by marathemara

The Courtyard Droll is funny, silly, ridiculous. He first appears in Homestuck as the Midnight Crew’s Clubs Deuce, a direct parallel to Ace Dick from Problem Sleuth. Later it turns out that he’s a fixture of the Dersite bureaucracy: in all three sessions we see him in, he’s one of Jack Noir’s agents.

CD is the most witless and hapless of the Dersites who become the Midnight Crew in the Alternian session. He screws up his first meeting with Sollux, and then screws it up again as Sollux’s exile. As a member of the Midnight Crew, he has trouble keeping Doze (the slowest of the Felt) in custody, and then runs around with a gigantic bomb under his hat. His equivalent in the Beta Earth session can’t get anything right either: he fails to steal the White Queen’s ring (thanks to Jade), he can’t steal the Tumor from WV either (thanks to Liv Tyler), and following Jack Noir’s orders to kill Jade only makes Jack Noir homicidally angry at him. No wonder he’s named for the lowest card in a poker deck.

In all three universes, he’s associated with explosives in slapsticky ways. Even the explosions that kill Jade, blow up Jane’s dream tower, and destroy the Alpha Earth Battlefield aren’t presented as serious things. It’s just the Droll doing as the Droll does, with a massive dose of highly flammable shaving cream mixed in.

He may be one of the bad guys, but CD is so cute-looking and hapless that you can’t help but root for him when he does something right, like patch things up (literally and figuratively) between WV and Liv Tyler after the former ate the latter’s green eye. He and his explosives and silly hats provide comic relief, a la Ace Dick and cartoon classics like Wile E. Coyote, and his antics bring Homestuck back to its comicky roots.