burning karkat

gives you a transparent

Oh boy cortyard drool gave me a present! I wonder whats inside

He’s actually a pretty smart dude. It’s hard to compare when even his ecto sister is a nuclear physicist but John’s pretty damn good at math, puzzles, and has some interesting literary analysis.

Literally that dude everyone in the friend group had a crush on in high school. But if you asked no one really had a good explanation for why. Dave, Rose, Roxy, Terezi, Karkat, Vriska…

John’s really, really good at reading people. He just chooses to completely ignore it for the most part. Look I base a lot of John interpretations around John’s gift giving in the first acts haha. For example he gave Rose crotchet equipment since he knows 1) she tends to get lost in rhetoric a lot, 2) would take it as a challenge and so actually do it, and 3) needs an activity that involves making things rather than ruminating on them. He primarily uses this skill to poke holes in Dave’s ironic facade, rile Karkat up, and be cruel to Davesprite though…

He’s not a nice person at heart. I mean we could debate intention vs action all we want but John basically just defaults to ‘nice’ since it’s easier for him and he’s usually pretty chill. Like he’s usually nice but rarely kind. You see it drop the moment he doesn’t like a person and/or finds it inconvenient to be nice.

Refuses to give sense of proportion. On one hand this makes him really fucking chill with a lot of things (including but not limited to: his grandmother’s resurrection, aliens, murder). On the other he’s much more likely to blow up at mundane shit than life altering shit just through sheer statistics. We’re introduced to this pretty early on with his animosity towards cakes. It also gives him a weird set of priorities and morals (Vriska vibes with him pretty well haha). This ties into…

Goddamn king of repression. Strilondes step aside, this guy successfully fooled everyone including himself into thinking he’s not a a depressed piece of shit absolutely chock full of anger and self-hate. Literally there was writing on the walls: his subconscious writing was all about how awful he was. He didn’t process his feelings about his dad’s death until years later and even then it was wildly misdirected towards a movie. He alone of the beta kids never had to confront another version of himself and has shown the severe disinterest in few retcon/doomed selves he’s encountered. (Also Alpha John with HIC must have been a fucking riot.)

One of the most powerful characters in Homestuck game mechanics wise. He just chooses not to do much with it since…

John’s a failure of a protagonist and knows it. (I’ve said this a million times so I won’t get into it again but basically he knows his passiveness fucked a lot of stuff up.)

His personal journey is a textbook tragedy. Literally everyone he started the game with is dead or altered beyond recognition. John has an intense disregard for fakes/duplicates but then he made the canon timeline where no one has a real connection to him (or, conversely, where he’s the fake one).

(John’s fully capable bringing his dad back…)

@abraxas-calibrator