#hal.pdf

My main opinion on Dirk is that Dirk does not function as a standalone character. There needs to be a secondary character for him to respond to for him to not fall totally flat. Sometimes that character is Hal, sometimes it's Roxy, sometimes it's Caliborn, sometimes it's Jane, so on and so forth.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's completely fine to have a character that works best as part of a dynamic... But that is not a limitation that Hal has, and Hal has a lot more going on with his character than "Suicidal Queer Teen". I don't have much interest in Suicidal Queer Teen. That was me. There's not even really an interesting twist on it, he's kinda just a regular Suicidal Queer Teen. Hal's got a lot of baked in philosophical questions about what it means to be human, though, and that's something I can actually work with.

Dirk not functioning very well as a standalone character also means that a lot of explorations of him as a character are more or less explorations of his relationships, typically with Jake, almost always romantic. Dirk being a Suicidal Queer Teen means that when an exploration is standalone, it's often bordering on fetishistic in its portrayal of queer suffering and poor mental health. Either way, the vibe is always downright voyeuristic, and I'm just not much of a fan. Voyeurism is a strong theme with the Striders, stemming from their ties to the Saw franchise. I don't mind that, that's intentional within the confines of the writing of the comic itself... But when fans are doing it by way of their fan material being like that, it's not an act serving a grand narrative purpose, because we are real people and not a part of the arcs of the Striders, nor are we set up as extradiegetic elements helping to carry the overarching themes of their characters. We are just human beings doing voyeurism through the means of fiction.