are only the tools we see her using – it’s probably pretty safe to say that no five-year-old could actually build that thing. Unless they were specifically advertising to Phineas and Ferb, which, given those two boys’ no doubt massive effect on the local economy with the sheer amounts of materials they purchase each day, is not out of the question, even if they did miss Phineas and Ferb’s actual ages by a good seven years or so. A B minus to the advertising department there.

For comparison, five years old is somewhat roundabout Suzy Johnson’s age.

But that’s a bit strange. A waterslide slide that looks to be taller than the tree in their backyard by a considerable amount – maybe somewhere fifty feet tall? It’s not a rollercoaster spanning the entire downtown area, but it’s certainly something. Not the most impressive mega-project this backyard has ever seen, but far away from the least, too.

Nevertheless, it does seem a bit odd that Candace, of all people, who constantly complains about not being able to get out of her brothers’ immense shadow, would be able to do something like this – something that can almost put her on their level all by itself.

Random throwaway gag for an episode? Out-of-universe explanations for things are no fun, though, and there’s hardly a need for that here anyway, because of all the things, this kind of becomes a pattern, if you know where to look.

(Source: Ask a Foolish Question, 8:42) can we talk about how adorable she looks here?

In Ask a Foolish Question, Phineas and Ferb construct an all-knowing supercomputer, intent on asking it a way that they can make their Mom happy, because she’s a great mother and is always doing nice things for them. It follows shortly after that Candace asks the computer to give her some guaranteed way to ensure her Mom would see what her brothers have done.

To which question the computer tells her to build a device to make Linda see, telling her to get, among other things, a toaster and a #2 pencil. It then proceeds to tell her how to construct said device, which we later find out is a hand mirror riveted to an accordion arm squished down inside the toaster, ready to spring out to hold said mirror at eye-level at a given point in time.

Let’s go with the assumption that there was no need to put a timer on the toaster – the computer could just tell Candace when to set it, which would likely have been immediately, given that Linda pulls up just two seconds later.

On the surface, it doesn’t seem terribly impressive, and I’ll be quite honest, compared to the ‘Amazing Man-Eating Dinosaur-Themed Totally Sick Waterslide of Doom’ it kind of isn’t. Although we don’t see it happening, it’s likely the computer gave her instructions on what to build and how to do it – with the caveat, of course, that it couldn’t help. Immobile supercomputer and all that.

Which is actually kind of important, when you realize that there is no wire going to the toaster, and yet the accordion arm springs up perfectly well despite that, holding that mirror up perfectly still so Linda could see her hairdo miraculously be repaired.

Toasters don’t run on batteries, nor solar power, nor do they have little nuclear reactors inside them. They consume energy, and this toaster obviously did as well, considering that the spring inside a toaster is designed for lifting bread, and is certainly not strong enough to support a nearly five-foot accordion arm and a hand mirror, all by itself, without power. No, somehow Candace must’ve rewired the inside of that household appliance to (most likely) run off batteries, and more so, keep the batteries invisibly within the toaster’s casing. It’s not an easy feat, even with instructions – which, remember, were only auditory anyway, with zero picture reference of any sort.

For an example, here’s Internet instructions on how to convert a corded lamp to run on a battery pack. With pictures! Granted, it’s not terribly difficult, but it does involve stripping wires and things of that nature, things that would be a bit difficult if you’re not sure what you’re doing. Also, there’s the fact that she wasn’t just rewiring the toaster, but also modifying the spring mechanism – or potentially removing it entirely – to allow the device to extend the accordion arm.

There is a difference between knowing how to do something, and actually being able to do, it – the difference between theoretical and practical skills, which will actually become more important later.

But, in all fairness, we could just as easily say the supercomputer used it’s infinite knowledge to be a perfect teacher, saying exactly what needed to be said in order to get the correct idea into Candace’s brain. That’s a reasonable assumption as well. So, with that in mind, let’s move on.

(Source: Fireside Girl Jamboree, 5:30)

That’s a wooden totem pole that looks at least twenty-odd feet, carved entirely with a chainsaw. Not something that I would believe to be easy to recreate. The fact that it’s a Fireside Girl’s patch is honestly not a big issue here, considering those girls have patches for wrestling alligators in the sewer. Still, perhaps that’s not impressive enough – and significantly, it’s not impressive alone. The pattern here is what gives it impact.

(Source: Last Train to Bustville, 8:53)

Here’s yet another example of Candace adding a notch to this pattern. When given enough – and the right motivation – she is certainly capable of massive undertakings like her brothers’. Like here, where she manages to tear apart an entire train in the time it takes for said train to ride the trails up the side of this slope. That’s not a thing that’d be easy to do – it’s just construction, but in reverse, especially when you consider that she turned all that scrap wood into pieces small enough to fit in the train’s furnace, as opposed to just throwing chunks off the side of train. There is no flying debris in this scene. The whole thing is burnt, and Candace was the one who made it happen.

(Source: Road Trip, 8:13)

If there was ever an example that even Candace can find enjoyment in her brother’s projects – if she’s not paying attention to what she’s actually doing – then it’s Road Trip, more specifically, the song Little Bit of Home on the Road. Unlike other episodes in which Candace joins in on the fun parts, after the project is complete (like Skiddley Whiffers, for example) and there’s nothing left but to have fun, here she joins in the process of working the project – of helping her brothers run the No-Stop Truck Stop smoothly.

It’s hardly the classic definition of ‘fun’, even when the only alternative is busting or sitting in a small RV, but it still must have been awfully enjoyable for even her – look at that smile on her face. It’s kind of sweet.

Of course, as soon as the song ends, it suddenly clicks in her brain what’s happening – what she’s doing, and she stops as quickly as she’s able. But that in itself is a recurring part of this recurring pattern. Candace can do these things, but she doesn’t set out to do them, only doing them almost by accident when she isn’t paying attention or is so preoccupied that she just doesn’t care.

Perhaps the job she took in Road Trip – that of waitress – isn’t the equivalent of construction a massive metal waterslide in her backyard in very little time, but the point remains that she took it. Despite all her own complaints and misgivings, there’s perhaps some small part of her that realizes that she has more in common with her brothers than she thinks – a part that lets her find enjoyment in even jobs such as these, in the same way Phineas and Ferb do.

(Source: Phineas and Ferb Interrupted, 6:48)

Now this one’s interesting. The ‘stupid, ridiculous’ (and also rocket-powered) castle… thing? Was constructed in a group effort by Buford, Baljeet, Isabella, and Candace, during the (incredibly amazing) song montage Blueprints.

Candace gets mad that it’s so small, stamps on it, and the firework rockets start, quite literally. The real question here is, if Phineas and Ferb didn’t help – since they were hit by the Dull-and-Boring-Inator – who actually did the, you know, rocket science? Buford and Isabella are obviously right out.

The obvious choice is Baljeet right? He’s a math whiz who often has to check Phineas and Ferb’s math for errors (that’s important, you should keep it in mind for later), and so he would have been the one to build this too, right?

I mean, he does promptly ask if the blueprints themselves were indicating feet or inches, which doesn’t imply that he was that on top of things, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Mistakes with units of measurement happen to everyone… usually along Imperial-vs-metric lines, but it’s not skin off my nose either way.

The real kicker here isn’t that little slip-up. Instead, it’s pretty evidently shown long before, in Unfair Science Fair. Let’s take a look.

(Source: Unfair Science Fair, 1:16)

In which Baljeet is so depressed because, despite his perfectly functional blueprint, he doesn’t possess the practical, mechanical skills to build a working model. He doesn’t even try, and then as he tries to help Phineas and Ferb later, he ends up, among other things, getting a wrench stuck on his nose and displaying the fact that he doesn’t know how to use a hammer correctly, or even lift a box clearly marked with ‘UP’ the right way up. This kid may be a math genius, but he has zero practical skills in this area.

(Source: Unfair Science Fair, 2:51)

That isn’t how you use it, Baljeet. I mean, seriously.

Even more damning, however, is his behavior in Not Phineas and Ferb. In which he and Buford take on the task of impersonating the two brothers while they’re out at the movies, only to be forced to build a project to successfully sell their disguises to Irving’s older brother, Albert. Admittedly, Buford isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed at times, but if Baljeet can manage to build a rocket-powered model castle that can carry Candace for an extended period of time effortlessly, then he should be able to manage something, right?

(Source: Not Phineas and Ferb, 5:33)the simplicity of the design enhances its innovation, am I right, guys? Guys?

Poor Isabella is so confused. Yes, all Baljeet could pull off was to stack two pieces of wood and a book. That is… not impressive, not by a long shot. The Eiffel Tower in the background, of course, being a hologram projected by Phineas and Ferb’s holographic projector hidden in the bushes.

Thankfully, Albert du Bois is… also not the sharpest tool in the shed, so it worked on him. But that is not the work of someone who can throw together personal rocket-powered propulsion devices in minutes. What it is is the work of a math genius who, despite his smarts, lacks the practical skill to create the things he imagines in the real world. Which is totally fine! There’s nothing at all wrong with that, not in a million lifetimes.

But if it wasn’t Baljeet who built those rockets, then who?

Well, if he and Buford and Isabella are all eliminated, it really only leaves one option: Candace. Let’s chalk it down to another notch in the pattern and move on.

(Source: Phineas and Ferb Interrupted, 6:49)

Sure you did, Baljeet. Sure.

(Source: I, Brobot, 00:33)

Yeah, it really does suck, doesn’t it, Phineas? You’d think with 104 days of summer – plus the 14 more of winter vacation, national holidays, bad-weather days, weekends, and even nights, there’d be plenty of time to get to everything… but the ideas just keep coming.

Of course, Phineas and Ferb are perfectly willing to include their sister in the building of their inventions, the same as they’re perfectly willing to include anyone. Candace joins them only rarely, but that’s her fault, not theirs. There’s always busting to be done, of course. However, it does provide some small implication that there just might be something missing from their team, doesn’t it? They’ve got the ideas and the practicality in Phineas and Ferb respectively, but they don’t have the numbers, it seems.

That actually has a really significant double meaning, too.

Nevertheless, their projects are always done at roughly the same time each day, and it’s generally something awesome. (Except on the day they tried crocheting, apparently.) It really is amazing that two young boys can do so much. Why, they would be the best ‘basic’ handymen ever – able to fix any little household or car problem with absolute ease. Whoever these boys end up together with in the future is going to be able to rest easy at night, knowing no flat tire or leaky roof will ever be an issue. Right?

(Source: Just Passing Through, 7:44)

Patience, Baljeet. It’s not like you could do any better. You’d probably end up with the bicycle pump stuck to your nose somehow.

Baljeet’s impatience aside, there is something relatively important here, so it’s definitely worth a note. This is the best establishment in the show of what I tend to call the ‘inverse complexity rule’. Basically, whatever Phineas and Ferb deign to do, the more complex and difficult it is, the easier it is for them, and the less complex and difficult it is, the harder it is.

Like in this basically perfect example. It took them less than an hour to not only completely rewrite modern understanding of the Pauli exclusion principle, but also build a device that puts that increased understanding to work, letting them pass through solid substances as they so desire.

However, those absurdly amazing skills don’t translate to the simple things in life, as we can see here. It’s very likely they could construct a re-tiring machine to blow up that bike’s tire faster then they could by hand. (Or a retire machine, complete with a fat cat and crossword puzzles to keep them warm well into their autumn years.) Basically, when it comes to what should be exceedingly complex things, Phineas and Ferb find them shockingly simple. Simple things, by contrast, take more effort than one might expect, given that even Baljeet was growing frustrated with the rate at which they were blowing the tire back up.

This might be entirely in their heads: they prefer the complexities so much they’ve grown out of practice with simple things. Or it could be an actual mental block – either one works, really, but the cause of that’s not really either here or there in this conversation. Just keep the inverse complexity rule in mind as we continue – as it’s not actually a one-time thing, either. It shows up quite a bit in Picture This, as well.

(Source: Picture This, 00:17)

In which they opt to turn the entire garage upside down in a literal way, as opposed to a metaphorical way. And, later on in that same episode:

(Sources: Picture This, starting at 00:59)

You do that, boys, it’s why we love you.

And because it would, quite literally, be harder for them to build a skateboard as opposed to the machine: whether that’s because they’re so used to the ease with which they complete large tasks that small ones seem daunting by comparison, or because it’s an actual mental block that prevents them from grasping smaller tasks as well as larger tasks is all up for debate, as I said, but not entirely important – the main point is that it’s a thing at all.

Of course, the whole point of this is to provide the evidence for this headcanon that Candace can actually do the things her brothers can do – she just doesn’t know it yet. The inverse complexity rule does seem to contradict that, however, as it would imply there ought to be something out there, something relatively simple, that Candace would either fail at or at least find hard – in it’s simple form, only to find remarkably easy in it’s complex form.

Is there such a thing?

Let’s check out Bee Day.

(Source: Bee Day, 2:06)nice face, Candace.

So, we all know what happens in this episode. Candace takes herself a magazine personality test, in a quest for her true teen identity. It’s a pursuit I’m sure we can all relate to. She’s later baffled when, after she tallies up her score, the magazine reports back that she’s supposed to be an emo teen.

(Source: Bee Day, 6:11)sibling unit, wading, wading, sitting here, not relating

Rocking the black hair and the ennui there, Candace. (Does anyone else find it amusing that dying her hair black and then back to orange, as she does in this episode, was one of the things she listed in her song Extraordinary from the episode Great Balls of Water as a, well, extraordinary thing to do? No? Just me? Moving on, then.)

The long and short of me bringing up this episode can be just about summed up in just one more screenshot.

(Source: Bee Day, 11:40)

Yup, that’s about it. Because Candace, who, as we all know, turned fifteen just earlier this year, wasn’t able to ‘tally up’ her score correctly – wasn’t able to do addition correctly.

Of course, taken alone, it’s plausible this was a one-time fluke, a mistake, the likes of which happen to everyone, right? After all, if it’s actually seriously something important, wouldn’t the inverse complexity rule mean that she should be able to complete incredibly complex math with relative ease? And there’s no scene like that in the show, is there?

Enter Backyard Aquarium.

(Source: Backyard Aquarium, 1:00)

In which Candace embarks on a quest to calculate the length of ‘soon’ by dividing by Jeremy’s face and, apparently, raising it to the power of herself. She later realizes that she should have carried the one as opposed to dividing by Jeremy’s face, giving her the result of the square root of ‘soon’ being ‘never’. Which, incidentally, means that ‘soon’ is exactly equal to ‘never’ multiplied by itself, presumably letting the two ‘never’s cancel each other out in the fashion of negative numbers.

But wait! This isn’t math, is it⁉ It’s just the overexcited ramblings of Candace being her usual flighty self, right? Jeremy’s face isn’t a valid mathematical operator, after all. Putting something like that into a mathematical equation and calling it math, why that’s…

(Source: Out to Launch, 3:12)

It’s exactly the sort of thing her brothers do. While some of their equations are formatted in a more ‘traditional’ way, like K*E = ½*m*v2, the whole montage they do here hinges on the fact that the most important part of all this is the part that contains the obviously-not-a-numerical-operator drawing of a bomb – and later, a smiley face, which seems to make the whole thing come together.

Those seemingly random drawings may not be so random after all – there could very well be actual meaning to them, just a meaning that only makes sense to Candace’s brain in a way that drawing bombs and smiley faces in an equation makes sense to Phineas’ and Ferb’s brains. Maybe she was on the right track there.

But there’s one final piece to this whole puzzle yet to be mentioned. After all, if Phineas and Ferb’s team is missing ‘more of us’ - more people like them, with the capability to build things as they can, and if that person is really and truly their older sister, and if Candace’s specialization is math – similarly to Phineas’ being the ‘ideas’ person and Ferb being the rather more ‘practical’ one – then wouldn’t that leave some sort of evident hole?

Shouldn’t there be examples, multiple of them, demonstrating that they have issues with dealing with very complex mathematics-related subjects in the lack of their older? How many of those could there reasonably be?

Let’s take a quick peek, first and foremost, with none other than Out to Launch itself.

(Source: Out to Launch, starting at 2:25)poor Phineas looks so traumatized in the picture below this one, doesn’t he?

It’s funny, it’s explosive, it’s set to soothing music, and it’s a failure montage. A failure montage that features several rocketships blowing up (in live action, no less), and also Phineas and Ferb in their underwear. And what was the cause behind this failure montage? Well, of course, it was that aforementioned mathematical error: using the bomb drawing in place of the smiley face. A simple error, perhaps, but one that certainly did a lot of damage before being caught and corrected.

Of course, maybe you aren’t convinced by a one-time incident. That’s fair – but it’s not happened just once, either.

(Source: Undercover Carl, 1:12)

Undercover Carl is a great episode. Aside from that, though, there’s also another example of this phenomenon: Phineas and Ferb getting everything right, and then hitting a snag on some math issue. It’s lucky they have Baljeet, who does happen to be excellent at math in his own right, despite not being very… capable with tools. Nevertheless – they made that error, and he caught it.

Moreover, while I personally feel it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that the fact Phineas and Ferb were so quick to send the blueprint to Baljeet – and he so quick to respond – can be taken to mean this happens frequently, that’s just my opinion, and so I won’t insist on it being true.

Instead, let’s look at two more incidents, both less blatantly obvious than the prior two, but still definitely worth pointing out. The first one comes from We Call It Maze.

(Source: We Call It Maze, 5:35)

In which Phineas and Ferb reveal why they use the Imperial system – because inch fractions work better with π’s 22/7 form. That’s a fractional estimate for π, yes – one that’s not even infrequent, by a long shot. Nevertheless, it is inaccurate, as all estimations for the value of π must be. More importantly, though, although by themselves, 22/7 is slightly more accurate than 3.14, (by about 11%, if my sources are correct) 3.14 is is a decimal, and merely adding 0.0016 to it makes it far and away more accurate, (within 0.00007) and there’s no need to stop – you can keep adding decimals until you get the precision you need.

This one’s perhaps a slightly pedantic quibble, as there are situations in which 22/7 may be more useful (when dealing with lots of fractions, for instance), though in the ways that these boys use their blueprints – sketching galaxy-spanning rocketship courses and whatnot – even a little error can be quickly magnified.

And moving right along to the final point, the least impressive one, perhaps, but still probably worth mentioning despite that, from Night of the Living Pharmacists.

(Source: Night of the Living Pharmacists)

It’s the song Triangulation, a ridiculously catchy song in which Isabella describes by what process she discerned where the beam that hit Roger Doofenshmirtz came from, after Phineas confusedly wonders how she managed to do so. Despite being the weakest point of the four, it’s still a notch to be added in the pattern, and it’s the patterns that make all the differences with these things.

And, finally, in closing, a perhaps ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek screenshot:

(Source: Ready for the Bettys, 0:08)

Yeah, that’s an actual thing she said. And look, she’s being all adorable again. I don’t generally take this phrase to be a significant part of the pillars for my theory, but considering everything else gone through here, it’s certainly something to take a second glance at, in my opinion.

In all simplicity, the headcanon of mine is this: that Candace Gertrude Flynn has that potential for creation in the same way her brothers do, and she’s shown it, from time to time, as well. Whether she had it once and then lost track, or just never quite got started and lost touch with that part of herself is really a matter of opinion to decide, but it does remain that she can. It’s not an unreachable goal for her: the inventing and building is in her blood just as much as her brother’s whether or not she even realizes it herself.

The specific lines of the headcanon go that, although both of the brothers can do everything, they do have things they’re better at than each other. Phineas being ideas, and Ferb at taking blueprints and plans, and making them reality. There’s a gap in between – translating ideas into blueprints to be made. So far, they’ve made do despite that, through a combination of trial and error and Baljeet’s help, when that pesky math is involved, but the real answer to the problem they probably don’t even know they have is a heck of a lot closer than they think.

And as for Candace herself, well, maybe one day she’ll stop busting for just long enough to give herself a chance to try these things, only to surprise herself when they come to light. Or, perhaps a worst-case scenario will come to pass, and she’ll be driven to call upon the deeply hidden parts of her own mind to undo some terrible consequence bearing down on the world.

(Incidentally, I wrote a fanfic about the latter instance.)

I really do love Candace as character for a lot of reasons, and this is really only one of them. There’s just so much to explore in her character, flaws and all, if you look for it, and, well, overanalyzing a children’s cartoon show who? I’ve never done such a thing in my life.

I promise.