#might edit this one into the post tbh

A while back I got an ask wondering if the “flushed” quadrant had anything to do with toilets, and I gave a meandering reply about the association of toilets/assholes and eyesight. Never quite made it back to the core question.

In the wake of Slurquest though (particularly the use of “pale” quadrant to invoke the whiteness of milk and motherhood*) it feels pretty straightforward: I think the term “flushed” may be an artifact of Alternia’s ubiquitous homosexuality, like the very concept of romantic love is entangled with anal sex.

* I framed moirallegiance as an extension of Alternia’s racialized (and age-polarized) notions of gender, where the black-boy’s tantrum is “pacified”, in the sense of a rubber nipple, by the white-mother and her white milk. But the notion of Rose needing to be Snow-White'ed out of her grimdarkness makes me wonder if this overlaps with a misogynistic trope too, the idea of sexually subduing hysteria… which would reverse the gender polarity and offer a position where women are the “blackness” in need of masculine “whiteness” (ie the colonial paradigm). In either case, the degraded are posed as irrational

I got an anon way back implying (but never outright stating) that grimdarkness was horniness, subsiding as it did through sexualized death. I think the above lends itself to that misapprehension, as does Damara’s schtick, where her Japanese speech (akin to Rose’s eldritch babble in its ostensible incomprehensibility) literally disguises an unrelenting (if insincere) demand for sex, representing a framework wherein irrational dark pockets categorically demand filling, presumed white.