TL;DR CR MEME

[ironicoolly]

TL;DR CHARACTER RELATIONSHIP MEME

1. post with your characters
2. respond to other people's characters with your characters
3. they tell you in detail what their character thinks of your character, ic or ooc! tl;dr is enouraged. don't have much/any cr? respond anyway, make magic happen!
4. then you react if you want!
5. other people do the same thing to you! maybe you can harvest your tl;dr to use in a cr chart later!

(shamelessly stolen from other people)

Comments

[ironicoolly]

LAUGHS HOLLOWLY AND BURIES FACE IN HANDS

So I think the important thing to consider about Gary is that Dave met him at the lowest point of his life. He'd just turned into a hideous monster and shanked his own brother because he believed a third party who told him his brother was just using him, that his brother never gave a shit about him... and from that experience he saw that, well, his brother did care about him. A lot. After that experience, he was promptly sent home, and there he learned that he failed his duty as Knight of Time and that his friends were all dead because he didn't do his job properly and save their timeline from becoming doomed. (It's actually a fair bit more complicated than that because holy shit, fuck Homestuck, but for all intents and purposes this is what Dave essentially gets out of it.) Right as he meets Gary, his sense of self-worth has just been shattered in a major way.

Needless to say, however, Dave is also a bitter asshole about a lot of things. He loathes Waverly Bay, he distrusts the heart, and the circumstances that led to him stabbing his brother have made him come to the belief that their whole setup is a trap. The gem, the fusions, the powers - all of it a trap with the endgame of turning them against each other. He's scared, and he doesn't know who to turn to. He doesn't know who to trust who won't try to hurt him, but he knows that he also doesn't trust himself to not hurt the people he cares for most deeply, and this is where I probably need to explain a little something about Dave's upbringing.

Dave was raised by a man whom, despite being his biological father, he called "Bro." Bro was... a weird fucker, in a lot of ways. Supposedly he was training Dave to become independent; to be a real man, one who can survive in the harshest of conditions and be absolutely undefeatable in combat. However, the way he went about it was pretty counterintuitive and, quite honestly, fucked up. He monitored Dave incessantly through hidden cameras. He attacked Dave at random times, without any warning. He beat down Dave's sense of self-worth mercilessly, depriving him of any scrap of affection.

The result? Dave Strider worshipped the ground he walked on, and he learned that he was never alone. He got used to never being alone, never having to make his own decisions, in a sense. Bro was an immensely controlling figure, and as much as Dave came to resent him for a lot of what he did, "controlling" also became all that Dave knew and was familiar with; there's comfort to be found in familiarity. Then Bro died, and Dave was left alone. All on his own, without any guidance in a hostile world where, Dave believed, everything was a trap.

Dave's immediate attachment to Gary is simple enough: Gary agreed with him. Gary saw things his way, and beyond that, Gary even seemed to think Dave was someone special. That everyone else there was useless, but hey, Dave wasn't useless like the others. And Dave... doesn't really know affection. Intense, unbridled affection is something that makes him uncomfortable, and so in a sense he's been conditioned to respond more to people who aren't affectionate. Part of this is because he's a clingy person by nature. That he's insecure and easily threatened. That he would probably feel pangs of jealousy and possessiveness if he got too attached to someone who was just really affectionate to everyone in general, and so he doesn't try to get too close to people like that. If someone is an affectionate person and they're affectionate to everyone, then Dave doesn't really trust that to be genuine, anyway. Someone who isn't affectionate, on the other hand? Someone who seems to hold the general populace in disdain, someone who never compliments anyone? Well, if Dave manages to squeeze a single nice word out of someone like that, then that's a big deal, and Dave will jump through hoops for validation from them - again, a lot of this has to do with the way he was raised and the fact that he spent thirteen years of his life worshipping a disdainful douche who didn't really do open affection.

Then he met Gary in person. Then he got to know a little about Gary's past. Then he learned more about Gary's fears, his insecurities. Gary Smith is someone who didn't take to anyone easily; someone who didn't trust anyone, because he'd had his trust betrayed before. But he trusted Dave, and that meant Dave needed to stick up for him. To be there for him. Dave needed to prove himself worthy of that trust, because trust from a distrusting person meant all the more, didn't it?

And sure, Gary is kind of imposing, to say the least. One might even call him "controlling," but again, Dave was raised by imposing and controlling. That kind of behavior is infuriating on some level, but it's still familiar, and that means it's behavior that Dave feels a degree of comfort in, as well. In a world that's terrifying in its unfamiliarity, Dave is going to cling to the familiar - especially since Dave's just had his self-worth completely shattered. Dave doesn't trust himself to not hurt the people around him with his shitty decisions, and he isn't used to having to actually make decisions by himself. Having that responsibility is terrifying, so maybe it's better that he doesn't have to. Maybe it's better if Gary just tells him what to do.

All in all, there are a lot of weird factors going on here, but it's safe to say that part of it is that Gary's got him trapped in a weird prison of guilt, part of it is that Gary is a figure of strength who exudes a sort of security for him that he feels like he can believe in, and part of it is that holy shit, getting complimented by Gary feels really fucking nice because Gary never compliments anyone. Needless to say, he's terrified of losing this friendship, because he's now very attached to Gary to a degree almost bordering on infatuation.

But he's not about to acknowledge that anytime soon.