How did you come to like John/Karkat as a ship? It was a very pleasant surprise since I’m very sure you are male, white, and straight. I really don’t mean offense from that I am just really curious.

paratactician:

Good fic, basically!

I AM ABOUT TO BE KIND OF FLIPPANT ABOUT HUMAN SEXUALITY, LOOK AWAY NOW IF THAT AIN’T YOUR THING

Here’s the way it works: I am, as you correctly state, a straight guy. This means I come equipped with a set of Het Goggles. Het Goggles are weird: they make me pay close attention to some things (e.g. breasts) and largely overlook others (e.g. John and Dave staring deep into each other’s eyes, wreathed in bishie sparkle). Het Goggles mean that I am relatively more likely to look at an interaction between a male and a female character and say ‘ooh, yep, definitely some UST going on there’ than I am to say the same about m/m or f/f interactions. They don’t make gay relationships invisible to me; they just mean I have to work harder to see them.

As a result, in most m/m pairs in Homestuck, I see no sexual tension. John/Dave: come on, they’re just friends! Karkat/Sollux: about as hot as rainwater. Eridan/Sollux: are you mad? That doesn’t mean the tension’s not there, it just means I can’t see it. But if a kind friend takes me by the shoulder and points me in just the right direction, strange shapes begin to loom from the mists ahead, and my startled mouth lets fall the words ‘oh God, I… I think I ship it’.

The kind friend in this instance was urbanAnchorite. Back at the beginning of last year’s HSO, I told her, very tentatively and with some embarrassment, that I didn’t ship John/Karkat. Her response was incredibly reassuring. She didn’t say, as I’d feared from my short acquaintance with fandom, ‘wow, Privilege Boy, way to be a gross, problematic homophobe’. She said: dude, you’re straight. Not many straight men are going to look at two fictional thirteen-year-old boys and say ‘well, I definitely think THEY should kiss’.

But she’s a smart shipper, and I take her views seriously, so I stuck at it. The first Homestuck fic I ever read was The Only Recipe For Lasagna You’ll Ever Need, so I was starting with an advantage. I read How Karkat Vantas Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Con Air, which remains one of my favourite fics of all time for any pairing. I read lock it up and leave. I read Waiting For God Tier, when it came out. I ventured a little further afield and read Cephied Variable’s But I’m a Friendleader!, which is fantastic. And then one day I was reading back through some old John/Karkat canon logs for a story I was trying to write, and I realised I was thinking: well, these guys should TOTALLY kiss.

To be quite honest, I still don’t ship John/Karkat in exactly the way I ship my het ships. If you were to send me some scorching hot Dave/Rose porn, I would flex an eyebrow and say ’…continue’. If you were to send me some scorching hot John/Karkat porn – a thing I’m not entirely sure is possible, because they’re both such dinguses, but never mind – I would thank you politely and decline, because dudes boning just pings a clean zero on my sexual Geiger counter.* But I think they’re in love, and I think it’s cute as fuck, and although obviously I want the final panel of Homestuck to be a huge splash of Terezi triumphantly licking Dave’s face as he smirks a one-pixel smirk, I’m definitely hoping that John will be trying to kiss Karkat ‘sensually!’ somewhere in the background. 

*Sam, ‘sexual Geiger counter’ is not a euphemism for my dick.