Thoughts on Kismesissitude
Jan. 10th, 2024 03:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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100quadrantedships recently. It features the quadrants of troll romance from Homestuck. They have to do with whether a relationship is sexual/romantic (concupiscent) or platonic (conciliatory), and based primarily on positive (red) or negative emotions (black).
"A Black Concupiscent relationship represents the Caliginous Quadrant. The romance is called Kismesissitude, and most humans fail to understand it."
-- Troll Romance Analysis
A link on100quadrantedships pointed to this interesting article, "A Guide to Healthy Kismesissitude" by Ask Toxie on Tumblr. I think that there's more overlap between human romance and troll romance than most people realize, but humans don't always put a name on it, which leads to people overlooking it and/or doing it badly. The patterns are still there. So I thought it would be fun to talk about this.
As Kismesissitude is outside the human spectrum of romance, it is often done incorrectly when intended to be a healthy relationship built on hate. Keep reading to learn more about about healthy hate!
So the first problem is that humans tend to thing of romance as based on positive emotions, and thus, if a relationship is primarily negative they do not classify it as romance. But they do tend to understand that both love and hate are emotions of passion. They are not opposites; the opposite of both is indifference. The position of "nemesis" is one of committed negative passion -- or as trolls would call it, kismesis.
Because humans don't tend to recognize this type of relationship as romantic, they get confused over the other emotions that it can generate, particularly lust and jealousy. However, this awareness does appear in tropes, and those tropes predate Homestuck as a canon. Hate + lust = hatesex or hatebanging. It appears often in fandom, but also in the mainstream. Hate + jealousy = The Only One Allowed to Defeat You. This is where it really shows as a relationship, as passion, when they get possessive about each other.
When humans don't realize that they're having a very intense, perhaps even exclusive, relationship based on negative feelings like hate and rivalry, they're flying blind. They usually fuck it up. But the confused feelings and fucked-up-ness are normal parts of this type of romance for trolls too. They're not so far apart after all. However, because trolls do know more about this quadrant, they have a higher chance of doing it better: the healthy kismesissitude of the featured article.
A kismesis is defined as someone that you hate. This hatred is separated from normal hatred by the dynamic of the relationship. As opposed to platonic hatred, a kismesis is special. Those involved in a kismesissitude detest each other, but would be lost without their presence, making life feel emptier. This is what qualifies it as a ‘romance’.
Most of the time, humans don't acknowledge this kind of relationship openly, and so it is rarely acknowledged that way in fiction either. But once in a while, you see an extremely explicit declaration scene:
Batman convinces the Joker to help save Gotham at the end by admitting that the Joker is important to him too (in a weird frienemy kind of way), which is all the Joker really wanted to hear. The Joker is overjoyed.
Then once the city is pulled back together and the day is saved, Batman and Joker have an oddly tender moment in front of the rising sun... wherein they declare their mutual hatred for each other. It's as funny as it is bizarrely heartwarming.
Batman: I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I hate you, Joker.
Joker: *GASPS* I hate you too!
Batman: I hate you more.
Joker: *holding back happy tears* I hate you most.
Batman: I'll hate you forever. *smiles*
-- Heartwarming: The LEGO Batman Movie
The purpose of a healthy Kismesis is to help their partner grow through rivalry. This benefits both involved by helping them both improve.
This reminds me of my series The Origami Mage. In it, the Origami Mage and the Kirigami mage are very dedicated rivals, based on practicing two very similar types of paper magic that are not quite identical.
>> When one kismesis is frequently better than the other and gets no challenge, then the relationship will likely fail. <<
I actually have a functional, surprisingly healthy version of this over in Terramagne with Dvorak and Qwerty. You can even see it right in their cape names. What makes it work is that they have a balanced relationship because, even though Dvorak is more powerful and skilled, Qwerty is just plain unshakeable. Dvorak can never really rest because Qwerty is always breathing down her neck ... a day late and a dollar short, canonically, but impossible to get away from. They drive each other absolutely bats. It is adorable. They're so stuck on each other that I could paint little spades over their eyes instead of hearts. <3< See them in:
"Off the Street"
"Beyond Their Failures"
"Going Steady"
"A Wizard's Fingerprints"
"Capes Make for Capers"
"On the Axle of Mindless Aggression"
Of those, "Going Steady" is the one that explains the whole nemesis concept in Terramagne cape politics. It's a very tight match for kismesissitude, so you like that sort of thing, watch for it -- or ask for more in any relevant prompt call. "Jealousy" is coming up in the January 20-21crowdfunding Creative Jam.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, a kismesis terrorizes his or her partner, but does not wish to do irreversible harm. One’s own definition of 'irreversible’ is debatable, however generally this implies that they do not wish to kill their kismesis.
This one is most dramatically demonstrated in the recently sponsored poem "Like Fragile Ice" when Jackie Frost skates into a truck during a cape fight, and her nemesis Contretemps leaps to protect her. In Terramagne, most cape fights are dominance fights (see the content notes). Black capes and white capes fight over territory, resources, and so forth. They are almost never trying to kill each other, or even do permanent damage, especially to a nemesis. That creates the potential for a healthy nemesis relationship, for certain values of "healthy" that parallel kismesissitude.
Killing one’s own kismesis would not only deprive them of a fun and challenging rival, but also leave a hole in the killer’s heart where their other half was. This is seen most heavily in a relationship that never truly blossomed, but the pitch-flirting was incredibly thick- Terezi <3< Vriska.
Pitch-flirting refers the provocatory actions taken to initiate or maintain a caliginous relationship. A more common human term is "pulling pigtails." Adults often falsely say that "boys pick on girls they like." It would be more accurate to describe that emotion as negative attraction than positive attraction. This is also discussed in my poem "Pulling Pigtails."
In human relationships, and thus entertainment, this dynamic is usually dysfunctional. You see it a lot in cases like Clark Kent <3< Lex Luthor and Professor X <3< Magneto. Or any other superhero/supervillain pair where you want to drag them behind the barn and give them a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex. Which is why Antimatter has that book on his shelf, and why they eventually worked out their attraction into a more positive direction, instead of "All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles." You can't even fairly complain that it's literary suppression of homosexuality, because humans really are that dumb in relationships. Clark/Lex and Charles/Erik? I grew up with boys exactly like them, in exactly the same dynamic, missing only the superpowers and definitely including the part where they hit each other because it was the only touch they thought they could get. 0_o
In the event of a relationship that becomes unhealthy, the quadrant system of romance has a failsafe- the Ashen quadrant. When relationships deal harm to one or both parties in a kismesissitude, be it to self, partner, or other quadrants/friends, someone will often step up to 'calm’ this relationship, mediating and acting as a buffer to keep this relationship from becoming pitch and creating harm.
"A Black Conciliatory relationship represents the Ashen Quadrant. The romance is called Auspistism, and it is not meant for couples but for trios."
-- Troll Romance Analysis
Humans will be more familiar with this as getting between two fighting friends.
I have something like this in Trichromatic Attachments. The three principles are the black cape Tarnish (Declaude Rowe), the gray cape Cavalier (Farrell Westover), and the white cape Princessa (Astoria Toller). It started out with Tarnish and Cavalier having a dynamic balance; they were sometimes adversaries, sometimes allies, but fairly even and both really liked roughhousing in the streets. But along came Princessa, and pulled Cavalier more into her orbit, which destabilized the balance between Cavalier and Tarnish. The jealousy kicked in, and Tarnish made a whopping big mistake with Cavalier, which created an absolute spiral of doom until the three of them managed to sort it out eventually. You can see in places where Princessa tried to damp down the conflict, but it didn't work as well as her usual mediation because of the boys' former relationship. It's not exactly ashen romance, but you can see the similarities.
Follow the thread Trichromatic Attachments in "The Things You Do," "Never Accept an Apology," "Spiraling Out of Control," "The Fourth for My Enemies," "When in a Dark Place," "Our Power to Change," "Bad Turn to Good," "Care and Take Care," "The Refusal to Be Victimized," "A Useful, Temporary Shield," "Heroes Are My Weakness," "Food and Cheer and Song," and "Because You Have Made It So."
Another example appears in some iterations of The Fantastic Four. There Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) and Victor von Doom (Dr. Doom) are rivals. Susan "Sue" Storm (The Invisible Woman) knows both of them and often tries to temper the conflict between them. It doesn't work out very well, but the thought is there.
Probably the most functional case I can think of is Spock, Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, and James T. Kirk in the original series of Star Trek. Spock and Bones argue all the time, over anything or nothing; Kirk tries to defuse the tension enough to avoid total mayhem. But you can clearly see how much all three of them love each other, because they are at times affectionate and they are all fiercely protective. In fact, any time you think, "Wow, they bitch like an old married couple," suspect kismesissitude; and if someone is getting in the middle of that, then it's probably auspistism (the ashen quadrant, which is a black conciliatory relationship).
If a relationship built on hate is healthy, however, then we must not forget that it is a concupiscent relationship, and it is one of passion. Without discussing what consenting adults do behind closed doors with a bucket, the nature of a kismesissitude, if it is working properly, is one in which those involved feel an attraction based on these adrenaline inducing interactions of challenge and antagonism.
See above re: hatesex. It definitely happens. It's just that trolls seem to be somewhat better at managing this sort of relationship in a healthy way compared to humans.
Another often sited and excellent (if platonic) example is that of DC Comics’s most popular character- Batman. He and the Joker are constantly at odds. They fight, they taunt, they plan elaborately around the next time they will face off like two love-struck teens waiting by the phone for their crush to call and plan a date.
Hence the "I hate you" example I cited above. That movie just made it a lot more explicit than other iterations of this canon, where it tends to be more veiled.
In the end, kismesissitude is a foreign and alien concept to humans- but not one entirely out of reach. If we look at these examples and dissect them, we can see the positive qualities of this sort of relationship built on antagonism.
I think it would be prudent for humans to put more thoughts into different types of romance, or deep and committed relationship, than they typically do. Ignoring it does not make it go away; you have to walk away and stop interacting for that to happen, and people usually aren't willing to do that. Mistaking it for something else is a disaster. If you have a rival, you need to understand their role in your life and respect it for what it is. If you can't do that, walk away before it really does blow up in both your faces.
Maybe some people need a copy of Homestuck more than The Joy of Gay Sex.
100quadrantedships recently. It features the quadrants of troll romance from Homestuck. They have to do with whether a relationship is sexual/romantic (concupiscent) or platonic (conciliatory), and based primarily on positive (red) or negative emotions (black). "A Black Concupiscent relationship represents the Caliginous Quadrant. The romance is called Kismesissitude, and most humans fail to understand it."
-- Troll Romance Analysis
A link on
100quadrantedships pointed to this interesting article, "A Guide to Healthy Kismesissitude" by Ask Toxie on Tumblr. I think that there's more overlap between human romance and troll romance than most people realize, but humans don't always put a name on it, which leads to people overlooking it and/or doing it badly. The patterns are still there. So I thought it would be fun to talk about this.As Kismesissitude is outside the human spectrum of romance, it is often done incorrectly when intended to be a healthy relationship built on hate. Keep reading to learn more about about healthy hate!
So the first problem is that humans tend to thing of romance as based on positive emotions, and thus, if a relationship is primarily negative they do not classify it as romance. But they do tend to understand that both love and hate are emotions of passion. They are not opposites; the opposite of both is indifference. The position of "nemesis" is one of committed negative passion -- or as trolls would call it, kismesis.
Because humans don't tend to recognize this type of relationship as romantic, they get confused over the other emotions that it can generate, particularly lust and jealousy. However, this awareness does appear in tropes, and those tropes predate Homestuck as a canon. Hate + lust = hatesex or hatebanging. It appears often in fandom, but also in the mainstream. Hate + jealousy = The Only One Allowed to Defeat You. This is where it really shows as a relationship, as passion, when they get possessive about each other.
When humans don't realize that they're having a very intense, perhaps even exclusive, relationship based on negative feelings like hate and rivalry, they're flying blind. They usually fuck it up. But the confused feelings and fucked-up-ness are normal parts of this type of romance for trolls too. They're not so far apart after all. However, because trolls do know more about this quadrant, they have a higher chance of doing it better: the healthy kismesissitude of the featured article.
A kismesis is defined as someone that you hate. This hatred is separated from normal hatred by the dynamic of the relationship. As opposed to platonic hatred, a kismesis is special. Those involved in a kismesissitude detest each other, but would be lost without their presence, making life feel emptier. This is what qualifies it as a ‘romance’.
Most of the time, humans don't acknowledge this kind of relationship openly, and so it is rarely acknowledged that way in fiction either. But once in a while, you see an extremely explicit declaration scene:
Batman convinces the Joker to help save Gotham at the end by admitting that the Joker is important to him too (in a weird frienemy kind of way), which is all the Joker really wanted to hear. The Joker is overjoyed.
Then once the city is pulled back together and the day is saved, Batman and Joker have an oddly tender moment in front of the rising sun... wherein they declare their mutual hatred for each other. It's as funny as it is bizarrely heartwarming.
Batman: I'm just gonna come right out and say it. I hate you, Joker.
Joker: *GASPS* I hate you too!
Batman: I hate you more.
Joker: *holding back happy tears* I hate you most.
Batman: I'll hate you forever. *smiles*
-- Heartwarming: The LEGO Batman Movie
The purpose of a healthy Kismesis is to help their partner grow through rivalry. This benefits both involved by helping them both improve.
This reminds me of my series The Origami Mage. In it, the Origami Mage and the Kirigami mage are very dedicated rivals, based on practicing two very similar types of paper magic that are not quite identical.
>> When one kismesis is frequently better than the other and gets no challenge, then the relationship will likely fail. <<
I actually have a functional, surprisingly healthy version of this over in Terramagne with Dvorak and Qwerty. You can even see it right in their cape names. What makes it work is that they have a balanced relationship because, even though Dvorak is more powerful and skilled, Qwerty is just plain unshakeable. Dvorak can never really rest because Qwerty is always breathing down her neck ... a day late and a dollar short, canonically, but impossible to get away from. They drive each other absolutely bats. It is adorable. They're so stuck on each other that I could paint little spades over their eyes instead of hearts. <3< See them in:
"Off the Street"
"Beyond Their Failures"
"Going Steady"
"A Wizard's Fingerprints"
"Capes Make for Capers"
"On the Axle of Mindless Aggression"
Of those, "Going Steady" is the one that explains the whole nemesis concept in Terramagne cape politics. It's a very tight match for kismesissitude, so you like that sort of thing, watch for it -- or ask for more in any relevant prompt call. "Jealousy" is coming up in the January 20-21
crowdfunding Creative Jam.On the opposite end of this spectrum, a kismesis terrorizes his or her partner, but does not wish to do irreversible harm. One’s own definition of 'irreversible’ is debatable, however generally this implies that they do not wish to kill their kismesis.
This one is most dramatically demonstrated in the recently sponsored poem "Like Fragile Ice" when Jackie Frost skates into a truck during a cape fight, and her nemesis Contretemps leaps to protect her. In Terramagne, most cape fights are dominance fights (see the content notes). Black capes and white capes fight over territory, resources, and so forth. They are almost never trying to kill each other, or even do permanent damage, especially to a nemesis. That creates the potential for a healthy nemesis relationship, for certain values of "healthy" that parallel kismesissitude.
Killing one’s own kismesis would not only deprive them of a fun and challenging rival, but also leave a hole in the killer’s heart where their other half was. This is seen most heavily in a relationship that never truly blossomed, but the pitch-flirting was incredibly thick- Terezi <3< Vriska.
Pitch-flirting refers the provocatory actions taken to initiate or maintain a caliginous relationship. A more common human term is "pulling pigtails." Adults often falsely say that "boys pick on girls they like." It would be more accurate to describe that emotion as negative attraction than positive attraction. This is also discussed in my poem "Pulling Pigtails."
In human relationships, and thus entertainment, this dynamic is usually dysfunctional. You see it a lot in cases like Clark Kent <3< Lex Luthor and Professor X <3< Magneto. Or any other superhero/supervillain pair where you want to drag them behind the barn and give them a copy of The Joy of Gay Sex. Which is why Antimatter has that book on his shelf, and why they eventually worked out their attraction into a more positive direction, instead of "All those years wasted fighting each other, Charles." You can't even fairly complain that it's literary suppression of homosexuality, because humans really are that dumb in relationships. Clark/Lex and Charles/Erik? I grew up with boys exactly like them, in exactly the same dynamic, missing only the superpowers and definitely including the part where they hit each other because it was the only touch they thought they could get. 0_o
In the event of a relationship that becomes unhealthy, the quadrant system of romance has a failsafe- the Ashen quadrant. When relationships deal harm to one or both parties in a kismesissitude, be it to self, partner, or other quadrants/friends, someone will often step up to 'calm’ this relationship, mediating and acting as a buffer to keep this relationship from becoming pitch and creating harm.
"A Black Conciliatory relationship represents the Ashen Quadrant. The romance is called Auspistism, and it is not meant for couples but for trios."
-- Troll Romance Analysis
Humans will be more familiar with this as getting between two fighting friends.
I have something like this in Trichromatic Attachments. The three principles are the black cape Tarnish (Declaude Rowe), the gray cape Cavalier (Farrell Westover), and the white cape Princessa (Astoria Toller). It started out with Tarnish and Cavalier having a dynamic balance; they were sometimes adversaries, sometimes allies, but fairly even and both really liked roughhousing in the streets. But along came Princessa, and pulled Cavalier more into her orbit, which destabilized the balance between Cavalier and Tarnish. The jealousy kicked in, and Tarnish made a whopping big mistake with Cavalier, which created an absolute spiral of doom until the three of them managed to sort it out eventually. You can see in places where Princessa tried to damp down the conflict, but it didn't work as well as her usual mediation because of the boys' former relationship. It's not exactly ashen romance, but you can see the similarities.
Follow the thread Trichromatic Attachments in "The Things You Do," "Never Accept an Apology," "Spiraling Out of Control," "The Fourth for My Enemies," "When in a Dark Place," "Our Power to Change," "Bad Turn to Good," "Care and Take Care," "The Refusal to Be Victimized," "A Useful, Temporary Shield," "Heroes Are My Weakness," "Food and Cheer and Song," and "Because You Have Made It So."
Another example appears in some iterations of The Fantastic Four. There Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) and Victor von Doom (Dr. Doom) are rivals. Susan "Sue" Storm (The Invisible Woman) knows both of them and often tries to temper the conflict between them. It doesn't work out very well, but the thought is there.
Probably the most functional case I can think of is Spock, Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy, and James T. Kirk in the original series of Star Trek. Spock and Bones argue all the time, over anything or nothing; Kirk tries to defuse the tension enough to avoid total mayhem. But you can clearly see how much all three of them love each other, because they are at times affectionate and they are all fiercely protective. In fact, any time you think, "Wow, they bitch like an old married couple," suspect kismesissitude; and if someone is getting in the middle of that, then it's probably auspistism (the ashen quadrant, which is a black conciliatory relationship).
If a relationship built on hate is healthy, however, then we must not forget that it is a concupiscent relationship, and it is one of passion. Without discussing what consenting adults do behind closed doors with a bucket, the nature of a kismesissitude, if it is working properly, is one in which those involved feel an attraction based on these adrenaline inducing interactions of challenge and antagonism.
See above re: hatesex. It definitely happens. It's just that trolls seem to be somewhat better at managing this sort of relationship in a healthy way compared to humans.
Another often sited and excellent (if platonic) example is that of DC Comics’s most popular character- Batman. He and the Joker are constantly at odds. They fight, they taunt, they plan elaborately around the next time they will face off like two love-struck teens waiting by the phone for their crush to call and plan a date.
Hence the "I hate you" example I cited above. That movie just made it a lot more explicit than other iterations of this canon, where it tends to be more veiled.
In the end, kismesissitude is a foreign and alien concept to humans- but not one entirely out of reach. If we look at these examples and dissect them, we can see the positive qualities of this sort of relationship built on antagonism.
I think it would be prudent for humans to put more thoughts into different types of romance, or deep and committed relationship, than they typically do. Ignoring it does not make it go away; you have to walk away and stop interacting for that to happen, and people usually aren't willing to do that. Mistaking it for something else is a disaster. If you have a rival, you need to understand their role in your life and respect it for what it is. If you can't do that, walk away before it really does blow up in both your faces.
Maybe some people need a copy of Homestuck more than The Joy of Gay Sex.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-01-15 03:55 am (UTC)It is definitely very different than Homestuck. Essentially, Disney Trolls is about horrible things happening to adorable whimsical troll-doll creatures who save the day with optimism, friendship, and singing, while managing to make a few very big and important aesops in a kid-friendly way.
Homestuck is (if I recall correctly from the fanfics, I never read the original) a story about the universe being destroyed and the main characters have to make a new one, with a lot of...well, lets just say it isn't very kid-friendly. Like, the troll's culture makes Sparta look warm and fuzzy, the humans are all kind of dysfunctional, and most of the characters are teenagers so they aren't exactly polite and polished.
If you are looking at Homestuck fanfic some of the moraillegiance stories are pretty good examples of healthy platonic-by-human-standards relationships and nonsexual intimacy.
A couple of them also have good examples of negotiating the Incompatible Orientation bit where an interspecies pair wants to have a relationship, but they first need to discuss if it is even possible, given the differences in psychology and culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-01-17 04:46 pm (UTC)-T~