Ok so first of all I have to say that the idea that Dirk and Jake’s relationship seriously wavered on any level but the superficial “are we officially dating” one is, imo, inaccurate. The boys are in love, they love each other and are best friends and this is true across the board for the Alphas.

Thanks a lot for your message though, and I’ve been meaning to say something about John and Dave’s relationship for a while now so sure, I’ve got a bit to say for you. 

predictably as hell this got really long, so meet me under the cut.

But to talk about them, I’m going to have to talk about a different pair of friends who grow up together, first. One underexplored element of Homestuck that I’ve always found interesting is how Classpect seems to reflect, to a degree, how characters take influence from their societies.

I’ve written plenty about Jake and Jane in this regard, but I think John is maybe my favorite example for how nuanced it is.

A great example of what I’m talking about is Equius and Vriska’s contrasting relationships with the Hemospectrum. Namely, Equius, the Void player, values it greatly, while Vriska, a Light player, regards it as a bunch of bullshit. 

What Vriska DOES put value in is how it affects circumstance–how it makes people see Tavros, how it makes people see her, the very real burdens of responsibility and societal expectation it puts on everyone. THAT’S real. 
THAT matters to her. 

But the ideology itself is a bunch of baloney, and Vriska picks up on that almost instinctually. Now let’s take stock of what the Hemospectrum is in the story. 
It is, simultaneously:

1) A source of STRENGTH, at least for Equius. 

2) Inherently irrelevant and unimportant to anything about any of the characters except how it makes society treat them.

3) Explicitly a lie. 

4) Most importantly for our purposes: Entirely physical. 

True to Homestucks’ Gnostic roots, unlike true ideas that the characters reason out over the course of the story, information that is unimportant, irrelevant, and built upon markers of physical identity is inherently coded with Void, as the aspect of all things false, unfortunate, unimportant and untrue. The world of the physical Yaldabaoth creates in Gnosticism is coded not just as the world of lies and physicality, but also as the world of Darkness. Hence the link.

For Homestuck, this means that that sort of information has a source. It can be traced on a timeline, just like any other objects in the story, because information like the Hemospectrum amounts to what is essentially a bad meme. 

For the Hemospectrum, that source is Equius, who first inherits that incredibly unimportant information from his society and then becomes nothing when he succumbs to its influence, allowing Gamzee to kill him. 

Now here’s the kicker: Eventually, Equius (along with Gamzee) becomes the source of the Hemospectrum himself, becoming part of Lord English and so explaining how LE got the idea to impose such a complicated system in the first place. 

In essence, once he becomes part of LE, the hemospectrum itself is Equius’ most lasting legacy on the plot, a time loop to rival Gamzee’s RIDICULOUS proliferation of clown-themed horror across the cosmos. Equius has truly become Void in this regard, a potent undercurrent for Heirs. 

Now let’s talk about Dave finally.

So like while it’s true that John and Dave’s friendship is mostly wholesome as fuck and really sturdy, I’m going to complicate that narrative a bit on both extremes. 

One of the things I’ve always found appealing about Dave is how intensely devoted he is to his friends growing up–which makes sense when you consider how unhappy he says he was in his home life. 

If Dave has a penchant for rapping ad nauseum and talking to his friends even after they leave to humorous extremes early on, well–that has at least something to do with the fact that he’s using them as an escape from his nightmarish childhood.

This devotion is more than just him being very giving and caring–he’s invested in all of the other betas emotionally, and it matters to them how they feel about him. Maybe none moreso than John, even years and lots of chilling out later.

And it plays into Davesprite’s lost sense of self in a big way. When John rejects him in favor of “Real Dave”, Davesprite is genuinely hurt and angry, and John continues to aggravate those feelings of displacement during the 3 year journey on the ship. John’s perception of him MATTERS to Dave.

And a lot of what made Dave’s childhood awful was his internalization of heroism as linked to not just Bro’s weird hypermasculine bullshit, but also explicitly to heterosexuality. 

Dave compares himself unfavorably to John as a hero, and knowing what we know about him now, it’s pretty reasonable to put Dave’s struggles with his attractions to men at the root of it. 

And given how similar Jade and John are and his obvious romantic interest in Jade, I’ve always read him as being just as interested in John–just closeted and repressed about it. 

Which means that all of those gay jokes he and John partook in had an effect on Dave far beyond what they had on John, which I think is really interesting. 
Also interesting, though, is how John reveals he parsed all of those things growing up:

As jokes. See, John also inherits a lot of his culture’s toxic ideology, like Equius does. But unlike Equius, John doesn’t inherit it as information to value and define himself by. 

Breath is the aspect of detachment and levity, and fittingly, John inherits these toxic masculinity-enforcing cultural memes as a series of jokes! Stuff he says, but doesn’t think about. Stuff not particularly worth “taking seriously”.

So his relationship to masculinity is a lot less fraught and intense–partly because he fits the mold more neatly than Dave, but also partly because he simply didn’t actually believe the stuff he was saying. 

Here, John is a depiction of the straight dude who makes shitty jokes and claims to be “just kidding”, except that John actually IS just kidding, and so he doesn’t really force the issue or focus on it. 

That doesn’t mean that toxic masculinity hasn’t had an effect on him–he still struggles with cultural shifts to a degree. But I like that Homestuck allows for different levels of impact of these cultural memes across individuals. This stuff doesn’t affect everyone equally, and it doesn’t affect everyone quite the same way. 

On top of that, it’s a good example of the fact that even a genuinely good person who doesn’t believe this stuff can have a negative effect on people they care about by transmitting these cultural cues. Because it’s the memes themselves that are toxic.