UPDATE: Sorry about the dissapointing news on 4/13 today. I imagine many fans won’t be in the mood to read this right now, but I thought it’d be a better way to spend the day than being dissapointed. So maybe you will. Either way, I put a lot of love into this. I hope it helps. 

I want to begin this post with a mea culpa.

In the wake of the last post covering Jake’s awareness of events unfolding around him, I was lucky enough to receive feedback from a number of really great people. Among that feedback was the idea that I was kind of overstating things with regards to Jake’s intelligence to the opposite extreme.

I feel that this is true! Not because I don’t think Jake is aware or that he was an actively getting Jane to lean one way in her answer–I still think that’s correct, and in fact I have more evidence to present in favor of it under the cut.

But I worry in my zeal, I presented a skewed image of how I think about Jake–essentially, I was trying to correct what I perceive as the fandom problem of invalidating Jake’s intelligence completely and painting him as a moron. I think it is a fair criticism to say I overcorrected in that endeavor. 

I’m hoping that admitting that my choosing to tone down certain claims is a direct result of valid and insightful criticism will allow you to give me the benefit of the doubt, and make it easier for you believe I am being genuine in approaching this subject and interested in and willing to incorporate feedback where I find it logically consistent. This is important to me for reasons that will soon become obvious.

That disclaimer out of the way, please click on the cut to see what I have to say.

If you do, by the way: Thank you. It means a lot to me.

There was originally an author’s introduction here. In the interest of brevity I reposted it to it’s own post, so click here to understand my motivations for writing and my desire for the fandom. Otherwise, please enjoy.

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Knights and Pages – Servitude and Ownage

In my last post, I advanced the idea that Pages are an Active class and Knights are Passive. In so doing, I made the mistake of implying Pages are all secretely hyperintelligent supergeniuses who use everyone knowingly. That wasn’t exactly my intent, but that’s fine–sloppy execution on my part. My bad.

What I didn’t do is discuss the potential key verbs Knights and Pages might operate under–because I honestly didn’t have one I felt confident in. In the wake of discussing the piece with @theworstpersonintheworld (misleadingly named), he made a suggestion that struck me deeply, and once I started thinking about the story in those terms everything truly fell into place.  

I think it will be useful in explaining the dynamic between Jake and Dirk as I see it, so I’d like to make the case for it here before we move forward.

The key verb for both Knights and Pages is ‘Serve’. This puts them in direct thematic opposition to Rogues and Thieves, who ‘Steal’, which lines up with those dual systems Sburb loves so much–after all, if Princes and Bards are ‘Destroy’ classes, it’s reasonable to assume there is also a ‘Create’ set, right?

Knights Serve their Aspect to others. Pages use their Aspect to Serve themselves. To establish this and contrast against Jake’s actions later, let’s take a look at some of Dave’s actions in this context to establish what this verb can mean. 

From the outset, Dave has a reputation for providing his friends with his Time, serving them long rambling diatribes to consume and enjoy–often far exceeding the time they’re willing to spend on the conversation. 

His primary contribution to the Beta’s game is to run loops around the session, constantly gathering all relevant resources possible so that his friends don’t need to worry at all about limitations like money or access to weapons and can do whatever they feel like. Essentially, Dave takes care of the minutiae. 

This predisposition to serving others is also likely why Knights seem to end up helping out with Frog Breeding duties so often. This is essentially the most important game objective, and so serving the Space player in completing it is also Serving every other player in step. 

And then there’s this. Serve is a word with double connotations. It can indeed imply servitude or service, and Dave definitely does that. But there’s a colloquial definition of Serve that derives it’s use from the term “Get Served”, which Urban Dictionary defines as: To be completely owned or shown up by someone. Kinda like Dave does to us here–which Karkat also does, by the way. 

This is also something Dave does repeatedly–he overwhelms Tavros with a time-consuming and epically sassy document, and makes Time-based power plays against Karkat gestures of antagonism. To serve someone in this sense essentially means to defeat them in rhetorical or literal battle, explaining why Aradia describes Knights as a Warrior class.

I’d like to posit a corollary attribute that I believe holds true for all Classes, as well. This one is not explicitly advanced textually, but I believe I can back it up. It takes place along a different axis. I posit that just as the classes affect their Aspect, so too they are affected BY their Aspect. 

So in addition to the Active/Passive distinction, we could read both Knights and Pages as ones who are Served by their Aspect. 

This is true of Dave, as he gets owned by his Bro in an explicitly time-consuming fight. And the trend continues as he then gets saved by his future selves over and over again throughout the session–being served in both senses:

If this reading of Knight happens to bother you because it means that the Beta session has an uneven distribution of Active/Passive classes, consider the dynamics of both sessions:

In the beta session, Rose essentially takes and follows orders from the Horrorterrors and Doc Scratch, whilst also distributing orders to Dave and John (who each take further orders from Terezi and Jade and Vriska, respectively). All of this is ultimately in support of the plan Jade commits to herself, plans herself, and executes herself–taking Active control of the entire session in one fell swoop at the last instant. 

In the Alpha session, all three Active players flounder and stifle themselves and each other with nothing meaningful to do and no way to receive substantial benefit. Ultimately, it is the Passive player–Roxy–who rises above the constraints of her session and achieves more or less competence at understanding her role and powerset by the end of the session. 

In the session that requires constant action and change, there’s Three passives to one Active. In the session that requires patience, introspection, and connecting with each other, the inverse is true. The incentives and natural skills of the players are set at odds in both cases, stacking the cards against them. 

That’s enough on Knights for now. To save on length, I’ll explain how the other Classes are affected by their Aspects elsewhere. I think we’ve established this framework well enough, so let’s pick up where we left off with Jake.

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Faith and Fear 

So basically, I was never exactly trying to argue Jake was some kind of secret supergenius manipulator. What I tried to say, rather, is that he’s pretty much about as aware and capable as his friends are. Whatever mental hiccups he has that can be attributed to mental shortcomings on our part are a red herring–Jake’s problem is actually similar to Jane’s: 

Willful ignorance coupled with an intense aversion to confrontation. Before I start talking about those, here’s some extra evidence in favor of my view that Jake manipulating Jane into denying her feelings was intentional. 

Last we talked about Jake, I mentioned how soon after Roxy messaged him and let slip about Jane’s crush, Jake messaged Jane in order to talk to her about it. What I missed was that that conversation with Roxy happens much earlier, and Jake and Roxy actually have a SECOND conversation on the subject…immediately preceding Jane and Jake’s conversation. 

Note here that Jake slips up and describes Jane’s pinings as “unrequited”. Jake broaches the subject, and then rambles a bit about how he wonders if people really do feel that way. Then Roxy is interrupted by something and has to go, which results in…

I’m not really vouching for the idea that this “Hmm.” is definitely Jake being given a line of quiet contemplation before he decides to do what he does next–talk to Jane–but I will advance it as a possibility. At the very least, the line is ambiguous. This kind of understated response is a little bit odd in the context of Jake being worried about Roxy’s danger, and he seemed lost in his own thoughts right before she left. 

Regardless, moving on to the next page. Nothing I said with Jane was fundamentally inaccurate, so I won’t cover that subject matter again. What I do want to answer is: Why? 

If Jake knew how Jane felt, why not just answer her? And why does he seem to forget Jane ever liked him in the first place once she says No–to the point that even with Brain Ghost Dirk, his literal own brain, telling him better, he still claims ignorance?

And the answer is that Jake conflates believing in someone with believing the things they say, and Jake very much wants to be a good friend to his loved ones. And what Jake fears more than anything is that he may have to confront or disappoint anyone. That he be forced to find out he accidentally hurt his friends’ feelings–or be forced to choose to do something that would do so himself.

This is why his big solution when he becomes a Trickster is to become a doormat and date everybody, explicitly so that he can make everyone happy–not because he wants to date everyone himself. (though he makes it a point to include Dirk when the girls exclude him)  And he admits his reasoning himself once the session falls apart:

So it’s more convenient for him if it turns out he really was wrong about Jane liking him–despite literal evidence to the contrary–and once he has it, he serves himself through Hope and believes it wholeheartedly. 

He then puts Jane in a situation where she ends up Serving him by acting as a confidant for months, all the while talking her up as such a great and understanding friend and thanking her. (This is an approach Jake constantly uses, by the way–think of his “standup gent” gratitude spiel in his first log with Hal. Why does Jake give it? He wants uranium–ie, Dirk’s service.)

And implicitly uses the head trauma he received during session entry as a plausible excuse for his lack of foresight, just as he uses his Hotheaded Adventurer persona to ignore possibilities he finds inconvenient. He does all this because on some level he’s genuinely convinced it’s all true, so this isn’t exactly active manipulation. But he convinced himself it was true in the first place because it was conducive to his preferred fantasies. 

This reluctance to confront his friends when he thinks there’s a chance he messed up also explains a question barely anyone seems to have asked:
If Jake was having so much trouble with Dirk, why did he always go to Jane or Erisol? Why never Roxy, over the course of six months?

The answer is because Roxy knows a secret (hidden information-Void stuff), a fact that Jake cannot square with his constructed identity: That he knew Jane liked him all along. Because she told him about it. (Roxy has her own reasons for not advancing this information, which we’ll get to someday.)

But because of all this behavior, Jake’s friends find it extremely difficult to approach him about subjects he doesn’t want to be approached with, which coupled with their own issues ends with everyone bottling up their feelings until they burst, always ending in Jake getting breathtakingly….

Devastatingly…

Served. 

But I don’t want to harsh on Jake here. It’s not that he doesn’t love his friends–it’s just that he’s kind of selfish about it. But that isn’t always a bad thing, as we’ll soon see. For now, do you know what Jake is more comfortable doing for Jane than letting her down gently over her unrequited feelings?

Literally dying for her. After she threatened him with sexual slavery.
And she’s not the one he chose to be with romantically–we’ll get to Dirk later. This is not a boy who cares only about himself–it’s a boy who is so scared of disappointing the people he cares about he would rather lie to them and himself forever rather than face the possibility. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt them, obviously. 

In the words of so many people who have told me about their perceptions of Dirk: “Intent does not invalidate abuse.”

 And there’s no one this habit of Jake’s hurts worse than it hurts Dirk Strider. 

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Fearful Heart 

We get exactly one pesterlog with Dirk and Jake, and in my opinion, it is the single best pesterlog in the entire story of Homestuck. For those who forgot: The log I will be quoting from is a memory from Jake’s 13th birthday, the day Dirk sent him the Brobot and confessed to being from the future. 

It is indicative of the nature of their relationship, since it is immediately after Jake remembers he’s dreaming that Brain Ghost Dirk adopts the sassier approach– likely a reflection of Hal’s effect on Jake’s perception of Dirk, brought to the forefront once Jake remembers his situation in the real world. 

The first thing worth pointing out is that Dirk doesn’t buy Jake’s Hothead Adventurer persona at all. Don’t get me wrong–Dirk takes Jake at his word when Jake talks about liking adventure and fighting and all of his interests, but when Jake tries to talk himself down intelligence-wise, Dirk flips his rhetoric to compliment him. 

And when he brings up Rose’s book series, Dirk opens by asking if Jake’s read it. When Jake dodges and tries to lean on not being able to understand it (and asks Dirk to help him keep the secret–more of his hiding stuff to spare people’s feelings), Dirk ignores the comment and launches into a diatribe on the book’s underlying themes–knowing Jake will follow every word of it. 

This perception into Jake’s true nature links into Dirk’s role as a Heart player–Nepeta similarly saw right through Karkat’s angry bluster and unpleasantness into the deeply emotional and gooey Heart underneath.

And when Jake leans on his dumb (and coded straight) adventurer’s persona to deliberately avoid letting his conversation with Dirk skirt too close to gay territory…

Dirk actually snaps at him, coming off pretty critical. It’s important to note this conversation takes place while Dirk is in the process of sending Jake the Brobot, a project he’s worked on for months and which we learn was meant to be a romantic gesture on Dirk’s part, judging by the ‘tender’ comments. So it’s safe to assume the dude’s got romantic thoughts on his mind right now.

And fairly intense ones, too: The Hal describes his memories about feeling for Jake as ‘heavily arresting’ periods of remembering ‘conflicted, incipient preteen episodes’ on the subject. This tells us that the episodes were getting started before Dirk was 13, that they involved conflicting emotions, and that they were intense enough that Hal is still essentially paralyzed by them–even removed from their original biological context. 

Especially because he brings up sexuality again soon after, only to once more be shut down–and with Jake taking ‘gay’ as a mean-spirited pejorative, no less. 

Soon after that, Jake says something that could be read as flirty and Dirk immediately jumps on it, escalating things to thinking about actual physical proximity. When Jake points it out, Dirk gets flustered and quickly changes the subject. He then starts talking DOWN how capable he is–a sharp contrast from later Dirk talking himself up in front of Jane.  They talk some more, the conversation turning to Dirk doubting his own ability to make the AR, and…

There’s two things to note here: The first is that Dirk is clearly and transparently moved. The second is that Jake explicitly notes that he appreciates Dirk being helpful–being of service. This exchange is linked to Jake’s faith, and arguably leads directly to the creation of the AR. It also leads to this:

In this way, the boys nearly exchanging their true feelings for each other is linked to the creation of new life–a concept (reductively) considered the domain of heterosexual couples. Alas, it veers off into the future talk, where we learn something else important:

This moment is important to Dirk. Jake’s faith in him is important to Dirk. So much so that the moment reverberates three years later, as Jake dreams about it, through Brain Ghost Dirk delivering a line that is actually unique enough to jar Jake out of the memory–essentially, Dirk’s feelings slipping through the Ghost to wake Jake up to his reality. 

Brain Ghost Dirk implies Dirk thinks Jake’s faith is impressive, further undercutting the fake reasons Dirk gives Jane for letting Hal hassle him.  This moment means a lot to Dirk, and it comes at a time when his emotions are likely already running high. Which makes it a real shame what happens next.

Jake reacts horribly to the Brobot’s design, which Dirk responds to with a question. Jake spends most of his life up until now talking up his love of fights, challenges and adventure, so Dirk asks for clarification. He then asks Jake to trust him, trying to sell the idea–but Jake makes it pretty clear he dislikes the idea. 

Which is why I really can’t parse him changing the subject as some cold-blooded act of manipulation. This conversation has been a rollercoaster for Dirk–he’s been built up, torn down, and sent a ton of mixed messages. The big romantic overture he had planned blew up in his face, and I think there’s an argument he can no longer do anything to fix it without knowingly exposing Jake to danger. Dirk wants to be done by this point, I think, and I would be too. 

And the tragedy is? I don’t even buy that this was Dirk imposing some Training Program on Jake out of his personal perspective that Jake needs to improve. At this point, I’d need a strong argument to convince me of the reading. It leaves too big a plot hole, and there’s a more obvious canonical explanation for it anyway.

Because if Dirk was willing to unilaterally impose training on Jake because he needed to be stronger, then it begs the question: Why not the same functionality for Jane? Are we putting it down to some completely canonically unaddressed misogyny? Jane is in as much danger as any of them, and far more unprepared. If he felt that strongly and was that willing to control, does it really make sense to think he’d stop short of training her personally to ensure their success?

It’s much more reasonable to assume the obvious: That when trying to romance his best friend, Dirk approached the situation logically. Jake talks about loving adventure all the goddamn time. Dirk knows he doesn’t actually do any adventures. But he believes Jake that he wants to. The answer? Simple. 

Set up an elaborate scenario in which Jake can experience all the adventure he wants–while also keeping him safe from monsters. Essentially, Dirk is trying to enable Jake to actually start living out his fantasy in a safe environment, and Jake inspires in Dirk the desire to help him in this way through Hope for romantic reciprocation.

Dirk isn’t interested in controlling Jake English at all. He’s trying to Serve him.

Which he succeeds at! Over the long run, Jake does indeed grow to view the chase as an adventure, and admits to finding the whole experience of the Brobot kind of exciting in confidence with Jane. I’d have to hear explanations if someone wanted to square this with Jake perceiving it as abusive, personally.

Hence why Jake levels up when he’s trounced. Which makes these lines Dirk delivers three years later, directly to the audience:

Straight up lies. It’s Dirk hiding from his hurt and confusion by destroying his own perceived fuckups with his fabricated Stoic Coolguy Warrior persona–the same way Jake hides from his own by burying them under his beliefs. 

In reality, all Dirk wants is to try to make what Jake wants possible. Which is very fitting, because there’s only one thing Dirk wants more than Jake himself. What Dirk wants is to be believed in. To be valued and wanted. To be of service, to be necessary, to be good. And specifically…

To be like Dave Strider. 

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As you Wish

I’ve already laid my case for why Dirk definitely did not set up the events of [S] Unite Synchronize, but with this context it’s worth noting the note Dirk was trying to play while setting up the session–essentially, he was trying to live up to Dave’s legacy and mythological role, acting to Serve all his friends complete session entry. 

He fails at this. Miserably. But Hal, who is also a Dirk trying to emulate Dave, succeeds–by the end, it literally take’s over as EVERYONE’S server player, even Dirk’s. He even takes Dave’s text color during the process AND literally takes charge of–his words–metatemporal mechanics.

That established, let’s refocus a bit and note the nature of Dirk’s relationship with all of his friends by the time they start playing.

We just took stock of how badly Dirk’s last attempt at approaching Jake romantically went, and soon after this the AR is created and begins attempting to intercept, manipulate and solicit Jake on Dirk’s behalf–I already went over how Dirk had no control over this, didn’t want it, and grew to hate Hal for it.   Several times over. 

To make matters worse, we learn Jake essentially toyed with Dirk’s heart with jokes he–again– never confronted Dirk to correct, although he correctly deduces it left lasting damage on Dirk’s feelings. 

Partly as a result, he views Jane as a competitor with an unfair advantage. Her complete ignorance about his sexuality doesn’t help matters, so he can’t talk to her. 

All the while, Roxy is actively and willingly pressuring him into romantic interest in her and directly comparing him unfavorably to Hal for his lack of romantic reciprocation. And Hal not only harasses Jake and positions himself as a better friend to Jane (this particular act I do not view as malicious), but uses Dirk’s very insecurity about failing Roxy against him.

And while Hal claims to be on Dirk’s side in the Jakestakes, Dirk is pretty much right to be suspicious of his intentions:

So essentially, Dirk has no one to talk to about his sexuality and gets ignorance or cruelty on all sides with regards to it. Is it really reasonable to demand of a teenager to come forward to his best friend–who he last heard voice rejection of the very CONCEPT of gayness–not only to admit his sexuality and explain how it factors into his alternate self’s abusive behavior, but also to confess or try to talk around his soul-searing, cosmic romantic love for the guy?

And that is what it is, make no mistake about it. The AR is either getting carried away with the feelings it says are distant and diluted for it, or confessing those feelings on Dirk’s behalf.

Heart is the aspect not just of love, but of any intense attraction between two or more people, and thus shipping. At first, these elements may seem disparate, but they’re more connected than they seem.

After all, what do you do if you ship two characters? If you think they’re in love? Typically they’re shown as close together as possible, trading attention and feelings. Placing their two souls in proximity to one another’s and implying a give and take between them.

Which is why it’s no surprise that Dirk expresses love by trying to close physical distance, or that when he and Jake hook up in the session, Dirk tries to compensate for his fears that Jake is straight and acting out of obligation by trying to stay as close as possible–thus being clingy and needy but with no real exchange of emotions taking place.

And in [S] Unite, we get shown the degree of Dirk’s feelings. When Jake revives him with the only romantically coded corpsesmooch in the comic, Dirk’s Heart symbol lights up and takes over the screen before he pulls off amazing feats while racing to Jake’s side. And in the panel just before, the lamp representing Dirk’s literal life lights up and overflows so brightly that it literally breaks, unable to contain the force of his passion.

Dirk’s Prince of Heart role does reflect how he destroys his relationships, but not the way most people think. It’s not that Dirk is willing to erode the selves of his friends to fit into his molds, but rather that Hal positioning his Self between Dirk and his friends undercuts Dirk’s ability to reach out and trust their perceptions, or even tell where he begins and Hal ends.

At the same time, Dirk’s intense fear of rejection keeps him away from broaching his problems with Jake the same way Jake’s fear of disappointing others stops him from broaching his–his Love getting in the way of honesty as much as his constructed Persona. 

Save for the trickster log–which he recants–Dirk never once even thinks to consider his friends as aggressors towards him. His instinct is to assume he’s somehow failing them instead. Just like with Jake, Dirk sees into the core of all of his friends, and what he really sees at the end of the day is this:

Dirk thinks Roxy is noble. He sees her as she really is–as one of the Nobles of the session, as they ALL are, seeing right past their flaws and mistakes and straight to the shining hearts of their intentions. Again, Roxy’s not even the one he wants to be with romantically, and we saw the intensity of how he feels about Jake. He wrote Jane entire books and sent her personal bodyguards crafted out of heirlooms taken from the Bro Dirk essentially wants to become. What would he have to say about them, if asked?

Dirk’s problem is his perception of his friends’ nobility leads him to erasing all their hurtful behavior, and his own perceived hurtful behavior stops him from seeing any nobility within himself. Dirk’s response to all of the complicated ways he’s been hurt in trying to manage the Hal and Jake situation as ethically as possible by all of his friends is to internalize responsibility for absolutely all of it. It never even crosses his mind to hold Jane or Jake or even Roxy accountable. Only his own identity.

When things finally explode on him, he turns all his pain inwards and projects it both onto Hal and onto himself.  Dirk’s Prince of Heart role nearly culminates in his most literal destruction of himself–Dirk being nearly Destroyed by Heart.

Jake’s love is no less complicated, but thankfully less drawn out. And Jake does love Dirk, again–I feel this is canonical. But I want to qualify this final section with a disclaimer, because I really don’t want to invalidate anyone.

So to be clear: I think reading Jake as aromantic is copacetic with the canon. Obviously I don’t share this reading–I see him as Bi–but all I’m going to argue here is that Jake deeply, truly, profoundly loves Dirk back. I’m going to describe the angle of that love, too.

But whether that love is romantic or platonic is irrelevant to me. You can read them as lovers or best friends or whatever shade of grey between is most pleasing to you, in my humble opinion. 

That said, I don’t feel the need to deconstruct Jake’s every line to determine why he didn’t mean each and every one that could suggest a lack of romantic interest. You can pretty much put almost all of them down in one of four categories: 

His worries about other people’s perceptions and early discomfort with queerness, his later discomfort with feeling unsafe and sexually threatened/objectified, his (willfully ignorant) lack of surety regarding the nature of Dirk’s feelings for him….

And the one I actually want to talk about. 

This is in response to Roxy talking about feeling like it hurts to let Dirk down. The thing is, Roxy–like Dave–is a Passive player, who predominantly feels inclined to help others. Of course failing someone she cares about is going to sting for her more than it would for Jake. 

That has nothing to do with Jake’s capacity for love, it has to do with the fact that Jake is selfish. It has to do with him regretting his self-absorption. Jake does love, and he loves intensely–he loves enough to die for it, which is pretty much as intense as it gets. He’s just deeply, deeply selfish about it. 

And I love that selfishness about Jake. Because it turns all doubts about whether Jake loves Dirk back to ash in one fell swoop, in one single, brilliant, shining moment. In this moment all of Jake’s plot threads come together–his sexual abuse and lack of agency, his growing fear, his certainty none of his friends wants him anymore, his selfishness and fantasy indulgence AND Dirk’s desire to live up to Dave’s image are all build up to one single, spectacular moment. 

A cinematic moment. A moment with deep philosophical implications. 

Everything about Jake and Dirk’s narratives builds up to this. Dirk’s desire to live up to Dave and Jake’s inherent selfishness are complementary, symbiotic forces. I mentioned earlier that when Dirk’s lamp lights up and overflows he performs incredible, unbelievable acts whilst rushing to Jake’s side. 

And when Jake is lit up by Aranea, removing his agency as a person COMPLETELY while also making him the brightest object in the sky, Jake manages to find a way to turn his power against her. And what he chooses to create reveals everything about his character. Because what he chooses to do is call Dirk to his side, to protect him and keep him safe from his perceived threat. 

Both of the boys literally LIGHT UP with their feelings for each other, in a comic where the concept of Light is explicitly linked to relevance, importance, understanding, and the concept of reaching Enlightenment or Nirvana. (Stay tuned, I’ll flesh this out more in my next three videos.) 

I’ve gone over the inherent romance in Jake choosing to create Dirk over literally any other option imaginable.  But with the new context of Jake explicitly looking to serve himself through Hope, it takes on an added edge. What Jake wants more than anything else in the world is Dirk, but not at all to make Dirk happy or because it’s what Dirk would want. No. 

Jake wants Dirk because he’s selfish. Because he wants life to be happy and easy and adventurous but carefree, and he believes he can always rely on Dirk to take care of things or bail him out when things get too intense for him to handle. Jake wants Dirk as a best friend, a bodyguard, a partner, a rival and a servant all rolled into one. 

Jake’s feelings for all of his friends have nothing to do with them and everything to do with himself. He’d rather die than live in a word without Jane, and that’s why he saves her–not because he thinks he owes it to her for past slights.

All of this is textual by implication. Dirk’s line:

”I am Brain Ghost Dirk. You kissed my boyfriend. Prepare to Die.”

Is indicative of the Dirk Jake wants and believes in in his head. This line is a movie reference to The Princess Bride, a romantic fantasy adventure comedy with a very curious dynamic between the romantic leads. No shortage of people have pointed out how Jake seems to see himself as or end up in the positions of sexualized and marginalized female protagonists, but I think there’s a cause to be made Jake’s “arc” draws from this specific one–Buttercup–above all others.

Buttercup’s dynamic with Westley is simple. She issues requests to him, and he responds “As you Wish.” This As you Wish is an explicit I love you, and the power of love is put forth as the source of Westley’s power and endless competence and ability throughout the entire story. It doesn’t matter what needs to happen, Westley finds a way to do it. And he does it because he believes in their love. 

Buttercup, however, struggles to hold on to her faith that love can overcome all things possible and wavers in her commitment to living for it, ending up nearly trapped in an unwanted marriage.  Buttercups’ arc is resolved when she chooses to believe in love even at risk of love, promising never again to hide what she truly desires–Westley.

This is the essence of Jake’s fantasy, and we know that’s what it is because when Caliborn threatens to kill Dirk in the Masterpiece (which the Credits suggest we’ll soon see once again), Jake responds by shifting his and Dirk’s fundamental power dynamic–once again Lighting Up with love to save him by delivering Caliborn his destined serving. 

Jake’s victory ends up giving Hope to all those opposing Lord English, but Jake himself doesn’t give a shit about that. Jake’s stated motivation for trouncing Caliborn is one thing and one thing only: Saving Dirk. Serving his own desire to see Dirk safe. Caliborn is hurting his friend, and Jake is mad about it. His motivation is essentially identical to his desire to save Jane, though–he doesn’t want to live without Dirk. 

And on Dirk’s side, this dynamic ultimately validates the idea that he became everything he wanted to become by emulating Dave through a bit of understated environmental storytelling. I already argued in favor of Grandpa being able to on some level remember his relationship to the Alphas, so click here to read that argument or accept my premise here and move on.

This dynamic answers a question that didn’t even need asking–why the Knight sitting on the Derse side of Grandpa’s house wears a suit suspiciously similar to one of Dave’s most well-known ones.

It suggests an explicit linkage of the idea of Knighthood and the idea of Dave, and suggests that this is the imagery that comes to Grandpa’s mind when thinking of Dirk. In one way, you could view this as Dirk managing to destroy his own thematic legacy in Bro and choosing to live up to something different–a sort of ultimate manifestation of his Prince of Heart role. 

And just for the record, this is a connection that has held true across not only the entirety of the Homestuck, but through Hiveswap as well, with a Knight standing right in front of a smuppet. 

Which suggests to me that WP has approached Grandpa’s memories and the Alpha’s arcs with the same attention to detail the comic itself gave them, and makes me extremely confident in what’s to come. Hopefully now you are too. Hiveswap’s attention to detail speaks to the quality of the story they’ve crafted, and we should all be excited beyond reasonable belief, in my humble opinion.

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Conclude.

So that’s it. That’s pretty much all my evidence for this reading of Dirk, Jake, Dave, and the wider story surrounding them. I look forward to hearing your responses. Personally, putting this together was revelatory for me. I hope it was for you, too. If it wasn’t quite, I hope you want to talk about it and keep track of the ongoing conversation I hope takes place here as a result. 

This series has been a passion project, but also essentially a side project to my youtube series aimed at welcoming and explaining Homestuck to new, incoming Hiveswap fans. If you find yourself trying to make it easier for a Hiveswap fan to understand what Homestuck is about and how it connects to the game, I hope you think of me.

If you like my writing and have a buck to spare, you could also really help me out by enabling me to focus on putting more of this content out there through pledging on Patreon. Doing so will also give you access to my private community of enthusiasts trying to advance new and interesting readings of this wonderful property. 

That’s really all there is to say on the matter. My next essay, if my current whim sticks, will be on Jade and Davepeta–and why Jade’s character arc isn’t as badly handled as many seem to think. If not, I’ll certainly get to it later. 

If you read this far, then all I want to say is thank you.  Thank you for being interested and open-minded enough to grant me the opportunity to share these ideas. I love you for it more than you could believe. I think people like you are what will save humanity from itself.

See you again soon, everyone. Until then,

Keep rising.