“Roxy starts off INCREDIBLY passive aggressive and manipulates the Jakestakes quite a bit for her personal benefit, even as she pretends not to” I don’t necessarily disagree but I am curious as to what you’re referring to. Do you have a post on this subject you could link me to?

I actually don’t, I’ve tackled writing one before but it just didn’t come together in my head. But its together now so here we go, I’m making it now JUST FOR YOU.

I really love Roxy and this isn’t me trying to shit on her, to be clear. What I’m describing is something Roxy addresses and feels regretful about herself, as she describes to Jake.

But honestly becoming aware of how rough Dirk gets it from everyone made watching the most common fandom takes on him pretty much insufferable to me, so I do want to use this as an opportunity to knock some more dents into the terrible “Dirk was an aloof, cold manipulator who lacked Heart” fandom metanarrative.

Because frankly the shit he gets from Roxy puts into perspective that in canon, Dirk is a deeply loving and self-sacrificing boy with the patience of a goddamn saint and the self-loathing of a particularly repressed catholic, so let’s run through the greatest hits.

Let’s start at the Trickster arc, where Dirk plainly expresses his awareness of the behavior Roxy was describing above.

By this point in the narrative, Roxy’s feelings for Dirk are an open secret that goes unspoken since Dirk and Jake are dating during the 6 months of the session, but Trickster Mode dredges it all back up instantly.

Now let’s go back to the start.

Right in the pesterlog where Roxy asks Dirk to think about what it’d be like if they had kids together, she quickly alternates between being dramatically despondent (gotta wonder why this doesn’t get mentioned the way it does when Eridan does it to Feferi, btw) and outright aggressively disappointed in Dirk because of his sexuality.

This is Roxy being really forcefully clear that Dirk is gay, and that his gayness is a huge fucking drag for her. And we really have to point out that Roxy is the only actual friend Dirk has who he’s even out to at this point in the story!
Jane is completely clueless, and the only other person who knows is Hal, who is the manifest opposite of healthy emotional support.

When we see Dirk and Jake talk at 13, Jake alternates between reacting sharply negatively when Dirk so much as mentions the word gay and avoiding the subject entirely when Dirk tries to talk about gayness.

So like, sure Dirk’s emotional constipation has a lot to do with trying to live up to ideals of masculinity, but then again it’s not that Dirk doesn’t try to talk to anyone about his honest feelings? It’s that everywhere he could turn he’s met with some combination of disapproval, defensiveness, ignorance and/or disinterest.

It’s a pretty shit environment to be a gay guy in, honestly! And Roxy’s in the best position to understand and empathize with what Dirk’s going through, which means I’m inclined to hold her a bit more responsible than Jane and Jake.

Speaking of those two, this is also the period when Roxy A) Wants to stop everyone from playing Sburb at all, and B) starts playing matchmaker for Jane and Jake. And her feelings for Dirk put a bit of an edge on her actions, because sure, I’m sure a real part of her just wants Jane to have a fair shot…

But then again, if Jane and Jake hook up, that means Dirk’s got nobody but her, doesn’t it? Even when Dirk is denying any possible future for them outside of Sburb, Roxy questions the fact, still holding out that Dirk will get ‘ungay for a while’, as she puts it to Calliope.

Meanwhile, she passes the time by alternating between flirtlarping with Hal, a cybernetic 13 year old Dirk (Dirk feels deeply conflicted about having created) and switching back to flirting at him when he asks her to stop.

She even outright complains that Dirk isn’t more like the AR, pressuring him to act more like he used to before he started really becoming aware of his sexuality, or at least before he stopped wanting to own it honestly. In other words, Dirk is being pressured to feign interest in Roxy, with his own AI doppleganger being held over his head as a “superior” verison of himself.

Hal is fully aware Roxy is doing this, btw, and he uses it to further manipulate and guilt-trip Dirk as a way to lash out due to his own issues. And we know that on some level, it works, because when he talks to Jane on the quest crypts he comes clean about the fact that he actually DID feel guilty that he couldn’t just be into girls and give Roxy what she wanted.

All of this plays into every aspect of how Dirk relates to himself and the people around him–He feels guilty for not wanting Roxy, he feels guilty for viewing Jane as competition, he feels guilty for making Hal and subjecting him to his torturous existence, he feels guilty seeing Hal act out a warped, juvenile, toxic version of his own affections for Jake..

And he’s confused into conflating Hal’s agency with his own and taking responsibility for all of this as indicative of his own personal failures without ever considering the faults of anybody else except Hal, who he perceives less as his own person and more as a particularly damning extension of himself.

It is not a wonder that Dirk feels innately fucked up and toxic by the end of Homestuck!

But it IS kind of infuriating that so much of the fandom takes his description of himself at face value, because most of what he feels guilty for isn’t actually his fault. Like, christ, Dirk confesses he felt guilty about Roxy not long after Trickster Roxy sexually assaults him. That’s what this scene is! It is a non-consensual act of sexually charged contact! This is literally on the level of Crockertier Jane delivering her sex slavery speech to Jake.

But nobody really talks about it that way here, because Dirk’s whole thing is taking everything stoically on the chin and holding nobody responsible for anything bad that happens but himself. This panel is basically the epitome of that.

He thinks about punching Roxy to defend himself, given an opportunity to be a “man of action” for like, maybe literally the first time in this session and solve a problem head on, but he doesn’t. Because ultimately, he can’t bring himself to consciously hurt Roxy, and his desperate need to be a Good Person simply outweighs his desire to be left alone.

Anyway it all works out in the end, and Roxy correctly deduces she ended up messing with Dirk’s head, so I’m glad they presumably worked through all that stuff on Earth C. I just wanted to try to impress what a rough ride this was for Dirk with regards to how he was treated over his sexuality specifically, since I think it’s gone so under-discussed in the fandom.

Now Dirk is happy with his boyfriend Jake and his best friends Roxy, Jane and Callie, and he’s got a cool brother who loves him, and he has everything he deserves and more which means all is right in the world.

Roxy is in a way better, healthier, happier place too, with anywhere between one loving snake girlfriend and two girlfriends+maybe an eventual boyfriend if she and John ever decide to do the dating thing.

The sky’s the limit and she’s got all the romantic attention she could want, which is what she deserves because she’s a gem and a treasure who does her best by her friends even if she fucks up sometimes.

Homestuck is good. The end.

Heyy It’s me again. So I was wondering, we know that jake has to hate the brobot right and was already abused enough by it, so why did it have to touch him? (I think you and someone else said that the brobot touched jake and I’m saying this because I don’t want you to be like “the brobot never touched jake you perv”) Does it have to do with what you said about jake feeling uncomfortable about his body? (Man I hope I don’t embarrass myself)

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:

“showing gentleness and concern or sympathy.”

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 important the important bit:

Jake’s relationship to the Brobot did not include feelings of being sexually assaulted. (Here’s a link to a way longer essay on this subject I already wrote ages ago, btw). That is entirely a projection of the fandom’s, based on the words of a character who is not Jake. It’s fanon.

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!!!

jake doesn’t find dirk threatening

oceanboydirk:

CW: discussion of sexual violence, sexual threats

“jane, please stop! i’m scared!”

i will say that i’ve heard somewhere that jane could be talking about ectobiology here. and she could be. but i think her comments on jake’s body give it a sexual meaning, and also, if the roles were reversed and it was a guy saying, “your only value is being hot and i’m going to force you to have children with me,” it would not be ambiguous.

(also the prime time of jake’s life was after the brobot was in it which reveals that he never really found the robot more of an annoyance and inconvenience at times and certainly not as a sexual threat. because jake is scared right now, and i posit that if the robot really had been that kind of threat, jake would not be wishing to return to a time where it was in his life but i digress.)

“no, why does everyone want to kiss me? aranea, stop!”

context: this is after the conversation with crockertier jane. aranea has said before that she knows jake is attracted to her. she is about to “heal” jake and turn his hope powers up to maximum radiance and was going to do it by kissing him. jake Does Not Want to be kissed.

this is brain ghost dirk, during jake and crockertier jane’s conversation.

“look at our god tier pajamas. i look really stupid and it’s weird that my leg hair is gone! but i think your pajamas are decent.”

(and then like twenty minutes later brain ghost dirk, who canonically represents jake’s subconscious desires and understanding, calls himself jake’s boyfriend.)

like you don’t have to care or believe me. i’m sure i skipped some things but these conversations which all happen really close together have always really stuck out to me. but i’m just saying, please listen to what jake is actually saying and thinking. he’s not scared of dirk.

Yeah I keep hearing people say “It’s common to want to be protected by someone you’re scared of it’s a common facet of abuse” which is great and all except Jake…literally never once makes a comment even remotely implying he’s scared of Dirk, or really the Brobot for that matter.

Also worth noting Jake wants to go back to when he was dealing with “being tackled by a feisty robot”, not, say, back to when he was with his Grandma. The way Jake reacts to Jane and Aranea and describes Brobot also casts a lot of doubt on the idea that the Brobot’s “tender” behavior was anything other than some pretty chaste romantic overtures.

Also: People have argued this is Jane line is about ectobiology? Sorry to burst bubbles, but it’s not. She references the trickster mode “zillion babies” thing, which explicitly describes sexual relations. This is Jake being threated with sexual assault. It’s not particularly ambiguous.

I’m glad you wrote this out cause I’ve been meaning to write a post about how Jake literally never implies being scared of Dirk even a little. Thanks