I should preface that this perspective is formed from the fact that four of the gay or achillean men that I knew in the fandom left around the time of the Epilogues; that wound up being a final straw for them.
It's a topic that we'd discuss from time to time and I felt it could be a valuable perspective to share.
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So, to start off, the main focus point of this whole thing is going to be the characters of:
Dave, Jake, Dirk and Karkat; with minor mentions of other male characters who express homoerotic behaviors.
Dave, I think it's to nobody's surprise, is a brilliantly written bisexual man; but that is due to the fact his bisexuality is a retroactive reading of his earlier behavior. When Hussie started out with this webcomic, I do not believe for a second that there was intent for Dave to be interested in men in any sincere way. I think that was a decision that Hussie made due to interaction with fandom and retroactive perspective on their own authorship.
The "you're so gay" epithets and attacks on masculinity that Dave was prone to in the early comic, later become recontextualized as an internal fear of his own latent attraction, something which culminates in his confrontation with Dirk, where he not only realizes that Dirk and by extension his own guardian, is gay, but that the ascribed "masculine ideals" he perceived were not translated completely.
Dave assumes a degree of irony with what his guardian does and thus, as a defense to his own self, couches all his own interest in that very same irony, for fear that any genuine intrigue would be met with homophobia.
So far, so good.
The problems rise when his relationship with Karkat finally gets a chance to bloom. Dave's bisexuality is only really given breathing space in the last leg of the comic, where his newfound romance with Karkat mostly takes place off screen and is informed to us by external characters and external mediums like twitter and tumblr posts from people close to Hussie. That's not *too* bad, there's nothing wrong with it inherently and I don't particularly mind it, I think it was a nice send off for his arc and a subversion of expectations when it comes to the archetype he filled early on in the comic.
You can make some commentary around the fact that it's frustrating the only (at the time of the comic's ending) canon achillean romance is danced around so hard, with no explicit in universe confirmation, but it's not the end of the world.
Things take a turn for the worse within the Epilogues, though. Their romance is walked back multiple stages and we now find out the most they've managed to do is hold hands, which is fine if it means we're going to get a healthy exploration of their romance which we did not get to see on screen, but it comes at the cost of painting Jade as the invader and falling into a trope that Hussie also utilized with Dirk and Jake, where a woman is coming between them somehow. I don't think it's a particularly fair depiction for Jade and it's an even more awkward depiction of adults, given that Dave had a whole discussion near the end of Homestuck where he was asking Dirk for advice on how to come out to his friends.
It gets even worse when we consider that by the time Dave and Karkat finally kiss, the narrative threshold has been thoroughly taken over by Dirk and he is practically playing dolls and trying to force them into it, which to me as a reader and to my friends at the time, tainted the innocence of their former romance. We get explicit confirmation that Dave has his faculties in check as he shakes off Dirk's narrative forcefulness, but no such moment is granted to Karkat, leaving a sour feeling that the only reason it happened is because Dirk made it happen, which sucks. Male/Male romances in Homestuck seem to now just follow a trend of always being under some form of duress.
Bringing us to the allstar couple of Dirk and Jake.
The background we have on both of these men, before we even meet them, due to internal and external media, is that Bro Strider is an overbearing abusive guardian who relentlessly trained Dave for SBURB because he wanted Dave to be able to survive the lethal game, even at the cost of Dave having a happy childhood, whilst Grandpa Harley was a billionaire gallavanting around the planet learning all he could about the game (and seemingly having a lot of illegitimate children... thanks Hussie.)
The nugget we can draw from these Beta depictions is that Dirk at his core will sacrifice happiness and feelings for the sake of what he considers the greater good and Jake is avoidant of all responsibility, using adventure as a way to ignore any problems he leaves in his wake.
Dirk is a brilliantly written gay man, which when me and my friends first read about him, truly shocked us. I can count on one hand the amount of fictional gay men that I have seen, depicted facing the struggle of internalized homophobia in the way that Dirk experiences it; and that is to say, Dirk isn't disgusted with being gay, but he believes his homosexuality is the original sin that prevents his friend group from experiencing happiness.
He believes that because he is gay, he is screwing up the potential couples in his friend group. If he pursues Jake, he denies Jane the chance at him, since they both like the same man AND he denies Roxy himself, which stings even more when he considers that they are the last two living humans in their Earth. Brilliant. 10/10.
Dirk later discusses the idea that if he could be interested in women, he could give Roxy what she wanted, because he genuinely believes that she deserves it; it's a gut wrenching admission and at the time of reading it, I remember all my friends just feeling for him.
This moment however, arrives after Dirk has already been ghosted relentlessly, lambasted by his own AI assistant and allowed his closest friend to assault him because he loathes himself. Dirk kisses more women on screen than he does his own boyfriend (not that their kiss was not given any gravitas), but I do think it's supposed to be part of an intentional motif with his character; the fact he sacrifices even his own desires for the greater good, but when even the trickster juju doesn't "fix" him, he finally lets his true feelings spill.
And that's about as much as we get with regards to the whole thing. The Epilogues roll around and Dirk morphs into an unrecognizable creep, who winds up doing many fucked up things for god knows what reason.
Jake, on the other hand, fills the role of a "macho" man, which is supposed to highlight the irony that he really isn't any of that. He's sensitive and avoidant and wants to live up to his friends expectations but falls short all the time because he's also selfish and willfully ignorant; a trait which winds up ruining his relationship with Dirk, as they both press the wrong buttons.
Dirk won't *allow* him to be avoidant and Jake worries he'll never be as amazing as people expect, so he'd rather not try, than fail completely, ignoring that these are both effectively the same result. Jake also tends to get sexualized a lot, something which brings him his own discomfort, and is threatened with sexual assault (and later experiences it, but I don't really want to go into that. I don't think that plot point was done well). There's even a callback moment where, much like another Page earlier, he is lifted by a Serket and about to be kissed against his will.
All of that to say, Jake is rather prone to having people be creepy around him, and even though Dirk's convoluted plan to get them to kiss (orchestrated by HAL), is definitely CRAZY, there was never anything beyond that between them that screamed "creepy".
Until of course, the dystopian horror of Trickster Mode, where Jake, fueled by the JuJu, flaunts intense heterosexual desires in Dirk's face and flaunts the idea of them all having babies in some kind of big polyamorous quaouple. It's meant to be this viscerally creepy moment where Dirk is left as the last bastion of rationality, and even he gives in because he's depressed.
And that's where the comic leaves us for their interaction on screen. We get a minor "they might talk" after Dirk and Dave's discussion, where it seems clear Dirk wants to resolve things between them.
And then everything that happens to them and between them in the Epilogues happens, it's too much to list; but I do find it weird that not ONE M/M couple has any kids. Rose and Jade manage to have a secret child that is then ascribed to being Jade's attempt at having a child with Dave. John and Roxy have a child. Rose and Kanaya adopt a child and Jane forces a child with Jake.
This is where I'll segway in to discussing Rufioh and Horuss. The Dancestors were never all meant to be serious characters, and at the time of the story, they were parodies of random Archetypes, but the relationship between Rufioh and Horuss was meant to be a reflection of Jake and Dirk, with Damara acting as a version of Jane. A horse obsessed "creepy" guy who builds machines that is so overbearing he won't take the hint that the shy guy that EVERYONE has the hots for doesn't really want him anymore. I'm not entirely sure if Hussie was making that as an intentional commentary of their relationship or if it was supposed to be a parody of the way the fandom TALKED about their relationship.
Given that there's been endless shipping wars between JakeJane shippers and DirkJake shippers, as well as wars between DaveJade shippers and DaveKat shippers, it's not lost on me that it's easy romance drama to place the key women (namely Jane and Jade here) as the antagonist to these achillean romances, but it's kind of exhausting that it happens twice, even if in different ways.
I think I lost my train of thought here, but my final point is that there's not really any M/M romance in Homestuck now that don't involve some creepy element of coercion to them, which isn't exactly fun to read when gay men are treated as sexual predators IRL.
I just hope things can be different going forward, or things can be changed.
for example, saying rose never had a respect for authority in the context of being vulnerable to parental abuse is, i‘m sorry to say, insane? throughout the entire story rose is haunted by her relationship with her mother, by the fact that she misunderstood her love and then her mom died so there was no hope to rekindle their relationship. her mommy issues even come up to this day, in the way the nymphs are as her creations! of course she’d be vulnerable to someone claiming to be her parental figure and saying she’s the only one that understands him.
Rose does have maternal issues! Maternal! They manifest in her elation to be able to have a relationship with Roxy, we see that come up on the lilypad! She doesn't have paternal issues. She doesn't even consider the idea of TALKING to Dirk on screen until the Epilogues. If the presumption that Rose has parental issues is a key point, you would assume more of her relationship to Roxy would be displayed IN THE EPILOGUES. It isn't! Rose suddenly fixating on Dirk being her dad and Dirk fixating on being her father are traits added by the Epilogue; contradictory to their prior on screen depictions.
the reason people aren’t really talking about the davekat thing is because it’s pretty simple to explain? dirk is manipulative and thinks he knows better and that’s been his characterization from his first introduction, the davekat thing is just an extent of that combined with the fact that in the epilogues his worst tendencies are just dialed up to the max. this is even something jade tries to do in candy, she’s just way worse at it. it has nothing to do with anyone’s sexuality?
Again. I'm not fixating SOLELY on how the Epilogues address Davekat, I'm discussing how the Epilogues don't help the portrayal OF Davekat. Dirk *is* manipulative and does think he knows better, but none of that depiction has ever been wrapped up in sexual violence towards his friends and family. I'm sorry but I don't know how you can continue to just separate Dirk's sexuality from this conversation as if it's inconsequential to his depiction. I'm 100% of the opinion that if the role of author for the Epilogues was given to someone else, there wouldn't be nearly as much homophobic rhetoric thrown into the sexual violence that is lambasted towards the queer men in the story. [Excluding Hussie, since they previously did that anyway.]
and as for the misogyny thing, did you just like, read homestuck with rose tinted glasses? again, the whole point of the epilogues is taking the underlying tendencies dirk already had and dialing them up. did you think dirk was indulging caliborn’s requests of drawing “filthy whores” aka his friends in “pornographic“ scenarios just because he fully bought in the fake saw game framing? like at this point i’m just not sure you ever understood dirk’s character beyond being gay in the first place, and now the epilogues are putting all his worst qualities on centre stage and you’re uncomfortable because your comfort gay guy has turned out to be not a very good person.
I think you're being weirdly hostile about this, nowhere did I call Dirk my comfort gay guy. This whole post has been about more than just Dirk, people are fixating on that point of the story when I've been trying to discuss how Homestuck as a WHOLE BODY OF WORK treats male queerness. Dirk just happens to be the most prominently queer because his identity is a main fixture since we meet him, versus someone like Dave whose sexuality becomes a prominent character point later in the story.
Dirk indulging Caliborn's requests because he isn't taking them seriously IS misogyny. Is that the same kind of misogyny that's present in the Epilogues? No. Because Dirk doesn't think Caliborn has the ability to actually affect anything and Dirk isn't the one calling his friends "filthy whores"; his lack of calling it out is not the same as actively being the one to wield the cudgel. At the same time, the context of that story is that Caliborn and Calliope present themselves as having future information that Dirk is desperately mining for; he indulges Calliope's fanfiction and art because he's curious as to whether it'll confirm he winds up dating Jake; similarly he had a drawing of him and Jake ready because he's hoping that Caliborn will slip up and confirm that they work out, since they both have future knowledge. That was the whole gag of that scene.
He's pining after the sole man he can actually attain and is stuck drawing EVERY POSSIBLE PAIRING other than the one he wants. Again, the gag is that Dirk is gay and unfulfiled.
Where in this whole conversation or general depiction of Dirk you see some egregious underlying misogyny, I have no clue. Even by the time they god tier and he's been assaulted by Roxy, he's still singing their praises as the most mature person in their session and declaring Roxy ABOVE him.
as for hussie being a reactionary author, nobody’s denying that their writing features some downfalls of the edgy internet culture of the time, but hussie’s also undeniably queer. you seem to extrapolating a lot, and seemingly making the argument of “hussie used slurs in early homestuck therefore their writing when it comes to queerness is also reactionary”. this just doesn’t hold up? like, do you think hussie made homestuck good on accident??
I'm sorry, but do you think Homestuck is good because of how it depicts queer people? Homestuck didn't indulge queer identity until Rosemary and even that wasn't given as much poignance as it could be given. By the time Dirk is brought on to the screen, Hussie is STILL doing reactionary depictions [Otherkin/Mituna and ableist slurs/Kankri and SJW's] and racial charicatures [re: Damara, re: tweeting "all characters in trickster mode are Canonically Caucasian"].
Homestuck is a subjective piece of media that people will mine for their own value. The overall body of work is impressive because of it's length and ability to juggle multiple narratives, as well as Hussie's incredible output and ability to pivot earlier throwaways as foreshadowing. They have a great understanding of character voice and tone and use a lot of methods to distinguish identity that have had a longstanding impact on creative works going forward. I don't think Homestuck is "good".
I also think that it is noble of Hussie to recognize these shortcomings and bring in external perspective to IMPROVE the story.
and the fact that this theme is often explored with gay characters is a side effect of the majority of the male cast of homestuck being queer.
Dirk is the only canonical gay man. I feel like I have to be very specific with my verbage because I'm discussing how gay men get portrayed and how male queerness is "Treated" by the story. Two different topics that intersect, not one topic.
As for how the Epilogues walked back Davekat in order of on screen mentions: Vriska and Terezi remark on how they're happy that Karkat and Dave are settled into a relationship. Roxy asks Dave about who he is romantically involved with and Dave dances around the topic, with Rose being coy about the same thing because she obviously knows. John clocks that something is going on between Karkat and Dave and Karkat interrupts the discussion. Jasprose EXPLICITLY tells Nepeta that Karkat is in a red relationship with somebody else now and then Davepeta discusses how they are surprised their attraction to Karkat isn't objected to by the side made up of Dave and Jasprose sarcastically remarks to the introspection. And finally, Dave hints at the topic and then asks Dirk how to come out to his friends, specifically John and Jade, because Rose ALREADY KNOWS.
(I might have a few of those lilypad orders wrong.)
This also all ended with iirc Hussie releasing a vine holding a paper saying "Davekat is canon". (The vine might have come before those story beats, vine is gone and I don't remember dates.)
The epilogues inarguably walk all of that back and basically make it so that all they did was hold hands and never really discuss their feelings to one another, which kind of contradicts how every other character and Dave himself depicts it.
And again, it's not BAD to walk that back, by any means, sure, give us a deeper exploration of it. But the exploration we got is one that culminates in a very disgusting portrayal of a gay guy forcing two men to have sex and posits Jade as some kind of invader to their relationship (which to me feels like an obvious allusion to how the fanbase was at the end of Homestuck either team DaveJade or team Davekat and Jade had to basically foot the bill for that.)
| Our first introduction to Dirk is via Bro, yes, but the idea that Bro is gay wasn't something that got given any kind of grounding until Dirk is introduced as a character. [...] If Dirk never existed in contrast to Bro, to answer your question, yes, making Bro gay would be homophobic as fuck. But Dirk no longer exists in contrast to Bro; hence yes, it is just outright homophobic that the guy who is singled out by the story as explicitly gay MULTIPLE times gets penned like this.
this is just straight up confusing to me because bro IS dirk and it doesn't erase that the first introduction we have of him is as an abusive man that exposes his child to pornography and while we're at it the first bit of info we have of this precious dirk is jake saying he programmed a robot to molest and assault him everytime he goes out LOL multiple ppl in this thread have told you dirk in the epilogues and postcanon are just stretches of HIS TEXT in homestuck and you're reducing him to being The Untouchable Gay One in a cast where almost every character is queer and equally flawed
and re:davekat being "walked back"? none of those things you mentioned contradicts the epilogues, they never get confirmed as a couple but it's very obvious to everyone else there's something between them and they're purposely very cagey about it because they're coy and it's never outright stated they do anything about it, john straight up in the epilogues says he thought dave and karkat had been together the entire time. i think you're confusing the statement "davekat is canon" to mean "davekat is a couple and they're dating", characters having feelings for eachother but not resolving them/not dating makes them "canon"
and anyway im done responding to this thread because we're walking in circles and several people are just repeating the same things over and over, it's not a productive discussion but i will say what other ppl have said before and you should try to detach this vision you have of dirk as a "The Only Gay Character" and try seeing him as a part of the actual big picture, he's an incredibly fleshed out character and reducing him to his sexuality isn't very charitable to the story that he's a part of
I'm divorcing Hussie's decision to make Dirk and by extension Bro gay from earlier Homestuck because I don't think Hussie outright considered the implications when making that choice. We have seen multiple times in the comic how Hussie will make a decision for the story and then not consider the wider implication: re "feeling caucasian".
I'm also trying to be charitable to the fact that yes, you can depict a gay man being abusive like that, but Dirk's arc fixates on his sexuality in such a specific way that then if he DOESN'T undo the negative stereotypes tacked on by Bro's depiction, it leaves a homophobic etching on the wall. Making Dirk gay was an intentional character choice by Hussie, and making his sexuality a KEY POINT OF HIS STORY was also an intentional decision, thus you cannot wash your hands of the negative implications stretching forward OR backwards, but I think everybody can at least be more charitable to what was already written as at the time of authoring, Bro wasn't a gay man or at least we had no reason to outright believe so.
And yes! You're literally adding to my point: the first piece of information we get regarding Dirk, whose arc is going to surround his sexuality and how that impacts his friendships, is that he now has a robot that will try to molest his romantic interest. Does that not trouble you in the slightest???? The only reason this story content mildly scrapes by is because Dirk winds up existing in antithesis to these negative gay stereotypes for the briefest moment come the end of Homestuck.
As for Davekat being walked back, I literally cited TWO moments where characters who were with them the entire journey explicitly state they're dating. Vriska and Terezi first, and Jasprose, who may I remind people has a degree of omniscience at this stage, says Karkat is in a relationship too.
I think you're coming into a thread about how Homestuck treats it's Gay Man and how Homestuck treats male queerness and reducing it to just being about Dirk. Again, this comic opened up with Dave and John being homophobic to each other on a regular basis, that alone pinpoints that the author had some things to unpack. Karkat makes use of a homophobic slurs in act 5!
How you can acknowledge all of that and say "yeah, the author doesn't hold any latent homophobic views" will go beyond me.
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.
'"I thought this was a love story," you say.
Your Lola's insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for.
A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves:
I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story.
You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back.
You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—
an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope.
Timid, and without conviction.
The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed.
I thought this was a love story.
You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it.
And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you;
This is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.'
-You, in the Inverted Theater - The Spear Cuts Through Water
"I don't care if the best I can hope for is half of what I want. I'm not here for a realistic outcome. I'm just going to fight! Forever! With perfect greed! Until I get everything!"
-Saturn, Heaven will be Mine
(I want to just expand that Dirk isn't the only character I resonate with; my post is how Homestuck handles M/M optics in general. I do think it does good strides in responding to fan feedback at times, but I also feel that it tragically doesn't do the legwork anymore to address how it more often than not falls flat on how men being gay is depicted in derisive or homophobic ways.)
Also, I refrained from touching on the Dirk candy route because I really still don't know how to unpack the way the story goes about Dirk doing that to himself, it's kind of "saved" (or ignorable in the larger meta about how the story treats male queerness) by factor of Dirk still being alive in Meat and thus it's not a definitive end to his personhood and narrowly IMO dodges over problematic depictions of queer people doing that.
I'm grateful for your input, Taz. I hope you get the DirkJake conclusion you dream of at the end of the day.
this is a really interesting thread with a lot of interesting points (my own take is boringly nuanced: hussie tries to engage with various complex topics and drops the ball sometimes, like with Fefeta: is she a comment on the misogyny of people reducing "nice" female characters to just being cute, is it just plain misogyny, or is it both? Same with the homophobia: they try to talk about and deconstruct homophonic tropes and sometimes fail and just Do A Homophobia)
What i am curious about is how you feel about meat!callieroxy? Not quite sure if achillean does or does not include nonbinary people, but in meat, callie and roxy are nonbinary and a man respectively, and are in a relationship. (Even though both characters are women in candy and they're also not in a relationship there? That might change tho, i don't agree with the people reading the candy!roxy gender speech and concluding that candy!roxy is canonically cis now)
kortom: onmisbaar gelijk een kookboek
Not done actually! Dandy is on the money that dirks gay experience is uniquely isolating and targeted, I think, at least in a way that made him resonate more for me as a gay man than Dave and Karkat did. I don't think it's just about his internalized homophobia either--i think all his friends are passively or actively homophobic to him, and the baggage of that adds up.
Jane is the least actively so, hilariously because she's the one who expresses the most overt homophobia in her thoughts, but for most of her time knowing Dirk she literally assumes he's straight and going to get with Roxy. This is true until they're 16 and start the session.
Roxy's been aggressively flirting with him since they were 13, culminating with forcibly kissing him as a trickster. She also starts flirting with Hal as soon as he becomes available.
Hal himself, despite "being Dirk", sets himself apart as being better than Dirk specifically because he can give Roxy what she wants, ie: perform heterosexuality for her. He says Dirk hates that he can't do this himself, and we later learn he's right--Dirks final word on the whole situation is that he wishes he'd been able to just Be Straight for Roxy and give her what she wants.
Incidentally, in the same log in which Hal sets himself apart as being better due to proximity to straightness, he also switches his text color to red--putting himself in closer proximity to Dave, Dirks masculine ideal who is himself bisexual.
Then there's Jake. In their log as 13 year olds in Jake's memory, Dirk tries to make a playful joke about furries being gay and Jake misunderstands it as a pejorative, even insisting that Dirk SHOULD be using it pejoratively because he's "from Texas."
Later when they're 16, Jake tells Jane that he used to accidentally play with Dirks feelings by saying they would be a great match if he or Dirk were girls.
Obviously Jake doesn't actually think or feel these things by 16, but the point is those are the only impressions of Jake's view of the situation that Dirk really has to go on, which goes a long way to explain how neurotic and anxious he is about the whole affair.
That's *before* unite synchronize happens and Dirk fully internalizes his view of himself as a toxic manipulator who ruined Jake's life and their relationship--his near murder of Hal is in fact implied to be near murder suicide, because he's just as motivated by hatred for himself as a toxic, corruptive force on Jake's life and literally sitting hovering over a super tall skyscraper he could easily jump from.
And then trickster mode happens, which Dandy is right about--it IS the apex of this queer horror narrative that Dirk is growing up with.
Everyone shows up talking about having procreative her sex, the girls try to get Dirk to dance/perform for them and he doesn't, and then they *literally move on to ogling and groping Arquis, the Dirk splinter more willing to perform heterosexuality.*
Let's be clear: The girls are talking about leaving Dirk behind and excluding him in favor of Hal, because he's gay.
Jake is the saving grace here, having the presence of mind even through the manic high of trickster mode to tell the girls he's not down with the ditching Dirk plan, and trying to open up to Dirk about how bad he felt about leaving and their problems before *asking Dirk to marry him.*
Dirk turns him down, but it's still another beat proving Jake's love for Dirk is on some level considered and genuine. Still, it's a footnote in a narrative that largely consist of Dirk being made to feel like a failure or a problem to his friends because he's gay specifically.
The epilogues continue this--Candy Dirk doesn't just die because Meat Dirk needs to consolidate power, he also dies because Candy is filtered through John's heteronormative notions of the world and Callie's cherubic notions of hate-fueled and *procreative* sex. Dirk's nature has no place in any of that.
And what emerges to take his place? Gamzee, another destroyer and ambiguous possible Dirk splinter, once again defined by the willingness to perform heterosexuality that Dirk lacks.
By doing exactly that, Gamzee insinuates himself into the void in the Janedirkjake dynamic Dirk leaves behind, and the result is getting to see just how horrible life can be for Jake without Dirk around. Dirks pretty awful to him in Meat, but at least it's just a breakup/throwing down the gauntlet of leaving Jake behind and leaving it to Jake to decide if he'll follow.
Just wanted to throw my hat in here--Dirk is continually and consistently depicted in contrast to cherubic themes of sex as inherently procreative, and that's tied into the way he's alienated from his friends through his sexuality growing up.
That's not even to get into the insane levels of abuse of Hal's soul implied by Doc Scratch, or frankly Bro's by Lil Cal if you really think about it.
If Dirk is the current king of abusers, it's largely because he's cosmically victimized by Lord English and Caliborn, the true embodiment of evil/homophobia/misogyny in the comic and literally his and Jakes romantic stalker. Hurt people hurt people.
'"I thought this was a love story," you say.
Your Lola's insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for.
A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves:
I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story.
You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back.
You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—
an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope.
Timid, and without conviction.
The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed.
I thought this was a love story.
You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it.
And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you;
This is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.'
-You, in the Inverted Theater - The Spear Cuts Through Water
"I don't care if the best I can hope for is half of what I want. I'm not here for a realistic outcome. I'm just going to fight! Forever! With perfect greed! Until I get everything!"
-Saturn, Heaven will be Mine
I'm not really sure how to feel about CallieRoxy in general. By the end of Homestuck, I thought it was another kind of victory for the lacking front of sapphic romance that was only really championed by Rosemary and left forlorn by Vrisrezi, but then the epilogues deconstruct a lot of their gender identities and present two alternative outcomes so it becomes very difficult to figure out how I'm *supposed* to read them.
All in all, I have more trans thoughts about Callie and Roxy and less Achillean ones? That also might just be because my perception of Roxy as a character is a very difficult one to stomach, too. I like everything they stand for, I just kind of wish the story would do more to unpack how fucked up a lot of the things Roxy did in the early story were; and that goes the same for all of the alpha kids, but it strikes a bit closer to home with Roxy because of afformentioned things.
As the story stands now, Roxy kind of got to wash hands of a lot of the negative things they did so I'm left in a state of limbo. I want more Roxy content and I want more Roxy exploration because I think Homestuck does catharsis well when it has a chance to. :)
@Dandy thank you, but I don't really dream of a dirkjake conclusion in HSBC anymore. I'll be really happy if it happens, but I'm happy with the fan work and the narrative I've built out of the epilogues for myself, on the personal satisfaction front. when it comes to HSBC I'm just along for the ride.
'"I thought this was a love story," you say.
Your Lola's insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for.
A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves:
I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story.
You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back.
You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—
an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope.
Timid, and without conviction.
The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed.
I thought this was a love story.
You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it.
And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you;
This is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.'
-You, in the Inverted Theater - The Spear Cuts Through Water
"I don't care if the best I can hope for is half of what I want. I'm not here for a realistic outcome. I'm just going to fight! Forever! With perfect greed! Until I get everything!"
-Saturn, Heaven will be Mine
"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."
Just popping in here to say you should avoid making those kinds of assumptions just because people disagree with you.
@alexis-- noted and fair. I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't like the idea of being told as a gay man that the way I related to Dirk growing up is irrelevant, and even if another gay person thinks so because they experienced the comic a different way, I don't think that makes my own experience invalid. My bad on the wording.
'"I thought this was a love story," you say.
Your Lola's insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for.
A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves:
I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story.
You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back.
You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—
an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope.
Timid, and without conviction.
The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed.
I thought this was a love story.
You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it.
And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you;
This is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.'
-You, in the Inverted Theater - The Spear Cuts Through Water
"I don't care if the best I can hope for is half of what I want. I'm not here for a realistic outcome. I'm just going to fight! Forever! With perfect greed! Until I get everything!"
-Saturn, Heaven will be Mine
I can't really say if CallieRoxy is sapphic or not because I do believe that at one point Roxy identifies as a man, but he was also just nonbinary at one point. But I also know plenty of transmen who still use the label as well, so I can't really comment on that front. I do like them, though I was also in a different thread where I discussed how the comic kind of treats Calliope's asexuality a bit oddly T_T. I can say, however, that I think Rosemary and Vrisrezi are also really decent depictions of sapphic women. I don't really agree with the idea that Dirk breaking up Rosemary via narrative mind control and belittling Kanaya's love for Rose the whole time isn't indicative of slightly lesbophobic rhetoric. Also, let's not totally rewrite what was going on when Rose was "sick" with her whole Ultimate!Self thing, I think it is a bit strange to act as if Dirk wasn't intentionally manipulating a woman who was clearly not in her best mind, and who did indeed make them break up while he was about to turn her into a robot by having her wife say things that he was making her say just to give Rose peace of mind that what was about to happen was okay.
You can say that Rose after the whole robotification is somewhat in control because she has omnipotence now or whatever, which is true, but Dirk definitely removed a lot of the agency she had before all of that, and that's kind of the point, like what he's doing IS bad and he definitely shouldn't have done it lol T_T Part of manipulation is when you convince someone to do a thing that is harmful to them, but beneficial to yourself and that is what happened with Rose becoming Rosebot. And Rose and Kanaya breaking up or having marital issues in a world where nobody can think clearly due to the universe they're in needing constant drama isn't real proof enough to me at least that Rose and Kanaya would've broken up the whole time or whatever, I think that is a drastic misrepresentation of both their characters.
Candy is everyone's worst traits dialed up to like 11, but in Meat the same people who act irrationally and who have 0 handle on their cognitive functions and ability to hold empathy for others are suddenly capable of doing all of that and more. I think because Rose is an actual Robot with god powers it's unfair to say what she does in Candy is just proof she'd have always done that lol.
As for Vrisrezi, eh idk I don't exactly see a lot of the issues people have with them. I think they're the perfect example of Doomed Yuri, I love how they always want to strive to be together despite all of their own issues and the world around them. I am also a highkey Vriska apologist though, so maybe I am biased </3 I just don't think Vriska's actions warrant as much punishment as people crave for her. They're two sides of the same coin as well, and for what many people hate about Vriska they'd also have to hate Terezi for and vice versa because they're so entwined with one another and don't exactly disagree on certain points. Nobody thinks Terezi's idea of becoming a legicerator that basically harasses and hounds the prosecution is bad because it's funny, but not so much when you remember the whole context behind the Alternian justice system anyway, and how she will most likely be sending lowbloods to be culled for petty crimes...like crossing the street the same time as a highblood or some shit lmao.
They're both lowkey kind of crazy and violent, which is why I think they're perfect for each other because they also want to change and just have different ideas for how to do that. I wouldn't say Terezi is some revolutionary that wants to upend the whole system, but she's very much someone who wants to help people, to be seen as useful and helpful to this system that perpetuates Violence, to be able to choose when violence is necessary and so forth. Whereas Vriska is all about doing things that are unpleasant for the greater good, using violence as a tool to get things you want because you know what's best and having as much control over your own life without an inherently violent system holding YOU down the whole time. Being shackled to the principles and ideals of heroism vs Doing what needs to be done regardless of how that makes you appear are, I think, one of the larger themes they represent and this is not a Vrisrezi analysis love post so I'll stop now </3
I also just find them relatable as sapphics idk doing things that are bad and then trying to make up for it later on but being lambasted for even trying or having people not believe me when I say I am sorry for it, having multiple men just sort of disregard my relationships with other women as unimportant or fleeting because our love couldn't possibly be as "profound" as that between men and women, even Kanaya's whole sexuality being seen as less of a valid sexuality and more so as a fetish or whatever are all things that I just kind of relate to as a real lesbian.