Equiusposting: a master thread for a perfect horse boy

Signing up and seeing this blessed topic. He is so pathetic, I love him.

Absolutely agreed. He's a complete fucking weirdo and I love him for that. My personal Equius headcanon is that he HAS actually succeeded at shooting a bow and arrow without breaking it, once, with perfect accuracy, by some miracle.

He felt so viscerally uncomfortable with this outcome for reasons he could not verbalize that he had to take a cold shower while Aurthour lingered concernedly nearby with a glass of milk. He has never mentioned or even thought about it since.

i think that is really beautiful. i appreciate this headcanon and i am giving it plus one (1) drop of sweat emoji! +💦

passeriinformal: 💦

i feel like he had a ton of potential, he was a very flawed character but that just gives him all the more room to grow and that growth could be really interesting to watch!! and at the same time people seem to discount him as Evil or something but i KNOW in my HEART that he is kind. like he made an arm for vriska and legs for tavros without them asking and without expecting compensation that must count for something??

and then besides that i do just love him so much has a sweaty freak hes a wierdo hes pathetic i want to tuck him in and give him a little kiss on his forehead

ps i love passeriinformal's headcanon immm going to steal that its mine now awesome headcanon

++ something else i forgot to mention is this aspect to equius which is like. he very well may be a very deeply unhappy person. hes pretty isolated and he literally ends up killing himself because according to hussie he could have broken the string that suffocated him if he just tried a little harder and him dying with a smile augghg. its fucking MISERABLE but its also so interesting and ive never seen anybody explore it before

I sometimes wonder if him fighting robots might act, in part, as a sort of self-injury by proxy. He sets them to kill mode too, which could even be partially motivated by passive suicidal ideation. (In addition to the... other reasons he may welcome the possibility of his own robots beating him to death.) Like mainly it's an outlet to take his anger out on, and also exercise and combat training, but there are probably ways to accomplish that with a lower risk of dying and less injury

And since he's getting hit hard enough to sometimes lose teeth, that may mean frequent dental pain, as well as pain from fractures, bruises, and so on. Even if he's pretty resilient, having that constantly in the background can still compound on stress, which then feeds back into the cycle. idk i am probably overthinking the horse weirdo

Honestly I think a lot of these things are Equius being a masochist, not a sign of depression. However, I do think the behavior is really unhealthy. Equius's masochism is not really the problem in and of itself. It is only so detrimental to his well-being because it is a replacement for any other form of structure in his life. Due to it being his fetish, sexual dominance is one of the few forms of order he understands, which leads to an intensifying feedback loop that reinforces his own delusions about how everyone (aside from nepeta, conveniently) is also as horny and obsessed with hierarchy as he is. Nobody plays into this delusion; he's mostly just hallucinating it.

One of the most important keys to understanding Equius's behavior is that he's a result of permissive parenting. He was never given any boundaries as a child. The stereotype of kids of permissive parents is that they're spoiled assholes, which Equius is, but another huge impact this has on him is that he doesn't really understand boundaries or impulse control. For him, it's all or nothing. And in the beginning of his arc, it's all. Equius needs order, he needs routine and stucture, but he has no idea how to do that for himself. Equius learns how to do this from his environment, which teaches him that the only way to do this to be a patriarch, a thing that he has no interest in and actually causes him a lot of personal strife. According to Hussie, his anger issues early in his arc manifest because he feels forced to be this dominant, paternalistic, stoic troll when he doesn't actually want to be. He wants to be a weird furry with his platonic catgirlfriend.

Unfortunatley, in his quest to let loose, he swings way too far in the other direction. Nepeta is basically the only positive influence in his life, and neither Nepeta or Equius want to address Equius's sexual masochism, nor should they. However, he definitely needed someone to. The dysfunction was always present. Him hornyposting soliloquies to gamzee every day, the getting his ass kicked by robots, the Aradia situation**. However, he still had some boundaries back then. If he thought a person was dangerous (Vriska, for example) he'd keep them at arms length, even though she actively flirts with him. Vriska tries to read his mind, and he slaps her with her own arm (although he doesn't seem to injure her at all). This is the most combative he ever gets with another troll. Contrast this to when we see him and Vriska on the meteor, and he's fully into her. He probably always was, but was holding back.

It's ambiguous, but my read on the Gamzee situation is that Equius's "plan" to deal with it was coax Gamzee into "changing his ways" by offering himself up to be Gamzee's punching bag and/or starting a relationship with him. This is a horrible plan, but Gamzee actively plays into the idea in the conversation leading up to the murder and by killing Equius in the way he did. I think it could easily be argued that Equius was taken advantage of, although I think it's a little more complicated than that. He should have known better and it was an incredibly stupid decision. However, I don't think he was thinking "I am going to do this and I am okay with the harm it is going to cause" or "I want to die because I hate myself"; I think he was thinking "gsfgfdhgdnh omg this is so hot" and literally nothing else. I do not get the vibe from Equius and Nepeta's last conversation that Equius was suicidal at all. The break up with aradia certainly didn't help his mental state, but I honestly think Equius thought he had a handle on the situation. I would be more likely to believe Equius didn't think he was going to be choked to death (instead of to unconsciousness) than that Equius wanted to kill himself because he was depressed.

Anyways, I know I said no discourse, but I rescind that on this topic if you all play nice.

** okay, elepant in the room, aradiabot. now, we can all acknowledge this was a dick move. poor aradia cannot catch a goddamn break from these bluebloods,. i don't think he was being malicious, i think he just convinced himself that she would be okay with it because he's a fucking moron and he didn't respect her enough to put himself in her shoes. i will also blame Arthour here for not stopping him, because apparently he knew about this plan and helped donate blood (according to a hussie comment). i'm not sure if author is allowed to say no to equius, though, because alternia might cull him for that. i wouldn't put it past them lol.

Homestuck is a million word cautionary tale on the pitfalls of unsupervised internet access and inadequate parenting skills.