So, like. It’s long past time I wrote about my favorite character in this webcomic.
Jake English is the best and most interesting character in Homestuck, and it’s pretty tragic that barely anybody knows it. This is partly due to Jake’s narrative and personality being one of the most understated and subtle in the comic, but it’s also due to a Fandom Narrative building up around him that unfortunately paves over a lot of Jake’s most unique and interesting character traits.
Let’s try and rediscover this diamond in the rough as we wait for the game that will largely center around an alternate version of him, yeah? Here, I’m going to debunk some pretty common misconceptions about Jake, what he likes, and what he dislikes.
Brawls, Wrestling–Scrums and Whatnot. And the Brobot.
Let’s put it plainly: Jake English likes fights. A lot of the discourse surrounding Jake’s relationship with the Brobot seems to ignore this, or implies that the Brobot, like, Ruined Fighting for him somehow because it was outside of what he initially envisioned when Dirk sent it:
A point commonly further backed up with this quote Jake gives Jane:
There’s a few issues with this interpretation. Jake’s initial negative reaction is his very first encounter with the Brobot, and his quote with Jane is one he delivers as a passing remark. And by simply comparing Jake’s actions before and after the Brobot is sent, we can tell Jake really wouldn’t rather deal with the monsters.
Before the Brobot is sent, when Jake is 13, he explicitly avoids going outside:
Which is easy to link to being afraid of the monsters, since Jake complains about them himself…
And has no problem going outside three years later, after the Brobot is sent. To some extent, this can be put down to Jake’s increased experience and competence. But…
That clearly doesn’t account for the entire shift, since Jake does indeed need the Brobot to save him. I’ll come back to that later, but really, we don’t even need to do all this backwards story introspection to decide what Jake Really Feels. It would be easier to just listen to the guy himself.
So yes, Jake complains about the Brobot to Jane in one passing remark…while he’s still dancing around the tangled web of his relationships with Jane, Dirk, and Roxy. A period of time when Jake, by his own admission, is thinking very much about what other people think and not entirely being honest with the people around him.
What does Jake say when he is being honest, though? What does he tell John in his letter, which Jake wrote when he was 16, after 3 years of dealing with the Brobot?
What does he tell Caliborn–who’s opinion he doesn’t care about–after entering the session, after 6 months of dating Dirk?
And what does he tell Jane about the Brobot when he’s actually being honest with her–which he’ll CONTINUE to do for six months, complaining about all of Dirk’s myriad issues and shortcomings as a romantic partner…without ever once bringing up the specter of physical fear or discomfort?
Wait, hang on. Let’s zoom in on that one, that one’s important:
Woah. Is that Jake conceptually linking the Brobot…to the thing he was most consistently excited about for the entire comic? Interesting. Wild. What could it mean. It would almost imply that after spending three years with the thing, he doesn’t really hate the experience of having it in his life.
Again, Jake is no stranger to complaining about Dirk over the course of their session–he complains to Jane endlessly about him, as well as to Erisol and even Caliborn a little. (Though never Roxy, hmm…I wonder why…(I know why and I’ll get to it in another post.))
But he never really complains about fighting or about the Brobot in general, and his general attitude towards fights seems to be changed absolutely not at all whatsoever–right up to [S] Credits.
And he ultimate views Dirk as a figure of comfort and safety, so much so that he trusts Dirk with protecting him even more than he trusts Grandma or his own powers–after all, even after Brain Ghost Dirk tells him that he wouldn’t need him if he unlocked his hope potential, Jake still chooses to simply make Brain Ghost Dirk real rather than doing anything on his own when he wants to feel safe:
So yeah, I find the idea that Jake was bothered by the Brobot on any meaningful level pretty hard to square with the avalanche of counterevidence that is in the canon. The Brobot was an imperfect gift, but Jake still ultimately enjoyed it.
Jake English likes to fight. Plain and simple. This is weird to a lot of people, and that’s fine, but it’s not actually that uncommon.
There’s plenty of sports that center around fighting or come with the risk of physical harm, like boxing, martial arts, etc. I’m a longtime fencer, and I genuinely liked going without protective padding and getting bruised from the sword impacts. Physicality appeals to some people.
Jake’s love for fighting established, feel free to join me tomorrow and we’ll take on a smaller issue. A tighter one.
I’ve written an obnoxious amount about Dirk, but seeing how quickly I was able to put that Dirk post out, I decided I’d like to use the next couple days to put out similar smaller posts about the other Alphas–Jake, Roxy, and Jane, In that order.
I’ve got at least two more posts of Jake in me before we move on to Roxy, and I should be putting out at least one of these posts a day–the next one’s already pretty much written, so I may post it early in the day tomorrow.
Hopefully, by doing this I can help people understand just how tangled and complicated the tangles of mutual hurt and mutual love are in this group of friends, and why I love this severely underrated group of Homestuck characters.
If you enjoyed this post and think others like it would be interesting to you, well–stay tuned. If you have a counterargument or you disagree with this post, feel free to respond and I’ll do my best to get back to you. I enjoy testing my ideas so long as we’re all nice about it.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
In related news, Dirk Strider and Jake English are deeply in love and I am so glad that they were able to work past the issues that plagued their relationship and the awful way the AR (itself a victim of circumstance) manipulated them throughout their early teens and played upon their worst insecurities with themselves and each other
I thank fandom jesus every day that the homestuck credits revealed to us that Dirk and Jake talked through their shit and are now cohabitating happily on an island filled with semi-sentient animals upon which they can freely pursue their ridiculous interests such as creating giant robots and then slamming those robots together in glorious combat
I’m so fucking glad that these boys who went through so much and suffered so much at the hands of forces much greater than them were able to overcome it all and find happiness the way they always wanted to – with each other
Just a reminder that Dirkjake is good ship about two queer teens making mistakes and then working them out together and you should never feel bad about loving them. Canon m/m narratives about mutual bad choices and mutual love and mutual working through issues are important and good and rewarding. Don’t let the discourse get you down!
extra reminder that like 99% of the stuff people pin on Dirk were actually the AR’s actions and Dirk had no control over the AR at any point. The narrative literally never stops hammering home how much more control the AR has than Dirk right up until [S] Unite Synchronize.
Agency and control are important concepts in relationships, as much so as power dynamics, and it’s good there’s an m/m narrative out there so focused on teasing out the nuances of those issues so a mindful audience can identify what a healthy relationship is.
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.
Okay, let me tell you what’s immature: the fact that you’re behind an anonymous face to start an argument. So what am I going to do? I’m not going to treat it like a civil conversation, because it’s not. You start a conversation with “Do the world a favor and stop romanticizing abuse.” Yeah, that isn’t really civil, sounds pretty condescending and accusatory to me. I’ve been running this blog well over a year now, and before that, I was very passionate about dirkjake. I’ve sat through and participated through this discourse already and honestly, I’m so tired. So, as it seems, I’m going to have to repeat myself. Although I don’t really think I should have to explain myself to someone so childish and won’t even come off anon.
Okay, here we go.
Let us take a moment to remember the circumstances of the alpha session.
Jake English, 16 years old. Dirk Strider, 16 years old.
Two TEENAGE boys who hadn’t had much or none human contact with anyone. They find out that they like each other respectively. Okay, that’s alright. Only problem is, how do they communicate that? These two kids have been best friends since they were at least 13 years old, seemingly younger than that. For two boys who don’t really have much experience with human interaction, how are they supposed to voice that to each other? I’ll admit, some of the methods Dirk used to capture Jake’s attention were not the best. I mean, the robot was created with the right intention, as Jake also asked for it, but ultimately, it was a huge issue. Not to mention that even some of the things done with good intentions can still harm us, and leaving his snarky egotistical younger AI self to the controls was not the best idea.
The relationship itself was all mostly off screen. It went on for the months that they were in the game. All we really see afterwards is the aftermath. Jake saying that Dirk was too clingy and overbearing of a boyfriend. Jake escaped to his planet to avoid confrontation, not answering any of Dirk’s messages. Now who is to say how long Jake disappeared. Days? Weeks? Anyone in Dirk’s shoes would be fucking worried sick that something may have happened, no wonder he exploded Jake’s phone.
I’m starting to lose my train of thought.
Okay, so on Jake’s part, instead of communicating with Dirk when they had an issue, it’s heavily implied that he spoke to Jane about it, multiple times.
The fact being that after they both broke it off, it was a mutual thing, even if the circumstances were shitty (trickster mode). It could be argued that both of them did not have a healthy relationship due to the fact that there was a lack of communication on both sides. After everything is done and they meet on the platform, it is shown that they have a happy reunion and start to talk things out for the first time since they started this relationship. It’s unsaid whether or not they restart their relationship once they reach the new session, but it’s very prominent that they are still very close. In all honesty, I prefer to have it left unsaid because honestly, I’d be happy with either choice. So, while I like to pair them together romantically, I’m content with them being together in general. It’s all up to the reader.
Just wanted to add to this: We have no reason to think Dirk had any control over what the AR did related to anything with the Brobot. By the end of the Alpha session, the AR has control of Dirk’s chumhandle, and the AR is just Dirk but with infinite more mental capacity–we get shown Dirk’s limits compared to the AR’s quite handily.
My point being: There’s no reason to think Dirk had primary access to the Brobot, or could restrict the AR from accessing it in any meaningful way. We also have no reason to think Dirk could modify the Brobot after he sent it past what AR could do, and Dirk’s initial design of the Brobot was based on the expectation that Jake would enjoy the risk and danger inherent to it.
The definition of the word adventure implies those things, and the Brobot is at least partly a consequence of Jake misrepresenting himself early on. Also Jake is seriously not even bothered by the Brobot and thinking he is makes his character basically incoherent, considering he trusts and believes in Dirk to protect him above anything.
Jake was abused. By the AR. Romantically and sexually. I really don’t think the Brobot factors into this except where it reinforces the AR’s aggressive romantic overtures. Dirk and Jake both mess up in ways that set up this scenario, but if anything Dirk is also a victim.
Coincidentally, so is the AR. Almost like this was meant to be a fucked up, awful situation with no clear monsters or black/white dichotomies?? wow
Flying through Storytelling 