The Trial of Dirk Strider: Struggling for Control, Within and Without
Watching characters suffer can be tough; seeing characters you love in pain even more so. In Homestuck this is an unavoidable difficulty, especially if you happen to love an absolute disaster boy.
I’m pretty sure I’ve cried about Dirk Strider more than any real boys.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Homestuck approaches the idea of self: this is a topic which runs right through the entire text of the comic, and which develops significantly over the course of the story. Of course, when talking about Homestuck’s notion of the self, it’s almost impossible to ignore the tangled dialectical web of, let’s be honest, total Di-Stri horseshit that suffuses much of the comic post-cascade.
It’s fair to say, at least on a surface level, that paradox space has a particularly high degree of punishment allotted for Dirk, and unpacking this sheds no small amount of light on his character. I like an occasional You’re Going to Have to Decapitate Me as much as everyone else, but beyond that, examining the particular narrative structure of Dirk’s suffering has broadened my understanding of various aspects of the Homestuck universe itself.
To some degree, talking about Dirk’s suffering has been a way for me to process the person I was when I first fell in love with his character, and with Homestuck at large. Being young, queer, lonely and full of existential dread was (and unfortunately still is) an especially relatable position for me. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that I lived several years of my young adult life vicariously through Dirk Strider, especially the bad, precarious mental health parts. Recognising the faults and mistakes I’ve shared with him— decapitations notwithstanding — has been part of the process of learning to grow past them.
Dirk makes it very clear that he likes to think of himself at the centre of things. Ironically, this isn’t an expression of self-centredness, or even narcissism — he hates himself too much for that — but could more accurately be described as a need for control in the narrative. Dirk doesn’t think he’s the centre of paradox space: he actively works to place himself there. Like a well-aimed nickel nestled snugly in a pile of plush puppet posterior, Dirk’s self-image is that of someone downright ensconced in Deep Plot Shit. In light of this his puppet predilection is not in the least bit surprising:
TT: If it puts your mind at ease, I’ll be the one pulling the strings here.
Several questions immediately present themselves: to what extent is Dirk’s position as a puppeteer a conscious role which Dirk constructs for himself, and which he motivates himself into playing?
To what extent is it a subconscious coping mechanism which Dirk has internalised in response to his circumstances?
And to what further extent is it an unintended expression of Dirk’s actual, fundamental role in the events of Homestuck — which is to say, to what extent could it be considered ‘foreshadowing’?
The various facets of Dirk’s character which these questions explore have direct correspondence with the individual parts of his splintered selfhood. Most notably, they all come back to bite him in the ass. And boy do they bite hard. On the one hand it’s clear that Dirk’s splinters are just another means of enacting Homestuck’s general approach to moral and existential quandaries: the Socratic dialogue. Less esoterically, it’s pretty reasonable to suggest (as Dirk himself does) that his various splinters of self exist and behave as a complex, protracted form of auto-flagellation.
We’ll talk later about how Dirk’s self-destructive tendencies are dealt with as he begins to grow and accept himself post-retcon, but for now we must consider the writing on the wall, or if you will, the bite-marks on the buttocks.
TT: I will be the unseen hand whose nimble digits are behind every subtle twitch in our session’s bulbous foam ass.
TT: At least those gyrations not happening by the volition of its own quivering absorbent proboscis.
By his own admission, Dirk actively works to be a guiding influence, both seen and unseen, behind many of the events in the lives of his friends. The part of master puppeteer is just one aspect of the multitudinous ironic substrata comprising his Objective Fucking Coolness. It’s important to note that this isn’t necessarily malevolent — in fact, it manifests as a sincere and deep desire to help his friends achieve their goals. Unfortunately, this desire is predominantly expressed by building them extremely deadly robots.
Dirk is somewhat unique among the Alpha kids in that he has parallels with several of the pre- and post-scratch trolls. This is perhaps most obvious when it comes to his resemblances to Vriska and Aranea, two characters who share Dirk’s destructive desire to be more than bystanders to the plot. Dirk and Vriska have similar ideas when it comes to helping your friends, although in Vriska’s case it’s very easy to see why her behaviour creates problems. She deliberately hurts and endangers several of the other trolls under the pretext of ‘8uilding character’, and in fact it’s extremely doubtful that she genuinely cares about helping them at all, at least before learning about the human disease called friendship.
TT: I asked her to refrain from telling either of you. I wanted to be the one to let you know. To wait for the right moment.
Dirk’s machinations are fairly benign by comparison, but they still end up alienating, confusing, and hurting his friends to a certain degree. Dirk’s wish to be the first to reveal that he and Roxy are living in the future places a burden on Roxy which is understandably painful. The brobot beats the shit out of Jake, and that’s really all there is to say on the matter. Lil Seb commits unspeakable violence against the cherished, stuffed and plinth-mounted memories of Jane’s grandfather. The autoresponder, which Dirk built primarily as a convenience and intellectual sparring partner, ends up as a constant go-between and effective barrier separating him from his friends, and is responsible for its fair share of bruises, to egos and elbows alike.
On the topic of the autoresponder, we as readers are encouraged to question the degree of influence that Lil Hal exerts over the events leading up to the Alpha kids’ entry into the Medium. In particular, it’s implied that the complex spaciotemporal choreography of [S] Dirk: Synchronize and [S] Dirk: Unite is almost entirely coordinated by Lil Hal, including the intermediate sloppy makeouts (which had me jumping for joy, I have to admit). In this case we see that by deliberately aiming to gain control of events to the greatest extent possible, Dirk has engineered the means through which he loses control of things completely.
These choices, in which Dirk actively vies for a central position of power in the events that are unfolding, tell us a lot about his understanding of the nature of heroism and action. Dirk clearly imagines himself as someone who acts, and who has importance through the action which unfolds due to his own action. This core tenet of the archetype of the classical hero is a fundamental theme which both of the Striders, Dirk and Dave, end up grappling with and ultimately abandoning (and even abjuring) to some extent. As a brief aside, it’s interesting that their namesake, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Aragorn ‘Strider’ Elessar, is often misunderstood to be the real hero of The Lord of the Rings — I hardly think it’s a coincidence that both Dirk and Dave preconceive themselves as heroes in the sense of being actors who direct the flow of things. The LOTR symbolism in the later stages of Homestuck is something for another time, though.
Dirk wants to see himself as an ‘unseen hand’ guiding the course of events, and the first way his punishment manifests is that none of his intended invisibility actually works: he is overtly responsible for a lot of the chaos that unfolds as the Alpha kids enter the session, and his friends make sure to let him know that. It’s arguable that the fallout of the Alpha kids’ entry into the Medium, together with the moments preceding it, colour the other kids’ views of Dirk significantly. In particular, I’d suggest that Jake’s perception that Dirk is an overbearing romantic partner is significantly influenced by Dirk’s behaviour before they were dating, to speak nothing of whether or not such a perception holds much water in actuality.
While Dirk’s active pursuit of control, his action toward the action, has its negative consequences, the way that this same pursuit expresses itself subconsciously is a much more involved problem, both for us as readers and for Dirk himself.
It has been suggested that having an internal sense that one has the ability to exert control and effect change in the environment forms a necessary part of healthy human function. When someone is forced to live in a state of extreme precarity for long periods, a state in which their environment seems unchangeable through their actions, where extreme change can and does occur completely externally and with little warning, it’s not uncommon for them to form an unhealthy relationship to the notion of control for this reason. I’d argue that the isolation and desolation which surrounds Dirk in Sea Hitler’s Water Apocalypse, and the subsequent absence of meaningful action in his own time-frame, causes him to latch onto anything allowing him that which his life on post-scratch, post-rebrand Earth cannot. Taking control whenever he can, even if it’s a terrible terrible idea, is Dirk’s way of coping with his conflict as a person of action in a place of relative powerlessness.
While this manifests in Dirk’s conscious pursuit of ‘coolness’, which often acts as a shorthand (and eventually a euphemism) for traditional, male-coded heroism in Homestuck, it’s the subconscious ways in which Dirk struggles for control that end up hurting him most significantly.
Dirk’s relationship with Roxy, and with his own queerness, is a good example of this. Dirk’s inability to control his own sexuality, and his frustration at this apparent failure towards his friend, is a source of constant guilt and pain:
TT: I think she probably felt bad for hitting on me all those years. Like I was getting fed up with her, or something.
TT: But all it really did was make me feel guilty.
TT: That I couldn’t give her what she wanted.
Feeling guilty in this way is a huge part of growing up queer in a heteronormative environment, and it’s something I was struggling with hugely at the same time Dirk was. Of course, being into boys, while it can sometimes feel like a bad idea, let’s be real, isn’t a flaw of Dirk’s at all: it’s Roxy’s behaviour which is reprehensible here, unequivocally. But to some extent that either doesn’t occur to Dirk or simply doesn’t matter to him: reformulating his own suffering as a form of punishment is another way in which Dirk vies for control over his experiences. He internalises and re-contextualises his lack of control over the feelings of others as an internal struggle for control over his own sexuality, mental state, &c. This outright catastrophising behaviour is damaging at the best of times, and becomes unbearable when combined with genuine disaster.
The most dramatic and painful moments for Dirk come with [S]: Game Over, not only in the on-screen events occurring in its wake, but also those immediately preceding it, and of course the catastrophe itself. Proceeding chronologically, upon reaching the god tier Dirk and Roxy immediately come face to face with the Condesce, the manipulator responsible for the aquaforming of post-scratch Earth and the extinction of the human race. Dirk is immediately presented with an extreme and twisted example of his own desires: Condy is not only objectively so much cooler than him, but she is commensurately so much more in control of events than Dirk could ever hope to be.
Dirk proceeds to charge the Condesce, and his moment of action costs him dearly. In the cruelest, most ironic way possible, the Condesce robs him of all agency by taking literal control of Jade and forcing him out of the centre of the narrative by banishing him outside the Incipisphere. By its very nature, the Incipisphere is, symbolically, the region within which the action is incipient — by being expelled from it Dirk is being prevented from effecting, or in other words initiating, any action or outcome at all.
The fact that Dirk manages to hold himself together in this period shouldn’t be understated. He’s just encountered the one responsible for, as far as he is aware, literally every bad thing that has pretty much ever happened to him. Roxy is still there with her, and he doesn’t know jack shit about Jane and Jake. He hasn’t even spoken to either Roxy or Jake since Trickster Mode. In attempting to act on his environment he has been robbed of any environment to speak of, cast way out into the paradospacial void, and his only possible course of action is to keep moving desperately forward.
When the events of [S]: Game Over transpire, Dirk is still in transit. We can only imagine his perspective in this time, since we don’t see him again until the aftermath. The spectacle, while already dramatic and terrifying from our narrative viewpoint, must be indescribably horrific from a distance. Passing by the ruins of Derse and seeing the shattered husk of Prospit in the distance, Dirk is forced to watch as the Incipisphere itself, his symbol of narrative control, is torn apart— he can only keep going as he sees his own planet collide with Jake’s.
We follow John’s quiet, almost contemplative journey through the destroyed session in person, but Dirk has to make the same trip having watched the events unfold while being powerless to stop it. He has to descend, alone, into the depths of hell, as potent a hell as there is to be found anywhere in Homestuck. He has to find Jake and Jane, killed with his own sword.
In the end, we and John together find him broken and despondent. I don’t…particularly want to dwell on what happens next, but it’s about as close to the real human tragedy of suicide, distinct from Sburban shenanigans and game constructs, as Homestuck allows itself to get. Dirk’s constant proximity to the concept is relatively rare, shared really only by Rose, his ectobiological daughter, and Doc Scratch, to whom he also has a fundamental connection. But while the former repeatedly settles on it as a form of defiance, and the latter is literally built for the purpose, Dirk’s repeated acceptance of death is mired in soul crushing self-loathing and a deep, deep sadness.
At the time there were plenty of jokes made about that scene in particular, in light of Dirk’s catastrophising tendencies: as with all things in Homestuck, there is humour to be found. But beyond that, it’s simply one of the most heartbreaking and moving depictions of total emotional defeat I’ve ever experienced.
DIRK: I failed.
The egocentrism of this statement is easy to dismiss, even comical in hindsight, but there’s a very real sense in which it’s a true analysis of Dirk’s situation. Measured against every goal which Dirk has set himself, the only possible conclusion is that he has failed utterly. From our position outside the narrative it’s easy to see that not only are Dirk’s personal expectations wholly unreasonable, they’re also deeply harmful.
This demonstrates another of Dirk’s conflicts: his constant manoeuvres to place himself at the centre (or the heart) of things mean that he is unable to see problems from the outside. It’s been noted elsewhere that Dirk often acts in imitation of Dave, in particular by imitating (or roleplaying, to quote a dear friend) his class of a Knight. What appears to be less well appreciated is the way in which he also tries, and again fails, to take on Rose’s class of Seer. Indeed, pretty much all of what we’ve been talking about reflects a subconscious attempt by Dirk to behave as an ‘active Seer’, which is, in the world of Homestuck at least, an ineluctable oxymoron. Seers are passive players — not in the sense that they simply aren’t active, but rather that by distancing themselves from action they are afforded greater insight into its consequences.
The nature of a puppeteer, which Dirk himself declares to be his role in the Alpha session, illustrates the predicament which Dirk finds himself in. Working with the traditional example Dirk provides for us, the puppeteer exerts control by using the force of gravity to create tension in a series of strings, and this tension is used to physically manipulate the object to which the strings are attached. Tension, then, forms a crucial part of the puppeteer’s power of control (and control of power).
Inherent in the string puppet example is the necessity for the puppeteer to maintain a position above their puppet — in the context of a puppet show, this places the puppeteer outside the realm of action by necessity. Any intrusion of the puppeteer downwards into the world of the puppet entails a loss of gravitational potential energy and therefore control.
In Dirk’s case, his inability to separate from his active alignment precludes the possibility of this form of control. While the puppeteer loses their power when tension in the strings is lost, Dirk loses his power, if anything, through an excess of tension. His net is cast so wide — so many irons in the fire does he have — that he finds himself at the centre of a constricting web of conflicting tensions which ultimately threaten to pull him apart.
We’ve talked a lot about Dirk’s unhealthy tendency to contextualise the suffering around him as personal failure. As we’ve seen, this is on one level patently false — Dirk’s warped perception of his control over his own narrative, and the fallout of that, is one of the punishments that paradox space keeps dishing out for him.
The most terrible punishment for Dirk, though, might be that in the end his perception is also completely true.
One answer to Dirk Strider’s own personal ~*~Ultimate Riddle~*~, and a final form his punishment takes, is the simple fact that he’s directly responsible for the creation of Lord English. Of course, every other character in Homestuck is also responsible for this — he is, after all, already here —and as such any involvement in LE’s creation could be argued to be a strictly neutral moral act. But Dirk has a fairly rare privilege, in that a computer-powered copy of his own thirteen-year-old brain forms an integral part of Lord English’s actual make-up.
Another answer to this riddle, one which Dirk actually has to confront, is his pre-scratch counterpart. A large portion of Dave’s character growth comes in learning how to understand and move past the trauma of his childhood, trauma which Bro Strider, Beta Dirk, is directly responsible for. At the same time, Dirk is forced to recognise the parts of himself which his pre-scratch self reflect back at him. A recurring theme in Homestuck is that love and friendship are key formative influences in the lives of people: we see this in Alt!Calliope, a character whose aloofness, and apparent insouciance, mark a stark difference from her other self, to the extent that the change is deeply unsettling and even tragic. In this sense Bro is Dirk stripped of all his positive influences — he’s the absolute worst case scenario existing within the overall potential of Dirk’s ultimate self.
This, then, is the final degree to which Dirk’s stated goal is repudiated by the narrative: every effort of his to play the part of puppet master fails terribly, and the only possible ways he ever could succeed are demonstrated to be completely awful. There’s a comparison to be made between Dirk and Caliborn here, especially in relation to Homestuck’s coding of a desire to wield control over its narrative as a toxic-masculine, almost violent conceit. But that’s a story for another time.
Again, there’s an enormous sense of tension to Dirk, between the parts of his ultimate self which are totally at odds, between his goals and his aspect, between the scattered splinters of his being held together by the most delicate of threads. Prior knowledge of Bro brings another form of tension to our experience of Dirk: there is a thick haze of dramatic irony through which we contextualise everything he does. We watch him struggle to become someone, knowing the terrible price of his potential failure. If Dirk is any kind of hero at all, then he must always be a tragic one.
Dirk is… look. He’s a total fucking mess and I love him to pieces. And I love all the pieces too. He’s a deeply kind and compassionate character struggling with a crippling lack of self-esteem; he’s both hypersensitive to the feelings of his friends and painfully blind to his own surroundings; he’s an insufferable cool kid, a fastidious know-it-all, a whimsical sarcastic motherfucker and so, so human.
I’m not sure I’m ever going to run out of ways to think about him — hell, I barely scratched the surface of his character in this essay — and in a way that’s an aspect of Dirk which ‘keeps hapening’ even outside of the fiction he inhabits.
TT: There seems to be no end to me. Like, wherever my mind falters, or threatens to retreat into the void in any way, my splinters pick up the slack, ensuring there’ll always be more of myself than I could ever know what to fucking do with.
And whereas for Dirk this is always framed in the form of punishment and pain, for us the reader it is often a positive experience. Characters whom we can’t get rid of often appear that way because they have so much relevance to our own lives — there’s so much that they can teach us.
The character of Dirk Strider has enriched and improved my life in a very real sense, and I’ll always have a deep fondness for him, not simply due to his infuriating ineffable charm, but also because a splinter of him is nestled deep in my heart. Like Jake, we all have Brain Ghost Dirks of our own: in the trial of Dirk Strider, this is the final sentence.
