homestucky:

i cant remember what i thought the first time i read it but i know that even now the idea of dave and rose fighting over who would go and sacrifice themselves as they thought PERMANENTLY in order to try and save each other and FULLY BELIEVING one of them was going to die forever and then not even being able to just send the one of them bcaus dave has to be a little shit and not let rose go alone and then they were BOTH GOING TO DIE but then they explode and die TOGETHER and rise out of the green sun as GODS while this CRAZY DRAMATIC LORD OF THE RINGS ass MUSIC is playing . boy. hoooh mama. i cant even handle it. i imagine the reason i cant remember what i thought when i first read thru was because i probbably BLACKED OUT from the DRAMA

tarnations:

I’m researching Carl Jung, specifically the references in Homestuck to his philosophies, and I found some raw as hell quotes that I think are pretty poignant when applied to Dave and Rose’s suicide mission.

“No one can or should halt sacrifice. Sacrifice is not destruction, sacrifice is the foundation stone of what is to come.“ 
“Sacrifice proves that you possess yourself, for it does not mean just letting yourself be passively taken: it is a conscious and deliberate self-surrender, which proves that you have full control of yourself, that is, of your ego”

That first one is I think pretty obviously directly applicable to the whole concept of godtiering. The latter one is most explicitly a belief Rose embodies throughout the early narrative, in a different sense than Dave. 

Dave is willing to sacrifice himself for people, both when he lets himself get shot to keep things on the Alpha timeline (and all the other deaths he experiences, even arguably the creation of Davesprite), and his insistence that he take the suicide mission while Rose lives. Dave’s idea of sacrifice is one of self-devaluing. He’s been trained by Bro all these harmful things, and this is simultaneously a denial of the “important role” he has been told he has, and a fulfillment of said role. 

Meanwhile, Rose’s earliest suicide threat (to her mother) is empty and meaningless, only an expression of vague teenage rebellion. Rose threatens to kill herself because it gives her “meaning.” Later, she loses her mother, and her rebellion becomes, itself, meaningless. Her rebelling shifts from being a denial of her mother’s love to a denial of the “character building” exercises SBURB wants to put the kids through. She’s rebelling against the concept of the character arc, the myth that hardship and suffering makes you better, more capable. Her rebellion is even against her previous refusal to admit her love for her mother; she’s “gone completely off the deep end in every way,” because her mother died. Rose finally finds a “purpose,” a real reason to rebel, whether you think it’s to avenge her mother, to destroy SBURB, to save her last few surviving loved ones, or anything else. 

And Dave doesn’t want her to sacrifice herself for any of those goals. He’s always been willing to put himself in harm’s way, but when the tables are turned (ba dum tss) he isn’t comfortable AT ALL. He refuses, he tries to stop her. And, fulfilling the Jung quote above, when he accepts her sacrifice and joins her, they find a new beginning together.

There are so many conclusions you can make from this, but I’m going to stop here before I end up going on a crazy tangent about how much Dave and Rose love each other, moreso than the other Beta kids, but I really think it’s a good perspective to have when rereading Homestuck and I urge you to do at least some surface level research if you’re interested in Homestuck Meta.