haha oh man

i’m not gonna say that jake is the smartest kid of his cohort, or that he’s in the same league as terezi/rose/jade, but a lot of people misread him when characterizing him as stupid. his difficulties throughout the storyline come from interpersonal issues; i.e., that he’s bad at reading situations, tonally, and he’s egocentric even at the best of times. (suggested reading: his conversation with jane after forgetting her birthday). unlike dirk, for example, who is hyperaware of his effect on other people but struggles interpersonally all the same, jake doesn’t pick up on others’ moods as quickly as any of his three friends. thing is, although this has zero bearing on how “intelligent” he is (in the problem-solving or memory-amassing sense), it’s how members of western society are trained to perceive intelligence. unless someone emanates brainpower á la sheldon cooper, our first judgment mechanism for intelligence is how good someone is at charming, manipulating, or generally interacting with others. it’s a faulty heuristic! but it’s how we read people. so when jake fails to realize that jane is peeved at him, and that it’s probably not the best time to talk about his boy problems, it’s read as “jake is dumb and can’t even understand that monosyllabic answers mean she’s pissed” not “jake grew up on a deserted island and has only been speaking to other teenaged human beings for a fraction of that time, so he’s a little slow on the uptake concerning nuanced, person-specific emotional indicators.”

furthermore: whenever we see one of jake’s moments of interpersonal “stupidity,” it’s always with the audience advantage. we know what’s going on at the other end of the conversation. we know jane’s pissed because she’s onscreen the entire time they’re talking. it’s dramatic irony that he blunders on about his romantic troubles, even as we’re thinking, “shut the fuck up, please, oh my god, why are you doing this.” that’s (one of) the point(s) of the passage. consider Oedipus Rex. sophocles knows that oedi fucked his mom, and tiresias knows that oedi fucked his mom, and we know that oedi fucked his mom, but if a blight is eating your city, your first thought probably isn’t “wow, i fucked my mom!”

additionally, for most of the comic, jake stands in the shadow of dirk. subject of Strider Mainpain as he is, jake has received the fandom notoriety he has as one part of dirk/jake, not for any widespread affection for his character (as contrasted with dirk himself, as well as dave). when he is portrayed, it is in conjunction with dirk – who is not breathtakingly intelligent, necessarily, so much as he’s person who tries very hard to seem intelligent, and has a lot of practice pretending. jake never pretends to be smarter than he is; ergo, when juxtaposed with dirk “how many four-syllable synonyms for ‘old’ can i cram into this sentence” strider, some conclude that he’s dumb.

still, for most of the comic, jake makes consistently decent decisions. he has his moments, sure. he’s a teenager. terezi has moments. but he’s clever, despite those moments. his pesterlogs are full of sharp lines and bright turns of phrase. his actions with liv tyler and the lotus capsule were skillful manipulations of technology. 

the irony in all of this is that jake parodies the “hot adventure chick” stereotype, the subversive element being his gender. yet the same mistake is made wrt jake as is often made wrt “adventure chicks” – the assumption that he’s stupid because his most-noted feature is his beauty. when his friends praise him, it’s almost invariably praise for his physical features, his ass, his face, his desirability. that he’s a funny, bright kid with a lot of cool interests is infrequently brought up in explaining their reasons for pursuing him. so that element of his character is skimmed right over in fanfic, where dirk is given the lion’s share of characterization and angst.

2009: homestuck launches, riding on the wave of problem sleuths success. pretty big for a webcomic but still very niche overall. fandom is basically nonexistent outside of the mspa forums. mostly straight men and programming nerds

2010: hivebent happens. hetalia fans, tired of being in a big, widely-disliked fandom and drawn to the promised land of a fandom with a large cast and its own shipping system, migrate to homestuck en masse. the fandom gets its first major boost in popularity, more than doubling practically overnight. new fans are mostly young women

2011: fandom steadily expands over the course of the year. ben nye literally sells out of grey body paint prior to comic-con. vriscourse comes to a head and people continue to argue about her death for months after. cascade drops in october, enough to crash multiple flash and download sites, and act 6 begins in november. by the end of the year its near impossible to use tumblr without being exposed to homestuck somehow.

2012: homestuck fandom peaks. this is the last year that homestuck is published regularly (the only hiatus lasts for about a month, before the dancestor intermission). homestuck is everywhere on your tumblr dash, on reddit, on 4chan. hussie has a tumblr and post and tweets regularly. in september the homestuck kickstarter begins, meets its $700k goal in less than 2 days, and finishes in october with nearly $2.5 million. this draws the attention of a few mainstream publications - pbs, wired, cnn, huffpo, etc. dante basco becomes a homestuck fan.

2013: homestuck fandom begins to shrink. first, in april, when the comic goes on a month-long hiatus. around this time, several other fandoms gain popularity - attack on titan starts airing in japan, off and dangan ronpa have just received english translations, welcome to night vale is finishing up its first season - thanks to homestuck fans looking for something to tide them over during the hiatus. when it comes off hiatus, homestuck resumes updating (much more often than most webcomics, but not nearly at the multiple-pages-per-day speed it had maintained prior). in october, hussie announces hes putting the comic on indefinite hiatus to work on the game, and that it will return with one final massive update containing the rest of act 6 and the entirety of act 7. namco high is published in late december to a resounding “meh”.

2014: homestuck remains on hiatus for nearly the entire year. the website only updates to announce new merch. paradox space launches in an attempt to revive the fandom, which has some success, but not nearly enough to compensate for the loss of interest over the hiatus. behind the scenes, whatpumpkin is wrapped up in legal drama with the odd gentlemen over stolen money and failure to adhere to a development schedule, finally severing their contract at some point over the summer. (hussie vaguely refers to “innumerable unspecified problems” in an mspa blog post, but due to a nda the full story doesnt become public knowledge until summer 2015.) hussie still tweets (but not regularly), but he nukes his tumblr. homestuck does eventually come off hiatus in october, hussie announces that the “one giant update” plan has been cancelled and serial updates resume. [s] game over stirs up the fandom

2015: updates continue regularly through january, at which point another hiatus begins that lasts until 413. on the same day that homestuck resumes, paradox space goes on an indefinite hiatus which continues to this day (”cancellation” would probably be a better word). a6a6i5 begins and, accordingly, the vriscourse comes back with a vengeance (although the fandom is now much smaller). davekat is canonized and surges to become the most popular ship in the fandom practically overnight. homestuck continues updating for a few months, with page after page of huge blocks of ponderous dialogue, reaching an emotional climax at the end of the summer with [s] terezi: remem8er. homestuck goes back on indefinite hiatus. early this year, steven universe finishes its first season, and near the end of it, undertale is released, both popular with ex-homestucks. at some point this year, hussie clears his twitter account.

2016: in february, hussie announces that homestuck is Ending, Seriously, For Real This Time. updates resume in late march. homestucks remaining fandom gets worked up, estranged fans rush to catch up, and ex-fans wax nostalgic. [s] collide drops to resounding applause and approval. opinions on homestuck are overwhelmingly positive up until act 7 drops and homestuck officially ends. the ending is almost universally considered a disappointment and the fandom works through the five stages of grief. there is a brief stirring of excitement when volume 10 is published in june, but it doesnt last long. fandom is lukewarm and disparate at best all the way up til october. hiveswap finally gets a trailer at the beginning of the month, and weeks later the credits drop. in spite of homestuck being “over” a canon jewish lesbian wedding is enough to interest a small number of new fans and revive the old ones. snapd8s keep interest high through the end of the year

another thing i forgot to post since i never finished it 

Hello I’m not dead !! :))

theyre both people who grew up from infancy under incredibly adverse circumstances and, instead of acknowledging that that adversity traumatized them, recontextualize their coping mechanisms and survival tactics as “strength”. vriska tells herself that her lusus turning her into a child soldier and constantly dangling the threat of death over her head made her a smarter, stronger, more cunning person. dirk tells himself that growing up isolated from any human contact and being forced to fend for himself against the elements and assassination attempts by the condesce made him capable, self-sufficient, and mature.

they think that adversity made them strong - pressure makes diamonds, steel sharpens steel - and that they are their best selves. and they love their friends (yes, even vriska - look at the way she talks to aradia or terezi), and they want whats best for them. specifically, dirk and vriska want what they think is best for their friends, regardless of their friends actual wants or needs. dirk and vriska think that adversity is what made them strong, so in order to empower their friends, dirk and vriska will be that adversity.

of course this fails because dirk and vriska 1. are stupid children, and 2. lack the social graces or understanding of interpersonal relationships to know when theyre pushing someone past their limits. the only real difference is that vriska is hyper-empathetic, whereas empathy for dirk is a learned skill - vriska has explosive episodes of rage that shes immediately consumed with guilt over, and dirk hurts people because he cant really understand when theyre expressing unease or discomfort

and they both have arcs that revolve around this architecture of strained, broken relationships and inflated egos crumbling around them. all of vriskas friends turn against her. dirks emotional inaccessibility is a prime contributing factor to the trickster clusterfuck. vriska, who thinks that she can handle everything, is killed by terezi in order to prevent a doomed timeline. dirk, who thinks that he can handle everything, is functionally neutered for the entire condesce/aranea conflict when jade teleports him to the furthest reaches of space.

post-retcon homestuck has a lot of flaws (ive written about this extensively before) and one of them is that while dirks arc gets a satisfying resolution, vriskas doesnt. dirk comes face-to-face with his own worst case scenario, how his mindset and behavior has the potential to damage people irreperably, and resolves to make amends and change. (vriska), when divorced from the environment of constant stress and violence that defined her childhood and shaped her as a person, opens up, lets herself be vulnerable, acknowledges her own flaws and shortcomings and ultimately reunites with the terezi from her native timeline. vriska prime doesnt have these same revelations about herself - yes, vriska prime and (vriska) are the same character, and (vriska) exists to show vriskas true nature and potential for introspection and self-awareness, but vriska prime is still exhibiting the flaws (vriska) overcame all the way through the end of homestuck. vriska comes SO fucking close to having a satisfying resolution, swerves, and misses it. thats the fault of bad writing, though.

The Kids in their lands. Huge kudos to Xamag, naturally.