roxilalonde:

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