dirkhalquius for the ship bingo?
right out the gate with my treasured favorite super rare ot3! thank you meat i DO have some opinions on these weirdos, mainly that they are GREAT.
hahahahaha SO
i really did put my eyes on that top right square at least five times before i realized that it says "they're fucking the same guy" and not, as my homestuck-conditioned brain interpreted it, "they're the same fucking guy." and while the former is technically correct in any concupiscent threesome, their being the same fucking guy is very important for this ship, and not just because its inherent in the dirkhal of it all. see, while i like each of the component ships in multiple contexts, the specific scenario that colonized my brain five years ago is a post-game future in which people who were merged as sprites retain memories of being a single entity, which means hal knows equius just about as well as he knows dirk, i.e., extremely intimately, in that unique and special way that can only come from having at one time been, say it with me now, the same fucking guy.
of course, hal's experience of having been arquiusprite was qualitatively different from and vastly more enjoyable than his experience of being dirk strider. you know how dirk tells jane that she should be more like jake, and vice versa? do you think that hal, equipped with empirical evidence that dirk should be more like equius, would be absolutely insufferable about it? i do. i think hal and equius would be besties and dirk would be so. jealous. of both of them. their relationship might have been antagonistic as fuck for a long time but he was still used to hal being there (for him) all the time in a very literal way, resenting him but understanding him and depending on him and vice versa, and how dare his roboreflection splinter be more well adjusted than he is, and enjoy an actual healthy relationship with the e%cessively built absurdly polite musclebeast fetishizing troll dirk definitely doesn't have a massive crush on or anything? i mean, really.
yeah yeah we all knew the "compatible brand of freaks" square was going to be doing some heavy lifting for this ship. i don't think there's any real need for me to go on and on about how dirk and equius are socially awkward engineering nerds whose common interests include furry art, building robots to fight, rap, and a smorgasbord of weird kinks, or the details of their respective obsessive tendencies and control issues, or the way dirk's martial prowess combined with his casual profanity would abso100tly take equius out at the knees, so let's just leave that on the table where we can all see it.
i do think it's worth noting that equius, though somewhat shy, is appro%imately 100 times more straightforward than dirk, with his mind games and overthinking everything behind the scenes puppetmaster complex, and i think it would be good for dirk to have someone punch through his walls of obfuscatory bullshit as unsubtly as possible. i don't think equius would do it without encouragement, but i like to imagine hal would be all too happy to provide that, and exercise his own manipulative tendencies for the benefit of everyone involved. after all, no one could be better positioned to understand both how good those two could be for each other, and how to get them to act on it.
for more explicit explorations of these exciting possibilities i recommend going through their whole ship tag on ao3, which i must note is at this point composed entirely of fics written for me.