#but also genuinely.. platonically committed to a gay man while we both have relationships w other people.. but always have each other..

[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

#text #asks #johnroxycallie #john egbert #roxy lalonde #calliope #Anonymous