#strider bros rooftop conversation

[itsmybirthdaythough]

Got to the Dave and Dirk rooftop convo that shit hurt BADDDD. Debating morality with an alternate version of your dead father figure (regardless of how strained the relationship is) would rip me to shreds Also the two of them being foils of eachother makes something in my heart feel heavy. Will give a comprehensive analysis when I gather my thoughts

[cringefail-clown]

What was Dirks relationship with his Bro like? Would it warrant a canon-esque Strider rooftop conversation?

they had a great relationship that turned kinda sour due to dave not being around much, which made dirk v upset at him bc the kid was lonely af in the apartment. when it comes to the rooftop kind of talk there are two other characters that'll get it wonk wonk

[airprime7]

Ok, the ask is correct, if you've read up to the end of Act 5 Act 1 then you're less than halfway through.

First things first:

The original image has a very Dave Strider extra

Derse and Prospit are the purple and yellow dream moons.

The squid shapes, cat shapes, and smiling ghost shapes are Rose, Roxy and John's shirt logos. You won't have met Roxy yet properly, but she's Rose's Mom as a kid (also the best character).

The ONK is "HONK" with the H cut off by the twitter cropping. HONK is a Gamzee thing, he's one of the trolls, he's a juggalo.

The Ben 10 person looks like Rose Lalonde.

The image with the pointy glasses in the background of the smiling friends thing looks like Dirk Strider, who is Dave's Bro (pictured just below) as a kid.

The next one is during one of their rooftop battle animations in Act 3, Bro and Dave do this pointing->thumbs down vs throat-slitting thing. Vriska and Tavros later repeat this in a different rooftop battle, and Jake and Brobot (Act 6 characters) parody it. It also comes up in [S] Collide, the final battle.

The guy holding a bucket looks like an imperial drone, parts of troll society involved in reproduction, where they gather genetic material in two buckets they hold. As such, buckets are a taboo sexual object for trolls. This is all the detail that is gone into on sex.

413 is the Homestuck number. It's the date of the start of the comic and the day it's set, it's John's birthday, it's the time of the first conversation (16:13), it's on numerous timers all over the place. There are 4 kids and they're 13 years old. 4 suits x 13 cards makes 52 card deck. The trolls have the corresponding 612, which sum to 1025 for act 5, and Act 6 has 11/11/11.

Everything else on that whiteboard is irrelevant, except for Jade Harley in the middle near the left

That purple thing I think is a princess might be wearing Dave Strider shades. It also looks incredibly buff in what might be a SBaHJ (Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, Dave's webcomic which is the source of many Homestuck in-jokes) refrance

I do love how quietly influential Homestuck has been on a generation of animators because it means sometimes I'm just watching a tv show and I have to pause and ask "hey. is that Dave Fucking Strider in the background?"

[simmonsized]

TBH i felt very ambiguous about dirk for a long time! but The Rooftop Convo (along with his mental breakdown, before that) really did me in haha

This reminds me that I should probably be asking you about your feelings on dirk strider by now, huh?

I was just so caught with Bro and the other guardians that I almost forgot to ask!!

Also, I felt the same thing! Didn’t have that big of an opinion on him until the more serious conversations. I really like Dirk as a character, very well written in Homestuck proper.

Well! Okay this is actually a super complicated question. I uh.

okay so like, history-wise, i suppose i was initially VERY interested in him, as a Young Bro, especially since i've been here since cascade, you know, BUT. when i came back to reread homestuck i just remember being like, i mean. yes they are all assholes and shitty and that's the point right, that all characters in homestuck are actually assholes. but other than being very funny and kind of cringe, i think i was mostly interested in his absolute lack of self-preservation, which is a crazy thing for a dude who grew up in an apocalypse, but beyond the Yucky Delight Factor, i didn't actually feel attached to him until after Jane's birthday.

you may not know this about me but i'm actually not much of a shipper lol so like. jake doesn't even factor into the way i view dirk, not really, not in the long run, beyond the way that i could talk about him and the way their relationship fell apart and WHY it fell apart etc etc. u know.

I was actually saving my Dirk Personality Breakdown for the Part 2 of my insane Bro rant lol. that's already 7 pages long btw, of just dirk shit. sorry i guess but uh.

Basically I am obsessed with his willingness to die to further his plans or achieve his goals, and i also think, in general, that the fandom is too afraid of engaging in the puppet thing. Dirk loves puppets, dude. that is a real canon fact. He's a fucked up guy. I'm obsessed.

Mostly what really drew me in (and I will use this again later in my nonsense haha) was this:

That really changed, in a way, a lot of how I think he presents himself "in canon" and it was extremely important to me. I guess a lot of how I portray Dirk depends on late canon, rather than the beginning, or his past actions, though i mean. he still sucks. I just like him a lot more after seeing him fucking lose it lol

[tomatograter]

IM LOOKING DIRECTLY AT YOU AND ASKING FOR YOUR OPINION/WHATEVER YOU CAN SAY ON ARQUIUS!!!!!!! i find the idea of arquius to be so interesting but i cant put my finger on exactly why

See i always thought Arquius was very much a wish-fulfillment masculinization fever dream/nightmare/monkey's paw situation for Dirk. There's a lot you can get out of the text by considering Hal as an active part of his psyche that's been repressed in the ""original"" strider but also unleashed upon the internet and message systems to do as he pleases and explore as he wishes. Plotwise, Dirk not wanting to give Hal a body is deeply tied to how he does not trust him (and how that's a little bit because he's ashamed of who, what, and how he is) but it's interesting to consider that sprites having connotations on identity is something we come back to in major ways, and how some of them relate to gender.

Namely, take Tavrisprite as a creation so horribly dysphoric it blows itself up to non-existance immediately AND Davepetasprite as the comic's first nonbinary character, who finds incredible joy in this state of being.

Arquiusprite completes a long cycle of visuals that reference how dirk interfaces with a long dead societal concept of being a man- the bro shtick, batman symbols, rogue samurai inspiration, hypermuscle fetish art tier of unattainable fantastic masculinity that is so laughably aggressive in its *BRANDING* tones it reads as effortlessly transmasculine. It's overcompensation. It's specially funny to consider how:

1) Arquiusprite is JUBILANTLY %#%#% EUPHORIC about his physical appearance, which is very much an exaggerated depiction of what a massive cis dude looks like

2) Arquiusprite and Dirk have an extremely awkward half-conversation about breasts, which, yeah for a kid living in the middle of hellfuck nowhere theres no way dirk has had any life prospects about chest procedures (and the equius side of the milking equation loops this all the way back to the many times dirk is the subject of a childbearing related conversation hes an unwilling participant of),

(Wait, who was it again that had links to dirk and alien girls and- Ah. Hmmmmmmmmm-)

Sure is some heavy handed thematic/color placement i will give you that!

3???) known trans woman and eggcracker vriska serket is the one who makes arquius happen in the retcon i rest my case pack it up hit the streets

Anyway i deeply reccomend going back to read the arquius + dirk logs in isolation if you want some secondhand embarassment and direct confrontation abt dirk's ridiculous sense of self, a lot of shit has been said about the rooftop death convo but this strikes me as just as important characterization with the bonus of being ridiculously funny

[chronotopes]

fire emoji!

sarah you get a dirk strider take i’m so sorry i don’t know how this asshole became my second favorite boy in homestuck it’s embarrassing but i’m fucking stuck here i guess

anyway. dirk’s conclusion in the narrative of homestuck proper is just as incomplete as jake or or jade’s or vriska prime’s, and the only reason this is overlooked is either if a) you’re mistaking it/conflating it with dave’s conclusion, or b) you are unnecessarily harsh on comic dirk: either you believe him to be an abuser, which, like, how, or you believe that him being kind of clingy and controlling and making some robot-adjacent mistakes is a direct precursor to bro-level abuse that he needs to be warned away from, which, like, fuck you, he’s sixteen. 

as it stands, it’s not like i begrudge dave the rooftop conversation, but on top of what dirk’s been experiencing for much of his time in the comic, “did you know that a version of you grows up to be a violent abuser? YOU seem like a good person tho” from a person he’s never met before could just as easily, in the longterm fallout of the game, be a confirmation/reinforcement of all the worst things dirk believes about himself as it is a turning point of any kind. 

bonus unpopular opinion here: i like homestuck’s incomplete character arcs. it ending on a million open questions feels right to me.

back on topic: thus, the epilogues are not unrealistic, nor are they inevitable. they’re a tragedy. they’re a look at the worst case scenario for Many characters, and dirk is one of them. is it valid to dislike them? obviously, but it’s also valid to a) be interested in what they have to say about people and who they have the potential to become, and b) use them as a challenge to create ‘bridges and offramps’ that create a more complex narrative of earth c than assuming by default that everyone turned seventeen and was fine, or even was Troubled But Getting Better But Not Being Challenged In Any Meaningful Way. the directions in which they sent fanwork is one of the reasons that, at the end of the day, i genuinely do appreciate the epilogues. case in point, dirk-centered because this post is. case in point part two, the vriska scene of which is one of the best i’ve ever read.

[thaumaturtles]

Epilogue Thoughts

So, I finished the epilogues at around 11 AM on 4/21 and spent the better part of today mulling over it internally. Overall, I think I liked ‘em. Don’t get me wrong, they were brutal and tragic and ripped my heart out, but this is my garbage and I’m allowed to enjoy it. I was planning on liveblogging the epilogues but constantly pausing to jot down my feelings detracted from the overall experience. This is probably gonna be pretty scattershot, since I have neither the ability nor the desire to order my thoughts properly. Now, without any further preamble, let’s get into it.

Jane

 A lot of people said they didn’t like the treatment of Jane in the epilogues, and, fair enough, she was pretty awful and Crocker stans have every right to be pissed. But to anyone saying it came out of left field or didn’t make sense, I’d have to disagree (for the most part). Jane was brainwashed by the Condesce for the first 16 years of her life, and we see the effects of this when she goes Crockertier. She’d almost certainly have baked-in presumptions about how trolls were “meant to be” (ie super violent) even before she was consciously aware that trolls as a race existed. Jane was also always really in denial about having been brainwashed by the Condesce and I can definitely see adult Jane flat-out refusing to do any self-analysis and just assume there are no remaining effects of the brainwashing and she’s “totally cured” now or whatever. Jane’s also not super progressive? Like the conversation where she discovers Dirk has a crush on Jake and that Jake might even reciprocate was pretty uncomfortable to experience, and she starts a business on Earth C even though there’s no real need for corporations in a world with infinite resources. This shows that she’s still stuck in the belief that capitalism is inherently good/necessary for no reason other than “it’s what i grew up with.” All in all I could totally see Jane as someone who’d grow up to become xenophobic and have this colonizer mentality of “I have to regulate the Other because they’re not capable of functioning without me”

As for the non-consensual/rapey stuff... I’m actually not gonna touch that shit with a six-foot pole. The narrative is very explicit in the fact that Jane is an abusive partner and what she’s doing Is Bad, but like if she’s your favourite character you probably aren’t going to be all gung ho about seeing her do all the things that she did, which were admittedly very upsetting to read. I completely understand if you couldn’t read past those parts because they were pretty rough.

The Epilogues do get pretty unpleasant to read though :/

The Epilogues are highly antagonistic towards Homestuck’s readers. This is a fact. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to interpretation, but it is at the very least not a new thing. Listen to Kate Mitchell of the Perfectly Generic Podcast and YouTuber OptimisticDuelist for more in-depth analysis than I could possibly provide on this, but one of Lord English’s greatest weapons is his ability to get people not to care about Homestuck, or even better, to revile it. That’s what the aspect of Rage represents: Plot Contrivance. As Karkat says,

THERE ARE OUTCOMES THAT ARE EVEN WORSE THAN THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION OF EXISTENCE ITSELF. FORCES MORE DAMAGING TO THE INTEGRITY OF REALITY THAN THOSE CAPABLE OF TURNING IMAGINATION INTO PURE VOID. THEY ARE FORCES WHICH IF HANDLED RECKLESSLY WILL NULLIFY THE BASIC ABILITY OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS IN ALL REAL AND HYPOTHETICAL PLANES OF EXISTENCE TO GIVE A SHIT.

This is repeated, by Hussie himself no less, later on during his smug self-insert, found here. After Hussie dies and loses control of the narrative, LE is free to try his hardest to get you, the reader, not to give a shit. Rose, in the Epilogue’s Prologue, says that if people stop caring about Homestuck, reality as they know it will break apart, which is exactly in line with LE’s plans. So the fact that the Epilogues are very hostile towards the reader is basically par for the course. That said, I can see how it kinda sounds like I’m being all “oh it’s SUPPOSED to be shitty you wouldn’t underSTAND,” but that’s. literally what’s happening. and there’s evidence for it in the text.

Of course, in the past, when the narrative would pull things like this it would be under the guise of, say, Homosuck, which is very obviously meant to be bad and is presented in a fun, satirical way. The Epilogues, on the other hand, are downright upsetting. They’re presented in a much grittier light, which can obfuscate to what degree it’s Actually A Joke, if it even is a joke in any capacity. The fact that they’re tragic, though, should not be seen as evidence that they’re bad.

Some stuff I Liked

Both routes had some really top-notch interactions in them. A lot of folks seem to be overlooking how genuinely good the writing was. I said the phrase, “they’ve still got it” ALOUD to myself once or twice because the dialogue really did have that good ole Homestuck Charm. The Dave/Karkat/Jade interactions early on in Candy (before everything went to shit) were pretty great, as was basically everything that came out of English’s mouth. I dunno who the Antiquities Consultant was, but they did an excellent job at mirroring Jake’s usual speech pattern. I find that a lot of people, when writing Jake, just kinda throw in as many random old-timey words as possible and as a result it feels kinda disjointed, but the writing team for the epilogues managed to make him feel very... would light be a good way to put it? Sort of airheaded I guess. Just very goofy idk

We got to see Rosemary and they were married and raised a kid and it was the best! Rose was really well-written, as was Kanaya; I really loved seeing those personalities balance each other out again. It was nice to see them be good parents in the Candy-verse. The Vriska they raised was such a fucking scamp too! It was nice to see a Vriska who had a positive home environment but still had that same spunk

Also, Dave. Just, all of Dave. He was really solidly written throughout the whole thing. I fucking love his interest in the economy holy shit. I got to hear Dave Strider say the phrase  “neoliberal austerity measures.” That’s the best. “Economically Aware Anti-capitalist Dave” is rivaled only by “Karkat (True Leftism)”. I’ve seen a few complaints that Dave’s interest in the economy was also OOC, but for one thing he’s an adult and can cultivate new interests if he likes, and for another Dave is a pretty clever kid, and very numerically-minded. (Is that a term? I mean he’s good at maths and such). Don’t forget, not only did he manage to accumulate all the wealth on LOCAH in the span of three days by taking over their stock markets, but he also used the hash map modus in his day to day life, showing that he was able to do calculations in his head as quick as breathing. As shown here, the hash map modus is pretty complex and requires you to come up with a word that has the same value as the thing you wanna use in order to use it. That’s not easy to do on a dime and yet he uses it in his rooftop battles with Bro. All of this is to say, he’d certainly learn to be very good at economics if he wasn’t already. It just suits him.

Oh and I also love that Dave still makes SBaHJ and Karkat has a bunch of sockpuppet accounts he uses to defend Dave’s honour. it’s very cute.

Karkat also had some lines in the epilogues damn. I hadn’t realized how starved I was of VantasRage until I read a few of his rants. Also we finally got to see Badass Rebel Leader Karkat and he’s just as great as we all knew he’d be

The davekat kiss in Meat was great too. It was very gratifying to see after all the narrative cockblocking that went down in Candy.

John realizing in the Candy universe that he isn’t responsible for everything and that they’re all still just people with their own autonomy was good. Much as I have problems with the Candy universe on a whole I liked this specifically.

Also, roxygen! I love roxy/callie as much as the next guy but John and Roxy were very cute near the end of the comic and I liked seeing them grow up and have a kid. John names his son after the guy from Night Court because he’s a massive dweeb. Love it.

We got some great Terezi writing as well. The johnrezi at the end of Meat was nicely written and made me feel a whole host of emotions despite me not even having shipped them that hard beforehand.

OH MY GOD THE OBAMA SHIT. I almost forgot to put this in because I was focused on other stuff but my word the whole Obama Situation was beautiful I loved every second of it. It was so over-the-top in the best way and it simultaneously carried airs of being So Serious And Important To The Narrative and being just the dumbest load of crap. I loved it so much

Also, I was very happy with Roxy and Callie coming out. Roxy talking about how he’d already come out as dating an alien with a green skull for a head and how it felt like maybe he was being “selfish” by also wanting to come out as trans was a great illustration of something that already-out LGB people often feel when realizing they don’t identify with their assigned gender. Additionally, Calliope coming to terms with the fact that they don’t have to identify as female just to further differentiate themselves from Caliborn was great. It really helped to show how far they’d come from just being Caliborn’s foil into being their own person. However, this leads into:

Some stuff I didn’t like

Speaking of Roxy and Callie’s transition, Dirk also came out. As a transphobe. Which was disappointing, to say the least. He made a point of misgendering Roxy as often as possible and was pretty dismissive towards NB people when he learned about Calliope’s identity. (You could make an argument that Dirk is being thoughtless by misgendering Roxy and not intentionally malicious, but I don’t see Dirk as the kind of guy who slips up very often. He’s very careful with language.) I always headcanoned Dirk as trans, as I’m sure most people did, so having him just up and become transphobic was kind of the worst. I intend to talk about Epilogue!Dirk a lot more in a later post but yeah. Not a fan.

EDIT: I’ve thought about the Dirk thing a little more and he does eventually start calling Roxy by the correct pronouns, albeit in kind of a “see see look at how openminded im being youre such a manly dudely stud bro” way. Dirk’s initial discomfort with Roxy and Callie’s identity more comes from his own egotistical belief that he should have already known about it than it does from genuine animosity. That aside, he does still say “She probably would have loved being a “they” when she was a teen,” which sorta rubs me the wrong way. I might just be being oversensitive though.

Also, in the Meat universe, Rose and Kanaya split up! I’m very upset about that. Ultimate Power be damned, I want happy, married lesbians! It sucks that we either have Rosemary OR Davekat but not both

On the topic of davekat, Jade really got done dirty by both Epilogues, huh? She was used as a narrative device in one and was an intrusive presence in the lives of Dave and Karkat in the other. TBH I was never a fan of davekatjade for a lot of reasons but I would have preferred they be in a happy poly relationship than what actually happened in Candy.

Actually, the only two polyamorous relationships in the Epilogues both turned out awfully. I doubt any of the writing staff had anything against poly people; I’m sure it was just a coincidence but either way it’s pretty unfortunate. I have a bit to say about this but this is running too long as is.

Gamzee

Fucking Gamzee.

Unanswered Questions

Will there be any further updates? I sure hope there will, because the ending was not very satisfying and creates more questions than it answers. I can sort of see where it might be going but they left way too much up in the air and it feels very much like it’s unfinished. V has referred to it as “the whole thing” on twitter, so it might be finished for good, but i really hope it isn’t

Why did Rose say the session they’re creating will be the most important session of SBURB ever played? Why couldn’t they play it on Earth C? Surely Earth C’s inhabitants would be more used to seeing alien life forms and would know the basics of SBURB, thus making it more likely for them to survive it. Why go to the trouble of seeding a whole new planet? I’m curious.

Can a character be said to be “Out Of Character” if the character’s own creator wrote those actions? What if they passed on the actual writing to someone else but still had to verify it themselves? What does OOC even mean? Does it mean “this doesn’t fit my headcanon” or “there is no evidence for this” or “the author wouldn’t write them like this”? If it’s the last one, can an author merely saying “this interpretation is correct” absolve ANY action from being deemed OOC? I like that I’m being made to think about this kind of thing now

To what degree is each universe truly “Canon”? I’m aware that Candy lost its canon-ness when John decided not to fight LE, but the two universes are intrinsically linked: we see characters from one universe travel to another and it’s implied that Terezi has spoken to both Johns. How canon is Meat, even? Are either of them even still bound by the need to be part of the Alpha Timeline anymore, since Lord English has been created? What does anything mean?

Final Musings

I understand completely if you don’t like the epilogues. Maybe you think they’re too dark. Maybe you just don’t agree with portrayals of the characters. Maybe you hate that they gave jade a fucking tail when she never had one in the main comic. There certainly were bits of it that I wasn’t a fan of, but there are also parts I really wanna go draw fanart of right now. I like the Epilogues, but if I write fanfic or make dumb joke posts about Earth C, I’m probably gonna ignore large swaths of it (such as, I’ll probably keep both John and Dirk alive, and make them kiss a lot)

There has been a great deal of vitriol directed specifically at Hussie about the epilogues despite the fact that other people worked on them. It’s difficult to take these criticisms in good faith when so many people are blaming solely Hussie. I’m aware that he had total control over actual plot elements and wrote a bit of dialogue, but the bulk of the actual text was written by V. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people’s attitudes towards the epilogues are very much like the general attitude towards Act 7 when it first came out. I’ll admit, I left the Homestuck fandom in like 2014 and didn’t return until mid-2017, but people’s Jimmies were definitely still Rustled even then. There was a general atmosphere of “I hate Hussie, and you should too! The ending was bad and no one asked for it!” but as time went on, and people started analyzing the ending and making meta posts about it, everyone sort of grew acclimated to the ending. Suddenly, the general consensus was that Homestuck was Good Again Finally and the ending was Amazing and The Fandom Loved It. I feel like maybe that sort of thing’s gonna happen again with the Epilogues. I really hope that, as it continues to update (if it does), everyone will sort of chill out about it

[blaperile]

Homestuck Epilogues - Meat - Page 16 (Epilogue 3 Page 3)

[compartmentalisinghmpf]

You can probably tell, from the fact that a post did not, in the end, materialse here yesterday evening, that stuff got long again. And I kind of got there from the laundry discussion, but it ended up being just about 0% about laundry, so here’s the one laundry related thing I did actually want to say, yesterday, because it involves an intriguing possibility:

Ok. So, Bro’s Muppets shirts that he’s complaining a!Dave keeps “losing” are actually accumulating in a hamper in the Lalonde’s laundry room; that makes sense. Who is doing the laundry, indeed? For a moment there I was going to nominate Bro for Strider laundry duty, as somebody must have been doing it (... right?) when Dave was growing up, no matter how shitty Bro was; but then I remembered that Dave explicitly said in the Act 6 rooftop conversation that Bro never did that. The Strider laundry mystery deepens!

Did... did Cal do their laundry??? :D

Anyway: whatever’s going on here - the laundry issue itself clearly spans universes and timelines!

[lesbrarians]

Strider brothers

1: sexuality headcanon keeping up w the theme of the night, gay and gay2: otp davetav and brodad!! 3: brotp dave/rose and bro/rufio4: notp dave/karkat and bro/dave5: first headcanon that pops into my head bro makes decent money on his websites, but their a/c is broken because they both are tech-heads and their money is usually spent on the latest dj equipment and video games and shit6: favorite line from this character iirc bro literally doesn’t say anything asides from the note he leaves dave that’s just “bro. roof. now. bring cal. WHERE DOING IT MAN. WHERE MAKING THIS HAPEN.” but as for quotes about him? i love the line that dave says where he’s like, “i’m not a hero. my bro was. john is. i’m not.” bc i love the thought of 7: one way in which I relate to this character i relate a lot to dave’s aversion to his own death and ability to fly off the handle. and i relate to bro’s 8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character that whole uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh thing about bro being????????? abusive to dave???????? somehow????? i have not read this exchange because the thought of it upsets me, but i’ve heard of it. it happened after i left the homestuck fandom. and it’s so out of left field bc like. how was bro’s quirks any different than mom and rose’s passive aggressive note exchanges, or dad strifing with John, etc etc?? from the very first page, we were conditioned to think that that’s part of homestuck’s charm, the universe just... has these weird quirky guardians that would, yeah, probably be considered abusive if they behaved that way in the real world. mom and dad would not be good parents in the real world either, but you don’t see them being called abusers in the webcomic. for literal years, the fandom built up an image of bro based on what we knew of him: we knew that dave idolized him, he called bro his hero, he cried when bro died, bro gave dave the only bedroom in the apartment. there was a really good, like, base for who he was. and then hussie like yanked the rug out from under us with this conversation with new information yyyyyyyyears later, presenting an image that’s inconsistent with how dave talked about bro before? and it’s just gross????? i don’t like parental figures as abusers. it makes me extremely uncomfortable. and i don’t want to see it in media if i can avoid it. and i don’t want to see my favorite character turned into one years after the fact lol. idk it’s just out of place with the universe. i don’t get why the one guy who strifes with his brother on the rooftop and runs an ironic porn puppet site and keeps katanas in the fridge is abusive, while the guy who got a restraining order from Cirque du Soleil and collects weird harlequins and throws pies in his son’s face is not??? and then i just accidentally found out how he’s supposed to have abused him, and i don’t like it, and i’m just........ i really really do not like how it was all retconned in. dave legit was happy with bro until the timelines made him start questioning his unconventional upbringing. the starvation thing threw me for a fucking loop bc uhhhhh that gif of baby dave was?? never taken by me or anyone else that i know of as. bro depriving a baby of food holy fuck, not when every other image was of him taking care of dave, i thought it was dave being ninja ba-- ugh okay you know what fuck it, fuck it, i don’t even give a shit, this is upsetting me and i’m not even involved in the fandom anymore and i don’t wanna think about this lol 9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? problematic cinnamon rolls

[fribbitz]

This reminds me of that one post, where they depict Dave as having retained none of the scars from his childhood since he didn't consider his abuse to be important to developing into who he became, it used those quotes from the rooftop bros conversation. It depicted Dirk keeping literally all of his scars since he considered suffering and pain to be a part of him. I'm paraphrasing from what I remember, I'll edit this with a link to it when I find it orz

EDIT: i found it... i remembered there being more text but this is the post that i was talking abt

i like the idea of "lore important" scarring after you godtier. the most recognisable would be how some people depict dirk with a scar on his neck after his dirkapitation in collide. idk its just a fun thing to think about, like what would scar after you become a god? i think, if the wounds not lore important (you accidentaly cut yourself while cooking) then it heals clean, like theres nothing there. but if it was important to the overall narrative, or if it was important to your character arc, then itd leave a scar (you were in a cooking competition and accidentally cut yourself, which led to you losing the first place. you now have a tiny scar on your finger)

[simmonsized]

YES!!! Yes to that whole--Yes!! Whenever I see people be like oh I like Bro Strider cause he's hot sure I love that iteration nothing like playing with your blorbo but when I say I love Bro Strider it's everything down to Dave's complicated relationship with him because I had that! Down to cutting someone off even though I still love them and, unfortunately, always will as my "guardian." Because it's a thing! It's not easy navigating those emotions or that situation like bruh there's no damn manual of How to Properly Deal When a Guardian Tries to Toughen You Up But Fucks You Up in the process.

And okay okay hear me out but I've had this long standing idea that, in some way, Bro was training Dave to kill him. Listen, when all the Jacks are in the headlock with Dirk, Dave sees this and hesitates for just a second before they both have that little second of understanding and he decapitates him, breaking the katana as well. It's just a second of actions but!! It just

Yeah, man, personal experience and what you have to do varies so wildly depending on the person ♥️ it's not an easy decision to make, and sometimes it hurts even if it's the right one! So thank you for sharing that with me!

I also do not mind people using Bro as a blorbo to fulfill their needs like. Characters are for playing with, and using one to fulfill a role is something people need sometimes! That is what's so fun about fiction.

Also that's an interesting theory! I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say that before!

I think for me a lot of the rooftop scene had to do with like, Dirk and Dave having a really intense emotionally vulnerable conversation, something Dave always wanted but could never have, and that giving himself and his past over to Dirk, and Dirk giving as much as he could offer, genuinely, to Dave, to give him this kind of. Weird understanding of Bro in a way he needed even if it's not perfect, I think that informs the later choice!

There's a lot to be said about choosing to kill the Jacks, at the expense of losing Dirk, and Dave making that decision BECAUSE of his Convo and new relationship with Dirk, not because of the way Bro raised him, if that makes sense? Like he does not kill them because of his weird Welsh sword powers, he does it because Dirk trusts him to make the right choice and such, I guess. We could get all representational about the transversal cut of Dirk's sword being a reflection of Dave's previous inability to break off Bro's katana after he died but like. That's all speculation and I am embarrassing myself so fotkriwjals.

Anyway that's a cool theory, definitely a first for me!