probably healthier overall (but still not healthy–all the Alphas had roles to play in hurting each other, as much as they cared), right up until they were all suddenly dead, since Hal is the only reason they made it through [S] Unite Synchronize.
I do find it kind of hard to get into these kinds of questions though. They’re not bad or uninteresting or anything, it’s just that the only answer my brain can really come up with is that they wouldn’t exist. Hal is a necessary component of the time loop that creates LE, and so the trolls and betas and alphas and everyone.
That’s the fundamental nature of LE’s evil and the core conflict that informs everything about Homestuck’s narrative, so I find it really hard to think around it, personally.
Oh, no. All I was alluding to was that Mind and Heart powers in general both seem to be linked to alt-universe memories. I kind of already believe this about Dirk, since I suspect he correctly subconsciously intuited Jane’s other name, Anna.
Since Dirk has Heart powers, I just mean he has the idea of Heart to add to any potential fraymotif combination. Considering what Dave and Terezi were able to do together, literally who knows what the kids could accomplish by working together as they learn to use their powers to their fullest.
An important thing to know about this gif is that Dirk doesn’t know who the fuck that is. The only Dirk that had met Neenah was Dream Ghost Dirk, and Alpha Dirk does not have the memories of that Dirk
Dirk just… Did this. He’s that cool
You have to realize that the Condesce exists in his world so he just randomly high fived someone who looks like the tyrannical ruler he wants to take down as a teenager
Which just makes this extra wild
I think just as important is why he did this, bcuz the context to this scene makes it one of the most understatedly beautiful parts of the comic.
We see the lamps light up like this again, sort of, in that the lamps eventually explode and take out the building holding them…but that happens when the kids God Tier. So Dirk’s feelings are being portrayed as roughly equivalent to that.
The High-Five itself drives this link in further. The High-Five as a gesture comes from a closely intertwined overlap between mainstream American culture and LGBT history, as it was started by Glenn Burke, and I quote “the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it”–Wikipedia.
And as for the High Five itself:
After retiring from baseball, Burke used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[9]
So yeah, high fives are literally gay dude culture. Considering the conversation that serves as the lynchpin of Dirk and Jake’s relationship is all about Dirk telling Jake about the fall of American civilization and that Dirk’s biggest role-model is Texan, I think it’s fair to say this is probably intentional.
Puts a neat spin on Dirk’s other gay high-five jokes about Jake, too. And we don’t even really need to bring all this High-Five history in to read Dirk’s feelings for Jake into this sequence.
Dirk spends a shitload of this flash Breaking glass windows. If we can understand Dirk’s suicide as Dirk Destroying his “Self”, it pretty clearly parses through his Prince of Heart title as Destroying Heart.
The window breaking, then, would be Dirk destroyingthrough Heart–using both his feelings for Jake and his cool-guy Persona to smash through the obstacles in his way and save himself and his friends from certain death.
And the final shot of window breaking, the one immediately following his high-five with Meenah?
Positions Jake’s green directly at Dirk’s back, as though pushing him onwards. Jake is, in a sense, the wings on Dirk’s back. In essence, Unite Synchronize is half desperate, heroic effort on the part of a gay teen to save himself and his loved ones.
That kind of attention to detail and symbolic impact is why I keep coming back to Homestuck. I want more stories about gay teens who love their friends to be celebrated as heroes, in all their painful messiness. And that’s why I deeply hope characters like Dirk and his ridiculous rocketboard high-fives stay with us for years to come.
Windows are made of glass, which is reflective, so Dirk is literally smashing through himself, and shattering that himself into a bunch of smaller reflective surfaces. Which connects rather well to his whole “splinters” thing. Just some more Prince of Heart imagery.
ffffffffffffffffffffff it never stops from keep going deeper
An important thing to know about this gif is that Dirk doesn’t know who the fuck that is. The only Dirk that had met Neenah was Dream Ghost Dirk, and Alpha Dirk does not have the memories of that Dirk
Dirk just… Did this. He’s that cool
You have to realize that the Condesce exists in his world so he just randomly high fived someone who looks like the tyrannical ruler he wants to take down as a teenager
Which just makes this extra wild
I think just as important is why he did this, bcuz the context to this scene makes it one of the most understatedly beautiful parts of the comic.
We see the lamps light up like this again, sort of, in that the lamps eventually explode and take out the building holding them…but that happens when the kids God Tier. So Dirk’s feelings are being portrayed as roughly equivalent to that.
The High-Five itself drives this link in further. The High-Five as a gesture comes from a closely intertwined overlap between mainstream American culture and LGBT history, as it was started by Glenn Burke, and I quote “the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it”–Wikipedia.
And as for the High Five itself:
After retiring from baseball, Burke used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[9]
So yeah, high fives are literally gay dude culture. Considering the conversation that serves as the lynchpin of Dirk and Jake’s relationship is all about Dirk telling Jake about the fall of American civilization and that Dirk’s biggest role-model is Texan, I think it’s fair to say this is probably intentional.
Puts a neat spin on Dirk’s other gay high-five jokes about Jake, too. And we don’t even really need to bring all this High-Five history in to read Dirk’s feelings for Jake into this sequence.
Dirk spends a shitload of this flash Breaking glass windows. If we can understand Dirk’s suicide as Dirk Destroying his “Self”, it pretty clearly parses through his Prince of Heart title as Destroying Heart.
The window breaking, then, would be Dirk destroyingthrough Heart–using both his feelings for Jake and his cool-guy Persona to smash through the obstacles in his way and save himself and his friends from certain death.
And the final shot of window breaking, the one immediately following his high-five with Meenah?
Positions Jake’s green directly at Dirk’s back, as though pushing him onwards. Jake is, in a sense, the wings on Dirk’s back. In essence, Unite Synchronize is half desperate, heroic effort on the part of a gay teen to save himself and his loved ones.
That kind of attention to detail and symbolic impact is why I keep coming back to Homestuck. I want more stories about gay teens who love their friends to be celebrated as heroes, in all their painful messiness. And that’s why I deeply hope characters like Dirk and his ridiculous rocketboard high-fives stay with us for years to come.
I remember that post, but I also remember a conversation that followed where I recanted the position because there wasn’t actually much explicitly debunking the position and I don’t see a need to harsh on the headcanon. British Jake is pretty neat, I like imagining it contrasting against Dirk’s affected Texan accent.
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.
Flying through Storytelling 