“I’m gonna go read that rp even though my partner hasn’t replied yet, maybe I’ll drop a comment asking if they’re oka – “
This user has been permanently banned from Cherubplay.
“whoa what the fuck even happened here”
What to remember when roleplaying Dirk Strider
Yo, yall, I saw someone in the cherubplay tag asking about a guide for this and I like to think I’m pretty good at Dirk roleplaying, so let’s go.
I was going to try and keep this away from most “fanon vs. canon” stuff, but as a heads up, with both Striders it’s fairly impossible to avoid talking about that because they put up such fronts that get read as their actual character. (More on that in a sec.)
While on the one hand you have the misreadings of Dirk that result in desperate, clingy, whiny “looking for doms” bed starfish, on the other hand, you have the suave, domineering, puppeteer Dirks who control literally everything their friends do, are always in control, and definitely never panic in a bad situation. While both of those misreadings are bad, I’d actually argue the second is more OOC than the first, and this is a post about why.
Anyway, this is gonna be a really long post because I like talking about Dirk and his complexes way too much, so hit the readmore.
1. Dirk is actually really bad at being in control.
There’s a popular piece of art that circles every once in a while that has both Striders thinking “This is it, I’m the only one who can do this, it’s all up to me.” While Dave looks frankly abjectly terrified – sweating, furrowed eyebrows, wide eyes – Dirk looks smug. He’s smirking.
I want you to take that art as an accurate representation of the Striders, and I want you to throw it out. No slamming on the art. It’s good art. But it was made in early act 6, when Dirk was still playing up his puppetmaster persona and before we’d started to peel back the layers of the Striderian onion.
Dirk likes to think he has everything in hand because he’s fond of the idea of being that sort of capable person. His role model, after all, is famed filmmaker Dave Strider, who not only spent his life making parodic ironic films ribbing at the Batterwitch, but also killed the juggalo presidents and gave his life trying to stop the Condesce’s rule of earth. Dirk has also grown up in an environment where he has very little he can control, so of course he idealizes the concept of pulling strings in every situation, having a hundred Xanatos gambits lined up at once and watching them slot into each other like the perfect metaphorical Rube Goldberg machine.
Here’s the problem: He’s shit at it.
This first gets called to attention by the autoresponder, who, unlike Dirk, is capable of handling this sort of mass manipulation thanks to being a supercomputer who can devote his attention to multiple things at once. Dirk thinks he has the second self thing under control. Dirk is wrong – he zones out a lot IRL as he’s looking after his dreamself. Dirk thinks he has the Derse situation under control. He’s wrong – Jane and Jake stumble into the Red Miles, Jane ultimately dying and Jake barely making it out alive. Even Unite Synchronization was probably handled by Hal/the AR (”leave the synchronization issues to me”), because it is all but impossible for a human being with a limited perception of the world to build that plan on the fly. But even if it was handled by Dirk – well, so what? It’s one thing he handled right amid a pile of things he handled wrong.
Dirk can’t plan or control Jake’s reaction to his advances. Dirk can’t control or plan how their session will proceed. Dirk can’t puppeteer his friends through their personal issues, or even do it for himself. And when the chips are down …
2. Dirk panics. Dirk panics a lot.
Hey, remember this?
Or maybe this?
How about this?
Here we have three different flavors of Dirk Panic!
Remember that thing I said about throwing out that art? Yeah, come back to that. It’s not entirely right. Dirk often doesn’t panic in battle situations. We see him dispatch a bunch of drones with no trouble, and even while the Jack brigade is kicking his ass, he seems pretty in control of his own emotions. Dirk knows he’s a capable fighter. Battle doesn’t scare him.
Social stuff? Hoo boy.
Dirk grew up alone, in the middle of an ocean, as one of the only two humans remaining on earth. He convinced himself that social interaction over the internet and across time was enough, but he always remained pretty sure that he was fucking up this socialization thing somehow. Jake runs off and he’s so completely at a loss for why that he leaves a gigantic log desperately trying to reach out and get answers. Roxy corners him and he’s so incapable of fighting back or finding an out that he desperately screams “I’M TOO COOL FOR THIS!” even as she all but forces Tricksterdom upon him. He meets with his brother, who he’s idolized since he was an infant and dreamed about speaking to … but his brother doesn’t seem to want to talk to him at all period, and all he can think is, is something wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with me?
This is because:
3. Dirk puts up a massive front, and isn’t very high on himself at all. In fact …
Here we really get to the heart of the issue, and why there’s so many misunderstandings of Dirk circling around out there.
Dirk might not be a Knight, but he has all the same hallmarks as Dave of desperately armoring himself in “being cool” to avoid letting people see the raw underbelly underneath. If you come out of Homestuck reading that Dirk believes he’s the best thing since sliced bread, then … well, then he fooled you. You saw his front, accepted that for all he is, and moved on, and somewhere, the metafictional concept of Dirk probably let out a sigh of relief and wiped sweat off his forehead.
Dirk deflects compliments from Jake routinely.
Dirk says that he believes effusive praise can destroy him.
The AR/Hal/whatever you’d like to call him states that irony was all either of them really had in response to their basic existential quandaries.
Part of the front is their irony, and this is touched on in canon pretty damn early when Dirk tries to explain to Jane the importance of irony and sincerity being intertwined. I actually recommend the Detective Pony tumblr for an interesting look at how this would express itself. Detective Pony is ironic. But it becomes sincere very quickly. Dirk starts caring too much about his story. But he has to mask that in more irony, but then he has to make sure you realize he really does care about that. Wrapped in another layer of irony, because he doesn’t want you to know how sincere he is. Wrapped in more sincerity, because he’s scared you’ll think he doesn’t care.
But basically, Dirk believes that the only way he can be worthwhile as a person is through appearing to be devastatingly capable, powerfully strong, and so above it all that he’s looking down his nose at everybody. He is frankly terrified that if people see who he is, under all the grandstanding and the cooldude shades, that they will be repulsed and leave him.
Because …
4. Dirk hates himself.
A lot.
Let’s just go over the greatest hits, here:
Dirk believes that his inability to return Roxy’s feelings makes him less of a good person, and that if he was truly “good,” he would be able to put aside who he is and give her what he believes she deserves.
Dirk describes his persona as “dismal” and states that he feels he is drowning in it, that he longs to “escape himself” but that it’s entirely impossible. This escalates to him nearly fucking murdering another version of himself mid-nervous breakdown, in a shortsighted and futile attempt to rid himself, by proxy through the responder, of the traits he finds most repulsive.
The responder, by the by, fairly literally having been built to spit Dirk’s bile back in his face constantly, just so he can never escape the reminder of how loathsome a person he is and that this is what other people have to deal with.
Despite not having even talked to Jake to learn his opinions on what transpired between them, Dirk routinely asserts that he is a toxic individual who bullied Jake into a relationship, assuming that Jake had no agency of his own and hated every moment of their time together. (Also note how he assumes his other friends feel similarly; he later tells Dave that all of them don’t really know how truly awful he is deep down and their fondness toward him is unmerited.)
Dirk even attempts to claim responsibility for Bro’s abuse, even though Dave immediately counters by explaining that Dirk isn’t responsible for it and that Bro’s relationship with Dave had a lot of different power dynamics than the relationship between Dirk and Jake.
This is why seeing past Dirk’s front is important. If you come out of Homestuck believing Dirk thinks he’s rad and nobody else can compare to him, you’ve missed something. There’s a post circling right now which argues that Dirk may suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. I couldn’t disagree with it more, because it misunderstands Dirk’s posturing to be real, sincere high-on-himself attitude. (Again, not to bag on the post; it’s well put together and I more than support MI headcanons, and read Dirk as mentally ill myself. I just disagree with this specific reading.) Dirk wants you to think he’s high on himself, because he is terrified that if you get too close you will see the screaming hellpit of self-loathing that exists at all hours within him.
5. He’s lonely. (And extroverted.)
Imagine never growing up with a single hug. Deprived face to face human interaction for your entire life. Imagine realizing you are the last person on earth, and imagine having that endless horizon of loneliness broken by friends who seem to actually care about who you are.
Dirk definitely gets a little condescending with his friends. Without a doubt. “Be more like Jane” and “be more like Jake” get said to the opposing parties with frequency. Before she quits, he’s kind of an ass to Roxy about her drinking. But Dirk cares so deeply about his friends that when he’s required to give up his life in hopes of saving them, he barely even hesitates.
Roxy suggests in early A6A5 that Dirk and Jake, once the session started, were practically inseparable, which explains a lot of why Jake finally got overwhelmed and ran for the hills. But from Dirk’s perspective – Dirk, who unlike Jake, longs for human contact and is desperate for social interaction that isn’t through a computer – he was probably overjoyed. He gets to hang out with his best friend and, now, boyfriend, in real life, with no boundaries of time or space between them. His friends are no longer just colored text entities he can only interact with online. They’re real people who exist in a real world space and he gets to hang out with as much as he wants.
(But you tie that in to his desperate terror that people will hate him once they get too close and see what kind of person he “really” is, and, well, it’s a disastrous cocktail.)
Now, I’m not saying you have to dwell on all this stuff in frilly, ridiculous fluff RP, or even in serious angst RP, but I am saying that this is stuff I always keep in mind when I play Dirk. Yeah, even AU versions of him. His complexes are so tied to how he reacts to things that I don’t like to tread too far from the basics.
Here’s some smaller tips that are less general personality and more just, things for your RP.
1. Don’t be afraid of the metaphors, and don’t use them too much.
Yeah, Striderian metaphor, I know. I was really afraid of them when I first started out, too. This is one thing where it really helps to just go out there and get some practice. Fuck around on msparp (if you dare) until you have the touch down. You can metaphor anything if you try hard enough. Have a look at some of Dirk’s more well-known metaphors for inspiration, but keep in mind, Dirk doesn’t metaphor as much or in as drawn out a fashion as Dave, so you already have a lot less to be afraid of.
For that matter, Dirk also almost never metaphor rambles when he’s stressed or serious. Dave, on the other hand, definitely does (Openbound when he’s talking about meeting Dirk; the Dave+Rose dreambubble chats pre-Cascade; even the leadup to Penis Ouija). In fact, Dirk makes a halfhearted attempt to metaphor a couple times when he’s being serious in the godtier chats, but drops it with “god, whatever, you know what I mean” (namely, when he’s talking about Roxy falling off the horse).
2. But don’t be afraid to go over the top either.
There’s a great example of a prompt which uses the well-worn decapitation meme as inspiration, describing how Dirk is so humiliated by a nosebleed in a gym that he considers how he’ll have to move to an amazon village and sell handicrafts, or maybe he’ll even have to decapitate himself. That sort of thing is great. If you’re going to metaphor, really get deep down in there. Don’t be afraid of being absurd. A lot of Dirk’s canon metaphors end in the absurd.
3. General grammatical tips
- Dirk’s grammar is more or less perfect, but sometimes,
- He breaks lines with commas when he’s indicating a pause. (He always starts the next line with a capital letter though.)
- He drops g’s from “ing” words occasionally; use your discretion. He does it a lot with “fucking” -> “fuckin’,” but always uses an apostrophe.
- He is not above sbahj references.
4. I mean, he’s gay though.
Not to bag on any other RPs, but a lot of misinformation flies around that Dirk said he doesn’t like to be labeled, or that Dirk deliberately avoided calling himself gay, when what happened is that he told Roxy it was an outdated term for the two of them, but later confirmed that he is only attracted to guys. If you want to play him as “not liking labels,” that’s fine and it’s your thing, but he’s still gay. Also, don’t be an asshole to people who do have him identify actively as gay.
I’ve ranted a lot on this subject. Let’s not get into it.
5. He’s just awkward.
When he talks, especially when he’s expressing affection. Look at this nerd.
(additionally, “Hello, is this Dave?” which is hard to screenshot and capture the spirit because glitchtext.)
6. misc. annoyance notes
- Dirk might have watched some anime as cultural research, but he probably is not a full on weeb and almost definitely doesn’t use fanboy Japanese.
- Though it’s long deleted, Hussie stated once that Dirk is not a brony and doesn’t even really like the show; he just likes Rainbow Dash. It’s logical to assume that Dirk probably also got into that as cultural research, in order to try and figure out what about that show appealed to adult men in the early 2010s.
Neither of these are make or breaks they’re just my personal gripes about Homestuck fandom’s treatment of Dirk when he’s canonically into philosophy, coding, and even a bit of art (let’s not forget his glorious “porn” for Caliborn).