And so we start this year with my DSaF and FNAF brainrot coming back, this’ll be interesting¿

Rupert wasn't sure what to think, especially since Dave was mostly himself still, minus the whole being a catboy now.

Dave could thankfully hide his cat ears with a hat, and he could mostly keep his tail wrapped around his waist, it only coming undone and wagging when Dave found something interesting.

And Rupert found out that Dave melts into his arms when he scratches behind Dave's ears, with Dave loving the feeling.

Sadly Henry and the Government couldn't find the CCC agents that did this to Dave, most likely running off when they got wind of the Government coming.

bit of a complex answer to this one but to start, even as a defender of the epilogues and hs2 i find their treatment of dave and karkat rather frustrating. there are some good davekat conversations and i'm personally a fan of how willing candy is to throw a wrench in their dynamic... but overall it feels like davekat are "solved" in post-canon. they have nothing to do, there is no real drama between them, they are a finished ship and that's all they will ever be.

i've known for a long time that 3.2 would be much more of an ensemble cast affair, so for 3.1 and the prologue i spent a lot of time thinking about how to give everyone something to do. well, no, "something to do" isn't really accurate, it's more like i wanted to push them forward into a new state of conflict that they then must resolve as the story goes on. that's distinct from "something to do" in the sense that putting davekat on some kind of Quest may force them to be more active, but it won't fundamentally change their (in my opinion) stale dynamic. so i really wanted to find a way to organically interrupt the davekat dynamic that didn't involve killing one or the other of them or, crucially, just completely outright separating them. because i think with davekat, if you accept that they are that rare couple that can really weather the years despite getting together so young, you get an opportunity to play with all sorts of new relationship dynamics.

so i knew all of this in abstract when i was writing the gf3 prologue (though admittedly my plans for gf3 as a whole didn't yet extend much farther than "it's gonna be a space opera"), but i didn't specifically have the idea to turn dave into a catboy until writing the chapter where it happens. sometimes you're writing a dialogue scene and then one of the characters will say some shit like "okay karkat ask a question or i'm turning your bf into a cat," and you as the writer have to be like. okay. hold on.

because you can't just say you can turn characters into cats and then not follow through, right? it was one of those moments that really make me love writing, where a character just said some random shit i thought was funny and then i had to seriously ask myself what it meant for the story. and i realized like, holy shit, dave has all this history with cats and cat people and furries where he's always been the sort of tsundere closet case of the beta kids, WHICH i always saw as a contributing factor to the way he reacted to june coming out in gf2.1.

and then it just dawned on me that like, maybe dave likes being a cat, and maybe it spoke to him so much that he kept the cat ears and tail. and maybe the fact that he keeps those traits is this unconscious admission that he is a lot queerer than he acts. and honestly, all the rest just sorta followed on from there! we see in 3.1 ch6 that dave and karkat are sleeping in separate rooms, that dave is isolating himself, and he's still very much embarrassed about and in denial of his cat-ness. and meanwhile, karkat is trying to convince jane to become a communist! which is admittedly a bit silly as a plotpoint, but like, it's karkat and jane. what's wrong with a little fancifully positive pitch romance between a wikipedia marxist and a globetrotting capitalist? uh but i digress

I think tom would understand but he will puppy eye him from afar cuz he a lil too clingy