Sure, let me try to articulate what I mean here.
Basically, the alphas as a group all love each other SO MUCH, which is awesome, they’re this closeknit squad and they’re all so important to each other and their relationships all make me feel enormous sprawling feelings, but the sheer AMOUNT they all love each other sort of blinds them to some of their own needs. They all want to think the very best of each other, and the occasional thoughts they have about each other that aren’t like 100% positive get immediately suppressed and marinated in guilt juice and they try not to acknowledge it and go back to focusing on the good instead.
So they’re all kind of bottling things up about each other, right? But it doesn’t come from any malicious place, it comes from a place of wanting to be the best they can be because they care about everyone else’s opinion so much but also knowing they aren’t always their best selves – and knowing their friends aren’t always their best selves – but if THEY know their friends sometimes are shitty, that means everyone else might know that THEY are sometimes shitty, too.
They’re all trying so hard to downplay the bad and upjump the good, which is MUCH MUCH easier to do with online relationships.
You throw them into physical proximity and suddenly those annoyances you all tried so hard to pretend didn’t bug you that bad and never talked about because talking about unpleasant things is, well, unpleasant, start to boil over. Put that on top of the stressful circumstances that led to several relationships starting the session OFF more strained than usual, and wow. They had no fucking chance.
I love the alphas so much – they got shit on by a lot of the fandom because their plotline was so internal and cerebral, but that is the kind of shit I LOVE. The betas were all friends, but they never felt like ONE GROUP to me. The full four way group dynamic never crystallized. We always found them interacting one on one and rarely ABOUT one another, because the betas’ conflicts were more or less external. The betas’ story up to Collide was them vs the environment, the game, doc scratch, sburb, the horrorterrors. The alphas’ story is so much about THEM. Their relationships. Them as a group. Their interpersonal issues and foibles and there’s this element of nitty gritty real HUMAN-ness to their struggles that isn’t super present with most of the betas who feel like more fantastical figures that struggle against equally fantastical antagonists. (The betas KIND OF segue into something like this post-Collide, but it’s not expounded upon as much, they’re split into different groups, and also a lot of it got retconned - Jade and John had some interesting moments on the boat but that stuff was probably the biggest victim of the retcon.)
OKAY.
Here’s an example of what I mean to wrap it up:
Jane and Roxy are best friends, they love each other deeply, you can tell from their every interaction that they care tremendously about each other’s opinion of them, but. Roxy has a drinking problem. This (I think) clearly makes Jane uncomfortable sometimes, but Jane suppresses it and pushes it down because she wants to think the best of Roxy, she minimizes the issue. No one ever confronts Roxy about this very serious problem she has in any real or effective way (not just Jane, NO ONE does this) because they all want to think the best of her and oh… haha….. it’s just a little foible… just a quirk…. it’s cool…. not a big deal …. I’m sure roxy has her life under control no big deal!!
Basically EVERY alpha relationship has something like this going on. Everyone downplays how much the AR bugs them because hey I’m sure Dirk has things under control he probably does this on purpose god Dirk you’re so silly jeez Dirk we’d really like to talk to you instead of your fucking hell robot sometimes but oh well I’m sure Dirk knows what he’s doing ho hum let’s all downplay how much this actually bothers us because we want to think the best of Dirk and can’t imagine him ever creating a situation he genuinely cannot deal with or control because well gosh he’s just so capable!
Everyone downplays how selfish Jake can be because oh well Jake is just silly he’s so nice he doesn’t MEAN to be this way I mean it’s JAKE how could Jake English ever do something as vaguely malicious as take advantage of how he KNOWS Jane never really says what she’s thinking if that thing is hard to say and use that to his advantage to give him a perfectly reasonable out on having to tell her he isn’t interested in a romantic relationship with her and then, KNOWING she actually did have a huge crush on him, constantly inundate her with his issues with his boyfriend for months thereafter. Surely Jake could never be that manipulative he’s so nice!! (NOTE: I love Jake English, specifically BECAUSE of things like this, I honestly would not like him if he were actually the way fanon paints him all the time, some weak cinnamon roll that can do no wrong.)
etc etc etc
This is why I love the alphas! They are a group of fucked up teenagers who are all struggling so fucking bad but all need their friends to believe everything is ok, and who need to believe their friends are ok, who want so bad for each other to be happy that they sabotage themselves both individually and as a group in misguided attempts to pretend at and manufacture that happiness without actually doing the hard work of fixing the underlying issues preventing them from TRULY achieving it.
(The one issue, as with most things in Homestuck that I have issues with, is that we are not shown the resolution to these arcs and struggles in canon, boooooooooooooooooooooo)
