#PMIO theory

[tfdtreasurer]

sorry for not asking about eridan but, why the feferi hate?

Don't worry anon I fully expected this question to be one of the first. Besides, Eridan and Feferi are foils to each other and thus any look at one is being done in the context of the other. Narratively, they're inseparable. My actual nuanced opinion on Feferi is that she's a bad person, a fascinating character, and yet one that I feel is so tragically misunderstood by everybody that it leads me to not liking how she's liked. If that makes any sense.

The short answer is she's one of the most casteist trolls out there. And not in the way Equius is, or Gamzee becomes, or Eridan claims to be. Her's is just a little too real and it kinda gives me icky vibes.

The long answer is... Well there's a reason a whole essay was in the works. If Eridan alludes to Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick of 1851, Feferi alludes to Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" of 1899 (which in a semi timely way, was published to the context of the Philippine–American War). In her first pesterlog with Kanaya, "burdens" is the word used to refer to her responsibilities. Not really enough on it's own, but then you keep reading Feferi pages. Eridan being the best that alternia breeds, seemingly exiled from living in the sea to serve her captives' needs. The captivity of animals that she's associated with bolstering that. How she espouses a desire to unite the races, but mentions having plans for the throne, implicitly retaining imperial power. Her weapon being named after the triple entente, an alliance of colonialist powers. How she remarks royalty is so civilized, alluding to the colonialist projects of that era being referred to the West's civilizing mission. The way she talks to Jade and is quick to use the r-word, like she'd have to make her speech a hundred times plain. Just the way that she often has other people doing things for her that seems to emulate the delegatory voice of the poem. Eridan being the orphaner for her. In the Make her Pay flash (which is the best flash don't @ me), she has Sollux fight for her as she seems to sit back. Even her creation of the dream bubbles is something she asks of the gods to do for her. And if you think I'm searching for patterns in the clouds here with my ancient-ass 1800s literature: just take a look at the regime of Beforus Feferi. How casteism wasn't abolished, it just became patronizing the lesser and pretending that considering them lesser but in need wasn't the inequality is was.

Eridan is interesting in combination with her because they're designed to contrast each other. Eridan is so deeply associated with hipster inauthenticity, pretention, over exaggerated theater, and explicitly mentions that villainy is practically a performance for her. She calls comin off as a diabolical sort "showwmanship." But pay attention to the way that each frame dropping their quirk. Eridan drops her to become more genuine for a moment. Feferi has to be asked to drop hers and gets mad that she's had to peasantify herself. And the tragic part is that although Eridan is in the position of the audience in that poem, in essence the soldier sent to brutally occupy the Philippines, Feferi also sees her as one of the ones needing to be civilized. Eridan is to her half devil and half child, fluttering and wild, needing to be restrained by a moirallegience she seems to have never wanted from her.

I don't mean to let Eridan totally off the hook. I see her character as being under a dramatic form of siege mentality, perceiving herself to be the target of everyone's hostility. As she's the orphaner, I feel vaguely inclined to give it to her a bit. Like yeah, I can't imagine that job title comes with the perk of making friends. But her siege mentality xenophobia primarily makes her think that everybody that isn't Feferi must hate her, to the point where she only trusts people when her relationship with them is adversarial. The subversion central to Eridan's character is that while she may be genuinely xenophobic, she isn't a supremacist, nor genocidal in intent. The weapons she claims to be amassing to conquer the surface aren't military, it's just whaling equipment she uses to prevent everyone dying. The Brand Whaling Gun and Bomb Lance. Some derivative of the Greener swivel harpoon gun (that I have yet to 100% identify but I do have the original picture used for the Photoshop). Broken killing lance heads (as can be seen in my pfp being held by captain Ahab).

So why do I hate Feferi? Because she does think herself superior to others, in a way that is supremacist. She's a paternalistic casteist of the highest order and it is gross.

But here's the twist: if people believed in the Feferi I just outlined, I'd love the character. Because I still do fundamentally believe in redemption and rehabilitation of people with really shitty beliefs. Feferi could've been a character who narratively served to demonstrate how her beliefs may appear good intentioned, but actually warns the audience of the trap of real life paternalistic racism that justifies colonialism with a friendly face. A narrative where she had character development and evolved alongside Eridan. Symbolically, the orphaner killing the idea of paternalism would've been goddamned beautiful. But instead, what I got, what we got, was the fandom never picking up on the nuances, the comic itself electing to skirt around the problematic elements, all leading up to this strange quirk of Homestuck where once you're aware of all this, you really can't look at cutesy Feferi fanart the same way ever again because it never gets addressed. And I think that's sad. But, until the people that like Feferi are in the same boat as me in wanting a redemption arc for her, I'm gonna stay her #1 hater.

[tfdtreasurer]

An Introduction to PMIO Theory

From here on out, I'm going to start tagging certain posts "PMIO Theory." I've also gone back and added it to my first post, which pretty succinctly demonstrates how critical the ideas contained within it are to this blog. So what does it mean? PMIO stands for Patron, Matron, Infant, Orphan. The theory at its most basic, posits a symbolic relationship between the characters Feferi, Kanaya, and Eridan. Controversially, it also posits that the characters of Feferi and Kanaya are flawed, and deserve correction through character development. They are in fact, not badass girlbosses, but kids that like all of the beta trolls, were uniquely traumatized by the manipulations of their abusive guardian Doc Scratch. It is this trauma that manifests in maladaptive behavior that ends up harming both themselves and others.

The four main tenets in more detail:

1. Patron

Feferi is the Patron. Her character, although not masculine in many ways, has a distinct patronizing streak that lends her to the masculine side of the "parents" in PMIO. A layer deeper, her multiple allusions to general imperialism and more specifically "The White Man's Burden" solidifies her as practicing paternalism. It is in the first PMIO tagged post that I explore that in more depth. The patron side of the "parents" is defined by being overly-assertive, or to stick to Homestuck terms, the active characteristic of Feferi's Witch class. The Witch class, witch (hehe) is of course the opposite of the Sylph.

2. Matron

Kanaya is the Matron. Her character, although so deeply identified as lesbian, is also deeply symbolically attached to motherhood. Her position as matron speaks more for itself than the patron. However, her being maternal is also bad, but less for others, and more for herself. For one, especially notable for a character who is so obviously a lesbian, her self worth is tied to the reproductive duties of the "jadeblood caste." Kanaya also suffers what I would call a chronic passivity, the same characteristic that sets her and Feferi's classes apart. Her first instinct to things that upset her is passive aggression, making her ineffective until too late at best, and enabling of others worst habits at worst, all of which hurts her.

3. Infant

Considered together, their shared aspect is their Infantilization of others, which this theory posits is something the narrative seeks to criticize about them, and the act of infantilization as harmful. It is important to remember that in the narrative as it is presented to the audience, Feferi and Kanaya are blatantly made out to be two halves of Hivebent's "bad moirallegiences," moirallegiences defined by the reversal of ever critical attraction to the pacifier clause in the troll romance exposition. The quote, for the reader's convenience:

"Trolls are a very angry and violent race. Some are more hot-tempered and dangerous than others, to the extent that if left to their own devices, they would present a serious threat to society, or even to themselves. Such trolls will have an instinctive pale attraction to a more even-tempered troll, who may become their MOIRAIL. The moirail is obliged to pacify the other, to function as the better half. The two partners in a strong pale relationship will serve to balance and complement each other's emotional profiles, and thus allow their other relationships to be more successful." (pg. 2401) [Emphasis added]

Contrast how these bad moirallegiences compare to the positive example of moirallegience in Meowrails. Nepeta neither patronizes nor fails to be direct in her criticism of Equius, ":33 < everyone knows youre a weirdo and a cr33p! / :33 < thats why youre lucky to have me to k33p an eye on you." Equius on the other hand, has a pale attraction to Nepeta and explicitly would like to pacified, "D --> As such, [Gamzee] is prone to being more violent and unpredictable than any of us / D --> Not everyone has been as lucky as I in the domain of moirallegiance."

As moirails, Feferi and Kanaya fundamentally fail because they're getting the order of how moirallegiences work wrong. For Feferi, it's a case of the exposition's example of mistaken signals, where she feels invited as moirail when in reality Eridan doesn't feel that way. For Kanaya, it's her fussiness and caring personality that gets in the way of properly expressing her own red feelings as Vriska uses her for her own gain. Both of them are attempting to interject themselves as a literal form of pacifier to their respective dangerous personalities, but aren't wanted as one in the first place. In other words, they are implicitly underestimating the maturity of their "moirail's" actual intentions and capabilities, and thus, infantilizing them.

4. Orphan

Finally, Eridan, as the Orphaner, was designed from the start to contrast with Feferi and Kanaya, and provide them character development by indicting their patronizing and matronly traits as harmful. Had things gone differently, whether you want to call it headcanon or the canon that could've been, or the true plan that was abandoned because Act 6 is a rushed mess, their character development would have been catalyzed by the Orphaner's symbolic rather than literal destruction of the patron and matron, eg. an Orphaning. This character development would allow them to effectively become their mature selves, and thus allow Homestuck to complete itself as a kind of "ensemble bildungsroman."

Using this tag

When you see me use this tag, it is because that post either primarily or tangentially relates to any one or number of these ideas. This tag is also not exclusive. If you want to contribute your thoughts to it, I am following the pmio theory tag and will hopefully notice the post. Or just tag me, I won't mind.

[tfdtreasurer]

im a pitch erikan shipper and i find it so interesting that u like them more in the pale quadrant ... i'd love 2 hear what makes them compatible there

Pitch EriKan

I'll start this out just with a quick word on pitch EriKan because it's mentioned and introduces some concepts necessary to understand going in: I don't mind the idea of them pitch, but it'd have to be for a very specific purpose. I actually tend to think that the quadrant system and kismesissitude especially should have been reevaluated as a social system, especially with the opportunity afforded by Homestuck's whole new universe thing. That being said, I have also occasionally played around with the idea that a tumultuous kismesissitude between Kanaya and Eridan does end up breaking apart Kanaya and Rose. At least temporarily. Like a weird fucked up auspisticism that only Eridan is capable of, by throwing a spanner into the works that allows the whole thing to be repaired for its benefit. Because I'll go ahead and say it: Rose and Kanaya don't have a healthy relationship in canon, related to fundamental flaws they have as characters. Look, I'm not saying there's not the real chemistry between them, there absolutely is, but other elements of their characters give them the capacity to ruin what they have. As much as I don't really have any interest in epilogues or post canon or beyond canon or "2" or whatever brand they're establishing it as now, what I hear about what happens between them, while a kick in the teeth, I wouldn't call it out of character for either of them. Yeah it's awful that our super sympathetic and lovable Kanaya is straight-up cuckolded, but she lacks the character development in canon to stick up for herself and prevent it, as harsh as that sounds. However, I think Kanaya could've absolutely received the character development to rectify those flaws and stabilize her relationship with Rose, if Homestuck as a webcomic actually bothered to conclude its story within its own canon. And the clearest path for a troll to receive character development is through moirallegience.

Kanaya, girl...

Yes, you heard me right. Kanaya has flaws. And that's okay. Let girls be fucked up and unhealthy. That's how you tell the story of how they get less fucked up and more healthy.

A quick overview of Kanaya's flaws, as I see them: The root cause of most of them is her passivity. Kanaya's default method of retaliation is ineffective passive aggression until its too late. When she loves someone, she ends up being a chronic enabler of their worst habits. She's prone to auspisticizing for others, a quadrant she herself admits isn't emotionally fulfilling for her. She's just unable to put her foot down for most things, which ends up making her fairly doormat-ish.

Less significant as flaws, she's also kinda fussy (whatever), and... if you ask me, just a touch socially regressive in a way that only really hurts herself. It's no real fault of her own. Kanaya is very deeply associated with religious maternalism and chastity. Her ancestor is literally the Dolorosa, she lives in an ivory tower, has a chastity modus. Where it becomes a flaw is that she connects too much of her self worth to how she can be a mother and carry the matriorb. Oh yeah and there's that whole thing of her reading rainbow drinker romances about forbidden love that definitely doesn't mean anything at all. In my book, she's a classically repressed CatholicSapphic™.

In the ideal world, Eridan and Kanaya exist to improve each other, like some sort of... platonic soulmates 🤔. A key component of moirallegience is the ability of two personalities to complement each other. Pacification is only part of the equation. If Kanaya's flaws are passivity and excessive emotional selflessness, then her moirail should be able to engrain in her a level of assertiveness and selfishness. Y'know, the things that Eridan infamously has in excess, and thus would theoretically balance out in a moirallegience. There's often a stigma attached to "entitlement," especially in relation to privilege, but we also shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. You cannot be your own advocate without some sense of entitlement. Kanaya deserves to be entitled to some things.

Let's veer back to me calling Rose and Kanaya a bad relationship, how heretical of me. This concept of Eridan partially serving as a mechanism by which Rose and Kanaya either break up or sort their shit out is so critical to my thinking that I came up with a clever little name for the concept...

VAMPIRE, VAMPIRE

Eridan, unlike Kanaya who is a rainbowdrinker, is a vampire. Well, another form of vampire, besides the emotional kind. She is, according to the United States Military Brevity Code, a HOSTILE ANTI-SHIP MISSILE. A vampire specifically built to strike and sink the RMS Rosemary.

Suspicious Detour

I think I've said before what my favorite panels of Homestuck are from pages 3328 and 3331.

What beautiful styling, what beautiful intertextuality, what beautiful character parallel, what beautiful everything. *Chef's kiss*.

While style can make a panel your most favorite, it can't really make it your least favorite. In a webcomic of so many styles: hero mode and sprites, hussnasty, SBAHJ... the worst a style can be is forgettable. Even "bad" styling, like late comic vriska or lazy background lalorbs can only make me laugh. It can only really be the substance behind a panel that annoys you so greatly as to occupy a spot at the absolute bottom. And this is why the panel of page 6064 is my least favorite panel in homestuck.

Well since substance is my issue, lets give this panel context.

"Ah, but this is Kanaya finally learning how to say 'No.' Isn't this what you want?"

The actual context you can find by clicking the link and going back a couple pages but the jist of it is that Kanaya is mad at Rose for getting drunk, which quickly segues into expressing why she's hates it when she's drunk. I generally like Rose. A quirky, smart but hubristic dork, what's there not to love? Well in this moment I absolutely despise her. I sympathize with Kanaya in her frustration of being robbed of the personality you fell in love with, and feeling like they're not living up to any of the promises they made to you. But after all those frustrations are voiced, Rose asks the question that page 6064 answers: "Are you going to brek[sic] up with me?"

Kanaya is essentially presented with an ultimatum she can issue, without even being the one that brought it up. A simple "Maybe" would've been an implicit demand to sober up or they're through. Yet, we already know Kanaya's answer. She doesn't put her foot down. This breaks my heart. I think Kanaya should feel a little entitled to Rose's sobriety. At the very least, for the promises made to her to be kept. The real kicker is that in the retcons, Kanaya isn't even given her moment to flip this panel on its head (like she should've) by saying anything different to show some character development. That's why substance is what makes panels bad. Because if you gave me the exact same panel with Kanaya saying "YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" it'd be back among my favorites. Hell, I'd be happy with "TEMPORARILY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Kanaya lacks entitlement... I'LL REMIND YOU WHO DOESN'T, THOUGH.

Eridan is a huge bitch (and that's kinda good)

See, Eridan is a pathetic little provocateur (and I wouldn't have it any other way), whose default mode of engaging with others is to W.A.H. B.A.D. (Whine, annoy, heckle, bitch, anger, demean). If there ever was any personality potent enough to goad Kanaya into active and not passive aggression through words alone, it would be her's. This behavior is mainly in service of stirring up caliginous feelings, but with Kanaya specifically it takes on a special meaning, because it is what she needs. In fact, there is already a canon example of Eridan explicitly steering Kanaya away from her passivity.

"ERIDAN: haha damn kan if thats your idea of offense bein made then i honestly gotta fuckin wworry for you...

This is Eridan essentially telling Kanaya that her passive aggressive sarcasm was so insufficient that she didn't even notice it, and she should let her teach her how to be a more direct hater. It should be noted that in this specific situation Eridan is fully aware that Kanaya means offense towards her, and Eridan's response is still that she needs to be more offensive, reinforcing the idea that she is goading her, and pushing her limits, even when she will be the target of that offense. Eridan already views most of her relationships with land dwellers as implicitly adversarial, so letting herself be the target is pretty on brand. It also paints their previous interactions in an interesting light. When Eridan "slut shames" her for being ashen quadrant promiscuous, well I don't think "how horrible" I think yeah shame her more until she gets it, she should be more entitled to a more emotionally fulfilling quadrant, auspisticizing SUCKS. When Kanaya finds herself nearly blocking Eridan, but puts up with it, I think "damn, so close." It is a weird moirallegience, one that can be easily seen as verging on pitch so closely it makes sense why you'd even call it that. But moirails being a little "mean" about their flaws is normal. Nepeta calls Equius a weirdo and a creep, which is correct and she should say it, just like Kanaya should call Eridan a fucking loser with dumb-fuck hang-ups she needs to get over. But an occasionally mean, bickering-full moirallegience is not necessarily pitch.

Another detour

Allow me a small tangent here to say that I think people have this warped, romanticized version of what kismesissitude is, instead of its toxic reality. To be clear, I'm not accusing you of this, my lovely asker, but I do feel I have to address it, before people tell me that they have a window into my mind and that I just want pitch EriKan because the nature of the moirallegience I described. Like, the popular understanding of kismesissitude is often just the kind of moirallegience I described, or of two enemies that strive to improve each other but never kill each other, but that's not really it at all. It's a mistake to look at the kismesissitudes of children largely imitating romance as being representative of reality. Instead, we should look at known adult kismesissitudes. Using the examples of Dualscar and Mindfang, as well as Spades Slick and Snowman, actual kismesissitudes are not productive or mutualistic, and seem to lead to murder and/or the brutal maiming of the other as naturally as red romance in humans lead to marriage. It sucks. These examples aren't really toxic kismesissitudes, they're kismesissitudes working as intended.

At the end of the day I can't really blame anybody for 'falling for it.' Black romance's romanticism is part of the story, and is literally in the name as a category of romance, complete with canonically overabundant media propaganda propping it up as an institution, not even to mention its officialization through mandated quadrant pailing. And of course, it's just fun to play with dynamics of rivalry but with smooches. Like I'm not heartless (spadeless?), I get it. But taking a hard serious look at the pitch quadrant, how haven't we come to the collective decision that kismesissitude is just symbolic of an abuser's manipulative normalization of toxic, destructive, creepy, dynamics with their victims? Doc Scratch's whole deal with steering Alternia's society to toughen up the troll kids for sgrub is meant to parallel all the same things Dave's Bro did to ready Dave for sburb. Why are still engaging with this creepy puppet motherfucker's institutions instead of throwing them out for being a whole crock of shit excusing his own barbarity?

So yeah abolish the quadrants yada yada and that's the main thrust of why I ship <> EriKan so strongly. God it feels good to be a hypocrite.

An Essayist's Favorite Letter: Why?

Look, any hypothetical that allows Erikan is implicitly inviting Eridan back into the narrative, which would be nice for me as an Eridan fan, but characters have to have purpose to justify their place in a story.

I don't see Eridan's part to play in the story as over yet. And I think her part is to be Kanaya's moirail. It is her justification to return, or at least one. If I were to really have my way, she'd also oppose Feferi (which btw is why I another reason I think EriKan should be pale, so that EriFef can be the one pitch (maybe (I'm actually not that sure if I like them together at all))) thus fulfilling her ironic role as Orphaner and Prince[ss] of Hope— by destroying the concepts of Maternalism in Kanaya and Paternalism in Feferi, but that's a whole other post. I can't get into it here lest this ungodly post gets any longer (edit: here's a start). And before I actually do close this out, if my answer here was a little indirect (or a lot), trust that I will always have more to say about EriKan in the future.

So uh wow, call to action because this became an essay like usual: to anybody else reading this, if you really hate Eridan and use that to say that she shouldn't be allowed back into the narrative, or that she "doesn't deserve to have a redemption arc," I'd like you to reconsider that position. Eridan is not a person. She's a character. In the language of storytelling, characters are just another sort of mechanism to communicate meaning. To constrain yourself to write without a character is like writing while denying yourself the letter V. Lipogram can certainly be technically impressive, but to be so may require denying itself its full potential. Eridan can be so much more if you simply let her be. For Kanaya especially, but for literally so many other characters too. Even if you still hate Eridan, think she can never wash herself clean of the sins that define her, or you just think she's boring, try to think of Eridan in the way she in her own 2nd person narration admits other people think of her:

But a useful one.

[tfdtreasurer]

The "About this blog," I guess

About me:

World's #1 TransFemmiDan headcanoner 🏳️‍⚧️

World's #1 EriKan shipper 🏳️‍🌈

World's #1 Feferi hater 👑👎 link

She/her for me, please and thank.

Once upon a time I thought "I should make an Eridan essay to explain my genius interpretation of Eridan." Then after writing a bit I had so many ideas it became nails to organize them. So then I figured I'll do an ask blog stuff so there's no essayist obligation to organize my thoughts besides tags. That was when I achieved true genuius.

Asking:

I am a dork-ass english student so expect some of my responses to be of dork-ass english student caliber. I am not afraid to dredge up the 1800s literature of my analysis, bitches.

FAQ:

Q. What is the PMIO theory tag?

A. This is your basic introduction to PMIO Theory.

If you need to know something about Eridan: ask me.

If you need to know something about my interpretation of canon or headcanons: ask me.

If you need to share your typical Eridan headcanons, big, small, cerebral, stupid: ask me.

If you need to share your Eridan related x-treme brainrot: ask me.

If you need advice on how to write Eridan: ask me, then discard advice at your leisure.

If you need to share your Eridan microfiction/vignette: ask me.

If you need to go to the bathroom: don't ask me, just take the hall pass and go.

Also, you don't have to be challengers to my #1 spots to ask (meaning don't worry if you prefer other gender identities for Eridan, don't ship Eridan and Kanaya, or actually do like Feferi. We're not enemies here, we just disagree on fictional characters and can respect each other).

I will generally refer to Eridan using she/her pronouns because that's this blog's prerogative. You don't have to and can use canon he/him, but just know I'm retransifying her in the response. However, if your version of Eridan involves a set of pronouns that you specifically want respected (e.g. a transmasc Eridan), state them up front or bold first instances of them, and I'll use them for that specific ask.

Ask rules:

Don't be mean to me I'll fuckin cry

The essay:

It probably won't happen but I ain't deleting it off my notepad app. Maybe some day, but by answering regularly enough, I might just go over most main points anyways.