sometipsygnostalgic:

i always wondered why dave was hiding so much stuff from jade (and john?) during the session, like every conversation with her seemed to be insincere on his end. almost like johnrezi.

he wasn’t hiding it from terezi as much, partially because that job is 413x more difficult, and i dont think he hid anything from rose. 

but when talking to jade he was all coy and fake-cheery… we KNEW he was in a bad mood about coinflip dave, but he just pretended that it was nothing, and he hid the fact that she was about to kill him from her for the rest of the game, and….

well, i suspect that dave’s relationships with both jade AND terezi (AND john obviously) were reinforcing those masculine ideas he had. he had to PROTECT jade from a bunch of harsh truths, again and again. he thought she couldn’t handle herself so he had to make sacrifices on her behalf. as far as jade knew he was just being a coolkid. also, we know jade’s fully able to look after herself. she doesnt need dave to do that. she just needs good pals.

whereas with terezi it’s more of the fact she’s kinda…. dirk-like, in many ways, and she was encouraging the attitudes in dave that he developed from his brother, masculinity and memes and assholery. dave admitted that he got really fuckin sick of her mind games.  and when they dated, they realized they werent sure how to do the whole Emotional Honesty thing. so it all crumbled even BEFORE clown circus.

i guess in the post-retcon dave was left to his own head a lot, left with karkat, so in building his relationship with karkat he was forced to realize that a lot of his previous assumptions about himself were wrong. because the fact it was not heterosexual broke down the whole heterosexual masculinity ideal he had for himself, he had to wonder if it was worth pursuing in the first place. and also he was with someone who knew him well but also wasn’t gonna mess with him and expect him to take it.