#2404

STOP SEE VER https://medium.com/@cleoenfaserem/pictorial-for-a-naked-eye-adult-09c645652fb4

Later our troll hero would try to explain this to our human hero, attempting to convey all the nuance of troll romance through a nearly verbatim recitation of the preceding excerpts.

I'm going to assume Karkat's explanation was identical, just with more swearing.

Looking at these two together, I'm reminded of their interactions back in Act 4. They always had a rather curious tone, and Karkat always seemed to be performing animosity towards John, rather than actually experiencing it.

Given what we've learned about troll romance, I'm forced to wonder exactly what type of 'hatred' Karkat really feels for John.

...oh, damn.

I was just going back through their conversations, trying to spot any quad-romantic subtext, and happened to stumble across this smoking gun, where Karkat expressed disgust at John reacting positively to his antagonism.

It sounds a lot like Karkat was trying to flirt as a kismesis, but John reacted in a way he interpreted as red romance. To Karkat, it may have seemed as if John was trying to enter multiple quadrants with him, something that Alternian culture considers taboo and 'perverse'.

Also, Karkat's just... blatantly pitch-flirting with Terezi here, isn't he?

The quality of this image is really annoying me, because it's just barely too low for me to recognize and translate its Daedric symbols. I might run a custom OCR script on it, if I ever have the time.

But every troll believes strongly that each quadrant holds one and only one true pairing for them [...]

It's normal for trolls to have multiple partners - but they're not supposed to have multiple partners in the same quadrant. Polyamory is normal, but there's a set of societal norms that govern how to practice polyamory, and those are the norms that are considered taboo to break.

I'm raising my eyebrow a little at the notion that every troll approaches relationships in the same way, without a single member of the species deviating from this norm. Then again, this is presented as the 'textbook' definition of troll relationships - and many human textbooks erroneously omit much of our lived experience.