19/10/2017 19:30:07 ¶ ●

callmearcturus:

> So like.

> “dirkjake is bad and unhealthy”

> That’s sure a statement. It really bothers me deeply. The level to which its dismissive and coldhearted really just.

> Dirk and Jake were two teenagers who were struggling with their emerging sexualities. They were two people who lived alone for the vast majority of their lives. Their entry into the game was their first significant interactions with people, for Jake in most of his life, for Dirk in his entire life.

> And they were bad at it. Holy shit, what a novel concept. A massive, stressful part of your life happens, and you don’t handle it with calm. You’re in a game out to kill you with monsters and traps, and you don’t nail it at every turn. You fumble through your new life, overloaded with new situations you could never hope to prepare for, and it doesn’t go well.

> “bad and unhealthy.”

> What really… fucks with me. What gets me hard, is that I’ve been in Dirk Strider’s shoes. I have done things that I’ll never be fully forgiven for, some real and some made up by my brain, but like Dirk, I want to be better. I think at my core there is a toxicity that I might never be able to pull out from the roots, but I’m fucking trying.

> And I know so many people who resonate hard with Jake’s character, who have walked his path and made his mistakes, who are honestly sometimes so fucking relieved to see themselves reflected with such fidelity.

> When people take these complicated characters who made mistakes, and they just write off their futures like that, they say “these two people cannot be together because there was a time when it was bad,”

> the little voice in the back of my head, the one that thinks I can’t be redeemed no matter how much I try, gets louder.

> I need there to be hope for the people who make mistakes. I need there to be forgiveness in the world. I need there to be the understanding that, dude, the person you were when you were 13 is not who you are at 16 or at even fucking 18.

> And maybe that forgiveness is not going to come from you in particular, but the fact you put out these broad stroke statements out to the people who will extend that hopefulness like they should be ashamed of themselves, that’s sick.

> This entire culture of “this person did something I think is bad, so they get written off,” that’s damaging. Especially with characters like Dirk and Jake because, y’all, people relate to these characters. They have lived similar traumas and hurts. They have hurt people in similar ways.

> And they’re just… hopeless, right? They’re bad. They’re unhealthy, huh? And the book closes and that is the end. Nothing happens next.

> That’s fucked up. And frankly, the people who do that, who the hell are you to arbitrate that? And in your life, when you fuck up in a big way, when you hurt people, do you also become damaged goods that can never be better?

> What the hell does that say about us all?

> You know who else is unhealthy and bad? Terezi. Karkat. Dave. Jane. Roxy. Vriska. Rose.

> If you are going to say the past missteps in a relationship make it and the people involved irredeemable, then there are very few people not sullied by that broad stroke.

> Please for the love of god, stop shaming people for a ship, especially to this particular hopeless, unsympathetic tune. Because man. Think about how much you’ve changed in the time between when you made a mistake and now. Think of every person who gave you that chance and who cared about you since then. Were they wrong?

> I don’t think so.