bluesayaka:

with the new flash, a lot of people have been bringing up the theory that the kids we’ve been following (except jake) are all dreamself copies, and that their original selves died despite supposedly being revived. this is based on images we see of them waking up dead in the bubbles:

however, there’s another possibility- that the original rose, roxy, dirk and john we see aren’t fated to spend the rest of their days in the bubbles. instead, this flash simply depicts them in the dreambubbles during the short span of time between their death and revival, after which their souls really do merge with their dreamselves. this idea is supported by canon:

in act 6 intermission 1, jade recounts her experience of being dead. note how she says she was dead for “a few minutes”- this would cover the amount of time between her death-by-shaving-cream and ascension on her quest bed. if we assume jade’s original soul died forever, this creates a possible plot hole. how would her god tier self have access to these post-mortem memories, and only for a few minutes, unless jade’s waking self died, explored the bubbles for a short time, then came back merged with her dreamself? jade states as much in act 6 intermission 2:

and while we can’t take her word alone as fact, it supports what we know about the process of god tiering. another example that backs this up is aradia’s ascension.

the death of aradia’s dreamself on her quest crypt directly caused her soulbot to explode. this is interesting to note because aradia’s original self was already dead, though she continued to linger in the world of the living- the fact that she only vanished upon her dreamself reaching god tier implies a definite link between the two, and seems to indicate a merger between her original self and her dreamself. hussie basically confirmed this on his formspring:

Her resurrection demanded that her dream self be killed on the platform. And so it waited there for the entire session until Jack destroyed Derse, and was consumed by fire. This woke her up, and restored her to life for the first time in years. Her robot exploded as her soul un-disembodied itself. She then attained the god tier as the Maid of Time.

all in all, while we don’t know the full story of these ghosts just yet, it’s completely plausible that the waking self ghosts in the first image didn’t stay dead for long, and that the version of john egbert we’ve been following for the past 5 years is indeed still the john egbert we started with.