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.
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.
What positive impacts could Bards have? Anyone can let things be destroyed, it's just a matter of not acting and allowing it to happen. The most extraordinary thing about them is the highly vague ability of theirs to be extremely dangerous somehow, and that has a good chance to not even be helpful.
Assuming that a Bard is relatively competent:
- Good at getting people to release their inhibitions
- Usually popular or influential, or at least a member of a popular/influential group within the scope of the cast
- Likely to be seen as a sympathetic friend; not judgmental or a snitch
- Getting people killed or overthrown isn’t always a bad thing, depending on who you’re killing or overthrowing
- Not a coward, although this is less bravery and more a general tendency towards lacking the instincts or desire to live that are necessary for self-preservation
- When viewed by enemies, either ignored completely as a non-entity, or seen as an incorrigible menace with no lasting countermeasures short of his total annihilation; these two views usually occur in sequence, with the former preceding the latter, but variations are not uncommon.
When looking at Bards, it’s important to understand that, even at peak capacity, they’re lazy. They might instigate things or try to get somewhere, but the ease with which their plans are inevitably derailed or exploited by the actions of others betray a lack of foresight or preparation. This isn’t necessarily an intelligence thing, either; you can have Bards who are fully capable of writing a virus that can get into the NSA’s computers, but think nothing of handing it over to a guy with a Russian accent for a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills.
While this weakness doesn’t make Bards very compelling candidates for leadership at all, and does mean that Bards who try to hack it alone will have dodgy chances at best, it is a weakness that can be circumvented by doing enough thinking and planning for two people. Pretty much all of the other classes can achieve this at peak capacity, and some of them are even expected to sustain the care and navigational prowess (so to speak) necessary for that kind of synergy.
Which title would you say would be the absolute WORST leader, in virtually any situation?
Definitely a Bard of something. Even when they mean well, Bards tend to give terrible advice, lack foresight, and dislike having to be responsible for anything. They’re also not usually taken seriously or listened to a lot, usually because of the other qualities I mentioned.
Aspect-wise: Rage, Hope, Doom and Life are all great ingredients for being a not-great leader. I think a Bard of Hope might be the actual worst, because a mixture of ambition and delusional thinking is not good in the rare event that a Bard decides that he ought to be a leader.
Wow I seriously love your grasp of the Light aspect and its effect on personality. How do you think a Destroyer class of Light would act? I have a Prince of Light for a fan session, and with my read of the Prince as one who simultaneously lacks and is surrounded by his Aspect, I'm having trouble thinking up a character that fits the classpect. (In whatever form of analysis you wish to give.)
Sorry about the long wait, everyone! I had lots of schoolwork to crunch through in this last month. We’ll see if it gets any better over the next few months.
Prince of Light
Princes are active destroyers. The crucial thing to understand about them as characters is that their ideal state is The Unfettered: somebody who ruthlessly punches past any and all opposition to a cardinal goal to which all other goals are secondary. This core goal is not always destruction in and of itself; in fact, a pretty common theme among the desires of Princes is creation. FMA:B’s Roy Mustang and Paranatural’s Forge are among the Princes that seek to instate order at all costs.
The Light aspect governs narratives. Tropes, symbols, arcs, genre and purpose are a Light player’s bread and butter. They look at the current state of affairs and see something that was shaped. A person with a gift for persuasive writing has the means to fulfill some kind of higher potential, as a politician or a journalist or the mastermind behind a massively more charismatic partner’s meteoric rise to power. External circumstances are everything to a Light player; their guide to both metaphysics and ethics.
A Prince of Light is liable to be a powder-keg of tension from the outset. Imagine believing that your luck is what makes you who you are, and finding that nearly every significant thing you accomplish causes suffering and woe. Depending on a lot of external factors, particularly the values that the Prince was brought up with (Do they even care about the suffering of others? Are they an Ender or a Saxton Hale?) and the reactions that their friends have to their more outrageous actions, you can find a Prince of Light lying anywhere from “just let me sink into the void and die so i’ll never hurt anyone ever again” to “hell fucking yeah let’s kill some more unrighteous dweebs”.
The “sink into the void” direction can get really seductive for Princes raised in much less violent societies or who have a preference for mind-games. You can read a sort of cultural elitism into this flavour of Prince of Light; they take pride not only in defeating an opponent utterly, but by doing it using nothing but their wits and words. A “dark” Prince of Light is inclined to conceal their involvement in the affairs of others, manipulating only very subtly– something like Doc Scratch’s modus operandi, but probably less honest about his evil.
The core theme uniting all of this is, of course, that of unnecessary self-limitation. Whether they’re playing with their prey (so to speak) or trying to hold back out of legitimate concern for the safety of others, the Prince is stifled in their actions by external pressures– a need to appear strong, a need to be good, a need to avoid arrest– and their own insecurities about their competence. See, unlike Knights, who have no trouble holding back because they doubt that they’re competent at all, a Prince is more worried about how he can damage things with his prowess at harming others. (Whether the things he’s worried about damaging are people or plots is more a matter of the Prince’s personal morality.)
With the Light aspect in the mix, you can expect your Prince to perceive an order to events that is stifling somehow– maybe because it demands his failure, or maybe because he despises authority on principle. If he’s particularly self-aware, he may see that the same order is responsible for his luck and various skills. And if he “gets it”, he’ll know that any attempt at rebellion is, itself, a symbol of the higher power-- but he’ll accept it.
i have a different reading of bards as starting off as stodgy people who take their aspect too seriously and have to learn to laugh at and satirize it but not become bitter upon learning their aspect is a joke but also not taking the silliness way too far into Bad Taste Territory either
This can definitely be a part of it too– although I would add that, as characters, part of reason why they might have these issues is that immature Bards often take themselves too seriously as well. It’s kind of the reverse of Maids, who sometimes have trouble seeing themselves as worth anything; sometimes a Bard just can’t see that he’s contributing nothing.
knightofcagealot replied to your post “Linking to Prince Posts”
Okay, but what about a good bard?
Oh gosh, I totally forgot about the Bard part of that question didn't I? Sorry about that; my internal editor goes a bit bonkers with the knife sometimes :/
My view on Bards and their Challenges can be seen Here, and that also includes a short treatment on how this might be expressed in a Bard of Void. I certainly think Bards can be "good" and beneficial to their teams from the start as well, and I'd say it'd probably even be "easier" for a Bard than a Prince, since a Prince's struggles are essentially endemic to their character, whereas Bards seem to struggle with a singular, shocking disillusionment in regards to a Message they carry and Philosophy they espouse, and where that disillusion leads them.
Some HS Classes are frequently described through and associated with certain adjectives, which are then themselves associated with the mythic tropes and archetypes upon which that Class is based, and Bards are one of them. Where Seers are "Canonically Mysterious", Bards are "Canonically Capricious/Whimsical". As such I think all Bards, whether "good" or "bad" would likely be tricksters to a certain extent; people who are unpredictable, misleading, and a bit more blase about the risks they're running than they probably should be, but that doesn't mean they have to be detrimental. For example: a Bard of Breath might "invite the destruction" of Flightiness in their Friends, keeping their Team on task; a Bard of Blood might sympathetically "invite the destruction" of Bonds of Guilt and Regret that are holding Friends back, or of "Hot-Blooded", intemperate acts, helping keep their Team cool-headed and amicable; a Bard of Void might "invite the destruction" of Void-as-Confusions, helping their Team realize what they need to accomplish, or "invite the destruction of Defeat through Void, as if by the Will of Void" by pulling a literal rabbit out of their hat right when their Team needs one. To take a few actually successful canonical examples, in This Log Gamzee "invites the destruction" of Eridan's Rage at Gamzee, Karkat, and Feferi by telling him about Sollux's death and how Karkat is handling it, and later, after the Session, "invites the destruction" of everyone's frustration, sadness, and anger "through Rage" through the humor and mellowness invited by his horn-pile :)
Bards can have a good influence, I think it's just that the Destroyer-Classes have a very hard row to hoe, one which challenges them to the very core in very direct ways, and that Hussie has chosen to portray this by giving the Bards in HS a mostly negative influence, in part because of this Arc(if I'm right about him writing Bards to have such an Arc), in part because of his idea of Bards as Tricksters(I mean, look at Loki, Raven, and Coyote stories; they tend to be both the biggest heroes and the most successful villains), in part because of his choice to connect Bards to Juggalos through the Bard=Clown connection, and in part due to the particular bent of his own long-lasting narrative interests in clowns(he has an old, very gory, webcomic called Whistles the Clown which apparently Gamzee parallels in certain ways though I've yet to read it). But, as with Princes and Thieves, just because AH has only written those classes as trouble-makers doesn't mean that's all any example of those Classes can ever be; it all depends on the personality and values you give them.
To switch gears a bit to cross-media comparisons, Vriska's as much a Thief as Danny Ocean, but who has Danny Ocean ever hurt in any physical way, or in any way that wasn't just and deserved(other than his wife Tess, that is, which is something he regrets for the rest of his life[not that regret makes his disappointment and failure of her alright; I just want to emphasized that he learned from the hurt he caused and tried to become a better person after causing it])? A Thief like Danny Ocean -or Nathan Ford, or Catwoman, or Nami- one with a conscience and a clear understanding of how their actions can hurt others if they aren't careful, can be a powerful, nigh-unstoppable force for good in the realm of myth, and so can Bards, and Princes, and any other HS Class if they possess a similar understanding :)
It is the immature lack of that understanding -their need to learn those lessons and allowance of the chance to do so- that leads to HS's "bad" Classes harming others, and how they respond to causing that harm and learning just how much damage they are capable of doing when they don't keep other and consequences in mind which determines whether these characters will ultimately be Heroes or Villains.
The Bard class is generally assigned to the “clowns” of life, lovable losers who are often lazy or unlucky. They tend to inspire abuse from others, whether they want it or not, but on the other hand are often easy to be around and share a few laughs with. Despite all of this, they are pretty much always extremely dangerous: the exact mechanisms behind the threat that they represent can vary greatly, but they’re always there.
Breath is an aspect that revolves around peace and trust. It governs the ethereal, the elusive and the ineffably good. Purity of spirit and the idea of mysterious benevolence are key concepts when dealing with Breath, and having faith in them is absolutely essential for any Breath player worth his or her salt.
As I said to someone once before, there’s something of a contradiction between “destroy” and “peace”. On the one hand, you have a violent action, often evocative of war and suffering; on the other, a static state of being characterised by such things as stability and balance.
That said, there’s also plenty of common ground between the behaviour classically exhibited by Bards and the standard demeanour associated with Breath players. Both kinds of people are significantly more at ease in territory that might make others more emotional, and tend to be seen as insensitive, unintelligent, or just plain lazy because of it. At the same time, there are hidden depths to them, with the perpetual danger that Bards pose to everybody around them and the fact that Breath players do in fact feel too.
A fully mature Bard of Breath doesn’t mind getting laughed at, or almost getting killed, or not knowing why anything happens. When things fall apart around him, he accepts it as the work of an inscrutable higher power and does not get worked up about trying to avert this destruction. All he needs is to act according to the values of friendship and goodwill that the Breath aspect espouses, and the Breeze will take care of the rest.
Whether his story’s conflict is against a being that feeds on despair (literal or not) or someone that’s only tangentially related to the thoughts of others doesn’t exactly matter. In the case of the former, attaining this detached state of mind will be the goal of the Bard of Breath, the very act of destruction that will end the story; in the case of the latter, the Bard’s embrace of the ineffable might engender a string of coincidences that eventually leads to the death of the ultimate foe.
What of an immature Bard of Breath? I'd say somebody who is too suspicious of others, who wants too much to control things, who takes too much initiative and gets too involved in others' business. Bards are born to let things die, not take care of them, and any attempt to spit in the face of destiny and do it anyway isn't going to work out well at all.
