DRRP App

[callbacks]

OOC

Name: Asher
Age: 25
Timezone: EST
Reserve link: Reserve Slot 12 yo
OOC contact: asherdashery, AIM: asherdashery

IC

Name: Dave Strider
Age: 16
Canon: Homestuck (MS Paint Adventures)
Canon point: True: [S] Game Over in the pre-retjohnned timeline
Assumed: The instant Grimbark Jade teleports him off the meteor to see John.

History: MSPA Wiki Bio

Character underwear: Dave's favorite boxers. The plain red cotton's comfortably time-worn, but it still proudly displays the PlushRump logo on the back.

Alt: These actually exist.

Memories:

- Laying eyes on John's hot but evil mom [pp. 8584 to 8633]
- Receiving the glitch-garbled transmission from Dirk [pp. 8295 to 8296]
- Leaping dramatically over the lava to catch his best best best best friend the Mayor [pp. 8287 to 8294]
- Weeplaughing over his selfies [pp. 8207 to 8214]
- Getting himself FRICKIN' KILLED FOR THE THIRD TIME in [S] Game Over


Regains:

- Renewable: Smuppet
A brightly colored, disturbingly nude felt puppet with wide eyes, pronounced buttocks, and a long, girthy...nose. Yes. You're sure that's what it is. Okay who are you kidding it's a penis. [gif warning]
- Liv Tyler
A stuffed bunny from some movie. Her holes and seams have been fastidiously repaired with purple yarn and her defense has been cleverly boosted with robot parts. She appears to have been both disarmed and deactivated and offers no more protection than any other stuffed animal.
- SBaHJifier
This camera creates a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comic based on anything it takes a picture of.
- Birthday Letters
A stack of colorful "Happy Birthday!" letters that appear to have been written by a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. They come in red, purple, green, and blue, and appear to be either from or to a boy named John.
- Terezi Pyrope's scratched caegar
A double-headed coin featuring some alien with horns. The alien's eyes have been scratched out on one side, which more or less defeats the purpose of said double-headed coin except in an #aesthetic sort of way.

Strengths & weaknesses:

Strengths:

✓ Loyal

You made friends with Dave! Dave will now die for you. I wish I could say this is an exaggeration, but Dave doesn't skimp when it comes to his crew: He's quietly gone to his death more than once (not even to speak of alternate iterations of Dave) to assist his friends and family and tends to trust without question the advice of people he thinks like him--right up until it's too late to salvage either himself or his opinion of them.

His dedication extends to ideas as well as people. Dave runs on intuition and an unexamined assumption that there's a right and wrong way for the world to go, the basis for which is largely rooted in the structure of Western narratives. Thus, heroes always win, and good people either shouldn't suffer or should recoup more than their losses. That thinking manifests in

I don't know why I'm putting this in the Strengths section at all except that it sometimes earns him some solid friendships and trust in return. That and one could say his loyalty is one of his strongest traits.

The flipside: His loyalty can be pretty easily used against him. He can also trap himself into thinking things have to be a certain way because it feels right or adheres to his general outlook on life when others would seek an alternate path.

✓ Clever

While he's no Rose or Jade, Dave can be surprisingly resourceful, particularly when it comes to exploiting loopholes for stupid gains. He's good at noting what's available in his environment and working around obstacles in unexpected ways rather than ramming through--see his breaking the legendary sword to get it out of the stone, or deploying the intellibeam laserstation to make a copy of his server disk for Jade.

Some of this stems from a vaguely scientific curiosity to test boundaries and see just how dumb things can possibly get. The rest comes from his quick, intuitive way of thinking; he's used to working on instinct and has a good head for when things do or don't feel right.

Flipside: Mostly he uses this intellect for inane reasons. Also, because he draws conclusions so fast, he can miss a lot, be easily distracted, or make too many surface assumptions.

✓ Takes things in stride, up to a point

Dave's got a fairly high-level ability to take what the world presents him and just, like, accept that that's what's going down. It's not exactly that he's chill; he's just resigned to never understanding anything, ever. He bears a sense of miserable obligation to everything being both a) stupid and b) awful, so that when bad things happen, he just goes on and concentrates on the things he CAN do.

Sometimes those things are limited to drawing crappy cartoons while trying to forget all the badguys he'll eventually have to fight.

Due to the general nature of Homestuck, he's particularly no stranger to violence, death, and being trapped in strange, sunless confines with no control over his life for long periods of time. And due to the general WEIRDNESS of Homestuck, he's not likely to be tripped up by much until the bodies start piling up, either.

Flipside: What he's really doing is ignoring the problem until it either goes away or it's too big for him to "deal" with. This does not actually constitute dealing with anything at all, and will usually come back around later to bite him in the butt, especially when it comes to emotional issues.

This also means he doesn't often say no to people, even when he's uncomfortable.

✓ Brave

But when the chips are down, Dave lives up to his title as the Knight of Time. As insecure as he is, as scared as he can get, the boy is very, very brave, and he will give everything for what he thinks is right: his friends, through thick and thin.

Flipside: It frequently gets him killed.

Weaknesses

✗ Easily influenced

Dave has no leadership skills whatsoever. He barely makes his own decisions half the time, and spends most of his time in SBURB following others' orders, even if he drops some token snark about it. A troll that he knows indirectly killed his best friend (if in an alternate timeline) wins him over with relative ease by playing into his silly meme games, and he trusts her to the point that she gets an alternate version of him killed just to prove a point. And even after THAT, in this timeline, the two of them end up romantically involved to some capacity.

It's unbearably easy to get Dave to like, or at least accept, anyone who pays attention to him, and the dumb, distractable boy lets just about anyone boss him around for it.

✗ Difficulty processing emotions

On those occasions that events overwhelm Dave's ability to go with the flow--confronting his own mortality, for instance, or the death of a loved one--he doesn't seem to know how to work through his emotions. He often freezes up, and his thought process always gets a little erratic, his choices lean towards recklessness and self-destruction. It's under greatest duress that he most falls back on ideas of heroism and sacrifice to suss out what he's supposed to do, and that road leads to dead Daves.

He also doesn't really know how to deal with other people's emotions--not in this timeline, anyway. He often responds to distress with platitudes or wipes his hands of responsibility entirely, feeling too insecure in the field of feelings to risk messing up.

✗ Highly insecure

A lot of his problems come back to that, actually: He's terrified of messing up, and he won't commit to action without knowing that it's the right thing to do, as if there's a code or model on which he can base his life. All the posturing and deflection stems from his fear of not measuring up to an ideal he's drawn from movies and from his weirdo Bro. He doesn't want to disappoint people. He constantly seeks validation. That and his distraction are what make him so easy to manipulate. He just wants people to tell him he's cool because he's scared, not even that deep down, that he isn't.

Skills & abilities: [Upon acceptance characters will be given Super High School Level titles that can be found ICly in their electronic student handbooks. While all powers will be dampened or nerf’d completely, any natural skill or abilities characters have that aren't magically/supernaturally-based will remain. For example, if a character is a sorcerer who also happens to be able to make a perfect omelet they would lose their magic but still be able to make a flawless breakfast. Powers pertaining to the character’s SHSL talent will be diminished but not taken away entirely.

Toot their horn! What skill would make them Super High School Level worthy? We encourage you to come up with your own titles if you have ideas and use this section to justify them to us.]

- Time travel/god tier superpowers

The big one, I guess. As the Knight of Time, Dave can loop back in time to either create stable time loops within the alpha timeline in which he can get more things done in a limited amount of time, or change something, which marks the timeline he came back from as a doomed offshoot timeline and ensures that the alpha timeline continues as it should. This dooms the time traveler from that offshoot timeline, if he remains in the alpha, and has led to him coming upon his own corpse once or twice.

He can also sense whether or not he's slipped off the alpha timeline into one of those doomed timelines, and can navigate the Furthest Ring, said to be an expanse where time and space are totally borked.

As a god tier SBURB player, Dave is also conditionally immortal--death only sticks if the death was either heroic or just--and can fly. He also gets magic self-cleaning pajamas that I guess probably grew with him? Who knows. Homestuck is weird. I don't even know.

- Art

Dave has a number of "artistic" hobbies: Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is his ironic webcomic project and arguably his most defining hobby, at least at thirteen; he enjoys photography, especially selfies; he seems to like remixing music and playing with his turntables; and, of course, he raps.

(Badly. So badly. Oh, god, make it stop.)

Most of his creative endeavors kind of suck objectively, but he does that on purpose, so. Yeah.

- Combat

Bro trained Dave in swordplay and in weaponizing his sylladex from a young age, and Dave is quite capable as combatant. He admits that he's "not that strong ok" [pp. 4727], but he IS fast, and despite not having adventured in quite a while, volunteers (in the retjohnned timeline) to fight the second-strongest Jack Noir boss, as he feels his fighting ability obligates him to.

- Pop culture knowledge

Dave is a veritable FONT of dumb pop culture trivia. He can reference anything from Beowulf to Eminem, though his knowledge base stops for obvious reasons at 2009. He's well-read and has clearly watched a lot of movies. Like, not even good movies. Just. So many movies.

He also benefits from a fairly savvy 2009 teenager's understanding of technology, which is not something all DRRP cast members have.

- Preserving dead things

Look, I don't know, but keeping all that weird dead crap he had in jars may come in handy one of these days, who knows.

Suggested titles: SHSL Meme-Loving Fuck COME ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO. Plus it's great because a meme is something that repeats, and Dave is, you know. Something that repeats. Through time loops. And also memes.
SHSL Freudian Slip
SHSL Timekeeper
SHSL Webcomic Creator or other such titles
SHSL Knight Complex

Motives:

Saving/protecting others, particularly friends or those he admires, is the big one. Nothing can stop him if this is his cause. This can be applied in heat-of-the-moment defense of a murderer's intended victim or a premeditated attack, if he's absolutely sure that his target means to kill someone else.

That's followed by self-defense and righteous revenge in a rough tie at second place. He's not likely to protect himself by covering up if he kills for either of these reasons, though, since he's a good-of-the-group-oriented guy.

The clincher would be his fatalistic sense of obligation to preserving the alpha timeline. As a time-traveler, he sometimes becomes aware that he is going to do something, and if he chooses not to do it, he knows that all that's going to do is split the future into two timelines--a "doomed" off-shoot timeline in which he doesn't, and the "alpha" timeline whose future he'd become aware of. That means that the timeline in which he didn't do the thing doesn't actually count and will somehow collapse on itself. Though avoiding the paradox wouldn't bring him to murder someone in the first place, if he already knows he has to and he understands why, then knowing that he is going to just ensures that he'll grimly go through with it.

And--since suicides/accidents are investigable killings!--Dave could be convinced he needs to die to save someone else, particularly if he's already regained memory of his heroic and "permanent" death. He could also let someone kill him for the same reason, or beat that person to the chase so that, when it comes down to trial, they won't be executed for what he turned into his suicide. He could also kill someone ELSE to save someone he's really fond of, if he knows that person he's fond of is going to kill someone else.

Third Person Sample: So Mock Trial threads count, huh?


Plot Involvement

Would you be okay with your character being a mole for Monobear?: Nah, not this time. Even if his color scheme is perfect.