DIRKJAKE THREAD!!!!

I can't believe Dirk, a teenager, acted slightly clingy towards Jake during his first relationship and the first period of time he had ever been in contact with living IRL humans. Truly he must be the most evil, unforgivable man of all time... a historical monster. JAILED for slight clinginess crimes.

honestly the nerve of these two teenagers who have had little to no social interation. they should have known how to communitate better because we all know that teenagers are very rational, especially in their first relationships, especially when theyre gay. why didnt they just talk? its so easy, duh

miscommunication final bosses

dirkjake rewrote how my brain worked at the ripe age of 13. so proud of myself for growing into the gay man i am today

I will always root for their reconciliation (whether romantic or platonic), until the day I am no longer in this fandom.

Maybe I’m just too painfully sentimental to appreciate the direction they were taken in postcanon (how the epilogues handled them undid the peace I’d seen between them in Credits and it was such a hurt that when I heard of it I swore never to finish reading a single page of the epilogues), but I’m not one to accept the recent reframing of them as toxic yaoi. I was *there* in the days of the first dirkjake discourse, the arguments in A6A5 (late 2012 early 2013) over whether dirk was abusive or jake was an asshole. Been there, done that.

Perhaps that puts me outside the current cool folks table, leaving me one of the few still clinging to the old order of post-Credits dirkjake thought. So be it. Someone has to keep the fire from going out anyway.

[strums pipa.]

There once was a bigname mlm ship. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

It was up there with the greats. We feasted on content. We were finally recovering from discourse of years past.

But.. then some authors wrote some Meat. Dashed our hopes for good. Now all we do is starve. Fan content’s drying up, and now our flame grows cold, just a whisper in the dark.

[melancholy pipa solo]

And will we let the fire go out?

Is this the end for us now?

Sunken ship that has long gone down

Will we let the fire go.. out?

Sometimes I find it hard to talk about these two together, because postcanon really sank this ship so hard even bringing the topic up in many wider fandom spaces provokes a barrage of opinions on how they’re terrible for each other and how it was always doomed to fail or how them supposedly being terrible for each other is part of the appeal.

So I linger on the moments that highlight the strength of their bond in the original comic.

How Jake seems to have such a grasp on Dirk that his mental image of him is a scarily good approximation (with some of Hal’s character mingled in there too to be sure) that is even capable of manifesting the same godtier powers as the real deal.

How it’s Jake believing in Dirk’s capabilities that convinces him to go through with the successful creation of the Auto Responder aka Hal.

How Dirk is one of only two folks (the other is Calliope) that does not belittle Jake’s intelligence, and indeed even gives him credit for it in the long 35-page flashback pesterlog that is their only direct conversation. [Sadly overshadowed by the fact that in the Epilogues both ultDirk and altCalliope esteem Jake as an empty-headed idiot.]

How in the Masterpiece, it’s Dirk getting the crap beat out of him by Caliborn that provokes Jake to unleash holy fire on the scaly bastard, going full Hopesplosion to come to Dirk’s defense.