Because We Don't Have Enough Of Quadrants

Prompt: Tears (pale table)
Fandom: Epic The Musical
Rating: Teen & Up
Relationship(s): Athena <> Telemachus
Adiotional Tag(s): POV Athena, hurt Athena needs a hug, past Zeus being an asshole, mentioned Apollo, hurt/comfort, lots of physical pain, angst, petting & soft ending.
Word Count: 1500 words

Summary: Athena wakes up to the delayed aftermath of God Games. Telemachus is there to help her.

AO3 / crossposted from main
{personal pale fills page}

So we did some some queerness headcanons for NDRV3 here. The thing about that is that we seperated the orientation into 4 parts, each for the quadrants along with the gender hcs. Here's an example of what we placed there [also we used ⭐ to notate pan-quadranted & 💫 to notate quadrant blurring];

Shuichi Saihara --> Ichika Saihara (she/her)
Gender: trans gal
♥️= grey-bi | ♦️= grey-bi
♠️= demi-rose | ♣️= aromantic

We saw it somobody else doing it and it felt weirdly genius? Like of course this could be the case! Because all 4 quadrants are meant to be diffrent kinds of attraction. Like on earth we only really take into account flushed attraction, or sometimes pale too (pitch tends to be turned into the previous two & ashen isn't considered romantic). But to people who have this romance system, they'd all have diffrent feelings about them. But it makes us curious if other people have also thought about it? And if so what are their headcanon quadranted orientations are for their fav characters.

---Clover (they/it)

[crossposted from my own journal]

We need more of it in my objectively subjective opinion.

Now, is the quadrant-romance system from Homestuck perfect? No. But it does allow for better exploration of relationships between characters then just regular romance (+ very maybe QPRs) tends to do.

Now, am I saying that we should 100% stick to canon and become super-geniuses to engage in fandom? No. But together with other puritanical trends I've been seeing more in fandom spaces, one of them is flattening ships to the point they no longer resemble canon. Which I wouldn't be against if people admitted to them being radically different from canon.

I'd still suggest having a glance at HS-trolls romance system, even if you have zero or negative interest in Homestuck, cause in my opinion; admitting that relationships that we wouldn't understand as desirable can still be so to others without these people being EVIL immediately, can help stop or slow down puritanical views, it did with me.

I'm not sure what to do if you want to use the system but don't want to add Homestuck terminology (except replacing Pale with QPR), but I still think letting ships be disastrous or weird would make fandom in general a lot more fun.