You’re not embarrassing yourself, this is a pretty common idea people have about Jake and the Brobot. That said, I disagree with basically everything about how this question is framed. Which imo, is good news for you, because it means the stuff you’re upset that the Brobot did is not actually a problem–if you decide to believe me, anyway.
If not, I welcome follow up questions on the matter. Let’s break this down, starting with one statement:
Jake doesn’t hate the Brobot.
This line. This “id rather deal with the monsters” line has caused me so many headaches, because people looove to quote Jake venting his irritation at Jane here completely out of context and take the statement at face value.
The thing is, we know what happens when Jake has to deal with the monsters instead of Brobot. What happens is Jake basically doesn’t go outside at all. On Jake’s 13th birthday, we’re told Jake pretty much just pretends to adventure all the time without actually going out much–no surprise, since he mentions growing up afraid of the monsters.
When he’s 16, by contrast, he treats going outside like an annoying chore. And while you chalk that up to Jake getting better at adventures across three years…
He still relies on Brobot to save him, so. He’s not that much better. It’s also made pretty clear Jake appreciates Dirk’s help and protection, and considers him a net positive in his own life.
And in fact, Dirk saving Jake through the Brobot over and over again is the only narrative justification we get for why Jake believes in Dirk’s ability to save him strongly enough to summon Brain Ghost Dirk.
Jake also makes it pretty clear that he A) Loves to wrestle and B) Ultimately likes the Brobot. He says it’s annoying sometimes in the same block of text where he says he finds it exciting, and that it makes his life feel like more of an adventure.
And when Jake is actually deep into the sexual objectification and abuse in his narrative, when he’s actually terrified and overwhelmed and feeling sexually threatened–
He says he wants to go back to “when all i had to worry about was being tackled by a feisty robot.” (PS: Hey he mentions wanting to go back to his pumpkin patch. Which is literally canonically the name for Dirkjake as a ship. Homestuck truly never ceases to give.)
The Brobot is being distanced from, and set as a highly preferable alternative to, all of the sexual violence being directed at Jake from Crockertier!Jane. Which strongly implies that the Brobot was not complicit in making Jake feel unsafe in this particular way.
So that’s some of the evidence in the “against” column. What is it that people base the idea that the Brobot sexually assaulted Jake on?
This single quote where AR references the Brobot’s “robogrope”. The grope is important, because this is the ~*Verifiable explicit text*~ everyone leans on to prove the Brobot was definitely literally groping Jake.
The trouble here is that the AR is actually well-known to be overly lascivious and sexually/romantically aggressive towards Jake. The AR is also a 13 year old boy with a flair for the dramatic. I am not really inclined to take the AR’s descriptions about the Brobot as the final word, especially since the description Jake himself gives is much more innocent.
Jake himself describes the Brobot, to the AR, in the exact same pesterlog where AR delivers his robogrope line. Jake does not describe groping, or sexual assault, or feeling objectified,uncomfortable, or manipulated–complaints he readily levies at AR himself, when AR actually behaves that way, btw.
No. Jake describes the encounter as “tender”. And that’s a pretty particular word to use. Not just because the definition of tender:
has literally nothing to do with sexual or predatory behavior–and in fact suggests its opposite. But because Tender has rather notable usage in Homestuck itself, as in…
Yeah. The word “Tender”, in Homestuck, most notably relates to Caliborn’s particular brand of tepid-ass sugar porn. Which means that as far as Jake himself is concerned, the Brobot’s treatment of him has a lot more in common with this…
…than with the kind of behavior displayed by Aranea, Crockertier!Jane, or the AR. It’s nice that Jake happens to be the one main character who’s casually implied to be subconciously omniscient, so you can easily make the argument some part of him literally knows about this.
This interpretation also happens to actually make sense from Dirk’s perspective, since Dirk was explicitly eager to draw Caliborn’s *TENDER* porn with himself and Jake. So there is actually canonical basis for Jake picking up on some of Brobot’s behaviors meant to convey “Tender”ness.
It’s just that only implies the Brobot was being cutesy, romantic, and caringly chaste–the kind of shit Caliborn likes. “Brobot rubbed a rose tenderly on Jake’s face while singing ghostbusters” is literally closer to the truth than “Brobot sexually assaulted Jake”, since again–and this is importantthe important bit:
So where are all my drawings of the Brobot’s wrestling giving way to the chastest, most caring, cutest displays imaginable, fandom? TIA. Dirkjake is canon, Homestuck is good, and I GUESS this is my 4/13 post because dirkjake remains my favorite thing about it.
Happy 4/13, everyone!!!
😛
i miss bgdirk he was so full of potential (get it)
Hey, guys! In this video, we dive into Classpects in a little more depth, focusing on the recurring symbol of the Witch’s Familiar. We also take a look at every case of Witch roleplay we’re currently aware of, and note how characters who roleplay as Witches always seem to end up with Familiars themselves.
We’ve gotta start with the fact that as the third Hope player, Jake is subject to a magical prophecy passed down from Cronus. All three Hope players roleplay Magicians at some point.
Eridan and Jake both use Hope to force an enormous amount of emotional labor out of a Life player. And both Eridan and Jake piss their respective Life players off so much they revoke a symbol of mutual friendship. Eridan does this by using willful ignorance to keep his belief in a legacy of destruction, and then selfishly choosing to destroy Hope to save his own skin.
Jake is more complicated. He actually foreshadows his own behavior when he tells John about his Grandma in his letter, back in Act 4. It’s telling that tells John he likes to be honest, because he’s anything but for the first half of Act 6.
Jake uses willful ignorance to get what he wants without having to be honest about it. In so doing, he ends up keeping secrets–not just from all his friends, but even from himself. Only the part of his brain that takes the form of Brain Ghost Dirk is fully honest about Jake’s true awareness of his surroundings.
Secrecy comes fairly naturally to a Witch. Jade’s plan in its entirety is shared with no one until the end, Damara is secretive and cryptic about her actions, the Batterwitch is noted for her secrets, Feferi doesn’t fill anyone in on the nature of her bargain with the Horrorterrors until after she’s already Dead…so on.
This seems to be an element of his Grandmother’s Jake emulates, but it doesn’t come naturally to him. He mentions that secrecy wears on him and leaves him feeling jaded, which is exactly how he ends up feeling about his relationship with Dirk.
Jade: Becquerel (Space) Damara: Lord English (Time) Feferi, The Batterwitch: Gl’bolyb (Life) Rose: The Horrorterrors (Void), Doc Scratch (Light)
The interesting thing is, the relationship between a Witch and her Familiar always seems to be described in terms of Service. Serve is the verb inherent to Knight/Page, with Knights often Serving for the benefit of others, and Pages often benefiting from the service of others.
It’s from Dirk that we get the best description of Witches’ Familiars, as he describes the relationship between Gl’bolyb and the Batterwitch.
And as it happens, it’s also an excellent description of the sum total of Jake’s experience of Dirk, himself. Which is fitting, because Dirk is also an intense roleplayer–one who roleplays a Knight.
Brain Ghost Dirk is the manifestation of Jake’s faith in Dirk as both his personal bodyguard and his secret weapon–a window into how Jake sees Dirk at his best. Here he parallels Bec saving Jade from the meteor or from imps. While Bec is powered by Space and Dirk by Hope, the image is of a devoted, hypercompetent protector.
Jake’s faith also has a hand in creating AR, however, and Hal becomes the interpretation of Familiars as foreboding and controlling figures. This Dirk most reflects Gl’bolyb imposing its will onto the Condesce’s desires, or Lord English imposing his onto Damara’s.
ok so i totally failed at making that quick or short but that’s the loose gist of it. I could write a lot more but i really need to learn how to make these points concisely so i am hoping this is short and concise enough to get the point across.
Maybe? I don’t really like jossing headcanons, but I’ve never really read a version of this idea that feels compelling to me, personally.
I think it’s more accurate to say Pages tend to either A) Attract the attention of others who mean well, but can be unpredictable in how they go about “helping” the Page, or B) Serve themselves their Aspects in very selfish ways.
I don’t think Jake in particular reads as “lacking” Hope. Understanding the impact Jake has on Dirk when they’re 13, specifically through the vector of his Hope, is instrumental to understanding both their characters, imo.
probably healthier overall (but still not healthy–all the Alphas had roles to play in hurting each other, as much as they cared), right up until they were all suddenly dead, since Hal is the only reason they made it through [S] Unite Synchronize.
I do find it kind of hard to get into these kinds of questions though. They’re not bad or uninteresting or anything, it’s just that the only answer my brain can really come up with is that they wouldn’t exist. Hal is a necessary component of the time loop that creates LE, and so the trolls and betas and alphas and everyone.
That’s the fundamental nature of LE’s evil and the core conflict that informs everything about Homestuck’s narrative, so I find it really hard to think around it, personally.
An important thing to know about this gif is that Dirk doesn’t know who the fuck that is. The only Dirk that had met Neenah was Dream Ghost Dirk, and Alpha Dirk does not have the memories of that Dirk
Dirk just… Did this. He’s that cool
You have to realize that the Condesce exists in his world so he just randomly high fived someone who looks like the tyrannical ruler he wants to take down as a teenager
Which just makes this extra wild
I think just as important is why he did this, bcuz the context to this scene makes it one of the most understatedly beautiful parts of the comic.
We see the lamps light up like this again, sort of, in that the lamps eventually explode and take out the building holding them…but that happens when the kids God Tier. So Dirk’s feelings are being portrayed as roughly equivalent to that.
The High-Five itself drives this link in further. The High-Five as a gesture comes from a closely intertwined overlap between mainstream American culture and LGBT history, as it was started by Glenn Burke, and I quote “the first and only MLB player to come out as gay to teammates and team owners during his professional career and the first to publicly acknowledge it”–Wikipedia.
And as for the High Five itself:
After retiring from baseball, Burke used the high five with other homosexual residents of the Castro district of San Francisco, where it became a symbol of gay pride and identification.[9]
So yeah, high fives are literally gay dude culture. Considering the conversation that serves as the lynchpin of Dirk and Jake’s relationship is all about Dirk telling Jake about the fall of American civilization and that Dirk’s biggest role-model is Texan, I think it’s fair to say this is probably intentional.
Puts a neat spin on Dirk’s other gay high-five jokes about Jake, too. And we don’t even really need to bring all this High-Five history in to read Dirk’s feelings for Jake into this sequence.
Dirk spends a shitload of this flash Breaking glass windows. If we can understand Dirk’s suicide as Dirk Destroying his “Self”, it pretty clearly parses through his Prince of Heart title as Destroying Heart.
The window breaking, then, would be Dirk destroyingthrough Heart–using both his feelings for Jake and his cool-guy Persona to smash through the obstacles in his way and save himself and his friends from certain death.
And the final shot of window breaking, the one immediately following his high-five with Meenah?
Positions Jake’s green directly at Dirk’s back, as though pushing him onwards. Jake is, in a sense, the wings on Dirk’s back. In essence, Unite Synchronize is half desperate, heroic effort on the part of a gay teen to save himself and his loved ones.
That kind of attention to detail and symbolic impact is why I keep coming back to Homestuck. I want more stories about gay teens who love their friends to be celebrated as heroes, in all their painful messiness. And that’s why I deeply hope characters like Dirk and his ridiculous rocketboard high-fives stay with us for years to come.
Flying through Storytelling 