This is a subject I'm really passionate about and I both agree and disagree with Dandy *as well as* many of the other posters here, so I'm going to try to outline my responses to broad points I've seen catching up on the thread while marking out my own position.

1) It strikes me that a whole bunch of this thread is a Homestuck fan coming here and talking about how Dirk uniquely and personally resonated with them as a gay person, only to be met with a bunch of people saying Dirk being gay isn't actually all that important based on their own readings which by their natures seem less informed by personal experience. I think this is a fundamentally kind of mean-spirited way Homestuck fans tend to end up talking past each other and a bad idea for discussion.

Homestuck characters exist collectively in all our minds, and all of us relate to them differently. Even if someone is coming to Dirk with a perspective informed by him being uniquely special to them as gay (that's me btw, I don't want to project too much on Dandy) I don't think that disqualifies their input anymore than it would for a Vriska fan relating to her as a trans girl, or ditto for June, or literally whoever.

2) Here's another gay guy willing to say the way the Epilogues handled gayness and Dirk specifically basically pushed me out of the fandom for years. But I actually don't have much of a problem with the text itself, I'm a big old Epilogues stan at the end of the day. I have a way harder time coping with the way the *fandom* talks about Dirk in the wake of them, the ease with which it talks about him killing himself and not deserving anything good and whatnot. I'm unsurprised to hear a lot of achillean fans left after the Epilogues; the same was true for my experience.

Do I think Dirk's depiction is homophobic? No, ultimately. Do I think its playing with fire, deliberately at the razor's edge of dancing with these tropes about gay men as predatory abusers and manipulators? Yes, it has been since the beginning. Mostly in terms of optics in the original Homestuck--Dirk is not really abusive or controlling towards Jake pretty much at all in that; I think people who think so just don't know how to untangle the threads of agency between him and Hal even though Jake explicitly says into the camera that he can tell the two are different partly explicitly because Real Dirk holds himself more accountable for his actions. But that's a whole other five videos.

But the epilogues are about the Dirk that's made every effort to be the best version of himself repressing and collapsing into his own worst potential, and so THERE Dirk very much is abusive and exploitative, validating the fandom's incomplete reads of him in the comic to an obnoxious degree. So much so that as a gay man with mental illness and self-harm tendencies myself, my ultimate response was to back away from canon Homestuck for a while and just make my own longfic that would reckon with the damage of the Epilogues while treating Dirk a little more niceys. It is honestly just not worth dealing with fans who aren't already invested in Dirk and Jake's love most of the time, it's like trying to argue with Vrisrezi haters. And Dirk and Jake never even killed each other!

What saves Dirk for me is the fact that ultimately, HSBC is *on his side* to some extent.
It presents the notion that to succeed at this narrative is to kill Dirk, which is expressed through the mouth of Candy John into the faces of people who've loved and grieved Dirk for decades and who rightfully treat him like he's demented for it, as absurd.

Even if you can't put your trust in HSBC because it's too "canon", the Dirkjake stocks are up like crazy if you just dip into fanwork. The Smuppet Show by nakedbee and laurasaurus, Elysiumstuck by eyegnats, Burning Down the House by victoria lacroix--a lot of the best art that exists around Post-Canon right now *is* either built explicitly around Dirkjake (the first two) or features really good heavy elements of it (BDTH). The epilogues didn't really sink Dirkjake in any meaningful way. This might be more true for me than most I suppose, in that I have an entire fan adventure specifically meant to give me gay catharsis from the epilogues that I just haven't gotten around to finishing posting publically, haha.

3) Homestuck *is* good on purpose, Hussie deserves *every ounce* of credit for making it that way, and the idea that love in Homestuck, teenaged or not, is something cringe or worthy of mockery is. Well. Absurd to me.

This gets at a lot of what's been said about both the struggles of achillean romances and of sapphic ones. Yes, Homestuck's relationships have historically gone unfulfilled or as missed connections, or ultimately implode under the weight of their own problems. That doesn't mean that the love itself isn't important!

The most obvious example of this is the retcon, which *only* comes about and saves the day specifically because Terezi loves Vriska, and ultimately it results in [S] Remem8er, where Vriska and Terezi rejoice in finding home and love with each other again and literally stare up into a sky overflowing with Light--you know, the aspect of Importance and Truth?

Its not so much that love is going to lead to endgame ships or anything that trite, it's that Homestuck is a story about people who are *trapped inside of themselves* and love is a transformative force by which the individual is deatomized and connected to an Other. It is literally a source of spiritual, philosophical growth in the pursuit of higher truths about the nature of the characters themselves and the world that entraps them.

So yes, Dirkjake's relationship is terminally codependent and toxic, destructively so. Their mutual love is also the thing that purifies and redeems each other--the only escape Dirk gets from the karmic curse of being some extension of Lord English is the fact that in Grandpa's memories of Dirk, Dirk isn't a Prince/Destroyer but instead a Knight/Protector, meaning Dirk's impact on Jake's life was positive enough that Jake internalizes him as a figure of comfort and safety.

This is straightforwardly self-evident--malo talked about Dirk imprinting himself on Jake earlier, but I don't think that's true-- Brain Ghost Dirk was part of Jake's psychology *before* Unite Synchronize, and even then Jake was able to distinguish between BGD and Hal *and* the real Dirk, explicitly calling the former two out as being less responsible and straightfoward than Dirk himself is.

The more obvious point of imprinting to me is Brobot, who Jake pleads to go back to while Crockertier Jane is terrorizing him, who became the reason Jake was able to go outside and have adventures after Grandma died, and who's protection Jake is so psychologically attached to that when Aranea force ascends him, the way he resists her is simply by believing that Dirk will come to rescue him from the scary girl.

The Masterpiece, frustratingly smothered by canon itself though it is, presents the counterpoint to this--Jake only ever deliberately activates his powers in the original Homestuck comic *when Dirk's life is in imminent and obvious danger*. So, both times his powers activate, generating intense Light reminiscent of that seen in [S] Remem8er, his feelings for Dirk are at the core of that expression's power.

HSBC has now expanded that tally to include [S] 8r8k, where Jake uses his powers to protect Jade and Tavvy. But like, all that tells us is that Jake loved Dirk as teens in the original comic to a narratively equivalent degree as how much Candy Jake loves his twinclone/grandma/granddaughter and son. So it's like, not a great argument for the idea that Jake's love for Dirk doesn't matter? It's only the foundational moment of the story that makes all of Homestuck temporally exist in the first place by defining the very nature of Lord English as an antagonist. I dunno, seems like it matters to me!

Really the only reason anyone really *cares* about Post-Canon at all *is* love. People WANT to see vriska and terezi meet again. They want to hope for reconciliation between Rose and Kanaya. Some of us want Dirk and Jake to reconcile too, though it rarely feels like there's much hope for that in the canon continuation of HSBC (in the fandom atmosphere, i think its pretty clear the comic is doing some work towards POTENTIALLY paying that off, though there could be twists). But even if that's true, we're in the post-canon now, and the fandom's love for Dirk and Jake's love shines through in the fans' work.

Ultimately, the central struggle of the Epilogues and Post-Canon is for Homestuck itself to *keep existing*, and love--between the characters themselves and between the fandom and those characters and their potential relationships--is a creative engine that powers more and more of that existence to come into being. That makes love an intrinsically powerful and existentially expansive force in Homestuck, and something to be cherished.

This is also just politically true given our real life circumstances. I don't want to hear about how a bunch of the most iconic, nuanced and textured queer relationships ever written are just jokes or unimportant in the same year as gay marriage is back on the supreme court chopping block in 2015, but that's just me. We can't take these kinds of stories for granted.

I'm not even talking about how love, heartbreak and the loss of love is itself an explicit and important core theme of the Epilogues because this post is already too damn long. Just go listen to The Leaving from the Beyond Canon album.