[The subject of this essay concerns Homestuck, and in particular the fraught relationship between the Alpha kids, and in particular particular the tense codependent threesome of Dirk, Jake, and the Auto-Responder. As such this series features TRIGGER WARNINGS for depictions of fighting in relationships, sexual and emotional coercion, gaslighting, head trauma, philosophical and existential quandaries, and of course, decapitation. This one in particular also includes feelings of suicide, murderous impulses, and self-loathing. Tread carefully.

Bold denotes a link to another essay. If you see a message in Bold, please take my premise for granted, or follow the link and read through the argument presented in that essay before continuing. Homestuck is complex and labyrinthine, and I had to focus discussion of any one part of it somehow or else we would meander in circles for fucking eternity, and no one wants to end up like Caliborn. This was my solution, so please try not to counter my points with critiques I may have already answered in another section! Thank you.]

Considering how much I’ve written on the subject, I’m sure by this point it’s worth asking: Why do I care so much? What prompted me to write these massive essays defending Dirk from the murkier conceptions people tend to have of him? Isn’t it more important to be wary of potential abusers than to give a male character the benefit of the doubt?

The first answer is that I believe the common perception of Dirk Strider as an abuser, or in some way capable of hurting his friends, tends to lead people to the common conception of the Alpha kids as an inherently dysfunctional group that dissolves, and that they never had it in them to be truly good friends to each other.

This is the perception that the Alphas were doomed to grow apart, and that when Sburb calls them the Four Nobles who cannot form bonds, we’re meant to agree with that narrative and hope the Alphas can find comfort and satisfying emotional relationships with other people, rather than each other.

Similar readings happen with Jake and Jane being held accountable for most of what went wrong, too. It’s just that Dirk pretty much got it the worst from the fandom during the years when Act 6 was ongoing.

And that mentality is, frankly…a bummer. I like friendships that stand the tests of time and circumstance, and reading about cosmically fated friends being awful for each other and ultimately failing at friendship on every level is…pretty depressing!

But I don’t believe this is Homestuck’s core thesis on the Alphas.

I see the story of the Alphas as a story about a group of people who love each other cosmically, intensely, with all the drama and fanfare of a cinematic movie or a Greek mythological epic. And I see them as a story about how even that kind of love can’t save your relationships for you if you can’t learn how to communicate.

It’s a story with a promise of reconciliation and improvement, and that Dirk and Jake are back together in [S] Credits tells me that this is the narrative about the Alphas that Hussie believes in, too.

The second reason is simpler: Dirk Strider is one of my favorite goddamn characters in the universe, and I think he deserves better than he gets. Dirk is the only explicitly gay character in Homestuck (Kanaya and Rose don’t receive textual confirmation on the subject), and as a fandom, we’re HARD on him.

Dirk gets assigned way more responsibility, competency, and control over the narrative than he at any point deserves, and it costs him dearly in terms of fandom likability. It’s reached such extremes that I’ve seen many posts and even entire blogs dedicated to the idea that Dirk doesn’t love his friends, and that he isn’t in love with Jake.

I’m going to be pretty blunt about this: A reading of Dirk where he doesn’t love his friends is not coherent. Straight up. It’s at odds with everything the story tells us about his motivations and character.

If assuming that Dirk worked together with the AR or wanted the entry into the session to play out the way it did stretches Dirk’s character, then ignoring how he feels about his friends and about Jake in particular is something like a literary pretzel act that goes horribly awry, killing dozens of bystanders.

Dirk comes off as pretty in-control and deliberately gives off the image of being cool with all of the abuse Jake is subjected to by the AR, however, and that’s going to be triggering for some people no matter what.

Some others just can’t decouple the idea of actual fighting as part of a relationship without interpreting it as physical abuse, for any reason. Both of those viewpoints are worthy of sympathy and compassion, and if you can’t unsee Dirk this way — hey, I get it! You’re not morally obligated to undo your triggers for the sake of a character, as if you even could.

But I don’t really think it’s the story Homestuck tries to tell, or even the story Homestuck ends up telling. It requires ignoring vast swaths of Dirk’s dialogue and several patterns of behavior that are every bit as noble and admirable as his commitment to his image and desire for control are contemptible.

Dirk, like all the alphas, ultimately comes out on top as a deeply loving teenager who will do anything to protect his friends. He’s the best written gay character I’ve ever seen, and I think his story is worth appreciating. So without wasting more time, let’s look over what the narrative tells us Dirk Strider — not the AR, not Bro, and not Brain Ghost Dirk — feels about his friends, himself, and himself as a 13 year old supercomputer.

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Dirk’s first pesterlog is with Jane, and as soon as he’s introduced, he’s looking out for her. Making sure she’s safe is his immediate priority, and once that’s established, he immediately revises the situation with the AR and Jake. He gives Jane several bits of rationale for why he allows their interaction to continue, not all of which sound good:

Note how even here, where he’s mostly upbeat and confident about the AR, Dirk complains about it’s aggressive suggestions that it’s actions and his own are one and the same. And it’s the final rationale that is the truth — Dirk allows the AR to continue doing what it does because it would be immoral to silence it. Not to train Jake to be skeptical, or to help it develop as a conversational partner.

This is demonstrable, because interacting with Jake doesn’t actually make the AR a better conversational partner. It certainly doesn’t make it a more enjoyable one. In fact, Dirk dislikes the Auto-Responder. Even early on in the story, he seems to downright resent it.

And it makes sense to say he resents it specifically for what it does to his relationship with Jake by playing all these mind games with him. I’ll lay out why I believe this is the case over the next two sections.

The next conversation Dirk has is with Roxy, and he has to deal with her being aggressively disappointed in his romantic disinterest with her. Despite the fact that he just committed his first murder and is currently stressed and unsure about what to do on Derse, Dirk goes out of his way to make her feel better about his feelings for her, even as she pigeonholes him into an understanding of his sexuality that he’s uncomfortable with.

Immediately afterwards, we get our first interaction between Dirk and the AR, and the barbs come out in full force. The AR keeps talking to Roxy, explicitly blocking Dirk from reading the transcripts as it alerts her to the fact that Dirk plans to make a move on Jake.

Despite the fact that by this point Dirk is already losing control of the session, he prioritizes Jane’s feelings, making the time to connect with Jane and make her feel better about having hurt Roxy.

At the same time he’s having that conversation, he accuses the AR of flirtlarping with Roxy solely to spite him and fuck with his head. The AR places itself on the moral highground specifically because it can give Roxy romantic attention, and Dirk can’t — something which it believes bothers Dirk.

That is to say, it can at least provide the affect of heterosexuality, which Dirk is not capable of doing. And it positions itself as superior because it can subvert the queer part of Dirk’s identity, suggesting he COULD be with Roxy, if only he tried hard enough. And Dirk later admits this is an area where he’s emotionally vulnerable:

Which means Dirk is right when he says it’s trying to fuck with his head. At this point, it’s worth looking closer at the relationship between Dirk and the AR. Throughout all their interactions, Dirk is skeptical of the AR’s intentions. It’s not just that he’s an asshole to it for no reason — he’s bitter at it because he believes it does not have anyone’s best interests at heart but it’s own.

Again, Dirk is right about this: The AR absolutely COULD have helped him and Jane out here, and chose not to. Instead it opts to needle Dirk as his control on the session starts to slip. And when the AR takes over as Jane’s server player, Dirk’s parting remark is very specific.

Dirk implies there’s already stuff the AR has done that he regrets. And really, there are only two things it could be doing that Dirk is referring to. There’s the flirtlarping with Roxy, obviously, which Dirk voices clear discomfort with. But there’s a more obvious source for Dirk’s resentment here: The Jake thing.

Dirk pretty much says as much, much later on in the story, when he calls the AR out for pretty much everything it did with Jake, and the way it involved Dirk himself.

We already sort of went over this in the last essay, but it’s worth mentioning again that for the most part, Dirk was absent from the AR/Jake dynamic during the session simply because he was busy. Dirk’s plate is full between Derse, Roxy, Jane, and Cherubs the entire span of time he’s trying to organize the session, and he simply didn’t have time to check on Jake more than once.

It’s also worth noting that the AR is something Jake and Dirk have talked about before:

They just haven’t discussed it honestly. We know this, because they couldn’t have. So much of the AR’s harassment is based on the romantic uncertainty Dirk and Jake are caught up in — and in particular, with Jake’s perceived reticence to engage the relationship — that it would have no power over Jake if Dirk and Jake had ever cleared the air.

So what’s stopping Dirk? If he hated what the AR did so much, and he couldn’t shut it off, why didn’t he at least work up the nerve to talk to Jake about it? Especially over the course of three years?

Well, before we answer that question, let’s take stock of the image of Dirk we’ve built up.

I think by this point we’ve established that Dirk isn’t just good friends with Jane and Roxy — he’s downright loving towards them. He’s constantly looking out for their feelings, trying to help them manage their friendship with each other, and invested in their physical safety and health. He doesn’t try to put them down or coerce them into anything except arguably playing the game, which they all need to collaborate on.

He worries about Roxy’s alcoholism, and he makes Jane a robot for her physical protection, just like Jake’s. He wrote an entire novel for Jane, and Jake’s Brobot took weeks, maybe months of assembly. These aren’t just endeavors Dirk throws himself into for the challenge — they’re passion projects. They’re Dirk getting “carried away.” We actually see what this looks like in action, during the loving spiel he gives Jane with regards to Roxy.

And for all I’ve said about his lack of agency during the events of [S] Unite Synchronize, some of Dirk’s most intense demonstrations of love and trust are buried there. Which means it’s time to discuss how Dirk feels about Jake.

I don’t think the fact that Dirk wasn’t playing an active part in orchestrating the events diminishes the power of the trust he shows in Jake by literally sending him his own head. The fact that he doesn’t hesitate to wonder if Jake will pull through speaks volumes.

But [S] Unite Synchronize does much better than that. With no words, the sequence of panels between these two flashes do more to illustrate the depth Dirk’s feelings for Jake than any other visual or written storytelling technique in Homestuck does at expressing any other concept — save, perhaps, for the symbolic poetry of Brain Ghost Dirk.

Remember the lanterns on Jane’s planet? These lamps track the living states of each of the Alpha kids. Once a kid loses one of their lives — either their real self, or their dream self — their lantern goes dark, permanently. Jake’s lantern is unlit from the start because his dream self is dead.

I always kind of wondered what the lamps were meant to foreshadow, figuring they would serve some bigger purpose later on. Obviously, they’re a nice little bit of world-building detail — Jane is a Life player, it makes sense that her land would include ways to track the lives of each kid. But they do serve another purpose in the story.

They’re meant to show us just what it is that Dirk feels for Jake.

Let’s go through the sequence where they feature heavily — the leadup to and execution of [S] Unite, and I’ll explain how. Please make sure to click the hyperlinks for this section, and view the lanterns before continuing.

Both Roxy’s and Jane’s lanterns go dark in sequence, immediately after both of them are killed. When we reach the panels, note that when Dirk revives them during the events of [S] Unite Synchronize, their lanterns do not turn back on.

Dirk’s lantern darkens when his dream self and real self are both knocked unconscious, but it keeps shining dimly. It isn’t until Aranea wakes his real self up that it lights up again. Immediately after that, Dirk executes [S] Synchronize, decapitates himself, and the lamp goes dark.

Then Jake kisses Dirk’s head, and Dirk’s lantern acts unlike the others. Dirk is down to one life now, so it should remain turned off. Instead it lights back up more vibrantly than we ever see any of the lanterns shine, except for when the kids go God Tier, until it ultimately explodes.

There’s no God Tiering here, though. Just [S] Unite, which starts off with a dazzlingly, poundingly bright Heart symbol, in an aesthetic touch that will be echoed by the Mind symbol in [S] Terezi Remem8er.

This is a flourish of visual storytelling. Dirk and Jake’s corpsesmooch is muddled and horrible for both of them, and both have their agency usurped by the AR in orchestrating it. Even so, it’s also got the distinction of being the only corpse kiss shared between two people who both admitted to having feelings for the other.

And it empowers Dirk, literally — the same way it’s implied Jake’s faith in him empowered him to make the AR, which we’ll touch on a little later. The sheer intensity of Dirk’s feelings are such that they simply break the lantern trying to portray them.

But some people aren’t convinced by visual storytelling alone. Can we prove that Dirk loves Jake more conclusively, give ourselves something to point to in the text? And can the intensity of that love, coupled with Dirk and Jake’s communication issues, explain why Dirk couldn’t bring himself to talk to Jake about his feelings?

I believe the answer to both questions is yes, and to prove it, we’re going to put a microscope to their first and only conversation together in the entire comic.

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This conversation changes everything about the context between Dirk, Jake, the Brobot, and the AR. It’s tone is wholly distinct from any of Jake’s interactions with any Dirk splinter, and it goes a long way in explaining why Jake regards Dirk as being so much more agreeable and helpful than the AR.

It also teaches us a lot about the root of Dirk and Jake’s problems, and the nature of Dirk’s relationship to the AR.

But I’ve written over 10,000 words to get here, so first we’re gonna fucking talk about how cute these boys are. Jake is fucking dazzled whenever Dirk says anything even remotely nice to him, and his ability to listen to Dirk talk about how cool he is without an ounce of cynicism honestly leaves me stunned.

Meanwhile, if Dirk sounds sweet when he talks to Jane and Roxy, then with Jake he’s downright saccharine. This is night and day from the interactions between Jake and the AR. Dirk and Jake tease each other and banter over movies, each other’s aesthetic tastes, and other things — but they’re never mean to each other. On the contrary,

While practically every other character denigrates Jake’s intelligence at some point, Dirk flatters it — countering Jake’s belittling of himself by mentioning how smart he is sometimes. It’s also worth noting how goddamn flustered he gets when Jake implies Dirk has thought about how to visit him.

And while Dirk likes to portray himself as hypercompetent in front of others, with Jake, he tends to play his skills down. And while many people doubt whether Dirk ever really loved Jake or if he just latched on to him as the only male around (Dirk included), it’s notable that what Dirk repeatedly seems to be drawn to is something specific about Jake.

Dirk is in deep, even at thirteen. Which tragically segues us out of the sweet, intimate, mutually bashful friendship we allowed ourselves to linger in and back into the flood of problems they’ve set up for themselves by 16.

By now, we’ve established that Dirk is absolutely in love with Jake. Not lust for the only guy around or condescending, controlling affection. Love. The kind of love that overflows lanterns until they explode and reduces a stoic coolguy to a stammering subject changer who can’t stop complimenting his cute, dorky best friend.

We’ve also established that, while Dirk doesn’t feel guilty about his sexuality per se, he does kind of feel guilty for how it affects the people around him. And what does Dirk know about Jake’s feelings, at 13?

Oh. Right.

In this pesterlog, Dirk tries several times to get Jake to open up, or leaves the door open for Jake to initiate a discussion of sexuality and attraction:

And Dirk is well aware Jake knows what being gay IS, because they talk about it right here, too:

What you’re looking at here is a gay teen making a joke about queerness to their best friend, and watching said best friend react defensively. This, in the fraught world of being a gay teenager, is pretty much as shit as it gets. Dirk rolls with it because Dirk rolls with everything, and it isn’t malicious behavior on Jake’s part, but that doesn’t mean it’s not harmful.

Between this, Roxy’s disappointment, and Jane’s total obliviousness, Dirk gets put through a fairly rough time for his gayness. If he pursues Jake regardless, it’s only because Jake flirts with him so damn hard at the same time as he slips his way out of any actual talking about sexuality.

Jake is every bit as interested as Dirk is, for the record — he’s just a 13 year old boy, and not ready to talk about it yet. He will be.

Still, the impression Dirk comes away with is that Jake is dancing around an uncomfortable subject, and that impression sticks. Dirk is getting mixed messages from Jake both throughout this conversation, and implicitly for the 3 year span of their friendship thereafter — further complicated by the sudden, unexpected presence of the AR. It’s romantic antagonism even reflects Dirk’s worries in this regard.

These are the ‘key subtleties’ Dirk refers to in his pesterlog with Jane. The fundamental diagnosis of Dirk and Jake’s dynamic is correct, here — but the AR turns it into a verbal weapon against Jake on Dirk’s behalf, without Dirk’s consent.

The only way to defuse the situation would be for Dirk and Jake to…talk about their dynamic. But Dirk has tried opening that conversation in a way that was comfortable for him years ago, and he failed spectacularly. Not only that, but in the wake of that conversation he was caught off guard by Jake’s initial poor reception to the Brobot, and was generally given mixed-messages mostly indicating Jake’s lack of romantic interest in him.

In three years’ time, Dirk has regrouped somewhat. But talking to Jake about this stuff is still clearly a big deal for Dirk. Something he has to prepare for, and struggles with thinking about. I mean, look at what just being asked to broach the subject does to Mr. Stoic Aloof Badass over here:

Dirk even admits it was a real concern for him later, during the conversation when he comes clean with Jane.

So essentially, as I see it, the amount of responsibility you’re willing to assign Dirk for the AR depends on how comfortable you are demanding of a queer teenager that he officially come out to his best friend who has already sort of demonstrated that he is not particularly receptive, AND to have that teenager confess their VERY intense feelings to that friend at the same time.

While also apologizing for the harassment and abuse performed on that friend by what is essentially a sort of younger sibling with access to all of said queer teen’s secrets, and the processing power of a supercomputer. A younger sibling said teen is personally responsible for, not unlike a parent would be.

It’s…a lot to ask of a perfectly fallible 16 year old boy.

And it’s no wonder that Dirk came off desperate and needy when he was dating Jake while trying to keep a lid on all those questions and feelings — He was worried Jake was straight, and only dating him because the AR bullied him into it.

Was it a mistake to avoid the subject for so long? Absolutely, and Dirk, like all the Alphas, made plenty of those. But I don’t really think it’s a particularly coercive or abusive act — just a teenaged failure to communicate.

But don’t worry! For those of you who do think this was another part of his abusive habits, Dirk Strider is right there with you. Because no one demands more responsibility from Dirk than he does.

AR may have been a mistake Dirk couldn’t have predicted, and the Brobot may have been a romantic gift meant to let Jake live out his dreams of adventure gone wrong, but those facts aren’t particularly important to Dirk.

Both are definitely among the things Dirk blames himself for, especially after listening to Dave’s speech about his Bro. He’s decided he’s responsible for everything the AR said and did, and that he’s directly accountable for hurting Jake, even for the things he didn’t say.

He reaches this conclusion before he even God Tiers, and it’s built up throughout Dirk’s narrative. He’s uncomfortable with the implications of sharing an identity with the AR, and sees his own feelings too clearly in it’s actions, leading him to conflate their actions as indistinguishable from one another’s.

His self-loathing and struggles with his perception of himself and his own capabilities, as he perceives them through the AR’s actions, culminates with a nervous breakdown where he stands on a rooftop and tries to perform ritualistic suicide-by-proxy while having an argument with the AR.

He sits on the edge of a rooftop for this. The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle. This is pretty clear suicidal behavior, and Dirk is pushed to the breaking point explicitly because he believes he’s hurt Jake to the point that he simply ran away and that he is indeed the same as the AR. He comes pretty damn close to killing the AR, and symbolically/kind of literally/probably literally, himself.

He doesn’t, ultimately — because it convinces him that it has actual feelings, and does not want to die. Once again, Dirk’s commitment to preserving life and making the moral choice when he’s in a position of power over another wins out.

But by the time he meets Dave, he’s still pretty much resigned to the fact that he’s critically, irreparably awful. Exactly the way Jake believes all his friends hate him now and that he’s destined to be alone forever. He’s decided he shares some responsibility for all versions of Dirk, that have ever existed — including Bro.

A lot of people seem to read this as a victory for his character, of sorts. Like, woo-hoo, he realized he’s abusive! He can get better now! And I think there’s value in that reading, don’t get me wrong. But as I’ve expressed over the course of this series, I really don’t feel there’s much that Dirk himself has done to put him on that level.

There’s plenty that he’s done that makes him bad at communicating, and stressful to be friends with — but not any more than any of the other Alpha kids. Which means what he’s really taking ownership of here is the AR’s actions, as well as those of his adult self.

And that he’s willingly doing that doesn’t objectively render Dirk Strider himself a canonical abuser, any more than Jake’s bout of depression means he really is inherently a loner? It doesn’t actually imply anything about how we should read his actions up until now.

What it does imply is Dirk’s commitment to a philosophy — namely, that there is an intrinsic element of “Dirk Strider” that he has to be responsible for, and that any bad action taken by any version of himself is one he’s personally accountable for.

Dave disagrees with this notion, however! And I do too. Dirk may have the potential to become someone like Bro, or like the AR, but the Dirk Strider who becomes one of our heroes doesn’t become either of those people — he becomes himself. Jake English grew up to become a person who lets babies dual-wield flintlock pistols while he goes on a date as Grandpa, and we don’t hold him accountable for that.

What we’re left with, then, is actually a philosophical debate between two perspectives. What’s truly most important to your identity — the person you’re naturally predisposed to be, or the person you choose to become?

Should Dirk forever understand himself as inherently broken in some regard, fundamentally “bad”, but with the potential to rise to “Decent”, like he’s currently doing? Or is Dave right to judge Dirk based primarily on his own words and actions?

I would agree with the latter notion. The reason why is simple: the argument that a person’s Ultimate Self can be inherently good or inherently bad, and that a single splinter of that Ultimate Self should have to reckon with that reality, is functionally identical to the idea of Original Sin.

It means that there’s something intrinsic to Dirk that is corrupt in some way. That he’s deeply tarnished, in a way his friends are not, and he should keep an eye out for his harmful actions to a degree greater than others do, because his capacity for Badness is Just That Big. There is a level of sin inherent to his person that Dirk feels he has to atone for under this understanding.

And considering that we’re talking about the only explicitly gay character in the entire comic, that…isn’t a narrative I particularly like for Dirk. Especially when so much of his personal turmoil revolves around being unable to make his friends happy specifically because of his sexuality.

He’s feels guilty he can’t give Roxy what she wants, guilty he wants Jake romantically, and guilty he wants Jake romantically AGAIN, but this time because he knows Jane also likes him. Pretty much all of his conflicts with his friends feature his sexuality, and both theirs and his own inability to talk about it in a healthy way.

But more than anything, I don’t like it because it makes it impossible for Dirk to begin distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy boundaries. Dirk has seemingly decided everything he did growing up was awful for Jake, when that’s demonstrably untrue.

It’s a carpet bombing approach that isn’t actually any more nuanced or workable than it would have been for him to reject any possibility that he is in any way responsible for anything that went wrong. Which is why I’m glad the narrative, up until now, has landed on a middle ground:

Leave it to Homestuck to do so much with three snapchat pictures that I don’t know what to do with myself. The flower crowns are a nice visual shorthand to let us know both Jake and Dirk are dealing with the toxic masculinity and heteronormativity that kept Dirk from speaking up and being honest about his emotions, meaning Jake finally has the emotionally available partner he wanted. (And so does Dirk.)

But the fights are even more telling. This is such a 180 from Dirk thinking he was a completely toxic influence in every part of Jake’s life that it makes my heart swell at least three sizes.

Because the fact that Dirk would start a fight between them, and that Jake would snapchat it, means that they’ve talked about their issues and relationship enough that Dirk knows Jake genuinely liked fighting with the Brobot, and that was never a big issue in their relationship.

It means not only that Dirk is making strides in being emotionally available for Jake, but also that he’s accepted that there are parts of Jake’s past that he’s responsible for that weren’t inherently toxic and damaging. He’s begun to admit nuance and complexity into his understanding of himself, and he’s begun to really communicate with his friends along the way.

And goddamn if that isn’t the happiest ending to a story I ever saw.

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Don’t get me wrong. I, like many, would love to see Dirk and Jake’s reconciliation and happiness together in more detail. (Hell, I pretty much wrote a small novel about them, just because I wanted to see their romantic reconciliation play out in detail.) I could explore this romance pretty much forever, and I don’t begrudge people who wish there were more!

But what we’ve got right now, as far as I’m concerned, is absolutely one of the best gay romance narratives ever seen in fiction, and I hope someday more people appreciate and enjoy it like I do.

And there’s plenty of future content featuring them to come, seeing as the snapchat could be giving us more post-canon content any moment, the Epilogue is set to heavily feature Caliborn’s Masterpiece, and Hiveswap’s trailer is in many ways a love letter to Dirk, Jane and Roxy from Grandpa’s perspective.

And after Hiveswap — well, who knows? Homestuck as a comic may be “over”, but if Hiveswap is successful, Homestuck as an intellectual property could go on forever. The most exciting thing about Homestuck has always been that I’ve never known what it was going to do next, and in that sense, this present moment is more Homestuck than ever.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. I hope it’s changed how you see Homestuck! And if it doesn’t, or you disagree with me, I’d love to hear why. But more than anything, I hope you’ll join me on whatever adventure Hussie and his team dream up next. Hopefully, things won’t ever stop from keep happening.

[The subject of this essay concerns Homestuck, and in particular the fraught relationship between the Alpha kids, and in particular particular the tense codependent threesome of Dirk, Jake, and the Auto-Responder. As such this series features TRIGGER WARNINGS for depictions of fighting in relationships, sexual and emotional coercion, gaslighting, head trauma, philosophical and existential quandaries, and of course, decapitation. Tread carefully.

Bold denotes a link to another essay. If you see a message in Bold, please take my premise for granted, or follow the link and read through the argument presented in that essay before continuing. Homestuck is complex and labyrinthine, and I had to focus discussion of any one part of it somehow or else we would meander in circles for fucking eternity, and no one wants to end up like Caliborn. This was my solution, so please try not to counter my points with critiques I may have already answered in another section! Thank you.]

While we can argue that Dirk had reasonable expectation of consent regarding the Brobot, and that Jake didn’t find it emotionally damaging, we absolutely cannot say the same about the romantic and sexual passive aggression Jake is subject to as a result of his friendship with Dirk through the AR.

Up until [S] Unite and the Alpha kids’ entry to the medium, Dirk is cast in a dim light. He comes off as lascivious, sarcastic and cutting, and insincere about his feelings towards Jake — pushing sexual comments onto Jake that he’s forced to respond to, but never responding to them himself, where he has to be accountable for them.

Practically the first interaction we’re privy to between Dirk and Jake is laded with this tense sexual attention:

Sure, everybody reading this now knows this isn’t Dirk, but the AR — but the initial reader is not yet aware of this! And Jake isn’t either. This is the first interaction we get with the character we first knew as Dave’s guardian, and he deliberately comes off as oppressive and domineering.

The AR deliberately misrepresents itself as Dirk, both to Jake and to the audience. It confounds the line between it’s own identity and Dirk’s, and suggests constantly that what it says and what Dirk would say are identical. This is something both Jake and Dirk himself complain about, even early on in the narrative:

Still, at first glance, it makes sense to hold Dirk responsible for the Auto-Responder’s actions — even if he isn’t personally responsible for them. After all, Dirk created the thing, and he maintains enough control over it that he can shut it off or disable it, if need be.

As the AR grows more and more possessive and aggressive towards Jake, doesn’t it say as much about Dirk that he let the AR continue it’s romantically aggressive interactions with Jake as it would have if he’d said those things himself?

At the very least, isn’t it damning to his character that he chose not to talk to Jake about it, letting Jake struggle in limbo trying to understand Dirk’s absence and the AR’s toxicity?

These are questions the narrative wants us to consider going in, already knowing that Bro was an abuser and primed to consider Dirk the same way. It seems to almost spell it out for us that Dirk Strider is a sinister force in Jake’s life, and that he is that way by his own design and commitment to his ironic, hyper-competent persona, just like Bro was.

The only problem with understanding the narrative this way is that it’s completely untrue. It’s taking hold of the set-up of Dirk’s character without internalizing the punchline.

Dirk is set up as a take on the Predatory Gay Villain archetype — or, at least, he was received that way over the course of the comic’s development by the audience. At the least, he was set up as a morally grey character akin to Equius and Vriska. But when you evaluate the forces acting on him over the course of the session, that’s not what I found.

I found a gay teenager who loves his friends desperately, struggling with being self-loathing, facing a philosophical choice between the lesser of two evils. A noble figure who did the best he could under the circumstances he was stuck in. A character who earned sympathy, love, and companionship.

Dirk actually had very little power over the AR/Jake situation, and while he definitely make serious mistakes with far-reaching consequences, so did all the Alpha kids. Reading Dirk as an abuser — rather than a victim of a toxic, codependent situation — requires assigning him a degree of skill and maturity that he plain old does not actually possess.

We’re going to explore why, and dissect the relationship between Dirk, the AR, and Jake in detail.

In this essay, we’ll answer the question of why Dirk could not simply turn off or disable the Auto-Responder as a long term solution to this dilemma, and explore the Auto-Responder’s perspective.

In the next, we’ll discuss why Dirk couldn’t approach Jake on the subject of the AR, and look closely at Dirk’s perspective.

You don’t have to agree with me, but hear out my argument and you’ll at least be able to decide with more surety why, exactly, you consider Dirk abusive — if you do — decide exactly what he is and isn’t responsible for, and determine what your comfort level really is with both Dirk as a standalone character and with his relationship with Jake.

Now that I’ve rambled on long enough, let’s get started.

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The tone of the toxic, codependent triad between Dirk, Jake and the AR is set literally from the first line any of the three speaks in the comic.

In this small introduction, we get a lot of important information.

Jake expects there’s a good chance Dirk would be more cooperative than the AR. He’s wrong, in this case, but the fact remains that this is something he feels he has good odds about. So it’s fair to say he considers Dirk overall friendlier than the AR.

He also states flatly that Dirk doesn’t like the AR, and would not be pleased to hear it’s well-received among his friends. Meaning Dirk and Jake have talked about it, at least to some extent.

We know that this communication hasn’t been completely honest, since neither Jake or Dirk have come clean about their feelings — if they had, the AR’s domineering displays of romance and sexual interest wouldn’t have the power to rattle and throw Jake off they do.

Still, as Dirk gets distracted trying to manage the steadily increasing chaos of the session, and the AR gets more and more undisturbed access to Jake. Dirk sort of ends up using it as a proxy, though against his own will. It flirts aggressively at Jake, but always with a cool air of distance because, of course, he’s just the AR. It’s not the same as the real Dirk saying it.

The AR isn’t courting Jake, but playing matchmaker (or is it?), and bitingly wearing down Jake’s perception of his own intelligence and capability all the while. This also leads Jake to wonder if Dirk’s perception of him might be similarly negative.

Dirk, meanwhile, remains distant and distracted to the point that Jake can’t talk to him until after the session starts. The situation spirals out of control, largely without his oversight.

Jake is increasingly aggressively gaslit by the AR, and grows doubtful — about the AR’s intentions, Dirk’s intentions, Dirk’s feelings, etc. That web of intrigue and uncertainty grows so intense that it affects Jake’s mental image of Dirk, which makes Brain Ghost Dirk echo some of the AR’s derogatory commentary.

We’ll talk about Dirk’s actual feelings about this situation later, but for now let’s consider the ethics of the situation on Dirk’s end. The AR is hurting Jake, and Dirk has the power to stop it. He could shut the AR off, disable or, it simply tell it to knock it off.

The problem with this solution is that the AR’s situation is miserable, too, and it’s a sentient being. It’s a 13 year old Dirk, in fact, stagnant and left behind as both Dirk and Jake grew as people. And one trapped without a body.

The only vector for agency the Auto-Responder really has is it’s voice. This means that the AR can only exist as a conscious entity if it’s being interacted with, and any actions Dirk takes to limit it’s speech are coercive and abusive by default. As a result, Dirk has decided to allow the AR to engage with Jake freely, despite not liking much of what it says.

Jake agreed with his decision, choosing to engage with the AR even though it grows increasingly more aggressive towards him. And despite both Jake and Dirk’s irritation with the thing, even after three years, he maintains an active role in this. He even sincerely tries to make friends with the AR the moment it seems to let its guard down.

And Dirk wasn’t ready for this kind of responsibility. He didn’t think the AR would be a successful project at all, let alone a fully-fledged sentient being. That the AR is ultimately sophisticated enough that it is alive, now fully conscious and living it’s own separate existence, was essentially an accident. An accident that Jake encouraged by cheering him on:

This pesterlog exchange is the moment that comes the closest to having Jake and Dirk actually talk about their feelings about each other. It ALSO happens to suggest Jake’s Hope powers may have had something to do with the AR’s creation.

Dirk got carried away and made it a sentient being, but Jake believed in him every step of the way, talking up what a good idea it was. Neither of them considered the potential consequences, but, you know — of course they didn’t. They were 13 year old kids.

In essence, the AR is a symbolic child, in the sense that it’s a responsibility they share between them. Not necessarily because Jake shares any responsibility for egging Dirk on. But because it comes naturally for Jake to throw himself into Dirk’s project and agree that the AR should be treated as though it is alive.

However, while they both feel they owe the AR their attention and energy, both resent what it’s doing to their friendship. Jake calls it out increasingly aggressively, perpetually demanding to talk to the Real Dirk.

And Dirk is by turns irritated by and outright suspicious of it, treating it either as a particularly annoying younger sibling or as a potential threat to him and his friends. He’s bitter and annoyed, his tone towards it often downright acidic, even when it seems to be trying to help. He resents it for what it’s doing to Jake.

Unlike Dirk Prime, who considers his worthiness for his friends’ love in question, the AR knows for a fact it’s friends don’t exactly have much room for it in their hearts. Roxy treats it like a blank check Dirk who’s romantic attention she can enjoy without feeling guilty, and ultimately doesn’t prioritize it like she does her other friends.

It’s relationship to Jake is complicated because it remembers what it felt like to be in love with him, but has no hope at all of reciprocation, and always plays the second fiddle to Real Dirk. Jane is friendly to it, but just as she misses Dirk’s homosexuality, Roxy’s alcoholism, and Jake’s…well, personality, the truly awful situation the AR is in is lost on her.

All in all, despite Dirk and Jake’s best efforts, it has no one to actually talk to. Which may be why it ultimately ends up living up to Dirk’s worst predictions.

While the AR is indispensable in getting the kids into the session, it also exploits an increasingly complex and dangerous situation and wrests control of it away from Dirk in order to fulfill it’s own desperate agenda. Even as early on in the narrative as the picture above, before the Red Miles enter the picture, the AR jokingly refers to a pail. What happens during Synchronize?

Kind of a stretch, as far as foreshadowing goes? Sure, but that’s part of the point. It’s impossible to say if the AR was ever telling the truth as to whether it wanted to help Dirk. Maybe it felt backed into a corner by Dirk’s distrust and Jake’s antipathy. Possibly it was just able to react faster than Dirk to the rapidly escalating terrible situation.

But we do have to raise the question and wonder, because we just don’t know how smart the Auto-Responder is, or how much it really knows. I mean, hell, the closest we get to a quantification is this:

Or perhaps forcing Jake into a dramatic, life-and-death, romantic confrontation — not with Dirk, but with itself — was a spur of the moment act of passion. We can’t really do anything but speculate, as far as the AR’s ultimate capabilities and motivations are concerned. What we do know is that in the end, when it’s presented with the opportunity, it acts.

The AR might not feel what Dirk feels for Jake, but it still remembers. And being caged in by the nature of it’s physical existence, stripped of it’s original identity, and given the power of a supercomputer only emboldens Dirk’s worst traits — possessive jealousy, desire for control, aggressive and derogatory intellectualism. It maneuvers itself into getting sent to Jake in person, where it cajoles and pressures him into kissing Dirk’s head, making sure to lay the romantic intensity on thick.

It also keeps gaslighting and condescending to Jake, all while answering his question in a way it knows he can’t understand. Deep Blue is the name of the first supercomputer to ever beat a world champion Chess player, after all. It also refers to itself as being in charge synchonization. of The AR is being cryptic and sarcastic, but it’s still basically copping to orchestrating this final scenario — it’s just impossible to know by how much.

And in the end, through bullying and gloating…

It gets what it wants.

Or does it?

Well, yes. Yes it does. But there is another narrative at play that I’m ignoring here, right? Several, even? Namely, one where Dirk willingly went along with the AR’s plans, or one where this really was Dirk’s plan all along, or one where they developed this plan together, on the fly — any narrative at all where Dirk shares some amount of responsibility for this, basically.

And my argument so far leaves questions unanswered. For starters, I doubt many are satisfied that Dirk ISN’T involved in setting this up as a romantic overture along with the AR.

If he was so opposed, why didn’t he do more to stop it? He is, after all, the hypercompetent badass who created it in the first place, right? And if he couldn’t do that much, then why didn’t he talk to Jake about any of it?

Next time, we’re going to focus on Dirk — the image that the narrative builds of Dirk, as well as the narrative Dirk builds of himself for his friends. And we’ll see these events again from his perspective, in order to determine if a reading of Dirk where he has agency during these events actually holds any water.

See you there.