#distributed self

Dave’s first thoughts as he stares out the window link Time, Death, and Entropy together. As the present rushes forward, eating up the future and shitting out the past, it transforms the living into the dead, and transforms the dead back into the component particles that make them up so that the universe can use them once more to build new things. We leave numberless ghosts of ourselves in the past, memories haunting our present living selves - we can interact in real time with our own death, as we consider the people that we used to be, versions of ourselves who aren’t alive anymore - we can watch ourselves dying in real time every second of every day.

Crows become a motif in Dave’s dreams, albeit dreams that we personally won’t get to see which he’ll talk about in the future - he watches himself through the eyes of crows, dying repeatedly as he watches himself from the perspective of other selves, switching to the viewpoint of another crow every time he dies.

Dave is fascinated with his own death. Does he have a considerably greater degree of Death Anxiety than the other characters in the comic? I’m not sure if he does, but the fact that he dreams about dying repeatedly, and the fact that out of all of the characters he tends to freeze up the most around dead things - his Doomed Selves, the Crow, and so on and so on - he’s certainly preoccupied with it. It’s a pretty huge deal when, in [S] Game Over: Dave is prepared to die to protect Jade, and he does so heroically. It‘s not the only time when Dave is prepared to die alongside someone he loves for no other reason than that he loves them - he chases Rose on her suicide mission to explode the tumor in the Furthest Ring.

I like Dave Strider. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, he doesn’t have an insincere bone body, even though he tortures himself by pretending to be the same kind of irony ninja as his brother. He knows what he loves, he knows where he draws lines, he lives for what he loves, and he’s prepared to die for it too.

Dave’s preoccupation with his own death manifests in his preoccupation with the Daves who live not literally in the physical coordinates of Paradox Space, but inside of other people. There is a Dave Strider who lives inside of Rose Lalonde. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of John Egbert. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Jade Harley. There’s a Dave Strider who lives inside of Bro Strider. And so on and so on.

None of these Daves is the same Dave as the Dave who lives inside of Dave Strider, and nobody will ever get to meet him. Even the Dave Strider who walks around in Bro’s apartment doing things is not the same as the Dave Strider who lives inside him. While heroes of Heart have to struggle with this aspect more than most, everybody in Homestuck - and I think, everybody in real life, too - has to struggle with the distributed self. We are all a disintegrated intricate dispositional complex, the heart, the mind, the loins, the glands, all wrestling each other for dominance over ourself, as we wrestle with the reputation that we build by taking action in our lives.

If Homestuck is Evangelion, Dave is Shinji Ikari, a title I bestow upon him with nothing but the warmest regards. A reluctant hero living in his father figure’s shadow, intensely anxious about the way he is perceived by other people, Dave’s struggle with himself - what actions he wants to define him, the conflicts he chooses to engage with, the conflicts he chooses not to engage with, his sexuality - are central to one of Homestuck’s major themes - Homestuck as a story about personal reproduction, cultural hegemony, and the repression of the self to try to conform to other peoples’ expectations. Once Dave finishes strifing his Bro, probably later today, I’m finally going to start talking about that a bit more.

Dave is constantly being watched by other eyes, and Eye imagery surrounds him at all times - he directly compares the Sun here to an Eye, albeit the eye of a needle, not a literal eye, and he spends a lot of the story feeling like he’s under the scrutiny of other characters. He wears sunglasses implicitly because he’s self-conscious about his own eyes. He doesn’t like to be watched. While Dave is surrounded by the trappings of a slasher film, thinking about the discomfort he experiences being observed by other people, as they create another Dave inside of themselves, another Doomed Self to haunt him, reminds me of a line from a 2000s Coming of Age Story, because of Winn Dixie. The lead character’s mother is long since dead, and now she only lives in other peoples’ memories of her. A line that stuck with me is the lead’s Dad recounting how she hated being a preacher’s wife.

"She couldn't stand having the ladies at church judge what she was wearing and what she was cooking and how she was singing. She said it made her feel like a bug under a microscope." Dave is in exactly this situation, but instead of being a preacher’s wife, he’s the little Bro of the coolest coolguy on the planet. Under the intense heat of other people’s perception, Dave squirms like a bug under a microscope.

Dave lives in Bro’s Shadow. Every action Dave takes, he takes in some way in relation to the overpowering ego of Bro Strider, who acts as Homestuck’s avatar of the badass. The Cult of the Badass is a fixture of American Culture, which I think troll society also examines holistically as it parodies Classical Sparta. Bro Strider is both a Hero and a Coolguy and Dave spends a lot of time trying to win his approval by patterning himself after him. But Dave’s character arc is about escaping from Bro’s shadow, and coming to a place where he stops being compared against other people - stops being compared against Bro, stops being compared against other Daves.

He doesn’t want to be the Dave inside of John, or the Dave inside of Jade, or the Dave inside of Rose, or the Dave inside of Bro - and he most certainly does not want to be the Dave inside of Skaia, the Knight of Time, a Coolguy, or a Hero.