it's not that we've sidestepped the idea so much as put it on layaway. in general i'm not huge on transfem Dave-- not because i think he's cis, but because it's Dave we're talking about here. he canonically lived with Karkat for more than half a decade before they had their first kiss. this is a dude for whom suppression is an artform. there's no "sudden moment of gender revelation" for him the way there was for June, no magical gender ghost to deliver the answer full formed. in a way he's sort of the opposite.

waaaaay back in the gf3 prologue, Jade hit him with the button that turned him into a cat against his will, but when he returned to being a person he kept the ears and tail as a subconscious acknowledgement that he liked being a cat. but he had no agency in this process. it wasn't something he asked for. i think after you've been trans for a while you'll meet someone who is just SUCH an egg, and every cell in your body wants to blast them with rays until they crack. and you know what, sometimes it works! i'm not an evangelist of the egg prime directive, it very much depends on context and sometimes somebody just needs to get walloped with a big gay mallet. but Dave very much is not one of those people. at least from my read of him, he's the type of guy who takes each step into new territory slowly and timidly, and if you try to hurry him along he's just going to give up and retreat until he can start over again on his own terms.

which is, you know, very catlike behavior. he's kind of a traumatized rescue if you think about it, even going back to him and Karkat on the meteor. it's easy to forget since Dave is such a funny and avoidant character, but he's lowkey got the most fucked up backstory of all the betas and maybe of all the homestuck humans. like the way Bro raised him is so messed up. it really reminds me of videos you'd see at the dawn of youtube, of gamer bros walking up their sleeping cat and then screaming loudly out of nowhere, chasing them around and laughing. if you've ever fostered an abused animal, you know that that kind of treatment leaves a mark and it doesn't come out easy.

so Dave's now in this really interesting position of being totally out of his comfort zone in every way imaginable. fleeing from earth with people he just met on a mission he has no stake in and unable to communicate with his better half for the first time in like a decade, while ALSO having these lingering feline features he very much has not come to terms with. he's started wearing skirts because they're more comfortable for his tail, but he's SO embarrassed about it. and now the people who meet him for the first time, the only version of him they know is the one with cat ears and a skirt. so already before he's even gotten used to artificial gravity, other people are defining his image for him just by bearing witness to how he looks.

this, to me, is not a conflict you resolve by having Dave say "oh wait, i'm a girl."

which is why he's latched onto Dare as hard as he has, and why the both of them have so quickly reverted to the comfort zone of how they used to act when they were teens. there's a boyishness to their friendship right now that is... i mean, god, i might as well say it since we've been circling this drain for a few paragraphs already, it's kind of an age regression arc isn't it? that's not how we've been writing it but in practice that's basically what has happened. both are majorly traumatized and suddenly single, both have a ton of baggage to sort through and have no idea where to start or even what their goal is. sometimes when you're in that situation the only rational choice is to bunker down and act like a kid again until the storm blows over. i like them as a pair because it lets us kind of relitigate classic JohnDave as a concept in a vacuum, but with all these added complexities orbiting around them in the background. gender being, naturally, one of the big ones.

yes, the reason they look like paper cutouts is because they actually are drawn on paper. I thought it would be funny and Sarah agreed! originally I planned to have them look like the "BLEH" and "BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH" scribbles in Homestuck but I'm just not very good at drawing that kind of cartoon frankly, and it also just didn't look as good imo in actual marker vs the hard mspaint brushes. so, I gravitated towards a more game ui influenced look, a little more polished. once I hit on the speech bubble looking icons with just facial expressions inside that felt pretty good, with one weird wrinkle: I was working with this sort of busted staedtler marker that Sarah found in our building's dumpster along with a bunch of other staedtlers and, bafflingly, some totally unused posca paint markers. anyway, I was using it to lay down the dark navy color because I liked how bleedy it was, how quickly the ink started flowing fast and hard. it did make the process more tedious because I had to turn the dumb thing upside down and wait for it to calm down before I did each new set of three sprites but overall I liked the results... until I scanned them in. I think my scanner has a weirdly limited sensitivity to blue generally, and it seems like whatever pigment staedtler uses is... I guess MORE reflective of light? than the tombows I used for the rest of the colors? especially the red tombow I used for Dave's colors. so I had to monkey around in photoshop to drop the blue values down darker, to match how it looked on the actual page.

here's the whole sprite sheet, which for whatever reason in this photo is much closer to the physical colors than the scans above are

once I color corrected them, Sarah cleaned them up and Janet composited them in with her sprites and set, resulting in the fun combo of styles in the chapter:

headsp8ce.

so this is the exact moment when i really committed to Dare as a name! based on discord messages, i've known since at least 6/13 that i wanted J to change their name at the end of chapter 8. my first candidate was actually Juri!

this would obviously be an utena reference because i love juri, but i knew pretty much immediately that it wasn't right for J's character (not to mention that i'd be uncomfortable bringing in a very particularly japanese name without establishing anything other than a vaguely white american cultural sphere up to this point).

i considered a lot of names! there was a point where i thought she might become june just to fuck with us, or maybe joan, but as time went on i found that sticking with the J convention really limited my options.

for a while it was gonna be a combination of letters from vriska, june, and X's names, but that didn't really work. i'm not actually sure where Dare came from? i was just smoking on the porch one night thinking about J's arc as the secret anime protagonist of godfeels and it occurred to me that i was trying so hard to find a cool name, like a strong, assertive name... but that's not J. they're specifically a shonen anime protagonist, more of an utena than a juri, and as such it would make sense for their name to be a lot more hokey and silly. then Dare just popped into my head and it just immediately felt perfect because it's like... god, it's SO saccharine? it's such an on the nose name. of COURSE that's what they'd pick! that's june all the way down, baby. the whole system is naive and sentimental, even X in its own way. embracing that silliness and letting them be THEMSELF in this direct way became such a huge part of Dare's story the more i wrote of them.

anyway, here's a fun thing: X giving Dare their name was a relatively late change to the [S]. i had a very different conception of that scene for a long time, where it was gonna be J announcing their name in this really audacious way that finally convinced X to let go of june. but then i started delving into X's interiority for myself and realized that just wouldn't work no matter how i sold it. it had to be a CHOICE, you know?

but before that, i wrote a lot of the J & vriska pulling X out of june scenes as them like, talking through possibilities for J's name? they're light-hearted and fun conversations, but they just feel like filler compared to everything else going on in the [S]. i'll go ahead and share them here though, just for kicks:

[other things happen]

and then there's this one that i didn't even bother formatting correctly because i realized by the end of it that this whole conceit just wasn't working, and i needed to completely recontextualize what they're doing and thinking in this sequence:

i'm glad people like Dare. waaaaaaay back before chapter 8 started releasing, after i announced that i was pivoting the story to make june explicitly plural, i said something along the lines of "i'm gonna make this story plural as fuck and no one is ready". when the dirk chapter went up, everyone in the fan server thought THAT was my plural gift to them. meanwhile the entire time i was just sitting on J's arc and them becoming Dare and maybe one of the most important characters in the whole series right now!!

there have been a LOT of tough sells in this chapter, which is why it's taken so long to finish, and honestly i'm shocked at how many of them people have taken in stride.

the bnuuy. bny. this thing.

commission for @/tulips@/shrike.club on mastodon

polyfrag (4056 words) by EtchJetty Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Homestuck, godfeels Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: June Egbert/Vriska Serket, Vriska Serket/Dare Egbert, Kanaya Maryam & June Egbert, Dave Strider & June Egbert Characters: June Egbert, Vriska Serket, dare egbert, Dave Strider, Kanaya Maryam, Tavros Nitram (Mentioned), Rufio (Peter Pan) (Mentioned) Additional Tags: Multiplicity/Plurality, Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Godfeels (Homestuck) Summary: Your name is June Egbert, and you're pretty sure you know how many people you are. (Set after Godfeels 3.1.)