yep! Lil Hal was wrong about Dirk because he perceives Dirk as the same teenager he was at 13, who Lil Hal still was in some ways. Dirk proper has grown up since then.
I think he’s a prince of heart roleplaying a knight in imitation of Dave, just like Dirk, since…he’s a Dirk. He destroys Heart (forcing Dirk’s suicide in Unite Synchronize) to serve his Self to Jake (offering Jake Dirk’s head/his own self, encased in the glasses).
His roleplay may be intense/unhealthy enough that he echoes Mind (and/or maybe Time, during Unite Synchronize? since he does mention managing temporal logistics) but that doesn’t mean he’s not a Heart player.
And I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding of either Mind/Heart symbolism or of how, exactly, roleplay/Aspect shifting work to say for sure right now. Maybe Hiveswap will lead us to know more, but “Prince of Heart roleplaying Knight” is as specific as I’m willing to get.
I think AR’s existence as Scratch backs up that reading. Knights’ serving of others gets them likened to Butlers, and Scratch is basically the best butler of all. Scratch easily parses as any combination of Prince/Knight and Light/Space, imbued as he is with First Guardian abilities and cueball omniscience. And that’s before we take into account the other souls he’s linked to, of course–but still, AR’s Class predilections seem to be there.
So, this page. This page is one of my favorites, because it shows just how much of a nerd Dirk is, and how wrapped up he and Hal are in their bizarre ironic one-upmanship games even though they don’t really seem to derive any enjoyment for them anymore. One thing to note in this convo is that, in keeping with Dirk’s focus on philosophy and history, they’re not really talking math, even if it might seem like it. More specifically, they’re talking math history.
The theme of the conversation is making bigshot claims of amazingness, while simultaneously introducing deliberate errors in one’s claims.
Hal opens the convo by talking about pi, the “big circle number”. Now, calculating digits of pi is indeed a popular method of testing the computational power and correctness of a computer. However, Hal claims to have “solved” pi, calculating every last digit. This is patent bullshit. As Dirk states, pi doesn’t have an end, it keeps going literally forever, never repeating, and this is one of the reasons why it’s so popular as a test. By claiming to have solved pi, Hal is “inadvertently” admitting to having made an obvious error in his calculations.
What’s interesting, though, is how Dirk claims it to be bullshit, by invoking “an ancient Greek guy” who “settled shit about irrational numbers” “practically when math was invented”, because this, too, is totally wrong, albeit in a more subtle, Dirk-esque way. Considering his interest in Greek philosophy, Dirk would indeed know the story of Hippasus of Metapontum, and how his heretical mathematical discoveries drove his peers to drown him.
Now, Hippasus (who may or may not have actually existed) is indeed credited with the discovery of irrational numbers, which are numbers that cannot be expressed as a fraction of two other numbers (and thus necessarily have no end to their decimal expressions), but the irrational number he’s credited with discovering isn’t pi, it’s the square root of two. Indeed, while pi is irrational, it took until the 18th century to fully prove this, and Lambert, the guy who first did so, was Swiss, not Greek. (Of course, the other, sadder joke here is that the 18th century, too, is ancient history from Dirk and Hal’s post-apocalyptic vantage point, though this is not clear at the point the conversation first happens)
And of course, Hal responds to Dirk’s confusion of history by claiming to have found all the prime numbers, which was proven to be impossible by an ancient Greek guy, specifically Euclid, in his work Elements, a book which mathematicians tend to regard with an awe close to what many people hold for the Bible, and which could by some if far from all definitions of mathematics be considered “practically when math was invented”.
And then Dirk tries to pretend he doesn’t know what prime numbers are for some reason? Yeah, I’m not actually sure if he’s doing something there or just being an ass.
[Author’s Note: This is a repost of Love, Faith and Fantasy–my piece on Jake and Dirk’s character arcs and the relevance of Knights and Pages in understanding them. I thought breaking it up into chunks would make the content more accessible, and give me room to flesh out each argument. Thus there will be some updates to the content. Hopefully this will mean more people can easily approach it!] [Pt. 1 – Knights/Pages – Service and Ownage] [Pt. 2 – Faith and Fear] [Pt. 3 – Fearful Heart] [Pt. 5 – As You Wish]
So now that we know that Knights are defined by service to others, and now that we have a clear reading of how badly Dirk wanted to be of service to Jake, it’s time to veer off a bit.
In this section, we’ll take a look at how hard Dirk tries to live up to Dave’s mythological role (while still very much carrying out his own), and see how that affects our reading of his character. We’ll also take a look at how Dirk is treated by–and feels about–the rest of his friends.
Dave is the only character who ends up acting as a server player for more than one person, and Dirk on some level tries to emulate Dave’s effect on the game the first chance he gets.
He fails at this, Miserably. But Hal, who is also a Dirk trying to emulate Dave, succeeds. By the end, Hal take’s over as EVERYONE’S server player, even Dirk’s. He even takes Dave’s text color during the process AND takes charge of–his words–metatemporal mechanics.
Dirk’s failure–and Hal’s success–in this regard established, let’s refocus a bit and note the nature of Dirk’s relationship with all of his friends by the time they start playing.
To make matters worse, we learn Jake essentially toyed with Dirk’s heart with jokes he–fitting into Jake’s general pattern of behavior–never confronted Dirk to correct, although he correctly deduces it left lasting damage on Dirk’s feelings.
Partly as a result, he views Jane as a competitor with an unfair advantage. Her complete ignorance about his sexuality doesn’t help matters, so he can’t talk to her.
All the while, Roxy is actively and willingly pressuring him into romantic interest in her and directly comparing him unfavorably to Hal for his lack of romantic reciprocation. And Hal not only harasses Jake and positions himself as a better friend to Jane (this particular act I do not view as malicious), but uses Dirk’s very insecurity about failing Roxy against him.
And while Hal claims to be on Dirk’s side in the Jakestakes, Dirk is pretty much right to be suspicious of his intentions:
So essentially, Dirk has no one to talk to about his sexuality and gets ignorance or cruelty on all sides with regards to it.
Is it really reasonable to demand of a teenager to come forward to his best friend–who he last heard voice rejection of the very CONCEPT of gayness–not only to admit his sexuality and explain how it factors into his alternate self’s abusive behavior, but also to confess or try to talk around his soul-searing, cosmic romantic love for the guy?
And that is what it is, make no mistake about Hal is either getting carried away with feelings he says are distant and diluted for him, or confessing the full form of those feelings on Dirk’s behalf. But the feelings are there, and they are cosmic in scale.
Heart is the aspect not just of love, but of any intense attraction between two or more people, and thus shipping. At first, these elements may seem disparate, but they’re more connected than they seem.
After all, what do you do if you ship two characters? If you think they’re in love? Typically. they’re shown as close together as possible, trading attention and feelings. Placing their souls in proximity to one another’s and implying a give and take between them.
Dirk’s Prince of Heart role does reflect how he destroys his relationships, but not the way most people think. It’s not that Dirk is willing to erode the selves of his friends to fit into his molds, but rather that Hal positioning his Self between Dirk and his friends undercuts Dirk’s ability to reach out and trust their perceptions of him, and even stops him from being able to tell where he begins and Hal ends.
At the same time, Dirk’s intense fear of rejection keeps him away from broaching his problems with Jake the same way Jake’s fear of disappointing others stops him from broaching his–Dirk’s Love getting in the way of honesty as much as his constructed Persona.
And yet, despite the unhelpfulness or outright cruelty Dirk’s friends put him through, largely because of his sexuality…
Save for the trickster log–which he recants–Dirk never once even thinks to consider his friends as aggressors towards him. His instinct is to assume he’s somehow failing them instead. Just like with Jake, Dirk sees into the core of all of his friends, and what he really sees at the end of the day is this:
Dirk thinks Roxy is noble. He sees her as she really is–as one of the Nobles of the session, as they ALL are, seeing right past their flaws and mistakes and straight to the shining hearts of their intentions.
Again, Roxy’s not even the one he wants to be with romantically, and we saw the intensity of how he feels about Jake. He wrote Jane entire books and sent her personal bodyguards crafted out of heirlooms taken from the Bro Dirk essentially shapes himself in the image of. What would he have to say about the two of them, if asked?
Dirk’s problem is his perception of his friends’ nobility leads him to erasing all their hurtful behavior, and the hurtful behavior he sees Hal commit on his behalf–which Dirk views as being his own actions, despite the fact that he never does anything about it for the exact same reason he stops himself from killing Hal–stops him from seeing any nobility within himself.
Dirk’s response to all of the complicated ways he’s been hurt in trying to manage the Hal and Jake situation as ethically as possible by all of his friends is to internalize responsibility for absolutely all of it. It never even crosses his mind to hold Jane or Jake or even Roxy accountable. Only his own self, and Hal as an extension of it.
It’s some pretty sad shit! Dirk conflates himself with Hal and views all of Hal’s actions as literally his own, despite the fact that they were carried out without Dirk’s agency of desire. And much of the fandom has taken the worst that Dirk has to say about himself at face value, in a way that simply hasn’t happened for…say…what Jake says about himself after the retcon.
So it’s a good thing, then, that Jake ultimately reciprocates Dirk’s feelings…and has a completely different view of Dirk than the one Dirk thinks he has.
How does Jake’s view of Dirk intersect with Dirk’s desire to live up to Dave’s image? And might it help resolve Dirk’s existential crisis of self-loathing?
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Flying through Storytelling 