Strilondes & gender roles

The way all the Strilondes parallel and reflect each other is so interesting to me, but particularly the similarities between Dave and Roxy, and between Rose and Dirk. People talk a lot about “Striders” and “Lalondes” as if they’re logically distinct character categories, but really the similarities between the actual dancestor pairs are mostly superficial ones. Rose and Roxy have similar physical appearances, similar interests (in wizards and creative writing) and similar life circumstances (their struggles with alcoholism), but their deeper characters and temperaments are almost the complete opposite of each other. Meanwhile Dave’s and Dirk’s surface attitudes of cool, stoic badassitude are virtually identical because they’ve both spent their lives obsessed with conforming to the same heroic masculine ideal; yet behind these projected personas their actual personalities are very different.

Dave of course is a naturally goofy, playful and affectionate person forced to adopt a stoic mask by the circumstances of his upbringing. Essentially, Dave is what you get when you take someone a lot like Roxy and have them brought up by someone a lot like Dirk. For Dirk meanwhile the “emotionless badass” façade does seem to at least partially reflect his genuine personality. He is naturally somewhat stoic and aggressive; his outward persona just involves exaggerating those traits and using them to cover the parts of himself that are more vulnerable. We’re not told exactly why Dirk is so obsessive about maintaining such a hypermasculine image, but it probably has something to do with overcompensation for his sexuality.

Just as Dave is a lot like Roxy, though, Rose is a lot like Dirk. And it’s occurred to me that – just as with the former pair – it’s at least possible a lot of the differences between them could have more to do with their responses to their expected gender roles than with their inherent personalities. Just as Dave could be viewed as essentially a version of Roxy who’s been forcibly “masculinized”, Rose is in some ways a version of Dirk who’s been partially “feminized”.

Both Rose and Dirk care a lot about projecting an attitude of superiority to others. But Rose tends to project her desire for superiority through her intellect, while Dirk’s is more strongly expressed through physical toughness and prowess in combat. Dirk is clearly very intelligent, and he does sometimes make a show of it – he tries to portray himself as a tactical mastermind and talks about having been “pretentious” about his philosophical interests when he was younger. But there are other times when he seems to downplay his own intelligence, while playing up his combat abilities instead.

While Dirk definitely cares about being seen as clever, the ability to kick ass with a ninja sword seems to be more central to his self-worth and sense of identity. In his conversation with Dave, he makes it sound like swordsmanship is his only useful skill:

Rose, in contrast, plays up her intelligence at every opportunity. She speaks and writes with great verbosity and with complex, elaborate language (Dirk can occasionally be loquacious too, but much less frequently and with less artificial showiness than Rose – when he does it it feels a bit less affected and more like he’s just talking in the way that comes naturally to him). Intelligence might not exactly be a traditionally “feminine” trait, but it’s more acceptable in a girl than physical aggressiveness is (and Rose’s particular intellectual interests – in literature and psychology, mainly – are on the more traditionally-feminine end of the spectrum). But while Rose is clearly also capable of Dirk-like violence and aggression, she usually only expresses it under extreme circumstances – like during her Grimdark rage following her mother’s death, or when suicidally charging the Condesce after Kanaya’s in GAME OVER.

Joke or not, this quote again suggests the idea that Rose is constantly bottling up a lot of her darker or more aggressive tendencies. She seems to be actively repressing her violent, “masculine” side, similarly to the way Dave has spent a lifetime repressing his empathic, “feminine” side.

Obviously it’s not as simple as “Rose and Dirk (or Dave and Roxy) are just genderswapped versions of the same character”, but I think it’s interesting how these individuals who are otherwise very similar seem to outwardly emphasize different aspects of their personalities based on gendered expectations.