it's a predictable shame that this thread is gonna be a magnet for bad faith non-arguments, so I want to freshen things up and maybe inspire some more productive conversation by talking up a few of the things that i think make dirkroxy good but are so often looked down upon as reasons to hate them.

ftm transition is such a beautiful step forward for roxy as a person! they spent so much of their life agonising over being the last woman alive and seeing their purpose as a babymaking machine to repopulate the earth... we see even pre-scratch that motherhood dominates roxy's life, to the point that they mourn the death of their only cat like the death of a human child and spend the rest of their life trying to bring it back to life with mad science. to discover not only that they don't have to be reduced to a baby making machine but that they don't even have to be a woman at ALL opens the whole horizon for them... the civilisation that invented womanhood was already long dead by the time you were born, why should you spend the rest of your days forcing yourself to fit into that box!!

and as for roxy and dirk together - the fact that they've had previously rocky romantic interactions as teenagers is exactly what makes them such compatible personalities! not because roxy has to wear dirk down until he reciprocates their one-sided advances, but because the BOTH of them have to realise they perpetuated toxic behaviours in the name of upholding a long-dead gender binary. roxy pursued an uninterested dirk in the name of fulfilling their need to be a mother, true, but dirk did the exact same thing by placing his own toxic expectations of masculinity on an unassuming jake english... outside of maybe some of the trolls (and calliope, in whom roxy does manage to find a confidant), roxy is the only one who can really understand the very specific cultural phantoms that led dirk to behave the way he did. like i already said, it's the very rare situation where dirk can take the weight off his shoulders of always having to be the master instructor and philosopher - because now that roxy has put in the hard work unlearning all that crazy shit from their past, THEY can become the instructor!

(i guess in a sense it's kind of like an inverted dirkuu, where dirk and caliborn would only ever be able to encourage each other's bad behaviours and make their respective relationships to masculinity that much worse... is that the appeal of dirkuu? i've never really bothered to think so much about that ship. what a fascinating quadrangle the cherubs make with dirk and roxy!)