⚙ dave strider (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeframes) wrote2016-10-15 11:07 pm
timeframes) wrote2016-10-15 11:07 pm
APP
OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: AO
Are you 16 or older: Yes!
Contact: vyco @ plurk
Current Characters: n/aTag: dave strider
IN CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Homestuck (homestuck the anime)
Age: 16
History: (Homestuck! Where everything’s made up and the plot doesn’t matter!)
Homestuck is an extended study on how Video Games are bad for our children, and also bad for us, the reader. A near epic length treatise on how not to be concise, the story is set around the story of four kids playing a game, Sburb, that causes (or at least coincides with) the apocalypse - and in winning it causes a new universe to be born with them in place as gods. Of course, winning is never as easy as it seems, and along the way they run amok with aliens (the Trolls), who are participating in a game of their own (Sgrub). Everything goes to hell via handbasket. It all ends up okay but like 12 of your friends are dead.
Personality: Dave Strider is a reformed coolkid, a teen older and wiser who has spent years holed up on a space rock with his friends who do nothing but encourage him to be a huge nerd. He knows he isn’t cool, and really no longer has any desire to be. Having spent the last few years of his life reexamining his own personality, Dave has tried to change himself for the better - expressing a desire to make sure that under whatever front he puts on, at least he’s got a solid foundation of “good” underneath it. Part of that change for him is unleashing his “goddamn geyser of hilariously self-pulverizing freudian bloopers,” and that he’s just really not able to stop himself from spouting whatever crap he’s thinking about which normally results in some really embarrassing confession that he now chooses to own instead of dancing around pretending he doesn’t see it. New, shiny and chrome Dave is really just the sweet kid who wants his friends to think he’s awesome he’s always been at heart, but with much less fraught torment over appearing to be as radically awesome as he once was.
Raised by a probably deranged echelon of “irony” who called himself Bro, who tormented his young charge with constant cryptic notes, swordfights and fuckloads of puppets, Dave has had a bit of a rough childhood. He’s never had a normal life, having to figure out basic things like laundry and using a fridge from movies and context, because neither of those things were done in his house. This is something he’s only really pretty recently come to grips with, having spent a lot of his younger years idolizing his Bro as both his personal hero and what a “Hero” is supposed to be. An ideal to live up to and furiously disregarding any implication that Bro wasn’t exactly as chill as he claimed. Living on a constant edge since he was a kid in the name of “training,” supposedly for the very purpose of preparing him for the game he was to participate in, has made him reluctant to embrace his own role as a hero and even more reluctant to fight. He discusses feeling unsettled at the thought of fighting and metal sounds, and now is able to discuss Bro with some honesty - he doesn’t like his guardian very much, and is (rightfully) angry for the way he was raised. Though he spent a large part of early canon zipping around using his time travel to the fullest extent and risking his own life (and losing it) in the process, he prefers not to use it now - and claims instead of wanting to be a Hero of Time (his assigned role), he’d prefer to just be a guy of dude, who doesn’t have the weight of some fated responsibility on his shoulders he doesn’t know how to handle or be responsible for basically dooming himself over and over. He no longer believes in the “ideal” hero, believing it to be a idea entrenched in society’s toxic masculinity pedestal, and he’s tired of trying to force himself to live up to both the cookie cutter of a “manly cool dude” and “hero.”
Still, despite his reluctance to take the mantle of big heroic dude saves the day, he does have a tendency to throw himself into things rashly and heroically - and has suffered some ultimate consequences because of it. During the “Game Over” sequence, he rushes in to heroically attempt to save Jade and is nearly immediately killed for it, and has had alternate selves produced from timetravel die often from messing with the timelines fated path - resulting in “doomed” versions of himself, always slated to die. This isn’t really a symptom of believing himself to be heroic though, and is really more tied to how much he cares about his friends. He genuinely cares a lot about them, going to all sorts of lengths to guarantee them safety. This tendency even resulted in the creation of a timeline offshoot version of himself “prototyped” into a sprite with a bird, allowing himself to become one of the “guides” of the game to help himself and the others succeed where his past self had failed. This has more than likely been dialed back a little with the retcon, as his whole outlook on life is a little healthier for it, making him not quite as willing to throw his life away for hopeless outcomes.
For all his childish fronting about trying to act aloof, he’s actually a pretty needy kid who wants for friendship and attention about as much as any affection starved 16-year old. He doesn’t really know how to act in person around other people, or at least didn’t before the Meteor events, having spent a lot of time just talking to them over the computer and has a tendency to ramble and mutter to himself when speaking. For all his pop culture references and self-proclaimed rap skills (yes he raps), he’s a completely next level nerd - he has headcanons about President Obama and is fascinated by preserved dead things and bones, and expresses an interest in studying paleontology were his life normal. He also spends a lot of effort on shit tier drawing of his “ironic” comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, a stupid parody of gamer comics that has since spun off into complete insanity, and also mixing tunes, which he’s better at than comics. For all his good sides, he does have one downfall: he’s kind of a meme shitlord, and can’t quite shake loose of maintaining his cool jokes and not at all annoying phrases, sorry. He’s actually pretty good at making friends, because even though he has a few annoying qualities (referencing obscure bullshit mostly), it’s pretty obvious he’s a nice kid who doesn’t actually mean any harm. He wears a pair of shades he got for his 13th birthday from John to this day, constantly, all the time, and has a unending love for the “Mayor” - an adorable war-scarred rebel veteran who now just wants to build idyllic cities out of cans and books. While on the meteor he develops a pretty fast “bro-ship” with Karkat, claiming to follow a “Bro Code” to the letter - a pretty impressive feat for befriending a guy who hated him when they first spoke. Also, for some reason, he absolutely cannot stop hitting on moms (including his own, Roxy). It’s a Thing.
On the other half of the coin of his self-awareness is his own examination of his insecurities. Which he has a lot of - though at least he seems pretty in tune with what they are. He knows he is unable to really handle of the weight of being a “hero,” and has no desire to. He knows he has issues with his Bro, the way he was raised and how that affected him. And he knows how he has a tendency to run his mouth and has approximately zero filter, which is something he’s chosen to accept about himself - as long as he keeps on himself to make sure he doesn’t fall into the cycle of being cruel and “too cool” for no reason.
Contracts: Honestly Dave thinks this whole deal is pretty shitty considering he's retired at 16 and already did his years of traumatic child labor service in space, but he also is pretty motivated to get back home. So he'll complain but pretty much sign (or thumbprint lock) with no big issue, but he would make a big deal about how he's actually retired and thinks it's kind of uncool to press gang a dude to work (yuck!!) while you're hitchhiking him home.
Abilities/Skills:
God Tier | God Tier basically comes with a really cool set of self-cleaning cape outfitted pajamas, and conditional immortality. He will be revived if his death is neither Just nor Heroic - meaning he will be dead if he is killed for being a huge dick, or for being a great big hero, but if he’s accidentally run over by a car or something he’d probably be fine. Also, he can fly.
Time Shenanigans | Dave hates time travel, but it’s the main basis of his power. He can use it in several different ways - some of them for combat too, skipping back in time to use future knowledge of an opponent's moves to block it before it happens, or dodging just a little too quickly than might actually be reasonable. He can also manipulate the stock market with it, though that seems like an insider trading legal violation. He can also create stable timeloops which means if he messes up it might result in a “alternate doomed timeline” where the Dave that’s created from that will die. It’s a little bit of a gamebreaky-power but he also absolutely refuses to use it except in dire circumstances and with the help of someone to control it (i.e. someone with future sight) since it’s so dangerous and likely to result in one of his own deaths.
Sweet Rapping SkillsSweet Sword Skills Dave has been trained since childhood to be a kickass ninja warrior, and can use a sword with the best of them, though he doesn’t really enjoy it - associating it with a lot of bad memories of his childhood. He also has a tendency to break swords in half, which probably isn’t a power but should be mentioned anyway.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths: Rapping/making music, pop culture references from 2009, making shitty comics, looking cool while doing skateboard tricks, eating 12 hot pockets in one sitting, building things out of canned goods. He’s also a loyal friend and REALLY smart kid (though to be entirely clear he only has through a formal 6th grade education), with an interest in research and learning though he’s never actually pursued it.
Weakness: A complete aversion to actually dedicatedly working on anything to completion, obsequious devotion to only liking things that are cool but not in like a tryhard way, extreme avoidance of violence or conflict if he can help it, also I lied he’s super bad at rapping but tries anyway.
Items: His sunglasses (once graced the face of Ben Stiller, now a treasured 13th b-day present), cool god tier pajamas (self-cleaning), a watch/walkie-talkie speaker thing that looks like the ass end of a puppet. It doesn’t work very well.
SAMPLES
Network Sample: fake amazon wishlist | warning: thread contains 400+ words on adam sandler
Prose/Action Sample: It’s a pretty momentous occasion to see Dave Strider, noted sufferer of near constant verbal diarrhea and insufferable ability to have commentary on just about anything at all whatsoever, completely shocked into silence. Amazingly though, no has stopped by to take a picture for the front page, or even express surprise that he’s done nothing but gape like a particularly dimwitted fish for the entire explanation - it’s almost as if they expect it as if they’re used to it. Like Dave is just yet another chumphole failing to liven up the process of abducting (yes, abducting, he was clearly in the middle of his own important business and no matter how politely the contract was phrased he would call it what it was) with some good witty banter and smartassey remarks. Had he completely lost all ability to bite back?
He was a broken man now, three years on a dank rock hurtling through the endless dark depths of space and not sassing up everyone within stone’s throw had really hurt his game for the time when he could have actually used it. His chance to lay down some serious wreckage on the rude fucks who had interrupted his shit and he blew it totally. Embarrassing, honestly. For everyone. He was used to hairpin turns of fate and fucked up situations, but “telezapped back to fucking Space” was so far outside the realm of possibility he hadn’t taken the time to consider his response to it. It was, ultimately, pretty insulting to have to face “unknown ride hurtling through Space to probably dangerous and ill-thought out location 2.0” without at least some warning. No one wants to see this sequel.
It’s funny, he realizes when he’s finally released off on his own, how fucking weird it is to be in public. Not the public of five friends and a clown, but actual different people, who he’s never met. Three years of separation from a human society you thought was dead is enough to fuck up your social behavior totally and he almost feels a little sick at the possibility of being thrown back into the ring with the big guy: Expectations. For the first time in a long time, he’s stuck thinking about what a goofy shit he looks like, standing in the street with his dumb new smartphone and-- shit. Snap out of, asshole. It’s not like he has a choice. It’s get back in the ring or roll back out onto the sticky beer covered floor of the Thunderdome, and he’s not ready to get his cape dirty yet. Fuck it. Might as well make the best of this shit sandwich, and start chowing down.
Are you 16 or older: Yes!
Contact: vyco @ plurk
Current Characters: n/aTag: dave strider
IN CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Homestuck (homestuck the anime)
Age: 16
History: (Homestuck! Where everything’s made up and the plot doesn’t matter!)
Homestuck is an extended study on how Video Games are bad for our children, and also bad for us, the reader. A near epic length treatise on how not to be concise, the story is set around the story of four kids playing a game, Sburb, that causes (or at least coincides with) the apocalypse - and in winning it causes a new universe to be born with them in place as gods. Of course, winning is never as easy as it seems, and along the way they run amok with aliens (the Trolls), who are participating in a game of their own (Sgrub). Everything goes to hell via handbasket. It all ends up okay but like 12 of your friends are dead.
Personality: Dave Strider is a reformed coolkid, a teen older and wiser who has spent years holed up on a space rock with his friends who do nothing but encourage him to be a huge nerd. He knows he isn’t cool, and really no longer has any desire to be. Having spent the last few years of his life reexamining his own personality, Dave has tried to change himself for the better - expressing a desire to make sure that under whatever front he puts on, at least he’s got a solid foundation of “good” underneath it. Part of that change for him is unleashing his “goddamn geyser of hilariously self-pulverizing freudian bloopers,” and that he’s just really not able to stop himself from spouting whatever crap he’s thinking about which normally results in some really embarrassing confession that he now chooses to own instead of dancing around pretending he doesn’t see it. New, shiny and chrome Dave is really just the sweet kid who wants his friends to think he’s awesome he’s always been at heart, but with much less fraught torment over appearing to be as radically awesome as he once was.
Raised by a probably deranged echelon of “irony” who called himself Bro, who tormented his young charge with constant cryptic notes, swordfights and fuckloads of puppets, Dave has had a bit of a rough childhood. He’s never had a normal life, having to figure out basic things like laundry and using a fridge from movies and context, because neither of those things were done in his house. This is something he’s only really pretty recently come to grips with, having spent a lot of his younger years idolizing his Bro as both his personal hero and what a “Hero” is supposed to be. An ideal to live up to and furiously disregarding any implication that Bro wasn’t exactly as chill as he claimed. Living on a constant edge since he was a kid in the name of “training,” supposedly for the very purpose of preparing him for the game he was to participate in, has made him reluctant to embrace his own role as a hero and even more reluctant to fight. He discusses feeling unsettled at the thought of fighting and metal sounds, and now is able to discuss Bro with some honesty - he doesn’t like his guardian very much, and is (rightfully) angry for the way he was raised. Though he spent a large part of early canon zipping around using his time travel to the fullest extent and risking his own life (and losing it) in the process, he prefers not to use it now - and claims instead of wanting to be a Hero of Time (his assigned role), he’d prefer to just be a guy of dude, who doesn’t have the weight of some fated responsibility on his shoulders he doesn’t know how to handle or be responsible for basically dooming himself over and over. He no longer believes in the “ideal” hero, believing it to be a idea entrenched in society’s toxic masculinity pedestal, and he’s tired of trying to force himself to live up to both the cookie cutter of a “manly cool dude” and “hero.”
Still, despite his reluctance to take the mantle of big heroic dude saves the day, he does have a tendency to throw himself into things rashly and heroically - and has suffered some ultimate consequences because of it. During the “Game Over” sequence, he rushes in to heroically attempt to save Jade and is nearly immediately killed for it, and has had alternate selves produced from timetravel die often from messing with the timelines fated path - resulting in “doomed” versions of himself, always slated to die. This isn’t really a symptom of believing himself to be heroic though, and is really more tied to how much he cares about his friends. He genuinely cares a lot about them, going to all sorts of lengths to guarantee them safety. This tendency even resulted in the creation of a timeline offshoot version of himself “prototyped” into a sprite with a bird, allowing himself to become one of the “guides” of the game to help himself and the others succeed where his past self had failed. This has more than likely been dialed back a little with the retcon, as his whole outlook on life is a little healthier for it, making him not quite as willing to throw his life away for hopeless outcomes.
For all his childish fronting about trying to act aloof, he’s actually a pretty needy kid who wants for friendship and attention about as much as any affection starved 16-year old. He doesn’t really know how to act in person around other people, or at least didn’t before the Meteor events, having spent a lot of time just talking to them over the computer and has a tendency to ramble and mutter to himself when speaking. For all his pop culture references and self-proclaimed rap skills (yes he raps), he’s a completely next level nerd - he has headcanons about President Obama and is fascinated by preserved dead things and bones, and expresses an interest in studying paleontology were his life normal. He also spends a lot of effort on shit tier drawing of his “ironic” comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, a stupid parody of gamer comics that has since spun off into complete insanity, and also mixing tunes, which he’s better at than comics. For all his good sides, he does have one downfall: he’s kind of a meme shitlord, and can’t quite shake loose of maintaining his cool jokes and not at all annoying phrases, sorry. He’s actually pretty good at making friends, because even though he has a few annoying qualities (referencing obscure bullshit mostly), it’s pretty obvious he’s a nice kid who doesn’t actually mean any harm. He wears a pair of shades he got for his 13th birthday from John to this day, constantly, all the time, and has a unending love for the “Mayor” - an adorable war-scarred rebel veteran who now just wants to build idyllic cities out of cans and books. While on the meteor he develops a pretty fast “bro-ship” with Karkat, claiming to follow a “Bro Code” to the letter - a pretty impressive feat for befriending a guy who hated him when they first spoke. Also, for some reason, he absolutely cannot stop hitting on moms (including his own, Roxy). It’s a Thing.
On the other half of the coin of his self-awareness is his own examination of his insecurities. Which he has a lot of - though at least he seems pretty in tune with what they are. He knows he is unable to really handle of the weight of being a “hero,” and has no desire to. He knows he has issues with his Bro, the way he was raised and how that affected him. And he knows how he has a tendency to run his mouth and has approximately zero filter, which is something he’s chosen to accept about himself - as long as he keeps on himself to make sure he doesn’t fall into the cycle of being cruel and “too cool” for no reason.
Contracts: Honestly Dave thinks this whole deal is pretty shitty considering he's retired at 16 and already did his years of traumatic child labor service in space, but he also is pretty motivated to get back home. So he'll complain but pretty much sign (or thumbprint lock) with no big issue, but he would make a big deal about how he's actually retired and thinks it's kind of uncool to press gang a dude to work (yuck!!) while you're hitchhiking him home.
Abilities/Skills:
God Tier | God Tier basically comes with a really cool set of self-cleaning cape outfitted pajamas, and conditional immortality. He will be revived if his death is neither Just nor Heroic - meaning he will be dead if he is killed for being a huge dick, or for being a great big hero, but if he’s accidentally run over by a car or something he’d probably be fine. Also, he can fly.
Time Shenanigans | Dave hates time travel, but it’s the main basis of his power. He can use it in several different ways - some of them for combat too, skipping back in time to use future knowledge of an opponent's moves to block it before it happens, or dodging just a little too quickly than might actually be reasonable. He can also manipulate the stock market with it, though that seems like an insider trading legal violation. He can also create stable timeloops which means if he messes up it might result in a “alternate doomed timeline” where the Dave that’s created from that will die. It’s a little bit of a gamebreaky-power but he also absolutely refuses to use it except in dire circumstances and with the help of someone to control it (i.e. someone with future sight) since it’s so dangerous and likely to result in one of his own deaths.
Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths: Rapping/making music, pop culture references from 2009, making shitty comics, looking cool while doing skateboard tricks, eating 12 hot pockets in one sitting, building things out of canned goods. He’s also a loyal friend and REALLY smart kid (though to be entirely clear he only has through a formal 6th grade education), with an interest in research and learning though he’s never actually pursued it.
Weakness: A complete aversion to actually dedicatedly working on anything to completion, obsequious devotion to only liking things that are cool but not in like a tryhard way, extreme avoidance of violence or conflict if he can help it, also I lied he’s super bad at rapping but tries anyway.
Items: His sunglasses (once graced the face of Ben Stiller, now a treasured 13th b-day present), cool god tier pajamas (self-cleaning), a watch/walkie-talkie speaker thing that looks like the ass end of a puppet. It doesn’t work very well.
SAMPLES
Network Sample: fake amazon wishlist | warning: thread contains 400+ words on adam sandler
Prose/Action Sample: It’s a pretty momentous occasion to see Dave Strider, noted sufferer of near constant verbal diarrhea and insufferable ability to have commentary on just about anything at all whatsoever, completely shocked into silence. Amazingly though, no has stopped by to take a picture for the front page, or even express surprise that he’s done nothing but gape like a particularly dimwitted fish for the entire explanation - it’s almost as if they expect it as if they’re used to it. Like Dave is just yet another chumphole failing to liven up the process of abducting (yes, abducting, he was clearly in the middle of his own important business and no matter how politely the contract was phrased he would call it what it was) with some good witty banter and smartassey remarks. Had he completely lost all ability to bite back?
He was a broken man now, three years on a dank rock hurtling through the endless dark depths of space and not sassing up everyone within stone’s throw had really hurt his game for the time when he could have actually used it. His chance to lay down some serious wreckage on the rude fucks who had interrupted his shit and he blew it totally. Embarrassing, honestly. For everyone. He was used to hairpin turns of fate and fucked up situations, but “telezapped back to fucking Space” was so far outside the realm of possibility he hadn’t taken the time to consider his response to it. It was, ultimately, pretty insulting to have to face “unknown ride hurtling through Space to probably dangerous and ill-thought out location 2.0” without at least some warning. No one wants to see this sequel.
It’s funny, he realizes when he’s finally released off on his own, how fucking weird it is to be in public. Not the public of five friends and a clown, but actual different people, who he’s never met. Three years of separation from a human society you thought was dead is enough to fuck up your social behavior totally and he almost feels a little sick at the possibility of being thrown back into the ring with the big guy: Expectations. For the first time in a long time, he’s stuck thinking about what a goofy shit he looks like, standing in the street with his dumb new smartphone and-- shit. Snap out of, asshole. It’s not like he has a choice. It’s get back in the ring or roll back out onto the sticky beer covered floor of the Thunderdome, and he’s not ready to get his cape dirty yet. Fuck it. Might as well make the best of this shit sandwich, and start chowing down.
no subject
Are you 16 or older: Yes!
Contact: vyco @ plurk
Current Characters: n/aTag: dave strider
IN CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Homestuck (homestuck the anime)
Age: 16
History: (Homestuck! Where everything’s made up and the plot doesn’t matter!)
Homestuck is an extended study on how Video Games are bad for our children, and also bad for us, the reader. A near epic length treatise on how not to be concise, the story is set around the story of four kids playing a game, Sburb, that causes (or at least coincides with) the apocalypse - and in winning it causes a new universe to be born with them in place as gods. Of course, winning is never as easy as it seems, and along the way they run amok with aliens (the Trolls), who are participating in a game of their own (Sgrub). Everything goes to hell via handbasket. It all ends up okay but like 12 of your friends are dead.
Personality: Dave Strider is a reformed coolkid, a teen older and wiser who has spent years holed up on a space rock with his friends who do nothing but encourage him to be a huge nerd. He knows he isn’t cool, and really no longer has any desire to be. Having spent the last few years of his life reexamining his own personality, Dave has tried to change himself for the better - expressing a desire to make sure that under whatever front he puts on, at least he’s got a solid foundation of “good” underneath it. Part of that change for him is unleashing his “goddamn geyser of hilariously self-pulverizing freudian bloopers,” and that he’s just really not able to stop himself from spouting whatever crap he’s thinking about which normally results in some really embarrassing confession that he now chooses to own instead of dancing around pretending he doesn’t see it. New, shiny and chrome Dave is really just the sweet kid who wants his friends to think he’s awesome he’s always been at heart, but with much less fraught torment over appearing to be as radically awesome as he once was.
Raised by a probably deranged echelon of “irony” who called himself Bro, who tormented his young charge with constant cryptic notes, swordfights and fuckloads of puppets, Dave has had a bit of a rough childhood. He’s never had a normal life, having to figure out basic things like laundry and using a fridge from movies and context, because neither of those things were done in his house. This is something he’s only really pretty recently come to grips with, having spent a lot of his younger years idolizing his Bro as both his personal hero and what a “Hero” is supposed to be. An ideal to live up to and furiously disregarding any implication that Bro wasn’t exactly as chill as he claimed. Living on a constant edge since he was a kid in the name of “training,” supposedly for the very purpose of preparing him for the game he was to participate in, has made him reluctant to embrace his own role as a hero and even more reluctant to fight. He discusses feeling unsettled at the thought of fighting and metal sounds, and now is able to discuss Bro with some honesty - he doesn’t like his guardian very much, and is (rightfully) angry for the way he was raised. Though he spent a large part of early canon zipping around using his time travel to the fullest extent and risking his own life (and losing it) in the process, he prefers not to use it now - and claims instead of wanting to be a Hero of Time (his assigned role), he’d prefer to just be a guy of dude, who doesn’t have the weight of some fated responsibility on his shoulders he doesn’t know how to handle or be responsible for basically dooming himself over and over. He no longer believes in the “ideal” hero, believing it to be a idea entrenched in society’s toxic masculinity pedestal, and he’s tired of trying to force himself to live up to both the cookie cutter of a “manly cool dude” and “hero.”
Still, despite his reluctance to take the mantle of big heroic dude saves the day, he does have a tendency to throw himself into things rashly and heroically - and has suffered some ultimate consequences because of it. During the “Game Over” sequence, he rushes in to heroically attempt to save Jade and is nearly immediately killed for it, and has had alternate selves produced from timetravel die often from messing with the timelines fated path - resulting in “doomed” versions of himself, always slated to die. This isn’t really a symptom of believing himself to be heroic though, and is really more tied to how much he cares about his friends. He genuinely cares a lot about them, going to all sorts of lengths to guarantee them safety. This tendency even resulted in the creation of a timeline offshoot version of himself “prototyped” into a sprite with a bird, allowing himself to become one of the “guides” of the game to help himself and the others succeed where his past self had failed. This has more than likely been dialed back a little with the retcon, as his whole outlook on life is a little healthier for it, making him not quite as willing to throw his life away for hopeless outcomes.
For all his childish fronting about trying to act aloof, he’s actually a pretty needy kid who wants for friendship and attention about as much as any affection starved 16-year old. He doesn’t really know how to act in person around other people, or at least didn’t before the Meteor events, having spent a lot of time just talking to them over the computer and has a tendency to ramble and mutter to himself when speaking. For all his pop culture references and self-proclaimed rap skills (yes he raps), he’s a completely next level nerd - he has headcanons about President Obama and is fascinated by preserved dead things and bones, and expresses an interest in studying paleontology were his life normal. He also spends a lot of effort on shit tier drawing of his “ironic” comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, a stupid parody of gamer comics that has since spun off into complete insanity, and also mixing tunes, which he’s better at than comics. For all his good sides, he does have one downfall: he’s kind of a meme shitlord, and can’t quite shake loose of maintaining his cool jokes and not at all annoying phrases, sorry. He’s actually pretty good at making friends, because even though he has a few annoying qualities (referencing obscure bullshit mostly), it’s pretty obvious he’s a nice kid who doesn’t actually mean any harm. He wears a pair of shades he got for his 13th birthday from John to this day, constantly, all the time, and has a unending love for the “Mayor” - an adorable war-scarred rebel veteran who now just wants to build idyllic cities out of cans and books. While on the meteor he develops a pretty fast “bro-ship” with Karkat, claiming to follow a “Bro Code” to the letter - a pretty impressive feat for befriending a guy who hated him when they first spoke. Also, for some reason, he absolutely cannot stop hitting on moms (including his own, Roxy). It’s a Thing.
On the other half of the coin of his self-awareness is his own examination of his insecurities. Which he has a lot of - though at least he seems pretty in tune with what they are. He knows he is unable to really handle of the weight of being a “hero,” and has no desire to. He knows he has issues with his Bro, the way he was raised and how that affected him. And he knows how he has a tendency to run his mouth and has approximately zero filter, which is something he’s chosen to accept about himself - as long as he keeps on himself to make sure he doesn’t fall into the cycle of being cruel and “too cool” for no reason.
Contracts: Honestly Dave thinks this whole deal is pretty shitty considering he's retired at 16 and already did his years of traumatic child labor service in space, but he also is pretty motivated to get back home. So he'll complain but pretty much sign (or thumbprint lock) with no big issue, but he would make a big deal about how he's actually retired and thinks it's kind of uncool to press gang a dude to work (yuck!!) while you're hitchhiking him home.
Abilities/Skills:
God Tier | God Tier basically comes with a really cool set of self-cleaning cape outfitted pajamas, and conditional immortality. He will be revived if his death is neither Just nor Heroic - meaning he will be dead if he is killed for being a huge dick, or for being a great big hero, but if he’s accidentally run over by a car or something he’d probably be fine. Also, he can fly.
Time Shenanigans | Dave hates time travel, but it’s the main basis of his power. He can use it in several different ways - some of them for combat too, skipping back in time to use future knowledge of an opponent's moves to block it before it happens, or dodging just a little too quickly than might actually be reasonable. He can also manipulate the stock market with it, though that seems like an insider trading legal violation. He can also create stable timeloops which means if he messes up it might result in a “alternate doomed timeline” where the Dave that’s created from that will die. It’s a little bit of a gamebreaky-power but he also absolutely refuses to use it except in dire circumstances and with the help of someone to control it (i.e. someone with future sight) since it’s so dangerous and likely to result in one of his own deaths.
Sweet Rapping SkillsSweet Sword Skills Dave has been trained since childhood to be a kickass ninja warrior, and can use a sword with the best of them, though he doesn’t really enjoy it - associating it with a lot of bad memories of his childhood. He also has a tendency to break swords in half, which probably isn’t a power but should be mentioned anyway.Strengths/Weaknesses:
Strengths: Rapping/making music, pop culture references from 2009, making shitty comics, looking cool while doing skateboard tricks, eating 12 hot pockets in one sitting, building things out of canned goods. He’s also a loyal friend and REALLY smart kid (though to be entirely clear he only has through a formal 6th grade education), with an interest in research and learning though he’s never actually pursued it.
Weakness: A complete aversion to actually dedicatedly working on anything to completion, obsequious devotion to only liking things that are cool but not in like a tryhard way, extreme avoidance of violence or conflict if he can help it, also I lied he’s super bad at rapping but tries anyway.
Items: His sunglasses (once graced the face of Ben Stiller, now a treasured 13th b-day present), cool god tier pajamas (self-cleaning), a watch/walkie-talkie speaker thing that looks like the ass end of a puppet. It doesn’t work very well.
SAMPLES
Network Sample: fake amazon wishlist | warning: thread contains 400+ words on adam sandler
Prose/Action Sample: It’s a pretty momentous occasion to see Dave Strider, noted sufferer of near constant verbal diarrhea and insufferable ability to have commentary on just about anything at all whatsoever, completely shocked into silence. Amazingly though, no has stopped by to take a picture for the front page, or even express surprise that he’s done nothing but gape like a particularly dimwitted fish for the entire explanation - it’s almost as if they expect it as if they’re used to it. Like Dave is just yet another chumphole failing to liven up the process of abducting (yes, abducting, he was clearly in the middle of his own important business and no matter how politely the contract was phrased he would call it what it was) with some good witty banter and smartassey remarks. Had he completely lost all ability to bite back?
He was a broken man now, three years on a dank rock hurtling through the endless dark depths of space and not sassing up everyone within stone’s throw had really hurt his game for the time when he could have actually used it. His chance to lay down some serious wreckage on the rude fucks who had interrupted his shit and he blew it totally. Embarrassing, honestly. For everyone. He was used to hairpin turns of fate and fucked up situations, but “telezapped back to fucking Space” was so far outside the realm of possibility he hadn’t taken the time to consider his response to it. It was, ultimately, pretty insulting to have to face “unknown ride hurtling through Space to probably dangerous and ill-thought out location 2.0” without at least some warning. No one wants to see this sequel.
It’s funny, he realizes when he’s finally released off on his own, how fucking weird it is to be in public. Not the public of five friends and a clown, but actual different people, who he’s never met. Three years of separation from a human society you thought was dead is enough to fuck up your social behavior totally and he almost feels a little sick at the possibility of being thrown back into the ring with the big guy: Expectations. For the first time in a long time, he’s stuck thinking about what a goofy shit he looks like, standing in the street with his dumb new smartphone and-- shit. Snap out of, asshole. It’s not like he has a choice. It’s get back in the ring or roll back out onto the sticky beer covered floor of the Thunderdome, and he’s not ready to get his cape dirty yet. Fuck it. Might as well make the best of this shit sandwich, and start chowing down.