Dirk calls himself “a heart player who was just a stone cold motherfucker” but Dirk is wrong. Not only is that not true about how he really feels, it isn’t even true about how he acts.
Dirk shows himself to be open when it comes to expressing his love and care for his friends. The dude is not cagey about his emotional attachment to them.
He’s more than willing to tell them how much he cares about them and wants to do things with them:
As well as give them praise, especially if they’re putting themselves down:
He’s also willing to be honest with his criticisms:
Sometimes he gives praise and criticism at the same time:
Dirk loves his friends, and he isn’t cold or distant about it. He tells them to their face by trying to encourage and support them with honest feedback, whether praise or criticism—after all, what value does praise have without honest critique?—and expressions of his affection and enthusiasm for them. This doesn’t always pan out but he really does try.
From what we can tell, there are very few things he’s actually cagey about with his friends. These seem to mostly be things that would would reveal that he was hurt or upset by something: emotions related to his own feelings rather than emotions related to himself.
He doesn’t let on to Roxy exactly why her comments about his sexuality/her flirting make him uncomfortable, he also hides how fucked up he is and how much he hates himself from them, and he avoids total honesty about how he feels about flirt-LARPING and the AR and his Bro frequently. None of those are that strange to hold back on. He also avoided directly confessing to Jake, which is presumably related to Jake’s “And years ago i used to joke around with him that we would probably be totally into each other if he was a girl” comment. Admitting a crush to a friend is particularly difficult when stigma around sexuality comes into play.
All of these are emotions where he’d have to risk exposing aspects of himself he isn’t ready to. Other than those and being from the future, he’s open, honest, and direct in his affections, praise, and criticisms. He is not cagey when it comes to what he feels about people.
After all, it’s DIRK who is the clingy, overbearing boyfriend.
Sure, he has the facial expressiveness of a teaspoon. But you can probably give a kid who grew up totally alone a break on that. Dirk makes up for it in sincere comments about how much he cares for his friends, all the time, to their faces and in conversations with other people. Dirk loves his friends and he tries to let them to know it.
So much for a stone cold motherfucker.
I do want to point out that Dirk saying “I just still think it’s impressive, that’s all” is technically Brain Ghost Dirk operating as Brain Ghost Dirk, since it’s a unique line and not technically part of the memory. I still think it’s a unique moment of Dirk’s Heart shining through the ghost to wake Jake up, I’m just pedantic as hell abount untangling Dirk’s direct agency from that of his splinters so I wanted to note it.
Anyway this post cured my dandruff and my depression and I’m going right back to bed now where I will sleep like a baby as a direct consequence of reading it. Dirk is the sweetest and kindest character in this comic and I’m alive. Time to go have sweet sweet dreams about Dirk being loved by his friends and reminded he’s appreciated and not awful.
I’ve seen a few of people call Dirk an extrovert, and I wanted to respond to that, but I don’t feel like I can cover my points in a blog post reply. @landofsomethingsomething and @revolutionaryduelist, I’d particularly love to hear your opinions, since I’ve found your meta on the subject the inspiration for considering this in detail.
Personally, I see him as someone who is introverted and has a difficult time handling people, but who is extremely clingy and in need of attention from specific people.
Hmm, so I’m by no means an expert on introversion/extroversion, so I’m afraid I don’t have that much to add to this other than to say…
I’m kind of convinced? At least, I find it about as compelling as the alternative, in lieu of a devastatingly powerful argument in favor of extrovert Dirk. This is an area of the canon that is vague enough that it seems to me you can read Dirk either way depending on which you relate to more. (I definitely relate to introvert readings pretty hard so…that…might be influencing me here in fact!)
So yeah I’m interested in hearing how others respond to this and I don’t think it changes a heck of a lot about the way the plot goes down but that isn’t all that matters. I appreciate the different reading on Dirk a lot, so thanks for writing this out like this!
Jade listens to Dirk ramble about human culture or current Earth C pop culture or the nature of pornography as a philosophical language/art and is in awe, it’s like listening to someone who knows what they’re talking about like Rose but with the intense phallocentric interest of Dave and she thinks it’s by parts fascinating and hilarious. Jade is probably the person who makes furries evolve from an interesting sociological field of study into a full-blown fandom for Dirk. She helps him design his Horsesona or whatever. They hide all this from Jake for a while because neither of them is ready to deal with the inevitable Na’visona but it happens eventually anyway.
Dirk listens to Jade ramble about the secrets of the universe and science and technology and high-level engineering mechanics. Like I said he tutors her and Jake to get them up to speed on the last 400 years of engineering progress but Jade picks it up in like, a week, and from then on immediately starts crafting innovations that leave Dirk confused and beffudled and FRUSTRATED just trying to keep up–he loves it. He also helps her out doing grunt work for sciencey stuff and is mentally freaking out all the goddamn time because he wants to impress her so bad. They commiserate over Jake’s awful taste but Jade clowns on him hard over how in love he is and Dirk sits there and takes it getting owned like a chump.
Roxy and Terezi:
They bond hard over falling for people who put out very strong personas that made them feel unloved for years (Dirk is also in this club even though he was the person Roxy was in love with after they talk it out. Terezi is like. Human romance sure is weird.) They also work together to tease the fuck out of John and eventually that grows into an interest in teasing the fuck out of each other. Also Terezi becomes Roxy’s go-to source for all the primest, juiciest Rose and Dave meteor years gossip/embarassing moments/secrets. One time Roxy teases Rose about, like, hey so i herd you willingly watched Twilight with Kanaya once and Rose is like FIRST OF ALL THAT WAS A FACETIOUS VIEWING AND SECOND OF ALL I WILL MURDER TEREZI PYROPE SHE’S THE ONE WHO WALKED IN ON US AND WE HAD THE COMMON ROOM -SCHEDULED- AND,
Jake also likes dead shit, as a matter of fact! Preserved dead stuff is an area of interest Jake, Roxy and Dave all share–Jake likes taxidermy, Roxy likes lavish funerals, and Dave likes paleontology type stuff.
Maybe Jake and Dirk go on adventures plundering ruins and shit and find old artifacts and stuff to bring back to Dave or maybe he’s even convinced to tag along eventually if he ever feels like adventuring again (unlikely but hey! quantum infinity!).
[Author’s Note: This is a repost of Love, Faith and Fantasy–my piece on Jake and Dirk’s character arcs and the relevance of Knights and Pages in understanding them. I thought breaking it up into chunks would make the content more accessible, and give me room to flesh out each argument. Thus there will be some updates to the content. Hopefully this will mean more people can easily approach it!]
Now that we’ve established that Knights are a Passive class and Pages an active one, and further established that the Passive/Active divide at least partly refers to a sort of inherent Selflessness vs. Selfishness, let’s take a look at what being a Page means for Jake.
To recap, the key verb for Knights and Pages is ‘Serve’–and the two classes are tied together by the symbol of Butlers, who show up linked to Dave and Jake with particular frequency.
This means we can roughly parse Jake’s title as:
One who Serves themselves Hope, or Serves themselves through Hope.
With the corollary attribute of One who is Served By Hope
So, how does Jake’s classpect inform us about his behavior?
Let’s take a look.
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, and it’s a red herring Jake kind of deliberately sets up. Jake’s problem is actually similar to Jane’s: Ignorance.
But where Jane’s ignorance is mostly genuine–if stubborn and self-serving–Jake displays an intensely willful ignorance coupled with an intense aversion to confrontation. These traits typically end with him putting the burden of action on his friends, especially Jane and Dirk, and primarily so that Jake doesn’t have to let Jane down by letting her know he’d rather date Dirk instead.
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.
The question is: Why go about things this way? And how’d Jake even manage this bizarre feat of ignoring reality in the first place? 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. 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:
Note that he admits to having put Jane on the spot while doing this, btw.
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 answers 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. 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–but we’ll get to Dirk later. The point is 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.
Jake is selfish, sure–but you can love deeply and perform great acts based on selfish love. Another way to parse it is that he’s self-directed. Jake is demonstrably not motivated by thinking primarily about how his friends might benefit from(or be hurt by) his actions–that’s Dave’s instinct.
Jake’s instinct is to get what he wants. But when they’re in danger, Jake wants to protect his friends more than he wants to stay alive himself.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt them when he’s thoughtless and selfish by choosing to believe whatever’s easiest for him, obviously. In the words of so many people who have told me about their perceptions of Dirk: “Intent does not invalidate harm.”
And there’s no one this habit of Jake’s hurts worse than it hurts Dirk Strider. We’ll talk about their relationship next.
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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.
anyone else still sometimes catch themselves thinking about how after all those years of idolizing dave strider and after all that time in the void session wondering and anticipating and nervously awaiting this theoretical possibility that he might get the chance to meet him, dirk finally fucking sits down with dave one on one hours from the final battle and like wow fucking surprise motherfucker
he gets to find out his literal worst fears were ACTUALLY true! the version of him that dave knew actually did, in fact, do his level best to ruin dave’s life and was an abusive, toxic influence from day one and throughout to the point where dave can’t even look at him without flinching!
this coming at a time when dirk is already horrendously low on himself, his relationship with Jake literally just blew up like 3 hours ago and if the AR thing went down even remotely the same way there was also that and holy hell dude what a time to be informed about the existence of Bro Strider. Dirk is sitting there thinking he was a toxic influence to Jake from moment one and probably all of his friends the whole time and here Dave is confirming everything from a parallel perspective?
you can just see this horrible gut clenching moment when this utterly defeated Dirk just meekly accepts that this other version of himself is reflective of his true innermost self and has justifiably ruined any chance he ever had of impressing or even knowing Dave
– and then you see Dave just immediately lift it off him, even get kinda angry at him for having the audacity to even try accepting it that way, you can FEEL Dave’s fucking confusion because he went in guns blazing expecting a confrontation with someone as impossible and inscrutable as Bro was. Dave went in expecting to punch a brick wall and get nowhere, and instead he got Dirk “you’re absolutely right and I’m so fucking sorry I ruined your life” Strider
and from Dirk’s pov, listening to this, watching this, having this realization that this dave isn’t an untouchable, aloof, mysterious and mythical heroic figure of legend at all, but that only makes him MORE worthy of idolization in all the ways that genuinely matter – and simultaneously thinking that he’s already sabotaged himself out of the chance to know him at all.
It’s like, god, you know those hyperrealistic nightmares people have sometimes that are so fucking scary because they’re indistinguishable from real life, the ones where after you wake up it takes a long time for the understanding that it was actually just a dream to hit you and then you want to cry with relief?
For Dirk this had to have been so much like that, the whiplash between being 100% sure that Dave was just going to say what he needed to say and then never speak to him again (and knowing Dirk would have considered it completely justified and never questioned his right to do so jesus christ) followed IMMEDIATELY by Dave just being like no you don’t get it, THIS you, this version of you, what I am looking for deep down in my fucking SOUL is for this you that you are right now to be a person that I can have in my life to tell me that I’m okay, that you’re okay, that WE’RE okay – and after fifteen minutes talking to you I can already immediately tell that you ARE that person.
Dirk’s friends were always only interested in denying the possibility that Dirk could ever truly become a monster, they could never have possibly understood just how DARK Dirk is at his most self destructive, and that’s part of why their reassurances were always hollow for him – they didn’t GET IT, right, they never could have followed the rabbit hole all the way down, so what did they know? But this guy, Dave Strider, has literally seen Dirk at his worst, has lived through the actual reality of the worst things living inside the full-picture potential of Dirk Strider, has dealt with that to great personal detriment and is fucking STILL sitting here telling him “I can tell that you are different, I can tell that you are better, and I am willing to trust you and help you to become a better person than the guy I knew because at the end of the fucking day, you are too important to me to give up on”
like yeah confronting dirk with all of that was what dave needed absolutely but BEING confronted and ultimately forgiven by dave was what dirk needed too, just as much
dirk: the force awakens was alright, I guess, but it really didn’t diverge enough from the formula of a new hope and just hit the same story beat for beat, complete with a major death as a character crisis point near the end of the —
jake: did you SEE when finn nailed that PERFECT shot and did you see how him and poe met back up and did you see that bit when bb8 gave finn a thumbs up like yeah buddy were in this together! and i cant believe she found luke at the end what do you think her jedi trainings going to be like??? oh my gosh strider do you think shell get to use a GREEN LIGHTSABER????? i bet luke has it just lying around and maybe hes gonna give it to her! do you think kylo uh wait i mean ben do you think hes maybe her brother or her cousin i sort of think cousin myself but theres all these people online talking about how they might have been adapted from some book character malarkey so maybe theyre TWINS but i dont think that makes sense for han and leia to have left her behind! oh my gosh that bit where one of the stormtroopers recognized finn i was on the edge of my flippin seat and i really thought *starts tearing up*
dirk: did … did you just say “starts tearing up” aloud
jake: i really thought he was gonna make it strider i really thought he was gonna be fine and i thought ben was gonna see the light and be a hero do you think leia can save him???? gosh i hope leia saves him i can’t friggin WAIT for episode 8
dirk:
dirk:
dirk:
dirk: um. anyway it was a great movie and i liked it a lot. uh, yeah.
Jake English would probably stan for the Star Wars prequels. Not like the fanboy Wookiepedia continuity geek “let me tell you about the technical specs of this droid who shows up in this one scene” stan, but as a man who sees the potential in every film. Like so:
“No john you see the star wars prequels are in of fact a poignant tragedy! The jedi order have been flipped to a broken and decaying institution of the galaxy and despite the good men and women and aliens within their order burearucracy and rules impede them in their quest for justice. And among it all the cause of its true downfall is a doomed romance needled in just the right direction by a sith the jedi were so arrogantly blind to he basically became their president! And yes john there are a lot of as you call them ‘big dumb cgi action scenes’ and i happen to like them a lot. What the fuck of it?”
Jake unironically quotes the line about sand at Dirk as a pick up line. The insinuation he is in fact not course and rough and irritating empowers Melty Sap Dirk to overpower Media Snob Dirk for a moment and drown in the fact Jake loves him as much as Anakin hates sand.
Flying through Storytelling 