Route 29: ｍｏｄｓ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
these_balls) wrote2010-04-27 11:40 pm
these_balls) wrote2010-04-27 11:40 pm
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Understand the secrets and have some fun
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Dave Strider | Homestuck | Reserved (1/3)
Name: Asher
Personal Journal:
E-mail: ash (dot) sofman [at] gmail
AIM/Plurk/Etc.:
Timezone: EST
Current Characters in Route: Agent York | Red vs. Blue |
Character
Name: Dave Strider
Series: Homestuck
Timeline: [S] Game Over
Canon Resource Links: Dave's entry on the MSPA Wiki
Personality:
DAVE: we just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best
-- But I'll try to keep this short, since this app's already running long and I go over a lot of this in Strengths/Weaknesses.
If Mowgli were a feral child raised within internet bro-dude culture rather than in the jungle, he might have turned out to be a lot like Dave. Dave is a mouthy, self-aware, clever nineties kid whose entire worldview seems to run on memes and storytelling tropes, but he's also deeply loyal, blindingly insecure, and just a little bit self-martyring. That may not be surprising given that his canon title is the Knight of Time. For all his claims to cool irony (and god I hope that's the last time I have to use either of those words in this app), when the chips are down, what Dave shows is love and valor, not distance.
He buries his chivalrous core beneath a trash-heap of pop culture references and pithy commentary. Like many Homestuck characters, he likes to hear himself talk, and his favorite game is wordplay--he's a self-described rapper but is also strangely well-read, given that he's spent his life since he was thirteen on a literal space rock. He doesn't even need an audience to spit words at; Dave is perfectly content to talk to himself should no conversation partner be available. If that sounds a little lonely, well. Yeah. It is. As chill as he makes himself out to be with the state of his world, he's an apocalypse survivor, and isolation shapes a lot of how he interacts now with the world. With the living population of his immediate world reduced to six, and less than half of those six willing even to speak with him, he's internalized a lot of unhealthy ideas and doesn't even know how to verbalize what's bothering him.
Some of this stems back to his relationship with his late legal guardian, Bro. In another, less abysmal timeline, Dave admits that, given the way Bro alternately neglected and picked on him, he can only think that Bro actively hated taking care of him and thought of the exercise as an ironic (damn it) game. The neglect has made Dave weak to positive attention; he'd do most anything for anyone who indulges in his absurd meme games or shows interest in his interests. The attacks have made him expect antagonism as a matter of course, but he hates it; he'd rather avoid conflict and pain than engage, even if in the long run it hurts him. And he responds to genuine kindness like a light-starved flower turning to the sun. Also, because Bro was so emotionally unavailable, Dave gathered most of his ideas on How Things Work from movies, with, you know. About as much success as one might imagine he'd achieve.
Dave at this canonpoint hasn't even begun to unpack his feelings on the Bro Situation, and likely will still say that Bro was within an acceptable range of eccentricity for a parental figure. He's never had another model of behavior with which to compare Bro. After being orphaned and tossed into a little space can with a bunch of other traumatized teenagers, he has no idea what being cared for responsibly actually looks like--and he doesn't know how to show others he cares, either, except through stupid and often pointless acts of sacrifice that they never wanted from him.
Because he does care, profoundly, horrifically, about the people who do care about him. About anyone who pays attention to him, really. His friends, who really like him, who indulge his weird memes and share their interests with him, too, despite his professed Better Opinions, are the most important parts of Dave's life, and he's died for them repeatedly. He's generally encouraging to creepy strangers on the internet--or, well, willing to engage in conversation, anyway, as long as they're not actively harassing him and his. He believes that there's a right way to behave, and that adhering to that unstated code should make things come out all right--which means, when things go "wrong," his first instinct is to blame himself. The importance of the Time aspect in Homestuck doesn't help with the whole taking-responsibility-for-unavoidable-shit problem.
Basically, someone just come help this mess of a child, oh my god. He'll love you forever and will grow so much given a little time and care. You'll never meet a more loyal nerdy rap ninja.
Dave Strider | Homestuck | Reserved (2/3)
STRENGTHS
✓ Loyal
Here's how it goes: You made friends with Dave! Dave will now die for you. I wish I could say this is an exaggeration, but Dave doesn't skimp when it comes to his crew: He's quietly gone to his death more than once to assist his friends and family and tends to trust without question the advice of people he thinks like him--right up until it's too late to salvage either himself or his opinion of them.
His dedication extends to ideas as well as people. Dave runs on intuition and an unexamined assumption that there's a right and wrong way for the world to go, the basis for which is largely rooted in the structure of Western narratives. To his thinking, heroes should always win, and good people either shouldn't suffer or should recoup more than was taken from them.
The flipside of this is that his loyalty and belief in a positive future can be pretty easily used against him. He can also trap himself into thinking things have to be a certain way because it feels right or adheres to his general outlook on life when it would be wiser to seek an alternate path.
✓ Clever
While he's no Rose or Jade, Dave can be surprisingly resourceful, particularly when it comes to exploiting loopholes for stupid gains. He's good at noting what's available in his environment and working around obstacles in unexpected ways rather than ramming through--see his breaking the legendary sword to get it out of the stone, or deploying the intellibeam laserstation to make a copy of his server disk for Jade.
Some of this stems from a vaguely scientific curiosity to test boundaries and see just how dumb things can possibly get. The rest comes from his quick, intuitive way of thinking; he's used to working on instinct and has a good head for when things do or don't feel right.
Flipside: Mostly he uses this intellect for inane reasons. Also, because he draws conclusions so fast, he can miss a lot, be easily distracted, or make too many surface assumptions.
✓ Takes things in stride, up to a point
Dave's got a fairly high-level ability to take what the world presents him and just, like, accept that that's what's going down. It's not exactly that he's chill; he's just resigned to never understanding anything, ever. He bears a sense of miserable obligation to everything being both a) stupid and b) awful, so that when bad things happen, he just goes on and concentrates on the things he CAN do. Sometimes those things are limited to drawing crappy cartoons while trying to forget all the badguys he'll eventually have to fight.
He's going to take to Pokéworld like a duck to water.
Flipside: What he's really doing is ignoring the problem until it either goes away or it's too big for him to "deal" with. This does not actually constitute dealing with anything at all, and will usually come back around later to bite him in the butt, especially when it comes to emotional issues.
This also means he doesn't often say no to people, even when he's uncomfortable.
✓ Brave
But when the chips are down, Dave lives up to his title as the Knight of Time. As insecure as he is, as scared as he can get, the boy is very, very brave, and he will give everything for what he thinks is right: his friends, through thick and thin.
Flipside: It frequently gets him killed.
WEAKNESSES
✗ Easily influenced
Dave has no leadership skills whatsoever and cannot take initiative. He barely makes his own decisions half the time, and spends most of his time in SBURB following others' orders, even if he drops some token snark about it. A troll that he knows indirectly killed his best friend (if in an alternate timeline) wins him over with relative ease by playing into his silly meme games, and he trusts her to the point that she gets an alternate version of him killed just to prove a point. And even after THAT, in this timeline, the two of them end up romantically involved to some capacity.
It's unbearably easy to get Dave to like, or at least accept, anyone who pays attention to him, and the dumb, distractable boy lets just about anyone boss him around for it.
✗ Emotions, what are those
On those occasions that events overwhelm Dave's ability to go with the flow--confronting his own mortality, for instance, or the death of a loved one--he doesn't seem to know how to work through his emotions. He often freezes up, and his thought process always gets a little erratic, his choices lean towards recklessness and self-destruction. It's under greatest duress that he most falls back on ideas of heroism and sacrifice to suss out what he's supposed to do, and that road leads to dead Daves.
He also doesn't really know how to deal with other people's feelings--not in this timeline, anyway. He often responds to distress with platitudes or wipes his hands of responsibility entirely, too unsure of his footing in the emotional field to risk messing up.
✗ Highly insecure
A lot of his problems come back to this, actually: He's terrified of messing up, and he won't commit to action without knowing that it's the right thing to do, as if there's a code or model on which he can base his life. All the posturing and deflection stems from his fear of not measuring up to an ideal he's drawn from movies and from his weirdo Bro. He doesn't want to disappoint people. He constantly seeks validation. That and his distraction are what make him so easy to manipulate. He just wants people to tell him he's cool because he's scared, not even that deep down, that he isn't.
✗ Inexperienced
Dave's skill set, while entertaining, is almost entirely inapplicable to a non-apocalpytic universe in which he does not have to take on a number of invincible endbosses with a magic sword, nor does he know how to survive in a world where he cannot "alchemize" food into existence with a few cards and a button. He is going to die. Someone please help him.
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Ralts
Because Dave is the Knight of Time, I thought it'd be thematically appropriate to choose the Pokémon that evolves into Gallade, one of the most knightly Pokémon out there. I'm specifically going with Ralts rather than, say, Shelmet/Karrablast or Honedge, because the canon point I picked for Dave is a negative one that cheats him out of a lot of healthy discussion about who he is and what he stands for; the Ralts line's empathetic nature will help heal the loneliness and the damage done, while Ralts' eventual evolution to Gallade will give Dave insight into his own growth--and where he still needs work.
Plus, Gallades are cool. Dave can stand to have one cool thing in his life.
Password: Pumpkin Seeds
Dave Strider | Homestuck | Reserved (3/3)
First Person Sample:
[TEXT]
you know
if she were my REAL mom
i bet she wouldnt have kicked me out of the house with just one lunchbox for a THREE DAY FUCKIN SLOG
i mean what the fuck!
how much transdimensional video game relocation bullshit does a guy have to go through to get some partway decent parental supervision in his life???
youd think a franchise literally designed for four year olds would be more kid friendly
come on wheres the endless supply of crustless pb and js that oughta be in my inventory
where are my hard earned vanilla dunkaroos
even my little psychic helmet guy knows this is prime horseshit i can tell by the faint look of pity and abject confusion on the visible sliver of his face every time he looks at me
right little buddy
yeah he gets it
do i look like i know how to forage for edibles in the eight bit rainforest
of course not
[This is text. He doesn't look like anything, except red. Red and text. A lot of it.]
if you threw an apple at my face right now i probably wouldnt even recognize the fresh produce thats how long ive been cooling my heels in fakey realchemized space ration hell
do they have apples here even
omfg if i bled for this shit and even this weird nintendo wet dream nerd bubble lacks the means to provide me a consolatory glass of aj for the travesty thats been my life im gonna
well im gonna just shut up and deal with it like i have for the past three years i guess but youll all know im not happy about the situation
so like
i dunno speaking of you all
i mean im assuming theres a you all im speaking to and im not just wasting my material on the uncaring cybervoid
not that itd be the first time
but i guess if theres someone out there
...
...............
a/s/l?
Third Person Sample:
"Bmm bmbm CHH b-bmm chkka CHH," Dave rattled over the background music, hands busy with clothespins and cloth. It was warm enough out today--barely--to risk the elements in the sleeveless birdkeeper top he'd found in his backpack and give his regular outfit a wash.
Christ, he missed the good old days when his duds were magic and laundered themselves. They probably weren't tailoring themselves to his growth spurts, either. Did this mean he was going to grow out of them eventually? Dave's beatboxing slowed for a moment and he frowned, looking over the shirt in his hands. Somehow, out here in the sunlight (something he never thought he'd see again, god damn) of this strange new world, his god tier rags just looked like damp pajamas. The gear of Time maybe even looked like it was starting to fade.
It made him feel weird. "I didn't ask for all this shitty metonymic symbolism this early in the morning," he muttered, flapping the shirt out once and then hanging it from the clothesline strung from one tree to another. As he bent to retrieve a second clothespin, though, he noticed his partner Ralts out of the corner of his eye.
The little guy was standing almost directly underneath Dave's drying cape. Dave almost warned him to knock it off--the cloth was still wet, and he didn't know if the thing could catch the Pokéflu or something--but he'd hardly yet gotten to see an expression that wasn't nervous confusion from his new partner. The dude actually seemed to be interested in something. So Dave just watched, mindlessly pinning up the other half of his shirt, while his Ralts took the damp corner of his cape in his cartoonish, fingerless hands and looked at it, tilting it this way and that in the light.
Eventually, he just spun in place and pulled it around his shoulders, like a tiny mantle of his own.
Dave snorted--or must have--because Ralts looked at him, startled or offended, and freed himself from the cloth to go trundle off somewhere no one would laugh at him. Dave just made sure he wasn't wandering into the tall grass before stooping to pick up the edge of the cape himself.
It was kind of dorky, wasn't it? Wandering down the road in an actual cape and cowl, that was. Dave smoothed his thumbs back and forth over the fabric and tried to imagine what it was the little dude saw in it, what it looked like from way down there.
Like a banner unfurling in the wind, maybe, silhouetted against the sun. Hero and champion.
Dave snorted again, but with less humor. Maybe he really was outgrowing this shit; the mental picture made his guts twist sickly behind his navel. "It'd make sense," he said to himself, because damn if he didn't find the sound of his own voice inexplicably soothing. "I mean, I'm not that guy anymore. The Knight of Time. It'd make sense if I couldn't stand that anymore, I fucked that shit up imperially. Galactically. Like, I fucked it up so bad they had to port me straight into a safemoded children's franchise just so I couldn't fuck it up any harder. So it's got to be over. I can be over it."
Nobody answered him. That was standard, when a guy was talking to himself; Dave didn't know what else he'd expected.
But he still felt weird. His thumbs stilled on the cloth and he looked off after his Ralts again.
A bit later, a long strip of fabric had been torn from the bottom of his cape, and Dave's Ralts had a ragged, rakish new scarf. A new scarf, and a name.
"I can't believe I'm actively participating in something so unironically corny." Dave sat back on one knee from tying the knot, and Knight lifted both useless hands to his scarf, twirled to feel its weight around his neck in motion. Even the torn strip looked ridiculously large on him. Dave breathed out. "I feel like I oughta have some kind of huge butter knife on me so I can provide you the Queen of England shoulder-dub of honor. Do you even have shoulders, dude, your noodle appendages just kind of gloop right out of you."
Knight ignored Dave's rambling and just--beamed up at him. As much as anything whose eyes were seven-eighths hidden could beam. After a shy pause, he struck what he clearly hoped was a heroic pose, arms akimbo, chin up.
Dave managed not to laugh this time, though his smile was totally crooked. He just put an awkward hand on Knight's raised head and ignored the weirdness curling in his stomach.
"Not bad, little dude."
His insides felt squirmy, like they knew he was kidding himself in some way he couldn't put his finger on. But the squirminess was edged with something...nice. Like it was still all right, maybe, not to put his hero problems away for good--not if it helped earn him his partner's first smile.
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