#moirail discourse

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The problem with troll romance discourse is that everybody wants the "cool and new" angles of romantic expression and no one wants to talk about how it was an inherently flawed system meant to perpetuate the biases of alternia and the division of emotional support systems, while also being a reflection of already existing aspects to human relationships and how people talk to each other as-is just framed as "weird alien shipping" to comment on it, and not something that id *actually* "unable to be described with human words" because a human wrote homestuck

This is why some people get hung up on moirals being "a type of romance" because "look, the text says it's a romance, let homies kiss homies" without reading further but also get super mad if you even hint that it could be platonic (or try to stress that everything in non-platonic relationships can be done platonically) even though the text literally says it's also platonic right afterwards

Curious that it's always moirail discourse and not about auspistism because it's a lot easier to point out that "a third wheel who solely exists to stop two other people from getting together" isn't anything you can spin into being fun for anyone involved, and is like the easiest to point to to say "hey, troll romance isn't actually a good system, it's just different"

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moirail discourse anon again and i'm actually rereading homestuck right now and i swear i got to a perfect moment to give another example. right after john retcons everything and everyone starts talking in the new timeline there is a conversation between vriska and kanaya where they talk about quadrants. vriska says that she doesn't understand why is everyone so private about it because she's totally open about her pale relationship with terezi to which kanaya says that she's not sure if vriska could understand that because pale relationships are very different in that aspect (almost like how platonic relationships irl aren't viewed as all that private like romantic ones can be. hmm). to which vriska says that red and black relationships are "so absorbing" and she doesn't have time for that right now which... seems to me very like irl romantic relationships can be absorbing but platonic ones aren't neccesarily viewed that way (even if they definitely can be) and vriska has no problem being moirails with terezi so. again, hmm. and let's not forget moirails' function in society is for calming the other troll down which sounds pretty absorbing too and yet, similar to platonic relationships which depending on the people involved can be very much absorbing as well, isn't ever described that way. and just a page later after that conversation you know what happens? kanaya tells karkat about how he shouldn't try to get into blackrom with vriska because she knows from experience (from when she had a flushed crush on her years prior obv) that while vriska is tremendous in pale relationships "anything stronger than that would probably be disastrous" which. well obviously irl romantic relationships are always described as the ones that are the strongest, aren't they? anyway. like i said moirails were literally described as soulmates but platonic idek how is this a discourse with that right there as well as this conversation i mentioned and like. everything else? lol

Eyup, it's almost like there's a clear distinction between the quadrants and what they facilitate for the people involved in terms of emotional investment and how much that does or doesn't work for them, compartmentalizing them into, shall we say, quadrants?

Also, depending on where post-canon goes, I feel like people generally agree that the two don't *really* want to be moirails, but it's the only thing they know how to describe where each other are in how they feel about each other due to external drama and always being in drastically different places in their lives, and general emotional immaturity.

In the epilogues, Terezi says her relationship with Vriska is complicated

but returning to the comic, proper, they end up as moirails, Vriska stresses that they're moirails, but just like almost everything the characters say, it can be interpreted that she's mostly just finding comfort in not having to think about her actual feelings for Terezi, since we have the whole situation with their ghost selves who *do* end up together (basically all of [S] Terezi: Remem8er., but also considering that one scrapped version when they would've kissed)

So people either recognize that moirails aren't romantic enough to really describe how they'd want to pair Terezi and Vriska, or they kind of just ignore/forget that the version of Vriska we end up following was seemingly fine with being moirails (which Terezi clearly gets hung up on in the epilogues), with Terezi searching for her post-English

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Literally the only concession I gave to that twitter discussion is that the text never actually outright explicitly says that Davepeta and Arquius remain moirails, and that that was just something I assumed because

not a single point while reading the comic did I think of morails as traditionally romantic (and still don't), and thus being actually related was a big deal, as opposed to the reason that Jasprose explicitly stops trying to court Nepeta after they become Davepeta, which is called out and not even related to quadrants

they literally both still have the moirail symbols in their typing quirks and have a huge flash page dedicated to how their reuniting is (even if just as a joke) "the most important part of the comic", with a highly detailed hug, and how the characters involved are basically cosmically tied to each other (you know, like moirails)

for as much as I talk about how fandom influences interpretation, I did in fact get so used to people calling them brorails that I've just consolidated that into my actual interpretations of the text

I read Arquius saying "former moirail" as specifically talking about the Nepeta side of Davepeta, not Davepeta as their own person

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i sent an ask like this to two other people now cause this has been pissing me off but like.

Yeah the people who talk about how moirails are romantic is something i can't understand. Because i'm sorry but isn't it obvious that trolls use the word romance for more things than humans do? It's like people see "troll romance 4 quadrants" and think "hmm that must mean human romance in different ways" or something. Matesprits are supposed to be like human romantic partners but all the other quadrants not only are different kinds of relationships but have different feelings associsted with them too. I'm begging everyone to remember that the quadrant explanation in homestuck said that in human terms moirails are like platonic soulmates. Moirails aren't like human romantic partners. The word romance doesn't mean all the same things for humans that it does for trolls. I'm going insane

GET BEHIND ME, ANON, THEY'LL COOK YOU FOR THIS ON TWITTER

Like, okay sure, maybe you took the word "romance" literally and didn't internalize anything actually said by the comic, like how it's literally introduced as being in a more platonic sense and specific purpose

and maybe you also don't question the fact that every character who talks about being romantically interested in someone with quadrants is someone who almost exclusively does not actually get their own feelings or has had explicit issues with them in the past, like genuinely believing that Horuss getting involved "romantically" with Meulin (the, BY HIS OWN WORDS, "ridiculous midblood" who he has "hardly ever given a second thought"), was anything more than an explicit parallel to Meowrails that was also NOT ACTUALLY A GOOD RELATIONSHIP FOR EITHER OF THEM AND NOT A GOOD EXAMPLE OF MOIRAILS, and did not have any actual romantic inclinations aside from how trolls view them, and *also* exists as a meta response to fandom, as all the dynamics among the alpha trolls are

and maybe you somehow ignore the biggest, most important representation of moirails being THE CHARACTERS WHO INTRODUCE IT, as Nepeta and Equius, despite all the shipping fanart and discourse about "kissing da homies", never once do anything exclusively "romantic", with both characters CONSTANTLY talking about other characters they'd rather be actually romantically involved with, like Nepeta's crush for Karkat and Equius's obsession with Aradia

And maybe you ignore that every time a "true" romance comes out, the most romantic thing described about them is that they "go beyond the quadrants", like Rose/Kanaya, Karkat/Dave, and the signless/disciple

Maybe you ignore all of that in service of some insistence that troll romance is a system that actually works and is a thing to take seriously

In the end, what's more important is what ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS, the people READING THE COMIC, get out of it

THEY'VE ALREADY SOLVED THIS STUPID DISCOURSE

JUST RESPECT THAT OTHER LIVING PEOPLE HAVE REASONABLE CAUSE TO NOT SEE IT AS ROMANTIC instead of being sanctimonious about it/how you do or don't want certain characters tied to each other

I cannot imagine a single person has ever maliciously pointed at two characters and said "I think these two platonically care about each other in a relationship that's explicitly not romantic but it not as simple as just being friends", it should not be this big a deal

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you know, people would probably be a lot less angry at others who say "kanaya and karkat are like moirails" if they could acknowledge that quadrants, as a literal romance system, are, pardon my french, "mostly bullshit", instead of holding on tight to "ugh, I hate people who can't see it as a valid romance and keep calling it the best friends quadrant" and then getting themselves worked up as they see people trying to pair kanaya romantically with men (which I agree you shouldn't be doing, and most definitely not karkat)

One of the most prevalent moirails in the comic end up becoming siblings

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the funny thing about it all is that there's now an official answer to moirail discourse that basically boils down to "it really doesn't matter how you interpret it, or even how the text expressed it, what matters are the relationships you've made through the terms used"

but because homestuck is "a text to be solved" and "interpreted correctly" and also this official answer is in the side text of merchandise that honestly isn't that impressive looking, the same arguments are going to happen every 6 months

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Moirail discourse ended through one genuine written paragraph under a basic graphic tee