by lackadaisicallexicon

He knew himself a villain—but he deem’d



The rest no better than the thing he seem’d;

And scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid

Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.

He knew himself detested, but he knew

The hearts that loath’d him, crouch’d and dreaded too.

Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt

From all affection and from all contempt

Lord Byron, The Corsair

Dirk Strider isn’t just the Byronic hero we need. He’s the Byronic hero we deserve.

The Byronic hero, for reference, is the ultimate incarnation of the anti-hero. You’ve seen him (and they do tend to be male); a self-absorbed, arrogant, intense social outcast of the most sexually enticing order. Just a quick trip to the “Dirk Strider” or “Bro Strider” tags will show you a perfect image of what I’m talking about.

Even before Dirk’s introduction, it was made clear that he was emphatically not like the other Alpha Kids/Beta guardians. Where Nanna was informative but generally passive, Grandpa was taxidermized or might as well have been, and Mom Lalonde spent most of her time as teen angst fuel for her daughter’s dark descent, Bro Strider was painted from the very beginning as an ubermensch, both by Dave’s fear-tinged admiration and by Bro’s own impossibly heroic abilties. Before he had a name, we knew Dirk was a lion among men.

His post-Scratch introduction page is more than obliging in reinforcing Dirk’s nature as an unattainable standard of hypermasculine perfection: in addition to having all the brute strength of the athlete (Dirk’s sparring regimen, after all, is identical to that of Equius), Dirk is startlingly intelligent, programming robots and, despite living across the ocean from the only other human to live for centuries, has amassed a working knowledge of centuries-old pop culture, ancient history, and engineering. He is both physically and intellectually superhuman.



These traits alone, though, are not enough to make Dirk the compelling character he is. It’s not difficult to be fantastically strong or intelligent in fiction; most protagonists in all fiction are some mixture, though typically diluted, of both. The traits that make Hussie’s Byronic hero so great are two less common ones.

First, and more common of the two, Dirk’s traits are concentrated. If Batman is a “Marty Stu”, Dirk is the patron deity of self-insert fanfiction. Dirk is hyperbolic in his every quality: fast enough to move objects without seeming to change position, strategic, capable of programming his own personality into a computer. This isn’t in and of itself particularly special; polymathic tendencies are par for the course in Byronic heroes, although it bears repeating that Dirk’s degree is less so. There is a difference between being impressive and being a demigod; Dirk falls much closer to the latter.

It’s the second of Dirk’s special traits that really makes him shine, and that is his externalization of self. Dirk doesn’t view himself in the first person, so to speak—he sees all his actions through the conscious lens of an outside observer, which allows him the unique privilege of being both the insufferable hero and one of the people that despises him. The self-hate he shows is honest, and so is the confidence. The same child who wrote “The Prince is awake. Your shit is wrecked.” built an AI that treats him exactly how he would like to be treated: like garbage.



Dirk is unable to stand his own personality, but he considers himself unable to change it without an act of self-destruction. This is where the true genius of the Prince of Heart title comes into play. As a “destroyer of souls”, Dirk is of course capable of doing so to those of other people, but more often and more successfully, he does it to himself. This is reflected not just in his desire to destroy the AR, but his current glitch-enabled solipsism and his endless rants in Trickster mode.

And yet, despite all these qualities, despite his self-absorption and abusive behavior, Dirk manages to work in some common humanity, best exemplified in his platonic love for Roxy Lalonde but also shown in the Crypt Bed conversations just after the Trickster episode, when he admitted that he’d been wrong, both in his opinion of Jake and the way he treated him. He isn’t perfect, but shows signs of a new character path: the Byronic hero turned straight.



No, not that kind of straight.



Dirk is showing signs of developing a new moral code, one revolving around being the same powerhouse he’s always been, only without the grievous harm to his personal relationships. Acknowledging his mistakes in a way that doesn’t make him harm himself, and admitting that the fault in others isn’t his to fix—these are steps Dirk is taking to go from the stylish abuser he was as Bro to the hero he was always meant to be.