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utopianparadoxist · 7 years

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Knights and Pages - Serving, Service and Ownage

[Author’s Note: This is a repost of Love, Faith and Fantasy--my piece on Jake and Dirk’s character arcs and the relevance of Knights and Pages in understanding them. I thought breaking it up into chunks would make the content more accessible, and give me room to flesh out each argument. Thus there will be some updates to the content. Hopefully this will mean more people can easily approach it!] [Pt. 2 - Faith and Fear] [Pt. 3 - Fearful Heart] [Pt. 4 - Noble] [Pt. 5 - As You Wish]

In my last post, I advanced the idea that Pages are an Active class and Knights are Passive. In so doing, I made the mistake of implying Pages are all secretely hyperintelligent supergeniuses who use everyone knowingly. That wasn’t exactly my intent, but that’s fine--sloppy execution on my part. My bad.

What I didn’t do is discuss the potential key verbs Knights and Pages might operate under--because I honestly didn’t have one I felt confident in. In the wake of discussing the piece with @theworstpersonintheworld (misleadingly named), he made a suggestion that struck me deeply, and once I started thinking about the story in those terms everything truly fell into place.

I think it will be useful in explaining the dynamic between Jake and Dirk as I see it, so I’d like to make the case for it here before we move forward.

The key verb for both Knights and Pages is ‘Serve’. This puts them in direct thematic opposition to Rogues and Thieves, who ‘Steal’, which lines up with those dual systems Sburb loves so much--after all, if Princes and Bards are ‘Destroy’ classes, it’s reasonable to assume there is also a ‘Create’ set, right?

Knights Serve their Aspect to others. Pages use their Aspect to Serve themselves. To establish this and contrast against Jake’s actions later, let’s see how this model applies to Dave, Karkat and Tavros. First, the Knights, and an outline of the different executions the Serve verb can take.

Serve can mean:

1. To provide, or give (a counterpoint to Take)

2. To provide service for

3. To own or defeat, in literal or rhetorical battle (in the colloquial ‘You Got Served’ sense).

From the outset, Dave has a reputation for providing his friends with his Time, serving them long rambling diatribes to consume and enjoy.--often far exceeding the time they’re willing to spend on the conversation.

Karkat does the same thing--often offering Pacts and Bonds to friends that he likes while simultaneously offering his services in helping them figure out relationship problems.

Davesprite comes back from the future and literally empowers not just Dave, but John by providing him Time in the form of a Hammer with Time powers.

Dave’s primary contribution to the Beta session is to run loops around the session, constantly gathering all relevant resources possible so that his friends don’t need to worry at all about limitations like money or access to weapons and can do whatever they feel like.

Essentially, Dave takes care of the minutiae. He provides a service to his friends--putting them in the best position possible to act out their own wills.

Karkat’s ultimate contribution to his session is similar--ultimately, Karkat’s main role was to maintain the bonds between all his friends. LIke Dave’s, Karkat’s nature affects every single other player, keeping them bound towards a common goal and thus bettering their odds of winning the game. (it’s worth noting I think Vriska’s view of Sburb is wrong here.)

This predisposition to giving service to others is also likely why Knights seem to end up helping out with Frog Breeding duties so often. This is essentially the most important game objective, and so helping the Space player in completing it is also helping every other player in step.

And then there’s this. There’s a colloquial definition of Serve that derives it’s use from the term “Get Served”, which Urban Dictionary defines as: To be completely owned or shown up by someone. Kinda like Dave does to us here--which Karkat also does, by the way, before going on a rant outlined by his ambitions and silhouetted with Blood colors.

When Karkat wants to make something bite, he ends a relationship. Refuses to continue offering his Aspect, basically. This is also something Dave does repeatedly--he overwhelms Tavros with a time-consuming and epically sassy document, and makes Time-based power plays against Karkat as a gesture of antagonism.

To serve someone in this sense essentially means to defeat them in rhetorical or literal battle, explaining why Aradia describes Knights as a powerful Warrior class--one of the definitions this wordplay allows for is a class that uses its Aspect to deal devastating, embarrassing defeats.

Dave obviously uses Time powers to fight, thus enabling him to Own/Serve his enemies in this sense, but Karkat is much more interesting here. Karkat also seems to fill the second stipulation Calliope puts onto Passive classes--that is, that they tend to function with less awareness of their Aspect, their Aspect working through them rather than under their direct control, as if through “The Will of the Aspect”.

Every time Karkat wins a confrontation in Homestuck, he does so by establishing a connection. You can argue Karkat’s aware he does this with Gamzee, but he doesn’t really parse it as doing a Knight of Blood thing. But with Clover he doesn’t realize what he’s doing at all! He thinks he just beat this green elf dude, but what actually happens is Clover wanted to enter a relationship with him.

What goes ignored is how unlikely a win this is--because Clover is so lucky, he straight up could not be defeated normally. Clover loses this fight not because he’s overpowered, but because he benefits even more than Karkat does. Clover is a horndog, and in his view there’s no better outcome to this fight than Getting Lucky. Karkat wins unawares, as if through the Will of Blood.

Contrast this with Jake’s win. Jake beats the felt, shocking Crowbar--but Crowbar doesn’t benefit from this at all. Jake does. Jake is the one who wants to be seen as an impressive adventuring hero, and by exposing Crowbar to an unforeseen possibility, he achieves that.

I’d like to posit a corollary attribute that I believe holds true for all Classes, as well. This one is not explicitly advanced textually, but I believe I can back it up. It takes place along a different axis. I posit that just as the classes affect their Aspect, so too they are affected BY their Aspect.

So in addition to the Active/Passive distinction, we could read both Knights and Pages as ones who are Served by their Aspect.

This is true of Dave, as he gets owned by his Bro in an explicitly time-consuming fight. And the trend continues as he then gets saved by his future selves over and over again throughout the session--being served in both senses:

In this sense, Dave also operates “As if through the Will of the Aspect”, even as he’s in control of his actual powers. He’s presented with stable time loops that he has to obey, and it’s kind of a loaded question whether any given Present Dave would have taken the same path had he not already been given the path to follow from his future selves.

Now, to contrast before we move on to the rest of this series, a few notes on Tavros:

Tavros’ main psychic abilities correspond to his Classpect--he’s able to move animals to serve his will, providing them direction. The reading that Pages inspire their Aspect in others isn’t totally off, in my view. What it misses is that Pages seem to inspire in others a desire to serve or help them. To benefit themselves somehow.

Vriska clearly perceives her actions towards Tavros a kind of twisted service, and while I don’t want to put the picture here, Tavros certainly ends up getting Served through Flight--a Breath concept. Tavros also gets the ability to fly early on, like John does--and Tavros gets it directly through Vriska’s service, one of the few times her efforts are actually helpful.

This doesn’t extend to just Vriska, though. Tavros inspires Kanaya and even Equius--who ordinarily wouldn’t help on account of the Hemospectrum--to provide him with robot legs, extending his freedom of motion, again a concept linked to Breath. This again benefits no one except Tavros.

Perhaps more telling is this visual language, which suggests Tavros was about to actually Do the Windy Thing--when he was acting under his own will and directing it for a goal he had in mind. Possibly healing? Who knows, we never find out, because this is Vriska. Needless to say, when asked to do things HER way and the way she would most benefit from....Tavros can’t do it. It’s not what comes naturally to him.

And of course, this reading puts a whole new spin on Tavros’ final act in the story. If we’re reading Pages as intrinsically kind of selfish and self-motivated, then Tavros’ motivation here isn’t to provide a useful service to Vriska. It’s to do something so useful she can’t possibly deny it, so he can have the pleasure of owning her.

This is Vriska getting Served. This is an immutable fact that is being stated for the record. That it is genuinely helpful does not mean that Vriska getting fucking wrecked isn’t what is taking place here. Notably, Tavros immediately gives power over the army to Meenah, because he doesn’t give a shit about responsibility. Tavros had a goal, and the ghosts helped him achieve it.

A final note:

If this reading of Knights and Pages happens to bother you because it means that the Beta session has an uneven distribution of Active/Passive classes, consider the dynamics of both sessions:

In the beta session, Rose essentially takes and follows orders from the Horrorterrors and Doc Scratch, whilst also distributing orders to Dave and John (who each take further orders from troll girls and Jade).

All of this is ultimately in support of the plan Jade commits to herself, plans herself, and executes herself--taking Active control of the entire session in one fell swoop at the last instant.

In the Alpha session, all three Active players flounder and stifle themselves and each other with nothing meaningful to do and no way to receive substantial benefit.

Ultimately, it is the Passive player--Roxy--who rises above the constraints of her session and achieves more or less competence at understanding her role and powerset by the end of the session.

In the session that requires constant action and change, there’s Three passives to one Active. In the session that requires patience, introspection, and connecting with each other, the inverse is true. The incentives and natural skills of the players are set at odds in both cases, stacking the cards against them.

In fact, @arrghus makes an insightful point about these unbalanced sessions:

Namely, that this puts the kids in the exact same position as the Trolls’ Red and Blue teams--which ALSO have an uneven distribution of Passive/Active classes under this reading, only reaching equilibrium when added together.

This segment covered, we can move on to Jake, and how this reading of Pages reflects on him.

This series has been a passion project, but also a side project to my youtube series aimed at welcoming and explaining Homestuck to new, incoming Hiveswap fans. If you find yourself trying to make it easier for a Hiveswap fan to understand what Homestuck is about and how it connects to the game, I hope you think of me.

If you like my writing and have a buck to spare, you could also really help me out by enabling me to focus on putting more of this content out there through pledging on Patreon. Doing so will also give you access to my private community of enthusiasts trying to advance new and interesting readings of this wonderful property.

See you again soon, everyone. Until then,

Keep rising.

#Homestuck #Dave Strider #Classpects #Tavros Nitram #Karkat Vantas #Knight/Page #My MSPA Analysis

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