thoughts on the quadrants?

homestuck is so critical of the ways love is systematized in basically every way and i think this is awesome. like. quadrants are a means of control. full stop. alternia as a society only functions as it's supposed to - as a funnel into dying on another planet - if the kids on it are eager to leave and are ready for war. the idealized, beautiful, man and a woman romance only exists for dad egbert and mom lalonde and it lasts just long enough for them to get teleport-stabbed to death. "this is what a kismesistude is supposed to be" literally gets terezi killed too, it's crazy. homestuck is so like. anti-love. it's awesome.

and on a more doylist level, it is ever funny that this approach to it also (seemingly accidentally) provided a foothold for polyamory and more openly queer thoughts in its fandom. i remember being in high school in 2012 and kind of into my friend (we were both boys at the time) and thinking "it's cool, it's not gay because it's in the homestuck way".

(and it was gay. just in a "budding trans lesbians who don't know how to navigate the idea" way)

AUSPISTICISM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is criminally underrepresented

I was going to be a sourpuss about how the fandom waters down moiraillegiance into just über besties and and auspisticism into [FILE NOT FOUND], but then Victoria said something genuinely intelligent and I don't know. I'm rethinking the whole thing now I'll get back to you in like three years

Anyway if you're gonna call your real-life bff your moirail there better be some weird romantic undertones in there too because it IS a romantic relationship

@victoria - What does it mean for Homestuck to be anti-love? I agree with your perspective that the quadrants are a means of social control, but to me, the idea was that love was a complex thing that could only be really found beyond the shackles of quadrants and analogous human oppressive societal demands.

I personally think that the idea of having to fill out the quadrants, to make more soldiers that'll carry out the Troll race, is incredibly hard.
I love the idea of gigantic robots coming to your door and asking you about if you had filled your pail, and if you haven't, they just cull you. It's stupid and perfect at the same time.

i really like quadrants. (i like them so much it is what i'm known for)

sadly though, i feel as though popular opinion in the fandom skipped straight from "quadrants are gross because they're alien and queer weird" to "quadrants are gross because sometimes romance sucks and has bad cultural implications".

for some reason, this type of criticism is mostly only applied to troll romance, even though human romance is also shown throughout homestuck to be harmful to its participants and culturally restrictive.

like, rosemary and dirkjake blow up in a fiery explosion, the alpha kids keep trying to pressure each other into having their babies- i feel personally that hussie just enjoys writing messy romance that goes wrong. i don't think this is something unique to troll romance, i think this is what hussie likes to write in general.

i mean, hussie has said many times that kismessitude can be affectionate and be a source of positive growth for people. that's why june and terezi end up getting together at the end of homestuck and this is portrayed as a obviously positive thing. that's also why they reiterate this in the epilogues. i don't think hussie would have gone to all the trouble of writing that if i was supposed to believe that kismesissitude is an unsalvageable evil.

I love that via the quadrants Homestuck invites the reader to question what it even means for something to be "romantic" (is romance even "real" or is it shaped entirely by a given society's cultural values - i.e. the importance of reproduction) so it's a crazy shame that the modern iteration on quadrant discourse basically centres entirely around arguing over whether moirallegience is "actually romantic" or "just platonic" as if those words have any fucking meaning beyond what the individual arguer perceives them as meaning

As a quadrants fan and auspisticism lover especially, I really feel like quadrants are an interesting vehicle for analyzing our own human systems of sexuality. For example, Karkat’s struggles with keeping things in one quadrant is a well known parallel for being gay.

A bit of a pet theory sort of example that I’m personally writing an essay on now, is Kanaya’s relationship to auspisticism as being a metaphor for compulsive heterosexuality. Yes, I swear I have canon evidence to back this up.

Personally, I’m a fan of the topic of sexuality in general, so adding conditional polyamorous aliens into the mix just makes it even more fun!

re: all the auspisticism lovers - i stand with you, and its truly a travesty that ashen quadrants werent expanded on more. i really wanna see what a good “long-term” ashen relationship would look like, if such a thing can even exist. well i assume it can, but our only prominent example of auspisticism is kanaya, but something tells me using only kanaya as a basis for auspisticism would… not be very conclusive to the entire nature of the quadrant?

re: victoria - this is such a well thought out take i had to sit and think about it for a few mins. i’m actually really curious about the whole anti-love thing. i think i do see what you mean, because as @textualApparition mentioned, most romantic relationships in homestuck seem to blow up in a big explosion. but ive always taken the perspective that this is because all the characters in homestuck are, well, going through hell. not to mention most of them are kids who have barely grasped the meaning of what makes a “healthy” relationship. for trolls its even worse because of their oppressive society and the threat of being culled if they don’t fill a pail.

smth interesting to me is that it’s noted that adult trolls find it easier to navigate the quadrants/distinguish the differences between the feelings associated with each quadrant. wish we could’ve seen that in homestuck proper, although we do get somewhat of a glimpse of it in mindfangs journals

imo the key thing about quadrants supposedly making more sense to adult trolls is that from a design perspective the entire point of the quadrants is to fuel teen drama, in much the same way sburb's themes of adulthood and reproduction are engineered precisely to have the greatest effect a cast of confused teens. as Homestuck moves forward from Act to Act it starts to heap more and more elements of interpersonal drama on top of the action adventure - which it makes explicitly clear is deliberate using gags like Spades Slick getting sick and tired of watching kids kiss on his viewscreen - and giving the trolls not just one but four unique different ways of being confused about their feelings was a calculated move to kick those teen feelings into overdrive. all of which is to say the reason the comic doesn't spend any time really exploring how adult relationships work among trolls is because Homestuck doesn't find emotionally mature and healthy relationships to be all that interesting and makes pains to avoids them like cooties

damn, that does make sense. homestuck is a comic about teens, and quadrants definitely accomplished what they were designed to do. in all honesty the big reason i wish we’d be able to see a Mature quadrant relationship in action is because i‘m curious as to just how bad the troll kids are handling their own, and seeing a mature and healthy example would probably drive that point home. like, theres clearly a distinction between the levels of messiness of trollromance and human romance, i mean the comic literally states this:

“(…)and unlike humans who have very orderly, simple, straightforward romantic relationships without exception, trolls exist in a state of almost perpetual confusion and generally have no idea what the hell is going on.”

so if the comic’s human relationships were bad, then just how bad were the trolls? ok i mean of course we know it’s pretty bad (people have died over quadrants after all) but unlike the human kids we have no solid example for what a healthy troll relationship wld look like, if that makes sense. giving an example of a healthy troll relationship would be cool and also a big help in determining just how fucked up and messy it really is. not that the comic ABSOLUTELY needs to, but it’d be a nice bonus to have for analysis purposes

to be clear i'm pretty sure "humans [...] have very orderly, simple, straightforward romantic relationships without exception" is supposed to be a joke LOL

oh shit, im gonna be honest i didnt really realize it couldve been a joke. thought it was more like an ironic statement, “wow if you think human relationships are difficult, have a look at THESE guys!” like i perceived the whole thing as being a testament to how grueling troll relationships are in comparison to human ones lol

Y'all cannot be reading victoria's post as saying homestuck is anti-love. Homestuck criticizes how a topic as vast and nebulous as "love" gets shoved into strictly-defined boxes in order to shape society in a certain way.

Re. Kanaya and "compulsive heterosexuality" - I don't think it's an accident that another jadeblood, Lynera Skalbi, feels she ought to choose between liking boys and liking girls. (Out of all the surface-dwellers in Hiveswap, only one is defineitely not default-Troll-bisexual.)

Out of all the quadrants, moirallegiance is the one that's always caught my imagination. There's just something oddly moving about a platonic life partner whose main role is to keep someone calm. Again Hiveswap - there actually seems to be some basis in Troll biology, in the way the "shooshpap" thing kind of hacks their parasympathetic nervous system.

Then there's whatever the hell the two Vriskas have going with the two Tavroses, which really does seem to break the quadrant system. OG Vriska tries to get OG Tavros to be her matesprit on several occasions, but she's also constantly attacking him like a really one-sided kismesis with someone who can't fight back. Meanwhile Vrissy (and everyone around her) seems to think she has a blackrom relationship with Tavros Crocker. But there's absolutely no sign of him having pitch feelings towards her - it's more like a traditional human relationship with one very dominant partner.

one of my favorite moment in homestuck and what i think is the epitome of quadrants is the conversation between karkat, terezi and dave in the game over timeline where they have their "intervention" for her because there's just so many elements at play.

firstly it's the fact that it's so clear she's in an abusive relationship but neither boys see it because of its blackrom coding. she's throwing out a lot of the typical abused party in an abusive relationship lines, but every instance of "love" gets replaced by "hate", muddling the message. "i hate how he treats me and i want to leave but i keep coming back because i love him so much" becomes "i keep coming back because i hate him so much", so the contradiction of the statement is lost, and it becomes a "healthy" expression of black rom, even though the language of abuse is so on the nose you can blatantly see through it.

then there's the way the boys utterly fail to help terezi and point out the obvious solution: "leave him". dave just washes his hands of it because he finds the whole thing weird and none of his business, even though he probably could've contributed something meaningful considering he's a survivor of abuse who's been grappling with that for the past three years on the consideration that he was about to meet a younger version of his abuser. and then there's fucking karkat and his absolutely divine take of "girl you just needed a third".

karkat's whole mentality is fascinating: one of his closest friends is being abused by his shitty ex and he's just trying to figure out the logistics of how to make it work. this is where the quadrants truly unravel, because first he blames rosemary for being unable to mediate gamzee and terezi, which begs the question of "why is it their responsibility?" and then you can't even dwell on that for too long, because he says the reason they failed is because they needed a mediator, even though they never had a black rom relationship, and the comic is pretty clear about ashen relationships only applying to black rom. and then you realize that rose has been an alcoholic for the past year or two, meaning that karkat sees rosemary having relationship problems because of rose's addiction not as a dysfunctional relationship, but as a different but completely valid form of romance.

and that's the crux of it: kismesitude existing means no relationship can ever be bad or abusive, because aggression, mistreatment and violence are all "valid" forms of romance. and then you look back at black rom as a whole and like, so much of it is just misogyny. aradia hates that equius tried to coerce her into a relationship, and even after ripping out her heart and beating him she kisses him anyway. equius' programming fails, but his coercion doesn't, because equius being misogynistic, weird and creepy to aradia is a form of romance too.

karkat's relationship with black rom is also really interesting, because he just. doesn't get it?? which makes perfect sense since his whole thing is that despite being brash and mean and aggressive, all of that is entirely superficial and no one takes it seriously, because in reality karkat genuinely loves and cares about all his friends, so he can just never actually be a good kismesis. all of his attempts fail: with john he says that he hates him and that's apparently the attitude on which he tries to build their relationship, but that's just so utterly untrue highlighted by the fact that his first conversation with john happens after they've built up their relationship. the fact that john just dismisses all the insults and goes right to talking to him like he's a great friend he likes is the perfect demonstration that karkat just cannot help himself and is literally incapable of actual hatred.

and then there's his thing with trying to "organize" his relationship with dave and terezi: the implication that he thinks dave and terezi can just, like, start vacillating between black and red is really weird if you think about it. like, how does he expect that to happen? it only makes sense if karkat views black rom as just like, banter. which he totally does because he says he wants terezi "in all quadrants" but like, he doesn't hate her at all, all their black rom-like interactions are just banter. and then you realize most of karkat's views on romance come from shitty romance media and it makes even more sense: karkat is just like those people who love dark romance and claim they want dark romance in real life, when in reality they want just like, a boyfriend who play fights them.

i feel like karkat is like, the entire reason kismesitude is kind of muddled in the sense that it seemingly includes anything from literal abuse to playful teasing. most of the detailed information we get on how black rom actually works is from karkat, and most people take it at face value because, well, he's the romance guy, and it's his culture, but actually looking at it and seeing how utterly incompetent karkat is at dealing with black rom, maybe we should be putting his words into question a lot more.

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?