A QUICK RUN-THROUGH OF: Passive (+) and Active (-) Classes!
classes are paired together based on the similarity of their functions and on occasion, the narrative parallels they share. they're separated with the terms "passive" and "active", and this greatly affects how a class uses their powers, how they act around it, and how their aspect affects them. NOTE: passive and active should not be compared to "good and evil". that is a fundamental misunderstanding of it entirely!
to be a passive (+) class is to invite through your aspect for the betterment of others. they're selfless and serve as an inspiration for their team. passive classes include: knights, heirs, sylphs, seers, rogues, bards, and muses.
to be an active (-) class is to use your aspect to benefit yourself. they're advantageous and orient themselves around acting upon their aspect. active classes include: maids, witches, mages, princes, thieves, pages, and lords.
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!
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
I have a duty!
Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30; Tiffany Aching, #1)
So this is vibing really really hard for me in terms of Active classes in general, and Jade and Jake in particular. I think the active/passive system is unfurling into something that is as profound and fascinating as the Aspects themselves in my head and I am really really excited about it.
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.
