Romantic Speculation Thread (Holiday Ship-To-Ship Combat)

[jumpjet2k]

It's less about hot-headed and more about dangerous trolls. Danger can come in many forms.

It's funny that you mention that, actually, because it got me thinking about the moirallegiances we've seen - specifically, Nepeta and Equius, one of the clearest examples we have of the pale quadrant.

As much as Equius is bossy and STRONG and prejudiced and maybe just a liiiiiiittle bit creepy, I wouldn't call him dangerous. Sure, his strength definitely COULD make him hazardous if he wanted to be, but he never uses it against other trolls - only robots and underlings. He does get angry, but he seems to have a lot of control over the target of his anger. And he definitely seems to regret injuring Aurthour. In fact, it seems he generally tends to be non-violent - he even scolds Nepeta for her aggression:

CT: D --> You e%terminate beautiful, innocent creatures by the hundreds
CT: D --> I can't condone such wretched behavior

It's curious to think that for one of the pairings that's stated over and over in canon to be a moirallegiance, they don't really fit the description all that precisely. I'm not sure exactly how this fits into my analysis...

[8oy Skylark]

I think in that case it's that he's potentially dangerous - he easily gets enraged, and is ridiculously strong. He has ways to vent it, yes, but it involves breaking things. He eggs on Vriska on at least two occasions that I know of, as long as she's targeting those of lower blood class. He could easily decide that venting his rage on the yellow bloods and lower is justified - after all, he is superior to them, so they should be fair game, right?
That's where Nepeta comes in. She maintains his connection to lower classes, and connects him to the other trolls he would otherwise have issues with. He manages to maintain a control on his temper because he doesn't want to hurt Nepeta, and in fact wants to keep her from danger. She listens to him, so he doesn't feel like he's being undermined, but she also questions his authority so that he has to continually keep his requests reasonable.

They have to be mutually beneficial, as well, remember?

[jumpjet2k]

I think in that case it's that he's potentially dangerous - he easily gets enraged, and is ridiculously strong. He has ways to vent it, yes, but it involves breaking things. He eggs on Vriska on at least two occasions that I know of, as long as she's targeting those of lower blood class. He could easily decide that venting his rage on the yellow bloods and lower is justified - after all, he is superior to them, so they should be fair game, right?
That's where Nepeta comes in. She maintains his connection to lower classes, and connects him to the other trolls he would otherwise have issues with. He manages to maintain a control on his temper because he doesn't want to hurt Nepeta, and in fact wants to keep her from danger. She listens to him, so he doesn't feel like he's being undermined, but she also questions his authority so that he has to continually keep his requests reasonable.

They have to be mutually beneficial, as well, remember?

That's all true. I, personally, can't picture Equius ever being outwardly violent towards the lower classes, but that probably has something to do with the fact that we've never actually seen him outside of the context of his moirallegiance with Nepeta. I guess that means she's doing a good job of it, then.

[8oy Skylark]

I think in that case it's that he's potentially dangerous - he easily gets enraged, and is ridiculously strong. He has ways to vent it, yes, but it involves breaking things. He eggs on Vriska on at least two occasions that I know of, as long as she's targeting those of lower blood class. He could easily decide that venting his rage on the yellow bloods and lower is justified - after all, he is superior to them, so they should be fair game, right?
That's where Nepeta comes in. She maintains his connection to lower classes, and connects him to the other trolls he would otherwise have issues with. He manages to maintain a control on his temper because he doesn't want to hurt Nepeta, and in fact wants to keep her from danger. She listens to him, so he doesn't feel like he's being undermined, but she also questions his authority so that he has to continually keep his requests reasonable.

They have to be mutually beneficial, as well, remember?

That's all true. I, personally, can't picture Equius ever being outwardly violent towards the lower classes, but that probably has something to do with the fact that we've never actually seen him outside of the context of his moirallegiance with Nepeta. I guess that means she's doing a good job of it, then.

The fact that it's the only Moirallegiance we've been introduced to that hasn't fallen apart entirely is a good indicator of this.

[gimmethegepgun]

That's all true. I, personally, can't picture Equius ever being outwardly violent towards the lower classes, but that probably has something to do with the fact that we've never actually seen him outside of the context of his moirallegiance with Nepeta. I guess that means she's doing a good job of it, then.

Well, when they're all in the Veil he isn't hurting anyone, though the Nepeta proximity may be related, along with his disturbing submission lust keeping him from doing anything to Karkat.
However, one of the times we saw him rage out and he WASN'T pacified, he ended up killing 2 lusii because he's so freakishly strong he punched his robot through the wall.

[8oy Skylark]

Example of how that chart I just drew would show possibilities:

show spoiler

hide spoiler

This is by far not all the Vriska possibilities; I threw it together in a few minutes. it's just an example. But it wouldn't be too hard to keep an up-to-date one of these; just add symbols as evidence appears.

Circle is for confirmed relationships, and the two related auspice relationships are intertwined in that quadrant.

[Centric]

I think that that was a bit of an isolated happening. It was coincidental, a possible consequence of the reacharound virus, and above all, a plot driver. I do see how the issue becomes one of collateral damage, however.

[sebastian]

I'd love to see Vriska get redeemed, but I really haven't seen much reason to call her reformed. Maybe downgraded from murderer to permanently-maimer to cruel and torturous person, but she's still got a long way to go.

Yes, every time I think Vriska got better she do something to disappoint me (like "persuading" Tavros to try the stairs with his new legs), now objectively she is got better, she went from murderer to manipulator, but she is still a bitch.
I don't think she enjoyed what she did on Alternia, maybe she even feel sorry for it, but the first step for redemption is to admit you did something wrong, and I'm not sure she ever made that first step.

So what I'm trying to say is that there might be the possibility of the moirallegence occuring between John and Vriska.

This could work.

Of course it could work, John is moirallegence personified.

[8oy Skylark]

I'd love to see Vriska get redeemed, but I really haven't seen much reason to call her reformed. Maybe downgraded from murderer to permanently-maimer to cruel and torturous person, but she's still got a long way to go.

Yeah, every time I think Vriska got better she do something to disappoint me (like "persuading" Tavros to try the stairs with his new legs), now objectively she is got better, she went from murderer to manipulator, but she is still a bitch.
I don't think she enjoyed what she did on Alternia, maybe she even feel sorry for it, but the first step for redemption is to admit you did something wrong, and I'm not sure she ever made that first step.

So what I'm trying to say is that there might be the possibility of the moirallegence occuring between John and Vriska.

This could work.[/QUOTE]

Of course it could work, John is moirallegence personified.[/QUOTE]

You seem to forget the Tavros incident is before she starts being heavily influenced by John. At best it's right when she starts manipul8ing him.
The redemption is more likely when John has a stronger influence to cause reform.

[gimmethegepgun]

Quotefail. Also, more likely that Vriska changed due to Nick Cage, not John, imho.

[LeCrab]

re: Moirallegiance

it's a two way street, it helps stabilize both trolls involved

So for example Nepeta helps mellow Equius out and diverts his anger towards the others. In exchange, Equius protects Nepeta from both herself and outside threats.

[BPrinny]

So...how would Vriska help John in a Moirallegiance?

[Varinn]

john becomes the best at the game. he's too much of a dumbass to do that on his own

[BlastYoBoots]

So...how would Vriska help John in a Moirallegiance?

She wouldn't necessarily have to, given humans don't feel the same way about Moirallegiance. Again, it's still up in the air whether or not it's possible, and we won't really get into it right now again bluh.

[gimmethegepgun]

So...how would Vriska help John in a Moirallegiance?

She wouldn't necessarily have to, given humans don't feel the same way about Moirallegiance. Again, it's still up in the air whether or not it's possible, and we won't really get into it right now again bluh.

I take your bluh, and raise you a glub.
Clearly, John is in desperate need of a Pranksters' Gambit recharge, and Vriska is apparently susceptible to John's persuasion. Or he'll reap the rewards of the Nick Cage seed he planted at a later time.

[tawawawa]

I take your bluh, and raise you a glub.
Clearly, John is in desperate need of a Pranksters' Gambit recharge, and Vriska is apparently susceptible to John's persuasion. Or he'll reap the rewards of the Nick Cage seed he planted at a later time.

But his love for Nick Cage is real, it's not an elaborate prank. The prank would be something more traditional, like his card tricks, bucket ( which is probably on some salamander's head by now ) or something else he has up his sleeves. It would be pretty interesting if Vriska takes it badly, causing the conversation in the past when John went by the pesterhandle ghostyTrickster and threatened to kill him. Could this be the conversation that lead John to change his pesterhandle to avoid the trolls? At this current point of time, his class is Ectobiolobabysitter, close enough to EctoBiologist. It's not that much of a stretch for Vriska to drop echeladder titles since she's big in FLARPing.

I personally don't see them getting any closer than Vriska viewing him as some easy to manipulate boy skylark to beat Terezi's Dave due to conversations between Vriska and Terezi in [S] Past Karkat: Wake up. Just because they both like Nick Cage doesn't mean Vriska likes John by proxy. He's just convenient for letting her know about a street tough maverick with nothing to lose along with being her player for the John vs Dave fight.

So far Vriska's been rather lineal with her conversations with John but I have no idea why she'd jump so far back into the past threaten him. Maybe because Kanaya was just talking to him? They do sit next to each other ( that must be so much fun for Kanaya ) in the lab, it would be easy to notice what the other is doing on the computer with a little leaning over.

[jumpjet2k]

Time for MORE THOUGHTS ON MOIRALLEGIANCE! Yaaaaay!

Kanaya was brought up as a possible "hot" troll needing a moirail to help cool her jets. I agree that she may have some violent tendencies that haven't really been exposed all that much - especially in her willingness to slice things up with her chainsaw without much of a second thought.

However, I don't see this working out because Kanaya works out so well as the "cool" side of a moirallegiance. She has at least served that position for Vriska in the past, and for all we know, she could still be there now. There's not really been strong evidence of a split between them, per se, although there hasn't been a lot of evidence of her serving that role any longer in recent situations. However, even if she's not serving as a "cool" moirail to Vriska anymore, she almost ended up as one to Rose until she made note of it and decided she didn't want it to happen. And actually, that doesn't necessarily preclude it from being the case right now, or becoming the case in the future - as we all have seen, Kanaya's not exactly the best at steering her relationships in the direction she wants them to go.

(As a fellow Virgo, I can relate, but that's a different topic.)

So it's for these reasons that I think it's pretty unlikely Kanaya's gonna end up as the "hot" side in a moirallegiance. Possible, yes, but probably no more likely than Karkat ending up in one. So back in the context of my argument of counting "hot" moirail trolls, I don't think we really end up any closer to the required number even if we consider her as a possible "hot."


Now, I'll move on to the discussion of Feferi Eridan that I didn't get to in my last post.

My basic argument, as I stated previously, is that Eridan really doesn't need a moirail any longer, so it's not likely that they'll reunite, as BYB has proposed. Reasons?

1. As I've gone to explain, I don't really believe in the troll serendipity theory any longer, at least when it comes to moirallegiances. I suspect that others still might subscribe to it, which is fine. At the very least, though, it's not as strong a reason now to insist that each and every troll must end up as a moirail.

2. Feferi ("cool") made a very good moirail for Eridan ("hot") while they were still on Alternia, as she made quite the effort to prevent him from killing all the land-dwellers. Now, though, all of them are pretty much dead anyways, barring the 10 that remain in the Veil with him. She doesn't benefit from the arrangement, either, because, as she said, he's quite the handful to deal with. She doesn't need to feed Gl'Bgolyb anymore, too, so there's really not a lot for her to gain from the arrangement.

3. Let's hypothesize that he could still want to go all genocidal and kill the remaining 10 land-dwelling trolls, and thus he still requires a moirail to prevent this from occurring. I feel that these key factors would deter him from making such a decision:

3.a. He doesn't have the power to do it. He's no longer got any doomsday devices, not that they would've actually worked anyways. He's got his big fancy gun, but all the other trolls have big fancy weapons, too. He's pretty much evenly matched with Sollux's eye lazors, as we saw in Make Her Pay - and that's just one troll! Even if he got all genocidal for some reason, the combined resistance of all the others would have no problem stopping him. So even if he felt like killing all the other land-dwelling trolls, he surely understands that he just isn't powerful enough to do it.

3.b He doesn't have the motivation. Eridan's desperate for a kismesis, which wouldn't really work if everybody but him and Feferi are dead. Granted, he could end up in a kismesissitude with Rose, as was (possibly) suggest in Alterniabound. That's only a theory at this point, though, anyways. He's not shown any signs recently that he wants to continue being violent, aside from a kismesissitude. And failure in an attempt to kill the land-dwellers would likely result in his being shunned by every other troll, leaving him with no kismesis or matesprit or even any friends. It just wouldn't make sense for him to try.

4. One of the recurring themes for Eridan is that he's never successful in any of his relationships. It's kind of a running gag at this point. Maybe he'll luck out and find a successful matesprit at some point, but he seems like one of the least likely trolls to fill all of his quadrants.

(This Feferidan argument is actually the original idea I was going to propose to attempt to debunk the Theory of Troll Serendipity. I don't think it's quite as strong an argument on its own as my original one, but it certainly does lend some more credence to my suggestions against a moirail pairing for each troll.)

Also, sorry for the wall of text again. It happens sometimes. At least I kept up our tradition with some random bolding, right?

[8oy Skylark]

I spent some time this afternoon analyzing the Conciliatory relationship quadrants, and came up with a few ideas I think might be useful to speculation.

For Moirallegiances:

The thing about a Moirallegiance, regardless of the attributes of the two people in the pair, is that they complement each other. We can talk about dangerous or danger-prone, or hot-blooded versus calm, but it's much simpler then that when you get down to it: It's positive and negative pairings. Like magnets, or an electrical charge; negative charges are attracted to positive ones, and vice versa. So what makes up a positive charge and a negative charge? It's really rather vague. But we can find several traits that create a negative potential, as well as several in a positive sense.

On the negative side, there are several traits common in all of the known Moirallegiance pairs that we can deduce. They are:
- Abilities that are a great threat to others around them if left unchecked.
- Mood swings between a dangerous mood and a more passive stance.
- A tendency to think of personal issues before issues that endanger others.

The positive side has several as well:
- Being generally in control of their emotions, as an opposition to the negative side's mood swings.
- Concern for other people's well being, and/or a lack of regard for self-safety.
- Less turbulent abilities, if any abnormal abilities at all.

This doesn't mean that a positive or a negative needs to have all of these traits, but they tend to have most of them.
This leads to some natural separations between characters, which makes Moirallegiance speculation easier. For example, Sollux would probably fall under the "Negative" trait thanks to his psionic abilities and bipolar mood swings.

On Auspistices:

This is one of the most confusing quadrants, because it involves three people instead of two. However, there is one thing that can be taken note of to make it easier. The purpose of an Auspistice is to maintain Calignous fidelity. This means two things; that Those prone to finding people to hate/projecting Calignous feelings are more likely to need an auspice, and that Once a central kismesis has been chosen for one of these characters, an auspice will probably be required for their secondmost potent option. This second-most potent option doesn't need to be solid hate; as shown, it can fluctuate between Flushed and Calignous feelings. But as long as it is a potent not fully flushed relationship, it can become an auspistice.

This means that anyone who doesn't have tendencies towards Calignous infidelity will probably end up auspicing a relationship, seeing as they have to fill this quadrant by the Troll Serendipity rule.

Edit: Oh look, my post is relevant to the previous one.

[ArmsAreLoud]

I would like to point out that Kanaya is attracted to the exact kind of "hot" moirail that she would deal with. She was an effective moirail with Vriska, and almost was with Rose: however, the former relationship failed and the latter never got on its feet because Kanaya's matesprit preferences coincide directly with the moirails she attracts.

As such, my theory is this: Either Kanaya will reach some sort of breaking point (a failure with Rose, perhaps?) causing her to shift to the hot side of the moirail pairing and require a calm partner, or she will not fill the quadrant at all.

[tawawawa]

Kanaya going "hot" would be frightening.

Frightening in a Hysterical Dame kind of way. I do hope everything turns out okay with Rose for her... so she doesn't flip the fuck out.

[8oy Skylark]

I'll just put it on record now I dislike the "hot" and "cool" analogy, because there are some people on the "hot" side who are actually not that "hot." Hence my further simplification into a positive charge and a negative charge. (This isn't about the tone, it's literally about the electrical charge. One side is always "negative" and one is always "positive," because they complement each other.)

On another note I thought I'd post something I noticed earlier. I was sketching one of my chart for the kids, and all of John's potential Matespritships are also potential Moirallegiances.
In fact, the only difference is that he might Moirail Jade but won't become matesprits with her.

So chances of him maintaining a relationship with both Rose and Vriska is fairly likely, assuming the kids get involved with Moirallegiance and some of the other quadrants.

[ArmsAreLoud]

The thing is, what is considered moirail zone for the trolls can be very easily translated to love for the simplified romance the kids know.

We could very easily see a troll trying to get into a pale relationship with one of the kids only to have it be mistranslated into matesprit flirting.

[8oy Skylark]

That's the issue with it. I think it's possible, but the chances of it happening aren't very large right now.

However I think that as long as they manage a grasp on the troll relationship system (if they ever do; they might not) they would be able to function as Moirails. And they already are be able to function as Moirails with another kid, because the Moirallegiance function isn't necessarily romantic.

The blackrom would be harder to fall into.

[Couch_Radish]

Going through as much as I can with the Flash game (Think I went through it all) I do think that Karkat still cares for Terezi.

Consider this situation: Past Karkat is asleep. He just woke up from Prospit being destroyed.

You play as Terezi, and head up the stairs to her Smelloscope. You use the Smelloscope, and you see Prrospit is toast. Old news.

Chest opens up, and use the chest, and become Future Terezi. Get your cloak from the chest you used to become Future Terezi, and down your red dragon cloak. Sniff through the Smelloscope, and you see that Derse is toast (in Terezi's terms, grape toast). Head down to the area where the teleports are for each troll's different area. Talk to Nepeta, and follow her into a secret area where you can sleep on a pile of wands.

Terezi agrees, with you getting the GAME OVER sign. Obviously Nepeta reports this to Karkat, where I believe Karkat will go to sleep in an attempt to rescue Terezi.

If this situation happens, Terezi might go back to Karkat.

[Lord Bob Bree]

The problem with that is, Karkat and Vriska can get that game-over too.