#server 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.

Now, truth is a big word, despite seeming on the surface to consist of only five letters. Like the cardinal items esteemed by the other aspects, it’s the kind of idea that can give rise to hundreds of unique, engaging storylines, and consume the thoughts of thousands of people for the entirety of their lives. Most people (and therefore most aspects) do spent a lot of time examining their own identity– but it’s Heart and Mind players that do so in terms of whether their identity even exists.

A Knight of Mind is probably not very confident about their own character to begin with. They might feel anxious about how other people perceive them, they might wonder if any positive personality traits that others ascribe to them are actually legitimate, and they might harbour secret feelings or ideas that they feel conflict with what they perceive as the image that they’re already projecting. Knights usually have some kind of clear course of action that they want to achieve, but tend to have personality issues that make it difficult to pull through on that course of action. For a Knight of Mind, that character issue is doubting their own character.

There are a couple of ways that a Knight of Mind can use in order to get around this problem. The immature strategy is to deny that there’s any problem at all, that they are perfect as they are and that change is either pointless (why fix what isn’t broken?) or outright impossible. When the Knight feels more confident, this thought process leads to classic cases of self serving bias, while Knights with worse self-images end up succumbing to the stagnation and general sense of purposelessness that characterized, for instance, mid-Act 6 Dave and Karkat.

Both the class and the aspect in this title operate according to the same basic principle of “one day, I will be stronger”, which gives you a general idea of where they always are– not quite as good at their craft as they can be. Pages in general are usually pretty good at realizing when they basically suck at something, especially when they have more hardworking teammates or role models to compare their own progress against, so that’s not likely to be a big problem (especially without confounding factors like the Hope or Mind aspects). Where they historically start to screw up is the crucial process of taking that realization– “I kind of suck!”– and turning it into a motive for working really hard. Instead, what tends to happen is that they lose confidence in themselves and stop trying, which is all kinds of bad for an up-and-coming Page.

In terms of Space/Time rhetoric, a struggling Page’s reasoning for giving up is likely to involve a fatalistic impression of their capabilities as static, unchanging properties (rather than something that can be improved with time). They might feel that their inability to deal with problems in the present is indicative of a fundamental problem with their own psychology– much like Jake’s worries that his brain works in a way that makes it impossible to be a good friend. Knowing this tells us how to put a Page of Space in the best position to get ahead; if you point out that they’re improving, they’ll feel like they are improving, and that’s half the battle for this kind of personality.

This doesn’t mean that you can spoil them, though, and tell them that they’re doing better even when they’re actually not. The second half of improvement is coming face to face with your flaws and actually learning from whatever personal catastrophes that they caused. Space players have a tendency to repress negative experiences under the guise of “moving on”, which is unhealthy in an emotional sense and, in a more immediately practical sense, also makes it difficult to learn from your mistakes. No matter how tempting it is to run away from the problems of the past and the present, a Page of Space ought to face up and accept whatever responsibility they have for the state of things, so as to prevent history from repeating itself.

I express how I’m feel-in’with my hands and words.I’m a craftsman of my body, kid,haven’t ya heard?I’ll snap wood like twigsbetween my toned thighs,and overpower any obstaclewith age-honed pride!

Fuck the past, fuck fate,no-one tells me what to do!Play with what ya see-- if you don’t like it?Break the rules!Advancing is key, I don’t bother to back-track,I just use the set-backs to decide my next act.

If your goal’s my defeat, I warn ya, it won’t be easyto keep down a Knight who takes every opportunity.

A Knight of Space’s facade would be the appearance of sincerity. She would project righteous anger at the right times, and constantly pretend to be looking forwards to whatever’s coming next– even (or especially) if it looks like it’s going to suck. In both cases she’s pretending to feel emotions that she isn’t really sure she does feel, a stark contrast to characters like Dave who pretend not to feel anything at all. The basic idea is that she feels obliged to have emotions about things, because that’s what heroes do.

For perfectionism, I’m guessing that she feels like she needs to make a big show of having to work to do whatever it is that she does, whether it’s art or fighting or studying. She wants people to say, “Oh yeah, she’s always working hard on her ____”, even if she’s actually breezing through it pretty easily. Of course, this is the road to not improving at all, as any sports instructor or athlete will tell you. She’ll only see real improvement once she starts actually pushing herself. Again, this is probably driven by narratives like those about Hercules or Rocky, who had a tough time completing their respective labours, and became known as heroes because of their choice to tough it out.

Anyway, holding back on a group project of any kind is a surefire way to screw your whole team over, so she should probably just suck it up and try her real hardest.