#most of the Homestuck characters use masks or facades in one way or another which i think kinda gets at hussies pathology lol

[gokupowers]

whats karkat like in the euphoria au?

omfg @swimfuel is responsible for like half of this. also its insanely long bc i am uncontrollably verbose

Karkat's always been angry.

Not angry at anyone or anything, but at the whole world. He's always been like this. Sometimes he thinks, if he stopped feeling this potent miasma of rage, always pounding in his head and through his veins, his heart would stop. 

As he watched his dad fall asleep, his head in his arms and a stack of bills on the counter, he was angry. At school, when he realized he was the only kid in hand-me-downs, he was angry. So when Vriska gets a gleam in her eye one day at recess, and asks him where his dad is, knowing full well he was cleaning right in front of them, voice vicious and thinly veiled, he doesn't think twice before punching her.

That was the first and last time he hit someone else on purpose.

After the fight, Karkat expected a lecture. Instead, his father looked at him sadly, held him in his arms, and apologized. Looking at his son’s little face, he told him; never do that again. Vantases don't use our hands to solve problems, we use our words. Right?

And boy, does Karkat use his words.

A nonstop stream of paragraphs and epiphets and swears and threats and made him less like the kids in his neighborhood who play-fight (and as he grew up, just plain fight), and more like the prim kids he knew at school.

One day, he watches Eridan’s dad throw a sneer and a snide remark at his father, passive aggressive comments on his work ethic and an underlying threat beneath it all. That night, he sees his dad cry for the first time, head down while he thinks he and Kankri are asleep.

Karkat learns that rich people don't use their hands to hurt other people. They use their words.

He grows up resenting the friends he made at school, while being inexplicably fond of them. He knows there's more to them than the money, that their lives are just as twisted up as his. But God, doesn't that money make it easier?

He thinks: all of his’ dads work for him to go to a fancy private school, when he says it's a better opportunity or for his future, Karkat knows what he's really saying. That it's for money. So one day, he wouldn’t have to reuse the same clothing for years, or see an eviction notice on the door. One day, he’s supposed to be rich.

So Karkat does just that; he pursues money. He dreams of security and safety and one day repaying his father and putting a stop to the growing shadows under his eyes and the sunkenness of his cheeks.

He throws himself into his studies, throws himself into his friendships, throws himself into everything so he doesn't notice at first, when his dad gets weaker. More tired.

When Kankri starts cooking more, he's in middle school, but none of it matters because now he's in the student government and speech and debate and learning to program and doing anything and everything that will make him more than a diversity hire or a charity case.

And for all that Karkat rages, he listens and he sees.

He sees Vriska, withdrawing, becoming meaner. She's started wearing makeup, he notices, but it does not come as a surprise. She's always been painfully vain, he thinks, but this is different in a way he can't put his finger on.

When he sees her take out a little white bag after school, passing it around a group of older kids, he understands.

He learns that rich people do drugs for different reasons then the people back home do. He's used to people people using to hide their pain, to distract them. Here, they're just bored. 

There's nothing for them to do, after all, with trust funds and stocks for passive income and a starting reserve of millions already their birthright. So they do drugs and have sex and hurt each other just for the hell of it. Unlike for Karkat, there's never any danger either; mommy or daddy  would always swoop in and the cops never saw it as anything but good fashioned teenage fun.

When Karkat turns 13, his dad's condition is unmistakable. His fatigue after too many late shifts when Karkat was a child now seemed laughable in comparison. He'd all but wasted away. Everytime Karkat asked, he was brushed off. It wasn't anything for him to worry about, just focus on those grades of his and playing with his friends, he was told.

When he asks Kankri, he tells him, in a way that's shockingly blunt for all the neurotically sensitive pontification his older brother is prone to, that it's cancer. They can't afford treatments anymore. Karkat hears the implication: they can't afford them, because of you.

Karkat is prone to smashing things, to shouting words, to handing out cruelty before he can recieve it. Once his dad dies, he smashes the laptop he'd worked hard to save up for with a summer job. Kankri wordlessly replaces it. Karkat is prone to these fits, though he only ever breaks what was his in the first place. Kankri worries about him because he's almost sure that's worse. 

Karkat realizes he can't program for shit, too many barbed exchanges between himself and Sollux's silicon valley genius-brain that he decides on something “attainable'', instead. Med school. If he plays his cards right, if he applies to the right scholarship and uses that anger as fuel... he'll make it. And he'll be able to help his dad, or at least, people like him. 

When his dad dies at 14, it's not a surprise. When Kankri is forced to take care of him, and things become worse between them, he's not surprised. This kind of thing always seemed to happen to Vantases. 

Maybe he becomes angrier, but no one notices. Karkat’s always angry, after all. Gamzee was his best friend, and the kid was always high out of his mind 

When they were little, Gamzee was fun, if a bit mischievous. He would talk about clowns and his father's religion and honk his own nose as if it was a horn. As he got older, the clown imagery became less cute and more horror movie levels of disturbing. Violent. One day, hed brought home a pigeon, with a fork stabbed through the middle, and presented it to Karkat like a cat, blood still on his fingers.

So when Gamzee started experimenting with weed in middle school, while Karkat couldn’t fully endorse it, Karkat was honestly a little relieved. He becomes more like how he was as a kid.

Gamzee had started to become more intense about his fathers religion, which karkat now unabashedly called a cult slash pyramid scheme. “IF SCIENTOLOGY IS AN ACTUAL COMPETITOR TO YOUR DAD’S COMPANY, THEN YES GAMZ, IT'S A CULT.”

Karkat gets used to managing people the way he was used to managing his father when he had worked too hard, or his brother when he had blundered into another friendship fuck up.

So managing gamzee is easy. He’s had practice.

When Gamzee starts taking uppers, Karkat notices. And he manages. Makes sure Gamzee never takes too many, is never totally unsupervised.

But he's started to hate it. Hate being everywhere for everyone, for taking care of teenagers who would always have more than him. The world makes him so fucking angry, but he's always been able to seperate that from the people he calls his friends. It's been harder, lately. 

So when Karkat sees Dave pummel Eridan’s face at that party, he thinks. They're the same.

It's the same halfhearted fantasy he's had for years, showing Eridan everything he says about him and people like him has concequences, that just because he had less money doesn't mean his fists wouldn't be just as painful, that he was any less real than the rest of them.

He always dismissed it, because Eridan was always more pathetic than genuinely maddening, everything an echo of his parents’ beliefs in a desperate ploy for attention and love. It wasn’t really his fault.

For Karkat, it was embarrassing. But that didn’t make it any more cathartically satisfying to hear his nose crunch under Dave’s fist.

(switch to first person POV)

And normally, you would be put off by this sort of ease of violence. But the last couple years,

with Terezi and Vriska maiming each other, Tavros' accident, fucking Aradia’s accident... You're not surprised by blood anymore. Besides, Eridan instigated, though you know if it was anyone who’d known Eridan for more than two minutes they’d realize they were all empty threats.

And you know Dave… Not really, not past first time you ran into each other on accident, but you've seen him crying. That counts for something. And you saw his hands tremble after he hit Eridan. You two are the same, you think. So much anger, and so much hunger for something more.

You've never met someone like him before.

You've seen intimations of him, in Eridan, in Cronus, in Equius, in every guy who hides an eating disorder and insecurity behind protein shakes and physical perfection, who blusters his way through masculinity because anything else is too scary. 

But Dave? He's serious about it all.

Effortlessly masculine, effortlessly cool, and just that little bit of unhinged. Well, you've never claimed to have good taste in men.

And something about him makes you want to manage him.

He's like you. If you can save him, that means you can be saved too.

#homestuck #hs #karkat #davekat #character study #euphoria au #ask #writing #like do u guys see the parallels between rose and dave here #but also parallels between dave and karkles i guess LOL #Dave uses his fists karkat uses his words and his constantly raised hackles #most of the Homestuck characters use masks or facades in one way or another which i think kinda gets at hussies pathology lol

[rosemary-is-in-pesterquest]

I am. SO. frustrated. that they keep fucking up davekat. like I just wanna go off. just wanna go the fuck off, man, I didn't even ship them that hard at first but god damn I do now and it's pretty much because the epilogues and HS2 have fucked them up so bad and I know they are better than that. let me just.

okay so originally, davekat is built on themes of mutual defensiveness in response to insecurity. when Dave is first introduced, he portrays himself as a cool guy, and gives us the concept of Strider irony. where a normal person might claim to love something shitty as an ironic joke, or maybe the ironic joke masks sincere enjoyment... Strider irony, according to Dave, has a billion more levels of sincerity and insincerity, to the point where you have no idea what the real intent is. in part, this is due to teen pretentiousness... but in some ways this is a reflection of him genuinely finding his Bro unfathomable, and wanting to protect his own genuine thoughts, opinions, and interests from criticism, without actually coming off as insecure. as time goes by, you can watch him and figure out what is sincere and what isn't... he doesn't actually keep that tight of a lid on things, but that's partially because the game allows him more freedom than he usually has. he at least isn't living in his Bro's shadow anymore. some might extrapolate this to mean that he's experiencing more physical and mental security than usual, while others might just say he's coming into his own via this journey, but the fact of the matter is that he felt the need to hide behind this facade in the first place. and the tricky thing with Dave is that it isn't all fake. it's a weird mixture of who he is, who he wants to be, and what he thinks others will respond well to. his development isn't so much discarding the mask, as it is reconciling what it's made of, and incorporating it into his true self as he matures. he accepts it as a piece of him. it's very subtle, and natural, and true to what growing up is really like. I think this is why so many people like Dave and relate to him so much.

for Karkat, insecurity manifests in the form of being hyper critical of everyone around him. to be honest, this also comes from a deep sense of concern for the people around him, and the fact that his friend group is made of a bunch of loose canons who do destructive shit for fun, and people who are easily dragged into that sort of thing. but the thing that keeps Karkat's hyper critical nature from irritating people too much is that he's also super extra critical of himself. he admits it when he's done something wrong... though admittedly often after it's made people angry at him, and he has a good amount of very sincere apologies that he delivers so that they come off as very sincere and actually work in terms of reconciling with people. Karkat's biggest issue is that criticizing your own internal flaws and actually fixing them are two different things. and while Karkat can identify many problems with himself, he's not always the best at making them go away. it takes him a long time to learn how to change himself, because in order to change yourself, you have to accept the flawed parts of yourself and work with them, rather than just trying to push them out of your sight. this is why his anger at his past and future selves is ultimately unhealthy. it keeps him from truly addressing the fact that his current self is just as subject to those same flaws. for example, if he's talking to a past self and a future self, and his future self is condescending to him, and his past self is naive, then his present self is both of those things to his conversation partners. but he's so repulsed by his own negative attributes that he's not really dealing with them. his saving grace is that everyone can see how hard he's trying, and how worried and scared he is. ultimately, Karkat doesn't want to be the reason for screwing everyone over, and that's more concern for others than anyone ever asked for. it gains Karkat a lot of good will, without him necessarily even realizing what he's doing.

what's excellent about davekat is that they come out the gate fully critical of one another... but neither is willing to back down either. somehow, these two insecure idiots trick each other into defending themselves. and it's brilliant, because they get all their critical bullshit out of the way immediately. they don't fear criticism from one another. they already criticize one another all the time, and it's fine. like, their worst complaints about each other are right out there in the open, and how freeing must that be for a couple of guys who worry about other people's opinions of them so much? Dave has nothing to hide and nothing to prove. Karkat defends his own positive qualities. it's good for them. eventually, they just kind of run out of material... and there's something comforting about knowing that they've said every bad thing they can think of about each other, and none of it was a deal breaker. they're still in each other's business constantly. and that's when they start to learn from each other. see, Karkat is really blunt. he wanders into the thick of things, yelling at people and making mistakes all over the place... and Dave is just more cautious than that. his whole cool guy persona is made to keep that kind of raw emotion from leaking out, and to make every mistake seem like he meant to do that. but Karkat makes mistakes all the time. and apologizes all the time. and he comes out okay. Karkat is sincere. but Karkat is also high strung... and Dave isn't. Dave knows how to chill, and he plans things, and he can sit down with people and calmly talk through a plan. get it in simple terms and hash things out without panicking. Karkat often exhausts himself trying to run around and manage everything, and while it can be kind of endearing to see how much he cares... it's not exactly healthy. Dave has more of a level head, beyond just his cool kid persona, and isn't afraid to make people walk things back and take it from the top. and actually, what Dave and Karkat have in common is that they try really hard for the people around them, and feel great concern for the people they love. when the chips are down, they value similar things. and once they've run out of ineffectual ways to badmouth each other, that's what they have left. probably the thing that bugs them the most about each other is how much they actually have in common in terms of priorities. and while I do think that in their relationship, they'll probably always bicker with each other, that's the core foundation. they're caring people who look out for their group and try to help wherever they can. in essence... they're both knights through and through.

and then HS2 fucks it all up. legit why even confuse anything about their relationship? just let them uncontroversially date, keep it lowkey and tasteful, realize the wonderful potential of their friends razzing them about it a little, and write a better story for them to exist in. god damn. like, seriously, just give them more people to actually care about, because Dave and Karkat feel out of character if they aren't constantly in the lives of a plethora of friends who are important to them. look at them in homestuck. look at everything they do best. of course they wouldn't thrive in HS2, none of the cast even likes each other anymore!! Dave and Karkat were basically instrumental in setting up rosemary, which fits so well with all of their characterization its insane. I just want everyone to periodically go back, and reread homestuck, and remember when these characters were good people.

BASED WENDELL COMING IN WITH THEIR ANALYSIS BETTER THAN WHATEVER THE FUCK THE HS2 WRITERS SHIT OUT