you know i never fucking thought id say this but i am less worried about how andrew hussie did/would potentially handle davekat (considering he gave us the gayest falling-in-love sequence ive ever seen and of course canonized the ship in the first place) than i am about coh*n ed*nfi*ld, even though he vowed to make his writing “ more qu**r”… considering he thinks jade is a part of dave and karkats romantic relationship and quickly backpedaled when people pointed out it was fucked up
heres what my angle is: i have no investment in davekat as a “ship” at all. its not interesting to me. ive written about issues i have with the way their relationship was developed in hs canon before. this isnt me getting salty over a notp or lack of confirmation because im sad my otp didnt get together.
what i AM invested in is the clear, explicit depiction of a healthy romantic relationship between men exclusively. what i AM invested in is seeing a bisexual character who struggles with his identity and compulsory heterosexuality and coming out of the closet end up with a man, in a world that overwhelmingly favors for bisexuals to bury their same-gender attraction entirely. what i AM invested in is seeing a female character who can form intimate, emotionally close friendships with boys without having heterosexuality imposed on her. what i AM invested in is seeing a pair of characters for whom polyamory was established as being uncomfortable and invasive have those feelings respected.
re: pissing off the straights, in particular straight men. its important to remember that straight dudes love rosemary. i have never in my LIFE seen discourse over rosemary; even johnrose shippers quietly moved on around 4 years ago.
but straight dudes have emotional investment in daves sexuality because dave was introduced as another straight dude, while they never had that particular connection to rose – shes a girl and therefore incapable of being a straight dude. so when she turned out to be bi or gay, it generally wasnt a big deal. but when dave – a guy who likes girls! one of us, they thought! – starts tearing down his wannabe-hypermasculine hetero-dude persona, criticizing these aspects of himself that straight dudes liked, and reveals that hes not really a straight dude at all… straight dudes feel betrayed. like theyve had something taken away from them.
callioxy is basically the same thing. straight boys are mad at callioxy, but theyre not mad that roxy likes girls. theyre mad that shes not with john – john egbert, “not a homosexual”, the last bastion of sacred heteromasculinity in a narrative that has established it as a destructive force of evil. the straight boy hero is supposed to get a girlfriend at the end! he has to be rewarded for his heroism with a prize i mean a lovely girlfriend! but the girl who was supposed to be his prize is very happy with another girl and hasnt been shown even interacting with a dude since before the credits.
john doesnt get a girlfriend, and the other two major male characters are confirmed gay/bi, so daves perceived heterosexuality is the last fucking thing they have to cling to. even if hes not straight, he could be dating a girl, and thats the next best thing. and some folks arent even satisfied with that, they arent satisfied until hes not dating a boy at all. consider how many “at least davekat still isnt canon” comments pop up on straightboy-dominated homestuck communities with every fucking snapd8.
wp and wlf want lgbt peoples money, which is why they sell the merch. im hesitant to call it queerbaiting, since… homestuck literally had an onscreen lesbian wedding. i cant fault it there. but it is an evolved, cleverer type of queerbaiting – where they can draw the money and attention of mlm without angering straightboys by actually showing mlm. i hope this isnt coming off as me saying theres some kind of privilege in wlw representation or something – straight dudes are okay with fictional wlw because they fetishize them – but it is almost certainly the reason for the uncertainty and discourse around davekat i think
this is a good post.
disclaimer before my huge addendum: I am really invested in davekat, though I like to think that doesn’t impart bias, since I’ve been around in the fandom for an assload of time, and I’ve seen everything from the great incest ban in act 4 to uh, what’s going on now with the credits and post credits, so here’s my thoughts.
sometimes people wonder why straightbros are so fucking invested in davekat not being canon and this post is really it. there’s a reason why hussie wrote caliborn identifying so much with dave and calling him the “alpha male”; caliborn is a direct takedown of the sort of 4chan and mspaf (mainly mspaf) straightbros that hussie was exhausted of having to deal with in his spare time. this is why criticisms such as “caliborn is meant to ridicule slash shippers” and “caliborn is making fun of bad fanartists” don’t really fly. caliborn’s behavior, his character focus, and the motivations behind why he writes characters behaving how they do are all takedowns of how straightboys on the forums (and, in extension, on 4chan – “homosuck” is even a name that originated there) behaved. boys are most important, girls only exist as romantic partners and don’t matter to the plot, romantic affection is something earned by the main hero as a reward for being good at things. even caliborn’s “yaoi” interlude is a joke because caliborn doesn’t understand yaoi is romantic. he thinks it’s about bro bonding, which is in itself still mocking those same straightbros, who asserted things like, until jake outright used the word “paramour,” that dirk and jake’s matching tats were just bro tats. that karkat’s brief crush on john wasn’t really gay because it was black. though it came after caliborn’s yaoi segment, that famous shot of dave and karkat being the “bro team” while dave sitting next to a sleeping jade was a “subtle shiptease.” etc.
but even putting caliborn aside:
straight bro types hate davekat because dave is their projection target, which is what I was trying to get at in that last overwrought paragraph. like you said, dave was introduced to them as “the straight guy” and, unlike john, even had some implied romantic feelings pretty early on in his existence (the famous 1px smile while he’s bugging jade, though I am hugely not a fan of davejade). so first dave doesn’t get a girl and not only that but outright disowns the idea that heroism and straightness are intertwined – talking about his feelings on sexuality and masculinity and abuse in ways that get him derided for being “tumblr pandering,” because straightbros embrace the bubble they live in as being an ideal world, and anybody who talks about the problems with the things dave did must be a hypertriggered tumblr sjw top kek.
there were wars back in the day over whether dave would end up with jade (the preferred option) or with terezi (or, later, jane), and while said wars weren’t just limited to boys, the boys were definitely loudest about their reasoning, which usually aligned with caliborn’s. which girl was the better reward for dave’s behavior? so when dave didn’t end up with a girl at all, period, it basically struck them as a direct attack. so while holding out hope that something would happen to disown it (take your pick: “karkat dies,” “jade is too hot and dave can’t resist her,” and of course, “it’s an ot3 where dave and karkat both only care about jade and never touch dicks”) they fell back onto john – they’d largely accepted long before this that jake was out of their reach and however dirkjake went pre-credits in canon, jake had some sort of Real Feelings for dirk (though a few of them still held out that jake was a preyed-upon straight boy). a few did try to push dirkroxy or dirkjane because “are we sure dirk is gay,” but the narrative pretty frankly disowns both so there was no point in holding on; they just had to quietly simmer in their anger that the most masculine dude in homestuck also happened to be one of the 3 gayest people in the entire comic. so john was their “last hope.”
I’m gonna admit here that I sort of like johnroxy, but that doesn’t really matter either, as my reasons for shipping it are different than dudebros’. but when it withered away without any attention in the credits and seemed pretty much destroyed in the 11/11 update, it was adding insult to injury for them.
this sort of behavior has a history with cishet dudes in fandom environments. from “bioware is disrespecting straight male gamers by not giving us more possible love interests” in dragon age inquisition to being angry at the (completely theoretical) idea that zelda could be a hero in a game instead of being link’s reward for doing good deeds. this narrative of “guy does heroic things and is rewarded with heterosexual romance and never questions masculinity or heteronormativity” is one that they’ve come to see as the norm, and anytime something they’re attached to upsets this norm, they start calling it bad. there’s even a bit of this in the way 4chan backlashed to undertale, a game completely without a player-run romance plot where the protagonist is always called “they” as opposed to “he” – a plot and character structure that seems to cater to tumblr, not to them, because it doesn’t revolve around the traditional straight cis male heterosexual woman-as-reward narrative.
some of them have moved on to making angry threats that if cohen “breaks up” aradia and sollux, a pair who was never even confirmed to be romantic post-sollux-death, they’ll spam up reddit with straight shit or what have you, their last desperate “I’ll MAKE you pay attention to me.” because now that john is by himself and dave is with a dude (which many of them are at least somewhat aware of and just trying to deny, or they wouldn’t be so mad about it), sollux is their last option. but the thing is that hussie hasn’t cared at all what they thought since act 5 ended and has been mocking them all along with caliborn.
but the davekat shit … is really god damn irritating from the pov of an gay individual who, for various reasons, wouldn’t be comfortable, myself, in a poly relationship. I’m completely supportive of poly people, of course, but it wouldn’t be right for me for some of the same reasons that dave and karkat express discontent with the idea. and it’s like that post about bi characters ending up in straight relationships – of course bi people irl can be in het relationships without it neutering or nullifying their sexuality, but in fiction, it buys into a narrative that same-gender interest is just a phase, that they’ll grow up or move on or mature back into straight relationships. djk gives us that in double, especially because, for many djk people, it’s just an excuse to get whichever of dj or jk they’re more interested while pretending that davekat never touch or express any romantic feelings for each other. the message it gives is not just “they grew back into liking girls, it’s ok, they’re still straight” but that they grow past their discomfort with poly specifically because they are interested in a girl; that heterosexual love is enough to bridge the gap between all their insecurity and discomfort (and, possibly, jealousy). calling it “an evolved form of baiting” is an interesting – and pretty true – perspective.
I’m definitely holding out for some kind of hard davekat confirm in, at the very least, the epilogue, but I too am kiiiiiind of nervous as to what’s going to happen before then.
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