1. Love the new url, it sounds great! 2. If you want to, what are your thoughts on the extent of the knight class’ exploitation abilities? Like, how Dave needs some ability to See timelines in order to be able to exploit them, and how Karkat sees himself as a master of interpersonal relations, though I’m less sure about how that influences his role as a Knight of Blood. Where does the justification “in order to allow for exploitation” end? Dave can travel through time but why? Seems like an heir
Ran out of characters. Where does it end? Dave can travel through time like an heir would, and then wield weapons that pause time like Aradia can, and then travel instantaneously—again, like an heir, and have a sense of which is the alpha timeline, like some sort of knowledge class. And then that’s not even mentioning his awareness of the narrative. Where does it end? Dothe ends justify the means and you can look sburb dead in the eye and say “I need this to exploit my aspect” that’s ok?
Sorry for pestering you so much, I have a habit of not being able to stop my train of thought once it gets going. Last bit: we haven’t really seen much of what happens in a fully realized page in homestuck (Id argue that Steven Universe at the end of his movie is a pretty good example of a fully realized page of heart) but I’m curious how you think the page being exploitational actually manifests in the page’s powers. Sorry this got so long, I’m just curious if you’ve got any thoughts on this
I’m glad you like it! It’s taking a bit of getting used to tbh - I keep going to naturally type sburbtheory instead of ardenttheories. Oops!
I think, in some ways, it’s as important to look at HOW Dave uses his powers as it is to look at WHAT powers he has.
Dave can travel through Time, much like Aradia can. That’s true! But the way Dave uses his Timetravel is quite different to hers.
Whereas she tends to use it to set up things for the longhaul future, to escape danger, to allow for the continuity of the timeline - and thereby follows exactly what she dictates Time to be - Dave is very much restricted to doing only what Time allows him to do.
His Exploitation of Time works because he spends a week in the game in the course of about three hours. He Exploits the Timeloops to make sure that they can get everything done in their very restricted amount of Time before the Reckoning - something even Aradia may not have been able to do. She doesn’t tend to use her Time abilities a whole lot, especially after a certain point (e.g. when she starts spending more time in the Dream Bubbles), whereas for Dave, Exploiting Time to give them more Time is one of his key moves.
In the same way, he Exploits Time to give them more Boonbucks and more Grist so that they can get everything they need extremely quick. Making loops upon loops upon loops of Daves doing things and then becoming those Daves ensures that everyone is able to survive even when the game seems to be actively working against them.
That’s also another thing to consider, I think. Dave’s Exploitations of Time are completely stable. Every single Dave that we see in the second part of Act 5 - which is especially prominent in the panel where Jade tries to focus in on Dave through her compugoggles, which comes up showing 12 different Daves in the timeline at once - is the exact same Dave.
It’s Dave going back and forth through time, seeing his past selves and future selves and then eventually becoming or having been those selves, rather than a bunch of different Daves from different timelines (such as we see with Aradiabot, for instance).
If Dave sees himself and hasn’t been there yet, he knows that it’s something he has to do in the future - otherwise he’ll end up as a Doomed Dave. And Doomed Daves are Dead Daves, which is something he tries his best to actively avoid.
So, in other words, he can travel through Time because he’s Exploiting how Time works for a purpose; to give themselves MORE Time in a session that has almost no Time at all. It oddly works, because he’s still having to exist within the rules of Time, he’s just… pushing them a little bit.
Heirs of Time, on the other hand, tend to have Time bend to their whim. It does whatever they want it to do, and might even push a bit harder at the rules than a Knight can.
They can become Time itself, do more jumps than Knights can (such as jumping through Timelines without becoming a Doomed Self like Dave would), can have Time flow differently around them (which Dave can’t; he has to create stable Timeloops, whereas the Heir could likely just make everything very slow or even stop around them while they kept going at a more natural pace).
In some ways, a Heir of Time might even be able to slow down their own ageing! We know for a fact that Dave’s grasp on Time isn’t that firm; he can’t Control time, just work within its grasp a bit.
I think, honestly, Dave knows what the Alpha Timeline is because he’d be dead if he was wrong. Which is a pretty simple answer? But all Daves that don’t follow the Alpha Timeline tend to end up dead pretty quick, and if he’s not meant to do it, he’ll die as a consequence of trying.
We know he doesn’t really know what makes the Alpha Timeline because there are instances where he just can’t explain things - when Jade tells him to just “do what feels natural” when he asks about his copy of the SBURB Beta (which somehow ends up with her); when he blatantly ignores Rose trying to leave him behind on the Green Sun suicide mission, which turns out to be the right course of action but isn’t something he thought actually NEEDED to happen - and I would therefore have to assume that his knowledge of what is and isn’t the Alpha Timeline stems pretty significantly from an innate sense that “if I do this I will fucking die”. Or, like, he’s just seem a dead self and knows that’s a bad choice.
His awareness of the narrative, from what I can understand, stems predominantly from exposure to Bro (the alternate form of Dirk). I went over that a bit ago, but it seems that Dirk has a habit of imprinting some of his abilities onto Dave, without actually giving him the full access to his powers (such as how Dave is kind of awake on Derse, but not fully; it’s a reflection of Dirk’s ability to be awake on Derse and Earth at the same time, but because it’s not actually HIS power it doesn’t work quite right).
There was more. You can find that specific post here! There’s also a few other posts in the discussion around that time, too.
Essentially, the narrative awareness thing isn’t totally a Time thing, nor is it anything really to do with his position as a Knight - so we don’t really have to worry about that.
So, to make a long post a bit shorter, there’s actually a lot Dave can’t do. He has to work firmly within the realm of Time, and he can’t do anything that would actively break its laws. A lot of Knights are going to work like this; trying to break the rules will make them face colossal punishment, and really all they can do is use what little wiggle room exists in the Aspect to their advantage.
If it would break how the Aspect works, the Knight can’t do it (Dave can’t have Doomed Selves exist in the same timeline because there can only be one Dave per timeline) - but if it can be justified, then the Exploit works (Davesprite isn’t actually Dave, the Player, so it’s accepted by SBURB).
We unfortunately don’t get to see a whole lot of Page Exploitation, which is frustrating, and also tends to be why I focus more on the description of Protecting for both Classes. However, to give it a pretty simple go…
Pages use their Aspect to Protect themselves. It’s actually a fairly selfish sort of Class - a bit like the Thief - and they have to work up to Protecting other people with it.
As such, when they Exploit it, it tends to be for their own gain - and isn’t usually that flashy at first.
Jake Exploits Hope by enabling people to Believe whatever the hell they want about him so they almost always dismiss him as a threat. He manages to talk Jane round in circles when it comes to her feelings for him so he doesn’t have to give her a firm yes or no, and it’s accepted because he’s “a bit of a dunce”, even though, like John, he can actually be fairly smart.
We can also say that he Exploits how goddamn vague Hope is as a concept. Some of the things he does are based solely around his own Belief in them - and that means he’s actually Exploiting his Belief into ensuring that these weird and wonderful things happen.
If we’d seen more of him in actual Hopey combat, we might have seen even more amazing spectacles like the Giant Hope Explosion. If he’d believed in it, he could have Exploited his Belief (or that of others) to make things Real that never should have been real - like Brain Ghost Dirk!
BGD was never actually a real Dirk or a real Splinter of Dirk, but because Jake Believed that he was, he managed to become Real. He gained all of Dirk’s powers even though he strictly speaking shouldn’t have, and almost managed to defeat Aranea single-handedly. And we know he was almost Real because he managed to stay in one place with some form of automony while Jake ran away.
So, that’s an Exploit x2; Exploiting Jake’s Belief in Dirk to actually make BGD in the first place, and then Exploiting Jake’s Belief in BGD’s existence to make him Real enough to actually Protect Jake (and again, this does come back to Protection, because that’s partly what BGD is for).
Like, it’s not technically stretching the definition and abilities of Hope too far, but it’s definitely getting closer to that line than a Knight would be allowed, and it’s very much more personal than a Knight tends to do.
In a way, you can say that Tavros Exploits Freedom and Options by gathering the entire Ghost Army. There’s an unknown number of Ghosts out there that he can use to his own gain, and plenty of Options to choose from with how the Dreambubbles work. Plus, to find Freedom by beating an unbeatable game, using all the dead souls who were never actually MEANT to be around in the first place seems like a pretty good Exploit to me.
Of course, I say both of those with a HUGE pinch of salt. Tavros’ for sure doesn’t really work when you think about how Knights Exploit, and that can be a bit… tricky. Although a lot of that could be because Hope and Breath are very non-physical Aspects that don’t have exact rules? Whereas Time is very distinct and firm, and there’s definite rules you have to obey.
I’ve seen people use Support instead, but I still think Protect works best. In either case,
They’d still have to obey the same rules as Knights, but I think they’d probably find even more wiggle room. They might be able to find the same sort of footing as a Heir, although it won’t come to them as naturally; the Page of Breath, for instance, might not be able to literally turn into the Wind, but they sure as hell could just mysteriously escape every confinement you try to force them into.
How do they keep escaping? Nobody really knows. But they probably can’t escape things that are sealed 100% tight - such as if they were teleported inside a concrete cube - and they probably rely on using the Breeze more than being the Breeze.
E.g. the Breeze can be used to steal back keys. It can also be used to throw rocks at keypads with perfect precision and oh look, the door’s open, lets go.
They might also be able to phase through things, but not actually turn into the wind - so they’re just corporeal enough to get dragged back through if they’re caught.
It might also just be the difference between what they can Exploit. For instance, a Page of Time might not be able to do the same Timeloops that a Knight can because that ability is focused a lot more on helping other people. They might, however, be able to send other things back and forth through time, like a personal Appearifier/Sendificator, because that’s technically not cheating so long as they remember to send the thing back to just a few seconds after they took it in the first place.
That’d be Exploiting how Time works as a fundamental thing, and just how far you can go before you start screwing up the Timeline. In that sense, I think Pages probably have to be VERY careful.
They might also have a better time at Exploiting Time on much more finite scales - such as by reverting time around a specific object because they’re technically not interfereing with the Timeline.
Pages’ powers tend to be more finetuned and a little more dubious without really stepping over into Heir or Witch territory. That’s as best as I can think to explain it, admittedly.
So, while the Heir of Hope could literally become Good Vibes and Positive Feelings, or literally become an angel, the Page of Hope can only spread those feelings if they already feel them, or could just summon an angel/take on its shape - the difference between Spontaneous Positivity and Shared Positivity, or Actually Being and Pretending To Be.
I think that probably makes sense. It might do! Pages are weird, if I’m completely honest, and the best way to understand them might just be to look at what an Heir can do and think, “okay, if that’s how far you can go when you’re actually becoming a thing, how far can you go when you’re not the thing without breaking the rules?”
