A discussion about Team Alphachronism

[thatreevesgirl]

I love the really great conversation we have going in the intro post. There are so many other things I want to know about everyone, so I got the okay to start another discussion post.

Let's start with our lovely OT4. Here are some questions that might spark some good discussion about our favorite alpha kids.

1. Do you have any particular headcanon for Dirk, Jake, Jane, or Roxy? Like having to do with their personality, sexuality, past, etc.
2. playerprophet shared her headcanon for how she ships the OT4 in the welcome post (with a diagram and everything). How do you ship it?
3. Do you ship anything inside of the OT4? (Like Jake<3Jane, Roxy<3Jane, or Dirk<3Jake)

Random Bonus Question:  Everyone kind of eluded to what mediums they do in the intro post, but I'm curious to know where you think your strengths are going to be when we get going with the HSO.  Art, fiction, other media, cosplay, both art and fic, etc.

Comments

[playerprophet]

Good questions, thank you, miss Reeves!

I have a headcanon that Dirk actually believed he was a sociopath for a while. I'm tired and I talked about it recently so I've got some more details here and here. Dirk is my favourite Alpha kid. Actually he's my favourite character in all of Homestuck. I am madly in love with the alpha kids.

And yeah my shipping chart has already been revealed so I'll skip that part - hahhaha!

My OTP is actually Dirk/Jake. (And Vriska/Kanaya but that's not so relevant here.) I didn't join team Dirk/Jake though because I wasn't really comfortable with excluding the girls. I'm also really fascinated in the dynamics between Jake and Jane, and Dirk and Roxy, and I felt like if I joined Dirk/Jake I would miss them. So why not ship them all at once?!

I'm not sure if you guys noticed but one of the teams (I believe they're still unconfirmed) is Jane<3Jake<3Dirk. Originally I thought "Nooo! Why exclude Roxy!" But now I wonder if they're going to play them specifically as a messy love triangle. That could be fun.

Roxy, though. :(

thatreevesgirl's headcanon

[thatreevesgirl]

Do you have any particular headcanon for Dirk, Jake, Jane, or Roxy? Like having to do with their personality, sexuality, past, etc.

Dirk: I have slowly, but steadily been building a pretty elaborate headcanon for Dirk. The biggest thing is I think when everything is said and done and the game is over (and hopefully everyone is still alive and well and happy) he will have some issues with socializing. He had been completely alone all his life, and until Derse, he never had personal contact with any other being (human or otherwise) period. I can only imagine how difficult Derse was when he woke up and suddenly had was surrounded by large groups of Dersians (is that the term). I bet he was very excited at first, but then overwhelmed because of his lack of practice in social situations. He hides this well. I think Dirk does well with Roxy, Jake, and Jane since he has established a close relationship with each of them, but I feel like he might be a little overwhelmed and awkward around everyone else. Dirk will play it like he is being cool and aloof, but I think he will be mentally exhausted and need a mixture of alone time and support from the other alpha kids to re-energize. Post-game is when I ship the alpha OT4 the hardest, just because I'm not sure they will have time to form a romantic relationship in-game.

I am of the camp that Dirk is pan-sexual. However, I feel he leans a little more towards men sexually but is at the very least demi-sexual towards women (thus Jane and Roxy are a sexually viable option for him). However, I think Dirk has made his hate of labels about sexuality very clear, so he refuses to define himself and gets pissed when others try to do it for him. He thinks labels are archaic, and the rest of the alpha kids just don't bring it up with him. Well, except for Roxy, who just likes to push Dirk's buttons.

Jane: I think Jane is very sheltered. In fact, I think I disliked Jane as a character at first because she is literally me at fifteen. I see all my silly, judgmental, overly-innocent teenage, flaws in her. However, I see such potential for her to become an amazing character, and she is the character that has grown the most during the story thus far. This makes me really like her now. I think with some gentle encouragement she will be one of the most pivotal members of the alphakid ship.

Roxy: I have so many feels for Roxy. I believe she is even better at masking her true self than Dirk. My sister is a lot like Roxy. Silly and fun (minus Roxy's alcoholic thing). The thing is, I know from my sister and other really funny people I've been exposed to, that humor often masks pain and depression. I think Roxy is doing everything she can to hide her feelings, and it will take a lot of time and a lot of encouragement (and probably a lot of fighting with her partners) to get her to become an emotionally viable part of the OT4. Roxy will be open sexually right away, but she will be the last to admit her love, she will be the last to cry in front of the others, she will be the last to accept that she doesn't have to be strong, funny, or drunk.

Jake: Oh Jake, you are my bicycle. Everyone wants a ride and you don't have a clue. He is my least emotionally complex character. He does things to please himself, but he also wants to please others. He reveres kindness, because his grandmother was such a kind person to him. He also doesn't have a very good sense of physical boundaries. He likes to tussle, cuddle, spoon, and just be the center of all the love (which works, since he is the bicycle). I have the feeling that when Jake is older he would be the kind of person to take charge in bed and give pleasure to his partners (and therefore he would get worn out a lot in the OT4).

How do you ship the alpha kids?
They are all romantically and sexually attracted to each other. In a big pile. I do think that some of the kids feel stronger sexually toward each other than others. I hate to do this, but I think Jake and Jane will probably have a few slight hangups about sex with same-sex partners at first. I do think this will dissipate pretty fast. I only do this because both Jane and Jake have had moments in canon where they seem to worry over this (Jane's reaction to Dirk possibly liking Jake, and Jake hemming and hawing over whether he should pursue something with Dirk if Dirk pursues him). I feel that each of them has a strength and downfall when it comes to relationships, but they all compliment each other as a whole.

As stated above, I think Roxy will be the most emotionally distant. She is very clingy and gossipy and sexual, but true emotions are hard for her. I think this is evident with her hilarious bouts of alcoholism and her connection to the void. Dirk will also be distant at times, but I feel like he will except comfort. Jane will speak first and think later, which will probably cause a few issues and arguments, but she is very face-value in the foursome. What you see is what you get with Jane. She doesn't play games like Dirk or Roxy. Jake will be the person who is the peacemaker. He is the glue that holds the ship together, and he is very honest like Jane, but somehow has a knack to smooth things over more than ruffle them up.

Do you ship anything inside of the OT4?
I'm a Dirk<3Jake shipper. It is solidly in my top five OTPs of all time. I have immense feels for it that can only be rivaled by my love of Gaara/Naruto (Naruto), Kirk/McCoy (Star Trek), Destiel (Supernatural), and Maka/Soul (Soul Eater). I love these ships with all my heart, but I never have any problems with open relationships and adding partners into my OTP's. (Example:I really like partners tossed in with my Kirk/McCoy, especially in the reboot version). Please, if you see me favoring this ship within the OT4, please stop me. I like balance in my multiships, and balance is crucial to keeping a foursome relationship together.

Bonus Question: I'm not really sure. My strengths are really up the whims of my inner muse. Sometimes it is an art day. Sometimes it is a writing day. However, I haven't written anything I'm hugely proud of in a year or so, so I would say that I'm more rusty at writing and art is where my strength is. I'll probably want to submit both at some point in the HSO. I'm kind of bad at the team thing. My muse doesn't always work well with others, but I promise I will try my hardest to make sure I don't voice my opinions too loudly, and work with others on the prompts.

[fayharley]

Oh boy, do we get to draw charts? I love drawing charts. Here's my general shipping chart for the entire Alpha universe (trolls, robots, kids, Cal) that's only half joking:

(Not pictured: The fact everyone but Jane has huge fucked up semi-sexual fixations on their deceased relatives.)

To sum it up? I just ship these guys as a fucking mess. I love messiness. I love people struggling to make all the pieces fit. I don't ship them as an exclusive foursome, clearly, but I can see them as each other's primary partners.

Breaking it down!

Jane: Of all the upcoming Alpha and Beta kid interactions I'm most excited to see Jane's with John and Jade. I know everyone is all up on the Dersecest angst, and that is great I'm not knocking it, but gosh I want more Prospit drama. And Dad! I want to know what the fuck is up with Dad. I probably have the fewest headcanons for Jane just because I'm so invested in what canon is going to do with her. There's just so much room for her to grow.

One aspect of her I'm terrible at writing myself and would like to see more of is her as a detective! A whole story about her investigating the tablets left behind by the Consorts and piecing together her own future with her friends would be amazing. Myststuck is easily my favorite flash of the entire comic.

Jake: What a weirdo. You folks are going to have to call me out on concentrating overly much on him because I just adore that kid. I'm certain something terrible is going to happen to him in the comic and I'm really excited for it! Also a world where Jake doesn't want to smooch his sexy young grandma is a world I don't want to live in.

Roxy: I think she would be the one most prone to jealousy, though she would have a hard time admitting to it. She has the biggest heart and is perhaps a bit too self sacrificing, to the point where she doesn't get her own needs met which leads to the jealousy.

Dirk: I do think he is at least partially object-sexual. I genuinely ship him with Cal, that part of the chart isn't a joke. I think that for the foursome to work the other kids are going to have to learn to relate to Cal in some manner.

(Also I'd love to see stuff dealing with Dirk and Jade, comparing their experiences having awake dreamselves pre-game. I'll make everything about Jade if no one stops me.)

Generally though my headcanons for them shift as is convenient to tell a cohesive story. My first Alpha OT4 fics were the ones with trans* Jake and Roxy. I wrote out my headcanons for that particular universe here. But that's just one of an infinite number of possibilities for how their relationship could shake out. I'm open to happy endings where they all fuck around on the internet together forever, but I'm also open to endings where Jane and Jake become evil overlords and keep their friends as pets.

In regards to shipping within the group I'm an opportunist. I'll ship whatever fits for the story. The only ones I really ship separate from the others is Beta universe Jane/Jake (aka Nanna/Grandpa), mostly for the sweet, sweet pseudo-incest. In the Alpha universe I'm all about the group smush.

Oh wow, that's all I can think of right now. I'll probably find more to ramble about tomorrow.

Bonus Question!
I'm planning to contribute fic mostly. My art mostly abstract so I don't think it's really what the challenge is looking for. I also make fanmixes sometimes! I made a mini Jake/Jane one that I'm working on expanding, I'd love to know what songs everyone else on the team associates with the Alpha kids.

[veira]

Okay, here we go!

I'm pretty partial to the idea that Dirk is avoidant of large crowds and terrified of thunder and thunderstorms. Imagine living in the middle of the ocean on an oil rig and having no way to escape a storm if it hit you? Plus he has his whole complex about being in control of everything, so it would drive him up the wall doubly. Also, the smuppets aren't for show! He's pretty furry too! I'm waiting for the day someone has him say, "Wanna yiff?" unironically in a fic, and then they do.

I love Jane a lot. She's so determined and confused, and one of my favorite tropes is people realizing they haven't been thinking critically about society, and then proceeding to think critically about society. Jane's going to go on a fun arc of that in canon and I can't wait. I also sort of headcanon that being MADE OF LIFE means that you are basically invincible. If she dies, she will revive. If she takes damage, she will heal. If Dersites mow the four of them down with Tommy guns, she will resurrect and go into a berserker rage to slaughter the lot of them before kissing her friends alive again. This may pose a problem if she ever tries to go god tier.

I really want to write a story about Roxy growing up in a carapace slum! So much! Just the idea of a child raised by an alien society is the coolest thing. Also, she made mutated cats! That is awesome. I like the idea that she would be completely scientific about her clonings, too, keeping huge charts and spreadsheets of thing she'd tried and traits she wanted to accentuate, not to mention alternate sheets for her experiments with the windows. She's so driven by her experiments and that's really interesting to me. I like science Roxy. I also like video game nerd Roxy, and I adore the idea that while Dirk studied the past like a textbook, she plucked out enjoyment from it. She loves her mom's books. She has a video game and console collection. She kidnapped a cat and gave him a silly name.

I think my Jake headcanon is kind of convoluted because he is too? He seems to live with a million fantasies in his head, different splinters of existence that he's lived out and thought over a million times in his head because he is alone on an island with nowhere to go, and he just has that much time. He has fantasies for everything. He's dreamed up a romance with each of his friends, in detail, and he has no idea which of those dreams he wants to become real. Maybe all of them. When Jane said she didn't fancy him, it was a relief because it collapsed that one fantasy and left him with one less to worry about. Her just wanting to be friends fell into the other fantasies just fine. He's got a lot of irons in his mental fire. All the irons. But he's a go-with-the-flow kind of guy, so whatever comes his way, he is very much ready for. Life's an adventure after all.

How do I ship the OT4? Dang. I have a hard time imagining them not having incredibly large places in each other's lives? I'm really partial to Jane and Dirk's absolutely amazing friendship in canon. I am pretty much incoherent over how much I love them and I tend to carve out dumb little paragraphs of them interacting in anything alphaverse that I write. Moreso than I tend to for the other twosomes in the foursome. I also really like Jake/Roxy mostly because fandom seems to ignore it entirely, and thus isn't supplying me with fodder as to how they work together. Lately I've been less big on Dirk/Jake and Jane/Roxy simply because it's everywhere and I feel a bit overexposed. But that doesn't mean I love it any less. Jake and Jane give me all kinds of feelings and sometimes I sit and remember back before she blew it when they had cute flirty pesterlogs, and I sigh fondly. Dirk and Roxy are. Well, they are complicated and I ship them the least, because I guess I'm a bit uncomfortable that Roxy doesn't seem to respect his choice to not talk about his sexuality (a thing I'm touchy about IRL). But as friends, I have a thousand feels about them, and I think that if they sat down and finally ironed out their issues with each other, I would be all over that ship. Which is what AUs and fic are for.

I JUST THINK ALL THE ALPHAS SHOULD SIT IN A PILE AND CUDDLE AND KISS. That's basically how I ship it. I'm not good at this. I'm the patron saint of gen. Why am I on this team? D:

I will be writing for HSO. I'm way out of practice with art and don't have the patience for it anymore. My taste in music is rappelling off the side of "hipster," so any fanmixes I would put together would make little sense.

[nextian]

I'm rolling around in delight at everything so far. What a good team.

Skipping the first three for now, except to say that I guess I'm the token Cotton Candy representative! But I mostly really don't ship them outside of the OT4; my headcanon for the kids is that they've been living in each others' pockets for so long that they can't develop a stable romantic relationship between any two or any three of the kids without the fourth there to balance things out, hence all the disastrous sixteen year old drama we've been watching so far.

I can't draw for beans so I'm here to write :) I can also songwrite and sing a bit, but I really make terrible recordings so any musical contributions will have to be covered by someone else, haha. I'm hoping you guys will be up for collabs!

[ferrrox]

Eeek I'm super late with this, things have been super busy! I am like 175% behind all of thes fantastic headcanons in this thread, though! I'm not a fiction writer at all, but these are all great!

re: mediums--i am going to draw stuff! I plan on doing lots of bonus round stuff, and then either collabing with someone for a main round or two or three, or possibly doing a comic or something if no one is up for it. My comic skillz are p. nonexistant, but this is what I did for a main round last year. I still do not know how panels work lol.

within the ot4 my biggest ship is roxy<>dirk, but mostly i just ship lonely kids x lonely kids.

one thing--regarding the possibility doing a game for the collab round--cool! sounds like people are into it an that's great! i'll contribute however i can, but am not a gamer at all myself so if we do a game i'll need people to specifically tell me what to draw.

Also, I don't know if it would work, but if we end up doing a game that could also pass as a story, maybe we could try to swing having both versions available for accessibility purposes? I don't know of like, ~*~acutal medical accessibility problems~*~ with games but am personally too ADHD/impatient to tolerate most of the console-based RPGs like I saw a lot in last year's HSO. I'm prob. weird, but I get super frustrated by the slow information gain, annoying breaks in convo, stuff like that? IDK, I know Homestuck is essentially an Earthbound spoof so most fans probably love all games like this, but if anyone else in our voter pool is like me we might want to see about trying to hedge our bets with an alternate straight-text version...

Anyway, this team is badass, and I'm sure we are going to make a bunch of righteously awesome stuff for our fave alpha OT4! and, to steal taz's great advice from last year's John<3Karkat team:

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