Here we are with these guys. You like these guys, yeah? Well, if you don’t, too bad. They’re in love so fucking deal with it.

Just kidding, who doesn’t love them? Some people, I guess, because we are all humans with our own interiorities and preferences and shit.

Ok enough hitting every possible opinion about Davekat. Time to get INTO it.

PANEL 1

Dave’s been internalizing a really complicated situation in his head, as they say.

There’s a troll roomba on the floor there. We talked a decent amount about what the differences between troll roombas and human roombas were, but some things are secrets so deep there isn’t a patreon tier expensive enough to accommodate them.

Artist note: I took time to really design the laundry room since the entire chapter takes place here. It’s a small, dark, intimate (hehe… hoo hoo…) space, but appropriately mundane yet familiar. I wanted it to quietly surround the conversation that takes place, visually mirroring the closeness of the exchange’s emotion. I hope it feels like a place you may recognize in one way or another. Much of the layout is actually taken from the laundry room of the house I grew up in. The best inspiration for me is lived experience!

And back to writer commentary: I DID have a startlingly visceral emotion of being back in my childhood laundry room when I saw it, even though the layout was different. And also the alien technology, and the green. It’s just that the vibes are There.

PANEL 2

For those of you who don’t memorize everything in the comic either for fun or to call us out when we have fallible human memory, this is Dave referencing the story Kanaya told him in a previous chapter. I didn’t write that part, but I like the idea of knowingly fucking up the point of a story in order to apply it to yourself, so I wanted to keep that going.

I mean, we all do that shit to some degree, right? Cram ourselves into the cracks in a story, or stretch it to fit a feeling we’ve had? It’s fucking GREAT when it hits just right without having to do any kneading, but that is a feeling that is hard to come by. So Kanaya and Dave both desperately trying to make meaning in the pointlessness of what they’re doing, etc etc. It’s good.

I also thought a lot about how the way people talk adapts after a long time hanging out with each other. I didn’t want to change the way they talked too much because I did not want to be executed for homestuck quirk crimes, but I wanted to give a bit of the feeling that they speak in the sort of synchronous cadence achieved by spending untold hours stewing in each other’s speech patterns, though possibly neither of them think about this enough to notice they’ve done it.

I also wanted it to feel a bit different than the dave chapter right before this, since it is a different Dave.

PANELS 3-5

Anyway also there is a lot of talk about candy characters and meat characters and I like how the Meat characters, though they are on the way to Plot, are sort of held in suspension until they get there. I wanted to set this scene in something very “domestic,” or perhaps even “boring” and after some conversation, we landed on laundry day. Even if you are plot guys, you have to wash stuff (once you get tired of pajamas that smell like someone took a dump on a butt).

Anyway, Dave has a lot of feelings about Dirk and you can just read and think about that on your god damn own, you don’t need me to tell you about it.

Also is it quarantine talking or does casual physical intimacy just knock anybody else onto their ass. Just curious.

Artist note: I really like the little rumbling animation of the washing machine in these first few panels… also Karkat’s faces and little circle blob-hands… just putting it out there. Those are good.

PANELS 6-8

God. Intimacy. Ya’ll ever consider that shit?

Sometimes heavy conversations happen while you are doing chores. It happens.

PANELS 9-10

For a long time i didnt notice the typo where it said “fraggle mortal meatsack” so that’s pretty good. We could have had that in there.

Karkat finding his feet steady on a soapbox, just about how much he likes Dave, this time. Ahh.

PANEL 11

Here it is, folks.

Also, I wanted some sort of visual way to show the impact of Karkat’s response to Dave’s fear ramble, and after a bunch of my own rambling, the artist came up with the bare laundry room lightbulb, which i fucking love. It influences each panel, but none more than this one.

Artist note: During the sketch phase, I was trying to figure out how I wanted to frame this last panel. I wanted it to hit and have its moment, but quietly so. I looked back at some of the kiss panels of the past: Rosemary, Dirkjake… they all were these long, scrolling panels with the reveal at the bottom, but they were moments that came with a lot of buildup. This wasn’t an exploding volcano kind of moment, but still one that I think deserved a little something. The single bulb seemed like a fitting answer to the problem, and so I then worked the lighting into the previous panels.