This doesn’t really have anything to do with sonnetstuck, so feel free to ignore it. I’m just awake for no reason and in light of the theme of my latest poem, I felt like writing some stuff about Dave. So here we go.

Like most people, when I read the “You don’t just make a clone of yourself to live in a dead end existence where it has no chance to thrive as an individual or surpass its limitations. That’d be sick.” pesterlog, I immediately thought of Davesprite. But then I read something that somebody reblogged on Tumblr, and it started me really thinking. The thesis was something along the lines of, “this also describes Beta-Dave’s relationship with his Bro.” The person who originally wrote that probably explained it better than me, but I’m gonna go ahead and break it down.

On the next page, Alpha-Bro says, “My duty isn’t to appropriate his [Alpha-Dave’s] methods with absolute loyalty, but to apply reason and improve upon them. To leave my own mark.” But Beta-Dave did the exact opposite of this. Consider the way he talks about puppets. The first time they’re mentioned, we get this: “You glance at one of the many RADICAL PUPPETS in your BRO’S collection and nod in approval. Is there anything not awesome about your BRO? No, you think not.” He then defends them to John: “cal is dope puppets are awesome.” Eventually, he admits to Rose that “theyre sort of starting to freak me out a little,” but he quickly clarifies with, “i mean dont get me wrong i think its cool and all.” But just a few lines later, he returns to his discomfort with not just the puppets, but Bro’s interests in general: “im just starting to think some of this shit is going a little far and its kind of fucked up.” Yet the next time puppets are mentioned, “You guess these things are kinda cool.” And it keeps happening.

Basically, all of that was a long-winded way of saying that Dave tried to duplicate his Bro’s methods of irony “with absolute loyalty,” even though that meant repressing a severe phobia. He says that Bro “basically knows everything and is awesome.” Bro is essentially his hero and role model: “God you hope you can be as good as your BRO at this some day. You’d never tell him that though.” Note the immediate assertion that Dave doesn’t want his Bro to know how he really feels about him. He wants Bro to think that he’s his equal, which means he tries to hide his failings and avoid letting Bro catch him doing things he thinks Bro wouldn’t approve of. He doesn’t always understand Bro’s irony, but he plays along because he thinks Bro is testing him and will be disappointed if Dave doesn’t “get it.”

And yet there seems to be some real tenderness in the relationship. When Dave makes his sweet fort, he happily thinks that Bro would approve of it and they “might be high-fiving over it right now.” And Bro has the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff website right in the middle of his content aggregator, because “Your BRO keeps up with your projects in his aggregator, just like you keep up with his.” Later, while imp-slaying, he has a conversation with Terezi in which he asks her where Bro is, and seems fairly concerned. And, of course, some of Bro’s actions that seem puzzling or even aggressive are to prepare Dave for SBURB: breaking Dave’s specibus seemed cruel at the time, but Dave needed it in order to bear the Royal Deringer. The roof fights were presumably Bro’s way of training Dave so he’d be prepared to fight the various monsters he encountered.

I guess that last paragraph wasn’t really relevant, but my point was that Dave is completely devoted to Bro and wants to mimic his methods even if that means he doesn’t understand what he’s doing or why. He has no desire to “apply reason and improve upon them. To leave [his] own mark.“Even John sees this as a problem: “i think you just gotta get out of your bro’s shadow and spread your wings dude!!!” It’s not clear whether Bro wants Dave to spread his wings or not, which makes things a little more complicated. Is Dave just not mature enough to develop independently? Or is Bro actively encouraging him to be a clone of himself, and doing exactly what Alpha-Bro saw as repulsive? Either way, Dave never thrived as an individual or surpassed his limitations, so why would he care about whether his “clones” did? It seems to me that Alpha-Bro is much more emotionally mature than Beta-Dave.

We really see this in the way Dave handles Bro’s death (my favorite pesterlog in the whole comic, slightly edging out Jaspersprite’s farewell to Rose). Dave begins by actually expressing frustration and possibly grief (“oh my fucking god … we just got done talking and agreed it would be awesome if you didnt bother me for a while you know like while i guess i grieved over this brutally murdered rad family member or something”, “whoops ok in the future ill try not to pitch any sort of dramatics while brooding over the cadavers of slaughtered loved ones”). But when Terezi asks Dave if he loved Bro, his answer is heartbreaking: “no.” He almost loses his cool (“puppets arent cool theyre shitty small fake people” (note how he earlier thought that saying something like this was practically taboo because it would disappoint Bro)), but he immediately regains it: “i was making a joke about being all broken up about it a guy can be sad and make jokes at the same time.” He refuses to tell Terezi whether or not he is or was grieving, and brings up “dead husband island” and his rue being “fucking bananas,” which are almost aggressively disrespectful. (There’s also the great “Bro was a hero, I’m not” moment, but for the sake of space, I won’t go into that.) And then the sword.

The command “> Dave: Break.” is literally referring to the way Dave removes Bro’s sword from his chest, but it’s also the moment when he breaks emotionally. This is when his shades fly off his face. We’ve already had it established that Dave’s shades are a sort of mask that he wears to hide his emotions (“behind these chill as fuck shades my face is having this crazy attack of the sads”), and this metaphor is so obvious that it’s almost worthy of eye-rolls. But the moment when they come off is actually very poignant because it’s the moment in which he’s weakest. When his dream self removed them to look at the Ring, it was a way of showing how much he trusted Rose. But this time, it’s not voluntary. Now, there aren’t any more jokes. “no fuck you go away.” He’s even honest about himself: “downplaying feelings is the chief rule of cool.” But this is the moment he finds out he has an exile in his head. He’s not in command of his own feelings, and now he finds that he’s not even in command of his own thoughts. This moment of extreme vulnerability is paired with a closeup of Dave’s eye, which he has tried to hide for so long. But in typical coolkid fashion, he suppresses these emotions and moves on to a new subject without working through them.

Good lord, this has really strayed away from my original points I had in mind. Back to the beginning: “You don’t just make a clone of yourself to live in a dead end existence where it has no chance to thrive as an individual or surpass its limitations. That’d be sick.” This is what Davesprite is in relation to Dave (although alternate future Dave hopped into the kernel voluntarily, meaning Dave didn’t actually “make” Davesprite, but he still treats him in this callous way), but it’s also how Dave sees just about everybody else. Dead Daves? Not a big deal. Terezi cries when she’s responsible for the death of a singe Dave, but Dave treats his own corpses with indifference. Time travel has made him numb to tragedies around him. When Terezi points out his strange relationship with his future selves (“WH3N DO3S PR3S3NT D4V3 G3T TO ST3P OUT OF TH3 SH4DOW OF 4LL THOS3 FUTUR3 D4V3S??”), Dave responds with “fuck who cares.” But even more disturbing is the way he treats alternate future Rose. He’s leaving her in a doomed timeline, with no idea whether she’ll survive. But he says almost nothing to reassure her. Remember, he’s spent months in the game alone with her. She has been his only friend during what must have been a terribly difficult time. But when she asks Dave what will become of her when he travels back in time, he replies, “just roll with it and see what happens.”

When Rose went grimdark and Gamzee went into murder mode, I was initially put off. It felt like these changes were coming out of nowhere. But when I reread key parts of their stories, I saw the foreshadowing clearly. Of course Rose, whose relationship with her mother was, to put it generously, complex, would have an extreme reaction to her death. And I feel like Gamzee’s transformation has already been talked about to death.

So here’s where I intended to go with this when I started: Dave and Rose. Rose’s casual destruction of her gate and the turtle temple parallel Dave’s indifference to his other selves’ suffering, and the two kids have many of the same problems with emotional repression. But while Rose was able to relieve this pressure by turning it into rage during her grimdark stage, Dave has had no such catharsis. When faced with the death of Bro, someone whom he admired and respected more than anyone else, he simply shut down. But very soon, he rebuilt the facade. The shades went back on. I’m not saying that I think Dave will suddenly snap in the way Rose or Gamzee did, but I think it’s an interesting possibility to consider. Dave is far more troubled than I had previously realized. His lack of empathy (not in all cases, but in some) is one of the major parts of his character, and he quite possibly is, as Alpha-Bro put it, “sick.”

…So now it’s 3:00. I’m pretty sure I’ll have no trouble falling asleep now. I’m not sure if this analysis was insightful or even coherent, and it was certainly meandering, but I think I’ll go ahead and post it anyway.