draco-rex:

revolutionaryduelist:

candyredterezii:

nvmjustmarina:

candyredterezii:

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.

Dirk could not have planned the events of Unite: Synchronize. The AR did.
That said, Dirk IS in love with Jake, and when Jake kisses him, the response of Dirk’s soul is such that his lamp on Jane’s planet overflows with Light until it shatters to pieces. And that kiss is what this high-five is directly preceding.

Light is the Aspect that denotes good fortune, importance, and relevance. It’s also implicated in Ascencion/the climb to Enlightenment. So relationships between characters that are particularly Important to both parties tend to be denoted by strong Light symbolism in Homestuck.

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 destroying through 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