#feels like the charactersare trapped in the machinations of some impersonal system that doesn't really care about them as individuals

[4lph4kidz]

(Same Dirk Anon)

I def read Dirk's splinters as more uhhh 'possibilities' - this COULD be you, if you let it be, and they reflect certain truths about your character that you need to come to terms with.

I guess the way I tend to think of it is, like- Davesprite broke Jade's heart, and got angry at Dave about it in Game Over. It's pointless to actually hold Dave accountable for that, but there's no denying that had he been in Davesprite's position he could or would have acted the exact same way. In that regard, I find it pretty pointless to actively hold Dirk accountable for anything AR does independent of Dirk's awareness or control; but because Dirk is so willing to immediately assume the worst of himself and take some level of ownership over his splinters that Dave would never do for Davesprite (or Jade, Jadesprite) I see him getting conflated with his splinters a LOT more often.

Ofc, selves are a complicated matter in Homestuck. Karkat's memo shenanigans are pretty indicative of that, though those are less 'possibilities' and more 'closed time loops', I guess. But even then, they serve as a purpose for Karkat to learn more about himself, even if it's more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than Dirk and his splinters are.

On AR and Dirk's agency, the amount of control Dirk actually has seems somewhat limited - assuming you don't think Dirk should just straight up murder the AR, which is an argument I've seen made. I would say that AR goes to prove Dirk has a lot less agency than he thinks he does - I'm reminded of Dirk giving that whole spiel to Jane about how he's going to mastermind the session, but ends up running to Calliope for advice on what to do the second something went wrong.

Or his claims that he can control his Dream Self perfectly, but almost got killed failing to do just that and ended up zoning out so much he was too late to warn Jane about Roxy's bomb. The bomb thing is interesting, because AR also chose not to warn her despite being FULLY capable of doing so, which indicates to me that... yeah, they're on different wavelengths here.

Or - Unite/Synchronise once Dirk's actual plans to enter the session go very obviously to shit, but even that's left ambiguous as to who actually orchestrated it. AR makes the most sense to me, though. I'm reminded of Scratch's High Stakes Timeline Wrangling - I was masochistic enough to read Hussie's authors notes, and iirc he mentioned something about Scratch being so competent because one of his components was a supercomputer.

Honestly, I read AR and Dirk's convo as soft confirmation that AR and Dirk weren't accurate 1=1 reflections of each other anymore. The conversation starts with AR blowing off Roxy trying to call Dirk for help, and ends with him asking Dirk "so can suicide fix this problem?" Strider if he's afraid to die. AR is what Dirk could have been, but currently isn't, but still contains a multitude of truths about himself that are uncomfortable to look at. ...but that's not the conclusion Dirk seems to come to, which I guess is what I meant when I thought Dirk wasn't being meaningfully challenged on what his splinters mean about himself.

(...which is still all setting aside the Jake thing. Jake pretty accurately pinned AR as a Dirk with 'no accountability, that just wants to screw with him' which... Dirk isn't happy about, but dirk and jake and dirk's splinters is a whole other nightmare.)

This all checks out with me as reading Dirk as a kid that's not as smart as he thinks he is getting a succession of reality checks straight to the face during the session. And then he's just kind of left dangling with the last one, which doesn't... really feel like a conclusion to his arc, but it's still better than what Jake got? It really feels like they just barely dug into the meat of Dirk's character before. All that.

feel free to ignore this, i just like rambling about dirk because he's absolutely fascinating and yet... done so goddamn dirty by the narrative. he is the bug i have under a microscope. i want to read all the conversations kidnapped PQ!Dirk has with Ult!Dirk so badly.

there's a lot of great kanaya quotes but i think the moment i realised she was like, one of my forever faves, was. "Impromputations".

Yeah! That's very much the read that makes the most sense to me, though it is still a very character-focused perspective and I try to keep other ways of framing things in the back of my mind. And I'd be more likely to agree he was 'done dirty by the narrative' if you take post canon into the picture but tbh I think being a Jake-liking individual has sort of lowered the bar for me when it comes to Homestuck's character biases... At least the author thought Dirk was interesting enough to take him seriously and address his stuff with some depth.

Generally speaking HS's concluding arcs were so messy that pretty much every single character was left wanting in one way or another, with the exception of maybe Dave, but I do still think Dirk is actually one of the better handled/more fleshed out characters? Seeing as he's one of only a handful who even had an identifiable arc and got something approaching a resolution for the better. Not everything was addressed or wrapped up neatly of course, and he sure isn't in a very HAPPY place, but still. I still took it as an ultimately positive ending for him. Maybe that's just because I'm generally okay with the ending of Homestuck as a whole, despite noting its many faults, mostly because I think its a miracle something as convoluted as Homestuck even made it to the end at all. That doesn't mean I'm not disappointed and don't love seeing other people explore what the comic didn't, I'm just relatively at peace with the fact that resolving characters wasn't really a priority for the work I guess.