Tag: Anonymous

would there be any chance of you putting subtitles on your homestuck videos?

Yes. In fact, one helpful fan in particular has been helping out by providing closed captioning for the videos in French! He’s credited in the videos, too. 

I have the transcripts in the form of the scripts for the posts themselves, so it’s really just a matter of time as to when I’ll put english subtitles up, at least. I know I’d like to get spanish subtitles too and I can do that eventually. The only reason it isn’t already happening is because all of my energy is currently going to putting out more analysis–whether that’s through videos or through the posts I’ve been placing here and on Medium. 

Well I meant did you do any analysis on the f/f ships like you have davekat and dirkjake

Oh! Sorry about that. I haven’t written about Davekat yet on an analysis level, only Dirkjake–I’ve been tackling various subjects where people feel Homestuck “made the wrong move” or “got bad” as I gather the words for them. This is why my other pieces of analysis are about Spades Slick and Act 7 and not characters/things I care a lot more about. 

However the next piece I want to write when I’m writing meta for the established fandom, rather than trying to lay the groundwork for new people to have an easier time getting into Homestuck, is about the Retcon–and that one should include a defense of Davekat and also something I’ve been meaning to write about Callieroxy.

I’m waiting on further developments before i even THINK about touching Vriska cohesively because she’s going to be eight pieces by herself length-wise, especially if I try to talk about her relationship with Terezi. For Rosemary I think I feel something coalescing as I flesh out my thoughts on the latter halves of Rose and Jade’s arcs so yeah I want to write about them sometime soon too.

I just don’t have a timetable for any of these though. I’d say probably:

Retcon/Davekat/Roxycallie->Rosemary->Vrisrezi 

Just no idea when I’ll get to them. Working on other-just as exciting-stuff right now 🙂 

Hey you wrote a bunch on dirk jake and davekat and that’s really awesome! But do you think you’ll ever touch rosemary, roxycallie or vrisrezi?

Aw, thanks! The truth is, I am a being of GUILT over the fact I haven’t writen more Rosemary–I did write one scene for them in one thing, but it was like, a chapter. 

The answer honestly is, I really don’t know. There’s a LOT more I want to write fanfic wise–hell I could write about these characters literally forever probably. 

The main thing is right now all creative energy I have for Homestuck–which, rest assured is quite a lot–is being dumped into analysis.
Working on this video series and attempting to cement and put forth new critical views on Homestuck in a way that’s not just new, but also compelling and accessible is takes a lot of time and energy–who would’ve guessed?

As a result, I don’t really know when I’ll next do fanfic writing. But in the long term, hopefully yeah!

a little late to the party but: jake, while being threatened with sexual assault and forced marriage, conjures up brain ghost dirk and asks him to help him, and also expresses a desire to go back home to his island (before the game) specifically mentioning the brobot as nothing more than a pest. that’s not … indicative of having a bad association with dirk is what i’m saying i guess.

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Ahahaha oh my god its true. I didn’t realize this, but BGD manifests immediately when Jake realizes talking to Jane simply will not work, and he feels physically threatened. And Jake immediately wants Dirk to help him, despite the obvious limitation of his not being real. 

And notice how he wants to go back to when he had to worry about the robot but he doesn’t say anything about the monsters that he also had to worry about?

Yeah. There’s an Ideal Time in Jake’s life, and it was when the Brobot was his biggest problem–not the monsters he had to deal with before Dirk sent it. 

Thanks for pointing this one out to me, because I had genuinely missed it. God Dirkjake so good and meticulously crafted, I fucking love Homestuck. 

EDIT: Also, Anon, I don’t believe in “late to the party” when it comes to Homestuck. There’s so much to unearth, consider and discuss with this comic and what’s coming next from What Pumpkin that I think anyone who’s willing to engage about it has a place and a voice. 

This being a perfect example :B You pointed me to stuff that I’m now genuinely considering editing into my articles or including in a future piece I write about Jake.

That’s genuinely valuable no matter what time span it’s in, and there’s nothing stopping the ship or our understanding about the comic from growing and evolving. Unless we choose to stop talking about it and thinking about it in new ways.

so you’ve talked a ton about dirk and his feelings for jake, but i think in a lot of ways jake is also a very difficult character to understand because he hides what he really cares about. what’s your take on his feelings for dirk? was he just overwhelmed by dirk’s intensity or did he really not care as much about dirk in return? or would it just take him longer to return dirk’s feelings?

I want to write about Jake at length someday–probably around the time I get to the point where adapting Dirk’s essays into video format is viable–but the basic breakdown is this:

Jake is in love with Dirk. The way he’s written makes it pretty clear he wanted Dirk from the start. Callmearcturus wrote a fantastic post breaking down the way Jake literally manipulated events so that Dirk, not Jane, would be the one to ultimately ask him out, which is readable here: http://callmearcturus.tumblr.com/post/150195543495/sorrydontknowman-replied-to-your-post-theory#notes

Beyond that point? Jake is in love with Dirk. He’s flighty and passive aggressive with Brain Ghost Dirk after years of dancing around the AR’s aggression and Dirk’s emotional distance, but all the boy really wants for all of the lead-up to Unite Synchronize is to talk to Dirk. He seeks him out. When he has to corpsesmooch Dirk’s head, his regret isnt about having to do it but about it not going how he imagined. After Dirk breaks up with him, Jake doesn’t talk about feeling uncomfortable with Dirk–he talks about how bad he feels for breaking Dirk’s heart and ignoring Jane.

He decides romance isn’t for him…when he thinks Dirk and all his friends hate him and is blaming himself for everything that went wrong. You know, the exact same way Dirk takes the blame for everything that went wrong himself and decides to stay away from Jake for his own good. Neither moment is particularly healthy for them. 

When Jake’s agency is well and truly compromised in every way when Aranea usurps his free will and exploits him for his powers, Dirk is who he turns to for protection. Jake summoning Brain Ghost Dirk is an understated visual storytelling moment in the same way Dirk’s lamp breaking when Jake kisses his head–it’s the moment where we see the full force of the one’s feelings for the other, and those feelings warp reality around their weight and make impossible things possible. 

Not only does Jake summon Dirk as his knight in shining armor, his Prince Charming if you will– but he summons a Dirk who calls himself Jake’s boyfriend (this is after they break up, remember?) and quoting The Princess Bride, an action movie all about a hyper-competent badass dude who does not just try, but succeeds at doing anything his beloved wishes, and which revolves wholly around the power of love, and performing dramatic feats in the name of that love. 

I. I don’t know what else to say there. That Brain Ghost Dirk moment seals the deal completely. That’s BGD embodying all of Jake’s fantasies at the time Jake needs it most, and the only other time we see Jake activate his powers is during the Masterpiece, when Dirk is the one who needs him to come save him. 

Dirk’s feelings aren’t one-sided. Dem bois are in love. That’s really all there is to say on the matter. I think I’d say Jake probably feels emotion a more low-key level than Dirk and that might have played into him considering himself unable to have those dramatic, romantic feelings–because, yes, Dirk is very intense about his emotions. But I think Jake’s hopesplosion moments make it pretty clear those feelings are absolutely there. He just processes and expresses them differently, which is fine, because that’s how it works in real life for plenty of people. 

There’s also an argument to be made that Jake hasn’t even had a chance to understand his emotions for Dirk outside of circumstances that were super stressful. He certainly flirted with Dirk a lot in the one pesterlog they really share, just before the AR’s creation–but after that, they’re either gagged by the AR situation or dealing with it’s fallout in the session. It seems pretty natural to me that would throw a wrench in Jake’s ability to understand his feelings in general, so who knows how he expresses his feelings now that they’ve had time to sort things out and reengage in a way that’s healthy? 

Hey, I saw a conversation the other day saying that Jake was sexually abused by the robot. Do you think there’s any canon evidence that supports that? (I read your essays, btw.)

No, not in the slightest. The only thing that remotely suggests that is Jake saying the wrestling got a little too “tender” for his liking, and he described trying to convey it as “awkward” at worst. 

The idea that the Brobot seriously hurt him in any way simply doesn’t square with Jake’s actions at all. When the monsters were what Jake had to worry about, he holed up in his room all the time despite his professed love for adventure.

After the Brobot showed up, he was annoyed by it and viewed it as an unpleasant, impossible chore–but he was perfectly willing to go out and HAVE adventures with it around, and the monsters now seem to scare him far less–a sharp contrast to pre-Brobot Jake. And though his personal skill is a factor here, the Brobot DOES have to bail him out from getting murdered by a goat monster.

Also assuming that the Brobot would do more than just be a little too romantic/gentle with Jake implies assuming that Dirk would design it to be sexually aggressive, which doesn’t line up with anything in canon. OR that the AR can manipulate it’s AI beyond just toggling its settings, which we have no evidence for. 

Jake was subject to romantic and even sexual harassment–by the AR, verbally, and in a situation where Dirk wasn’t able to do anything about the situation, and in fact likely wasn’t even aware of it since the way the narrative is presented implies the AR is already screening Jake’s messages from Dirk for a good chunk of the build up to Unite Synchronize (after the initial message in the bathroom, Dirk receives no more Jake pester bubbles, despite the fact that Jake is messaging him over and over and he DOES receive them from other sources.)

But extending that to the Brobot doesn’t really square with Jake’s general attitude towards it (annoyance and a bit of romantic discomfort, or at least, discomfort with vocalizing it’s actions TO THE AR, who he already has a fraught and uncomfortable relationship with) and it definitely sure as hell doesn’t square with Dirk’s motivations at all. 

If I were to guess, I’d say the Brobot is programmed to be somewhat suggestive of romantic overtures and was in part an attempt at courtship on Dirk’s end, but then the AR coming along made it damn near impossible for Dirk and Jake to communicate about romantic stuff and that made Jake see it somewhat uncomfortably because it’s yet another instance of Dirk implying interest but being really vague and unclear about it. 

But that’s essentially me just writing fanfiction based on a vague suggestion in canon, as is any allegation of sexual abuse.

All we know for sure is the Brobot acts in a way that makes Jake uncomfortable enough to mention it (in the hypersexualized and fucked up context he’s already trapped in with the AR, that Dirk can’t do anything about)…

…BUT not uncomfortable enough that he’s anything less than pleased when the Brobot shows up to save him from a monster, or uncomfortable enough to undercut the fact that he fundamentally views Dirk as a figure of safety and protection. All of the discomfort with Dirk he displays through Brain Ghost Dirk comes through verbally, where it’s easy to argue the AR’s treatment of him has messed with his view of the real Dirk. 

In physical space–where the Brobot resided–Jake doesn’t see Brain Ghost Dirk as anything but a protector when the chips are down. The idea that any Dirk stand-in sexually abused him physically simply doesn’t square with that reality, to me.