>>114589599If you wanna believe Rose and Alt-Calliope's explanation, "canon" consists of three principal qualities: Truth, Relevance, and Essentiality.
Truth is straightforward. The events that take place within it are real. The Alpha Timeline is hard, absolute Truth. Doomed timelines are deviations from this Truth, and so they are spawned from paradoxes. They are "not true", and without Truth any number of increasingly illogical bullshit can happen, until the timeline itself folds itself into a quesadilla and Paradox Space eats it.
Relevance is the trait by which events are necessary to show. The protagonist of a story naturally has the most relevance in a story, and this quality is also inherent of the Light aspect, which is why Vriska's bullshit gets center stage. A timeline can be "Untrue" but still "Relevant", like Davesprite's timeline.
And last, Essentiality is the quality by which an event needs to happen, regardless of how true or relevant it is. It may occur offscreen. It may only be relayed through text, or even just implied. But as long as it is Essential, it was a thing that definitely needed to happen.
And so thus according to the rules of canon, only the "Meat" timeline is True, because it closes various outstanding time loops. In "Candy" these loops are broken, and so ordinarily the timeline would be slated for demolition. However, due to Alt-Calliope encasing this universal instance within the event horizon of her black hole self, Paradox Space cannot consume it. It still is Untrue, and its Relevance and Essentiality were waning too. But it won't die, because of the actions of an Uberdeity. HS^2 gave it a huge shot of Relevance, but really, do we NEED to see any of this garbage? It's pointless. Almost all the Essential actors have already departed. None of this matters, and certainly even less is truly real.
Perhaps it's just an excuse for bad writing though, but I've never been a fan of "meta" answers too much.
