Tag: dirkjake

a little late to the party but: jake, while being threatened with sexual assault and forced marriage, conjures up brain ghost dirk and asks him to help him, and also expresses a desire to go back home to his island (before the game) specifically mentioning the brobot as nothing more than a pest. that’s not … indicative of having a bad association with dirk is what i’m saying i guess.

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Ahahaha oh my god its true. I didn’t realize this, but BGD manifests immediately when Jake realizes talking to Jane simply will not work, and he feels physically threatened. And Jake immediately wants Dirk to help him, despite the obvious limitation of his not being real. 

And notice how he wants to go back to when he had to worry about the robot but he doesn’t say anything about the monsters that he also had to worry about?

Yeah. There’s an Ideal Time in Jake’s life, and it was when the Brobot was his biggest problem–not the monsters he had to deal with before Dirk sent it. 

Thanks for pointing this one out to me, because I had genuinely missed it. God Dirkjake so good and meticulously crafted, I fucking love Homestuck. 

EDIT: Also, Anon, I don’t believe in “late to the party” when it comes to Homestuck. There’s so much to unearth, consider and discuss with this comic and what’s coming next from What Pumpkin that I think anyone who’s willing to engage about it has a place and a voice. 

This being a perfect example :B You pointed me to stuff that I’m now genuinely considering editing into my articles or including in a future piece I write about Jake.

That’s genuinely valuable no matter what time span it’s in, and there’s nothing stopping the ship or our understanding about the comic from growing and evolving. Unless we choose to stop talking about it and thinking about it in new ways.

so you’ve talked a ton about dirk and his feelings for jake, but i think in a lot of ways jake is also a very difficult character to understand because he hides what he really cares about. what’s your take on his feelings for dirk? was he just overwhelmed by dirk’s intensity or did he really not care as much about dirk in return? or would it just take him longer to return dirk’s feelings?

I want to write about Jake at length someday–probably around the time I get to the point where adapting Dirk’s essays into video format is viable–but the basic breakdown is this:

Jake is in love with Dirk. The way he’s written makes it pretty clear he wanted Dirk from the start. Callmearcturus wrote a fantastic post breaking down the way Jake literally manipulated events so that Dirk, not Jane, would be the one to ultimately ask him out, which is readable here: http://callmearcturus.tumblr.com/post/150195543495/sorrydontknowman-replied-to-your-post-theory#notes

Beyond that point? Jake is in love with Dirk. He’s flighty and passive aggressive with Brain Ghost Dirk after years of dancing around the AR’s aggression and Dirk’s emotional distance, but all the boy really wants for all of the lead-up to Unite Synchronize is to talk to Dirk. He seeks him out. When he has to corpsesmooch Dirk’s head, his regret isnt about having to do it but about it not going how he imagined. After Dirk breaks up with him, Jake doesn’t talk about feeling uncomfortable with Dirk–he talks about how bad he feels for breaking Dirk’s heart and ignoring Jane.

He decides romance isn’t for him…when he thinks Dirk and all his friends hate him and is blaming himself for everything that went wrong. You know, the exact same way Dirk takes the blame for everything that went wrong himself and decides to stay away from Jake for his own good. Neither moment is particularly healthy for them. 

When Jake’s agency is well and truly compromised in every way when Aranea usurps his free will and exploits him for his powers, Dirk is who he turns to for protection. Jake summoning Brain Ghost Dirk is an understated visual storytelling moment in the same way Dirk’s lamp breaking when Jake kisses his head–it’s the moment where we see the full force of the one’s feelings for the other, and those feelings warp reality around their weight and make impossible things possible. 

Not only does Jake summon Dirk as his knight in shining armor, his Prince Charming if you will– but he summons a Dirk who calls himself Jake’s boyfriend (this is after they break up, remember?) and quoting The Princess Bride, an action movie all about a hyper-competent badass dude who does not just try, but succeeds at doing anything his beloved wishes, and which revolves wholly around the power of love, and performing dramatic feats in the name of that love. 

I. I don’t know what else to say there. That Brain Ghost Dirk moment seals the deal completely. That’s BGD embodying all of Jake’s fantasies at the time Jake needs it most, and the only other time we see Jake activate his powers is during the Masterpiece, when Dirk is the one who needs him to come save him. 

Dirk’s feelings aren’t one-sided. Dem bois are in love. That’s really all there is to say on the matter. I think I’d say Jake probably feels emotion a more low-key level than Dirk and that might have played into him considering himself unable to have those dramatic, romantic feelings–because, yes, Dirk is very intense about his emotions. But I think Jake’s hopesplosion moments make it pretty clear those feelings are absolutely there. He just processes and expresses them differently, which is fine, because that’s how it works in real life for plenty of people. 

There’s also an argument to be made that Jake hasn’t even had a chance to understand his emotions for Dirk outside of circumstances that were super stressful. He certainly flirted with Dirk a lot in the one pesterlog they really share, just before the AR’s creation–but after that, they’re either gagged by the AR situation or dealing with it’s fallout in the session. It seems pretty natural to me that would throw a wrench in Jake’s ability to understand his feelings in general, so who knows how he expresses his feelings now that they’ve had time to sort things out and reengage in a way that’s healthy? 

Hey, I saw a conversation the other day saying that Jake was sexually abused by the robot. Do you think there’s any canon evidence that supports that? (I read your essays, btw.)

No, not in the slightest. The only thing that remotely suggests that is Jake saying the wrestling got a little too “tender” for his liking, and he described trying to convey it as “awkward” at worst. 

The idea that the Brobot seriously hurt him in any way simply doesn’t square with Jake’s actions at all. When the monsters were what Jake had to worry about, he holed up in his room all the time despite his professed love for adventure.

After the Brobot showed up, he was annoyed by it and viewed it as an unpleasant, impossible chore–but he was perfectly willing to go out and HAVE adventures with it around, and the monsters now seem to scare him far less–a sharp contrast to pre-Brobot Jake. And though his personal skill is a factor here, the Brobot DOES have to bail him out from getting murdered by a goat monster.

Also assuming that the Brobot would do more than just be a little too romantic/gentle with Jake implies assuming that Dirk would design it to be sexually aggressive, which doesn’t line up with anything in canon. OR that the AR can manipulate it’s AI beyond just toggling its settings, which we have no evidence for. 

Jake was subject to romantic and even sexual harassment–by the AR, verbally, and in a situation where Dirk wasn’t able to do anything about the situation, and in fact likely wasn’t even aware of it since the way the narrative is presented implies the AR is already screening Jake’s messages from Dirk for a good chunk of the build up to Unite Synchronize (after the initial message in the bathroom, Dirk receives no more Jake pester bubbles, despite the fact that Jake is messaging him over and over and he DOES receive them from other sources.)

But extending that to the Brobot doesn’t really square with Jake’s general attitude towards it (annoyance and a bit of romantic discomfort, or at least, discomfort with vocalizing it’s actions TO THE AR, who he already has a fraught and uncomfortable relationship with) and it definitely sure as hell doesn’t square with Dirk’s motivations at all. 

If I were to guess, I’d say the Brobot is programmed to be somewhat suggestive of romantic overtures and was in part an attempt at courtship on Dirk’s end, but then the AR coming along made it damn near impossible for Dirk and Jake to communicate about romantic stuff and that made Jake see it somewhat uncomfortably because it’s yet another instance of Dirk implying interest but being really vague and unclear about it. 

But that’s essentially me just writing fanfiction based on a vague suggestion in canon, as is any allegation of sexual abuse.

All we know for sure is the Brobot acts in a way that makes Jake uncomfortable enough to mention it (in the hypersexualized and fucked up context he’s already trapped in with the AR, that Dirk can’t do anything about)…

…BUT not uncomfortable enough that he’s anything less than pleased when the Brobot shows up to save him from a monster, or uncomfortable enough to undercut the fact that he fundamentally views Dirk as a figure of safety and protection. All of the discomfort with Dirk he displays through Brain Ghost Dirk comes through verbally, where it’s easy to argue the AR’s treatment of him has messed with his view of the real Dirk. 

In physical space–where the Brobot resided–Jake doesn’t see Brain Ghost Dirk as anything but a protector when the chips are down. The idea that any Dirk stand-in sexually abused him physically simply doesn’t square with that reality, to me. 

Speaking as an mlm abuse survivor who used to think Dirkjake was abusive:

It’s not. 

The reading that Dirkjake is abusive is understandable–if you’re someone for whom the imagery proved triggery or which reminded you of your own experiences. That stuff happens. It’s okay. You’re not obligated to like a ship.

But the reading that Dirkjake is abusive simply has no basis in canon.

The story canon sets out to–and succeeds at–writing is simply not abusive. At all! I wrote four essays about it, combing through the canon in detail.   The issues that people typically pin on Dirk are simply not ones that he could do anything about, or was even responsible for. I framed those as an invitation to be questioned in good spirits, but I never have been for some reason.

 And yet, I keep seeing parts of the fandom trudge along a completely baseless train of discourse that never even had the wheels to spin on.

It’s fine if you dislike Dirkjake for personal reasons. Nothing wrong with that. 

But I feel there’s something like a reading comprehension crisis going on with this section of Homestuck, and I really wish people would take the time to look at the story that’s actually there rather than parroting the hazy impressions they were left with after absorbing a 3 year old interpretation of the comic that fandom was too intensely invested in to change–or even allow itself to question–after the canon had long since evolved. 

At the very least, stop claiming I need to be aware of a canon reality that doesn’t exist. Or question me about it directly, where we can have a conversation about it. 

aradibaa:

me, banging pots and pans together at 3am: dirkjake! is! not! abusive! they! are! just! some! teens! that! fucked! up! it! is! not! that! deep!!

i would say it IS ‘that deep’ but the way it’s that deep pretty solidly establishes that Dirk and Jake’s dynamic isn’t abusive. 

Jake is abused–by the AR. Iirc, Dirk is abused by the AR too, btw. And AR is trapped in a horrible situation through no fault of his own due to the nature of his existence, as is Dirk, because he has no moral or practical way to control the AR. The fault here is the AR, but even with him there’s extenuating circumstances.

It’s not even some teens that fucked up due to factors any teens would deal with. It’s teens that fucked up due to a freak accident landing them in an impossible philosophical/emotional quagmire. 

Dirkjake is super deep. It explores questions of philosophy and identity and what it means to value someone and what ethical action is, and the aesthetics of the entire relationship are couched in both boys’ primary interests–action movie tropes and philosophy, respectively.

It’s also not abusive. I really wish people would take the time to untangle the deeply complex dynamic that’s actually at play with the Alphas instead of trying to render it a simple, boring, black and white thing. Hussie’s storytelling during that section straight up deserves better imo. 

it is 4 days until valentine’s and let me fucking tell you

stormsbourne:

how much dirk strider loves jake english and how cosmically In Deep he is means so much to me. dirk is actually In Love with jake on a level I think a lot of people tend to discredit as a first crush, or they take him at his word when he cynically says maybe he only liked jake because he was the only boy around. (which is very untrue – dirk is in a bad place when he says that and is trying to distance himself from what he feels are his own fuckups wrt jake.) 

dirk has been in love with jake for at least 3 years of his life – he and jake are dancing around flirting with each other for the entirety of the dreambubble log. if it was as shallow or easy to dismiss as dirk later wants to believe I’m sure he could have handled it then. that’s not to say he didn’t put way too much pressure on jake to be The One – of course he did – but it does mean that dirk’s feelings aren’t shallow, false, or easily overcome. dirk strider is head over heels for that boy. dirk strider is so completely horrendously in love that he cannot be happy without some form of jake english in his life and when he decides to stay away from jake (because he erroneously believes it’s better that way and jake hates him now) he is in fact cosigning himself to a miserable existence where he is going to keep going in circles chasing himself about how he never deserved jake.

not that it matters since they clearly hook back up in the post-act 7 world but hey

the depth and breadth of dirk’s feelings for jake is heart-aching if I think about it too hard and I think it’s something a lot of gay people can relate to, especially tied up as it is with dirk’s fear jake isn’t interested or that he dragged jake forcibly into it. but dirk is In Love. he’s in love in a romantic epic sense and, in a way I think he probably buys into a little too much given his love of antiquity, an almost greek sense where love is a madness that consumes you. dirk is truly and deeply enchanted by jake english and he knows it and on some level knows that he can’t really ever be over it. 

jake loves dirk too, of course, but dirk is afraid that jake’s feelings can’t run as deep as his and never could. though I think this fear is largely misplaced (for understandable reasons), it’s clear to see where it came from. dirk is in love with jake on an almost cosmic, transcendent level. it’s hard to think anybody could ever return your feelings with that sort of sheer raw realness. 

they are so desperately, deeply in love though. 

they really are.

hypeswap:

dirkjake soulmate tattoo au:

jake, looking from the pointy anime shades on his arm to the ones on dirks face: it’s probably just a coincidence, right?

Jake’s just as into Dirk as Dirk is into him so tbh itd probably just cut out the middle man but this is cute