Can u elaborate on why u don’t old the ta Vris Jake parallels? Ur the only one I trust with the boy (Jake)
The gist of it is that it’s a too shallow of a parallel to be taken dead-seriously, which it was.
As pages, tavros and jake have ‘echoing’ material - the aspirational imaginary figures- tavros’ quite fake and jake’s unbelievably true to life ghost-, tavros shooting grandpa and jake shooting a fairy bull in return, undergoing training to reach some kind of locked potential / grand reward for being a ‘hard class’… but they’re of different aspects, and have a startlingly different life setup from the get-go. One is a breath player, one is a hope player. One is an airheaded troll boy into fatal live action-roleplaying as facilitated by a monstrous government and the other is a human kid trapped on the destroyed remnants of his bombed old house because if he dared to went out, for at least 7 or so years, he would have been mauled by monsters.
Dirk isn’t to jake what vriska was to tavros.
Aranea is, and this is emphasized multiple times. She tries to seduce him, gives up when he’s unwilling, and pries his head wide open with sylph-y light powers for his destructive hope potential while he’s having a meltdown (To “cure” every fault and fissure on his mind, what curious phrasing.). When that doesn’t go as planned, because her plan is very hastily done, she impales him with dirk’s sword and jane at the other end. Heroic/Just death.
But even then, they’re not a clear parallel, because jake isn’t tavros. No matter how much he’s judged otherwise, he IS quite perceptive and difficult to blindly manipulate. He often ends up blowing back on the hands of whoever is trying to influence him. (Jake’s biggest influence is his own self, and the hopeful artifice and lies he tells himself, contradicting even his own wants.)
Jake can even recognize AR by his speech patterns, and makes a point to separate his existence from dirk’s.
Which takes me to the next point; PQ jake seems oddly unaware of AR’s existence when describing dirk, to a comical point where dirk comes off as an hyper-gaslighting individual to jake’s painfully clueless one (which as per above, is just not true.) And past that, brobot comes off as an object of senseless aggression, going as far as breaking into jake’s home after he’s retreated. That strikes me as retroactively painting jake as a target with no safe spaces, even in his own room, for a robot whose’s main purpose was this:
protecting him from constant threats and challenging him in the jungle to become stronger to be able to stand up more on his own.
Dirk didn’t build it to attack him while he’s sitting around watching a movie, or even for him to use it on maximum difficulty from the get go- brobot has a novice mode, but jake feels patronized by it, and purposefully sets the difficulty higher against advice to not do so. Dirk sent him the bot when they were 13 as a gift, because there was no other way he could materialize himself to assist. It always makes me a little upset when that is portrayed as something solely, inherently malicious of him.
Dirk isn’t trying to be malicious to jake, nor does he taunt him about not being capable enough. Jake isn’t bound to dirk purely out of fear. quite the contrary.
This isn’t, in any conceivable way, equal to tavris.
if Dirkjake is anything, it’s a cringe mirror to vrisrezi
