by marathemara

DAVE: so do you know this stuff cause youre from the future or cause youre a sprite

DAVESPRITE: both

DAVESPRITE: theres all sorts of stuff i suddenly knew about the game when i became this orange feathery asshole

DAVE: so now youre like

DAVE: a wise feathery asshole

DAVESPRITE: i am fuckin filthy with wisdom its sick

DAVESPRITE: i mostly know stuff about your personal quest

DAVESPRITE: what used to be my quest but i guess i got to deal with not being alpha dave no more

DAVE: yeah i guess

DAVESPRITE: shrug

DAVESPRITE: its all good

[http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=004736]

The Knight of Time and the Prince of Heart are, by their mythical natures, prone to generating copies of themselves, Dave by splitting off doomed timelines and Dirk by splintering his own identity into robot after robot. Today we’re going to look at my favorite Strider splinter: Davesprite, created when a doomed Dave went back in time to stop his past self from prototyping Lil Cal by jumping into the sprite himself.

My first impression of the Dave that creates Davesprite is that he’s a much more mature and levelheaded version of Dave. Having used Lil Cal for his second prototyping, he’d ended up with a basically useless sprite and had to learn everything about the game’s mythology and how to kill imps by himself. He also knows he’s in a doomed timeline, which tends to be a sobering thought. During his four months level grinding in a timeline without John or Jade, where his only company is a hysterically laughing Calsprite and occasional messages from Rose, he grows up a lot. He is then able to decide it’s time to go back and change the timeline, and after all his time traveling, he is now the person with the power to do it.



Davesprite goes on to advise Dave, both as sprite and as alternate future self, and to protect Dave’s friends, but even after all that, he’s still endearingly Davelike. He can be distracted by Terezi’s funny photomanipulations, and he share’s Dave’s interest in Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and makes references to it all over the place, but he also gets to keep the Strider identity crisis.



Davesprite’s sacrifice weighs heavy on him. By giving up his place as Alpha Dave, he’s made sure the game can continue, but he still regrets it. He groups himself with Daves who died of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, not feeling like his otherwise heroic actions count for anything because he’s “not the real Dave.”



His friends also aren’t sure what to do with him. During their journey through the Yellow Yard, John has no trouble thinking of Davesprite as Dave, “just a magical orange dave with wings!” But Jade, who spent more time with Davesprite on the trip, sees him as different from Alpha Dave in ways she can’t explain and insists that his name is “Davesprite” rather than “Dave sprite,” making him fundamentally different from Dave rather than just another version of Dave.



Davesprite probably interprets all this in entirely the wrong way, thinking that Jade is interested in him because he’s a version of Dave. When Jade says he broke up with her because “hes just going through a lot of stuff right now“, the Strider identity crisis is probably a factor in that. It’s also what drives him to leave John and Jade once they reach the new session.



Davesprite resolves his identity crisis by going off with the sprites to try being a sprite instead of a Dave. We haven’t seen how this pans out yet. I hope he can figure things out and continue to be helpful–maybe not to Dave anymore, but maybe to his post-Scratch counterpart, the Automatic Responder, who’s been having similar problems with being a copy of Dirk. And I hope we get to see more of Davesprite, because of all the Daves in Homestuck, he’s still my favorite.

