#active classes

Before we go further, I should note that this doesn’t necessarily translate to a belief in a god who designs you with all these things in mind, or a single specific soulmate, or the concept of destiny (although if you do believe in any of those things, more power to you!). You can figure that most of your talents are accidents of your upbringing– maybe you enjoy drawing because your parents signed you up for art classes for five years and it’s your escape from the grind of everyday life, not because that was something you were literally put on this Earth to do– but still have that attitude of “I’m good at it, so I’ll do it”. Fate and soulmates and that stuff are fundamentally things that happen to you, and so is the lived experience that has shaped who you are today.

The differences between Heart and Breath appear in the player’s interpretation of this immutability. Heart players see it as a playbook, a guide, a map: they’re driven to find out who they’re supposed to be, and use this knowledge to inform their decisions in life. They assess their responses to different stimuli– colour schemes, temperature ranges, narrative structures– and construct an internal image of themselves that helps them make the right choices for them specifically. This process also describes how they look at other people: their understandings of their friends are primarily defined in terms of all the things that make their friends happy, and therefore what is good for them.

Breath players, on the other hand, aren’t concerned with pinning any of this stuff down at all. They have a general sense of what feels good and what feels right, and beyond that trust goodness to assert itself through whatever agents are around. If you make a mistake somewhere along the line, the chances are that it’s mostly inconsequential, and you can make up for it by doing it better the next time around. When Breath players interact with people, they tend to assume that they are more similar than they are different: everybody likes to have fun, nobody really wants to die, and everything in between doesn’t really matter as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the first two things. There is a certain indifference here, albeit one that makes the Breath player amiable rather than callous. If you don’t really care how other people have their fun, you’re already much friendlier than a lot of people on this planet.

So, summing up: both aspects recognize an incontrovertible order to things. Heart seeks to curate and understand it, Breath goes “that’s neat” and moves on with life. With these similarities and differences in mind, we can look at how they alter the expression of a particular class– in your case, Knight.

Knights’ interactions with their aspects are fairly neat and tidy, at least compared to some of the stuff that other classes get up to. With Knights, it’s all about projecting a persona: a “better self” that lives up to the Knight’s ideals of strength and desirability. Because all peoples’ perceptions are filtered through their aspect, the Knight’s ideal of strength draws heavily from the qualities that their aspect considers vital to a mature person… but it doesn’t necessarily represent those qualities accurately. There is a degree of caricature in the Knight’s conception of their aspect, one that turns what should be their strong suits into what can be pretty severe character flaws.

Although I started this post looking at Heart, I have a stronger idea of what a caricature of a Breath person would look like, so we’ll go with that first. Your Knight of Breath presents themselves as an aloof figure, who doesn’t commit to any path of action or code of conduct but is always game to be silly with other people, even in situations of grave danger. The ideal of strength here is being impossible to lay a finger on: if you’re not there to be hurt, nobody can hurt you. Naturally, this eagerness to play games belies an unwillingness to play the game– to set aside your fears and doubts and actually prove that it doesn’t matter to you who knows your darkest secrets or how much money you have or whatever else you’ve been pretending not to be worried about.

The Knight of Heart, on the other hand, presents a more… directed personality than this. The more gauche among them might declare outright that they don’t care what other people think of them, and publicly insist on doing things their way, then get into a loud and very visible fight when someone points out a flaw in their way of doing things– even if that person was right. A more cerebral Knight of Heart might be quieter about the self-affirmation, but they will still take great pains to ensure that they stick to their guns. They want people to look at them and say, “Say what you will about her, but she has conviction.” The mistake here is confusing a rigidly performed persona for the real deal: an ideology founded on the notion that you should stand up for what you believe in is notably silent on the matter of what it is, exactly, that you should be believing in. It’s acting on the principle of action, rather than acting on principles.

So, we’ve got two caricature/character dynamics here: the Breath player who misses the point of abnegation and tries to use their performed indifference to shelter themselves from doing the things that they pretend not to mind, and the Heart player who misses the point of sincerity and loses themselves in doing the things that they think they should be doing, without pausing to actually get around to thinking about what they should be doing. The next point of order is thinking about the kinds of thought process that could lead there– what kind of self-image could make someone do this?

For Heart, at least, there’s a clear probable cause: not really having a sense of self of your own. If you think of yourself as a wishy-washy, “social chameleon” sort of person, and overcompensate by trying to be as consistent as possible (even if this makes you come across as an asshole sometimes), I can see an unconscious aversion to ever really thinking about who you’re supposed to be taking root and feeding into the hollow intransigence I mentioned earlier.

The caricature of Breath is a little bit harder to pin down, but fortunately for us, we have a canonical example of the opposite thought process to draw on. Karkat, the Knight of Blood, privately always knew that he was inadequate: unable to serve the Alternian empire on account of his hideous mutation, unable to fend for himself in a fight compared to the likes of Vriska and Kanaya, unable to really bring Gamzee to justice for his sins. This drove him to over-perform his passions, in an attempt to convince himself that it was his vehemence and ambition that saw his team succeed in solving the Ultimate Puzzle.

Conversely, our Knight of Breath will fear that they are just the opposite: instead of thinking themselves unable to impress, they might see themselves as overbearing, fundamentally hostile to friendship and goodwill. Expressing any negative emotion could be the seed of their next great failure-- far better to repress it, just in case it drives someone away. Direction does nothing but divide and destroy, thinks the unrealised Knight of Breath, not realising that sometimes a mutual goal is one of the greatest bonding experiences a group can have.

Knights are supposed to divorce their personal character from the things they do– whether it’s fear, loneliness, wrath, brashness, or something else entirely, the way you act and feel does not deserve a say over what it is you ultimately achieve, or what it is that the hand of fate ultimately decides for you. Ideally, a Knight triumphs over their personal flaws and thrusts themselves into the path of danger and risk, the consequences be damned, because they’re the only one who can. Assuming that you live a fairly normal life compared to Dave and Karkat, this probably involves less dodging past fireballs and knifing belligerent dragons than my phrasing perhaps implied and more opening up to people and taking risks with social implications.

Seers are liable to be tempted to follow suit, but their path is more fraught: their pride is less brashness than it is hubris– the (woefully mistaken) belief that one can stand against the gods. Again, following the rules of modern day life in the real world, switch out “gods” for the cold hard facts of reality, like the reality that the problems you’re facing aren’t the kind of things that you can fix alone. If you find yourself desperately wanting to do everything on your own rather than involve anybody else, and remembering times in the past when you did that exact thing and failed miserably, you probably fall on the Seer side of this distinction. Ideally, a Seer learns from these remembered mistakes and does not repeat them: she finally calls her accountant and asks for help pulling out of the floundering Vietnamese Jacuzzi market, or listens to her girlfriend’s increasingly transparent hints about getting a goddamn haircut.