Thinking back on the idea that sprites represent the Platonic “geists” of their associated heroes, when we consider that both Roxy and Calliope contain “Nepeta-ness”, it starts to look a lot like the theory put forth in Plato’s Symposium that humans, having been created with two heads and then split into two, search for a romantic partner who literally completes them; Roxy and Calliope both contain different parts of Nepeta, and they attract each other because these different aspects of Nepeta-ness want to join together into a whole Nepeta.
Which makes complete sense in Homestuck, because that’s exactly what the cherubs are: “two-headed” beings who split in two upon reaching maturity, and spend their lives seeking out a mate who matches their missing half!
My first follow-up thought to this was that it makes perfect sense for characters like Equius, Gamzee, and Caliborn to be drawn to each other, because they are fated to be components of the Lord of Time, and could therefore be considered splinters from the same whole: but as I read through Homestuck: Book 6, on p.69…
Much later in Act 6, we see Lil Cal is a juju vessel containing the splintered souls of various controversial characters in the story: Caliborn, Equius, Dirk, and yes…even Gamzee, which means he’s actually here watching this ball drop in TWO forms. But all these figures are, in some manner, highly exaggerated negative manifestations of author avatars, who have amalgamated themselves within the body of English to wreak havoc on the story/reader. This is the galaxy-brained interpretation of the line. The most important character in the story is me, or more specifically, the most villainous, destructive splinter-composite of the author’s presence in the story.
Equius, Gamzee and Caliborn are not splinters of Lord English; they’re splinters of the author Andrew Hussie, attracted to each other by this exact force: the different parts that make up Andrew-ness want to reform into a new, whole Andrew, or rather a shadow of the original Andrew. Lord English is the pieces of Andrew Hussie disassembled and put back together again in a new shape.
So paradoxically, in the story Dirk is shown to be a seed for Doc, but outside the story it’s closer to the opposite: Doc was somewhat of a prompt for Dirk’s profile.
Homestuck: Book 6, p.390