Tag: dirk strider

Let’s talk about control, agency, philosophy, and Dirk Strider.

Dirk Strider gets a lot of flak. I don’t feel it’s entirely undeserved–like all the Alphas, Dirk loves his friends intensely but doesn’t know how to express affection, receive it, be honest, or basically connect to other people in any way at all.

But a lot of the flak that Dirk gets is rooted in things Dirk didn’t actually do. It’s rooted in things the AR did. And by conflating the two, the fans fall into a trap Dirk explicitly calls out himself, in the comic. 

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One might say Dirk tacitly approved of the AR’s actions by allowing them to continue, making this kind of a self-serving defensive statement.
One could also say Dave actually really loved committing to being a cool guy, and in both cases they would be wrong as shit, because they’d be missing half the narrative.

In reality, Dirk couldn’t do anything about the AR’s actions towards Jake, and indeed, his outburst here reveals that the way it treated Jake was the cause for his coldness towards the AR during the first half of Act 6: He finds the AR’s actions insipid. 

And it’s not like that’s a secret:

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Jake knows Dirk doesn’t like the AR. It’s an established fact in their relationship. Which means they’ve talked about the AR’s behavior to some extent, however stiltedly and dancing around the actual issue of Dirk and Jake’s romantic feelings for each other. 

So knowing Jake is likely privy to the answer to this question, it’s time to ask: Why couldn’t Dirk do anything about the AR?

And the answer is: Because it’d be immoral to do so. At least as immoral as doing nothing, if not more–at least, that’s how Dirk thinks of it:

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The AR has no outlets for expression other than talking to Dirk and his friends and operating computers and things relating to computers. The AR is essentially a Dirk who’s only means of being Dirk is by expressing its thoughts, and so Dirk shutting it down for an extended amount of time or trying to coerce it into expressing itself the way he would prefer is an act of outsize violence. 

Essentially, Dirk can’t really stop the AR from doing monstrous shit to Jake without being willing to do monstrous shit to it. And Dirk struggles with that reality because he’s the only reason it has to exist in these inhumane circumstances. 

Dirk considers himself responsible for the AR’s creation (which he is) and has determined that to limit its ability to talk or engage with reality would be morally wrong. Dirk commits to this right up until his breakdown log with the AR, and even then, he chooses not to kill it because he thinks it would be wrong. 

This is despite the fact that Dirk didn’t set out to make a sentient entity in creating the AR, and didn’t think he’d be successful even at the more modest aims he set out to achieve:

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I’ll try not to harp on the fact that this exchange both leads to the first time Dirk and Jake dance around their mutual feelings for each other AND also results in the birth of a new life (I am harping on it though Jake’s Hope shit has as much to do with the AR’s creation as Dirk’s Heart shit) but the takeaway is pretty clear here:

Dirk didn’t set out to make a sentient AI. The AR was an accident, and once created, Dirk took responsibility for it and tried to do right by AR according to his values. The story of Dirk and Jake early on is a story about Dirk being tied up in a philosophical dilemma as much as it is about Jake’s action movie tropes–which is fitting, because philosophy and movies are respectively Dirk and Jake’s biggest interests. 

The uptake of this? Dirk didn’t refuse to help Jake or do anything about the AR because he didn’t give a shit or he thought Jake needed to man up and take it or anything of the sort. Dirk’s demeanor towards the AR throughout his narrative shows that the situation with Jake bothers him quite a lot, even after they enter the game. 

Dirk didn’t do anything because he felt that was the most moral choice. Because he was trying to do the right thing. And Jake was aware of it. 
In resume, Dirk is the best boy and Dirkjake is canon, thanks. I’ll probably be back some other time with further small breakdowns. 

miss-serket:

Dave and Jake’s cases of (physical) abuse have parallels. Understandable given who they were both dealing with.

From [s] Prince Of Heart: Rise Up and [s] Dave: Strife

I’d feel a lot better rebloggin this if I didn’t feel like it was setting up a lot of false parallels between Dirk and Bro that feed into the endless pile of misconceptions about the plot that is Dirkjake abuse discourse, so I’ll settle for reblogging it (because I like visual callbacks and Dave’s abuse narrative) while also jotting down my thoughts in shortform here. 

Well. Shorter form. I dunno if I can really do short. 

The rough gist of it, though, is this: 

Jake’s situation with the Brobot isn’t remotely parallel to Dave’s situation with Bro in any way other than to contrast off each other. And presenting them as 1:1 correlations does a disservice to both narratives.

There’s a couple of angles to untangle these narratives from, but I’ll focus on the most important: The victim’s feelings in each case.

Simply put, Jake doesn’t feel about Brobot the way Dave feels about Bro. Dave is scared and anxious throughout the lead up to the Bro fight. Jake is mildly annoyed by the Brobot at worst, and we get shown direct evidence that the Brobot is a net plus to his state of mind:

When Jake is 13, before the Brobot, he talks about adventuring a lot but never actually does it–preferring to hide in his jungle globe out of fear of the monsters. When Jake is 16, with the Brobot around, Jake is comfortable enough adventuring outside that it’s barely even noteworthy to him. Given that the Brobot has to save him during the escapade, it’s not really implied that’s due solely to the increase in Jake’s competence.

Now add to this that while Jake perceives Brain Ghost Dirk as intellectually derogatory and romantically lascivious/objectifying (both behaviors we see the AR but not Dirk act out at Jake), in physical terms, Jake sees BGD as a protector and defender, as a presence of comfort and safety–as shown when he literally summons a BGD calling himself Jake’s boyfriend (Post breakup!) to protect him when he loses all agency, and…

Yeah. Jake wasn’t bothered by the Brobot enough to undermine his view of Dirk as someone who would keep him safe and stop him from being hurt, which makes it hard for me to buy that his fight with the Brobot was traumatic on anywhere near the level of Dave being forced to fight his actual parent and guardian.

It’s also noteworthy that Dave hates fighting, while Jake liking to roughhouse is practically one of his main character traits. In fact, the very dynamic between Brobot and Bro is different because Strifing with Bro was something Dave never had a say in, whilst Dirk made Jake the Brobot in response to Jake constantly talking about liking not just roughhousing, but adventure, which the Brobot is designed to set up.

It is not Dirk roughly imposing a training agenda from on high–it’s Dirk misinterpreting the signals his best friend was sending him because his best friend was telegraphing a persona that was not actually him. 

To whatever extent The Brobot DID bother Jake, though? Dirk wasn’t in control of it in the first place–the AR was, and there’s no reason to think Dirk could really do anything about it. The AR is as competent as Dirk, only moreso with the benefit of cyber-omniscience. There’s no real way for Dirk to out-compute the AR in order to somehow lock it out of controlling the Brobot. 

At this point I’m stoppin cause I’m not about to re-write all four of my essays on this subject in a single tumblr post but yeah Dirk and Jake’s situation is way more nuanced and complicated than Bro and Dave’s situation.

Jake was abused, but by the AR and later Jane, Dirk was if anything also a victim to the AR with some shitty rationalization methods, the AR was a victim to it’s own traumatic circumstances, etc. etc. 

In resume Dirk and Jake are the best characters in Homestuck.

rosessmellnice:

forgottenhsfacts:

sources: http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006456, http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=007152

not really sure if this counts as a fact, or just a theory, but in a conversation with Dirk, AR foreshadows Jake kissing Dirk’s severed head/skull. in that same conversation, he mentions that his plans are in motion, and also foreshadows Dirk using the bucked (pail) to wake up Jake. in my mind, that equals him having the whole thing planned out beforehand. he is a sentient computer program, after all.

==> Submitted by gracioushd

@war-time-leader

He objectively did plan it, he literally says so and we get shown Dirk’s cognitive limits over and over during that whole section. By the end, AR has control over every one of the kids and is acting as their server player. He even literally tells Jake “leave the temporal logistics to me.” Dirk during Unite Synchronize is impressive, but it’s just Dirk following a bunch of orders.

thederangedsolicitor:

revolutionaryduelist:

Why hats (or items of headware, at least) are a symbol of the Heart aspect.

So I was watching this Supereyepatchwolf video, and it reminded me really hard of @bladekindeyewear old posts on Hats as a symbol for Heart, something I remember being abused by at the time because he was really upset about it. 

I wasn’t married to the idea, but this video sort of convinced me of it by making it clear how tied the concepts of fashion and identity really are–particularly, the way fashion allows an intimate and visceral expression of the Self.

Keep reading

Glasses are, arguably, a mind symbol. Dahni has a lot of stuff about this, but the short of it is:
A) Help perceive things & have laptops in them. Hats, outside of Jane’s tiara, don’t do anything significant/meaningful. Mind is the ‘rational’ aspect, while Heart does whatever it wants.
B) Cover the eyes, windows to the soul or whatever, contrasting with hats covering your head, where the mind’s at.
C) All the Mind players so far, along with Dirk, who inverts/ghosts/etc Mind, have glasses.

Hmmm. So, I don’t personally buy inversion theory–to my knowledge it was jossed and a little too specific, at least, if the definition you’re working with is roughly the same as BKEW’s.

I do think there is some Aspect duality symbolism in the story, though–I just wanted to make my position on Inversion clear. As to whether I agree with you in general, though–I’m conflicted and giving it some more thought, but for now I’d say I think I do?

What I would say is that in this sense, glasses can be a symbol of both Heart and Mind, depending on how they’re used. But I don’t really feel ready to try and untangle those nuances just yet–for now I’d just say I think I agree, and both interpretations, to whatever extent they conflict, can be true. 

Why hats (or items of headware, at least) are a symbol of the Heart aspect.

So I was watching this Supereyepatchwolf video, and it reminded me really hard of @bladekindeyewear old posts on Hats as a symbol for Heart, something I remember being abused by at the time because he was really upset about it. 

I wasn’t married to the idea, but this video sort of convinced me of it by making it clear how tied the concepts of fashion and identity really are–particularly, the way fashion allows an intimate and visceral expression of the Self.

So to make this short, here’s my argument: 

Hats are a heart symbol because fashion is an expression of self-identity, and the less utilitarian something is, the more expressive it becomes. Fashion is also a signifier of identity, which means it’s function isn’t just to act as a venue for us to express ourselves, but also used in order to help others identify us. Like the video points out, there are are a lot of professions and types of identity that can be immediately identified through their hats:

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Like Chef hats or cowboy hats.

All of that plays into Heart’s themes of inherent identity and just following your “heart” or “Self” to the natural expression OF that identity.

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That’s why Dirk’s most immediately recognizable visual signifier is his glasses. Sunglasses are also a kind of headware, although his shades ARE utilitarian–sunglasses hide one’s natural impulses, their feelings–which Dirk desires to do, in keeping with his Prince of Heart identity. 

But glasses in general are typically objects meant to help one see the world better, especially in Homestuck– where they double as computers, and thus allow their characters to gain a higher understanding about any subject they could want to think about. 

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And Dirk expresses himself through his connection to his glasses SO MUCH that he creates a version of himself that is in fact Literally His Glasses. 

Like his Katana echoing “I might splinter, but I don’t break” by being unbreakable, Dirk’s glasses express his relationship with reality–his nature is to hide his feelings in the world of the physical, and to see the world always through the world of concepts and ideas–the internet.

I guess maybe this gets across my understanding of the appeal of the Aspects? Many people seem to misunderstand them, saying they’re either too ill-defined (The Aspects don’t mean anything) or ill-executed (”We don’t know anything about Doom, or Rage, or Mages!). 

In my opinion, they are neither of these. The Aspects are already IN Homestuck, because they’re just a set of ideas that are vaguely but DISTINCTLY different from each other. We don’t know exactly what they are, but we do know two things:

1) There are twelve, and while we cannot tell exactly what they all describe, we can sort of tell them apart.

2) Together, they are used as components that can describe absolutely anything:

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Knowing this, by following patterns in visual symbolism, direct plot actions, relationships and characterization, you can start to reverse engineer what the idea of “Blood” can be about, or what the idea of “Rage” can be about. 

This is because the Aspects are ultimately just IDEAS that are seeded throughout the entirety of the story, and the process of “Classpecting” is only one part of understanding them. It’s about trying to pin down what ideas the Aspects could embody, and then seeing how that embodiment exists in the story. 

Maybe that explains why I dig the aspects so much? I hope so. If you happened to enjoy this a lot, just fyi, I’ve started a Youtube series analyzing Homestuck through this and other lenses of analysis you might also like. I’m pretty damn excited about the content I’ve got lined up for it, so I hope people are still up for thinking about Homestuck in new ways. 

It’s possible I’m misremembering something from homestuck proper, but where did the whole “anime dirk” thing come from?

There’s like. Two references to him liking anime in Homestuck proper, and it’s sort of part of his aesthetic. And Tumblr is a lot more interested in Anime than it is in Philosophy, so when it came time to use Dirk in fandom culture, he kind of got boiled down to the interest or sets of interests that fans found most relatable or humorous, instead of the core traits that actually inform and flesh out his character. 

So basically: A little bit of canon and a whole lot of fanon, like a lot of things in Homestuck.