purplepurpleunicornsparkle:

revolutionaryduelist:

So remember when this was going on:

While Grandpa was off doing…fucking this:

Jake’s fundamental problem is the same as Grandpa’s: Escapism. In Grandpa, that misery and desire for escapism seems to grow into outright delusion–the guy seems plain old not that in touch with reality.

That’s how Jake operates when he has problems he doesn’t like and he doesn’t want to do better. Jake runs away because Dirk is needy and suffocating–the dude ain’t perfect, and he’s not any better at talking about his problems than Jake is because he likes to pretend they don’t exist by subsuming them into his (fake as shit) hypercapable persona.

But Dirk was needy and suffocating in the first place at least partly because Jake had already hurt his feelings pretty badly several times over, and led Dirk to believe he was most likely straight. Jake is aware of this!

But Jake would, in all things, prefer to resolve his conflicts in a way that doesn’t require him to acknowledge or address any way he might have possibly fucked up or hurt his friend’s feelings. That’s why neither of them can make actual progress on improving their relationship–Jake is as willfully ignorant about the core of their issues as Dirk is willfully burying them to keep up his front. And neither of them will likely talk about how Jake really felt about Brobot or about the whole AR situation for that exact same reason. Jake is busy immediately trying to forget any of that existed or could, in fact, have been parsed as a problem. Dirk is terrified of hearing Jake’s real answer. 

My friend Sburb (who I mysteriously can’t tag?? sorry about that) made a really good point about Jake’s planet–Xenon. Xenon can be used as an anesthetic, numbing one’s perception of the world, and that lines up with Jake’s modus operandi perfectly. It’s not that Jake doesn’t like Dirk, but that he is deeply terrified of confrontation and numbs himself to any possibility that may require it. Like, it’s no mistake that Jake’s innate sense of happiness and ignorance ramp up in intensity PRECISELY to match the most depressing thing he’s confronted with–Erisolsprite. Jake knows how miserable and angry Erisol is on some level, but acknowledging that would be really sad and require Jake to do something probably uncomfortable! So he doesn’t, and he pretends there isn’t a problem instead. Like. Really aggressively.

After like SIX MONTHS of enjoying Dirk’s company despite all these issues on BOTH their ends, long past the point when people who weren’t teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing would have sat down and said “Ok there’s definitely a problem here, let’s talk about it,”–yeah, all these underlying problems stress Dirk out enough that he gets to be too much for Jake and he runs away. Where he goes right on thinking about Dirk all the time, subjecting Jane to long rambles about him, and when Caliborn comes calling Jake spends his time making comments like this:

Which is A) Trolling Caliborn to some extent and really fucking funny, I love you Jake, B) Indication that Jake is now a lot more comfortable positioning himself as mlm than he was when talking to Jane, and C) That last one is obviously a reference to Dirk that Jake is making intentionally. Jake is, again, sharper than he’s given credit for. He knows what classpects are and he’s spent six months in a session where there’s exactly four of them. Even while running away, Jake is still making comments about Dirk that would absolutely be flirting if he were talking to the guy himself, and still largely thinking positively about him. 

Jake running away doesn’t reflect his feelings for Dirk. It reflects his obsessive need to avoid confrontation, and his willingness to believe anything he can tell himself to avoid it. 

this is all good

I’d also like to add that Jake is pretty inarguably canonically a BIGTIME INTROVERT. Just look at how he acts on the platform surrounded by people, even people he loves. He’s shy, nervous, quiet, and immediately pulls away from the group and isolates himself. Before meeting his friends in the medium, Jake hasn’t been around another human being since he was six years old. He probably never knew about social exhaustion, because anytime he experienced it before, he could just turn on a movie. Jake likes to be by himself. He needs time alone to recharge from social interactions.

Dirk, meanwhile, appears to be an extrovert. He’s not good at being alone and withers without social interaction.

Jake is drained by being around others and Dirk is drained by being by himself, so there’s a disconnect there that they don’t know how to navigate. Dirk feels clingy and suffocating, while Jake feels cold and unfeeling. Neither of them are really either of those things. They just experience their feelings differently. If you look at how they’re both talking about themselves before Collide, Dirk is saying that he feels he bullies everyone into spending time with him while Jake is saying that he shouldn’t even have friendships because he can’t experience emotions correctly. These boys need to be educated about how diff people have diff needs, and then use that education to negotiate a good and HEALTHY relationship with each other, which, I think, Credits proves that they have.

(Though I woulda loved to have actually fuckin seen is grumbe gurmble)

Also, insert a lot of words about Love Languages here for more shit on this but instead I’m just gonna link @landofsomethingsomething ‘s amazing DirkJake series, Thanks for Playing, which deals with this exact conflict and kind of goes through Dirk and Jake learning that the way they experience love and navigate relationships is inherently different, but that doesn’t make them incompatible – it just makes their relationship a constant negotiation, which is good, ultimately, for both of them.

Fuck I was gonna write about Jake’s introversion too and it got lost amidst the rest of my points, fuck it you do it better anyway thanks

There’s also this!!