parodeity | subnautica ic inbox 3.0;

[ there is exactly one other person in the universe who shares a sense of humor with dave this closely. rose gets his jokes and follows along more often than she doesn't, but his absurd roots and her gothic ones don't always overlap. jade and jon have never really come close to getting dave's jokes even if they laughed, and karkat didn't really have the patience to even pretend to try to understand sbahj even if he could quote some of it through long exposure to dave and rose. bro had maybe understood or maybe had not. it was impossible to tell and didn't even matter.

no one he's spoken to since arriving in sub has ever fully gotten him, either. the kharaa fucking adore dave's offbeat sense of humor, but he knows better than anyone it makes no actual sense to them. they just...like him. for some reason.

but while dirk's grasp on irony is opposed to dave's even if he suspects most people who know them might assume there's overlap or that they're working off the same playbook - while his grasp on irony is opposed and he deliberately puts in the sincerity that dave does almost by accident, he gets it.

and while it doesn't move him immediately, he does relax as the pastiche goes on.

eventually he even laughs, a quick huff of air more than anything else, one of the quieter varieties of dave expressing humor. ]

[Dirk is calling it a win. The more Dave relaxes and the happier he gets, the more Dirk himself unwinds. It isn't just their fight; Dirk is nervous about showing things he made to Dave. Dave seeming to like it is incredibly relieving. Dirk even manages to eat a few chips towards the end of things in his relief.]

[ amused is not happy but it's as close as he's going to get for the foreseeable future and at least he is amused. he likes the ridiculous rewrite. it's an emotion and it exists and it makes him tired again but whatever. ]

You should've shown me this earlier. [ like when they first got here, immediately ]

It didn't really occur to me.

[Showing Dave things he makes can be weirdly nerve-wracking. Even when it's just making Dave a coffee maker by request.]

You can have the full catalogue of Di-Stri rewrites if you want.

Why? Didn't it occur to you. Not the second half.

[ since that didn't really require a why ]

If you want to reach into the deeper analysis of things, then frankly, I don't really value most of my work. The only things I've ever really been proud of have been given to the people I love as birthday presents. It didn't occur to me that you'd want to see the bullshit I made up because I was bored and angry at dead directors.

The fact that I always really want to impress you doesn't help.

You like seein' shit I don't value.

Because I value a lot of things about you that you don't. It probably isn't a surprise that the reverse is true.

You might not have noticed that I was nervous about handin' you even the coffee maker.

[god that sounds stupid]

...I thought that was because you didn't want to give me even more access to coffee.

I was mostly resigned to that. [The thing that made him nervous...] My concern was you'd hate its coffee more than the other coffee machine. And then I'd have fucked up the one thing you asked me to do with it. That you drink even more coffee now is agonizing, but it really makes me happy you enjoy it.

The other coffee machine made terrible coffee? [ like. it wasn't hard to improve on it. ] Literally always told you I wasn't sure why I was drinkin' it.

But you asked me, specifically, to make you one that made better coffee.

You constantly impress me.

I don't like to let you down.

I'm the only person who ever lets me down?

That is not how down-lettin' works as much as it is how your inability to share culpability with other people works. Like, if I let you down, you decide it's because your expectations were too high, instead of accepting that maybe I just fell short of what you wanted from me and that's on me.

I don't have any expectations of you.

[ that's been a historic problem so he's decided he just won't? heads up. ]

[Meaning Dirk has failed them. Over and over, until Dave decided not to expect anything.]

Okay. Cool.

[He swallows, and repositions the pillow so he can rest his chin on it again.]

Wanna watch another thing?

[ it's more like he's decided his expectations are a cage and cannot be allowed to exist, and also, they hurt, but. ]

Sure. Which one are you second most proud of?

[Dirk thinks that would be Dave's interpretation. He knows, though, that it's all on him.]

You said you wanted to take a look at Armageddon? It's pretty okay.

[ @dirk meet him in the pit ]

Yep. Have spent too many hours rappin' at John about his stupid all-the-same-movie disaster films to pass that up.

[So Dirk loads it up. This one features liberal use of the cast commentary track to critique the issues with the film, including Affleck's iconic note that he "asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up, so that was the end of that talk." Dirk also brings in Night at the Museum clips of Owen Wilson. The general effort seemed to have been to alter the pacing of the film to insist on (absurdist) character focus and attention to the human elements. All explosions have been removed from the film and the romance between Affleck and Tyler was edited into a rivalry for the cameraperson's love, which is eventually stolen by the special effects. Because Owen Wilson is in the film, Dirk helpfully added various Ben Stiller performance to give Wilson's character a heartwarming buddy dynamic. All government officials have been replaced by Snoop Dogg clips, mostly from "Wasn't Me." The humour is of course in his usual vein, absurd and fractal and often sophomoric when not in the realms of obscure philosophy. The shuttle has a Peaches the Dog logo instead of NASA.

Also he edited in badly MSPaint-drawn baby versions of himself all over the asteroid in every single scene.]

[ @farrah what the fuck i want to see this film

this time dave does laugh, and it's probably the exact moment the special effects/cameraperson otp becomes canon because. why? because this is the sort of idiocy he lives for. dirk's obscure philosophy humor doesn't always land even if he gets it but the stupid off the wall stuff always does.

why is he this way

also the mspaint-drawn babies make him snort ]

[honestly same

Dirk considers that a personal victory. He may consistently fail to meet Dave's expectations, but at least Dave thinks he's funny. This time Dirk never fully relaxes, but the laugh does make him happy. His fingers unknot themselves from their grip on his pillow buddy.]

[ i'm gonna kill u for doing this to me an innocent

dave is slouching into the couch more. he's not really relaxed in the sense he could be on his feet in an instant and hasn't slung himself halfway on dirk or otherwise made a nuisance of his person like he usually does when things are completely fine. but his expression isn't blank so much as tired and he's zoning out into a different variety of not-there, simply letting himself watch whatever's on the screen and not focusing on anything else at all.

eventually, though: ]

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