Seeking truth through conversations on Love and Fandom
Tag: analysis asks
Idk if you’ve already mentioned this but wrt Jake being smarter than he presents himself as, there’s also this dialogue about Tavros (and Vriska) early in Act 5:
GC: H3S NOT R34LLY H3R FR13ND THOUGH GC: YOU SHOULD S33 HOW H3 T4LKS 4BOUT H3R B3H1ND H3R B4CK GC: SH3 H4S NO 1D34 HOW B4D H3S PL4Y1NG H3R GC: BUT TH3N 1 DONT TH1NK H3 KNOWS HOW B4D SH3S PL4Y1NG H1M 31TH3R GC: S33 1TS COMPL1C4T3D
But I haven’t been able to find anything in the rest of the comic that builds on this quote. What do you think?
The thing is, this quote doesn’t refer to Vriska and Tavros. It refers to Doc Scratch. Here’s the full quote:
Terezi and Aradia are talking about how Scratch distracted them, giving Vriska the opening she needed to hurt Tavros in the first place.
I haven’t deleted it because I think it’s a lot better than people thinking Jake is a clueless moron, and deleting it wouldn’t stop the reblogs anyway. But I think I overstated my point pretty hard.
Jake is really perceptive and aware–much more than people give him credit for–but he’s not like, moreso than any other one of the kids. He’s just about on par with them. What people mistake for cluelessness is actually willful ignorance that Jake uses to avoid confrontation because it scares him, basically.
I think reading Pages as a class that is out to serve themselves and inspires others to serve them is a much more comprehensive and accurate description of how Pages act in general.
I don’t think that behavior is always particularly intentional and highly ceberal/manipulative though, and I certainly wouldn’t say what happened with Tavros and Vriska was at all equal.
Tavros found himself outmaneuvered, manipulated and coerced at almost every point with Vriska– that she did it all out of a desire he inspired in her to help him become stronger doesn’t really change that.
You can abuse someone while wanting to help them every step of the way, and Vriska’s intentions weren’t even quite that clear-cut and noble. Things with Dirk and Jake are substantially more complicated, and I don’t consider Dirk’s behavior abusive or coercive at all (Hal is another story).
But that I’m trying to reframe how Pages are perceived to act in general shouldn’t be an indication that I’m trying to establish a new parallel between Dirk and Jake’s relationship and Tavros and Vriska’s.
They are two completely different arcs with totally different contexts, and how I read Jake and Tavros as characters doesn’t mean that either was less abused–Jake by Hal, Crockertier!Jane and Aranea, Tavros by Vriska.
But uh yeah basically check out that other post, I wrote better in that one and I had new info to add there anyway. Thanks a ton for sending me an ask I could use as a loose excuse to get this off my chest.
So the first thing to note is that any gender can be any class. Hussie confirmed that girls can be Princes on twitter at some point, I don’t really have a link or anythin but I thought I’d point that out.
And in my view the gender restrictions were always canonically shaky in the first place. They were delivered by Calliope early in Act 6, and Calliope understands a lot about the game (I think she’s right about her descriptions of Active/Passive classes and I use her definitions as my own), but I don’t think Calliope understands very much about gender or identity by that point.
I mean, that’s a plot point! Calliope thinks she’s incapable of feeling red romance because of her species…even as she expresses profound fascination and interest in it. Calliope, like all the characters, is influenced by a status quo of heteronormativity and gender essentialism. What she says about how often any class is any gender reflects 2 things:
1) Her own views on gender and identity, which at this point are still limiting and self-restrictive in a way she explicitly grows out of just like every other character in the comic, given that she starts dating Roxy.
2) The patterns of the four sessions she has access to and draws sources from. Calliope doesn’t analyze all of Sburb–she analyzes Sburb in the context of Homestuck, just like we the audience do, and where the conclusion she draws is incorrect, it’s informed by a bias towards preestablished gender norms.
As for the specifics, there’s tons of ways trans/nonbinary people could interact with Sburb. Dream Selves are idealized selves so I guess trans people who find that powerful and gratifying there could be an element of transition to the transformation. God tier powers are reality warping enough to enable that kind of thing in dozens of ways, too.
Not that that’s necessary, obviously. Lots of trans people don’t want to transition and I suspect some people would consider it being presented that way kind of cheap. There’s also tons of ways to enable more honest gender expression through the Alchemy system. For instance, I read Jake as non-binary or genderfluid and I think he expresses that potential fairly well. So there’s that. There’s also people who read, say, Roxy and Dirk as trans–and since Calliope is at the mercy of her sources which are historical documents that track the mythologies of the players as they present them, there’s not really any way she’d know better.
I think Sburb is always best interpreted as expansively as possible while still holding to the existential philosophy that informs its game design. So the answer is anyone can be anything they feel called to, wherever they fall on the spectrum. Sburb is interested in having its players self-actualize, and that can happen in as many different ways as there are stories to tell–whether we’re talking about rises to heroism narratives, or coming of age and coming out narratives. (Coming out narratives are intrinsically heroic narratives anyway, in my view.)
You probably weren’t expecting an essay length answer to this question. So like let there be no doubt at all from this point onwards this is exactly the kind of content you can legitimately expect from this blog. This is who I am. I’m sorry.
Also, you’re welcome.
Yes, Dirk is a furry. And his relationship to furries shows us a lot about his parallels and similarities to one Rose Lalonde. Who is also a furry.
Let’s get into this.
Dirk is interested in furries to some extent, and finds the aesthetic appealing on some level. I mean, look at this. I can’t even count how many pictures of muscley horse dudes there are here. The dude isn’t exactly subtle. To quote Jake…
He dodges, and badly at that. To Dirk, swole bunny men represent something to hide–an interest he has that he cannot honestly incorporate into his cool, stoic, Above It All Persona. Not even through the hyper-sincere irony he tells Jane about. It’s something to hide, which means that at his core it’s something that matters to him.
And hey, you know who else is very much not shy about plastering her interests where anyone can see for her own pleasure?
As plenty of people have noted recently, there’s no heterosexual explanation for this. I’d already categorize this as falling into the spectrum of anthropomorphization we talk about as Furry–if you disagree that’s fine, though I do know furries who like this kind of thing. The point is that like Dirk, Rose knows what she likes, and like Dirk, Rose likes some weird shit.
On this side of the argument, though–showing that the characters like this furry stuff through their own characterization–Dirk gets a lot more content than Rose does. But Rose’s relationship with furry is confirmed much more intensely than Dirk’s on the other side of this argument: through their relationships to their Splinters.
In both cases, they’re happy to pretend that furry stuff doesn’t interest them at all, and part of their approach to doing so is either joking about others being interested in it or actively playing up their resentment for it. Either way, the implication they send is that they themselves are Not Interested.
This is alie, and is to be ruthlessly exploited for comedy, which Homestuck does magnificently well.
Both Dirk and Rose are very invested in seeming Above the kind of self-indulgent identity play that Furry tends to encompass. Intense sincerity of expression bothers to them even as it appeals, because the images they want to project to the people they care about is one of aloof, self-aware, competently critical collectedness. One could say it bothers BECAUSE it appeals.
Which is the exact reason Rose is so annoyed by Jasprose. Jasprose acts as Rose would without the self-awareness she uses to present only the carefully crafted persona she wants other people to see. Jasprose doesn’t think about what others think of her at all. Jasprose thinks in terms of self-indulgence.
A self-indulgence explicitly linked to their status as full-blown, unabashed Furries. Jasprose, by her very being, brings all of Rose’s hidden words and feelings to Light, not being shy at all about sharing them and indulging whatever desire is on her mind.
She mixes cat terminology with flirting, stressing her identity as someone who is a furry and loving every second of it. Davepeta even draws the distinction between her and Rose, noting that Jasprose owns who she is and acts more honestly about it.
But there are genuinely harmless ways that Arquis DOES reflect Dirk’s interest, and those are worth unpackaging. Specifically, there’s the way AR describes himself finally becoming happy.
And yeah someone could nibble with this wording and say well actually Equius likes horses so maybe its him and I actually couldn’t be less interested in trying to explain why Dirk’s character already incorporates an absolutely Furry level of enjoyment of horses so here’s his room again.
So basically Dirk and Rose are interested in furry stuff to some extent but won’t really admit it. They wouldn’t admit it to you if you asked them or anything.
I think this is really fascinating and that they share this particular nuance of characterization so completely is fantastic. Even Dirk’s double face palm and Rose’s pillow hiding feel really similar to me in the sentiment of mortified frustration it gets across.
And all this really stresses their similarities and makes Roxy’s line emphasizing how similar Rose and Dirk are hit home all the harder. I wanted to ramble about that for a while. God I love these kids what was I talking about again?
Oh yeah furries. So Rose and Dirk are both furries but neither of them would CALL themselves furries in public.
Yet. The thing is, this girl exists:
Give Jade like, one birthday party where she decides she wants everyone to have a furry party and draw up fursonas together, and we’re good to go. There’s pretty much no circumstances under which I doubt Jade’s power to get all her friends to stop hiding an interest they ALL KNOW DEEP DOWN they share with her but keep pushing away out of a dumb point of pride.
It’ll be great I promise someone write this fic ok thanks in advance. Anyway yeah give Jade like a year after they get to Earth C and she’ll get them all on the same page. By which I mean all, not just Dirk and Rose.
Jane’s actually the only main character who hasn’t expressed any interest in furries at any point in the story to my memory, and she’s already been willing to play around with trollsonas. Which means at some point in the context of eternity these kids are going to get the hell over themselves and draw some fursonas. And if they don’t, Jade will make sure they will.
So yeah. Every human kid in Homestuck is a furry. Also every living troll, and Callie. Probably all their subjects too frankly.
You pretty much nailed any thought I could have. But oddly, we don’t actually see ANY of the strilonde’s echeladders–only the Prospit kids. Wonder what thats about, come to think of it.
I guess my biggest recommendation for the moment would be Tex Talks, who’s series on Homestuck is fascinating if still ongoing. All four of these videos were absolute game changers in understanding the story, and the project is ongoing but much more friendly to newcomers than my endgame meta on tumblr for sure.
At which point, I have to switch into shilling a little. Rambling about Dirkjake and meta on tumblr is actually a side project to me, and most of the meta I wrote over the last couple weeks was sorta just a small detour I was taking to rebuild my Tumblr platform somewhat. My MAIN project is Homestuck, Explained, a video series where I’m aiming to explain Homestuck to newcomers plot element by plot element, making sure each part of the story is given the thematic grounding and weight it deserves to keep each video saying something fresh and interesting.
I’m back to video editing on that now but I won’t be able to answer everything just yet. Still, people have found it helpful in understanding the early plot elements and a really nice explanatory community has sprung up around it.
The next two recs kinda depend on what you want to learn about with regards to Homestuck.
@sam-keeper hasn’t done much classpect stuff but her work takes a completely fresh and fascinating view of the canon. She woke me up to Homestuck’s gnostic influences and their deep implications, wrote about Homestuck’s history as a part of and effect on hypercomics as a medium, and her books on Homestuck’s ending themes and medium play (”A bodyless and timeless persona” and “A horizon of jostling curiosities” respectively) are nothing short of transcendent. She doesn’t tend to rely on Classpects stuff at all so her work pretty much stands on it’s own I think.
If what you ARE interested in is Classpect stuff then Tex Talks is great, but another good place to get your foundations is probably Bladekindeyewear, too.
Disclaimer though: Inversion theory was jossed by WP to my memory, and even if it wasn’t I don’t really buy into it the way @bladekindeyewear posits it. Any time you read about a Seer becoming a Witch or something you should probably take it with a grain of salt, in my view. I also think he’s completely wrong about Knights/Pages, who he describes as the Active/Passive ‘Exploit’ Class. I think there’s much more canon backing for the idea that they are the Passive/Active ‘Serve’ class.
That said I fucking ADORE BKEW’s post on the Blood/Breath Aspect dichotomy, and he did some fantastic work on pinning down the Aspect Dichotomies in general. The physical symbols for each Aspect he points out in particular are absolutely stellar. His post on the Ultimate Riddle and “Do as you Wilt” were also great for understanding the story on a thematic level.
If I were to suggest you start anywhere I’d say probably the Tex Talks videos if only because they’re like been lovingly spoonfed mindfucks and you don’t even have to read. They’re all great though.
Those are the three people who pretty much laid the foundation for my own approach to Homestuck from a mechanical understanding standpoint (i’d also credit @what-the-fuck-is-homestuck‘s character analysis from, you know, a character analysis standpoint as being foundational to me.) So those are my BIG RECS.
But if you’re really interested and want even MORE…
I haven’t been able to keep up with every single Homestuck theorist out there, so I don’t know how useful they all are in understanding the canon, but @theworstpersonintheworld gave me the ‘Serve’ verb and I think he’s got some really good ideas, and while I haven’t read through all of @dahniwitchoflight ‘s writing I have found her writing on Denizens pretty interesting and compelling and her writing on Aspects and dualities seems pretty good and solid, too. And @blindrapture wrote some great stuff on Caliborn predicting the ending of Homestuck–and seemingly the audience’s reaction to it as well.
There’s also @analytic-chaoticism and @wakraya (who wrote a gr8 piece on Act 7) who seem to be the biggest names I’ve seen hazarding theories about Hiveswap, if you’re into that. I’m probably missing people because this is a big umbrella because Homestuck is fascinating and massive and we’ll never be done digging.
You nailed a good part of it. I think Dirk and Dave are pretty well-charted by the canon, but basically I think Dirk would be inclined to look for Roxy in both Dave and Rose, which would be easy with Dave because he takes after Roxy hard anyway. So there’d be a lot of hangouts and the degree to which Dirk can satisfy Dave’s need for emotional openness probably relies on how much Dirk’s issues with the Alphas are sorted out, because Dirk uh…really really hates himself. Especially by canon endgame. Which brings us to Karkat.
I feel it somewhere in my heart that Karkat catches wind of the Alphas’ emotional turmoils through Dirk and immediately sets about fixing all of it because nu uh, fuck no, fuck that shit Karkat has dealt with ENOUGH romantic turmoil and he’s not having any of this bullshit teen drama in his ultimate reward. As a result Dirk immediately would die for Karkat on command even if he wasn’t already inclined to do so for Karkat being The One Dave Loves anyway. This is cool because Dirk and Karkat have a fucking lot in common!
There’s the being subjugated by the Condesce, the intense self-loathing and being convinced they destroyed relationships by the sheer nature of their beings, the intense and vicious arguments with versions of themselves…there’s a lot to bond over. It’s cute. I want more of that. All of this has the added bonus of making Dave basically the happiest fucker alive in the multiverse on top of Karkat and Dirk just being…really good influences on each other. Karkat can help Dirk out with relationships! Having the approval of physically hypercompetent Dirk could do a lot to reduce whatever angst about his own battle skill Karkat has left! There’s so much there ;_: I love them.
Where things get a lot MORE interesting is with Rose, almost entirely because seeing Roxy in her is…
going to be a lot harder.
On top of that, Rose is curious and inquisitive, like Dirk is. And she’s particularly interested in Dirk’s oddities. Traits she could really question and dig into:
Rose hasn’t really lost her interest in psychotherapy, I think–but Dave has definitely chilled out a lot and stopped trying so hard after he started dating Karkat. Like Terezi, Rose enjoys the hell out of a dude trying to be cool who has something to hide. Which makes Dirk “perfectly stoic, taciturn to the max about everything” Strider pretty much the perfect fucking target.
So early on there’s definitely a lot of Rose teasing Dirk and doing her psychoanalysis thing at him, which could make for some absolutely stunning dialogue. Probably a lot of calling him “Dad” or “Father”, too, god I love Rose Lalonde. And Dirk like, he sees himself in Rose a lot and that might make him more defensive and critical of her than most…but I think it’s more likely that what he sees of Roxy in her and what he knows from Rose’s history (she was effectively the closest thing he had to a Mother figure, too–it’s just not a legacy he chose to lay claim to) would force him to reckon with the fact that someone can have a lot of Dirk-like traits and still be fundamentally…you know. Good.
I think over the long haul Dirk and Dave would end up feeling like twin brothers to each other, balancing out the weird dad-son feels into something wholly unique. Same goes for Dirk and Rose, but Dirk would uniquely value Rose’s insight and he’d probably be likeliest to go to Rose for advice or counsel out of anybody…especially if they ever get to know each other well enough to figure out they share a proclivity for self-loathing and assuming outsize responsibility without relying on their friends.
Jake can make Dirk FEEL good about himself, but Rose could probably put into words exactly why he is objectively good, and Dirk would appreciate that. Rose, meanwhile, would appreciate someone who can keep her grounded in herself and her own strengths and flaws when she gets too wrapped in her own head to talk to people…even if I also think Dirk doing so would piss her off.
They’d be good for each other basically. And Dirk would get ripped on hard enough to actually break his stoic facade, which I think is a marvel we all wish to see.
Jake’s fundamental problem is the same as Grandpa’s: Escapism. In Grandpa, that misery and desire for escapism seems to grow into outright delusion–the guy seems plain old not that in touch with reality.
That’s how Jake operates when he has problems he doesn’t like and he doesn’t want to do better. Jake runs away because Dirk is needy and suffocating–the dude ain’t perfect, and he’s not any better at talking about his problems than Jake is because he likes to pretend they don’t exist by subsuming them into his (fake as shit) hypercapable persona.
But Dirk was needy and suffocating in the first place at least partly because Jake had already hurt his feelings pretty badly several times over, and led Dirk to believe he was most likely straight. Jake is aware of this!
But Jake would, in all things, prefer to resolve his conflicts in a way that doesn’t require him to acknowledge or address any way he might have possibly fucked up or hurt his friend’s feelings. That’s why neither of them can make actual progress on improving their relationship–Jake is as willfully ignorant about the core of their issues as Dirk is willfully burying them to keep up his front. And neither of them will likely talk about how Jake really felt about Brobot or about the whole AR situation for that exact same reason. Jake is busy immediately trying to forget any of that existed or could, in fact, have been parsed as a problem. Dirk is terrified of hearing Jake’s real answer.
After like SIX MONTHS of enjoying Dirk’s company despite all these issues on BOTH their ends, long past the point when people who weren’t teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing would have sat down and said “Ok there’s definitely a problem here, let’s talk about it,”–yeah, all these underlying problems stress Dirk out enough that he gets to be too much for Jake and he runs away. Where he goes right on thinking about Dirk all the time, subjecting Jane to long rambles about him, and when Caliborn comes calling Jake spends his time making comments like this:
Which is A) Trolling Caliborn to some extent and really fucking funny, I love you Jake, B) Indication that Jake is now a lot more comfortable positioning himself as mlm than he was when talking to Jane, and C) That last one is obviously a reference to Dirk that Jake is making intentionally. Jake is, again, sharper than he’s given credit for. He knows what classpects are and he’s spent six months in a session where there’s exactly four of them. Even while running away, Jake is still making comments about Dirk that would absolutely be flirting if he were talking to the guy himself, and still largely thinking positively about him.
Jake running away doesn’t reflect his feelings for Dirk. It reflects his obsessive need to avoid confrontation, and his willingness to believe anything he can tell himself to avoid it.
this is all good
I’d also like to add that Jake is pretty inarguably canonically a BIGTIME INTROVERT. Just look at how he acts on the platform surrounded by people, even people he loves. He’s shy, nervous, quiet, and immediately pulls away from the group and isolates himself. Before meeting his friends in the medium, Jake hasn’t been around another human being since he was six years old. He probably never knew about social exhaustion, because anytime he experienced it before, he could just turn on a movie. Jake likes to be by himself. He needs time alone to recharge from social interactions.
Dirk, meanwhile, appears to be an extrovert. He’s not good at being alone and withers without social interaction.
Jake is drained by being around others and Dirk is drained by being by himself, so there’s a disconnect there that they don’t know how to navigate. Dirk feels clingy and suffocating, while Jake feels cold and unfeeling. Neither of them are really either of those things. They just experience their feelings differently. If you look at how they’re both talking about themselves before Collide, Dirk is saying that he feels he bullies everyone into spending time with him while Jake is saying that he shouldn’t even have friendships because he can’t experience emotions correctly. These boys need to be educated about how diff people have diff needs, and then use that education to negotiate a good and HEALTHY relationship with each other, which, I think, Credits proves that they have.
(Though I woulda loved to have actually fuckin seen is grumbe gurmble)
Also, insert a lot of words about Love Languages here for more shit on this but instead I’m just gonna link @landofsomethingsomething ‘s amazing DirkJake series, Thanks for Playing, which deals with this exact conflict and kind of goes through Dirk and Jake learning that the way they experience love and navigate relationships is inherently different, but that doesn’t make them incompatible – it just makes their relationship a constant negotiation, which is good, ultimately, for both of them.
Fuck I was gonna write about Jake’s introversion too and it got lost amidst the rest of my points, fuck it you do it better anyway thanks
Jake’s fundamental problem is the same as Grandpa’s: Escapism. In Grandpa, that misery and desire for escapism seems to grow into outright delusion–the guy seems plain old not that in touch with reality.
That’s how Jake operates when he has problems he doesn’t like and he doesn’t want to do better. Jake runs away because Dirk is needy and suffocating–the dude ain’t perfect, and he’s not any better at talking about his problems than Jake is because he likes to pretend they don’t exist by subsuming them into his (fake as shit) hypercapable persona.
But Dirk was needy and suffocating in the first place at least partly because Jake had already hurt his feelings pretty badly several times over, and led Dirk to believe he was most likely straight. Jake is aware of this!
But Jake would, in all things, prefer to resolve his conflicts in a way that doesn’t require him to acknowledge or address any way he might have possibly fucked up or hurt his friend’s feelings. That’s why neither of them can make actual progress on improving their relationship–Jake is as willfully ignorant about the core of their issues as Dirk is willfully burying them to keep up his front. And neither of them will likely talk about how Jake really felt about Brobot or about the whole AR situation for that exact same reason. Jake is busy immediately trying to forget any of that existed or could, in fact, have been parsed as a problem. Dirk is terrified of hearing Jake’s real answer.
After like SIX MONTHS of enjoying Dirk’s company despite all these issues on BOTH their ends, long past the point when people who weren’t teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing would have sat down and said “Ok there’s definitely a problem here, let’s talk about it,”–yeah, all these underlying problems stress Dirk out enough that he gets to be too much for Jake and he runs away. Where he goes right on thinking about Dirk all the time, subjecting Jane to long rambles about him, and when Caliborn comes calling Jake spends his time making comments like this:
Which is A) Trolling Caliborn to some extent and really fucking funny, I love you Jake, B) Indication that Jake is now a lot more comfortable positioning himself as mlm than he was when talking to Jane, and C) That last one is obviously a reference to Dirk that Jake is making intentionally. Jake is, again, sharper than he’s given credit for. He knows what classpects are and he’s spent six months in a session where there’s exactly four of them. Even while running away, Jake is still making comments about Dirk that would absolutely be flirting if he were talking to the guy himself, and still largely thinking positively about him.
Jake running away doesn’t reflect his feelings for Dirk. It reflects his obsessive need to avoid confrontation, and his willingness to believe anything he can tell himself to avoid it.
I wouldn’t call it meaningless or circumstantial especially since Jade is kind of HER OWN SPRITE, so you’ve got this whole motif going of Dave and Jade’s SPRITES ending up together in a weird hyper-roundabout way. But in terms of sprites acting as sprites like…sprites release themselves more or less, and towards the end of the story act as sprites for basically whoever they decide needs it or they feel like it for. So I’m not sure it’s a critically relevant point either, you know?
Flying through Storytelling 