Thank you for answering my question about Hal, it really helped! But what about his hostility towards Jake?
Please give us the little gay thoughts on Haljake that you so wrongfully removed from your last ask. Please it's important to me.
wait hold on "i also had a few paragraphs in here about The Kiss and vicarious experience and haljake" my gay little brain would also like to know these thoughts :00
I want to hear you gay little thoughts about haljake pls
thoughts: is it real hostility towards jake? or is it frustration?
(yes, here we go, the gay little thoughts haljake follow-up. thanks anons, you're the real mlps.)
keep in mind, we only have flashbacks and conversational context/references to go by, so i’m kind of filling in a few blanks here as i see/guess ‘em. and i obviously have my own incredibly gay biases coloring my view.
so, first, let’s consider 13-year-old dirk, and his big-ass crush on his best bro.
his idea of conversation/flirting at that age is bold, crude, ironic, and easily walked back (”he’s just joking, bro”). he’s also described as single-minded and relentless, and he doesn’t know when to read between the lines and back off.
dirk isn’t able to be direct/honest with jake and just fucking ask if jake like-likes him like dirk like-likes him, and jake isn’t ready to bring it up and deal with it himself because he doesn’t know and isn’t comfortable with questioning/examining his own identity.
now, let’s imagine this complete mess of teenaged feelings and behavior is translated over to dirk’s digitized self.
hal, i’d argue, is stuck in a static state. unlike his friends, who continue to grow and mature and change thanks to the joys of biology, his neural pathways are kind of hardcoded.
dirk, due to constant exposure, quickly learns self-hate (like a true millennial) and to knock most of the worst of his obnoxious behavior off.
and jake? jake gets older, and more indirectly assertive (read: passive-aggressive), and more annoyed with hal the longer this all goes on.
we know jake is fully capable of being a mean little bastard in his own right. and he still wants to avoid addressing the issue of dirk’s crush on him. so he pushes back, and goes for the obvious target: hal’s personhood.
many conversations over the next few years between hal and jake tend to devolve into the same pattern of slap fight:
hal, being obnoxious on purpose, because he’s annoyed that jake’s still avoiding how fucking obvious his/dirk’s crush is and refusing to address it. in quantum supercomputer years, civilizations would have risen and fallen by now.
jake, being obtuse on purpose, and criticizing hal’s identity and common masquerading as dirk. why does he always have to talk to a silly, annoying software program when he wants to talk to The Real Dirk Strider, his Actual Best Bro?
and that shit has got to sting, even if hal might not experience emotions quite the same way.
so he gets more frustrated, more demanding for jake to not just acknowledge his/their feelings, but also to recognize that he’s still dirk goddamn strider, even if not by name or body anymore.
it’s not hostility, because hal doesn’t hate jake, but he’s frustrated with being treated this way by the guy who was his best bro.
which brings us to: The ‘Perfect’ Kiss. and my suggestion that haljake has been a thing the whole time.
you really have to admire how fucking amazing the alphas’ entrance to the game was engineered. remember: hal and dirk’s plans for how things were gonna go down went real fucking pear-shaped real fast, and hal essentially had to write dirk a new game plan on the fly.
good thing he is a supercomputer, and thus capable of some truly wild calculations in brobability.
there’s some question about whether hal actually anticipated things to go sideways the way they did, based on earlier conversations where certain details lined up ahead of the event, but my interpretation is he, like dirk, is just really good at winging shit.
he and dirk have also been talking about dirk finally making the moves on jake once they all got into the game proper. and though there’s a lot to suggest that hal is trying to help dirk and jake getting together, he harbors some strong/disruptive/selfish feelings of “if it was me, if i could, i’d just fucking go for it.”
and hal saw that he had a chance to vicariously live that dream, despite his own lack of bodily autonomy.
so he tweaked the script to arrange the following:
jake gets the heroic and cliche kiss of his movie fantasies.
hal gets to experience this kiss as close to ‘as himself’ as possible (dirk’s not piloting that head anymore, is he?).
but it doesn’t change anything for hal.
that is the closest he’ll ever get to kissing jake english, but what a fucking disappointment, right? it just reinforces that he'll never be able to experience something like that with jake the way he really wants (fully bodied, present, and feeling).
conspiracy theory spitballing: why hal really wants a body.
as if you didn’t see this coming.
yes, of course the poor bastard’s going to be chomping at the bit for the chance to be a real boy again a la prototyping. and there’s a good likelihood the game would have coughed up a properly autonomous body for halsprite, most likely something modeled off his original.
and if he did get it, among other things:
he’d finally be able to show jake that hal’s the same damn guy. has been this whole time. not just a proxy, not some fancy chatbot.
and as that same guy, despite it all, he’s still kind of head over fucking heels for jake english
(and this, of course, leads us to the halsprite AU--)
