by @marathemara





Dave Strider is perhaps one of the most relatable characters in Homestuck. Practically every reader has felt like him at some point in their lives, and his coming-of-age narrative reminds a lot of us of things we ourselves have gone through.

Where John seems unnaturally cheerful, Jade’s personal problems require supernatural help to resolve, and Rose has not a chink in her emotional armor, it’s easy for the reader to spot the cracks in Dave’s facade of ironic detachment and follow his internal conflict between what he wants to do and what’s expected of him. When he claims to like his bro’s puppet collection, you can guess he’s lying for some reason, since he’s broken the pattern of John and Rose openly disliking their respective guardians’ collections of harlequins and wizards. The fridge full of swords instead of food, and Bro’s unusually violent Strife sessions with Dave, provide hints (clearer in hindsight) that there are serious things wrong in Dave’s life. And when Dave destroys one of Bro’s dolls in a blender, it’s clear that even if he doesn’t consciously know that Bro’s treatment of him is neither normal nor right, he’s still determined to strike out on his own at some level.



Let’s pause for a moment to consider Bro’s expectations and treatment of Dave. Bro is clearly an abusive parent, in his physical treatment of Dave, his neglect of his needs (remember that there was never food in the fridge), and his use of Lil Cal to constantly terrify Dave. But to what end? Bro seems to want to make Dave into a copy of his own ideal self–a hypermasculine lone-wolf expert swordsman and friend of puppets with no empathy and a maximum of coolness. Of course, since he has no empathy, he’s never going to get that result, whether his goal is self-gratification or to prepare Dave for SBURB the only way he knows how.

Dave senses he’s being mistreated, though it takes him a long time to realize that’s what has happened, and that sense in itself is a wrench in Bro’s plan, since it drives Dave to challenge the insular lifestyle Bro wants for him by seeking friendships outside the home. Just like many of us draw emotional support from the Homestuck fandom and other online communities, Dave’s online friendships with John, Rose, and Jade give him emotional support and glimpses of different lifestyles. John even provides Dave with a small way of rebelling against Bro’s expectation that Dave will grow up to be a mini-Bro, by sending him round sunglasses which Dave immediately puts on instead of Bro-style triangular shades.

It’s not until Dave enters the Incipisphere and physically separates himself from Bro that he begins to come into his own and explore what he wants for himself out of life. This journey begins with the second prototyping of his kernelsprite. Dave is about to prototype Lil Cal, a symbol of his life with Bro, but he is interrupted by a doomed Dave from a timeline in which he did exactly that and the result sucked. That doomed Dave then prototypes himself, becoming Davesprite. Now Dave’s closest advisor is himself, and he is able to compare his own desires and actions to those of the more-traditionally-heroic Dave who became Davesprite. Davesprite pulls Caledfwlch from the stone; Dave breaks it instead, rejecting the game’s expectation that he become the hero his planet needs. Davesprite used time travel liberally, and owes his continued existence to it; Dave has experimented with the time loops he needs to construct to be a Hero of Time and decided that the responsibility of maintaining those loops is too much for him.



Even as Dave tries to reject the heroic roles thrust upon him, he maintains expectations of himself that are carried over from Bro’s expectations of him. He tries hard to keep up his ironic detachment, to be the best fighter, at least until he realizes Jade is more powerful than him, and to assert human heteronormativity at every turn, trying halfheartedly to live up to his heroic role until it causes his death in the Game Over timeline.

To really break out of those expectations and create a new identity for himself, Dave needs an environment where the expectations no longer apply, where he can look in at them from the outside and see them for what they are. He gets that environment on the New Alpha meteor. There’s no fighting to be done during the three long years between the Scratch and the new session; and Vriska’s influence has somehow* kept Dave and Karkat from fighting over Terezi, so there are no obstacles to them working out how they feel about each other.

Dave’s relationship with Karkat violates Bro’s expectations in a big way–as Dave puts it later on:

And it lets Dave step outside those expectations and realize how arbitrary and controlling they actually were, and how much worse they made his life. During those three years we don’t see on the meteor, he comes to terms with who he is and the choices he’s made, and at the end of that time is confident enough in himself to talk openly with Dirk (who is, remember, post-scratch Bro) about his emotions, and even ask him for coming-out advice.

The Dave we see at the start of the Omegapause is calm and self-confident and no longer feels the need to hide behind a poorly maintained facade of ironic detachment in order to get respect. He’s been given, and has given himself, the space to think about his life and decide he really doesn’t want to be the hero everyone expects him to be, and that he’s okay with that. I hope all of you reading this, if you are struggling with questions about your identity or your future, have a safe space and supportive friends to help you through this difficult time in your life. If it can turn out okay for Dave, given all he’s been through, it’ll turn out okay for you too.

*There’s no evidence in the Vriskagram of exactly what Vriska did to make Karkat and Dave stop fighting over Terezi. My guess is that Terezi simply spent time with Vriska instead of with Dave, quietly removing her from the equation.

