Dave Strider [TG] turntechGodhead (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chronologistics) wrote2013-01-01 01:22 am
chronologistics) wrote2013-01-01 01:22 am
Dave Strider | Homestuck | The Box Application
Player Information
Player name: Cas
Contact: Plurk @![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
tiikyo or AIM @ tiikyo
Are you over 18: Yes.
Characters in The Box Already: N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: Act 6, Act 6, Intermission 2 (page 8555)
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive:Insert witty comment about the piles upon piles of dead Daves Alive.
History: Sproing!
Personality: Just take a look at this guy. No, seriously, take a nice, long look at him. A towel will be procured for you to mop up the inevitable perspiration.
This guy is the coolest motherfucker on the face of the planet. He is so cool that polar icecaps want to drift their gargantuan, icy asses toward the Equator just to get a little sun. He is so fly that flies wonder why they aren’t just called Daves. He is so awesome that his picture would have been next to the word “awesome” in the dictionary, only he had been too busy being totally sweet to show up for the photoshoot. But it's totally fine; he is so awesome that only his name suffices as an appropriate approximation of the word: Dave Strider.
Yeah. This guy? He’s kind of a big deal.
He's so much of a big deal, in fact, that he frankly does not have time for any more of this personality section bullshit.
... at least that is what Dave would like you to believe.
On the outside, the Dave we see is the living embodiment of everything cool. At least, that's what he thinks, anyway. From his suave hair, to his ironically-humorous aviators (a gift from his best bro, John Egbert), to his rad baseball tees, hipster jeans, and matching red chucks, to his totally nonchalant I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-About-The-World swagger -- there is very little (read: absolutely nothing) about this kid that isn’t just so goddamn awesome. He’s witty, he’s charming, he’s completely unafraid to drop some sick rhymes on any poor unsuspecting mofo like they’re hot (because they are, duh) and paint the town with their shame. He’s pretty much got an answer for everything, but especially about bands whose existence that one might dubiously question. He is a talented musician, as well as an amateur photographer, and an aspiring humorist with a number of (ironically-humorous, are we seeing a trend here?) internet blogs and social networking profiles that he maintains on a daily basis.
He is also pretty damn adept with (cheap and/or broken shitty) swords.
So. Cool.
-- but as much as Dave wants to portray himself to be the hero or the king, deep down, he knows he is not.
For all his swagger, he is still very much a very young kid who has a habit of collecting weird dead things preserved in jars, taking a ton of pictures of himself in the bathroom mirror, and hiding apple juice in his closet because his brother apparently thinks the fridge is for sharp objects and cherry bombs.
He has spent his much of his life living in the shadow of his super-hip-and-even -more-way-cool elder brother,Dirk Bro. From the way he dresses, to the way he holds himself, to the way he fights, he strives to emulate Bro, creating an esoteric battle of self-perpetuating oneupmanship that, as per the rules of irony, oftentimes doesn't make much sense to those untrained in the art.
(He still isn’t quite there yet.)
Trying to be like Bro is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, Dave has been relentlessly sculpted, trained, molded, and prepared to be at the top of his game, every game. He is incredibly fast and incredibly agile, capable of flash-stepping (yes, it is exactly what it sounds like) and intricate swordplay. He is always calm and collected, keeping a hella fine poker-face even when coming face-to-face with his own dead body, Bro’s dead body, or even with the possible disestablishment of reality. When he is given a task, he throws himself into it without question, working relentlessly to get it done because if there is one thing he knows, it is that Striders don’t back down. He's the kind of guy that you want working with you when you are playing a game that determines the fate of the universe because he kicks ass, takes names, and gets shit done; he makes it HAPPEN.
The other side of that coin, however, is that being sculpted, trained, molded, and prepared to save the universe before he could even get the chance to grow some peach fuzz means that he lacks a lot of social graces. It is, perhaps, the most ironic thing about his coolkid demeanor -- for all the posturing he does, he harbors a couple of deeply-festered insecurities.
Dave is rather prickly about his personal boundaries, preferring to hide behind a pair of obnoxiously-huge sunglasses(though he will claim their presence in the name of irony) in order to remain casual and aloof to a point of standoffishness that can inhibit his ability to form strategies on his own. We're given the impression that he prefers being a follower than a leader -- despite the fact that the game classifies him as an “Active Class” -- and using his powers to exploit the hell out of the temporal flow in order to aid his friends, rather than stepping up to be any kind of a leader to them; as far as Dave is concerned, "Bro was a hero, John is [a hero], not [him]."
Dave knows how to support a team, because God knows they fail at supporting themselves when things get too hot to handle, which they always do, and he knows how to do it well... but it is difficult for him to work by himself, for himself.
His aloofness and nonchalance is not to say that he is emotionless. Far from it, actually., Perhaps in spite of the fact that it had likely been drilled into him since before he could walk that emotions were weakness, Dave's emotions run incredibly, deep; he is just not exactly good at expressing them. It can make being around him rather emotionally taxing, if one isn't familiar with him, because it is oftentimes difficult to tell what he's thinking as opposed to what he is saying or doing. He can be both very direct and not. In moments where he can't completely neutral -- either because something genuinely has unsettled him, or because he is feeling more alone than he is comfortable with -- his discomfort becomes obvious to those close enough to him to see it when he launches into long, winding, and often-times nonsensical tangents; or, if in person, he will quietly mumble and murmur to himself until someone calls him out on it.
(Shut up, it's perfectly natural.)
It is obvious to those few friends that he does hold close that he needs his Coolkid facade. Growing up is an awkward, difficult time in any kid’s life, even without the fate of the universe balanced in the palm of your hand; nothing feels like it is in control. If maintaining an air of cool gives him the little piece of mind to get shit done, then there is nothing wrong with letting him keep it.
If there is one thing to take home about Dave Strider, it is that for all of his casual demeanor, all of his playful jeering, all of his swagger, and all of his insecurities (that he totally does not have, he insists), it is that he is the best bro a bro could ever have. He will do absolutely anything for his friends, even if it means playing a dumb game with them, or travelling back in time to keep them from doing some utterly stupid shit, or taking a lot of fucking bullets in the middle of a pointless battle with some immortal dog-demon-jester-thing for them. Seriously, a bro’s gotta be there for his best bros, it’s pretty much the first cosmic law of the universe.
The lengths he will go to ensure his friends’ lives is nothing short of heroic, despite how Dave insists he is not a hero. He is a protector, a defender, and he will pursue that role with every fibre of his being, until his last dying breath.
And that is truly what makes him really cool, even if his friends can see it and he cannot.
Abilities/Strengths and Weaknesses:
Abilities:
Strengths: Dave is pretty physically fit, and very skilled in swordplay. Compared to his friends, it gives him an advantage in sticky situations.
He's very smart and cunning, as obvious in how easily he can manipulate SBurb's system to get Jade into the Medium, and how quickly he picks up on time shenanigans and creating time loops.
Most importantly, however, it should be noted that when the cards are down, and the hands are dealt, Dave will do whatever it takes to get shit done and make it happen. A good example of this is traveling backward in time to prevent John from dying. It caused that timeline to cease to exist, and he essentially became (paradoxically) a living doomed timeline by prototyping himself so that he could become his alternate past-self's sprite.
Weaknesses: WEAKNESSES? WHAT WEAKNESSES? THIS BOY IS THE PERFECT BOY. HE IS AN ADONIS. EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES TURNS TO GOLD. MEN WANT TO BE HIM, WOMEN WANT TO DO HIM, AND SMALL CHILDREN BOW BEFORE HIS FEET -- no, this is far from the truth. The biggest weakness by far Dave has is his lack of confidence in himself, ironically enough. Dave is always comparing himself to Bro, and yet always selling himself short. It feeds into this deep-seeded need to go above and beyond to prove himself to be the best at whatever is being thrown at him; the problem is that -- in Dave's opinion -- he will always fall short. In trying so hard to prove himself -- also to prove just how cool he is -- it makes him remarkably susceptible to peer pressure from those close to him, particularly from John.
In that sense, it is also very difficult for him to really take initiative. He feels much more comfortable following, rather than leading. This isn't to say it's impossible -- he'll be among one of the first to jump up and do what it takes to save someone -- but it's difficult for him to do it without that impetus. Again, Dave doesn't exactly know how to work by himself for himself.
While he is very smart, he is also pretty forgetful. On more than one occasion, he sets off his own sylladex traps, purposefully forgets the names of people (and trolls) whom he doesn't really care much for, and he even once forgot to forget something. Being cool takes up a lot of brainpower, okay, give a guy a break.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample: Dave on the Test Drive. Warning: TL;DR. Lots of it.
Prose Log Sample:
The Mayor had never been much of a talker. He was kind of an eccentric guy, really; sort of like a giant toddler. He didn't care much for fancy things to play with -- did chess pieces really even grow up playing with toys? Where does that fall on the irony scale? -- didn't care much for anything more advanced than green chalk (to eat) and tin cans (to govern).
But that's what made him awesome. Even if he didn't talk much, even if talking to him did sometimes feel like you were talking to a toddler who couldn't offer you any of the doting, fatherly advice you might (or might not) have been looking for, there was never any pressure when you were hanging with the Mayor.
And that's why Dave had saved him; why it had been so important to swoop down and nearly do a swan-dive into motherfucking lava to rescue his silent, easily-entertained, carapace ass. And now that the Mayor was standing with feet planted firmly on what had once been the rooftop to Dave's old apartment building, it was time to go flying upward and bail everyone out of Karkats REALLY FUCKING BIG PROBLEM OVER HERE!!!!!! whatever that may be.
"Goodbye, Mayor."
Dave supposed it was a little (read: very) shitty to bail on the Mayor, of all people and carapeces, and swoop off into what could possibly turn out to be your shitty death -- seriously, that had to be a tear glistening in one of those beady white eyes, strongly silent like the strong and silent dude that the Mayor was -- but a dude had to do what a dude had to do.
The gate to LOFAF -- red and glowy against LOHAC's... was it actually a sky? Come to think of it, it always looked fucking oppressively black -- drew closer and Dave held his breath. It never mattered how prepared you were to hop gates, it was always a little jarring when you tore out of that shit like popping a zit. It always felt like it was ripping the air out of your lungs like letting all the air out of a balloon with a farting sound.
A crisp, chilled air -- it smelled of frost and palm trees -- overcame him as the gate opened and swallowed him whole, and the next thing he knew he was engulfed in a sudden blinding whiteness.
(Well. That was certainly never a part of gate-hopping.)
Player name: Cas
Contact: Plurk @
Are you over 18: Yes.
Characters in The Box Already: N/A
Character Information
Character Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: Act 6, Act 6, Intermission 2 (page 8555)
Is your character Dead, Undead or Alive:
History: Sproing!
Personality: Just take a look at this guy. No, seriously, take a nice, long look at him. A towel will be procured for you to mop up the inevitable perspiration.
This guy is the coolest motherfucker on the face of the planet. He is so cool that polar icecaps want to drift their gargantuan, icy asses toward the Equator just to get a little sun. He is so fly that flies wonder why they aren’t just called Daves. He is so awesome that his picture would have been next to the word “awesome” in the dictionary, only he had been too busy being totally sweet to show up for the photoshoot. But it's totally fine; he is so awesome that only his name suffices as an appropriate approximation of the word: Dave Strider.
Yeah. This guy? He’s kind of a big deal.
He's so much of a big deal, in fact, that he frankly does not have time for any more of this personality section bullshit.
... at least that is what Dave would like you to believe.
On the outside, the Dave we see is the living embodiment of everything cool. At least, that's what he thinks, anyway. From his suave hair, to his ironically-humorous aviators (a gift from his best bro, John Egbert), to his rad baseball tees, hipster jeans, and matching red chucks, to his totally nonchalant I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-About-The-World swagger -- there is very little (read: absolutely nothing) about this kid that isn’t just so goddamn awesome. He’s witty, he’s charming, he’s completely unafraid to drop some sick rhymes on any poor unsuspecting mofo like they’re hot (because they are, duh) and paint the town with their shame. He’s pretty much got an answer for everything, but especially about bands whose existence that one might dubiously question. He is a talented musician, as well as an amateur photographer, and an aspiring humorist with a number of (ironically-humorous, are we seeing a trend here?) internet blogs and social networking profiles that he maintains on a daily basis.
He is also pretty damn adept with (cheap and/or broken shitty) swords.
So. Cool.
-- but as much as Dave wants to portray himself to be the hero or the king, deep down, he knows he is not.
For all his swagger, he is still very much a very young kid who has a habit of collecting weird dead things preserved in jars, taking a ton of pictures of himself in the bathroom mirror, and hiding apple juice in his closet because his brother apparently thinks the fridge is for sharp objects and cherry bombs.
He has spent his much of his life living in the shadow of his super-hip-and-even -more-way-cool elder brother,
(He still isn’t quite there yet.)
Trying to be like Bro is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, Dave has been relentlessly sculpted, trained, molded, and prepared to be at the top of his game, every game. He is incredibly fast and incredibly agile, capable of flash-stepping (yes, it is exactly what it sounds like) and intricate swordplay. He is always calm and collected, keeping a hella fine poker-face even when coming face-to-face with his own dead body, Bro’s dead body, or even with the possible disestablishment of reality. When he is given a task, he throws himself into it without question, working relentlessly to get it done because if there is one thing he knows, it is that Striders don’t back down. He's the kind of guy that you want working with you when you are playing a game that determines the fate of the universe because he kicks ass, takes names, and gets shit done; he makes it HAPPEN.
The other side of that coin, however, is that being sculpted, trained, molded, and prepared to save the universe before he could even get the chance to grow some peach fuzz means that he lacks a lot of social graces. It is, perhaps, the most ironic thing about his coolkid demeanor -- for all the posturing he does, he harbors a couple of deeply-festered insecurities.
Dave is rather prickly about his personal boundaries, preferring to hide behind a pair of obnoxiously-huge sunglasses(though he will claim their presence in the name of irony) in order to remain casual and aloof to a point of standoffishness that can inhibit his ability to form strategies on his own. We're given the impression that he prefers being a follower than a leader -- despite the fact that the game classifies him as an “Active Class” -- and using his powers to exploit the hell out of the temporal flow in order to aid his friends, rather than stepping up to be any kind of a leader to them; as far as Dave is concerned, "Bro was a hero, John is [a hero], not [him]."
Dave knows how to support a team, because God knows they fail at supporting themselves when things get too hot to handle, which they always do, and he knows how to do it well... but it is difficult for him to work by himself, for himself.
His aloofness and nonchalance is not to say that he is emotionless. Far from it, actually., Perhaps in spite of the fact that it had likely been drilled into him since before he could walk that emotions were weakness, Dave's emotions run incredibly, deep; he is just not exactly good at expressing them. It can make being around him rather emotionally taxing, if one isn't familiar with him, because it is oftentimes difficult to tell what he's thinking as opposed to what he is saying or doing. He can be both very direct and not. In moments where he can't completely neutral -- either because something genuinely has unsettled him, or because he is feeling more alone than he is comfortable with -- his discomfort becomes obvious to those close enough to him to see it when he launches into long, winding, and often-times nonsensical tangents; or, if in person, he will quietly mumble and murmur to himself until someone calls him out on it.
(Shut up, it's perfectly natural.)
It is obvious to those few friends that he does hold close that he needs his Coolkid facade. Growing up is an awkward, difficult time in any kid’s life, even without the fate of the universe balanced in the palm of your hand; nothing feels like it is in control. If maintaining an air of cool gives him the little piece of mind to get shit done, then there is nothing wrong with letting him keep it.
If there is one thing to take home about Dave Strider, it is that for all of his casual demeanor, all of his playful jeering, all of his swagger, and all of his insecurities (that he totally does not have, he insists), it is that he is the best bro a bro could ever have. He will do absolutely anything for his friends, even if it means playing a dumb game with them, or travelling back in time to keep them from doing some utterly stupid shit, or taking a lot of fucking bullets in the middle of a pointless battle with some immortal dog-demon-jester-thing for them. Seriously, a bro’s gotta be there for his best bros, it’s pretty much the first cosmic law of the universe.
The lengths he will go to ensure his friends’ lives is nothing short of heroic, despite how Dave insists he is not a hero. He is a protector, a defender, and he will pursue that role with every fibre of his being, until his last dying breath.
And that is truly what makes him really cool, even if his friends can see it and he cannot.
Abilities/Strengths and Weaknesses:
Abilities:
Time loops: Time Shenanigans are at the heart of Homestuck -- or at least, in one of the heart valves -- and time itself is pretty much a damsel locked away in a dark tower. Naturally, where there are damsels in distress, there are knights to protect them, and this is as far as this metaphor is going. Canonically, Dave, as a Knight of Time, is charged with maintaining and preserving the alpha timeline in order to ensure no one royally screws something up beyond repair. He achieves this by traveling backward through his timeline in order to establish "stable time loops". With time loops, he is able to interact with his past selves, and thus his past selves are able to interact with his future self. Basically, when this happens, it looks like a an absolutely preposterous amount of Daves.
He is also capable of altering the time of specific objects at hand, bringing them to various points in their timeline.
(Note: I understand that time travel can get incredibly godmode and tricky, so I am completely willing to work with the mods as to how to limit/modify it.)
Godtier: Canonically, those who have ascended to godhood -- IE: "get godtier" -- become essentially immortal. They can only be killed if their death is considered "just" (meaning, he's done something to warrant dying) or "heroic" (he dies for the greater good). Of course, I totally don't mind nerfing this for the sake of the game ;)
Flash-stepping: This is one of the abilities taught to him by Bro, literally what it sounds like. Dave is able to travel short distances with such a speed that it is difficult to keep track of him with the naked eye; it appears as a flash.
Melee Combat: Due to Bro’s extensive (and usually spontaneous) combat training, Dave is very capable in the art of strife, especially swordplay.
Strengths: Dave is pretty physically fit, and very skilled in swordplay. Compared to his friends, it gives him an advantage in sticky situations.
He's very smart and cunning, as obvious in how easily he can manipulate SBurb's system to get Jade into the Medium, and how quickly he picks up on time shenanigans and creating time loops.
Most importantly, however, it should be noted that when the cards are down, and the hands are dealt, Dave will do whatever it takes to get shit done and make it happen. A good example of this is traveling backward in time to prevent John from dying. It caused that timeline to cease to exist, and he essentially became (paradoxically) a living doomed timeline by prototyping himself so that he could become his alternate past-self's sprite.
Weaknesses: WEAKNESSES? WHAT WEAKNESSES? THIS BOY IS THE PERFECT BOY. HE IS AN ADONIS. EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES TURNS TO GOLD. MEN WANT TO BE HIM, WOMEN WANT TO DO HIM, AND SMALL CHILDREN BOW BEFORE HIS FEET -- no, this is far from the truth. The biggest weakness by far Dave has is his lack of confidence in himself, ironically enough. Dave is always comparing himself to Bro, and yet always selling himself short. It feeds into this deep-seeded need to go above and beyond to prove himself to be the best at whatever is being thrown at him; the problem is that -- in Dave's opinion -- he will always fall short. In trying so hard to prove himself -- also to prove just how cool he is -- it makes him remarkably susceptible to peer pressure from those close to him, particularly from John.
In that sense, it is also very difficult for him to really take initiative. He feels much more comfortable following, rather than leading. This isn't to say it's impossible -- he'll be among one of the first to jump up and do what it takes to save someone -- but it's difficult for him to do it without that impetus. Again, Dave doesn't exactly know how to work by himself for himself.
While he is very smart, he is also pretty forgetful. On more than one occasion, he sets off his own sylladex traps, purposefully forgets the names of people (and trolls) whom he doesn't really care much for, and he even once forgot to forget something. Being cool takes up a lot of brainpower, okay, give a guy a break.
Samples
Network/Action Spam Sample: Dave on the Test Drive. Warning: TL;DR. Lots of it.
Prose Log Sample:
The Mayor had never been much of a talker. He was kind of an eccentric guy, really; sort of like a giant toddler. He didn't care much for fancy things to play with -- did chess pieces really even grow up playing with toys? Where does that fall on the irony scale? -- didn't care much for anything more advanced than green chalk (to eat) and tin cans (to govern).
But that's what made him awesome. Even if he didn't talk much, even if talking to him did sometimes feel like you were talking to a toddler who couldn't offer you any of the doting, fatherly advice you might (or might not) have been looking for, there was never any pressure when you were hanging with the Mayor.
And that's why Dave had saved him; why it had been so important to swoop down and nearly do a swan-dive into motherfucking lava to rescue his silent, easily-entertained, carapace ass. And now that the Mayor was standing with feet planted firmly on what had once been the rooftop to Dave's old apartment building, it was time to go flying upward and bail everyone out of Karkats REALLY FUCKING BIG PROBLEM OVER HERE!!!!!! whatever that may be.
"Goodbye, Mayor."
Dave supposed it was a little (read: very) shitty to bail on the Mayor, of all people and carapeces, and swoop off into what could possibly turn out to be your shitty death -- seriously, that had to be a tear glistening in one of those beady white eyes, strongly silent like the strong and silent dude that the Mayor was -- but a dude had to do what a dude had to do.
The gate to LOFAF -- red and glowy against LOHAC's... was it actually a sky? Come to think of it, it always looked fucking oppressively black -- drew closer and Dave held his breath. It never mattered how prepared you were to hop gates, it was always a little jarring when you tore out of that shit like popping a zit. It always felt like it was ripping the air out of your lungs like letting all the air out of a balloon with a farting sound.
A crisp, chilled air -- it smelled of frost and palm trees -- overcame him as the gate opened and swallowed him whole, and the next thing he knew he was engulfed in a sudden blinding whiteness.
(Well. That was certainly never a part of gate-hopping.)