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I have blog header colours turned on my dashboard and it jus so happened to make the trans pride flag 

A couple of people have asked and I’m so glad they did because my tired ass loves talking about quadrants, so thank you so much!

I’m gonna try to hold back and not make this too long, since I’ve already covered these topics in other posts and I really don’t wanna seem like a broken record. Anyway here goes.

Troll romance, aka quadrants, are direct parallel to human sexuality, this is touched on tons of times in the comic, especially when quadrants are the main topic at that moment. The whole point of quadrants is that they aren’t real, they’re a concept, or a social construct made up by society, that everyone is supposed to uniformly fit into.

Karkat’s character arc is that he doesn’t actually fit into this, this is the troll equivalent of being queer, trolls are even killed if they haven’t filled the necessary romantic quadrants when Drones show up to collect their genetic material. Troll society doesn’t have the concept of being gay, just like human society doesn’t have quadrants, it’s all seen as the same type of relationship to each respective species. 

Quadrants were a very clever allusion to human sexuality that I still love. Karkat coming to terms with this is a very intentional direct parallel to Dave coming to terms with not being straight. 

Dave was raised in an environment full of toxic masculinity where he was expected to never cry or show much emotion, when he was 13 he tried his best to put on this hypermasculine facade that fell apart once he realized all that stuff he thought was spoonfed his whole life about sexuality and masculinity was a bunch of made up bullshit. Karkat is exactly the same, but with quadrants. He always did have a fascination with them, I have no doubt that his love for romance was genuine, but it may have also been a form of overcompensation. It’s pretty fitting that the two ended up together because of this. They were both able to find a middle ground and deviate from social norms, and just be themselves.

Trolls are supposed to have one person in one quadrant per time, not one person in more than one at any point. Karkat says to himself that he wants Terezi in all the quadrants, despite the fact that he always tried to settle on one but couldn’t decide (and for some reason thought a sensible solution would be to schedule it)

Combined with this is the fact that The Signless and The Disciple had a relationship that surpassed the quadrants, this is supposed to further emphasize what Karkat is dealing with. This is also probably the reason Vriska couldn’t place what quadrant Dave and Karkat were in, because they’re in both none of them and in all of them at the same time. It’s closer to human dating than troll romance. 

Beforus was a lot more calm than Alternia, so deviation from the social norm wouldn’t be as harsh, but this allowed us to get confirmation from Kankri that deviation from quadrants is actually viewed in the same way as being gay on earth, with his usage of phrases like “Panquadrant” which we can assume is the closest thing to “Homosexual” by troll standards. Aranea and Kankri were the only trolls to ever really touch on this, and Aranea did so only while talking about cherubs.

Speaking of cherubs Calliope and Caliborn have always been intentional inverses of each other, this topic is no acception at all, I’m gonna plug a previous post about this. Keep in mind that for cherubs, black romance is the norm, and no other.

While talking to Roxy, Callie says she doesn’t know if she’s capable of having red feelings, even though she would like to, so the topic fascinates her and she expresses it through fantasies of red relationships. She’s been pressured to believe that she, as a cherub, should have black feelings, because that’s what would be normal of her, be she never seemed to like the concept of black romance to begin with. She’s the equivalent to a closeted or unaware gay human.

Now for Caliborn. He’s the inverse, like many things with each other. Caliborn loves black romance and is disgusted by red romance. He’s seen bringing up blackrom several times and explains it to Jane as what’s normal for his species. He sees red relationships as “pornography”, as if they are something scandalous and dirty. Dirk describes this as Caliborn “Fetishizing his disgust for it”. He’s the equivalent to a straight human who fetishizes gay couples.

John realizing he has black feelings was supposed to be an allusion to realizing that he’s gay (by troll standards, this isn’t 100% literal). His conversation with Karkat about it, without context, would read exactly like a person realizing they’re gay. Of course that’s not what’s going on but it’s a very intentional reference to it.

Kinda seems like a one sided conversation, doesn’t it? I’m tired of “conversations on race” whenever another innocent, unarmed black person is executed by the police. They’re as perfunctory as they are repetitive.

We need justice, not another hollow conversation that doesn’t change anything and does nothing to prevent the next shooting.

Under the proposed deregulations, this sort of thing would be explicitly permitted, and we know it’s possible because it’s been done. Now consider how much more communication happens via the Internet in 2017 than in 2005/2006. It’s not even email or websites; big chunks of the telephone network now pass through ISP-mediated VOIP channels, and those conversations would likewise be targetable by faked outages.

For example, there was the time that Comcast blocked Boston-area subscribers from accessing their GMail inboxes, and when folks called their support line to complain, they falsely claimed that it was a technical issue on Google’s end and tried to sell them a Comcast email account.

Or the time that Madison River Communications ended up getting fined for their VOIP-metering scheme when it turned out that they were interfering with 911 calls made by users in their service area.

Or the time Verizon started selectively blocking text messages sent by pro-choice advocacy groups, even to recipients who’d explicitly opted into them.

ITS NOT A COMPLIMENT, CHARLES

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I still care about you being well I still wonder how we conquered hell I still love this nonsense team we make