Also guys, listen. I never really liked Dirk to begin with, but I can get why fans of him really didn’t like Meat (or Candy for that matter). But if it helps at all, I feel like it’s pretty clearly spelled out that this is Dirk at his absolute worst? During canon, he was manipulative and aloof, and his entire personal struggle was learning how to resist the urge to take advantage of his friends and to better himself. But then we get this from Meat 25:
It’s pretty clear at this point in Meat that Dirk has achieved his Ultimate Self. He’s acquired power of the meta-textual narrative, and he’s able to “allow” or “disallow” characters to act within the narrative. Maybe I’m wrong, but that smacks of “Ultimate Prince of Heart Powers” to me.
In this quote here, Dirk’s literally telling Rose that the Ultimate Self is a culmination of every version of yourself, ever. Every doomed, alternate, dead, whatever version. (Rose, in the prologue with John, pretty much confirmed this.)
So this is Dirk with every iteration of himself, including the shitty ones. That means, Hal, and Caliborn, and Bro.
So while yeah, somewhere in here is still partially the Dirk that we knew from canon and love, this isn’t the same Dirk anymore. It’s not that he’s gotten bad character development, or bad writing, or is out of character, he’s literally an entire different entity altogether. Slightly further down the page, he literally says that he’s given up his Humanity in order to Ascend.
To me, it seems like she was right to be worried. Dirk may be “better” in that he’s more realized, more powerful, more “himself”, but he was never going to be good in the moral sense of the word.
