Tag: bro strider

shitstuck:

like okay. i’m sure cal was the reason bro was so certain about sburb and i’m sure he inhibited communication a lot and messed with his feelings for dave but i feel like even without the influence of cal dave’s childhood would still have been Not Great

cause i mean bro was for sure a gay dude growing up alone in the eighties and maybe even a trans gay dude of color depending on ur hcs (i’m never quite sure what to think regarding him and dirk and whether or not i think they’re trans) so he had to have faced a ton of hate in his life and like i’m not trying to say trans gay poc tend more towards being abusive cause first of all that’s a really bigoted thing to say but second of all it’s just statistically not true

but you can’t deny that in some cases facing hate like that will make the person want to push down whoever they can so someone else will be the victim and not them. historically in america it happened a shit ton!

so i don’t think it’s a stretch to say that bro’s childhood/adolescence contributed a lot to the way he treated dave, even without the influence of cal

i feel like cal was the source of the idea that dave had to be the perfect man to be sburb’s “protagonist” as we see caliborn wants when he draws all those shitty comics but i still think dave would’ve faced toxic masculinity, emotional abuse, and even some level of sexual abuse had cal not been present.

hal turing tested made a really good post a while ago that he reblogged recently about how hal is dirk with everything that kept him from being bro (read: his friends, just about any source of physical joy) taken from him, and we see that because of this hal lashes out frequently in fear and anger with the only tools he has

bro is dirk with none of those positive influences in the first place. bro is dirk at the worst he could possibly be. if we say that dirk in the alpha universe as we know him is Dirk As He’s Supposed To Be (dirk neutral, if you will), bro is Dirk From The Dark Timeline. bro is like, evilstuck dirk.

i feel like the trans-universal qualities of dirk are, like, autism, gay, self-aware (to an extent, and when not inhibited by an evil puppet), and low empathy/inability to understand and/or analyze other people’s feelings and abilities the way he can his own, and with this worst-case scenario dirk, all of those just make him unable to modulate his actions towards dave (or anyone else) so cal kinda did it for him

idk i kinda lost where i was going but anyway i can’t just sort bro’s actions into the two categories of “he did it for sburb” and “cal made him do it” and call it good