ive noticed people seem to struggle with understanding how “strilonde bits” work. they think that irony is purely about something being shitty in a meaningless, one layer joke.
do you think dirks room is filled with puppet memes because he actually hates puppets? do you really think rose lalonde purchased squiddles merch to wear and then hot-topic-ified it because she hates the squiddles? do you think dave wore the sunglasses john bought him every single day for the Ironies because he actually thought they were shitty and dumb??
the homestuck writers themselves really thought rose would name her own daughter “yiffy”. because oh haha isn’t that a shitty and funny name to saddle a child with. no! that’s not how their brand of irony works!
rose lalonde would name her child something overly grandiose but not technically horrible like “coraline constance jones laika lalonde harley”, then wink and nudge at everyone about how Sophisticated the name was; as if to say LOOK how silly it is for parents to be fancy about that shit.
but in reality rose managed to pull the book coraline off the shelf during one of her mother’s worse lapses at age 9 and read it eighteen times in one night relating to the main character so hard she cried. and she chose that name for her daughter partially because it’s near and dear to her heart, but also because she hopes her daughter never has to feel as neglected as rose did as a child.
like… i know the extremely painful mischaracterization in hs2 has been beaten into the ground by fans by now, but the idea it purports that rose lalonde is straight up mean and uncaring, especially towards her own child, still leaves an incredibly bitter taste in my mouth all these years later.
I love the dynamic rose and dave share but in the comic (at least for me) it always felt like they were restraining from outright showing how much they mean to each other
and it's not like dirk is any way better at being open, it's just that roxy is so good at it, she's compensating for them both