Why do you hate the quadrants?
I don’t think the quadrant system benefits the people using it. Instead, I think it’s a tool of the Empire designed to shape individuals’ desire to connect and interact and love into a tame, compartmentalized form. In a culture where friendship is a “disease” and trolls are expected to automatically distrust each other, quadrants serve as a safety valve that limit a troll’s personal trusted network to only 5 people or so. How do you build a large-scale rebellion when trolls don’t want to turn their backs to anyone but their quadrants? The answer: they never did. The Signless tried to preach the gospel of a politically potent love that went beyond quadrants, but it never caught on and the Condesce was never overthrown except by the destruction of her planet.
On a more micro-level I think trolls, like everyone else, have the ability to feel a massive variety of emotions, and the custom of splitting those emotions off from each other is pointless and painful. Plenty of surviving troll characters in Homestuck don’t feel strictly in the quadrant system: Karkat dates Dave in the human way, and I’m pretty sure none of the quadrants fully encompass the way Terezi is in love with Vriska. Even among the trolls who didn’t have the time and proximity to move away from the quadrant system, there were excessive amounts of flipping and vacillation–and Karkat confirms that that’s a common cultural trope. Hussie even said early on that figuring out what quadrant young trolls are attracted to each other in is a real pain in the ass for a lot of them. People can talk all day about how trolls feel romance differently, but in the end I think they’re not that different from humans, and the idea of such a specialized monogamous where the feelings can’t mix without it being infidelity or indecency feels like a terrible idea.
The trolls find human friendship weird because they perceive it as being different than troll friendship, not because troll friendship doesn’t exist. I’m sure friendship being a “disease” was just something that Karkat said to be obnoxious. We have canon examples of troll friendships that exist outside the quadrant system and predated any interaction with the humans: Nepeta and Terezi, Eridan and Karkat, Terezi and Vriska, Tavros and Aradia, Karkat and Sollux, even Eridan and Vriska continued to have some relationship after their kismesissitude broke off. We have discussions about trolls being “in cahoots”. They definitely do not feel restricted to only socializing or organizing with their quadrant-mates, and even if there is no concept or reverence of friendship as a thing that won’t stop trolls from having friends.
Human monogamy is just as much of a construction as quadrants, really.
