RE: alexis and "dave-lite" roxy SOO TRUUUUE i was having super similar trains of thought while i was writing my post too... I think guyroxy is at their best when they're obfuscating gender entirely, not necessarily in a cliche'd void-between-genders sense but in the sense of rebuilding gender up from nothing and having the freedom to redefine what masculinity is entirely on their own terms. cus if they're just building themselves up into the dead civilisation's idea of what a man used to be so they can be with dirk then we're just doing dirkjake again and dirk doesn't have to learn anything! make that man meet roxy in the middle and expand both of their understandings of what a man can be!

now that i'm in my second or third revision of my understanding of homestuck i don't think its thesis on gender can be so STRICTLY understood as 'masculinity=bad', but it does obviously make a lot of good arguments for escaping masculinity's confines, and as the child of a post-gender world emerging into a post-canonical universe roxy is in such a unique position to subvert and reinterpret the original comic's position on maleness not by running back into that burning house but by being the architect of a sexy new manhood entirely. so by having their 'male form' take on so many of the trappings of dave strider - basically the comic's poster child for the tragic consequences of performing maleness - it absolutely can make the transition arc seem a lot more regressive than it has all that potential to be...

THAT BEING SAID: the gag of roxy becoming a tribute to like, peak homestuck fandom's very stereotypical noncommitted trans boy who kins dave strider but only because he's a little beautiful and androgynous and very easy to casually cosplay in day-to-day absolutely lands for me LMFAO especially because the characters in that timeline are all still very immature despite their age and are clearly in a very awkward figuring-shit-out stage. and like i was already talking abt in another thread, i think the way we get to see glimpses at roxy's gender arc at different points in their life via the two timelines gimmick is a really underrated aspect of the postcanon: roxy going from very awkwardly (almost jokingly like you say) masculine, to more accepting of their former feminine aesthetiques, to maybe even thinking they ARE a woman again at some point in the future before hopping back on the elevator into the self actualisation mines... it no longer feels to me like inconsistent characterisation or an attempt to 'fix' a version of the character that didn't work, but rather like a very genuine and realistic path for our roxy to be going down. which must be why i'm so invigorated by y12k truly looking down the barrel of roxy's immortality and showing us how that kind of self-reflection could change someone not just over the course of some months or years, but potentially over centuries and millennia and into eternity!