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.
I found this on the internet claiming to be manly, Cancer-themed neck jewelry
and
okay
I bet on Alternia, awkward symbol combinations are the equivalent of horrible relationship namesmooshes and/or doodling “MR [YOUR NAME] [YOUR CRUSH’S SURNAME]” in your schoolfeeding binders surrounded by little hearts (or clubs or whatever. trolls).
and one time everyone is bored and that is when Dave walks in on Karkat grimacing in concentration and gouging a fist-enclosed pencil across a book like Karkat still thinks paper is stone-tablet and chisel type technology, gotta carve your grocery list down before the barbarians attack and pillage your alphabet
Karkat has been trying to combine
and
and coming up with variations on the above squiggles, which is absolutely the best thing that has happened to Dave all afternoon.
holy shit dude, Dave says as he yoinks the book away.
After dinner Dad taught Karkat how to dance all the Ginger parts to the Fred Astaire dances he taught John growing up because like hell is he not going to pass down his fancy feet to his son’s boyfriend and make it all worthwhile. John complained from the sofa the whole time and Karkat refused to give up.
John asking karkat on a date as a joke and having karkat sit at a restaurant by himself until he realizes john isn’t showing up
It’s your own fault, really.
The two of you were going back and forth, like you always do. You said a line about a candlelight hatedate, he replied with a laugh, saying “Sure, 7pm at Antonio’s, see you there.” It sounded like a sarcastic joke. You replied with a sarcastic agreement. That being said, you also thought there was a degree of sincerity beneath that sarcasm.
Evidently not.
You’ve been sitting at this dingy pizzeria down the street for thirty-five minutes now. He hasn’t shown up. You are so stupid. This is just another testament to failure and romantic ineptitude on the long list of disappointments that is your life. What the hell were you expecting? For John to come, admit to being in love with you all along, and initiate those sloppy makeouts you’ve been desperately wanting for sweeps? Fuck you, past self. Your expectations are an embarrassment to you’s across time.
What she means: Karkat has feelings from the moment he laid eyes on John. Every one of flustered fumbling rants at him were empirically a result of that hate at first sight, and then he slowly started to like him and actually enjoy talking to him, and the same with John turnways, who absolutely adored getting Karkat all worked up. They have the same typing quirk with one all caps and one lowercase. Their taste in movies were paralleled, and they both like Failure to Launch. They weren’t stuck together, they didn’t have to talk to each other, but they both wanted to, so much. Karkat couldn’t stop bringing himself to do that, and John slowly got more and more happy to hear from him every time. John threw a bucket at Karkat’s head with a joke about making out with him if they weren’t all smooched out by the time three years were up. John knew how Karkat felt. he thought about it. Karkat couldn’t get him off his mind and the first thing he did when he finally got to talk to him was address how NOT in love with him he was and admitted to thinking about it. Often. Zappy John was so delighted every time he popped to a Karkat point in time and was so excited by his little fits, where every other character is like ok he’ll stop eventually if we just ignore it where as John is TICKLED by it. They have paralleled quests. He’s everything he’s not. There’s so much more. There is so much more. Where is the resolution. I thought I had it at the end of Act 5 where Karkat said I don’t really hate you and I never did, I was always okay with you, but then he just went and admitted he was thinking about John. Romantically. These passed few years. And John is finally following up on the Jake thing questioning heterosexuality. It can’t end like this. I can’t have this dangled in front of my face for all these years only for left-field ships where people are just suddenly friends without that gradual conversational build up and then bam love interests suddenly be a thing, and obscuring any wrap up our two male leads could have possibly gotten for better or worse. Meet me in the pit, Andrew Hussie. Meet me in the pit.
Cheloneuniverse 