dirkroxy general

hey! @minokawa, calling a trans character an "abomination" violates our rules on transphobia. please keep discussions on this sort of thing tasteful, it's pretty difficult to imagine any situation where that sort of vitriol would be appropriate. thanks!

thank you kevin for calling this out ur a real one. even if u dont agree with a headcanon it is NOT an abomination, especially a trans one that me and so many real people genuinely connect to

@dirkroxy
i never undestood the hate boner that the average 𝕏itter user has for it. like really???? dirkroxy???? thats the super duper mega hyper oh so evil ship????? its really silly honestly.

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!)

seeing people get heated about gay dirkroxy and esp transmasc roxy is sooooo telling. they can't handle a man being too "pink" lol

omg Jake i wish i refreshed and saw ur response before I posted... dirkroxy is really so exciting for both characters in that even just engaging with them seriously forces a similarly serious breaking down of gender/roles that they are both so aggressively slotted into. it requires growth and true understanding from both of them...

I peeeeeeersonally think the hs2 muddied the water a bit in terms of roxy's transitioning and appearance being so dave-lite that it can seem unserious. work like y12k is so electric because it just completely refuses to pander to 'gender optics' we're so used to in topics of characters transitioning. (which is in part why i think some people struggle with it so much.) I have been digging roxy's more recent outfits like the jammies so far and am excited to see more looks.

another thing i like about dirkroxy is how much it plays in the face of people who implicitly accept that trans men aren’t dating options for gay guys ajcannjfsajh??? i remember once looking up “would you date trans men” on some gay reddits and just seeing uninterrupted “no no no no vagina ew” DUDE IDK WHY I WAS EVEN SURPRISED BUT I WAS. IS THAT REALLY HOW MOST THINK?? but dirk obviously starts out as that kind of guy right fkndsknfs it’s spelled all over his relationship with jake, and even dave. even without dirk being cis, hes the type to put the ideal of Cis Male on a pedestal. theres almost a force-something aspect i like about dirkroxy where dirk is basically tortured and killed and destroyed and torn for 10000 years until he Learns.

am I the only one who has always headcanon'd pale dirkroxy? like, ever since I saw these two (esp. the post trickster conversation) I'm like, yeah these two are pale and that's my HC forever.

re:myself

I should probably mention that I also love red dirkroxy lol that's not me saying I only like pale dirkroxy btw. wish we got to see more of their relationship in canon but I'm very happy with what we got. o7

re:spicyyet irt the transmen as a dating option for gay men

This was incredibly subversive to me that I was like, genuinely really surprised to see being delved into in ANY kind of media. I hardly see this topic with trans masc / trans men in really anything. It actually inspired my own trans story regarding this exact topic. I really think dirkroxy was the most perfect avenue to explore this in respect of their individual characteristics and idiosyncracies. I'd say it was even a stronger undertaking to delve into considering the common notion that Dirk may have been a bit rigid about his dating pool choices in the beginning, eventually "settling" for the only "man" around. And that's all it was in peoples eyes. In a way, we were also settling on his choices. But like, throwing him in a torture chamber for 1000 thousand million years for him to come to the conclusion that, your dating pool choices DO matter sure, but not in the way that you were initially inclined to think of. Not in the way you molded your masculinity. I just enjoy it a lot. I was pretty indifferent to dirkroxy with their fandom image generally being an incompatible unrequited relationship. But I love when ideas are pushed, I love to see unconstrained settings that force the character to confront their contradictions and conflict because of how abstract their world has become. thats the appeal for me anyway.

RE: alexis and "dave-lite" roxy SOO TRUUUUE i was having super similar trains of thought while i was writing my post too... I think guyroxy is at their best when they're obfuscating gender entirely, not necessarily in a cliche'd void-between-genders sense but in the sense of rebuilding gender up from nothing and having the freedom to redefine what masculinity is entirely on their own terms. cus if they're just building themselves up into the dead civilisation's idea of what a man used to be so they can be with dirk then we're just doing dirkjake again and dirk doesn't have to learn anything! make that man meet roxy in the middle and expand both of their understandings of what a man can be!

now that i'm in my second or third revision of my understanding of homestuck i don't think its thesis on gender can be so STRICTLY understood as 'masculinity=bad', but it does obviously make a lot of good arguments for escaping masculinity's confines, and as the child of a post-gender world emerging into a post-canonical universe roxy is in such a unique position to subvert and reinterpret the original comic's position on maleness not by running back into that burning house but by being the architect of a sexy new manhood entirely. so by having their 'male form' take on so many of the trappings of dave strider - basically the comic's poster child for the tragic consequences of performing maleness - it absolutely can make the transition arc seem a lot more regressive than it has all that potential to be...

THAT BEING SAID: the gag of roxy becoming a tribute to like, peak homestuck fandom's very stereotypical noncommitted trans boy who kins dave strider but only because he's a little beautiful and androgynous and very easy to casually cosplay in day-to-day absolutely lands for me LMFAO especially because the characters in that timeline are all still very immature despite their age and are clearly in a very awkward figuring-shit-out stage. and like i was already talking abt in another thread, i think the way we get to see glimpses at roxy's gender arc at different points in their life via the two timelines gimmick is a really underrated aspect of the postcanon: roxy going from very awkwardly (almost jokingly like you say) masculine, to more accepting of their former feminine aesthetiques, to maybe even thinking they ARE a woman again at some point in the future before hopping back on the elevator into the self actualisation mines... it no longer feels to me like inconsistent characterisation or an attempt to 'fix' a version of the character that didn't work, but rather like a very genuine and realistic path for our roxy to be going down. which must be why i'm so invigorated by y12k truly looking down the barrel of roxy's immortality and showing us how that kind of self-reflection could change someone not just over the course of some months or years, but potentially over centuries and millennia and into eternity!