app for thelegion

[turntex]

APPLICATION
Player Name: Kelly
Plurk Handle: tinybro
Other characters: N/A

Character Name: Dave Strider
Fandom: Homestuck
Character Journal: turntex
OU, AU, or OC? OU
If canon, canon point: End of canon
PB: Canon and fanart icons
Superhero Name: Justin Time

History: thank god this is a fandom with a very thorough wiki because this would be an exhausting history to write out

Additional OC and AU Background: N/A

Personality: Dave grew up with a brother that he eventually described as "a hyper-aggressive lunatic of a guardian", and it significantly affected his personality and development. For the majority of the canon, Dave tries very hard to be stoic and unflappable and "cool" all the time, relying on "irony" for humor and basically being extremely guarded about everything. He let his guard down a little, to varying degrees, with his friends, but for the most part he tried to keep a specific persona. Back then, he seemed to idolize his Bro and likely learned these habits as a result of trying to gain Bro's approval. The fact that he was raised in the most ridiculously unsettling and hostile environment probably didn't help matters.

At his core, Dave is honestly a huge dork. He likes photography and rap and apple juice and preserved dead things, he gets jumpy around puppets, and he sincerely cares about his friends and does a lot to help them and try to make them happy (even while masking all that care under layers of indifference and flippancy). And he has a number of issues that he keeps close to his chest, too used to hiding vulnerabilities to be open about shit like his conflict over how he perceives his Bro or his obvious self-esteem problems.

However, over the course of the canon, particularly the last stretch of it, Dave experienced a great deal of personal development. Having spent three years stuck on a meteor with only his sister and a bunch of aliens and dreamghosts for company, he slowly came to terms with of a lot of things about human society and the way he was raised. He's since eased up on the stoicism, recognizing it as a learned behavior because of the culture of masculinity he was raised in (though he tends to fall back on his old habits with strangers and when he's uncomfortable). He had some revelations about compulsory heterosexuality and ended up even romantically involved with an alien boy (though he's remained a little awkward about how to bring it up with the friends they didn't spend years hanging out with aliens, since he still cares a great deal about what they all think of him).

All developmental factors and growth taken into account, Dave is a very laid-back guy with an odd sense of humor. He's become much more relaxed and his "coolness" has become less of an adopted persona and more just a side-effect of his overall chill. He's not afraid to do silly things, especially to make his friends happy (and he's less likely to fall back on the excuse of "irony" these days, now just at a stage of "who gives a fuck"). He's pretty happy now, even actually smiling at times (while at the beginning of canon, the closest he ever came was an extra little pixel to make his linefacing into kinda a smirk). Dave's honestly a thoughtful guy, both in the sense that he thinks deeply about things and that he cares a lot about the people he's close to. He's even very chill and forgiving about the things that messed him up for years, as despite all his revelations about how the actually abusive way his Bro treated him and whatnot, he's still conflicted about how he should feel about the guy and manages to get some closure with Dirk, talking out his issues without necessarily holding Dirk responsible for the way his alt-universe self acted. They even hugged. Aw.

On the less positive side of things, Dave's got a tendency to ramble and mumble to himself about complete nonsense, and still gets rather awkward and guarded about certain things. His humor can be straight up mean sometimes (though he's gotten somewhat better about that). He's very needy, maybe an aftereffect of coming to live with people who actually care about him after growing up with a guardian who alternately ignored and was extremely aggressive with him, and can be super annoying when he wants someone's attention. He's nervous about blood and his own mortality, to the point where he got extremely obsessive about making sure his time loops were stable because seeing his own dead body freaked him out so much. He doesn't actually like fighting, despite being really good at it, but he's always way too willing to do what has to be done despite his personal reservations. And he can sometimes fall too hard into the "stoic and cool" mindset to do the said shit that's gotta be done, which lets him do things like decapitate Dirk with barely a moment of hesitation but definitely cannot be good for his mental health.

Canon Powers:
- Time shenanigans. The exact limits of Dave's time traveling powers as the Knight of Time are hard to pin down, but he does have specific tendencies with them in comparison to other Time players (whether because of personal preference or because of their differing classes). Dave seems to primarily use his powers to himself travel through time (by months at the longest jump we saw, and it's unclear if it could have be used to jump even greater lengths of time). Anything in his possession would come with him, but he had to be careful about creating stable time loops in order to prevent offshoot doomed timelines. He mostly used these powers for maneuvering in battle, assisting himself in battle from different points in time, and abusing the stock exchange. There were some crazy combos he could pull off with other players and their respective powers, but they're massively complicated and likely unimportant for the purposes of this game so MOVING ON...
- Godtier powers. Upon reaching godtier, Dave gained a few extra bonus abilities. He can fly, he gained the Gift of Gab (which canonly allows him to have actual spoken dialogue with other people but fandom often interpreted as allowing godtiers to understand and speak any language), and he became conditionally immortal. The immortality doesn't seem to affect aging and so natural death might still be a thing, but otherwise he can't be killed unless the death is considered Heroic or Just by the mechanics of the universe. Otherwise, he's just revived again.

Game powers: ONE POWER - TIME SHENANIGANS (SORTA). As Dave's canon abilities have the potential to be crazy complicated to just straight up game-breaking, he'll have a very toned down variant of them here. Similar to Tracer's abilities in Overwatch, he'll be able to jump forwards or backwards in time by just a few seconds, allowing him to move at what looks like super speed or warp back to a former position. He can also slow or stop time in a localized area for a few seconds to affect the setting, villains or teammates in his immediate vicinity. Much less usefully, he's something of a sentient clock since he's always aware of what time it is or how exactly how long it's been since any other time.

Abilities:
- Crazy ninja-esque moves. Dave was an accomplished fighter even before the game started due to Bro's training. Besides being skilled with swords and weaponizing his fetch modus (the latter of which doesn't matter here because the fetch modus is a construct unique to his universe), he's very agile and fast.
- Generally a smart dude. Though he's not the "smart guy" of the cast, Dave is surprisingly intelligent in certain ways. He's extremely good with numbers and he's got general knowledge of everything from pop culture to history and myth. However, he can be a little forgetful, and he doesn't know jack shit about sports.
- Rapping, shitty art, and ironic hipster photography. Unlikely to ever be useful, but those sure are some skills he has right there.

Setting: Though he's come a long way in working through a lot of his issues, Dave still has something of a hero complex, in that he doesn't think of himself as a hero. He'll jump right into the superhero thing because it's funny and all, but at his most sincere core he doesn't consider himself capable of heroic things despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, mostly because of comparing himself to people like John or his very complicated feelings about his Bro. I think it'll be interesting to force him more obviously into the role. He'll also just have a lot of fun with the setting in general, even if he'll be lowkey salty about being snatched away from all his friends to be here.

SAMPLES

Prose Sample: TDM thread

Network Sample:
[Did they intend this to be a video journal or something? Well, it wasn't specified, so Dave falls back on text as he's used to, even fussing with the settings until he can get something like the obnoxious brightly-colored text he's most accustomed with. Hey, it's all about familiarity and comfort and all that shit, right? Let him have this, it's probably good for his mental health or something.]

testing testing
alright cool typeface secured
or is it a font whats even the difference actually
is there internet in the spacefuture because thatd be pretty sick
i missed being able to just fucking google the answers to these critical questions
there was no casualty of earths destruction more tragic than the loss of google
all of humanitys knowledge and resources at our fingertips so twelve year olds can search "anime titty" and find all they ever dreamed of in seconds without mom and dad being any the wiser so long as they learned to clear their browser history
anyway
thoughts on the situation
it sucks the end
seriously tho your space station is cool and all but i went through hell to get to a new world and i kinda thought that getting to stay with my friends and all would be a given so this is some serious bullshit
who do i gotta write a formal letter of complaint to about this shit
like hey if you can produce for me all the rest of my little squad of assholes i guess im down with hanging around here
not the planet we put a lot of fucking effort into setting up but hey whatever
but im actually pretty attached to everyone so you cant really expect me to just settle down with a spouse and 2.5 kids without them
except vriska you can leave her in paradox space
(im kidding)
(sorta)

Additional info: I'll make sure to put up a post so people can opt out of the colored text and whatnot because it can definitely be very eyebleedy and awful.

If this is your first character being apped to the game, did you reserve first? Here!