The Deep Blue of Weird Plot Shit — Dirk as Romantic Predator
[The subject of this essay concerns Homestuck, and in particular the fraught relationship between the Alpha kids, and in particular particular the tense codependent threesome of Dirk, Jake, and the Auto-Responder. As such this series features TRIGGER WARNINGS for depictions of fighting in relationships, sexual and emotional coercion, gaslighting, head trauma, philosophical and existential quandaries, and of course, decapitation. Tread carefully.
Bold denotes a link to another essay. If you see a message in Bold, please take my premise for granted, or follow the link and read through the argument presented in that essay before continuing. Homestuck is complex and labyrinthine, and I had to focus discussion of any one part of it somehow or else we would meander in circles for fucking eternity, and no one wants to end up like Caliborn. This was my solution, so please try not to counter my points with critiques I may have already answered in another section! Thank you.]
While we can argue that Dirk had reasonable expectation of consent regarding the Brobot, and that Jake didn’t find it emotionally damaging, we absolutely cannot say the same about the romantic and sexual passive aggression Jake is subject to as a result of his friendship with Dirk through the AR.
Up until [S] Unite and the Alpha kids’ entry to the medium, Dirk is cast in a dim light. He comes off as lascivious, sarcastic and cutting, and insincere about his feelings towards Jake — pushing sexual comments onto Jake that he’s forced to respond to, but never responding to them himself, where he has to be accountable for them.
Practically the first interaction we’re privy to between Dirk and Jake is laded with this tense sexual attention:
Sure, everybody reading this now knows this isn’t Dirk, but the AR — but the initial reader is not yet aware of this! And Jake isn’t either. This is the first interaction we get with the character we first knew as Dave’s guardian, and he deliberately comes off as oppressive and domineering.
The AR deliberately misrepresents itself as Dirk, both to Jake and to the audience. It confounds the line between it’s own identity and Dirk’s, and suggests constantly that what it says and what Dirk would say are identical. This is something both Jake and Dirk himself complain about, even early on in the narrative:
Still, at first glance, it makes sense to hold Dirk responsible for the Auto-Responder’s actions — even if he isn’t personally responsible for them. After all, Dirk created the thing, and he maintains enough control over it that he can shut it off or disable it, if need be.
As the AR grows more and more possessive and aggressive towards Jake, doesn’t it say as much about Dirk that he let the AR continue it’s romantically aggressive interactions with Jake as it would have if he’d said those things himself?
At the very least, isn’t it damning to his character that he chose not to talk to Jake about it, letting Jake struggle in limbo trying to understand Dirk’s absence and the AR’s toxicity?
These are questions the narrative wants us to consider going in, already knowing that Bro was an abuser and primed to consider Dirk the same way. It seems to almost spell it out for us that Dirk Strider is a sinister force in Jake’s life, and that he is that way by his own design and commitment to his ironic, hyper-competent persona, just like Bro was.
The only problem with understanding the narrative this way is that it’s completely untrue. It’s taking hold of the set-up of Dirk’s character without internalizing the punchline.
Dirk is set up as a take on the Predatory Gay Villain archetype — or, at least, he was received that way over the course of the comic’s development by the audience. At the least, he was set up as a morally grey character akin to Equius and Vriska. But when you evaluate the forces acting on him over the course of the session, that’s not what I found.
I found a gay teenager who loves his friends desperately, struggling with being self-loathing, facing a philosophical choice between the lesser of two evils. A noble figure who did the best he could under the circumstances he was stuck in. A character who earned sympathy, love, and companionship.
Dirk actually had very little power over the AR/Jake situation, and while he definitely make serious mistakes with far-reaching consequences, so did all the Alpha kids. Reading Dirk as an abuser — rather than a victim of a toxic, codependent situation — requires assigning him a degree of skill and maturity that he plain old does not actually possess.
We’re going to explore why, and dissect the relationship between Dirk, the AR, and Jake in detail.
In this essay, we’ll answer the question of why Dirk could not simply turn off or disable the Auto-Responder as a long term solution to this dilemma, and explore the Auto-Responder’s perspective.
In the next, we’ll discuss why Dirk couldn’t approach Jake on the subject of the AR, and look closely at Dirk’s perspective.
You don’t have to agree with me, but hear out my argument and you’ll at least be able to decide with more surety why, exactly, you consider Dirk abusive — if you do — decide exactly what he is and isn’t responsible for, and determine what your comfort level really is with both Dirk as a standalone character and with his relationship with Jake.
Now that I’ve rambled on long enough, let’s get started.
The tone of the toxic, codependent triad between Dirk, Jake and the AR is set literally from the first line any of the three speaks in the comic.
In this small introduction, we get a lot of important information.
Jake expects there’s a good chance Dirk would be more cooperative than the AR. He’s wrong, in this case, but the fact remains that this is something he feels he has good odds about. So it’s fair to say he considers Dirk overall friendlier than the AR.
He also states flatly that Dirk doesn’t like the AR, and would not be pleased to hear it’s well-received among his friends. Meaning Dirk and Jake have talked about it, at least to some extent.
We know that this communication hasn’t been completely honest, since neither Jake or Dirk have come clean about their feelings — if they had, the AR’s domineering displays of romance and sexual interest wouldn’t have the power to rattle and throw Jake off they do.
Still, as Dirk gets distracted trying to manage the steadily increasing chaos of the session, and the AR gets more and more undisturbed access to Jake. Dirk sort of ends up using it as a proxy, though against his own will. It flirts aggressively at Jake, but always with a cool air of distance because, of course, he’s just the AR. It’s not the same as the real Dirk saying it.
The AR isn’t courting Jake, but playing matchmaker (or is it?), and bitingly wearing down Jake’s perception of his own intelligence and capability all the while. This also leads Jake to wonder if Dirk’s perception of him might be similarly negative.
Dirk, meanwhile, remains distant and distracted to the point that Jake can’t talk to him until after the session starts. The situation spirals out of control, largely without his oversight.
Jake is increasingly aggressively gaslit by the AR, and grows doubtful — about the AR’s intentions, Dirk’s intentions, Dirk’s feelings, etc. That web of intrigue and uncertainty grows so intense that it affects Jake’s mental image of Dirk, which makes Brain Ghost Dirk echo some of the AR’s derogatory commentary.
We’ll talk about Dirk’s actual feelings about this situation later, but for now let’s consider the ethics of the situation on Dirk’s end. The AR is hurting Jake, and Dirk has the power to stop it. He could shut the AR off, disable or, it simply tell it to knock it off.
The problem with this solution is that the AR’s situation is miserable, too, and it’s a sentient being. It’s a 13 year old Dirk, in fact, stagnant and left behind as both Dirk and Jake grew as people. And one trapped without a body.
The only vector for agency the Auto-Responder really has is it’s voice. This means that the AR can only exist as a conscious entity if it’s being interacted with, and any actions Dirk takes to limit it’s speech are coercive and abusive by default. As a result, Dirk has decided to allow the AR to engage with Jake freely, despite not liking much of what it says.
Jake agreed with his decision, choosing to engage with the AR even though it grows increasingly more aggressive towards him. And despite both Jake and Dirk’s irritation with the thing, even after three years, he maintains an active role in this. He even sincerely tries to make friends with the AR the moment it seems to let its guard down.
And Dirk wasn’t ready for this kind of responsibility. He didn’t think the AR would be a successful project at all, let alone a fully-fledged sentient being. That the AR is ultimately sophisticated enough that it is alive, now fully conscious and living it’s own separate existence, was essentially an accident. An accident that Jake encouraged by cheering him on:
This pesterlog exchange is the moment that comes the closest to having Jake and Dirk actually talk about their feelings about each other. It ALSO happens to suggest Jake’s Hope powers may have had something to do with the AR’s creation.
Dirk got carried away and made it a sentient being, but Jake believed in him every step of the way, talking up what a good idea it was. Neither of them considered the potential consequences, but, you know — of course they didn’t. They were 13 year old kids.
In essence, the AR is a symbolic child, in the sense that it’s a responsibility they share between them. Not necessarily because Jake shares any responsibility for egging Dirk on. But because it comes naturally for Jake to throw himself into Dirk’s project and agree that the AR should be treated as though it is alive.
However, while they both feel they owe the AR their attention and energy, both resent what it’s doing to their friendship. Jake calls it out increasingly aggressively, perpetually demanding to talk to the Real Dirk.
And Dirk is by turns irritated by and outright suspicious of it, treating it either as a particularly annoying younger sibling or as a potential threat to him and his friends. He’s bitter and annoyed, his tone towards it often downright acidic, even when it seems to be trying to help. He resents it for what it’s doing to Jake.
Unlike Dirk Prime, who considers his worthiness for his friends’ love in question, the AR knows for a fact it’s friends don’t exactly have much room for it in their hearts. Roxy treats it like a blank check Dirk who’s romantic attention she can enjoy without feeling guilty, and ultimately doesn’t prioritize it like she does her other friends.
It’s relationship to Jake is complicated because it remembers what it felt like to be in love with him, but has no hope at all of reciprocation, and always plays the second fiddle to Real Dirk. Jane is friendly to it, but just as she misses Dirk’s homosexuality, Roxy’s alcoholism, and Jake’s…well, personality, the truly awful situation the AR is in is lost on her.
All in all, despite Dirk and Jake’s best efforts, it has no one to actually talk to. Which may be why it ultimately ends up living up to Dirk’s worst predictions.
While the AR is indispensable in getting the kids into the session, it also exploits an increasingly complex and dangerous situation and wrests control of it away from Dirk in order to fulfill it’s own desperate agenda. Even as early on in the narrative as the picture above, before the Red Miles enter the picture, the AR jokingly refers to a pail. What happens during Synchronize?
Kind of a stretch, as far as foreshadowing goes? Sure, but that’s part of the point. It’s impossible to say if the AR was ever telling the truth as to whether it wanted to help Dirk. Maybe it felt backed into a corner by Dirk’s distrust and Jake’s antipathy. Possibly it was just able to react faster than Dirk to the rapidly escalating terrible situation.
But we do have to raise the question and wonder, because we just don’t know how smart the Auto-Responder is, or how much it really knows. I mean, hell, the closest we get to a quantification is this:
Or perhaps forcing Jake into a dramatic, life-and-death, romantic confrontation — not with Dirk, but with itself — was a spur of the moment act of passion. We can’t really do anything but speculate, as far as the AR’s ultimate capabilities and motivations are concerned. What we do know is that in the end, when it’s presented with the opportunity, it acts.
The AR might not feel what Dirk feels for Jake, but it still remembers. And being caged in by the nature of it’s physical existence, stripped of it’s original identity, and given the power of a supercomputer only emboldens Dirk’s worst traits — possessive jealousy, desire for control, aggressive and derogatory intellectualism. It maneuvers itself into getting sent to Jake in person, where it cajoles and pressures him into kissing Dirk’s head, making sure to lay the romantic intensity on thick.
It also keeps gaslighting and condescending to Jake, all while answering his question in a way it knows he can’t understand. Deep Blue is the name of the first supercomputer to ever beat a world champion Chess player, after all. It also refers to itself as being in charge synchonization. of The AR is being cryptic and sarcastic, but it’s still basically copping to orchestrating this final scenario — it’s just impossible to know by how much.
And in the end, through bullying and gloating…
It gets what it wants.
Or does it?
Well, yes. Yes it does. But there is another narrative at play that I’m ignoring here, right? Several, even? Namely, one where Dirk willingly went along with the AR’s plans, or one where this really was Dirk’s plan all along, or one where they developed this plan together, on the fly — any narrative at all where Dirk shares some amount of responsibility for this, basically.
And my argument so far leaves questions unanswered. For starters, I doubt many are satisfied that Dirk ISN’T involved in setting this up as a romantic overture along with the AR.
If he was so opposed, why didn’t he do more to stop it? He is, after all, the hypercompetent badass who created it in the first place, right? And if he couldn’t do that much, then why didn’t he talk to Jake about any of it?
Next time, we’re going to focus on Dirk — the image that the narrative builds of Dirk, as well as the narrative Dirk builds of himself for his friends. And we’ll see these events again from his perspective, in order to determine if a reading of Dirk where he has agency during these events actually holds any water.
See you there.
