Do you think the time Roxy harassed Dirk into kissing her counts as assault(or "coercion")? It's uncomfy to think about, especially because they're both overall nice people, but it's been in the back of my mind lately. I get the feeling that if a guy did that to a girl, there would be an outcry. Ugh, I would've liked to see the alpha kids resolve their issues after the final battle.
tw: kind of frank discussions about sexual assault and my own personal feelings on a high level about exploring grey morality in fiction
I think the most important thing to consider when you’re trying these questions out is what the victim thinks, instead of thinking about what the situation would look like in a totally different context with real life people. We already know what Dirk thought of everything that went down, because after Trickster mode ended they talked for like a million words about their feelings. The crypt bed talks are the closest thing we get to a conclusion for the alphas (which sucks so bad, I’m with you there.)
This is why I hate applying real world rules to fiction like they fit 1:1, because they often don’t. Is Dirk written like a victim of assault? Do you feel that his dialog in the events after the trickster arc imply him as one? I don’t think anyone would argue that what Roxy did there was OKAY, it most certainly was not – it was horrendously shitty of her, in fact – but up to that point the context of Dirk and Roxy’s relationship always had this poisonous underpinning of Roxy resenting Dirk for being gay and pressuring him about it in really uncool ways, and we saw on screen first hand what Dirk thought about that stuff. He doesn’t read like an assault victim to me.
Again, in my mind, the most important thing when you’re talking about things like assault is whether or not THE VICTIM FEELS ASSAULTED.
I think given what we saw of Roxy talking to Jane and Jake and Dirk talking to Jane, it’s obvious that Roxy feels absolutely fucking AWFUL about what she did and knows it was absolutely 100% wrong, and I think it’s also obvious that if some rando from Tumblr walked up to Dirk and said soooooooooo Roxy is an abusive manipulator guilty of sexually assaulting you what are you going to do about that Dirk would probably literally punch that rando in the face and then fume about how wrong they were for weeks – Because he personally does not see himself as a victim and his and Roxy’s situation was extenuating, weird, not really translatable to real life, and they love each other deeply despite how fucked up everything is.
The alphas ALL hurt each other deeply over the course of their stories, and it’s a fucking crime that we didn’t get to see them all reconcile on screen, but applying context-free thought exercises to the group that way rubs me the wrong way. Fiction isn’t reality and Roxy dubcon kissing Dirk is just one of a parade of shitty things we see happen on screen over the course of Homestuck.
For instance, Roxy being fucked up on Trickster drugs and being pushier with Dirk than she ever would have off them has an obvious parallel to Jane being fucked up on MIND CONTROL and threatening Jake with literal rape and sexual slavery. Do we take her to task for that too? Or, like, what about 10 seconds ago when Jane trickster’d Jake? That was a pretty uncomfy situation too, wasn’t it? We know what a low state Jake and Jane were in at that time and we know their relationship is in utter shambles because of some combination of entitlement and unrequited pining and poorly handled festering issues. The AR manipulating Jake and Dirk when the AR itself is a victim. Jane in a moment of emotional turmoil stating that she liked Roxy better when she was drinking. The alpha situation gets VICIOUS sometimes, and that is a big part of why I love them so fucking much. Their stories are hella personal and the narrative doesn’t really pull punches.
Back to this, I find the the things Roxy did OFF the drugs “worse”, actually, it’s implied she’d been pretty uncool and guilt trippy about it for years and years and Dirk DID feel like shit about it – not at Roxy, exactly, but at himself. He internalized a lot of it as his problem when it absolutely was not, and I DO think he and Roxy need to work this poison out between them at some point between now and eternity. But the difference between fiction and real life is that I can look at this plot structured in fiction and feel hope that they WILL talk about it and will work it out because this isn’t reality and an actual gay man is not at risk of undergoing actual IRL abuse at the hands of an actual woman. Fiction is a safe arena to tackle hard questions because real people are not put in the position of having to guess at real people’s true feelings and risking perpetuation of actual abuse.
I hope that made sense.
Oh and one last note before the disclaimer – this is a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE part of why I am fucking NOT okay with Roxy having been silently bisexual the whole fucking time. God, the way female sexuality is handled in Homestuck upsets me. If Roxy herself was bisexual the whole time the fact that it NEVER comes up when her struggling with her shitty feelings about Dirk and his orientation were so central to that entire relationship. Jesus. But this post isn’t about that so I won’t go into the full damn rant.
(obvious disclaimer about anyone with personal history with this sort of thing that they project onto the characters etc etc etc I’m not getting into any of that because victims are free to cope however they want and if ascribing a fictional character victimhood in ways that are different from how I read that character is one of them that’s absolutely fine with an asterisk about how that is a very personal mechanism and that reading isn’t and can’t be expected to be universal.)