jankystats:

revolutionaryduelist:

swamp-wizard:

ok, i was gonna respond to this post directly but i cant because arc has apparently blocked me lol, so ill paste what i wrote here

i mean ive been active in this fandom since 2011, LONG before dirk
was even a character (and, more tangentially, when fandom by and large
liked bro and the reading of his treatment of dave as abuse didnt have
much traction), ive been on board for as long as dirk strider has been
there, and “demonization”…. has never, ever been the majority fandom
opinion of his character

because people LOVE striders! people have
loved striders for years. people love strider manpain. negative
opinions of the striders have always been very much in the
minority, and while dirk gets it a hell of a lot worse than dave he is
still generally pretty well liked. dave gets more love and fan-content
than any of the betas and dirk is neck-and-neck with roxy for the
alphas. the reading of dirk as a sexual predator is pretty soundly
rooted in homophobic sentiment about gay men but its not a very popular
reading

and even back at the beginning of act 6, back when people
only called him d or di or bro, back when people jumped the gun and
wrote fanfiction where his name was “dick” and then had to backtrack and
edit a couple months later, people were making soft dirk fic and art.
and i know this bc that was the time i was MOST involved with homestuck
fandom and most actively consuming content. i tracked the brojake tag,
back when it was called that. there were fics and art about dirk being
sad and tender and pining hopelessly after jake in the months between
the start of act 6 and dirks formal introduction. and people continued
to produce fics and art about dirk being sad and pining for years, even
and especially after they broke up. there has literally never been a
shortage of soft dirk content for as long as hes been a character! soft
dirk has always been fanon!

because fandom is always very kind to male characters,
especially when theyre young, especially when theyre conventionally
attractive, especially when theyre white (or, in the case of homestuck
characters, easily read that way). look how many people still go to bat
to defend eridan or gamzees character even though theyre UNQUESTIONABLY
evil/abusive/bigoted. i dont want to like, understate the fact that
people do read dirk as sexually predatory specifically because
hes gay and i dont want to understate how fucking heinous that
interpretation is, but its never, ever been fanon. soft dirk has pretty
much always been the norm

I like literally couldn’t care less about the tumblr conflict here but I will say I’m genuinely happy for you if that was your experience of Dirk in fanon–but it is in no way objective, nor an accurate representation of my own in Tumblr fandom space as a teenage lgbt dude. I’ve been here since 2010, and I’ve been an active member of the fandom for the entirety of that time, so here’s my experience:

Dirk discourse ran artists I liked out of this fandom. Dirk discourse made me doubt myself and made me feel shitty for relating to Dirk AND Jake while I was figuring out my feelings while falling for my best friend, and Dirk discourse ruined my ability to coherently understand the canon for YEARS–and not just where Dirk was involved but with all the Alphas. 

Homestuck fandom was an absolutely massive space back during the height of Dirkcourse, so it’s entirely possible we just ran in different circles and saw different experiences of the fandom. To call Dirk’s demonization is palpably absurd to me though, because my experience was that that reading of Dirk fucking dominated. 

And even among people who LIKED Dirk, it still seeps in! The aftereffects of that reading of Dirk still have a MASSIVE effect on how he’s read in fandom TODAY.

Dirk is demonstrably one of the sweetest kids, he has nothing but kind words for Jake when he talks to him, thinks the world of Roxy (and tells her so) even AS SHE SEXUALLY HARASSES HER, and never thinks a single lousy thought about Jane either other than “yo uh maybe you should be less skeptical” which, you know, he knows how miserable it makes Roxy so he kind of has a point.

There is no part of the Dirk Strider canon experience that squares with Dirk calling people idiots or being an elitist prick about literally anything. Every Dirk that shows up acting that way in fandom is a bizarre conglomerate of AR and Bro wearing Dirk’s skin. 

I get that this is a complex narrative but my experience living through fandom and growing up alongside these characters was NOT that people were genuinely trying to understand it, but that moral purity tumblr politics chose an interpretation of events and largely ran with it, severely harming the fandoms’ perception of the absolutely critical nuances in the comic. 

Which is how we now have people believing Dirk is interested in controlling his friends (give me one section of the comic where this happens), or that Jake wasn’t in love with him and only dated him out of obligation, or that Dirk is hypercritical and holds his friends to high standards(again name a single time)…Dirk does literally none of these things. He has the potential to, sure. And chooses not to deliver on it every time.

It’s why people now say you can only ship Dirkjake once Dirk “realizes he was abusive” or “figures out how he hurt his friends” when in reality that’s something all of the Alphas needed to learn, and Dirk is really not a unique 

And that’s been my experience of the fandom for as long as Dirk’s been a part of it, whatever your experiences have been. Decide to go about this however you want, but please don’t revise all of fandom history to put yourself on the moral high ground here–the reality you are describing is not the reality for everyone, even if it’s real for you.

I literally told you like yesterday I’m not in LOVE with soft Dirk but consider it a welcome reprieve from Basically Bro Dirk, and that’s pretty much true.
The reason people are rejecting your take on this so harshly seems to have nothing to do with people making Dirk “ugly” and everything to do with making Dirk something that he canonically is not: An asshole. 

I’m not really speaking for arc or anyone else who “does” soft dirk here, just speaking as a dude who has enjoyed the movement quite a lot and feels he has a sense of where it’s coming from in answer to most fanon. 

anyway your experience of dirk fanon is not objective, mine was mostly negative, whatever you want to believe Dirkcourse was and is a continual problem that makes it actively harder for people to understand fanon. As for all this? I think you’re a legit good guy and that some overly bity hot-take meme posts have gotten things out of hand. 

Also trying to turn this into a public tumblr witch hunt–and whether you meant it to or not there’s a real risk that’s what this is gonna be when you start calling people homophobic for how they personally use the word queer–is legit disgusting and I hope you reconsider the course of action quickly. 

Feel free to hit me up if you want to talk about this in private or something dude. I’m happy to try to help if I’m able, but I think you’re straight up in the wrong about this. 

1) fanon is large, it contains multitudes

2) but yes, some ideas and interpretations and trends are far more popular than others

3) different people are going to have different reactions to characters, and to fanon interpretations of characters, and there’s nothing wrong with that

4) in my own interpretation (in this fandom since 2013, always a multishipper never much of a stan, have recently whittled down my fandom consumption to a little analysis-heavy, dirk-heavy corner and that’s been a positive decision): all of these fanon interpretations can easily be about the same fanon character

like, emotionally relatable strider manpain centred likeable ultimately good-natured (but incredibly self-destructive) dirk, single initial that launched a thousand fanworks dirk, got-lots-of-lovin-in-fanfic dirk is also often angry, elitist, insufferable in mannerism, stemlordy, robot-that-needed-to-be-taught-to-love, it’s-all-up-to-me-and-that-prompts-a-smile (remember that one?) dirk. in sum, those are two sides to the same fanon character interpretation, one i’ve seen in probably hundreds of fan works. it’s a flawed character interpretation in a lot of ways! it’s deserving of criticism from multiple angles! but it also describes a three-dimensional character who many fans clearly like, not a cardboard cutout Bad Gay or an indefensible monster. 

5) it’s never been soft dirk vs. hard dirk, it’s been people who want to moralize the text through some really shallow analysis, and people who don’t. there have always been moralizers, there still are, and their main game is telling you which entirely fictional people are Morally Bad and should therefore be thrown in the dustbin. this is a dumb game! But in the Babby’s First Theory petri dish of tumblrstuck this dumb game gained a lot of clout and did a lot of damage. it led to very serious discussions about whether a fictional stylized fantasy relationship, which we know almost entirely from fictional online chat logs that aren’t even between the two people in it, is “objectively abusive.” that’s definitely an unanswerable question! and probably a bad one! but quite a few people took their answers to it very seriously, they harassed people who answered it differently, and they made people feel like actual shit. that’s terrible! and the terribleness of that isn’t negated by reminding everyone that fanon dirk actually did contain multitudes! fanon dirk always contained multitudes, fanon dirkscourse always contained garbage.

6) i have been lurking the dirkscourse corner of 2017 homestuck tumblr for months, not for popcorn reasons but because I actually like anaylsis of this character, i like reading everyone’s different interpretations, and I really like reading the secondary analysis where we pick apart fanon too. it’s fascinating! but it also seems like a lot of the very angry disagreements result from people talking past each other. people aren’t just disagreeing on their interpretation of this character, or on their moral analysis of this character’s motives. it seems like people are disagreeing most vehemently because they’re here for different reasons. they want different things out of this. they are doing this analysis for completely different purposes. of course they’re not seeing eye to eye!

7) more on that. if the question is “is dirk the fictional character abusive,” I think a nominally correct answer is “no,” but a much better answer is “that’s the wrong question.” I know folks really care about this and identify with these characters, but fictional characters aren’t real people and analyzing fiction (especially this fiction) from an in-universe perspective is the worst way to do the thing. this isn’t judge judy, we aren’t here to be rules lawyers. there is no such thing as “what actually happened” in dirk and jake’s relationship, or any other thing described in this webcomic. the correct response to someone saying “dirk is abusive!” isn’t “no he isn’t,” it’s “why are you running around trying to decide which fictional characters are 100% certified Abusive? according to who, you? what purpose could that possibly serve?”

8) i’m all for talking out our different interpretations of this fictional relationship, but let’s all remember that’s just what they are — interpretations. none of them are objectively correct. and you probably aren’t gaining or losing any morality points for favouring one over another.

9) i probably missed quite a few Significant Posts in today’s dustup, so if you’re going to tell me I’m not responding fully to (Thing) in (Dirkscoure Today Post #??)…you are probably right

10) larger societal currents have always been here, fandom trend currents have always been here. there has always been an element of assuming gay courtship is somehow more Active or Predatory or Corrupting than otherwise equivalent straight courtship (and that’s, yannow, garbage). there has always been an element of My Fanfic Boy Is Best Boy, Nothing Is Wrong With Him Ever (and that always leads to highly inaccurate fanon of a different stripe). here, these two currents probably collided a bunch to some rather strange ultimate effects. neither of these currents disappears because you mention the other one.

11) but seriously, can we please not moralize everything, for good or ill? can we all remember there are much more interesting things to do with fiction than trying to decide whether a character is a) A Bad Man, No Really, I Mean It This Time, b) Actually Not Culpable In Anything Ever And Always The Victim, or c) Always The Victim, but i mean the victim of Bad Fanon, like not just Incorrect Fanon but Morally Bad Fanon because that’s totally a thing, So Meta. can we all recognize that homophobia/mlm marginalization breathes life into both Predatory Gay and Perfect Fanfic Woobiepet stereotypes at the same time? can we agree that personal insults are probably never warranted in an argument about how we should interpret the interpretations of a webcomic character? can we deal with fiction as fiction, not as something we can Objectively Morally Analyze? can we please talk about something more interesting?

Okay I think that’s all of it. I expect strange reactions to this, probably.

So I fundamentally agree with all of this, for the record, and I think this is the most intelligent breakdown of the situation thus far.

Here’s what I think you’re missing. 

Predatory Gay (or what we’re talking about right now, Kind of An Asshole) Dirk and Perfect Fanfic Woobiepet Dirk (as you refer to him, anyway–considering the fanwork movement I’m discussing here, I think that’s a reductive take and I’d kind of just call this brand of Dirk Canon Dirk) can both carry homophobic elements, sure. 

But even swamp-wizard himself noted that any homophobia carried by Soft Dirk brand was minimal at best. I’m not making a claim that no one should ever engage with or produce Asshole Dirk content–though I’d be delighted if anyone pointed me to a single time he was an asshole in the comic the way fanfic commonly depicts him. (spoilers, I looked, it doesn’t exist).

But Dirkjake is by far the least recognized, least celebrated canonical ship in Homestuck, and this image of Dirk (and the complementary vagueness in perception of Jake, who is by turns viewed as a victim of Dirk’s or varying degrees of uninterested) is absolutely why. 

Fanon produced an image of Dirk Strider and Jake English that simply isn’t real. You’re straight up incorrect in saying there’s “no ‘what actually happened’” in Dirk and Jake’s relationship, because the canon tracks a complex and nuanced series of events that lead to a specific, intentional artistic statement: 

They’re in love, they help each other, they’re whole, valid, noble human beings.

This very argument is preposterous, and if you applied it to any other relationship in this canon you will immediately see why. No one is going to argue that there’s no “what actually happened” between Rose and Kanaya’s evolving relationship, or Vriska and Terezi’s mutually estranged and confused passion–without being rightfully laughed off.  

I’m not arguing against the “Dirk is abusive” track because swamp-wizard isn’t claiming that, and neither do many of his associates. What I am arguing against is people taking some bizarre mix of AR, Bro, and the worst of Brain Ghost Dirk and humanizing it by jamming inside Dirk’s skin in fanon. 

Meanwhile, AR–who is canonically emotionally manipulative and cruel–tends to be treated with much softer edges. The answer to the question of Dirk and Jake’s feelings for each other is, for much of the fandom, a great big Shrug, and the ambiguity to the perception of the fandom has nothing to do with Hussie’s writing and everything to do with the narrative fans themselves developed and imposed on it. 

And Dirk? The Dirk Hussie wrote, the Dirk who is actually coherent and who’s motivations and actions are clear in every line of the comic and reflect all of the attention to detail and care that Hussie put into every other character, and who’s romance ties into his philosophical issues in parallel to Jake’s movie tropes?

Fandom treats that Dirk as though he doesn’t exist. He has been replaced with a weaboo jerkass who simply isn’t real, and to me as an mlm teenager who benefited greatly from Dirk and Jake’s romance until the Dirkcourse outright ruined my ability to perceive it for years, that’s infuriating.

That’s why I’m talking about this. I am not interested in moralizing or condemning anyone for their fanon depictions of Dirk–I just want the fandom to know them for what they are. Fanon. There is a rich vein of stories and characterization to tap into with Dirk and Jake, but fandom is broadly uninterested in it as opposed to…say…Davekat, largely because the fandom narrative around them has grown so muddled and imposing. 

I’ve written plenty about this! I’ve deconstructed and reconstructed this story like four times over by now, and have YET to be answered by a single person giving me an actual reason why Dirk is actually an asshole in the canon. It’s a false projection people are so attached to they do not want to question it, and that would be fine in any other context except the one where that very projection is stifling a moving and empowering MLM narrative from being able to come into full cultural force. 

You’ll have to explain to me if you feel my desire to change that dynamic–for my own sake, for the sake of other young queer MLMs, and for WP’s sake since god knows they’ve been hurt by this in terms of PR and brand perception worse than anyone–is somehow equivalent to trying to moralize about in-universe depictions of a character. 

If that was the issue, this wouldn’t bother me. I’d regret that Hussie wrote a relationship narrative that isn’t too resonant or empowering for LGBT dudes and move on. But that’s not what’s happened, and what has happened is infuriating and tragic. Especially when it’s one of many elements contributing to this fandom’s hypercritical perception of Andrew Hussie himself, and the currently understood ending of Homestuck. 

I don’t think I’m out of line in saying so, and if you want to convince me I should stop, I’m going to need a stronger argument.