You’re not wrong, but I think part of what Homestuck’s arguing is that what we think of as “true evil” IS just lack of maturity, and Bro’s stoic machismo is simply one of the different explorations of this stunted lack of emotional growth and self-awareness.
Caliborn isn’t just arbitrarily an infinite evil asshole–he’s literally biologically incapable of growth. AR is the same way–frozen in time developmentally by his nature as AI. Both reflect an absolute domination that echoes Yaldabaoth, and both turn out to be mayor components of LE.
The difference between them is that AR becomes LE through heroic sacrifice, having transcended his innate limitations through connections to others by becoming one with Equius and wanting to serve his friends.
Caliborn stunts himself willingly, by making the selfish and childish choice to murder his sister and force his predomination early. This is what allows him to play Sburb alone.
But it also secures his downfall, because by killing Calliope rather than devouring her soul through predomination, he puts Calliope’s soul out in the furthest ring, thus ensuring he’d be out looking for her as LE and causing the events that end his rule in Homestuck.
(This is why there’s no Caliborn ghost corresponding to Alt!Calliope’s timeline–she predominated naturally, and devoured Caliborn’s soul/consumed his strength. This is also why we don’t just see AR/Equius/Gamzee’s souls out in the void after they become part of LE–Caliborn didn’t just kill them to take over, he predominated and made their souls part of him.)
Both are tragic heroes, in the true Greek tragedy sense. AR’s story is one of heroic but flawed transcendence out of inherently unjust circumstances that made him innately imperfect–a result of Dirk’s own childhood hubris and demiurgic act of creation. Caliborn’s hubris is his own, and it’s what allows him to both create and destroy himself and the entire reality of Homestuck.
yep! Lil Hal was wrong about Dirk because he perceives Dirk as the same teenager he was at 13, who Lil Hal still was in some ways. Dirk proper has grown up since then.
I’d also kinda argue, given my view of Roleplay and Knights as Passive*, you could see some of Dirk’s behavior as indicative of what a Bard of Heart might look like.
That doesn’t mean Dirk is roleplaying a Bard or anything, it’s just that the inherent flexibility of the Classes tends to lead to weird overlaps and blurred lines. Basically, Dirk growing up is a Prince to his core, but he isn’t trying to be.
What Dirk wants to be is a Knight, like Dave. Hence, he makes versions and representatives for himself all over the place, having them either serve his purposes/desires [Sawtooth & Squarewave], or having them act in his stead to serve & protect his friends [Lil Seb & Brobot].
But those agents house something of Dirk’s destructive instincts, and tend to destroy/break stuff. So in a sense, Dirk can be seen as inviting destruction through Heart, because destruction is happening because of his being in a way he isn’t directly aware of, and didn’t necessarily intend.
The epitome of this is AR, who is a Prince of Heart roleplaying a Knight himself, who is willing to engage in a LOT more potentially destructive action while being able to delude himself into thinking he’s just being helpful/servicial.
AR giving Dirk’s head to Jake probably parses, somewhere in his mind, as serving Jake Dirk’s/his own Heart/Self on a silver platter. And since doing that involved getting Dirk to commit suicide, it was an act of Destruction of Heart/Self.
But basically everything AR does is a subset of Dirk’s own initial choice to create him, right? So when traced back to the root, Dirk’s eventual forced suicide can be interpreted as Dirk having invited the destruction of his own Heart/Self, through his Heart/Self as manifested by AR.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that Dirk’s creation of the AR itself can be interpreted as an act of service in his own mind. Dirk didn’t actually think AR’s creation would be successful, and it’s Jake who egged him on, making it a point that he thought Dirk would succeed simply because he believed in him so much.
And Dirk, who is already in love with Jake by that point, definitely wouldn’t have wanted to fall short of his best buddy’s faith in him. So. There’s that.
The trick to getting me to answer asks is basically to ask me anything I can somehow twist into being about dirkjake. sorry lol
*(Worth mentioning that I think this view holds even if Knights actually are Active, since they’re presumably still less Active than Princes, and so roleplaying a Knight would render Dirk less Active than he would ordinarily be. This shit’s all relative.)
I think he’s a prince of heart roleplaying a knight in imitation of Dave, just like Dirk, since…he’s a Dirk. He destroys Heart (forcing Dirk’s suicide in Unite Synchronize) to serve his Self to Jake (offering Jake Dirk’s head/his own self, encased in the glasses).
His roleplay may be intense/unhealthy enough that he echoes Mind (and/or maybe Time, during Unite Synchronize? since he does mention managing temporal logistics) but that doesn’t mean he’s not a Heart player.
And I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding of either Mind/Heart symbolism or of how, exactly, roleplay/Aspect shifting work to say for sure right now. Maybe Hiveswap will lead us to know more, but “Prince of Heart roleplaying Knight” is as specific as I’m willing to get.
I think AR’s existence as Scratch backs up that reading. Knights’ serving of others gets them likened to Butlers, and Scratch is basically the best butler of all. Scratch easily parses as any combination of Prince/Knight and Light/Space, imbued as he is with First Guardian abilities and cueball omniscience. And that’s before we take into account the other souls he’s linked to, of course–but still, AR’s Class predilections seem to be there.
You’re not embarrassing yourself, this is a pretty common idea people have about Jake and the Brobot. That said, I disagree with basically everything about how this question is framed. Which imo, is good news for you, because it means the stuff you’re upset that the Brobot did is not actually a problem–if you decide to believe me, anyway.
If not, I welcome follow up questions on the matter. Let’s break this down, starting with one statement:
Jake doesn’t hate the Brobot.
This line. This “id rather deal with the monsters” line has caused me so many headaches, because people looove to quote Jake venting his irritation at Jane here completely out of context and take the statement at face value.
The thing is, we know what happens when Jake has to deal with the monsters instead of Brobot. What happens is Jake basically doesn’t go outside at all. On Jake’s 13th birthday, we’re told Jake pretty much just pretends to adventure all the time without actually going out much–no surprise, since he mentions growing up afraid of the monsters.
When he’s 16, by contrast, he treats going outside like an annoying chore. And while you chalk that up to Jake getting better at adventures across three years…
He still relies on Brobot to save him, so. He’s not that much better. It’s also made pretty clear Jake appreciates Dirk’s help and protection, and considers him a net positive in his own life.
And in fact, Dirk saving Jake through the Brobot over and over again is the only narrative justification we get for why Jake believes in Dirk’s ability to save him strongly enough to summon Brain Ghost Dirk.
Jake also makes it pretty clear that he A) Loves to wrestle and B) Ultimately likes the Brobot. He says it’s annoying sometimes in the same block of text where he says he finds it exciting, and that it makes his life feel like more of an adventure.
And when Jake is actually deep into the sexual objectification and abuse in his narrative, when he’s actually terrified and overwhelmed and feeling sexually threatened–
He says he wants to go back to “when all i had to worry about was being tackled by a feisty robot.” (PS: Hey he mentions wanting to go back to his pumpkin patch. Which is literally canonically the name for Dirkjake as a ship. Homestuck truly never ceases to give.)
The Brobot is being distanced from, and set as a highly preferable alternative to, all of the sexual violence being directed at Jake from Crockertier!Jane. Which strongly implies that the Brobot was not complicit in making Jake feel unsafe in this particular way.
So that’s some of the evidence in the “against” column. What is it that people base the idea that the Brobot sexually assaulted Jake on?
This single quote where AR references the Brobot’s “robogrope”. The grope is important, because this is the ~*Verifiable explicit text*~ everyone leans on to prove the Brobot was definitely literally groping Jake.
The trouble here is that the AR is actually well-known to be overly lascivious and sexually/romantically aggressive towards Jake. The AR is also a 13 year old boy with a flair for the dramatic. I am not really inclined to take the AR’s descriptions about the Brobot as the final word, especially since the description Jake himself gives is much more innocent.
Jake himself describes the Brobot, to the AR, in the exact same pesterlog where AR delivers his robogrope line. Jake does not describe groping, or sexual assault, or feeling objectified,uncomfortable, or manipulated–complaints he readily levies at AR himself, when AR actually behaves that way, btw.
No. Jake describes the encounter as “tender”. And that’s a pretty particular word to use. Not just because the definition of tender:
has literally nothing to do with sexual or predatory behavior–and in fact suggests its opposite. But because Tender has rather notable usage in Homestuck itself, as in…
Yeah. The word “Tender”, in Homestuck, most notably relates to Caliborn’s particular brand of tepid-ass sugar porn. Which means that as far as Jake himself is concerned, the Brobot’s treatment of him has a lot more in common with this…
…than with the kind of behavior displayed by Aranea, Crockertier!Jane, or the AR. It’s nice that Jake happens to be the one main character who’s casually implied to be subconciously omniscient, so you can easily make the argument some part of him literally knows about this.
This interpretation also happens to actually make sense from Dirk’s perspective, since Dirk was explicitly eager to draw Caliborn’s *TENDER* porn with himself and Jake. So there is actually canonical basis for Jake picking up on some of Brobot’s behaviors meant to convey “Tender”ness.
It’s just that only implies the Brobot was being cutesy, romantic, and caringly chaste–the kind of shit Caliborn likes. “Brobot rubbed a rose tenderly on Jake’s face while singing ghostbusters” is literally closer to the truth than “Brobot sexually assaulted Jake”, since again–and this is importantthe important bit:
So where are all my drawings of the Brobot’s wrestling giving way to the chastest, most caring, cutest displays imaginable, fandom? TIA. Dirkjake is canon, Homestuck is good, and I GUESS this is my 4/13 post because dirkjake remains my favorite thing about it.
So, this page. This page is one of my favorites, because it shows just how much of a nerd Dirk is, and how wrapped up he and Hal are in their bizarre ironic one-upmanship games even though they don’t really seem to derive any enjoyment for them anymore. One thing to note in this convo is that, in keeping with Dirk’s focus on philosophy and history, they’re not really talking math, even if it might seem like it. More specifically, they’re talking math history.
The theme of the conversation is making bigshot claims of amazingness, while simultaneously introducing deliberate errors in one’s claims.
Hal opens the convo by talking about pi, the “big circle number”. Now, calculating digits of pi is indeed a popular method of testing the computational power and correctness of a computer. However, Hal claims to have “solved” pi, calculating every last digit. This is patent bullshit. As Dirk states, pi doesn’t have an end, it keeps going literally forever, never repeating, and this is one of the reasons why it’s so popular as a test. By claiming to have solved pi, Hal is “inadvertently” admitting to having made an obvious error in his calculations.
What’s interesting, though, is how Dirk claims it to be bullshit, by invoking “an ancient Greek guy” who “settled shit about irrational numbers” “practically when math was invented”, because this, too, is totally wrong, albeit in a more subtle, Dirk-esque way. Considering his interest in Greek philosophy, Dirk would indeed know the story of Hippasus of Metapontum, and how his heretical mathematical discoveries drove his peers to drown him.
Now, Hippasus (who may or may not have actually existed) is indeed credited with the discovery of irrational numbers, which are numbers that cannot be expressed as a fraction of two other numbers (and thus necessarily have no end to their decimal expressions), but the irrational number he’s credited with discovering isn’t pi, it’s the square root of two. Indeed, while pi is irrational, it took until the 18th century to fully prove this, and Lambert, the guy who first did so, was Swiss, not Greek. (Of course, the other, sadder joke here is that the 18th century, too, is ancient history from Dirk and Hal’s post-apocalyptic vantage point, though this is not clear at the point the conversation first happens)
And of course, Hal responds to Dirk’s confusion of history by claiming to have found all the prime numbers, which was proven to be impossible by an ancient Greek guy, specifically Euclid, in his work Elements, a book which mathematicians tend to regard with an awe close to what many people hold for the Bible, and which could by some if far from all definitions of mathematics be considered “practically when math was invented”.
And then Dirk tries to pretend he doesn’t know what prime numbers are for some reason? Yeah, I’m not actually sure if he’s doing something there or just being an ass.
Ah. Sorry for putting words in your mouth, if that’s what I did–I was kind of wired yesterday and I don’t remember my exact wording too well, so I’m worried I mighta come off that way. Kinda forgot this is a view people still have, honestly.
Suffice it to say, I feel you’re incorrect. AR was explicitly not acting with Dirk’s authorization, since AR explicitly screens/blocks all of Jake’s messages to Dirk after the very first one that Dirk reads. And Dirk wasn’t even able to keep up with the circumstances leaving up to Unite Synchronize–his entire narrative is him being overwhelmed by the amount of information he has to process and unable to keep up. It doesn’t make sense to attribute Unite Synchronize to anything but AR’s design, especially since Dirk lays the events squarely on AR’s shoulders–despite being inclined to assume responsibility and self-loathing for anything he perceives as his mistakes–and AR not only doesn’t deny it, but actively takes credit for it.
As for the Brobot, Dirk certainly did build it, but that’s not really comparable to what Vriska does, and it’s questionable how much it lines up with Dammek currently. Mainly because Dirk was explicitly trying to give Jake what Jake very loudly, very boldly said he wanted, and as it turns out Jake demonstrably likes the Brobot–it’s AR he was frustrated with in canon for the most part.
I wrote several essays on this already that can be found here, so you’re free to read that and agree/disagree at your pleasure. Regadless, I consider the “Dirk was abusive/toxic to Jake (and depending on who you ask, AR)” reading little more than bad, outdated fanon.
it’s sort of a mix of stuff. I pretty much think the biggest contributing factor to AR’s descent is the absence of his connections to the other Alphas, and I think that’s true of Bro as well.
I mean that’s pretty much explicit. All four of the Beta guardians are unsatisfied, unhappy, or a wreck in some way, and the unifying thread between them is the lack of the others. This is particularly pronounced for Bro, who is not just barely-functional like Mom and Grandpa are, but profoundly destructive to others and himself when lacking their companionship.
This isn’t JUST about Jake, I could say things as relevant about the ways Dirk needs Roxy and Jane, but I wanna keep this short and you all know what I’m about so let’s use Jake as an example.
Dirk explicitly fears his own potential for darkness and hates himself for it and the reason he falls for Jake in the first place is because of Jake’s *faith* in him, in his kindness and caring and potential to do good.
Dirk is drawn to Jake because Jake sees the value in him and sees the good in him and Jake being able to do that makes it easier for Dirk to see it in himself, too. So without that influence in his life at *ALL*, even less than what AR got?
It’s easy for me to see how Bro would fall apart to the degree he does. For the most part, that’s all there is to say on the matter.
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but. let me complicate the narrative for you a little.
I used to be firmly of the opinion that Bro’s actions had nothing to do with Lil Cal and were all on Bro, and the latter’s still true. However, @jadedresearcher kinda turned my world around when they pointed out a simple fact:
There are explicit, demonstrable influences that Lil Cal exerts on Bro, in terms of his personality growth at least. Namely, Bro and Dirk have a divergent interest.
Namely, the SAW-inspired snuff film/”I want to play a Game” stuff. Bro expresses an interest in it, but Dirk really never so much as mentions it. The Jigsaw aesthetic is Caliborn’s thing exclusively, and the only real narrative explanation it has in the story is Lil Cal acting as a transmitter for the interest.
So having this in mind I think there is an extent to which Cal’s influence can be implicated in Bro’s descent. Not that it excuses any of his assholery.
Lastly, here’s a bit of rarely indulged speculation:
We do already know Grandpa raised Mom, suggesting Grandpa may have raised Bro as well. Hell, Hiveswap even has a blurry as hell picture that may be of Bro facepalming that i can’t for the life of me find right now so i guess ill just post it later who cares, the point is
if it’s true Grandpa remembers the Alphas in some way, or if it’s true *Bro* does– given that he’s a Heart player, that seems plausible too–those could also be factors that isolated Bro and made him vulnerable to Cal’s influence?
That is, of course, purely speculative. It’s just one of many potential questions I’m excited to see if Hiveswap will explore.
Yeah, I sympathize with AR a lot, I don’t want to give off the impression that I don’t–it’s just Dirk and Jake are the ones most hurt by the current fandom standing. If I’m able to change that for the better someday I would definitely want to flesh out the nuances of the AR (i am feeling kind of hopeless about the possibility right now, i’m not gonna lie) but for right now I think there’s more than enough of people making the AR better than he is to go with making Dirk worse.
For instance, I don’t think Dirk and Jake were needlessly dismissive at all. AR earned his treatment through his treatment of Jake–which, by the way, is a large part of the reason Dirk was so frustrated and bothered by him.
That said, the AR–I decided to start calling him Hal–Hal’s situation is kind of innately tragic, too. There’s a lot of pathos to read into his lot in life, and I think he earns his own sort of redemptive narrative victory though it’s a harsher one than Dirk, which makes sense because…Dirk tries really hard to be a better person and succeeds at it. I’ll definitely want to write about that someday.
Flying through Storytelling 