#this is kind of in response to those people in the “worst homestuck character” tourney lol

[exaltior-a]

Personally the amount of people who are either "Jake is a stupid himbo" or "Jake is actively malicious" blow my mind. No, Jake isn't stupid, and he's not evil. He's a sixteen year old who is implied to have a mental disability and/or brain damage (it's not exactly clear, Caliborn claims they have the same developmental disorder and Dirk iirc worries that Jake hit his head too much, I guess you can take either with a grain of salt but I digress), and has not had meaningful real life interactions with other human beings in years. He is in the wrong for his actions, but it feels. Purposefully ignorant to claim he's just stupid or just evil for them.

He's socially stunted. He wants to emulate heroes in movies but lacks self esteem and experience. If the alpha kids had enough time to be more fleshed out (and let's be real, if Hussie cared about Jake) this might have been explored more thoroughly. He'd never had the opportunity to learn how to cope with a relationship, how to communicate his needs, or understand that he can't control how other people perceive him like he can through a computer screen.

He doesn't know healthy boundaries because he's never had to use them, and this goes both ways (allowing his friends to sexualise him and treat him like an object, as well as constantly complaining about his relationship with Dirk to Jane) Like yeah he does run away instead of communicating with Dirk and yeah he does dump all his problems on Jane. I love Jane, but one of her problems is her bottling up her feelings and people pleasing until everything blows up. She should have told him off much sooner, and while he was being a dick, it was partly because she allowed him to feel like it was okay to do, since she never told him it wasn't after the first few times or when she was starting to get aggravated.

His problems with Dirk are a little more complicated because we're never actually shown their relationship or how it broke down, but from what we can gather, Jake felt overwhelmed by Dirk's intensity and decided to ignore him rather than tell him try and avoid confrontation but leading to Dirk being frustrated and breaking up with him. Dirk claims he feels like he bullied Jake into a relationship, and though I personally think that's him making it seem worse than it was, it does mean that Dirk probably was trying to go too fast. I've best heard it is Jake being an introvert pretending to be an extrovert.

This is not to say I don't think people can't dislike or even hate Jake, but it's like. Idk. Misinterpreting a character and disliking that version of them is a little redundant to me.