#roxycallie obviously

[obscenicon]

ummmmmmm. underrated ship (to me): roxyrosemarycallie. you get roxykan (transfeminine bonding. severely underrated rarepair. roxy literally made kanaya the matriorb). rosecallie (the most ultra rare ship ever but the one time i read it it was in the form of a fandom wank report so automatically i think it'd be a hilarious pitchship). lalondecest (mommy issues foreverrr) and rosemary and roxycallie (virtues extolled at length by others more talented than i). it would be so insane i think

OHHH I LOVE YOU ANON. THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR BEAUTIFUL SOUL. kanroxy rosemary and lalondecest are all very very important to me and obviously combining them makes me ill. unfortunately calliroxy means next to nothing to me but in this context i can very much enjoy it <3

[girlbowser]

it's honestly such a sus scene.

like, for starters, several people openly knew about postcanon before it started.

obviously, rose and dirk knew. dirk because he was setting up some funni ultdirk stuff, rose because she saw it all coming. but nobody ever really talks about callie and roxy having strong feelings about postcanon before it happens

nobody talks about this. that callie describes it in the terms of a science experiment. that roxy pressures him into choosing before he's really that ready.

"any tampering could taint the results," says callie, immediately before tampering with it lmao

i dunno. i think theres so much going on here. i really have to do a detailed epilogues reread, especially with the new context we have about rose from beyond canon. candy rose was hiding so much from us The Entire Time and its led me to a couple of fucking. earthshattering revelations about what exactly her plan is

but thats for another time lol.

tldr. it was really barely a choice for him. people who already had plans within plans (roxycallie have shit cooking in both meat and candy, rose has shit cooking in both meat and candy, and dirk is ultdirking it up) pressured him into it. most importantly i think is that this was The Last Narratively Relevant Thing To Do To Wrap Up Homestuck -- the masterpiece really was all that was left. deciding not to do it is such an earth-shattering choice that it literally does not grok with canon.

basically i dunno. but im guessing it has something to do with retcon, with altcallie, and with Narrative Roles.

and my big headcanon is that a lot of people were involved in sorta uh. truman-show-ing john? which is a whole OTHER can of worms but.

god candy timeline is so incredibly sus

anyway. i think the entirety of postcanon is a study in strilondenomics and thats why i like it adsfsgdjhdfkjsg

still havent read anything post canon related so i might have some wrong assumptions, but why did they make john do the “coin flip” meat candy thing after it was established that he was p much above binding narrative decisions… like if it were a repeat terezi thing or a dave thing id get it but johns the retconner?

[nintendont2502]

I love just hoarding ships of my favourite characters. Like. If I like you you're getting every ship I can think of

[synodicatalyst]

some epilogue thoughts (part 1)

there’s a lot of people up in arms about things like j*hnroxy marriage and j*hnrezi, d*vejade, etc being Canon and honestly? i can relate. and i agree with lots of things that have been said. i think it’s a pretty poor move to release content that actively turns away a good 80% of readers. i’m hurt re: the way Certain Characters were treated. i think the epilogue really tried to toe the line between “classically homestuck reader-hostile / deep / Super Meta” and “outright hurtful” and i think it definitely didn’t do it well enough, nor delicately enough, for me to appreciate it

HOWEVER (this sounds like a big however but its sort of not that big a deal)

also here is where we delve into Spoiler Territory

i think there’s a misunderstanding, or at least people have been putting things weirdly and wildly out of context, re: a lot of things

i’m not saying that you’re wrong to be mad, or disgusted, with the way that characters were treated or portrayed. but, this isn’t homestuck saying “actually roxycallie and vrisrezi and davekat are bad and these Straight ships are canon As They Should Be LOL”

many characters (like rose) say that they’re not “canon” or that the lives that they’re living don’t feel “real” (john) at some point. it’s fanfiction. heterosexuality within homestuck is very overtly and obviously meant to evoke a sense of unease, of wrongness. even fucking JOHN comments on it - he talks about how roxy seems “wrong” when she basically flings herself at him in the candy route. like, saying “j*hnroxy became canon and also john and terezi fucked in the epilogue” out of context is like, wack, because yeah, both became ‘canon’, but j0hnroxy was actively shown to not work - IT WAS HONESTLY MORE LIKE BASHING ON THE SHIP THAN ANYTHING ELSE. THEY GOT DIVORCED.. their relationship was awful - 

john and terezi fuck when terezi is basically starving to death in the middle of the void and john is dying. it’s um, like, romantic? but also its like, very gritty. (this doesnt mean i was exactly chill with the fact that it went down, or how it happened, but. like. the whole scene was meant to be emblematic of the way the Meat route was harshly, extremely and very intentionally a portrayal of the Harsh Reality where the candy route was overly, way too far wacky and horrible discordant wish fulfilment. Terezi submits to the “why should i keep going? vriska’s probably dead anyway” pessimistic line of thinking where in the candy route she persists and doesn’t return home despite john’s pleas.) the johnrezi like. its not even that bad. definitely not as bad as like. g-gamjane i guess

panquadrant vrisrezi, on the other hand, is canonised in the candy route and it’s positive - vriska has some incredible and important moments in conjunction with this revelation, talking about her self-loathing and the disconnect between herself and terezi. terezi talks about her unfathomable yearning for vriska as she fused with her Game Over self, which drove her to search in the depths of the void for YEARS... she, terezi, and john are cemented as the most... Separate From Canon as individual characters. they’re like pivot points. 

d*vejade is just outright slandered - jade is portrayed as a horrible, absurd manic pixie dream girl crossed with a weird yaoi lover who just Really Fucks and her overtures towards davekat are horrible and uncomfortable and pushy. it’s very clearly not Canon Real Ultimate Self jade and it’s not supposed to be. again, absurd.

anyways this has been a really long post but what i’m saying is that i do think like, in context, a lot of the things people are iffy about - the weird uncomfortable way john BASICALLY “CUCKS” CALLIE by dating roxy, for example, is obviously not supposed to be like “ACTUALLY J0HNR0XY IS THE TRUE ENDGAME SHIP” - it’s more of an active criticism. it’s the monkey’s paw. it’s not an endorsement. which doesn’t make the way it sort of...goes down... Good, but it’s definitely not the author going “these straight ships are the good ones actually” like ive seen people saying

[landofsomethingsomething]

your askbox seems crowded with johnroxycallie asks today. welllll sorry im going to add another one to the pile! i am intrigued! i used to ship johnroxy because it seemed real & cute but i moved to roxycallie when it was canon. but this is interesting?? sooo im interested but not sold. give me your best sales pitch for this new ot3 and adopt me into that good good 4 person fold?

Okay here’s why I like it.

To start you have to understand my salty relationship with Roxy’s bisexuality. I basically wrote my own god damn narrative for it in my own head because I am just so over homestuck’s completely unwillingness to give women arcs relating to their sexuality. Womens’ queerness is always something treated by the narrative as obvious and unworthy of commentary or exploration or any element of revelation/self-discovery or even an iota of reflection or struggle, which is especially FRUSTRATING when they’ve been shown struggling with the queerness of OTHERS. It’s that last part that gets me w Roxy -- I especially hate this with Roxy specifically because her relationship with Dirk was so very fucking fraught with her being bitter at him for being gay and thus unwilling to be with her. Roxy was aggressive about her attraction to Jake and Dirk and I would have really liked to see SOMETHING about like. The narrative there after she meets Callie, especially when Callie expressly tells Roxy that her species can’t experience human romance and blah blah blah blah there are so many things I would have loved to know more about re Roxy and her sexuality but this post is already going to be long so enough said about how mad I am about this specifically

The way I’ve settled on it for my own peace of mind is that Roxy went after Dirk and Jake most aggressively because she had the “save the human species” thing held up as the banner of like, the most important thing she could do to the exclusion of most else. Couple that with her being upset at Dirk for being gay and you get a workable explanation for her suppressing her own bisexuality and being so exuberantly performatively straight. 

So. Callie is the only person outside the other alpha kids that Roxy has had this lifelong close relationship/bond with. They have a conversation where they basically gal pal each other aggressively, with Callie saying her species can’t do redrom/human romance and Roxy being cagey about whether she’d reciprocate because Callie is basically telling her there’s no point to the thought exercise and who likes rejection?? but Roxy is the one who brings it up and is clearly fishing to see if Callie likes her likes her and blah blah blah people have been shipping RoxyCallie long before credits video because of all this, the ring, etc. The closeness of their relationship and the mutual “if only this could work it could be so good” narrative there like all right. 

Then, John. There’s an element to Roxy’s attraction to John that’s rooted in that instinctive thing she has going on that you can see on display in their first meeting, where she sees A Dude and immediately does her mental calculus to determine hey here is A Dude, he’s kind of cute, he’s maybe not gay and/or off-limits b/c my best friend has a huge messy crush on him. And it would be real easy to weigh the scales here and go full RoxyCallie if that were the sum and parts of their relationship, but like, here’s the thing -- it’s not. 

I just cannot let go of John and Roxy as the sole survivors of the Game Over timeline. Roxy is Callie’s beacon of optimistic hope, Roxy is the one who acts to save Callie and preserve her in the alpha timeline (with John’s help -- John gives Roxy the ring after all. I like that detail in the full scope of them being a Unit in the future.) But JOHN plays that role for Roxy. Roxy watches Rose die and is ready to sit down and throw in the towel. She tells John straight up that her only plan going forward after this is to accept her fate and bury her mom and wait for her miserable doomed timeline to end and take her with it. John is the one who convinces her there might be a better way, there might be hope. JOHN is the one who acts to preserve Roxy’s existence in the alpha timeline. I really love the parallel between Roxy bringing Callie back from the brink of oblivion and John bringing Roxy back from the same via the same mechanism that allows John to get the ring that allows Roxy to bring Callie back in the first place. That is a really tidy loop and I like it a lot.

So, Roxy in Earth C with a boy she likes and has a connection with that literally no one else can understand because no one else went through Game Over, no one else has this dissonant experiences that might not mesh 100% with the people they love, no one else has this potential imposter syndrome. I love the idea of Roxy and John bonding over that and have never really been willing to give it up. I love the idea of Roxy coming to understand that her infatuation with the idea of A Boy, Any Boy and the future she wanted so bad were products of trauma and really examining that and then realizing she fell for John legitimately, that she genuinely finds him charming

Simultaneously, Roxy in Earth C with the alien girl she’s had a crush on for like probably forever, and now she’s free of the burden she always assumed she had to repopulate the human race. Also her entire family is queer and she’s free to explore her own feelings with that context. Maybe to accept that her feelings for Jane were never purely platonic (and her feelings for Callie certainly never were) and half her frustration at Dirk was that he insisted on being “true” to himself while Roxy never felt she could be and imposed straightness on herself out of obligation to the human race. That could make a girl bitter, right? (I have so many god damn feelings about Roxy and Dirk reconciling post-canon)

And here’s Callie with her insistence that cherubs can’t experience redrom, too. Except now she’s living on Earth C with, for example, Karkat, a troll who absolutely experiences romantic feelings the same way humans do despite all his species lore stating Trolls Can’t Feel Like That. And now Callie has eternity to explore HER feelings -- and we know part of why Callie just accepted that she couldn’t experience flushed/human romance is because she didn’t think anyone would ever love her like that anyway, right? She thought she was hideous and unloveable. Well now she’s here on Earth C and there’s no way Roxy is going to go on letting her believe that. And without that holding her back from exploring the way she REALLY feels, you can see a path to Callie allowing herself to experience emotions she never thought she could. 

And all of these are positive things and wonderful things for these people to learn about themselves and about each other. 

Roxy caught between the boy she fell for on her journey and the girl she fell for long before her journey even started, just having this realization like, everyone is doing what they want here, this is our universe and our earth and our society and our rules, and she’s kind of unofficially dating them both for awhile but not committing labels-wise to either until eventually she’s just like fuck it??? Here’s how I feel, now how about you??? And I cannot imagine Callie protesting Roxy loving them both or someone else loving Roxy as much as she does, and John’s relationship with romance throughout Homestuck is so bemused and ???? and exploratory, I imagine he’s like well this is kinda weird is this like a troll thing and Roxy is like no this is just an us thing and they deal with it

John and Callie have already been spending tons of time with each other throughout and again, as I referenced in an earlier post, there’s some initial awkwardness that settles out into a balanced arrangement and Callie and John both love Roxy and care about each other very much.

Also like, until there actually is some kind of epilogue that does more with John’s current depression arc and ties in the Masterpiece with everything, I like this alternate reality where John has someone who understands him in a way really no one else can there for him when his shit starts to go south, I like the idea of there being an entire long ass subplot where John tries to isolate himself and Roxy is instrumental in not allowing that to happen, I like Callie’s cheer in the face of her own blisteringly unforgiving history and reality being an inspiration for John, I like a lot of things that canon as it stands doesn’t have a satisfying character-driven arc for at the moment.

And, you know, to cap all this off, I really just like JohnRoxyCallie as an acknowledgement that bisexual woman are not “less” for liking boys, that bisexual woman don’t “count” unless they are exclusively with women, and that bisexual people in real life who ship bisexual characters with people of opposite/other genders are not somehow betraying the queer community by doing so, while simultaneously not sacrificing a potential f/f romance for a m/f one.

The LGBT community’s relationship with bisexual women is MY pet issue, because obviously I’m a bi woman, and there’s obviously an element of that going on as well. It bothers me with the treatment of a lot of fandom/homestuck’s bisexual women (this frenzy by queer fandom to erase every relationship a bisexual woman ever had with a man as being not real or not valid for x, y, z reasons while Straight Fandom is over there doing the same thing, but opposite) but Roxy is by far the Homestuck Canon Bisexual Woman I personally care about the most so SHRUG that’s why you get a million words of my feelings

Anyway that’s why I like them