recollé application

[parodeity]

PLAYER
YOUR NAME: Lucy
18+?: Yes
CONTACT: lucylovespluto
CHARACTERS IN GAME: n/a
RESERVATION LINK: bam

CHARACTER: CANON SECTION
NAME: Dave Strider
AGE: he's like 20 now and still aging since the comic just keeps happening
CANON: Homestuck

CANON HISTORY: Where doing this
CANON PERSONALITY:

When he was thirteen years old, Dave Strider was obsessed with being "cool". Raised by an inscrutable guardian bent on training Dave to face the end of the world through questionably intense means and a perceived lack of affection, Dave chose to see Bro as being mysterious or stern or aloof. The things that he didn't quite get or that made him uncomfortable about his life were simply the upper echelons of irony that Bro made into a lifestyle, and someday it'd probably all make sense and he'd be that cool, too. Three years and a lot of world-shattering revelations and quiet thinking time later, Dave's not so much obsessed with being cool (although he still makes an attempt off and on). He actually hugs Dirk (a younger alternate-universe version of his guardian) for telling him he didn't think he was cool in the way that didn't mean much, but that he thought he was cool in the "right way" (i.e. being a good person). Dave does still keep up a semi-hipster persona and doesn't like to confront shit head on but more...edge around it and sort of try to maintain his cool, and he does still have a lot of the same interests, but he's also more emotive and willing to admit he's lame. Irony and coolkid shit is less a militant way of life and more just hobbies and habits and shit he finds funny these days, which is character development - or growing up.

While Dave has grown up and matured in many ways, he hasn't quite grown up in others. By act 7, pre-epilogue, he's a sixteen year old guy and he seems to think dicks are the pinnacle of humor and he's really fucking obsessive about apple juice. He's more mature than normal sixteen year old guys in the sense he's died a fuckton and has dealt with the end of the world and has a lot of serious issues he's still working through...but it's important to note that Dave is also going to act like a sixteen year old guy a lot of the time. He will make jokes and they will be dumb and he will think he is the funniest motherfucker in the universe even if no one else happens to agree with him on that point. As long as he's making magic happen in his own mind it works, right?

Even when being cool and disinterested was the most important thing, Dave kind of fucking sucked at it. His poker face has actually historically been pretty decent thanks to being fairly chill slash level-headed and not terribly emotive facial expression wise, but he has pretty much always been a lame nerd at heart which kind of cancels that out. In his earliest appearance, John manages to troll him about apple juice found in his closet (LITTLE MONSTERS AND PEE JUICE...), for example. While he's usually pretty even-tempered and go with the flow, when Dave finally flips his shit it's usually utterly stupid and he has to go "welp never speaking about this again". See: accidentally killing a bird stealing his game, failing to break a sword for the first time ever when it protruded from the body of his guardian and just laying there face down on the ground like a loser where he landed on the rebound, throwing a temper tantrum at Jade about welsh swords, etc. "Disinterested" is also not something he always managed when talking to his friends. While Dave's always been harder to read than, say, John (although really who isn't harder to read than John), he gets excited about the dumbest shit and doesn't really hide it well. Rose even mentioning she was working on alchemizing beverages during meteorstuck got him to "omg" a bunch when she said she'd give apple juice her best shot (after he went please say aj please say aj please say aj). There's also the huge fucking example of the Mayor, who Dave honestly is waaaaaaaay too into and who Dave always excitedly talks up whenever the dude comes up in conversation. These are not the actions of a stoic coolkid, Dave Strider.

look i bring up a lot of things and then have to back track a lot of those things i bring up cause sometimes the things i bring up are ill advised to say or make people uncomfortable or make me uncomfortable its just a thing about me
Dave is also just really fucking awkward sometimes. As you may have guessed from the above quote, a lot of it is verbal awkwardness. Dave basically has no filter, and tends to engage in a sort of flow-of-consciousness commentary style conversation rather than anything else. A lot of times no one else even has to be involved, as he finds his own voice soothing and will just wander around muttering to himself at length without even really noticing he's doing it. He's done this before in text as well, simply leaving walls of red courier for his friends to come back to whenever they wander off on him mid conversation or simply don't answer at all. All the Strilondes are fairly wordy, and Dave is no exception to the rule - but unlike Rose and Dirk, he doesn't tend to stay on topic but can veer all over the place on a whim, sharing Roxy's more freestyle mode of conversation. Or if he does pick a topic to stick to, it is often a really stupid thing that derails all hints of a serious conversation, such as when (in a now-defunct timeline) Dave insisted that the white cueball Jade had was an eggy looking thing and proceeded to continuously derail her evil conversation to talk about the eggy looking thing, regardless of where she was trying to steer the conversation. He backtracks shit he says a lot about as often as he just goes ok I just said that moving the fuck on, but either way he always acknowledges this is a fault of his these days although it's not something he's even remotely trying to fix.

i had to face this fact a long time ago i could either try to change that part of myself which is an unwinnable war or i could try focusing on being like a vaguely half decent person so at least the shit i inevitably blurt out from deep down isnt all that bad
Dave Strider can be a jackass. He likes to troll people (he actually manages to get one of the trolls to block him during the whole troll-the-humans campaign because he made the guy so uncomfortable just by spouting bullshit at him) to a certain degree of just messing around with them for kicks, and he's frequently sarcastic and deadpan. He riles people up on purpose sometimes and isn't particularly apologetic about it. However, Dave also is an inherently decent dude. He admits that Karkat, for example, is fun to mess with, but says he'd never want to actually upset the guy and that there's a line. This comes across in most of his conversations - whenever someone he cares about seems to be getting genuinely seriously upset, he'll usually back off or flip to serious if he was joking around previously. He gave less of a shit about the trolls being ridiculous at the start of the game, but these days Dave tends to think about the difference between being a douche and a decent person almost all the time. He says it's probably because of Bro (who was...not a decent person) - but really, Dave has always been shown to be a decent person. He's reasonably friendly in a sort of casual way and does demonstrate concern for others a lot even though he tends to backtrack if called on it and even if he's not really the best at like...dealing with that concern or demonstrating it in a great way. Emotions are weird and Dave is not great at handling them still although he's better than he once was.

He does not believe himself to be a hero - and in fact states that his Bro ruined the concept of heroism for him - and at sixteen says he's stopped trying to live up to the standard of being one (or being a "manly man"). Even at thirteen Dave stated he wasn't a hero, and he's always been clearly uncomfortable with the concept of being put into that role. Despite the fact he's always been awkward about being put in the hero role, Dave has usually ended up accepting the responsibility. Even though he doesn't see himself as a hero, he will always without fail throw down his life for the sake of his friends. That's sort of the responsibility of time players (see: Aradia Megido) and Dave thinks the responsibility fucking sucks but he 100% always prefers to give his own life rather than those of his friends. He'd automatically assumed the responsibility for the Green Sun suicide mission because he thought it "should be him" but also because any world where his friends die rather than him is just unacceptable. A world without Rose or John or Jade or the others is just one that the alpha timeline cannot possibly allow to exist. His death in the timeline pre rewrite was Heroic, dying in a failed effort to get Jade resurrected; the death that led him to god tier was one he could have avoided had he not gone to assist Rose without a second thought. Although Dave seriously doesn't believe himself to be a hero and would argue the point if it came up, he has pretty damn heroic tendencies when left to his own devices for two seconds. However, this seems to be because he feels he has to do these things - the reluctant hero cliche he's meta'd about before.

While the man who raised him was all about being in control and in charge, Dave is very much not. He's not a leader by any stretch of the imagination and furthermore really has never wanted to be. He's always been fine with John being the defacto leader, although he struggled with not measuring up to John a lot. That was never about having a problem with John being in charge. Dave is actually generally happier in a follower sort of role when it comes to plans or missions or what have you. His time in Homestuck is generally spent running around under orders from others (usually one of his brigade of bossy overpowered ladies, one of whom is his sister) and while he puts up some token snark resistance he pretty much falls into line with a team game plan whenever one is thrown his way. He allows Terezi to guide him through his session after she wins him over with shitty gifs, despite her having just gotten an alternate John killed, and while he's not a super fan of Vriska he adheres to her plans with only a slight side derail wondering if Karkat was going to throw a fit over not being the leader any longer. While Dave always ends up accepting the responsibilities hurled at him, he frequently points out he doesn't really want them and would like to be just a Normal Guy. In charge of like. Being Dave. And hopefully nothing else.

Growing up with a man who Dave came to believe had to loathe him had a lot of effect on him - beyond the whole worrying about being a good guy and not wanting to be a hero and hating fighting (although he will always fight when he needs to) and being kind of messed up in other ways, Dave is pretty fucking insecure and is extremely clingy and attention-starved. He frequently bothers his friends for attention, and poor Rose Lalonde gets a fuckton of this on the meteor. Dave even at one point asks if he can go along with Rose on one of her dates with Kanaya, and otherwise just kind of invites himself into her vicinity and starts rambling at her. This is a thing that hasn't really changed since he was thirteen - once Dave likes someone (and it is so easy to get him to start paying attention to you, because you just have to give him some sort of vaguely positive attention and you're in, like Terezi managed) he's unlikely to ever leave them the fuck alone. He is a loquacious friendship barnacle, attached to you for life. He latches onto the idea of Roxy as a Mom fairly quickly, and after the initial awkward silence with Dirk breaks, Dave similarly seems attached to his alter-Bro, especially with a little bit of closure on the subject of his not-alter Bro.

So, now that we've established that Dave is a hilarious and talkative nexus of awkward attention-starved shenanigans and reluctant heroism, we should probably finish up with the fact that Dave Strider does actually take a lot in stride. While he frequently commentates on how bullshit his own universe and situation is, Dave is more go-with-the-flow than he isn't. He's dug his heels in on shit a few times (most notably when Jade was trying to get him to time travel for evil training) but is more often willing to kind of just cave on whatever (see: the part about being a follower) and/or deal with whatever comes his way. He's good at adapting to bullshit. Dave is actually a smart dude, but tends to apply his clever nature to sort of inane shit when he isn't using his brains to find loopholes or to get around new obstacles. He's not a scholar by trade like Rose, but instead is sort of functionally intelligent and savvy, and he uses it to roll with the punches. His ability to sort of be unphased by shit because he simply cannot work up to legitimately caring is actually ironically a trait that is kind of innately cool without a lot of real effort, but it's the part of his coolkid facade that he never really worked at a lot. While he does have his freak outs and mess ups, Dave is more often than not simply able to go "welp" and move on with his shit after saying (or rambling) his piece.

SKILLS/ABILITIES:

• In the non-ridiculous normal abilities section: Dave is good at mixing music, amateur photography, and making terrible comics. He's also really fucking amazing at building things (or at least building houses upwards) and is able to handle computers/technology in the sense he's a capable user (he does not build or code anything). He also likes to rap a lot.

• Dave can utilize a hammerspace storage system known as a sylladex. His fetch modus is the hash map.

• Dave's strife specibus is 1/2 bladekind and bladekind. This means he uses swords as his weapon of choice (and also broken swords).

• He's an excellent combatant, having been trained from basically birth to fight someday by his anime ninja older bro. Beyond the ninja-esque speed and flashstepping (which he could do even as a baby, wtf), he's just pretty good at sword fighting and is very much a combat pragmatist, going so far as to use Jade as a shield against Jack once he figured out Jack wouldn't hurt Jade.

• As the Knight of Time, Dave is able to manipulate the flow of time and is (according to another time player) a "powerful warrior class who uses the flow of time as a weapon". He is shown to be able to hop through time (and to be able to hop himself and EVERYONE ELSE forward through time 5000+ years, what the fuck), but in a way that he has to maintain a series of stable timeloops unless he wants to stack up a shitload of doomed Daves. Dead Daves are the enemy, man - and to explain that, any Dave that isn't part of a stable time loop (i.e. Dave at some point in the future backtracks and becomes that Dave) is fated to die because...time travel. In battle, Dave's time manipulation is shown to allow him to flashstep all over the fucking place and/or spam himself in battle (he can flashstep normally, but adding time travel to it makes it Worse) and backtrack the fuck up if one of his allies goes down, to "fix" things (shown in stellar stereo when he teams up with the Seer of Mind, who can see the best way to rewind). Another time player is shown to be able to freeze an enemy in place, and apparently time players are really fucking good at managing their time shit (if they aren't, they're p much dead), so Dave tends to have a pretty good grasp on timelines and consequences and when and where he is.

• As a god tier player, Dave is conditionally immortal. Unless his death is deemed Just or Heroic, he will simply revive. The other abilities that all god tier players receive also apply to him, and those are the ability to fly/float, and the ability to change into his god tier pajamas at will. Said pajamas are magic in the sense that they are apparently always clean even if not laundered, and they're super comfy.

• He can apparently breathe in space? Since he flies around in legitimate outer space sometimes? SO THAT'S A THING.

CHARACTER: AU SECTION
AU NAME: Dave Strider
AU AGE: 17
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: Hazel eyes instead of bright red, but otherwise he looks the exact same.

AU HISTORY:

i certify i talked over anything mentioning other people w/ those other people fyi

• Born and raised in Texas, Dave is the youngest kid in his family. His parents were questionably blessed with two sets of twins in December - Dirk and Roxy on the 4th, and then three years after them Rose and Dave on the 3rd. They moved to Recollé when he was eight. He still has the accent.
• His parents are perfectly nice, perfectly ordinary people. They moved for his dad's job, which is Something Computery. Dave knows the details if cross-questioned but tends to be vague unless you actually interrogate him on the matter. His mom is a pianist.
• He grew up super close to his siblings, basically. There's Rose-the-twin-sister whom he'd pretty much do anything for (this is true of every sibling, however). There's Roxy-the-older sister, who tended to drag him around when he was younger (and...even at this age, so) and who he has interest osmosis'd from to a degree. There's also older-brother Dirk whom he shared a room with until Dirk moved out, and who is one of the usual targets of Dave's late-night texts of idiocy.
• While some of the others might have been closer to dad growing up, Dave is a mama's boy. He can play piano fairly well and likes most things musical, although he's not actually involved in anything musical at school. Band sounded like too much Effort and not enough freestyling, whoops. He actually has a good singing voice, but rarely utilizes it for anything other than singing annoying songs at his family members and friends and/or occasionally messing around with music in his free time, though those songs and works never make it anywhere beyond friends and family.
• While music is kind of near to a main hobby, dance is more his main activity. He's been in various lessons since he was four or something and got signed up to take tap and ballet alongside his sibs; Dirk apparently did tap and so did Roxy, but Rose did ballet. Dave has since taken a few different styles, and kept up with tap and ballet. He doesn't bother to talk about it a lot despite actively doing the whole dance thing, but it's not really a matter of being embarrassed or secretive so much as Dave's talkativeness tends to be focused on random train-of-thought and weird shit, and he has to be pinned down and interrogated to actually give a coherent account of his day to day activities often enough.
• He's a decent student who turns in his work on time and doesn't skip classes. He sometimes falls asleep in classes, though. Also, his notes are absolute crap and no one should ever ask to copy them twice; Dave tends to just kind of note down anecdotes and weird trains of thought and he doodles a lot. Sometimes there are raps in the margins? Most of his "decent" notes come from copying them from friends after the fact.
• He's in the science club because he thinks their experiments are fun, and is fairly unapologetic about this fact. Dave isn't a religious club attendee, however, and has been known to skip meetings off and on. He usually shows up if they're doing experiments, but otherwise is more likely to show up at, like, photography club shit even though he's not a super great attendee there, either.
• A huge fan of social media, Dave uses it in his own fashion and frequently does things Just Because. His instagram is a weird place to be. He also has a Blog but it's not really worth reading. At all. Neither is his webcomic.
• In case it wasn't clear from the list, Dave has an eclectic set of hobbies and interests and is at least passingly familiar with a lot of things; he's a jack of many trades although he considers himself master of few, but doesn't sweat it generally.

AU PERSONALITY:

Dave seems really similar to his canon counterpart on the surface; the differences tend to be most visible underneath. He's less insecure, for example, and since his family background was supportive and good rather than everything Bro was, Dave's pretty well adjusted and doesn't have any real hangups about family and being close with other people. He's not bothered by affection of any type and can generally accept it and hand it out without any extra awkwardness - that is, he's awkward in the sense he's still a teenage boy, but as he is not a teenage boy with an abusive childhood past, he's more comfortable about it. His easygoing facade is much less a facade and more the truth; he's rarely bothered by much and while he still doesn't seem to care about being in charge and prefers to let other people play leader, it's less about weird control hangups and more about just being content to go with the flow.

Not being raised by a hypermasculine aggressive ninja, Dave's pretty calm and doesn't have as many hangups about how a guy or a hero ought to act; he just kind of does whatever he wants, secure in the knowledge his family will generally support him as long as he's not, like, breaking the law or something (and maybe even then, all things considered). He's still a good guy more willing to put others first, but he probably wouldn't be quite so fast to throw his life at problems until they went away (maybe). At the very least he doesn't worry about whether or not he's a good person; he just kind of is content in the knowledge that is a thing.

The family he was raised with has affected him. Dave has actually supportive and normal loving parents and he is a mama's boy to a very strong extent (he's the youngest and is her Baby therefore, okay). He also has actual siblings who have never once tried to actively hurt him or force him to do anything out of the usual sibling antics. He's picked up on some of the things they like to the degree that he can interact with them about said things - Rose's Lovecraftian horror, Roxy's fondness for makeup and fantasy novels and computers, Dirk's ridiculous projects. Dave's always been good at knowing just enough about something to bullshit it or reference it sideways. While in canon he had trouble speaking up about issues or asking for help when he needed it - or admitting to needing help at all - Dave's reincarnate self would immediately go to one of his siblings or his parents for help, or even some of his friends. There is no situation he can imagine which one of his family members could not fix or at least alleviate, and he's never been embarrassed or reluctant about going to them for help when he needs it. At least, no more than a usual amount and not enough to stop him doing it. While Dave is kind of casually cagey about himself naturally, it doesn't actually extend to being true in the way it did in canon; he's more willing to open up, especially with the people he loves.

Perhaps most importantly he doesn't really consider being cool as being a factor in decisions or even as something that's particularly important. Dave is shadeless since he has zero reason to want that kind of defense (though he is likely to pick up the affectation again as he gains memories) and he doesn't put in a lot of effort towards appearing Cool and Ironic. His sense of humor is kind of a dead ringer for his canon self's (see: Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff) but that was proven to be a thing that will just stick with Dave regardless of his circumstances. His shitty comic transcends universes and honestly that's probably a bad thing?? Someone pry ms paint away from this child's hands.