yall ever get physically mad at yourself for how much you love homestuck like you’ll just be sitting somewhere minding your business and your brain busts in like “have you considered that every time anyone visits roxy they have to probably wade through 4,000 cats and jake teases her constantly about getting a dog and dirk stands there statue still while kittens climb his pant legs pretending their claws don’t hurt and dave just walks in and lays on the floor and is immediately sat upon by 6 individual cat breads while karkat scoffs nearby about how earth meowbeasts don’t actually care about anyone and appealing to soft human emotion is just an evolutionary mechanism they’ve developed to great effect while simultaneously sneaking a kitten into his pocket”
and you just have to be like I have work to do you piece of shit shut the fuck up let me live can I not think about homestuck for like one second please but it’s too late because you’re already smiling as you imagine rose lalonde sneaking food from her plate to a multitude of cats under the table with a perfectly straight face while dave dials up terezi to ask how to formally prosecute her for blatant cat bribery and wanton feline corruption
You know, beta!Roxy’s parenting style suddenly makes a lot more sense in the context of her having seen the specific ways that Jake Harley was a shitty parent and deciding to avoid all of his mistakes as hard as possible.
That’s the point, really. You can’t really build a functional relationship with another person, let alone a person who is dependent on you, by focusing on not doing things. Even if the things you’re not doing are objective negatives. Not being a specific flavor of shitty parent doesn’t automatically shake out to being a good parent.
I’d definitely agree that Rose was neglected, but she was neglected in an entirely different way than Joey and Jude were neglected. Rose self-isolated because she was showered with so much generically positive attention that she stopped trusting it, and Roxy either didn’t understand why Rose was withdrawing, or didn’t know how to fix it, so she just doubled down. Roxy hid a lot of aspects of her life from Rose and presented an empty caricature of domestic motherhood as hard as she could to try to compensate, and all it taught Rose was that she ought to hide anything she cared about at any depth, too. Roxy kept the house so spotless that any area that isn’t Rose’s private space seems almost sterile, and the constant senseless housekeeping made Rose uncomfortable moving around her own home. None of these mark a healthy relationship! But they do all read as reactionary overcompensations for Jake Harley’s behavior toward his kids – the frequent extended absences, the passive exposure to his “trophies” which Joey, at least, seemed deeply upset by, the complete emotional distance with which he treats them, the lack of concern for their living conditions.
(And sidebar, but with how Joey doesn’t know anything about her long-term babysitter’s family and doesn’t feel comfortable asking but suspects that it’s not a happy situation? Yeah, I agree with Joey’s suspicions; Roxy probably didn’t have a lot of good parenting role models at home, either, whoever was raising her.)
The point isn’t “not being Jake justifies Roxy’s parenting,” it’s "a lot of healthy interpersonal dynamics are learned skills and the new canon contextualizes why Roxy doesn’t seem to have learned them despite appearing to have good intentions.”
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