seer of heart vs knight of heart? kind of an odd pair of classes but im not sure which one i am, any help?
All told, I wouldn’t consider Knight and Seer an odd pair to be agonizing over at all. Members of the two classes can act surprisingly similarly to each other, when it comes to their flaws. They tend to rashly overestimate their abilities or underestimate the obstacles facing them, often feel as if not being able to handle things entirely by themselves is a personal failure, and can often come across as smug assholes, not entirely undeservedly.
Luckily for the both of us, these classes aren’t entirely composed of downsides, and the answers that the two classes are meant to give to the flaws above differ pretty drastically between the two. Let’s talk about them!
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.
The real challenge for you here is going to be assessing yourself frankly: Knights and Seers are both very good at convincing themselves that their problems aren’t problems at all. A Knight tells themselves that they’re not putting off something difficult– how can you tell that apart from actually being someone who isn’t putting off something difficult? A Seer tells themselves that the people giving them advice just don’t know what they’re talking about– how can you tell that your perception isn’t just filtered by your own stubbornness? These are questions that we all have to answer, in our quests to understand ourselves, even if most people don’t get the chance to hear them formulated so explicitly.
Could we have more details on Ender? Not necessarily WHY he's a prince... But more what sort of prince? (I'm a sucker for enders game character analysis slay me)
It’s been a long time since I last read any of the Ender’s Game books, but as a general sort of outline: in the first book, Ender shades as quite passive-- and therefore quite villainous. I'd place him between Dirk and Kurloz on the scale of self-reliant to manipulative-- he’s not that much worse than Dirk, but his subordination to the people running his military academy costs him some Prince points.
The big Princely moment for him, of course, is discovering that the enemy he wiped out in his simulations was actually a real species. His horror and self-disgust afterwards is comparable to Dirk’s months-long struggle with his own overbearing overtures: destroying things is all well and good, until you actually do it and realise that you’re never going to get what you destroyed back. His decision to rebrand himself as “The Xenocide” in the years after this (in the sequel Speaker For The Dead), stubbornly refusing to be remembered as a hero for his heinous crime, is another hugely important part of his development as a Prince– from this point onwards, he cuts the chessmaster shit and starts to travel the universe himself.
I’m not really sure what aspect he’d belong to, but judging from the above, I’d ballpark him as being in the neighbourhood of Mind, Space and Light: concerned very much with remembering the mistakes of the past, so as not to repeat them.
could you please explain the difference betweeen a knight of heart and a knight of breath? im caught between the two aspects; im not sure which i relate to more :// also i am a derse dreamer, if that helps anything
Heart and Breath have quite a few similarities: they share the view that the important things in life are immutable. A person is who they are, and trying to work against it isn’t just futile– it’s unconscionable. The best outcomes for everyone arise when you do what you were born to do. (These aspects are not alone in this opinion, but that’s a topic for another day.)
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.
And there we have it: the Knight of Breath and the Knight of Heart, assessed in terms of their points of contrast with each other. I hope you found this informative!
A few months ago I posted an aspect “test” that made some of you laugh. Here’s the other half of it: A class “test” based on the way people drive.
Lord: Honks and screams throughout his two hour commute. Randomly floors the gas pedal or slams the brakes. Cuts people off without signalling. Bribes and blackmails his way out of speeding tickets. Has a vanity license plate that reads “NMR1 BOSS.”
Witch: Hauls scrap metal in a flatbed truck with an engine she’s rebuilt five times. Sings and dances to rap and country while waiting in the drivethru. Pulls over sobbing uncontrollably after seeing a dead deer on the side of the road.
Prince: Weaves in and out of traffic. Tailgates people who won’t let him pass. Drifts into a U-turn at full speed while sipping a latte and booking plane tickets on his phone. Never wears a seatbelt. Never looks in the rear view mirror except to fix his hair.
Thief: Pulls up behind you and leans on the horn just as the light turns green. Speeds past you on the wrong side of the road to beat you to the next red light. Opens her sunroof so she can give you the finger. There are no other cars on the road.
Knight: Stays up late restoring his ‘67 Mustang. Revs the engine loud enough to wake the entire neighborhood. Wears eleven different Mustang T-shirts in rotation. Joins conversations just so he can change the subject to Mustangs. Rides the bus to work.
Maid: Pulls over to ask a stranger for directions. Gets upset that their explanation was insufficiently clear and spends the next half hour lecturing them about interpersonal communication. Owns a GPS. Has no idea how to use it.
Mage: Wanders around back roads for two hours looking for a shortcut. Gets lost while daydreaming about Pokemon. Has fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror, an anime figure on the dashboard, decals on the hood, and a bumper sticker that says “my other car is a cdr.”
Sylph: Shows up unannounced to take you to the farmer’s market. Buys exactly one sweet potato. Decides, upon dropping you off, that the sweet potato belongs to you. Remains in your driveway with her engine idling and balances her checkbook.
Rogue: Drives a 1986 Toyota with missing wipers, missing seat cushions, two burnt out taillights, a broken muffler, a huge crack in the windshield, and a radio stuck on a Spanish-only news station. Doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. Sleeps in the back seat with the garbage.
Heir: Heads down the road at a normal speed like a normal person. Notices you standing on the curb. Stops and waits for you to cross. Rolls down his window to smile warmly and tell you he hopes you have a nice day. You’ve never met this guy.
Seer: Takes a taxi. Breathes in sharply when the driver forgets to signal, speeds up to catch a light, or gets within ten feet of another car. Keeps asking if they’re lost. Can’t understand the driver’s accent and constantly asks him to repeat himself.
Bard: Drives in the fast lane at half the speed limit. Cuts across three lanes of traffic with his left blinker on to get in the right lane. Misses his exit. Shifts into reverse to go back to it. Parks in the wrong driveway. Falls asleep at the wheel with the engine running.
Page: Gets a used Volkswagen with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Doesn’t understand what the clutch is for. Stalls the engine at every stop sign. Learns to parallel park just so he can stay out of the parking garage.
Muse: Owns three thousand pairs of roller skates. Never leaves the house.
(Indiana Jones anon) Well, true, but he's also a professor and doesn't really think of what he's doing as stealing. "It belongs in a museum" is an important quote of his, for understanding this.
Well, you’re the Indiana Jones expert here I guess :P
I'm having trouble figuring out the difference between witch of blood and maid of blood, Can you explain ?
Maids and Witches both tend to resent being told what to do by other people, although they do often end up doing what they’re told anyway if they think that there’s no other way out.
Looking at the two classes through the lens of Blood, which is kind of the aspect of “I have the stuff it takes to rule the world, fight me if you think I don’t!”, a Maid of Blood is the kind of person who ends up being obliged to talk things out with others every now and then, to make sure that they aren’t burning bridges that might be handy later. A Witch of Blood is the kind of person who gets to keep as much as possible under wraps until the last possible second, and (when confronted with the smouldering remains of the last bridge they burnt) gets to announce that they’ll just have to make another one.
Indiana Jones as a Maid of Hope- am I on to something or am I missing something obvious?
I’ve never seen any Indiana Jones movies, but I’m wondering if you’ve considered Rogue at all? Seems like he’s always racing against other people who want to steal the same stuff that he does, and I’m sure that having a healthy disrespect for authority or playing by the rules would be great for someone in his line of work.
Do you think a good rogue of mind could establish a telepathic communication network between themelf and all the other players?
I don’t see why not. It might look a little like a virtual reality thing where people on the network get to decide what they look like, like a souped up “avatar”.
Hi, I'm stuck between mage if doom and mage of light, what do you do if more than one aspect fits your personality? Thank you ^-^
Doom and Light both have loads of big ideas about what you “must” do and being the “Chosen One”, giving their players paranoid thoughts and a sense that you must act in a certain way to justify your existence. Players of either aspect can have very different responses to these beliefs, even compared to players of the same aspect, depending on factors like dream moons, personal levels of self-esteem, and of course class.
So– usually when a Mage is meant for something, it’s something that will hurt them in the short-term for the sake of some long-term gain. The intended (or actual) recipient of this gain doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether the Mage intends to make this trade, regardless of how much it costs them, and whether they go through with it or chicken out. For Mages of both aspects, chickening out looks a lot like playing the fiddle while Rome burns: childishly trying to wring out a little more fun from life before paying the ultimate price, without making an effort to change that at all. Most importantly, the Mage title cements the grand fate of these particular Light and Doom titles as something costly– even if they do want to accomplish something amazing and break out of the mold a little, that desire is tempered by the knowledge that they’ll lose something in the process.
Where Light and Doom differ is their core focus. For Light, as with Void, it’s the idea of meaning– why are we here? What are we meant to do? Why did X happen? For Doom, as with Life, it’s the idea of existence– what is out there? What are the rules? … Is something coming to get me?
(Side note: I did Mage of Light a while back, so feel free to check that out. Might do Mage of Doom some day, but I’ve got a lot of asks to work through first.)
what offensive powers could a thief of void or a mage of void have ?
Void is kind of a “hacks” aspect because it’s all about reinventing who you are as a person, and the powers that stem from the aspect all tap into that idea in at least some respect. Luckily for anybody worried about balance, the pattern so far seems to be that players (of any aspect) get a power that is convenient for the plot, but not one that’s utterly game-breaking or impossible to reconcile with what your title is supposed to do, and then have to “train” or do some other shit to unlock more of the potential powers that they can get their hands on.
Back to your question: Thieves aren’t really about direct offenses– as characters a fair fight is the last thing they should walk into, and the powers that tend to come to them reflect that tendency, by making it really hard for anybody the Thief wants to beat to fight back. If by offensive you mean, like, effects applied to an enemy, you can get pretty far with a theme of nullification– disabling powers, getting past things like Lord English’s invincibility (in that specific instance, maybe by stealing the nonexistence of his clock?) and effects like blindness or darkness that stop people from seeing what the Thief’s up to. Roxy’s “steal Void” power has a couple of offensive applications that she never explored in-comic too– imagine stealing the nonexistence of an explosion at the feet of an enemy!
Mages are kind of a blank page powers-wise, but I guess there’s precedent for them being some kind of offensive powerhouse, between the shit that John can do and the fact that chasing things without regard for the cost (as Mages tend to do) often goes hand in hand with having some kind of power, real or imagined. I could see a Mage of Void doing the same thing that Roxy did vis a vis summoning things, except this time by “sacrificing” Void, and like I said above, there are loads of things you can do that power that were never covered in canon. Another cool thing I just thought of is telepathy: blowing down the barriers that normally exist between consciousnesses, potentially knocking out your opponent with the force of your mind alone depending on how incomprehensible it is to them.
PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE write something/anything about knight of mind!!!!!!
I commend you on your 4bsolut3ly r4d1c4l cho1c3!
Knight of Mind
Knights like to come across as tougher than they really are. They’re concerned with learning to pull their own weight and push themselves to accomplish something meaningful in life, as opposed to sitting around waiting for someone to give them the go-ahead.
Like Heart, the Mind aspect deals in the divide between perception and reality, but it reverses the importance of the ideal and the physical worlds. To a Mind player, the truth of an object or a person is located in its physical form, and the ideas we have about them are nothing but shallow imitations of that truth. Unfortunately for anybody who really cares about the truth, the ideas are the only thing that we can access directly. And unfortunately for Mind players, the truth is kind of their big obsession.
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.
The more mature strategy is, of course, to doubt that their character exists at all. It turns out that it doesn’t matter how nice or well-liked you are if you consistently strive to do really good things that have actual, positive impacts on the world around you. Do heroic things consistently enough and you’ll be a hero, for all intents and purposes.
Heeey, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing your thoughts about our shared classpect, The seer of hope? ^^
Sure, but not before I make the obligatory “twinsies” remark without which any answer on this title would be sorely remiss.
*poof*
Seer of Hope
Hope is the aspect of delusions and deduction. Those that it chooses as its champions are held hostage by the vagaries of their perception, their naturally rational sensibilities perplexed not by the wiring of their minds but rather the assumption that what they witness is, in fact, what is.
Seers are clever and competent– not clever and competent enough to deal with the worst of the problems that face them, but too clever and competent to willingly follow the advice of others. Their stories are about becoming humble enough to actually apply external guidance in their personal affairs, and in doing so become clever and competent enough to understand that the best teachers are eternal students.
Speaking very broadly, you could say that the Hope aspect says that belief is power. That sounds really mystical and cool if you leave it at that, but if you want to get something meaningful out of it you have to unpack it a bit. The core insight of the Hope aspect is that you have to believe you can do something before you can actually do it. Belief isn’t so much power as it is a power enabler. It doesn’t end there, though– simply believing that you can raise your arm doesn’t mean that your arm is in the air. There’s another element to power; desire. In the belief system of Hope, belief is the means by which the human mind actually accesses both its ability and its willingness to perform physical acts.
What does that actually mean for a person, though? Assuming, as I always do, that people are initially pretty bad at their aspects, Hope players are generally confused about the relationship between belief, desire and ability. Do we believe in ourselves because we are competent, or are we competent only when we believe in ourselves? Do we just want to be competent, and tell ourselves we are so that we don’t feel useless? These are the kinds of questions that reside at the core of any Hope player’s decisions.
As Hope players, Seers of Hope tend to overestimate how effective their communication skills are– part of this is assuming that others see things the same way that they do, and part of it is assuming that whatever they have said is “enough” for their audience to immediately grasp everything. Of course, assuming that other people know everything you do is a fast way to rack up some serious miscommunication problems. Sometimes, you just have to tell them stuff that you think is obvious, in a way that doesn’t make them want to murder you.
Character traits that make this difficult include impatience– one of the many great traits that frequently coincide with hubris. This is problematic on several levels for a Seer of Hope in particular, and not just in the region of interpersonal relations and communications; deduction is often a process that takes time and thought, and a Seer of Hope can quickly give up on that and just stick to whatever their gut says is right, using their formidable intellect to come up with rationalizations for actions rather than true reasons. Taking people at face value and ignoring (or refusing to face) the possibility that they’re wrong or lying is a frequent pitfall for this kind of character. Initiative is key when investigating the truth, and unfortunately initiative is often something that Hope players lack.
As I alluded to above with my comment about sticking to one’s gut instincts, the intellectual laziness that Hope players tend to manifest is a symptom of a deeper issue-- we let our desires rule us instead of the other way around, resulting in erratic and inexplicable behaviour that doesn’t accomplish much of anything. If you can force yourself to ask yourself why you make the choices you do and resist the temptations of a quicker or easier way to secure pleasure, you’ve already achieved the basic skill needed to succeed as a Seer of Hope.
Quick update to the blog; I’ve moved the stuff on the Disclaimer page to the About one, to make room for “The Aspects”-- a series of short blurbs for each of the 12 aspects (which will also double as a hub for hyperlinks to the tags associated with those aspects). So far I only have 6 aspects done, but finishing it will probably have to wait a few days.
Also, I turned the subheadings on The Archive into hyperlinks to the appropriate tags too, so you can (as an example) click “Bard” to see all the posts about Bards that I’ve ever written, including the short comparisons and stuff like this ask.
I'm caught between Rogue and Maid of Time. Would you mind running down what the similarities and differences between them might be?
Rogues and Maids both tend to be overly concerned with the thoughts and judgment of other people, something that can manifest in shyness and hesitance at bad times, or an unwillingness to take actions that really need to be taken. On a related note, both classes tend to be quite selfless, but can often feel taken advantage of if their help is not reciprocated with some meaningful gesture.
They learn similar lessons, too: a Maid realizes that it’s not worth sinking her own ship to mete out justice or help a struggling soul (in Time terms, this is because we all only have so many hours in a day– you shouldn’t waste the precious time you have left for someone else’s sake), while a Rogue learns not to take all the assholes in the world so personally. If they’re really an asshole, you can just take their stuff, and everyone else will thank you for it.
The big difference to keep in mind is the idea of legitimacy. In the case of Rogues, the judgment of other people is “right” (to an extent), so you’d find that playing your cards below-deck is the most effective course of action. On the other hand, a Maid surrounded by people who think that she’s being too self-serving or greedy is best served by telling them up-front that she prefers to do things her way.
Weird question, but what God Tier do you want to get if you aim to speedrun SBURB?
Probably Prince of Time. Speedrunning SBURB would be all about the powers, and Time’s the best aspect for raw speed that you can get. Assuming that I still know about God Tiering, I can hurry my ass off to my Quest Bed (I guess using the PCHOOOOO code?) and off myself (Princes are pretty prepared for this from a personality standpoint) for a quick God Tier, then game stock markets to get enough boonbucks for a bunch of really strong Fraymotifs, and timelines to climb through the God Tiers until I get my hands on some broken ass Prince of Time power. Then it’s a matter of vastly accelerating the frog breeding process, killing everyone’s Denizens, and then killing the Black King. (Probably all at the same time– a Prince of Time on this kind of mission doesn’t give a shit about getting a bunch of alternate versions of himself killed because he fucked up a couple of time loops.)
That title gets bonus points because SBURB is exactly the kind of game that isn’t meant to be speedrun, i.e. a prime target for a Prince of Time to completely miss the point of and attempt to speedrun.
so i took the test and it seems very insistent in telling me im a page of space. might i ask for some information on this page? whenever you have the time, that is! thank you!
Page of Space
All else being equal, Pages have some of the most grueling and challenging advancement arcs that the focus of their life stories permit. Most of this is due to a deadly combination of idealism and a sort of lackadaisical approach to life that makes it hard for them to stick to things. These traits attract trouble like wildfire– the Page starts something that they don’t quite have the oomph to finish, but it comes back to chase them until they finally bite the bullet and get that oomph (or die a failure). As an almost karmic recompense for these problems, Pages who have managed to hone their idealism into something that can actually be translated into actionable strategies have spent so much time on the “wrong” side of the street that they’ve already made practically every mistake in the book– and that’s a kind of experience that can’t be beaten out of you.
The Space aspect concerns self-improvement and thinks of the universe in terms of its growth, which is good news for Pages in some ways, and not so good news in others. Space players tend to be patient and methodical, but these traits also make them prone to suffering from crippling indecision and perfectionism. They also tend to be quite ambitious, and at their best are marked by a stalwart refusal to let anything stand in the way of their futures.
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 mentioned idealism and growth above, in relation to the Page class and the Space aspect respectively. These two ideas dovetail rather nicely together; if you can convince them that things can or will improve, a Page of Space is ready to buckle down and wade through (metaphorical) puddles of shit if that’s what it takes to get through the story... but make things look like they’ll go wrong, and they start to cry foul and look for ways to jump ship. For someone who still has a long way to go, these appraisals of the future are often based off how the world is at the present, but of course that’s a mistake-- change is the only constant. A Page of Space’s attentions are better focused on how they can use the things in the here and now to get a better future.
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