what i mean when i say homestuck is anti-love is that it is very suspicious of romantic ideals and narratives. you have this idealized version of what romance is supposed to be between dad egbert and mom lalonde, and it's specifically limited to guardians. guardians are larger than life figures, unknowable by their charges and uncontrollable by the players. "true romance", where you meet someone and fall in love immediately, love as it's seen in the movies is this thing "adults" have. as homestuck picks at the complicated, ethereal idea of adulthood, it becomes clear that the "true romance" is unattainable, because the curtain is pulled back, and the adults we meet at a remove in the first half of the story are reintroduced as messy, complicated teenagers, and all of their actions in the first half are recontextualized by that. dad egbert/mom lalonde becomes this weird, kind of creepy thing with roxy's (HOPEFULLY) one-sided crush on jane's dad. nanna and grandpa, who already had troubles because of HIC's adoption schemes are recontextualized into jane and jake, a relationship so noxious that the characters in question are only crawling out of the shadow cast by it now, close to 15 years later.

conversely, the "endgame" romances in homestuck are subversive relative to this ideal. whether you like these ships or not, you have stuff like davekat, where their dynamic really is just two bros chilling in the hot tub. and they are less than 5 feet apart. because they are gay. and you get stuff like (vris)rezi, where the path to get to a comfortable love involves both of them dying and giving up everything they thought they cared about because the other matters more. rosemary is more messy and complicated than i think people give them credit for, like. a major part of rosemary as a pairing is that it's based on a new relationship paradigm: the YA romance. i don't feel bad at all saying that the romance between kanaya and rose (or vriska, if you're UNBELIEVABLY BASED) is a little bit a reflection on the dynamics of twilight. there's a lot to say about twilight's romance, but there's nothing to gain in pretending it's not worth talking about. and at the core, the romantic fantasy of twilight is that of a dangerous person who is dangerous to everyone but you, their chosen object of affection. it's not a new idea to romance fiction, by any mean, but it is a new idea to the budding YA fiction genre, something homestuck takes a lot of interest in. (see also: eridan as harry potter, hussie is usually ahead of the curve but especially with HP hate)

dirkjake, a good relationship dynamic even if it doesn't produce a "shippable commodity" in the end, isn't even endgame. a lot of the alpha kid dynamics are really good at being suspicious of dating, of the nuclear family, of everything people are told to want.

and rosemary, the one that is still clinging to a YA ideal, is the pairing that takes the biggest hit in the epilogues, the story where adulthood crashes in. adults suck, then you are one. and what are you, as an adult, doing still modelling your relationship on bella/edward?