sdKGNgkngkn EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS WHERE DO I START. DIRK MAKING GAMES. THE GAMES BEING SHITTY BUT TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ALL THE STUFF JAKE LIKES. JAKES *FACES* THOSE FACES I’M IN LOVE
It IS bang to the elephant, Jake. Dirkjake is canon and im in nirvana
Ok this is legitimately like, my favorite Dirkjake fan content I’ve ever seen. It’s actually set post-canon and follows up on the characters issues that we know and understand and they’re interacting in new ways but they feel believable given what we’ve seen before and and and
God it’s so cute??? Hang on I have to scream more in Part 2
The way I see it, it makes a lot of sense: Pages are inherently Self-Serving, and that’s both an intense weakness and a great strength.
Why? Because in Homestuck, reality is made not just of what you want, but of what you’re willing to make happen. Willpower and thought are tangible, powerful things in Homestuck–things that shape the communal reality that all the characters share on their adventure.
So what if you had a natural talent to give yourself whatever you want? What if you had a natural talent to make other people WANT to give you whatever you want? Once Pages understand this potential in themselves and exploit it to it’s fullest potential, you get–well, you get Gods uniquely skilled at achieving exactly the outcome they want. So you get Jake summoning Brain Ghost Dirk, which should be impossible. You get Tavros managing to somehow organize an entire army out of extremely self-absorbed troll ghosts so he can finally show Vriska up, just by being nice and talking to them all one by one.
Ultimately, Homestuck posits that happiness/fulfillment/success, in reality, is made by knowing how to traverse the boundaries between what exists, what you want, and what the people around you want. Pages’ key verb, by design, gives them the shortest path to getting there. Other classes might use their ability to Make or Steal or Destroy to get what they want, but Pages have the luxury of simply Serving it to themselves–partly by making other people genuinely want to give it to them, or by using their Aspect to serve their own desires directly instead.
This makes them powerful vectors for organizing wills into a single goal, ie: Powerful leaders or warriors under the right circumstances.
The reason this is such a double-edged sword is twofold. For one thing, Pages being self-serving also makes them inclined to be cowardly and conflict avoidant, even when conflict is necessary. They’re also prone to put their own interest ahead of the group’s. For another, they can inspire people to want to help them, but those people are also their own people with their own predilections and ideas about what serving someone else means, which leads to unpredictable results. One need look no further than Vriska to see how that can go wrong.
And it’s worth noting that being self-serving is something society by and large strongly discourages, especially if you’re going to be asking people for help in accomplishing whatever you want to get done! It’s seen as a pretty Bad thing to be. So Pages perhaps more than most classes tend to be conditioned against embracing their innate skills.
This is a true mess of words. Hope it makes any damn sense but feel free to send me another ask if it doesn’t! And thanks a ton!
ok hold on a minute because i want to talk about the “jake is dumb” trope and its prevalence especially in fanfic
i’m not gonna say that jake is the smartest kid of his cohort, or that he’s in the same league as terezi/rose/jade, but a lot of people misread him when characterizing him as stupid. his difficulties throughout the storyline come from interpersonal issues; i.e., that he’s bad at reading situations, tonally, and he’s egocentric even at the best of times. (suggested reading: his conversation with jane after forgetting her birthday). unlike dirk, for example, who is hyperaware of his effect on other people but struggles interpersonally all the same, jake doesn’t pick up on others’ moods as quickly as any of his three friends. thing is, although this has zero bearing on how “intelligent” he is (in the problem-solving or memory-amassing sense), it’s how members of western society are trained to perceive intelligence. unless someone emanates brainpower á la sheldon cooper, our first judgment mechanism for intelligence is how good someone is at charming, manipulating, or generally interacting with others. it’s a faulty heuristic! but it’s how we read people. so when jake fails to realize that jane is peeved at him, and that it’s probably not the best time to talk about his boy problems, it’s read as “jake is dumb and can’t even understand that monosyllabic answers mean she’s pissed” not “jake grew up on a deserted island and has only been speaking to other teenaged human beings for a fraction of that time, so he’s a little slow on the uptake concerning nuanced, person-specific emotional indicators.”
furthermore: whenever we see one of jake’s moments of interpersonal “stupidity,” it’s always with the audience advantage. we know what’s going on at the other end of the conversation. we know jane’s pissed because she’s onscreen the entire time they’re talking. it’s dramatic irony that he blunders on about his romantic troubles, even as we’re thinking, “shut the fuck up, please, oh my god, why are you doing this.” that’s (one of) the point(s) of the passage. consider Oedipus Rex. sophocles knows that oedi fucked his mom, and tiresias knows that oedi fucked his mom, and we know that oedi fucked his mom, but if a blight is eating your city, your first thought probably isn’t “wow, i fucked my mom!”
additionally, for most of the comic, jake stands in the shadow of dirk. subject of Strider Mainpain as he is, jake has received the fandom notoriety he has as one part of dirk/jake, not for any widespread affection for his character (as contrasted with dirk himself, as well as dave). when he is portrayed, it is in conjunction with dirk – who is not breathtakingly intelligent, necessarily, so much as he’s person who tries very hard to seem intelligent, and has a lot of practice pretending. jake never pretends to be smarter than he is; ergo, when juxtaposed with dirk “how many four-syllable synonyms for ‘old’ can i cram into this sentence” strider, some conclude that he’s dumb.
still, for most of the comic, jake makes consistently decent decisions. he has his moments, sure. he’s a teenager. terezi has moments. but he’s clever, despite those moments. his pesterlogs are full of sharp lines and bright turns of phrase. his actions with liv tyler and the lotus capsule were skillful manipulations of technology.
the irony in all of this is that jake parodies the “hot adventure chick” stereotype, the subversive element being his gender. yet the same mistake is made wrt jake as is often made wrt “adventure chicks” – the assumption that he’s stupid because his most-noted feature is his beauty. when his friends praise him, it’s almost invariably praise for his physical features, his ass, his face, his desirability. that he’s a funny, bright kid with a lot of cool interests is infrequently brought up in explaining their reasons for pursuing him. so that element of his character is skimmed right over in fanfic, where dirk is given the lion’s share of characterization and angst.
none of this is to say that good characters have to be “intelligent,” by any of the many arbitrary definitions thereof. that intellect is indispensable to heroic or good characters is not my argument. it’s that jake’s lack of immediately observable intelligence being mistaken for stupidity has roots in how his decisions are presented.
All of this is pretty great. It’s also worth noting that a lot of Jake’s obliviousness is actually willful ignorance–Jake actively uses that his friends see him as dense at times to his advantage in avoiding accountability. When you get right down to it, Jake is one of the sharpest and most perceptive characters in the comic.
I’d put him at about Dirk’s level, though obviously, neither of them are quite a match for the Seers.
Which is why it’s pretty sad to me that most of his fandom depiction boils down to “He has a hot ass and people like looking at it.” Jake is way more complex and he’s a fascinating, versatile character to play with conceptually.
It’s also worth noting that where every other character in the comic praises Jake’s looks but downplays his intelligence, Alpha Dirk proper–not AR o Brain Ghost Dirk, who are different agents who think differently–pretty much never comments on Jake’s looks (outside of the one time Dave mentions it and Dirk agrees…in the process of explaining why he didn’t want to talk about it).
And where he comments on Jake’s intelligence, it’s to make it clear that he thinks Jake is smart and to flatter and validate him.
Tl;dr I wish the fandom appreciated Jake half as much as Dirk Strider does
Haha yeah I was being kind of flippant and facetious in the ask I think you’re referencing. I only want to start conversations, not impose a new understanding, so I’m happy to talk things out and debate views!
Tl;dr Jake wanted Dirk the whole time, he wants Dirk selfishly because he views Dirk has his protector and bodyguard and because Dirk helps him with whatever he wants help with, and he knowingly manipulated Jane into denying her feelings for him despite knowing otherwise for a fact because Roxy told him that she had feelings for him.
All of this is literally textual and in the comic.
Reading Jake as passive is the only reason anyone thinks DirkJake is ambiguous instead of one of the most mutual and passionate gay romances in all fiction, and it’s based on nothing but misinformation.
I’ve written so much about this it’s not funny, but feel free to read any of my various arguments on the subject and debate particular points if you want to follow up on something in particular.
Karkat: the reason there’s any people who think Karkat was turned into a joke and was never effective in the plot at all is because he almost always exerts his impact by “Allowing” his aspect, and thus ends up pretty effective all told despite not being aware of what he’s doing!
Tavros: reading Tavros as passive ignores the fact that Tavros fights and resists Vriska’s will every step of the way throughout his abuse, and is pretty capable about knowing who to get to help him in stopping her.
It ignores that the one time Tavros almost used his powers he was acting under his own agency, and that he quite expressly and dramatically is unwilling to do things the way Vriska wills them on him.
On Vriska’s end, ignoring that Pages inspire others to act for their own benefit paves over the element of her character that genuinely perceived herself as trying to help him, which is a textual element that complicates our view of her.
Obviously none of that is to say Tavros asked for it, or that any of what Vriska did is justified. But the way their wills play off each other is more complex than just “she bullies him and he’s a pushover”.
Tavros is NOT a pushover. He’s overpowered by force, but he tries fucking hard to resist his abuse. And Vriska doesn’t exactly just hate Tavros–there’s an element of her behavior genuinely rooted in a desire to help in the context of the fucked up world she grew up in.
But more than anything reading Pages as passive ignores Tavros’ motivation for raising the ghost army and turns it into “oh he ended up helping Vriska to her benefit in the end and that’s…his character arc?”
Which isn’t what that scene is at all. That scene is Tavros getting what he personally wanted to have closure for himself and move on from Vriska for good. Tavros healed. He moved on. He got a pretty gentle sort of revenge because Tavros is ultimately a kindhearted and gentle boy, but he used the ghosts specifically to aid his desire to own the fuck out of Vriska and then moved the hell on.
Reading Pages this way means that Tavros’ arc wasn’t written for the purpose of making a depthless joke of an abuse victim, which means you can understand Vriska’s character complexly without having to prioritize her over her victim.
I sure as hell wouldn’t call it, like, a perfectly handled narrative, but it does make it substantially better and make Tavros ’ ending a lot more satisfying. Also gives me more hope both Vriska and Tavros will be treated well with whatever on earth happens in the epilogue.
Homestuck was, if not good, at least only kind of shitty instead of dramatically in your face blatant abuse mockery shitty all along. Tavros is definitely treated as jokes, but he’s also given actual closure re:his abuse arc, that actually makes sense given who he is as a person. And understanding that means Vriska’s character was handled with more care, too.
Please let me boast about my lock screen because I got consent.
Soooooo cute and cool dirkjake lock screen!!!! by @honesk1
I am translating HS into Japanese with hone-san. On the way I had hone-san show me an unpublished illustrations. Every picture is really wonderful, and I adopt one of them in my lock screen.
It’s so amazing!!!
oohhhhhh my god oh my god oh my god this is incredible and i’m living
Preface/Disclaimer: This series is not meant to belittle or otherwise shit upon the obvious tremendous amount of artistic effort that went into Homestuck’s final updates. I think everyone can agree the conclusion was visually & aurally stunning, and I would even say that what writing that was present was also top notch. This series is purely meant to explore something many people have found fault with: the failure to deliver on arc conclusions for just about every single one of Homestuck’s main characters despite a significant amount of build up and narrative foreshadowing that such conclusions were planned. I won’t be chiming in about the main plot/plot holes/etc, either, this is purely character discussion.
What Is A Character Arc? Also known as an “inner journey,” a character arc is generally what separates a main protagonist from a secondary, minor or background character. The successful completion of a character arc is often what allows a character to be considered “round” vs “flat” – meaning that by the end of the story they have changed in some fundamental way.
Homestuck is a coming of age story, featuring young characters thrown into impossible situations expressly meant to challenge them and grow them as people. This is actually stated in the narrative several times, but more importantly, shown to us via what actually exists of each major characters’ arc. My argument then is that these arcs were truncated with a narratively lazy conclusion, not that they didn’t exist at all – and this is a large part of why so many people are finding the conclusion unsatisfying.
Pt. 2: Jake English
Possibly the most contentious and chronically misunderstood character in the main cast, Jake English is the first Alpha we ever meet in canon, and also the first character I often see pointed when accusations of having no point, purpose or defining arc start flying around. Personally I think that Jake not only HAD an arc, but was very close to completing it – so much so that I find his conclusion one of the most unsatisfying of all. He is missing key conversations that would have wrapped him up nicely, and while they might not have convinced people who already disliked him that he was a character worthy of a second look, they would have at least let us Jake fans that do exist feel good about always, appropriately, having had faith in a character whose arc is so defined by believing in oneself.
Let’s start with Jake’s primary conflicts. (Or, as I like to call it, Jake’s Shit.)
Here’s the second of the class essays, covering the Steal and Serve pair, the four classes that take up the middle of the spectrum:
Thief & Rogue and Page & Knight.
The next essay–on the Change & Know pair–is available in it’s entirety for my Patrons, so if you can spare me a buck a month you can get it and more content early if you decide you like it enough. Higher reward tiers will let you invite friends to the Discord so they can access this stuff and talk about it, too!
Feel free to @ me, reblog or send me an ask with your thoughts on these first two essays. There may be some things I can’t answer as they will be answered in later posts, but I might use those as inspiration for what teasers to release from sections of the next two essays over the course of the week.
You can also feel free to talk to me in the Hiveswap Discord where I moderate and cry about Homestuck. I’m very interested in seeing how my thoughts stand up to scrutiny, so don’t be shy!
Flying through Storytelling 