@ofthcvoid said: tell me about dirk and the alphas, how does he view them, what does he feel about them, what does he think...
this is going to be an entire doozy actually geez. alright let’s get going
i want to start with jane, because his relationship with her is, while still complicated, easiest to tackle. dirk sees himself in jane to some extent, more so than roxy or jake -- he thinks they’re the most logical of the group, the most grounded. they’re the same brand of cynical. they get each other, but i feel they’d also clash in such a way that would be pretty ugly for the both of them. jane’s got a temper and dirk’s pretty volatile and he knows that, right? he’s well aware of his own vices and likes to think he’s pretty well versed on jane’s. something i think about a lot is how it’s established that dirk tells jane she should be more like jake (and vice versa, but i’ll get to that later) -- dirk really does adore jane, right, but feels like she’s missing this kind of lust for life, this recklessness that she of all people can afford. in many ways, dirk’s pretty jealous of jane. where she lives, how she was raised, her leg-up on chances with jake, etc... she’s got a lot of stuff that, in an ideal world, dirk feels like he’d enjoy.
let me talk about the birthday thing real quick. that wasn’t about jane, that was about jake, right? it wasn’t that he didn’t want to see jane at all. he did, because she’s his friend and he does love her!! their talk on the quest bed is VITAL. he carves himself open for her (and yes it isn’t the place or the time, but such is a dirk s.trider drama), comes clean in such a way that we only see twice before; once when he’s threatening to kill hal because he’s sick of himself, once again when everyone’s hopped up on trickster candy. i think jane’s general attitude aids this tbh -- dirk knows she’s not going to pity him, or get too tangled up in the emotions of things, and that’s a comfort for him. jane is his friend -- maybe not his best friend, and maybe they’ve had bumps in the road, but he’d do what he could for her all the same. he loves her. wants the best for her.
roxy? now that’s his best friend. his right hand, his rock, his everything. dirk says it all for me on the quest beds, really: ‘TT: I’m proud of her. [...] TT: She's probably stronger than the other three of us put together.’ roxy is the most important person in his entire life, and will continue to be until the end of said life. dirk loves her so much it’s like difficult for me to put into words?? she’s the closest thing he’s got to family and he knows that. he really does believe she deserves the world and it KILLS him that he can’t give it to her -- that he can’t love her in the way she wants, that he can’t fix their shitty universe so she’d get the chance at a normal life. like he says, not a day didn’t go by where he wasn’t beating himself up about not being able to feel that for her, to let her live the way she wants to. he’d give anything for her in a way that he wouldn’t anyone else.
he worries for her, wants and needs her to be there with him when everything finally slots into place. to my recollection she’s the only person he actually says that he outright loves, and i think that rings true to how he feels about her. she’s a league above the rest.
it’s not all sweetness and light, though. dirk’s not a person with a sunny disposition and he really does think himself into a frenzy sometimes, and i think about what roxy said about d.irkj.ake a lot; ‘the writing was always on the wall’, or something like that. in my head, dirk kind of... okay he sees that as jealousy. as ‘you’re not happy for me because you think if you can’t have me, no one else should get to’. dirk’s capable of talking himself into bitterness with people he adores, and just because roxy is, well, roxy, she’s not exempt from that.
he does love her, though. more than he ever thought he was capable of loving someone. that just means she has all the more power to make him hurt.
jake (: listen. please listen to me. dirk’s in love with jake. i’m not saying that what we got in canon was like peak romance or whatever but dirk is, unquestionably, in love with him. his fucking lantern explodes when jake kisses him for fuck’s sake!! dirk’s in love with jake and it scares the living shit out of him because he already has this achingly low opinion of himself and he just thinks jake is so good, so funny and optimistic and just so fucking bright. he just loves jake so much. like trust and believe roxy is his main girl but the fact of the matter is her flirting, the way it makes him feel guilty, it means it’s all the easier to seek solace in jake, who makes him feel so damn GOOD. like he can do ANYTHING. and THAT’S why he falls for jake, right?? because jake BELIEVES in him, and dirk thinks he’s such a shitty person that he needs jake’s sweet faith in him (and it’s just so casual when we see it in canon; ‘i believe in you!’ ‘you do?’ ‘always have.’) and when he feels like he’s starting to lose that he grips all the harder y’know? he feels so wildly out of control where jake is concerned. it’s terrifying.
as i said in jane’s segment though, he tells jake a lot that he could serve to be more like her. jake is sort of a hot box of rocks, bless him, and doesn’t have the kind of protective outer shell that jane has, and dirk worries that he’s just going to get himself hurt if he carries on believing that life is like a movie and that eventually all the plot threads are going to come together and he’ll get his happy ending. dirk knows better than most that sometimes happy endings just don’t happen (after all, his bro had fought so hard and the world had STILL ended -- how the fuck were they supposed to outdo that). he thinks jake is TOO soft sometimes. that’s why he sends brobot. it wasn’t exactly the best thing for him to do, but look at it from a 13 year old kid’s perspective -- jake was too scared to leave his house because of the monsters and was always saying how much he wanted to scrum!! dirk wanted to give him what he wanted and protect him in one fell swoop.
there’s so much to cover with jake, seriously. dirk’s still in love with him as of the post-credit snapchats and probably always will be, no matter what jake thinks of him. his first love is going to stick with him, probably more severely than it would with anyone else thanks to his status as a heart player. if roxy is who dirk wishes he was, if he wasn’t so intent on getting in his own way, jake is who dirk wishes he could deserve, who he wishes he was good enough for.
