#the i can haz cheezburger decade comes to an end.... tragic times we live in :(

[homestuckreplay]

The Final Homestuck Update of 2009

(page 1082-1088; some general Dave and Rose thoughts)

I can’t believe Dave would pour some apple juice out for Cal. That’s his favorite drink, the king of juices, and not easy for Dave to come by. But Dave sucks unfortunately, and I was such a hater reading this update for the first time, because this absolute idiot is more concerned with his relationship with a torn up puppet who he only pretends to like than with his actual close friend who is in danger. Dave is okay in the small doses of pesterlogs and flashes, but I genuinely think part of the reason I’ve loved Act 3 so much up til now is because I haven’t had to deal with Dave’s bullshit, and I really hope this isn’t the start of an extended Dave section.

It’s good to get a glimpse of Rose on page 1088 – and Vodka Mutini, the tiny sleeping void – right at the end. She’s spent this entire comic so focused on getting people to play Sburb, helping John play Sburb, and finding ways to reconnect to John in order to play more Sburb. She’s basically always doing something and trying to solve a problem, and seems happiest when she’s busy, even if being busy involves actually making things worse (see: ripping out crucial parts of John’s house or dropping them into the abyss) and now suddenly she seems hopeless. There’s more she could do – it would be smart to create defined spaces for the cruxtruder, totem lathe and alchemiter, and mark them out for Dave, for example – but this feels like a moment where when she stops crisis response for even a second, the reality of the situation sets in and she can’t spring back into action.

The thing is, having seen Rose work really hard for hundreds of pages to at least try to help John, Dave on the surface looks really bad by comparison. And I’m trying to figure out how much of that is real – how much is Dave messing around with his sylladex, thinking about his possessions, and texting his friends more than Rose did – and how much is just their self-image. Rose definitely wants to seem like she’s smart, competent, level-headed, and capable of saving people from world ending threats, so she plays up those aspects of herself, and it’s easier to overlook a moment where she plays the violin for 40 seconds of the two minutes she has left (p.222) or reads her grimoire for no practical purpose (p.301-5) or considers passive-aggressive ways to get back at her mother (p.373-4), etc.

Conversely, Dave wants to seem like he’s cool, detached, ironically self-aware, and like he’s not overinvested in his friendships, so a scene like today’s where he’s fucking around with his sylladex reinforces this, and works like confirmation bias. It’s easy to skim over the fact that Dave just put himself in danger of physical pain and social ridicule from an authority figure, just to get these games for Rose, just on her word without evidence of her situation. Dave said ‘if you ever find yourself in the position where your life depends on me playing that piece of shit game, then ill play’ (p.333) and he didn’t say that ironically, he meant it when the time came. So it’s frustrating that he’s still talking about his bro’s ‘mysterious ways’ (p.1085) and that he wasted so much time gathering weapons that he didn’t end up using, but looking back, I don’t think Dave is actually handling this situation worse than Rose is. She was just more attuned to the specifics and urgency of the situation.

I think that all four kids have their surface image, and that Dave and Rose consciously construct theirs while John and Jade don’t realize they’re doing it. I think all four have a deeper layer to their personalities that is specifically intended by the author, although different readers might make different inferences about what that is. And I think that all four kids are really convincing with their surface image a lot of the time – they fool each other, they fool their guardians, and they fool the reader, because so much of Homestuck (including the narrative text) is written in their voices without much external commentary. I know I’ve fallen into the trap with all of them at times where I take them at their word and I’m sure if I was actually friends with them, I’d do it even more, so it’s a clever reflection of actual social relationships and the disconnects that actually exist between people. Especially when those people are young, traumatized, and have such different lives that it’s hard to fully comprehend each other’s.

And I can remind myself of this stuff all day but it does not change the base emotional response of: I love Rose and I don’t like Dave.

So overall, this is not my favorite way Homestuck could have ended 2009, but there’s always going to be disappointing updates and characters that I like less; we can’t get a page 1073 every day. And I know that some people love Dave and are thrilled to see him back. Even so, tabbing to the next page in Homestuck and getting Dave feels to me like biting into a delicious looking cake and getting mayonnaise instead of frosting, and holy shit, now I’m wondering if Dad did that to John as a prank once and that ties into his bad experience with cake. That’s totally an Egbert style prank.

> Dave: Make an April 14th’s Resolution to be an open and honest person.