paratactician:

Anonymous asked: I’m sorry. You couldn’t write the words “Sollux/Terezi manifesto” and expect me to do anything other than wibble gently in anticipation.

Cadmium asked: tell us more about your Dave/Rose headcanons. (OTP forever sob)

A heart too quick to show emotion is indeed a mark of the base. – Theognis 366

It must be blindingly obvious to anyone who has spent any time on my tumblr or my AO3 fics list that my four favourite characters in Homestuck, by a country mile, are Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, Terezi Pyrope, and Sollux Captor.

 This is not coincidence. I genuinely think that, in a small but significant way, Sollux and Terezi are the nearest thing the trolls have to the Derse twins.

 The thing that unites all four characters, as I read them, is control. They all prize it, and they are all determined to maintain it. They measure their success by how well they are controlling their surroundings, and by how well they are controlling themselves. Rose is at her happiest when she’s holding all the cards and at her most discomfited when she’s playing catch-up (where her unusually blunt snark only highlights the fact that she’s getting her ass kicked, for once). Dave’s delight when Terezi can’t read his, can’t read his poker face contrasts sharply with how flustered he gets at a few S1LLY L1TTL3 ON1ONS. Terezi goes to fantastic lengths to maintain her treasured professionalism, but we all know what happens when she doesn’t succeed. And Sollux, who has more to fear from losing control than any of them, eventually dies proving his own mastery.

 It’s borne out by their interactions, too. One of the notable things about Dave and Rose, and one of the reasons I and so many others ship them like burning, is the way they [S] relax around each other. Dave and Terezi, and to a lesser extent Rose and Kanaya, are all about competition, snarky horseshit, sending the ball off at weird angles so the other person has to scurry to retrieve it. Dave and Rose are about collaboration. Their best pesterlogs – and it’s something I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to capture in my fics – are like two professional players just kind of knocking a ball backwards and forwards for the fun of it, and yes this overextended metaphor is leading somewhere – the point they try and have an actual argument but get distracted by sheer love of each other’s voices. Now let’s briefly turn to Sollux and Terezi; does this remind you of anyone? The style’s different, the words are different, the personalities are different, but name me one other troll with whom Terezi would resort to the immortal comeback:

GC: M4YB3 M4YB3 M4YB3
GC: M4YB3 M4YB3 1S 4 STUP1D WORD
GC: M4YB3 TH4TS TH3 B1G M4YB3 W3 SHOULD 4LL POND3R TON1GHT
GC: OV3R SOM3 HOT SHUT TH3 H3LL UP T34

GC: SO YOU TH1NK 1M S4VVY?? >:]

She’s not bothering to be the clever one any more; she’s not making her incisions and playing her games, the way she dances in circles round Karkat and flattens Vriska’s overtures with elegant restraint:

 AG: Haha, 8n’t it a 8ummer you never died????????

GC: NO >:P

 Sollux is to Terezi as Dave is to Rose. They’re all smart, maybe a little too smart, and they’ve all walled themselves up in different ways behind barriers of snark and sass and putdown, built towers from which they can look down at their friends milling about in confusion, and sigh, and occasionally facepalm. Smart teenagers put themselves on top of pillars and then devote most of their energy to keeping their balance, because the longer you stay up there the worse it’s going to look when you wobble. It’s only in each other’s company that they consent to come down, kick off their shoes, and stop trying so Goddamn hard to be perfect. Depending on how you ship, you may find that sexy, or adorable, or just rather dull. But the sight of the four ‘control’ characters relaxing, letting each other take some of the strain for a bit – of Dave and Rose dropping the masks and dancing, of Terezi hanging out with the one troll she really respects as her intellectual equal, these pairs of stupid clever kids who really know each other – just clutches at my heart every time.

 In my ideal world, one day these four will get together with a lot of sugary snacks and play board games, or possibly Mario Kart, and it will be the best and the funniest thing anyone has ever seen. Until then, I wait.